The opportunist parties are “open” by definition, in two senses: first they do not have a strictly outlined programme with a sound basis to it and sometimes not even unequivocally established objectives, and secondly – but the two aspects affect one another – they have a loosely organized structure, gradually adapted and moulded, like the programme itself, to the changing flow of outside events. The fact that for them “the movement is everything, the aim is nothing” necessarily implies the consequence that the principles, the programme, the tactics, the organization are nothing, too: they claim to be “concrete”, to “get their teeth into” daily reality and, in this sense, to transform it; their reality is servile adaptation to “events”, allowing themselves to be transformed lying down; in a word, tail-endism. They are houses without walls, windows without glass: absolutely anything is let in, absolutely anything can exit.
From the polemics between Lenin and Martov at the 2nd congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (not to mention the statutes of the First International), the revolutionary Marxist party is, on the contrary, “closed” – in terms of the invariability of its programme, the unchanging nature of its objectives, the possession of a tactical plan, the inviolability of its organizational discipline. It is a walled fortress: a part, or rather an organ, of the class in its fight for emancipation, a selective force and one of synthesis, not a shapeless “jelly” – and this is how it must be, since it is the prospective guide for the seizing of power and the practice of a dictatorship. Not just anyone enters it, because its tools are not merely a public exhibition of interchangeable objects to suit the taste of the buyer, but a unique and binding heritage, not left up to “choices” and not exposed to the vicissitudes of historical constraints.
The characteristics of opportunist parties are their heterogeneous and indeterminate nature, the absence of delimitation; the characteristics of the revolutionary Marxist party are – and this is not an acquired fact but a reality to be defended – its demarcation from the outside and its unity towards the inside. In the former type of party, class as a dynamic entity blurs and dissolves, not only losing the vision of its final objectives and the way to achieve them, but absorbing alien objectives and adapting to paths that are not its own; in the latter type of party, the class integrates its energies into an organism that operates in a single direction along a single path: the party, which precedes the class, instead of following it; which directs it, and is not directed; which is, indeed, the class seen in terms of its historical journey, not of the accidents of time and space.
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Only the inability to make use of dialectics can see a contradiction between “closure” of the party as an expression of conscience and will - as a programme and organized militancy - and its candidature for directing the great proletarian masses and, before this, drawing them into its own area of influence. And yet, if ever there were a “manual” for projecting the party towards the outside, it is What is to be Done? Yet, at the same time, there is no “manual” of practical action and active militancy that starts out more strictly from the closed “dogmatism” of the party, in order to reach a definition of the multiplicity of its “open” tasks, i.e. facing “outwards”.
The truth is, that in direct opposition to the claims of opportunism, the “closure” of the revolutionary Marxist party within the unyielding walls of its programme, principles, objectives, “tactical plan” and organization is a necessary precondition for its very ability to act as a force of synthesis for the countless impulses that arise from the social subsoil and which, if abandoned to themselves, end up lost in the trickles of the daily struggle and its inevitable reflections on empirical, opportunist eclecticism. The revolutionary party advances its candidature to guide the masses – i.e. to direct them according to a single method towards a single point, by bringing together layers of the proletariat driven into the arena of social struggle by precise objectives, and, in the vast majority, without access to comprehension of its programme, not to say its objectives, but polarized around it by encountering its action, which is not inspired by changing, sectorial interests, and by the relentless pressure of vital needs common to everyone - precisely because it tends to achieve within itself the maximum unity of selected and “directed” energies. It is not an intellectual, or, worse still, a moral luxury that marks its “confines”: it is a requirement for battle. Closure within those confines is not meant to rest complacently, as an élite would do, ready to act only when history decrees its appearance on the scene: protected by these confines, it comes out in order to achieve the greatest possible class unity consented by the factors in the objective situation, towards sealing historical objectives and actual class movement – this being something that does not fall from the heavens but is actively built up. In an article by our current devoted in 1921 to the United Front (a remote objective today, though one that appears before us in all circumstances) we read: “those who find themselves seeing a contradiction between invoking the unity of all workers and actually detaching part of them from the others by organizing them in a party with methods that differ from those of other parties, even those that appeal to the proletariat and call themselves revolutionary, demonstrate that they have grasped nothing about our programme; since in fact these two concepts share the same common origin.
“The first workers’ struggles against the ruling bourgeois class are struggles by more or less numerous groups for partial and immediate objectives. Communism proclaims the need to unite these struggles and their development, in order to give them a common objective and a common method, and this is why it speaks of unity above and beyond the single professional categories, beyond local situations, national frontiers or race. This unity is not the material sum of individuals and groups, but it is achieved through the shifting in direction of the action of all the individuals or groups, when they feel they constitute a class: i.e., they share a common objective and programme.
“If, then, only part of the workers are in the party, nonetheless there is unity of the proletariat, since workers with different professions from different places and of different nationalities take part on the same level, with the same objectives and the same rules of organization. A formal, federative union of trade unions or perhaps an alliance of proletarian political parties – despite having larger effectives than those of a class party, does not achieve the basic postulate of the union of all workers, because there is no cohesion and singleness in its objectives and methods.”
In addition, explaining the work carried out by the Party with a view to, and in favour of, unifying the class unions at the time, the article continues on a very topical issue: “ Just as energetically, and even before reaching this organizational unity […], communists uphold the need for action by the whole of the proletariat, now that it faces an attack by the bosses, so that its partial economic problems merge into one single one: that of mutual defence. Once again, they are convinced that, by showing the masses that there is a single postulate and there must be a single tactic to face the threatened reduction of salaries, unemployment and all the other signs of anti-labour attacks, and that this programme is the one outlined by the Communist International - a fight led by the political class party against the bourgeois State, for the dictatorship of the proletariat - the task of demonstrating that the proletariat must have a single programme of revolutionary belligerence will be made easier. From the “single front” of the proletariat organized by the union against the bourgeois attack, will arise the single front of the proletariat based on the political programme of the Communist Party, demonstrating, by its action and unceasing criticism, that any other programme is insufficient.”
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In What is to be done?, as in 1903, Lenin saw the walled citadel of the party at the centre of a network of lose Organisationen, a myriad of free, intermediate organizations, open to all workers; and he pointed to the task of penetrating it and embracing it, like the gradually concentric circles of a growing influence. Only in this way would the working class one day be able – as it was – to become, in turn, compact and closed towards the ruling class and its servile appendages, and move to attack the bastions of power.
Consider this a paradox, if you like, you who are immersed in the ideology of the class enemy: only the revolutionaries – walled up in their minority organization, jealous of its independence, hostile towards any hybridism amongst parties, convinced of the instability and insufficiency of any partial victories in the context of bourgeois society – nonetheless have the right to talk about working class unity against capital, about a proletarian front against the unity between the bourgeoisie and opportunism, about the consequent fight to defend the immediate living and working conditions of the exploited masses.
They alone have this right; they must acquire the power of it.
International Communist Party