The acceleration of events and the gravity of the 'years of truth' compel revolutionaries to deepen their conceptions about the vanguard organisation of the proletariat, about its nature and function, its structure and mode of operation.
This report on the nature and function of the organisation was adopted by the International Conference of the ICC of January 1982. In the next IR we will publish the second report, on the structure and mode of operation of the organisation.
1. Since it was formed, the ICC has always emphasised the importance of an international organisation of revolutionaries in the new upsurge of worldwide class struggle. Through its intervention in the struggle, even on a still modest scale; through its persistent efforts to work towards the creation of a real centre of discussion amongst revolutionary groups, it has shown in practice that its existence is neither superfluous nor imaginary. Convinced that its function corresponds to a profound need in the class it has fought against both the dilettantism and the megalomania of a revolutionary milieu still heavily marked by irresponsibility and Immaturity. This conviction is based not on a religious belief but on a method of analysis: marxist theory. The reasons for the emergence of a revolutionary organisation, its role, form, goals and principles cannot be understood outside this theory, without which there can be no real revolutionary movement.
2. The recent splits the ICC has been through cannot be seen as a mortal crisis of the organisation. They are essentially expressions of the inability to understand conditions, the line of march, of the class movement which gives rise to the revolutionary organisation:
3. An inability to understand the function of a revolutionary organisation has always led to a denial of its necessity:
4. The necessity for an organisation of revolutionaries remains as great today as it was yesterday. Neither the counterrevolution, nor huge outbreaks of struggle where no organised revolutionary fraction was present (as in Poland today) eliminate this necessity:
5. The communist programme and the principles of militant activity are the foundation stones of any revolutionary organisation worth its name. Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary function, ie. no organising for the realisation of this programme. Because of this, marxism has always rejected all immediatist and economist deviations, which serve to deform and deny the historic role of the communist organisation.
6. The revolutionary organisation is an organ of the class. An organ means a living member of a living body. Without the organ, the life of the class would be deprived of one of its vital functions, and thus would be momentarily diminished and mutilated. This is why this function is constantly being reborn, growing, expanding, and inevitably creating the organ that it needs.
7. This organ is not a simple physiological appendage of the class, limited to obeying its immediate impulses. The revolutionary organisation is a part of the class. It is neither separate from nor identical with the class. It is neither a mediation between the being and consciousness of the class, nor the totality of class consciousness. It is a particular form of class consciousness, the most conscious part. It thus regroups not the totality of the class, but its most conscious and active fraction. The class is no more the party than the party is the class.
8. As a part of the class, the organisation of revolutionaries is neither the sum of its part (militants) nor an association of sociological strata (workers, employees, intellectuals). It develops as a living whole whose various cells have no other function than to ensure that it operates in the best possible way. It gives no privilege either to individuals or to particular categories. In the image of the class, the organisation emerges as a collective body.
9. The conditions for the full flowering of the revolutionary organisation are the same that allow for the revolutionary maturation of the proletariat as a whole:
It's these factors which give both the class and its political organisation their unitary form.
10. The activity of the revolutionary organisation can only be understood as a unitary whole, whose components are not separate but interdependent:
11. Many of the political and organisational incomprehensions which have been expressed in the Current are derived from forgetting the theoretical framework which the ICC adopted at its beginning. They are based on a poor assimilation of the theory of the decadence of capitalism, and of the practical implications of this theory in our intervention.
12. While the organisation of revolutionaries has not changed its essential nature the attributes of its function have been qualitatively modified between the ascendant and decadent phase of capitalism. The revolutionary convulsions which followed World War I have made certain forms of existence of the revolutionary organisation obsolete, while developing others which had only appeared in an embryonic manner in the nineteenth century.
13. The ascendant cycle of capitalism gave a particular and thus transitory form to revolutionary political organisations:
The possibility of immediate reforms, both economic and political, shifted the field of action of the socialist organisation. The immediate, gradualist struggle took precedence over the broader perspective of communism that had been affirmed in the Communist Manifesto.
14. The immaturity of the objective conditions for revolution led to a specialisation of tasks that should have been organically linked together, an atomisation of the function of the organisation:
15. The immaturity of the proletariat, large numbers of which had just come out of the countryside or out of artisan workshops, the development of capitalism within the framework of nations that had only just been formed, obscured the real function of the organisation of revolutionaries:
16. The transitory characteristics of this historical period falsified the relations between the party and the class:
It was against this degeneration in the function of the party which the left of the Second International and the early Third International were fighting. The fact that the CI took over some of the conceptions of the old bankrupt International (mass parties, frontism, substitutionism) is a reality which should not be seen to have the virtues of an example for today's revolutionaries. The break with these deformations about the function of the organisation is a vital necessity imposed by the historical epoch of decadence.
17. The revolutionary period which followed the war meant a profound, irreversible change in the function of revolutionaries:
18. The revolutionary organisation has thus an immediately unitary nature, even if it isn't the unitary organisation of the class, the workers' councils. It is a unity within a wider unity - the world proletariat which has given rise to it:
19. The maturation of the objective conditions for revolution (concentration of the proletariat, greater homogeneity in the consciousness of a class that is more unified, better qualified, with an intellectual level and a maturity superior to what it was in previous centuries) has profoundly modified both the form and the goals of the organisation of revolutionaries: a) In its form;
b) In its goals:
20. The triumph of the counter-revolution, the totalitarian domination of the state, made the very existence of the revolutionary organisation more difficult and reduced the scope of its intervention. In this period of profound retreat its theoretical function prevailed over its function of intervention and proved itself to be vital for the conservation of revolutionary principles. The period of counter-revolution has shown:
This is why, even though the organisation does not exist for itself, it is vital to conserve resolutely the organisation that has been engendered by the class, to strengthen it, and to work towards the regroupment of revolutionaries on a world scale.
21. The end of the period of counter-revolution has modified the conditions of existence of revolutionary groups. A new period has opened up, favourable to the development of the regroupment of revolutionaries. However, this new period is still an in-between period where the necessary conditions for the emergence of the party have not been transformed - through a real qualitative leap - into sufficient conditions.
This is why, for a whole period of time, we will see the development of revolutionary groups who through the confrontation of ideas, through common action, and finally through fusing together, will manifest the tendency towards the constitution of a world party. The realisation of this tendency depends both on an opening up of the course towards revolution and the consciousness of revolutionaries themselves.
Although certain stages have been reached since 1968, although there has been a selection within the revolutionary milieu, it should be clear that the emergence of the party is neither automatic nor the fruit of voluntarism, given the slow development of the class struggle and the still immature character of the revolutionary milieu.
22. In fact, after the historic resurgence of the proletariat in 1968, the revolutionary milieu proved to be too weak and immature to deal with the new period. The disappearance or sclerosis of the old communist left, who had struggled against the stream during the period of counter-revolution, was a negative factor in the maturation of revolutionary organisations. Even more than the theoretical acquisition of the coma mist left, which were slowly rediscovered and re-assimilated, it was the organisational acquisitions (the organic continuity) which was missing, and without these acquisitions theory remains a dead letter. The function of the organisation, even the need for it, was often misunderstood, when not actually subject to ridicule.
23. In the absence of this organic continuity, the elements that emerged from the post '68 period were subjected to the crushing pressure of the student and contestationist movement, in the form of:
The decomposition of the student movement, its disillusionment faced with the slow, uneven pace of the class struggle, was theorised in the form of modernism. But the real revolutionary movement purged itself of the least firm and serious elements, for whom militantism was either a monkish occupation or the supreme stage of alienation.
24. Despite the striking confirmation, especially since Poland, that the crisis would open a course towards broader and broader class explosions, revolutionary organisations, including the ICC, have not freed themselves from another danger, no less pernicious than modernism and academism: immediatism, whose twin brothers are individualism and dilettantism. The revolutionary organisation must be able to resist these scourges today if it is to be able to definitively liquidate them.
25. In recent years the ICC has suffered the disastrous effects of immediatism, the most typical form of petty bourgeois impatience, the final incarnation of the confused spirit of May 1968. The most striking form of this immediatism has been:
The departure of a certain number of comrades shows that immediatism is a very serious disease, and that it inevitably leads to denying the political function of the organisation, its theoretical and programmatic basis.
26. All these leftist type deviations are not the result of a theoretical insufficiency in the platform of the organisation. They express a poor assimilation of our theoretical framework, and in particular, of the theory of the decadence of capitalism, which profoundly modifies the forms of activity and intervention open to the revolutionary organisation.
27. This is why the ICC must vigorously oppose any abandonment of the programmatic framework which can only lead to immediatism in political analysis. It must resolutely fight:
28. In order to preserve our theoretical and organisational acquisitions, we have to liquidate the vestiges of dilettantism, that infantile form of individualism:
The organisation is not in the service of the militants in their daily lives; on the contrary, the militants wage a daily struggle to insert themselves into the broad work of the organisation.
29. A clear understanding of the function of the organisation in the period of decadence is the necessary condition for our own development in the decisive period of the 1980s. Although the revolution is not a question of organisation, it does have questions of organisation to resolve, incomprehensions to surmount in order for the revolutionary minorities to exist as an organ of the class.
30. The existence of the ICC can only be guaranteed by a reappropriation of the marxist method, which is its surest compass in the comprehension of events and in its intervention. All work of the organisation can only be understood and developed on a long term basis. Without method, without a collective spirit, without a permanent effort of all militants, without a persevering attitude that excludes all immediatist impatience, there can be no real revolutionary organisation. In the ICC the world proletariat has created an organ whose existence is a necessary factor in future struggles.
31. In contrast to last century, the task of the revolutionary organisation is more difficult. It demands more of each of its members; it still suffers from the last effects of the counter-revolution, and from the imprints of a class struggle still marked by advances and retreats. For a whole period the organisation will often be forced to struggle against the stream in difficult conditions.
Although it no longer has to live in the stifling, destructive atmosphere of the long night of the counter-revolution, although its present activities are being undertaken in a period favourable to the class struggle and to the outbreak of mass movements on a world scale, the organisation must know how to retreat in good order when there is a momentary set back in the class movement.
This is why, right up until the revolution, the revolutionary organisation must know how to struggle resolutely against the tides of uncertainty and demoralisation that can sweep over the class. The most vital task is the defence of the integrity of the organisation, of its principles and its function. Learning how to resist, without weakness, without turning in on themselves for revolutionaries, this is the way to prepare the conditions for the future victory. This demands a bitter struggle against immediatist deviations, so that revolutionary theory can take hold of the masses.
By liberating itself from the scars of immediatism, by reappropriating the living tradition of marxism, preserved and enriched by the communist lefts, the organisation will demonstrate in practice that it is the irreplaceable instrument secreted by the proletariat so that it can be equal to its historic tasks.
ADDITION
It is in periods of generalised struggles and revolutionary movements that the activity of revolutionaries has a direct, even decisive impact, because:
The presence of revolutionaries, who have to put forward clear political orientations for the movement and accelerate the process of homogenisation of class consciousness, can then be a decisive factor that tips the balance one way or the other, as was shown by the German and Russian revolutions. In particular, we must recall the fundamental role played in this area by the Bolsheviks, as Lenin defined it in the April Theses:
"Recognise that our party is a minority and at the moment only constitutes a small minority in the Soviets of Workers Deputies, faced with all the opportunist, petty bourgeois elements who have fallen under the influence of the bourgeoisie and who are spreading this influence within the proletariat... Explain to the masses that the Soviets of Workers Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government and that, consequently, our task, as long as this government allows itself to be influenced by the bourgeoisie, can only be to explain patiently and systematically to the masses the errors in their tactics, basing this on their practical needs" (Thesis 4).
From today, the existence of the ICC and the realisation of its present tasks represents an indispensable preparation for being equal to the tasks of the future. The capacity of revolutionaries to carry out their role in periods of generalised activity is conditioned by their present activity.
1) This capacity is not born spontaneously but is developed through a process of political and organisational apprenticeship. Coherent and clearly formulated positions, like the organisational capacity to defend, disseminate and deepen them, don't fall from the sky, but have to be prepared right now. Thus history shows how the capacity of the Bolsheviks to develop their positions by taking into account the experience of the class (from 1905 to the war), and to strengthen their organisation, allowed them, unlike the revolutionaries in Germany for example, to play a decisive role in the revolutionary combats of the class.
Within this framework, one of the essential objectives of a communist group must be to go beyond the artisan level of activity and organisation which, in general, marks the initial phase of the political struggle. The development, systematisation, the regular accomplishment of its tasks of intervening, publishing, distributing, discussing and corresponding with close elements must be at the centre of its preoccupations. This implies a development of the organisation through rules 'f functioning and specific organs which enable it to act not as a sum of dispersed cells but as a single body with a balanced metabolism.
2) From today, the organisation of revolutionaries represents a coherent pole of international political regroupment for the political groups, discussion circles and workers' groups which emerge all over the world with the development of struggles. The existence of an international communist organisation with a press and an intervention makes it possible for these groups, through a confrontation of positions and experiences, to situate themselves, to develop the revolutionary coherence of their positions, and, in some cases, to join the international communist organisation. If such a pole is absent, there is much more likelihood that such groups will fall into dispersion, discouragement and degeneration (through, for example, activism, localism and corporatism). With the development of struggles and the approach of a period pf revolutionary confrontations, this role will become all the more important with regard to the elements directly produced by the class struggle.
More and more the working class will be forced to face its mortal enemy face on. Even when the overthrow of bourgeois power is not immediately realisable, the shocks will be violent and decisive for the outcome of the class struggle. That is why revolutionaries must intervene right now, with whatever means they have, inside the class struggle: