Learning from the experience of the past (Part I)

Since its foundation in 1975, the ICC has strived to defend its programmatic and organisational positions by remaining firmly anchored to the acquisitions of the historical struggle of the working class. Our International Review contains numerous series of articles addressing the main experiences in the history of our class and its organisations. During the 1980s and 1990s, the ICC even published several books and pamphlets on the history of the Communist Left [1]. This approach embodied the axis around which the International Communist Current was formed: the continuity between the revolutionary movement as it developed from the late 1960s onwards and that of the past, thus marking the historical unity of the proletarian struggle beyond the terrible period of counter-revolution that began in the late 1920s, and the resulting organic break with the revolutionary movement of the past. While a large number of ‘modernist’ currents claimed to want to do something ‘new’ by rejecting this continuity, the ICC has always strongly claimed it; not to glorify or sanctify it, but to examine it critically in order to draw the most essential lessons from it with a view to arming the working class theoretically and politically for future struggles. Here, the ICC merely took up the method already implemented by the Italian Communist Left when it undertook to draw lessons from the revolutionary wave of the 1920s and the formation of the Third International. As it explicitly stated in the first issue of the journal Bilan [2]: "Certainly, our faction claims a long political past, a deep tradition in the Italian and international movement, and a set of fundamental political positions. But it does not intend to use its political history to demand adherence to the solutions it advocates for the current situation. On the contrary, it invites all revolutionaries to test against events both the political positions it currently defends and the political positions contained in its basic documents."

But the Italian Left itself was merely drawing on the method of analysis set out by Marx in the aftermath of the revolutionary episode of 1848: " On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! [3]".

The construction of the future class party will not be possible without the ability of today's revolutionaries to pursue the tireless task of critically assessing the experience of past organisations, ‘without taboos or ostracism,’ as the Italian Left proclaimed. This is the only way to avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over again and to pass on the best of this experience to future generations of revolutionaries. This is the aim of this article: to set out the main lessons drawn by the ICC from the history of the workers' movement concerning the building and defence of the organisation of revolutionaries.

1 – What method should be used to form the organisation?

In the summer of 1847, the founding congress of the first truly communist organisation in history was held in London: the Communist League. This episode marked a profound change in the history of the workers' movement. It signalled the transition from utopian socialism to a materialist approach to social transformation [4]. Until then, the first proletarian organisations had been deeply marked by the immaturity of the working class in terms of numbers, politics and organisation. One of these, the League of the Just, founded in 1836 in Paris by German socialists in exile, came into contact with Marx and Engels in 1847 [5]. This rapprochement was the result of debates and heated polemics led by Marx and Engels, who, since 1844, had themselves been working intensively to bring together and coordinate the main communist forces on a European scale. Through this long and patient work, they eventually won over part of the socialist milieu of the time to their cause: "… in the spring of 1847 Moll visited Marx in Brussels and immediately afterwards me in Paris, and invited us repeatedly, in the name of his comrades, to enter the League. He reported that they were as much convinced of the general correctness of our mode of outlook as of the necessity of freeing the League from the old conspiratorial traditions and forms […] What we previously objected to in this League was now relinquished as erroneous by the representatives of the League themselves; we were even invited to co-operate in the work of reorganization. Could we say no? Certainly not. Therefore, we entered the League …[6]."

The first task undertaken by the ‘Marx fraction’ within the League was to work on the development of organisational principles and statutes capable of establishing a clear demarcation between the proletarian camp and the bourgeois camp. Moreover, the first point of the statutes clearly formulated the essential idea of revolutionary communism: “The aim of the League is the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society, based on class antagonism, and the foundation of a new society without classes and without individual property. [7]” These same statutes guaranteed the principle of international unity and provided the League with a centralised framework of functioning with the appointment of a central committee [8]. Last but not least, these statutes set out a fundamental idea: that each member of the organisation was deeply committed to respecting and applying these principles and the decisions taken collectively and unanimously at each congress[9]. It was in this context that the League of the Just was renamed the Communist League.

The Second Congress, which took place at the end of November 1847, would enable a further step forward to be taken. After lengthy discussions and heated debates, Marx succeeded in winning over the majority of the organisation to the materialist conception of history and thus to the need for a new programme: “the latter was adopted in its fundamental features, and the congress specifically instructed Marx to write, on behalf of the League of Communists, not a profession of faith, but a manifesto, as Engels had proposed. [10]”. The Communist Manifesto was completed in February 1848. Although it was unable to influence the course of the revolutionary days of spring and summer 1848 in France and Germany, it publicly proclaimed the historical programme of the proletariat to the world. In doing so, the Communist League shed the sectarian tendencies inherited from the past. The drafting and publication of the Manifesto laid the groundwork for a long-term historical perspective on which revolutionary organisations would be able to base themselves in the decades to come.

Fifteen years later, in 1864, the question of organisation was the starting point for the formation of the International Workingmen's Association (the First International). The task at hand was to bring together, within a single organisation, the very diverse political currents of the proletariat (Proudhonists, Lassalleans, Blanquists, trade unionists, etc.). Faced with this situation, the truly proletarian elements, with Marx at their head, argued for temporarily postponing theoretical clarification. After drafting the Inaugural Address, Marx set about drafting the Statutes that would enable the IWA to function on the basis of clear organisational principles acceptable to all. The international unity of this organisation, guaranteed by its centralised nature through a general council, enabled the IWA to clarify, step by step, political differences with a view to reaching a unified point of view. Marxism's most decisive contribution to the founding of the IWA therefore clearly lies in the area of organisation.

Despite numerous contributions and greater theoretical and political homogeneity, the Second International, founded in 1889, was unable to adopt this organisational method. Its federalist structure, composed of national parties, was a mode of organisation that was antagonistic to international centralisation, despite the very late establishment of the International Socialist Bureau in 1900 and the adoption of statutes for international congresses and the functioning of the ISB from 1907 onwards.

Drawing on the experience of the Bolshevik Party between 1903 and 1917, as well as a critical examination of the formation of the Communist International in 1919, the Italian Communist Left, from its formation in the 1920s, distinguished itself from other political currents in the revolutionary movement of the time by its positions on the question of organisation. While the Left Opposition led by Trotsky tended to reduce the building of the party essentially to the will of its militants, the Italian Left argued, on the contrary, that this work of construction remained “subject to and determined by the conditions of the class struggle as they are contingently given by historical development and the balance of forces between the existing classes.” These two approaches illustrated two resolutely different political methods. The first, marked by opportunism, was driven by a frenetic desire to immediately gather as many people as possible at the expense of programmatic clarity and precise principles. The second, embodying the marxist conception, advocated the broadest possible discussion of principles and programme in order to establish a clear definition of membership criteria, without the slightest concession to bourgeois and petty-bourgeois visions. It was indeed this latter method that the Bolsheviks had defended at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1903 and throughout the period of building the foundations of the party that would lead the working class in Russia to take power in October 1917. On the other hand, it was the former method that prevailed within the Communist International and paved the way for its opportunistic degeneration during the 1920s [11]. In 1946, the Communist Left of France, in a polemical article on the premature founding of the Internationalist Communist Party of Italy, summed up the issue in these terms:

"In sum, the method used by the CI in the ‘construction’ of Communist Parties was everywhere opposed to the method which proved effective in the building of the Bolshevik Party. It was no longer the ideological struggle around the programme, the progressive elimination of opportunist tendencies which, through the victory of the most consistently revolutionary fraction, served as the basis for the construction of the party. Instead the basis was an addition of different tendencies, their amalgamation around a programme that had deliberately been left incomplete. Selection was replaced by addition, principles sacrificed for numerical mass [12]."

To sum up, the guiding principle that must guide the founding of an organisation lies, obviously, in the development of a programme that the organisation and its militants commit to fully embrace and defend within the working class; but also, fundamentally, in an organisational framework based on clear principles embodied in statutes.

2 – The struggle to defend organisational principles

Revolutionary organisations, as bodies that permanently express the historical antagonism between the working class and bourgeois society, constitute a veritable ‘foreign body’ within that society. Consequently, militants who join a communist organisation must assume their commitment by breaking radically with the customs of bourgeois society and all its social strata that have no historical future (notably the petty bourgeoisie and the lumpenproletariat). But this ‘break’ does not happen automatically; it requires vigilance and a continuous and repeated struggle against the constant pressure of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologies on the organisation and its militants.

The construction of the organisation therefore requires a relentless and determined struggle to defend proletarian principles and morality. Two episodes in the history of the workers’ movement have provided particularly important lessons in this regard:

• The struggle against the Alliance of Socialist Democracy within the IWA.
• The Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903.

Despite the struggle waged by the ‘Marx party’ in favour of unity and centralisation, the IWA remained subject to certain weaknesses resulting from the immaturity of the proletariat at the time: this was a proletariat which had not yet completely freed itself from the vestiges of the previous period, particularly sectarian and conspiratorial movements. This weakness was particularly pronounced in the most backward sectors of the European proletariat, where it was just emerging from craftsmanship and peasantry, as in the Latin countries. In 1868, Bakunin joined the IWA and took advantage of its weaknesses to try to subject it to his ‘anarchist’ ideas and take control of it. The instrument of this operation was the Alliance of Socialist Democracy, founded in 1868, which was used to penetrate the ranks of the organisation [13]. In fact, the Alliance was both a public and a secret society. In itself, the existence of several currents of thought within the IWA was not a problem. On the other hand, the actions of the Alliance, which aimed to replace the official structure of the International and form ‘an International within the International’, constituted a real mortal danger to it. The Alliance had attempted to take control of the International at the Basel Congress in September 1869 by trying to pass, against the motion proposed by the General Council, a motion in favour of the abolition of the right of inheritance. But having failed, the Alliance began to campaign against the alleged ‘dictatorship’ of the General Council, which it wanted to reduce to the role of “a correspondence and statistics office” (in the words of the Alliance members), a “post box” (as Marx put it). Openly hostile to the principle of centralisation expressing the international unity of the IWA, the Alliance advocated ‘federalism’, complete ‘autonomy’ of the sections and the non-binding nature of congress decisions. In fact, it wanted to be able to do as it pleased in the sections it had taken control of. It was this danger that the 1872 Hague Congress had to counter. It was the scene of a real struggle to unmask and free the IWA from the Alliance's stranglehold. Following the report of the commission of inquiry, which proved the sinister policy of the Alliance, the congress decided to expel Bakunin and J. Guillaume [14]. On the other hand, no action was taken against the members of the Spanish delegation who had belonged to the Alliance but who assured that they were no longer part of it. The Hague Congress was, however, the swan song of the IWA. Well aware of the demoralisation among the ranks of the proletariat caused by the terrible repression of the Commune, Marx and Engels also proposed transferring the General Council from London to New York, far from the conflicts that were increasingly dividing the International. This allowed the IWA to die a natural death (ratified by the Philadelphia conference in 1876) without its reputation being hijacked and tarnished by Bakuninist schemers. The struggle between the proletarian fraction of the IWA and the Alliance is most often presented as a personal quarrel between Marx and Bakunin, or, according to anarchists, as an opposition between the ‘authoritarian’ and ‘libertarian’ versions of socialism. These explanations mask the true significance of this struggle. In fact, the IWA was the first organisation to be confronted with the threat of political parasitism. That is to say, a movement which, while claiming to adhere to and defend the communist programme, concentrates all its efforts on denigration and manoeuvres aimed at weakening or even destroying the organisations of the proletariat.[15] By being able to identify and wage an uncompromising struggle against this scourge, the IWA made a very important contribution on which the ICC was able to build from the 1980s onwards, in the face of the resurgence of the parasitic danger [16].

In 1903, the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) was the scene of a similar confrontation between the advocates of a proletarian conception of revolutionary organisation and the advocates of a petty-bourgeois conception. The challenge of this Congress was to unify the various committees, groups and circles claiming to be part of the social democracy that had developed in Russia and in exile. While several differences of opinion were expressed during the discussions, particularly regarding the various definitions of party membership, the split between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks occurred over a seemingly much more trivial issue: the composition of the editorial board of Iskra, the RSDLP's newspaper. Until 1903, it had been composed of six militants (Lenin, Martov, Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zassoulich and Potressov).

Following a proposal by Lenin, the Congress decided to reduce the team to three members (Lenin, Martov, Plekhanov) [17]. The hysterical reaction of part of the congress, starting with Martov, revealed the extent of the clique mentality within the party. One of the driving forces behind Martov's rebellion was his sentimental attachment to his friends and comrades from the old Iskra. But it was also due to his growing and unfounded mistrust of Lenin's true motives, which were to equip himself with the means to respond to the organisation's new needs. However, the unacceptable behaviour of Martov and his supporters continued after the Congress. Although they found themselves in a minority at the end of the Congress after the departure of the Economists and the Bund [18], they refused to submit to its decision. Martov, out of solidarity with his ‘ousted’ friends, refused to join the new committee and subsequently pursued a policy of boycotting all central organs as long as they remained in the minority. Lenin was subjected to a veritable smear campaign by the Mensheviks and all those who supported them in the international socialist movement, accusing him of wanting to replace ‘democratic’ life within the party with an all-powerful central organ. Thus, the ‘Bolshevik fraction’ led by Lenin had to take on the task of building the party, waging a tireless struggle against the influence of Menshevism.

The Hague Congress in 1872 and the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903 highlight the extent to which the defence of the organisation and its principles of functioning has always been the subject of the utmost vigilance on the part of revolutionary marxists. In both cases, it was precisely on the question of organisation that a decisive separation took place between the proletarian current and the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois currents.

3 – The tireless struggle against opportunism

These episodes were two expressions of a much broader problem within the labour movement: opportunism and its variant, centrism [19]. There are two sources behind the emergence of these two tendencies in the working class and its organisations. On the one hand, there is the pressure of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologies, as we have explained above. On the other hand, there is the difficult process of the proletariat's maturation and development of class consciousness. Opportunism is essentially expressed in the clear separation between the goal of the proletarian movement, revolution, and the means to achieve it, ultimately setting them against each other. If the tendency to abandon proletarian positions is not stopped, it can lead an organisation to betray the class and definitively switch to the side of the bourgeoisie. Opportunism and centrism are therefore permanent dangers that all organisations have had to face. It was particularly in the Second International that this problem arose in all its magnitude, with the theorisation of revisionism developed by Eduard Bernstein within the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). In his 1898 pamphlet entitled The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy, Bernstein openly called for questioning the necessity of the proletarian revolution as a preliminary phase in the construction of socialism: “Practically speaking,” he wrote to Kautsky in 1896, “we are only a radical party; we do only what all radical bourgeois parties do, except that we conceal it under language that is entirely disproportionate to our actions and means.” Bernstein's theoretical positions attacked the very foundations of marxism in that they rejected the inevitability of capitalism's decline and ultimate collapse. Based on the prosperity of capitalism in the 1890s, coupled with its rapid colonialist expansion across the globe, Bernstein argued that this system had overcome its tendency toward self-destructive crises. Under these conditions, “the goal was nothing, the movement was everything,” and the antagonism between the state and the working class could be overcome. Bernstein openly proclaimed that the fundamental principle of the Communist Manifesto, that workers have no country, was “obsolete”. He called on German workers to support the Kaiser’s colonial policy in Africa and Asia.

In reality, Bernstein's revisionism was by no means an exception or an isolated case. In France, the socialist Millerand joined the Waldeck-Rousseau government, alongside General Gallifet, the executioner of the Paris Commune; a similar trend existed in Belgium. In the United Kingdom, the British Labour movement was completely dominated by reformism and narrow-minded nationalist trade unionism. In fact, the tendency to abandon proletarian positions was increasingly gaining ground within the ranks of the International. This experience " confirms the impossibility of maintaining the proletariat's party during a prolonged period of non-revolutionary activity. The eventual participation of the Second International's parties in the imperialist war of 1914 only revealed the organization's long-standing corruption. The ever-present permeability and penetrability of the proletariat's political organization to the ideology of the ruling capitalist class, during prolonged periods of stagnation and decline in the class struggle, reach such a scale that the ideology of the bourgeoisie ends up replacing that of the proletariat, and the party inevitably loses its class content (…) to become the class instrument of the enemy [20]."

It was in this context that left-wing minorities waged a fierce and uncompromising struggle in the period leading up to the outbreak of the First World War to defend the revolutionary character of the political organisation and the necessity for proletarian internationalism:

• Within the SPD, the minority grouped around Rosa Luxemburg opposed, for nearly two decades, the revisionist current and the centrism embodied by Karl Kautsky.
• In Holland, the marxist current of the SDAP, grouped around the journal De Tribune, took up the fight in 1907 against the reformist drift represented by the parliamentary fraction led by Troelstra.
• In Russia, in the aftermath of the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903, the Bolshevik fraction took up the struggle against opportunism, first on questions of organisation and then on questions of tactics.
• In Italy, it was not until December 1918 that the ‘abstentionist’ fraction was formed within the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). This fraction would later form the backbone on which the Communist Party of Italy was founded in 1921.

What lessons can we learn from this struggle?

• First, these different groups had a genuine desire to defend revolutionary principles within a degenerating organisation. With the exception of the premature splits by the German and Dutch left [21], they fought to the end, that is, as long as there was proletarian life and the possibility of debate within the party. This demonstrated strength of conviction and a real fighting spirit.

But this struggle was also marred by significant weaknesses:

• dispersed political activity, most often confined to their own party, to the detriment of an international regroupment of the left that would have allowed them to work together. This was particularly the case with the left wing of the SPD, which was unable to organise itself as a collective body within the party, completely underestimating the importance of contact with other groups.
• This first weakness largely explains why these groups were reduced to a handful of countries (Germany, Russia, Holland, Bulgaria, Italy), while in other countries (such as France, Great Britain and the United States) they either did not exist or were particularly weak. This lack of international unity among left-wing minorities completely disarmed the marxist current in the face of the bankruptcy of the Second International and the betrayal of social democracy at the outbreak of the First World War.
• But the main weakness lay in the inability of most groups to grasp in depth the political role they had to play, that is, the work of a fraction. Only the Bolsheviks were able to understand their task in the present moment, namely to act as a bridge between the failed Second International and the new party that needed to be prepared.

4 – The need for a clear vision of the role and function of the organisation

As we recalled in the introduction to this series, it was the left fraction of the Italian Communist Party that demonstrated:

• that the existence of the party is determined by the balance of forces between the two main classes of society shifting in favour of the proletariat;
• that between two moments in the party's existence, the fraction constitutes an organic bridge between the old and the future party.

Thus, an organisation's ability to assume the role for which the class created it depends in particular on its capacity to understand the historical period in depth (especially the main dynamics of the evolution of capitalist society) in order to grasp the specific tasks to be undertaken in a given period.

After the failure of the revolutionary movements of 1848, Marx and Engels understood that the class struggle was going to experience a profound setback. They concluded that the conditions were no longer in place to maintain the League in its previous form and function. They had to wage a determined struggle against the Willich-Schapper tendency which, marked by a tendency towards immediate action and incapable of foreseeing the period of retreat and reaction, wanted to rush the organisation into adventurous actions. The split within the League took place precisely on this issue. "During the early years, the Willich-Schapper tendency seemed to have won the victory, not only because it had retained the majority and maintained the organisation of the League, but also because of all the noisy and boisterous demonstrations it provoked [...] while the Marx and Engels faction seemed to have been silenced or to have ceased to exist. But thirteen years later, [...] at the founding of the First International, we find Marx, Engels and their comrades occupying the leading positions in the movement and playing a dominant role in the work of building the new proletarian parties, while the Willich-Schapper tendency had completely vanished, leaving no trace behind and making no theoretical or practical contribution to the new class organisation. [22]”

The various currents that opposed opportunist degeneration within the Communist International were to face the same challenge: to understand in depth the 'tasks of the hour’. It was the left wing of the Italian Communist Party (which saw itself first and foremost as a fraction of the CI) that understood the consequences of the defeat of the revolutionary wave for the role of revolutionaries. Having understood that the counter-revolution (manifested in particular by Stalin's seizure of power in the USSR and the introduction into the CI of the fraudulent thesis of ‘socialism in one country’) temporarily removed the prospect of forming a new party, the Italian Left committed itself with determination to genuine fraction work. This consisted in particular of carrying out a critical assessment, “without taboos or ostracism”, of the reasons for the failure of the revolutionary wave and the opportunist degeneration of the CI. Like the tendency led by Marx and Engels in the Communist League, the Italian Left's rigorous and uncompromising approach to defending principles enabled it to make a solid and lasting contribution to the revolutionary movement. However, this did not prevent it from also wavering in the face of the upheavals imposed by the historical situation. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 provoked a serious crisis within the Fraction after a minority committed itself to the Republican side in the name of anti-fascism. Subsequently, it was the majority itself which, taking up the excesses of its main theorist, Vercesi, analysed the situation as conducive to revolution (its journal taking the name Octobre instead of Bilan) and completely ignored the prospect of world war. As a result, it found itself scattered and unable to develop a truly organised political life when the Second World War broke out. Only a small minority of militants in the south of France maintained the Fraction's traditional positions and continued their political work in particularly difficult conditions. But this reconstituted Fraction eventually dissolved in 1945 when almost all of its members, learning of the formation in Italy of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista led by Onorato Damen, decided, without even examining its political foundations, to join this organisation individually [23]. Only Marc Chirik opposed this decision, considering that it called into question the entire approach of the Italian Fraction since the late 1920s, as had previously been the case with the position of the minority of the Fraction that had joined the anti-fascist militias in Spain and Vercesi's political drift after 1937. Only the small nucleus led by Marc Chirik, which would later take the name ‘Gauche Communiste de France’ (1944-1952), remained in continuity with the Italian Fraction, a continuity that was openly or shamefully rejected by the various groups claiming to belong to it. For its part, the GCF, firmly grounded in the theoretical and political achievements of the Italian Fraction, was able to go further and deepen the Fraction's work on a whole series of issues.

The same cannot be said of the left wing of the Communist Party of Germany, which, after its expulsion in 1920, formed the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, KAPD). This organisation was founded without any real reflection on the specific role it was to play in view of the changing historical conditions and the opportunist dynamics of the CI. This lack of clarity led to considerable heterogeneity within the party and to completely erroneous organisational concepts such as putschism and activism. In July 1921, after the CI issued an ultimatum to the KAPD to merge with the VKPD, the party leadership, with the support of Gorter, adopted a resolution to break with the CI and call for the formation of a ‘Communist Workers' International’ (KAI) [24]: "The participating groups were few in number and represented very limited forces: besides the Essen tendency, there was the KAPN, the Bulgarian Communist Left, the Communist Workers’ Party (CWP) of Sylvia Pankhurst, the KAP of Austria, described as a ‘Potemkin village’ (ie a sham) by the KAPD of Berlin. In the end, this rump ‘International’ was to vanish with the disappearance or progressive withdrawal of its components. The Essen tendency went through multiple splits. The KAPN disintegrated, initially as a result of the appearance of a current attached to the Berlin tendency, hostile to the formation of the KAI, then by internal conflicts, based more on clan conflicts than political principles [25].” While the revolutionary wave was already in retreat, and the left fractions remaining within the CI could have been grouped together within a single international left-wing communist current, the artificial formation of this ‘new International’ had disastrous repercussions for the revolutionary movement. The disintegration of the KAI and its main components, the KAPD and the KAPN, plunged thousands of militants into passivity and total political disorientation. This debacle strikingly illustrates the reality that organisations which are unable to establish a deep understanding of the period and its challenges remain helpless, without a compass, incapable of making a lasting and coherent political contribution to the development of class consciousness and the understanding of how to build a revolutionary organisation.

5 – Lenin's struggle to build the Bolshevik Party

a) – A conscious and long-term approach

The delay in forming the Communist International in March 1919, more than a year after the outbreak of the revolution in October 1917 and nearly two months after the failure of the insurrection in Germany in January 1919, was a major weakness of the last revolutionary wave. This emergency situation did not allow the CI to clarify in advance all the programmatic and tactical implications of capitalism's entry into the “epoch of wars and revolutions.” Moreover, the formation of new communist parties in the heat of revolutionary struggle prevented their construction on the basis of a frank and uncompromising political struggle to eliminate opportunist currents and the residues of bourgeois ideology. The lesson to be drawn from this is that the constitution of the future party cannot be achieved spontaneously and empirically, but must be prepared patiently, so that it emerges before the first revolutionary assaults. More generally, as the ICC stated in April 1975, in the first issue of our International Review: “The idea that revolutionary organization builds itself voluntarily, consciously, with premeditation far from being a voluntarist idea is on the contrary one of the concrete results of all Marxist praxis.”

Here, our organisation was echoing the conception defended by Lenin in his pamphlet What Is To Be Done? published in 1902. At that time, the workers' movement in Russia was marked by a particular form of opportunism known as ‘economism’: "Like the Bernsteinians, for whom ‘the movement is everything, the goal nothing’, the Economists, such as those grouped around the paper Rabochaya Mysl, also worshipped the immediate movement of the class; but as there was no parliamentary arena to speak of, this immediacy was largely restricted to the day-to-day struggle in the factories. For the Economists, the workers were mainly interested in bread and butter issues. Politics for this current was largely reduced to seeking to achieve a bourgeois parliamentary regime, and was mainly seen as the task of the liberal opposition. […] In this extremely narrow and mechanical vision of the proletarian movement, class consciousness, if it was going to develop on a wide scale, would in any case emerge more or less from an accretion of economic struggles. And since the factory or the locality was the principal terrain of these immediate skirmishes, the best form of organisation for intervening within them was the local circle. This too was a way of bowing down before the immediate fact, since the Russian socialist movement had for the first decades of its existence been dispersed in a plethora of loose, amateurish and often transient local circles with only the vaguest connections to each other [26].” The main purpose of What Is To Be Done? was precisely to demonstrate the impasse that economism represented for the workers’ movement and the construction of a combative revolutionary organisation in Russia. Although Lenin set out several theoretical errors in this pamphlet [27], which he later corrected after the experience of the mass strike in 1905, the thrust of his polemic was profoundly correct: "In recent years the question of ‘what is to be done’ has confronted Russin Social-Democrats with particular insistence. It is not a question of what path we must choose (as was the case in the late eighties and early nineties), but of what practical steps we must take upon the known path and how they shall be taken. It is a question of a system and plan of practical work. And it must be admitted that we have not yet solved this question of the character and the methods of struggle, fundamental for a party of practical activity, that it still gives rise to serious differences of opinion… [28]."

Contrary to the localist, immediate and spontaneous vision conveyed by economism or the eclecticism of Rabochaya Dyelo (as well as the Menshevik tendency from the Second Congress of 1903 onwards), Lenin set about waging a long-term struggle to promote a conscious and long-term approach to building the organisation. This indissoluble link between consciousness and the future touches on the very essence of what constitutes the historical being of the proletariat, which, "denied all economic power within society, exploited at the point of production, can only look to itself for its own liberation. It can oppose capitalism only with its own solidarity and its own consciousness: two weapons which themselves embody the principle characteristic of the future society [29]”. The same applies to the revolutionary vanguard. Only with the future as its compass can it assume its function and tasks without being constantly buffeted by events: “the less we rely on the unexpected, the more likely we are never to be caught off guard by ‘historic turning points’," Lenin asserted. It was precisely this patient, methodical and planned work that enabled the Bolshevik fraction to forge a party capable of contributing to the working class's seizure of power in October 1917.

b) - No construction without a deep assimilation of the party spirit

But the organisational struggle that Lenin undertook from 1902-1903 contained another dimension, inextricably linked to the one developed just before. While the RSDLP was still a collection of circles and groups, Lenin deplored the dispersion and profound lack of concern among a large part of its ranks for the general needs of the organisation as a whole. His determination to give priority to party spirit over the visions inherited from the circle spirit was particularly evident in the conception of the militant that he defended at the Second Party Congress. Unlike Martov's formulation, Lenin's distinguished itself by the fact that activists had a duty to respect the decisions of the congress and the party and to play an active role in their implementation. In other words, in Lenin's view, a militant was an individual belonging to a collective body, whose responsibility was to defend the whole, to participate in debates, in setting the direction, in the decision-making of the whole and in the implementation of those decisions. Moreover, after the 1903 congress, Lenin continued to castigate his Bolshevik comrades for their platonic agreements, repeating in letters, texts and resolutions, over and over again, that every militant must be fully committed to the struggle as a whole. This active attitude, which Lenin urged every militant to adopt, had to be evident in all areas of the organisation's life, as he reiterated in 1905, a few months before the Fourth Party Congress, which marked the unification of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks: "Danger may be said to lie in a sudden influx of large numbers of non-Social-Democrats into the Party. If that occurred, the Party would be dissolved among the masses, it would cease to be the conscious vanguard of its class, its role would be reduced to that of a tail. That would mean a very deplorable period indeed. And this danger could undoubtedly become a very serious one if we showed any inclination towards demagogy, if we lacked party principles (programme, tactical rules, organisational experience) entirely, or if those principles were feeble and shaky. But the fact is that no such ‘ifs’ exist. We Bolsheviks have never shown any inclination towards demagogy. On the contrary, we have always fought resolutely, openly and straight forwardly against the slightest attempts at demagogy; we have demanded class-consciousness from those joining the Party, we have insisted on the tremendous importance of continuity in the Party’s development, we have preached discipline and demanded that every Party member be trained in one or other of the Party organisations. We have a firmly established Party programme which is officially recognised by all Social-Democrats and the fundamental propositions of which have not given rise to any criticism (criticism of individual points and formulations is quite legitimate and necessary in any live party). We have resolutions on tactics which were consistently and systematically worked out at the Second and Third Congresses and in the course of many years’ work of the Social-Democratic press. We also have some organisational experience and an actual organisation, which has played an educational role and has undoubtedly borne fruit, a fact which may not be immediately apparent, but which can be denied only by the blind or by the blinded” [30]. Far from the authoritarian and dictatorial vision that most bourgeois academics and thinkers constantly attribute to him, Lenin's entire organisational concept is based on the will for organised action, founded on the revolutionary consciousness and conviction of each militant.

Conclusion

At the end of this first part, the main lessons that the ICC draws from the experience of the revolutionary movement of the past are therefore as follows:

• The construction of the revolutionary organisation proceeds from a conscious approach that enables it to assume its role in the long term.
• Its formation is based on a programme, as well as on clearly defined principles and a centralised framework of operation at the international level.
• The defence of the organisation against all forms of intrusion by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologies is a relentless and permanent struggle.
• The ability of an organisation to assume the role for which the class has created it cannot rely on a minority of militants. On the contrary, it requires the resolute and convinced involvement of all militants in all political tasks.
• In order to avoid constantly repeating the same mistakes and to be able to pass on the best of its experience, the organisation must make a constant effort to critically assess its own political life and draw the essential lessons from it. The same applies to the examination of the experience of the workers' movement and its unitary organisations.

The second part of this series will be devoted precisely to the ICC's assessment of five decades of its own political life.

 

[1] These include two books on the Italian Communist Left and the German-Dutch Left, as well as on the Russian, British and French Communist Left.

[2] This was the theoretical journal of the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy which appeared between 1933 and 1938.

[3] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, 1852.

[4] It is not possible in this article to explain in detail the difference between utopian socialism and the materialist view of history developed by Marx and Engels. For this, see: Communism is not a nice idea but a material necessity [Part 1 “From primitive communism to utopian socialism”], International Review No. 68, 1st quarter 1992, as well as Engels' work Socialism, Utopian and Scientific.

[5] The latter had already embarked on a project of political organisation in the form of correspondence committees with a view to coordinating communist militant forces in Europe.

[6] F. Engels, “On the History of the Communist League”, 1885.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Thus, from its very beginnings, the workers’ movement embraced the principle of centralisation, which expresses the fundamental and indispensable unity of the proletariat on an international scale. Criticism of this principle by anarchist currents, which oppose it with federalism, is a significant indication of the petty-bourgeois nature of these currents.
Proletarian centralism obviously has nothing to do with centralism as practised by the bourgeoisie, particularly in its Stalinist variants, which is based on totalitarian state control over society, a phenomenon that has spread on a large scale in the decadence of capitalism.

[9] For more details, see: “The historical context of the ICC statutes”, International Review No. 5, 2nd quarter 1976.

[10] David Riazanov, Marx and Engels. Lectures given during the Marxism course at the Socialist Academy in 1922, Les Bons caractères, 2004.

 [11] See in particular: Centenary of the foundation of the Communist International - What lessons can we draw for future combats?, International Review 162

[12] “Internationalisme nº 7, 1945: ‘The left fraction - Method for forming the party,’” International Review No. 162.

[13] For further details on the struggle against the Alliance within the IWA, see:

• “The 1st International and the Fight against Sectarianism”, International Review no. 84, 1st quarter 1996.
• “The 1st International against Bakunin's ‘Alliance’”, International Review no. 85, 2nd quarter 1996.

[14] Principal leader of the Jura Federation of the IWA, which was under the control of the Alliance.

[15] "It is high time, once and for all, to put an end to the internal struggles provoked daily in our Association by the presence of this parasitic body. These quarrels only serve to waste the energy that should be used to fight the bourgeois regime. By paralysing the International's activity against the enemies of the working class, the Alliance serves the bourgeoisie and the governments admirably.” (Engels, “The General Council to all members of the International”, August 1872, warning against Bakunin's Alliance).

[16] See: ‘Building the organisation of revolutionaries: theses on parasitism’, International Review No. 94, 3rd quarter 1998.

[17] Lenin's proposal was based on the fact that the three militants who were not reappointed to the editorial board of Iskra had not taken on editorial work in the previous period. But the way Lenin presented his proposal was designed to spare their feelings. In particular, it opened up the possibility of co-opting these militants back onto the editorial board.

[18] Hence the name ‘Mensheviks,’ meaning ‘minority.’

[19] The ICC published several articles on opportunism and centrism, particularly during the 1980s. See in particular the second part of the text “Discussion: Opportunism and Centrism in the Working Class and its Organisations” in our International Review No. 43, as well as the resolution adopted at our 6th Congress entitled “Opportunism and Centrism in the Period of Decadence” in International Review No. 44.

[20] “On the Nature and Function of the Political Party of the Proletariat,” Internationalisme No. 37, September 1948.

[21] After the expulsion of the ‘Tribunists’ at the extraordinary congress of the SDAP in 1909, the majority of the group decided to hastily found a new party (the Social Democratic Workers’ Party). In Germany, after the expulsion of the left from the SPD in 1917, the ‘radical left’ remained autonomous and, unlike the Spartacus group, refused to join the USPD in order to continue its work as a fraction within it.

[22] “The Historical Conditions of the Formation of the Party,” Internationalisme, No. 19, February 1947.

[23] See the critique by the French Communist Left: “On the 1st Congress of the Internationalist Communist Party of Italy,” Internationalisme No. 7, 1945, under the article “The left fraction - Method for forming the party” in International Review No. 162.

[24] The ‘Berlin tendency,’ which was in the majority within the KAPD, remained hostile to the formation of this new International.

[25] “Report on the Role of the ICC as a Fraction”, International Review No. 156.

[26] “History of the Workers' Movement. 1903-1904: The Birth of Bolshevism (Part 1),” International Review no. 116, 1st quarter 2004.

[27] In particular, the idea that class consciousness has to be imported from outside the working class.

[28] “Where to Begin”, Iskra No. 4, May 1901, in What Is To Be Done?, Marxists Internet Archive.

[29] “The Nature of Communism”, Communist Organisation and Class Consciousness, ICC pamphlet.

[30] “The Reorganisation of the Party”, Marxists Internet Archive.