Rejected resolution on Centrism and proletarian political organisations

1) Academic debate on the question of centrism is impossible. As a concept, centrism was born and has developed in the workers' movement in the face of the necessity to demarcate the political forces present in the class struggle, in particular with a view to the constitution of class parties in the present epoch of wars and revolutions. It is no accident if this question is today posed, once again, in the ICC, in a period where decisive class confrontations are on the horizon, and so also the perspective of a new class party: on the reply to this question will depend the nature of the party tomorrow, and the attitude of revolutionary groups today in preparing this perspective. The practical experience of the 3rd International's tragic collapse, followed by the fiasco of the so-called ‘4th International', the theoretical framework of the nature of the working class, the decadence of capitalism, and state capitalism as capitalism's mode of existence in the present period, provide the proletariat with all the necessary material for criticising the concept of centrism and its implications.

2) Because of its condition within capitalism as an exploited and revolutionary class that bears within it capitalism's destruction, the proletariat is constantly subjected to two contradictory tendencies:

-- its own movement towards consciousness of its situation and of its historical destiny;

-- the ideological pressure of the dominant bourgeoisie, which tends to destroy its consciousness.

These two irreconcilable tendencies determine the uneven character of the class struggle, which goes through successive advances or revolutionary attempts, and retreats or counter-revolutions, and in which there appear vanguard minorities organized in groups, fractions or parties, called on to catalyse the class’s movement towards its consciousness.

The proletariat can only have one consciousness: a revolutionary consciousness; but, because it is born in bourgeois society, and can only liberate itself when it disappears as a class, its consciousness is a developing pro­cess, never completed in capitalism, permanently confronting the bourgeois ideology that impregnates the whole of society.

This situation determines the dynamic of the proletariat's political organizations: either they fulfil their function of developing class consciousness against bourgeois ideology, and are situated practically in the proletarian camp, or they succumb to bourgeois ideology, and are integrated practically into the bourgeois camp.

3) The demarcation of camps among political organizations is itself a developing historical process, determined by the objective conditions of the development of capitalism and of the proletariat within it. Since the beginning of the workers' movement, a process of decantation has occurred this has progressively shrunk and demarcated the proletarian terrain.

At the time of the 1st international, the development of capitalism was still characterised, even in the heart of Europe, by the introduction of large scale industrial productsion and the formation of the industrial proletariat from the declining artisans and the dispossessed peasantry. At this stage of the development of the proletariat and of its consciousness, the frontiers of the workers' movement could still contain such dissimilar currents as Bakuninist anarchism and Proudhonism, issued from the petty bourgeois and peasant past, Blanquism, anchored in the Jacobin intelligentsia, Mazzinism with its program of radical republicanism, and marxism, the developed expression of the revolutionary proletariat.

At the time of the 2nd International, the end of the period of national revolutions and of the childhood of the industrial proletariat had considerably reduced the frontiers of the workers' movement, by obliging the proletariat to constitute itself as a distinct political party, in opposition to all the bourgeois and petty bourgeois currents. But the necessity of struggling for reforms within ascendant capitalism, the coexistence of the ‘minimum' and ‘maximum' programs during this period, allowed certain currents like an anarcho-syndicalism, centrism and opportunism to exist in the proletarian political camp alongside revolutionary marxism.

In the present epoch of capitalist decadence, in the era of state capitalism, of the integration of the mass parties and trade unions into the cogs of the state capitalist machine, of the impossibility of reforms in a situation of permanent crisis and of the objective necessity of the communist revolution - an epoch opened by the first world war - the proletarian political camp is definitively limited to revolutionary marxism. The different opportunist and centrist tendencies, with their program of parliamentarism and legalism, with their strategy of attrition, based on the mass parties and trade unions, have passed irrevocably into the capitalist camp. The same is true of any organization that abandons in any way the terrain of the world revolution, as was to be the case for the 3rd International with the adoption of ‘socialism in one country', and for Trotskyism with its ‘critical' support for the second world war.

4) The question that revolutionary marxism must ask itself, faced with the historical phenomenon of opportunism and centrism, is not whether or not proletarian organizations are threatened by the penetration of bourgeois ideology, but how to understand the particular conditions in which the latter could give rise to the existence of currents distinct both from revolutionary marxism and from the bourgeoisie. The workings class and its organizations - however clear they are - are by their very nature always penetrated by bourgeois ideology. This penetration takes on the most varied forms, and it would be seriously underestimating it to search out only one of its forms. The outcome of the combat between class consciousness and bourgeois ideology in an organisation is either the development of the former against the latter, or the destruction of the former by the latter. In the epoch of capitalist decadence, when class antagonisms are expressed in a clear-cut manner, this means: either the development of the revolutionary program or capitulation to the bourgeoisie.

The possibility of a ‘third path' during ascendant capitalism - ie the existence of' currents and positions that were neither truly bourgeois nor truly revolutionary within the workers' movement - was the result of the room left by an expanding capitalism for the proletariat's permanent struggle to improve its living conditions within the system, without it putting the latter into danger. Opportunism - the policy that sought immediate success to the detriment of principles, ie the preconditions of the final success - and centrism - a variation of opportunism, trying to reconcile the latter with a reference to marxism - developed as political forms of the reformist disease that gangrened the workers' movement during this epoch. Their objective basis lay, not in any fundamental differentiation of economic interests within the proletariat, as Lenin's theory of the ‘workers aristocracy' put it, but in the permanent apparatuses of the trade unions and mass parties, which were tending to become institutions within the framework of the system, integrated into the capitalist state, and separated from the class struggle. When capitalism entered its period of decadence, these organizations moved definitively into the capitalist camp, and with them went the reformist, opportunist and centrist currents.

Henceforth, the immediate alternative posed for the working class is revolution or counter-revolution, socialism or barbarism. Reformism, opportunism and centrism have lost all objective reality inside the workers' movement, since their material base - the winning of reforms and immediate successes without any struggle for the revolution, and the corresponding mass organizations - no longer exists. All policies that aim at immediate success while distancing themselves from the revolution have become, from the proletarian point of view, an illusion and not an objective reality, they represent a direct capitulation to the bourgeoisie, a counter-revolutionary policy. All the historical examples of such policies in the epoch of decadence, such as the Communist International's ‘going to the masses', show that, far from leading to immediate success, they lead to complete failure, the betrayal of organizations and the defeat of the revolution in the case of the CI. This does not mean that any proletarian organisation that degenerates passes over immediately as such to the bourgeoisie; outside the crucial moments of war and revolution, capitulation to the bourgeoisie may be partial and progressive, as the history of Bordigism shows. But this does not change the general characteristic of the process, the permanent contradiction between revolution and counter-revolution, the denaturation of the first into the second, without passing by ideologies of an intermediary type, as were opportunism and centrism.

5) The thesis developed by Trotsky in the 1930s, and taken up again today by the ICC, according to which opportunism and centrism represent in their essence the penetration of bourgeois ideology, defined simply in terms of ‘political behaviour' (lack of firmness in principles, hesitation, attempts to reconcile antagonistic positions), within the organizations of the proletariat, is a radical departure from marxism's historical materialist method:

-- from materialism, because it stands reality on its head by considering political currents as the result of behaviour, instead of considering behaviour the result of political currents, defined by their relationship to the class struggle;

-- from history, because it replaces the whole general evolution of the proletariat and its organizations by fixed categories of particular types of behaviour, which are unable to explain this historical evolution.

Its consequences are disastrous for a whole series of essential aspects of the revolution­ary program:

(1) By placing the origins of the weaknesses of the proletarian organizations in a hesitating behaviour, it opposes to this another behaviour - will to action - and so bases its perspective on determination, a deviation typical of Trotskyism in the 1930s.

(2) Applied to the epoch of capitalist decadence, it leads to the rehabilitation into the proletarian camp, of the ‘centrist' current, and thereby of the Social-Democracy after its participation in WW1 and the crushing of the post-war revolution, of Stalinism after the adoption of ‘socialism in one country', and of Trotskyism after its participation in WW2; in other words, to the abandoning of the objective criterion of internationalism, of participation in war or revolution to demarcate the proletarian and the bourgeois camps; to the recognition of nationalist positions - such as ‘socialism in one country' for Stalinism, or the Trotskyist ‘critical support' for imperialist war - as expressions of the proletariat.

(3) As a result, it alters, amongst other things, all the lessons drawn from the revolutionary wave, and justifies, however critically, the policy of opening the 3rd International to the counter-revolutionary elements and parties of the Social-Democracy, thereby constituting a serious danger for the revolution and the party of tomorrow.

(4) In the final analysis, it implies a calling into question of the revolutionary nature of the proletariat and of its consciousness, since, if centrism designates all cohabitation of contradictory positions, then the proletariat and its organizations are always and by nature centrist, since the proletariat necessarily drags with it the marks of the society in which it exists, of bourgeois ideology, while at the same time affirming its revolutionary project.

6) The truth of a theory lies in practice. The application of the concept of centrism by the 3rd International in the formation of the communist parties of Europe, and by the Trotskyist Left Opposition in the formation of the so-called ‘4th International', provides the definitive historical demonstration of its bankruptcy in the epoch of capitalist decadence. Its lack of clarity on the henceforward bourgeois nature of ‘centrism' led the CI into a policy of compromise with the counter-revolutionary Social-Democratic tendencies and parties, by opening the doors of the International to them, as was the case in Germany where the KPD had to amalgamate with the USPD, or in France, where the PCF was formed with the SFIO which had participated in the ‘Sacred Union' during the war. In the same way, Trotsky's conception of centrism dragged him into a voluntarist policy of building a new International and of entryism into the counter-revolutionary Social Democracy. In both cases, these policies accelerated the deaths of the CI and of Trotskyism in a spectacular way.

The fact that the communist lefts continued to use the term ‘centrism' and ‘opportunism' is in no way a proof of their adequacy, but an expression of the Left's difficulty in immediately drawing all the theoretical lessons of the experience they had just been through. The Lefts were at least clear on the main point, ie the counter-revolutionary function assumed by the currents described as ‘centrist', but their analysis was weakened by their resort to concepts applicable to the degeneration of the 2nd International. As witnesses, we can call the untenable positions of Bilan on the duality between Stalinism's (proletarian) ‘nature' and (counter-revolutionary) ‘function' after 1927, and on the description of the USSR as a ‘proletarian state' right up to WW2.

7) An organisation's class nature is determined by the historical function that it fulfils in the class struggle, for an organization does not emerge as a passive reflection of a class, but as one of its active organs. Any criterion based solely on the presence of workers (as for Trotskyism) or of revolutionaries (as for the ICC today) within an organization, to determine its class nature, is derived from idealist subjectivism and not from historical materialism. The passage of a proletarian organization into the camp of the bourgeoisie is essentially an objective phenomenon, independent of the consciousness that revolutionaries may have of it at the time, because it means that the organisation confronts the proletariat as part of the objective, adverse conditions of capitalist society, and that it thus escapes from the subjective action of the proletariat. The continued presence of workers, and even sometimes temporarily of revolutionary fractions within it, is in no way contradictory with this fact, since the function that it then fulfils for the bourgeoisie is precisely that of controlling the proletariat.

There exist decisive historical criteria that mark the passage of an organisation into the capitalist camp: the abandonment of internationalism, the participation in war or counter-revolution. For the Social Democracy, and the trade unions, this passage took place during WW1, for the CI with the adoption of ‘socialism in one country', for the Trotskyist current during WW2. Once this passage has taken place, the organization is definitively dead for the proletariat, since henceforward, the principle that Marx put forward against the capitalist state, of which it is now a part, must be applied to it: it cannot be conquered, it must be destroyed.

The death of an International means the simultaneous betrayal of all or the majority of the parties of which it is comprised, through the abandoning of internationalism and the adoption of a nationalist policy. But because these parties are each integrated into a national capitalist state, exceptions may exist, determined by specific national conditions, as was the case in the 2nd International. These exceptions, which were not repeated during the collapse of the 3rd International with the unanimous adoption by the CPs of Stalinist nationalism, in no way disprove the general rule, nor the necessity for these parties to break completely with the policies of their one-time ‘fraternal' parties. For a certain time, there may continue to exist within the latter revolutionary currents or fractions which have not managed to understand immediately the change in situation, and which are led later on to break with the party that has gone over to the counter-revolution: this was the case with the Spartacist’s in Germany, first in the SPD and then in the USPP. This process has nothing in common with the impossible birth of a proletarian organisation from a bourgeois organisation: these parties break organisationally with the party that has gone over to the bourgeoisie, but represent the programmatic continuity of the old party from which they were born. This expresses the general phenomenon of the lag of consciousness behind objective reality, which appears even when these fractions have left the party: thus, even though all the left fractions had been excluded from the CI by 1927, the Italian fraction continued to analyse the CI and the CPs as proletarian until 1933 and 1935 respectively, and a large minority within it continued to defend the reference to the CP after the analysis of the latter's death in 1935.

8) The subjectivist method that takes the continued presence of revolutionaries within an organisation as a criterion of its class nature completely disarms revolutionaries in the formation of the party. For revolutionaries fight to the end to keep a party for the proletariat, and if their mere presence within it is enough to save the party for the proletariat, this means there can be no reason for them to break with an organization until they are excluded. This circular reasoning boils down to leaving the initiative to the enemy. On the one hand, it encourages the over-hasty condemnation of a party in the case of an early exclusion, but on the other, it paralyses revolutionaries in the opposite case where a party that has gone over to the bourgeoisie is ready to keep revolutionaries within it as a warranty of its ‘working class’s appearance, as was the case with the USPD and a whole series of Social Democratic parties in the revolutionary movement at the beginning of the century. By suppressing the objective criteria of parties' class nature, it also suppresses the objective necessity of the formation of the revolutionary party. And so the circle is closed: the theory of centrism produces the ‘centrism' that it claims to describe and combat, and thereby engenders itself in a vicious circle which can only lead to the conclusion that the working class and its consciousness are centrist by nature.

9) When it arrives at these conclusions, the theory of centrism as a permanent disease within the workers' movement appears for what it is: a capitulation to the bourgeois ideology that it claims to combat, a refusal to draw the lessons of historical experience, an alteration of the revolutionary program. The rejection of this theory, the continuation of the marxist analysis of the lessons of the past and the conditions of the class struggle in the present epoch on the basis of the work of the communist lefts, and the recognition of the impossibility of centrism in this epoch, is the opposite of a disarmament of the revolutionary organisation faced with bourgeois ideology; it is its indispensable armament for combating this ideology in all its forms, and for preparing the formation of a real revolutionary party.