False theories of the party - Conclusion

We can conclude very simply by repeating that the confusions of the Bordigists and those of the councilists have the same origins: the failure to understand the revolutionary character of defensive struggles. These two political currents, which are apparently so different, come together in their confusions. Because any political position which rests on a separation between economic and political struggles implies the negation of the proletariat as a revolutionary class capable of becoming conscious of its historic aims. This is where Bordigism and councilism lead.

To insist upon the proletariat’s inability to go beyond the strictly defensive terrain by its own strength, to repeat that it is up to the party to fill the gap, this is basically to affirm that it is not necessary for the proletariat to go beyond this terrain. The modernists drive the nail in even further by pretending that when the working class struggles for economic demands it is a ‘c1ass-for-capital’, that is, an economic category completely subject to capitalist domination. It is not surprising that such a view of consciousness has pushed the majority of modernists into the arms of petit-bourgeois despair.

Both the Bordigists and the councilists separate class consciousness from the objective conditions which enable the struggle to develop. Both look upon revolutionaries as elements exterior to the proletariat. For the former, consciousness cannot by developed by the proletariat itself; it is therefore a matter of importing their consciousness from outside, and it is the party that performs this function. For the councilists the role of revolutionaries must be limited to a philosophical one, simply as intellectual spectators; this immediately places them outside the concrete struggles of the class. Neither of them understand that a correct and dialectical conception of class consciousness and its flowering goes hand in hand with an understanding of revolutionaries as a living and active part of their class.