Since communism is not a utopia, or an abstract ideal, its roots lie in the preceding society. The possibility of and objective conditions for communism derive both-from the internal contradictions of capitalism, and the political capacity of the revolutionary class to overthrow capitalist society. It is both the degree of the develop­ment of the productive forces and the nature of the social relations embodied in the proletariat that are the nutrients for the growth of the future society. It is only when the development of the productive forces has reached a certain level, when there is no further possibility of development for the preceding society, owing to the development of the contradiction between the capitalist relations of production and the further development of the productive forces, that communism and the proletarian revolution become objective necessities.

The seizure of control of all the means of production by society “becomes possible, becomes an historic necessity, when the material conditions exist for this to happen. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable not through the acquisition of the understanding that the existence of classes contradicts ideals of justice and equality etc, nor through the mere will to abolish these classes, but through certain new economic conditions.” (Engels, Anti-Duhring, 1894)

These new objective conditions clearly demonstrate that the only social relations that will permit the progressive development of the productive forces, that will respond to the present needs of humanity, are those which abolish the distinction between capital and labour; which abolish cap­ital and the wages system, commodity production, and all national and class divisions.

This allows us to state the following:

- Communism must be a society without classes, without exploitation of man by man, and without any kind of indiv­idual or collective property. The only possible culmination of the socialisation of production by capitalism is the social expropriation, by the whole of society, of the means of production. Only the abolition of class privileges and individual expropriation can resolve the existing con­tradiction between the social nature of production and the capitalist nature of social relations.

This social expropriation of all the productive forces and the means of production can only be undertaken by the proletariat: an exploited class, with no economic property, and functioning as a productive collectivity.

- Communist society is thus based on the abolition of scarcity and on production for human needs. Communism is a society of abundance, which will permit the satisfaction of all the diverse needs of humanity. The level of develop­ment of the productive forces, of human science, technology and knowledge, will permit the liberation of man from the domination of blind economic forces.

For the first time in history, human beings, by consciously attaining mastery over conditions determining their own life and reproduction, will pass “from the reign of necessity to the reign of liberty.”

This production for human needs, the liberation of humanity, can evidently only be realised on a global scale, and through a revolution of all aspects of economic and social life. Thus, communism abolishes the law of value. Communist pro­duction, socialised and planned at all levels by all human beings, is based exclusively on the production of use value, whose socialised and direct distribution excludes exchange, markets, and money.

- From a society of exploitation of man-by-man, of economic competition and economic anarchy, and thus of conflict and competition between individuals and classes, under communism humanity enters a society dominated by the human community.

In this community all forms of political power (governments, state, police…), which maintain the domination of one class over another, will disappear at the same time as exploitation and class divisions. The existence of govern­ments, of all ways of oppressing humanity and human creativity, will give way to a simple administration of things, to an “association of free producers”.

These characteristics of communism are the minimum points that can be outlined. Beyond this (bearing in mind what we have said above) any further description is necessarily limited to broad generalisations. Moreover, this brief description has not dealt with the consequences of the new way of life for human relationships. Nor of the implications of the abolition of divisions and segregations within soc­iety, of alienation, of relations of force between men…

However, even this broad outline shows the immense gulf that separates the world of the future from capitalist society and all previous societies.

A society without exploitation! Where we live according to our needs and desires! Where there is no separation be­tween intellectual and manual labour! Where liberty means more than the freedom to sell one’s labour power!… Inconceivable!

Even if we cannot conceive in any detail of this immense leap that humanity will have to make, one thing is clear: never before in the history of humanity has there been the necessity for a qualitative leap of this kind.

This statement clearly has a double—edged significance. For it is clear that a leap of this kind can only be accomplished by a social class fully conscious of its historic mission. But the class capable of attaining this level of consciousness, the working class, is precisely time class subjected to the most extreme deprivation, the most ferocious exploitation, and the persistent pressure of bourgeois ideology.

Thus all the qualities of communism, which make it a far higher level of humanity than all previous societies, are themselves dependent on the weakness, the deprivation, and the inhumanity of the existence of the proletariat. Because “the whole inhumanity of social existence is present in the conditions of existence of the proletariat in a con­centrated form”, the working class “cannot liberate itself without suppressing all the inhuman aspects of present day society which are concentrated in its own situation.” (Marx, Engels The Holy Family 1844). It is the position of the proletariat as an exploited class which forces it to liberate the whole of society, to create a society without classes or exploitation.

-- The proletariat, 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.

-- But this fact also means that proletarian opposition to bourgeois society is very weak and fragile. Having no economic privileges upon which to base its confrontation with bourgeois society, the proletariat is extremely vul­nerable to the constant pressure of bourgeois ideology, whose aim is to deflect the proletariat from the path towards its final struggle for emancipation.

THIS IS WHY THE PATH TOWARDS COMMUNISM IS NOT AN INEVITABIL­ITY. COMMUNISM IS THE FRUIT OF A LONG AND PAINFUL STRUGGLE. THIS IS WHY, despite the extraordinary revolutionary potential of the proletariat, which has nothing to lose but its chains, and has a world to win, THERE IS NO ABSOLUTE GUARANTEE OF THE VICTORY OF THE REVOLUTION, NOR CAN THERE BE ANY DETERMIN­ISTIC VISION OF ITS DEVELOPMENT. BUT IF THIS NEW HISTORICAL EPOCH IS NOT ATTAINED, THEN HUMANITY WILL DESCEND INTO A NAMELESS BARBARISM, PERHAPS EVEN ITS FINAL DESTRUCTION.

Thus the path towards communism, the class struggle, appears as a series of victories and defeats; of set—backs followed by renewed surges forward. It takes the form of a tension between will and consciousness, of constant re—appraisal and self-criticism.

“Bourgeois revolutions, such as those of the eighteenth century, storm quickly from success to success. They outdo each other in dramatic effects; men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds and each day’s spirit is ecstatic. But they are short lived; they soon reach their apogee, and society has to undergo a long period of regret until it has learned to assimilate soberly the achievements of its period of storm and stress. Proletarian revolutions, however, such as those of the nineteenth century, constantly engage in self—criticism, and in repeated interruptions of their own course. They return to what has apparently already been accomplished in order to begin the task again; with merciless thoroughness they mock the inadequate, weak and wretched aspects of their first attempts; they seem to throw their opponent to the ground only to see him draw new strength from the earth and rise again before them, more colossal than ever; they shrink back again and again before the indeterminate immensity of their own goals, until the situation is created in which any retreat is im­possible, and the conditions themselves cry out: Hic Rhodus, hic salta! Here is the rose, dance here!” (Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852).

On the basis of this incessant movement and constant self— criticism, the proletarian revolution pursues a jagged path towards communism. In fact,

- The communist revolution is not the culmination of an economic process, but merely the precondition on a political level for an economic and social transformation. It is the point of departure for a whole process of transformation of the old society. In the past, the economic power of a class and its capacity to impose a new system of social relations were practically synonymous. The new social struc­tures, which embodied social progress and were imposed on society by force or persuasion, found their justification in the particular economic interests of the revolutionary class. To illustrate this, it is sufficient to recall how feudal society was destroyed by the bourgeoisie.

From the 15th and 16th centuries, the great bourgeois families, particularly in Southern Europe, were incontestable masters of trade and commerce. Along the trade routes over land and sea, flowed an incessant tide of metals, textiles and spices… A sea of gold flooded the towns, amid the new routes that joined the new trade centres. The arts, sciences, letters, and ideas all flourished. Scientific and technical discoveries multiplied, like the industrial cities. It would not be long until Copernicus developed his theory of the movement of the celestial spheres. Extraordinary advances occurred on the level of human understanding: everywhere the need for speed and precision was evident, as much in matters of finance and commerce as in those concerning industrial production. A social class was in the process of overturning society and conquering the world. For this it possessed one essential force: the power of finance and money. Without directly challenging the political power, which remained in the hands of time feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie imposed its own laws on society.

“The struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal nobility is the struggle of town against country, industry against landed property, money economy against natural economy; and the decisive weapon of the bourgeoisie in this struggle was its means of economic power, constantly increasing through the development of industry, first handicraft, and then, at a later stage, progressing to manufacture, mind through the expansion of commerce. During the whole of this struggle, political force was on the side of the nobility…” (our emphasis) (Engels, Anti-Duhring)

For the transition from capitalism to communism, the abolition of all forms of exploitation, the proletariat does not possess this kind of economic power. It will have no money, property or industrial power to aid it in its struggle. There is no economic power that can bring about the dissolution of the power of capitalism, and a gradual transition to communism. What material power could the proletariat gain through the possession of the instruments of labour, machines, or even whole factories, within the general framework of the domination of capitalist social relations? The idea of the possession or even partial possession of the means or fruits of production by the proletariat within a capitalist framework is an objective impossibility, a trap, a mystification. Only a violent, worldwide revolution can provide the basis for the collective appropriation of the means and fruits of production.

To the extent that the proletariat is not based on any particular economic interest, or any form of property, it cannot envisage setting up a new kind of exploitative society. It is precisely as the last exploited class in history, which “has nothing to lose but its chains”, that the proletariat is led, objectively, towards the construction of a classless society, a society without exploitation. The proletariat will remain an exploited class after the revolution, after the seizure of political power. Between this seizure of power — the installation of the proletarian dictatorship — and communism, a period of transition will be necessary. In this period the proletariat will be obliged to generalise its own condition throughout the whole of society, by integrating other social classes and strata into productive labour. Without this social transformation, without this progressive elimination of classes, the proletariat will remain an exploited class (producing surplus value for the parasitical consumption of other social strata) even after the worldwide political revolution.

Very often the following questions arise in connection with the communist revolution: “there is nothing to prove that once it has seized power the proletariat will not (to take revenge) begin to exploit some other class: look what happened in Russia!” ... or “power corrupts even those with the best of intentions” etc. The very way these quest­ions are posed betrays their faulty reasoning.

They are based on an inability to understand the nature of the proletariat as both an exploited and a revolutionary class. They fail to take into account:

— the absence of any material basis for the economic power of the working class, which is the only possible basis of class oppression.

— the necessity and objective possibility of a classless society as the only possible basis for the continued development of the productive forces.

Those who fail to see this are led very easily into such platitudes, which are in fact an apology, a justification for the maintenance of capitalist social relations. This myopia, characteristic of bourgeois ideology, cannot see that if, after the revolution, one section of the working class began to exploit the others (it is clearly absurd to imagine the whole of the working class exploiting itself), this would signify nothing less than the retreat of ­revolution, i.e., the re—emergence of capitalism. The “exploiting workers” would have become, in a real and objective sense, representatives of the bourgeoisie (not of a new class). The revolution and the destruction of capitalism would only have been postponed.

The victory of the worldwide communist revolution, is not therefore in itself decisive, nor an absolute guarantee of the victory of communism. During the period of transition, a retreat back towards capitalist society is still possible. An immense effort will be required by the proletariat, through the development of its own consciousness and solidarity, to struggle against the possibility of such a retreat.

This is why only a limited number of weapons are available to the proletariat for this struggle. First of all it is clear that the proletarian revolution and the proletarian dictatorship cannot tolerate any vestiges of the old bourgeois power. On the contrary such vestiges will have to he progressively dismantled and destroyed during the period of transition. In the past this clean sweep of past institut­ions was not necessary.

The bourgeois revolution involved overturning many pre-capitalist social structures, as well as modes of thought and behaviour… but not the fundamental basis of pre-capitalist society, the exploitation of man by man, and the apparatus to enforce this exploitation. The axe of the inquisition was replaced by the ‘democratic’ blade of the guillotine. Our new masters, while ‘liberating’ the future exploited class from feudal servitude, could quite easily accommodate themselves to more ‘inoffensive’ aspects of the old regime, such as the repressive apparatus of the feudal state. They simply adapted this apparatus to suit modern requirements. Police, functionaries, inquisitors changed their uniforms. Thinkers, teachers, philosophers changed their doctrine. In certain cases, such as Germany and Russia at the start of the twentieth century, bourgeois economic power could co—exist with a farm—yard of aristocrats, Junkers, imperial officers and bureaucrats, nobles, princes, and emperors, etc.

Because it was simply a case of replacing one repressive society with another, the bourgeoisie could make good use of the old repressive structures of feudal power, which were indeed essential for the maintenance of bourgeois economic power.

Nothing of this kind is possible for the proletariat, whose position as the dominant class is only possible on the basis of the prior destruction of every aspect of the bourgeois state. The experience of the Paris Commune showed that the proletariat can not simply take over the existing state, but must destroy it from top to bottom.

The proletariat must therefore create weapons of struggle and of social transformation which are themselves appropriate to the nature of communist society. The mode of organisation of the proletariat, organised as a revolutionary class, must correspond to the nature of the social revolution and of the new form of society to be initiated by the proletariat.

“This appropriation is further determined by the manner in which it must be effected. It can only be effected by a union, which by the character of the proletariat itself can only be a universal one, and through a revolution in which, on the one hand the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organisation is overthrown and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat without which the revolution cannot be accomplished and in which further, the proletariat rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.” Marx, German Ideology, our emphasis).

The collective organisation of the working class, class solidarity, the growth of revolutionary consciousness, clear­ sighted and tireless action, the creative participation of the whole working class in the immense tasks which lie ahead all these are the fertile soil of revolution, the seizure of power and of communism.

The revolution of the world proletariat, besides being a collective and violent process, is above all dependent on the development of class-consciousness.

In the past objective conditions played a greater part in social transformation than the will and consciousness of men and women. The succession of different modes of production occurred to some extent “above the heads” of men and women, and of social classes. Dominated by the underdevelopment of the productive forces, the revolutionary class was forced to submit to a reality that appeared autonomous, mysterious and immutable. Historical forces appeared as natural forces: blind, violent, arbitrary, and uncontrollable.

“Communism differs from all previous movements in that it overturns the basis of all earlier relations of production and intercourse, and for the first time consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals.” (Marx, German Ideology, our emphasis).

Thus as we have noted above, communism and progress towards communism, i.e., revolution, are part of the same process, and pose the same problems. Each particular stage of this movement (stages which cannot be considered in isolation from each other) already contains the characteristic fea­tures of the final goal. In this sense, if communism means the conscious organisation of production for human needs, then the social transformation and revolution that precede communism can only be conscious actions themselves. The proletariat must thus understand reality without prejudice, because it is the first class that is really able to do so.

Revolutionary classes of the past struggled for a social order that was progressive in relation to the preceding social order, but which was nonetheless based on a new form of exploitation. The consciousness gained by these classes through their struggle could only be a mystified conscious­ness, since it had to hide or justify this exploitation. But the proletarian struggle does not lead to a new form of exploitation, but liberation of society from all forms of exploitation. In this sense, proletarian class conscious­ness is the first that can understand social reality in a really scientific way.

Certainly, the development of working class consciousness is never a completed process; far less is it the ‘spontaneous’ product of the first working class struggles. It develops gradually under the pressure of material circumstances and the historical experience of the class, a continual process of growth and enrichment. Nevertheless:

— If it is correct that the development of class conscious­ness never reaches the level of ‘perfection’, this does not mean in any sense that the revolution can do without revolu­tionary class consciousness. Neither spontaneism nor voluntarism can be the basis of the revolution.

— The seizure of power by the proletariat demands that the class is fully conscious of its ‘historic mission’. It is impossible to quantify the level of consciousness required. Nevertheless, it must correspond to the needs of the revolution and of communism. Moreover, the develop­ment of class consciousness can only be a collective process. This development is the product of a conjunction of different factors, arising both from objective conditions and the subjective capacities of the class. It is to this question that we now turn.

To attempt to describe the whole history of humanity is obviously impossible! We will limit ourselves here to a summary analysis of the most important stages of the ideological development of this history.

In the first stage of human development, i.e. the primitive community which knew neither production for sale nor exchange, human beings still made no differentiation between their own evolution and that of the natural forces which surrounded them. Evolving in a community which satisfied its needs in a direct manner, where there was no division of labour, where tools were, like food and housing, held in common, human beings conceived of themselves as an integral part of the human and natural milieu. This direct dependence that linked each person to the community and the natural environment led humanity to see and express itself in terms of a magical unity. The signs of this magical unity could be seen everywhere but the unity itself was more than these signs.

Thus language, which appeared early in history, became a magical link between human beings, their community and the forces of nature. This means of communication did not serve merely utilitarian purposes: it possessed a true power over nature of which it was a concrete and immediate expression, through the enforcement of taboos and interdicts. Certain hunting or gathering grounds could not be named or else uncontrollable forces were released. Magical spells were held to exercise a direct control over nature.

Human beings thus established a very close relationship between themselves and the surrounding natural world.

But if it is true that this harmonious relation between the material conditions of existence and the community expressed a fundamental unity between social life and the natural rhythm, between social being and thought, between concrete activity and language, we should not forget that we are still dealing with a society where the productive forces had hardly developed at all, where scarcity exerted its cruel domination over the whole of society. The community was at the mercy of natural forces, cataclysms (drought, storms, famines…), of an all—powerful nature which ruled and commanded. Man’s terror and wonder before the natural world on which he depended led rapidly to a primitive fetishism. Manifestations of nature (rain, heat, the wind, the stars etc), without yet really acquiring a divine nature, were understood as indep­endent forces: active and terrible forces that had to be respected, feared and pacified.

It was not until this moment, when human beings abandoned a nomadic existence and began to cultivate the land, that the transition from simple magic to religious rites occurred.

“The hunter, when he sought to bring himself luck in the hunt, resorted to witchcraft and magic. The peasant, understanding the law which regulated the seasons, perceiving the normal succession from germination to maturity and then death, had to turn to other forms of thought to explain the natural forces. Thus we had the birth of myth and the conception of the spirit. (...) For the agricultural peoples the vital force resided in the natural elements, which contain both birth and death. There were many such elements with no logical link to connect them: they were seen as different aspects of a single force. These were the moon, the sun, woman, water, the snake etc (...) In all of these the vital force appeared as something separate, as existing for itself and real in itself.” (Herbert Kuhn).

This primitive fetishism of natural forces expresses the first attempts of human beings to explain the world and natural phenomena to themselves. But to the extent that they saw themselves entirely dominated by nature, human beings imagined a way to escape from or control nature through religion. Perhaps reality could be encapsulated in a single sacred concept? Agriculture (the first form of the influence of human beings over their natural environment) thus led to the consolidation in social thought of the illusion of the existence of a higher, essentially religious, power. Thus, as Marx explained:

“Religion is the self-consciousness and self esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself or has already lost himself again.” (Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of Right).

Later on the development of the social division of labour, the production of means of subsistence exceeding the immediate needs of the community, the appearance of a surplus… all these led to the disintegration of ancient social relations, to the dissolution of the primitive communities through the action of exchange. The communities began to exchange with each other the surplus from their production.

At this stage the development of the productive forces led to the systematic use of labour power and its exploitation through slavery. Thus agriculture, the exploitation of the land and the domestication of animals created a hitherto unimaginable source of wealth. This development led to the creation of social relations on a completely new basis. No longer were products and instruments of labour held in common; they became private property. With the division of labour it became necessary for men to procure the food and the instruments of labour which, naturally, assume the form of property. In the same way men became owners of a new source of food — cattle; and later on of a new means of production — slaves. At his side, woman, who has wholly lost her ancient matriarchal rights, remains merely the owner of the house­hold goods. And parallel to the development of this great social division of labour arises the first great division of society into classes: master and slave, exploiters and exploited.

This growth of private property in the form of herds, slaves, luxury goods, means of production etc, this separation of producers from their products, the beginning of the exploitation of man by man, evidently leads human beings increasingly to become separate from nature and from them­selves. The community is no longer a direct expression of the natural environment; it no longer consists of a series of egalitarian and harmonious relationships but on the contrary is now based on particular private property relationships. The individual gradually loses his objective and ancestral links with the community and his direct economic link with the means of subsistence. He becomes a competitor with his fellow man.

At this stage of its historic development the social organisation of the human community could no longer be guided by the will of the community as a whole. Rent by internal contradictions and irreconcilable social antagonisms commodity society was obliged to adopt a series of laws and rules which appeared to stand above society and whose aim was the maintenance of social order.

“And this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it and increasingly alienating itself from it, is the state.” (Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State)

In the same way, linked to the appearance of this political and juridical structure, the dominant mode of social thought became that which represented and justified the interests of the dominant and exploiting class. This thought is no longer the direct reflection of practical activity, no longer maintains the same intimate contact with the collective will; it is characterised, on the contrary, by the distance which it seeks to place between itself and reality. The ideas which in the primitive community were an expression of the language of real life became in commodity society the ideas of the dominant class.

Thus there arose at the same time as the political superstructure an ideological superstructure.

This new division of society into classes was thus justified and declared eternal by the dominant class. The reality of exploitation was veiled; the particular interests of a privileged minority were presented as the interests of society as a whole and as the precondition for progress. The division between manual and intellectual labour led to the creation of specialised strata whose role was the defence and development of these ideas.

In the years to come this justification of the exploitation of one class by another was constantly reaffirmed and strengthened. But the justification put forward was not always the same. With the development of the productive forces humanity acquired a greater capacity to understand reality. Each step along the march of progress, each victory of humanity over the domination of nature went hand in hand with the enrichment of ideas and of social understanding.

“Society developed and, during recent centuries, at an ever greater pace. The forms of labour are modified. The relation of men to each other, their attitude towards work, towards nature, towards the higher forces which dominate them, all these develop as well. And this is the origin of the evolution of our view of life and the world.” (Pannekoek, The Workers Councils)

                Unlike any other animal society, even the most organised, humanity is not content with the simple unconscious reproduction of its life—activity.

The social needs of human beings grow with the material capacity for their satisfaction. Unlike animals human beings cannot respond to their needs solely on the basis of immediate satisfaction or on the basis of the infinite reproduction of a single process. They need an intermediary. Human beings must produce their means of subsistence but also make use of the means and instruments of production in an increasingly conscious way. Moreover, to accomplish this, human beings must develop their relationships with each other and transcend, more or less consciously, forms of organisation that stand in the way of progress.

The material transcendence of the old structures, of the old relations of production, is necessarily accompanied by the transcendence of old forms of social thought and of the dominant ideas of the past. This is not only because the development of the productive forces brings with it a development of social thought but also because a revolutionary class can effectively accomplish its historic tasks only by proving to the whole of society — in opposition to the class in power — the social effectiveness of the interests it represents. Thus each improvement of the material infrastr­ucture of society corresponds to a similar development and enrichment of social thought.

Whenever a society reaches maturity from the point of view of material, i.e. productive, development, ideas, science, art and literature all flourish. Each step forward brought about by the development of social relations, all technical progress and social change, are marked by a corresponding revolution in the world of ideas. Thus one can say that capitalism represents an incredible ideological and material advance over all preceding Asiatic, feudal and ancient societies. The extraordinary impetus given by capitalism to technical and scientific progress demanded the systemisation of a rational and materialist analysis of reality if this progress was to be consolidated and maintained.

The triumph of this conception coincided with the zenith of bourgeois economic development.

Impatient to free society, which it had already conquered economically, from its primitiveness and old beliefs, bourgeois society embarked upon a rational critique of the old feudal dogmas. Already during the Renaissance when the bourgeoisie was gaining control of the Italian cities the ideological representatives of the bourgeoisie had challenged the sacred values of feudalism such as the immortality of the soul and the existence of a divine being. But even when bourgeois thought retained a religious character it tried to impose a religion, Protestantism, which was more accommodating to the ideas of usury and interest.

Everywhere the bourgeoisie imposed new relations of production based, not on the direct dependence of the serf on the feudal lord but on the conception of juridical equality, on the existence of individuals who were ‘free’ to sell their labour power on the market. This was the basis of capitalist social relationships which was now conquering the old superstitions… and was to conquer the world.

“Almost overnight the world grew nearly ten times larger; instead of a quarter of a hemisphere the whole terrestrial globe now stretched out before the western Europeans who rushed to take possession of all the remaining corners. At the same time as the narrow boundaries around the country of origin fell away so too did the thousand year old fetters of medieval thought. An infinitely broader horizon opened up to man’s physical and mental gaze.” (Engels, Origin of the Family)

This mental awakening, this increased capacity to understand reality, physical, natural and human phenomena... the origins of all this lie in the economic power of the bourgeoisie; in the impetus given by bourgeois society to the means of production and productive technique. Scientific materialism is the ideological expression of this growing capacity to ‘master’ nature and understand its laws.

“Nature remains a ‘realm of necessity’ on which man depends. But he is capable of regulating this dependence in a rational way inasmuch as his knowledge of its laws improves. And he obtains this knowledge from the socialisation of nature, i.e. from his own practical transformation of nature in production.” F. Jakubowski, Ideology and Superstructure in Historical Materialism)

But this understanding was limited since:

- the development of the productive forces was still insufficient for human beings to satisfy their social needs. Under capitalism the relationship between humanity and nature was broken, soiled and polluted. Capitalism had socialised production but not the mode of appropriation of production.

— the bourgeoisie, being an exploiting class, is forced to conceal the reality of this exploitation. Above all it is unable to recognise the historical and transitory nature of every mode of production. These illusions permeate bourgeois ideology.

“The bourgeoisie were the first to recognise the economy as a total process, operating under a unified set of laws. It was capitalism that had brought about this unity and created a coherent society in contrast to the particularity of all earlier social orders. But these laws appear to the bourgeoisie to be natural laws, which depend on the lack of consciousness of their participants. If the bourgeoisie were to recognise these laws as social and historical this would also mean that it would have to recognise its own domination as historically limited. Class interest and class consciousness contradict each other...

“But this fact alone cannot account for the ideological nature of the consciousness which springs from the social position of the bourgeoisie. There is a much more decisive contradiction which is that between social production and private appropriation. The means of production are produced socially and for society but are in the hands of individual capitalists. ‘Capital is not a personal but a social power’, but the movements of this power are directed by the individual interests of the owners of capital who do not have an overall view of the social role of their activity. The laws and the social function of capital proceed but ‘only over their heads, only irrespective of their will, without their consciousness’ (Lukacs). Private ownership of the means of production means that the only possible view from the position of the bourgeoisie is that of the individual capitalist; and to the individual capitalist the laws which result from the alienation of labour must appear to be independent of man.” (F. Jakubowski, Ideology and Superstructure)

Thus the objective limitations of capitalist production, of commodity production in general are reflected in the limitations of bourgeois thought. It is the recognition of these limits that leads us to differentiate between bourgeois ideology and the class consciousness of the proletariat. Certainly bourgeois ideology expresses an attempt to become conscious of the world. But this consciousness was already limited, and developed grave illusions. This is for the two reasons outlined above: the nature of capitalist production and the inability of the bourgeoisie to admit the transitory nature of capitalist production.

“The essence of commodity — structure has often been pointed out. Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people” (Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness)

In the same way the social relationships between classes appear as natural relationships between things. Moreover, separated from the fruits of their labour, producers see their social activity as independent of themselves and outside their control.

“All these consequences result from the fact that the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself — his inner world — becomes. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into god the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence the greater the activity the greater is the worker’s lack of objects. Whatever the product of his labour is, he is not. Therefore the greater this product the less he is himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently as something alien to him and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien... Political economy conceals the estrangement inherent in the nature of labour by not considering the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production.” (Marx,     Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts)

This alienation must inevitably be reflected on the level of social thought. In fact “the development of thought is merely the reflection of the real development transported and transposed in the brain of man.” (Marx, Capital Vol. 1.) This is why the material limitations of commodity production, which implies the reification of the social conditions of production (that is, they appear as objects, as things), are reflected in a corresponding limitation of social thought. Capitalist alienation is reflected on a social level so that:

—            thought and science appear as essentially contemplative activities. Thought is like a ‘glove’ which is made to ‘fit’ reality or a cast that is moulded by, but does not transform reality.

—            social relations are studied as phenomena obeying supra—historical laws. Bourgeois ideology has no place for human activity which could transform these laws, or transform humanity itself.

—            the natural sciences were the prototype of an ‘exact science’ that, separated from its object, is restricted to the contemplation of reality drawing conclusions on the basis of an empirical assessment of the ‘facts’.

—            thought is fragmented into a multitude of ‘specialist studies’ each with its own system of laws, independent of all the others. Totality is conceived of simply as the sum of these individual facts.

All this implies that ideology is incapable of understanding reality or the development of reality in a coherent manner. The different aspects of social life appear as particular facts, or specific situations, unrelated to each other. They appear as fixed entities, independent of human development. Reality is seen as an object and not as the product of human activity, perceptible and concrete. This is why, as Engels put it:

“Ideology is a process which the so—called thinker attains without doubt consciously, but with a false consciousness.” (Engels, Letter to Mehring in Philosophical Studies)

What must be asked now is: ‘What interest lies in speaking about the appearance of ideological superstructures? How can the definition of ideology enable us to understand the birth of proletarian consciousness?’

It is obvious that if we linger over the problem of ideological superstructures, we do so in order to understand better the phenomenon whereby the proletariat becomes conscious. What have our investigations so far uncovered?

At present, we know that the tendency for the proletariat to become conscious of its role as a revolutionary class isn’t a totally new phenomenon. Other revolutionary classes in the past have also struggled to impose their own world-view so as to triumph over old dogmas and sclerotic ideas. The struggle to install a new society, to institute a new mode of production, has been accompanied in the past by a struggle between ideas, a struggle between different conceptions of the world. Thus, throughout the course of the development of human society, the class struggle which established new social relations has always been, simultaneously, a struggle for the victory of new general ideas. From the moment that society becomes sclerotic on an economic level, from the time that the relations of production become transformed into a shell inhibiting the life and progress of society, from then on all the ideological forms corresponding to the past evolution of society become uprooted and void of content, openly contradicted by social reality. Optimism and vitality manifested in ideologies, philosophy, and art are re­placed by philosophical pessimism, obscurantism and a decline in artistic expression and social thought, once society has entered into a period of senility and decadence on an economic level. A growing disjuncture appears between the existing relations regulating society and the new historical necessities confronting it, as well as the ideas men hold about society.

In such periods, the only ideas which can really be progressive are those which announce a new society. Ideas, foreseeing new types of social relations, surge up and first take on critical, utopian and contestationist forms before becoming revolutionary.

Class consciousness unfolds in the same context. For the work­ing class, the putrefaction of the economic contradictions of decadent capitalism and the process of decline of bourgeois ideology establish the fertile terrain necessary for the development of its own historical consciousness. Another point of comparison exists between the development of proletarian consciousness and the ideological processes that characterised the struggle of revolutionary classes in the past. Proletarian consciousness, just as ideology in general, rests on a totality of material conditions of an economic and social kind. The existence of such a concrete base determines the conscious march forward of the proletariat. The development of class consciousness thus expresses the very real economic and historic antagonisms of two social classes. In the course of this essentially practical movement, class consciousness can establish itself and triumph.

       “A massive transformation of men is necessarily verified in the mass creation of communist consciousness, because such a transformation can only become operable in a practical move­ment, in a revolution. This revolution is not only made necessary because it is the only means of overthrowing the ruling class, but equally because only a revolution will allow the class which has overturned the other class to sweep away all the rottenness of the old system.” (Marx, The German Ideology)

Proletarian consciousness, like revolutionary ideas of the past, can only really triumph at the end of the political and social victory of the working class.

“The religious reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control. This however, requires that society possesses a material foundation, or a series of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous product of a long and tormented historical development.” (Marx, Capital, Vol. 1)

The definitive surpassing of the old ideas of the past im­plies, therefore (and this has always been the case), surpassing materially the old economic contradictions.

“Religion, the family, the state, law, morality, science, art, etc. are only particular modes of production and therefore come under its general law. The positive supercession of private property, as the appropriation of human life, is therefore the positive supercession of all estrangement, and the return of man from religion, the family, the state, etc., to his human, i.e. social existence. Religious estrangement as such takes place only in the sphere of consciousness, of man’s inner life, but economic estrangement is that of real life — its supercession therefore embraces both aspects.” (Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

And yet, despite certain resemblances, we continue to speak of ideologies when speaking of the past and class consciousness when speaking of the proletariat. Is this a simple terminological difference?

In reality, we use these two different terms because of our concern to precisely characterise two fundamentally different processes. What distinguishes the ideological process of revolutionary classes in the past and the development of con­sciousness in the proletariat is far more important than the few elements that they share in common. Furthermore, the very nature and origin of proletarian consciousness prevents it from being identified with a simple ideology.

What are the distinctions between ideology and class consciousness?

Ideological superstructures express, at the level of social thought, the existence of an economic infrastructure based on the exploitation of man by man. The social class which is dominant within this infrastructure and which possesses economic power, the means of production and material force, equally possess the ideological means necessary to justify its rule. It is in this sense that one can speak of an ideological “reflection”. Even if the ideas of the ruling class contain real­ities and are not just murky notions without substance, they still must passively follow a much more determinant reality, that of the economy and its laws. Thus, even in the course of the revolutionary struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism, the critical action of bourgeois ideas, in the last analysis, only constituted the visible tip of the iceberg. The real revolutionary action took place lower down, at the base of society.

Although it is true that the writings of philosophers during the Enlightenment - the work of the French Encyclopaedists, books by Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, Kant, Locke, etc — contributed to weakening seriously the ideological superstruc­ture of feudalism, while giving credibility to the revolutionary struggle of the bourgeoisie and the imposition of its political rule, it is also true that their contributions always followed slightly in the wake of the process of economic transformation already underway in society. All the geniuses who were the precursors of the bourgeoisie (Roger Bacon, Pomponazzi, Leonardo da Vinci, Erasmus, Thomas More, etc) expressed the more and more flagrant contradictions existing between the de­gree of development of the productive forces and the social relations of feudalism, and the still timid advance of the bourgeoisie on the economic level. Despite its revolutionary role, bourgeois ideology only appeared as a justification after the fact of the gradually acquired economic power of the bourgeoisie.

“Capitalism succeeded in determining concretely the historical programme of its struggle only in the nineteenth century, in other words at the end of its historical trajectory. Right up to the eve of its victory, the historical intelligence of capitalism was gradually realised to the extent that its economic position developed and cleared a path for its further develop­ment within the old society.” (Bilan, no. 5, March l934, our emphasis).

Conversely, the consciousness of the proletariat doesn’t rest on any economic infrastructure. The proletariat has absolutely no economic power; it cannot have as its objective the estab­lishment of a new form of exploitation. Even when it affirms itself as the ruling class of society, the proletariat will not become an exploiting class. No economic considerations force the proletariat to forge an ideology to justify the continuation of exploitation. And even if it wanted to, the proletariat couldn’t create an ideological superstructure. The instant the political gains of class consciousness freeze into absolute ideas, into ideologies, they lose their revolut­ionary character and become integrated into the overcrowded edifice of bourgeois prejudice.

The consequences of this situation are the following:

1.     Contrary to the past progress of social thought, the con­sciousness of the proletariat is not bound by, and does not passively follow, the economic transformation of the old society. Since it possesses no economic privilege whatsoever, the proletariat is obliged from the start to assert itself through a conscious, political movement before passing on to the material overthrow of the existing order. Class consciousness, the revolutionary programme of the proletariat, must proceed and condition the overthrow of existing society.

“Like capitalism, the proletariat too will need to establish a base of principles particular to itself as a class, which can absorb the oppositions, commotions and upheavals produced by capitalist society and direct them toward the installation of the proletarian dictatorship (...) However, if capitalism could proceed with the elaboration of its historic programme in a non-systematic, disorderly, contradictory fashion, the proletariat, on the contrary, finds itself forced to pre-establish the political basis necessary for the growth of its revolutionary struggles.” (Bilan, no. 5 March 1934)

Communist consciousness doesn’t content itself with reflecting a state of fact, but must express itself as an active element in the revolutionary process.

2.     Ideology tends to preserve the ruling, social order by maintaining it in place and declaring it immutable. Once in power, the exploiting class has every interest in perpetuating mysticism and dogmatism. This is why the bourgeoisie delights in alienation and recognises in it its own power. Reality is masked; the historical character of social relations is veiled. But the social situation of the proletariat is totally different from that of the bourgeoisie. Its situation gives it other possibilities of ‘understanding’ than those of the bourgeoisie. As a result, it is obliged to revolt against its situation and tear apart capitalism’s complacent ideological mask, which would have everyone believe in the eternal nature of capitalist society. One of the first conditions needed for the trans­formation of the situation of the proletariat and for the end of its exploitation is precisely its recognition of the trans­itory, historical, transformable character of capitalism.

The proletariat wouldn’t launch itself head-on against exploit­ation if it were not partially convinced that the economic and social laws which regulate its exploitation are not laws of nature operating independently from human action, but are laws which reflect a concrete, transitory reality.

“Only such a comprehension renders possible the transformation of this reality, by giving to man through the suppression of the separation existing between the producers and the means of production, the mastery of his own strength, which in economy is opposed to him like a thing. The dissolution of the ‘reified’ appearance of reality and the suppression of its material basis is of vital interest to the proletariat.” (F.    Jakubowski, Ideological Superstructures in the Materialist Conception of History)

Behind this somewhat abstract language lies the following idea: since it possesses no economic interest which can aid it in its struggle against the bourgeoisie, the proletariat must develop a demystified understanding of its own situation in order to be able to transform it. Class consciousness allows the pro­letariat to realise that the relation between capital and labour in which it lives is not a relationship between abstract things, established once and for all, but is a very living social relation which can and must be changed. All ideologies, of whatever hue, are absolutely incapable of arriving at this global understanding.

3.     What is the starting—point of ideology? The means of production held as private property isolate the individuals who belong to the bourgeoisie. Single capitalists, nations, competing individuals, the individual possessor of commodities, such is the starting—point of bourgeois ideology. Ideology, even if it expresses very well the domination of a social class, is never a truly collective product. Like a mirror broken into a thousand fragments which all reflect the same image, ideology imposes itself on all individuals. Society submits to the ruling ideology just as it submits to an economic situation which it does not control and which appears to be an external force. The competitive individuals of capitalist society all submit to the same ideological bludgeoning, to the same illusions, to the same prejudices and dogmas. Yet despite this, each regards the other as a stranger, as a competitor, and each imagines that he himself has a very original personality and set of ideas. Real solidarity in action and thought is impossible from the point of view of capitalist society and capitalist ideology. And this is bec­ause the collectivisation of the means of production and the socialisation of human relations are impossible from the capitalist point of view. The individual in capitalist society is irremediably alone; his ideas and his way of life — both products of bourgeois rule — cannot enter into a really col­lective movement.

The proletarians, on the contrary, are associated in the process of production. They are pushed toward union and sol­idarity by their condition of life. Only their association in struggle, the fruit of their association in the process of work, allows them to bring pressure to bear on their common enemy - capital. Thus, throughout the history of their struggle, the workers have pushed for the unification of their forces.

“At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operatives of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them (...) But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses (...) The collision between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes.” (The Communist Manifesto)

Only the proletariat is able to constitute itself into a class based on international solidarity. This solidarity is a fore­runner of what social relations will be like in a communist society, and it springs up spontaneously in the struggle. It is an unbelievable phenomenon. Workers, who scarcely spoke to each other yesterday because of the infernal pressure of work, who even sometimes felt in competition with each other, sud­denly find themselves talking together in the heat of the struggle, closing ranks and helping each other, feeling so united that it takes all the power of the bourgeoisie with its unions and police to break apart their iron solidarity. This is the starting—point of class consciousness!

The starting—point of political reflection in the proletariat doesn’t lie with the individual as an individual, but the individual as a part of a whole, as a part of a class. In this sense, it’s not important what this or that worker thinks. What is important is what the proletariat as a class will be compelled to do and what it must become conscious of doing. Class consciousness starts off from the totality and is a highly collective process.

4.     But the totality, the class in which proletarian conscious­ness arises, is not a characterless mass, an ordinary part of all that makes up bourgeois society. There are also sects, convents and religious groupings which claim they have attained a total community in their life and thought. The bourgeoisie itself is obliged to ‘solidarise’ when faced with the attack of the proletariat; the peasantry can also constitute a greater or lesser collectivity, etc. In reality, none of these other classes, strata or sects can attain the degree of sol­idarity reached by the proletarians for the simple reason that the proletariat constitutes an historic class, the bearer of a new type of social relation. The proletariat constitutes an historic class antagonistic to the bourgeoisie; it is the living negation of capitalist society. Class consciousness also possesses this historic dimension. It is not a simple ideological reflection of a given situation.

Is it enough for the proletariat merely to imagine the des­truction of capitalism? Is the class struggle the fruit of an unbridled imagination? On the contrary! Class conscious­ness, which is acquired by the workers and which pushes them always further in their struggles, is a completely concrete and practical process. It is an active force that materialises in a very precise manner; it requires the living experience of the struggle to subsist and grow. In its practice, the proletariat cuts through problems that hadn’t been solved theoretically, raises others, while discarding old, used—up ideas and revitalising others. And for a qualitative stage to be once more passed beyond, the proletariat must draw the political and theoretical lessons of its past experiences.

The revolutionary wave of the 1920’s confirmed the living, eminently practical character of class consciousness. The Russian, the German, the Hungarian revolutions all saw the flourishing, the intense outburst of ideas within the class. At the same time as the struggle develops, everywhere workers’ councils and general assemblies surge up; everywhere impromptu meetings, earnest discussions and innumerable exchanges of ideas and propositions take place. Workers, who yesterday were stagnating in the crass ignorance imposed on them by cap­italism, become orators who show their practical intelligence and unbelievable audacity. Millions of workers, who had pre­viously submitted silently to the yoke of capital, break into speech and provide living proof of their initiative and ingen­uity in exchanging a thousand ideas and a thousand thoughts, gathering information and political discussions together from everywhere... The political milieu is brought to a white-hot pitch, a thousand channels of exchange and reflection are created... Class consciousness begins to live collectively and practically.

But it is not necessary to wait for insurrectional and revol­utionary periods to see the development of this process. When it is the fruit of real struggle, the proletariat’s daily resistance to its exploitation equally constitutes a fertile terrain for the expansion of class unity and consciousness. You see the same phenomenon produced, but on a more reduced scale, as that which marked the revolutionary period of the 1920’s — a sudden bubbling—up of ideas, of discussions, all intense and living.

It should be well—understood that this process isn’t mechanical or homogeneous. The level of consciousness attained by the workers’ assemblies, by these struggles of daily resistance to capitalism, doesn’t lead in general to an overall questioning of capitalist society. The class struggle, just like the pro­cess of coming to consciousness within the proletariat, is a fluctuating movement, a wave which unceasingly renews itself but which can also go into reflux.

Nevertheless, one thing is certain: the historic strength and practice of the proletariat remains dormant as long as the workers remain subjugated to bourgeois ideas. It is class consciousness which transforms their potential power into effective strength. Through their practice, the workers dis­cover that they form a particular class, one exploited by capital, and that they must-fight against it to liberate them­selves from exploitation. Their struggle obliges them to understand the economic system, to know the society in which their enemies and allies are to be found.

“The real education of the masses can never be separated from the independent, political, and particularly from the revolutionary struggle of the masses themselves. Only the struggle educates the exploited class. Only the struggle dis­closes to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its hor­izons, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.” (Lenin, ‘Lecture on the 1905 Revolution’ delivered 22 January 1917, reprinted in The Revolution of 1905)

5. Class consciousness begins from the struggle of the pro­letariat itself. Contrary to the ideology which assumes that a division exists between the ‘economic’, the ‘social’ and the ‘political’, class consciousness is based at one and the same time on economic and political struggles, because they are inseparable.

“Political and economic strikes, mass strikes and partial strikes, demonstrative strikes and fighting strikes, general strikes of individual branches of industry and general strikes in individual towns, peaceful wage struggles and street massacres, barricade fighting — all these run through one another, run side by side, cross one another, flow in and over one another — it is a ceaselessly moving, changing sea of phenomena.” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions)

Only the intimate liaison between economic strikes and political strikes, whether partial or generalised struggles — allows for the later development of the struggle, its international generalisation and the enriching of class consciousness.

“An outstanding feature was the manner in which economic strikes were interlaced with political strikes during the revolution. It is quite evident that only when these two forms of strikes are closely linked up with each other can the movement acquire its greatest power. The broad masses of the exploited could not have been thrown into the revolutionary movement had they not seen examples of how the wage workers in the various branches of industry compelled the capitalists to improve their conditions. This struggle imbued the masses of the Russian people with a new spirit.” (Lenin, ibid.)

By resisting the degradation of their living conditions, workers thus acquire a sense and consciousness of their own force. Its struggle and its consciousness expand when the proletariat sees its social gains torn from it once again by the bourgeoisie. It is progressively obliged to take into account that the cap­italist crisis is a mortal crisis, that this putrefying system can no longer grant anything to the working class, that capit­alism has ceased to be a progressive system. But the proletariat cannot really become conscious of this except by struggling in a more and more radical way, by refusing to accept austerity and capitalism’s drive towards war, by seeing the partial ‘defeat’ of its struggles so long as they remain on a strictly economic level. These series of ‘defeats’ on the level of demands made in struggle (i.e. what’s granted by the bourgeoisie today is taken back tomorrow) gradually become transformed into victories on the level of class consciousness and political unity within the proletariat. The movement of the struggles orientates itself little by little toward a political and revolutionary questioning of the whole of society.

The fact that class consciousness is essentially the fruit of experience, of the practical struggle of the class, truly implies that the activity of the entire class is irreplaceable. Revolutionary consciousness, like the political emancipation of the proletariat, is the work of the workers themselves. It has nothing to do with a collection of rigid ideas, of ready made recipes developed exterior to the class. Similarly, the consciousness which the proletariat has about its situation is not an awareness about an object external to itself, but is a consciousness of what it is itself. Proletarian consciousness is the consciousness of the proletariat of itself as a class. This means, quite simply, that in becoming conscious of its own situation in the process of production, the proletariat becomes conscious of the nature of the capitalist system in all its complexity and barbarity. And this development of consciousness is always synonymous with the class struggle. Class consciousness is, then, the affirmation by the pro­letariat of its nature as a revolutionary class, as conscious being.

We have seen what
distinguishes ideology from the development of consciousness in the
proletariat. Earlier, we tried to understand why the characteristics of
communism make the con­sciousness of the proletariat indispensable. Now we must
pose the following questions: ‘How is it possible for the class to become
conscious? How is class consciousness manifested?’

The
first element which makes class consciousness possible is the revolutionary
class nature of the proletariat. The pro­letariat, like other revolutionary
classes of the past, is obliged to organise itself consciously if it is to
overthrow the old economic and political order.

“Like
all human activity, and particularly because it is a social movement, the
action of a class is necessarily an organised action. In fact, every class, and
above all a revolutionary class, only manifests its own living reality when it
engenders within itself a tendency towards self-organisation. This tendency
corresponds both to immediate, practical, material necessities and to the more
general necessities for reflection, understanding and consciousness about its
own being, its existence and its future.” (‘Class consciousness and
Organisation’, a document presented by the ICC to the IInd International
Conference organised at the initiative of Battaglia Comunista, October
1978; see the pamphlet Second Conference of Groups of the Communist Left)

For
the proletariat, its organisation and consciousness are the only weapons it
possesses.

“Unlike
these previous classes, the proletariat is the only class called upon to take
over the whole of society which does not dispose of any economic basis of power
within this society, as a prelude to its future domination. The only material
strength that the proletariat has is its organisation. This is why organisation
constitutes for the proletariat, still more than for other classes, a decisive
and fundamental con­dition for its struggle, Its capacity for self—organisation
is the measure of its passage from a class—in—itself to a class—for—itself,
from a simple economic category within cap­italist production into an
historical class. For the same reasons, consciousness is an even more
fundamental element for the proletarian struggle than for the struggle of
previous revolutionary classes.” (‘Class Consciousness and Organisation’,
ibid., p.52)

As
Marx said, “the only social power possessed by the workers is their numbers,
but that power is broken by disunity. The dispersion of the workers is
engendered and maintained by their inevitable competition”. To overcome
disunity and com­petition in order to finally triumph over capitalism, the
workers have but one choice: to organise and struggle together for their common
interests. The place which they occupy in the process of production makes it
possible for them to organise on the basis of unity and solidarity. Such
organisation is, in fact, a formidable force.

“The
community spirit has always been the principal, necessary force for the
progress of the revolution. This progress is embodied in the development of
solidarity, of mutual relations between workers, of unity. Their organisation
and their growing power are the new characteristics which are forged in the
struggle (...) The virtues of solidarity and zeal, the impulsion to act as a
solid unity engendered by the social struggle, are the very basis of the new
social system which will rest on work in common.” (Pannekoek, The
Workers’ Councils, 1941)

But
organisation and solidarity on their own can’t determine the collapse of
capitalist society. It remains necessary for them to be maintained and welded
together by combative will and collective consciousness.

“The
workers have in their hands one element for success: their numbers. But numbers
don’t tip the scales unless unified by means of association and guided by
consciousness. The experience of the past has shown us that fraternal links
must exist between the workers of different countries and must incite them to
hold out together, shoulder to shoulder, in their struggles for emancipation.
Ignoring these links will be punished by a common defeat of all their dispersed
attempts.” (Marx, The Address of the International Workingmen’s Association
to all Workers in the World, 1864)

United organisation, collective functioning, the living,
active participation of the workers, political consciousness, solidarity are
all so many elements welded together in the tendency to the proletariat to
constitute itself into a revolutionary class. Organisation and class
consciousness are, thus, not only linked together, but are inseparable. It is
the devel­opment of political comprehension which reinforces the organisation
of the proletariat into a revolutionary class. The progress the class makes in
self—organisation allows it to enrich its consciousness. This is why a
proletarian organisation which has lost its last spark of revolutionary life by
taking on the views of the bourgeoisie, thus becoming an organisation which can
no longer defend the final goals of the movement and which is no longer infused
by new blood coming from the partic­ipation of the workers — this is why such
an organisation is nothing but a cadaver for the proletariat, and as such must
be swept aside and replaced in the new revolutionary wave of struggle.

The organisation of the class

“The type of organisation
that the working class creates in the course of history is necessarily linked
to the different stages that capitalism itself goes through, and varies
according to the objectives that these stages give birth to, and impose upon
the struggle of the proletariat.” (‘Class Consciousness and Organisation’,
ibid.)

At
the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the workers had got accustomed to
distinguishing machinery from the use capitalism made of it (the first riots by
the workers had destroyed machines), and hence no longer directed their attacks
against the material means of production but against the social system itself,
their first attempts to regroup themselves really appeared. The first struggles
for the right of assoc­iation appeared at this time. The utopians were the
theoreticians produced by these first class battles. They tried to intervene in
the movements, organised by the proletariat in order to accentuate their
political dimension. But their theories ran aground because of their utopian
character and the state of the class struggle itself.

“The
first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times
of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, these
attempts necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the
proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its
emancipation (...) The Socialist and Communist systems properly so called,
those of St. Simon, Fourier, Owen and others, spring into existence in the
early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat
and bourgeoisie.” (The Communist Manifesto)

Later,
by coming in contact with the Chartist movement and by becoming influenced by
the progress of trade unionism, the proletariat and its most conscious elements
were able to estab­lish the basis for historical materialism. Historical mater­ialism
is the basis of a method of action and struggle in as much as it is an
instrument for understanding reality in a demystified way. The strengthening of
such consciousness allowed the proletariat in 1847 to transform the Society of
the Just, a secret, conspiratorial society, into a revolutionary organisation
of propaganda and combat.

One
year later, the Communist Manifesto launched the idea of the necessity
for an autonomous organisation and political movement of the proletariat. As a
result of the combined efforts of its trade union and political organisations,
the working class progressively demarcated its struggle within the political
movement, distinct from the democratic organisations of the bourgeoisie and
their ideas.

Nevertheless,
the proletariat and its revolutionary elements still lacked a crucial element
of understanding. The First International, because it thought that the period
of its own constitution (1864) was also the period of “social revolution” which
would bring with it the imminent conquest of power, didn’t understand the
necessity of struggling essentially for economic demands while always keeping
the final goal in sight. To do so would have required attributing tasks to the unitary
organs of the class that were distinct from those of the revolutionary
organisation. Its limited understanding of the period thus caused the
International Working Men’s Association to organise around political currents
as well as workers’ associations and unions.

“One
had to wait the development of the IInd International before the consciousness
of this reality (that revolution was still not on the agenda) really passed
into the practice of the workers’ movement, and two forms of organisation
adapted to the necessities and possibilities of the movement could at last be
consciously and systematically constructed”. (R.    Victor. ‘The Proletariat and its Vanguard’, in Revolution
Internationale, no. 17, 1975)

With
the IInd International, the understanding of the period, and the distinction
between the unitary and political organisations of the proletariat, were made
more precise. The definitive overthrow of bourgeois rule couldn’t be the
immediate aim of the struggle. The task of that time was to prepare for the
final struggle through the struggle for political and economic reforms. In
order to accomplish this task, the proletariat had to provide itself with, on
the one hand, a unitary, economic organisation in which every worker
could belong on the simple basis of being a worker, while on the other hand,
creating a political organisation whose criteria for membership had
nothing to do with the social origin of its adherents, but was based on their
political agreement. This organisation was also a parliamentary
organisation. It was a question of creating unions, co—operatives, etc, and a
mass party.

Certainly,
the economic and political character of the workers’ struggles were still tied
to one and the same process. This is why the distinction made between ‘the
economic’ and ‘the political’, and the rigid separation erected between the
‘minimum’ and the ‘maximum’ programmes, came to constitute a real barrier to
the development of class consciousness after some theoreticians of the IInd
International made these div­isions into principles (for Bernstein the movement
was every­thing, the goal nothing). This conception ‘facilitated’ the passage
of the Social Democracy into the capitalist swamp the instant the material
conditions necessary for the communist revolution were realised. From that time
on, a new process of maturation of class consciousness was called for, as were
new forms of class organisation.

“The
revolutionary movements which sprang up at the end of the First World War,
especially in Russia and Germany, confirmed there and then the possibility of
the immediate realisation of the ‘maximum programme’, by creating the new forms
of organisation adapted to the new task which had at last arrived on the
historical agenda: the definitive destruction of bourgeois rule.

“The
workers’ councils, which arose spontaneously for the first time in the class movements
of 1905 in Russia, showed them­selves to be the specific form of class
organisation, a form of organisation which would be systematically recreated by
all workers in struggle against the capitalist state. The workers’ councils —
assemblies formed in the factories and working class neighbourhoods —
constituted the form of organisation which allowed the proletariat itself to
lead its own struggle. The councils physically regrouped the whole of
the working class, and simultaneously took up the economic and political
character of the struggle. These two aspects of the struggle, henceforward,
became impossible to separate, even momentarily.” (R.    Victor, ‘The Proletariat and Its Vanguard’,
ibid.)

But
in all of this, what part is played by revolutionaries?

The
‘mass party’ form of organisation loses its essential basis in decadent
capitalism. That basis is the possibility and necessity for the proletariat to
participate in bourgeois Parliaments, so as to impose on capitalism reforms
beneficial to the workers. In decadence, the bourgeois state must be destroyed
in all its forms, and this act of destruction cannot be the work of a minority
or fraction of the class, no matter how enlightened it may be; it must be the
work of the ENTIRE working class, that is to say the WORKERS’ COUNCILS.

Thus,
in such a situation and period what role do revolutionaries have? Why must they
exist when the councils bring together the economic and political struggle,
class consciousness and organisation? It’s even possible to say that it is the
councils which allow the class to surmount, both theoretically and practically,
capitalist exploitation and its ideology.

“The
organisation of councils permits the working class to liberate itself
progressively from the yoke of capitalism, and particularly from the yoke of
bourgeois ideology. Within them gradually materialises the proletariat’s
consciousness of itself and its will to give class consciousness a concrete and
real expression”. (Theses presented to the IIIrd Conference of the General
Workers Union of Germany (AAUD) in 1920)

Why
does the proletariat in the period of decadence continue to develop a minority
organisation composed of its most com­bative and most conscious elements — the
communist vanguard?

The
reply to that question must be located within the overall process of
self—organisation and development of class conscious­ness. Immediately, the
term ‘process’ indicates that class consciousness doesn’t appear finished and
perfect on such and such a day. It doesn’t appear from nowhere or descend on
the workers like a revelation. Class consciousness must be forged gradually,
and this process is long and painful.

Class consciousness as a process

Even if it’s true that it’s
the entire proletariat, organised in councils, which has the task of carrying
out the communist revolution to its end, this doesn’t mean that the conscious­ness
of this necessity exists in a constant and homogeneous manner among all the
workers. Moreover, the unitary organisation of the proletariat in councils is
also not a constant phenomenon.

To
arrive at communism, at a consciousness of the necessity to organise itself in
councils, the proletariat must travel a difficult road. Even the simple will to
struggle, to go on strike, to resist capitalist exploitation, doesn’t exist in
a constant manner within the working class. Periods of lull or discouragement
or illusions can mar a wave of struggles and cause it to fall back. And if the
bourgeoisie can profit from such refluxes in the struggle by drowning the
workers’ movement in a blood—bath, then the perspective for revolution is put
back to a more distant future.

The
process of the class struggle, the process through which the proletariat forms
itself into a revolutionary class, un­folds in a progressive, uneven, jostling
manner. Hence, you rarely see important strikes and struggles flaring up across
the world all at the same time. The internationalisation of workers’ struggles
proceeds gradually under the pressure of the internationalisation of the
capitalist crisis. Neither does the proletariat have a homogeneous
consciousness about how to struggle and how to lead its strikes towards the
revolution. Certain sectors, certain workers will be more decided, more
combative; others will continue to hesitate, unprepared to commit themselves to
a battle to the end.

What
causes this? The answer is evident. Within capitalist society, the proletariat
is a class in which alienation is pushed to the limit. It’s a class which the
bourgeoisie strongly impregnates with its ideology and divides through
competition. The goal towards which the proletariat moves when it constitutes
itself into a conscious and unified class is in contradiction to the capitalist
conditions which give rise to it as a class. Between the revolutionary pro­letariat,
and-the proletariat atomised into units of competing individuals, or just
beginning its first struggles for economic demands, there is a dialectical
contradiction, which must culminate in the class acting voluntarily and
consciously, and in an organised way.

“The
fundamental difficulty of the socialist revolution remains this complex and
contradictory situation. On the other hand, the revolution can only realise
itself through the conscious action of the great majority of the
working class; on the other hand, the development of class conscious­ness comes
up against the conditions of the working class in society, conditions which
prevent and unceasingly destroy the consciousness of the workers regarding
their historic, revolutionary task.” (‘On the Nature and Function of the
Party’, Internatioalisme, no. 38, 1948, reprinted in the Bulletin
d’etude et de discussion, no. 6, 1974)

The
proletariat, whatever the unity attained in its struggle, never acts in the
same way as an individual acts. It never acts like a single person mechanically
directed towards a goal. Since it is unable to develop its consciousness
according to the stable, frozen principles of an ideology, or according to a
series of ready—made recipes, the proletariat can only become conscious of its
situation in a real and practical pro­cess linked to the material conditions of
its social existence. It is essentially in the course of its struggles that it
forges its practical and theoretical weapons. But these struggles themselves
have their source in a very long and complex social process.

“The
sudden general rising of the proletariat in January under the powerful impetus
of the St. Petersburg events was outwardly a political act of the revolutionary
declaration of war on absolutism. But this first general direct action reacted
inwardly all the more powerfully as it for the first time awoke class feeling
and class consciousness in millions upon millions as if by an electric shock.
And this awakening of class feeling expressed itself forthwith in the
circumstances that the proletarian mass, counted by millions, quite suddenly
and sharply came to realize how intolerable was that social and economic
existence which they had patiently endured for decades in the chains of
capitalism. Thereupon there began a spontaneous general shaking of and tugging
at these chains (...)

“Only complete thoughtlessness could expect that
absolutism could be destroyed at one blow by a single ‘long drawn’ general
strike after the anarchist plan. Absolutism in Russia must be overthrown by the
proletariat. But in order to be able to overthrow it, the proletariat requires
a high degree of pol­itical education, of class consciousness and organisation.
All these conditions cannot be fulfilled by pamphlets and leaf­lets, but only
by the living political school, by the fight and in the fight, in the
continuous course of the revolution. Further, absolutism cannot be overthrown
at any desired moment in which only adequate ‘exertion’ and ‘endurance’ are
necessary. The fall of absolutism is merely the outer expression of the inner
social and class development of Russian society.

“This apparently simple and purely mechanical
problem may there­fore be stated thus: the overthrow of absolutism is a long
continuous social process, and its solution demands a complete undermining of
the soil of society; the uppermost part must be placed the lowest and the
lowermost part highest, the appa­rent ‘anarchist’ chaos must be changed into a
new order.” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike)

The development of proletarian consciousness
requires the rot­ting of material and economic conditions, the laying bare of
the contradictions and horrors of capitalism, the worsening of social tensions.

But this fertile terrain must not be left fallow.
It’s necessary for the proletariat to sow the seeds of its struggle by drawing
sufficient lessons from its past actions in order to use such a favourable
situation to generalise its political understanding. It must bring about this
generalisation of its experience even in times of lull in the struggle. In such
periods, the pro­letariat can reflect upon its past experience and draw up a
balance—sheet of the victories and defeats it has lived through, thus preparing
itself for the future. It is, in this sense, that the development of class
consciousness is not the immediate reflection of a given situation.

The proletariat isn’t content with sitting waiting
for the next wave of its struggle before beginning to carry out its theoretical
work. The development of its consciousness, even though it can’t subsist
constantly and in a homogeneous fashion within the majority of the class,
requires a work of incessant, theoretical reflection, criticism of past
experience. It involves the constant refining of the communist programme, of
the proletariat’s historical interests.

How does the proletariat carry out this work of
constant re­flection, of active generalisation of its political gains?

One thing is clear: given the contradictory
situation which it finds itself, the proletariat cannot entrust this task to
all of its members. In periods of social calm, the great majority of workers
submit to the pressure of bourgeois ideology. The task of generalising
political gains and homogenising class consciousness falls to the most decided,
the most combative elements of the class. Thanks to this fraction, to this part
of itself (defined from a political point of view), the proletariat can
collectivise its gains in consciousness by raising itself above immediate
contingencies and partial experiences. Because this fraction has arrived sooner
at an understanding of the goals of the movement, it enables the working class
to reinforce the tendency to break down the isolation and divisions which
fragment and weaken its struggle. In this way, a powerful and conscious class
can oppose itself to capitalism and triumph over it.

In order for these elements of the class to carry
out their tasks properly, they must regroup themselves into revolutionary
communist organisations. And they will have an essentially active role to play
within the struggle of their class.

“Revolutionaries are those elements within the
class who through this heterogeneous process are the first to obtain a clear
understanding of the ‘line of march, the conditions and the ultimate general
results of the proletarian movement’ (Communist Manifesto), and because in
capitalist society ‘the dominant ideas are the ideas of the ruling class’,
revolutionaries necessarily constitute a minority of the working
class. As an emanation of the class, a manifestation of the process by which it
becomes conscious, revolutionaries can only exist as such by becoming an
active factor in this process.” (The Platform of the ICC. Published in
English as a separate pamphlet entitled Platform and Manifesto of the
International Communist Current)

Thus, when revolutionary organisations arise within
the working class, they arise on the same basis, and out of the same necessity
which forces the proletariat to organise itself in councils. Revolutionaries
are, then, a spontaneous and voluntary product of their class. Spontaneous,
because their existence is a product of the struggle and is enriched by the
practical experience of their class. Voluntary, because they come from the historic
necessity of the class struggle and not just from simple, limited,
mechanical, economic factors.

“It is only the international understanding of
the working class, which can guarantee its definitive triumph. This need has
given birth to the International Working Men’s Association. It isn’t a child of
a sect or a theory. It is the spontaneous product of the proletarian
movement, engendered itself by the natural, irrepressible tendencies of modern
society (...) The aspirations and general tendencies of the working class
emanate from the real conditions in which it is placed.” (Marx, ‘Letter to
Paul Lafargue’, 1870, our emphasis)

The spontaneous and historic movement of the
proletariat truly constitutes the base, the only base for the existence of
revolutionaries. Revolutionaries don’t appear in order to satisfy their own
aspirations through the pursuit of mach­iavellian goals or dreams of
dictatorship. They arise because the unitary organisation of the class can’t
fulfil, by itself the complex needs for conscious self—organisation by the
majority of the workers. Revolutionaries also appear because right up to the
time when the working class has realised its final revolutionary aim, it will
still exist in capitalist society and continue to suffer from its
contradictions and humiliations, its depraved atmosphere and seductive lies.
The proletariat cannot liberate itself from the heritage of thousands of years
of slavery and obscurantism from one day to the next. There­fore, up until a
communist society exists, the process whereby the class develops its consciousness
will remain a heterogeneous phenomenon, although tending to generalise and
develop more and more.

How can one conceive of the generalisation of class
consciousness, if the whole of the class collectively loses its ‘memory’ of
theoretical and political gains in consciousness made in the struggle’ after
each strike, after each partial defeat or victory in its struggle? How can the
homogenisation of class consciousness be possible if the proletariat, after
each combat, must re-travel the historical road that leads from the struggles
of the weavers of Lyon, past the struggles of the Russian workers of 1917, to
the struggles of workers today in 1982? Where will it get the political lessons
of its struggles? Are these lessons to be found in the clouds or the collective
unconscious?

No! If these lessons exist (and they constitute one of the guarantees
for the victory of the revolution), they must exist in a material human form.
Communist consciousness isn’t a mystical affair, but a highly concrete and
human fact. And communist consciousness and action are inconceivable without a
revolutionary programme and a revolutionary organisation. This necessity is
imposed by the very nature of communism and proletarian consciousness. If it is
to make the communist revolution and transform society, the proletariat cannot
do without a qualitative development in the way it understands its historical
interests.

Revolutionaries at the Second Congress of the Communist International defined the role of the party in the following way:

“The Communist International rejects most decisively the view that the proletariat can carry out its revolution without having an independent political party. Every class struggle is a political struggle. The aim of this struggle, which inevitably turns into civil war, is the conquest of political power. Political power can only be seized, organised and led by a political party, and in no other way.” (‘Theses on the Role of the Party’, our emphasis.)

This position, with certain exceptions, was the position of the vast majority of revolutionaries at that time. Where did it arise? How did it develop?

The origin of this conception of the party must be sought in the general positions defended by the Second International. It coincided with a period when a flourishing capitalism could still allow the winning of lasting reforms by the working class and when revolutionaries wound up relegating the ultimate goal of revolution to a remote and inaccessible future. Social Democracy, understanding that the time was not ripe for a communist revolution, laid the emphasis on trade union work and on the need for a party to devote itself to parliamentary work. As Edward David, an English Social Democrat underlined: “…the brief flowering of revolutionism is most happily past… the party will be able to devote itself to the positive exploitation and the expansion of its parliamentary power.” This was how the ‘revisionism’ of Bernstein and Kautsky was born, i.e. the sharper and sharper separation of the economic activity of the workers (led by the unions) and their political activity (delegated to a mass parliamentary party): this could only lead to the abandonment of the final goal of the workers’ struggles. As early as 1902 Kautsky therefore was proposing a ‘gradual movement, through democratic and imperceptible means, from capitalism to communism.’ The party of the proletariat then had but one sole task - that of participating in parliament with the aim of imposing this progressive movement. The seizure of power was no longer seen as the violent overthrow by the workers themselves of the bourgeois state, as the ‘emancipation of the workers’, but as an affair of parties, as the peaceful conquest of the bourgeois state. This gross distortion of marxism brought with it another one: the proletarian party was no longer seen as that vital fraction which prepares the proletariat to take its destiny into its own hands. Instead the party became a governmental apparatus; the proletariat must delegate its political activity and its power to the party by voting for it in full confidence.

Given that the avowed goal was the ‘conquest’ of the bourgeois state the idea of mass working class political organs did not exist for Social Democracy. The only political organ of the proletariat was the party. If the state could only become proletarian under the control of the proletarian party it was logical to believe, as did the Second International, that the seizure of power could only be organised, undertaken and directed by a party. For this task, and above all in order to lead the struggle for reforms, the party must be a mass, ultra-disciplined and hierarchical organisation. The ideological heritage of bourgeois revolutions weighed heavily on these conceptions!

At the beginning of the Twentieth Century the left elements of Social Democracy began to react in a healthy way against the theses of the Second International. Their great merit lay in perceiving the new epoch that was opening up and in clarifying the role of revolutionaries in the light of that period. Their first reaction centred on the separation made by Bernstein, Kautsky and friends between economic struggles and their ultimate goal — the communist revolution. In his first writings against the Narodniks (Russian populists who supported the idea of a revolution based on the peasant commune), Lenin pointed out the final objectives of the economic struggles of the proletariat:

“The Russian Social Democrats concentrate their activity and attention on the industrial working class. When the advanced elements of this class have assimilated the ideas of scientific socialism and have understood the role of the Russian worker in history, when their ideas have become widespread and the workers have created stable organisations that can transform the present incoherent economic warfare into a conscious class struggle — then the Russian worker will rise up in the van of all the democratic elements, overthrow absolutism, and lead the Russian proletariat (side by side with the proletariat of all countries) into an open political struggle for the victory of the communist revolution.” (Lenin. Collected Works. Vol 1.)

Subsequently Lenin never ceased to struggle fiercely against the view of one part of the Social Democratic Party, the Mensheviks, who failed to see in Russia, the objective conditions for a proletarian revolution. He also turned away from the Social Democratic conception of a mass party. For Lenin the new conditions of struggle meant that there was a need for a minority vanguard party that would work for the transformation of economic struggles into political ones.

In her work Reform or Revolution (1898) Rosa Luxembourg also opposed the opportunist and counter—revolutionary deviations of the Second International. She called to mind, amongst other things that, “for Social Democracy, the struggle within the existing system, day by day, for reforms, for the amelioration of workers conditions, for democratic means, is the only way of intervening in proletarian class struggle and orientating it towards the final goal, i.e. of working for the conquest of political power and the abolition of the wage system.” (R. Luxemburg. Mass Strike, the Party and the Trade Unions, our emphasis.) Rosa Luxembourg also insisted on this unity between the economic struggle and the political struggle, on the fact that defensive struggles are merely a preparation for the final political struggle for the seizure of power.

All over the world the left of Social Democracy affirmed the need for the communist revolution that the new period had put on the agenda. This left opposition arose at Zimmerwald in 1915 and then at Kienthal in 1916 as a bulwark against the wave of chauvinism and nationalism that definitively overwhelmed the Second International and the Unions at the beginning of World War One.

But that bulwark was still weak and immature. The period had changed dramatically. The demise of Social Democracy forced revolutionaries to reject their former ‘reformist’ and unionist- conceptions. It was necessary to develop the communist programme, to adapt it to the new needs of the struggle etc. All this could not take place without casualties. And despite their bitter struggle against the ideas of the past, revolutionaries still felt the weight of Social Democracy on their shoulders. Let us not forget that the political and militant formation of such revolutionaries as Lenin, Luxembourg, Pannekoek etc were burdened by the theoretical baggage of the Second International. Most of these militants first took up arms in a period when capit­alism was still progressive and the theses of Kautsky still carried weight. To ‘cast off an old skin’ is never easy and the remnants of old ideas still cling here and there.

For example, the idea still put forward by some revolutionaries, that the proletariat could use democratic institutions to hasten the revolution. Thus at the beginning of the Twentieth Century most communists saw the Paris Commune of 1871 as a model of working class control of a democratic republic, of the use of a democratic institution as a tool for workers power.

“International Socialism considers that the republic is the only possible form of socialist emancipation - with this condition, that the proletariat tears it from the hands of the bourgeoisie and transforms it from ‘a machine for the oppression of one class by another’ into a weapon for the socialist emancipation of humanity.” (L. Trotsky,  Thirty Five Years After: 1871 — 1906.)

In fact only the Dutch Left, on the basis of Luxembourg’s analysis in Accumulation of Capital, defended the idea of the bankruptcy of bourgeois revolutions in the period of decadence and the impossibility of struggles for national liberation.

Lenin for his part saw the “need for the proletariat to use all the democratic institutions and aspirations in its class struggle against the bourgeoisie.” (Lenin, Complete Works, vol. 23, 1915—1916.) In Two Tactics of Social Democracy (1905) he defended the idea that “the proletariat must lead its democratic revolution to a successful conclusion by linking itself to the peasant masses in order to obliterate the force of autocracy.” So for the Bolsheviks the creation of any democratic nation state was progressive. For Pannekoek and the Dutch Left on the other hand only the international proletarian revolution constituted a viable perspective in an epoch when the system was revealing its historic bank­ruptcy by plunging mankind into imperialist massacres.

A further confusion still weighed on the revolutionary movement, an ideological legacy of Social Democracy: a schematic conception of the coming to consciousness of the proletariat, a distorted view of the relationship between the party and the working class. This confusion is particul­arly clear in the theses in What is to be Done? elaborated by Lenin in 1902. Lenin used this work, produced in a period of reflux in class struggle, in his battle against a school of ideas prevalent in Russia at that time: Economism. A minor offspring of the theories of Bernstein, this current extolled the need for the class struggle to remain on a strictly economic terrain. In contrast to this conception which transformed Marxism into an ideology of historic fatalism, which made a cult out of the passive spontaneity of the workers and condemned the party to inactivity, Lenin showed very forcefully the need for the proletariat to go beyond the economic to the political struggle and defended the power of revolutionary theory and activity. Starting from a correct concern to put forward the ultimate goal of the economic struggle Lenin ended up ‘bending the stick’ too far the other way. Although his aim was to respond to this false separation, introduced by the Economists, between the economic and political aspects of the struggle, by emphasising the political character of these struggles Lenin was led to underestimate the economic struggle. Defensive struggles were no longer seen as a fertile soil for the development of class-consciousness: the political dimension of the movement developed ‘outside the sphere of the relations of production’. The economic and political would meet of course, but somewhat in the manner of two parallel lines that meet at infinity. Furthermore the party becomes the sole body capable of organising this fusion and of bringing consciousness to the workers.

It is therefore not surprising that Lenin took up in his book whole passages from Kautsky’s writings, for his argument rested in fact upon a Social Democratic line of argument. The keystone to What is to be Done? is contained in this now famous quotation taken from an article by Kautsky in Neue Zeit in 1901.

“Of course Socialism, as a doctrine, has its roots in modern economic relationships just as the class struggle of the proletariat has and, just as the latter, emerges from the struggle against the capitalist created poverty and misery of the masses. But socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out of the other; each arises under different conditions. Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge. Indeed modern economic science is as much a condition for socialist production as, say, modern tech­nology and the proletariat can create neither the one nor the other, no matter how much it my desire to do so; both arise out of the modern social process. The vehicle of science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia: it was in the minds of individual members of this stratum that modern socialism originated and it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians who, in their turn, introduce it into the proletarian class struggle where conditions allow that to be done. Thus socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously.”

The idea that class consciousness does not arise in a mechanical way from economic struggles is quite correct. But Lenin’s error was to believe that class consciousness cannot develop on the basis of economic struggles and must be introduced from the outside by a party. This incorrect view of the relationship between the party and the workers’ struggles leads to a form of mysticism that finally caused these words to fall from Lenin’s pen.

“…but what is the role of Social Democracy if it is not to be ‘the spirit’ which not only soars above the spontaneous movement but raises it to its programme?” (Lenin, What is to be Done?)

What is more, this apology for technical and scientific knowledge being the unique property of the intellectual specialists fused very neatly with Social Democracy’s vision of the seizure of power by the proletariat. Since the bourgeois state had to be seized by a party and used for the benefit of the proletariat the seizure of power demanded the existence of qualified and intelligent technicians capable of taking over the reins of administrative power!

In her work Social Reform or Revolution Rosa Luxemburg had already put her finger on other aberrations produced by this separation between class consciousness and the struggle itself, between the economic and political aspects of the proletarian struggle. In placing socialist consciousness outside the relations of production Kautsky and Lenin reduced the communist revolution and its development to an abstract and religious ideal. From such a standpoint the socialist programme and, the need for revolution are no longer the fruit of economic realities, the product of the objective conditions of the class struggle. They no longer reflect the ever more blatant internal contradictions of capitalism or the imminence of its collapse but reduce it to an ‘ideal’ whose force of persuasion rests only on the perfection attributed to it. Luxemburg continues her critique:

“We have here, in brief, the explanation of the socialist programme by means of ‘pure reason’. We have here, to use simpler language, an idealist explanation of socialism. The objective necessity of socialism, the explanation of socialism as the result of the material development of society, falls to the ground.” (Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, 1898.)

In 1904 in a more direct response to What Is To Be Done? she outlines the global framework in which the intervention of revolutionaries is situated.

“The international movement of the proletariat towards its complete emancipation is a process peculiar in the following respect. For the first time in the history of civilisation the people are expressing their will consciously and in opposition to all ruling classes. But this will only be satisfied beyond the bounds of the existing system. Now the mass can only acquire and strengthen this will in the course of their day to day struggle against the existing social order — that is, within the limits of capitalist society. On the one hand we have the mass; on the other its historic goal located outside of existing society. On the one hand we have the day-to-day struggle, on the other the social revolution. Such are the terms of the dialectical contradiction through which the socialist movement makes its way. It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss of its mass character, the other the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back to the condition of a sect; the other the danger of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform.” (Luxemburg, ‘Organisational Question of Social Democracy’, in Die Neue Zeit, 1904, our emphasis.)

In a polemic that also opposed Lenin, Trotsky took up this correct and dialectical view of the relation between the daily struggle of the proletariat and class consciousness. In a passage entitled ‘Down with Political Substitutionism’ he wrote in 1904:

“The system of political substitutionism, just like the simplistic system of the ‘economists’ proceeds — consciously or not — from an inability to understand the relationship between the objective interests of the proletariat and its consciousness. Marxism teaches that the interests of the proletariat are determined by the objective conditions of its existence. These interests are so powerful and so ineluctable that they finally compel the proletariat to make the realisation of its objective interests its subjective interest. Between these two factors — the objective fact of its class interests and its subjective consciousness — lies the domain that is part of all life - the domain of conflicts and confrontations, errors and disappointments, vicissitudes and defeats. The tactical perspicacity of the proletarian party lies entirely in between these factors and consists in shortening and facilitating the road from one to the other.” (Trotsky, Our Political Tasks, 1904, our emphasis.)

This living and dialectical view of the revolution — in which the proletariat takes its own destiny into its own hands — is Trotsky’s answer to the rigid conception which limits the revolutionary process to a purely technical and organisational preparation of the proletariat for its dictatorship.

But it would be a caricature to simply contrast the substitutionist What Is to be Done of Lenin with the wholly clear and healthy vision of Rosa and Trotsky. The latter, let us not forget, came in the Twenties to defend the militarisation of Labour and the all-powerful dictatorship of the party.

In the first place, Lenin himself, to some extent, ‘corrected’ the gist of What Is to be Done. In his later works, which were enriched by the concrete experience of the class and the appearance of councils in 1905, as well as in his militant activity, he was a long way from mechanically following the theses of What Is to be Done. On the contrary the Bolshevik Party throughout its intervention in the defensive struggles of the class asserted itself not as an outside element but as an active and vital fraction of the proletariat. The entire revolutionary movement was far from being totally clear on the question of the relation between the party and the class.

Rosa Luxemburg and the German revolutionaries were no more capable than the Russian revolutionaries of severing completely the umbilical cord that tied them to Social Democracy. It is true that Luxemburg was the first to break from the doctrines of Trotsky. When, after 1910 she accused him of opening the floodgates to opportunism she was not supported by any Russian Social Democrat, and most notably not by Lenin, who found her accusations ‘exaggerated’. However it was Lenin and not Rosa who urged most clearly and most rapidly for an organisational split from the most opportunist elements of the Russian Social Democratic Party: the Mensheviks. Luxemburg and Kautsky were, in contrast, in agreement f or once since both criticised this ‘splitting’ policy and called for the reunification of Russian Social Democracy.

Up until events forced the creation of the German Communist Party in 1919 (KPD) Luxemburg remained hesitant. She hesitated to leave the Social Democratic Party (SPD); she hesitated to form a separate organisation which, at first, ran the risk of being a minority organisation; she retreated before Lenin’s persistent desire to create a new Communist International…

Luxemburg was not attached to the SDP in Germany because of any lack of political perception about the objective decay of Social Democracy. In the Crisis of Social Democracy, published in 1916 she fiercely criticised the attitude of the Second International to the imperialist war and the support given by Social Democracy to the national bourgeoisie. No, what imprisoned Luxemburg and made her hesitate was her general conception of mass revolutionary action and the consequences of this for the role of the party.

This militant, who had passed through the school of Social Democracy, developed such an unconditional attachment to the mass character of the revolutionary movement that, for her, the party had to adapt itself to anything that bore this character. Because of her attachment to the Social Democratic vision of the mass party Luxemburg was reluctant to go in advance of the movement. She hesitated to leave an organisation in which the majority of workers still had confidence. Even after the overt and definitive demise of the SPD and the 2nd International in 1914 Luxemburg continued to reiterate that it was for the mass movement to overcome opportunism; revolutionaries could not accelerate this movement.

For her the “errors committed by a truly revolutionary workers’ movement are historically more fruitful and more precious than the infallibility of the finest central committee” (Organisational Questions of Social Democracy) Thus revolutionaries could not take the initiative in going beyond the old Social Democratic organisations.

Luxemburg’s general concern was correct — the insistence on the collective character of the workers’ movement — but the insistence that “the emancipation of the workers is the task of the workers themselves” brought with it incorrect practical conclusions. And a simple concern can easily fall into idealisation, into fetishism. Fetishism of everything that has a mass character leads revolutionaries down the dangerous road of the opportunism of the Second International. An attachment to the mass character of this or that organisation or political tool can lead simply to supporting parliamentary politics (‘because the mass of workers continue to vote’). Paul Levi, a prominent representative of the KPD after Luxemburg’s death followed that path. His conception of a ‘mass party’, which would be entirely subordinate to the movement of the masses, led him to fall gradually back into the clutches of Social Democracy. This was why he urged the fusion of the KPD with the left of the SPD, rejoined the USPD in 1922 having been excluded from the CI and finally rejoined the SPD.

Luxemburg never came to understand the fact that the collective character of revolutionary activity is something that grows and develops. The homogenisation of proletarian consciousness is not made once and for all. The party effectively remains a minority when the vast majority of the working class are subjugated by bourgeois ideology. Its task consists then, not in bending itself to the dominant ideology of the masses, but in defending on a political level, as well as on an organisational level, the entire communist programme. Only in this way can the party effectively play a role in the homogenisation of class consciousness.

The German revolutionaries, like most revolutionaries of that time, were not entirely clear about the process by which the proletariat seizes power. On the whole communists saw in the workers councils the organs for the seizure of power. And in every case up to 1920 the CI insisted on the predominant role of the councils in the revolution and in the exercise of power. However, no communist, no revolutionary organisation saw very clearly the relations that should exist between the territorial soviets (the basis of the transitional state) and the workers councils. Confusion existed between the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Furthermore the speech made by Luxemburg at the founding congress of the KPD (Spartacist League) in 1918 left room for very grave ambiguities. The text lacks political clarity, particularly on the destruction of the bourgeois state by the proletariat:

“So the conquest of power for us will not be effected at one blow. It will be a progressive act for we shall progressively occupy all the positions of the capitalist state, defending tooth and nail each one that we seize… the councils must have all power in the state... step by step, by hand to hand fighting, in every province, in every town, in every village, in every commune, all the powers of the state have to be transferred bit by bit from the bourgeoisie to the workers’ and soldiers’ councils.”

What does this text suggest?

1. that the proletariat must involves themselves in the bourgeois state in order to destroy it (a position which allowed the vestiges of revolutionary parliamentarianism to appear.)

2. that the proletariat should use the bourgeois state to its own advantage.

3. that the workers’ dictatorship is expressed through a proletarian state.

So it is understandable that this conception of the revolution that resembles the schema of bourgeois revolutions led revolutionaries to envisage the need for the proletarian party to take power. The Spartacists did not defend a position very different from that of Lenin but they laid strong emphasis on the ‘mass’ character of the party’s seizure of power.

“The Spartacist League refuses to take over the power of government merely because the Scheidemann—Ebert element have completely discredited themselves... The Spartacist League will never take over the power of government otherwise than by a clear manifestation of the unquestionable will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of Germany.” (Proposed programme adopted by the KPD (Spartacists) at its foundation in 1918. Published in Die Rote Fahne Dec. 1918.)

To the question ‘What are the origins of substitutionism?’ we can respond: the weight of Social Democratic conceptions. But to the question ‘What are the causes which allowed the development of substitutionist conceptions?’ we must reply: the general political immaturity of the international working class.

“The first imperialist world war signalling the end of the period of capitalist ascendancy marked the absolute point of no return for the workers’ movement of the 19th Century and its immediate objectives. Popular discontent against the war became rapidly politicised into frontal attacks against the state in key countries of Europe. But the majority of the proletariat was unable to cast off the relics of the past, (adherence to the policies of the Second International which was now in the camp of the class enemy) and to fully under­stand the implications of the new era. Neither the proletariat as a whole nor its political organisations fully understood the needs of the proletarian struggle in the new age of ‘war and revolution’, ‘socialism or barbarism’. Despite the heroic struggles of the proletariat in this period the tide of revolution was drowned in the massacre of the working class in Europe. The fact that the Russian revolution was the beacon for all the working class in that epoch did not alter the fact that its isolation was a serious danger. Even a temporary gap between revolutionary outbreaks can have its dangers but by 1920 the gap was becoming increasingly unbridgeable.” (Judith Allen. ‘The Degeneration of the Russian Revolution’, in International Review No. 3, 1975.)

However as long as the class was sufficiently strong and the revolutionary movement was on the upturn the theoretical confusions about the relations between the class, the party and the state could be overcome by the concrete experience of struggle. Thus the practice of the workers in Russia confirmed the material impossibility for a workers’ party, even if it is a minority of the class, to substitute itself for the activity of the entire working class.

The question of who took power in Russia in October 1917 is answered by history and the practice of the proletariat itself. On the eve of the insurrection the Petrograd Soviet felt itself sufficiently strong and sufficiently supported by the provinces to call for the convocation of a Congress of Soviets and urge it to prepare for the armed insurrection. The Soviet believed that the Congress had a role in “giving a solution to the problems of the organisation of revolutionary power.” After untiring propaganda by the Bolshevik Party within the Soviets and the factory committees, the majority of workers finally declared themselves in favour of the seizure of power. From a military viewpoint it was the Revolutionary Committee that in Petrograd prepared the insurrection. This committee, which was composed of representatives from the Soviets, from the navy, the factory committees, the railways and the Red Guard (armed workers) was not an organ of the party, even if the Bolsheviks were dominant inside it. The Revolutionary Committee stayed in permanent contact with the whole of the working class and never ceased to act under its control; it was an organ that was directly linked to the Soviets and the factory committees. Not for an instant did the contact between the barracks, the factories, the committee and the party break down. A vital and continuous link existed between all the organs cementing the collective will of the class. The workers as a whole made decisions and held in their hands the reins of history, even if the day-to-day military actions were implemented by a small number of people. This is why, when he was accused of taking power with a small group of ‘conspirators’ i.e. the Revolutionary Committee, Trotsky replied:

“Professor Pokrovsky denies the very importance of the alternative: soviet or party. Soldiers are no formalists, he laughs: they did not need a Congress of Soviets in order to overthrow Kerensky. With all its wit such a formulation leaves unexplained the problem: why create soviets at all if the party is enough? ‘It is interesting’ continues the professor,’ that nothing at all came of this aspiration to do everything almost legally, with soviet legality, and the power at the last moment was taken not by the soviet but by an obviously illegal organisation, created ad hoc,’ Pokrovsky here cites the fact that Trotsky was compelled ‘in the name of the Military Revolutionary Committee’ and not the Soviet to declare the government of Kerensky non—existent. A most unexpected conclusion. The Military Revolutionary Committee was an elected organ of the Soviet. The leading role of the committee in the overturn did not in any sense violate that soviet legality which the professor makes fun of but which the masses were extremely jealous of.” (Trotsky. History of the Russian Revolution, vol. 3, our emphasis.)

What do these phrases mean? Do they suggest that the October Revolution took place within strict bourgeois legality, under the protection of formal democracy, with no clandestine activity? Of course not! The ‘Soviet Legality’ of which Trotsky spoke was very simply the need for the collective will of the workers, for their control over the whole of the revolutionary process. The seizure of power in Russia showed in an astounding way how the workers as a whole can decide and control the revolution. In his History of the Russian Revolution Trotsky describes how this control was concretised and how the workers prepared the insurrection through the Soviets.

No party substituted itself for the practical and decisive activity of the workers. The Bolsheviks acted in a decisive way within their class but they did not take power in the place of the workers. However theoretical confusions existed on the nature of the relations between the party, the working class and the state, and on the role of the party. And since the party is not simply a passive reflection of consciousness these misunderstandings, which had existed in embryo since 1902, would expand and accelerate the degeneration of the revolution. From 1918 on the political power of the working class was being restricted and stifled by the state apparatus at whose head stood the Bolshevik party. Since the seizure of power the Bolshevik Party had entered into conflict with the unitary organs of the proletariat and presented itself as a party of government. This substitution of the councils’ power by that of the party was justified theoretically (along with the militarisation of labour) in Trotsky’s work Terrorism and Communism written at the beginning of the Twenties — a tragic work which already contained the theor­etical justification for acts like the Kronstadt massacre.

“We have more than once been accused of having substituted for the dictatorship of the soviets the dictatorship of our party. Yet it can be said with complete justice that the dictatorship of the soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party. It is thanks to the clarity of its theoretical vision and its strong revolutionary organisation that the party has afforded to the soviets the possibility of becoming transformed from shapeless parliaments of labour into the apparatus of the supremacy of labour. In this ‘substitution’ of the power of the party for the power of the working class there is nothing accidental, and in reality there is no substitution at all. The communists express the fundamental interests of the working class. It is quite natural that in the period in which history brings up those interests in all their magnitude on to the order of the day that the communists have become the recognised representation of the working class as a whole.” (Trotsky. Terrorism or Communism.)

Once the party and the state become the avowed ‘representatives’ of the working class as a whole they could never be wrong, they were always right even in opposition to the entire working class, even at the price of massacres. From that instant socialism itself becomes the affair of the party and of the state. From that moment the Russian state began destroying the councils that meant destroying the strength of the revolution and sinking deep into counterrevolution.

And alongside these serious confusions the Communist Inter­national was developing the concept of the United Front, the idea of defending a minimum programme with a mass party, the need for union work, the positions of revolutionary parliamentarianism etc. Rather than trying to go against the reflux in the revolutionary wave and to hold communist principles intact the CI was bending itself more and more to this retreat and was also adapting its practices. Differences between ‘tactics’ and principles developed, as they had within the Second International. Rather than always keeping in mind the international interests of the proletariat the CI became more and more the mouthpiece of the Russian State and sounded its death knell when it adopted the theory of Socialism in One Country. These theses defended by the CI were merely brought forward to defend the strengthening of state capitalism in Russia. From that point on the Bolshevik Party became the most docile tool of the counterrevolution.

A human body attacked by germs will always give rise to a reaction. It secretes anti—bodies to try to check the evil and destroy it. A revolutionary proletarian organisation reacts in the same way. Even if seriously attacked by the virus of bourgeois ideology the revolutionary organisation can still be saved from death. As long as a spark of life remains intact it impels a healthy reaction within itself, a sort of defence mechanism. But the moment that the ailing organisation leaves the proletarian camp its death is irreversible. There is nothing left for the proletariat to do but to definitively abandon the corpse and undertake the reconstruction of a new weapon of struggle.

The progressive degeneration of the Communist International provoked an upsurge amongst the healthiest revolutionary elements. But how difficult this upsurge was! Those who today pretend to invent everything anew and who judge history from their superior intellectual heights in fact adopt a purely infantile attitude, imagining what ‘should have been’ in that period and condemning every thing that goes outwith their abstract schemas. We don’t judge history, but draw from it lessons for the future. It would also be ludicrous for us to analyse the reflux of the revolutionary wave and the death agony of the Communist International as if they were the products of the machiavellian plans of the Bolsheviks! — as if they had been preparing their coup since 1902. It would also be ridiculous to idealise any left fraction that emerged in the Communist International, endowing it with all the virtues of truth. The process of counterrevolution that condemned the CI sowed terrible confusion within the workers’ movement. Even those who pursued the task of theoretical elaboration during the dark years of the 30s, the elements of the Communist Left, had to look for a long time in order to see all the implications of the defeat. No left fraction held all the keys to the problems, or the ‘whole truth’. All retained traces of the terrible defeat and their political positions were all deformed in one way or another. For the ordeal through which these revolutionaries had passed was indeed a terrible one.

Their class was crushed on an international level after 1927; the bastion of the world revolution became progressively more isolated and was transformed into a bastion of the counterrevolution; their international organisation was definitively dead from the moment it adopted the theory of ‘Socialism in One Country’; their British, German, Dutch and Danish comrades, who became progressively more isolated, were forced by the CI to fuse with centrists and opportunists of the most vile sort, under pain of expulsion... under these crushing blows many simply hung their heads and submitted. Nevertheless some had enough militant courage and revolution­ary will to continue struggling.

Those who reacted to the degeneration of the Communist International were few and they never managed to form an organised and cohesive international opposition. Their appearance in some parts of the world (from Mexico to Asia, and of course including Russia) was not really coordinated at a political or organisational level. Although many contacts and exchanges were made, notably between the KAPD, Bordiga’s fraction, the British comrades round Pankhurst, the Belgian left etc., although Il Soviet (organ of the Italian Left) published many texts from the left current and although international contacts existed up until the Second World War, the weight and force of the impact of the counterrevolution hurled the left fractions into profound isolation.

We don’t have time to look at all the left fractions or oppositions which appeared within the International; we will have to be content simply with analysing how the most significant left currents reacted to the specific positions of the Bolsheviks and the CI on the party.

The Italian Left

Without going into all the political and historical details which led to the formation of the Italian Left we’ll simply say that as far back as 1926 - the date of its expulsion from the Italian Communist Party — the Italian Left, led by Bordiga, was to fight mainly against

1. The CI’s conception of ‘revolutionary parliamentarianism’.

2. The idea of the united front and the directives of the CI concerning the formation of communist parties by joining with centrist and clearly bourgeois elements.

3. The Russian state’s development towards a bourgeois state and the Communist International’s gradual abandonment of internationalist positions.

4. The communist parties’ gradual development towards becoming bourgeois nationalist parties through their participation in the Second World War in the name of ‘anti—fascism’ and the ‘defence of democracy’.

However on the question of the role of the party and its relation to the working class the Italian Left proved unable to draw all the lessons of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. In fact the Italian Left was to return to the positions and theses of the CI, in their entirety, on the role of the party in the revolution (adopted in 1920). This is demonstrated by the texts of the Italian Left Communists that were published of 1921/2. In these texts Bordiga embraces once more the old separation, developed by Lenin in What is to be Done, between economic and political struggles. By starting out from a subtle reasoning which condemns static photographs of reality that see social classes as economic entities without movement, Bordiga arrives at the incorrect conclusion that the working class can define itself as a thinking, acting class only through a revolutionary minority. The proletariat does not define itself economically but solely through its political movement, the party. Thus by beginning from the correct premise that the class is not simply an economic category and that the revolutionary party is indispensable to the homogenisation of its political consciousness, Bordiga reaches an absurd conclusion. He ends up, quite simply, without wanting to, by erasing those economic and material determinations that form the real basis of class consciousness and of the very existence of the party. In exactly the same way as Kautsky when he made a separation between reforms and revolution, Bordiga too ends up by placing the needs of the communist revolution not within material contingencies, but in the perfection of an ideal.

By developing the idea that you cannot talk about class consciousness and even class action outside the activity of the party, by in a sense making the existence of the party precede that of the working class, the Italian Left walks on its hands with its feet in the air. If the consciousness of the class and its will to act can only be condensed and concretised in the class party, and if it is not the proletarian struggle which itself expresses and produces this movement towards consciousness by secreting revolutionary organisations, if this is how it is, then where does the party come from? How does it arise? Does it come from the heavens? The only answer that seems to satisfy our Bordigists of yesterday and today is that in What is to be Done, i.e. revolutionaries are intellectuals who possess the ‘know-how’ and the understanding, and who bring consciousness complete to the workers. They are elements external to the proletariat.

It is this simplistic and false conception that appears in the texts of the PCI (Programma Communista), which today represents the worst caricature of the Italian Left. On the one hand, say the PCI, we have the masses who are incapable of going beyond immediatism without the directing intervention of the party, the Commander—in—chief of the proletarian troops. On the other hand we have the party, the only body capable of really acting on and thinking about the historic interests of the proletariat, the sole bearer of the invariant communist programme. In as far as the revolution is, despite everything, a conscious revolution, (the PCI is forced to admit this) it is essential that this revolution is led, directed and set up by the only conscious organ of the proletariat, its party. So it is logical that it should take power, and take on the dictatorship of the proletariat, as it is the party that ensures the constitution of the proletariat into a class struggling for its own emancipation. The dictatorship of the proletariat will thus be the dictat­orship of the communist party and it will be a party of government. (cf. the ‘Theses of the Abstentionist Fraction of the Italian CP’, 1920.)

But the question which must be posed in the face of such sledge—hammer arguments is this: if the workers are only a herd of mindless sheep why should they follow the commands of revolutionaries rather than those of the bourgeoisie? How will they be capable of distinguishing the revolutionary direction the party is proposing? Let’s hear the response of the PCI. “If the proletariat follows the party it’s not under the influence of passive obedience. It is clearly absurd to conclude that the party ordains and the class ‘obeys” But neither, according to the PCI, is it because the masses possess an ounce of the party’s divine intelligence; it is because:

“If the party can and must become an effective organ of leadership, if it can and must win the decisive influence that will enable it to constrain the soviets and lead them to power, it is because it possesses over the rest of the mass of proletarians the advantage of knowing the general results and conditions of the proletarian movement, as it says in the Manifesto; it is because at each moment of the class struggle, and also in advance of future developments, it can and must indicate the objectives, the methods and the organisation that will make this struggle as effective as possible and make it advance towards its final goals; it is because it can and must give practical political answers to the problems posed to the workers by the needs of the struggle.” (Le Proletaire, No. 269. ‘No revolutionary action without party leadership.’ June 1978,)

Observe the shining clarity of this response! If the workers follow the orders of the party it is because “they can and must follow them”. If the workers are capable of following them it is because the “party can and must be the clearest”! What could be more natural, in fact. Once upon a time the good words of the priest were followed blindly or ‘of their own free will’ by the faithful, because the priest claimed to be the incarnation of divine will. Tomorrow the workers will follow the words of the party because it claims to embody the path to communism. So it is the miraculous virtue of pol­itical clarity per se which will lead the workers to obey the directives of the party.

What a rigid, sterile and impoverished vision. What the Bordigists, stuck behind their spectacles, can never see is the living class struggle. For if it is not indissolubly linked to the workers’ struggles, to the ever greater cap­acity of the proletariat (stimulated by the objective con­ditions as well as by the intervention of revolutionaries) to understand and put into practice a political framework of its own, forged in its own experience - then the party’s theoretical clarity can only wither away, becomes sclerotic and even die.

The question of understanding why the workers will take the direction put forward by their party is not simply founded on programmatic correctness. If the workers are content to apply the ‘directives’ of the party — however correct they are —without understanding and without assimilating them into daily experience, without seeing in them an expression of their global historic interests, they are only representing an attitude which leaves them bound hand and foot on the terrain of the bourgeoisie. The communist revolution would be ser­iously compromised by this, for such weak political conviction on the part of the workers could be used profitably by the class enemy.

The only guarantee for the revolution does not rest on the workers’ obedience, even active obedience, to the directives of the party, but on their collective strength, on their global capacity to understand the goals and the means of revolutionary activity, on their collective class consciousness.

All the confusions on the party that exist in the groups which have come out of the Italian communist left are based precisely on this fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of the communist revolution and of how the proletariat comes to consciousness. The Bordigists reduce a whole living, complex and collective process to a question of technical and military preparation. The communist revolution, which they identify as the seizure of state power by the party, requires ‘specialist’ professional revolutionaries capable of taking over the reins of government. Readopting the old confusions of the Bolsheviks about the relation between the party, the state and the class, they make a simple identification between the bourgeoisie’s seizure of power and the communist insurrection.

“After having conquered control of the state the proletariat must undertake complex functions… It would be a fund­amental mistake to believe that such a degree of preparation and specialisation could be achieved merely by organising the workers on a trade basis according to their traditional funct­ions in the old regime… We will instead have to con­front tasks of a much more complex nature which require a synthesis of political, administrative, and military preparation. Such a preparation, which must exactly correspond to the pre­cise historical tasks of the proletarian revolution, can be guaranteed only by the political party; in effect the political party is the only organism which possesses on one hand a general historical vision of the revolutionary process and of its necessities and on the other hand a strict organisation of all its particular functions to the final general aim of the class… It is for this reason that the rule of the class can only be the rule of the party.” (Bordiga. ‘Party and Class Action’, 1921.)

In response to this view which delegates the accomplishment of the revolution to a minority of political ‘spec­ialists’ (as happened in revolutions in the past), we simply offer two quotations. The first is taken from Trotsky’s work ‘Our Political Tasks’ written in the heat of the polemic against What is to be Done,

“At, the very moment that Lenin was creating his formula of the social democratic Jacobin, his political friends in the Urals were elaborating a new formula for the dictatorship of the proletariat. ‘If the Paris Commune of 1871 failed — say the Uralian marxists — it’s because diverse tendencies were represented within it, often contradictory and opposed to each other. Everyone put his oar in, and this led to much dispute and little action…. It must be said that the proletariat, not only in Russia but worldwide, must be pre­pared and prepare itself to receive a strong and powerful organisation… The preparation of the proletariat for the dictatorship is such an important organisational task that all others must be subordinated to it. This preparation consists, among other things, of creating a state of mind in favour of a strong and powerful organisation, of explaining its meaning. One might object that dictators have appeared and have done so on their own. But it hasn’t always been like this, and the proletarian party must reject all spontaneism and opportunism. It must unite itself at a higher degree of knowledge and with an absolute will… the one must imply the other…’

This philosophy can be summed up in three theses:

1. The preparation of the proletariat for the dictatorship is a problem of organisation. It consists in preparing the proletariat to ‘receive’ a powerful organisation, crowned by a ‘dictator’.

2. In the interests of the dictatorship of the proletariat, it’s indispensable to consciously prepare for the appear­ance of this dictatorship over the proletariat.

3. Any deviation from this programme is a manifestation of opportunism.

In any case, the authors of this document have the courage to say loudly that, to them, the dictatorship of the proletariat looks like a dictatorship over the proletariat: it is not the working class which, through its autonomous action, has taken the destiny of society into its own hands, but a ‘strong and powerful organisation’ which, reigning over the proletariat and through this over society as a whole, will ensure the passage to socialism.

In fact, to prepare the working class for political rule, it’s indispensable to develop and cultivate its self—activity, the habit of activity, permanently controlling all the executive personnel of the revolution. This is the great political task of international social democracy. But for the ‘social dem­ocratic Jacobins’, for the intrepid representatives of political substitutionism, the enormous social and political task of preparing a class for state power is replaced by an organisational—tactical task: the fabrication of an apparatus of power.

The first approach stresses methods of educating and re-educating ever-growing layers of the proletariat, by making them participate in active political work. The second reduces everything to the selection of disciplined executives of the different echelons of the ‘strong and powerful organisation’ - a selection, which, to make the work easier, can only be ach­ieved by the mechanical elimination of those who are unsuitable.” (Trotsky. Our Political Tasks, 1904.)

Subsequently, Trotsky correctly compared this position of the ‘Uralian’ tendency with that of the Blanquists. In fact, Blanquism was also characterised by a lack of understanding of the immense differences which separate the proletarian revolution, made by the ‘vast majority’ of the exploited over the ‘minority of exploiters’, from earlier bourgeois revolutions, made by the “exploiting minority against the exploited majority”. The angle from which the Bordigists today view the role of the party in the revolution is a Blanquist one. So they see the party as a steel bloc made up of clairvoyant specialists which emerges “when the time has come to build the complete mono­lithic and exclusive edifice of its own theory”. (Programme Communiste No. 76). Posing as the sole defenders of workers’ consciousness, our Bordigist comrades not only have a megalomaniac and infantile spirit, but also a conspiratorial and putschist view of the revolution. Their caricature of’ a party goes hand in hand with a caricature of the communist revolution.

This warped view of the proletarian revolution has already been adequately criticised by marxists in the 19th century. This is what Engels said of the Blanquists’ idea of their role at the moment of the socialist revolution.

“Brought up in the school of conspiracy, and held together by the strict discipline which went with it, they started out from the viewpoint that a relatively small number of resolute, well—organised men would be able, at a given favourable moment, not only to seize the helm of state, but also by a display of great, ruthless energy, to maintain power until they succeeded in sweeping the mass of the people into revolution and ranging them round the small band of leaders. This involved, above all, the strictest, dictatorial centralisation of all power in the hands of the new revolutionary government..” (Engels, Introduction to the Civil War in France.)

These two quotations suffice to show the logical and necessary link between the idea one has of the role of revolutionaries in the communist revolution, and the nature of the revolution itself. Overestimating the role of the party means cutting off the revolution from its vital collective strength. Likewise, to give the party the power to embody class consciousness is to prevent the full flowering of that consciousness; it means taking the immediate state of consciousness of the great mass of workers as a fait accompli, making rigid its weaknesses. It does no great service to the proletariat to entrust its rev­olutionary minority with all the tasks that demand consciousness and determination. On the contrary, this attitude can only encourage submission to the dominant ideology. By acting in this way, revolutionaries turn themselves into an obstacle on the path to revolution.

It is in order to avoid this trap that we insist so strongly on the gulf which separates communism from the social trans­formations which have preceded it. And it is for this reason also that we have tried to differentiate class consciousness from simple ideology.

In fact the substitutionist conceptions about the role of the party are not only founded on a lack of understanding of the specificity of the proletarian dictatorship, nor on a confusion between the transitional state, the party and the working class. These conceptions emerge logically from a restricted theory, from an erroneous analysis of class consciousness. Most of the groups that came out of the Italian left took up the same theoretical errors as Lenin and Kautsky. They do not see the true identity that exists between economic and political struggles, between proletarian theory and practice. They do not see class consciousness as a living process, as the affirm­ation of the conscious being of the proletariat. The idea of the party being outside the class arises from the identification of class consciousness with an ideology. So it is normal that, for the Bordigists, consciousness should be a feat of intellec­tual understanding, marxism a ‘science’, and the communist programme a fixed doctrine. It is also normal in that case that revolutionaries should be seen as ever—so—wise profess­ionals in politics, whose job is to bear consciousness to the workers.

These confusions are also to be found amongst the less sclerotic and less monolithic groups of the Italian left. In a text in Prometeo, the theoretical organ of the Partito Comunista Internazionaliste (Battaglia Comunista), the following analysis of class consciousness appears:

“Once again we have to return to the essential point of com­munist doctrine… according to which there exists a great difference between ‘class instinct’ and ‘class consciousness’. The first is born and develops within workers’ struggles as the patrimony of the workers themselves; it comes from the antagonism of material interests and is nourished by the growing economic, social, and political contradictions brought about by this antagonism; finally, it depends on a certain degree of tension in the relationship between proletarians and capitalists. The second, consciousness, is born out of the scientific examination of class contradictions, it grows with the growth of knowledge of these contradictions it lives and is nourished by the examination and elaboration of facts coming from the historic experiences of the class…

Consciousness is therefore precisely an element ‘introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without where con­ditions allow that to be done’ (Kautsky, cited by the ICC in a polemical fashion in Revolution Internationale No. 12). The arguments of the ICC don’t demonstrate what they aim to demon­strate, on the contrary, they show that these comrades know nothing of dialectics…

In other words, nothing that the ICC says alters the fact (or could do so) that ‘The vehicle of science is not the pro­letariat’ (again Kautsky and Lenin cited by the ICC); neither have they understood the Marx of The German Ideology…

Are the ruling ideas the ideas of the ruling class, or not? Is it or is it not true that those who possess the material means of production also possess the intellectual means of production and that the proletariat on the other hand is an exploited, and thus, an ideologically dominated, class?

If this is true, then it’s also true that ‘it was in the minds of individual, members of this stratum that modern Socialism originated: it was they who communicated it to the more intell­ectually developed proletarians who, in their turn, introduce it into the proletarian class struggle where conditions allow that to be done’ (Kautsky and Lenin again).” (PCInt, ‘Class and Consciousness: from Theory to Political Intervention’, Prometeo, 1st Semester 1978. Our emphasis.)

This quotation sheds much light on the errors that we have emphasised in the analysis of Bordiga and Lenin.

What is the reasoning of the PCInt?

It starts from a real premise — that the dominant ideas are the ideas of the dominant class and that the proletariat is subjected to this ideology. But from the starting point of this statement they construct an almost totally sterile and rigid analysis. First error of judgement: the workers in order to accomplish the revolution must have at their disposal a scientific analysis and an ideological understanding of the same quality as that of the class enemy. Class consciousness is a ‘scientific reflection of the experiences of the class’, it is the “reflection in the domain of ideas of the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and is thus the subjective element which permits the overcoming of this contradiction through the revolutionary destruction by the proletariat”. So class consciousness is defined in exactly the same way as ide­ology, which is also the reflection in the domain of ideas of an objective reality (cf. Marx; The German Ideology.)

Second error of judgement: in so far as the workers submit to the dominant ideology, in so far as they are dispossessed of the means of production, they are also dispossessed of class consciousness, i.e., of the revolutionary ideology. Only revo­lutionaries, who, as members of the bourgeoisie, have at their disposal the means of intellectual production, can bring soc­ialist consciousness to the workers. So we arrive at the following absurdity: the communist revolution is possible thanks to the use of the scientific capacities of the bourgeoisie (in the service of the workers). Class consciousness becomes an ideology, in competition with bourgeois ideology, but forged with the same tools!

By trying to appear dialectical, the PCInt ends up becoming contradictory, because they tangle themselves up in their own explanations. In fact, if class consciousness is simply an ideological reflection, on what economic power does it rest? If the workers are effectively dispossessed of all economic power, how can they create an ideology? Does the ideology forged by revolutionaries float in the heavens, does it stand both inside the class struggle and within bourgeois ideology? Since the workers will always be dispossessed of the intell­ectual and material means of production, how can they accomplish the communist revolution and transform the whole of society? If their simple “class instinct” is enough, why have they not already made the revolution? By what miraculous means will rev­olutionaries manage to introduce into the class something of which the workers will always be dispossessed?

The responses of the PCInt to these questions seem very unsat­isfactory to us; they leave us hungry:

“Here resides the false problem: does socialist consciousness come from the class or from those who ‘know how to examine the laws of history’? It’s a false problem because it’s not posed in a dialectical manner, i.e., in a way that really makes it possible to grasp social and historical reality. Its solution in fact, resides outside the terms of the alternative and encom­passes both. Socialist consciousness is scientific reflection on the experiences of the class and on the problems it poses, developed by those who have the means to undertake this ref­lection, and who identify themselves politically with the class.” (Op. cit.)

No, comrades, the question we posed was not a false problem, easy to evade. The question that we posed is at the heart of two radically different conceptions of class consciousness. In failing to respond to the question “who holds and develops class consciousness?” you place yourselves in an impasse and stay inside the contradiction. The ‘dialectical’ efforts that you make to emerge from this, resolve nothing. Our conception of class consciousness attempts on the contrary, to respond to this question and to shed some light on how the proletariat will accomplish (without the help of the bourgeoisie) the communist revolution. The proletariat is the only holder of class consciousness, precisely because it has no economic power, no means of production. The consciousness of the proletariat is characterised by an indestructible link between activity and thought.

The theoretical evolution of the proletariat does not simply come as a “reflection” of its practice, it is not simply a philosophical interpretation of the world: it is an active factor, a means for the concrete transformation of reality. Theory and practice are inseparable. Only the working class in its class struggle can synthesise these two aspects of socialist consciousness. The activity of revolutionaries is certainly a privileged moment in the global and collective activity of the proletariat, but only constitutes one of its aspects (although an indispensable one). It is surely not with the same ideological weapons that the proletariat struggles against its class enemy. The revolutionary strength of the proletariat is in fact its condition as an exploited yet revolutionary class; it is a class without any power in society, and at the same time it alone is capable of releasing humanity from all forms of exploitation and class rule. Class consciousness is characterised precisely by the fact that it is simultaneously a rigorous understanding of reality and a practical transformation of it, which is something no ideology, no ‘scientific’ understanding, can be. The revolutionary power of the proletariat rests entirely and solely on class consciousness and organisation. Robbing it of the possession of this power, placing a thousand intermediaries between its theory and its class struggle, robs it of the capacity to accomplish the communist revolution. And if the proletariat as a whole is not capable of carrying out the destruction of the old world, we may as well lay down and die, for no act of will, no pious wish can change it.

Thus, despite the many contributions made by the Italian left to the enrichment of revolutionary theory, despite the courage and obstinacy with which it managed to preserve the gains of communism, the degeneration of the CI, the weight of bourgeois ideology still lies heavily on the shoulders of today’s communist groups. The ICC does not pretend to have understood everything, it does not claim to be ‘the sole holder of class consciousness’, but at least its work of reflection is based on a precise concern: to draw out the maximum number of lessons from the Russian revolution and the reflux of the revolutionary wave in the twenties, so as to avoid falling into the old traps which snared the Bolsheviks. And one of the essential lessons which comes to us from historical experience seems to us to be: only a unified and conscious proletariat can transform society. No party, no minority can substitute itself for the proletariat in the accomplishment of this task.

The German Left

The German and Dutch left represent the other revolutionary voice that tried to free itself from the counterrevolutionary chorus sung by the CI from the beginning of the twenties.

The German left was regrouped around the KAPD, which was founded in 1919 by those left-wing elements who were excluded from the ‘official’ Communist Party, the KPD(S). The KAPD, which was admitted to the CI as a ‘sympathising party’, was mainly opposed to the International’s positions on parliament and the unions (cf. Gorter’s reply to Lenin in 1920), to its conception of the united front and its support for national liberation struggles.

The KAPD tried to establish contact with the other left groups which existed within the CI, e.g., the Belgian, Hungarian, Italian, Mexican, Bulgarian and Danish left, in order to form a coherent left opposition. This opportunity was short-lived as the KAPD was excluded from the CI in 1921.

On the question of the party, the KAPD takes credit for in­sisting quite correctly on the need to build a strong coherent party capable of putting forward a global political direction and of developing class consciousness even at the risk of remaining a minority for the time being (points 7 and 8 of the theses on the party, written in 1921 to be presented at the congress of the CI). This is very far from the ‘anarcho­-syndicalist’ conception that the Bordigists like to see in the position of the German left. In the whole of the theses on the party there is no mention made of the need for the party to take power (perhaps this is the anarchist deformation with which the Italian left reproaches the KAPD). On the contrary, emphasis is placed on the role of the councils (distinct from the party) as the instruments of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Nevertheless, the German and Dutch left were no more able to draw all the lessons from the Russian revolution and its defeat than were the Italian, British, Hungarian or Mexican left. In no document of the KAPD or the KAI (the new International created in 1922 by elements from the KAPD), is there any mention made of the fact that the substitution of the party and the state for the power of the councils had a strong effect on the degeneration of the Russian revolution.

On the contrary, several serious confusions developed within the German left.

1. Because of an incorrect analysis of the Russian revolution as both a bourgeois and a proletarian revolution (1921), and then as a bourgeois revolution, a tendency developed within the KAPD which saw the existence of a political party as the reason for the bourgeois nature of the Russian revolution.

2. By theorising the correct refusal to consider itself as a parliamentary party that should take power, a tendency was formed within the KAPD—AAUD around clearly ‘anti-party’ positions. This ‘anti—intellectual’ current was found in the Essen tendency of the KAPD, and then in the League of Council Communists. But the most well-known split with the KAPD—AAUD, at the beginning of the twenties, was the one which formed the AAUD(E) around Otto Ruble.

3. As it rejected the separate existence of a political party as such, the AAUD(E) advocated the development of organisations that were half way between the party and the coun­cils: the General Workers Union (AAU). Pursuing this analysis to its final conclusions, some elements ended up by splitting and by disbanding themselves on the basis of an anti—organisational analysis. In 1925, Ruhle himself was to give up all organised political activity.

From the beginning of the thirties, all that remained of the German and Dutch left were some elements regrouped in the SDP, isolated ‘anti—party’ individuals, terrorists like Van der Lubbe and those communist groups which came out of the AAUD(E) and denied the need for a revolutionary organisation of the proletariat to preserve the principles of the communist programme.

In fact, the big mistake of these elements of the German left (which was severely hit by the general retreat in the con­sciousness of the proletariat and by the weakness of revolution­aries in Germany during the revolutionary wave), lay firstly in their failure to understand the change in the nature and the function of the party in the decadent period. The KAPD glimpsed this change. It pointed out quite correctly the differences between the revolutionary period and the period of parliamentarism. It made a distinction between the role of the parliamentary workers’ parties of the 19th century and that of the communist party in the epoch of social revolutions. But not all of the implications of this difference were com­pletely assimilated by the German left. This is why a tendency developed within the KAPD that confused the very notion of the party with that of a mass parliamentary party. This tendency, being unable to draw out all the practical consequences of the change in period, unable to expose the substitutionist mistakes of the Bolsheviks, simply ending up by ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’. The reasoning behind this was the following: “because the role of a party as such can only be as a leader, a parliamentary boss which tries to dominate the masses and wield power in their place, and because we re­ject this role, we will go beyond all parties.”

On the other hand, the German left always suffered from the general immaturity of the proletariat in Germany, and from the inability of revolutionaries in this country to forge a rev­olutionary party, armed with theory and ready to face the wave of proletarian struggles. For a long time the elements of the left of the SPD had hesitated to break openly with Social Democracy and form an independent party. For this reason, the KAPD appeared as a young organisation with little experience.

This general immaturity of the class played a large part in obscuring the sight of the German left, especially on the nature of the balance of forces between the classes and on the impact of the revolutionary wave. In this way the KAPD failed to see that the events of 1921 heralded the beginning of the prolet­ariat’s defeat. On the contrary, they saw it as the symbol of the height of the revolutionary movement. This over­estimation led them, in spite of themselves, into the voluntaristic adventure of the ‘March Action’ in 1921.

The numerous hesitations of the German revolutionaries, their lack of confidence in their role, the bitter setbacks undergone after the failure of the March Action, the degeneration of the CI and the reflux of the revolutionary wave, the failure to understand the change in the balance of forces between the pro­letariat and the bourgeoisie: all these things could only enc­ourage demoralisation, pessimism, and the final collapse of the German left, to the point where it ended up resorting desperately to terrorist action. Contrary to the Italian left who were able to draw up a more realistic balance sheet of the period, the German left showed itself to be weak and unable to understand what would be the responsibilities of revolutionaries during the counter—revolution. Unlike their Italian comrades, the German revolutionaries did not form themselves into a fra­ction capable of defending tooth and nail the gains of the past struggles.

This is why, today, far from maintaining and expressing a clear and coherent continuity with the past revolutionary wave, far from expressing the strength of the German and Dutch left in their critique of the CI, the present—day councilist organisations are an extreme manifestation of all its weaknesses and confusions.

Just like the Bordigists, the councilists too deny the potent­ially revolutionary nature of the economic actions of the class. Their analysis of the revolutionary process, like that of the groups of the Italian left, ends up by snatching from the pro­letariat the possibility and the necessity of going beyond a ‘trade unionist’ level of struggles and consciousness. Although for the Bordigists this inability is made up for by the existence of the party, for the councilists, as for the anarcho-syndicalists, it is the economic struggle by itself that suffices to destroy the state. For Daad en Gedachte, a fairly sclerotic example of the Dutch left, there is no qualitative difference between a strike contained by the unions and the communist revolution. This group pushes an apology for the economic struggle to the point of absurdity and ends up with the clearly ‘economistic’ positions of the 2nd International and of Lenin. But unlike Lenin, who in spite of everything saw the need for the proletariat to go beyond a trade union level, Daad en Gedachte does not cease to eulogise about the economic struggle. The qualitative extension of the struggle is suffic­ient to shake the old world. And for Daad en Gedachte it is out of the question that this quantitative accumulation can also transform itself into a qualitative development:

“The revolution doesn’t differ essentially from these daily class actions, for example by the fact that the workers raise themselves to a higher level of consciousness during the course of the revolution. The revolution does not at all differ qualitatively from these class actions, the only difference is a quantitative one.” (Daad en Gedachte, May 1975.)

For Daad en Gedachte, the consciousness of the working class is purely empirical and immediate. The workers don’t need to generalise their organisational and political experiences. Each struggle is sufficient in itself, contained in its factory, in its region, within its limited territory. The councilists don’t understand at all the revolutionary character of economic struggles and the need for their political extension through the homogenisation of class consciousness. Here we find an old refrain dear to Social Democracy: the movement is every­thing, the end is nothing!

It is logical that this immediatist conception of class con­sciousness leads the councilists to topple into unionism and localism and to completely neglect the role of revolutionaries within the struggle. In certain cases this underestimation leads to a pure and simple negation of any role for revolution­aries at all. In this way Daad en Gedachte stay with the limits of an activity that is strictly theoretical and academic. But pushed to its final conclusion, the councilists’ apology for the strictly economic struggle of the proletariat ends in the pure and simple self-destruction of all revolutionary organisation.

The councilists are no more capable than are the Bordigists of reaping the political fruits left by the ripening of the revolutionary wave in the twenties. They are no more capable of separating the wheat from the chaff, of safeguarding the need for a political organisation of the proletariat while rejecting substitutionist aberrations. The councilists like the Bordigists are the price paid for fifty years of counter­revolution, fifty years of confusion and theoretical bewild­erment, during which time the revolutionaries who succeeded in swimming against the current were few and far between. Only a group like the Gauche Communiste de France (which published the review Internationalisme in the 1940’s and 50’s) showed themselves capable of preserving the precious gains bequeathed by the experience of the Russian revolution. As is shown by one of Internationalisme’s texts, ‘On the nature and function of the political party of the proletariat’, published in October 1948, this group was almost the only one that did not fall into the political deformations which are revealed both in the positions of the Bordigists and those of the councilists.

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.

Just as the proletariat’s grasp on its consciousness demands a constant will and effort, so the organisation of revolution­aries as a coherent collective body is not a process improvised at the mercy of chance. The fact that the communist organisation arises in response to an objective and historic need, that it appears as a part of the proletariat, as the fruit of the spontaneous class struggle, does not mean that it can let itself be carried along unthinkingly by the tide of events. Strict ‘obedience’ to the spontaneous flux of the struggle ends up by altering the truly revolutionary direction of this spontaneity. The proletariat’s historic interest does not consist in bowing passively before the situation as it arises ‘from day to day’. The revolutionary spontaneity of the proletariat tends to direct its struggles consciously and voluntarily towards a final goal. It has nothing to do with the chaotic and uncontrolled outbreak of a series of sporadic revolts. The workers’ struggle spontaneously tends towards a greater mastery and a considered self-control. Unlike the revolts of classes or strata with no historic future, it does not burn out as quickly as it flares up, but smoulders ceaselessly, bursting out into conflagration that destroys the existing order in a conscious manner.

For the proletariat, the sudden, spontaneous and largely unforeseeable reaction to the misery of capital, is combined with the possibility of generalising the struggle both materially and theoretically, of drawing the lessons of today’s strike to prepare those of tomorrow. Proletarian spontaneity includes the potential ability to confront the bourgeoisie, to incorporate isolated resistance into actions of a larger scale, into a wider political framework. This potential both makes the intervention of revolutionaries indispensable, and allows it to be something other than a dead letter, a seed sown in the desert. It is because it works on fertile soil, because it addresses comrades who can hear, understand, and put into practice political orientations corresponding to their historic interests, that the party plays so fundamental a role in the development of the proletariat’s capacity to direct itself towards its goal.

The organisation of revolutionaries in “distinct political parties”, on a clear programmatic basis, is a determining factor in the proletariat’s spontaneous will to master its struggles consciously. This for the simple reason that “the organisational question cannot be separated from the political question” (Lenin): it is itself a political problem.

The experience of history strengthens this idea. Thus, while the Bolsheviks showed a bitter determination to organise outside the current of the old Social Democracy — and so threw all their weight into the progress of the revolution - the left of the German Social Democracy hesitated to cut rapidly the umbilical cord attaching it to a corpse, and in doing so put a brake on the historical course of the world revolution.

Rosa Luxemburg, the most eminent representative of this left, although she had in her writings broken openly with Kautsky’s policies as early as 1910, and although she recognised the split between their political positions, nevertheless refused to carry this split onto the organisational level. This because she only saw here a mere ‘organisational recipe’ and not a fundamental political question.

Tied to the Social Democratic vision of the party, which defended the need to be ‘at the level of the masses’, she never arrived at an understanding of how the organisation of revolutionaries into a clear political fraction, distinct from the old organisations that had become the enemies of the proletariat, could help the spontaneous movement of the class to vanquish the opportunists, and constitute a living element of that spontaneity.

By insisting on the need for the spontaneous movement to overcome the opportunists itself, without any real interven­tion by the party, Rosa Luxemburg, despite herself, removed the organisational question and the existence of revolution­aries to the sidelines of this same spontaneous movement.

Obviously, the existence of revolutionaries and their regroupment in organisations and eventually as a party depend on objective conditions. We have also seen that the revolution can only be the work of the workers themselves and as a whole.

“Man does not make history of his own volition, but he makes history nevertheless. The proletariat is dependent in its actions upon the degree of maturity to which social evolution has advanced. But again, social evolution is not a thing apart from the proletariat; it is in the same measure its driving force and its cause as well as its product and its effect. Its action is itself a determining force in history. And though we can no more skip a period in our historical development than a man can jump over his shadow, it lies within our power to accelerate or to retard it… But (the victory) will never be accomplished if the burning spark of the conscious will of the masses does not spring from the material conditions that have been built up by past development.” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis in the German Social Democracy, 1916, our emphasis.)

Thus the party cannot “skip a period in our historical development” and make up for the consciousness of the “great mass”. But does this class consciousness always appear as the widest majority movement? In 1916, when Rosa Luxemburg wrote these lines, could the Social Democracy, which had dragged the proletariat into the war, be said to express the class’ consciousness? And yet the great majority of the proletariat continued to have illusions in this organisation. Was this a sign of maturity and political consciousness?

The revolution will indeed be the conscious work of the workers as a whole. But the road there does not stretch out like a beautiful straight line. The proletariat does not travel calmly as one man towards it. The vast working masses do not always follow a single path, and do not always have the same consciousness. Even in a revolutionary period there are moments when the great majority of proletarians continue to be half-blinded by the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie. In these crucial moments the ‘acceleration’ introduced by a minority of revolutionaries can be decisive. In these moments, it is not the reaction of the great proletarian masses still under the sway of bourgeois ideology that allows you to measure the maturity reached by the class’ consciousness, but the position of the proletariat’s clearest elements. The task of these elements is to spread their understanding to the rest of the workers, and not to lower their politics to the level of the masses.

Far from following passively the flux and reflux of their class’ struggles, the communists’ role is to organise them­selves so as to accelerate the revolutionary tendencies smouldering within these struggles. They are at the same time living products of their class, and an active factor in the maturation of the proletarian struggle.

Thus, once revolutionaries have understood the bankruptcy of an old political system, of a previous organisational form and political practice, their responsibility is not to wait until the rest of the workers have caught up before organising themselves on a clear basis and putting forward a perspective for the struggle. This attitude makes any progression of class consciousness impossible and ends up in a vicious circle. For how is the proletariat as a whole to become aware of the death of these old forms of organisation and of the bankruptcy of past political positions if its most conscious elements themselves hesitate to say that they are dead and to propose a new orientation?

Drawing together the energies of the revolution into a polit­ical organisation independent of the old workers’ parties that had gone over to the enemy camp, was not in Germany, or else­where, a mere “organisational” question. The organisational problem is fundamentally a political problem. The German left’s hesitations to break organisationally with the Social Democracy betrayed other, more profound ones. The revolution­aries hesitated to criticise openly and to denounce firmly the deeds of the executioners of the proletariat, who, after driving the workers into the bloodbath of the world war, were to become the “bloodhounds” of the bourgeoisie: Scheidemann, Ebert, Noske & Co — the whole stinking scum of the Social Democracy.

Thus in January 1918, the first great strikes to break out under the impact of the Russian revolution were consciously held back and misled into bourgeois legality — in other words, to their death by the Social Democratic Party. Confronted with these manoeuvres (which, moreover, were generalised throughout Europe), the Spartakists, the left wing, which had not yet broken with Social Democracy, remained completely impotent.

“In the afternoon, Scheidemann and Ebert (SDP) proposed to the action committee (elected during the strike), to enter into negotiations with the government through the intermed­iary of the union leaders, whom the chancellor was prepared to meet. The action committee’s members were disoriented. As Jogisches (Spartakist) emphasized, they no longer knew what to do with this revolutionary energy. They saw the trap that was prepared for them, but went no further than to affirm that only delegates from among the strikers could properly negotiate in their name!” (P. Broué, La Revolution en Allemagne, 1969, our emphasis.)

Drawing the lessons from the defeat of this strike                — for which the revolutionaries bore a heavy responsibility -Jogisches later wrote:

“Through parliamentary cretinism, in its desire to apply the schema laid down for all union strikes, and above all through lack of confidence in the masses… the committee limited itself, under the influence of the Social Democratic deputies, to trying to enter into negotiations with the government, instead of rejecting all forms of negotiation and unleashing the energy of the workers in the most varied forms.” (Spartakist leaflet cited in Documents et Materiaux pour une Histoire du Mouvement Ouvrier en Allemagne (l9l4-l945), Vol. II/2.)

Still later, the Spartakists came to realise that their hes­itations had been a dangerous error, and were to form an independent political party. This is why the Communist Party — the KPD (Spartakus) — was at last created in December 1918. Sadly, its birth came late, and in January 1919 the Communist Party was still shot through with the same fear of decisive intervention, the same eternal wrangling before any action could take place, the same lack of direction and of any clear political perspective.

Here is how a communist witness described, in the paper, first of the Spartakus League and then of the KPD(S), the movement of January 1919 and the reaction of the Communist Party.

“Then the incredible happened. The masses were there very early, from 9 O’clock on, in the cold and the fog. And the leaders were sitting somewhere deliberating. The fog thickened and the workers were still waiting. And the leaders deliber­ated. Midday came, and hunger was added to the cold. And the leaders deliberated. The workers were going crazy with excitement; they wanted a word, an act, that would calm their delirium. Nobody knew what. The fog thickened, and with it, the dusk. Sadly, the workers went home; they had wanted something big, and they had done nothing. And the leaders deliberated. Outside were the proletarians, gun in hand, with their heavy and light machine guns. And inside the leaders deliberated. At the prefecture the canons were aimed, there were sailors at every corner of the building, and all the rooms opening on to the outside were swarming with soldiers, sailors, proletarians. Inside, the leaders sat and deliberated. They sat and sat all night and into the following morning as the day became grey and so on and so on, and they deliberated. And groups gathered again on the Siegesallee, and the leaders still sat and deliberated. They deliberated, and deliberated, and deliberated.” (Die Rote Fahne, September 5, 1920.)

This description, despite its anecdotal and rather caricatured turn, sums up well enough the situation in the days of January 1919. Instead of intervening in the unfolding movement from the 4th January on, to give it the clear perspective of over­throwing the bourgeois government, the communists hesitated a long time, a prey to their own confusions. This had the effect of slowing down the workers’ revolutionary drive, and above all of maintaining their illusions. Only at the last moment, and pushed by the movement itself, did the KPD(S) advance the slogan of the seizure of power. This was not well received. In fact, neither the denunciation of the Ebert government, nor the setting forward of the movement’s final goal, had been prepared or argued well in advance. This is why, despite their combativity, the workers reacted hesitantly when faced with the perspective of breaking with the Social Democracy.

“The majority of Berlin workers were not prepared to take part in, or even to accept, this war that was on the point of breaking out between two camps, each claiming to be soc­ialist. The meetings and assemblies held in the factories almost declared themselves for an immediate end to the fights between tendencies, to the ‘fratricidal struggle’, and for the universally demanded and applauded ‘unity’ of all the socialist currents.” (P. Broué, La Revolution en Allemagne, 1969.)

In Germany then, all the work of propaganda and political agitation on a clear programmatic and organisational basis was completely lacking. Later on, the KPD was to continue on its opportunist path, and merge, in December 1920, with the ‘left’ of the Social Democracy, the VKPD. This hazy attitude provoked a reaction of the healthiest elements of the political vanguard and their organisation in an independent party, the KAPD. Sadly this reaction came too late — i.e. in April 1920. The world revolution was already on a more difficult footing, and was to struggle through defeat after defeat to its final extinction in 1927. The revolutionaries had failed in their task — they had not organised early enough.

In January 1918, Rosa Luxemburg had already drawn one impor­tant lesson from the revolutionary movement of 1917:

“If the cause of the revolution is to progress, if the victory of the proletariat and socialism are to be anything else than a dream, the revolutionary workers must set up leading organ­isms capable of using and guiding the combative energy of the workers.” (R. Luxemburg, Die Rote Fahne, 14th January, 1918).

This lesson, which was sadly not put into practice at the time, should be of use to us today. It should allow us to understand that the primordial task of revolutionaries today is to put forward a clear political orientation, and to prepare it through a whole preliminary work of propaganda. What does this mean concretely?

We have seen that the German revolutionaries’ hesitation to organise themselves separately went hand—in—hand with their lack of political perspectives. When they deliberated end­lessly in closed session, while the armed proletarians waited for some concrete proposal from them, the revolution­aries of January 1919 were unable to decide rapidly on the immediate perspective because they were themselves confused about the global orientation that the movement should take. And because of this, they failed in one of the communist vanguard’s essential responsibilities — to insist constantly on the movement’s final goal and on the practical means for getting there.

“Communists are distinguished from the other working— class parties by this only:

1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat independently of all nationality.

2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.” (Communist Manifesto)

For the communists, orienting the proletarian movement onto the path of the revolution means continually demonstrating the proletariat’s historical and international interests and final goal of the movement. This seems, and is, simple, but putting such a task into practice is far from easy.

But some revolutionaries mistrust such simplicity, which seems to them to hide some unpleasant trick. In their eyes, such simplicity can only be an easy way out, an ignorance and underestimation of the party’s lofty responsibilities. To put a bit more shine on this ‘simplicity’ and surround the party with its full glory, they feel obliged to give it the role of ‘leader’ or commander.

Orientating the proletarian movement is too passive a task for their taste. They want something a bit spicier, a bit more lively. Thus they slide away from the idea of ‘orientat­ing’ or ‘giving a direction’ towards a false political inter­pretation of the role of revolutionaries. By making the apparently simple jump from ‘giving a direction’, to ‘leading’ in the sense of ordering or commanding, they give the impression of according greater importance to the activities of the party. In reality, they do nothing of the kind.

To give revolutionaries the task of making themselves pass­ively obeyed and followed like generals by proletarian ‘troops’, is to carry over the old schemes of past revolutions into the communist revolution. In reality, such an approach makes it impossible for revolutionaries to have any real impact. For, as we have seen, as long as the workers do no more than passively follow orders (whichever camp they come from), this simply means that they are not yet ready for power, nor sufficiently conscious of their own interests. World capitalism will not be thrown to the ground by an imbecile and obedient army, but by a strong, united class, thoughtful and self-confident. It is for this that revolutionaries must work, not to make themselves adored as heroes and fine speechmakers.

“The party’s historical function is not to be a General Staff directing the class as if it were an army, and, like an army, equally ignorant of the final goal, the immediate objectives of the operations, and the overall movement of the manoeuvres.

The socialist revolution is in no way comparable to a military action. Its realisation is conditioned by the consciousness of the workers themselves as they dictate their own decisions and actions.

Thus the party does not act in the place of the class. It does not demand its ‘confidence’ in the bourgeois sense of the word — that is, to be delegated to decide on the destiny of society. Its sole historic, function is to act so as to allow the class itself to become aware of its task and of the ends and means which are the foundations of its revolutionary action.” (‘On the Nature and Function of the Party’, Internationalisme, no. 38, 1948. Text reprinted in the Bulletin d’etude at de discussion, no. 6, our emphasis.)

Politically orientating the proletarian movement means acting so that the class can become conscious of the revolutionary direction that historically it is committed to take. In carrying out this task, in no way do revolutionaries ‘sacrifice’ their importance. On the contrary, this is what gives them a really primordial importance — for it is precisely the whole proletariat’s capacity for self-awareness and self-organisation that constitutes the only guarantee of the revolution’s victory.

What has the living example of the Russian revolution taught us?

It has shown us that revolutionaries, far from imposing on the proletariat a political leadership brought from outside, far from adopting a voluntarist attitude worthy only of petty corporals, far from forcing the course of events, simply worked to make the proletariat as a whole conscious of its historic interests. Contrary to the claims of bourgeois propaganda, which wanted to make them out as the ‘putschists’ of 1917, or as pitiless dictators, the Bolsheviks never received from the proletariat the task of taking power; they were never delegated by the workers to act in the proletariat’s place; they never won the workers’ confidence in the bourgeois sense of the term: “Vote for us and we’ll do the rest.” The Bolsheviks lived and acted in their class like fish in water. They had forged this unity after months and even years of patient work of explanation, propaganda, agitation, and constant insistence on the struggle’s final goal. This unity was poss­ible because the party did nothing other than to give a more general political formulation to the needs and concrete tendencies existing in the proletariat. And this clear for­mulation decided the course of the revolution.

In this case, revolutionary theory was able to become a prac­tical force, and to win over the workers as a whole. This was not thanks to some mysterious and magical seasoning provided by the party, but simply because it expressed in clear and general terms a real need of the workers. It is not surprising, then, that it found such an echo among the proletarians in Russia, and that the Bolshevik revolutionaries were naturally put at the ‘head’ of the combat. They did no more than to express clearly what the workers felt confusedly.

“The sailor Khorrin tells in his memoirs how the seamen who considered themselves Social Revolutionaries would in reality defend the Bolshevik platform. This was to be observed every­where. The people knew what they wanted, but they did not know how to call it by name…

How was it that with this weak apparatus and this negligible circulation of the party press, the ideas and slogans of the Bolsheviks were able to take possession of the people? The explanation is very simple: those slogans which correspond to the keen demands of a class and an epoch create thousands of channels for themselves. A red—hot revolutionary medium is a high conductor of ideas. The Bolshevik papers were read aloud, were read all to pieces. The most important articles were learned by heart, recited, recopied, and wherever poss­ible reprinted… The usual explanation of the success of Bolshevism reduced itself to a remark upon ‘the simplicity of the slogans’, which fell in with the desires of the masses.

But the toilers are guided in their struggle not only by their demands, not only by their needs, but by their life experiences. Bolshevism had absolutely no taint of any aristocratic scorn for the independent experience of the masses. On the contrary, the Bolsheviks took this for their point of departure and built upon it. That was one of their great points of superiority.” (Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 2)

Formulate clearly and simply a need existing in their class, starting from the experience of the struggles themselves, take account of the general and historical aspirations of the pro­letariat, orientate the movement and accelerate its revolution­ary tendencies… these are the ‘mysterious’ means that revolutionaries use to fulfil their role effectively. Nothing very magical in fact. The simplicity of their tasks is easily explained: communists pursue no ends other than that of con­tributing actively to the consciousness of their class.

Simplicity is not synonymous with easiness or fatality. Un­doubtedly, the role of revolutionaries can be simply defined, but it nonetheless remains the product of a very complex situation, and its concretisation demands effort and continuity. First, as we have seen, revolutionaries have to organise them­selves. They must remain constantly alert to the enrichment of revolutionary theory from the experiences of their class, draw the lessons of the past, keep in view the final goals, situate their activity in a long—term perspective. They are not always given the opportunity to have an impact in their class; they cannot proclaim themselves ‘the class Party’ and provide a wholly artificial solution to the complexity of class consciousness and its development. Like their class, and despite the continuity in their tasks and their existence, revolutionaries are part of social reality; they undergo the changes in the balance of class forces between them and the bourgeoisie, the flux and reflux of the class struggle. In periods of defeat for their class comrades, they remain a tiny minority, to draw out patiently the lessons of the defeat, and prepare for the renewal of the struggle. The communist organisation is not sheltered from these historical events, any more than it can escape entirely from the pressure of bourgeois ideology. It is a living body which must breath, nourish itself, act, get its breath back… and as such, it can also be struck by illness and death.

Even if they constitute the most conscious element of the proletariat, communists are not for all that infallible. We have seen the extent to which the confusions of the Bolsheviks played a nefarious role in the later development of the world revolution, and to what extent they became an active force in its degeneration. This remark is equally true for the confusions of the Dutch and German revolutionaries. To think of the development of class consciousness as a natural and inevitable fruition is as absurd as thinking that the magical power of the party can lead the proletariat to rev­olution. Revolutionaries will not develop the consciousness of the proletariat by sitting back and twiddling their thumbs, or by hitting the workers forcibly over the head with their unvarying programme. To think, either that the party is nothing, or that the party is always right, and that its task is to ‘force the course of events’ comes down in the end to killing all life in the real process by which the workers get a grip on their class consciousness. From these stand­points, the development of class consciousness is no longer a living thing that grows, overcomes its contradictions, develops qualitatively and collectively, but an impotent, paralysed, dying old hag. Revolutionary theory is no longer an active and necessary ferment, but a powerless and useless mummy.

This incomprehension of the living, practical and collective way that class consciousness develops thus leads, not only to confusion about the role of revolutionaries, but to serious dangers for the proletariat itself.

In fact, every time that revolutionaries have tried, through force, voluntarism or plain demagogy, to impose ‘their’ con­ceptions, they have only succeeded in pushing the workers into dead—ends and the Canon’s mouth.

Let us recall the lamentable experience of the opportunist wing of the VKPD, the Unified Communist Party of Germany, produced by the unnatural fusion of the KPD and the USPD, and which became the official section of the IIIrd Internat­ional in 1920. For Levi, the eminent representative of this party, what mattered was to conquer ‘the hearts and minds’ of the labouring masses at any price, even if it meant flat­tering their illusions, while for the same party’s voluntarist and ‘putschist’ wing what mattered was, on the contrary, to go over straight away to action, without taking account of the real state of the struggle and the consciousness of the class. In fact, as Gorter and the KAPD quite rightly emphas­ized in the text ‘The Road of Doctor Levi and the VKPD’, this putschism is simply a normal extension of opportunism. Right from its foundation, the VKPD followed this path. It continued to work in the very unions that had gone over to the national patriotic camp in 1914; it adopted a parliamentarist tactic to win over the ‘broad masses’ and finally ended up defending the necessity of a United Front with the Social Democratic massacrers of the proletariat. In short, the VKPD adopted at their most extreme all the confusions that developed in the IIIrd International from the IInd Congress on. In Germany, only the KAPD raised its voice against such a practice.

“There then emerge two main tendencies, which can be recog­nised in every country, for all the local variations. The one current seeks to revolutionise and clarify people’s minds by word and deed, and to this end tries to pose the new prin­ciples in the sharpest possible contrast to the old, received conceptions. The other current attempts to draw the masses who are still on the sidelines into practical activity, and therefore emphasizes points of agreement rather than points of difference in an attempt to avoid as far as possible any­thing that might deter them. The first strives for a clear, sharp separation among the masses, the second for unity; the first current may be termed the radical tendency, the second the opportunist one… In contrast with the strong, sharp emphasis on the new prin­ciples — soviet system and dictatorship — which distinguishes communism from Social Democracy, opportunism in the IIIrd International relies as far as possible upon the forms of struggle taken over from the IInd International (Unions, parliamentarism).” (Pannekoek, ‘Die Entwicklung der Weltrevolution und die Taktik des Kommunismus’, 1920, reprinted in Pannekoek and Gorter’s Marxism)

Far from being contradictory, voluntarism and opportunism feed on each other; each complements the other’s errors. Both re­veal an identical incomprehension of the process whereby the proletariat comes to consciousness, and of the active partic­ipation of revolutionaries in the process. Each of these confusions abandons the perspective of a long and patient work of explanation within the class, of a constant insistence on its final goal and historical needs. For the voluntarists, the proletariat must be led to action by the will and strength alone of a minority, for the opportunists it must be led by flattery and the abandonment of communist principles. In 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks followed neither of these courses. For them, the party had to go beyond the illusions remaining among the proletariat. Rather than waiting for the working class to get rid of them itself, without any intervention from its vanguard, it had to, on the contrary, put itself ahead of the confused aspirations of the workers, give them a clear expression, facilitate the development of class consciousness, act in such a way that the proletariat might arrive at a con­ception of its real historical interests. For Lenin, this was not a matter of flattering the prejudices that most workers still held to, nor of acting without taking into account the level of consciousness of the working masses, but of generalising throughout the proletariat the awareness of the necessity for the seizure of power and of making the proletariat capable itself of realising its historical task.

“The temporary strength of the social patriots and the hidden weakness of the opportunist wing of the Bolsheviks lay in this, that the former leant on the prejudices and present illusions of the masses, while the latter accommodated them­selves to them. Lenin’s principle strength lay in that he understood the movement’s internal logic and regulated his policies accordingly. He did not impose his plan on the masses. He helped the workers to conceive and realise their own plans. When Lenin brought all the problems of the revolution down to a single ‘explain patiently’, this meant: to bring the consciousness of the masses into accord with the situation, to which they had been driven by the historical process.” (Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 2, our emphasis)

This is what the real concern of revolutionaries should be!

This is how they should carry out the long work of explanation and criticism of past illusions, and push for the homogenisation of class consciousness. And to be able to carry out this work, they must avoid two pitfalls: the abandonment of principles and the final goal, and substitutionist and minority action. It was in this way that Lenin, when he put forward his ‘April Theses’ (which put forward the necessity of the world pro­letarian revolution) in April 1917, refused any possibility of conciliating the Mensheviks under the false pretext of reinforcing proletarian unity. At first, he remained in the minority of the party, where he was called an anarchist and a madman! Then, by this same patient and untiring work of ‘explanation’ he managed to convince the whole Bolshevik party. Lenin’s strength at this point was his political clarity, which corresponded to the confused desires of the workers and the actual necessities of the situation. And yet not for a moment did Lenin ‘bow’ to the illusions still held by a majority of the proletariat in this period.

“Not for one minute did Lenin close his eyes to the existence of an ‘honest’ national defence mentality among the masses. While not merging with them, neither was he disposed to act behind their backs. ‘We are not charlatans’, he said in reply to future objections and accusations, ‘We must base ourselves solely on the consciousness of the masses. But if, because of our positions, we have to remain in the minority, that’s fine!... The real government is the Soviet of workers’ deputies. In the Soviet, however, our party is in the minority… Nothing to be done about it!... There remains nothing for us to do but to explain patiently, perseveringly, and systematically the wrongness of their tactic. As long as we are in the minority we will carry out a labour of crit­icism, to separate the workers from this trickery. We don’t want the masses to take our word for it. We are not charlatans. We want the masses to detach themselves from their errors through their own experience.’” (Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 2)

These are Lenin’s words on the eve of the insurrection. What is he proposing? Does he defend the need for the party to impose itself by decree or minority action? Does he demand that the party direct events without taking account of the experience of the whole proletariat? Nothing of the kind! A few months before the revolution, Lenin is not proposing anything other than to begin a long process of criticism and explanation, a reminder of the final perspective. He pro­posed nothing other than to spread a revolutionary awareness, to generalise to the whole proletariat the political gains that had achieved a greater clarity in the organised workers’ vanguard.

For Lenin was perfectly aware that in February or even in July 1917, the proletariat as a whole was not yet sufficiently strong or conscious to seize power. Despite all the confusions that subsisted as to the necessity for the Bolshevik party to seize power, one thing still remained clear: it was the soviets that controlled and directed the seizure of power, and for them to be able to do so, the majority of workers had to be aware of the necessity of revolution.

“In July, even the Petrograd workers did not possess that preparedness for infinite struggle. Although able to seize the power, they nevertheless offered it to the Executive Committee. The proletariat of the capital, although inclining toward the Bolsheviks in its overwhelming majority, had still not broken the February umbilical cord attaching it to the compromisers (...) If the proletariat was not politically homogeneous and not sufficiently resolute, still less so was the peasant army (...) Thus the state of popular consciousness — the decisive factor in revolutionary policy made impossible the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in July.” (Trotsky, ibid.)

The attitude of the Bolsheviks in 1917 is opposite to that of the Comintern and the VKPD and its ‘putschist’ wing. The latter, and even a part of the KAPD, imagined that they could play the role of vanguard, through ‘exemplary’ acts that would show the truth of the communist programme, through forcing the rest of the workers to follow the same path. In this way, the militants of the VKPD (encouraged on the initiative of a member of the Communist International) were to try in March 1921 to ‘force the course of the revolution’. This attempt was to be a pitiful disaster.

“On Thursday 24 March, the Communists were to try by every means, including force, to unleash a general strike. Detachments of militants tried to occupy the factories by surprise so as to bar the entry to those they called ‘scabs’ — the vast mass of non-communist workers. Elsewhere, groups of unemployed workers harass those going to, or at, work. Incidents occurred in several large Berlin factories, in the Ruhr, and in Hamburg where unemployed workers and dockers who had occupied the quays were chased after a lively exchange of fire. The overall score was low; 200,000 strikers according to the pessimists, half a million according to the optimists. Some failures were especially galling, like Sult’s, who failed to convince his comrades in the power stations.” (Pierre Broué, La Revolution en Allemagne, 1969)

The work of propaganda and agitation conducted by the Bolsheviks before October 1917 brought very different results:

“Where is the insurrection? There is no picture of the in­surrection. The events do not form themselves into a picture. A series of small operations, calculated and prepared in ad­vance, remain separated from one another both in, space and time. A unity of thought and aim unites them, but they do not fuse in the struggle itself. There is no action of great masses. There are no dramatic encounters with the troops. There is nothing of all that which imaginations brought up upon the facts of history associate with the idea of insurrection. The general character of the revolution in the capital sub­sequently moved Masaryk, among many others, to write: ‘The October revolution was anything but a popular mass movement. That revolution was the act of leaders working from above and behind the scenes.’ As a matter of fact, it was the most popular mass insurrection in all history.  The workers had no need to come out into the public square in order to fuse together; they were already politically and morally one single whole without that (...) But those invisible masses were marching more than ever before in step with events. The factories and barracks never lost connection for a minute with the district headquarters, nor the districts with Smolny. The Red Guard detachments (armed workers) felt at their back the support of the factories. The soldier squads returning to the barracks found the new shifts ready. Only with heavy reserves behind them could revolutionary detachments go about their work with such confidence. (...) The bourgeois classes had expected barricades, flaming con­flagrations, looting, rivers of blood. In reality, a silence reigned more terrible than all the thunders of the world. The social ground shifted noiselessly like a revolving stage, bringing forward the popular masses, carrying away to limbo the rulers of yesterday.” (Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 3)

In October 1917, as in Germany 1921, the struggle does not appear to us as a confused action by millions of workers. In both cases, revolutionary action is not carried by all the workers, taken individually. And yet despite this apparent similarity, there is a fundamental difference between the two events. In the March Action of 1921, the revolutionaries acted in small armed detachments totally cut off from the working masses; during the seizure of power in Russia, the action of armed detachments of the proletariat took place under the control of the collective will of millions of proletarians. It was the whole, conscious proletariat that directed the march of events, even if this participation did not take a spectacular, anarchic form.

The fusion of the revolutionary wills of the whole proletariat really existed in this moment. It lived through a thousand channels, through the contacts and innumerable exchanges between the soviets, the districts, the revolutionary committee and the workers, between the Red Guards and the Bolsheviks…

Everywhere, the revolutionary flame burned unceasingly, setting light to people’s energies, unleashing initiatives from every quarter. Propositions and decisions were born spontaneously from this mass of millions of workers. And at the same time, the consciousness gained by all these proletarians in arms, their wills welded together in pursuit of the same aim, gives the overall picture a remarkable appearance of calm, decision and precision.

The world proletarian revolution will not be a flash in the pan. It will not be the anarchic and uncontrolled explosion of thousands of desperate rebels without any future. The revolution of October 1917 has shown us: the communist rev­olution is the most conscious and controlled historical phenomenon that humanity has ever known. Under the political supervision of millions of proletarians, it will violently confront the blind and unrestrained forces of the bourgeois counter—revolution with precision, courage and self—awareness.

But the proletariat will come to such a determined and collec­tive consciousness neither automatically, nor easily. Neither the thrust of events, nor the accentuation of the crisis, nor the fall in its living standards will be enough to open its eyes to the historical perspectives of its struggle. The crisis will urge it on, will force it to struggle ever more bitterly and massively. The decay of the bourgeoisie’s economic, social and political order will be the objective terrain of the revolution. But manure will never be anything more than manure. Life will never spring out of fertiliser alone. The proletariat’s situation in the process of production, the new relations of production that are an objective part of                 its condition, the historic force it bears within it, are so many seeds that must blossom out of so much dung. And yet this promise of life is so fragile that the slightest effort may stamp it out before it is able to blossom out completely. To protect and develop it more completely, so that a massive and homogeneous consciousness of the necessity of revolution might develop on the objective soil of this decay, the pro­letariat has provided itself with revolutionary organisations.

The history of the Russian revolution, and of the world wide revolutionary movements that shook the capitalist world at the same period, confirms that this is the function of revolutionaries. But how to carry out this task? Does developing and homogenising class consciousness simply mean propagating ideas and writing fine theoretical works? How are revolution­aries to conceive of their intervention within this class?

As part of their class, revolutionaries participate in this transformation of the world. They have nothing in common with sects of intellectual visionaries. The proletariat’s grasp on its self-awareness is a living, concrete process; it would be absolutely false to try to separate this process from the practice of the class struggle, from the movement of strikes and the proletariat’s partial struggles. Revolutionaries participate fully in this practice; they intervene actively in strikes, general assemblies, and the actions of their class in struggle. Revolutionaries do not reflect merely for the pleasure of contemplating their own navels. It is not simply to understand reality in theory that they deepen the communist programme. When revolutionaries enrich revolutionary theory, they only do so the better to define and orientate their concrete intervention in the class struggle, and to tie it in better to the practice of the proletariat. There is nothing passive nor strictly theoretical about their action in the development of class consciousness. Even if they are not a mechanical product of the class struggle, even if they have organised consciously in order to act, communists consider their intervention as a special moment of their class’ global practice.

Even when, at certain moments of historical development, they still have little impact and take on an essentially propag­andist task of spreading general ideas whose echo among the workers remains minimal, revolutionaries never intervene at a strictly speculative nor intellectual level. When they intervene in the class struggle, they do not put forward a pure abstract theory that the workers are supposed to ‘appropriate’ instead of struggling. They are in the struggle.

In it, they defend demands, forms of organisation (strike committees, genera1 assemblies…). They support everything that can spread and strengthen the struggle. Their task is to intervene and participate — as far as they are able — in all the partial struggles of their class. They must stimulate every tendency for the proletariat to organise itself indep­endently of capital. Revolutionaries will be present in every political and organisational expression of the prolet­ariat, in every struggle, in the general assemblies, soviets, and neighbourhood committees. There they will rigorously attack the manoeuvres of capital’s guard-dogs who will use the cover of ‘working class’ language to try to detour the struggle into dead-ends and defeat.

In the pre-revolutionary period, the party will try through its press, its slogans, and the agitation of its militants in every struggle, to transform these struggles from simple economic reactions to the economic decomposition of capital, into political struggles for the destruction of the bourgeois state. In these movements the party supports every demand, every slogan capable of helping that transformation, capable of unifying the combat politically. Concretely, it calls for the centralised co-ordination and unification of autonomous strike committees, and for their transformation into political councils; it calls for the transformation of workers’ self-defence into an organised military offensive against the bourgeoisie. In the same way, during the insurrection, it participates in the proletariat’s military organisation to put forward the final goals of the armed struggle, and its analysis of the balance of class forces. During the civil war, it insists on the necessity of extending the international revolution, and of subordinating military and economic questions to this political aim.

This practical intervention of revolutionaries participates fully in the development of class consciousness. For developing class consciousness means developing a practical awareness which transforms the struggle and pushes it forward. Developing class consciousness does not just mean spreading revolutionary ideas, but also participating in the struggle as revolution­aries and as a fraction of the class, to defend the practical application of this theory. Homogenising the political gains of the struggle also means homogenising their concrete impli­cations, while constantly emphasizing the movement’s final goal.

“We reject no partial action. We say that every action, every combat must be perfected. pushed forward. We can’t say that we reject this or that combat. The combat born of the economic necessities of the working class must, by every means, be pushed forward.” (Intervention of Hempel (KAPD) at the 3rd Congress of the CI, 1921, our emphasis.)

“…as communists, we do not have the task of initiating slogans of daily struggle amongst the working masses — these must be posed by the workers in the factories. We must always point out to the workers that the solution of these daily questions will not better their situation, and that in no way will it be able to bring about the downfall of capitalism. We Commun­ists have the task of participation in this daily combat, of marching at the head of these struggles. Therefore, comrades, we don’t reject this daily combat, but in this combat we put ourselves ahead of the masses, we always show them the road and the great goal of communism.” (Intervention of Meyer—Bergman (KAPD) at the same congress)

What do revolutionaries do to ensure that class consciousness moves forward?

They participate in every struggle and in its organisation, and from beginning to end they use the driving force of each combat to take the greatest possible number of steps towards the constitution of the proletariat as a force capable of overthrowing the dominant system.

“The aim of communist intervention is to contribute to this apprenticeship. In every struggle, communists must show the movement’s historical and geographical dimensions, but this does not mean remaining satisfied with setting out the final goal of world—wide communism. We must, moreover, at each instant know how to weigh up the point the struggle has reached, and be able to make proposals which are concretely realisable, and at the same time represent a real advance of the struggle in the development of the unity and awareness of the whole class. To go as far as possible in each struggle, to push its potential capacities to the limit by proposing goals which are realisable but always more advanced — this is what revo­lutionaries aim, for when they intervene in the open struggles of their class. In decadent capitalism, these working class struggles follow the same law that governs revolutionary struggles, and which Rosa Luxemburg resumed thus: “the Russian revolution only confirms the fundamental lessons of all great revolutions, which all have the following vital law: either they advance resolutely, with a very rapid mo­mentum, beating down all obstacles with an lion hand, and always setting their goals further ahead, or they are very quickly driven back beyond their weak point of departure, and rushed by the counter-revolution: in a revolution, it is impossible to stop, to mark time, or to be satisfied with the initial aim once it is reached.” (R. Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 1918)” (Report on intervention adopted at the 3rd Congress of Revolution Internationale, June 1978.)

The intervention of communists thus consists essentially in stimulating the forward march of the workers’ consciousness and combat — in using each moment of the proletariat’s combat to make it evolve qualitatively and collectively towards the world revolution and communism.