Individualism, the highest stage of alienation

In a previous article, we showed that, for Jaques Camatte[1], communism is not the product of class struggle but the work of rebellious individuals who abandon the world in order to better break the chains of slavery. His rejection of the working class’s revolutionary struggle can only lead to the rejection of any form of political organisation of the proletariat, which he claims are nothing more than a venue for clashes between rival gangs with gangster-like ways. Since any revolutionary future is no longer viable, all that remains for Camatte is to abandon the world to tend his garden and maintain good relations with the village mayor! Faced with a capitalist society in decay, what Camatte is actually cultivating is the irresponsible desertion of the terrain of class struggle.

Camatte’s legacy? Producing theory for theory’s sake, denigrating revolutionary groups that struggle, under difficult conditions, to build an organisation capable of fulfilling its role within the proletariat. Some, like the ‘communisers’, claim this legacy as their own. For these modernists, the advent of Stalinism, “heir to Lenin’s conceptions,” signifies the failure of any revolutionary struggle of the working class and of any organisation defending the communist programme. In doing so, they merely fuel the bourgeoisie’s lies, dressing up the Stalinist counter-revolution as the heir to the workers’ movement and the October Revolution. And with what enthusiasm they wallowed in the vile anti-communist campaign that followed the collapse of the USSR! They also lent their ‘revolutionary’ endorsement to the bourgeoisie’s attacks on the organisations of the proletariat.

The communisers against revolutionary organisations

In his text, ‘The Renegade Kautsky and His Disciple Lenin [1]’, written in 1977, the founder of communisation, Dauvé, serves up an anti-Leninist pamphlet to better reject any need for a proletarian organisation: “When the proletariat constitutes itself as a class and in one way or another declares war on capital (and it has no need for anyone to provide it with THE KNOWLEDGE to do so, being itself, within capitalist relations of production, merely variable capital, it suffices that it wish to change its condition even slightly to be immediately at the heart of the problem that the intellectual will himself have some difficulty reaching), the revolutionary is no more or less bound to the proletariat than he already was. But theoretical critique then merges with practical critique, not because it was brought in from the outside, but because they are one and the same thing.”

The idea behind this paragraph is that the class will educate itself to become a class-conscious entity and declare war on capital solely because one fine day it will have decided to “change its condition.” A completely idealistic and voluntarist vision! What are the subjective and objective conditions that allow the proletariat to constitute itself as a class in order to declare war on Capital? A mystery! Oh no, sorry, yes, there are conditions: it is when theoretical criticism (that of the communisers) merges with practical criticism (that of the proletariat). In other words, when the divine spirit of the theorists finally descends upon the masses! And Dauvé tells us that this must not be brought in from the outside? Ultimately, without realising it, Dauvé adopts Kautsky’s very logic, whereas Lenin — as Dauvé himself acknowledges — criticised himself after 1905 by rejecting this vision of working-class consciousness being imported from outside.

For Dauvé, the revolution is ultimately the product of a class that, as a whole and spontaneously, has decided to rid itself of its condition. Since this desire for change is shared by the entire class, it seems logical to him that a revolutionary organisation is superfluous. It will be a compact mass that will launch an assault on capitalism, as if by magic! The armed forces of the counter-revolution, the divisions within the class, and the weight of the dominant ideology, have miraculously vanished! We are being told here of a mass of individuals, not of an associated class capable of organising itself as a revolutionary force conscious of its ultimate goal. And for good reason: in the eyes of the “communisers,” the proletariat must negate itself as a class-for-capital.

For revolutionaries, there is no identity between the class’s unitary organisations and its political organisations, given that consciousness within the working class varies significantly from one period to another, from one country to another, from one sector to another… Far from forming the monolithic bloc implied by Dauvé, it is heterogeneous. It is precisely this that establishes the need for revolutionary organisations to actively participate in the process of developing the working class’s struggle; to develop — on the basis of the historical acquisitions of the workers’ movement — as militant organisations, defending a communist orientation in the struggle. Without a constant reference to the historical struggle of the proletariat and the lessons its vanguards have drawn from it, such an organisation could not today, in any way, play its role, which is to contribute to the development of proletarian consciousness. For Dauvé, since the class is merely variable capital, consciousness is something entirely secondary. For revolutionaries, on the contrary, the question of consciousness lies at the heart of the revolutionary process — a consciousness that, far from being the individualistic and narrow-minded vision of the ‘communising’ intelligentsia, is the historical product of the struggle of a revolutionary class[2].

The theoretical impasse of Communisation

Driven by an approach completely opposed to the political organisations of the proletariat, the communisers consider themselves individuals whose sole activity is academic reflection.

When they claim to ‘advance’ revolutionary theory by referring to Marx, these philosophers succeed only in stripping marxism of what it truly is: a theory of proletarian struggle that can evolve only within a collective and organised framework, with a view to participating in the class struggle. Believing themselves to represent the continuity of marxist critique, the communisers in fact only confuse the consciousness of those seeking political clarity and a revolutionary perspective. The marxist method is not an abstract method, a Socratic dialogue among ‘enlightened’ individuals, but a weapon of struggle whose compass is the communist revolution and whose aim is the strengthening of the proletarian struggle.

As we write in our programmatic platform, “Marxism is the fundamental theoretical acquisition of the proletarian struggle. It is on the basis of marxism that all the lessons of the proletarian struggle can be integrated into a coherent whole.

By explaining the unfolding of history through the development of the class struggle, that is to say struggle based on the defence of economic interests within a framework laid down by the development of the productive forces, and by recognising the proletariat as the subject of the revolution which will abolish capitalism, marxism is the only conception of the world which really expresses the viewpoint of that class. Thus, far from being an abstract speculation about the world, it is first and foremost a weapon of struggle for the working class. And because the working class is the first and only class whose emancipation necessarily entails the emancipation of the whole of humanity, a class whose domination over society will not lead to a new form of exploitation but to the abolition of all exploitation only marxism is capable of grasping social reality in an objective and scientific manner, without any prejudices or mystifications of any sort.

Consequently, although it is not a fixed doctrine, but on the contrary undergoes constant elaboration in a direct and living relationship with the class struggle, and although it benefited from prior theoretical achievements of the working class, marxism has been from its very inception the only framework from which and within which revolutionary theory can develop”.

In fact, the abstract nature of communisation theory, cut off from the practice of class struggle, and the importance it attaches to individuals, is an expression of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology that the workers’ movement has always fought against. They regard theory as an ‘object’ reserved for ‘specialists,’ in line with their pyramidal and petty-bourgeois conception of society. There is often talk in these circles of “theory of theory” or “theory for its own sake.” But there is rarely any mention of a practical weapon for the proletariat in struggle, of encouragement, clarification, and guidance for the fight.

In this regard, here is an illustration of what communisation theory can produce: “It is from the concrete activity of the insurgents that theory has produced the concepts of its own abstract language. But it is not through the dissemination within the class of the abstractions of which theory is currently composed that the immediate consciousness of the insurgent proletariat will be transformed. To bring revolutionary vocabulary out of abstraction is not to spread among ‘the masses’ abstract concepts that everyone could now understand. It is to practically abolish the institutions, forms, relations, etc., that these abstract words designate in theoretical thought, and thereby create the new vocabulary of the new modalities of social life. Will the proletarians negate themselves by using the word ‘communism’? On the minuscule scale of their presence within the world proletariat, theorists will participate in this transformation by finally renouncing their jargon. They will find opportunities to do so in the midst of the crisis. Their theoretical insight, if it exists at all, will necessarily be of limited effectiveness, far more so than in past revolutions. For there will be no mass movement to lead or advise: there will be no masses. In the shift toward the individual, general abstract concepts will become less useful”[3].

Reading this excerpt from a theorist who claims to be “clairvoyant,” all this “abstract jargon, which has no impact on the reality of the workers’ struggle…” “… will disappear in the movement of proletarian individuals toward communisation.” Why, then, do they persist in this useless theoretical activity? Because it confers upon them the status of intellectuals, distinguishing them from the masses of those who lack access to the abstractions of the theorists of communisation — the very same people who are capable of quoting, with great pedantry and pretension, the texts of Marx. All this is based on their petty bourgeois disdain for the proletariat and its detested organisations – the ones which have the courage to maintain the revolutionary struggle.

The height of absurdity is that the implications of their theory are (in their eyes) less important than the affectation in which they revel! Judge for yourself: “The difficulty of TC (Théorie Communiste) lies in its absolutely non-normative character (the revolution or the true struggle would be this or that) and its absolutely non-essentialist approach to the definition of classes. By considering the contradiction between the proletariat and capital as their relationship and not as the encounter of two entities as they would be in themselves outside of their involvement, the TCEist paradigm must be articulated systematically because it does not rely on any particular element within the contradiction that serves as proof or assurance (even potential) of its overcoming, other than the respective positions of the terms of the contradiction.

We must articulate every particular moment, historical or as an element of the totality, precisely as a moment of the totality; that is to say, we can say nothing without saying everything. This is the condemnation that the theory of revolution as the overcoming of all classes in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production pronounces against itself[4].” In plain terms: political clarification for the general needs of the struggle is the least of their concerns!

These verbose modernists, who take pleasure in dismissing the historical struggle of the proletariat and the contribution of the workers’ movement, demonstrate their inability to understand what a developing historical movement is. Their pretentious theories often boil down to multiple and partial borrowings, to poorly digested passages from the works of the proletarian movement, from which they strip away the revolutionary meaning. Recast into patchwork productions, these borrowings instil doubt, discredit, and even contempt for the real proletarian struggle.

Above all, this role requires no break with the hierarchical behaviour imposed by dominant social relations. Those who have invented “good reasons” to regard the revolution as a product of their own ramblings invariably create a hierarchy in which supporters who accept their explanations are placed at the top; the despised masses are at the bottom of the ladder.

Idealism, in turn, is a logical result of the separation they establish between themselves and the proletariat. To conceive of the working class — which, as they insist, must negate itself as a class integrated into capital to form an indistinct mass of individuals who, one fine day, will be compelled to revolt against their alienation — requires that enlightened individuals provide it with a theory external to them, to which the atomised workers must submit, as a profession of faith. They thus bear similarities to Bakunin’s ideas and his conception of the communist revolution as a process of spontaneous dissolution of classes!

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Rosa Luxemburg argued that: "Marxism is not a dozen people who ascribe the right to ‘expert knowledge’ to each other and before whom the mass of faithful Moslems must prostrate themselves in blind trust. Marxism is a revolutionary world outlook which must always strive for new discoveries, which completely despises rigidity in once-valid theses, and whose living force is best preserved in the intellectual clash of self-criticism and the rough and tumble of history”[5] At the same time, as Lenin had already pointed out: “We see that the grand phrases against the ossification of thought, etc., conceal a lack of concern and an inability to advance theoretical thought. The example of the Russian Social Democrats illustrates in a particularly striking way this phenomenon common to Europe (and long pointed out by German Marxists) that the famous freedom of criticism does not mean the replacement of one theory by another, but freedom from any coherent and thoughtful system; it means eclecticism and a lack of principles[6].” But what is most absurd about these modernist intellectuals is that, in order to advance revolutionary theory, they would have to consign the entire workers’ movement to the dustbin of history. Yet they claim to refer to Marx, who, together with Engels, developed a scientific method and a revolutionary theory: historical materialism. What a contradiction! Unless, of course, their aversion to the proletariat reveals, once again, their petty-bourgeois nature! The entire work of Marx and Engels is imbued with the movement of history, whose outcome (indispensable but uncertain) is the advent of communism. With all due respect to these so-called ‘communisers,’ Marx and Engels were fighters for the working class, not armchair intellectuals in slippers, but representatives of the organized vanguard of the proletariat: “For Marx was, above all, a revolutionary. To contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and the state institutions it has created, to collaborate in the liberation of the modern proletariat — to whom he had first given an awareness of its own situation and needs, an awareness of the conditions of its emancipation — such was his true vocation. Struggle was his element. And he fought with rare passion, tenacity, and success. He contributed to the first Rhenish Gazette in 1842, to the Vorwärts in Paris from 1844 to 1848, to the Deutsche Zeitung in Brussels in 1847, to the New Rhenish Gazette from 1848 to 1849, and the New York Tribune from 1852 to 1861; furthermore, the publication of a host of militant pamphlets, work in Paris, Brussels, and London leading up to the founding of the great International Workingmen’s Association — the crowning achievement of his entire life’s work — these are results of which the author could have been proud, even if he had done nothing else[7]”.

As Engels says, the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association was the crowning achievement of Marx’s entire work. And it is in this tradition that the ICC stands. Contrary to the ramblings of our self-proclaimed revolutionary armchair theorists, for us:

“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. To accomplish this task in an indissoluble way, the revolutionary organisation:

• participates in all the struggles of the class in which its members distinguish themselves by being the most determined and combative fighters;
• intervenes in these struggles always stressing the general interests of the class and the final goals of the movement;
• as an integral part of this intervention, constantly dedicates itself to the work of theoretical clarification and reflection which alone will allow its general activity to be based on the whole past experience of the class and on the future perspectives crystallised through such theoretical work.[8].”

Revolutionaries are not spectators of the class struggle. Convinced that the proletariat is the only revolutionary class in capitalist society, they intervene to push it to develop its struggle, to gather the new energies emerging from it in order to strengthen its active and determined self-organisation. The ‘communisers’ are incapable of playing this active role. Worse, they stifle those seeking revolutionary positions by trapping them in a dead end.

Marx said in the Theses on Feuerbach, “the question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness [Diesseitigkeit] of his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question”.

How petty-bourgeois individualism and its careerist spirit can be exploited by the capitalist state

In 2013, the modernist milieu in Britain was shaken by what was called “Aufhebengate,” a scandal involving a member of the Aufheben group, JD, a lecturer in social psychology at the University of Sussex. He had written or co-authored a number of articles, notably “Knowledge-Based Public Order Policing: Principles and Practice,” published in Policing, A Journal of Policy and Practice, which analyses police tactics during workers’ protests and other manifestations of public ‘disorder.’ He also participated in conferences and “professional development” training programs addressing identical or similar issues (such as the “emergency services’” response to public disasters). This body of “academic work” was often produced by a team of scholars such as C. Stott and S. Reicher, who never hid the fact that their work was intended to help the police develop smarter tactics to contain social protests, and which was certainly used for that purpose. These academics have repeatedly mentioned JD as part of the team or acknowledged the contribution his research made to the bourgeois state’s police repression[9].

Another case affected the communiser milieu: “In the second half of March, the Greek revolutionary circle ‘TPTG’ announced that Woland, whose real name is Manousos Manousakis, one of the principal editors of the communising journal ‘Sic’ and a member, until recently, of Blaumachen, a Greek group of like-minded people, was participating in the current SYRIZA government, as Secretary General of the Ministry of Economy, Infrastructure, Maritime Affairs and Tourism. Readers may be aware of the case in the text written by ‘TPTG’, “60 days older and deeper in debt” [2] available, among others, on the website “Dialectical Delinquents”. Faced with the scandal, the first reaction, and most reassuring for aficionados of communisation, has been to say that the accession of Woland to the summit of the state is probably due to more or less troubled, personal motives, unpredictable up until now”[10].

While some were drawn to state institutions to advance their careers, others were caught red-handed colluding with Holocaust deniers, as evidenced by Dauvé’s participation at the bookstore La Vieille Taupe alongside Pierre Guillaume, dishonestly mixing Faurisson’s ramblings with the text of the International Communist Party, Auschwitz or the Great Alibi, which is a perfectly valid denunciation of anti-fascism by an organisation of the Communist Left. This gross lie has, in the past, allowed the bourgeoisie to launch a large-scale attack against proletarian organisations[11]. We can also mention that Camatte has found a disciple in Francis Cousin and his group “Cercle Marx,” which fraudulently uses Marx to supply the far-right with modernist theses, even going so far as to grant his group an interview from which we quoted several passages in a previous article.

To this list, let us add Dominique Blanc of the Organisation of Young Revolutionary Workers (OJTR), author of the pamphlet: Militancy, the Supreme Stage of Alienation and who is now found… in a Breton nationalist party! This pamphlet, published in 1972, is the modernists’ go-to text against revolutionary organisations, arguing that all militant activity is alienating. Blanc’s text is a full-scale attack on all forms of militancy: “Militant organizations must be fought relentlessly”; “Alienation cannot be eliminated with a wave of a magic wand, and militancy is the specific trap that the old world sets for revolutionaries”; “The first temptation that comes to mind is to attack their ideologies, to expose their archaism or exoticism (from Lenin to Mao) and to highlight the contempt for the masses hidden beneath their demagoguery.

But this would quickly become tedious when one considers that there is a multitude of organisations and tendencies, and that they all insist on asserting their own little ideological originality. Moreover, this amounts to playing on their own turf. Rather than their ideas, one should target the activity they carry out in the ‘service of their ideas’: MILITANTISM.” As we can see, this text targets leftist organisations (Maoists, Trotskyists, anarchists) without, of course, mentioning their class nature —that of leadership parties belonging to the political apparatus of the capitalist state, whose role is to bring elements seeking revolutionary positions back onto bourgeois ground. This is a godsend for the bourgeoisie!

Revolutionary militancy is the opposite of the practices of bourgeois organisations: “The structure of the organisation of revolutionaries must take two fundamental needs into account:

• it must permit the fullest development in revolutionary consciousness within itself and thus allow the widest and most searching discussion of all the questions and disagreements which arise in a non-monolithic organisation;
• it must at the same time ensure the organisation’s cohesion and unity of action; in particular this means that all parts of the organisation must carry out the decisions of the majority.

Likewise, the relations between the different parts of the organisation and the ties between militants necessarily bear the scars of capitalist society and therefore cannot constitute an island of communist relations within capitalism. Nevertheless, they cannot be in flagrant contradiction with the goal pursued by revolutionaries, and they must of necessity be based on that solidarity and mutual confidence which are the hallmarks of belonging to an organisation of the class which is the bearer of communism”[12].

The ‘communisers’, from the heights of their petty-bourgeois pretensions, cannot hear any of this. Revolutionaries must face constant pressure from bourgeois ideology, particularly the weight of individualism, which, in the phase of capitalism’s decomposition, holds a special place.

This pressure of individualism has always been a millstone, a pressure fought against since the infancy of the workers’ movement by revolutionary organisations:

Individualism can also derive from petty bourgeois influences, or from directly bourgeois ones. From the ruling class it takes up the official ideology which sees individuals as the subject of history, which glorifies the “self-made man” and justifies the “struggle of each against all”. However, it is above all through the vehicle of the petty bourgeoisie that it penetrates into the organisations of the proletariat, particularly through newly proletarianised elements coming from strata like the peasantry and the artisans (this was notably the case last century) or from the intellectual and student milieu (this has been especially true since the historic resurgence of the working class at the end of the 60s). Individualism expresses itself mainly through the tendency:

• to see the organisation not as a collective whole but as a sum of individuals in which relations between persons take precedence over political and statutory relations;
• to advance one’s own “desires” and “interests” as opposed to the needs of the organisation;
• consequently, to resist the discipline necessary within the organisation;
• to look for “personal realisation” through militant activity;
• to adopt an attitude of constantly contesting the central organs, which are accused of trying to crush individuality; the complementary attitude is that of looking for “promotion” through gaining a place in these organs;
• more generally, to adhere to an élitist view of the organisation in which you aspire to be one of the “first class militants” while developing a contemptuous attitude to those seen as ‘second class militants’.”[13]

In response to this, revolutionaries have always conceived of their activity within a framework associated with:

• collective action and solidarity among members of the organisation, where debate for political clarification is essential, where every member of the organisation participates actively and with enthusiasm and passion in bringing the collective to life;
• the necessity of an organisation (and its centralisation as an expression of its unity) to carry out their intervention on an international level;
• confidence in the future and in one’s own strengths, confidence in the proletariat as the bearer of communism, confidence in the fundamental role that revolutionary organisations play within the proletariat;
• consciousness, lucidity, coherence, and unity of thought, a taste for theory.

André

 

Appendix: Extract from the article ‘Class Consciousness and the Role of Revolutionaries [3]’ in International Review No 7, 1976

Having defined the origin of class consciousness, the article draws conclusions regarding the nature of revolutionary theory and the role of revolutionaries within the class. Because of their rejection of class consciousness and the communist programme, the existence and function of communist political organisations are a mystery to the ‘Communisers’.

“To define proletarian consciousness as an historic process characteristic of a social class, and characterised by the affirmation of the ‘conscious being’ on the scene of history, is to go no further than a simple statement of fact. To stop at this point would leave us with nothing more than a theoretical dissertation on the characteristics of class consciousness with no understanding of the objective forces which have led us to formulate these definitions. In fact it is by going beyond the purely theoretical aspect of their activity that revolutionaries gain a consciousness of their historical role as an active part of a whole. One can’t knock down a wall by blowing at it, or destroy a whole system of exploitation with pious words and philosophical reflections. It is by fully taking up their responsibilities to the working class that revolutionaries can accelerate the process of gaining consciousness and the constitution of the proletariat as an autonomous class. For revolutionaries this responsibility necessitates a clear vision of their function, the identification of the historic tasks for which they have been engendered.

1. The nature and function of revolutionary groups and of the party can only really be explained through the profoundly contradictory nature of the process of the proletariat’s coming to consciousness. This is a contradiction which underlies and accompanies the development of class struggle itself, and will continue to be a feature of the period of transition right up to the final disappearance of classes: the contradiction between the position of the working class as an exploited class and its historic tasks which will lead to the abolition of all exploitation; the contradiction between the proletariat’s inability to create a ‘proletarian ideology’ on the basis of any kind of economic power, and the over-riding need to gain a theoretical understanding of the lessons of its struggle, to be fully conscious of its historic goals. Thus the proletariat is forced:

-- on the one hand to put into practice in its day-to-day struggles the fundamental watchword of the communist revolution: ‘the emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves’;

and on the other hand to forge the indispensable theoretical weapons for its conscious emancipation, even though it is impossible for the proletariat to break completely from the hold of the dominant ideology.

Revolutionary minorities thus appear as products of this contradictory need. They arise as an integral part of the proletariat and yet are not necessarily members of the working class in a sociological sense. Because the economically dominant class controls the material and ideological means of production, the proletariat cannot give birth to a culture or ideology ‘sociologically intrinsic’ to itself, since this would imply an economic interest, and thus an interest in the perpetration of its position as an exploited class. For this reason revolutionaries are defined as members of the proletariat (according to political criteria); their task is the theoretical elaboration of the historic lessons of the class, and to ensure that these lessons are understood on the widest possible scale.

2. Because the proletariat has to consciously overthrow the old society, this transformation, at once practical and theoretical, demands a clear vision, a keen understanding of ‘the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement’ (Marx, The Communist Manifesto). So long as class antagonism and capitalist exploitation continue to exist, this vision of the final goals of the movement will continue to be confronted with the coercive influence of bourgeois ideology. For this reason this vision will not immediately be granted to the majority of the proletariat. The diffusion and growth of revolutionary theory, and consciousness of the final goals of the proletarian revolution within the class as a whole, cannot take the form of a ‘natural’ phenomenon, or a mathematical and linear progression: above all it is the product of an organized effort by the class. This conscious attempt by the proletariat to equip itself with a revolutionary theory, and to draw lessons from its past struggles, takes a material form in the appearance of revolutionary minorities and their constitution in pre-revolutionary periods into a party.

This constant striving of the proletariat itself towards the constitution of a revolutionary party is absolutely not comparable to the voluntarist action of individuals or groups of individuals who think that the construction of a revolutionary party is a substitute for action by the class as a whole. The fact that revolutionary theory appears as the theory of revolutionary groups does not make it a result of individual effort or the ‘discovery’ of ‘this or that would-be universal reformer’ (Marx, The Communist Manifesto). It is the concretization of the development of actual class struggle, and arises in response to a vital need in the proletariat.

3. The proletariat is thus not considered as a class on an abstract level, but on the level of its real actions, its incessant struggle to confront the objective conditions of the period. From this historic practice there has arisen, not a series of dogmatic principles applied to the class struggle like a theoretical ‘recipe’, but the theoretical expression of this experience. Revolutionary theory does not constitute a definitive and invariant body of principles, but a true reflection of the concrete activity of the proletariat, made explicit and generalised on a theoretical level by revolutionary groups and re-appropriated by the class. Thus, each problem solved by the struggle and self-organisation of the class corresponds to a new theoretical gain, which will itself be transformed into actual practice by the intervention of revolutionaries in future struggles. Thus theory, product of the social existence of struggles, draws its energy from practice, and in turn influences the political clarity of coming struggles.

Developing out of the concrete struggles of the class, revolutionary theory, originally the expression of revolutionary groups does not remain their exclusive property, like a hidden treasure. On the contrary, the very role of revolutionaries and the party concretises the fundamental concern of the proletariat to re-appropriate its historical lessons and to generalise them as widely as possible. Their function is to diffuse revolutionary theory within the class, understanding that this process is a phenomenon occurring within the proletariat itself, and that it isn’t a question of ‘injecting’ theory into practice, or of seeing theory as some sort of chemical yeast which activates a whole historical process.

Theory and practice complement and interpenetrate one another. To concentrate on one at the expense of the other, to insist that theory is the primal cause, or on the other hand to ignore the active side of theory, is to risk being led down the dangerous paths of voluntarism or academicism.

4. It is not the existence of revolutionary groups which makes the proletariat a revolutionary class. Even if the bourgeoisie were to suppress every revolutionary in the world, it would be simply putting back the hour of its death, without being able to suppress the class struggle or prevent the proletariat from throwing up new groups of revolutionaries. By destroying the first blossoms on a tree, one can’t definitively halt the whole process of its reproduction.

For this reason revolutionaries, while having no interests distinct from those of the class, are at the same time not synonymous with it. They are only a part of it, the most resolute part. Revolutionaries are not the general staff of an unconscious and obedient army, nor are they the helmsmen of the revolution. They trace the broad outlines of the struggle and point out the final aims of the movement. Their function is not to prepare to take on the ‘management’ of workers’ struggles or to issue the ‘correct slogans (which) organically give birth to the conditions and possibilities for the technical organisation of the proletariat’ (Lukacs). Their role is not to organize the class, to direct the autonomous organization of the class by means of practical ‘recipes’ for this or that form of unitary organisation, but to always put forward the general political aims of the movement.

5. Revolutionaries and the party cannot substitute themselves for the class. This implies that their function, while being indispensable, does not constitute an end in itself, a complete and perfect process which can replace the activity of the proletariat itself, or inject into the spontaneous mass class movement the truth which is inherent to it, or ‘raise’ the proletariat from the level of its primitive economic needs to conscious revolutionary activity. This is why, while being an active and constituent part of the proletariat, which participates fully in the proletariat’s coming to consciousness, the party is in no way a mediator between theory and practice, experience and consciousness. Both of them, the party and the class, are the material unity between theory and practice; there is no need for this unity - identical in both party and class - to be the responsibility of an intermediary (since an intermediary can only really be placed between two initially separate entities). This unity is a living process which determines both the party and the class as a whole and the class’s unitary organisation in workers’ councils. To make the party the mediation between theory and practice comes down to conceiving of theory as external to the proletariat, as the sole property of the party, which thus becomes the only force able to ‘draw the sense out of praxis’; it comes down to denying all possibility of the political and conscious seizure of power by the proletariat. Following this reasoning, the workers’ councils would become empty shells, administrative and statified organisations. The party would be the sole bearer of revolutionary content within the councils. In which case it would be very logical to assign to the party the actual direction of the dictatorship over society and to put the party at the head of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The party is not a directive or executive organization, an organ created by the proletariat for the seizure for power. The idea that the direction of the workers’ dictatorship is the task of a single revolutionary party constituted as a mass party during the post-revolutionary period, shows a grave misunderstanding of the real political goals of the party. In fact, the party does not aim at disproportionate growth so as to incorporate as many elements as possible into itself. Its function is not that of a single totalitarian state party. On the contrary it will always remain the expression of a part of the class and its raison d’être will tend to disappear in proportion to the growth of socialist consciousness within the class as a whole.

The fact that the party does not have the task of substituting itself for the class in no way implies that its existence represents a last resort, a necessary evil which should be kept in check or avoided as much as possible. Revolutionaries and the party are necessary products, indispensable elements in the process of the proletariat’s coming to consciousness. To negate their function using the excuse of substitutionist errors in the past is to display a sterile purism; it is to disarm the proletariat of one of its most vital weapons. The historic task of revolutionaries and the party, far from representing some sort of panacea, forms part of a general tendency for the proletariat to constitute itself as a conscious revolutionary class. Revolutionaries are the most combative and resolute elements within the working class; they develop an organised intervention within the class struggle with the perspective of putting forward the final goals of the movement. Their active participation within the class struggle exercises a decisive influence on the general orientation of the movement, an influence which can actually show material results in the general political direction of the struggle, the acceleration of the constitution of the proletariat as an autonomous class with the aim of seizing power and destroying wage slavery.”