(From Internationalisme - August 1946)

This article first appeared in Internation­alisme no 12 in August 1946. Although it is a product of the immediate post-Second World War period, it is still remarkably relevant today, 36 years later. It deals with the question of when the formation of the party is both necessary and possible.

For those who refuse to recognize the need for a political party of the proletariat, the problem of the role of such a party, its function and the moment for its form­ation is obviously of no interest.

But for those who have understood and acc­epted the idea of the party as an express­ion of the working class in its struggle against capitalism, the question is crucial. For those militants who understand the need for the party, putting the issue of when to form it in a historical perspective is of the utmost importance because the question of when you form a party is linked to your whole conception of what the party should do. Is the party a pure product of the ‘willpower' of a group of militants or is it the result of the evolution of the working class in struggle?

If it is a mere product of will, the party can exist or be formed at any time at all. If, on the other hand, it is an expression of the class in struggle, its formation and continued existence are linked to periods of upsurge and decline in the proletarian str­uggle. In the former case, we are talking about a voluntaristic, idealist vision of history; in the latter, a materialist conception of history and its concrete reality.

Make no mistake about it -- this is not a question of abstract speculation. It is not a scholastic discussion on the proper words or labels to use: either ‘party' or ‘fraction' (‘group'). The two conceptions lead to diametrically opposite approaches. An incorrect approach based on not under­standing the historical moment for the proclamation of the party necessarily leads a revolutionary organization to try to be what it cannot yet be and to miss being what it can be. Such an organization, look­ing for an immediate audience at any price, transforming principles into dogmas instead of maintaining clear political positions based on a critical examination of history, will not only find itself blurring reality in the present but compromising its future by neglecting its real tasks in the long term. This approach leaves the way open for all sorts of political compromise and opp­ortunism.

This is the very paint Internationalisme criticized in the Bordigist party in 1946, and 36 years of the ICP's activity amply confirms the validity of these criticisms.

However, some formulations of Internation­alisme lend themselves to possible misinterpretation. For example, the phrase: "the party is the political organism the proletariat creates to unify its struggles" (p2). Put this way, the statement implies that the party is the only motor force towards this unification of struggles. This is not true and it is not the position Internationalisme defended, as any reader of its press can verify. The formulation should be taken to mean that one of the main tasks of the party is to be a factor, an active factor, in the unification of the class struggle by orienting it "towards a frontal attack on the state and capitalist society, towards the building of a comm­unist society." (ibid)

Regarding the question of the Third World War, the war did not happen in the way Internationalisme predicted. There was no generalized war, but a series of local, peripheral wars called ‘national liberation' struggles or ‘anti-colonial' struggles; in reality they were subservient to the needs and interests of the major powers in their struggle for world hegemony.

It is nonetheless true, as Internationalisme predicted, that the Second World War Zed to a long period of reaction and profound dec­line in class struggle, which lasted until the end of the period of reconstruction.

Some readers may be shocked by the use of the term "formation of cadres" which Internationalisme announced as the "task of the hour" in that period. Today the word "cadres" is only used by leftists preparing future bureaucrats for capital against the proletariat. But in the past, and as used by Inter­nationalisme, the idea of forming cadres meant that the situation did not permit revolutionaries to have a large-scale infl­uence in the working class and that there­fore the work of theoretical development and formation of militants inevitably took pre­cedence over any possibility of agitation.

Today we are living in a completely different period, a time of open crisis for capitalism, and of the renewal of class struggle. Such a period makes the regroup­ment of revolutionary forces both necess­ary and possible. This perspective can be carried out by the existing, scattered revolutionary groups only if they reject any rationalization of their own isol­ation, if they pave the way for a real debate on the political positions inher­ited from the past which are not necess­arily valid today, if they consciously commit themselves to a process of inter­national clarification leading to the possibility of a regroupment of forces. This is the real way towards the form­ation of the party.

When to form the Party

There are two conceptions of the formation of the party which have clashed ever since the first historical appearance of the proletariat, that is, its appearance as an independent class with a role to fulfill in history rather than its mere existence as an economic category.

These conceptions can be summarized as follows:

* The first conception holds that the form­ation of the party depends essentially, if not exclusively, on the desires of indiv­iduals, of militants, of their level of consciousness. In a word, this conception considers the formation of the party as a subjective, voluntaristic act.

* The second conception sees the formation of the party as a moment in the development of class consciousness directly linked to class struggle, to the relation of forces between the classes at a given moment due to the economic, political and social sit­uation at the time; to the legacy of past struggles and the short and long-term per­spectives of future struggles.

The first conception, basically subjective and voluntaristic, is more or less con­sciously tied to an idealist view of history. The party is not determined by class struggle; it becomes an independent factor determined only by itself and is elevated to being the very motor force of class struggle.

We can find ardent defenders of this con­ception right from the beginning of the workers' movement and throughout its hist­ory up to the present time. In the early days of the movement Weitling and Blanqui were the most well-known representatives of this tendency.

However great their errors and however much they deserved the severe criticism Marx meted out to them, we should consider them and their mistakes in a historic perspective. Their errors should not blind us to the great contribution they made to the workers' movement. Marx himself recognized their worth as revolutionaries, their devotion to the proletarian cause, their merit as pion­eers inspiring the working class with their unflagging will to end capitalist society.

But what was an error for Weitling and Blanqui, a lack of understanding of the objective laws governing the development of class struggle became for their later foll­owers the very focal point of their exist­ence. Voluntarism turned into complete adventurism.

Undoubtedly the most typical representatives of this today are Trotskyism and everything linked to it. Their agitation has no limits other than their own whims and fantasies. ‘Parties' and ‘Internationals' are switched on and off at will. Campaigns are launched, slogans, agitation like a sick man in con­vulsions.

Closer to us we have the RKD[1] and the CR[2], who spent a long time in Trotskyism and left it very late in the day. They have unfortunately kept this taste for agitation for its own sake, agitation in a vacuum, and have made this the very basis of their existence as a group.

The second conception can be defined as determinist and objective. It not only considers that the party is historically determined but that its formation and exis­tence are also determined by immediate, contingent circumstances.

It holds that the party is determined both by history and by the immediate, contingent situation. For the party to really exist, it is not enough to demonstrate its general historical necessity. A party must be based on immediate, current conditions which make its existence possible and necessary.

The party is the political organism that the proletariat creates to unify its struggles and to orient them towards a frontal attack on the state and capitalist society, towards the building of a communist society.

Without a real development of the perspect­ive of class struggle rooted in the object­ive situation and not simply in the subject­ive desires of militants, without a high degree of class struggle and of social crisis, the party cannot exist -- its exist­ence is simply inconceivable.[3]

The party cannot be created in a period of stagnation in the class struggle. In the entire history of the workers' movement there are no examples of effective revol­utionary parties created in periods of stagnation. Any parties begun in these con­ditions never influenced or effectively led any mass movements. There are some forma­tions that are parties in name only but their artificial nature only hinders the formation of a real party when the time comes. Such formations are condemned to be being sects in all senses of the word. They can escape from their sect life only by falling into quixotic adventurism or the crassest opportunism. Most of them end up with both together, like Trotskyism.

The possibility of maintaining the Party in a period of reflux

What we have said about the formation of the party is also true for the question of keeping it alive after decisive defeats of the proletariat in a prolonged period of revolutionary reflux.

People often use the example of the Bolsh­evik party to counter our argument but this is a purely formalistic view of history. The Bolshevik party after 1905 cannot be seen as a party; it was a fraction of the Russian Social-Democratic party, itself dislocated into several factions and tendencies.

This was the only way the Bolshevik fraction could survive to later serve as a central core for the formation of the communist party in 1917. This is the real meaning of the history of the Bolsheviks.

The dissolution of the First International shows us that Marx and Engels were also aware of the impossibility of maintaining an international revolutionary organization of the working class in a prolonged period of reflux. Naturally, small-minded formal­ists reduce the whole thing to a maneuver of Marx against Bakunin. It is not our intention to go into all the fine points of procedure or to justify the way Marx went about it.

It is perfectly true that Marx saw in the Bakuninists a danger for the International and that he launched a struggle to get them out. In fact, we think that fundamentally he was right in terms of content. Anarchism has many times since then proven itself a profoundly petty-bourgeois ideology. But it was not this danger than convinced Marx of the need to dissolve the International.

Marx went over his reasons many times during the dissolution of the International and afterwards. Seeing this historic event as the simple consequence of a maneuver, of a personal intrigue is not only a gratuitous insult to Marx; it attributes him with demonic powers. One has to be as small-minded as James Guillaume to ascribe events of historic dimensions to the mere will of individuals. Over and above all these leg­ends of anarchism, the real significance of this dissolution must be recognized.

We can understand it better by putting these events in the context of other dissolutions of political organizations in the history of the workers movement.

For example, the profound change in the social and political situation in England in the middle of the 19th century led to the dislocation and disappearance of the Chart­ist movement.

Another example is the dissolution of the Communist League after the stormy years of the 1848-50 revolutions. As long as Marx believed that the revolutionary period had not yet ended, despite heavy defeats and losses, he continued to keep the Communist League going, to regroup forces, to streng­then the organization. But as soon as he was convinced that the revolutionary period had ended and that a long period of reaction had begun, he proclaimed the impossibility of maintaining the party. He declared him­self in favor of an organizational retreat towards more modest, less spectacular and more really fruitful tasks considering the situation: theoretical elaboration and the formation of cadres.

It was not Bakunin or any urgent need for ‘maneuverings' that convinced Marx twenty years before the First International that it was impossible to maintain a revolutionary organization or an International in a period of reaction.

Twenty-five years later, Marx wrote about the situation in 1850-51 and the tendencies within the League in these terms:

"The violent repression of a revolution leaves its mark on the minds of the people involved, particularly those who have been forced into exile. It produces such a tum­ult in their minds that even the best become unhinged and in a way irresponsible for a greater or lesser period of time. They can­not manage to adapt themselves to the course history has taken and they do not want to understand that the form of the movement has changed ..." (Epilogue to the Revelations of the Trial of Communists in Cologne, 8 Jan­uary 1875.)

In this passage we can see a fundamental aspect of Marx's thought speaking out against those who do not want to take into account that the form of the movement, the political organizations of the working class, the tasks of this organization, do not al­ways stay the same. They follow the evol­ution of the objective situation. To answer those who think they see in this passage a simple a posteriori justification by Marx, it is interesting to look at Marx's argu­ments at the time of the League as he form­ulated them in the debate with the Willich­-Schapper tendency. When he explained to the General Council of the League why he pro­posed a split in September 1850, Marx wrote, among other points:

"Instead of a critical conception, the minority has adopted a dogmatic one. It has substituted an idealist conception for a materialist one. Instead of seeing the real situation as the motor force of the revol­ution, it sees only mere will ...

... You tell ( the workers) : ‘We must take power right away or else we should all go home to bed.

Just like the democrats who have made a fetish of the word ‘people' you make a fetish of the word ‘proletariat'. Just like the democrats, you substitute revolutionary phrase-mongering for the process of revol­ution."

We dedicate these lines especially to the comrades of the RKD or the CR who have often reproached us with not wanting to ‘construct' the new party.

In our struggle since 1932 against Trotsky­ist adventurism on the question of the form­ation of the new party and the Fourth Inter­national, the RKD only saw who knows what kind of subjective ‘hesitations'. The RKD has never understood the concept of a ‘fraction', that is, a specific organization with specific tasks corresponding to a specific situation when a party cannot exist or be formed. Rather than making the effort to understand this idea, they prefer the simple dictionary-style translation of the word ‘fraction', in order to support their claim that ‘Bordigism' only wanted to ‘re­dress' the old CP . They apply to Left Comm­unism the measure they learned in Trotsky­ism: ‘either you are for redressing the old party or else you have to create a new one'.

The objective situation and the tasks of revolutionaries corresponding to this sit­uation, all that is much too prosaic, too complicated for those who prefer the easy way out through revolutionary phrase-mon­gering. The pathetic experience of organizing the CR was apparently not enough for these comrades. They see the failure of the CR simply as the result of a certain prec­ipitousness while in fact the whole opera­tion was artificial and heterogeneous from the start, grouping militants together around a vague and inconsistent program of action. They attribute their failure to the poor quality of the people involved, and refuse to see any connection with the objective situation.

The situation today

It might at first sight seem strange that groups who claim to belong to the Inter­national Communist Left, and who for years have fought alongside us against the Trot­skyist adventurism of artificially creating new parties, are now riding the same hobby­horse, and have become the champions of a still faster ‘construction'.

We know that in Italy, there already exists the Internationalist Communist Party which, although very weak numerically, is none­theless trying to fulfill the role of the party. The recent elections to the Constit­uent Assembly, in which the Italian ICP participated, have revealed the extreme weakness of its real influence over the masses, which demonstrates that this party has hardly gone beyond the limitations of a fraction. The Belgian Fraction is call­ing for the formation of the new party. The French Fraction of the Communist Left (FFGC) , formed recently, and without any well-defined basic principles, is following in its footsteps, and has ass­igned itself the practical task of build­ing the new party in France.

How are we to explain this fact, this new orientation? There can be no doubt that a certain number of individuals[4] who have recently joined this group are simply expr­essing their lack of understanding and their non-assimilation of the concept of the ‘fraction', and that they continue to expr­ess within the various groups of the ICL (International Communist Left) the Trotsky­ist conceptions of the party that they held yesterday and continue to hold today.

It is equally correct, moreover, to see the contradiction that exists between abstract theory and practical politics in the ques­tion of building the party as yet another addition to the mass of contradictions that have become a habit for all these groups. However, all this still doesn't explain the conversions of all these groups. This expl­anation must be sought in their analysis of today's situation and its perspectives.

We know the theory of the ‘war economy' set forward before and during the war by the Vercesi tendency in the ICL. According to this theory, the war economy and the war itself are periods of the greatest develop­ment of production, and of economic expan­sion. As a result, a ‘social crisis' could not appear during this period of ‘prosper­ity'. Only with the ‘economic crisis of the war economy', ie the moment when war production would no longer be able to supply the needs of war consumption, when the continuation of the war would be hind­ered by a scarcity of raw materials, would this new-style crisis open up a social crisis, and a revolutionary perspective.

According to this theory, it was logical to deny that the social convulsions which broke out during the war could come to any­thing. Hence also, the absolute and obstin­ate denial of any social significance in the events of July 1943 in Italy[5]. Hence also, the complete misunderstanding of the signif­icance of the occupation of Europe by the allied and Russian armies, and in particular of the importance of the systematic destruc­tion of Germany, the dispersal of the German proletariat taken prisoner of war, exiled, dislocated, and temporarily rendered inoff­ensive and incapable of any independent movement.

For these comrades, the renewal of the class struggle and, more precisely, the opening of a mounting revolutionary course, could only occur after the end of the war, not because the proletariat was steeped in patriotic nationalist ideology, but because the obj­ective conditions for such a struggle could not exist during the war period. This mis­take, already disproved historically (the Paris Commune and the October Revolution), and even partially in the last war (look at the social convulsions in Italy 1943, and certain signs of a defeatist spirit in the German army at the beginning of 1945) was to be fatally accompanied by a no less great error, which holds that the period following the war automatically opens a course towards the renewal of class struggles and social convulsions.

This error's most complete theoretical form­ulation is to be found in Lucain's article, published by the Belgian Fraction's L'Inter­nationaliste. According to his schema, whose invention he tries to palm off on Lenin, the transformation of imperialist into civil war remains valid if we enlarge this position to include the post-war period. In other words, it is in the post-war period that the transformation of imperialist war into civil war is realized.

Once this theory has been postulated and systematized, everything becomes simple and we have only to examine the evolution of the situation and events through it and starting from it.

The present situation is thus analyzed as one of ‘transformation into civil war'. With this central analysis as a starting-point, the situation in Italy is declared to be particularly advanced, and thus justifying the immediate constitution of the party, while the disturbances in India, Indonesia and other colonies, whose reins are firmly held by the various competing imperialisms and by the local bourgeoisies, are seen as signs of the beginning of the anti-capit­alist civil war. The imperialist massacre in Greece is also supposed to be part of the advancing revolution. Needless to say, not for a moment do they dream of putting in doubt the revolutionary nature of the strikes in Britain and America, or even in France. Recently, L'Internationaliste wel­comed the formation of that little sect, the CNT, as an indication "amongst others" of the revolutionary evolution of the sit­uation in France. The FFGC goes to the point of claiming that the three-party coalition government has been renewed due to the proletarian class threat, and insists on the extreme objective importance of the entry into their group of some five comrades from the group ‘Contre le Courant'[6]

This analysis of the situation, with the perspective of decisive class battles in the near future, naturally leads these groups to the idea of the urgent necessity of building the party as rapidly as possible. This becomes the immediate task, the task of the day, if not of the hour.

The fact that international capitalism seems not the least worried by this menace of proletarian struggle supposedly hanging over it, and goes calmly about its business, with its diplomatic intrigues, its internal riv­alries and its peace conferences where it publicly displays its preparations for the next war -- none of this carries much weight in these groups' analysis.

The possibility of a new war is not compl­etely excluded, first because it is useful as propaganda, and because they prefer to be more prudent than in the 1937-39 adven­ture where they denied the perspective of world war. It's best to keep a way out just in case! From time to time, following the Italian ICP, it will be said that the sit­uation in Italy is reactionary, but this is never followed up and remains an isol­ated episode, without any relation to the fundamental analysis of the situation as one that is ripening ‘slowly but surely' towards decisive revolutionary explosions.

This analysis is shared by other groups like the CR, which counters the objective perspective of a third imperialist war with the perspective of an inevitable revolution; or like the RKD which, more cautiously, takes refuge in the theory of a double course, ie of a simultaneous and parallel development of a course towards revolution and a course towards imperial­ist war. The RKD has obviously not yet understood that the development of a course towards war is primarily conditioned by the weakening of the proletariat and of the danger of revolution, unless they have taken up the Vercesi tendancy's pre-1939 theory according to which the imper­ialist war is not a conflict of interests between different imperialisms, but an act of the greatest imperialist solidarity with the aim of massacring the proletariat, a direct capitalist class war against the proletarian revolutionary menace. The Trot­skyists, with the same analysis, are infin­itely more consistent , since they have no need to deny the tendency towards a third war; for them, the next war will simply be the generalized armed struggle between cap­italism on the one hand, and the proletariat regrouped around the Russian ‘workers' state' on the other.

In the final analysis, either the next imp­erialist war is confused, one way or another, with the class war or its danger is minimized by making it the necessary precursor of a period of great social and revolutionary struggles. In the second case, the aggrav­ation of inter-imperialist antagonisms and the war preparations going on today are explained by the short-sightedness and un­awareness of world capitalism and its heads of state.

We may remain thoroughly skeptical about an analysis based on nothing more than wishful thinking, flattering itself with its clairvoyance, and generously assuming a com­plete blindness on the part of the enemy. On the contrary, world capitalism has shown itself far more acutely aware of the real situation than the proletariat. Its behavior in Italy in 1943 and in Germany in 1945 proves that it has assimilated the lessons of the revolutionary period of 1917 damned well -- far better than the prolet­ariat or its vanguard. Capitalism has learn­ed to defeat the proletariat, not only through violence, but by using the workers' discontent and leading it in a capitalist direction. It has been able to transform the one-time weapons of the proletariat into its chains. We have only to see that capitalism today willingly uses the trade unions, marxism, the October Revolution, socialism, communism, anarchism, the red flag and the 1st May as the most effective means of duping the proletariat. The 1939-45 war was fought in the name of the same ‘anti-fascism' that had already been tried out in the Spanish war. Tomorrow, the workers will once again be hurled into battle in the name of the October Revol­ution, or of the struggle against Russian fascism.

The right of peoples to self-determination, national liberation, reconstruction, ‘econ­omic' demands, workers' participation in management and other such slogans, have be­come capitalism's most effective tools for the destruction of proletarian class consc­iousness. In every country, these are the slogans used to mobilize the workers. The strikes and disturbances that break out here and there remain in this framework, and their only result is to tie the workers still more strongly to the capitalist state.

In the colonies, the masses are being mass­acred in a struggle, not for the state's destruction but for its consolidation, its independence from the domination of one imperialism to the profit of another. There can be no possible doubt as to the meaning of the massacre in Greece, when we look at Russia's protective attitude, when we see Jouhaux becoming the advocate of the Greek CGT in its conflict with the government. In Italy, the workers' ‘struggle' against the monarchy in the name of the republic, or get massacred over the Trieste question. In France, we have the disgusting spectacle of workers marching in overalls in the 14th July military parade. This is the prosaic reality of today's situation.

It is untrue that the conditions for a re­newal of class struggle are present in the post-war period. When capitalism ‘finishes' an imperialist world war which lasted six years without any revolutionary flare-ups, this means the defeat of the proletariat, and that we are living, not on the eve of great revolutionary struggles, but in the aftermath of a defeat. This defeat took place in 1945, with the physical des­truction of the revolutionary centre that was the German proletariat, and it was all the more decisive in that the world proletariat remained unaware of the defeat it had just undergone.

The course is open towards the third imper­ialist war. It is time to stop playing the ostrich, seeking consolation in a refusal to see the danger. Under present conditions, we can see no force capable of stopping or modifying this course. The worst thing that the weak forces of today's revolutionary groups can do is to try to go up a down staircase. They will inevitably end up breaking their necks.

The Belgian Fraction think they can get away with saying that if war breaks out, this will prove that the formation of the party was premature. How naive! Such a mistake will be dearly paid for.

To throw oneself into the adventurism of artificial and premature party-building not only implies an incorrect analysis of the situation, but means turning away from the real work of revolutionaries today, neglecting the critical elaboration of the revolutionary program and giving up the positive work of forming its cadres.

But there is worse to come, and the first experiences of the party in Italy are there to confirm it. Wanting at all costs to play at being the party in a reactionary period, wanting at all costs to work among the masses means falling to the level of the masses, following in their footsteps; it means working in the trade unions, taking part in parliamentary elections -- in a word, opportunism.

At present, orienting activity towards building the party can only be an orient­ation towards opportunism.

We have no time for those who reproach us for abandoning the daily struggle of the workers, and for separating ourselves from the class. Being with the class is not a matter of being there physically, still less of keeping, at all costs, a link with the masses which in a reactionary period can only be done at the price of opportunistic politics. We have no time for those who, having accused us of activism from 1943-45, now reproach us for wanting to isolate ourselves in an ivory tower, for tending to become a doctrinaire sect that has given up all activity.

Sectarianism is not the intransigent defense of principles, nor the will to critical study; nor even the temporary renunciation of large-scale external work. The real nat­ure of sectarianism is its transformation of the living program into a dead system, the principles that guide action into dog­mas, whether they be yelled or whispered.

What we consider necessary in the present reactionary period is to make an objective study, to grasp the movement of events and their causes, and to make them understood to a circle of workers that will necess­arily be limited in such a period.

Contact between revolutionary groups in various countries, the confrontation of their ideas, organized international dis­cussion with the aim of seeking a reply to the burning problems raised by historical evolution -- such work is far more fertile, far more ‘attached to the masses' than hollow agitation, carried out in a vacuum.

The task for revolutionary groups today is the formation of cadres; a task that is less enticing, less concerned with easy, immed­iate and ephemeral successes; a task that is infinitely more serious; for the form­ation of cadres today is the precondition that guarantees the future party of the revolution.

Marco

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[1] The RKD (Revolutionary Communists of Germany). They were an Austrian Trotskyist group opposed to the foundation of Fourth International in 1938 because they felt it was premature. In exile, this group moved farther and farther away from this ‘International'. They were particularly opposed to participation in the Second World War in the name of the defense of Russia, and in the end came out against the whole theory of ‘degenerated workers' state' so dear to Trotskyism. In exile this group had the enormous political merit of maintaining an intransigent position against the imperialist war and any participation in it for any reason whatsoever. In this regard it contacted the Fraction of Italian and French Left during the war and participated in the printing of a leaflet in 1945 with the French Fraction addressed to the workers and soldiers of all countries, in several languages, denouncing the chauvinistic campaign during the ‘liberation' of France, calling for revolutionary defeatism and fraternization. After the war, this group rapidly evolved towards anarchism where it finally dissolved.

[2] The CR (Revolutionary Communists) were a group of French Trotskyists that the RKD managed to detached from Trotskyism towards the end of the war. From then on, it followed the same evolution as the RKD. These two groups participated in the International Conference in 1947-48 in Belgium, called by the Dutch Left which brought together all the groups which remained internationalist and had opposed all participation in the war.

[3] We must be careful to distinguish the forming of a party from the general activity of revolutionaries which is always necessary and possible. The blurring of these two distinctions is a very common error which can lead to a despairing and impotent fatalism. The Vercesi tendency in the Italian Left fell into this trap during the war. This tendency rightly considered that the conditions of the moment did not allow for the existence of a party nor for the possibility of large-scale agitation among the workers. But it concluded from this that all revolutionary work had to be scrapped and condemned. It even denied the possibility for revolutionary groups to exist under these conditions. This tendency forgot that mankind is not just the product of history: "Man makes his own history" (Marx). The action of revolutionaries is necessarily limited by objective conditions. But this has nothing to do with the desperate cry of fatalism: ‘whatever you do will lead to nothing'. On the contrary, revolutionary Marxist has said: "By becoming conscious of existing conditions and by acting within their limits, our participation becomes an additional force influencing events and even modifying their courses." (Trotsky, The New Course)

[4] This refers to the ex-members of Union Communiste, the group that printed L'Internationale in the 30s and disappeared at the outbreak of war in 1939.

[5] The fall of the Mussolini regime and the refusal of the masses to continue the war.

[6] A little group constituted after the war, which had an ephemeral existence. Its members, after a brief passage in the ICP (Bordigists), left politics.

The International Communist Party (Communist Program) at a turning point in its history

At the end of the sixties, the working class put an end to fifty years of counter-revol­ution by engaging in struggle internationally (1968 in France, 1969 in Italy, 1970 in Poland, 1975-6 in Spain, etc). At the present time the mass strike in Poland has marked the highest point in a new period of struggle which will lead to class confrontations that will decide the fate of humanity: either revolution or war.

On an international scale, the bourgeoisie recognizes what a mortal danger the combativity of the workers means for its system. In order to confront the danger of the mass strike the capitalist class collaborates across national frontiers and even across the imperialist blocs. The proletariat will not face a surprised and disconcerted bourgeoisie as it did in the first wave of struggle in 1968; it will confront a bourgeoisie which is forewarned and prepared to use its capacities of mystification, derailment and repression up to the hilt. The process of the inter­national unification of the working class in its struggle for the destruction of capitalism promises to be a long and difficult one.

This is the reality confronting the revolutionary minorities who are part­icipating in the process of the unification of the working class and in the development of its consciousness. Far from being up to the demands of the present period, revolutionary organiza­tions are in an extreme minority. They exist in a situation of political confusion and profound organizational dispersion.

For more than a year, the weaknesses have been accentuated by splits and the disappearance of groups. This phenomenon is culminating today with the crisis shaking the International Communist Party (ICP) (Communist Program). After a wave of exclusions and numerous depart­ures, the majority of the organization has taken up the most chauvinist and nationalist positions of the bourgeoisie, by taking sides in the imperialist war in the Middle East. This organization is paying the price of its political and organizational sclerosis.

The ICP has been unable to draw a critical balance sheet of the revolutionary wave between 1917-23 and the counter-revolution which followed it, of the positions of the Communist International and the left fract­ions which broke from it -- particularly on the union and national questions and on the question of the organization of revol­utionaries and of the party. These, together with its incapacity to understand the stakes of the present period, have led it straight to opportunism and activism and to the dislocation of the organization.

It is the responsibility of all revolution­ary organizations to draw the lessons of this crisis which expresses the general weaknesses of the revolutionary movement today, and to actively ensure that the necessary and inevitable decantation does not lead to a dispersion of revolutionary energies. History does not pardon, and if revolutionary organizations today are not capable of living up to the demands of the situation, they will be swept away without recourse, weakening the working class in its task of defending the perspectives of communism in the course of its battles.

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"A crisis which is very serious for us and whose repercussions will probably be decisive throughout the organization, has just exploded in the Party". (‘Better fewer, but better', Le Proletaire no.367, Il Programma Comunista, no. 20). The articles in the press tell us of cascading departures:

In France:

-- the split of those who were regrouped around El Oumami, which used to be the organ of the ICP for Algeria, and now has become "the organ of Algerian Leninist Communists", defending bourgeois nationalist positions in a pure third ordlist style;

-- the departure of the majority of members in Paris and a few others scattered around France "amongst which were those with lead­ership responsibilities", apparently on positions close to E1 Oumami, with a plan by some to bring out a magazine, Octobre.

In Italy:

-- "In Italy, the crisis has shaken all the sections because of its suddenness, but only some comrades in Turin and some comrades in Florence (we don't know how many) have been involved in the liquidation" (I1 Programma Comunista, 29.10.82).

In Germany:

-- the disappearance of the section and of the publication Proletarier.

In giving this news, the press of the ICP doesn't speak of:

-- the expulsion last year of sections in the south of France, including Marseilles, by the same leadership who have now left in France, and of sections in Italy, including Ivrea.

It appears that those who were expelled put in question the whole policy of setting up a panoply of ‘committees' (‘committee against redundancies', ‘committee against repression', committees in the army, of squatters, feminists, etc) , whose objective was to better ‘implant' the Party inside ‘social struggles';

-- the departure of other elements who protested against these expulsions, and individual resignations for unclear reasons.

-- the disappearance of the ‘Latin American sector'.

The whole of the ICP has been thrown into disarray in a few months without any real clarity. Why is there a crisis? And why now?

The events taking place in today's period of mounting class struggle are starting to dissipate the mist of bourgeois ideology in the heads of workers. Further, they put the political positions of revolutionary minorities to the test by sweeping aside the debris of groups made gangrenous by bourgeois ideology and by shaking or dislocating ambiguous and use­less groups.

In this sense, the crisis in the ICP is the most spectacular manifestation of the con­vulsions of the revolutionary milieu today. A year ago, when we spoke of con­vulsions, splits and regression in the revolutionary milieu (International Review, no.28) in face of the ‘years of truth', the whole political milieu turned a deaf ear. Perhaps today these people are going to wake up! The revolutionary milieu (including the ICP) didn't want to create a framework of international conferences allowing the decantation of political positions in a clear way; today they submit to a process of decantation by the ‘force of events', with all the attendant risks of a loss of militant energies. Even today reality is exposing the programmatic weaknesses of the ICP, it is still up to revolutionaries to draw up a balance sheet in order to avoid repeating the same errors ad infinitum.

It cannot be denied that for a long time the ICP has been a pole of reference, in some countries, for elements searching for class positions. But by basing itself on an inadequate and erroneous political program and on the internal structure of a sect, the ICP has been over the years, growing more and more sclerotic. Its political regression was revealed in the test of events: faced with the massacre in Lebanon, the ICP called on the proletarians in the Middle East to fight "to the last drop of blood" in defense of the Palestinian cause in Beirut. Some months later, the organization burst apart.

The crisis can't be explained by mistakes ‘made by the leadership' or by ‘tactical errors', as both the splitters and the remaining ICP seems to believe. The mistakes are programmatic and lie at the very root of the constitution of the ICP (see the articles on p.15 and p.20 in this issue). Today they are paying for these errors. The ‘return to Lenin' in order to support the ‘glorious struggle for national liberation', which the splitters advocate, in order quite simply to cover up their Maoist leanings, is very close to the position of the ICP. If the ICP is today only hanging by a thread, this way of explaining the crisis in terms of ‘tactical errors' or ‘mistakes of the leadership' is going to definitively finish it off.

A crisis which illustrates the weakness of a conception of organization

The bluff of the ICP

The crisis today leaves us with a somber balance sheet for "tomorrow's compact and powerful party". It has led, according to the ICP's press, "to the organizational collapse of the international centre and the disappearance of the former editions of Proletaire, and to the departure of all the responsible centers in France". (Le Proletaire, no.387). The militants who remain in the ICP were not aware of what was going on. They were reduced to making appeals in the press for members who wanted to remain in the party to express themselves in writing to the box address. It's unbelievable that they have had to resort to methods of communication that give the state such an easy means of identification.

The famous and arrogant ‘responsible centers' left taking with them material, and money which included the dues which had been paid that very day by local sections (according to an ICP militant in Paris). We see here the habits of bourgeois political gangsterism totally foreign to the proletariat which we unambiguously bra­nded as such at the time of the ‘Chenier affair' during the crisis of the ICC (International Review, no.28). The grand, high-sounding words on the ‘centralized' pure and hard party were only a bluff. The ICP is collapsing like a house of cards: "the crisis was expressed by a decentralized and localist activity, covered up by a facade of centralization" (Il Programma Comunista, 29.10.82).

The grand speeches on ‘organic centralism' hid a federalism of the worst kind where each part of the organization ended up only doing what it decided to do, a flabby structure open to all the influ­ences of bourgeois ideology, a true nursery of irresponsible people, of apprentice bureaucrats and future rec­ruiting sergeants for imperialist massacres, as has already happened for the Middle East.

After having prattled on for forty years about the party which ‘organizes' the working class, you can't fall any lower than this.

Perhaps this crisis will serve as a lesson to all the groups in the present movement who reduce any debate to the question of the party, who bestow upon themselves titles of glory which they have done nothing to merit, who shackle any real progress towards a true party of the working class by their absurd pretensions today. To explain all the difficulties of the class struggle internationally as being due to the absence of the party, to put forward the idea that this eucharistic presence is the only perspective for solving everything, as the ICP has done for years, is not only false and ridiculous it also has a cost. As we said in International Review no.14:

"The drama of Bordigism is that it wants to be what it isn't -- the Party -- and doesn't want to be what it is: a political group. Thus it doesn't accomplish, except in words, the tasks of the party, because it can't accomplish them; and it doesn't take on the tasks of a real political group, which to its eyes are just petty. (‘A Caricature of the Party: the Bordigist Party').

Where then is this famous ‘monolithic bloc' of a party? This party without faults? This ‘monolithism' asserted by the ICP has only ever been a Stalinist invention. There never were ‘monolithic' organizations in the history of the workers' movement. Constant discussion and organized political confrontation within a collective and unitary frame­work is the condition for the true solidarity, homogeneity and centralization of a proletarian political organization. By stifling any debate, by hiding divergences behind the word ‘discipline', the ICP has only compressed the contradictions until an explosion was reached. Worse, by preventing clarifica­tion both outside and inside the organization, it has numbed the vigilance of its militants. The Bordigist sanctification of hierarchical truth and the power of leaders have left the militants bereft of theoretical and organizational weapons in the face of the splits and resignations. The ICP seems to recognize this when it writes:

"We intend to deal (with these questions) in a more developed way in our press, by placing the problems which are being posed to the activity our party before our readers". (1l Programma, idem)

For the moment these words seem more like a wink to the militants who have left in a state of complete political confusion, some of whom must be aware of the mire into which they have sunk, than a real recognition of the bankruptcy of the ICP, ‘alone in the world', as it describes itself. The recognition of the necessity to open up the debate on the "problems being posed to the activity" and the actual opening up of discussions both internally and externally, is one of the conditions for keeping the ICP within the proletariat, for fighting against the political decay which is gnawing at the organization. The ICP has experienced other splits in its forty years of existence, but today's one is not only shaking its organizational frame­work, but also the fundamentals of its political trajectory, placing before it the alternative: third worldism or marxism.

Internationalism against any form of nationalism

The open nationalism of El Oumami

El Oumami broke with the ICP because their defense of the PLO in Beirut had met with resistance. But judging by the positions of the ICP on the question, this resistance must have been rather weak. The only point at issue seems to have been how far one should go in defending the PLO.  El Oumami entitled the document in which it declared itself ‘From the program-party to the party of revolutionary action'. A whole program!

El Oumami defends the progressive character of the Palestinian national movement against "that cancer grafted onto the Arab body, the Zionist, colonialist entity, the mercenary, racist and expansionist state of Israel". For El Oumami it is out of the question to put on an equal footing the "colonialist-Settlers' state" (Etats-pied-noir) and the "legitimate states" of the "Arab world".

This type of distinction has always been the argument used by the bourgeoisie to enlist the working class into war. Yes, all capitalist states are enemies of the revolution, so we are told, but there is enemy no.1 and enemy no.2. For the first world war German Social Democracy said in essence ‘let us fight against Russian despotism'; for the other side, it was ‘let's fight against Prussian militarism'. In the second world war, it was with the same language that all the ‘anti-fascists' with the Stalinists at their head, enlisted the proletarians, by calling on them to participate in fighting enemy no.1, the ‘fascist state', in order to defend the ‘democratic' state.

For E1 Oumami, the ‘Jewish union sacree' has made class antagonisms disappear in Israel. It is useless to make appeals to the proletariat in Israel. This is pre­cisely what the Stalinists said during the Second World War when they talked about the ‘accursed German ‘people'. And when, after a ‘Solidarity with the PLO' demon­stration, El Oumami, to the cries of "Revenge for Sabra and Chatila", bragged of having "captured a Zionist and giving him a good duffing up", it was the same as the French Communist Party's "to each a boche" at the end of the second world war.

E1 Oumami has joined the ranks of the bourgeoisie with this abject chauvinism. At this level, it is a Maoist, virulently third-worldist group, which doesn't merit much time being spent on it. But what is striking, in reading the texts, is that these nationalist chauvinists are full of the words of the Italian Left, that fraction of the International Communist Left which was one of those rare examples and the most important, that was able to resist the counter-revolution and maintain a proletarian internationalism in the whirlpool of the second imperialist war.

How could the ICP, ‘continuator' of the Italian Left, develop such a nationalist poison within it? How could it affect the Paris leadership, the editors of Proletaire, the editors of E1 Oumami, the section in Germany?

In the third part of this article we shall recall how the ICP conceived this child by forgetting a whole period of the history of the Italian Left between 1926 and 1943; how the ‘Party' was formed in 1943-45 with elements from the Partisans in Italy and the ‘anti­fascist committee of Brussels', how political confusions on the role of ‘anti-fascism' and the nature of the blocs set up at the end of the second world war were never clarified. Today all this has broken through to the surface.

Because the ICP nourished this child and even today still recognizes it, it is now the legitimate product of its own incoherence and degeneration.

The shameful nationalism of the ICP

"Naturally for the true revolutionary, there isn't a ‘Palestinian question', but only the struggle of the exploited of the Middle East, both Arabs and Jews, which is part of the general struggle of the exploited of the whole world". (Bilan, no. 2)

E1 Oumami deserts this position: schooled in the ICP's tactics, it poses the question not in terms of classes but in terms of nations. The future ‘party of revolutionary action' therefore puts its begetter, the ICP, against the wall, knowing full well its congenital incoherence, and hurls a defiance to it:

"Let's imagine for an instance the invasion of Syria by the Zionist army. Must we remain indifferent or worse (sic), call for revolutionary defeatism under the pretext that the Syrian state is a bourgeois state that needs to be overthrown? If the comrades of Proletaire are to be consistent, they must say so publicly. As for us, we openly take a position against Israel".

And further:

"Le Proletaire pronounces itself for the destruction of the Colonialist-Settler state of Israel. So be it. But at the same time, it supported the submission of the Palestinians to a national oppression in the Arab countries, when Israel entered Lebanon in order to continue Syria's work. So then, where does the specificity of Israel lie? Do we have to believe that the destruction of the Colonialist-Settler state has the same significance as the destru­ction of the Arab states, however react­ionary they are?".

For E1 Oumami, it's clear: class criteria don't apply to an Arab proletarian. His state is an Arab state, and that's that. First the war, then the bright tomorrow.

But how does the ICP reply? What does the historic party, the intransigent defenders and heirs of the Italian Left have to say? Just a small "yes, but...".

The article ‘The national struggle of the Palestinian masses within the framework of the social movement in the Middle East', published in Le Proletaire and Il Programma, begins by preaching to us about pan-Arab feelings, Arab capital, the Arab unitary tendency and the Arab nation. It's like the dream of a university student who missed the mark at the end of a course on pan-Slavism, black studies and other Guevarist preoccupations from the sixties.

"Arab capital" doesn't owe allegiance to American capital - ...that would be a "superficial" vision. On the other hand, the "colonialist Jewish state" is "constitutionally" in this position. The ICP doesn't say that Israel is totally a classless bloc, but that the prolet­arians there seem to it to be "more anti-Arab than the bourgeoisie". Xenophobic sentiments of course never touch Palest­inian or French or Italian proletarians. And to finish up, we are left with the lowest level of Maoism that could be cooked up -- a reheated version of the kind pioneered by the American ‘Students for a Democratic Society', who talked about the working class having "white skin privilege", through which they exploited the black workers of America.

As for the PLO, it remains a defender of widows and orphans in "the most advanced part of the gigantic social struggles in the Middle East".

The ICP affirms:

"It is precisely on the terrain of the common struggle (ie. common to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat) that Arab and Palestinian proletarians can acquire the strength to stand up against those who are their apparent allies, but who in reality are already their enemies".

Who? What? Ah, but it is only

"the appearance which is inter-classist",

Bordigist science tells us . .. In reality the class struggle

"lives inside physical subjects themselves... beyond, outside and even against the consciousness of individuals them­selves".

The ICP replaces politics by individual psy­chology.

"It is necessary to strengthen the nat­ional struggle by taking out, the content which the bourgeoisie takes care to give it".

This is called defending the ‘double rev­olution' by doing so and not doing so....

The article of clarification (?) ends up quite simply, in delirium. It is necessary to "build an army under proletarian leader­ship thanks to the organizational work of communists", in order to create a "co-belligerent" with the PLO army.

The ICP dishes out the same lamentations as the splitters:

"The proletariat in the metropoles isn't really going into action".

So --

"in its place, one could look to the movements of the young, of woman, to anti-nuclear and pacifist movements". (Le Proletaire, no. 367).

This is the sad refrain of all third­worldists, students, the blase and the modernists: the proletariat is ‘letting us down'.

As the ICP claims to be the party already, its children can only want the movement ‘immediately', hence its description of those who resigned or split as ‘mouvement­ists'. But El Oumami was only taking the leftist tendencies in the ICP to their logical conclusion. It will not be easy for the ICP to get out of this leftist pit. It is not taking that path. For now, it means its ‘mea culpa' on exactly the same ground as E1 Oumami. The party doesn't know how to make "the tactical link" with the masses; it is still too ‘abstract' too ‘theoretical'. All this is false. The ICP uses the words ‘communist prog­ram' in order to cover up a ‘theor­etical void' and a practice of supporting nationalism, of unprincipled activism. We are now going to examine in more detail this theoretical void and its practical ramifications.

The sources of errors: the theoretical void

"Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circum­stances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumst­ances with which they are directly con­fronted. The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the minds of the living". (Marx, The 18th Brumaire).

The CI and the Lefts

In order to explain the crisis of the ICP you have to go back to the roots of its political regression, to the lack of understanding of the errors of the Communist International and to the necessary critical re-examination of the past which the present milieu has neither wanted nor been able to do.

The Communist Left of the 20's didn't seek to explain the degeneration of the CI by a ‘crisis of leadership' nor simply by ‘tactical errors', as the ICP today wants to explain its own crisis. That would have been to reduce the crisis of the CI to the Trotskyist line that "the crisis of the revolutionary movement can be reduced to the crisis of the leadership", (Trotsky's Transitional Program). The Communist Left took into account that the CI was founded during an international revolutionary wave that arose suddenly from war and that it hadn't succeeded in grasping all the demands of the "new period of war and revolution". Each Congress of the CI testifies to the increasing diffi­culties felt in grasping the implications of the historic crisis of capitalism, in throwing off the old social democratic tactics, in understanding the role of the party and workers' councils. To draw all the programmatic implications of such a situation was impossible during their tumultuous times. To try today to elevate into dogmas everything that the CI produced means turning your back on the Communist Left.

The Lefts within the CI, the German, Italian, Dutch, British, Russian and American Lefts, were the expression of the avant-garde of the proletariat in the major industrial centers. With its hesitant and often confused formulations, the Left tries to pose the real problems of the new epoch: are the unions still working class organs or have they been caught up in the mach­inery of the bourgeois state? Should you finish with the tactics of ‘parlia­mentarism'? How should one understand the national struggle in the global period of imperialism? What is the perspective for the new Russian state?

The Communist Left never managed to act as a fraction within the 111rd International, to confront it with its positions. In 1921 (when the ‘provisional' banning of fractions in the Bolshevik Party in Russia took place), the German Left (KAPD) was excluded from the Communist International. The successive elimination of all the Lefts followed until the death of the CI with its acceptance of ‘socialism in one country'.

If the Lefts were already dislocated within the CI, they would be even more so outside it. At the time of the death of the CI, the German Left was already dispersed into several bits, fell into activism and adventurism, and was eliminated under the blows of a bloody repression; the Russian Left inside Stalin's prisons; the weak British and American Lefts had long since disappeared. Outside Trot­skyism, it was essentially the Italian Left and what remained of the Dutch Left which, from 1928 on, would maintain a proletarian political activity -- without Bordiga and without Pannekoek -- by each making a different assessment of the experience they had had.

The revolutionary movement today still has a tendency to see only the partial and dislocated form of the Communist Left, as it was left by the counter-revolution. It speaks of this or that positive or negative contribution of this or that Left outside the global context of the period. The ICP has accentuated and aggravated this tendency by always reducing the Communist Left to the Italian Left, and then only the Left between 1920 and 1926. For the ICP, the German Left became a bunch of ‘anarcho­-syndicalists', identical to the Gramsci tendency. This is not to say that one must not severely criticize the mistakes of the German Left, but within the ICP these become a total caricature. The idea of restoring the heritage of the Communist Left which was buried by the counter­revolution becomes in the ICP an end­less process of republishing Bordiga's texts. The heritage of the Left is above all a critical work: the ICP has reduced it to the liturgy of a jealous sect. Thus, a whole generation of ICP militants only has a deformed idea of the reality of the International Communist Left and the political questions they posed.

The period of the ‘fraction' and Bilan (1926-1945)

The Bordigists never speak of this period of the Italian Left: it's not acknowledged by the ICP. What becomes then of the ‘organic continuity' which the ICP lays claim to in order to announce itself as the one and only heir of the Communist Left?

A whole twenty years of militant work. But ...Bordiga wasn't there during those years. The only explanation one can find is that ‘organic continuity' means the presence of a ‘genial leader'.

The Italian Left in exile around the magazine Bilan continued the work of the Communist Left with the watchword of the times: "Don't betray". The reader will find the details of this period in the ICC pamphlet called La Gauche Communiste  d'Italie (available in French) .

In order to continue its activity during a period much more difficult than the present one, it rejected the method which consisted of turning Lenin into a bible. It gave itself the task of drawing the lessons of the defeat by sifting the experience ‘without censorship or ostracism' (Bilan, no.1). In exile, the Fraction enriched its contributions with the Luxemburgist heritage through, amongst other things, the support of militants in Belgium who rallied to the Italian Left. As the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, it took up the whole work of the Left: by rejecting the defense of national liberation struggles; by putting into question the ‘proletarian' nature of the unions (without ending up with a defini­tive position); by analyzing the degeneration of the Russian revolution, the role of the state and the party. It outlined the historic perspective of the period as a course towards world imperialist war and this was done with such a degree of clarity that it was one of the only organizations to remain faithful to proletarian principles, by denouncing anti-fascism, popular fronts and participation in the defense of ‘Republican' Spain.

The war numerically weakened the Fraction but the ICP completely hides the fact that it did maintain its political activity during the war, as witnessed by the bulletins, leaflets, Conferences and constitution (in 1942) of the French circle of the Communist Left which published Internationalisme. Towards the end of the war, the Fraction excluded one of its leaders, Vercessi, condemning his participation in the Brussels ‘Anti-Fascist Committee', (just as it had excluded the minority which let itself be dragged into the anti-fascist enrolment for the war in Spain). In contrast, the ICP, being formed in Italy in 1943, flirted with the ‘Partisans' and made Appeals for a united class front with the Stalinist CP and the Socialist Party of Italy (see the article ‘The ICP: What it claims to be and what it is', in this issue of the IR).

The formation of the ICP

The International Communist Party of Italy was formed on the basis of a heterogeneous regroupment: it demanded the dissolution of the Fraction, pure and simple, while groups of the ‘Mezziogiorno', who had ambiguous relations with anti fascism, the Trotskyists and even the Stalinist CP, were integrated, albeit with Bordiga's caution, as constitutive groups. Vercessi, and the minority excluded on the question of Spain, were likewise integrated without discussion.

"The new party isn't a political unity but a conglomerate, an addition of currents and tendencies which cannot help but clash. The elimination of one or other current is inevitable. Sooner or later a political and organizational delimitation will impose itself". (Internationalisme, no. 7, February 1946).

Indeed, the Damen tendency split from the Party in 1952, taking the majority of the members and the newspaper Battaglia Comunista and the publication Prometeo.[1]

All the political and theoretical work of the Fraction disappeared so that the ICP could be formed in an immediatist and unprincipled regroupment. The ICP turned its back on the whole heritage of Bilan: on anti-fascism, the decadence of capit­alism, the unions, national liberation, the meaning of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the state in the period of transition. All this heritage the ICP considers ‘deviations' from the ‘invariant' program. For the new ICP the Stalinist parties are ‘reformist'; Russia is a less dangerous imperialism than enemy no.1, US imperialism; the historic decadence of capitalism becomes ‘cyclical and structural crisis'; the theoretical acquisitions of Bilan on the program, are replaced by a return to ‘Leninist tactics'. Thus the ICP helped to take debates in the revolutionary movement back twenty years, to the time of the CI, as though nothing had happened between 1926 and 1945.

While Bilan insisted that a party can only be formed in a period of mounting class struggle, the ICP proclaimed itself the ‘Party', in a period of utter reaction. Thus, they created a ‘tradition' in which anybody can call themselves a ‘party', at any time.

The re-examination of the lessons of the past which Bilan carried out became, in the ICP, the ‘invariant' program, ‘fixed for all time', ‘undiscussed and undiscussable'. Instead of a critical examination of the past, a ‘restored' marxism was created, with an ‘immutable' nature, transformed into a liturgy inside a monolithic structure where only the voice of the master, Bordiga, was permitted to be heard. On the basis of a theoretical regression and an absolute isolation, with the germs of activism and an ambiguity on principles from its birth, with the internal structure of a sect, the ICP could only become sclerotic and paralyzed. What Internationalisme wrote in 1947 has become prophetic:

"More than its political errors, it is its organizational conceptions and its relations with the rest of the class, which make us doubt the possibility of the ICP of Italy correcting itself. The ideas which came to the fore at the end of the revolutionary life of the Bolshevik party and which marked the beginning of its decay: the forbidding of Fractions, the suppression of free expression in the party and in the class, the cult of discipline, the exaltation of the infallible leader, today serve as the very foundations of the ICP in Italy. If it persists on this path, the ICP will not be able to serve the cause of socialism. It is with a full consciousness of the whole gravity of the situation that we cry: ‘Stop there. You must turn back, for the slope here is fatal'." (Internationalisme, ‘Present-Day Problems of the Workers' Movement', August 1947).

Today, the ‘tactical' plan which the ICP searches for like a Holy Grail is only a subterfuge to avoid the real, necessary theoretical and political work.

The reawakening of the class struggle

When the period of reconstruction came to an end with the resurfacing of the crisis of capitalist decadence, when the first wave of class struggle, from the end of the sixties to the mid-seventies took place, marking the end of the period of counter-revolution, the ICP, faithful to the diktat of Bordiga that the crisis would break out in... -- 1975, didn't make the connection. Fixed in its ‘invariant' immobility, it wasn't to be found during the 1968 strikes in France or in Italy in 1969, but it was waiting for "the masses to line up behind its banners". The over­flowing of the unions, the rejection of parliamentarism, and the growing disillusion with the results of ‘national liberation struggles', which these battles produced, found no response within the ICP. It didn't speak to the new generation with the voice of Bilan, and Internation­alisme, but with that of the mistakes of the CI, elevated into dogmas. The total incomprehension of this period is today summed up by the fact that discontented militants reproach the ICP for not having supported the "glorious struggle for national liberation in Vietnam".

This first wave of struggle against the crisis didn't leave sufficiently solid acquisitions to ensure a political stability to the new groups and elements who emerged. The situation had to mature, and revolutionary minorities had to retie the historic thread by working towards political clarification.

In order to ensure the necessary critical reexamination of the past, in order to avoid the dispersion of revolutionary energies, an International Conference of discussion was called for in 1976 with political criteria defining the framework of the Communist Left. The ICC particip­ated in this work with all its strength. The Conferences (see the minutes in the Bulletins of the International Conferences, see the IR nos.16, 17, and 22), like that at Zimmerwald at the time of World War 1, attempted to provide a framework for the decantation which would inevitably be produced within the movement in a period of crisis and upheaval.

In a period of mounting struggles, the possibility and necessity of working towards the regroupment of revolutionary forces is the expression and the spur for a process of unification of the international working class. But for the ICP, the very word ‘regroupment' is blasphemous, for it is already the Party.

For the ICP, we were only the "debris of the revival of the class". The party rejected any idea of a conference of international discussion, considering that between revolutionary groups, it is possible to have relations of force: the "fottenti e fottuti" (crudely speaking, the fuckers and the flicked). Indeed, why discuss when the ICP has already so infused the truth that the militants of the organization mustn't buy the press of other ‘rival' organizations, because that would only give them money!?

"The Party can only grow on its own basis, not through a ‘confrontation' of points of view, but through a clash against others, even those who seem close". (‘On the Road Towards the Compact and Powerful Party of Tomorrow', Programme  Comuniste, no.76)

Today we can see how the ICP has grown on its own basis:

This sectarian attitude isn't the pre­rogative of the ICP. The ex-Pour Une Intervention Communiste (PIC), the Fomento Obrero Revolucionario (FOR). the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste (GCI), all considered these Conferences as a ‘dialogue of the deaf'. You only discuss when you agree! It's more peaceful! Even the PCInt-Battaglia Comunista who put out the first appeal for the Conferences hasn't truly under­stood why they were necessary. For the PCInt, since it is also imbued with Bordigist self-satisfaction, they had to serve as a spring-board towards a "common practical work" in order to respond to the "social democratizations of the CP's" (see the letter of appeal for the 1976 Conference). In order to convince the PCInt to invite other Bordigist parties, this organization had to be pushed, quite hard, and it was only too happy when they turned the invitation down.

But even a beginning of political clarification was too much for the PCInt and the Communist Workers' Organization. They ‘excluded' the ICC at the 3rd Conference because of its disagreements on the question of the party, not after a profound discussion, but a priori, after a maneuver worthy of the most sinister intrigues of a Zinoviev in the degen­erating CI. What a fine school Bord­igism is! Especially if you touch their fetish, the party -- which they alone know how to build, with the results that are now well known. At a recent meeting, called the ‘4th International Conference of the Communist Left', which Battaglia sees as "an indisputable step forward from the preceding conferences" (Batt­aglia Comunista, 10.11.82), Battaglia and the CWO "began to deal with the real problems of the future party" ... with a group of Iranian students who have hardly broken from thirdworldism. After all, everyone has a people to liberate: Programma its Palestinians, Battaglia its Iranians.

But during this period, 1976-1980, the ICP did, despite it all, begin to feel that it was time to ‘move'. Having turned its back on international political clarification, and without a coherent analysis of the new period, the ICP simply swapped its immobility for frenzied activism: two sides of the same coin. Today, seeing the organization in tatters, what does the ICP emphasise? ‘Tactics' once again -- and not only for the national question, but for everything.

The ICP transformed the anti-parliamentarism of the Abstentionist Fraction into a ‘tactic' and then called for participation in elect­ions and referendums. It calls for the defense of ‘democratic rights' for immigrant workers, including the right to vote. Why? So that it can afterwards tell them not to vote? Now we see what happens ‘afterwards'. ‘Anti-narliamentarism' has become purely verbal, separated from any coherence about the historic period of capitalism.

Union ‘tactics', frontist committees, crit­ical support for terrorist groups, like Action Directe in France - it's OK as long as it helps to ‘organize' the masses.

And in Poland, the ICP saw the saboteurs of class autonomy, Solidarnosc and its advisors in the KOR, as the ‘organizers' of the class movement -- the ones who did everything they could to drag the movement onto the terrain of defending the national economy. And the ICP calls for the ‘legalization' of Solidar­nosc, alongside the democratic bourgeoisie!

Not wanting to discuss with the "debris of the class revival", the ICP preferred to recruit from the residues of the decomposi­tion of Maoism. When the ICP played the policeman, the ‘steward' against the ‘fasc­ist danger' at demonstrations of immigrant rent strikers in France -- which in fact meant forbidding the distribution of the revolutionary press -- this was a symbol of its descent down the slippery slope of leftism.

Perspectives

The ICP should have rejected the position of E1 Oumami a long time ago, before this gangrene penetrated the organization. E1 Oumami sings the siren song that lures the ICP towards the coherence of the bourgeoisie. The ICP can no longer take refuge in incoherence and jargon. Patch-up jobs don't last long in the present period. In the first place, the ICP and the whole revolutionary milieu have to recognize clearly that in this epoch internationalism can only mean a total break with all forms of nationalism, an intrans­igent struggle against any national movement, which today can only be a moment in the str­uggle between imperialist powers large or small. Any wavering on this question immed­iately opens a breach to the pressure of bourgeois ideology which will quickly and ineluctably lead a group towards the counter-revolution.

It's not too late for the ICP to draw back, on condition that it has the strength and the resolve to look reality in the face, to re-examine the lessons of the past, to re­view its own origins in a critical manner.

There have been other departures from the ICP over the past year, but we don't know exactly what has become of these militants. In Marseille there survives a circle which says ‘the formal party is dead, only the historic party lives on.' This Bordigist vocabulary isn't very clear to common mort­als: does the ‘historic party' mean the Bordigist program? Marxism? What bal­ance-sheet has to be drawn and why are these elements silent today?

Others left the ICP because of the stifling organizational atmosphere and out of instinct­ive reaction against degeneration. But you have to go further than a mere observation. You have to go to the roots of the disease.

You can't stop half-way, in the belief that you are ‘restoring' a ‘true' Bordigism which doesn't exist, the pure Bordigism ‘of Bord­iga', which never existed. This path leads to the land of small sects, to tinier and tinier ‘Partiti', each one claiming the leg­itimate title, each one ignoring the others. We've seen this with numerous Bordigist splits over the years. Each one claims to be the true ‘leadership' that will guide the working class to paradise.

Political clarification can't come out of patch-up jobs, or out of isolation. It can only be done with and in the revolutionary milieu. The spell of silence has to be broken, by opening up a public debate, in the press, in meetings, to finish with the errors of the past, to ensure that this decantation takes place in a conscious way, to avoid the dispersion and loss of revol­utionary energies. This is the only way to clear the ground for the regroupment of revolutionaries, which will contribute to the unification of the international work­ing class. This is the task of the hour; this is the real lesson of the crisis of the ICP.

JA

---

[1] After the split Bordiga's party became the Partito Communista Internationale. Many ex-members of the Fraction left with Damen and the program of Battaglia Communista (PCInt) in 1952 contained certain important positions of Bilan on the national question, the union question, on Russia. Unfortunately, the thirty years that separate us from the beginnings of Battaglia saw this group get caught up in a process of sclerosis. This can be easily seen by reading its press today and comparing it to the platform of 1952.  

Defensive struggles, revolutionary struggles: the dynamic of the working class

The "Groupe Communiste Internationaliste", formed in 1979 by militants who had just split from the ICC, is a typical illustration of the weakness and difficulties of today's revolutionary milieu. These comrades' ill-considered creation of a ‘tendency' within our organization on an irregular and incoherent basis; their hasty departure, without trying to conduct a debate on principle which would have made it possible to clarify their diver­gences fully, expressed some of the most wide­spread faults in the revolutionary milieu today -- immediatism, voluntarism and sectarianism. Their starting point was, in fact, an impatience with the stagnation of the class struggle in the mid-70s. Disappointed by the proletariat, they took refuge in the Bordigist vision which makes the Party the ‘dens ex machina' of the class movement. In the same way, frustrated by their inability to immediate­ly convince the rest of the organization, they left before even drawing up a document summarizing their disagreements. Rather than under­take serious revolutionary work (which, in a living proletarian organization, also implies defending minority positions) they preferred to abandon themselves to the typically leftist and student delights of multiplying little circles where each individual can indulge him­self whole-heartedly in the petty-bourgeois ambition to be ‘master in his own home'. In a word, to sectarianism.

Following its original trajectory, the GCI has continued a systematic denigration of the ICC, constantly looking for counter-examples to disprove our analyses, constantly deforming our positions rather than taking up a real and fruitful polemic. Moreover, in arguing their basic positions, these comrades have been led to develop vague theories and abstract schemas to which they "adapt" reality. In so doing, they have rapidly abandoned any real under­standing of the working class and its move­ment; they have thrown into the dustbin of history whole chunks of the workers' movement and, in particular, the Second International.

As with many of today's revolutionary groups, this is at the core of the GCI's confusions on a whole series of' problems -- especially on the process of the development of working class consciousness and the role of revolutionary minorities, on the nature and the role of class violence, on the present perspectives for the class struggle and for our period's historic direction -- confusions which prevent it from contributing usefully to the coming battle.

This is what we aim to demonstrate in the following article.

Class consciousness and the role of the Party

The GCI[1] is perfectly aware that, unlike the bourgeois revolutions, the proletarian revolution will be a conscious one:

"The conditions and determinations of the proletarian struggle are thus radically different from those which conditioned the class struggle in the past. For the proletariat, which has no new system of exploitation to impose, the knowledge of its own being in movement (and therefore of its own goal) is necessary to its victory." (La Communiste, No 6, page 3) Unfortunately, while the GCI accepts this general premise, it immediately deforms it by ‘adapting' it to its own vision of class and party, The GCI is firmly anchored in the conviction that only a minority of the proletar­iat can arrive at a clear awareness of the means and ends of the revolution: "to demand that there be a general consciousness, in the sense that all workers are conscious of the objective and the means to achieve it, and of their accumulated experience, is to ask the impossible; the very conditions of exploitat­ion prevent it." (Rupture avec le CCI, page 10) Class consciousness is seen as the prerogative of those ("communist nuclei, groups, fractions, even individuals") who are to make up the world communist party. As for the great mass of workers, it is only later that they will acquire this precious gift, after the seizure of power and during the proletarian dictatorship. The GCI thus finds itself caught in two mutually exclusive affirmations: on the one hand, that "for the proletariat, the knowledge of its own being in movement (and therefore of its own goal) is necessary to its victory," and on the other, that "to demand that there be a general consciousness, in the sense that all workers are conscious ... is to ask the impossible." In the use and distorted meaning it makes of the word "all", the GCI plunges further into the confusion it thinks it is escaping. Do we have to remind them that, for marxism, "all the workers" is not a mere arithmetical sum of individuals? This "all" refers to the class as a social entity, with its own historical dynamic, It refers to the consciousness of the class as a whole, not to the consciousness of each worker as an individual, This difficulty in grasping the concept of the class as a whole, a difficulty common to every kind of petty-bourgeois approach, presents the GCI with an insuperable problem which it ‘gets out of' only by resorting to another old aberration.

How then, according to the GCI, will the proletariat be able to make the revolution? Essentially, this job falls to the party.

This position presents a number of difficult­ies in dealing with more concrete problems. If the workers are no better than unconscious sheep, why should they follow the party, why should they follow revolutionary slogans rather than those of the bourgeoisie? Why did the workers in Germany not follow their parties (KPD, KAPD) when these latter called the March Action in 1921? "There was a putsch because of a lack of preparation (eg the VKPD's overnight changes in position), and errors in appreciating the state of mind of the masses, and the balance of forces between the two antagonistic classes." (Le Communiste No 7, page 16).

What did this preparation (a success in Russia, a failure in Germany) consist of? In the March Action, there was no "serious conspiracy," no "insurrectional plot, no massive insurrection, and still less any weak­ening of the bourgeoisie," (ibid), This is how the GCI ‘gets out of' the difficulty it finds itself in -- by completely eliminating the factor of class consciousness.

The factors determining the victory of the insurrection are reduced: for the party, to a "conspiracy", a "plot", and for the class, to a "massive insurrection". Full stop.

If the GCI eliminates class consciousness so easily from its analysis of revolutionary movements, when they talk about it so much in other texts, this is fundamentally because they do not know what they are talking about, and because they do not understand what class consciousness is.

Class consciousness is the working class' consciousness of its own being, of its per­spectives, and of the methods it adopts for carrying them out. It is not awareness of an object outside the proletariat, but a self-awareness, and is therefore accompanied by a change within the proletariat. Class conscious­ness only exists through a conscious class. The class being conscious does not mean that each worker, taken individually, has this consciousness, but it is a material fact that a conscious class means the class affirming itself through the destruction of the capital­ist system. Any attempt to dissociate class consciousness, the conscious class, and the material destruction of capitalism, is simply to reintroduce the separations and specializations of bourgeois ideology into revolutionary theory.

Collective class consciousness cannot, then, by its very nature, be the property of a minority. The party, or the revolutionary nuclei, does indeed have a theoretical understanding of the problems of the revolution, but they cannot claim to be the exclusive owners of class consciousness.

In fact, the GCI does not see where class con­sciousness comes from, nor how it develops. On the pretext that "action precedes con­sciousness", they refuse to understand that class consciousness is formed in the daily struggles of the class, and from the inevit­able reflection it is obliged to undertake on its own experience. Nor does the GCI see that it is because the proletariat gains in aware­ness that it is able to modify its methods of struggle. The proletariat will not undertake a "massive insurrection" under the pressure of misery alone, as the GCI seems to think. The proletariat will only make the revolution if it knows what it is doing and where it is going.

On this point, the GCI likes to spread the idea that the ICC is, amongst other things, profoundly "democratic". "With its cult of generalized consciousness (which it turns into a fetish before which it falls down on its knees), the ICC has fallen straight back into ‘bourgeois democratic' ideology." (Rupture avecle CCI, page 11). Elsewhere, the GCI affirms that "the minority aspect of class conscious­ness will certainly remain until an advanced stage of the revolutionary process, to be spread to ever-widening sections of workers during the period of dictatorship. The communist revolution is thus mainly undemocratic".

Contrary to what the GCI thinks, the question is not one of ‘minority' or ‘majority' in itself. We have no attachment to scenes of voting mechanisms, of forests of raised hands, of fine majorities carrying the day but are concerned with understanding the conditions that make the revolution possible. Neither the revolution, nor the transformation that follows, will be possible thanks simply to a ‘conscious minority'. The transformation of capitalist society, whose blind forces domin­ate the proletariat, as they do the rest of society, will not be done by decree; it is possible only through the proletariat's conscious and collective action. The guarant­ees of society's transformation are the prolet­ariat's mobilization and its ability to take on complete power. This is why the dictatorship of the proletariat will mean workers' democrac­y; that is to say a real equality, an unprece­dented liberty for the whole working class.

This will also mean the rejection of all violence within the proletariat. While on the subject, we might ask the GCI what they mean concretely when they say that the communist revolution will be anti-democratic even within the proletariat?

The GCI reproaches the ICC just as virulently for our "assemblyism", "formalism" or "general assembly fetishism" -- the exact term varies from day to day -- in brief, the fact that we propagandize, in our general intervention, for particular organizational forms for the workers' struggle: that is, today, general assemblies, strike committees, elected and revocable delegates, which foreshadow the Workers Councils of the revolutionary period ... The GCI argues that since all organizational forms (Councils, strike committees, unions, etc) can be recuperated by the bourgeoisie (which is quite true), the form is therefore unimportant, and all that matters is the content. The GCI has thus developed a schema which obliterates the link between form and content.

We are not attached to an organizational form as such, but to a content: the development of class consciousness through the workers' active participation in the struggle, their collect­ive functioning, the supersession of the separation between ‘economic' and ‘political', the breakdown of the division of workers by sector or by factory. There are not any number of organizations that correspond to this content, and in any case not the trade unions (even if the GCI considers some of them to be "classist"), nor the industrial unions. A political group's lack of clarity on the organizations where the revolutionary dynamic will find its expression is dangerous. The GCI's position on today's struggles' organizational forms has led them to a hopelessly inadequate intervention in relation to Poland. So on the one hand, as they try to prove that "it is impossible to say in advance and outside real life that the ‘class union', ‘council', ‘commune' or ‘soviet' forms have completely exhausted their historical cycle and will no longer appear as expressions of the proletar­ian movement" (Le Communiste, No 4, page 29), so instead of denouncing the free unions, the GCI writes: "These (free unions) can indeed be real workers' organizations, wide, and open to all workers in struggle, coordinating and centralizing the strike committees, but, they may also, under the joint pressure of the authorities and the ‘dissidents' be transformed into organisms of the bourgeois state". (Le Communiste, No 7, page 4.).

On the other hand, the GCI has been content to insist on the movement's massive and centralized character, without bringing themselves to talk about the forms of organization that this presupposes -- general assemblies, elected and revocable delegates -- doubtless because this reality was too ‘democratic' for their taste?

The GCI's silence as to the struggle's organizational forms is all the deeper since, in the final analysis, they are not interested in understanding the movement of the working class. As far as they are con­cerned, it is the party that organizes the class.

The concrete role of the Party

"(Communists) are not opposed to the numerous associations that appear amongst the proletarians, and which struggle for particular objectives (...). They act to raise their level, to generalize their tasks and objectives, to melt them together organically: that is to say, to unite them in one organization, or at least, if this is not possible directly, to centralize them around the most advanced pole". (Rupture avec le CCI, page 8).

The GCI's perfect ideal is the party tending to centralize the whole class -- the function fulfilled by the First International in the 19th century of "organizing and coordinating the workers' forces for the battle that awaits them." (Marx, 1871). The GCI is completely unaware that the revolution of the working class on the one hand, and the change in the historical period on the other, have modified the historic role of revolutionaries:

"In the early days of the workers' movement, the necessity for distinct communist organizations fulfilling a particular function was not felt in an urgent way. The primary task of organization that revolutionaries like Marx gave themselves was to try to make the proletariat, into an organized and autonomous force, by uniting the dispersed class expressions existing at the time. This was the course followed by the First Internation­al which was as much a political party in the strict sense of the term as a general organization of the class (workers' associations and societies, unions, etc). With the Second International, a greater separat­ion was put into operation between, on the one hand, the political party, and on the other, more general organisms such as the unions. However, the immaturity of the burgeoning proletariat and the possibility of waging permanent struggles for reforms, and therefore of creating and keeping alive permanent organizations of struggle (unions), gave a great weight to the ‘organizing' role of revolutionaries. The parties themselves were mass organizations, linked to the unions. This practice was reflected in the ideas that marxists held about their role. In fact, throughout this period, in the absence of decisive revolutionary experiences (the Paris Commune being an isolated event), marxists tended to see the political party as an organism which would more or less progressively organize the majority of the class and which because of this mass nature would be led to exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat. This con­ception was particularly strengthened during the period of social democracy ....

But after 1905 in Russia, this conception began to break down. The entry of capital­ism into its period of decline, the opening of the epoch of world revolution marked by the first world war, definitively and profoundly changed the conditions of the workers' struggle and therefore equally the characteristics of its organizations. Capital­ism's crisis prevented the survival of permanent struggles, and the mass organizations (unions and parties) were engulfed by the state apparatus. At the same time, the greater maturity of the proletariat led it to launch itself into revolutionary confront­ations and to spontaneously create unitary class organizations abolishing the division between politics and economics; the Workers Councils. The Workers' Councils are "the discovered form of the dictator­ship of the proletariat" (Lenin). In this situation, the real function of revolution­ary organizations became much clearer: revolutionaries, even if they still formed parties, constituted a minority whose impact as ‘organizers' was reduced vis-a-vis the mass of the proletariat in movement. Instead their specific political role of developing class consciousness became crucial for the progress of the revolution...." (quoted from ‘The Necessity and Function of the Party', World Revolution No 55).

In the present period, when the proletariat is tending to launch itself into massive struggles and the workers to organize in their millions, the vision of a party unifying the workers' associations in "one organization" betrays a deep-seated megalomania and anachronism in those who put it forward. The GCI thinks it has found a historical prop for this conception: the KAPD in Germany, from 1920-21, which worked essentially in the ‘Unionen' (AAUD). This organizational form has won its approval for two reasons: first, because the ‘Unionen' were strictly linked to a party and second, because there was a political criterion for membership -- acceptance of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

So the GCI glorifies the KAPD: "In the KAPD's practice, we cannot but find indications as to the content of the revolutionary movement to come," (Le Communiste No 7, pages 18-19). Blinded by the fact of having finally discover­ed the organizational form they were looking for and a party that created it, the GCI is incapable of appreciating to what extent both the creation of the ‘Unionen' and the KAPD's intervention were in many respects the results of the weakness of the revolut­ionary movement in Germany. The ‘Unionen' were created after the defeat of the Workers' Councils, which the bourgeoisie had succeeded in neutralizing. The political disorientation of the proletariat that followed was reflected in these bodies, which were clearly a withdrawal to the factory and which the workers saw simply as more radical trade unions. This disorientation was also to influence the intervention of revolutionaries: the KAPD's intervention was a voluntarist attempt to rebuild the mass movement thanks to the ‘Unionen'. The KAPD's centralization was only the mirror image of the lack of any real centralization in the class, and of the dispersal of its forces. In the end, the KAPD's putschist attitudes (in the March action) only led to defeat.

Armed with all this ‘historical-theoretical' baggage, the GCI sees its role as being primarily one of "organizing the class" - or at least those elements that will let themselves be organized. Its efforts have come to nothing either because its ‘calls' have met no echo in the groups concerned (eg their call for a "coordination of workers in struggle" in Le Communiste No 2, criticized in International­isme No 35), or because its various committees, set up on an artificial basis and lacking any real internal life, rapidly succumbed to their own contradictions. These disastrous experiences should be enough to show the GCI that this is not the direction for revolutionary work to take today. In the present period, revolut­ionaries must intervene to defend clear perspe­ctives within the general struggles of the class; something the GCI had practically stopped doing, up to the movements in Belgium at the beginning of 1982, being too preoccup­ied with the organization and the activation of their phantom ‘committees'.

The working class

Carried away by their search for "active" and "historic" minorities, the GCI has been led to define the working class in a manner peculiarly their own: "The ICC is unaware that the existence of the working class does not appear in the static numbering of proletarians, nor even in a majority of them, but often in minorities that express the tendency towards the constit­ution of the class," (Rupture avec le CCI, page 3). The GCI has thus developed a completely abstract vision of the working class. A vision which is foreign to Marxism because it simply wipes out the class' economic determinations. Where does this "movement" that they make a criterion for defining the class come from; what is the material motive force for the struggle, if not the proletarians' exploitat­ion?

This is the definition of the working class that has propped up the GCI's intervention which has been progressively centered upon certain sectors of the working class, espec­ially the unemployed, presumably considered likely to break out into motion more rapidly than workers employed in the industrial con­centrations. We can see how far the GCI has gone in its worship of "movement", irrespective of the social forces behind it, in its posit­ion on the Berlin squatters' struggle: "The struggle in Berlin, conducted above all by the youth, is in fact part of the proletariat, because the occupations correspond to an authoritarian satisfaction of a general need of the workers, and because to carry out these occupations, the movement must confront the bourgeois state and call into question the sacred principle of private property," (Action Communiste No 4, page 6).

If the GCI has rejected "static economic determinations" this is the better to glorify a movement on the grounds that it confronts the state, and in the name of purely moral criteria: "authoritarian satisfaction", "sacred principle of private property," etc...

The squatters' movement expresses the dead-end that capitalism has come to, a dead-end which provokes convulsions throughout society.

Nevertheless, such movements do not bear with­in themselves the supersession of this system. Only the working class contains this super­session, and can and must develop its struggles in order to unify all these social revolts. The GCI prefers to give the squatters' movement its own perspectives -- centralizing housing struggles across national frontiers. The GCI's blind attraction for ‘everything that moves' makes them call into question an essential basis of marxism and of the revolutionary struggle: that the working class is today's only revolutionary class.

Class violence

Since the GCI does not understand the working class' ability to organize itself unitarily, and develop its class consciousness, no more does it grasp how the proletariat will be able to beat the bourgeoisie by means of its organized class violence. This leads it into a number of confusions which all have in common the idea that physical confrontations will play a central part in the development of the revolut­ionary perspective. The GCI also defends ‘workers' terrorism' and insists on the need for ‘military preparation' of the insurrection, and for the proletariat to develop a ‘red terror'. Because we do not share these ideas, the GCI accuses us of ‘pacifism' and ‘legalism' - "The ICC has never disengaged itself from social-pacifism," (Rupture avec le CCI, page 14).

The ICC is in no doubt that the permanent struggle between two irremediably antagonistic classes is, and that the revolution will be violent. But the real question is: "What role does violence play in the proletarian revolution?"

To this question, Rosa Luxemburg replied:

"In the previous bourgeois revolutions, it was the bourgeois parties that took charge of the political education and leadership of the revolutionary masses and, moreover, it was simply a matter of overthrowing the old gov­ernment; and so short-lived street fighting on the barricades was the most, appropriate form of revolutionary struggle. Today, the working class has no choice but to educate itself, to unify and to lead itself in the course of the struggle; and so the revolution is directed as much against capitalist exploitation as against, the old state regime. So much so, that the mass strike appears as a natural means of recruiting, organizing and preparing for the revolution the largest possible proletarian strata, as well as being a means for under­mining and destroying the old state, and for limiting capitalist, exploitation (...) What was once the main outward sign of the revolut­ion -- fighting on the barricades and direct confrontation with the forces of the state  -- is in the present Revolution, no more than the culminating point, a phase in the pro­cess of the mass proletarian struggle." (Mass Strike, Party and Unions).

The battles for the proletarian revolution may well be bloodier and more violent than those the bourgeoisie went through in making its revolution. But it is the proletariat's consciousness and its ability to organize that will determine how effective its violence is, and not any ‘military preparation in itself', as the GCI thinks. This is why the proletarian party's essential role in preparing the insurr­ection, as at a more general level, lies in the development of class consciousness.

The GCI's incomprehension of the question of class violence consequently determines certain errors in its intervention. According to the GCI, the working class will have to go through a specific apprenticeship in violence. This leads them to applaud every violent act carried out by isolated groups of workers. "Violence is today an immediate need for every struggle that wants to strike home," (see the article on Longwy-Denain in Le Communiste No 1). And because they are afraid that this might weaken their propaganda for violence, they absolutely refuse to consider that these violent outbursts often combine a real combativity with an equally real lack of perspectives, as in the steel struggles in France or Belgium. The GCI's intervention does not correspond to the real needs of the class.

The working class does not need to learn how to be violent, any more than it needs to learn how to go on strike. The working class produces revolutionary organizations because it needs to understand and analyze the situation, and to trace clear perspectives for its struggles -- not to applaud its more immediately spectacular actions.

In its leaflets, the GCI is constantly advanc­ing slogans such as "illegal restraint of the bosses" or "destruction of stockpiles". And yet the ‘exploits' of rank-and-file unionism (destruction of banks, tax-centers and company headquarters, or illegal restraint of bosses) should be enough to make them understand that these slogans are not in themselves, any more than any others, a sign of the seriousness of the proletariat's autonomous struggle.

An organizing activism, a worship of partial movements, an apology for ‘minorities' and violence in a context where the working class' immaturity has so far left room for illusions on the party ‘leading the class', ‘organizing it', or ‘centralizing its violence' -- these are the factors which have enabled the GCI's intervention to have produced a relative and ephemeral increase in numbers in Belgium. The GCI's foundations are shaky. We have just seen that they are built on a basic miscomprehension of the nature of the working class, of how the class develops its consciousness and of the role of revolutionary organizations and of the party. This is, in fact, an incomprehension of the dynamic of the class struggle.

The dynamic of class struggle

When we leave the realm of definitions and theory, which has become a pure abstraction for the GCI, we can see the full extent of these theoretical errors. The GCI is, in fact, unable to offer any serious analysis of the movement of the class struggle. The main reason is their refusal to take account of the objective conditions, ie the material conditions which determine, within the capital­ist system, a struggle's potential -- or its limits. This idealist approach appears as much in their historical incomprehension (the difference between struggles in capitalism's ascendant and decadent periods) as in their incomprehension of the struggle's development at an international level today.

Rejection of the Second International and the trade unions

The GCI has rapidly rejected the concept that forms the mortar of the ICC's platform -- the division of capitalism into ascendant and decadent periods. To be precise, they have never produced a real critique, preferring to let drop the odd word of this here and there[2]. They also reject the implications of this periodiza­tion for the potential of the workers' struggle. That is to say: in the 19th century, the period of capitalism's expansion, the revolut­ion was not directly on the agenda. In the context of this expansion, the proletarian struggle could culminate in reforms, improve­ments in its conditions, whether on the econ­omic level (reduction in working hours, increase in wages) or on the political (rights of assoc­iation, freedom of meeting and of the press, extension of the right to vote, etc). Over and above these immediate aims it was through these struggles that the proletarians developed their organization, unity and class consciousness; through this experience, the revolutionary struggle was prepared. In this period, the social-democracy and the unions were the organizations that regrouped workers around both the immediate and long-term objectives. A century later, the GCI considers that any reform that capitalism could integrate was anti-proletar­ian to the core: "Following the improvement in working conditions and the rise in wages made possible by the high level of capitalist accumulation, the workers' struggles were, on each occasion, transformed into struggles for reforms (and therefore destroyed as proletar­ian struggles), factors for capitalist expan­sion and ‘progress'," (Le Communiste No 6, page 32). So what should the proletariat fight for? According to the GCI: "our class can only realize one kind of partial conquest; when the workers wrench a reduction in the rate of exploitation from capital's grasp," (Le Commun­iste to No 4, page 14). We have already answered this hopeless absurdity, "Outside its revolut­ionary moments, the workers' struggle has never had the aim of putting an end to the growth of the rate of exploitation, for the very good reason that this would mean the end of capitalist accumulation, and so the end of capitalism itself," (‘Lutte revendicative et Revolution', Internationalisme No 40). This analysis of the GCI's is a good illustration of their approach, which delights in elaborat­ing sterile schemas. Perhaps the reality of the struggle at the end of the 19th century should come into it? It is simply dumped in the dust­bin of history. The proletarian organisations of the time? Social-democracy and the unions are decreed ‘counter-revolutionary', the former from its birth, the latter once they were legalized by the bourgeois state. Quite apart from its political grotesqueness, this example is significant. What the GCI rejects, in fact, is that the working class is not only a revolut­ionary, but also an exploited class. This implies that it struggles firstly for immed­iate objectives (for the improvement or against the deterioration of its living conditions), and that the struggle's revolutionary potent­ial can only be realized in given historical circumstances -- the period of capitalist decadence.

For the GCI, the working class ought to be revolutionary in all historical conditions, and in each particular struggle. They try to ram reality into this schema by affirming in every one of their utterances that the workers' struggle today is "for an increase in wages and unemployment benefits," "for a reduction in working hours," thus attributing to every struggle an offensive character direc­ted against the bourgeoisie on the economic terrain. This vision is, in many respects, profoundly absurd. Even today, when determined struggles of the class contain the question of the Revolution directly within them, every struggle has defensive aspects. It is the resistance to the degradation of its living conditions that pushes the working class to develop its combat to the point where it becomes a revolutionary struggle, when the defensive aspect, while always present, takes second place. The transformation from defensive to revolutionary struggle demands a whole maturation on the part of the working class, its struggle, and its consciousness. The GCI's vision, which only recognizes as ‘struggle' those movements that pose the question of revolution and which see the revolution con­tained directly in every struggle and every factory, is a wholly idealist one.

Internationalization of struggle

The GCI generally ignores the problem of the struggle's generalization. But when it does consider the problem, it always does so incorrectly because it does not understand the material conditions that determine the potent­ial of the present workers' struggles.

The GCI thinks that the revolution is on the agenda in an identical manner throughout the world, with some secondary differences between various countries. For us, the fate of the Revolution will be determined in the central countries of capitalism, where the proletariat is the most concentrated and the most experien­ced -- and where the bourgeoisie is the most highly developed, with all that this implies. This is why we have always placed the resurgence of international class struggle in 1968, when the whole of Europe was shaken by social convulsions. We explicitly reject the theory of the ‘weak link', which sees the Revolution breaking out in those conditions where the bourgeoisie is weak and ill-equipped against the proletariat. We have reaffirmed this posit­ion in trying to understand the perspective opened up by the mass strike in Poland in 1980-81. We have insisted that the development of the struggle in Poland, like the Revolution, was essentially dependent on the proletariat in the central countries of capitalism taking up the struggle.

As far as this question goes, the GCI has up to now demonstrated a hopeless inability to under­stand the dynamic of the class struggle in the present period; what are its important movements? Where, within the international movement of the working class, are we to find the focus of the confrontation between bourgeoisie and proletariat? Etc, etc...

So, on the pretext that there were struggles before 1968, the GCI thinks it's clever to deny the significance of the period opened up in 1968. In the same way, when we analyze Poland as "the most important workers' movement since 1917," the GCI (more to be ‘original' than to offer another analysis) proclaims that "this bombastic and apologetic affirmation really actively forgets (no less!) the important class movements which in recent years have shaken the capitalist world from Latin America to Iran, from Turkey to Korea, and from Italy to China)," (Le Communiste No 13, page 13). The GCI needn't worry, we haven't forgotten these struggles. But not all these movements are of the same importance[3]. It's not a question of judging a movement's characteristics in themselves (from this point of view, the struggle in Latin America has often been more violent and more general than those in Europe), but of seeing how they do or do not integrate into the gener­al dynamic of the world working class, taking account of the maturity of the situation -- on a historical level. From this point of view, Poland, like the 1968 movements in Europe, represents a qualitative step forward for the whole movement and for the consciousness of the world proletariat.

The GCI puts everything on the same level. Worse still, at times it reverses events in order of importance. Thus while "in Poland, the schema of the counter-revolution is unfolding" (after December 13th), "the struggle of the proletariat in El Salvador represents a great step forward in the communist struggle and the formation of the world party." While the first thing they have to say about the defeat in Poland is that it shows fully "the inadequacy that materializes through the absence of a communist leadership," the lesson they draw from E1 Salvador is that "We know from our own class experience that in the present situation in El Salvador (...) in spite of everything, communist minorities exist," (Le Communiste No 12). The totally disproportion­ate importance accorded here to E1 Salvador, and to Latin or Central American struggles in general[4], originates in their worship of violence in the struggle, and of ‘military' confrontations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Their inability to understand that only the struggle in the centre of capitalism can offer a perspective to the workers' combativity in the peripheral countries, and to defend this perspective before the working class, condemns them to the role of admiring spectators of the perpetual massacres there, to becoming the apologists for the isolation of this fraction of the world working class.

In these conditions, it is not surprising that the GCI understands nothing about the problem of the internationalization of the class struggle. "Revolutionary marxism has always analyzed the best way of generalizing a movement, as being neither to ‘invade' other countries, nor to ‘wait' for the movement to break out simul­taneously everywhere (...) On the contrary, the best means of generalizing a movement world­wide is to reply blow for blow against ‘one's own' bourgeoisie, or the direct representatives of the world bourgeoisie; it is to intensify the class struggle as much as possible where it has broken out." (Le Communiste No 13, pages 9-10) -- this was what the GCI had to say in reply to the questions posed by the events in Poland: when and how can such a struggle become international? Once again, the GCI is half right -- and therefore half wrong. Clearly, the best way for workers in a given country to help a movement internationalize is not to wait, but to take action in this direction. But more was needed than these banalities -- and in particular a reply to the following questions: was the situation ripe enough for the movement in Poland to go beyond national frontiers in this way? What objective conditions determine such a situation? Essentially, it is a matter of the proletariat in capitalism's centre setting itself in motion. From this point of view, it was impossible to ignore the immaturi­ty of the international class struggle (see the International Review Nos 24, 25, 26 and lnternat­ionalisme Nos 59 and 60). The GCI seems incapable of situating itself at this level of analysis, and of understanding that the conditions for internationalization are above all world-wide.

The historic course

The GCI's profound lack of confidence in the working class potential prevents them from replying clearly to the question: what direct­ion is society going in? Towards generalized war or class confrontations?

The ICC has pointed out that, since the beginning of the crisis, and contrary to the class' situation in the 1930s, the proletariat has resumed its struggle on a world scale. While war is the only solution the bourgeoisie can propose for the crisis, it cannot be un­leashed as long as the proletariat's resistance remains unbroken on a world level. The future is thus one of class battles which will decide victory of the proletariat (and so of the Revolution) or its defeat (and the possib­ility for the bourgeoisie to unleash war).

The GCI is well aware of the difference between today and the 1930s; they state quite correct­ly that in that period of blackest counter-revolution, the course lay inevitably towards war. But today, for them, the tendencies towards war and towards Revolution are develop­ing simultaneously, each supporting the other.

For example, the GCI writes, on the struggle in Poland: "it is clear that today's events, which materialize the force of our class, dial­ectically strengthen the intensification of the world bourgeoisie's march towards its ‘solution' to the crisis, generalized war. The develop­ment of the proletarian struggle is also a development of anti-working class measures and mystifications, thus strengthening the struggle between classes," (Le Communiste, No 7, page 7).

The GCI's ‘contribution' to marxist theory is to have completed ‘dialectically' the slogan that Lenin addressed to workers during World War 1 - "Turn the imperialist war into a civil war" -- by providing its bourgeois complement. The bourgeoisie is supposed to be able to "transform the danger of civil war into the material and ideological preparation for imperialist war" (Le Communiste No 13, page 13). This hazy new theory ill conceals the GCI's incomprehension and profound mistrust of what the proletarian struggle means in practice. The GCI does not really understand that when the proletariat struggles, it tends to become aware of its own interests, to struggle on its own class terrain, and to organize independently of the bourgeoisie; and that as long as it has this ability, the bourgeoisie will be unable to lead it off to war. The GCI, on the contrary, sees the prol­etariat as a mass, manipulated either by the bourgeoisie or by a party. The bourgeoisie is supposedly capable of confronting the struggle and producing mystifications to take the prol­etariat off its class terrain (where it has its solidarity and its internationalism, struggling at the same time against war and the crisis), into imperialist war (where the proletariat is divided, under the yoke of nationalist war propaganda)! This position leads the GCI into numerous errors: on the theoretical level, they unconcernedly propagate the bourgeois idea that the class struggle increases the danger of war. Their analysis of particular situations is equally incorrect: for instance, their analysis of the Falklands War -- designed in reality to give more weight to the bourgeoisie's ideologi­cal campaigns on the danger of war -- as an inter-imperialist war between the US and the USSR (see The International Review No 30). These incorrect positions can only make their intervention in the working class yet more sterile.

Conclusion

This text is not an exhaustive examination of the GCI's positions. This polemic has essentially tried to clarify a series of confused ideas that still hold sway in the revolutionary movement. In fact, for the GCI as for other groups, the main source of these confusions lies in their incomprehension of the working class' nature, of its real dynamic, and of the different aspects of its struggle. The extent of these confusions is a good demonstration of the revolutionary movement's difficulty in re-appropriating marxist theory. It also brings out the necessity for groups prepared to under­take the work of clarification to answer these confusions, whether in public meetings or in the written press.

In our opinion, the GCI is not among those groups whose existence is an expression of the effort to clarify revolutionary perspectives. Up to now, the GCI's main function in the revolutionary movement (including those ele­ments that it ‘organized' in its committees) has been to spread confusion.

Quite apart from their theoretical regression since leaving the ICC, and the regular outpouring of "historico-theoretical" innovations in their press, this is demonstrated by their attitude towards today's revolutionary milieu. By their refusal to hold public meetings, or to attend those we organize, by their attempt to sabotage the 3rd Conference of Left Communist groups, the GCI up to now has only demonstrated one thing -- its ever-deepening sectarianism.

In fact, the GCI's main concern is its own self-satisfaction, the justification of its existence by an ‘original' vision, as much of the history of the workers' movement as of the problems posed today.

Sadly, these ‘discoveries' of the GCI do not take us far, unless it is to an ever-greater calling into question of marxism. The fact that this group has been promising for three years to produce its "Theses of political orientation defining our group's theoretical bases," (Le Communiste No 1, May 1979), and has still not managed to publish its "theoretical bases" says much about its difficulty in defining itself coherently.

Those, like the GCI, who are constantly quoting Lenin, need reminding that nothing irritated him more than "bombastic, hollow, radical phraseology."

But those who are constantly mouthing their ‘Bolshevism' need reminding of Lenin's reply to a call for ‘Bolshevism on a West-European scale':

"I don't attach much importance to this desire to call oneself ‘Bolshevik', since I know some ‘old Bolsheviks' from whom heaven preserve us ...In my opinion, it shows a frivolity and absolutely inadmissible lack of party spirit to trumpet a new Bolshevism for a whole year, and leave it at that. Isn't it time to think, and to give comrades something which lays out this ‘Bolshevism on a West-European scale' as a coherent whole?" (Lenin, Oeuvres Completes, Tome 23, page 18).

-J‑

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[1] GCI - Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, BP54, Bruxelles 31, 1060 Bruxelles, Belgium.

[2] We learn from the GCI that the notion of "capitalist decadence" defended by the Left Communists on the basis of Luxemburg's economic analysis, was in fact nothing other than "one of the period's (1936) two dominant bourgeois theses (upheld by the social democrats, Trotskyists and Stalinists ....)" (Le Communiste no 6, page 46) - a statement they don't for a minute think of demonstrating! The GCI thinks it can refute the notion of decadence simply by declaring that "capitalism has not stop growing, as can be verified in the sequence of events from the imperialist war of 1939-45 to the infernal growth of capitalism since the war..." (ibid). But this argument shows nothing if not that the GCI has got stuck in the swamp of bourgeois propaganda which tries to use its ‘growth rates' to bludgeon us into belief in the eternal life of capital!

[3] By contrast, what the GCI ignores, or has never learned, is how to determine the repercussions of a particular struggle, and its impact on the development of class struggle world-wide. For them, ‘all cats are grey'.

[4] According to the GCI, ‘class unions' have thus existed in Argentina and Peru, of which, moreover, they are unable to give another example anywhere else in the world. Nor does the GCI hesitate to illustrate the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 by the example of the class struggle in ....Patagonia! (Le Communiste no 5). More recently, the GCI has ‘discovered' that in El Salvador the BPR, a populist organization set up in 1975 and led by leftists, was originally a proletarian body! (Le Communiste no 12).

Introduction

Within the proletarian milieu it is more or less well known that the Bordigist current claim to be a ‘sure, hard party', with a ‘complete and invariant program'.

All the evidence shows that this ‘party' is divided into four or five groups, including the International Communist Party (Programme Communiste), stemming from the same tree -- all claiming to be the only legitimate heir of the Italian Left and the sole incarnation of the ‘historic party' of their dreams. This is probably the only ‘invariance' they all share. On the other hand, the real political positions of this ‘party' at its origins, ie when it was founded in 1943-44 following the collapse of Mussolini's regime in Italy in the middle of World War II, are hardly known, and this is especially true with regard to the majority of the militants in these parties.

In order to lessen this ignorance, we think it is extremely important to republish here one of the first documents of this new party (the Internationalist Communist Party, as it was called), which appeared in the first issue of its paper Prometeo. This document, which deals with a crucial question -- the position of revolutionaries towards an imperialist war and the political forces participating in it will enable every militant to have a precise idea of the clarity and maturity of the political positions which presided over the foundation of this party, and the practical actions which these positions necessarily implied.

What the ICP (Program) claims to be

To make clearer the difference between what it claims to be and what it has been and continues to be, we should begin by recalling what the ICP (Program) claims to be. To do this we shall limit ourselves to a few quotes from an article which saw itself as fundamental, and which still serves as a central reference point: ‘On the Road to the ‘Compact and Powerful' Party of Tomorrow', which appeared in no.76 of Programme Communiste in March 1978.

"Its (the party's) existence isn't attested by the fact that it is ‘finished' rather than being built, but by the fact that it grows like an organism with the cells and structure it had at birth; that it grows and becomes stronger without altering itself, the materials which served to constitute it, with its theoretical links and its organizational skeleton" (p.15).

Leaving aside the Bordigist's pompous style, and with considerable reservations about the affirmation that the ‘theoretical materials' are the sole, exclusive precondition for the proclamation of the party, independent of whether the class struggle is advancing or receding, let's simply look at the idea that the ultimate evolution of an organization largely depends on the pol­itical positions and the coherence it had at the beginning. The ICP (Program) is an excellent illustration of this!

Polemicizing against us, the author of the article finds himself obliged to say some­thing (but once is no mortal sin....) about the positions defended by the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left and its enormous theoretical and political contrib­ution in the review Bilan and then in Octobre from the early 30's to 1945[1]:

"To claim today the continuity which the Fraction managed, through a splendid battle, to maintain so firmly... also means understanding the material reasons why the Fraction has also left us, alongside many positive values, number of decrepit elements." (p. 7).

Among other things, these decrepit elements derive from the fact that

"it's not a question of looking for failings in its own theoretical and programmatic weapons, but of rediscov­ering on all the points their strength and power, and of referring to them as to a monolithic bloc and so going forward again....of arriving, with the original weapons to the exclusion of any other, at a complete understanding of the causes of the defeat and of the conditions for a future offensive."

The problem is that the Fraction was impru­dent enough to have made a critique of the positions and orientations of the Communist International. This

"led the Fraction into certain weaknesses, for example, on the national and colonial question, or with regard to Russia, where it sought a different road from the Bol­sheviks in the exercising of the dictator­ship.... and also, in a certain sense, on the question of the Party or the International."

And, further on, Programme cites Bilan to illustrate the heresies of the Fraction: "the left fractions can only transform themselves into a party when the antagonisms between the position of the degenerated party and the position of the proletariat threaten the whole system of class relations."

"Passages of this kind obviously feed to the speculations of those who, like the group Revolution Internationale, theorize today about the inevitable opportunist degeneration of any class party which claims to have constituted itself before the future revolutionary wave and who, while awaiting this wave under the pretext of Bilan, dedicate themselves to a total revision of the founding theses of the International." (p. 9).

The Bordigist party absolutely cannot conceive of the possibility of criticizing, in the light of real experience, positions which have been shown to be false or inadequate. ‘Invariance' doesn't allow it. However, let us note that having doffed his hat to the ‘firmness', the ‘splendid battle', the ‘positive values' of the Fraction, the ICP's spokesman rejects just as ‘firmly' everything that was a real contrib­ution in the work of the Fraction. As for ourselves, the ICC, we openly recognize that the contribution of the Fraction has been a major element in our own development, not only on the question of when the party is constituted, but on many other questions which the article describes as ‘weaknesses'. The ‘monolithic bloc' which the article talks about, besides being a windy phrase, is no less than a regression vis-a--vis the positions of the Fraction, and even of the Communist International.

"What defines even a small nucleus of militants as a party is a clear awareness of the need to win the influence within the class which it only possesses in potential, and the effort devoted to achieving this end not only through propaganda for its program, but through active participation in the struggles and in the forms of collective life of the class; this is what, even today, clearly defines us as a party." (p. 14).

Here is a new definition of the constitution of the party. This time the emphasis is on ‘activism'. We are well acquainted with this kind of activism through the leftists, from the various Trotskyist parties to the Maoists.

The ICP has again and again fallen into this trap, from its foundations during World War II to its active support for the Palestinian camp in Lebanon today, and including part­icipation, alongside the Trotskyists and Maoists, in all kind of phantom committees - soldiers committees, committees for supporting the Sonacotra struggle, immigrants struggles, etc....In all these frenetic activities, it's always less a question of ‘defending the program' than of acting as ‘hewers of wood' in order to ‘win influence in the class'.

But this doesn't stop the ICP from sitting on its paws like a cat and writing:

"Let us say in passing that the Fraction in exile in no way limited itself to ‘theoretical research' but waged a raw practical battle! If it wasn't yet a party but a prelude to it, this wasn't due to any lack of practical activity, but rather to an insufficient; theoretical work." (note p.13).

Let's pass over this ‘insufficient theoret­ical work' of the Fraction. The latter never had the pretension of having the ‘completed program' in its pocket like Programme Communiste does. It modestly saw itself making a contribution to the program in the light of a critical examination of the experience of the first great revolutionary wave and of the counter­revolution which followed. The Fraction certainly lacked the megalomania of Bordigism after World War II, which, without the slightest embarrassment, and without laughing, can write:

"The history of our small movement has shown.... that the party isn't born because and when the class has, under the pressure of material circumstances, rediscovered the necessary road of the class struggle. It is born because and when a necessarily ‘microscopic' circle of militants have reached an under­standing of the causes of the immediate objective situation and an awareness of the conditions for a future revival; because it has found the strength, not to ‘complete' marxism through new theories...but to affirm marxism in its integrality, unchanged and intact; because it has been able to draw up a balance-sheet of the counter‑revolution as a total confirmation of our doctrine in all domains." (p. 10).

"It's because it (the Bordigist current) achieved this (the ‘global balance-sheet of the past') that 25 years later it could constitute itself into an organized critical consciousness, into an active, militant body, into a party.... we shall see later on in what conditions and on what basis, but we can say straight away that it was not carried along by an ascendant movement, but on the contrary preceded it by far." (p. 5).

This basis is defined as:

"...the unitary bloc of the theoretical, programmatic and tactical positions reconstructed by the small, the ‘micro­scopic' party of 1951-52 (?) or of today; and this can only be done within its ranks". (p. 5-6).

Let's take careful note of this conclusion: "it can only be done within its ranks". However, the Party had a regrettable accident along the way, an accident spoken about with some embarrassment:

"In 1949...the Appeal for the International Reorganization of the revolutionary marxist movement was produced. What was being proposed to the small, scattered nuclei of revolutionary workers who wanted to react against the disastrous course of opportunism certainly wasn't a bazaar of all those who wanted to build that rickety edifice called the ‘unity of revolution­ary forces' which everyone talks about. On the contrary what was being proposed was a homogenous method of struggle, based on a rejection of the solutions presented by the groups influenced, if only particularly (sic!) and indirectly (sic!) by the conformism which infests the world -- solutions whose inanity could be confirmed by a ‘doctrinal critique'."

Let's not dwell on all these contortions, which are supposed to explain an orientation which can be seen clearly enough through its title. What's more, this wasn't the first time that the Bordigist party had launched such appeals, and not just to "small, scattered nuclei of revolutionary workers". As we shall see, in the middle of the imperialist war, an appeal was addressed to much more ‘serious' forces, for the constitution of a ‘workers' Front', for the ‘Class Unity of the Proletariat'.

So let's see the party at work as it is and as it was ‘at birth'.

Appeal of the ‘Agitation Committee' of the ICP

(Prometeo no. 1, Apri11945)

The present appeal is addressed by the Agitation Committee of the Internationalist Communist Party to the agitation committees of parties of a proletarian direction and to the union movements in the enterprises in order to give to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat a unity of directives and of organization on the eve of social and political events that are going to revolutionize the Italian and European situation; with this aim, we propose a meeting between the various committees to put forward a common plan.

In order to facilitate such a task, the Agitation Committee of the ICP will briefly state its programmatic viewpoint, which can be regarded as an initial base for discussion.

Why have we judged it opportune to address ourselves to the agitation committees in the factories rather than to the central committees of the various parties?

A panoramic view of the political milieu which has defined itself not only in the anti-fascist struggle but in the more specific struggle of the proletariat has convinced us (and this not just today) that it is impossible to find the minimum common political and ideological denominator to serve as the basis for an agree­ment on revolutionary action. The differ­ent appreciations of the war (its nature and aims), different appreciations of the definition of imperialism, divergences on methods of union, political or military struggle are sufficient proof of this.

On the other hand, we are all agreed that the crisis opened by the war is the most profound and incurable crisis ever to afflict the bourgeois regime; (we also agree) that the fascist regime is finished socially and politically, even if German weapons still bring it some oxygen, and even if we must still wage a hard and bloody struggle to extirpate it from Italian soil; and finally, that the proletariat is the only protagonist of the new history of the world which must arise out of his inhuman conflict.

But the triumph of the proletariat is only possible if it has solved in advance the problem of its unity in organization and in struggle.

And such a unity has not been realized; nor can it ever be realized on the basis of the Committee of National Liberation, which arose for contingent reasons due to the war, which wanted to take up an aspect of the ideological war against fascism and Hitlerism but which was congenitally incapable of posing the questions which could surpass such contingencies. It did not take up the historic demands and objectives of the working class, which in fact have come up against the reasons and aims of the democratic war -- a war which the CNL has instigated and animated. The CNL has thus shown itself unable to unify the mighty forces of labor.

In the face of the war, leaving aside ideo­logical pressures, we can see the represent­atives of high finance, of industrial and agrarian capital, side by side with repre­sentatives of workers' organizations; but who would dare to think of the CNL, which includes people like De Gasperi, Gronchi, Soleri, Gasparotto, Croce, Sforza, acting as the motor of the class struggle and of the assault on bourgeois power.

If the CNL is historically capable of resolving the problems due to the state of urgency within the framework of the bourgeois state, it can in no way be the organ of the proletarian revolution which is the task of the class party, which will have understood the basic needs of the proletariat and will have adhered profoundly to the necessities of the struggle.

But this party will be unable to accomplish its historic mission if it finds the pro­letariat morally and physically divided, discouraged by inane internal struggles, skeptical about its own future.

This is the blocked situation we've seen in all the movements of crisis in recent years. The huge waves of the proletarian revolution have foundered on this reef.

A disunited proletariat can never mount an attack on bourgeois power, and we must have the courage to recognize that at present to the Italian proletariat is disunited and skeptical like the whole European prolet­ariat.

The imperious task of the hour is thus the class unity of the proletariat. The factor­ies and workplaces constitute the natural and historic milieu for the affirmation of this unity. This is the only way the pro­letariat will be able to take advantage of the crisis of capitalism which the war has opened but cannot resolve.

We conclude our appeal by summarizing our thinking in a few points:

1) Because the reasons, final aims, and practices of the war divide the proletariat and its fighting forces, we must oppose the policy that aims to subordinate the class struggle to the war with one that subord­inates the war and all its manifestations to the class struggle;

2) We are for the creation of unitary organs of the proletariat which emanate from the factories and industrial and agricultural enterprises;

3) Such organs will in fact be the united front of all the workers, and the agitation committees will participate democratically within them;

4) All the parties linked to the struggle of the proletariat will have the right to propagandize their ideas and their pro­grams the proletariat will be able to attain political maturity and freely choose the political leadership that will guide it to victory;

5) The struggle of the proletariat, from partial agitations to the armed insurrection, if it is to triumph on a class basis, must develop towards the violent conquest of all the power - the only serious guarantee of victory.         

10 February 1945

Prometeo's comments on the responses to the appeal

We have a response to this appeal from the Agitation Committee of the PDA and the Party of Labor (Milan) who declare themselves unable to take up our proposal, though they would have done in more favorable conditions, because the political line of the PIL, while aiming at the proletarian revolution, doesn't allow it to exercise such and influence over the masses of northern Italy.

Our appeal met with full agreement from the revolutionary unions, who explicitly accept­ed to collaborate in the creation of base organs and who declared themselves fully in agreement with our position on the struggle against the war.

There was also a reply from the Libertarian Communists, who saw the terms of the proposal as being the terrain they themselves were working on, "both from the point of view of the general political situation, the attitude towards the war and the necessity for a class organization of the workers whose objective is the expropriatory revolution through the constitution of workers' councils of management"; and they are satisfied that such a standpoint is shared by the internationalist communist comrades.

On the other hand, it is stupefying to find that the Communist Party of Italy verbally expressed its refusal to answer us, having already expressed its position towards us in its press. Not long afterwards, following a sporadic campaign of denigration against us (accusing us of being fascists in disguise), it put out a paragraph in its review Factory which call us provocateurs, referring directly to our proposal for the constitution of organs of the workers' united front. In March, there followed a circular from the Party's Milan Federa­tion inviting the base organs to "intervene energetically to cleanse...".[2]

Traditionally incapable of answering yes or no, the Socialist Party replied:

"Dear comrades, in response to your appeal, we confirm that our Party is not at all against the fact that your comrades should participate in the Agitation Committees in the factories where your Party has a real presence and that their collaboration takes place in the framework of the general mass struggle, for which the agitation committees have arisen".

Our response to this letter which elegantly eludes the question was as follows:

"Dear comrades, we would have preferred it if your response had been more in conformity with the questions posed in our document, and in this serve more conclusive, thus avoiding a waste of time, especially because the political sit­uation, following the military events, is aggravating more and more and is imp­osing ever-more serious and urgent tasks on the masses and on proletarian parties in particular.

Allow us to draw your attention to two points:

a) our proposal didn't pose the question of adhering to already existing agita­tion committees of this or that party, but was seeking an agreement between the leading organs of such committees in order to concretize a joint plan of action, to resolve in a unitary manner all the problems arising out of the crisis of capitalism.

b) It was implicit that the objective of our initiative wasn't "the general mass struggle" but the creation of organs of proportional representation, on a class terrain and moving towards class objectives.

It goes without saying that such committees can have nothing in common with the committees which have arisen on the basis of CNL, which as you say can't be consid­ered as class organs.

We hope for a more precise response on these points, since the possibility of common work depends on them."

So far, there has been no response.

(Prometeo, no.1, April 1945).

Conclusion

We can save ourselves the bother of a commentary. Such an appeal, addressed to the CP and the SP (living forces of the proletariat, these are!), for the constr­uction of proletarian unity, speaks for itself, and this in spite of the astute tactic which consists of the Party not directly addressing the other parties, but doing so through a phantom ‘Agitation Committee' of the Party, addressed to the ‘agitation committees' of the other parties.

We should add that nothing came out of this appeal (and for good reason!); but it does leave us with a testament, an indic­ation of a party which has "grown with the materials which served to constitute it, with its theoretical limbs and its organizational skeleton".

But it would be imprecise to say that this appeal didn't produce anything. This was its result:

"By following the directives given by our leading organs, under the pressure of events, our comrades -- having pre­ventively warned the masses against premature actions and having repeatedly indicated what objectives (class objectives) they had to reach -‑ united without distinction with the formations working for the destruction of the odious fascist apparatus by participating in the armed struggle and in the arresting of fascists ..." (‘A Panoramic View of the Movement of the Masses in the Factories', Prometeo no.2, 1st May 1945 -- cited by A. Peregralli, in L'Altra Resistanza„ La Dissidenza di Sinistra in Italia 1943-45).

So much for the Party in the north of the country. As for the south, we can cite an example from Calabbrio (Catanzano), where the Bordigist militants grouped around F. Maruca -- a future leader of Damen's group -- remained in the Stalinist party until 1944, when it went over to the ‘Frazione'.

"Maruca affirmed (in 1943) that the victory of the antifascist front was the indispensible historic condition for the proletariat and its party ‘being in a position where they could accomplish their class           mission ". (cited in Peregralli, op cit, p.57).

In conclusion: with regard to the Bordigist party, we can say:

Tell me where you come from and I'll tell you where you're going.

MC

 

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[1] The author talks about the activity of the Fraction from ‘30-40', and is completely silent about its existence and activity between 40 and 45, when it was dissolved. Is this out of simple ignorance or is it to avoid having to make a comparison between the positions defended by the Fraction during the war and those of the ICP formed in 43-44?

[2] Translator's note: the rest of the phrase is unreadable but one can guess its general gist.

Mankind has developed productive forces which if put to good use could in several years time eliminate on this planet all scarcity in food supplies, housing, health services and communication. But today, these forces, this enormous productive potential, is increasingly paralyzed and destroyed by the mechanisms and internal contradictions of the capitalist mode of production.

More and more the world is being deprived of everything as it plunges into a capital­ist crisis of overproduction.

By the end of 1982, unemployment figures in the major industrialized countries had broken all records since World War 2. Moreover, the rate of unemployment is still steadily increasing: a half a million more unemployed in the US in a single month.

The same record-breaking phenomenon and the same accelerating rhythm applies to business failures and countries sliding into financial bankruptcy. Famine is spreading in the underdeveloped zones of the world.

In the Eastern bloc food rationing rivals the worst years of the Second World War. And in the heartland of the most power­ful country in the world, in Detroit, unemployed workers at the end of their funds line up in front of soup kitchens.

At the same time, factories are closing down or working at a steadily decreasing percentage of their capacity (70% in the US; the European steel industry is paralyzed at 50%!). Agricultural surplus is being destroyed and prices of agricult­ural and industrial raw materials are plummeting because there are no buyers.

In terms of future perspectives, governments have now abandoned the rhetoric of “the light at the end of the tunnel” and are now talking about “preparing for years of sacrifice and austerity”.

The reality of the crisis is more and more obvious. ‘Natural’ causes (lack of energy sources or raw materials) are not responsi­ble for blocking the productive machinery: international traders do not know what to do with all the unsold stocks of oil and milk. It is not the lack of manpower either (educated or not): unemployment is hitting illiterate workers, workers with diplomas or without, and university grad­uates.

It is not a lack of technological innovation: the most advanced sectors of modern indust­ry (electronics, computers) which were spared in the early days of the crisis are being hit now. Silicon Valley in California, the world mecca for advanced electronics, is for the first time hit by unemployment. It is not for any lack of ‘good capitalist economic policies’ either; all economic policies are failing. Reagan’s policy promising recovery through spending cuts and a balanced budget has brought neither recovery nor a balanced budget. Production has fallen in the US and the State deficit is at one of the highest points in the history of the country. Mitterand’s policy which, on the other hand, promised recovery through a rise in consumption and an increase in the State deficit has indeed inflated the deficit but industrial production has continued to decline like the workers’ standard of living. Eastern bloc state capitalism is suffocating in the swollen growth of arms production.

With each convulsion of the crisis, one thing comes clearer: the source of the paralysis of the productive forces is to be found in the world social system of production itself.

Once again in less than 50 years, mankind is living through a merciless demonstration that capitalist laws of production are historically played out.

Whether they want to or not, the exploited classes are going to have to face the issues that this bleak and frightening perspective raises.

Can there be a new period of relative ‘economic recovery’ once again as there was after the convulsions of 1967, 1970 or 1974-5? Is a genuinely communist solution to the crisis simply a utopian dream?

Can there be a short or medium-term economic recovery?

First let us see what the experts of western international economic organizations have to say. The Financial Times of November 17, 1982 reported the conclu­sions of the OECD’s Committee on Economic Policy concerning predictions for 1983:

“The secretariat of the organization now doubts that the prediction it made for a 2.5% increase in production in 1983 can be achieved, because of the stagnation in 1982. No growth is to be expected in Europe next year and the Japanese economy will continue its slow-down, partly caused by the agreements on export limitations. The OECD is less optimistic than Washington concerning any solid economic recovery in the US”.

Those who in principle are responsible for the functioning of the capitalist economy see no possibility for recovery in the near future. At most, some of them predict a momentary slow-down in the economic decline of the US and only in the US, just in time for the presidential elections... But judging by the present evolution of the situation even this paltry perspective seems unrealistic.

Some ‘savants’ of the decadent bourgeoisie talk about an eventual economic recovery in the ‘long-term’ but they do not know where or when or how such a recovery could happen.

This lack of any future perspective expresses the impasse of the bourgeoisie; it is forced to deal not only with the growing ineffectiveness of all its economic policies but with the accumulation of difficulties these policies have themselves produced.

As we wrote at the beginning of 1980:

“Not only have the remedies that the governments used to fight the crisis proven increasingly ineffective but the abusive use of these remedies has led to a poisoning of the patient”. (International Review no. 20, ‘The 80s: The Acceleration of the Crisis’).

The financial insolvency of the governments of Mexico, Argentina, Poland, and Zaire is not a problem ‘localized’ in the less-industrialized regions. It sanctions the failure of international capitalist policies founded on generalized deficit-spending, debts and credit.

The media talk a lot about the debts of the less-developed countries. But the estimated 500 billion dollars debt of these countries seems laughable when compared to the debts of the most powerful countries...especially the US. In this strongest industrial metropole of the world, the general econ­omic debt from 1960--1980 multiplied by 5.4! From 1970 to 1980 the American public sector debt went from. 450 billion dollars to 1069 billion dollars; the private sector debt went from 975 billion dollars to 2840 billion dollars!

Today, more and more debts are coming due but the debtors do not have any real means of paying, no more than they had when they first began this policy of massive credits. In this situation no government cares to talk about a genuine recovery.

The Achilles heel, the congenital handicap of capitalism, is that it cannot itself create markets enough to absorb, to buy, all the potential production it is capable of bringing forth. Unlike slave societies of ancient history or feudalism when capitalism becomes historically unable to assume society’s material means of survival, it is not because of any lack in the means of production (capitalism has “too much” in a overproduction crisis) but because there are not enough paying markets.

Decadent capitalism, whose scarcity of markets has led to two world wars, whose subjection of all social life including the most advanced scientific research to the military imperative of “protecting markets” from each other; this sterile and barbarous system thought that credit could be a palliative for the chronic lack of solvent markets, especially since the end of the sixties -- in other words, since the end of the post-war reconstruc­tion.

But the development of credit can only ease the functioning of the economy if it is accompanied from time to time by a corresponding increase in the capacity for real payment of those who have become debtors. Otherwise it merely masks the fundamental problem, delays the payment question and worsens the situation. What we have been seeing in recent years is in fact an increasing acceleration of credit while real production has slowed down and even declined.

Through the use of credit, capitalism has delayed the violent explosion of its contradictions, but it has done only that -- delayed it.

To accomplish this it has paid dearly. It has had to destroy the foundations of one of its most vital instruments, the international monetary system.

Thus, in recent years, capitalism has meticulously, step by step, created the conditions for an economic crisis which combines the characteristics of the 1929 crash with the characteristics of Germany in 1920s, when you needed a wheelbarrow full of paper money to buy a stamp.

At the end of 1982 the fear of economic collapse due to the growing number of insolvent debtors led to a wave of panic in the financial world. What is the solution they have come up with?

To stampede ahead with more of the same thing: increasing the amount of money in circulation through the International Monetary Fund, the Special Drawing Rights (reportedly 50% more!).

To prevent a financial crash, which would mark capitalism’s inability to counter­balance the lack of solvent markets through credit, through an excess of paper money, capitalism has no other solution but to produce...more paper.

For the capitalists, the problem is less and less “how to bring about a recovery” and more and more “how to avoid an un­controllable collapse”.

This spells the end of illusion for those who believed in the purely “monetary” nature of the crisis or in the explanation of “restructuration”. The real cause of the crisis is at the heart of production relations, in the way the different classes of society work together to produce.

For the workers, capitalism has only one perspective to offer, unemployment, misery, exclusion from society. Less and less able to rule through the strength of the economy, capital rules and will rule more and more through force and terror. It is the language of “austerity”, of unemploy­ment blackmail, of forced sacrifices.

But misery and poverty open no doors to economic recovery; on the contrary, they just further shrink the existing markets. And yet each national capital is forced by international competition to take this road.

Slowly but inexorably the collapse of capitalism is preparing enormous class confrontations. The fate of mankind rests with the outcome of these battles between capital and the world proletariat.

If one day the bourgeoisie succeeds in definitively breaking proletarian resistance and mobilizing workers into a new war, the very existence of the human species will be in question.

But if the workers of the whole world manage to engage an international struggle for the intransigent defense of their class interests, they will open the way to the only possible solution for man­kind -- communism.

Communism is not a utopia; it is the only realistic solution

Because the problem is in the roots of the system, these very roots must be torn out!

Capitalist institutions, capital itself, wage-labor, the market, commodities, nations, have all become living absurdities in terms of the needs and capacities of humanity.

The basis of the laws of capitalism dates back to the end of the Middle Ages. At that time a serf with his work and the work of his whole family could scarcely feed a single member of the nobility. Today an agricultural worker in the US can feed 80 people. But just like the workers of the Renaissance, his income is not determined by his needs, or by the productive possibilities of the society as a whole but by the value of his labor power as a commodity on the market. Just as in the time of the merchants of Venice, capital produces and will always produce only as a function of the needs of its own accumulation.

When for reasons of the market this accum­ulation becomes impossible, capitalist production collapses, whatever the prod­uctive forces society has at its disposal, whatever the needs of mankind.

Humanity will not be able to avoid a violent, world social revolution, completely changing the organization of society from top to bottom.

Factories must be made to function only for the fulfillment of human needs; production must be distributed accord­ing to the needs and possibilities of man, and the market and wage labor must be eliminated. Mankind will have to consciously unify world production -- in a word, create socialism.

The crisis which is only at its beginnings today will by its devastation show that what seems to be a utopian dream right now is in fact the only possible way to escape from nuclear holocaust.

Each day more the economic crisis will place the burden of historical respons­ibility on the shoulders of the world proletariat: either break the chains of the old world or perish with it.

What point has the crisis reached?

Industrial production is at the level of 1973

For the fourth time since the beginning of the crisis at the end of the 60’s, capital is experiencing a fall in industrial growth which following the past pattern will be more profound than each previous fall.

Since 1978 industrial production has declined overall in the major western countries.

At the end of 1982, production fell to the 1973 level in most of these countries: that means to the level of 10 years ago.

Japan is now in its turn feeling the crisis: growth has continually slowed down and the fall will be all the more brutal as in 1974-5.

Unemployment accelerates

The number of unemployed and the proport­ions of unemployed in the active population are at the highest level since the war.

But the rate of unemployment far from slowing down has been speeding up since 1980 at an unprecedented pace.

“The bourgeoisie is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society”. (Marx and Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party).

 

The crisis is ahead of us

The unemployment rate is still far from the level of the depression in the 30’s. This should not be a “consolation” but an illustration of how far capitalism can go in this crisis if the international proletariat does not have the strength to impose its revolutionary solution.

The explosion of debts

The “solution” adopted, opening the flood gates of credit, is clearly seen in the evolution of the debt of less developed countries (it has increased fivefold in10 years).

But this is only a small part of the global debt of world capitalism.

 

The fall in raw materials

The crisis of overproduction is shown by a fall in demand and in the prices of raw materials especially since 1981.

For the less developed countries which are generally producers of raw materials, this means certain bankruptcy.

The fall in oil prices at a time when the crisis is deepening has destroyed the myth of the ‘oil crisis’.

 

The slowdown of world trade

The growth of world trade, like production, has constantly slowed down since 1977.

In 1982 the growth of international trade fell in absolute terms and faster than the volume of production. This has led to the development of protectionism.

 

Sources: Annual Report of the GATT 1981/2; Newsweek; OECD "Principaux Indicateurs Economiques".