The document by the internationalists of Battaglia Comunista on “The Role and Structure of the Revolutionary Organisation” comes from the Second of the International Conferences called by the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) which took place in 1978. It has never been published in English by us before⁽¹⁾ but we are doing so as part of a discussion on the role and structure of the revolutionary party inside the Internationalist Communist Tendency which will culminate in a meeting later this year. It is the first of a series of such documents dealing with different aspects of the party question so we are prefacing this with a few words by way of background.

One of the central and most vexed questions (at least since the failure of the revolution in Russia) has been the question of the role and nature of a revolutionary minority of the working class, the party. Each generation it seems has to confront the question anew but can only do so adequately if it takes into account the real achievements of previous struggles and previous generations of proletarians. This was the case for the forerunners of the Communist Workers’ Organisation in the UK which like other left communist organisations was formed following the end of the capitalist post-war boom in the early 1970s. It was a time of great suspicion towards the failed legacy of the Russian Revolution as exemplified in the Stalinist USSR and there was much sympathy for the views of Otto Rühle that “all parties are bourgeois”. After all the collapse of Social Democracy, in the face of imperialist war, followed not long after by the rise of the partyocracy in the USSR, alongside the abandonment of world revolution by the Third International seemed to wipe out the idea that mass parties and “vanguard” parties alike had anything to offer the working class. For those who entirely rejected the notion that the USSR had anything to do with socialism but was in fact a peculiar form of state capitalism the whole party question was problematic. So much so that councilism and the cult of “spontaneity” exerted an enormous influence at that time.

However, the real nature of working class revolution stubbornly keeps coming back to confront revolutionaries. Unlike other antagonistic and subordinate classes in history, the working class has no form of property to defend. It is the propertyless class. Unlike the bourgeoisie it cannot make incremental gains by getting rid of this law or abolishing that privilege under the old regime. Its only “property” is its ability to labour (and produce surplus value for the exploiting class) and its only weapons, as Anton Pannekoek noted, are it’s “consciousness and its organisation”. And here lies the problem which Marx confronted in The German Ideology. If the following is true:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.

How can the working class ever break free from such dominance? The answer lies firstly in the insoluble contradictions of the system. These include regular and periodic economic crises and the fact that its continued existence depends on the increasing exploitation of a class which is “in civil society but not of civil society”, the working class (proletariat). The class responds to this situation by coming together to resist exploitation by collective action which occasionally takes the form of wider insurrections. The class struggle is the school for an alternative to capitalist exploitation. But in the course of the struggle it is inevitable that some workers (and some non-workers who can see through the system and identify with the working class) come to an awareness, a consciousness, of the need for something more than the daily guerrilla war against capitalism. They perceive the need for a political programme which goes beyond the system itself. However, as a minority in the class, they have to organise themselves to take their aims further so what more natural than to create an organisation, a party, which unifies both them and all the gains in consciousness that the class struggle has historically produced?

The problem of the nature, role and structure of the proletarian political party was now posed. And it would not be answered in the short term. Marx initially thought he had found it in the International Workingmen’s Association or First International. In its Rules he posed its key ingredient. “The emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves”. By this he meant not that the workers did not need a party (as the councilists misinterpret that quote) but that at last the working class had its own political body independent from all bourgeois organisations. However the First International was riven by disputes, particularly with the followers of Bakunin and Proudhon and died as a real force after a decade or so. In its place came Social Democracy which in some ways was a step backward since it was based on national parties. It sank deep roots in the working class at a time when bourgeois control of the media and ways of reaching the mass of the population were largely ineffective. Social Democracy grew into a movement of millions and began to create the illusion that capitalism could be gradually conquered through the ballot box or at least peacefully. The revolution which Marx saw in The German Ideology as essential for wiping the slate of past domination clean (see Thesis 5 in the document which follows) was relegated to some distant and unspecified future (the so-called maximum programme).

In fact, far from acting as a repository of communist consciousness in the class the opposite was happening. The presence of genuine revolutionaries in Social Democracy only served to disguise the fact “the movement”, increasingly riddled with nationalist and imperialist notions, was actually integrating the working class into capitalism. This was not clearly revealed until 1914 when the vast bulk of Social Democratic parties of the so-called Second International voted to support the machinations of their “own” government and marched the working class off to imperialist war. And in the revolutionary wave after the war Social Democracy provided its second service to capitalism by continuing to support the capitalist suppression of the first genuinely international attempt at working class revolution. The Social Democrats in Germany (in particular) mobilised their masses against the masses who followed the newly-founded Communist Parties, thus ensuring the defeat of the revolution outside Russia. This in turn led to the final victory of counter-revolution in an isolated Russia. That counter-revolution was to be carried out by the very party which had led the revolution in the first place.

The Bolsheviks were one of the few parties in Social Democracy to reject nationalism and imperialism, and as a result came to wield an enormous influence inside the revolutionary class movement in Russia. Here the war had brought death, destitution and quasi-starvation and, in the weakest link of the capitalist chain, revolution was on the agenda. The Bolshevik Party was not a disciplined mass as later Stalinist (and Trotskyist) mythology would portray it. It was full of lively debate about what the revolution should be and how it would come about. What, however, was significant about it was that, though relatively small in 1914 it was present within the wider working class and perceived to stand for clear positions against both Tsarism and the war. This marked it out as did its unwavering support for the soviets as real working class bodies capable of replacing capitalist rule. This made it a rallying point for all those who saw that proletarian revolution was the only solution.

What it did not debate very much was the role and position of the party in the coming revolution. In this respect it assumed that the main aim was for the party to grow and once it had enough support to “take power”. In short it still largely accepted the Social Democratic notion that the party represents the class and thus carries out the revolution in its name. Thus, when the Provisional Government made up of Social Democrats of various hues, was overthrown instead of passing power to the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets it was decided that a new government would stand above it, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom). And once the Left Socialist Revolutionaries abandoned it this became a single party government. The party thus came to be the state and there was no separation between them. Few at the time saw the danger, not only for the revolution, but also for the idea of a revolutionary party, especially once the consequences of the isolation of the revolution became apparent.

The Russian Revolution we have dealt with, and will deal with, further elsewhere. Here we simply want to make a brief comment about revolutionary organisation. The Russian Revolution demonstrated that the party, revolutionary minority or whatever else you want to call it doesn’t start the revolution and it doesn’t finish it either. But it exists in the class before the revolution and participates in the revolution from the beginning. Its influence goes beyond its membership. It exerts a leadership as a guide pointing the way forward and criticising all those who aim to halt the revolutionary process. It may even lead insurrection wherever this is necessary but insurrection is not revolution and this ultimately can only be carried out by the mass of the class once they have gone through the revolutionary experience themselves. And it is the class-wide organs (councils or soviets, local committees etc) which are the real transformers of society. This is simply because socialism cannot be brought in by decree but only by the conscious self-activity of the mass of the class once it has taken up the programme proposed by its own revolutionary minority, its party.

It is a complex issue and has many aspects which pose many questions which we will be addressing in the coming months. One thing though is clear – the idea of a mass party in advance of the revolution belongs to the past. The collapse of Social Democracy revealed this in 1914 as did the abortive attempts of the Comintern to form united fronts with Social Democracy as the revolutionary wave declined in 1921-2. It was an error repeated by the Trotskyists from the 1930s onwards when they went into “entryism” into the Social Democratic parties and which wiped them out as a revolutionary tendency. As the Platform of the Committee of Intesa put it in response to the united front

It is mistaken to think that in every situation expedients and tactical manoeuvres can widen the Party base since relations between the party and the masses depend in large part on the objective situation.⁽²⁾

The first task of revolutionaries is to defend a revolutionary perspective whatever the situation and not chase this or that opportunist or short-term policy to attempt to build an organisation on false (and dishonest) premises. The brief document here is a starting point for what we hope will be renewed debate on the various issues facing the formation of a truly international and internationalist class party.

The Role and Structure of the Revolutionary Organisation

Communist Consciousness

We hold to the acquisitions of revolutionary theory elaborated by Marx in The German Ideology, confirmed by the practical and theoretical work of Lenin, reaffirmed by the first two Congresses of the Third International and in the formation of the Communist Party of Italy. They were defended by the Italian Left inside the Committee of Entente, and throughout the 1930s and 1940s according to which:

1. Since history is the history of class struggle, it is the proletariat which will accomplish the decisive step that will take humanity from the realm of necessity to the world of freedom.
2. The proletariat cannot gradually conquer a position of strength within capitalist society; the continued existence of the capitalist mode of production does not gradually diminish the power of the bourgeoisie, as was the case where previous rising classes were confronting earlier exploiting classes. On the contrary, the power of capital over society tends to become absolute and to exert itself on the deepest layers of civil society.
3. From the very existence of a class forced into a position of decisive antagonism against other classes concretely “emerges the consciousness of the need for a fundamental revolution, communist consciousness”.
4. It is during periods of crisis, when the bourgeoisie is no longer able to control the explosion of the contradictions inherent in its mode of production and its social relations, that the possibility of a revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois power is put on the historical agenda.
5. This revolution “is necessary … not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew” (Marx). And “both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution”. (Marx)
6. During the period leading up to it, and during the revolutionary process itself, communist consciousness is found amongst a minority of individuals from the working class and other classes, but it derives from the very existence of the proletariat, from the objective nature of class antagonisms, and continually refers back to it. It draws from this objective situation its strength and its materialist nature, and is thus the patrimony of the whole class.
7. As the expression of the historic movement and programme of the proletariat, communist consciousness cannot be defined as ‘ideology’ in the Marxist sense; on the contrary, it is the most complete instrument for grasping social and economic reality as a whole, since its aim is to change this very reality. Whereas bourgeois revolutionary consciousness was directed against the external aspects of aristocratic rule and was based on the necessity to substitute one exploiting class (the bourgeoisie) for another, communist consciousness is directed against the very class nature of present-day society and all previous societies: its goal is the elimination of class divisions. It is not the last theory in the proper sense of the word, but it is certainly the last revolutionary theory. The proof of this is the fact that the ideologies which have broken away from revolutionary Marxism in the so-called ‘socialist’ countries (which for communists are a form of state capitalism fully integrated into the class enemy’s international line-up) have no road to take except the traditional one of classical bourgeois ideology – even though they don’t even do this very well.
8. The relationship which links the class to its communist consciousness is the same one which links the class to the future exercise of its dictatorship: it resides in the objective social and economic contradictions, in the very dynamic of history. It will not be present in the minds and psychology of all proletarians until the time when they are ready to make their own history.
9. It is necessary to definitively reject and fight against the theory – alien to Marxism and typical of petty bourgeois idealism – which maintains that communist consciousness can grow and become generalised outside of the revolutionary process itself. It is based on the idealist principle of the superiority of ideas, and can only deceive potential revolutionaries with an impossible vision of reality, drawing them away from their unavoidable duty as communists and obstructing their work.
10. This fundamentally anti-Marxist thesis was adopted by the council communist movement, which, beginning from an erroneous evaluation of the process of revolution and counter-revolution in Russia, arrived at positions alien and opposed to those of the communist movement.
11. A position close to that of the council communist movement, and which also has to be rejected, recognises that only the revolutionary process makes it possible for communist consciousness to become generalised, but which reduces this to a “consciousness of the need for revolution”, thereby renouncing the organised struggle against the highly organised forces of the bourgeoisie; although the defenders of this position talk about the revolution, they are actually working for the preservation of capitalism and for the hegemony of one of the two imperialist blocs
12. Similarly we have to reject the position that communist consciousness, the entire inheritance of principles, theses, and positions pointing towards communist revolution, is something given once and for all, and doesn’t change from one historic phase of the movement to another. Those who gravitate around this position forget that communist consciousness is something directly attached to the class and to the experiences it objectively goes through in its subordination to capital. They therefore forget that theses and positions have to alter with changes in the real situation in which the class lives. The main problem is to recognise the characteristics of the class struggle through all these changes, and to draw the necessary lessons from it. Naturally all the variations in the capitalist mode of production cannot, despite the bourgeois theories of the national communist parties, alter the basic substance of class society, or the fact that the proletariat is, and remains, the class which is economically exploited and socially and politically dominated.

The Organisation of Revolutionaries: The Party

1. In the entire period leading up to the revolution, and even during the initial phase of the revolution itself, communist consciousness is possessed by a minority, i.e. only a minority possesses and acts on the basis of this consciousness. This is a real and concrete fact which is beyond discussion. This minority has the duty of forging the tools necessary for the class to develop, in the moments of crisis in the capitalist mode of production, this “practical movement”, the revolution – the only way that mass communist consciousness matures within the class itself. In the fullest sense the organisation of the revolutionary minority is the party.
2. The party has the permanent task of giving back to the class the entire legacy of theses, principles, and expressions of the struggle for communism, as that communist consciousness which has come about through the experiences which the working class itself has lived through.
3. The party is therefore the medium through which the relationship between the class and its consciousness has been expressed throughout the entire history of capitalism’s existence, just as it will be during the period of transition from capitalism to communism.
4. The seizure of power by the working class, and thus the beginning of the revolution for the whole of society, is only possible during the crises of capitalism and when the class recognises, in the principles and programme of revolutionaries, its own historic interests; when, during the assault on the bourgeois state, it rallies around the party and its programme.
5. The ups and downs of the party-organisation faithfully reflect the ups and downs of the life of the class. It almost disappears during periods of profound reflux when the bourgeoisie reigns supreme on the economic and political level. But just as the objective antagonism between the classes can never disappear, so communist consciousness which is nourished by this antagonism can never disappear either. It may though be reduced to the point where the organisation of revolutionaries seems to have disappeared. This is particularly the case when the defeat of the class leads to fear and disillusionment in the ranks of revolutionaries themselves, and thus to confusion and aberration on the level of communist consciousness. This was confirmed in Italy in the period around 1948, when the definitive victory of Stalinism⁽³⁾ – which had disarmed the class and led it to re-forge its own chains – provoked division in the ranks of the unified organisation, the Internationalist Communist Party, which had arisen in 1943 as a response to a potential reawakening of the class from the profound depression of Stalinism.
6. The existence of several organisations claiming the title of the party in no way undermines the continuity of the party and the necessity for militants to defend it. This was the task of the comrades of the left fraction in France and Belgium vis-a-vis the party founded at Livorno in 1921 throughout the period in which the Third International and the Soviet power had not yet, in their estimation, completed their cycle of degeneration. This was completed with the Soviet Union’s participation in the war in Spain as an agent of the counter-revolution, and in one of the blocs in the world imperialist war. The defence of revolutionary continuity was then crystallised in the new Internationalist Communist Party, which reunited in its theses and programme the whole corpus of experience and elaboration from the previous period. The fact that this party was later divided into two trunks⁽⁴⁾ and that one of them gave rise to groups and currents that were often openly counter-revolutionary (we are thinking of Invariance)⁽⁵⁾ has not led to the total disappearance or betrayal of the bases of the 1943 programme.
7. Although we cannot exclude the possibility of a revolutionary upheaval in one country under the guidance of a ‘national’ party at a time when the world party of the proletariat has not yet been formed, past historical experience and the growing supra-national concentration of imperialism teaches us that revolutionaries must seek to forge the international party on the basis of the theoretical and programmatic platform expressed by the communist consciousness of revolutionaries for half a century. The supra-nationality of capital, i.e. the identical class interests of the bourgeoisie in all countries, is matched by the supra-nationality of proletarian interests. A revolution that is victorious in one country will not survive for long if it does not have the active solidarity of the world proletariat, not only on the defensive level, but also through revolutionary assault on the whole capitalist system. The world party of the revolution is essential for the execution of this vital strategic plan; and, because it is so concerned with the generalised attack on capital it will subordinate to this plan the tactics of its section in the country where the revolution first breaks out.
8. This is the perspective the party will have for its international work. The supra-nationality of proletarian interests and of the party’s strategy will be reflected in the centralised organisation of the party. The party is the indispensible tool of the proletarian revolution, because only the party can incorporate into a programmatic political platform the ongoing developments coming out of the objective situation of the class, developments which would otherwise remain extremely incoherent and easy prey to sectarianism and corporatism – both expressions of bourgeois ideology – even before being hit by the repression of the bourgeois state. It is essential that the party is solidly regrouped around its central positions, that it is organised on the principle of centralism and not of federalism. Just as the class transmits to the party the multiple and sometimes contradictory experience which the party has to elaborate in a unifying programme and then return to the class, so within the party itself experiences of militant activity and strategic and tactical positions can go from the periphery to the centre and back to the periphery.

The Class and the Party

The notion that the party is only forged immediately before the revolution and even during it completely deforms the concept of the party. If in effect the class is capable of carrying through the revolutionary offensive – which demands a particular level of political homogeneity in the class without the intervention of the politically unifying factor represented by the party, then the party itself is superfluous. If it is the class which, at a certain moment in the development of its struggle “equips itself” with the party, then the latter becomes an operational instrument which has no connection with the problem of consciousness. Once again we are back at the famous theory of the councilists.

This is why, within the left communist movement it’s necessary to fight against the conception which, while recognising the necessity of the party in carrying out the revolution, postpones the constitution of the party to a “riper” period. It is based on an underestimation of the practical tasks of the party (or organisation of revolutionaries as certain comrades like to express it). We have seen that one of the essential tasks of the party is to equip itself with operational instruments which can, in the most concrete way possible, return to the class the programme of working class emancipation, elaborated by the party on the basis of the historical experience and existence of the proletariat. The formula “the party acts as part of the class in the class itself” says nothing, because all it means is that revolutionary militants are part of the proletarian struggle wherever they happen to be present and thus bring to it the critical positions and general orientations of the party. This is necessary but not sufficient if the party is to fulfil its role as a guide, unless one is saying that the party will undergo such numeric growth that it has a mass presence everywhere which contradicts the generally held idea that it is a ‘minority’ of the class.

It is a definitively acquired revolutionary principle that intermediary organs between party and class must exist for the entire period before and after the revolutionary offensive. These are organs the party uses to extend as far as possible the influence of its platform and orientations throughout the entire class. The class moves and struggles on the level of economic or, one might say, contractual demands. Only revolutionaries have a precise awareness of the limitations of these struggles, their inability to emancipate the class. Communists distinguish themselves from the mass of workers by the fact that even while they fight alongside the whole class in its defensive struggles they denounce the limitations of these struggles and use them to propagandise the necessity for revolution. Communists have to link the struggles of the class to a political strategy for attacking the bourgeois state. They must prepare the instruments which the party will use concretely to orientate the proletariat’s offensive when the whole system is in crisis and the struggle is becoming generalised.

The party would be failing in its fundamental duties – indeed it would be unable to function as an organisation of revolutionaries, as a party – if it neglected to work within the class with all the necessary instruments in the period leading up to the revolution, It would mean that, when the situation was objectively favourable, it would be unprepared and isolated from the class, which would result in the class being disarmed and disorientated.

The concrete possibility of making progress in the arming of the party is naturally closely linked to the degree of maturation of the class struggle and the real relationship in the class between revolutionaries and the agents of the left wing of the bourgeoisie. This does not mean that the kinds of tools to be used cannot be exactly envisaged in the programme of the party. The proof of this is that the ‘internationalist factory groups’ envisaged in our programme, and which must be an integral part of the platform of the international party whose creation we want to contribute to, may have a difficult life today, but in other times they have had an enormous importance (from 1945 to 1948 for example). Their task is not to simply ‘incite the struggle at the economic level’ as certain comrades seem to believe, but to transmit to the class the general political principles of the party, solidifying a sympathetic layer of the class and creating a reference point for future revolutionary struggles. The difficulty of the present situation, the low level of class consciousness, is reflected in the enormous difficulty of strengthening and extending this workers’ network. But if we miss out this point in the programme, putting it off to better times, we will render ourselves incapable of carrying out our duties when the time is ripe, since we will lack the cadre and the experience which the party can only develop through a long and combative presence in the working class.

Among the instruments which the party must equip itself with in its work towards the class and towards the revolution, the network of factory groups is the most urgent and important, but others must be studied and prepared⁽⁶⁾ even though they don’t yet seem to be necessary owing to the numerical weakness of revolutionaries and the unpropitious political situation. On the other hand, other organisations, such as the ‘communist youth’, must be considered products of a previous phase in both bourgeois society and the revolutionary movement and are thus now superfluous.

We reaffirm the principle that there is no class party without the instruments which really link the central organisation of the party to the class; those who underestimate or deny this affirmation are not working for the party.

1. The dialectical relationship between the class and its party does not disappear or go through qualitative changes during the seizure of power and the construction of the proletarian ‘semi-state’. Both are only possible when the class is concentrated and united around this objective.
2. The proletarian ‘semi-state’ will be characterised by the soviet form discovered by the proletariat itself during the experience of the Russian revolution. The gradual disappearance of classes carried out by the practical revolutionary movement of the proletarian masses will be accompanied by the mass production of communist consciousness and, consequently, by the gradual disappearance of the party.
3. The party will in no way identify its own structure with the structure of the “workers’ state”, but will accomplish its role as a political guide as long as the class recognises its own interests in the orientations it defends.
4. The need for groups of the communist left to deepen their understanding of the problems of the transition period must begin from the clear and fundamental affirmation that without a party there can be no revolution and proletarian dictatorship, just as there can be no proletarian dictatorship and workers’ state without the workers’ councils.

Notes:

(1) The original translation was printed in the pamphlet Second International Conference of Groups of the Communist Left November 1978 Volume One: Preparatory Texts by the International Communist Current (ICC). This translation is of the version on the Italian section of the leftcom website at leftcom.org

(2) See our pamphlet “Platform of the Committee of Intesa 1925 – the Start of the Italian Left’s fight against Stalinism as Fascism increased its grip”. For details see back cover.

(3) Stalinism was obviously victorious in the USSR in 1928 but this refers to the role of the reformed Italian Communist Party under Stalin’s loyal henchman, Togliatti in helping to establish social peace in Italy in the post-war period.

(4) This is a reference to Bordiga and the Bordigists’ split from the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) in 1951-2. A future article will outline the organisational differences between the two tendencies but details on the split can be found in Bordiga; Beyond the Myth by Onorato Damen (see advert in this issue).

(5) “Invariance” was the first split in the Bordigist camp (in 1966 but there have been many more since) and the only one when Bordiga was actually alive. Led by Jacques Cammatte, it denounced the Bordigists for their “activist” turn. Eventually Cammatte concluded that all political organisations were “rackets” and that the working class was a “class for capital” with no hope of making a revolution.

(6) This was written 38 years ago and since then the restructuring of the working class over the last 30 years has also led to the attempt to organise in localities which our Italian comrades call “territorial” groups. The CWO itself has experimented with groups which fight in each area around such themes as “No War but the Class War” at the time of the Iraq War. We should point out that this is not an attempt “to organise the class” (as the ICC said in 1978) but to organise revolutionaries and widen their impact within the class. The revolutionary political organisation or party cannot simply be an ideological construct which simply propagandises in a vacuum as this document tries to stress.