Origin and function of the party form - Jacques Camatte

General Premises

The central thesis
that we wish to state and illustrate is that Marx and Engels derived
the characteristics of the party form from the description of communist
society.

We shall attempt to indicate methodologically as far as possible the
link between the different works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the
Italian left. We shall, in short, use all the elements from the Marxist
school. Some points will, moreover, be indicated, but not studied
fundamentally.

The struggle of the
embryonic proletariat in the French revolution led some revolutionaries
(Varlet, Leclerc, Roux, i.e. the Enrages) to believe that the
revolution could only benefit a category of people and that it was not
universally liberatory. At the same time, however, the Egaux questioned
the possibility of this revolution liberating humanity. Thus they
proclaimed the need for a new revolution led in the name of reason (cf.
Marx's critique in The Holy Family).

The theory of the
universal evolution of reason and of its role is in Hegel's system
which completed the work of the French philosophers and the bourgeois
revolutionaries. Moreover, the proletariat was growing in numbers and
in its power in society when Marx entered the political scene. It was
from Marx's and Engels's observations of the struggle of the
proletariat that they gave birth to the idea that the enlightening
solution was not the real, the true one, and they also saw that this
solution was to be found in the proletariat's struggle.

They understood
that the question could not be resolved theoretically because the
question, the emancipation of humanity, had not been posed practically
since the bourgeoisie thought in terms of an abstract man in a category
excluding the proletariat. The liberation of man had to be seen in the
area of practice and one had to consider real men, i.e. the human
species (cf. Theses on Feuerbach 8
and 10). Marx went on to criticize the Hegelian system armed with this
inspired intuition. He found out why the dialectic was on its head. He
attacked the monster with reckless enthusiasm. (Marx was the new
Oedipus who resolved the enigmas). He returned to the field of practice
when the difficulties grew too great and threw what was real in old
Hegel's face: the existence of the proletariat. Since he was
anti-modern, Marx always drew new strength from the proletariat to
support the fight, explaining the proletariat's struggle (we shall try
as often as possible to underline this aspect).

Marx noted all the
practical and theoretical struggles and he was also in the current of
work of other fighters such as Engels, Moses Hess, the French
socialists etc.. Thus the summation was finally made, theory of the
proletariat, theory of the human species, which appeared in all its
power in the full phase of the eruptive development of human society:
the 1848 revolution, with the Communist Manifesto.

Thus Marxism is the product of the whole of human history, but it could only be born by the proletariat's struggle which:

"(has)
no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society
with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant." (1)

Our work today is
that of trying to explain how the inspired intuition has become
reality, the communist programme, how the programme was proposed to
humanity through the medium of the proletariat. How Marx and Engels
fought for its acceptance by the proletarian organization ("...the
history of the International was a continual struggle of the General
Council against...the individual sections"), how it won in 1871 with
the Paris Commune which showed the absolute need for it (need expressed
its verification and validity). We shall study all that so as to
specify the origin and function of the party form. Finally we shall
deal with the question with the reasoning that the only activity with
any reality is that of the programme, i.e. its necessity. Capitalism no
longer exists for us, only communist society does .(cf. numbers of 'il
programma comunista' of 1959-60 as well as what was dealt with in
Milan)(2) on the theme that our theory is the only one able to base
itself on a future action.

ORIGIN OF THE PARTY FORM

One has to know how
human consciousness evolved in order to understand Marx's - critique of
bourgeois society. Leaving aside the period of primitive communism and
the phase of its degeneration (beginning of class society), there are
three main movements, two straightaway:

1. knowledge mediated by God,

2. knowledge mediated by individual man (capitalist period, cf. the Florence, Casale and Milan meetings.(3)).

In the second case
it is a matter of knowing what is man (cf. the writings on man by the
bourgeois philosophers such as Hume, Locke, and Helvetius). One
precedes from the abstract definition of individual man (characterized
by reason) to the problem of knowing what is the best form of society
allowing an optimum development of this man, therefore what the best
social organization which will guarantee the most rational development
of humanity, seen as the sum of all people alive
at a certain stage, is. Finally, given that the human spirit is
perfectible, the masses have to be educated for the liberation of man.

Marx destroyed the hegelian monster in an implaccable critique in the Paris Manuscripts,
in the critique of the state and of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (law
being the link among individuals and between them and the state), and
in On the Jewish Question and came to grasp the real meaning of
the movement of human society in its totality. Humanity as a whole
tended to communism described thus:

"Communism
as the positive transcendence of private property as human
self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human
essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of
man to himself as a social (i.e. human) being - a return accomplished
consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development.
This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as
fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine
resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and
man - the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence,
between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and
necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the
riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.
"The entire movement of history, just as its (communism's) actual act
of genesis - the birth act of its empirical existence - is therefore,
also for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process
of its becoming." (4)

The character of the proletariat is to be:

"…a
class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an
estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a
universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular
right because no particular wrong but wrong generally is perpetuated
against it; which can no longer invoke a historical but only a human
title;…"

(here too we find the basic constant of Marxism: the criteria for
judging truth or error is that of the species, what interests us is not
a contingent and transitory fact, but the human being which mediates
all knowledge and action. The proletariat does not found its action in
history on the ownership of a certain means of production and so on the
partial liberation of man, but on the non-possession of human nature
which it wishes to appropriate and thus emancipate man.)

"which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences
but in an all-round antithesis to the premises of the German state; a
sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating
itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all
other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of
man and hence can win itself only through the complete rewinning of
man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat." (5)

The following quotation from The Holy Family again specifies what has just been stated:

"Indeed private
property drives itself in its economic movement towards
its own dissolution, but only through a development which does not
depend on it, which is unconscious and which takes place against the
will of private property by the very nature of things, only inasmuch as
it produces the proletariat as proletariat, poverty which is conscious
of its spiritual and physical poverty, dehumanization which is
conscious of its dehumanization, and therefore self-abolishing. The
proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounces on
itself by producing the proletariat, just as it executes the sentence
that wage-labour pronounces on itself by producing wealth for others
and poverty for itself, when the proletariat is victorious, it by no
means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only
by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears
as well as the opposite which determines it, private property. "when
socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat,
it is not at all as Critical Criticism pretends to believe, because
they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since in the
fully formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the
semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of
life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society
today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the
proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical
consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no
longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need - the practical
expression of necessity - is driven directly to revolt against this
inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate
itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the
conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own
life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society
today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go
through the stern but stealing school of labour. It is not a question
of what this or that proletarian, or even of the whole proletariat, at
the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat
is, and what, in accordance with this being it will historically be
compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and
irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the
whole organization of bourgeois society today. There is no need to
explain here that a large part of the English and French proletariat is
already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to
develop that consciousness into complete clarity." (6)

Thus the problem of
the becoming of the proletariat is that of knowing how the question of
classes and the state would be resolved, thus also the question of the
future society. The bourgeoisie tended, moreover, to prevent the
realization of the organic link between the class and its programme; it
tended to reduce the proletariat to a class of this society and, to do
so, made it abandon its programme. Here is the theoretical location of
the question of the party. All these questions
were not dealt with individually, the reply was made as a whole. Marx
had the intuition of the future society and he went on the draw out the
theory of the state and the party in this knowledge. All Marx's and
Engels's work was to be the description of this society and its defence
against bourgeois society. The following article (7) in the Parisian Vorwarts (7.& 10.8.1844.) enables us to show this.

The Nature of the State

Marx analysed here what the state is:

"From
the political point of view, the state and the system of society
are not two different things. The state is the system of society.
Insofar as the state admits the existence of social defects, it sees
their cause either in the laws of nature, which no human power can
command,(a) or in private life, which does not depend on the state, or
in the inexpedient activity of the administration, which does not
depend on it."(8)

Then he analysed the 'faults' of the state and the remedies invoked:

"finally,
every state seeks the cause in accidental or deliberate short-comings
of the administration, and therefore it seeks the remedy for its ills
in measures of the administration, Why? Precisely because
administration is the organizing activity of the state." (9)

Here we already
have the critique of the bureaucracy which some now wish to present us
as a class. We can also note Marx's keen interest in questions of the
definition of the mechanisms of the state. It was thus that he was
closely to follow the measures taken by the Paris Commune. The
importance of administration had to be limited and simplified in order
that the bureaucratic phenomenon could disappear, and, given the link
with authority, prevent membership of the administration being
accompanied with privileges.

Later Marx
envisaged the different contradictions linked with the state and
criticized the reformists who were those who wanted to fix the 'faults'
of the state which are by their very nature irreparable:

"Suicide is against nature. Therefore the state cannot believe in the
inherent impotence of the administration, i.e., in its own impotence.
It can perceive only formal, accidental deficiencies in its administration and try to remedy them." (10)

Here the position
of the Stalinists and the various democrats is defined very precisely.
But this did not satisfy Marx, he scoffed at his adversaries by showing
them their impotence:

"And
if these modifications prove, fruitless, the conclusion is drawn
that social ills are a natural imperfection independent of man, a law
of God or - that the will of private individuals is too spoilt to be
able to respond to the good intentions of the administration. And how
preposterous these private individuals are! They grumble at the
government whenever it restricts their freedom, and at the same time
they demand that the government prevent the inevitable results of this
freedom!"(11)

This is the
critique of the Stalinists who want a strong democratic power and who
'grumbled' each time de Gaulle restrained 'freedoms' and increased the
power of the state. They did not agree on the form of the state! Marx
mocked these illusions showing that the state is the organized power of
a class which dominated society:

"For
this fragmentation, this baseness, this slavery of civil society is the
natural foundation on which the modern state rests, just as the civil
society of slavery was the natural foundation on which the ancient
state rested. The existence of the state and the existence of
slavery are inseparable," (12)

Marx took this impossibility of reformism to its extreme by criticizing Ruge's position which stated

"…the
smothering of uprisings which break out in "disasterous isolation of
people from the community (Gemeinwesen), and in the separation of their
thoughts from social principles." (13)

That is to say that
the state has to be used to liberate the proletariat if one wishes to
avoid a check. This position was to be readopted by Lassalle, Proudhon,
Duhring etc. …(14)

Marx replied by analysing what the bourgeois, and all other revolutions were:

"But do not all
uprisings, without exception, break out in a disasterous isolation of
man from the community? Does not every uprising necessarily presuppose
isolation? Would the 1?89 revolution have taken place without the
disasterous isolation of French citizens from the community? It was
intended precisely to abolish this isolation." (18)

The Proletarian Path is not inside the Stat

Do the facts of the proletarian struggle appear in exactly the same manner? No:

"But the community
from which the worker is isolated is a community the
real character and scope of which is quite different from that of the
political community. The community from which the worker is isolated
by his own labour is life itself, physical and mental life, human
morality, human activity, human enjoyment, human nature." (19)

Here the critique achieves totality because it is radical, but:

"To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for man the root
is man himself." (20)

The poverty of the
proletariat is its separation from its human nature. This critique
supercedes the narrow limits of Proudhon's which was merely a rational
impoverishment and thus even a derationalization on the real poverty of
man. The Stalinists with their theory of absolute poverty are the real
inheritors of Proudhon and E. Sue (cf. Marx's critique in The Holy Family).
The claim of the proletariat was manifested in its will to
reappropriate its human nature and Marx defined the communist programme
as:

"Human nature is the true community of men." (21)

So the state does
not exist in communist society. The principle of authority, of
organization and co-ordination between men is the human species. It is
the return to primitive communism, but also integrating the
intermediate evolution (cf. the previous citation on communism). The
human species has been represented imperfectly and fragentedly
beforehand: e.g. the totem. Men delimited themselves in relation to it,
according to a participation with it (Moira of the ancient Greeks):

their individual
existence was not separate from that of the species. The split between
the two showed up when class society was established, attaining its
greatest development in the existence of the proletariat. It is this
poverty that Marx expressed in all its universality: the poverty due to
separation from the Gemeinwesen:

"The
disasterous isolation from this essential nature is incomparably
more universal, more intolerable, more dreadful, and more
contradictory, than isolation from the political community. Hence, too,
the abolition of this isolation(b) - and even a partial reaction to it,
an uprising against it - is just as much more infinite as man is more
infinite than the citizen, and human life more infinite than political
life.' (22)

Some philistine,
i.e. some vulgar democrat, will think that clever Marx drew all that
from his powerful brain because, for him, some philistine, reflection
is the exclusive property of some brain activity, if not…farewell
division of labour!! In fact it was not so. The proletariat is the
living manifestation of Marx's thought of the enunciation of the
universality of poverty and thus of the universality of its liberation.

"Therefore, however partial the uprising of the industrial workers may
be, it contains within itself a universal soul; however universal a
political uprising may be, it conceals even in its most grandiose form
a narrow-minded spirit." (23)

If this can be considered as a critique of blanquism, it is all the
more a powerful blow at Proudhon, whose shabby thought discovered a day
when the working class did not have political ability, thus it could
not govern. His refusal, as with the other anarchists, correctly to
envisage the economic, then the trade union struggle. Marx continued:

"We
have already seen that a social revolution is found to have the point
of view of the whole, because - even if it were to occur in only one
factory district - it represents man's protest against a dehumanized
life, because it starts out from the point of view of a separate real
individual, because the community, against the separation of which from
himself the individual reacts, is man's true community, human nature."
(24)

The proletariat
tends to oppose its own Gemeinwesen, the human being, to the capitalist
one, the oppressive state. It has to expropriate this being to realize
this real opposition. It can only do so if it organizes in a party.
This is the representation of its being, its prefiguration. The whole
life of the class, thus the party, is dominated by the movement for the
appropriation of this being. Here the
consciousness of the mission of the proletariat is expressed
specifically as the appropriation of human nature.

The Revolution and the States

The discovery of
the direction of the movement of human society, the movement towards
communist society, is concomitant with that of the rediscovery of man,
thus the simultaneous manifestation of the need to appropriate the
latter's nature. All that defined the programme:
Marx characterized the bourgeois revolution to specify this:

"The political soul of revolution, on the other hand, consists in the
tendency of classes having no political influence to abolish their
isolation from statehood and rule." (25)

The bourgeoisie possessed means of production in feudal society which
gave it a power unrecognized by the state. Hence the need to be
separated from the Gemeinwesen
no longer. That is why the bourgeoisie demanded the dissolution of the
different estates (henceforth there would only be people), because
their existence was the legal expression of its actual estrangement. It
pronounced that all social layers would participate in the state. In
fact only owners would participate (cf. The different constitutions and
analyses of them by Marx). Hence the wish of the bourgeoisie for all to
have property - its Utopian character - which assured equality among
individuals but also gave 'self-consciousness' to each individual.
Basically then, the bourgeoisie realized a political revolution. We
proletarians cannot be
satisfied with such a revolution because its point of view is:

"that of the state,
of an abstract whole, which exists only through separation from real
life, and which is inconceivable without the orqanized contradiction
between the universal -idea of man and the individual existence of
man." (26)

Therefore the
proletariat had to conquer power but it must not struggle for a
so-called more progressive form against another. It does so when it
struggles for one side of the bourgeoisie against another (democracy
against fascism). Its action must be external. The proletariat has to
abolish the opposition between the individual and the species to make
the revolution, the contradiction on which the present state rests.
(While there are individuals there is the problem of their organization
in society and this exists in the relation of their organization to the
needs of the human species.) The proletariat must not make a revolution
with a political aim because this:

"organizes a ruling stratum in society at the expense of society itself". (27)

Then, before going into the characterization of the proletarian revolution, he stated:

"Every revolution overthrows the old power and to that extent it is "political." (28)

The bourgeois
revolution is thus a social revolution while it dissolves old society,
and political when it destroys the old political power, but in
definitely strengthening its own political power (at least it hopes to
do so) it creates only a political revolution. Because the bourgeoisie
had to use a political organization to establish its social
organization which is inseparable from the former: why? Because the
bourgeoisie made a revolution that wished to create an abstract human,
the individual separated from nature and his own species, because it
wanted to liberate men from the old feudal relations (dependence of men
on each other and on nature). The problem was to define what would be
the relations between the new men. That is why the Declaration of the Rights of Man
and the citizen were formulated and which were only realized when the
revolution entered its practical bourgeois terrain, when it lost the
hope of really liberating humanity (after having destroyed the
movements like the Sans-Culottes, cf. The Holy Family). For
Marxism, on the other hand, man is the human species; social man has a
human link with the species and a human link with nature (domination of
it). Clearly the proletarian state cannot be a special organ regulated
by clearly formulated rules, by whatever right, but will be the human
being.

"But socialism cannot be realized without a revolution. It needs this
political act insofar as it needs destruction and dissolution, But
where its organizing activity begins, where its proper object, its
soul, comes to the fore - there socialism throws off the political
cloak."(29)

The Proletarian Parties

Marx's later work
was to study how to realize that. That is why he went into a specific
study of society and indicated the main feature of its transformation:
property of the species, destruction of exchange etc… He stated all
that in the Manifesto then, about the Commune, in The Civil War in France (the question of the destruction of the bourgeois state and means to limit careerism among other things).

The party thus represents the Gemeinwesen.
It cannot be defined by bureaucratic rules, but only by its existence,
and the party's existence is its programme, the prefiguration of
communist society, of the liberated and conscious human species.

The corollary is
that the revolution is not a question of forms of organization. It
depends on the programme. Only one proved, that the party form is the
one most suited to represent and to defend the programme. The
organizational rules in this case are not adopted from bourgeois
society, but derive from the vision of future society, as we shall
show.

Marx derived the
orginality of the party from the proletariat's struggle. From the start
the proletariat manifested itself an a new Gemeinwesen, it manifested
the goal it tended to - a society without private property but with
property of the species instead:

"…the
proletariat at once, in a striking, sharp, unrestrained, and
powerful manner, proclaims its opposition to the society of private
property. The Silesian uprising begins precisely with what the French
and English workers' uprisings end, with consciousness of the nature
of the proletariat. The action itself "bears the stamp of this superior
character, not only machines, these rivals of the workers, are
destroyed, but also ledgers, the titles to property, and while all
other movements -were aimed primarily only against the owner of the
industrial enterprise, the visible enemy, this movement is at the same
time directed against the banker, the hidden enemy, finally, not a
single English workers' uprising was carried out with such courage,
thought and endurance.

"…it is enough to compare these gigantic infant shoes of the
proletariat with the dwarfish, worn-out political shoes of the German
bourgeoisie, and one is bound to prophesy that the German Cinderella(c)
will one day have the figure of an athlete. It has to be admitted that
the German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat,
just as the English proletariat is its economist, and the French
proletariat its politician."(30)

In all these cases
it was the struggle of proletarians which was the critique of the
different aspects of human activity. Knowledge does not come to us
directly from the bourgeoisie as some wish us to say. It comes from the
struggle of our class. It is not a particular sphere of our activity
which arrives passively from the opposing class, it is something moving
and impassioned which has been taken from its class enemy by the
proletariat. The young Marx was completely correct in
writing that the ideas of communism:

"..which
have conquered our intellect and taken possession of our minds, ideas
to which reason has fettered our conscience, are chains from which one
cannot free oneself without a broken heart: they are demons which human
beings can vanquish only by submitting to them."(31)

Marx had thus
integrated three facts and retransmitted them to the proletariat in the
form of theses forming the communist programme. This was therefore born
of struggle and it is the impersonal force above generations, Marx and
Engels were the substrate of the first universal consciousness and
transmitted it to us. Marx made clear from the start that the programme
was not an individual's product. That coincides with what we have often
said, that the revolution will be anonymous or will not be.

But this goal, this
liberation, is precisely the one that society tends towards as the
liberation of the proletariat is the liberation of humanity, a constant
affirmation of Marxism. The programme born in the struggle could only
be affirmed by it. That leads us on to considering the conditions for
the struggle against capital, thus the conditions for the link between
the proletarians and the programme. We have to separate the periods of
revolution and counter-revolution. The proletarians, only support their
mission when they have no reserves (let us integrate that into the
dynamic of society, into the class struggle: can capitalism assure a
reserve for the proletariat, give it security? see The Holy Family. All that is related to the problem of the crisis and the different cases that can occur are explained in the
Rome Theses (1922).(32))

An important
characteristic of the party is derived from that, from the fact that it
is the prefiguration of the person and communist society, it is the
mediating base of all knowledge for the proletarian, i.e. for the
person refusing the bourgeois Gemeinwesen and accepting the
proletarian one. The knowledge of the party integrates all that of past
centuries (religion, art, philosophy, science). Marxism is not only a
scientific theory (among so many others!), but incorporates science
and uses its revolutionary arms of foresight and transformation to
achieve the goal revolution. The party is an organ of foresight, if
not, it is discredited.

"The middle class
party in Prussia discredited itself and brought on its present misery
chiefly because it seriously believed that with the 'new era' power, by
the grace of the Prince Regent, had fallen into its lap. But the
workers' party will discredit itself far more if it imagines that in
the Bismark era or any other Prussian era the golden apples will drop
into its mouth by the grace of the king. That disappointment will
follow Lassalle's hapless illusion that a Prussian Government would
carry out a socialist intervention(d) is beyond doubt. The logic of
things will tell. Jut the honour of the workers' party demands that it
should reject such illusions even before their hollowness is exposed by
experience(e)."

Why that? Because:

"The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing." (33)

This is the essential characteristic of the proletariat.

Party and Revolution

We have thus specified the links between the programme and the class,
i.e. between state and class. We must new state how the liberation
movement is constituted by the revolution. What will the revolution's
character be? It will be violent:

"For
although industry makes a country rich, it also creates a class of
unpropertied, absolutely poor people, a class which lives from hand to
mouth, which multiplies rapidly, and which cannot afterwards be
abolished, because it can never acquire stable possession of property,
and a third, almost a half, of all English people belong to this class.
The slightest stagnation in trade deprives a considerable part of this
class of their bread, then such a situation occurs, what is there left
for these people to do but revolt? By its numbers, this class has
become the most powerful in England, and woe betide the wealthy
Englishmen when it becomes conscious of this fact.
"So far it is not conscious of the fact. The English proletarian is
only just becoming aware of his power, and the fruits of this awareness
were the disturbances of last summer. The nature of these disturbances
was quite misunderstood on the Continent. At any rate, people wondered
whether the matter might not take a serious turn. But there was no
question of that for anyone who saw the events on the spot. In the
first place, the whole thing was based on an illusion; because a few
factory owners wanted to reduce wages, all the workers in the cotton,
coal, and iron areas thought that their position was endangered, which
was not the case at all. Moreover, the whole affair was unprepared,
unorganized and without leadership. The strikers had no definite aim,
still less were they united on the nature and method of the action to
be taken. Hence, at the slightest resistance on the part of the
authorities they became irresolute and unable to overcome their respect
for the law. When the Chartists took over the leadership of the
movement and proclaimed the People's Charter to the assembled crowds:
it was already too late. The only guiding idea vaguely present in the
minds of the workers, and of the Chartists as well, with whom it had,
in effect, originated, was that of revolution by legal means - in
itself a contradiction, a practical impossibility - in their efforts to
achieve which they failed. The very first measure jointly undertaken by
all - stopping the factories - was forcible and illegal. In view of the
inconsistent character of the whole of the undertaking, it would have
been suppressed at the very outset if the administration, for whom it
came as a complete surprise, had not been equally irresolute and
resourceless. Nevertheless, insignificant military and police forces
sufficed to hold the people in check. In Manchester one saw thousands
of workers trapped in the squares by four or five dragoons, each of
whom blocked one of the exits. The "legal revolution" had paralysed
everything. Thus the whole thing fizzled out; every worker returned to
work as soon as his savings were used up and he had no more to eat.
However, the dispossessed have gained something useful from these
events: the realization that a revolution by peaceful means is
impossible and that only a forcible abolition of the existing unnatural
conditions, a radical overthrow of the nobility and industrial
aristocracy, can improve the material position of the proletarians.
They are still held back from this violent revolution by the
Englishman's inherent respect for the law; but in view of England's
position described above there cannot fall to be a general lack of food
among the workers before long, and then fear of death from starvation
will be stronger than fear of the law. This revolution is inevitable
for England, but as in everything that happens there, it will be
interests and not principles that will begin and carry through the
revolution; principles can only develop from interests, that is to say,
the revolution will be social, not political." (34)

Here Engels
anticipated Marx's conclusions in the Paris Vorwarts articles. He also
described magnificently the proletariat without the party.
Unfortunately the English proletariat was unable to separate itself
from the bourgeois Gemeinwesen. On the contary, a kind of alliance between the two classes came into existence to exploit the world.

"It is well known
that in England parties coincide with social ranks and classes; that
the Tories are identical with the aristocracy and the bigoted, strictly
orthodox section of the Church of England; that the Whigs consist of
manufacturers, merchants and dissenters, of the upper middle class as a
whole; that the lower middle class constitute the so-called "radicals",
and that, finally, Chartism has its strength in the working men, the
proletarians. Socialism does not form a closed political party, but on
the whole it derives its supporters from the lower middle class and the
proletarians. Thus, in England, the remarkable fact is seen that the
lower the position of a class in society, the more "uneducated" it is
in the usual sense of the word, the more closely it is connected with
progress, and the greater is its future. In general, this is a feature
of every revolutionary epoch, as was seen in particular in the
religious revolution of which the outcome was Christianity: "blessed
are the poor", "the wisdom of this world is foolishness", etc. But this
portent of a great revolution has probably never been so clearly
expressed and so sharply delineated as now in England. In Germany, the
movement proceeds from the class which is not only educated but even
learned..." (35)

Thus is answered the famous anarchizing question, have the masses to be educated to organize the revolution?

Resulting from what
we have just written is that the proletariat only exists when it is
revolutionary, when it has its aim and its programme. It opposes its
state, the human being, to bourgeois society. Otherwise it is debased
and its aim is bourgeois. It becomes something of this society. Then it
no longer has life as its life is revolution (cf. The above quotes).
That is why the Communist Manifesto states:

"Political power,
properly so called, is merely the organized power of
one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest
with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to
organize itself as a class, by means of a revolution, it makes itself
the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions
of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept
away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of
classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as
a class." (36)

Class, party,
programme, and revolution, all that is specified. The class does not
act and thus does not exist outside what is formed as the party,
characterized its programme (which is its aim). The party can only
realize its mission through a revolution.

Marx and Engels did
not content themselves with an 'intuition', they showed the reality of
the programme. Every time that the question of revolutionary struggle
was not central to their activity they returned to their 'theoretical
studies' i.e. to specify the programme. They discovered the general
law, the overall law, and after specified the particular ones. These
studies were not only an enrichment, but also a potential
reinforcement. They performed then while in contact with the
proletarian struggles question of the state and the commune (cf.
Lenin's explanation in State and Revolution).
These studies allowed the specification of the description of communist
society and so the modes for attaining it too - by an extrapolation
into the past - they specified the evolution of human society:
indications of a society with no class struggle (primitive communism),
an extrapolation verified during the publication of Morgan's works
(thus losing the nature of an
extrapolation), well used by Engels and harx. It is thus that one views
the latters work on capital. One can state that there are three
essential moments here: that of capital's birth, that of fully
developed capital, and, finally, the one of communist society. To
unveil the historical movement in its real becoming, Marx opposed them
without noting that he went from one to the other. This is why it was
so easy for Stalinists to theorize that Capital gave no indication of
communist society.

The Tormented Cycle of the World Party

As an historical
product, the programme could only "be born in the proletarian struggle.
Marx and Engels had to reveal it to the working class and humanity in
1848 with the Communist Manifesto. They had to explain it
clearly in the IWMA rules. Now it is a question of how it is imposed,
why the proletariat abandons it in certain periods, what are the
conditions for its rediscovery? This is the question of the formation
of the party, the question of its reconstruction resolved at the Naples
and Rome meetings of 1951.(37)

The first phase of the workers' movement was the sectarian phase:

"The
first phase in the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeisie
is marked by sectarianism. This is because the proletariat has not yet
reached the stage of being sufficiently developed to act as a class.
Individual thinkers provide a critique of social antagonisms, and put
forward fantastic solutions which the mass of workers can only accept,
pass on, and put into practice. By their very nature, the sects
established by these initiators are abstentionist, strangers to all
genuine action, to politics, to strikes, to coalitions, in brief, to
any unified movement. The mass of the proletariat always remains
unmoved by, if not hostile to, their propaganda. The workers of Paris
and Lyons did not want the Saint-Simonians, Fourierists or Icarians,
any more than the Chartists and trade-unionists of England wanted the
Owenists. All these sects, though at first they provided an impetus to
the movement, become an obstacle to it once it has moved further
foreward; they then become reactionary, as witness the sects in France
and England, and more recently the Lassalleans in Germany who, having
for years hampered the organization of the proletariat, have finally
become nothing less than tools of the police. In fact, we have here the
proletarian movement still in its infancy, comparable perhaps to the
time when astrology and alchemy were the infancy of science. For the
founding of the International to become a possibility, the proletariat
had to develop further.
"In comparison with the fantastic and mutually antagonistic
organizations of the sects, the International is the real and militant
organization of the proletarian class in every country, linked together
in common struggle against the capitalists, the landowners, and their
class power organized in the state." (38)

All this period
corresponded to that of the post 1815 counter-revolution and saw the
greatest development of secret societies. This is why the Communist
Manifesto states:

"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims."(39)

We shall return to
this question with the study of blanquism which is simultaneously that
of the link of a minority to the mass. For the programme to be defended
by an organization, the movement had to supersede the stage indicated.
Then there is the question of imposing it. This is why Marx and Engels
fought inch by inch in the IWMA to make the programme triumph. Let us
recall Marx' s letter to Bolte, the history of the IWMA was that of a
struggle between the London General
Council and the national sections (cf. p.1 above). That is, the party
acted inside the proletarian organization and, at the 1871 London
Conference, the party-programme won out:

"Considering the following passage of the preamble to the Rules: 'The
economical emancipation of the working classes is the great end to
which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means:

That the Inaugural Address of the International Working Men's Association
(1864) states: 'The lords of land and the lords of capital will always
use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of
their economical monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue
to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of
labour ... To conquer political power has therefore become the great
duty of the working classes';

"That the Congress of Lausanne (1867) had passed this resolution 'The
social emancipation of the workmen is inseparable from their political
emancipation';

"That the
declaration of the General Council relative to the pretended
plot of the French Internationalists on the eve of the plebiscite
(1870) says; 'Certainly by the tenor of our Statutes, all our branches
in England, on the Continent, and in America have the special mission
not only to serve as centres for the militant organization of the
working class, but also to support, in their respective countries,
every political movement lending towards the accomplishment of our
ultimate end - the economical emancipation of the working class';

"That false
translations of the original Statutes have given rise to various
interpretations which were mischievous to the development and action of
the International working Men's Association;

"In presence of an
unbridled reaction which violently crushes every effort at emancipation
on the part of the working men, and pretends to
maintain by brute force the distinction of classes and the political
domination of the propertied classes resulting from it;

"Considering, that
against this collective power of the propertied classes the working
class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a
political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed
by the propertied classes;

"That this constitution of the working class into a political party is
indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution
and its ultimate end - the abolition of classes;

"That the
combination of forces which the working class has already effected by
its economical struggles ought at the same time to serve as a lever for
its struggles against the political power of landlords and
capitalists -

"The Conference recalls to the members of the International:

"That in the
militant state of the working class, its economical movement and its
political action are indissolubly united." (40)

Also, the creation
of the First International, just as that of the Second (both products
of the proletarian struggle) was also the attempt to prevent the
movement from falling into the hands of the anarchists and reformists.
The Third International too was established in the midst of
revolutionary struggle.

To understand this one must envisage two points:

1. Link between the organization-party and the programme-party.

2. What situations and moments favour the foundation of the party?

1. Marx specified these elements in his letter to Freiligrath (41):

"Let
me state to begin with, that the League had been dissolved, at my
instance, in November 1852, I never again belonged, and do not now
belong, to any secret or public society; that therefore the Party in
this wholly ephemeral sense ceased to exist for me eight years ago."

That is, the party
as a group of people (organization). The link with point 2 takes place
through the intermediary of this question; why dissolve this
organization? Marx replied by explaining that this is a phase of
retreat, a counter-revolutionary phase.

We ought to link
this reply organically to the statements at the Naples (l951) meeting
on Marxism as theory of the counter-revolution and on the capitalist
revolutionary nature of Russia. In this second study we stated that our
movement had already known other periods of counter-revolution, thus we
should not make the Russian question central to our activities as this
would sooner or later result in a contingent vision.

In these periods
the party is reduced to those comrades who have, in one way or another,
refused the victory of the enemy class which many militants theorize in
wishing to "break from the situation" by doing something at any price.
History, for Marx and Engels, was only the continual transformation of
human nature. A period of retreat cannot create good militants. Those
remaining have to be protected from this world's corruption, which is
not easy:

"Can
one escape dirt in ordinary bourgeois intercourse or trade? Precisely
there it has its natural abode. …
"The honest villainy or villainous honesty of solvent morality I do not
set one iota higher than the irrespectable villainy by which neither
the first Christian communities, nor the Jacobin Club, nor our
erstwhile 'League' was entirely unbesmirched. The only thing is that in
bourgeois intercourse one becomes accustomed to being dead to all sense
of respectable villainy or villainous respectability." (42)

No Utopia about man, so no activism, cordon sanitaire around the party as was clarified in a sul filo del tempo.

This retreats from
action, the thought out will to refuse action on the bourgeois field
when that of the autonomous proletariat is no longer possible caused
Marx to be "several times bitterly attacked, if not by name then by
clear allusion, for this "inactivity"".(43) As we have frequently
stated; music of the counter-revolution, words of yesterday. Today it
is the same. Our "inactivity" is attacked because we refuse to leap
into the whirlpool of bourgeois corruption, our action is
incomprehensible to them.

Why the Party never disappeared

Marx specified the life of the party after stating this:

"The 'League', like
the Societe des Saisons in Paris(f) and like a hundred other societies,
was only an episode in the history of the party, which is growing
everywhere spontaneously (naturwuchsig) from the soil of modern
society." (44)

The formation of
the organization is a product of the antagonisms of this society. If
the class has been beaten, if its organ of struggle has lost its
revolutionary character by rejecting the programme, or if it has been
destroyed during an armed struggle, a new organization will reappear
spontaneously, the social contracts will lead to an explosion on the
historical scene; the party will reappear.

The party is not
just this differential notion then, this organization whose life
somehow depends on the class struggle. What is the integral notion?

"I
have also tried to clear up a misunderstanding that when I refer to
the party I mean an organization which died eight years ago, or an
editorial board which broke up twelve years ago. When I refer to the
party I do so in an historical sense." (45)

i.e. the prefiguration of future society, prefiguration of future man, the human being which is the real Gemeinwesen of man.

It is the
attachment to this being which appears to be negated in the periods of
counter-revolution (just as the revolution now seems to be a Utopia to
everyone) that allows us to resist. The struggle to remain in this
position is our activity, Marx said at the Central Committee meeting of
the Communist league (l5.9.1850)(46):

"Schapper has
misunderstood my motion. As soon as the motion is accepted we will
separate, the two districts will separate, and the people involved will
have no further connection with each other. They will be in the same
league, however, and under the same Central Committee. You will even
retain the great mass of the League membership. As far as personal
sacrifices are concerned, I have made as many as anyone else, but they
have been for the class and not for individual people. As for
enthusiasm, there is not much enthusiasm involved in belonging to a
party which you believe will become the government. I have always
resisted the momentary opinion of the proletariat. We are devoted to a
party which would do best not to
assume power just now. … Louis Blanc provides the best example of what
happens when power is assumed prematurely."

More generally,
this question is linked, to that of knowing under what conditions one
can undertake an action. What is the link between this and
consciousness. We shall elaborate on this, but first let us remark that
the act of uselessly dissipating energy in periods of retreat,
mortgaging the historical encounter between the proletarian
organization and its integral programme.

"Such
events are however maturing in Russia where the vanguard of the
revolution will engage in battle. This and its inevitable impact on
Germany is what one must in our opinion wait for, and then will come
the time of a grand demonstration and the establishment of an official,
formal international(g) which simply can no longer be a mere propaganda
society but only a society for action. We are therefore decidedly of
the opinion that such an excellent means of combat should not be
weakened by wearing it away and using it up at a time when things are
still comparatively quiet, when we are only on the even of the
revolution."(47)

All Marxists agree
on this last point. One only has to recall Lenin's and the Bolshevik
Party's struggle, that of Trotsky, and the whole work of the left to
clarify that, for us, insurrection is an art.

What occurs in
periods of revolution, as in those of retreat, is the continuity of our
being, the affirmation of our 'programme-party' in its historical sense.

Rejection of Anarchism to save the Programme

Marx and Engels
struggled in the IWMA to make the programme (not their personal
ideology, the narrow vision of the anarchists and all our enemies)
victorious. The sticking point was not the final vision; everyone
wanted communism, even the bourgeoisie (cf. Lenin on this), but on the
means for attaining it, on the 'tool' for the liberation: the
dictatorship of the proletariat. The support for this characterizes
Marxists (letter to 'unreadable'). Let us recall the movement: the
class acts only when it constitutes itself in the party representing
its interests and thus, owing to this class' characteristics, those of
all humanity. The party seizes power, destroys the bourgeois state,
sets itself up as ruling class, thus as the state which now no longer
has a political, but a social function, hence arriving at the human
nature which is the real Gemeinwesen of man. The destruction of classes
is the conditio sine qua non. This is the basic rub with Bakunin.

"We
read in article 2: 'It (the Alliance) desires above all the political,
economic and social equalization of classes'. "The equalization of
classes, if taken literally, amounts to the harmony between capital and
labour, which is precisely what bourgeois socialists so unfortunately
preach. It is not the equalization of classes, a logical impossibility
and therefore incapable of achievement, but on the contrary the
abolition of classes which is the true secret of the proletarian
movement, and the prime object of the International Working Men's
Association." (46)

This secret is
maintained in the Party which is the dissolution of all enigmas, thus
all antagonisms engendered in class society.

"(The
Circular of the Jura Federation) states that, according to the Statutes
and the decisions of the founding congress, the International is
nothing other than "a free federation of autonomous" (self-continuing)
"sections" and that the emancipation of the workers is their own task,
"without any leading authority, even resulting from free consent"
"Accordingly the General Council would only be "a mere statistical and
correspondence bureau". This original foundation would rapidly be
falsified by the right given to the General Council to strengthen
itself with the help of new members and more still by the Basle
Congress resolution which gave the General Council the right to suspend
any section until the next congress and to regulate provisionally the
disputes until the pronouncement of the Congress. Thus one would have
given the General Council a dangerous power; the free union of
autonomous sections would be transformed into a hierarchical and
authoritarian organization of "disiplined sections" so much so that the
sections would be entirely in the hands of the General Council which
could refuse, at will, admissions and suspend their activities"
"To us German readers who know only too well the value of an
organization able to defend itself, all this will seem very
startling....
"But the struggle for the emancipation of the working class is for
Bakunin and his associates merely subterfuge: the true object is
completely different.
"The future society must be none other than the generalization of
the organization which the International will assume. We must thus
be anxious for this organization to approach our ideal as far as
possible... The International, the seed of the future human society(h),
must from now on be a faithful copy of our principles of liberty and
federation and must thrust from its ranks any principle tending to
dictatorship and authority."

"We Germans are
decried for our mysticism, but we are very far from attaining such a
mysticism. The International, a model for future society with no more
Versaillard firing-squads, military courts, permanent armies,
interception of letters, Brunswick criminal trials! Just now, when we
have to fight for our own skins with tooth and nail, the proletariat
must not organize for the necessities of its struggle which is imposed
on it every hour and every day, but according to the ideas that some
ghosts make of a vague future society! Let us depict what would become
of our German organization if we were to organize according to this
model....
"If Stieber and all his associates, if the entire Black Cabinet, if, on
command, Prussian officers enter the social democratic organization so
as to destroy it, the committee, or rather the statistical and
correspondence bureau must absolutely not defend itself for that would
be to introduce a hierarchical and authoritarian society and, most of
all, no disciplined sections! yes, no party discipline, no
centralization of forces, in a word, no arms with which to fight! In
short, where will we go with such an organization? To the lax and
rampant organization of the first Christians, to the slaves who
accepted with thanks each kick and who through flattery, it is true,
furnished victory to their religion three centuries later. This is a
method of revolution that the proletariat most certainly will not
imitate!"(49)

The Different Phases in the Life of the Part

We can now specify the life of the party.

1 . Phase of sects.

2 . Development of the party in 1840-8.

3 . Period of
retreat beginning in 1850. It was preferable to dissolve the league
because of what we have just said and because the moment for the party
to seize power had not then arrived. The class had been beaten.

"If, then, we have
been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from the
beginning. And, fortunately, the probably very short interval of rest
which is allowed us between the close of the first and the beginning of
the second act of the movement, gives us time for a very necessary
piece of work: the study of the causes that necessitated both the
latter outbreak and its defeat, causes that are not to be sought for in
the accidental efforts, talents, faults, errors, or treacheries of some
of the leaders, but in the general social state and conditions of
existence of each of the convulsed nations." (50)

This is also true
for the involution that manifested itself in 1926; hence Trotsky's
error in believing that one could reconstruct an international. This
involution revealed to us all the errors revealed by Engels. Instead of
a logical study and a balance sheet which would have allowed for the
preparation for another revolutionary rise, one tried, to find the
cause of the defeat in the betrayals of leaders, Stalin's crimes, the
passivity of the masses, the incorrect application of slogans (cf. e.g.
Trotsky's criticism of the German movement of the 1930's). Only we
posed the problem correctly and we stated that we have been beaten
but...

4 .
Reconstruction of the movement which accelerated with the 1857 crisis.
Marx and Engels studied fundamentally the reasons for the defeat. Their
leaving the league did not mean their acceptance of the defeat, on the
contrary, they tried to find out if the revolution could not break out
elsewhere, in India or China, and come to radicalize the proletariat's
struggle in the West. Lenin held the same position, which is also ours.

1864: foundation of
the IWMA which took place in a period of rising of the proletarian
movement, only the conditions were not altogether favourable. However,
the proletariat tended to supercede sectarianism and supported this
international organization. Also there was the anarchist danger, for if
the movement were to be taken over by anarchists, it would run the risk
simply of being reduced to lower
types of struggle. This is why Marx and Engels believed the foundation
of the IWMA to be necessary.

l871: the
proletariat took power. The characteristics of the Commune will be
analysed in a study of the French workers' movement and on the military
question. In any case, the class was beaten internationally.

In the new period after 1871, as in that after 1850, action was above all theoretical work. In 1851 Engels wrote to Marx:

"What
use will be the entire gossip and drivel of the whole of the émigré
rabble made at your expense when you will reply to it with your
Economy?" (51)

On November 24th, 1871, Marx wrote to De Paepe:

"I have already
told you in London that I have often asked myself whether the time has
come for me to withdraw from the General Council. The more the
association develops, the more time is lost, and finally I do have to
complete Capital once and for all." (52)

The workers had to be given their means of struggle.

5 . Marx drew
up a fresh balance sheet in 1871 and specified the conditions for
struggle. He specified the link between human will and action, that the
party-programme was produced at a given moment of the human struggle,
that the proletarian, organization could only develop with a certain
level of class struggle, i.e. the class had to gain its programme. Put
another way, the party does not form by the direct will of men. It is
recreated in determinate periods. It was a matter of knowing how the
revolutionaries could prepare the best conditions for the return of the
party onto the stage of history. All this was explained in Marx's
speech of September 25th, 1871:

"…the
great success which had hitherto crowned its (the IWMA's) efforts
was due to circumstances over which the members themselves had no
control. The foundation of the International itself was the result of
these circumstances, and by no means due to the efforts of the men
engaged in it. It was not the work of any set of clever politicians;
all the politicians in the world could not have created the situation
and circumstances requisite for the success of the International. The
International had not put forth any particular creed. Its task was to
organize the forces of labour and link the various working men's
movements and combine them. The circumstances which had given such a
great development to the association were the conditions under which
the work people were more and more oppressed throughout the world, and
this was the secret of success.(…) But before such a change (socialism)
could be effected a proletarian dictature would become necessary, and
the first condition of that was a proletarian army. The working classes
would have to conquer the right to emancipate themselves on the
battlefield. The task of the International was to organize and combine
the forces of labour for the coming struggle." (53)

6 .
1871-1889: the period of the reconstruction of the movement which ended
in the foundation of the Second International which was a little
'forced'. Actually it was supported above all by the possibilists and
various reformists. Engels accepted its foundation to prevent the world
movement from falling into their hands (cf. the Engels-Lafargue and the
Marx-Engels-Sorge and others correspondence).

The programme
underwent practical proof in 1889 and was reinforced. The Commune of
1871 had allowed the specification of the theory of the state. The
cycle of the proletarian movement was thus terminated; no social
phenomenon could again 'question' Marxism. There remained only the
hypothesis of a non-catastrophic evolution of society, thus of a
peaceful revolution. The 1914 war showed the absurdity of all that.

The reformist
vision could only be imposed because of the development of imperialism
which created contradictions after a while from the colonized
countries. Only the groups remaining on the basis of the international
programme assured the continuity of the human being = party-programme.

The Last Counter-revolutionary Storm

Tactical errors
prevented the proletariat's reorganization as the world communist
party. These were the errors of the united front and too 'forced' a
vision which prevented the Russian proletariat from receiving the aid
of the world proletariat. This tactic somehow recognized the defeat of
the western proletariat and theorized it. The theory of the
counter-revolution grafted itself onto these errors. Here we reach the
most difficult, longest, and most painful stage of the development of
the workers' movement. The counter-revolution triumphed in the guise of
revolution. To be able to get the better of the latter, it was
insufficient to get onto the field of the 'Russian leaders' (Trotsky's
error). One cannot consider the Russian question to be central. The
validity of Marxism in no way depends on the success or failure of the
Russian revolution because Marxism had been shown to
be correct in each of its parts. Thus success of the Russian revolution
depended solely on the world-wide victory of the proletariat. Now, as
has been shown many times, the victory of socialism in Russia depended
on the seizure of power by the proletariat in the West. If there has to
be a verification, one has to find it in our western zone.

The continuity was
not destroyed. The Left defended the programme. It showed the facts of
it in all their purity on all their levels, theoretical, practical,
tactical. Better still, if made a new summation of all the separated
elements of Marxism, which had not been ordered organically after the
struggle, in an ensemble of theses which did not pretend to have
discerned something new, but had ordered things for
a more effective struggle. These were the Rome Theses (1922) and the Lyon Theses (1926)(i) and all the works on the party.

The proletariat
abandons its programme in periods of defeat. This programme is only
defended by a weak minority. Only the programme-party always emerges
reinforced by the struggle. The struggle from 1926 to today proves that
fully.

This struggle takes
place with providing evidence and demasking critically far greater than
that the Russians were led to do practically. It consists in showing
how they were led to create new categories to include reality in their
general positions. We know that the bases far the foundation of the
world communist party will only exist after the critical demasking is
over: the recognition. We alone
also know that the proletariat has to draw this out in struggle. It
will thus rediscover its programme which is presently denatured and
prostituted. We can show our task by this following comparison: Jesus
chased the moneylenders out of the Temple, we must chase away all those
who sell their theoretical goods calling them Marxism. SO yet again
invariance, i.e. the continuity of our human nature = party programme.

It is only by so
envisaging the party that one can integrate the apparent opposition
between the act of proclaiming the possibility of communist revolution
in 1848 and stating in 1859 (which was already done differently in The German Ideology) that all social forms only disappear when they have exhausted their possibilities.

The communist
revolution can shorten the transitory capitalist phase from the moment
when there is a development of the productive forces that engenders a
class able to appropriate the human nature. Henceforth communism is
possible, laying that is not to delude oneself on the capacity for the
ruling class to resist which can still 'realize something' which
hinders the liberation movement because it provokes the rise of
opportunism in the proletariat. Marx and Engels could prepare the
troops for the retreat after the defeat by realizing all that. All
other movements threw or throw all their forces into the battle and are
completely destroyed. It is this dialectical vision that gave birth to
our historical continuity (cf. on this question what may be called the
anti-fatalism and anti-activism of the Lyon Theses of 1926).

In any case, now we
have arrived at the point indicated by Marx when the social form had
exhausted all its possibilities (at least for a large part of the
world). We greet with joy the great movement of expropriation which
develops on a world-wide scale because the greater that it grows, the
greater the possibility of the reappropriation of the human nature, the
more real communism is.

FUNCTION OF THE PARTY FORM

The function of the party derives from the struggle in contemporary society and from the description of communist society.

First, the organization of workers, organization of force and the use of violence.

"The political
movement of the working class has as its ultimate object, of course,
the conquest of political power for this class, and this naturally
requires a previous organization of the working class developed up to a
certain point and arising precisely from its economic struggles.

"On the other hand,
however, every movement in which the working class comes out as a class
against the ruling classes and tries to coerce them by pressure from
without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a
particular factory or when in a particular trade to force a shorter
working day out of individual capitalists by strikes, etc. is a purely
economic movement. On the other hand, the movement to force through an
eight hour etc. law, is a political movement. And in this way out of
the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up
everywhere a political movement, that is to say, a movement of the
class, with the object of enforcing its interests in a general form, in
a form possessing general, socially coercive force. While
these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organization,
they are in turn equally a means for developing this organization.

"where the working
class is not yet far enough advanced in its organization to undertake a
decisive campaign against the collective power, i.e., the political
power of the ruling classes, it must at any rate be trained, for this
by continual agitation against this power and by a hostile attitude
toward the policies of the ruling classes. Otherwise it remains a
plaything in their hands..." (54)

The party thus allows the organization of the class. After it will become the subject of the dictatorship of the proletariat:

"1. The aim of the
association is the overthrow of all privileged classes and their
subjugation to the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will carry
through the permanent revolution until the realization of communism,
the ultimate form of organization of the human family. 2. Towards the
realization of this goal the association will form a bond of solidarity
between all tendencies of the revolutionary communist party, while, in
accordance with the principle of republican brotherhood, it dispenses
with all national restrictions." (55)

It is this
dictatorship which allows the destruction of the bourgeois state and
which impels the social formation (cf. Engels in Anti-Duhring). This
dictatorship is historically necessary and thus 'free'. Here we have to
say that we are not for just any dictatorship and that this
dictatorship is a means. We have to see against whom the dictatorship
must be enforced, against what, in whose and in what name.

One can say from
this point of view that only the reactionary dictatorships, which wish
to maintain a class oppression, are authoritarian because they are
rejected by man (being unnecessary to his development and because they
absorb the Gemeinwesen to exploit it). The revolutionary
dictatorship is not authoritarian because it is accepted by man as a
liberation while this new Gemeinwesen will have an increasing
tendency to identify itself with the human existence, and so disappears
as a phenomenon outside people. Lenin said that the dictatorship of the
proletariat was that of the immense majority over the minority, unlike
that of the bourgeois class. Marx also showed in Capital that
the latter also becomes evermore the dictatorship of capital, thus
itself developing outside the class. During the revolutionary period,
in fact, the revolutionary power of the bourgeoisie allowed the
development of production by the destruction of the bonds linked with
the existence of feudal society. Therefore capital and the capitalist
are identical to begin with and the freedom of the one reflects on the
freedom of the other. Afterwards, with the capitalist concentration
together with the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, the
capitalist tends to be separated from his having and he, who was
capital's being, becomes its property. The capitalist as person
disappears:

"If the crises
demonstrate the incapacity for the bourgeoisie for managing any longer
modern productive forces, the transformation of the great
establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock
companies (trusts) and state property shows how unnecessary the
bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the
capitalist are now performed by salaried employees." (56)

Freedom disappears
or, more the case, it is merely that of capital. This becomes an
impersonal force served by a bureaucracy (pathology of classes) which
becomes the organization of the modern state, put another way, the
state becomes state-capital with its bureaucratic administration. All
the individuals in this society participate in capital, they receive a
profit in proportion to what they invested.

The modern state
has to make this operation, this equalization, respected. Hence the
crying contradiction of our epoch: an ever more oppressive state and
the demand by individuals for it to be even stronger, (the last French
crisis linked to the Algerian war was the nth. demonstration of this).
The bourgeois dictatorship has become a monstrous form alien to man,
hindering the development of society which, as a whole, tends to
communism. Capitalism itself tends to disappear (57).

The proletariat has
to struggle against this dictatorship. The destruction of the latter is
the suppression of sickness of men; the installation of the
dictatorship of the proletariat is its recognition by the appropriation
of human nature. Thus the antitheses individual-state,
individual-species, liberty-authority-necessity are dissolved.

The dictatorship of
the proletariat was suggested to Marx by the events of the bourgeois
revolution, by Babeuf, by the struggles of the French proletariat in
its specific blanquist form (not to forget Flora Tristan) by that of
the English and the German workers.

The workers express
practically the theoretical need formulated by Marx in his critique of
Hegel: might is right. They rejected all forms of struggle and aspired
to a kind of power which would allow the foundation of a classless
society. It is important to note that Marx always based himself on
reality to establish his theory (cf. the same process on the question
of the state and the lessons of the Commune).

From this flowed:

a. the party is a minority of the class.

b. unification of the proletariat internationally to take power. International character of the revolution and of communism:

"The
importance of communism is not that it is a highly serious question of
the time for France and England. Communism has a European
importance..." (58)

the party has to unite the struggle and make it lose its limited character.

c. the class
struggle is a war, so an army is needed. There is therefore the
question of neutralizing certain social layers, the question of allies:
one has to establish a base for regrowth in case of defeat.

We have, as Marx
underlined several times, an ardent passion for man and his liberation,
but it is not for that reason that we shall throw ourselves into the
struggle. We must always try to dominate the strategy and the terrain
of struggle. Our enemy will be assured sooner or later of the
maintenance of order in an opposite case (cf. the anarchist and their
precipitation). For us insurrection is an art.

Characteristics of the Party of Tomorrow

Given that the
party is the prefiguration of communist society, it cannot adopt a
mechanism, a life principle, an organization, linked to bourgeois
society. It has to realize the destruction of this society.

1. Refusal of the democratic mechanism. Our position is: organic centralism.

2.
Anti-individualism. The party realizes the anticipation of the social
brain. All knowledge is mediated by the party as is all action. The
militant does not have to seek the truth; this is afforded him by the
party (truth in the social domain, in other fields one can come to it
after the revolution and only then).

Tendency to realize social man.

3. Refusal of any
form of mercantilism and careerism. The relationship between comrades,
their manifestation, must be inspired by the comments by Marx on James
Mill's book: all activity, all manifestation, must be the affirmation
of human joy by communication with the other and, hero, with future
society.

4. Abolition to
social antagonisms linked to classes. There are only communist
militants in the party. Practically this means the unity of the party
around place of living and not place of work.

5. The party has to
be the dissolution of the enigmas and must know itself to be so. It
must present itself as the harbour for the proletarian, the place he
affirms his human nature so that he is able to mobilise all his
strength against the class enemy.

One must specify
these characteristics because they make clearer the party's function;
they allow one to have an integral view of it.

The party is this
impersonal force above generations, it represents the human species,
the human existence which has finally been found. It is the
consciousness of the species. It can only manifest itself under certain
conditions. In a revolutionary situation there can be the overturning
of praxis which is the overthrow of all past and present human
development. The party decides to seize power. The destruction of
bourgeois society ends human prehistory. Then everything converges. It
is the culminating point of the theory by the exact prediction of the
favourable moment for action (insurrection is an art). The two
phenomena are summed up, it is the consciousness of action which
appeared, consciousness before action.

Marxism is a theory
of human action, a theory of the production of consciousness. So it is
also a reflection on this action, on this praxis, so it is
consciousness of this action. It is thus produced consciousness. It is
the absolute truth of this consciousness (Milan meeting in 1960).
Consequently we can say that it is a guide to action (because it is the
organical action of the proletariat, subject of history) a guide to
human action leading to the liberation of man, towards his
consciousness, towards communist society. It is the guide to human
emancipation.

 

 

Postface January 1974

From the Party-Community to the Human Community

This text was
published in 1961 as the 'Report of the internationalist groups in
France' and was not the contribution of party militants because, at
that time, the small organization originating in what is called the
Italian left did not really see itself as a party on an international
scale. In fact the text was the work of two people, myself and Roger
Dangeville. It is an example of what Bordiga called a semi-finished
work because it had not been fully edited. Originally it
was to have been an expose for the Rome March 1961 meeting. Since I was
unable to be there, I wrote a text, but, lacking the time, I resorted
to a condensed presentation of some points (often only listed) to give
an impression of the work's totality.

Due to its numerous aims, this text could only be dense and sometimes involved, often laconic, because I wished:

- to deal with the
question of the partyy in specifying its different moments and
especially to define the future party as it could be which was
connected with the idea (to be demonstrated) that the party arose
spontaneously, thus trying to supercede the spontaneity-consciousness
opposition and above all that of consciousness coming from outside and
immanent consciousness, often reduced to spontaneity.

- to present the
left in its originalityy, to divide it from Leninism and Trotskyism, to
make a real break with the Third International.

- to lay the
foundations of the anti-immmediatism and anti-activism of the left, to
augment the invariance of the theory of the proletariat.

- to approach the
analysis of what I connsider to be the fundamental relations that of
the Gemeinwesen and the human being (etre humain).

It was Bordiga who
wanted the text published. Once it had been printed, even in its
imperfect, elliptic and, sometimes, defective style, the die was cast.
One no longer needed to envisage its modification, but to consider the
investigations that it contained. One had to go on from the sketches to
exhaustive explanations. This did not happen throughout the party
because, in fact, the text gave rise to an intense opposition inside
the current of the left. The attempts to impose it were met with only a
feeble echo, but it existed, which allowed a supercession of the whole
question of the party. Thus there was a meeting in Marseille at the end
of 1962 with a section dealing with 'The Three Internationals'. It was
hoped to clarify historically the life of the class, and party as had
been sketched in Origin and Function… This did not occur and did not
supercede the level of generalities. The essential arguments developed
during this meeting were published in Invariance Serie I, n. 6 'La Revolution Communiste' chs. 1.2 'Les Lecons de 1'histoire du mouvement proletarien'.

The work on the
democratic mystification began in 1962 and was approached at various
party meetings from then on. It was also in the same perspective. Again
there was but a weak echo. Only a few, including Bordiga, agreed that
the job should be done. The theses in Invariance Serie I, n. 6 ch. 5
(see The Democratic Mystification)
provide the essentials of this work. (N.B. the schemes are Bordiga's
but not the commentaries underneath them.) Yet we did not define an
important passage written
in 1964 commenting on Marx' s Contribution to the critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law.
(a preparatory work for the study of democracy). We do so here because
it illustrates well our position then inside the organization.

" All
other state forms are definite, distinct, particular forms of state.
In democracy, the formal principle is at the same time the material
principle. Only democracy, therefore, is the true unity of the general
and the particular."(j)

"For there to be
democracy on a large base, men have to be on an egalitarian basis: they
must be reduced to approximately the same substance. The human species
is unified by the action of capital, but atill object and not subject,
hence the bourgeois limit to historical social development. The
democracy form of organization can be useful for a humanity reaching
this stage. Humanity tending to its unification can still have an
external being, as a prisoner, alienated to an economic form. The
society tending to give it its real being (communism) cannot be
democratic.

"The unification
movement is constructed to the profit of an oppressive
being. This oppressive moment, at the beginning of the domination of
capital, still did not envisage itself because capital did not dominate
in a real manner, but had to assure its hegemony, above all against the
proletariat. Consequently it is the first aspect that matters: hence
the utopians' illusions, then those of the reformists.

""In democracy
the state as particular is merely particular; as general it is truly
general, i.e. not something determinate in distinction from the other
content."(k)"

"This is fully
verified in present-day society. It is the limit. The state is the
universal-concrete; it is society because society has conquered the
state. It models the state in its image. Here again the limit,
bourgeois society tends to destroy classes to make men slaves of
capital. It tends to do the same as communism, only the latter has the
vanishing of classes as supposing the sovereignty of man. The
domination of the Gemeinwesen. The capitalist state can thus be
the universal being, not of men, but of capital's slaves.
"It is no longer true for the whole, for the basis! The question of the
link between state and society is, mutatis mutandis, that of the link
of the party and the class and, later, the whole of humanity.
Capitalism tends to resolve the question by making the state a social
force, society alienated to capital, which dominates men. We therefore
have to specify this movement of unification which supposes the
parallel of the concentration of consciousness. Thus also as a
corollary, the question of the link between the united masses and
this consciousness, between the class and its social brain: the party.
That is the great question asked by the philosophers (e.g. especially
Hegel who posed it clearly and plainly in his philosophy of the state).
There is the beginning of the reconciliation between the social and the
political in bourgeois society. Beforehand it seemed that the political
movement was independent of the other. Force still appeared to be in
individual and not a social and economic fact. That is what Proudhon
did not understand. His theory of violence was one of physical
violence, as it could have been in primitive society. The strongest man
could really dominate it. Now who can attack the system physically? It
is this phenomenon of equalization which is fundamental. We are all
kids faced with the impersonal power of capital.

"All the powers
have been subjugated under a single one, economic force. Politics, as
an element seemingly autonomous in function, was also subjugated. That
is also the case with war. Men cannot wage war as in Napoleon's time.
Capital in its metamorphosing engine of iron and steel imposes a given
form of destruction and outside the fundamental consideration that
before one waged war for enrichment, now for impoverishment to restart
the productive machine at full-tilt. Machines and men produced in mad
quantities had to be destroyed.

"So the
characterization of the state when bourgeois society emerged from
feudal society is completely true. First Marx made the following
remark:

""In democracy
the constitution, the law, the state itself, insofar as it is a
political constitution, is only the self-determination of the people,
and a particular content of the people."(l)"

""In the states
of antiquity the political state makes up the content of the state to
the exclusion of the other spheres. The modern state is a compromize
between the political and the unpolitical state."(m)"

"This is the
fundamental characteristic of a society where capital dominates
formally, a period when it tends to use its political power to ensure
its domination, to make it a social domination. The bourgeois
revolution is a social revolution with a political aim. It also tends
to assure its political domination by a social force. It is
simultaneously the end of politics, the question of the relationship
between men, their organization and domination, is resolved, by an
external being: capital. So far as capital has not yet assured its
material and real domination, there is an arrangement between the
political and non-political states. There is also an arrangement
between form and matter. Hence what seems paradoxical; democracy which
ought to be realized for man is realized by excluding man. That
inevitably happens while democracy supposes a domination, a
dictatorship and a base as large as possible."

At the same time
the study of the 'philosophical question' tended, to deal with the same
theme, but differently. The following statement showed this amply:

"Philosophy appeared when primitive communism dissolved, so at the moment when the Gemeinwesen was secured by a class state. Philosophy =the theoretical attempt to reconcile antagonistic forces of the old society."

The most obvious
proof of the non-acceptance of those various analyses, all having the
central point of the rejection of democracy and the affirmation of the
need for a new community lay in the debate on organization which became
very acute in 1964. Then some comrades (some of whom later published Rivoluzione comunista,
but this also applies for the small group publishing Ottobre Rosso)
believe that the party ought to intervene mere actively in the
struggles which since 1962 (in Italy) had attained a certain
importance. They saw the cause of the incapacity of the party to
intervene in those struggles in its way of life, its organization. That
is why they proposed the abandonment of organic centralism, actively
supported since 1952, and its replacement with democratic centralism
and they preached a new what is to be done?

Bordiga reacted
strongly against this tendency and published 'Notes for the theses on
the organization question' (Florence meeting 31.10. - 1.11.64.). These
were accompanied by texts elaborating the definitive theses,
fundamental texts suitable for showing the invariance of a position
entitled 'Contribution of our present post-war movement to the
organization question'. Origin and Function… was included among them
and the sections 'why the party never disappeared' and 'The bases of
the future party were reproduced (cf. il programma comunista
no. 1
1965). This meant that Bordiga still agreed with this text and implied
that the comrades trying to continue the task undertaken with him were
to carry out their researches. This is why I wrote to Bordiga in a
letter dated 27.12.64.:

"The
relation between the party and the community is also the question
the material community created by capital as well as that of the
mistake of the French (bourgeois) revolutionaries who wished to found a
new community while capital was founding its own with its own
development, will be studied later in work on the workers' movement.
Only this aspect of the question is linked to the study of Capital,
chaper 6 above all, and Marx's famous Urtext where he deals with this
question."

The consideration
followed of the party-individual relation and the critique of the
affirmation of the negation of the individual ending finally in the
negation of the human being himself.

The allusion to the
material community of capital is explained by the fact that the study
of the Sixth Chapter of 'Capital' was undertaken at the same time. It
was due to this study that the explanation of the development of the
community assumed a more adequate basis. In a letter dated 11.5.64.
sent to Dangeville and Bordiga, I raised these points:

"The meaning of the
demonstration is this when the human communities are destroyed by the
action of economic forces, use value loses its importance, usefulness
of the product disappears to be replaced by exchange value. Production
was for man in primitive society; after it was for wealth. The movement
of the expropriation of man, of his separation from the Gemeinwesen,
is accompanied by the increasing autonomlzation of exchange value. Here
Marx analysed the passage to capital as the passage to the complete
autonomization of exchange value.

""Money which
results and autonomizes itself (verselbststandigte) from circulation,
which perpetuates and valorizes (reproduces) itself, is capital. Money
has lost its fixedness (Starrheit) in capital and has become a process
from being a palpable thing." (Urtext in Grundrisse (Berlin-E.) p. 937)"

"Marx also showed how capital became an impersonal being. It is also important to note that Capital Vol. II
begins with the metamorphosis of capital. It is no longer a matter of
the commodity circulation process which is formal (see above); it is a
question of the metamorphosis of the same being.

"…then he indicates
that capital is the result of a long process and he
makes the essential remark:
""One sees at this determined point in what way the dialectical form of
exposition is correct only if one knows its limitations (Grenzen)."
(p.945)"

"That is, one has
to know the pre-capitalist forms of production and communism. Thus Marx
described communism and, more immediately, the ultimate forms of
capitalism. It is just these forms that we shall try to evidence in
trying to see how commodity-capital presents itself.

"Capital absorbs
the real non-capitals labour. To do this labour has to lose its
concrete character, its use value for man, and become use value for
capital; all human labour has thus to become abstract. Here we find
again in another form what Marx said in his critique of Hegel's
philosophy of the state.

"...Capital is the
negation of value because it is its own affirmation. It is its
valorization, its reproduction on an ever increasing scale. It is the
negation of value but the affirmation of value that has achieved
autonomy: capital. A value which is no longer linked to whatever use,
if it is not a valorization and so the only use value interesting for
capital, is labour. But here yet again labour has lost its character as
use value for man. It is for capital (cf. in the same order of ideas
the 1844 Manuscripts where Marx explains what labour under the rule of
capital is: wage labour.)

"Thus labour is
originally an activity of man allowing him to exploit the land. All the
later social forms interpose an intermediary between land and man.
Capital does more, it makes man a source of wealth, it inverts the
phenomenon. Man is like the ancient land from which all products
necessary for life are taken. Capital draws life from that, exploits it
just as man exploits an iron ore mine. This is therefore as appearance
of an impersonal being that capital originates.

""They (i.e.
individuals) do not have any relations between themselves from the
point of view of organic social metabolism, which develops in
circulation, without this objective mediation (i.e. commodities). This
exists solely as reified (sachlich) one for the other, something which
is finally developed solely in the money relation, where their common
being (Gemeinwesen) appears as an external and so accidental
thing above everyone. The fact that the social ensemble which appears
through the clash of independent individuals, at the same time as a
material (sachliche) necessity and as an external bond to them, it
represents exactly their independence for which social existence and so
a
necessity but it is only a means, to appear to individuals themselves
as something external, in money as something palpable.(…)
In as much as they are not subsumed in a natural community nor, on the
other hand, consciously subsume elements of a community, a community
under them, this must be by comparison with them, by comparison with
independent subjects as something reified (sachliches), likewise
independent, external, and accidental. This is just the condition that
they as private, independent persons remain at the same time in a
social ensemble." (pp. 908-9)"
"Now this is what I believe can be deduced from this passage: the human
community is destroyed by the action of private property, exchange,
division of labour and simple circulation.

"But simple
circulation cannot lead to the reconstruction of a material community
because there is no liberation of man, no separation from his immediate
community mediated by the land, feudal hierarchy, or even by money. Man
has to be circulated as a commodity (labour power) for there to be the
birth of autonomous exchange value (capital) which would be able to
presuppose the whole of the social phenomenon. Capital becoming the
material Gemeinwesen of man, but an enslaved, abstract man (see in parallel the critique of Hegel's philosophy of the state).

"Hence the
mystification of abstract communities which is also negated by economic
movements in any case as they draw the limits to the realization of
these communities, in pre-capitalist society and especially during the
early period of capitalism (period of formal domination). The question
of democracy ought to be seen in this way. Recreating a human community
while the economic movements and forces had been liberated by the
bourgeois revolution and could but tend to install the community of
capital. Seen in this way, Marx's polemic with Ruge assumes a further
dimension.

"One also sees why
Marx was so interested in the prior forms, in the analysis of the
division of labour in primitive communism, in the forms of its
dissolution, in the period of simple commodity circulation, and finally
in capitalist society.

"Hence the role of
politics in the whole period from primitive communism to developed
capitalism (real domination). Politics was the attempt to unify men
separated by the productive forces. Now the same men are reunited under
the domination of capital, so politics is used by capital to dominate
men. Hence the contradiction that emerged with the use of forms that
were useful but which are now no longer adequate, which also means that
bourgeois society is based on a misunderstanding, a lie which has its
source in the very roots of this society."

In my letter dated 26.5.64. to the same people, I made the following remarks:

"Thus
in pre-capitalist mercantile society the law of value is 'necessary'
when it is a question of producing commodities. Under capitalism it is
not a question of producing commodities, but of valorizing a value,
increasing it. Thus it becomes process. Everything is in motion. That
is why pre-capitalist society can make do with metaphysics while
capitalism engenders the dialectic."

The same themes
were always underlined, as too with the expose on the French workers'
movement at the Marseille meeting (July 1964). But this encountered the
same opposition, more often passive than active. The account of the
meeting was only published in French in 1971 in Invariance Serie I, n. 10.

Let us return to
the question of the party to state that at this time the formal party
to be was seen as having to be the party community, i.e. by definition
it could only be the realization of the historical need which then was
defined as being that of the proletariat, realizing the human
community. Put another way, the distinction between historical and
formal party ought to have tended to lose all meaning. But such a
statement implied the rejection of all discussions, often
lively ones, on forms of organization and the need for leaders in them.
The supporters of organization at any price, on the other hand, saw the
debate as a choice between formal and historical party. Hence the
strange 'specification' that Bordiga believed he had to make in
Considerations on the party's organic activity when the general
situation is historically unfavourable, the title alone
institutionalizing the difference between historical and formal party
and making any supercession impossible. One also must say that since
1963 the same organization considered itself to be a party that really
existed, hence the expression 'organic activity of the party' in a
clear context. The "specification was thesis 12:

"This
distinction existed in Marx and Engels and they had the duty to infer
from it disdain for belonging to any formal party as they were, with
their work, on the line of the historical party. Thus no militant today
can however conclude from this that he has the right to choose to be in
line with the 'historical party' and to ridicule the formal party. It
is not that Marx and Engels were supermen of a type and race unlike all
others,,but one must understand that their proposition has a
dialectical and historical meaning.
"Marx said: party in the historical meaning, in the historical sense,
and formal or ephemeral party. The first notion contains a continuity
and hence we derived our characteristic of the invariance of the
doctrine from the time Marx formulated it, not a genius invention, but
as a result of human evolution. But the two concepts are not in
metaphysical opposition and it would be foolish to express it with the
little catechism, cold shoulder the formal party and go instead for the
historical one.

"When we deduce
from the invariant doctrine the conclusion that the revolutionary
victory of the working class can only be won with the class party and
its dictatorship, and, guided by Marx's works, we state that before the
revolutionary and communist party, perhaps the proletariat was a class
for bourgeois science, but not for Marx and us; the conclusion to be
deduced from it is that victory requires a party deserving
simultaneously the title of historical and formal party, i.e. the
victory requires that the reality of action and history have resolved
the apparent contradiction, and that it has dominated a long and
difficult past, between the historical party, thus as to the content
(historical, invariant programme) and contingent party, thus as to the
form which acts as force and physical practice of a decisive part of
the proletariat in struggle.

"The synthetic mise au point of the doctrinal question must also be applied, to the historical stages before our own."

One can clearly see
from all the above text that the entire basis of the question was
removed, all that remained was by definition the justification for the
existence of the small organization whose majority wished to call a
party at any price (and at the beginning of 1965, when these theses
were published, they succeeded) while before for Bordiga and always for
us, the party could only be in a distant
future.

However, I
approached the question again based on all the world indicated. Thus I
wrote this in a letter to Bordiga dated 18.6.65. accompanying the
dispatch of a collection of commentaries on works of the young Marx (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, 0n the Jewish Question):

"Marx
found the solution in the communist Gemeinwesen. He demonstrated the
genesis of the state and so the destruction of the old community and
afterwards the reformation of the community. One can show that this was
Marx's basic preoccupation. In fact he discussed capital in 4 different
ways: 1. in the 1844 Manuscripts he insisted mainly on alienated labour
and so wage-labour in capitalist society, 2. Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
He started from the material relation, the commodity, then capital. The
conclusions were the same, only Marx wanted to show both how the social
process was
actually produced and how it occurred in man: the various economic
schools. So a double plan, on one hand purely economic facts and
historical considerations on the other. 3. Forms which precede
capitalist production. In the first two texts he tried to see how the
wage labourer had been produced, how capital constituted itself. The
difference between the two works resulted from the different central
points; the alienated wage-labourer and capital. Here Marx explained
that capital could only develop by destroying the natural community

then the one mediated by land etc.. The central point is the community. 4. The Urtext which is only a part of the draft of Contribution…
Here Marx posed the problem of the autonomization of exchange value and
showed that gold could not realize that, only capital could. Only he
also indicated that, now, capital can be the material community. It
alone could replace the old community destroyed during the various
revolutions which are the various periods of man's expropriation, up to
the total rejection of man, even ejected from the production process
and thus from labours the proletarian. This is important because it
completes the investigations of the Forms… and moreover allows the
unifying of the whole work on the fundamental question of the
community, i.e. communism."

On 21.6.65. I specified:

"A simple addition
to my last letter. The specifications on the party community are vital
for understanding the historical and formal party. The two are not
opposites, nor have we interposed these two terms to oppose them, but,
on the contrary, to interpose the historical continuity, to show that
it was integral while our enemies saw only the differentials. That is
why prior to knowing Marx's terminology, we spoke of integral
(historical), and differential (formal) party. The party arises
historically, i.e. integrally, because it expresses
the totality of the communist programme. But the class struggle made
the party afterwards not always to succeed in supporting the whole of
the programme and to allow itself to be limited to replies offered to
situations posed by the class struggle while it had contingent tasks to
accomplish (that was possible when there was still the possibility of
progressive emancipation, but that is no longer so now capitalism has
fully developed). Thus the present party form can only be historical.
Now this is the community which is the prefiguration of communist
society; its essential task is to unite the working class which will
again be set in motion by the crisis of capital leading to the
revolution. Afterwards the party (reappropriation of the human being)
will unify the species: abolition of classes. This is all in Marx's
so-called philsophical works."

The neo-Leninist
and Trotskyist current dominated ever more from then on. Bordiga
released ballast, even retreated, moaning that he abandoned the work
tending to supercede the historical moment of leaving the old workers'
movement and so really founding the originality of the Italian left.
Thus he no longer quoted Origin and Function… among the texts forming
'The documentary material showed and illustrated to comment on the
general these of the Naples meeting' after the Naples theses (July
1965): a compromise between the two divergent positions?!

This little history
is needed to show the accord one could have with Bordlga on the
question of the party as well as the limits. Origin and Function was a
sort of key text because many polemics revolved around it (all those
leaving the PCI after 1962 attacked it violently) and because it was
the start of a supercession continued with the work published in
Invariance, and also owing to the opposition it incited,
it provoked the strengthening of the Leninist component with the
worship of the link with the Third International by Bordiga, but
especially by the PCI which fell completely into the Leninist current
and lost all originality after 1966. It is also a key text because it
supports the resistance to the counter-revolution, the effort of
isolation (the famous cordon sanitaire); the workers' agitation (apart
from the Belgian miners' strike of 1960, linked to the structural
crisis of Belgian capitalism, which was limited) did not assume greater
depth until a few years later, but then it was no longer the classical
proletariat manifesting itself. It also reflected the shakings linked
to the anti-colonial revolutions. It was in this appreciation of the
historical moment that there was the divergence inside the PCI. Great
effort is made in the text not to place it contingently, but in the
totality of the communist movement. Also one tended to destroy any
sectarian vision fixed on the small organization in trying to supercede
it with the perspective of uniting all the forces really
future-oriented, so as to start the attack on the counter-revolution;
capital.

Finally this text
appeared, when the left tended, to extend geographically a bit thus
posing acutely the relation with the perspective outlined, in 1856 of a
revolutionary movement about 1975. One had to think of the huge body of
the class conceived historically as a unitary phenomenon, an attempt to
supercede Marx's strictly
limited position. But such an adoption of positions also led to a
critical view of the past, hence the divergence with those wishing to
question nothing and to continue… Over time this divergence could only
be aggravated.

The themes in
Origin and Function were not exhausted in 1965 but in fact were taken
up again in other works published in Invariance such as Perspectives
(Serie I n. 5). In I/6 The Communist Revolution they were taken up
again in Chapter 8.5: 'The reunification of the class and the formation
of the party-community'. One also has to specify the importance of the
forecast. But this did not happen because the critique of organization
founded on the analysis of the May 1968 movement led to a questioning
of the way of understanding the formation of the communist party. This
was the letter of 4.9.69. written with Gianni Collu on gangs published
in Invariance Serie II, n. 2 with a preface and called De
l'organization.

Origin and function
cannot really be understood without a knowledge of the accounts of the
meetings before 1962 published in Invariance Serie I(n) or which
appeared in Bordiga et passion du communisme. Those texts were unknown
to the French public in 1968, that is why we quoted them extensively
when we published Invariance I/1. We also used many quotations from
Lenin with the polemical intention of showing that
he could not be reduced to What is to be done?, +hat he had a greater
vision of the party phenomenon (we only wanted to note his overgrowth
and not to convey everything definitely superceded and realized). Now
this has no more interest. So we prefer to publish the text as it
appeared, in Italian in 196l with Bordiga's sub-titles.

We said that
Dangeville participated in the production of Origin and Function. The
reader can see his evolution by reading the 4 volumes of Parti de
Classe in 'Petite Collection Maspero'.

Finally let us note that Rubel's text Remarques sur la concept du parti prolotarien chez Marx was a great source of inspiration.

*********

The various studies made since 1969, some of which appeared in Invariance
Serie II, have led to a total supercession of the classist position and
so too any theorizing about the party. This will be shown exhaustively
in future issues of the journal. Nevertheless, we have to take a
position on this old text to show a development itself clarifying the
conclusions at which we have arrived.

One saw in Origin
and function as elsewhere in Bordiga's work after 1945 that the party
is always the party as it has to be. Basically the small group had to
be under extreme tension to define something, and this could only
happen with the mediation of the grasping of communist society. So as
soon as an element was seen differently, everything had to be changed
as the party was really envisaged through the totality.

It was the same for
the proletariat: it was postulated as it had to be through
transhistoric consciousness, determined by an historical process, or,
more exactly, according to a representation determined by a specific
historical process.

The party was
conceived of as always having to be produced in its purest form. The
proletariat the same being always more the true proletariat: from the
Bras-nus of 1793 through the artisinal proletariat of 1871 to the
German proletariat of the 1920s,
the true proletariat.

Here is the
weakness: there is a true proletariat, but it does not have the
consciousness, thus it is not the true one. But here comes an
explanation based on various theorizatlons of the integration of the
proletariat into bourgeois society. Always the crisis destroys it and,
then, there would no longer be an obstacle to the
proletariat-consciousness meeting.

This briefly is the
theory of the proletariat developed by the Italian left. The crisis is
one of the links of the theory with that of value. The crisis is only
true real, on the basis of the law of value which in turn is only
possible with reference to man, man determined by a production process
and not abstract man, but a man who has an antagonistic determination
to capital, which is opposed to him. Now the crisis has been
encapsulated by capital and so there appears an impasse for the two
theories.

We do not wish to
criticize them exhaustively, we simply wish to note, the
presuppositions of the theory of the proletariat and its limits, given
that this theory is one of the pillars of Origin and function.

As was said in this
text, the schema of the communist revolution was imposed on Marx by the
observation of the course of the French revolution. The bourgeoisie
believed that it could liberate humanity. Here Marx did not make a
reduction, he conceived this class in its human dimension and in its
limitations. The irrefutable proof of the check was the existence of
the proletariat which the bourgeoisie theorized and avoided in
preoccupying itself with pauperism and its extinction.

Now this class is
not passive, it rebels. Marx saw here the possibility finally to
accomplish the task of reconciling men by eliminating class antagonisms
because a class showed itself unlinked to any particular determination:
the proletariat as negation.

Also, following the
Ricardian socialists, he presented this class in liaison with and on
the basis of the law of value and he added that the proletariat was the
class producing surplus-value. But he did not stop at this discovery
and he analysed the movement of capital and stated its tendency to
integrate the proletariat and negate classes. However, this is always
found as a tendency in Marx: the crisis can reinvigorate the negativity.

We say this to show
where we were enclosed in Marx's schema and where we have developed and
somewhat exhausted its possibilities. This prevented us from
superceding the Marxian vision in 1961 although reality already imposed
it. But that is also true of our predecessors for such a supercession
ought to have been made from the 1920s.

Certainly one can
find the elements for such a supercession among Marxists and
anti-Marxists in the 1920-39 period (also in the Immediate post-war
period), but, on one hand, they are definitely only feeble remarks that
can be used now that the 'step' has been taken and, on the other hand,
we often only have a very recent knowledge of them. The Second World
War eliminated a pile of documents which have only reappeared since
1968. Besides, we have already said that the revolutionary movement
during its emergence will often not go beyond the resurrection of the
immediate revolutionary past. We have not escaped such a phenomenon.

Here a critical
analysis of the proletarian movement, from the beginning of the century
above all, is needed. We began with the KAPD et le mouvement
proletarien, Bordiga et la question russe, Russie et necessite du
communisme, Bordiga et la passion du communisme and as we shall do with
an analysis of the Spanish revolutionary movement and as Casten Juhl
also did with La revolution allemande et le spectre du proletariat, an introduction to Herman Gorter's The Communist Workers' International.

But that will not
exhaust the critique of our historical behaviour, that is, our way of
representing history and situating ourselves in time: all historical
reconstruction is participation in the past. We have to reconsider the
representation Marx made of the proletariat and to confront it with
what the proletariat has really done.

This questioning
does not have the goal of projecting an anathema, but of locating
clearly where and why there was an illusion. This will also not imply
the revalorizing of prior anti-Marxist positions, above all as an
integral solution e.g. democracy.

Here we are led to considering the second pillar of Origin and Function: the Gemeinwesen. But that is also to say that there was a certain contradiction between the theory of the proletariat and the research on the Gemeinwesen.
One saw this but also maintained the hope that the real movement would
dissolve it with the manifestation
of the proletariat as the last class which would thus not only have a
classist character but, after its movement to constitute the community,
would lose this character. That is why we stated that the proletariat
was integrated into the CMP by its immediate being but not by its
mediate being, defined by its tendency and mission, and that afterwards
the constitution of the party would be its immediate negation, by its
negation of the proletariat, the party would pose the human community.
This began with the publication of the Theses in n. 6 and Transition
(mainly written by Gianni Collu).

But here again we
would make an accommodation. One can only leave its domain by
superceding the theory of the proletariat and the labour-value
theory(o).

This was realized in 1972:

""…the abstract
characteristics lead to the REPRESENTATION of the concrete by the path
of thought". The law of value, doubtlessly, was the representation of a
concrete, but, as representation, it was not the concrete itself. The
development of the concrete and of its representation are not closely
linked, all the more as the 'thought-concrete' resulting in the law of
value has not been the dominant characteristic: wages, for example,
have never been actually the
price of labour power (with all the implicit consequences) but as a
more or less correct price for labour, and profit as wages of the
entrepreneur and not the fruits of plundering. The dominant
characteristic is part of the integrant relation of social praxis and
if the king is only king because his subjects see themselves as
subjects, this king is nonetheless not abstract but very real and it is
around his very real person that society is organized.
"Because one had given the attributes of 'thought-concrete', the
revolutionary content of the law of value, to the representation that
the proletariat became, one made the proletariat a 'revolutionary'
class; one established on the basis of the law of value, representation
of a concrete at a determined historical moment, the theory of the
proletariat. The theory of the proletariat, because it is 'theory', has
a basis in the law of value: other theory. But there is a
self-justification of the two theories. Because the proletariat is a
direct expression of living labour, it gives its content to the law of
value because labour is the content of value, its concrete reality, its
substance. No proletariat: no law of value, thus the need to provide a
theoretical basis and an historical necessity to the proletariat,
leaving the interpretation of history in order not to remove the
proletariat from the political scene. Hence moreover the problem of the
'revolutionary movement' maintaining the tautology and looping the
theory and finally participating in the tautological process of
capital! If we have difficulty expressing this 'tautological process of
capital', it is only because we participate in the same movement, we
use the same artifices to maintain the same theoretical and historical
coherence without daring to make the supercession now required (what
are fictitious capital, the universal class etc. if not theoretical
artifices?). Besides, put in the sack by the very concrete reality of
the revolution, we are led to produce the concepts of its real
dimension: its biological dimension! And here the too tight skin bursts
under the pressure of such a developed content! We give the revolution
directly the dimension of the species, a spatial and historical
dimension alongside which the 'moment of capital' appears like a simple
historical hiccup. Our very understandable distraction is equalled only
by our enthusiasm and we shall be reactionaries and revolutionaries,
heretics and prophets. We have never been further from and closer to
Marx! Our contradiction is only his contradiction implied by his
theoretical developments." (letter of J-L. Darlet, 9.11.72.)

CAMATTE

---

(1) The Civil War in France in The First International and After (Harmondsworth, 1974) p. 213.

(2) i.e. the
International Communist Party October 1959 (Milan) meeting entitled The
Classical Solution of the Historical Doctrine of Marxism for the
Vicissitudes of the Miserable Bourgeois Present. (Translator)

(3) i.e. the
Florence meeting of March 1960 entitled Historical Revolution of the
living, working and knowing Species. 1. Natural communism, almost myth
and social poetry; 2. Class War on infamous private mercantilism; 3.
Arrival of the classical message of the communist party, and the Casale
Monferrato meeting of July i960 entitled Arduous Systematization of the
revolutionary Communist Programme among the Miasmas Of Bourgeois
Putrifaction and Pestilential Opportunism as well as the meeting noted
in note (2) above.

(4)Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 in Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol. Ill (London, 1975) pp. 296-7.

(5)Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction in Collected Works Vol. III. p. 186.

{6)The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism: Against Bruno Bauer and Company in Collected Works Vol. IV (London,1975) pp. 36-7.

(7) Critical Marginal Notes on the Article 'The King Of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian' in Collected Works Vol. III pp. 189-206.

(a) Here we find the permanent critique of Marxism of the pretended eternity of the capitalist form of production.

(8)ibid. p. 197

(9)ibid. p. 198

(10)ibid. p. 198

(11)ibid. pp. 198-9

(12)ibid. p. 198

(13)ibid. p. 204

(14)?
15)?
(16)?
(l7) Our enemies' position is that the maximum goal of the party has no
'concrete' substance given, that the concrete historical facts are the
states and parties acting through the state. Here the correct answer is
well put: the two terms of the antagonisms, the state of yesterday and
the party of tomorrow, condition each other reciprocally in their
material reality, which is 'scientific', without evoking any kind of
myth.

(18) ibid. p. 204

(19) ibid. p. 204

(20) Contribution… cit. p. 182

(21) Critical Marginal Notes… cit. p. 204

(b) Proletarians can only acquire class consciousness by struggling and organizing themselves in a party.

(22) ibid. p. 204-5

(23) p. 205

(24) loc. cit.

(25) loc. cit.

(26) loc. cit.

(27) loc. cit.

(28) loc. cit.

(29) ibid. p. 206.

(c) This has been
fully shown to be so, now again we must base our revolutionary strategy
on the proletariat's activity in this sector of the world: invariance
of Marxism!

(30) ibid. pp. 201-2.

(31) Communism and the 'Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung' (Rheinische Zeitung, 15.10.1844.) in Collected Works (London. 1975) P. 221.

(32) i.e. A. Bordiga and U. Terracini Le Tesi del P.C.d'I. sulla tattica (Roma, 1922) in Rassegna Comunista A. II, n. 17 (30.1.22.) (Translator)

(d) Cf. the previous criticism of Ruge on the use of the state.

(e) Our emphasis since here we have as the corollary the critique of the theory of experience we have always rejected.

(33) Marx to Engels 18.2.1865. in Marx Engels Selected Correspondence (MOSCOW, 1975) p. 155.

(34)The Internal Crises (London 30.11.1842.) in Collected Works Vol. II, p. 373-4.

(35) Letters from London (I) in Schweizerischer Republikaner 16.5.1843. in Collected Works Vol. Ill, pp.379-80.

(36) Manifesto of the Communist Party in Collected Works Vol. VI. pp. 505-6.

(37) i.e. the April
1951 (Rome) meeting entitled Party and Class Action (Theory and
Consciousness), Party and Class, The Overturning of Praxis,
Revolutionary Party and Economic Action, and the September 1951
(Naples) meeting called Lessons of Counter-revolutions, Double
Revolution, Revolutionary Capitalist Nature of the Russian Economy.

(38) The Alleged Splits in the International in The First International… cit. Pp. 298-9.

(39) in Collected Works Vol. VI p. 519.

(40) Resolution of the London Conference on Working-Class Political Action in The First International cit. pp. 269-70

(41) letter of 29.2.60. in Marx Engels Selected Correspondence (London, 1956) p. 146 (emphases added).

(42) ibid. p. 150

(43) ibid. p. 148

(f) The international notion of the party.

(44) ibid. (emphases added).

(45) cited in F. Mehring Karl Marx (London, 1946) p. 291 (emphases added).

(46) in The Revolutions of 1848 (Harmondsworth. 1973) P. 343.

(g} Here Engels stated in other terms what Marx had explained to Freiligrath.

(47) Engels to J.P. Becker 10.2,1882. in Selected Correspondence cit. p. 422.

(48) The Alleged Splits in the International in On the First International cit. pp. 280-1

(h) Inter-class harmony and between capital and labour, let us recall.

(49) Engels Der Kongress von Bonvillier und die Internationale (Volkstaat 10.1.l8?2.) in Marx Engels Werke Band 17, pp. 476-9

(50) Engels Germany: Revolution and Counter revolution in L. Krieger ed. The German Revolutions (Chicago, 196?) p. 124.

(51) Letter of 13.2.1851. in Marx Engels Werke Band 27 p. 191.

(52) in Karl Marx Library Vol. III ed S.A. Padover (New York, 1973) P. 458.

(53) speech on the Anniversary of the International (World (New York) 15.10.1871.) in The First International cit. p. 270-1.

(i) i.e. Progetto di tesi per il IIIe Congresso del Partito Comunista Presentato dalla Sinistra - Lione 1926 (Rome, 1926)

(54) Marx to Bolte in Selected Correspondence cit. pp. 328-9 (letter dated 23.11.71.)

(55) World Society of Revolutionary Communists in The Revolutions of 1848 p. 57

(56) Engels Anti-Duhring (MOSCOW, 1947) p. 330

(57) Cf. Marx's passage in Capital Vol. II
(Moscow, 1956) p. 123 on possession and needs. One should attach to
that the theory of need which would be a theory of the attributes of
human nature.

(58) Marx Communism and the 'Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung' in Collected Works Vol. I pp. 215-6.

(j) in Collected Works Vol. III, p. 30.

(k} ibid. p. 30

(l) ibid. p. 31

(m) ibid. p. 31.

(n) Let us note
apart from Origin and Function, Le VI Chapitre inedit du 'Capital' et
l'oeuvre economique de Marx (no 2), L'etre humain est la veritable
Gemeinwesen de l'homme (n. 3), Mai-Juin Theorie et action (n. 4),
Perspectives (n. 5), Transition (n. 8), Charac… [unreadable] …movement
ouvrier francais (n. 10); as well as Proletariat et
Gemeinwesen (n. Special) and n. 6, all the texts written by Bordiga
where the theses 2.1 on Russia and. 4,3 (Capital and. Agriculture) were
also by him.

(o) Different
currents in Marxism (partyists and councilists) as well as in anarchism
developed a theory of the proletariat so that when we speak of
superceding the theory, this does not only concern the social movement
from which some of us come: the Italian left.