On the Regroupment of Revolutionaries: Letter of Rupture with Bordigism

Following the end of the Second World Inter-Imperialist War, the revolutionary militants who had escaped the massacre (frontlines, concentration camps, etc.) and who had denounced the democratic and frontist enlistment in the "anti-fascist resistance" by defending class bases during the war, attempted to regroup to intervene in an organized and effective manner in the process of workers' struggles.

Several members of the former "Union Communiste" group, which had published the journal and later the review "L’Internationale" before the war (see JT1 issues 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14), after trying to revive their old organization, played a key role in an international regroupment that aligned itself with the legacy of the Party (Parti Communiste Internationaliste), established in 1943 in Italy and officially founded in 1945 under the impetus of Damen and Vercesi, an initiative to which Bordiga later rallied. In France, this regroupment was named the "French Fraction of the Communist Left International" (journal "L’Étincelle", then "L’Internationale").

Thanks to this, the former UC members hoped for a continuation of the political clarification they had begun in the 1930s and an organizational development that would allow them to gain significant influence among the working class. However, with the stagnation and decline of these struggles—despite notable reactions such as the strike at Renault in April/May 1947 (on which we will have the opportunity to elaborate, along with other aspects of this post-war period, by publishing articles from "L’Internationale")—these militants quickly realized the illusions they had harbored about the dynamics and value of such a regroupment.

Initially, they attempted to initiate an internal debate on clarifications regarding positions as fundamental as the Russian Revolution and the Third International, state capitalism and Russian imperialism, the conception of the Party and its relationship with the class, revolutionary activity and intervention vis-à-vis the unions, and the understanding and application of the Marxist method. Clashing with the Leninist dogmatism of Bordiga and his disciples, and thus with the impossibility of positively evolving the regroupment, they decided to break away. The letter from Lastérade to Chazé (two former UC members), which we publish below, announces this rupture and outlines the main reasons for it.

Beyond the error committed in the analysis of the period opening after 1945, which led to the founding of the Party in Italy (the illusion of an offensive by the working class while capitalist reconstruction was already beginning under the leadership of the two major imperialist blocs that had repartitioned the world at Yalta), it was the reintroduction by Bordiga of all Leninist positions that drove the regroupment into an impasse. Indeed, this nullified all the previous clarification work carried out during the 1930s by the communist left (the group of Internationalist Communists in Holland, the fraction around "Bilan" in Belgium, the Union Communiste in France, the group of Council Communists ICC2 , then Living Marxism in the United States), at a time when Bordiga was sidelined from political life due to his "semi-voluntary" seclusion under fascism in Italy, reducing it to nothing. The entire critique of Leninism—not only regarding parliamentarism but also the decay of the system and state capitalism, national liberations, unions, the role of the Party, etc.—was thrown into oblivion. The apologia for Bolshevism, as can be seen today in "Le Prolétaire" and "Programme Communiste," was instead set to develop.

The revolutionaries had to start anew, outside any reckless regroupment, on maximalist bases of clarification vis-à-vis Leninism and its Trotskyist and Bordigist derivatives. This is what the "Gauche Communiste de France" (review "Internationalisme") attempted to some extent, rejecting the opportunistic founding of the PCI3 from 1943 due to a different analysis of the period that was opening and which had separated from the tendency that went on to form the "French Fraction of the GCI" in 1945 (see "Bulletin d’Étude et de Discussion" n°7, June 74, supplement to R.I; also see "The Ambiguities Concerning the 'Partisans' in the Constitution of the PCI in Italy in 1943" in the "Revue Internationale" of the ICC, n°8, Dec. 76). However, this "GCF" still clung to dogmatic analyses derived from "Bilan" regarding the Party, the Russian Revolution, and revolutionary intervention. The conditions of its dissolution in 1952 illustrate this: theorizing the failure of a third world war, the organization decided above all to "save the cadres" by dispersing them! Let us also recall that the Union Communiste had diverged from "Bilan" over the interpretation of events in Spain between July 36 and May 37, as the Belgian fraction denied the revolutionary character of workers' struggles in the absence of "the" Party (see J.T issues 11 and 13).

Today, the necessity of regrouping revolutionaries is evident due to the resurgence of proletarian assaults since 68, which marked the end of capitalist reconstruction. However, precisely in light of past experiences, this regroupment must not occur hastily or on confused bases that fall short of the historical clarifications made by the entire international communist left vis-à-vis Leninism. Yet, the ICC4 , which positions itself as the "champion" of such a regroupment, has reintroduced through the back door—by uncritically claiming the legacy of "Bilan" and "Internationale" (due to the "historical continuity" obligation!)—key elements of Bordigism that had been expelled through the front door: the Party is the class, there is no maturation of class consciousness outside of it, apologia for the Bolsheviks!

The PIC, positioning itself within the perspective of an indispensable regroupment of revolutionaries but remaining uncompromising on the need for maximum theoretical clarification and on the practice that would characterize this future regroupment, has communicated its reservations regarding an International Conference organized on April 30/May 1 in Milan, in which only the PCI ("Battaglia Comunista") and the ICC participated; see its texts in the recently published brochure "Textes et Comptes-rendu de la Conférence organisée par le PC Internationaliste" ("Battaglia Comunista", C.P n°1753, Milan - Oct. 77).

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17/2/49
My dear Chazé,

After reading the response from the Executive Committee (CE) of the PCI to my letter and following the meeting of our CE the night before last (Tuesday, February 15), I find myself compelled to take a position that corresponds to the logical outcome of the evolution of the French Communist Left.

I - The response from the Italian PCI is marked by arrogant pedantry and Jesuitism. It is hardly friendly even to the French Bordigists themselves who had called for an international discussion on the issues raised by the letter.

It appears that this response is an act of defense by the PCI’s CE, determined not to be drawn beyond the line set by Bordiga and highly cautious about introducing dangerous discussions within the party’s base.

a) To a proposal for discussion, the response is a refusal to engage outside a “unitary basis for framing the issues,” meaning outside orthodox Bordigist boundaries.

b) The Italian document claims it is arbitrary to establish an ideological and historical continuity between the initial positions of the Bolshevik Party and the Third International and the open shift to the counter-revolution of Stalinist Russia.

On the historical level and regarding the economic and social foundations of the Russian regime, no one—least of all Bordiga—has ever pinpointed the moment when economic and social measures marked a fundamental break in the course of the USSR’s evolution.

On the political level, the succession of factional struggles never exceeded the scope of secondary issues, to the point that Vercesi and Bordiga still hesitated before 1945 to condemn the Russian regime as imperialism or state capitalism.

c) Our position does not consist, as the document claims, of condemning a “failed legal or statutory definition,” but of establishing that the legal and social state of affairs achieved by the Bolsheviks expressed a certain relationship between classes and between the party and the proletariat—a relationship that marked the beginning of an evolution toward the state capitalism we know today.

If the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party can be included in the general process of retreat, it is as an instrument of the realization of Russian state capitalism, itself a consequence, on the Russian level, of the victory of international capitalist forces.

d) The Italian document strives to suggest that we mistake effects for causes, subjective factors for objective and determining causes.

It is a commonplace in polemics to portray the opponent’s viewpoint as superficial and secondary compared to the depth of one’s own arguments. But in the matters that concern us, there is a domain where Marxists have never been able to move beyond vague notions. Assertions about fundamental historical and economic causes, or theses on forms of production, appear fragile when addressing the economic foundations of socialism after the disappearance of private capitalism.

For Bordiga and his followers, the primary cause of all exploitation lies in mercantilism and money. Could it not be objectively said that these are merely the usual forms of realizing surplus value, the classic mode of expressing the exploitation of the masses by a minority? The primary basis of exploitation is that a worker benefits from only a small portion of what they produce (the majority going to a minority), whether that production takes the form of money or consumer goods.

Regarding superficiality, it would be easy to reproach the Bordigists for their pettiness in criticizing the Third International, a critique they accuse us of barely sketching out. Their entire critique revolves around the famous question of the United Front, which they treat as a strategic error. We believe the United Front can be more accurately traced to its true origin by considering it an elastic strategy necessary for the unconditional defense of the Russian state, a defense imposed on the workers’ movement, which, through the Third International, became the protector, the means of blackmail, and the propaganda agent of the Soviet state.

e) A falsification of our position consists in claiming we argue that another formula could have saved the Russian Revolution, whereas we explicitly stated: “these Leninist achievements constituted the most disastrous way in which the inevitable destruction of the necessary October Revolution could occur...”

f) We must also reject the grandiose yet hollow phrases, the overuse of adjectives like “dialectical” as a substitute for argument, and phrases like “it’s not Marxist” or “Marxism has proven that...”. Similarly, we reject the vague rhetoric about “dialectical relations between the class and the party,” “the party as the most complete expression of the class,” “the party necessarily fused with the class” (which does not prevent explaining many things by “the break in relations between the party and the class”); “the party as the specific organ of revolutionary dictatorship”; “there is no guarantee other than the party’s fidelity to the program” (but from when did the Bolshevik Party cease to be faithful to the program, and to which program?).

g) As for the replacement of old exploiters with new ones, it is understandable that the Bordigists refuse to consider its mechanism. How was the class of bankers, industrialists, merchants, and landowners replaced?

When we recall the meticulous considerations Marx made about social strata (in Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, for example), one cannot help but be concerned that our Bordigist Marxists remain in the realm of general formulas and imprecision, seeking to resolve the most gigantic and consequential phenomena of the century through simple equations.

h) The Italian document dismisses the role of mass organizations in the revolutionary process as null or even negative unless they are dependent on the party. The PCI should then have the honesty to say that mass organizations can only be tools for controlling (if not chaining) an unconscious proletariat, whose only useful attribute is its physical strength for the party.

i) The PCI’s CE dishonestly equates us with the Trotskyists on the issue of bureaucracy, while they see it merely as a “usurping caste” that could be removed to restore the intact framework of a proletarian regime in Russia. For us, bureaucracy is a convenient term to designate a social reality comprising millions of members, which originally developed at the expense of the Bolshevik Party’s bureaucrats.

j) Regarding the claim that we merely rehash old ideas while presenting them as new solutions, it must be reiterated that old problems need to be re-examined and resolved in light of fundamental lessons that the masters of Marxism did not have.

k) We do not follow Marxist methodology to reach our conclusions; we have not written volumes of economic theory to support our claims. It could be countered that Marx, and later Lenin, drawing lessons from the Paris Commune, formulated hypotheses and outlined socialist perspectives with successive phases of communist realization without providing the precise economic developments such claims would require.

A militant’s general knowledge allows them to make judgments whose scientific foundations are often only clarified much later. One did not need Bordiga to publish twenty pages of convoluted text to know what to think of Russia and the Third International.
For example, one could produce texts more pretentious than profound without ever addressing the problem posed: can exploitation of man by man exist outside the classical forms of mercantilism? The fact that Marx did not discuss this or that it had never occurred is not an argument; but it is an argument to show that in Russia, a significant portion of the privileges of the Stalinist exploiting class exists outside the sphere of money and mercantilism.

By posing the problem, we expected the Bordigists to tell us what the forms of production and distribution were in a society entirely directed by an exclusive minority: the party. By addressing these problems, the PCI’s CE would have advanced the theoretical work of the vanguard, even if only by exposing itself to a concrete critique of the Bordigist position, which tolerates no revisionism except precisely regarding the formulas they consider false about the withering away of the state and proletarian democracy, which were part of communist ideology.

l) The polemical argument that we recognize the recruitment of the exploiting bureaucracy also occurs within mass organizations, and thus condemn their role as a guarantee, is of poor value. For us, the value of mass organizations lies not in the special quality of their members but in the permanent presence of the entire active class through a broad and free confrontation of all proletarian currents, even in individual form. This confrontation is exactly the opposite of what occurs under the banner of a totalitarian ruling party. The role of propaganda, brainwashing with mystical or commercial-style slogans, and the coercion of workers through physical or moral pressure are replaced by the power of demonstration, conviction, and collective understanding, which alone lead to true class consciousness and not to party fanaticism.

The organization of the masses is the channel for raising the proletariat as a whole to awareness of its interests, elevating the real proletariat into a ruling class, an organizing class of a new society.

Bordiga’s argument is indeed lamentably weak, suggesting that proletarian democracy is merely a matter of tallying opinions, replacing the scientific search for solutions to class problems with voting. These inevitable means (obviously used within the PCI itself) of collective life do not constitute the fundamental value of proletarian democracy. Bordiga, by the way, does not propose abolishing votes and opinion tallies in his party, congresses, or program, but he does propose abolishing proletarian democracy.

m) All documents one might expect from the Italian PCI will aim only to demonstrate the untouchability of the Party criterion; all judgments on workers’ movements, all programmatic perspectives, will revolve around a single axis: the party. Where the party is absent, there is only bourgeois democracy and counter-revolution; where the party is present, there is revolution and socialism.

Our perspective is not to wait for progress in this direction or for clarification of the problems everyone faces, even if they sometimes condemn the way they are posed. The Bordigists would rather engage in retrograde revisionism or disown their movement’s past. Why, for example, was there no response regarding the Left’s positions in 1938 on the issue of proletarian dictatorship and unions? Does Bordiga wish to cast a veil over the twenty years of darkness to which he resigned himself?

II – Regarding the particular situation of the French Left, Frédérique’s attitude is highly significant. At the last Executive Committee meeting, Frédérique demonstrated that her political raison d’être was limited to the adoration of Bordigist theologians. She stated that we are nothing outside the Italian PCI, that we must recognize it as our sole leadership since we have no leadership in Paris, and that we must agree to become schoolchildren again (implying at Bordiga’s school).

The group’s activity should be devoted to distributing a translation of Prometeo (to which, in principle, we would have the right to contribute while being entirely incapable of doing so). This mentality, in my view, has nothing to do with that of a revolutionary militant who must always take responsibility and act with full awareness and a constant will to fulfill their role on every occasion. This schoolgirl attitude may be part of the Bordigist conception of relations between leaders and the base, but it shocks me to the point that I no longer feel obliged to attend meetings where such a religion is professed.

The reasons that led us to work with the Communist Left no longer exist. The illusions we had about the organizational development and political progress of the Italian PCI are dead. The PCI now sees its membership decline while the possibilities for fruitful collective political life within it fade. The Italian PCI seems to me to be rapidly becoming an organization like the one that once produced Bilan, a journal that boasted endlessly of being the only Marxist one and never convinced anyone, not even Vercesi, whose pirouettes at the Liberation annihilated all the political work of the émigré Left.5

I therefore cease to participate in this sterile current. This separation, moreover, seems to align with the desires of the Italian comrades and Frédérique, who no longer wish to tolerate obstacles to their closed circle.

Yours sincerely,
Pierre Laste

PS, I received your letter just as I was about to mail mine. It changes nothing in my decision; I see no need to present ourselves under the banner of the Communist Left to confront other currents.

• 1Jeune Taupe, the publication of the PIC (Pour une Intervention Communiste). — Footnote by the Translator.
• 2This is referring to the International Council Correspondance, the periodical of the Group of Council Communists, of which Paul Mattick was the editor. — Footnote by the Translator.
• 3Throughout the text, PCI refers to the Partito Comunista Internazionalista or the Internationalist Communist Party, formed by militants of the Italian Communist Left around Onorato Damen. — Footnote by the Translator.
• 4The ICC here refers to the International Communist Current. — Footnote by the Translator.
• 5In 1945, Vercesi founded an "Anti-Fascist Coalition Committee" in Brussels, thereby breaking with the class-based foundations of proletarian internationalism. He was later individually reintegrated into the PCI and became a member of its Central Committee. Note by JT.