In Defense of the Communist Programme

“Social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which misled theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.” Marx, Eighth thesis on Feuerbach

The original party programme of 1920 of the Communist Worker’s Party of Germany (KAPD) captured the spirit of the movement for communism in the ‘epoch of wars and revolutions’; in doing so they were able to articulate and interpret, as communists, the lived experience of a working-class engaged in crisis activity, self-organization and engaged in the movement for communism. The heart of the program is the interpretation of the mass action of the working-class engaged in crisis activity; today, if the numerous flashpoints of struggle, center and peripheral, that rise and fall on a timeline starting in 2008, become generalized and seek to link to one another across borders and boundaries, the communist programme would need to interpret the debt-crisis terrorism, war weariness and structural economic changes to the regime of capital. A programme that sought to understand the real movement of the proletariat in struggle, while also defending communist principles as active participants in these generalized struggles, within the mass action.

“It is in the mass struggles that the factory organisation appears. It surfaces as something which hasn’t had and couldn’t have any equivalent, but that is not its novelty. What is new is that it penetrates everywhere during the revolution, as a necessary arm of the class struggle against the old spirit and the old foundations which were its base. It corresponds to the idea of the councils; that is why it is absolutely not a pure form or a new organisational trick, or even a “dark mystery”; organically born in the future, constituting the future, it is the form of expression of a social revolution which tends towards a society without classes. It is an organisation of pure proletarian struggle. The proletariat cannot be organised for the merciless overthrow of the old society if it is torn into strips by job category, away from its terrain of struggle; it must carry out its struggle in the factory. It is here that workers stand side by side as comrades; it is here that all are forced to be equal. It is here that the masses are the motor of production and are ceaselessly pushed to take control of production, to unveil its secrets. It is here that the ideological struggle, the revolutionising of consciousness, undergoes a permanent tumult, from man to man, from mass to mass. Everything is oriented towards the supreme class interest, not towards the craze for founding organisations, and the particular job interests are reduced to the measure which is due to them. Such an organisation, the backbone of the factory councils, becomes an infinitely more supple instrument of the class struggle, always an organism receiving fresh blood, owing to the permanent possibility of re-elections, revocation, etc. Going forward in the mass actions and along with them, the factory organisations will naturally have to create for themselves the centralised organs which correspond to their revolutionary development. Their principal business will be the development of the revolution and not programmes, statutes and plans in detail. It is not a credit bank or life assurance, even if – this goes without saying – it makes collections when it’s necessary to support strikes. Uninterrupted propaganda for socialism, factory assemblies, political discussions etc., all that is part of its tasks; in brief, it is the revolution in the factory.” – Programme of the KAPD, 1920

The proclamation of the ‘death of programmatism’ must be countered by the communist minority, but even this rebuttal must be the collective work of multiple participants. We are so far removed from the fractions immediately following the degeneration of the Third International that, dispersed and preoccupied, the real movement which does unfold on the international scene is missed. By articulating a defense of the communist programme, the participants in such a discussion develop their own politics and engage the debate that contemporary communists must be focused on: our tasks in the present and the future, and the methodology and theory that will inform us.