Short report

The report had already been shown, as is customary, at the previous general meeting of the Party, the one at the end of 1968. It was important to deal with some issues which, in the general confusion resulting from the break-up of the opportunist parties, are being distorted by the false left, petit-bourgeois, anarcho-syndicalist, etc, groups, which contribute to further confusing the already big mess.

Our party can be blamed for a lot but certainly not a lack of clarity, and since, in these times, what is needed to resume the revolutionary class struggle is critical and programmatic clarity, it has been necessary to deal with old issues and re-examine distant historical events that have troubled the communist movement. The work, like all party works, is not meant to be an intellectual and historiographical contribution, but an instrument of revolutionary struggle, according to the well-known marxist formula that there can be no revolutionary action without revolutionary theory. The party must draw the lessons of the counterrevolution in order to beat the enemy and allies of capitalism, first and foremost the false workers’ parties, the agents of the bourgeoisie within proletarian bodies.

On the relations between party and economic action, party and workers’ economic unions, a thorough study has already been extensively carried out, based on the past and recent classic texts of the Communist Left. The participation of communists in the class unions is a firm point, just as the establishment of the network of communist groups in the factory and in the unions to win them over to the influence and leadership of the party, is an indispensable point. The forces of the party alone are not sufficient to guarantee the mounting of a class army capable of beating capitalism. It’s necessary to win over to the communist leadership as many wards of the proletariat as possible. To achieve this essential goal, with the aim of the final assault on power, it’s not enough to be conscious of it; it is also necessary to penetrate the class organs with the party’s global action.

It’s said that trade unions have now ceased being organs of proletarian defense because the imperialist phase of capitalism does not allow partial achievements. Opposed to the trade unions, crippled by opportunism, other “grassroots” organs should stand, which would entrust proletarian defense directly to the “political” action and, being the expression older than it’s believed, to the instincts of the masses. Hence, there is a talk again of Soviets, factory councils, grassroots commissions, and so on.

The central thesis of the Italian Communist Left was enunciated in Italy in 1919 in face of the “maximalists”, revolutionaries in words and counter-revolutionaries in deeds, of the Socialist Party of that time, forerunner of today’s party, the PCI, and of all the “kindred” parties of the world. It is the position which the 2nd Congress of the Communist International codified in appropriate theses, firmly grasping the Marxist theory: the Soviets are political organs of the proletarian power. Therefore they arise when the struggle for the power becomes decisive, and not when founding them jumps into the heads of the party leadership; since they have to replace immediately, after the victory, the representative, parliamentary and democratic organs of the capitalist State.

The factory councils, that in the workerist conceptions of ordinovism were confused with Soviets, are not political, but economic and factory organs, and in the unlikely function of controlling the production, they can only arise when the bourgeois economy is in complete disarray – as in Russia in the last months before October – in opposition to the corporate managements as organs for executing political provisions in the economic field, knowing very well that this activity can only be effectively and efficiently performed when political power has been wrested from capitalism.

In support of these old and well-established theses of the Left, lies the history of the rise and development of the aforementioned organs, the tragic events of their capture by the capitalist State (as in Germany and Austria) or, on the contrary, their becoming organs of the proletarian dictatorship, as they did in Russia, in the revolutionary period.

Underlying these formulations is another marxist programmatic cornerstone: the revolution is not a matter of forms of organization, so it does not take steps forward by replacing one organ with another of a different name, as it does not strengthen the party’s march towards the revolution by adopting eclectic and inconsistent tactics, replacing men and leaders deemed incapable with others deemed experts, etc. From this it can be deduced that, without the firm leadership of the class political party, any organ of the proletariat: trade union, Soviet, factory council, etc, acts in a counter-revolutionary direction.

From this it cannot be concluded– as the false leftists ultimately agree with the general opportunism of today and yesterday – neither that we should be indifferent to the political struggle – anarcho-syndicalist error, which denies the political party – nor that we should be indifferent to the economic struggle – purist error which denies the revolutionary function of the proletarian class and asserts a split between political and economic struggle, falling back into the idealistic abstractions traceable to the individualist anarchism. Nor finally that party action would be subordinated to the immediate moods of the masses, the ordonovist error, summing up all the workerist and immediatist errors on the basis of a workers “democratism”, taken from bourgeois democracy, whereby first come the immediate organs of the class, councils, etc and only after (or never?) the political party.

The Communist Party, as the history of its struggles shows, has never given up or renounced the conquest of any genuinely class-based organs, but it doesn’t make these organs fetishes to which its programmatic and even tactical approach should be subordinated.

The report, substantiated by illustrative quotations from the positions of the various opportunist tendencies and marxist counter-theses, concluded with the reaffirmation of firm cornerstones of the communist struggle, whereby, whatever the historical conditions could be, the resumption of the class action, the formulation of communist tactics and finally the party’s hegemony in the revolutionary struggle of the masses are all unthinkable without the party having first carried out an intensive activity in the workplaces and in the class economic and political bodies, in order to create there its own organs of execution and linkage between the proletariat and the leadership of the Party.

[Il Programma Comunista, issue nº17, October 1st 1969]

Introduction

We’ve already dealt extensively with the issue of the immediate economic struggles of the working masses and the party’s task in them, as well as with the party and workers’ economic unions. The goal was to re-establish the exact position of revolutionary communism in this field, as well to clear away the fog spread by opportunism in order to shed light on the glorious and international tradition of the Communist Party. In times of revolutionary retreat, of stagnation of class clashes, the most remote among them and more than defeated positions, deviating from the healthy marxist principle, flourish again, and the party is forced, in its long work of programmatic rearrangement, to face them again, as if all the battles of the past had to be repeated even today, as if they had been of no use. This is certainly not the case, but the class party would be guilty of levity if it didn’t defend the integrity of the program against any enemy, in the face of any divergent position. It’s in this ceaseless work that the party’s comrades are enucleated, fortified and extended. Of the theoretical and programmatic confusion, from which comes that of politics and action, only the class enemy and opportunism benefit.

As if the heresies of the present false workers’ parties were not enough, more are being added to confuse the proletarian ranks and make the party’s work more difficult and burdensome. The current immediatist regurgitations, petty-bourgeois in nature and anarchic in form, denying the party and the class organization of the proletariat, scramble to re-propose to the workers – the old generations being disappointed, those raised on stalinist poison being confused, new recruits being skeptical – idiotic and confused positions, presenting them as new and original parts of history, positions that envisage the replacement of the political party and the class union by other bodies, once again reducing the solution of the question of power to forms of organization, to more or less brilliant devising. Whenever a “new” verb has been invoked, doom has punctually befallen the proletariat and the course of the revolution.

This study seeks to show, then, through historical happenings and clashes of opposing tendencies even within the class Party, not only that the supposedly “new” is older than the old, but that every form assumed by the organized struggle of the proletariat is precarious and transient if it’s not substantiated by the communist program, for it’s not only a matter of overthrowing the political institutions of capitalist power, but of building the new proletarian power, the class dictatorship, and maintaining it on the world scale, to achieve the communist era.

Old invariant principles

Saying “old”, in times when the ability is measured by the highest capacity to stupefy, is saying outdated, dying, ready for the graveyard. It’s a psychological reflection of the productive frenzy, launched in geometric progression by capital’s insatiable hunger for surplus value toward the criminal absurdity of producing for producing sake. The machines decay as soon as they’re designed. Their degree of usefulness is measured by the rate at which they pump out human labor, which in capitalist hands is transformed into capital. Everything, made proper by the present mode of production, becomes a means of exploiting human labor, just as everything Midas touched was transformed into gold.

Marx wrote to Ruge in September 1843:

«Nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not face the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say: Cease your struggles as they are foolish; we will give you the true word of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and the consciousness is something that it has to acquire, although it does not want to (…) It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realizing the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying out its old work».

The class political party is the historical achievement of the class consciousness, from which it cannot separate itself. Marxist doctrine is the body of «principles»,drawn «out of the world’s own principles». by which humanity «consciously is carrying out its old work». Presuming from these principles, deforming them, or claiming to give new ones, is moving away the class from the consciousness that it «has to acquire, even if it does not want to».

From the 1848 “Manifesto of the Communist Party”:

«The theoretical conclusions of the communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes».

New names for old mistakes

Ever since the political party arose, the morphological structure of the class shows in this way: at the base, the mass of workers, or the class statistically intended; at the top, the class political Party; in the middle, the workers’ trade unions. The class, in its historical meaning, exists thanks to the existence of its apex, the party. It’s a primordial condition. But its operational existence also depends on its economic defense organization.

The various historical deviations from revolutionary Marxism are all traceable to the separation of the elements of this structure. The separation of the party from proletarian economic organizations produces the “purist” error: the party is considered as a monastery and the party activity as mere custodianship of texts. Historical examples: theoretical anarchism, in which the political activity is “sinful” and blasphemy is the party, the State, and any organization, including the economic ones; where primes, in idealistic self-sufficiency, “the Unique”, the individual. Keeping away the immediate economic organizations from the party is expressed in the “unionist” error. Classic example is the “revolutionary unionism”, which exalts immediatism, workerism and economicism. This deviation is the matrix of “ordinovismo”, in reference to a distortion that claimed to bind itself to Marxism. It’s clear that both deviations, although they may sometimes boast of Marxist intonations, have nothing to do with Marxism.

Instead, two “interpretations”, the revolutionary and the reformist, refer to Marxism. There has often been a decanting of elements and, less often, of “purist” and “immediatist” groups into revolutionary and reformist organizations. Historical examples are the accession of the French revolutionary unionist Rosmer to the Communist International and the en bloc, or near, transition of the ordinovists to the modern reformism of the former national-communist parties.

To the detriment of all the present and surviving opponents of communism, let us say at once that the October Revolution, the birth of the International and the communist parties put an end forever to the conflict between revolutionary Marxism and reformism, even though, in the latter’s shoes, opportunism dominates the workers’ movement, and the immediatist excrement. of the old fashioned kind, regurgitate in the proletarian ranks.

Opportunism is the shape of the counterrevolution: therein lies the danger lurking within the working class. It denies neither the party nor the trade union, it dresses in red and strokes Marx’s beard, presents itself to the crowds with an extensive and massive organization, is active in every form and circumstance, in bourgeois parliament and State organs, in trade unions and class organizations, it takes root in the fertile soil of the mercantile and monetary economy from which it draws financial and social substances, it tends to tie the proletarian class to the fortunes of capitalist society through the intermediation of the middle-classes and labor aristocracy.

This is why we must emphasize the party and the marxist program, which is essential to qualify the workers’ political party. But it’s not enough to call oneself a party, claiming generically the program without acting in accordance to principles: tactics are essential.

When the threat of opportunism loomed within the Communist Party of Italy and the Communist International, this was made explicit on the ground of tactics, and the Left had to fight continually by demonstrating that there were not more than one tactic useful for revolutionary ends, but only one, and that this assessment came out from the observation that multiple tactics, devised by the national and international leaderships, deviated from a principled basis.

Immediatism, even within the Communist ranks, always appear on the tactical plan, and at first swears and perjures that it will not renounce its principles and program, assuring in words that later when the occasion has ceased, it will return to the right path. Step by step, we have witnessed, detour after detour, the total reversal of the old ex-communist parties. Just as you can’t improvise the class party, you can’t improvise its tactics.

The various formulas of a claimed historical acceleration of social conflicts and revolutionary solution, whatever their colorful names, all converge in opposing the only valid scheme, by theoretical formulation and historical proof: political party – intermediate organizations – class. Substituting the party for the other elements in the series, even if briefly, or re-ordering them, kills the historical capacity of the class and delays the solution instead of accelerating it. In light of this necessary hierarchy, we don’t need to know names and surnames, dates and places of birth of purported new parties, programs, solutions and inventions

The Communist Left always fought, being Lenin still alive, for the birth of communist sections of the International in an unhurried way, such that the part that separated from the old socialist parties would be firmly established on revolutionary positions, sacrificing even momentary numbers and consistency. The clamors of the then fashionable “western bolsheviks” for this intransigence covered the voice of the Left, but not their miserable shame for having betrayed the communist cause in the brief glimpse of the following years. It’s true that the party is strengthened at the fire of struggle, but it’s equally true that it must pre-exist, embodying the revolutionary program and action.

It was said, at that time, that in Italy we had “cut too far to the left”, and in fact the centrist leadership of the communist Party of Italy, which succeeded the left leadership, immediately arranged to bring in through the window not just many people and characters who’d been prevented in ’ from entering through the door in 1921, but positions and wills of an outspoken opportunist brand. If there can be one regret today, it is that “it had cut too little to the left””. What guarantees could the eclectic positions of the maximalism give, when everything was thought of but giving the party an intransigent revolutionary direction? What credit could give the Ordine Nuovo group, which placed the party at the tail end of the series in the Marxist formula said above, and had it preceded by those “factory councils” whose function is impossible to define?

Clarity of principle and purposes

The Communist Party of Italy hadn’t been formed yet, and the communist fraction within the Italian Socialist Party had just arisen, when at the Bologna congress of the Socialist party (PSI), in August 1919, a program declaring that Soviets should be formed in Italy, was launched. Plans for the establishment of Soviets multiplied. Each had its own, more original than the others. The communist left, in the prevailing chaos, set about putting things in their place. In a series of articles that appeared in the organ of the fraction, Il Soviet, "The question of Soviets, factory councils, and the primary function of the party" was addressed. Mainly in a series of three articles entitled Towards the Establishment of Workers’ Councils in Italy, which appeared on January 4 and 11 and February 1, 1920 (more would follow soon after), the whole matter was investigated. We report their texts, pointing out to the reader that they coincide exactly with the theses of the Communist International approved by the 2nd Congress, held in Moscow seven months later, that is, from July 17 to August 7, 1920, from which we’ll report essential excerpts for a proper comparison.

The articles of Il Soviet must first of all explain what the Soviets are, as they arose from the fire of revolution in Russia, because extreme confusion was being made between Soviets, factory councils, generic organs of workers representation, democratic electoralism, etc. Then, having re-established the exact terms of the issues as they were realized in revolutionary Russia, the text of the Communist Left addresses the errors of the Ordine Nuovo, the unionism, and also those enunciated in some other proposals of the Bologna Socialist Congress. The articles carry out the themes in an extremely concise but highly effective way, without resorting, as we have to do later, to particular historical references, for it was precisely in those years that the proletariat, unlike today, was fighting incredibly some tough social and political battles, and in the fire of those struggles it assimilated, with relative ease, even the most arduous problems of the revolution.

Towards the Establishment of Workers’ Councils in Italy

This is the full text of the five-part article on this fundamental issue:

(Il Soviet, 4 gennaio - 22 febbraio 1920) [Here]

[Il Programma Comunista, n. 18, 15 ottobre 1969]

The theses of the Communist Left

The communist text Towards the Establishment of Soviets in Italy had exposed errors and even maneuvers of the socialist center and the right wing, sparking a deep controversy. This new text, Towards the Establishment of Workers’ Councils, reiterated the different nature and function, compared to the economic unions, of the factory Councils, with which the proponents of Ordine Nuovo on the one hand, those of “Guerra di classe” on the other, claimed to replace the Soviets, or the workers Councils, and even the class political Party.

The polemic was of primary importance, because both the ordinovists and unionist confused the political and economic activity, the importance of immediate struggles with that of the struggle for power, going so far as to advocate the workers’ control in the factory and over the economy, even before they possessed the only true instrument, namely the political power, the State of proletarian dictatorship. The Communist Left proclaimed that not only would economic power be exercised after the conquest of political power, but that it would even be an exhaustive illusion to believe that control over the economy could be carried out immediately and simultaneously over the entire network of production and exchange, having to envisage, instead, the economic transformation as a more or less long process, arising from factors of an objective nature and the ability of the Communist Party to progress in winning over the masses to communism.

The series isn’t: struggle for power in the factory – exercise of power for the transformation of the factory economy (through the factory councils) – towards the workers’ State, as the ordinovists claimed. The Marxist dynamic is different: struggle for power at least on a national scale – exercise of power in the transformation of the economy (dictatorship of the proletariat) – society without classes and without a political State.

Lenin had drawn an initial conclusion in his address to the First Congress of the Communist International (March 1919):

«Put a distance between yourselves and those who delude the proletariat by proclaiming the possibility of victories within the bourgeois framework, and propose that the proletarian organs should combine with or collaborate with the instruments of bourgeois domination».

Lenin’s directive hit the socialist parties, and in particular the so-called "centrist" fractions, independents, etc, which advocated legal recognition of workers’ and factory Councils by the State, in order to conceal their deep counterrevolutionary nature and in an extreme attempt to bridle the proletarian masses.

“Seize the power or seize the Factory?”, again from Il Soviet, issue of Feb. 22, 1920, taking its inspiration from the factory occupation by the striking workers in Liguria, operating through the Factory Councils.

“We would not like – commented "Il Soviet" – “the working masses to get hold of the idea that setting up the councils is all they need for taking over the factories and getting rid of the capitalists, This would indeed be the most dangerous illusion. The factory will be conquered by the working class – and not only by the workforce employed in it, an issue that would be too weak and non-communist – only after the working class as a whole has seized the political power. Unless it has done so, the Royal Guards, military police, etc. – in other words, the mechanism of force and oppression that the bourgeoisie has at its disposal, its political power apparatus – will dispel all the illusions».

The subsequent failure of the factory occupation was a foregone conclusion, and the whole dirty farce of the next false communist parties, the so-called “self-management”, “factory to the workers” and “land to the peasants” was anticipated by thirty years.

Once again the function of the party was forgotten, and the Communist Left had to remember it:

«The fundamental problem of the revolution thus lies in gauging the proletariat’s determination to smash the bourgeois State and take power into its own hands. Such a determination on the part of the broad masses of the working class exists as a direct result of the economic relations of exploitation by capital that put the proletariat in an intolerable situation and drives it to smash the existing social forms. The task of the communists, then, is to direct this violent reaction on the part of the masses and give it greater efficiency. The communists — as the Manifesto said long ago — have a superior knowledge of the conditions of the class struggle and the proletariat’s emancipation than the proletariat itself. The critique they make of the history and of the constitution of the society put them in a position to make fairly accurate predictions concerning the developments of the revolutionary process. It is for this reason that communists form the class political party, which sets itself to the task of unifying the proletarian forces and organizing the proletariat into the dominant class through the revolutionary conquest of power».

* * *

All the communist Left polemical action resulted in the “Theses on the Establishment of Workers Councils”, in opposition to the various projects presented within the PSI. We reproduce the text, not only as a historical document, but as a serious and consistent contribution of communists to the theoretical and practical elaboration of the revolutionary line. The Theses appeared in the Il Soviet issue of April 11, 1920, also before the Second Congress of the Communist International.

Theses on the Establishment of Workers’ Councils

Proposed by the C.C. of the Communist Abstentionist Fraction of the P.S.I.

(Il Soviet, April 11th, 1920) [ Here ]

The theses of the International

The Italian Communist Left had always regarded its activity in every field as contributing to the world struggle of the proletariat. Being still a fraction of the PSI, or the leadership of the Communist Party, its theoretical elaborations, contributions in theses and debates, both in Italy and in international communist bodies, aimed at making a contribution to the whole international communist party.

Indeed, not only did the Left collaborate with Lenin and the leaders of world communism in the “Conditions of Admission to the Communist International” by bringing an element of particular intransigence to their formulation, but also indirectly, in the case of the definition of the tasks of the party and proletarian bodies, on which, at the Second Moscow Congress in July 1920, the Communist International gave a special body of theses that, under the title The Trade Union Movement, Factory and Workshop Committees, dealt with the questions of the party’s connection with the proletariat’s trade union and company economic organizations and then, in the Theses on the Role of the Communist Party in the Proletarian Revolution, with questions related to the Soviets.

Clear is the coincidence of positions between the Italian left and the Communist International on the basic questions. On the subject of the political party and the working class, the thesis 2 of the Theses on the Role... thus expresses itself, in scorn and condemnation not only of the blundering positions of today’s ex Communist parties, but also and especially of the International’s own blurry and zig-zagging positions in the years after 1924:

«Until the time when state power has been conquered by the proletariat, and the proletariat has established its rule once and for all and secured it from bourgeois restoration, until that time the Communist Party will only have the minority of the working class organized in its ranks. Until the seizure of power and during the period of transition the Communist Party is able, under favourable conditions, to exercise an indisputable ideologic and political influence over all the proletarian and half-proletarian layers of the population, but is not able to unite them organizationally in its ranks. Only after the proletarian dictatorship has wrested out of the hands of the bourgeoisie such powerful media of influence as the press, education, parliament, the church, the administrative machine and so on, only after the defeat of the bourgeois order has become clear for all to see, only then will all or almost all workers start to enter the ranks of the Communist Party».

«The task of communism does not lie in accommodating to these backward parts of the working class [i.e., the worker’s groups who are followers of opportunist, white and yellow parties and unions], but in raising the whole of the working class to the level of the communist vanguard».

«The Communist International remains firmly convinced that the collapse of the old ’social democratic’ parties of the Second International can under no circumstances be portrayed as the collapse of the proletarian party in general. The epoch of the direct struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat leads to a new world party of the proletariat: the Communist Party».

«The Communist International rejects most decisively the view that the proletariat can carry out its revolution without having an independent political party. Every class struggle is a political struggle. The aim of this struggle, which inevitably turns into civil war, is the conquest of the political power. (…) The same class struggle demands in the same way the centralization and common leadership of the different forms of the proletarian movement (trades unions, co-operatives, factory committees etc). Only a political party can be such a unifying and leading centre».

«It is not with the general strike alone, with the tactic of folded arms, the working class can achieve the victory over the bourgeoisie. The proletariat must take on the armed uprising. Whoever understands that will, also have to grasp that an organized political party is necessary and that formless workers’ bodies are not sufficient. The revolutionary unionists often talk about the great role of the determined revolutionary minority. Well, a truly determined minority of the working class, a minority that is communist, that wishes to act, that has a programme and wishes to organize the struggle of the masses, is precisely the Communist Party».

In Thesis 8, the question of the Soviets is directly addressed:

«The old classical division of the workers movement into three forms – the party, the trades unions and the co-operatives – has been overtaken. The proletarian revolution in Russia has created the basic form of the proletarian dictatorship – the soviets. The new division that we are everywhere encountering is (1) the party, (2) the soviet, (3) the trade union. But the soviets, as well as the production workers associations, must constantly and systematically be led by the party of the proletariat, that is to say by the Communist Party. Organized vanguard of the working class, the Communist Party, represents the economical, cultural and the political needs of the whole working class, as well as it must lead the struggle of the whole working class. It has to become the soul of the soviets, of the trade unions and the other workers organizations.
     «The rise of the soviets as the basic historical form of the dictatorship by no means decreases the leading role of the Communist Party in the proletarian revolution. When the ’left’ Communists of Germany (cf. their appeal to the German proletariat of April 14, 1920 signed ’Communist Workers’ Party of Germany’) declare: ’That the Party too has to adapt more and more to the idea of Soviets, and takes on a proletarian character’ (Kommunistische Arbeiterzeitung, no. 54), then we see a confused expression that suggests the idea that the Communist Party must dissolve itself into the soviets, that the soviets could replace the Communist Party. This idea is fundamentally false and reactionary. In the history of the Russian revolution we experienced a whole period in which the soviets marched against the proletarian party and supported the policies of the agents of the bourgeoisie. The same thing could be observed in Germany and is also possible in other countries. On the contrary, the existence of a powerful Communist Party is necessary in order to enable the soviets to fulfill their historic tasks, a party that does adapt itself to the soviets, but is in a position to make them reject the adaptation to the bourgeoisie and social democracy, a party which, by means his organized fraction, will take the soviets under his leadership».

«a) A great revolutionary excitement among the widest circles of workmen and workwomen, the soldiers and workers in general; (B) A strong political and economic crisis, attaining such a degree that the power begins to slip out of the hands of the government; (C) In the ranks of considerable masses of workers, and first of all in the ranks of the Communist Party, a serious decision to begin a systematic and crucial struggle for the power has become ripe. Proceeding to the direct organisation of Soviets in the absence of the above three conditions is impossible».

«It is a treason to introduce the Soviets into the general bourgeois-democratic constitutional system(…) The Soviets are the dictatorship of the proletariat. The National Assembly is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Joining the dictatorship of the working class with that of the bourgeoisie is impossible”. After stating that the Soviets are not “green house flowers”, the theses conclude, “ The Soviets without the proletarian revolution are impossible and inevitably become a parody».

[Il Programma Comunista, n. 19, October 31st 1969]

Soviets and factory councils

The positions of the Second Congress of the Third International and those of the Communist Left, not limited to the Soviets issue, nor to that of the Communist Party issue, but on the Trade Unions, on the Factory Councils, on all the different organs that the class struggle expresses as needed, this match up perfectly. It was with good reason that the International rested a fundamental importance to the ability of the Communist Party to lead the masses in any struggle against the regime, and, on the basis of the Trade Union theses, the Red International of Labor Unions was constituted, with the clear purpose of organizing the class trade unions, in opposition to the yellow, social-democratic trade union central in Amsterdam.

The Theses on the Trade Union Movement, by the Third International, having noticed that the trade unions during the World War had entered into a permanent pact of alliance with the bourgeois State to support it in the war effort, and that, when the conflict was over, they had given their support to prevent clashes between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, highlights the exclusively legalitarian character of the trade union policy headed by the Social Democrats. This policy strives to substitute the practice of strikes with the practice of “long term contracts”; the class organization with the establishment of “Communions of Labor”, of “Joint Industrial Councils”, embryos of corporative bodies with the purpose of permanent collaboration between trade unions and company management, with the aim of arriving at those State-imposed “arbitration” committees that represent the great aspiration of the trade union bureaucracy and the bosses to avoid or mitigate the class confrontation.

To the union bureaucracy’s function of dividing “the powerful stream of the labour movement into weak streamlets,” for reformism against revolution, the theses oppose that “the Communists must join such unions in all countries, in order to make of them efficient organs of the struggle for the suppression of capitalism and for communism,” and also to lead the immediate struggles of the proletarians. The theses reiterate the need not to create “special trade unions”, except in cases of “exceptional acts of violence on the part of the trade union bureaucracy such as the expulsion of single local branches of the unions, lead by the communist or, as a result of the narrow-minded aristocratic policy, being the unskilled workers excluded from entering into the organizations”; but to remain in these unions “which are in a state of ferment and passing over to the class struggle” and to support Federations “with revolutionary tendencies – although not communist ones (…) for the purpose of fighting against the counter-revolutionary tendencies of the trade union bureaucracy, to support the spontaneous direct action of the proletariat”.

The theses conclude this first part with the classic Communist enunciation, “subordinate the unions to the practical leadership of the party, as the advanced guard of the workers’ revolution”, an aim that makes necessary to “have communist groups in all the trades unions and factory committees”, representing the fraction of the Party which points to “acquire by their means an influence over the labour movement and direct it”.

The second part of the Theses on the Trade Union Movement deals more specifically with the issue of factory councils. In the conditions of complete disintegration of the economy, brought about by the First Imperialist War, the resumption of industrial production was also very slow due to “absenteeism” of the capitalists themselves who, accustomed to the fabulous profits of the war period, guaranteed by the best “customer” imaginable, which is to say, the State, didn’t feel like investing their capital for a “modest” business profit. In this particular historical environment arose the need for workers to make themselves, if not promoters of economic recovery, at least the “controllers” of the economic efficiency of enterprises, with the practice that came under the name of “workers’ management”. For this purpose, the factory councils arose.

The Communist International, in the Second Congress thesis, emphasizes this specific task of the factory councils, but correctly places them in the historical period that seems to precede the revolution, at least in Europe. The text begins as follows, and reminds us of the previously mentioned precise anticipation made by the Communist Left regarding the workers’ occupation of the factories:

«The economic struggle of the proletariat for the increase of wages and the improvement of the conditions of life of the masses, is getting more and more into a blind alley. The economic crisis, embracing one country after another in ever-increasing proportions, is showing to even unenlightened workmen, that it is not enough to demand an increase of wages and a shortening of the working hours, but that the capitalist class is less capable every day of establishing the normal conditions of public economy and of guaranteeing to the workers at least those conditions of life which it gave them before the world war. Out of this growing conviction of the working masses, their efforts to create organisations being able to start a struggle for the alleviation of the situation by means of workers’ control over the production, through the factory committees of production, are born.
    «This tendency (…) at the end it results in the fight for control over industry, the special historic task of the factory committees. Therefore, it is a mistake to form the shop committees only out of workmen who are already struggling for the dictatorship of the proletariat; on the contrary, the duty of the Communist Party is to organise all the workers on the ground of the economic crisis, and to lead them towards the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat by developing the struggle for workers’ control over production, that they all understand».

«The Communist Party will be able to accomplish this task if, taking part in the struggle in the factory committees, it will instill into the minds of the masses the consciousness that a systematic reconstruction of public economy on the basis of capitalism, which would mean its new enslavement by the government in favour of the industrial class, is now totally impossible. The organisation of economic management in the interests of the working masses, is possible only when the government is in the hands of the working class, when the strong hand of labour dictatorship will proceed to the suppression of capitalism and to the new socialist organisation».

The theses then explain the reasons of practical utilization of circumstances for the purpose of workers’ mobilization and their organization in the factory councils. In Thesis 5, another categorical formulation is made, “The factory committees cannot be substitutes for the trades unions”. The text continues with a precise and concise analysis of the different functions of the two bodies:

«The unions organise the working masses for the struggle for the increase of wages and shortening of hours on a national scale. The factory committees are organised for workers’ control over production, for the struggle against the economic disorganization, and embrace all the workers organizations, but their struggle can only gradually assume a general political character.. The Communists must endeavour to render the factory committees the nuclei of the trades unions and to support them as long as the unions will overcome the counter-revolutionary tendencies of their bureaucracy, as they consciously become organs of the revolution».

The Party’s centralizing task is strongly emphasized by the following text:

«The aim of the Communists consists in inspiring the trade unions and factory committees with a spirit of determined struggle, and the consciousness and knowledge of the best methods of such a struggle, which means the spirit of communism. In carrying out this duty the Communists must in practice subordinate the factory committees and the unions to the Communist Party, thus creating the proletarian mass organs as a basis for a powerful centralised party of the proletariat, embracing all the organisations of the workers’ struggle, leading them all to one aim, to the victory of the working class, to the dictatorship of the proletariat, towards the communism».

In the third part, the theses affirm the urgency of an international class-based trade union organization, which would bring together all local unions and national trade union centers, to make them powerful organs of revolutionary struggle, in order to contrast the infamous yellow central in Amsterdam, submitted to the world imperialism through the social-democratic control.

In conclusion, the Factory Councils, or any company body, have no resemblance to the Soviets and don’t fit into that scheme that the International had predetermined and which we’ll repeat to dispel any doubts or misunderstandings: “1st the Party, 2nd the Soviet, 3rd the Trade Unions”.

The immediatist and situationist orgy

Needless to say that both the unionists and the anarchists, and even Mussolini, declared themselves in favor of the factory councils. It must be credited to the unionists that, at their March 1920 congress in Parma, they made precise recommendations that the factory councils should not be transformed into new organs of business conciliation, of productive goading, excluding that their function as managers of the future social economy would enable them to overthrow the capitalist regime. The anarchists, moreover, in declaring their adherence to factory councils, made it clear in a motion voted by the congress of the Italian Anarchist Union in Bologna in July 1920 that:

«The Congress, bearing in mind that the Factory and Department Councils have their main importance, insofar as the revolution is expected to be near, becoming the technical organs of expropriation and the necessary immediate continuation of the production, but that, as the present society continues to exist, they would suffer the dampening and accommodating influence of the latter, considers the Factory Councils to be organs suitable for organizing, in view of the revolution, all the arm and brain producers in the place of work itself and for the purposes of anarcho-communist principles; being entirely anti-State organs and possible nuclei of the future management of industrial and agricultural production. They are also considered suitable for developing, in the wage-earning worker the consciousness of the producer and useful for the purposes of revolution, by fostering the transformation of the discontent of the working and peasant classes into a clear will of expropriation».

«fighting all tendencies of collaborationist deviation and ensuring that all workers in each factory, whether organized or not, participate in their formation».

«I accept this famous control of the factories and also the social cooperative management, but I ask that we have the technical capacity to run the companies; I ask that these companies will produce more and, if this is guaranteed to me by the blue-collar workers and no longer by the bosses, then it’s no difficult for me saying that the last (the workers) must take the place of the first (the bosses)».

The anti-Marxist concretism of Ordinovism

In contrast to the opportunist mythology, Antonio Gramsci but Angelo Tasca, the real “theorist” of the Factory Councils wasn’t Antonio Gramsci but Angelo Tasca. These are the main points of his motion at the June 1920 Congress of the Turin Chamber of Labor. We quote two of them that characterize very well the positions completely outside Marxism and the doctrine of the Communist International:

«The ‘Council’ is an organ of proletarian power in the workplace; it tends to give the wage-earning producer consciousness and thus to bring the class struggle from the level of resistance to that of conquest. This transformation starts from the workplace, but must involve enterely the union action. Therefore, the ‘council’ is the element of the transformation of the union organization by trade and by category into that by industry, which does not represent a mere change of form, but a real change of action, whereby trade union organizations stand for the Communist Revolution and prepare to become, after the victory, constituent elements in the structure of the new regime».

«The Congress considers inappropriate and contradictory any struggle for the recognition of factory councils, because their task of control, in order to be meaningful, has a political aim. Indeed the control of production can only result in the struggle for the elimination of the capitalist as a class, namely, for the destruction of the bourgeois State and the establishment of the proletarian State. So the struggle for the full recognition of the councils will be done, it must be done, but it can’t be anything other than the revolution (…) No conquest – it’s our duty not to delude the workers and ourselves – can be made in the presumption of wresting ‘bits of power’ from the capitalist; let the factory council gather all its power from the fact that it’s the expression of the will of a conscious mass and not from the impossible and absurd recognition by the capitalist unable to suicide».

To better characterize the factory councils, it’s enough to refer to what the Fiat-Centro Executive Committee established. Since, says the resolution, «democratic forms of industrial government have become necessary, corresponding to the historical position that the working class occupies today, the Works Council is the form of this democratic industrial government».

Summarizing the chaotic infatuation that paralyzed the Italian proletariat, we quote a passage from an article in Avanti!, Turin edition, on the occasion of the decision of the Turin Chamber of Labor to carry out a provincial general strike on March 13, in which the ordinovist influence is easily detectable, but also the absolute lack of a vision and program needed for the class clash:

«Proletarian, you were nothing, you are something, you will become everything! Proletarian, you have your own law, you have your own order, you have your own power! Proletarian, you have your own government! Proletarian, this government of yours, entirely yours, symbol of your freedom, symbol of your autonomy, is the Internal Commission, is the Executive Committee of the Council of ward commissioners! (…) Proletarian, you have your own place in the factory, because you’ve entered a representative system; because you’re a citizen of a nation, of your nation, the labor world, the factory! Proletarian, you build your society, you build your State, you build your historical organization, within which you will find the satisfaction of your needs».

Everything dies without the Party

Was the Communist Left against factory councils, against factory occupations, against the general strike, against Soviets? No! The Left’s theses testify to the fact that it possessed – unique in the enormous confusion produced by the disintegration of the old Socialist Party – a firm political orientation, battle direction and organization of all forms of workers’ struggle. To all the ramblings about “workers’ industrial government”, about “power in the factory”, to all the hybrid claims of building a new society on the basis of company or factory bodies, the Communist Left dramatically posed the historic, essential issue of the class political party, the Communist Party.

In the article Towards the Establishment of the Workers’ Councils, dated Feb. 22, 1920, which appeared in Il Soviet, organ of the communist fraction of the PSI, and quoted earlier, the subject of the party is carried out not only with regard to the Soviets, a specific issue, but a fortiori for every other proletarian body:

«Can the Soviets, the State organs of the victorious proletariat, play a role as organs of revolutionary struggle for the proletariat while capitalism still controls the State? The answer is yes — in the sense, however, that at any given stage, they may represent the right terrain for the revolutionary struggle that the Party is leading. And, at that particular stage, the Party has to fashion such a terrain, such a grouping of forces, for itself. Today, have we reached this stage of struggle in Italy? We feel that we are very close to it, but that there is one more stage to go through.The communist party, which has to work within the Soviets, does not exist yet. We are not saying that the Soviets will wait for it before they emerge. It could happen that events occur differently. But then we will run this strong risk, that the immaturity of the party will allow these organs to fall into the hands of the reformists, the accomplices of the bourgeoisie, the saboteurs and falsifiers of the revolution. And so we feel that the problem of forging a genuine communist party in Italy is much more urgent than the problem of creating the Soviets».

«The forging of an efficient and healthy revolutionary movement in Italy will never be accomplished by advancing new organs shaped on future forms, like factory councils or soviets – just as it was an illusion believing that the revolutionary spirit could be saved from reformism by importing it into the unions, seen as the nucleus of the future society. We will not effect the sorting-out process through a new recipe, which will frighten no one, but by abandoning, once and for all, the old “recipes”, the pernicious and fatal methods of the past. For well-known reasons, we feel that this method has to be abandoned, and expelled from our ranks, along with the non-communists, and the electoral method, as we see no other route to the setting up of a Communist Party that is worthy to affiliate to Moscow (....)
     «Let us work towards this goal, starting with the elaboration of a consciousness, a political culture, in the leaders, through a more serious study of the problems of the revolution, with fewer distractions from spurious electoral, parliamentary and minimalist activities. Let us work towards this goal. Let us issue more propaganda concerning the conquest of power, to build awareness of what the revolution will be, what its organs will be, how the Soviets will really work out. Then we can say we have done truly valuable work towards establishing the councils of the proletariat and winning through them the revolutionary dictatorship that will open up the radiant road to communism».

But ordinovists first, in 1919, and maximalists later, in 1921, remained deaf to this call, repeatedly made by the communist left, to drive the anti-communists out of the Socialist Party and transform it into the Communist Party. One and the other took refuge in the justification that the unity of the Socialist Party should not be broken, and that the way to Communism would be won by exercises in the Factory Councils, in the Trade Unions, in the hazy future Soviets. The history, the dramatic facts of those years, proved that nothing was saved from the ramblings of ordinovist “concretism” and maximalist maneuverism. The Communist Party arose as the Left had preached and predicted it: with the revolutionary scalpel, operating a drastic selection from the socialist ranks of non-communists.

No trace is found, in the writings of the proponents of the Factory Councils and Soviets, of the political party, of the Russian historical example, of the teachings of the October Revolution. On the contrary, the Party is put by them out of the history, and when it appears, if it appears at all, it is at the back, as a filler, a cultural decoration, an academy of scholars in marxology.

Quite otherwise will the “concretists” conceive the Party, when, having blown up the forts of proletarian bodies by fascist gangs and social-democratic treachery, they will use it as the only and last base, moreover held up by the heroic tenacity of the Communist Left, to save their individual careers as politicians outside national borders, within which they would return after a twenty-year period in the tow of rich and powerful international masters.

[Il Programma Comunista, issue nº20, November 15 1969]

The Party was understood as a democratic-parliamentary array in which the formation of “majorities” and “minorities” would determine the constitution of its “government” and its “opposition”; both legitimate and empowered to enclude every proletarian “tendency”, from anarchists to reformists, from syndicalists to maximalists, from centrists to leftists. In this way the party was conceived only as an organization, only generically working-class and socialist, or communist, according to tendencies and the times, and its program, according to this conception, reflected the party’s spirit of accommodation to circumstances, in every time and place. The Party, as a body of unified principles and action, becomes incomprehensible, becomes a “last supper” of loyalists, “excluded from history”, at the mercy of objective conditions, thus sub-human, and so on and so forth. Even if these things aren’t said, they’re done, and then, when the time comes, they will be codified. In this way Lenin becomes accommodating, tactical, without fixed patterns and unchanging principles. The “real” communist party is only the one that manages to stay afloat, through thick and thin, precisely because it’s… communist.

The Christian “original sin”, which determines from birth the fate of the individual and the human species, is matched by a “communist baptism”, which would make the proletarian party, whatever “sins” it commits, invulnerable from the snares of the enemy, only if it “wants” it. Only then to damn the enemy’s greater strength, to justify the most bitter defeats, otherwise predictable and inevitable. It was forgotten then that not only is essential a Party, but the Communist party that must rest on the revolutionary Marxism. This teaching, stemming from the “lessons of counterrevolution”, is instead made its own by the Communist Left, and forms a particular object of study and political codification in the famous Theses of Rome of 1922, from which the reconstitution of the new Communist World Party is inescapable.

Brief history of class organs

The so-called “communists” of today like to attribute a label of originality to Marxism by releasing it from the events of past history and denying it the cognitive possession of tomorrow. This is false: it’s an existentialist claim. The facts charged to confirm, with tragic exactitude the precise anticipations of the Communist Left and to reinforce the revolutionary communist doctrine and praxis.

To this end, along with quotations of topics used by proponents of immediatism, especially in Italy, the cradle, if you will, of philosophizing “the new”, we will give a summary of the evolution of workers’ and factory councils.

- The Internal Commissions

Initially, these were formed by workers who enjoyed the confidence of the factory employees with the task of forwarding workers’ grievances to the company management. They weren’t usually stable, and were appointed whenever the need arose to deal with the boss. The limits of competence of these workers’ committees were limited to punitive and dismissal measures taken by the factory management. Wages and working hours were handled by the unions.

The Internal Commission was first recognized in Italy at the signing of the three-year labor contract between the management of ITALA, automobile factory in Turin, and the FIOM (Italian Federation of metal workers) on October 27, 1906. The text provided that all conflicts regarding the interpretation of the contract were to be resolved by agreement between the I.C. and the management. The contract also stipulated that there should be five members of the I.C., without saying how they should be chosen, and that they should remain in charge for the duration of the contract. As labor contracts were established, the more or less opposed recognitions of the I.C. were made.

Anarchists and syndicalists opposed I.C., believing them to be organs of social pacification, which prevented those “revolutionary gymnastics” represented by strikes.

With the suppression of the right to strike during World War I, as a result of industrial mobilization for supply the army, I.C. were granted only the right to sponsor workers’ demands at companies and Industrial Mobilization Committees. From what the FIOM leaders of the time reported, we can infer the reformist character of the I.C., on the basis of which not only the Factory Councils but also the theorizing of ordinovism would later arise.

At the FIOM National Congress in Rome in November 1918, Bruno Buozzi, the general secretary, stated that:

«The claim that the organizations are making with increasing vigor, in connection with the increase of their strength, to discuss directly or through the I.C. everything in the factories that concerns not only wages, but the very distribution of work, tends in itself to make the workers and the bosses share the technical direction of the factories». Emilio Colombino, also secretary of the FIOM, pointed out:

«To conquer the factories it’s necessary that the workers must learn what industry is, because it would be useless to conquer them and later to lose them because we don’t know how to manage it. It’s therefore necessary that we slowly take our best comrades and put them in touch with the industrial needs and make them understand what the difficulties and the means to overcome them are. The IC must be in contact with the industrialists and understand their mischiefs and learn from them, because we have many theories in our heads and we must admit that we’re not always infallible. It’s worth insisting on these I.C., which are always branded as treasonous. We even came to doubt whether it was useful to keep them, because when they are named, after a fortnight the workers send them packing, accusing everyone of treason (…)
«So we insist on I.C. It’s the first step towards the conquest of the factory (…) It’s the I.C. that has to analyze industrial trends, realize it, control it, supervise the activity of the industrialists, in order to defend the interests of the working class community. To see what production costs, what raw material costs, what production costs in the countries of origin, what it costs in the factory, what’s the profit margin, what is the wage to be paid to the worker. This is what we demand, much less than the participation proposed by the industrialists, and we demand it in order to create the organizers of tomorrow, for the industrialists in the workers’ camp, those who will have to run the factories when we, as we hope, will soon be masters of the world».

- The factory councils

With the resignation of the I.C. of the Fiat-Centro (10,000 workers factory in Turin) a new I.C. was appointed in August 1919, which informed the workers that department commissioners had to be elected; these in turn were to choose the members of the I.C.

It’s interesting to note this comment by Avanti!, which pointed out that in this way:

«the class struggle takes on new and complicated forms and makes necessary the rise of nimbly articulated workers’ institutes, capable of adhering to the process of industrial production and immediately solving the innumerable conflicts, which arise from the multiple labor specializations».

«We’ve reached the point at which the working class, if it doesn’t want to fail in the task of reconstruction that is in its fates and will, must begin to order itself in a positive manner appropriate to the end to be achieved. And if it’s true that the new society will be based on work and the coordination of the energies of the producers, the places where work takes place, where the producers work and live in common, will tomorrow be the centers of the social body and will have to take the place of the governing bodies of the today’s society».

After a few weeks, the Congress of the Turin Chamber of Labor voted on an agenda based on the maximalists line, decreed at the party’s Bologna Congress in August 1919. The agenda, after accepting the resolution of the party congress in Bologna for “ to begin the work of preparation for proletarian management”, adds:

«Regarding the principles, in the establishment of the Councils, we must conform, the Congress considers: (a) that the new bodies (instruments that the working class forges for itself to conquer all social power, starting from the factory and extending to all the branches of production), must strictly adhere and train to the process of production and distribution of social wealth; (b) that the mass of all manual and intellectual producers must find in them an organic form and become a disciplined army, conscious of its purpose and of the appropriate means to achieve it; (c) that this creation of new bodies does not take away value and authority from the existing political and economic organizations of the proletariat, but tend to achieve through them the maximum power of all producers, organizing all the people in the system of workers’ councils. In accordance with these principles, the Congress approves the establishment of this new body, calling the highest class organizations of the Italian proletariat, on the guidelines of the Communist program, to extend, intensify, facilitate and coordinate the movement for the establishment of the Communist Republic, and mandating the future representatives of the organizations of Turin and province to the Confederal Congress, to support in it the recognition of the new body of the Producers’ Council, and inviting the CGL to establish that, in its special red week, the propaganda for the extension of the Producers’ Councils, in all the italians regions, would be intensified».

- The program of the factory commissars

These deviations are found, more pronounced than elsewhere, in the so-called Program of the Factory Commissars, in whose “statements of principle” we read:

«1) The factory commissars are the only and true social representatives (economic and political) of the proletarian class, because they are elected by universal suffrage by all workers in the workplace itself».

The immediatist thesis of these false Marxists is made even clearer in point 3, where we find this statement:

«The directives of the workers’ movement must arise directly from the workers organized in the very places of production and express themselves through the factory commissars”, so that “the Councils embody (…) the power of the working class organized by factory, in antithesis to the boss’s authority which is expressed in the factory itself; socially they embody the action of the whole proletariat in solidarity in the struggle for the conquest of public power, for the suppression of private property».

«The Assembly of all the commissioners of the Turin factories, with pride and confidence, affirms that their election and the establishment of the Council system represents the first concrete affirmation of the Communist Revolution in Italy!»

Then too, as in the clashes between the London General Council of the International and Bakunin, the critique of the political party in the form of a critique of bureaucratism returned, because of that the leadership of the party itself would be transformed into the a praetorian oligarchy. The danger of functionalism in the party is not an abstract hypothesis, but isn’t removed either by organizational expediency, or by a change in principles and program, or even less by tactical reversals or diversions, or, finally, and all the more so, by blaspheming over bureaucratism itself.

On the other hand, this danger is far closer, and materializes far more often, precisely in those rank-and-file bodies which, in the wishes of the workerists, should be immunized from it because of their exclusively working-class composition.

We purposely referred to that passage by FIOM union leader Colombino, who declared that the members of the I.C. were believed by the factory proletarians to be sold out to the boss. And it’s now an unfortunately centuries-old story that it was precisely in the workers’ unions that the ranks of the traitors to the communist revolution arose and were trained in. Indeed, not surprisingly, in the immediate bodies, as well as in the parliamentary delegations of the workers’ parties, the politics of accommodation, opportunism and up to the open betrayal, have always prevailed: in the immediate bodies, because the continuous and close contact of their leaders with capitalist “reality”, lead them to overestimate contingency, by sacrificing to it the long and hard preparation for the revolutionary assault on bourgeois State power. The same occurred in the parliamentary delegations where the socialist deputies found in the super-corrupt environment of representative democracy all the conditions to take root there, when they should have gone to the parliaments to destroy them.

The revolutionary syndicalism arose as a reaction to the despicable reformist practice of the workers’ leaders, but the result was to deceive the class once again by the indication of the use of false instruments and false forms of revolutionary struggle. Nothing changed, and reformism continued to celebrate its orgies of obscene collusion with the bosses and the State power of the class enemy.

The factory councils had their glory day with the occupation of the factories, in the fall of 1920, in which they finally managed some companies, occupied by their respective workers. That same day was their swan song.

- Workers’ Councils in Germany

Germany had not only the strongest socialist party, the Socialist Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), but also the strongest national trade union. The strongest international trade union federations, construction, metallurgy, etc., were based there. The German Trade Union Central, like the SPD, joined to the “sacred union” by supporting the imperialist war under the pretext that the extraordinary “achievements” that the proletariat had reached in the Reich were to be saved and defended.

Enacting the Auxiliary Service Law on December 31, 1917, the permanent Internal Commissions or Factory Councils were also established by law, eligible for election by universal and secret suffrage, and subsidized by the company managements, even for the working hours lost by the factory commissioners.

In November 1918 the unions made a pact of “union of labor” with the bosses for national reconstruction, anticipating the ignominies perpetrated after World War II by the “modern” trade unionism.

In April 1919, under the impetus of the general strike, the Berlin government agreed to introduce workers’ councils into the constitution, and in April itself submitted a draft in which, among other things, it said: “Powers of control and administration, in the fields assigned to them may be granted to the workers’ and management councils”. In the same month, the Congress of Councils accepted, by a majority vote, a program of a corporatist nature in which was provided “the establishment of a Chamber of Labor for which all the Germans having the right, will be authorized to vote”. This is the “Labor Constituent ’’, advocated by the italian socialists, well seen by the immediatists and the fascists, who will finally realize it later, with the Fascist Chamber of Corporations.

Furthermore, the program asserts: “Each trade elects a production council to which the various categories send their representatives”. The draft also calls for the establishment of two chambers, the General People’s Chamber and the Chamber of Labor. The former being entitled to legislate on the political and cultural level, and the latter on the administrative level. It also calls for the Production Councils, in which workers are represented by the Councils, and Labor Unions, organs “of understanding between the leagues of business owners and the workers’ trade unions”, in order to keep balance in labor and class matters. The program specifies their purpose as follows: “The production Councils are the representatives of the production, jointly supported by workers and bosses. Workers are represented in them by their councils. The Council of Production is the foundation of socialization”.

Fascism would thus find forms and instruments already packaged for its success, prepared to perfection precisely by social-democratic opportunism, obviously pacifist, anti-fascist and counter-revolutionary.

The substance of the project was embodied in the law of Feb. 4, 1920, in which the main tasks of factory councils were established, including “a) cooperation with company management to promote productive efficiency and the introduction of new work methods; b) promoting and maintaining industrial peace, promoting the prompt intervention of conciliation offices, or by other means suitable for the peaceful settlement of disputes that may arise”, and a whole series of legal means, designed to avert the breakdown of the social equilibrium.

On the other hand, the assembly of councils in Berlin on June 26, 1919, with a majority of communists and left-wing independents, approves a program in which the political functions of the councils do indeed find a certain place, but there’s a serious lack of considering the conquest of political power not as a process directed by the political Party of the working class, but as the democratically expressed will of the working people. That is the political weaknesses of the Spartacists and the inherent hesitancy of the centrists (the same ones that prevented the establishment of a homogeneous Communist Party in Germany in time, in front of the events) stand out. However, it cannot be noticed in this program of the Councils any either corporative or pacifist tendency, contrasting in this, sharply and class-wise, to both the governmental and the trade union, i.e., social democratic, projects.

The social-democratic government, which today we would call “leftist”, transformed those Councils into State organs which, in the intentions of the naive, should have established the “industrial workers’ government”, the “proletarian power” over the means of production. The prophecies of the Communist Left were punctually fulfilled. The capitalist State would also take over the trade unions. Without the leadership of the proletarian political party, the Communist Party, all class bodies first lose all real capacity for revolutionary struggle, then they fail even the class struggle, and finally they are used by the capitalist class.

Fifty years later, as capitalism is about to repeat this attempt, using a variety of tricks and sleight-of-hand in cahoots with the trade union leaderships and today’s social democratic parties, i.e., the former communist and socialist parties, the proletariat seems not to have understood the lesson and is sailing at the mercy of the most ruthless counterrevolution.

[Il Programma Comunista, issue nº21, October 1st, 1969]

- Workers’ Councils in other countries

On May 4 and 5, 1919, delegates from communist-led workers’ councils met in Vienna and formulated a declaration that honors the Austrian revolutionary proletariat. We quote the essential passage:

«The National Assembly, the Landtag and the City Council, are organs of bourgeois society. The proletariat has the understanding that it can never achieve its full political and economic emancipation by means of the bourgeois-democratic bodies, whether being in them the minority or the majority. The history of class struggles teaches us that a ruling class has never relinquished power by resolution of a parliament, let alone spontaneously. On the contrary, the bourgeoisie has so far shown that it knows how to secure its interests by employing all the means of the power of violence outside legislative bodies».

Finally, the declaration stipulated that bourgeois organs should be replaced with purely proletarian organs.

Ten days later, on May 15, 1919, the law establishing the factory councils was passed, based on a social democratic project, totally similar to that of German social democracy and all other countries.

The Viennese socialist newspaper Arbeiter Zeitung commented on this historic event as follows:

«With the Works Council Act a new workers’ law has been created; this law recognizes as a legal institution that of the workers’ trustees in the companies, and grants them exactly defined rights. Thus is broken the absolutism of the boss (…) The law which recognizes the right of works councils to confer monthly with the boss on the management of the company and admits workers as directors in joint-stock companies, offers workers the opportunity to achieve little by little, by experience some useful technical and administrative notions, which will make them fit to take over the management of the company later. The capitalist can be made to disappear from the factory only when the workers impose a group of experienced and suitable trustees to take over the management of the company themselves. This is the purpose of the institution of company directors».

«The hope conceived by the workers that they (the councils) would be an instrument of economic socialization hasn’t been realized. Of the two fundamental functions assigned to them by law: defense of workers’ interests and participation in the management of companies, the second has remained a dead letter or almost so. Events showed that the factory councils neither took care of it nor were able to fulfill it; but that, on the contrary, they had devoted themselves, with so much greater effort, to the first task, that they had carried it out with a much greater success, and that, although limited, their function in the capitalist economy remained of great importance....
     «On the other hand, the terror then manifested by the bosses that the establishment of factory councils would have a revolutionary effect in the wage earners and keep them in a state of perpetual agitation unfavorable to the good harmony between employers and workers and to the smooth operation of the factories, proved to be absolutely unjustified. On the contrary, it appeared with ever-increasing clarity that the existence of an intermediary body between management and the wage-earners in large companies was indispensable; that precisely in times of crisis the councils had a pacifying and moderating action on the masses; and that, if it became necessary to take measures unfavorable to the workers, the workers accepted them better when these measures were communicated and explained to them by the factory councils, which had discussed them with management and done everything possible to mitigate their severity».

These three quotations reflect well the generous intentions of the Austrian Communists, the demagoguery of the Social Democrats and centrists, and their open, collaborationist and pacifist opportunism without reservation.

In England, the Factory Councils arose, and still live, as open organs of collaboration, in accordance with the “recommendations” made to the british capitalism by the Whitley Commission, which published five reports: on March 8, 1917, the Interim Report on Joint Standing Industrial Councils, on October 18, 1917, the Second Report on Joint Standing Industrial Councils, and the Supplementary Report on Works Committees, on January 31, 1918, the Report on Conciliation and Arbitration, and finally, on July 31, 1918, the Final Report. The first one is the fundamental document, from which the others come from, and we need only quote its first lines to get an exact idea:

«We recommend that His Majesty’s Government should propose without delay to the various associations of employers and employed, the formation of joint standing industrial councils in the several industries, where they do not already exist, composed of representatives of employers and employed, regarding to the various branches of the industry and the various categories of workers engaged».

«The better utilization of the practical knowledge and experience of the workers..,means of insuring to the workers the greatest possible security of earnings and employment, without undue restriction upon changing of occupation or employer …. means for securing to the workers a greater share in and responsibility for the determination and observance of the conditions under which their work is carried on…the settlement of the general principles governing the conditions of employment, including the methods of fixing, paying, and readjusting wages».

Alongside these bodies, other councils arose for each branch of industry, and above all the Industrial Arbitration Tribunals, with the task of settling labor disputes.

Needless to say, these Joint Councils were well received by the Trade Unions, who sent their representatives to them. In 1942 the Trade Unions published a pamphlet in which they stipulated that the working-class spirit toward the company should be one of “open and ready cooperation, not internal discord”, and its specific body was precisely the Whitley Councils.

The Whitley Report also recommended that the Workshops Committees, or factory commissions, should deal only with the day-to-day affairs of the workers in the factory and, to ensure their success, they «could not be used by the industrialists as an alternative to the workers’ organization».

Very significant is the judgment expressed by one of the notorious Mr. and Mrs. Webb, worse than social democrats, to whose pen is due that panegyric of Stalinism which today’s false communists cite as an example of “socialist historiography”.

«So far as the Workshop Committee”, Sidney Webb comments, “isn’t really representative of the feelings and desires of every corner of the factory, it will not work out to the best advantage. Nor will it work well if it is made use of to contrast the Trade Union, or as a rival to it, or if it is allowed to deal with matters in derogation or in evasion of the district or national agreements between the Employers’ Association and the Trade Unions».

«Any competent manager will consider a big mistake by the management the innovation of any sort in any of these matters [i.e., conditions of hygiene, working hours, wages, etc] without having explained the matter to the Workshop Committee, and its opinion requested and considered. Such consultation may seem to take more time than an autocratic management of the factory, and to involve more trouble. In reality, as all experience shows, such a consultation invariably saves the management, in the long run, a great deal of time and trouble; and often saves no little expenses too. But, what is even more important, such a consultation, which infrequently results in a genuine improvement of the proposal, secures the conscious adherence of the whole factory, without which the highest efficiency would be impossible».

Finally, against the “joint” and workshop committees, both of clearly and explicitly collaborationist intonation, arose the Department Stewards or Shops Stewards, as representatives in the factory of the Trade Unions, thus subordinate to the social-pacifist policy of the british trade unions. Particularly during World War I, the Trade Unions bargained an agreement with the capitalist government of England in order to prevent the social conflicts in the factories and to cooperate with the company management.

The organization of Shops Stewards also arose, however, as a need for the organizing of unskilled workers who flowed, in the English industry, in great numbers during the conflict, while the Trade Unions traditionally organized only skilled workers. It was these unskilled masses that brought a wind of anti-establishment struggle against the cost of living, working conditions, etc, which had its trial-by-fire in the strike, the first unauthorized strike in trade-unionist history, of the Clyde engineers, which saw the Shops Stewards at the head, instead of the unions which refused to lead it.

The organizational structure of the shop stewards has no national structure, but is based only on the single shop-floor. There the stewards are elected without regard to the Trade Union to which they belong, and their power is not executive but devolved to the assembly of all workers. Born spontaneously, the Shops Stewards have thus lived so far without claiming to build a real movement.

The lessons of October

From the above we’ve learned that the determining element in the class struggle, whether in its most basic forms of social clashes to defend the wages against the economic dictatorship of capitalism, or in the more complex forms of violent clashes of the working masses against the existing economic and even, in some cases, the political structure, has never been any particular body of struggle, such as the workers Councils, the Trade Unions themselves, the Control Committees, or any others of the kind. We also learned that all these organs, though they arose in the fire of struggle, burned themselves out in the struggle itself due to the absence of the leadership of the proletarian political party. Reflexively, the bourgeoisie has understood, in general, that these organs aren’t incompatible with its class domination of the society and is working for taking possession of them, adapting them to the different, but essentially the same, needs of defending its political power. We have purposely presented quotes, chronologies and programs, to document to the reader that the positions of the Communist Left, called “a priori” by the usual concretists, found its confirmation in the doctrine I front of the present and the future facts.

It’s essential, however, to call the unquestionable authority of the October Revolution, after the teachings of the counterrevolution, having dialectically shown the primacy of the political Party.

To put an end to all the gymnastics, exceptions and subtle distinctions proper to the “practical” men, we could close all the issues raised with a simple statement: the architect of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was the Communist Party. The unquestioned authority of the Party over the action of the masses took the form of Soviets, signifying that not only the Communists, in a condition of revolutionary maturity, were materially ready for the conquests of power, but also the decisive strata of the class were sensitized by the political and historical direction of the Party.

In Russia, the Soviets arose on the eve of the two revolutions, that of 1905 and 1917. The Bolsheviks didn’t head them until the day before the victorious insurrection, after having been in a very clear minority. The Soviets, up to that point, inspired by the opportunism, acted as organs of counterrevolution. This didn’t mean that they weren’t “mature”, but that the level of political struggle had not invested the class yet, that the breakdown of the bourgeois regime had not reached complete exhaustion.

Things were different in the trade unions and factory councils. The Trade Unions, which on the eve of the February Revolution numbered just three with 1,500 members, organized later 3,500,000 workers in a very short time after the fall of the Czar.

The factory councils developed at the same time. John Reed tell that the first factory and department councils sprang up in the government factories, which, having been abandoned at the beginning of the February Revolution by their leaders, military officials, were kept alive by the very workers organized in the factory councils. In a flash the Workers’ Commissions spread in all the state factories, then to the private ones working for the government. First in Petrograd and then in all the major cities of Russia the factory Councils sprang up, and, shortly before October, held their first Congress. During this period, from February to October, the factory Councils carried out a formidable activity, not only aimed to defending the conditions of the workers, but increasingly engaged in the direct management of enterprises sabotaged and closed by the bosses.

This was the period when, on the wave of the revolutionary struggle, the soviet power was being pitted against the power of the bourgeois government.

As early as June at the Councils’ convention in Petrograd, a conflict of political direction emerged between the Factory Councils and the Trade Unions, which were also simultaneously meeting in congress, arose. The Councils argued that the Trade Unions should give no respite to the anti-capitalist struggle, and accused its leaders, the Mensheviks and the Revolutionary Socialists, of collaboration with the bosses and the Kerensky’s government.

When it became clear that the strike was now an insufficient and, in some cases, even counterproductive weapon, the Trade Unions were forced to face the essential question, that one of the power. Bolshevik leadership made its way into the Trade Unions, as did the Factory Councils, which provided the cadres of the revolutionary struggle to the party.

After the October victory, the trade unions and the factory councils did an important work in reconstruction and economic transformation. But, especially in the factory councils, corporatist tendencies showed up. The workers in some factories believed that, with the revolution, the power over the factory had passed directly in their hands and that, on the basis of this power, they could freely dispose of the means of production and products. This tendency, which was overtly anarchist in nature, was eradicated through a strong centralization of the economy. At the 9th Party Congress in April 1920, which approved the militarization of labor, Trotsky declared:

«Each worker feels he is a soldier of labor who cannot freely arrange his life. If there is an order for him to be transferred, he ought to obey it, and if he does not, he will be considered a deserter who must be punished. (…) The worker must learn to submit to the needs of a unique economic plan. The whole task of the Soviet regime consists in making sure that the constriction operated on the worker is exerted from the inside, and not from the outside».

The struggle against the "habit", in Russia, meant precisely the struggle for the consolidation of the dictatorial proletarian power, which didn’t hesitate to eradicate even the mentality instilled in the worker by bourgeois practical education.

The bolshevik government considered the union membership mandatory for all th workers, and a crime against the socialist power the strike and any act of sabotaging production. Under the socialist regime, the delivery is to fulfill the production obligations and defend the proletarian power, even with one’s life.

The suggestion of forms of organization

The Soviet of Russia seemed the magic formula to the Western parties who, in the absence of the historical conditions to transplant them, settled for a surrogate, the Factory Councils and the Department Commissars.

The same fate befell later, but in the usual spirit, to the party organization, which the loyalists to the fashion of the times wanted to trace back to the Russian one and transformed the party organization by territorial sections into an organization by cells, with the obvious consequence that, in practice, the party base was broken down into professional category cells, repeating the trade union company division. Instead, the territorial section brought together militants from all professional and even social backgrounds, who therefore had a general view of the problems and were inclined not to overestimate the “private” matters of category, trade, factory. The traditional factory communist groups, which had proved to be excellent irreplaceable political instruments in the workplaces, directly employed by the Party, in transforming themselves into factory cells became, it was said, the “base” of the Party, and not organs subordinate to it. In practice, then, the cells didn’t influence Party decisions, but endured them as emanations of the local and national leadership, giving rise to the false hierarchy of the Stalinist version of democratic centralism.

The renewed organizational form corresponded to the new programmatic deviations. The fight between the Left, centrism and the Right, which were being reproduced de facto within the Party and the International itself, is well known: the Communist Left saw the so-called “Bolshevization” as a means of crashing the healthy Party structure, disorienting the class, and insinuating that the advance or retreat of the revolution depended on forms of organization and not on the correct Communist line. A thousand examples could be brought to illustrate the extent to which the type of organization disorients the proletarian masses themselves, in the same way that the great man, the hero, the aesthetic symbol suggests to them, while assigning to these the same place to which Marxism relegated the revolutionary romanticism.

This doesn’t mean that organization shouldn’t exist, the anarchist thesis, but that organizational forms must derive from the real process facing general class interests. The Party doesn’t invent forms. The Party selects them and substantiates them with its historical program, with the tasks and aims of the revolutionary struggle. The opposite, that the Party subordinates its historical and political action to formal pre-constructions, to which it reduces its program, is false.

There’s a necessary hierarchy of functions, to which corresponds a hierarchy of forms: first comes the political Party, then comes the Soviet, and finally the Trade Union. The deviations of the different combinations of the elements of this hierarchy we already analyzed at the beginning of this study. It remains to be seen, on this basis, how this hierarchy is constituted, taken for granted that the primacy of the Party represents an absolute and indisputable thesis.

[Il Programma Comunista, issue nº22, December 15, 1969]

Hierarchy of functions

That the political party is both the primary function and form is asserted only by revolutionary communists. For everyone else, Stalinists and Maoists included, the party comes after the proletarian State. The Marxist construct collapses by transferring the supremacy from the Party to the State even if in a Soviet form.

Stalin, as known, debased the function of the Party to the point that he entrusted the revolutionary solution to the relationship between the Soviet State and other States. This gave rise to the horrifying consequence that the interests of the proletariat’s world revolution should necessarily subordinate to those of the Russian State. The opposite is true: the interests of the Russian State and of any proletarian State had to bend to those of the International Communist Revolution. Today the question isn’t brought up, as there is no proletarian State, but the lesson remains for the future.

The question, from the point of view of political power, is set in these terms: political power is directed by the Communist Party, the sole representative of the working class. When, as in the case of its dissolution in China, the Party dissolves into another, that is into the Kuomintang; or, as in the case of the political united front, it is joined by other parties with a working-class label, when this happens, the Party subordinates itself to the existing political power, doesn’t conquer it, nor does it tend to. In this case the party dies and political power remains in the hands of the enemy.

The delivery of the unified front, the alliance with the social democratic parties, even went so far as to envisage a military unified front, accusing the communist left of unionism, which instead realized the unified front in the field of trade union struggle and economic defense. The consequence was that, while solemnly proclaiming on one hand, the Party’s priority over other workers’ bodies, on the other hand, acting in such a way, ended up degrading the Party into to one among several workers’ parties, all fighting for the same goal, considered immediate, thus reversing the iron hierarchy of functions discovered by Marxism.

Why the united front, the trade unions, the factory councils and the workers’ councils or Soviets, can be captured by the class enemy, as it has been? Even the Party itself, as an organized body, can be turned over to the enemy, once it has abandoned its communist program. But the Party, which has never departed from its principles, even if reduced in its numbers, remains at the front of the revolutionary battle, ready, under favorable conditions, to resume the leadership of the class struggle. The political party, then, returns to first place not because of a fetish for the party-form, but because of its primary function as the possessor of the program, a set of principles and goals.

A fraction of the Bolshevik Party itself assumed, before the revolutionary victory, and suggested that, after October, after having taken the power by the violent overthrow of the bourgeois State, the party should cede the government of the proletarian State to the Soviets and submit to their majorities. The stalinist counterrevolution thus realized this “Sovietist” vision by subordinating the Party to the State in the Soviet form. Thus the interests of the Russian and the world communist revolution were subjugated to a State that, on the ongoing counterrevolution, was degenerating into the State of Russian capital, disregarding names and formulas.

For more, the laws of the State mechanism, even of the proletarian dictatorship ones, are different from those of the Party.

The lessons of the Communist Left

The order of importance of proletarian bodies is not always the same. Before the Soviets arose, the order was Party - Trade Union - cooperatives - working class. Then, under revolutionary conditions: Party Soviets - Trade Unions - working class. Now, in the absence of the revolutionary conditions that will be able to express the soviets, the order is: Party - Trade Unions - working class (the cooperatives being now fully incorporated into the capitalist market).

The Party tends to create workers organizations outside the factories, giving general directives to be executed by the Councils and other factory bodies, that is why neither the theses of the International nor those of the Communist Left locate those factory organs in the hierarchy of essential functions for revolutionary struggle. The factory is the cell of the capitalist economy, not that of proletarian or even capitalist power.

The company management won’t willingly abdicate its functions as the mechanism for the extortion of surplus value. But it has been seen from the foregoing – apart from matters of doctrine of unquestioned authority – that even when the management of the factory and of its totality would pass into the hands of trade unions or councils and the figure of the boss and any anonymous management of him would disappear, the conditions of production, that is, the capital form of the means of production and products, the wage form of labor, the mercantile and monetary form of exchange, would not change. Not only that, but the factory would remain a closed compartment in which a general view of social and political conditions would be stifled. We have seen that even the party does not escape this condition if it ventures to transfer its base to the factory as happened with “Bolshevization”.

This problem is of a great importance precisely at this time in history. Period of lushness of small groups and the exhumation of old and already failed, anarchoid and idealistic formulas of a petty-bourgeois nature, due to the combination of the crumbling of the capitalist regime and the impotence of the false communist parties, together with the trade union leaderships inspired by them. These “renewed” formulas would entrust the factory councils, regardless of how they name them, with the resumption of the revolutionary class struggle, and in some cases they would like to make the reconstitution of the political Party dependent on the movement of these factory councils or committees. In front of the reformist orgy in which the parties and the union leaderships are inexorably drowning, the idea is to turn the wheel of the class struggle in a revolutionary direction, abandoning forever the party-form and the union-form, now considered corrupt or, as saying today, “integrated into capitalism”.

The same vague plan was held by the revolutionary unionists who broke away from the CGL to organize themselves into a new anarchist union, the USI, because of the distaste those proletarians felt toward the leadership of the Socialist Party, forerunner of today’s opportunist parties, but far less corrupt and unraveling than today’s false Communist Party. History has pointedly confirmed that, if these upheavals had one function, it was to weaken the revolutionary front of attack on the reformist and opportunist policies of the false workers’ parties and trade unions.

Exactly the opposite from what advocated by certain immediatist directives, the political direction of the revolutionary movement by the communist Party must be grafted on the basis of the workers’ struggle in defense of their immediate conditions. The restoration of doctrine, in unison with the introduction of the communist program leading the class, is the essential condition. Both functions involve the theoretical struggle against the deniers of the principles of revolutionary Marxism, and the political struggle against all opportunist, capitalist political formations and the State.

The Party creates its organs in the workplaces: the communist groups that organize themselves inside the class unions. The task of these groups, which, we repeat, are subordinate to the Party external to the workplace, is to influence the proletarians in the factory and to direct their class bodies, as it is to unify the maximum proletarian forces possible into the trade unions in order to win their leadership.

When the organs of immediate struggle, economic and political, will rise again, the Party will not be indifferent and will work hard to win their leadership. But if we were to make the reconstitution of the Party dependent on the emergence of these factory bodies, we would be committing the ordinovist error, distorting the results and the historical process. The Party, as a core, has already reconstituted itself on the basis of revolutionary Marxism, not waiting for this eventuality.

The historical process is complex and contradictory, and we certainly cannot, today, direct it according to our will as militants of the revolution. But this doesn’t mean that we must bend our historical and battle program to contingency, to chance, to the so-called “situation”. One of the characteristics that distinguishes us from everyone else is that the Party knows where to go and how to go about it, because it knows tomorrow, in the sense that it knows as of now, how to deal with the problems and difficulties that will rise before the unstoppable march of the proletarian communist revolution. This knowledge comes from the firm possession of doctrine, from the correct orientation it has always held, from never being diverted from the immediate fact, from the miserable and counter-revolutionary today.

The “opinion of the masses” in a counterrevolutionary situation, such as the one we are experiencing today, and which has persisted for half a century, is always followed by the influence of the enemy ideology widespread in the workers’ ranks through the false workers’ parties and the official leaders of the trade unions. And, according to the so-called “new” workerist formulas, should we entrust the revival of the class, which exists only when there’s a strong class party, to “opinions” obtained through democratic means, expressions of bourgeois ideology, on which the suicide of the proletariat itself has been based on so far? The masses alone will be able to express unconscious and sacrosanct rebellion against the capitalist regime, however without knowing how to give themselves a conscious direction. Even the Spartacists thought that political power shouldn’t be won without the democratic consent of the masses, and they made the fatal double mistake of adapting to that “consent” both to separate too late from the splitting Social Democratic Party and to entangle themselves in the even more dangerous Independent Social Democratic Party.

The class may express all its representative and fighting bodies, but it can never operate as a class in history without its Party. This is a harsh statement, but it must be made.

Class warfare itself, on the other hand, expresses the inalienable need for the political Party when it becomes clear that the economic and political struggles of the proletariat, fought under opportunist leadership, don’t advance the proletariat’s march toward its emancipation by a single step. The opportunist leadership of class bodies then becomes intolerable, the monopoly of the false workers’ parties over the trade unions, over the organized workers’ movement: the masses tend to shake off this heavy burden and follow the revolutionary communist direction, the only one that can lead them to victory.

Just as revolution is not a fact but a process (Lenin), so the rebirth of the class Party is not an accident, the product of a superior will or decree. The Party, the product of the proletariat’s centuries-old historical confrontation, must precede the seizure of political power, the revolutionary stage of the masses. If this condition does not occur, the clash of the masses will fail.

These are the lessons of history, condensed into the doctrine, program and political organization of the Communist Party, and tomorrow into the revolutionary class action.