We re-propose to the proletarians, to whom the advancing crisis makes them feel the subjugation of their economic defence organisations to the interests of the state and the capitalist economy, the classic approach, the only one on the line of revolutionary Marxism, given by the Party to the trade union question. This approach is based on the following cornerstones, which are clear from all the texts that follow:

1) The trade unions after the Second World War, in all advanced capitalist countries, are ‘tricolour’ trade unions, i.e. organisations that put the defence of workers’ economic conditions and daily lives after the defence of the interests of the national economy, the capitalist state, democracy and social peace between classes. That is, they are unsuitable and inadequate bodies even for the mere defence of the immediate needs of the proletariat. Of these unions, however they are labelled, the proletarians have nothing to defend and nothing to save.

2) The dynamics of these ‘tricolour’ organisations continue to unfold in the sense of their ever more complete insertion into the gears of the bourgeois state, even in the formal organisational and legal sense. This trajectory of theirs, which will lead them to become even formally mere appendages of the state machine, unfolds to varying degrees in different countries, and is irreversible unless the proletariat’s class struggle is resumed.

3) Faced with this observation, not of today, but of twenty-five years ago, not based on contingent events, but on a correct Marxist analysis of the capitalist becoming, which today’s events only confirm, the Party does not draw the inference to abandon work in these organisms. In these organisations and outside them, the Party’s task is to put forward to the proletariat the need for the resurgence of class economic associations, i.e. workers’ bodies for the conduct of economic struggles that are free from state and bourgeois influence.
     This resurrection will be the result of the class returning to the terrain of defending at least its most basic economic interests, with the method of class struggle, against the pressure of capital.
     It could be expressed in two senses: either in the reconquest, ‘perhaps with a beating’, of the present trade unions, a reconquest which must not only mean a change of leadership, but a decisive overthrow of the whole of the present policy in all fields of activity and of the same organisational form of the trade unions; or ex novo, that is through the reconstitution by the struggling proletarians of economic organisations for the immediate struggle (outside of and against the present organisations). These two possibilities cannot be determined a priori: the prevalence of one rather than the other, or of both at the same time, depends on the actual course of the class struggle and not on voluntarist exercises.

4) One of the elements which distinguishes the class Party from all the endless circles and small groups is the prospect of the resurgence of class economic organisations, stemming from the resurgence of the proletarian struggle and acting as a necessary and indispensable ground, not only for the conduct by the Party of the revolutionary struggle for power, but also for any notable strengthening of the Party’s influence on the proletarian masses. Without the widespread emergence of class-based economic bodies, not only will there be no revolution and no conquest of power, but neither will there be the real, necessary strengthening in an autonomous way of the Party and its influence on the class.

5) This is what all our texts have said for the past 25 years. This is what we have always told the proletariat. Those who do not agree with this perspective, those who dream of traumas that would, by some unknown magic, lead the working class to the revolutionary assault directly, with a strong Party at the head of the masses and the conquest of power; those who, worst of all, affirm that the forms of the future class revival cannot be foreseen are naturally ‘free to follow any path that diverges from ours’. It is enough that they do not refer to the tradition of the Communist Left and the International Communist Party, that they do not distort, in the Stalinist manner, our texts, that they do not falsify what the Party has always affirmed: for the revolutionary struggle to be resumed, for the Party to be able to strengthen its influence over the proletarian class, and to come to lead it in the final battle; for the workers themselves to be able to effectively defend their living conditions against the bosses, the bourgeois state and their opportunist lackeys, the resumption of struggles on the economic and social terrain and the rebirth of the class unions is necessary!

From the texts of the Left:

In the imperialist stage, capitalism, just as it seeks to dominate its economic contradictions in a central network of control and to co-ordinate, through an elephantiasis of the State apparatus, the control of all social and political facts, so too does it modify its action towards workers’ organisations. At first the bourgeoisie had condemned them, at a second time it had authorised them and allowed them to grow, at a third time it realised that it could neither suppress them nor allow them to develop on an autonomous platform, and it set out to incorporate them by whatever means into its State apparatus, into that machinery which, while exclusively political at the beginning of the cycle, became in the age of imperialism both a political and economic apparatus, transforming the State of the capitalists and the bosses into a capitalist State and a State-master. In this vast bureaucratic scaffolding, places of golden imprisonment are created for the leaders of the proletarian movement. Through the myriad forms of social arbitration, of welfare institutions, of bodies with an apparent function of balancing the classes, the leaders of the workers’ movement cease to rest on their own autonomous forces, and are absorbed into the bureaucracy of the State...

The proletariat’s own movement of economic organisation will be imprisoned, using exactly the same method inaugurated by fascism, i.e. tending towards the legal recognition of trade unions, which means their transformation into organs of the bourgeois State. It will become clear that the plan for the hollowing out of the workers’ movement, proper to reformist revisionism (Labourism in England, economism in Russia, pure syndicalism in France, reformist syndicalism à la Cabrini-Bonomi and then Rigola-D’Aragona in Italy) coincides substantially with that of fascist syndicalism, Mussolini’s corporatism, and Hitler’s national-socialism. The only difference is that the former method corresponds to a phase in which the bourgeoisie is solely on the defensive against the revolutionary danger, while the latter corresponds to the phase in which, due to the surge in proletarian pressure, the bourgeoisie goes on the offensive. In neither case does it confess to acting on its own class interest; instead proclaiming that it wants to fulfil certain economic needs of the workers, and foster collaboration between the classes...

... In point 6, while every syndicalist theory is condemned, the necessity of the Party’s presence and penetration of the trade unions with a general communist union organisational layer is affirmed as a condition not only of final victory, but of every advance and success. In point 7 all this is reiterated, and the limited and local conception of economic struggles dear to the traitors is condemned…

The October 1974 issue No. 2 of this journal, under the title ‘Class Unions Must Rise Again – Firm Points of the Communist Left’, contained five points that meagrely reiterated the long-standing positions of revolutionary communism vis-à-vis the workers’ union. In support of the short text, significant excerpts from Party texts from 1945 to 1965 were published, limited in number only for economy of typographical space, which also serves as a significant means of the objective dictatorship of the counter-revolutionary situation.

Ever since the era of communist revolution began, reforms, the true and only means of existence of social-democratic political movements, have served as an instrument to keep the working masses off the path to revolution, to the point that the bourgeois State itself has embraced a reformist policy, first with the fascist regime, then with its natural, merely temporal extension, anti-fascism. A reformist policy demands the abandonment of direct struggle, obstructs class mobilisation, shifts the masses from class struggle to class collaboration, and poses the problem of power not as the violent clash of the proletariat against the State, but as incorporation into the State to the point of becoming its form of government. This situation is the same in every country in the world.

It is no coincidence that the workers’ trade union movement has been mobilised to subordinate the very reasons for the union’s existence – which are the immediate economic defence of the working class – to the policy of reform in a thousand aspects: reform of housing, of the school, and finally of the State. A trade union that operates in this way evolves towards its integration into the State, ceasing even to defend the worker’s living and working conditions, ceasing to be a workers’ union, and transforming itself into a mere organ of the State.

Having made this observation, which was also accurately examined and described in ‘The Historical Course of the Class Movement of the Proletariat’ in 1947 and in ‘Trade Union Splits in Italy’ in 1949, the Party did not come to the conclusion that the trade union is outdated, no longer needed, and must be replaced by another political body, rather it solemnly reaffirmed, in the wake of the communist tradition from Marx to Lenin, that ‘any prospect of a general revolutionary movement will depend on the presence of the following essential factors: 1) a large, numerous proletariat of pure wage-earners, 2) a sizeable movement of associations with an economic content including a large part of the proletariat, 3) a strong revolutionary class party, which, composed of a militant minority of workers, must have been enabled, in the course of the struggle to oppose, broadly and effectively, its own influence within the union movement to that of the bourgeois class and bourgeois power.’ (‘Revolutionary Party and Economic Action’, April 1951).

This corresponds to the class ‘pyramid’ described in the theses of the Second Congress of the Communist International of 1919, namely ‘party, trade unions, class’, in order of importance, which is specified on the eve of the seizure of power as ‘party, soviet, trade unions, class’; it translates Marx’s concept of the trade unions as ‘a school of war’ and a ‘lever of revolution’ and Lenin’s, view of the trade unions as ‘the transmission belt of the party’.

The party must work in the trade unions, even ‘reactionary’, ‘tricolour’, or ‘right-wing’ ones, remembering that they are still workers’ unions, of wage earners only, with reactionary, tricolour or right-wing leadership. This is the lesson of Lenin in ‘Left-Wing Communism’, and the lesson of the Left reiterated in ‘Theses on the Historical Duty etc.’ in 1965:

‘It is an old thesis of left-wing Marxism that we must work in reactionary trade unions in which workers are present, and the party abhors the individualistic positions of those who disdain to set foot in them, and who go so far as to theorise breaking the few, feeble strikes that today’s unions dare to call’.

In order to ‘work in the unions’ the party must participate in the workers’ economic struggles, agitations and strikes, however few and ‘feeble’ they may be. This participation consists not only in the physical presence of the party militants among the workers in struggle, but also, together with the exaltation of the struggle itself, in the ruthless criticism of the trade union policy of the central unions, showing its subordination to the preservation of the present regime, proposing a return to the use of the means of direct struggle and economic demands common to the entire working class.

ECONOMIC DETERMINISM

The ‘Theses on Tactics’ formulated by the Left at the 1922 PCd’I Congress highlight, as is developed elsewhere in this issue of the journal, the realistic and materialist basis of the very existence of the party and its action. The economic needs that the capitalist economy’s pressure on wage-labour induces, obliges workers to organise an adequate defence, pushes them, in given historical unfolding, in which the existence of the capitalist regime appears untenable for the proletariat, to embrace the Party’s positions and direction. Trade union organisation, the economic association of workers, is therefore the product of these needs, indeed ‘The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers – writes Marx in the Manifesto – [It] is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle’.

As long as capitalism, and thus wage-earners, exist, there will be struggles and a ‘union’ of workers, whereby workers will fight against the bosses and their organisations, hence the political struggle.

In ‘Value, Price and Profit’, Marx then warns the class not to exaggerate to itself the successes of these struggles because it’s ‘fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady’. So Marx outlines the programmatic direction: ‘They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market’. When this occurs, we have the deviationist phenomenon of syndicalism, of workerism, which remain stuck and tied to effects. Marx therefore concludes: ‘They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system”’.

Not denial of the struggles against the ‘effects’, but rather, struggling against the ‘effects’ of the bourgeois system, whilst ‘understanding’ that one must attack the causes, the very existence of the present regime. The economic struggles, the class struggle belongs to the workers, the organisation belongs to the workers, understanding the limited value of these struggles and overcoming them belongs to the party.

In the General Statutes of the International of 1872, this concept is enshrined: ‘In its struggle against the collective power of the possessing classes the proletariat can act as a class only by constituting itself as distinct political party, opposed to all the old parties formed by the possessing classes. This constitution of the proletariat into a political party is indispensable to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate goal: the abolition of classes. The coalition of the forces of the working class, already achieved by the economic struggle, must also serve, in the hands of this class, as a lever in its struggle against the political power of its exploiters. As the lords of the land and of capital always make use of their political privileges to defend and perpetuate their economic monopolies and to enslave labour, the conquest of political power becomes the duty of the proletariat’.

Marx, again in 1871 in a letter to Bolte, reiterates the close connection between the economic-material basis and political action

‘[O]ut of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are themselves equally a means of the development of this organisation’.

Lenin, in the equally lucid and sharp pages of ‘What Is To Be Done?’, fighting against spontaneism, syndicalism, but not denying spontaneity and trade unionism, concludes: ‘[Our] task [consists in drawing…] the working-class movement… under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy’. And he specifies:

‘The workers’ organisations for the economic struggle should be trade union organisations. Every Social-Democratic worker should as far as possible assist and actively work in these organisations. But, while this is true, it is certainly not in our interest to demand that only Social-Democrats should be eligible for membership in the “trade” unions, since that would only narrow the scope of our influence upon the masses. Let every worker who understands the need to unite for the struggle against the employers and the government join the trade unions. The very aim of the trade unions would be impossible of achievement, if they did not unite all who have attained at least this elementary degree of understanding, if they were not very broad organisations. The broader these organisations, the broader will be our influence over them – an influence due, not only to the “spontaneous” development of the economic struggle, but to the direct and conscious effort of the socialist trade union members to influence their comrades’.

The same concepts Lenin would reiterate in ‘Left-Wing Communism…’ against the German workerists (K.A.P.D.) and all those who would not work in the ‘reactionary’ trade unions. Lenin goes as far as to establish that the trade union organisation is ‘a formally non-communist, flexible and relatively wide and very powerful proletarian apparatus, by means of which the Party is closely linked up with the “class” and the “masses”, and by means of which, under the leadership of the Party, the “class dictatorship” is exercised’.

The party, therefore, works in the unions, penetrates them, tends to their leadership, before, during and after the revolution. The Communist International sets this as a condition of admission. The ninth of the famous ‘21 Moscow Points’ sounds exactly like this: ‘Every party… must systematically and persistently develop Communist activities within the trade unions, … councils ... [and] organise Communist cells the aim of which is to win the trades unions etc. for the cause of Communism’.

TRADE UNIONS ARE IRREPLACEABLE

The workers’ economic associations will cease to exist when communism has triumphed in the world, because, as we have seen, they constitute the organisation, ‘the proletariat’s true class organisation in which it fights its daily battles with capital, in which it trains itself’, as Engels wrote to Bebel in 1875. They are so irreplaceable that the trade unions are the natural battleground between the revolutionary communist party and the other parties, because they are the recruiting ground of the class army under the direction of the party.

The texts that have been compulsory so far, spanning over more than a century, which crystallise the historical experience of the class in the various phases of the transition of trade union organisation, do not reveal any other organism capable of structuring the proletariat in its elementary and basic action of economic defence. Perhaps the Soviets? Not even the Soviets can replace the function of the trade unions, because the Soviets, or equivalent organs, are political organs for the conquest of power, they arise in the crucial phase of revolutionary action which, as we have seen, cannot disregard elementary action in the economic field, i.e. the emergence of the Soviets has as its premise the existence, the efficiency of the trade unions, or, in other words, of the working class organised on the economic terrain. This has been true in absolutist Russia, in industrial Germany, in ‘civilised’ Italy, it will be true tomorrow anywhere on earth where the proletariat will be on the frontline of the revolution, if Marxism is not dirty water.

Maybe works councils? Not even, because they were limited to the company at most, they could function as the company base of the economic union. The old Chambers of Labour, for example, constituted a formidable network because they brought together workers from different professions and different companies in a unitary local central, so it was possible, especially with the adequate penetration of the class party, to have an overview of local class action. All the more reason for this positive characteristic lies in the national trade union central, and tomorrow international.

The reconstitution of such a class-driven network can easily be seen as decisive to revolutionary mobilisation. Party work in this direction must therefore be indispensable, within the limits of the material conditions.

A CERTAIN REACTIONISM

It is Lenin who in ‘Left-Wing Communism…’ hammers the infantile positions of the German ‘leftists’ and even goes so far as to say that ‘a certain “reactionism” in the trade unions is inevitable under the dictatorship of the proletariat’. Let alone that this ‘reactionism’ is possible in trade unions not controlled by communists. ‘In countries more advanced than Russia – Lenin argues – a certain reactionism in the trade unions has been and was bound to be manifested in a far greater measure than in our country... The Mensheviks of the West have acquired a much firmer footing in the trade unions; there the craft-union, narrow-minded, selfish, case-hardened, covetous, and petty-bourgeois “labour aristocracy”, imperialist-minded, and imperialist-corrupted, has developed into a much stronger section than in our country.’

‘That is incontestable,’ Lenin commented. This is incontestable, gentlemen ‘revolutionaries’ of the broken ‘sieve’.... ‘The struggle... in Western Europe is incomparably more difficult than the struggle against our Mensheviks... This struggle must be waged ruthlessly... to a point when all the incorrigible leaders of opportunism and social-chauvinism are completely discredited and driven out of the trade unions’. And it is indisputable that this struggle must be waged against the labour aristocracy ‘in the name of the masses of the workers and in order to win them over to our side... against the opportunist and social-chauvinist leaders in order to win the working class over to our side’.

‘It would be absurd... to forget this most elementary and most self-evident truth’. It would be foolish to draw ‘the conclusion’ that ‘because of the reactionary and counter-revolutionary character of the trade union top leadership... we must withdraw from the trade unions… It would be foolish... [t]o refuse to work within the reactionary trade unions... leaving the insufficiently developed or backward masses of workers under the influence of the reactionary leaders, the agents of the bourgeoisie’.

There is enough to reaffirm that communists do not back down from work and the battle within the trade unions due to the fact that they are directed by reactionaries, by counter-revolutionaries, by proponents of a ‘tricolour’, ‘chauvinist’ policy. But ‘fools’ abound, and, in the name of ‘revolutionary politics’, they would like revolutionary Marxism to be converted into the recognition of an outright communist licence given to the ‘practical ones’, to those who ‘make the revolution’, in ‘referendums’, in the multiple ‘social managements’ of State organs (the school, ‘commuting leftists’, is an organ of the political State of the bourgeoisie, not a ‘neutral’ organisation, nor even more so proletarian; it is not conquered, it is demolished!), in the shady dealings within the ‘generic revolutionary’ movement.

In the previous issue we noted, in Marx and Lenin, that the economic association of workers arises on the basis of the defence of the physical conditions of the proletariat and that for these reasons it is indispensable to the proletariat, despite the ephemeral and transitory character of the ‘conquests’ and a ‘certain reactionary character’ of the trade unions. We have also revealed how, despite these limiting aspects, communists must work organised in the trade unions, transferring revolutionary directives into them, in order to make them bodies not ends in themselves, but ‘levers’ for the revolutionary political struggle against the capitalist regime.

PHASE OF STATE TOTALITARIANISM

With the appearance of fascism, the State prepares and equips itself to absorb the workers’ unions, tends to subject them to its dictatorship, giving them legal bargaining power, and progressively incorporating them into its administrative machinery. The master-State tends to monopolise all aspects of social and economic life, as well as being the organ par excellence of political dictatorship. Capitalism thus enters its third phase, that of imperialism, in which ‘the ruling bourgeois class, in parallel with the transformation of its economic practice from liberalist to interventionist, has the need to abandon its method of apparent tolerance of political ideas and organisations for a method of authoritarian and totalitarian government: and in this lies the general meaning of the present epoch’.

This judgement of the Left in the immediate post-World War II period (‘The Historical Cycle of the Capitalist Economy’) is reflected in the ‘Historical Course of the Class Movement of the Proletariat’, in the sense that the bourgeoisie ‘modifies its action towards workers’ organisations’, which it had previously ‘authorised and allowed to grow’, because it ‘understands that it can neither suppress them, nor allow them to develop on an autonomous platform, and proposes to frame them by any means within its State apparatus’; in which ‘gilded prisons are created for the leaders of the proletarian movement’. This process, which began with the advent of fascism, continued into the post-fascist era, during which ‘the very movement of economic organisation of the proletariat will be imprisoned, using exactly the same method inaugurated by fascism, that is, with the tendency towards the legal recognition of trade unions, which means their transformation into organs of the bourgeois State. It will become clear that the plan to hollow out the workers’ movement, proper to reformist revisionism (Labourism in England, economism in Russia, pure syndicalism in France, reformist syndicalism à la Cabrini-Bonomi and then Rigola-D’Aragona in Italy) essentially coincides with fascist syndicalism, Mussolini’s corporatism, and Hitler’s national socialism’.

This process is ‘irreversible’, and is contained in the general complex ‘[of] the capitalist struggle to deprive future revolutionary class movements of the solid basis of a truly autonomous workers’ union framework’ (‘Trade Union Splits in Italy’). In this way today’s trade unions, even those claiming ‘red’ origins, such as the CGIL for example, are sewn ‘on the Mussolini model’, i.e. they are oriented in the sense of their total incorporation into the bourgeois State machinery, whatever label they display. These trade union centres ‘serve’ the State, as they serve it in England, America and Russia, in the formula of the ‘national economy before all else’, of the subjugation of the immediate interests of the working class to the immanent interests of social preservation of the bourgeois class and its regime. It is mere fiction to claim that, nevertheless, the trade unions fight against the bosses, when we know that the fascist trade unions arose ‘playing on the national accord the motif of the fight against the bosses’ (see Mussolini’s useful and significant speech in Dalmine), precisely because the dominant feature of the imperialist phase is not so much the individual ‘employer’ as it is the system as a whole, synthesised by its State leadership, which is forced, again for the sake of preservation, to maintain a game of balance between the different social forces and between the very class elements whose total interests it represents. The capitalist regime is also willing to sacrifice individual masters for the sake of its preservation, as Engels taught when he foresaw in ‘Anti-Dühring’ the eclipse of the bourgeoisie and its replacement by an army of serfs preyed upon by the State.

HISTORICAL DIALECTICS

The process of absorption of the trade unions into the State, which the Left has (called) ‘irreversible’, has made some people exclaim that the time has come to turn their backs on the workers’ union and devote themselves to the ‘political’ movement. We have already seen that this attitude clashes inexorably with the party programme, but even before that it clashes with Marxist doctrine. This position goes hand in hand with the typically anarcho-syndicalist position that the political party is outdated, the old ‘communist’ parties having passed into the service of the bourgeois regime.

With Marx we pointed out that workers’ economic associations do not arise out of faith, will, but out of the irrepressible necessity of proletarians to defend their piece of bread and their jobs, against which capitalism constantly presses, even though it knows it is urging the working class to mobilise and thus open itself up to revolutionary party initiatives. These conditions are as irrepressible as it is irrepressible for capitalism to delay, restrain, oppose the economic associationism of the proletariat, using the means, congenial with its imperialist totalitarian phase, of capturing it, imprisoning it, in its State machinery. This, however, does not suppress the reasons, the root causes of the class contradictions that are precisely irremediable in a bourgeois regime.

The masses will return to the struggle when they can no longer tolerate the increasing and inexorable pressure of the capitalist economy, which, despite all the retreats and tricks of the State, ultimately proceeds to exacerbate its anarchic character. In the economy, the State attempts to plan, which means to control these irreconcilable contradictions of its own. It cannot disregard this attempt, imposed on it by capitalist centralisation and concentration. But any attempt is doomed to failure, even if it is ‘irreversible’, i.e. even if capitalism can no longer return to liberalism, to the conditions prior to its monopolistic phase.

We did not need fascism to arrive at these considerations. Social-democratic reformism was already on this road, that of emptying the class character of the workers’ economic movement. Fascism in fact inherited the reformism of trade union piecards. Today, this line of continuity persists.

It follows that the tendency of the State is to subjugate the workers’ economic unions, and that of the class is to prevent it. The class struggle, the relations of force will direct this contradiction, and not the denial of antagonism, nor the abandonment of the worker’s union into enemy hands forever, which would mean abandoning the proletarian camp into the enemy’s hands.

Three positions clash in the proletarian economic movement. One that denies the trade union, the one that advocates for the para-State union, and the one that upholds the class union. To the first belong those who consider the trade union outdated, such as those who advocate a party trade union or corporate bodies replacing the economic union. To the second belong the current trade union centres, which mystify their ‘autonomy’ in a mere opposition or formal non-subordination ‘to the parties, to the government, to the bosses’, but claiming that they want to subordinate the immediate workers’ interests to the ‘superior’ interests of the ‘national economy’, which means the State, of the bourgeois class. The third is adhered to by those fighting for the resurgence of a class-driven, red proletarian economic movement.

The policy of the first two groups is objectively convergent, both in the current situation of unchallenged dominance of the tricolour piecards, and in a situation where the need for the red union will be overbearing. The first group refuses to oppose the ‘pro-statists’ by dreaming of ‘new forms’, entrusting the overthrow of the enemy’s dictatorship to forms rather than forces. It stands outside Marxism and the field of revolution which, we will never tire of repeating, draws its raison d’être from economic determinations and not from the world of ideas. The battlefield is always the same, the cornerstones on which the revolution rests are always the political party, the class union, the pure wage-earning class. Not recognising even one of them means leaving it in the hands of the enemy who will not hesitate to use it, against the revolution. This is the story of the last fifty years. To pretend, for instance, that because the proletariat has become bourgeois (an infamous thesis beloved of the extra-parliamentarians), we must go and find another ‘class’ to replace it, and locate it in the kaleidoscopic existentialist jolts of groups of idlers is to transform ourselves from ‘professionals’ of the revolution into mercenaries of the counter-revolution, always ready to put ourselves at the service of the first adventure.

ORIGINAL POLICY OF THE LEFT

The first objective to which the true communist party aspires is ‘to be the centre of the struggle and of the redemption against the reactionary capitalist centralisation tending to impose itself on a scattered and dispersed working class definitively abandoned to itself by the opportunist bureaucracy’ (from ‘Theses Presented by the PCd’I – 4th Congress’). The same text opens with the peremptory assertion that ideological propaganda and proselytising are not enough, but that it is necessary to participate ‘in all those actions to which the proletarians are driven by their economic condition’. In the ‘Lyons Theses’, in the face of the convenient and defeatist position of penetration of the fascist guilds, the Left’s watchword sounds peremptory: ‘The watchword of the rebuilding the Red unions must be issued in conjunction with the denunciation of the fascist unions’, which appeared not even formally as voluntary associations of the masses, but true official organs of the alliance between the bosses and fascism.

This position was taken up in the 1951 ‘Characteristic Theses’, which formed the ‘basis of Party membership’ and were binding on all. In them, after reaffirming that ‘the Party recognises without any reserve that not only the situation which precedes insurrectional struggle but also all phases of substantial growth of Party influence amongst the masses cannot arise without the expansion between the Party and the working class of a series of organisations with short term economic objectives with a large number of participants. Within such organisations the party will set a network of communist cells and groups, as well as a communist fraction in the union’. After this canonical reaffirmation of the Party’s centuries-old position with respect to the proletarian economic movement, unchanged even in this ‘third’ imperialist phase of capitalism’s ‘irreversible’ tendency to capture trade unions the ‘Theses’ state that ‘In periods when the working class is passive, the Party must anticipate the forms and promote the constitution of organisations with immediate economic aims. These may be unions grouped according to trade, industry, factory committees or any other known grouping or even quite new organisations. The Party always encourages organisations which favour contact between workers at different localities and different trades and their common action. It rejects all forms of closed organisations’.

This is the ‘revolutionary policy’ of the Left, which no other self-styled political movement of the ‘left’ shares and which it actually opposes, and which can be expressed in the formula of ‘reconquest, perhaps with a beating, of the current trade unions or the resurgence of new ones’, capable of containing within them the network of organised communists.

In this particularly depressed situation, the party does not expect from its incessant and intelligent participation in workers’ struggles an appreciable shift of forces, until the struggle movement recovers in intensity and extension. It is in this class revival that the fertile ground for the development of the party’s complex activity among the masses of wage-earners is to be found, both to wrest the leadership of the existing trade unions from the tricolour leadership and to ‘encourage’ new economic workers’ organisations in which the Party can ‘freely’ carry out its classist and revolutionary action.

Today, although the trade unions are practically foreclosed to revolutionary communists, due to the overwhelming power of the tricolour policy of the trade union leaderships, which also manifests itself in forms of legal barriers – such as the infamous ‘delegation’, which constitutes a true form of coercion, of the union’s tendency to transform itself into a ‘compulsory’ union, a typical quality of the fascist union – the communists do not abandon them voluntarily and carry out their activity, not only in the sense of participating in workers’ struggles, but also in the relentless battle against the traitorous policy of the central unions. This is one of the fundamental reasons for the Party’s action, to show proletarians the harmful consequences of the official trade union policy and to anticipate the imperative need for a total overthrow of this policy.

This struggle is therefore a badge of the Communist Left against the bourgeois State-opportunism bloc. The party knows that without decisive influence over the organised proletarian masses it cannot even think of a tactical plan. It must therefore penetrate them with its appropriate trade union and factory organs. These group and organise the communist proletarians under the party’s direct command and also involve sympathisers. They constitute the party’s network in the class, and, together with other specific organs expressed by the actual conditions of the class struggle, they form a system comparable to that of the circulation of blood in the human body, by means of which the body of the class is unceasingly supplied with the life-blood of the programme, the directive, the aims of revolutionary communism. It is in this way that ‘revolutionary preparation’ is realised, and certainly not through voluntarist and organisational exercises.

Through the groups, the party comes into contact with workers organised by other political parties and movements on the economic and struggle terrain. It is on this terrain that facts, actions, programmes, intentions, wills and political aims are measured, in which the party proves to the workers that it is the only one with a complete and irreplaceable arsenal for the achievement of the effective, real and complete emancipation of the class from capitalist exploitation.

It is evident that the forces of opportunism, allied with the bourgeois State in the legalitarian bloc directing the workers’ trade union and political movement, will not omit any means to prevent the groups from arising and developing, just as they will put every obstacle in the way of the propaganda and proselytising carried out by the party. It is inescapable that the large-scale dissemination of the network of communist groups will be one of the signs of the return of the working class to the terrain of direct struggle, which is so fertile for the penetration and development of the Party’s revolutionary action.

The groups do not replace trade unions or any other economic defence organisation. The Party has no interest in setting up trade union bodies made up only of communists, which it knows to be a minority of the class, while it is aware that the victory of communism will be possible on the preliminary condition that its influence is extended to the masses not yet framed or controlled by the Party itself, a condition which is presented to it in the united class economic organisation that is ‘politically neutral’, in principle accessible to pure wage-earners only, and in which it can carry out political and organisational work freely.

TOWARDS THE CLASS UNION

The re-creation of these conditions that characterise the ‘Red Union’ does not depend on the party or its action, but finds its deterministic impetus first in the return of the working class to the terrain of general direct struggle. At this stage, the current trade union and political leaderships of the proletariat will tend to huddle more and more in defence of the capitalist regime, waving the old rags of the defence of the economy, of unification against resurgent fascism to protect the regained democracy, to cover up the only way in which the bourgeois and privileged classes can maintain their economic, social and political supremacy, i.e. by crushing the class, reducing their wages, terrorising them with mass unemployment, misery, hunger, disorganisation, the threat of a new war, with the strengthening of State and irregular repressive forces. Their true face as servants of capitalism will appear in all clarity to the masses. The workers will have no choice but to defend their wages, their jobs, first of all by clashing against their own leaders, and then by forging instruments and forms of organisation and combat that respond to these immediate needs.

The Party, in foreseeing this realistic development as of now, qualifies itself to occupy a pre-eminent place in the class struggle and in the new class organisation. For these reasons it must intensify its critical action and battle against all non-communist politics, encourage those class unrests which are raised by the approach of the radicalisation of struggles and by the intensification of pressure on workers, foresee and encourage all those forms of association which stand in contrast and in opposition to official trade unionism and which ‘favour contact between workers at different localities and different trades and their common action. It rejects all forms of closed organisations’ (‘Characteristic Theses of the Party’, 1952). In this sense, recent and even less recent manifestations of autonomous economic struggle in some industrial factories and among railway workers are condemned to remain unfruitful episodes of class development if they do not tend to link up with each other, to open up, precisely, to workers from different localities and categories, breaking down subjective preclusions of a political, party or even sectarian nature. The linking of these thrusts could be the harbinger of the reweaving of a class network that is as fertile as ever and could represent a first step towards class economic organisations that are the catalysts of the coming struggles.

AMONG A THOUSAND DECEPTIONS A SURE DESTINATION

What we have unfolded, incontrovertible in historical development and Marxist tradition, inevitably leads to the safe prediction of the classist regeneration or resurrection of the workers’ economic movement. Aware that we constitute one voice in the bleak desert into which the betrayal of false workers’ parties has transformed the fertile and lush soil of social confrontation, we do not propose miraculous recipes, nor do we squander our meagre forces in the face of the spell of modern mirages, perhaps unaware that they are erasing the narrow but clear path traced by our work.

This work, which consists of the conservation and preservation of age-old doctrine, aims to keep the connotations of the proletariat’s class action sharp and clear, when on all sides a thousand efforts are being made to blur, corrupt and deform them, with the certain result of prolonging the workers’ centuries-old state of subjection to the enemy, under the pretext of ‘more modern’ visions, infallibly traceable to bourgeois power.

Inexorably to be rejected are the protesting influences of sterile and shapeless strata, who, lacking ‘a school of thought and a method of action’ tested by the sure scrutiny of history, seek to denigrate the class political party and the class union, in the name of a cheap revolutionism that hides the eagerness to be among the first, the best, the elected.

Similarly, the attempt to spread indeterminacy and uncertainty is to be rejected, when on the other hand, the confidence and impudence of the enemy gangs is to be countered, in the absence today of physical forces of equal weight, by the certainty that the class will deploy on the combat front in the perhaps not too distant future.

We must throw back, at the cost of a still prolonged silence, the thousands of attempts, albeit generous ones, to get out of the ghetto in which the revolution has been confined to so far, to lean on the outlandish contortions of the dissatisfied pleiad of ‘backside workers’ and their aspirants, trying to bend the incorrupt doctrine to the recognition of non-classist initiatives, committing the old mistake, which marked the death of the Communist International, namely that the petty-bourgeoisie can express an autonomous and independent political movement, or worse, a ‘radicalism’ that provokes the classist revival of proletarian struggles. The proletariat will return to the struggle under the pressure of economic determinations, and not ‘pressed’ by idealistic urges.

It is on this ground that the class unions will have to and will rise again for the revolution to resume its march.