I must make two preliminary remarks: I do not intend to follow the line of official commemorations, and I will not make a biography of Lenin nor will I tell a series of anecdotes about him. I will attempt to trace from a historical and critical Marxist point of view the figure and role of Lenin in the revolutionary emancipation movement of the world working class: such syntheses are only possible by looking at the facts with a broad perspective of the whole, and not by going down to the analytical, journalistic, often gossipy and insignificant detail. I do not believe that it gives me the right to speak on Lenin by mandate of my party to be ’the man who saw Lenin’ or who had the good fortune to speak with him, but rather participating, as a militant of the proletarian cause, in the same struggle for the very principles Lenin personifies. Detailed biographical material has been made available to comrades by our entire press.

In the second place, given the vastness of the subject, as well as being necessarily incomplete, I will have to pass quickly over questions of primary importance, and assume that these terms are already known to the comrades listening to me: there is no subject in the problems of the revolutionary movement which has no relation to Lenin’s work. Without pretending, therefore, to exhaust the subject, I must be, at the same time, not brief, and perhaps excessively synthetic.

I need not set out the history of the falsifications, manipulated in the years preceding the Great War, of the Marxist revolutionary doctrine, as it was admirably outlined by Engels and Marx in all its parts, of which the classic synthesis remains the Communist Manifesto of 1847. Nor can I here carry out, in parallel, the history of the struggle, which was never silent, of the Marxist left against those falsifications and degenerations. To this struggle Lenin makes a contribution of the first order.

Let us first consider Lenin’s work as a restorer of the philosophical doctrine of Marxism, or, to put it better, of the general conception of nature and society; one that is proper to the system of theoretical knowledge of the revolutionary working class, which needs not only an opinion on the problems of economics and politics, but a stance on the whole broader framework of questions now indicated.

At a certain moment in the complex history of the Russian Marxist movement, which I will touch on, a school emerged, headed by the philosopher Bogdanov, which sought to revise the materialist and dialectical 878Marxist conception, in order to give the workers’ movement a philosophical basis of an idealistic and almost mystical nature. This school would have Marxists recognise the alleged overcoming of materialist and scientific philosophy by modern neo-idealist philosophical schools. Lenin responded to it in a definitive manner with a work (Materialism and Empirio-criticism) unfortunately little translated and little known, which appeared in Russian in 1908. In it, after a mighty amount of preparatory work, he developed a critique of ancient and modern idealistic philosophical systems, defended Marx and Engels’ conception of dialectical realism in its brilliant integrity, overcame the abstruseness in which the official philosophers are caught, and finally demonstrated how the modern idealist schools are the expression of a recent state of mind of the bourgeois class, and their penetration into the thinking of the proletarian party only corresponds to a psychological state of impotence, of bewilderment. This is nothing but the ideological derivative of the actual situation of defeat of the Russian proletariat after 1905. Lenin establishes, in a manner that rules out further doubts, that ’there can be no socialist and proletarian doctrine on spiritualist, idealist, mystical, moral grounds’.

Lenin defends the whole of Marxist doctrine on another front, that of economic assessments and criticism of capitalism. Marx left his monumental work, Capital, incomplete, but he left the proletariat a method of studying and interpreting economic facts, which it must apply to the new data provided by the recent development of capitalism, without misrepresenting its revolutionary potential. Revisionism, especially German revisionism, tries to cheat on this terrain, elaborating ’new’ doctrines that constitute corrections, in appearance secondary, but in reality substantial, to those of the master. And we say "cheat" insofar as it is demonstrated (by Lenin better than by any other) how it was not only a matter of objective scientific results that they believed they had arrived at, but of a process of political opportunism and corruption of the leaders of the proletariat, which also made use of the expedient removal from circulation important writings by Marx and Engels whose thought they were partly falsifying, partly rectifying.

Contributing with other economists, including Rosa Luxemburg and Kautsky in his best years, to the continuation of Marx’s economic critique, in innumerable works Lenin argues that the modern phenomena of capitalism: economic monopolies, the imperialist struggle for colonial markets, are perfectly interpretable for Marxist economic science, without having to modify any of its fundamental theories on the nature of capitalism, on the accumulation of its profits through the exploitation of the wage-earners. In 1915, Lenin summarised these results in his book on Imperialism, which remains a fundamental text in communist literature: this theoretical attitude allows for the political developments, which we will have to talk about, of the struggle against opportunism and bankruptcy of the old leaders in the world war.

A theoretical struggle, in the more restricted field of Russia, Lenin also leads against the bourgeois falsifiers of Marxism, who pretend to accept, not its political and revolutionary content, but its economic and historical system and method, in order to use it to demonstrate that in Russia capitalism must have won over feudalism, poorly concealing under this adherence to Marxist theses on historical development the intentions of repressing the further advance of the proletariat.

Lenin, we may note, thus presents himself, working as a theorist, as the defender of the inseparability of the parts that make up the Marxist conception. He does not do this out of fanatical dogmatism (he is less deserving of this accusation than anyone) but by basing his demonstrations on the examination of an enormous quantity of factual data and experiences, provided by his exceptional culture as a scholar and militant and illuminated by his incomparable genius. In Lenin’s manner we must consider all those who attentively welcome only one of the arbitrarily separated ’parts’ of Marxism: whether they are bourgeois economists who are comfortable with the method of historical materialism, as was the case a few decades ago, and not only in Russia, but also in Italy (another country of backward capitalism); whether they are intellectuals linked to the philosophical schools of neo-idealism, who claim to reconcile them with the acceptance of communist social and political theses; whether they are comrades who write books claiming to share the ’historical-political’ part of Marxism, but then proclaim the entire economic part, i.e. the doctrines fundamental to the interpretation of capitalism, to be fallacious. Lenin on various occasions analysed, criticized similar attitudes, brilliantly and Marxistically found their true origins outside and against the interests of the true process of proletarian emancipation, and no less brilliantly predicted in time the dangerous opportunistic developments that would emerge in dedication to the enemy cause, more or less directly, and without prejudice, of course, to the loyalty to our flag of this or that comrade considered individually. In Lenin’s footsteps, we must reply to those who "deign" to accept our opinions with such reservation, and with arbitrary distinctions, and bizarre partitions, that they will actually give us more pleasure by sparing themselves the task of accepting the "rest" of Marxism, because the greatest power of Marxism lies in its being an overall perspective of the whole reflection, in the consciousness of a revolutionary class, of the problems of the natural and human world, of political and social and economic facts at the same time.

Lenin’s restorative work is more grandiose, or at least more universally known, in what is the "political" part of the Marxist doctrine, thus meaning the theory of the state, of the party, of the revolutionary process, without excluding that this part, which we would better call "programmatic", also contemplates the entire "economic" process that opens with the revolutionary victory of the proletariat. The triumphal dispersal of the misunderstandings, deceptions, meanness, and prejudices of opportunists, revisionists, petty-bourgeois, and anarcho-syndicalists, is made even more palpitating and suggestive for this part. After Lenin, the polemical weapons on this terrain are broken in the hands of all our contradictors near and far: those who still pick them up only demonstrate their ignorance, that is, their absence from the living process of struggle of the proletariat yearning for its liberation. Let us cover broad sections of this series of theses which are so many fragments of reality nailed down in terms of an insuperably true and vital doctrine. We need only follow Lenin: be it the theses of the first congresses of the new International, be it the speeches, be it the problems, be it the programmes and proclamations of the Bolshevik party on the way to the great victory, be it the patient and ingenious exposition of State and Revolution in which it is shown that the theses never ceased to be those of Marx and Engels, in the true interpretation of the classical texts and in the true understanding of the method and thought of the masters, from the first formulation of the Manifesto to the evaluation of the facts of the subsequent period and especially of the revolutions of 1848, 1852 and the Paris Commune: the historical advance of the world proletariat that Lenin takes up and links to the revolutionary battles in Russia: the defeat of 1905, the crushing revenge twelve years later.

The problem of the interpretation of the state is resolved within the framework of the historical doctrine of the class struggle: the state is the organized strength of the ruling class, born revolutionary, which has become conservative to its positions. As with all other problems: there is no state, an allegedly immanent and metaphysical entity awaiting the definition and judgement of the reactionary or anarchist petty philosopher, but the bourgeois state, the expression of capitalist power; and the way will the workers’ state be, and how this will be after the disappearance of the political state. All these phases are situated in the historical process, as our scientific analysis allows us to trace it, in a dialectical succession, each arising from the previous one and constituting its negation. What separates them? Between the state of the bourgeoisie and that of the proletariat there can only be the culmination of a revolutionary struggle, in which the working class is led by the communist political party, which wins by overthrowing bourgeois power with armed force, by establishing the new revolutionary power: and this implements first of all the demolition of the old state machine in all its parts, and organises the repression of attempts at counter-revolution with the most energetic means.

The anarchists are answered: the proletariat cannot immediately suppress all forms of power, but must ensure ’its’ power. We reply to the social democrats that the path to power is not the peaceful path of bourgeois democracy, but that of class warfare: and that alone. Lenin is the leader of us all in the long defence of this much falsified position of Marxism: the critique of bourgeois democracy, the demolition of the legalitarian and parliamentary lie, the mockery, in the sarcastic and corrosive vigour of polemic taught by Marx and Engels, of universal suffrage and all similar panaceas as the weapons of the proletariat and the parties that stand on this ground.

Reconnecting masterfully with the fundamentals of the doctrine, Lenin solves all the problems of the proletarian regime and the programme of the revolution. "It is not enough simply to take over the state apparatus", say Marx and Engels commenting on the Manifesto many years later, and after the experience of the Paris Commune. The capitalist economy must slowly evolve to socialism, while workers’ power is prepared in a legalitarian way, the opportunists arbitrarily conclude, with a theoretical ’swindle’ that will remain classic. Instead, Lenin comes to clarify: it is necessary, ’in addition’ to taking possession of the old state apparatus, to break it to smithereens and put the proletarian dictatorship in its place. To this end we don’t get by democratic means, and it is not based on the immortal (for the philistine) ’principles’ of democracy. It excludes from the new freedom, from the new political equality, from the new ’proletarian democracy’ (as Lenin himself liked to say, giving democracy an etymological rather than historical interpretation), the members of the defeated bourgeoisie. That only in this way can the freedom for the proletariat to live and rule be placed on a realistic basis was made clear by Lenin with propositions of crystalline evidence no less than of magnificent theoretical consequentiality. Let anyone blame the trampled freedom of association and of the press to the foul tools, whether hired or unconscious, of an anti-proletarian restoration. In polemics they are, after Lenin, resoundingly beaten; in practice we hope he will always find enough lead from the revolutionary guard to overcome his lack of understanding theoretical arguments.

And with regard to the economic task of the new regime, Lenin explains – not only with regard to Russia, which we will have to say more about later, but in general – their necessary gradualness of evolution, as well as the true nature of the distinctions which set it against the private bourgeois economy, in the field of production, distribution, and all collective activities.

Here, too, there is the luminous, rectilinear link to the most authentic sources of Marxist doctrine; to Karl Marx’s responses to the thousands of banal confusions of bourgeois adversaries, and of followers of Proudhon, Bakunin and Lassalle; to the best polemic of the Marxist left against Sorelian syndicalism. The apparent contradiction: after the conquest of power, will there still be a bourgeoisie to repress with dictatorial armour, will there still be reluctant elements of the proletariat and more so of the semi-proletariat to bend with legal discipline, will there be ’despotic’ intervention (Marx), with the decrees of the new power, in economic facts, such as the recognition by it that it must ’wait’ to suppress certain capitalist forms in given fields of the economy? – is resolved in a logical, exhaustive, marvellous way, in the construction of a revolutionary programme that is not afraid of reality: because it is not afraid to adhere to it; because it is not afraid to grasp it and crush it in those parts for which the time has come to pass between dead things, forms, in the relentless process of evolution and revolutions.

As a necessary factor in all this renewing struggle, against the degenerations of labourism and syndicalism, Lenin traces the task of the class political party, Marxist and centralised, almost militarised in the discipline of the supreme moments of battle, and to the opportunists he rebukes how the politics of the revolutionary class is not low parliamentary manoeuvring, but civil war strategy, mobilisation for the supreme uprising, preparation to manage the new order.

And to crown the masterly edifice, after the efforts, the pains of giving birth to a new regime foreseen in Engels’ classic passage, the necessary demands of the rule of sacrifice for the vanguard militia, stands the sure and scientific prediction, entrusted to far more than the mystical impatience of impotent thinkers, of the society without state and without constraints, of the economy founded on the satisfaction to the limit of the needs of each of its components, of the complete freedom of man not as an individual, but as a living species in solidarity in the complete and rational subjection of the forces and resources of nature.

To Lenin we therefore owe the reconstruction of our programme, as well as that of our critique of the world in general and the bourgeois regime in particular, which together complete the theoretical elaboration of the ideology proper to the modern proletariat.


The Bringer of Marxist Politics into Reality

Lenin’s theoretical work cannot be considered separately from his political work: the two are continually intertwined and we have divided them up only for formal convenience of exposition. While re-establishing the revolutionary conception and programme of the proletariat, Lenin became one of its greatest political leaders, and implemented in the practice of class struggle the principles that he defended on the ground of doctrinal criticism. The field of his grandiose activity during the years of his not so long life is not only Russia, but the entire international proletarian movement.

Let us first consider Lenin’s work in Russia over thirty years of political struggle, up to the moment when he appears as the leader of the first workers’ state. Opponents on all sides have sought to deny the continuity and unity between this task of the great historical figure of Lenin and his Marxist doctrine. This would not be a realisation of the proletarian political programme in the capitalist and ’civilised’ West, an effective victory of socialism as it appears in the modern developed countries, but a spurious historical phenomenon, peculiar to a backward country like Russia, an of a movement, of a revolution, of an ’Asian’ government that does not have the right to connect to the historical task of the world proletariat, and the latter does not have the right to consider it as its first victory, as the historical proof of its revolutionary ideals being realised. The western bourgeois says this in order to reassure himself about the possibility of Bolshevik ’contagion’, the opportunist social democrat in order not to be forced to admit the liquidation of his programmatic perspectives of class collaboration and peaceful and legal evolutionism, which he shamelessly pretends to be proper to the advanced proletariat of the most ’civilised’ countries, the anarchist to attribute to the nature of the Russian people and the traditions of absolutism the coercive forms of the revolution, and stubbornly not to see the obvious proof, à créver les yeux, of the ineluctable necessity of them.

Nothing could be more baleful than this thesis. Lenin signifies the international, world and even western (if by the west we mean all countries populated by the white race and infested with the most modern delights of industrial capitalism) content of the Russian revolution. The facts prove this too obviously, apart from all arguments supporting the Marxist and communist evaluation of the proletarian becoming of all countries.

Vladimir Ilijc Ulianov was born in 1870: it was twenty years later that he took his place in the political struggle in Russia. What does this date, 1890, mean besides the fledgling future great proletarian leader? Prior to this epoch, a remarkable and multifaceted revolutionary movement had already existed in Russia for several decades. The survival of absolutism and feudalism, overthrown in the rest of Europe by the democratic bourgeois revolutions, was accompanied by a movement tending to overthrow the tsarist regime, and which was anxiously trying to define the positive content of this opposition.

The nascent capitalist bourgeoisie, the middle bourgeoisie with its intellectuals, all the other layers oppressed by the intolerable weight of the privileges of the aristocracy, the clergy, the high officials and officers, participate in this chaotic movement, which nevertheless has beautiful pages of struggle and heroism, never bowing before the ferocious repressions of the tsarist government. Let us say that the Russian Bolsheviks do not deny their affiliations from the best traditions of this movement of the 1860s, ’70s, ’80s; but Lenin and Bolshevism represent, in the midst of this vast framework, the contribution of a particular and original coefficient, destined to prevail over all other factors. Because the date 1890, Lenin’s debut in the political arena, coincides simply with this: the appearance of the working class in Russia. The capital, the machines, the industrial technology of the West had crossed the borders of tsarist Holy Russia, which seemed to separate two worlds, but could not stem the overbearing forces of expansion of modern capitalism. With their entry, with the rise of large factories, a true industrial proletariat emerged, first in a few major urban centres.

Even before Lenin and the other Russian social-democratic Marxists, the intellectual leaders of the movement of opposition to tsarism eagerly drew on the ideologies and literature of the western revolutionary movements, to use them in elaborating their programmes and demands. This ideological import is made more active by the continuous emigration of the persecuted to intellectual centres abroad, as well as by the Slavic races’ easy ability to assimilate. It is not just a matter of importing ideologies, but of finding the one that corresponds to the actual development of social conditions in Russia, and has a concrete class basis in them. Marxism itself penetrates into Russia, as a theory, with someone who chronologically precedes Lenin, who in his good times presents himself to us as one of the best Marxists, who is Lenin’s teacher: Plekhanov.

But it is Lenin who at the same time arms himself with the set of doctrines already elaborated for the advanced workers’ movement of the West and carries out his political activity in the midst of the nascent working class by following the concrete questions of workers’ life in the factories and elaborating their original function within the framework of Russian life. From then on, for Lenin, the working class, the last to arrive, statistically almost negligible in the immense population of the tsars’ empire, presents itself as the protagonist of the inevitable revolution. This cannot mean a ’specifically Russian’ function, contribution, but it is possible insofar as the arrival from the West of the means and conditions of a great capitalist economy can be accompanied by the fertilising arrival of the already elaborated critique of the essential characteristics of all capitalism, and of a method, particular to the proletarian class, of interpreting the most varied social environments and historical moments: historical materialism and the critique of the bourgeois economy of the Western Marxists.

If the cretins of the journalistic polemic now want to serve us, after a mystical Mongolian Lenin, a Lenin German professor and pangermanist agent, we have only to remind them that Karl Marx, from whom Lenin found prepared the mentality he needed, was said by the ignorant to be a German agent, while he drew the materials of his doctrine largely from the country where capitalism had come first in its economic development, England, as he studied and took into account the data from the most characteristic of bourgeois revolutions, that of France, in a relevant manner. Both Marx and Lenin lived for a long time outside their country of origin; both, like other great revolutionaries, also personally had the opposite psychological features to those characteristic of their race. One could find no better counterpart to the pedantic German university scholar than in the brilliant and vibrant mental type represented by Karl Marx, who had nothing to envy in terms of tenacious industriousness and thorough preparation: the Russian’s contemplative and mystical inertia is sharply contrasted by the realism of thought and the precision and intensity of work of the formidable human machine of intense performance that was Lenin. Marx was, it is true, a Jew: if it were true that this were a flaw, one could not even impute it to Lenin! But these are but the last arguments that allow us to define in the two giants the two most important exponents of a movement to which no other can contend, not even from far away in time, the non-rhetorical qualification of world importance.

It is certainly not possible for me to make the history of Lenin’s political function in Russia: it would be a matter of expounding the complex history of the Bolshevik party and of the greatest revolution known to history, and the data of all this cannot, in its substantial part, be unknown to you.

Lenin first appears to us in a suggestive manner in his criticism of all the theoretical and political positions of the other movements of opposition to tsarism, and especially those which fabricate spurious theories for the action of the working classes. In this struggle against all forms of opportunism he is implacable and does not hesitate in the face of the most serious consequences.

Lenin contrasts a proletarian class ideology to bourgeois political liberalism, which, through intellectuals necessarily driven to be rebellious, tends to spread to the proletariat. One of the leaders of the ’narodniki’ had declared that ’the working class was of great importance to the revolution’. In this sentence was evident the intention of the bourgeoisie to ’use’ the proletarian masses to overthrow absolutism, and then, as in France a century earlier, to establish its own rule even and above all against the proletariat. But Lenin represents the answer: it is not the working class that will serve the revolution of the bourgeoisie: it is the revolution that will be made in Russia by the working class, and for itself.

On the strength of this brilliant historical insight, formidably backed by comprehensive studies of the nature and degree of development of the Russian economy, Lenin can fight against all falsifications of the revolutionary programme and the various opportunist parties and groups. Just as he fights that bourgeois Marxism to which we have alluded, so he fights against ’economism’, which claims that the political struggle against tsarism must be left to the bourgeoisie and that the proletariat’s activity must be kept on the terrain of economic improvement, postponing the emergence of a workers’ political party until after the bourgeoisie has won power and ’political freedoms’. In this theoretical struggle, which takes place around 1900, the contents of the campaign against pre-war Bernsteinian international revisionism, of social-nationalist opportunism of the war years, and of post-war Menshevism are shown. In 1903 Lenin arrived at the split in the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, proclaimed at the London congress although the formal organisational split came later. Apparently the disagreement was over questions of internal organisational technique: very important, however, for a party fighting by illegal means in an environment of fierce reaction. But the content of the split, as subsequent years were to prove, is substantial and profound. The split was wanted and prepared implacably by Lenin: and then he pronounced the phrase: "before uniting we must divide", in which one of his greatest teachings is summed up: that the proletariat will never be able to win without first getting rid of the traitors, the inept, the hesitant; that in cutting off the unhealthy parts from the body of the revolutionary party, one will never be brave enough. Of course Lenin was called a dissolver, a disintegrator, a sectarian, a centraliser, an autocrat, and anything else you want: he merely laughed at all this phrasing which opportunists invariably make use of when they see their manoeuvres foiled, as at all the empty rhetoric for unity, which, outside the condition of homogeneity and clarity of directives, is for Marxists nothing but empty words.

Other dissensions take shape before arriving at the final and resounding one of the war years: Lenin’s clarifying work, long aimed at the future, continues to unfold accumulating the true conditions of the future revolutionary victory. At times Lenin, in exile abroad, gathered only a few simple workers’ adhesions around himself and his small group of faithful: but he never doubted the final outcome of the struggle. The future must prove him right: the small groups will become the thousands and thousands of proletarians who defeat tsarism and capitalism in 1917, the millions of men who will parade in endless processions around the body of their leader seven years later.

We have no way of dealing more deeply with the Bolsheviks’ criticism of the ’liquidators’, who after 1905 wished to renounce the illegal forms of the party by favoring the alleged constitution granted by the emperor; nor with that of the revolutionary socialist party, of its programme which placed the peasant class at the forefront by claiming that in Russia the proletarian revolution would not have as its central issue the abolition of private capitalism, and of its petit-bourgeois methods; nor with that of the anarchists, of the syndicalists, of so many other political schools of varying importance agitating in the kaleidoscope of the pre-revolutionary period.

Lenin created the party that was to respond brilliantly to revolutionary demands, a magnificent instrument of action and struggle. And the time came for the transition from polemical criticism and patient preparatory organisation to open battle: around the secessionists of many episodes the concentration of revolutionary forces began to form: in the orbit of the workers’ vanguard party came the war-weary soldiers, the poor peasants; the soviets, which appeared in 1905 in the first great revolutionary struggle in which Bolshevism was vigorously tried and affirmed, in 1917 gradually turned towards Lenin’s party. In this period of action Lenin’s qualities emerge in a fantastic way, and would lend themselves to any form of mystical amplification, if what was taking place were not for us Marxists the necessary crowning glory of such a complete and exhaustive preparation of revolutionary conditions in every field. In the July uprising Lenin, despite the temptation of a moment, says resolutely that the time has not yet come to play the all-for-all: but in the October days, alone or almost alone, he understands that the moment has arrived which must not be allowed to pass and he vibrates with an infallible hand the decisive blow, he frames in the magnificent political manoeuvre of a party the formidable crisis of the struggle of the opposing social forces from which the working class must emerge triumphant.

The theoretical critique of democracy and bourgeois liberalism culminates in action, with the expulsion by force of the armed workers of the democratically elected constituent assembly, the ’bunch of scoundrels’!

Lenin’s word: power to the soviets, won; the dictatorship of the proletariat theorised by Marx makes its tremendous entry into the reality of history. The counter-revolution in its manifold efforts will no longer win: before the implacability of the revolutionary terror it will have to retreat, just as it will not be able to exploit against the success of the work of government, at the head of which Lenin stands, the accumulation of internal difficulties of the Russian economy and the failures of the proletariat in the other countries of the world. Lenin and his party continue in the new phase their work, different but no less arduous, building more and more their strength and experience.

We have said little of Lenin’s realisation of a Marxist policy in Russia: we are still left with all his international activity. Here too the struggle against deviations from Marxism is not only theoretical, but political and organisational. Not yet well known to large crowds, as were the traditional leaders of the parties of the 2nd International, Lenin animated the left-wing current within it and its struggle against revisionism. It was thanks to him if the Stuttgart congress passed the motion advocating a general strike in the event of war.

The war came, and it was Lenin who was the first to realise that the Second International had ended forever in the shameful failure of 4 August 1914. Within the socialist opposition to the war, which gathers in Zimmerwald and Kienthal, a left polarises around Lenin’s formula: turn imperialist war into class war. And it moves towards the foundation of the new International, which can rise in 1919 in the capital of the first proletarian state, having by then established its Marxist doctrine on solid foundations, having given the grandiose essay of proletarian politics that it implements, in the victory of the Russian Communist Party.

After the restoration of proletarian theory, the work of the 3rd International is grand in the concrete application of the division from the opportunists of all countries, in the banishment from the ranks of the world workers’ vanguard of reformists, social democrats, centrists of all categories. A palingenesis is taking place in all the old parties, and the foundations of the new revolutionary parties of the proletariat are being laid. Lenin guides the difficult operation with an iron hand, dispelling possible uncertainties and weaknesses.

It is later on that we will have the opportunity to say something about the reasons why the gigantic battle has not yet met with final success in all countries, and why the greatest strategist of the proletariat is leaving us at a time when on many fronts the struggle is not in our favour.

The political work of the new International contains some other essential aspects of which we want to say a few things. The theoretical Marxist restoration undoubtedly led to the fundamental conclusions of the first constituent congress on programmatic matters, and to a good part of the doctrines best elaborated at the second, in 1920, the best congress of the International. Thus for the questions on the conditions of admission, on the task of the communist party, on the significance of the workers’ and peasants’ councils, on the work in the trade unions. But other questions are dealt with, with no less fidelity to the Marxist method in the general lines, but with a more pronounced character of originality with respect to the more serious shortcomings of the traditional socialist movement.

This is the case with the national and colonial question. The condemnation of social-nationalism with its sophistry on national defence, on the war for democracy and freedom, and on the restoration of the bourgeois juridical principle of nationality, is reaffirmed on the theoretical and practical terrain without any possibility of equivocation. The importance of the social and political forces that oppose the power of the main imperialist bourgeois states is Marxistically and dialectically assessed in those places where there is not yet a modernly developed proletariat, i.e. in the colonies and small countries subjugated by the large capitalist metropolises. Thus an ingenious political synthesis is constructed of the struggle of the European proletariat and the other more modern countries against the big bourgeois citadels, on an exquisitely classist platform, and of the rebellion movements of the peoples of the east and of all the colonial countries, with the aim of shaking up the world foundations of the defensive fortification of the capitalist system with the help of all these forces. In this position, the world communist proletariat maintains an attitude of leadership and vanguard, and takes nothing away from its ideological theses as well as from the objective of its realisations, which remains its class dictatorship, just as it concedes nothing to the ephemeral and erroneous theoretical and political premises of the semi-bourgeois national revolutionaries of the countries in question, from whom the proletarian communist parties will have to take away all leadership of the movement as soon as possible. This delicate historical question does not leave the framework of the revolutionary dialectic, provided it is entrusted to Marxistically mature political forces: while it cannot be excluded that it could lead to some danger if above all one wanted to present it as a ’new’ word that would differentiate the attitude of the International from the too rigid attitude of the classical Marxist left; which could only be done by some opportunist who does not renounce living, who knows for what prospects, on the margins of the International. In the theoretical terms given by Lenin to the question, and under his political direction, the danger was not to be feared, and no attenuation, but an intensification of effective revolutionary world action, was to be considered verified.

Of the ’agrarian’ question we shall say a few things shortly. But even in the position taken by the Second Congress on this question, looking at the bottom of things, it is nothing more than an analysis made by shedding light on the true Marxist view of the problem of the agrarian economy. Lenin had also given us remarkable theoretical work in this field. Politically, the International finally resolved this problem, which it was convenient for the opportunists not to address because they executed a skilful manoeuvre by swindlingly shifting from the revolutionary thesis that the industrial proletariat will be the prime mover of the revolution, to their opportunist attitude of courting the interests and class privileges of a supposed workers’ aristocracy, which they wanted to drag into an alliance with capital. The agrarian doctrine of the Third International is based on the ABC of Marxism, making it clear what are modern agrarian and industrial holding; traditional small holding; and above all the regime of the small economic holding connected to the purely legal unity of large latifundia under a single owner, exploiting several families of land workers. The gradualness of the economic construction of socialism, already asserted and justified in the general theory of the Communist International, has as its obvious consequence that the proletarian dictatorship must bring different solutions to these various agricultural stages: only for the first is there a coincidence with the socialising programme of big industry, while for the third the immediate programme can only be the elimination of the latifundist and the handing over of the land to individual peasant families, until the technical conditions for centralised, industrial-type cultivation mature in a second historical stage. From this clear theoretical analysis of a problem that the opportunists have always been happy to overlook, the political relations between the industrial proletariat and the various peasant classes are incontrovertibly clear: complete parallelism with the agricultural wage earners on industrialised estates, alliance with the poor peasants who work the land directly, relations to be contingently assessed with the semi-poor peasants. From the latter a fundamental contribution to the revolution is obtained in this way, without ever forgetting the pre-eminence in it of the great urban proletariat: a pre-eminence sanctioned by the very constitution of the Soviet republic by giving far greater weight to the representation of the workers than to that of the peasant masses, and by the fact that it is the former that gives the new workers’ state machine its personnel.

Here too, exaggerations and misunderstandings are more than possible, if this pre-eminence of revolutionary tasks is barely forgotten. Comrade Trotsky’s rebukes of the "peasant" tendencies which breed opportunism in the French party are very notable in this respect, and it seems to us essential not to forget here too that it is not the case, since this is not necessary to magnify the work of the International which does not need it, to affirm that these are new and unforeseen solutions with respect to the fundamental Marxist line, almost as if to throw a bait to certain dubious attitudes. Nor does it seem to us to be the case, even if no substantial dissent is concealed under this, to present, as comrade Zinoviev seems to want to do, Bolshevism or Leninism as a doctrine in its own right, consisting of the revolutionary ideology of the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry. This (we do not say in our comrade’s intentions, but in the views of opportunist currents) could lend itself as a theoretical formulation to counter-revolutionaries disguised as advocates of a historical retreat from the content of the Russian revolution: while among the finest traditions of the Bolshevik party remains the brilliant historical insight with which it confronted the social-revolutionary programme, from which it ’stole’ an essential point but in order to make it realised not by the peasant class, but by the working class: because only by the latter, and not by its own forces, can the former be led to liberation.

I cannot here give more than a hint of these issues, but comrades know, or can see, a pamphlet of mine on the ’agrarian question’ and, better, the theses of the Second Congress of our party on the question itself, which represent the unanimous stance of the Italian communists on the platform I have tried to briefly recall.


The alleged tactical opportunist

We now come to consider the most delicate and difficult aspect of Lenin’s character: that which relates to his tactical criteria. Tactics is certainly not a separate issue from that of doctrine, of the programme, of general politics, and above all for this reason we reject with all our strength the interpretation of the opportunists – of which Frederick Engels first gave the definition when, as if foreseeing Bernstein’s falsifications condemned the attitude of those who compromise the vision and preparation of the final programmatic perspectives through everyday petty issues – as those who have made fatal concessions in practice to equivocal flexibility, to pandering diplomacy, to the alleged ’realism’ as understood by the shopkeeper and philistine.

On this false note the bourgeois insists in order to boast of who knows what his revenge on the ’utopianism’ idiotically attributed to Lenin and his school. On this the opportunist insists for not dissimilar reasons; on this the anarchist insists in order to claim for himself the illusory capacity to never contravene integral fidelity to revolutionary attitudes. I cannot here develop even in a small part, and for a multitude of reasons, the whole question of communist tactics, which awaits other treatment. I propose only to expound a few observations on Lenin the tactician and political manoeuvre-maker, and to claim what is the true character of his work. Tomorrow a debate of this nature may become very important, since it is not excluded, and we shall see why, that somewhere Lenin’s teaching may be misrepresented from what it really should be, when one knows how to consider it in the formidable and complex as well as unitary whole of his work. For we deny that there is any discord, even the slightest, between the rigid and implacable Lenin of the years of discussion and preparation and the indefatigable Lenin of the multiple realisations.

Here, too, we should first examine Lenin’s tactics as leader of the Russian revolution, then as leader of the Communist International. There is much to be said about the tactics of the Bolshevik party before the revolution: we have said what the party’s task was in the major programmatic directives as well as in the criticism of its adversaries, it remains to deal with its conduct in relation with similar parties in the successive contingent situations which preceded the great autonomous action of 1917. This very important matter is continually invoked by the Russian communists in their stance on the problems of international tactics: and unquestionably it must and will always be taken into precise account in the debates of the International.

Let us limit ourselves to recalling a subject of prime importance, and one on which the Russian comrades themselves were in disagreement at the time: the Brest-Litowsk peace of 1918 with imperialist Germany, which was wanted above all by the clairvoyance of Lenin. Did it mean a compromise with Kaiserist and capitalist militarism? Yes, if one judges from a superficial and formalistic point of view; no, if one follows a Marxist dialectical criterion. On that occasion, Lenin dictated the true policy that took into account the great final revolutionary necessities.

It was a matter of considering the state of mind that had dictated their revolutionary impetus to the Russian masses: away from the front of the war of nations, to overthrow the internal enemy. And it was a question of creating the reflection of this defeatist situation in the ranks of the German army, as had been done from the first moment with the "fraternisations". The future proved Lenin right and proved wrong those who superficially judged that the struggle against militarist Germany had to be continued, paying no attention either to these long-standing programmatic considerations or to the practical ones (for this time absolutely coinciding with the former: which is not always the case, and it is then that the difficulties of the tactical problem are most serious) that demonstrated the certainty of defeat for reasons of military technique. General Ludendorff stated in his memoirs that the collapse of the German front, after a series of resounding military victories on all sides, at a time when the situation was technically good in all respects, was due to moral, i.e. political reasons: the soldiers no longer wanted to fight. Lenin’s ingeniously revolutionary policy, while speaking a language of protocol transaction with the Kaiser’s delegates, was able to find revolutionary ways to reawaken, under the uniform of the German automaton-soldier, the exploited proletarian who is led to slaughter in the interests of his oppressors.

Brest-Litowsk not only saved the Russian revolution from the onslaught of German capitalism, whose place Entente capitalism hastened to take with no less counter-revolutionary arrogance, but, after the months it had taken to make the Red Army an invincible bulwark, brought about the defeat of Germany in the west. Which was wrongly attributed to the alleged strategic skill of generals like Foch or Diaz, the military leaders of the Entente whose professional inferiority the war proved a hundred times over.

Let us now turn to the subject that is most insisted upon to show the Lenin of concessions and transactions: that of the new Russian economic policy, to briefly mention it.

We have recalled that we must think of the economic task of the proletarian revolution, of its necessary gradualness and its internationality, and we have also recalled, albeit fleetingly, the theoretical and political significance of the relations which logically the industrial proletariat of Russia had to establish with the peasant classes. But, we are told by our adversaries, it was not just a matter of proceeding slowly towards a socialist and then communist regime, but there was a real retreat into outdated positions, a re-establishment of purely bourgeois forms which it had been hoped to suppress, a bargaining with world capitalism to which it had declared a war without quarter: and this shows that the communists and Lenin have adapted themselves to practising the same opportunism that they had loudly reproached others for.

We maintain, on the contrary, that there can be no question of opportunism, since the whole grandiose tactical manoeuvre has been carried out, in the theoretical thinking with which Lenin presents it to us, in the application led by him hour by hour, up to almost two years ago and, to be clear, in the magnificent formulation of the problem given by Leon Trotsky in his powerful speech at the 4th World Congress, with the constant and tenacious aim of the supreme interest of the revolutionary process and the final triumph in the complex struggle against the formidable and multiple resistances of capitalism. The very word: Lenin, is a guarantee of this.

In a first period the fundamental problem of the Russian revolution was that of the military struggle, which directly continued the revolutionary offensive, in repelling the multiple counter-offensives of the reactionary forces not so much on the internal political front as on all the fronts that had to be created against the white bands supported by the big and small bourgeois powers. In this epic struggle, which only at the end of 1920 can be considered to have come to an end, through the episodes and phases which I do not have to remind you of here, the Red Army and the Red police behaved with such brilliant decision in crushing the enemy that no one will want to speak of compromises and renunciation of the broader evaluation of the class conflict between revolution and counter-revolution. Nothing so far must permit the belief that this same decision will fail, should the antagonism between the proletariat and world capitalism, on which the politics of the first workers’ and peasants’ state is built, intensify, or even move back to the military terrain. Now, in that period, the problem of building socialism presented itself as secondary, and it was a matter of preventing the political-military conquest of the proletariat from being endangered, on the one hand, and provoking the extension of revolutionary victory to other countries, on the other.

At the beginning of 1921, the situation emerged from this phase: on the one hand, the revolution in Europe was, albeit for the time being, postponed in the face of the general phenomenon of the capitalist offensive against the proletarian organisations; on the other hand, the struggle to violently overthrow the soviet regime was abandoned by the bourgeois powers. It is no longer a question of just living as best they could and conducting the struggle, the very necessity of which, in the face of the danger of a bourgeois and tsarist restoration, held the various revolutionary classes together, but of organising, on formulas which can only be contingent and transitory, the economy of a country like Russia, in which the political force of capitalism and other reactionary forms (such as agrarian feudalism) has been defeated, but due to the absence of technical, economic, and social conditions, because of the disruption brought about by seven years of war, revolution and blockade, one cannot speak of establishing a fully socialist economic regime.

For this reason, the proxies of the dispersed and rebellious White hordes had called to be let in and declare that since the communist economy could not be realised at once, power was to be handed back to them so that they could administer the country in a bourgeois economy; or that this could be remedied by disarming the apparatus of the army and the revolutionary state and appealing to the mysterious ’free’ and ’spontaneous’ initiatives of the ’people’, as the anarchists say without realising that they are proposing the very same thing as above, these are opinion we will leave to the madmen or the morons.

Quite another limpid and courageous Marxist analysis guided the Bolsheviks, with Lenin at their head, towards the difficult solution.

Political and military necessity had ’imposed’, in that early period, a set of economic measures that were not taken for their own sake, but to crush the resistance of certain classes and strata. Lenin called this set of measures ’war communism’. Thus it was necessary, without being able to think of any middle ground, to ruthlessly demolish the old administrative apparatus of Russian industry, which was, in a backward country, nevertheless highly centralised; to expropriate not only the large landowner, but also the middle landowner because he constituted an anti-revolutionary class to be put out of action; to completely monopolise the grain trade, as it was otherwise impossible to ensure the supply of the large centres and the army: without questioning whether the proletarian state could have stably held the socialist organisation to replace all these forms suppressed by necessity.

When this period came to an end, the problem presented itself in its essentially economic aspects, and a new and different solution was consequently found. Today, all this becomes crystal-clear, provided it is examined without being clouded by pseudo-revolutionary prejudices. Within the framework of Russian society one recognises, says Lenin, the most varied economic forms: patriarchal agricultural regime, small-scale agrarian production for the market, private capitalism, state capitalism, socialism. The struggle is economically not so much about the transition from state capitalism to socialism, but rather the struggle against this ’state capitalism’ of the ’octopus’ of the petty-bourgeois peasant economy and private capitalism. What state capitalism is as indicated by Lenin is well clarified by Trotsky in the speech already mentioned (which should be published in Italian in a very popular pamphlet). It is not, as in the traditional meaning of the phrase, socialisation implemented by a ’bourgeois’ state, but socialisation, implemented indeed, in certain fields of the economy, by the proletarian political power, but with reservations and limitations that amount to keeping intact the supreme political and financial control of the state while adopting the methods of capitalist ’commercial bookkeeping’.

That is to say, the Russian state acts as entrepreneur and producer, but it cannot, in the real Russian economic conditions, be the sole entrepreneur, as it would be in the ’socialist’ regime: for it must allow distribution to take place, not by means of a state apparatus, but by means of the free market of the bourgeois type, where the small peasant-merchant, the small industrial entrepreneur and in certain cases the local medium capitalist and the large foreign capitalist are allowed to intervene, in organisations and enterprises, but strongly controlled by the workers’ republic with its appropriate organs.

To act otherwise, especially in relation to the agrarian question, only meant paralysing any possibility for production’s life. Since there could be no question of socialisation, or even of state management for an appreciable share of an agriculture as rudimentarily equipped as Russia’s, there was no other way to make the peasant produce than to grant him the freedom to trade in agricultural commodities, after making him pay to the state a tax ’in kind’, which took the place of the requisitions introduced out of necessity during ’wartime communism’.

This new orientation of economic policy is presented as a kind of retreat, but this retreat, in the actual sense now given to it, is but an inevitable moment in the complex evolution from capitalism and pre-capitalism to socialism: a moment foreseeable for the other proletarian revolutions as well, but evidently of less significance the more advanced big capitalism is in their respective countries, the more the ’territory’ of proletarian victory will have previously spread.

We must note another danger that the NEP stemmed in time: the downgrading of the industrial proletariat. The difficulties in supplying the big centres had led to a migration of workers from the factories to the countryside: Beyond this the economic consequences had a very serious danger of a social-political nature, depriving the revolution and its organs of their main base: the urban proletariat, and thus compromising the most essential conditions for the whole process to take place.

The measures adopted made it possible to cope with this phenomenon, to raise the standard of economic life more and more, and to fight against the natural scourge of famine, which had unfortunately come above all the difficulties caused by the enemy.

Among the measures characterising the new economic policy is, of course, the establishment of an economic and even diplomatic modus vivendi with the bourgeois states. No serious theory of revolution can claim that, since there are bourgeois and proletarian states, there must be permanent war between them: this war is indeed a possible fact, but it is in the revolutionary interest to provoke it only when it serves to favourably precipitate that situation of civil war within the bourgeois countries, which is the ’natural’ way by which the proletariat’s victory is achieved. It is therefore nothing strange, while this is not possible from the communist point of view, that the bourgeois states have themselves ascertained the impossibility of arousing an anti-communist uprising in Russia, we are in a period of military truce and economic relations, the need for which is concretely apparent on both sides. It would even be ridiculous to reduce such an issue to repugnance for certain diplomatic contacts and the demands of etiquette.

The very situation, on which the break-up of the conference in Genoa took place, shows that the Russian government does not give up matters of principle at all and does not hint in the least at a return to the directives of private economy, as all our opponents like to insinuate all the time. By wresting from capitalism, albeit at the cost of an adequate compensation in Russia’s various natural resources, some of its forces promoting large-scale production, the work theorised by Lenin is being continued in order to suppress little by little the small agrarian and commercial industrial economy which is the enemy of the proletariat, and the main enemy where, as in Russia, the organisation of political domination of big capitalism has already been put out of action. And the problem of political relations with the peasant class is not solved with a formula that smacks of opportunism, because if concessions are made to the petty peasantry, we do not lose sight of the fact that it is a revolutionary factor insofar as its struggle against the boyar is welded to the proletariat’s struggle against capitalism, but in its further development the workers’ programme must definitively overpower and surpass the peasant programme of the alliance.

I will move on after these incomplete hints to the concept that many have of Lenin’s advocated tactics for the Communist International, and his lively criticism of the ’left’ tactical criteria.

The method Lenin uses to examine tactical problems and to make the theory of ’compromise’ is fully satisfactory. But I want to say at once that, in my opinion, the vast task of the elaboration, by this method, of the tactics to be adopted by the International is far from being accomplished. Lenin leaves exhausted the question of doctrine and programme, but not that of tactics. There is a danger that Lenin’s tactical method will be misrepresented to the point of losing sight of its clear revolutionary programmatic presuppositions: this could possibly endanger the very consistency of our programme. By some right-wing elements in the International, Lenin’s tactical criterion is too often invoked to justify forms of adaptation and potential renunciation that have nothing in common with the luminously revolutionary and finalist line that connects all of Lenin’s grandiose work. The problem is very serious and very delicate.

What is Lenin’s essential criticism of the ’left’ errors? He condemns every tactical evaluation which, instead of referring to the positive realism of our historical dialectic and the effective value of tactical attitudes and expedients, becomes a prisoner of naive, abstract, moralistic, mystical, aesthetic formulas, from which suddenly spring results that are completely foreign to our method. The whole rebuke to the pseudo-revolutionary phraseology which often arbitrarily takes the place of the real Marxist arguments is not only just, but is perfectly in tune with the whole framework of the grandiose work of restoring revolutionary values ’in earnest’, due to Lenin, and which we here vaguely try to trace in its synthetic outline. All tactical arguments based on the phobia of certain words, of certain gestures, of certain contacts, on a pretended purity and uncontaminability of communists in action, are laughable stuff, and constitute the foolish infantilism against which Lenin fights, the child of bourgeois theoretical prejudices with an anti-materialist flavour. To substitute a moral doctrine for Marxist tactics is balderdash.

This does not mean that certain tactical conclusions advocated by the left, and defended by many with these naive arguments, cannot be re-presented as the culmination of an effective Marxist analysis stripped of all ethical and aesthetic velleity and perfectly ready to accept, with good reason, the demands of revolutionary tactics, even when they lack elegance and nobility in their immediate appearance. For example, in the tactical theses of the Second Congress of our party, which constituted an attempt in the aforementioned sense, while criticising the tactical method of the united front of political parties as a permanent body above them, the argument that it is unworthy of communists to deal with opportunist leaders, or to meet them, is never used to reach this conclusion. I think this very word ’opportunist’ should be changed, because of its moralistic flavour. I cited the problem not to discuss it, but merely as an explanatory example.

Taking into account the latest outcomes of the tactical experience of the International, and the fact that for two years Lenin has not been its coordinator, we have the right to argue that the problem must still be discussed in order to arrive at a solution. We refuse to have Lenin’s Marxist realism translated into the formula that any tactical expedient is good for our purposes. Tactics in turn affect those who employ them, and it cannot be said that a true communist, with the mandate of the true International and the true communist party, can go anywhere with confidence that he will not fail. We have seen the recent example, which I mention in passing, of the workers’ government in Saxony. The president of the International had to say, rightly scandalised, that the comrade sent to the post of state chancellor, instead of following the pre-established revolutionary tactics and organising the arming of the proletariat, had made himself a prisoner of the observance of legality. It was a matter, says Zinoviev, not of intentions of communist action, but of purely Germanic respect for the Chancellor role. The phrase is strong, and it is worthy of Marx (perhaps it is Marx’s own), but Zinoviev has to ask himself whether the cause of the failure lay in the qualities of that comrade or in the tactic itself, which had been planned and ran up against insurmountable difficulties.

Doesn’t ’stretching’ the extent of tactical projects beyond all limits come up against our own theoretical and programmatic conclusions, the culmination of a true realistic examination controlled by continuous and extensive experience? We consider illusory and contrary to our principles a tactic which dreams that it can substitute the overthrow and demolition of the bourgeois state machine, a cornerstone so vigorously demonstrated by Lenin, with the penetration of who knows what Trojan horse into the machine itself, the illusion – truly pseudo-revolutionary and petty-bourgeois – of blowing it up with the traditional stone. The situation, which has ended in ridicule, of the Saxon communist ministers shows this: that one cannot take the capitalist state fortress with stratagems that spare the revolutionary masses a frontal assault. It is a grave mistake to make the proletariat believe that one possesses such expedients to ease the hard way, to ’economise’ on its effort and sacrifice. Believing this has led to a serious state of disillusionment in the German party, which has unfortunate consequences, even if it is debatable that it has had the very serious consequence of not launching the direct general attack at a time when it would have succeeded. Now the German communists are giving the word of general insurrection and proletarian dictatorship. It had to be said beforehand that, while there are very variable situations and power relations, and in many cases one cannot give that word as an immediate formula, it is, however, generally established that one is the highroad by which one must necessarily pass; that “there are no half-revolutions, only revolutions”.

Many would have us believe that Lenin’s mentality is to always leave blank the page on which the daily tactical task is to be written, excluding all generalisations. This would be the alleged ’truly Marxist’ realism. A ’true Marxism’ is thus seen to appear, which could tomorrow become analogous to the ’true socialism’ lashed out at by Karl Marx. What we know of Lenin and of the colossal synthesising content of his work, authorises us to reject this falsification that would lower him to the level of vulgar opportunism, to eradicate which he dedicated his life. The tactical Marxist method must be free of preconceptions drawn from arbitrary ideologies and furtively introduced psychological attitudes, it must refer to reality and experience; but this does not mean descending to the gossipy and cowardly ’eclecticism’, branded at the time by a campaign of Russian Bolshevism, which hides the petty-bourgeois sloth of false revolutionaries. Our realism and experimentalism, if they eschew gratuitous ideological abstractions, tend however, in the elaboration of the movement’s consciousness, to achieve on a rigorously scientific basis a unitary and synthetic, not capricious and arbitrary, orientation of everyday practice.

In Lenin, we affirm, the tactical evaluation, even daring if you want in the sense that he less than anyone else allowed himself to be guided by extemporaneous sentimental suggestions and formalistic stubbornness, never abandoned the revolutionary platform: that is to say, its co-ordination to the supreme and integral aim of the universal revolution. And this co-ordination must be specified and clarified in the tactical discussions of the International, to which Lenin gave the method and also undoubtedly the formulation of certain results, but without leaving us a complete elaboration, because this was not historically possible until now. In pursuing its work, the International must beware of the danger that the thesis of maximum tactical freedom will come to conceal the abandonment and desertion of Lenin’s "platform", i.e. the loss of sight of the revolutionary aims. Having lost sight of these, it would be pure anti-realistic voluntarism to leave as the basis of tactical decisions not a synthetic set of directives but, so to speak, a simple signature of one or more individuals. This would reverse the entire unitary discipline, in the truly fruitful sense, of our organisation. And I will say no more on the subject.

With those who would overemphasise in Lenin the tactician "without fixed rules" we will always bring up the unity that binds all his political work. Lenin is that great man who, with his eyes fixed on the final revolutionary goal, is not afraid of being called, in the time of preparation, the dissolver, the centraliser, the autocrat, the devourer of his masters and friends. He is the ruthless purveyor of clarity and precision where this entails the collapse of false harmonies and posturing alliances. He is the man who knows how to stall when it is appropriate, but who at a certain moment knows how to formidably dare and, as I have recalled, in October 1917, faced with the very hesitations of the CC of his party, after pestering it with pressing messages, rushes in person to Petrograd, incites the workers to take up arms, passes over all uncertainties. A bourgeois, who heard him speak, recounts: ’I had been told of his cold, realistic, practical language; all I heard was a series of fiery incitements to the struggle: Take power! Overthrow the bourgeoisie! Oust the government!"

Now the Lenin of pondered tactical assessments is the same man who in potency embodies those faculties of revolutionary audacity. Many a marmot would like to clothe himself in the skin of this lion. So we say to so many who invoke dexterity and elasticity in tactics and cite Lenin, but whose revolutionary potentiality we have reason to doubt: do likewise, show that you are embodied in the dominant necessity of the victory of the revolution, which in the culminating moment is made up of irresistible momentum and hard blows, and then you will have the right to speak in his name!

No, Lenin does not remain the symbol of the practical accidentality of opportunism, but that of the iron unity of the force and theory of revolution.

The function of the leader

Lenin is dead. The giant, and not even yesterday, has abandoned his work. What does this mean for us? What is the place of the function of leaders in the whole of our movement and the way we judge it? What will be the consequence of the disappearance of the greatest acting leader of the Russian Communist Party and the Communist International, in the entire world revolutionary struggle? Let us briefly revisit, before coming to the conclusion of this already lengthy discourse, to our assessment of this important problem.

There are those who roar against the leaders, who would like to do without them, who describe or fantasise a revolution ’without leaders’. Lenin himself illuminates this question with his limpid criticism, clearing it of superficial confusion. There are, as historical realities, masses, classes, parties and leaders. The masses are divided into classes, the classes represented by political parties, the latter led by leaders: it is as simple as that. Concretely speaking, the problem of leaders took on a special aspect in the Second International. Its parliamentary and trade union leaders had encouraged the interests of certain particular categories of the proletariat, whose privileges they tended to establish through anti-revolutionary compromises with the bourgeoisie and the state.

These leaders ended up severing the ties that united them to the revolutionary proletariat, drawing ever closer to the bandwagon of the bourgeoisie: in 1914 it was openly revealed that they, far from being instruments of proletarian action, had become pure and simple agents of capitalism. This criticism, and the righteous indignation against them, must not mislead us to the point of denying that leaders, but leaders quite different from these, will exist in the parties and the revolutionary International. That any leadership function automatically transforms itself, whatever the organisation and its relations, into a form of tyranny or oligarchy, is such a trite and disproportionate argument that even Machiavelli five centuries ago could, in The Prince, give a crystal-clear critique of it. Of course, the proletariat is faced with the not always easy problem of having leaders and preventing their functions from becoming arbitrary and unfaithful to class interests. But this problem is certainly not resolved by stubbornly failing to see it or by pretending to remove it by abolishing all leaders, a measure that no one would be able to indicate what it consists of.

From our historical materialist point of view, the function of leaders is studied by stepping decisively outside the narrow limits in which the vulgar individualist conception encloses it. For us, an individual is not an entity, an accomplished unity divided from the others, a machine in its own right, or one whose functions are nourished by a direct thread that unites it to the divine creative power or to any philosophical abstraction that takes its place, such as immanence, the absoluteness of the spirit, and similar abstrusions. The manifestation and function of the individual is determined by the general conditions of the environment and society and its history. What is elaborated in a man’s brain has had its preparation in the relations with other men and in the fact, also of an intellectual nature, of other men. Some privileged and exercised brains, better constructed and perfected machines, better translate and express and rework a wealth of knowledge and experience that would not exist if it did not rely on the life of the community. The leader, more than inventing, reveals the mass to itself and ensures that it can recognise itself better and better in its situation in relation to the social world and the historical becoming, and can express in exact external formulas its tendency to act in that sense, the conditions of which are set by the social factors, the mechanism of which is ultimately interpreted starting from the investigation of the economic elements. What’s more, the greatest scope of Marxist historical materialism, as an ingenious solution to the problem of human determination and freedom, lies in having taken its analysis out of the vicious circle of the individual isolated from the environment, and returned it to the experimental study of the life of collectivities. Thus the verifications of the Marxist deterministic method, given to us by historical facts, allow us to conclude that our objectivist and scientific point of view in considering these questions is correct, even if science at its present level of development cannot tell us by what function the somatic and material determinations on the organisms of men are expressed in collective and personal psychic processes.

The leader’s brain is a material instrument functioning through links with the whole class and the party; the formulations that the leader dictates as a theorist and the rules he prescribes as a practical leader are not his own creations, but the specification of a consciousness whose materials belong to the class-party and are products of vast experience. Not all the data of this consciousness appears present to the leader in the form of mechanical erudition, so that we can realistically explain certain phenomena of intuition that are judged to be divination and that, far from proving to us the transcendence of certain individuals over the masses, better demonstrate to us our assumption that the leader is the operating instrument and not the motor of common thought and action.

The problem of leaders cannot be posed in the same way in all historical epochs, because its data changes in the course of evolution. Here, too, we move away from conceptions that claim these problems are resolved by immanent data, in the eternity of the facts of the spirit. Just as our consideration of the history of the world assigns a special place to the class victory of the proletariat, the first class to win possessing an exact theory of social conditions and knowledge of its task, and which can, ’coming out of human prehistory’, organise the domination of man over economic laws, so the function of the proletarian leader is a new and original phenomenon in history, and we can well dismiss those who want to raise it again by citing the prevarications of Alexander or Napoleon. And indeed, for the special and luminous figure of Lenin, even if he did not live through the period that would appear to be the classic period of the workers’ revolution, when this would show its greatest strengths in terrifying the philistines, the biography encounters new characters and the traditional historical clichés of greed for power, ambition, satrapism, pale and fade in comparison with the straight, simple and iron story of his life and the last detail of his personal habit.

The leaders and the leader are those who best and most effectively think the thought and will of the class, constructions that are as necessary as they are active of the premises that historical factors give us. Lenin was an eminent, extraordinary case of this function, in terms of intensity and extent. As wonderful as it is to follow the work of this man to the effect of understanding our collective dynamic of history, we will not, however, admit that his presence conditioned the revolutionary process at the head of which we saw him, and even less that his disappearance stops the working classes in their march.

The organisation into a party, which allows the class to truly be a class and live as such, presents itself as a unitary mechanism in which the various ’brains’ (not only brains of course, but also other individual organs) perform different tasks according to an aptitude and a potential, all in the service of a purpose and an interest that gradually become more and more intimately unified ’in time and space’ (this convenient expression has an empirical and non-transcendent meaning). Thus, not all individuals have the same place and weight in the organisation: as this division of labour takes place according to a more rational plan (and what is today for the party-class will be tomorrow for society). It is perfectly out of the question for those at the top to be privileged over the others. Our revolutionary evolution does not go towards disintegration, but towards the increasingly scientific connection of individuals with each other.

It is anti-individualist insofar as it is materialist; it does not believe in the soul or a metaphysical, transcendent content of the individual, but places the functions of the individual in a collective framework, creating a hierarchy that unfolds in the sense of increasingly eliminating coercion and replacing it with technical rationality. The party is already an example of a collectivity without coercion.

These general elements of the question show how no one better than us is beyond the banal meaning of egalitarianism and ’numerical’ democracy. If we do not believe in the individual as a sufficient basis of activity, what value can a function of the brute number of individuals have for us? What can democracy or autocracy mean to us? Yesterday we had a machine of the highest order (a ’champion of exceptional class’, sportspeople would say) and this we could put at the supreme apex of the hierarchical pyramid: today he is not there but the mechanism can continue to function with a slightly different hierarchy in which at the top there will be a collective body made up, it is understood, of chosen elements. The question is not posed to us with a legal content, but as a technical problem not prejudiced by philosophies of constitutional or, worse still, natural law. There is no principled reason for us to write ’chief’ or ’committee of chiefs’ in our statutes, and from this premise a Marxist solution to the question of choice begins: a choice that makes, more than anything else, the dynamic history of the movement and not the banality of elective consultations. We prefer not to write the word leader into the organisational rule because we will not always have within the ranks an individuality of the strength of a Marx or a Lenin. In conclusion, if the man, the ’instrument’ of exception exists, the movement uses him: but the movement lives the same when such an eminent personality is not to be found. Our theory of the leader is a long way from the nonsense with which theologies and official politics demonstrate the necessity of pontiffs, kings, ’first citizens’, dictators and dukes, poor puppets who delude themselves that they make history.

More than that: this process of elaboration of material belonging to a collectivity, which we see in the individual leader, just as it takes from the collectivity and returns to it enhanced and transformed energies, nothing can remove it from its circulation within the collectivity. The death of Lenin’s organism does not at all mean the end of this function if, as we have shown, in reality the material as he elaborated it must still be the vital nourishment of the class and the party. In this purely scientific sense, trying to guard ourselves, as far as possible, against mystical concepts and literary amplifications, we can speak of an immortality, and for the same reason of Lenin’s particular historical approach and his task to show how much broader this immortality is than that of the traditional heroes of which mysticism and literature speak to us.

Death remains for us not the eclipse of a conceptual life, since this has no basis in the person but in collective entities, it is a purely physical fact that can be scientifically assessed. Our absolute certainty that the intellectual function which corresponded to Lenin’s cerebral organ is by physical death arrested forever, and does not translate into an incorporeal Lenin whom we can celebrate as an invisible presence at our rituals. That mighty and admirable machine is unfortunately destroyed forever, then becomes the certainty that its function is continued and perpetuated in the organs of battle in the direction of which he excelled. He died, the autopsy showed how: through the progressive hardening of the cerebral vessels subjected to excessive and incessant pressure. Certain mechanisms of very high power have a short mechanical life: their exceptional exertion is a condition of their premature unusableness.

What killed Lenin was this physiological process, determined by the titanic work to which he wanted, and had to, subject himself in his supreme years, because the collective function demanded that this organ should run at the highest efficiency, and it could not be any other way. The resistance that opposed the revolutionary task ruined this magnificent tool, only after it had broken the vital points of the adverse matter on which it operated.

Lenin himself wrote that, even after the political victory of the proletariat, the struggle is not over; that we cannot, having killed the bourgeoisie, dispose of its monstrous corpse: it remains and decomposes in our midst and its pestilential miasmas pollute the air we breathe. These venomous products, in their multiple forms, have had their way with the best of the revolutionary creators. They appear to us as the immense labour necessary to confront the military and political exploits of world reaction and the plots of the counter-revolutionary sects, as the spasmodic effort to emerge from the atrocious straits of starvation produced by the capitalist bloc, to which Lenin had to subject his organism without being able to spare himself. They appear to us, among other things, as the revolver blows from the social-revolutionary Dora Kaplan, which remains lodged in Lenin’s flesh and contributes to the dissolving work. Striving to be up to the objectivity of our method, we can only find in this evaluation of pathological phenomena in social life the way to express a judgement on certain attitudes that otherwise would not, in their insulting senselessness, be susceptible to being judged, such as that of our local anarchists who commented on the death of the greatest fighter of the revolutionary class under the title: "Mourning or celebration?". These too are ferments of a past that must disappear: paranoid futurism has always been one of the manifestations of great crises. Lenin sacrificed himself in the struggle against these survivals that surrounded him even in the triple fortress of the first revolution; the struggle will still be long, but eventually the proletariat will win by rising up out of the manifold pitiful exhalations of a social state of anarchy and servitude, and their disgusting memory.


Our perspective of the future

At the moment of Lenin’s death, a question arises before us, and we will certainly not escape it. Has Lenin’s great prediction failed? Is the revolutionary crisis, which we awaited with him, postponed, and for how long?

It is not the first time that we Marxists have been reminded that the revolutionary, ’catastrophic’ predictions of our masters have been belied by facts. Especially in the works of socialist opportunists, one complacently enumerates how many times Marx waited for revolution and it did not come.

In 1847, ’49, ’50, ’62, and ’72, Marx repeats his conviction – and the relevant passages are quoted more or less exactly – that the economic-political crisis of capitalism corresponding to that given epoch being resolved in the social revolution. The passages are taken at random from theoretical works from that complex corpus that are the materials of Marxism. Of course, it is the same critics who would then serve us with a reformist Marx and all the ’peaceful sunsets’ without being able to tell us how it would then be reconciled with the precipitous and impatient Marx heralding apocalyptic catastrophes. But let us leave them and see what can be said of this delicate subject of revolutionary prediction.

If we consider the activity of a Marxist party in its purely theoretical aspect of the study of the situation and its developments, we must certainly admit that, if this elaboration had reached its maximum of precision, it should be possible, at least in very general lines, to say whether one is more or less close to the definitive revolutionary crisis. But, firstly, the conclusions of the Marxist critique are in continuous elaboration in the course of the formation of the proletariat into an ever more conscious class, and that degree of perfection is but a limit to which we strive to approximate. Secondly, our method, rather than having the pretension of enunciating a full-scale prophecy, intelligently applies determinism to establish statements in which a given thesis is conditioned by certain premises. Rather than knowing what will happen, we are interested in coming to say how a certain process will happen when certain conditions occur, and what will be different if the conditions are different. The fundamental affirmation of Marx and Lenin, which we claim as undeniable, is that modern capitalism generally lays down the necessary conditions for the proletarian revolution, and that when this takes place, it can only take place according to a certain process, the broad outlines of which we enunciate as the point of arrival of a vast critique, based on experience.

If we wanted to return here to the whole question of how this process can be hastened by the work of the proletarian party, it would not be difficult for us to come to this conclusion. The party must know how to prepare itself for how to behave in the most diverse eventualities, but since this is an empirical fact of history and not the reservoir of absolute and unquestionable truth, in which we do not believe as in a nec plus ultra, it is interesting that the party not only knows that when the revolution comes, one must act in a given way and be ready for those given tasks, but believes that the revolution will come as soon as possible. The total revolution as the dominant aim must so inspire the party’s action, even many years after it has taken place, that, as long as one does not fall into gross errors in the immediate assessment of the relationship of forces, we can say that it is “useful” that revolutionary forecasts are somewhat ahead of events.

History shows us that those who have not believed in revolutions have never made them: those who have so often anticipated them as imminent have often, if not always, seen them come true. It is true that less than for any other movement, the final goal is set for us with the function of a myth as the driving and determining force of action, but it is no less true that, in the objective and Marxist consideration of the formation of a psychology of the masses and also of the leaders, this magnification of revolutionary probability can, under the right conditions, have a useful task.

We do not say that the communist leader, even knowing the revolution to be impossible, must always declare it imminent. On the contrary, this dangerous demagogy must be avoided, and above all, the difficulties of revolutionary problems must be brought into view. But in a certain sense, the revolutionary perspective must be revived in the ideology of the party and the masses, as it is revived in the minds of the leaders themselves, in the form of a coming closer to us in time.

Marx lived in anticipation of the revolution, and this places him forever above the insult that revisionism has done him. Lenin after 1905, when Menshevism despaired of proletarian revolution, waited for it in 1906. Lenin was wrong: but what can make an impression on the workers? This mistake, which not only resulted in no strategic disaster, but ensured the autonomous life of the revolutionary party, or the fact that when, late if you like, the revolution came, Lenin was able to put himself at the head of it, while the Mensheviks ignobly went over to the enemy?

One or more of these failed predictions do not and will not diminish the figure of Lenin, all the more so as they do not diminish the figure of Marx, since Lenin actually gave the bourgeoisie a ’taste’ of what a revolution is. Let the reformists or anarchists protest that ’it is not a revolution’, which only serves to submerge them in the ridicule they deserve in the eyes of the simplest of proletarians.

In conclusion, of the two parts of which each of our revolutionary conclusions or ’forecasts’ is made up, the second is the vital one; the first, which can be translated, if you like, into a date that you try to prefix, is of secondary value, it is a postulate that must be posed for the purposes of agitation and propaganda, it is a partially arbitrary hypothesis like all those that must, by necessity, be posed by any army that prepares its plans assuming the movements of the enemy and other circumstances independent of the will of those who direct it.

But do we really want to ask ourselves what the prospects are today? Communists the world over claim as their own share Lenin’s thesis that the world war opened the revolutionary and ’final’ crisis of the capitalist world. There may have been minor errors in the assessment of the speed of this crisis and the speed with which the world proletariat could have taken advantage of it, but we stand by the essential part of the assertion, because the factual considerations on which it rests still stand.

It is possible that we will go through a phase of depression in revolutionary activity, not in the sense that the capitalist order will be reorganised in its foundations, but in the sense that revolutionary combativeness will be lower or less fortunate, and this, precisely because it does not contradict Lenin’s essential evaluations, exposes us to the danger of a phase of opportunist activity.

In the beginning of The State and Revolution Lenin himself says that it is fatal for the great revolutionary pioneers to be falsified: as was the case with Marx and his best followers. Will Lenin himself escape this fate? Certainly not, although it is certain that the attempt will have less of a response in the ranks of the proletariat, which by instinct will follow to hear in Lenin’s name not the word of mistrust, but that of generous encouragement to fight. However, we already see the bourgeoisie of the world, astonished and dismayed at the solidity of the regime founded by Lenin, of which they are only now realising that the mourning of a hundred and more million men is manifested in a way that surpasses all historical memories of collective demonstrations, consoling themselves by describing a Lenin who is different from his idea, his cause, his flag, a Lenin who is victorious, yes, but because he has been able to recoil from a part of the front, because he has abandoned vital parts of his programme. We reject these deceptive compliments: the greatest revolutionary has no need of opposers’ consensus and concessions from the scribes of capital’s press: we do not believe in the sincerity of these tributes across the class front, and we recognise in them only a new aspect of the influences that the bourgeoisie organises in order to dominate the ideology of the proletariat as much as it can. United around Lenin’s coffin is the ardent fervour of the world’s millions of proletarians and the hatred, even if not always dared to confess, of the capitalist scoundrels, to whom he made the sting of revolution be felt in the flesh, the implacable point that searches for its heart, and will find it.

This hypocritical attitude of bourgeois thought almost certainly preludes other attempts at falsification, more or less close to us, against which tomorrow’s militants have a duty to fight: a duty to be fulfilled, if not with the same brilliance, however with the same decision Lenin showed if compared to the masters of Marxism.

I cannot here even sketch an examination of the current world situation. We are in the presence of a retreat of the forces of the working class in many countries, where fascist-type forms prevail, and we are not so naive as to contrast those countries, in addition to the great and glorious Soviet Union of Russia, with those in which other feats of the bourgeois left and social democracy are being initiated and prepared, the sort of MacDonald and Vandervelde. The capitalist offensive was and is an international affair: and it attempts to bring about the unification of the anti-proletarian forces in order to politically and militarily counter revolutionary threats, to depress the economic treatment of the working classes beyond measure.

But although, in broad outline, this is the bourgeois attempt to fill, with this depression of wages, the gaps brought by the war to the mass of wealth, the very success of the political offensive in many countries, and the examination of the results from the point of view of world economy, allow us to conclude more and more that the disruption brought to the bourgeois system is irreparable. Apparent recoveries and attempted expedients only result in further difficulties and insurmountable contrasts: all the countries of the world are heading for a further economic depression, and today, to mention but one more, we are witnessing the unravelling of the financial power of France, the political bulwark of bourgeois reaction, as a repercussion of the crisis in the reparations question. The vaunted improvement of the Italian economy certainly cannot be contrasted with all this, since, even if the tawdry propaganda with which it is claimed to be credited were right, it would not change the general picture. But you all know how in Italy not only the proletariat, but the upper classes themselves, go through a period of malaise and economic tension that worsens every day. In Italy there is a political apparatus that, better than any other, tends to weigh the consequences on the working classes, saving above all the industrial and agrarian profiteering classes.

For us, the bourgeois counter-offensive is proof of the inevitability of revolution, which has entered the consciousness of the ruling classes themselves. For the superiority of the revolutionary Marxist doctrine is also in this, that the opposing classes themselves are forced to feel its justness and act according to this feeling, despite the continuous abortions of doctrines and ideological restorations that they put into circulation for the use of the foolish. If we could resume the examination of the means by which the bourgeoisie has done what it could to find ways out from the aforementioned ’catastrophic predictions’ thrown in its face by the theoreticians of the proletariat, we would see how the coupling to the deceptive expedients of economic and political collaboration – of which the standard-bearers were, are, and will certainly still be the democrats and social democrats – of the method of open counter-attack and punitive expeditions, shows that all resources are now at stake for reaction, and that it will soon have nothing left to oppose the fatality of its collapse, even if its intention is to prefer the collapse, with the bourgeois regime, of all human social life to the victory of the revolution.

How this development will take place and how it will affect the formation of the fighting phalanx of the proletariat, undermined by enemy’s enticements and bullying, is not given here to say. But all our experience, the doctrine built on it by the working class, the colossal contribution made to this titanic work by Lenin himself, lead us to conclude that we will not see a stable phase of the reorganisation of private capitalism and bourgeois rule. Through continuous shocks, and we do not know how soon, we will arrive at the outcome that the theory of Marxism and the example of the Russian revolution point us to.

Lenin may not have calculated well the distance that separates us from this historical outlet: but we remain, with a formidable array of arguments, authorised to maintain that, on the troubled path, the history of tomorrow will pass through Lenin, will reproduce the revolutionary phases whose Marxist perspective he has revived in theory and tempered in realisation.

This is the unwavering position we take before any momentary prevalence of opposing forces, before any of tomorrow’s attempts at oblique revisionism.

The theoretical, political, organisational weapons which Lenin hands over to us, are already battle-tested and victorious, they are hardened enough to be able to defend the work of the revolution, his work.

Lenin’s work brilliantly shows us our task, and by following his admirable path we, in turn, we communist proletariat of the world, will show how revolutionaries know how to dare at the supreme moment, just as they will have known, in the tormented vigils, how to wait without betrayal, without hesitation, without doubt, without deserting or abandoning for a moment the grandiose work: the demolition of the monstrous edifice of bourgeois oppression.