Italian Socialist Party THESES OF THE COMMUNIST ABSTENTIONIST FRACTION May 1920 [ I - II - III ] |
1. Communism is the doctrine of the social and historical preconditions
for the emancipation of the proletariat.
The elaboration of this doctrine began in the period
of the first proletarian movements against the effects of the bourgeois
system of production. It took shape in the Marxist critique of the capitalist
economy, the method of historical materialism, the theory of class struggle
and the conception of the development which will take place in the historical
process of the fall of the capitalist regime and the proletarian revolution.
2. It is on the basis of this doctrine which found its first and fundamental systematic expression in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 that the Communist Party is constituted.
3. In the present historical period, the situation created by bourgeois relations of production, based on the private ownership of the means of production and exchange, on the private appropriation of the products of collective labour and on free competition in private trade of all products, becomes more and more intolerable for the proletariat.
4. To these economic relations correspond the political institutions characteristic of capitalism: the state based on democratic and parliamentary representation. In a society divided into classes, the state is the organisation of the power of the class which is economically privileged. Although the bourgeoisie represents a minority within society, the democratic state represents the system of armed force organised for the purpose of preserving the capitalist relations of production.
5. The struggle of the proletariat against capitalist exploitation assumes
a succession of forms going from the violent destruction of machines of
the organisation on a craft basis to improve working conditions, to the
creation of factory councils, and to attempts to take possession of enterprises.
In all these individual actions, the proletariat
moves in the direction of the decisive revolutionary struggle against the
power of the bourgeois state, which prevents the present relations of production
from being broken.
6. This revolutionary struggle is the conflict between the whole proletarian
class and the whole bourgeois class. Its instrument is the political class
party, the communist party, which achieves the conscious organisation of
the proletarian vanguard aware of the necessity of unifying its action,
in space by transcending the interests of particular groups, trades or
nationalities and in time by subordinating to the final outcome of
the struggle the partial gains and conquests which do not modify the essence
of the bourgeois structure.
Consequently it is only by organising itself into
a political party that the proletariat constitutes itself into a class
struggling for its emancipation.
7. The objective of the action of the Communist Party is the violent overthrow of bourgeois rule, the conquest of political power by the proletariat, and the organisation of the latter into a ruling class.
8. Parliamentary democracy in which citizens of every class are represented is the form assumed by the organisation of the bourgeoisie into a ruling class. The organisation of the proletariat into a ruling class will instead be achieved through the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, through a type of state in which representation (the system of workers’ councils) will be decided only by members of the working class (the industrial proletariat and the poor peasants), with the bourgeois being denied the right to vote.
9. After the old bureaucratic, police and military machine has been destroyed, the proletarian state will unify the armed forces of the labouring class into an organisation which will have as its task the repression of all counter-revolutionary attempts by the dispossessed class and the execution of measures of intervention into bourgeois relations of production and property.
10. The process of transition from the capitalist economy to a communist one will be extremely complex and its phases will differ according to differing degrees of economic development. The end-point of this process will be the total achievement of the ownership and management of the means of production by the whole unified collectivity, together with the central and rational distribution of productive forces among the different branches of production, and finally the central administration of the allocation of products by the collectivity.
11. When capitalist economic relationships have been entirely eliminated, the abolition of classes will be an accomplished fact and the state, as a political apparatus of power, will be progressively replaced by the rational, collective administration of economic and social activity.
12. The process of transforming the relations of production will be accompanied by a wide range of social measures stemming from the principle that the collectivity takes charge of the physical and intellectual existence of all its members. In this way, all the birth marks which the proletariat has inherited from the capitalist world will be progressively eliminated and, in the words of the Manifesto, in place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
13. The pre-condition for the victory of proletarian power in the struggle
for the realisation of communism are to be found not so much in the rational
use of skills in technical tasks, as in the fact that political responsibilities
and the control of the state apparatus are confided to those people who
will put the general interest and the final triumph of communism before
the particular and limited interests of groups.
Precisely because the Communist Party is the organisation
of proletarians who have achieved this class consciousness, the aim of
the party will be, by its propaganda, to win elective posts for its members
within the social organisation. The dictatorship of the proletariat with
therefore be the dictatorship of the Communist Party and the latter will
be a party of government in a sense totally opposed to that of the old
oligarchies, for communists will assume responsibilities which will demand
the maximum of sacrifice and renunciation and they will take upon their
shoulders the heaviest burden of the revolutionary task which falls on
the proletariat in the difficult labour through which a new world will
come to birth.
1. The critique which communists continuously make on the basis of the fundamental methods of Marxism, and the propagation of the conclusions to which it leads, have as their objective the extirpation of those influences which the ideological systems of other classes and other parties have over the proletariat.
2. First of all, communism sweeps away idealist conceptions which consider
the material of the world of thought as the base, and not the result, of
the real relations of human life and of their development. All religious
and philosophical formulations of this type must be considered as the ideological
baggage of classes whose supremacy which preceded the bourgeois epoch
rested on an ecclesiastical, aristocratic or dynastic organisation receiving
its authority only from a pretended super-human investiture.
One Symptom of the decadence of the modern bourgeoisie
is the fact that those old ideologies which it had itself destroyed reappear
in its midst under new forms.
A communism founded on idealist bases would be an
unacceptable absurdity.
3. In still more characteristic fashion, communism is the demolition of the conceptions of liberalism and bourgeois democracy by the Marxist critique. The juridical assertion of freedom of thought and political equality of citizens, and the idea that institutions founded on the rights of the majority and on the mechanism of universal electoral representation are a sufficient base for a gradual and indefinite progress of human society, are ideologies which correspond to the regime of private economy and free competition, and to the interests of the capitalist class.
4. One of the illusions of bourgeois democracy is the belief that the living conditions of the masses can be improved through increasing the education and training provided by the ruling classes and their institutions. In fact it is the opposite: raise the intellectual level of the great masses demands, as a pre-condition, a better standard of material life, something which is incompatible with the bourgeois regime. Moreover through its schools, the bourgeoisie tries to broadcast precisely the ideologies which inhibit the masses from perceiving the present institutions as the very obstacle to their emancipation.
5. Another fundamental tenet of bourgeois democracy lies in the principle
of nationality. The formation of states on a national basis corresponds
to the class necessities of the bourgeoisie at the moment when it establishes
its own power, in that it can thus avail itself of national and patriotic
ideologies (which correspond to certain interests common in the initial
period of capitalism to people of the same race, language and customs)
and use them to delay and mitigate the conflict between the capitalist
state and the proletarian masses.
National irredentisms are thus born of essentially
bourgeois interests.
The bourgeoisie itself does not hesitate to trample
on the principle of nationality as soon as the development of capitalism
drives it to the often violent conquest of foreign markets and of the resulting
conflict among the great states over the latter. Communism transcends the
principle of nationality in that it demonstrates the identical predicament
in which the mass of disinherited workers find themselves with respect
to employers, whatever may be the nationality of either the former or the
latter; it proclaims the international association to be the type of political
organisation which the proletariat will create when it, in turn, comes
to power.
In the perspective of the communist critique, therefore,
the recent world war was brought about by capitalist imperialism. This
critique demolishes those various interpretations which take up the viewpoint
of one or another bourgeois state and try to present the war as a vindication
of the national rights of certain peoples or as a struggle of democratically
more advanced states against those organised on pre-bourgeois forms, or
finally, as a supposed necessity of self-defence against enemy aggression.
6. Communism is likewise opposed to the conceptions of bourgeois pacifism and to Wilsonian illusions on the possibility of a world association of states, based on disarmament and arbitration and having as its pre-condition the Utopia of a sub-division of state units by nationality. For communists, war will become impossible and national questions will be solved only when the capitalist regime has been replaced by the International Communist Republic.
7. In a third area, communism presents itself as the transcendence of the systems of utopian socialism which seek to eliminate the faults of social organisation by instituting complete plans for a new organisation of society whose possibility of realisation was not put in relation to the real development of history.
8. The proletariat’s elaboration of its own interpretation of society and history to guide its action against the social relations of the capitalist world, continuously gives rise to a multitude of schools or currents, influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the very immaturity of the conditions of struggle and by all the various bourgeois prejudices. From all this arise the errors and setbacks in proletarian action. But it is due to this material of experience that the communist movement succeeds in defining with ever greater clarity the central features of its doctrine and its tactics, differentiating itself clearly from all the other currents active within the proletariat itself and openly combating them.
9. The formation of producers’ cooperatives, in which the capital belongs to the workers who work for them, cannot be a path towards the suppression of the capitalist system. This is because the acquisition of raw materials and the distribution of products are effected according to the laws of private economy and consequently, credit, and therefore private capital ultimately exercises control over the collective capital of the cooperative itself.
10. Communists cannot consider economic trade or craft organisations
to be sufficient for the struggle for the proletarian revolution or as
the basic organs of the communist economy.
The organisation of the class through trade unions
serves to neutralise competition between workers of the same trade and
prevents wages falling to the lowest level. However it cannot lead to the
elimination of capitalist profit, still less to the unification of the
workers of all trades against the privilege of bourgeois power. Further,
the simple transfer of the ownership of the enterprises from the private
employer to the workers’ union could not achieve the basic economic features
of communism, for the latter necessitates the transfer of ownership to
the whole proletarian collectivity since this is the only way to eliminate
the characteristics of the private economy in the appropriation and distribution
of products.
Communists consider the union as the site of an
initial proletarian experience which permits the workers to
go further
towards the concept and the practice of political struggle, which has as
its organ the class party.
11. In general, it is an error to believe that the revolution is a question
of forms of organisations which proletarians groups into according to their
position and interests within the framework of the capitalist system of
production.
It is not a modification of the structure of economic
organisations, then, which can provide the proletariat with an effective
instrument for its emancipation.
Factory unions and factory councils emerge as organs
for the defence of the interests of the proletarians of different enterprises
at the point when it begins to appear possible that capitalist despotism
in the management of the enterprises could be limited. But obtaining the
right of these organisations to supervise (to monitor) production to a
more or less large degree is not incompatible with the capitalist system
and could even be used by it as a means to preserve its domination.
Even the transfer of factory management to factory
councils would not mean (any more than in the case of the unions) the advent
of the communist system. According to the true communist conception, workers’
supervision of production will not be achieved until after the overthrow
of the bourgeois power, and it will be a supervision over the running of
every enterprise exercised by the whole proletariat unified in the state
of workers’ councils. Communist management of production will be the direction
of every branch and every productive unit by rational collective organs
which will represent the interests of all workers united in the work of
building communism.
12. Capitalist relations of production cannot be modified by the intervention
of the organs of bourgeois power.
This is why the transfer of private enterprises
to the state or to the local government does not correspond in the slightest
to the communist conception. Such a transfer is invariably accompanied
by the payment of the capital value of the enterprise to the former owners
who thus fully retain their right to exploit. The enterprises themselves
continue to function as private enterprises within the framework of the
capitalist economy, and they often become convenient instruments in the
work of class preservation and defence undertaken by the bourgeois state.
13. The idea that capitalist exploitation of the proletariat can be gradually diminished and then eliminated by the legislative and reformist action of present political institutions, be it elicited by representatives of the proletarian party inside those institutions or even by mass agitation, leads only to complicity in the defence of the privileges of the bourgeoisie. The latter will on occasion pretend to give up a minimum of its privileges to try to appease the anger of the masses and to divert their revolutionary attempts against the bases of the capitalist regime.
14. The conquest of political power by the proletariat, even if such
an objective is considered as the final, total aim of its action, cannot
be achieved by winning a majority within bourgeois elective organs.
Thanks to the executive organs of the state, which
are the direct agents of the bourgeoisie, the latter very easily ensures
a majority within the elective organs for its delegates or for those elements
which fall under its influence or into its game because they want to individually
or collectively win elective posts. Moreover, participation in such institutions
requires the agreement to respect the juridical and [political bases of
the bourgeois constitution. This agreement is merely formal but nevertheless
it is sufficient to free the bourgeoisie from even the slightest embarrassment
of an accusation of formal illegality at the point when it will logically
resort to its real means of armed defence rather than abandon power and
permit the proletariat to smash its bureaucratic and military machine of
domination.
15. To recognise the necessity of insurrectionary struggle for the seizure of power, while at the same time proposing that the proletariat exercise its power by conceding representation to the bourgeoisie in new political organisations (constituent assemblies or combinations of these with the system of workers’ councils) is an unacceptable programme and is opposed to the central communist demand, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The process of expropriating the bourgeoisie would be immediately compromised if this class retained a means to influence somehow the formation of the representative organs of the expropriating proletarian state. This would permit the bourgeoisie to use the influence which it will inevitably retain because of its experience and its intellectual and technical training, in order to deploy its political activity towards the reestablishment of its power in a counter-revolution. The same consequences would result if the slightest democratic prejudice was allowed to survive in regard to an equality of treatment which is supposedly to be granted to the bourgeois by the proletarian power in such matters as freedom of association, propaganda and the press.
16. The programme which proposes an organ of political representation based on delegates from the various trades and professions of all the social classes is not even in form a road leading to the system of workers’ councils, since the latter is characterised by the exclusion of the bourgeois from electoral rights and its central organisation is not chosen on the basis of trade but by territorial constituency. The form of representation in question is rather an inferior stage even in comparison with present parliamentary democracy.
17. Anarchism is profoundly opposed to the ideas of communism. It aims
at the immediate installation of a society without a state and political
system and advocates, for the economy of the future, the autonomous functioning
of units of production, rejecting any concept of a central organisation
and regulation of human activities in production and distribution. Such
a conception is close to that of the bourgeois private economy and remains
alien to the fundamental essence of communism. Moreover the immediate elimination
of the state as a machinery of political power would be equivalent to a
failure to offer resistance to the counter-revolution, unless one pre-supposes
that classes have been immediately abolished, that is to say that there
has been the so-called revolutionary expropriation simultaneous with the
insurrection against bourgeois power.
Not the slightest possibility of this exists, given
the complexity of the proletarian tasks in the substitution of the communist
economy for the present one, and given the necessity that such a process
be directed by a central organisation representing the general interest
of the proletariat and subordinating to this interest all the local and
particular interests which act as the principal conservative force within
capitalism.
1. The communist doctrine and economic determinism do not see communists as passive spectators of historical destiny but on the contrary as indefatigable fighters. Struggle and action, however, would be ineffective if divorced from the lessons of doctrine and of experience seen in the light of the communist critique.
2. The revolutionary work of communists is based on the organisation into a party of those proletarians who unite a consciousness of communist principles with the decision to devote all their energy to the cause of the revolution. The party, organised internationally, functions on the basis of discipline towards the decisions of the majority and towards the decisions of the central organs chosen by that majority to lead the movement.
3. Propaganda and proselytism in which the party accepts new members only on the basis of the most sure guarantees are fundamental activities of the party. Although it bases the success of its action on the propagation of its principles and final objectives and although it struggles in the interest of the immense majority of society, the communist movement does not make the approval of the majority a pre-condition for its action. The criterion which determines the occasion to launch a revolutionary action is the objective evaluation of our own forces and those of our enemies, taking into consideration all the complex factors of which the numerical element is not the sole or even the most important determinant.
4. The communist party, develops an intense work of study and political critique intimately linked to the exigencies of action and to historical experience, and it strives to organise this work on an international basis. Externally, in all circumstances and with the means at its disposal, it works to diffuse the lessons of its own critical experience and to refute enemy schools and parties. Above all, the party conducts its activity and propaganda among the proletarian masses and works to polarise them around it, particularly at those times when they are set in motion in reaction against the conditions capitalism imposes upon them and especially within organisations formed by proletarians to defend their immediate interests.
5. Communists therefore penetrate proletarian cooperatives, unions, factory councils, and form groups of communist workers within them. They strive to win a majority and posts of leadership so that the mass of proletarians mobilised by these associations subordinate their action to the highest political and revolutionary ends of the struggle for communism.
6. The communist party, on the other hand, remains outside all institutions and associations in which bourgeois and workers participate in common, or worse still, which are led and sponsored by members of the bourgeoisie (societies of mutual assistance, charities, cultural schools, popular universities, Freemasons’ Lodges, etc.). It combats the action and influence of these institutions and associations and tries to divert proletarians from them.
7. Participation in elections to the representative organs of bourgeois
democracy and participation in parliamentary activity, while always presenting
a continuous danger of deviation, may be utilised for propaganda and for
schooling the movement during the period in which there does not yet exist
the possibility of overthrowing bourgeois rule and in which, as a consequence,
the party’s task is restricted to criticism and opposition. In the present
period, which began with the end of the world war, with the first communist
revolutions and the creation of the Third International, communists pose,
as the direct objective of the political action of the proletariat in every
country, the revolutionary conquest of power, to which end all the energy
and all the preparatory work of the party must be devoted.
In this period, it is inadmissible to participate
in these organs which function as a powerful defensive instrument of the
bourgeoisie and which are designed to operate even within the ranks of
the proletariat. It is precisely in opposition to these organs, to their
structure as to their function, that communists call for the system of
workers’ councils and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Because of the great importance which electoral
activity assumes in practice, it is not possible to reconcile this activity
with the assertion that it is not the means of achieving the principal
objective of the party’s action, which is the conquest of power. It also
is not possible to prevent it from absorbing all the activity of the movement
and from diverting it from revolutionary preparation.
8. The electoral conquest of local governmental bodies entails the same inconveniences as parliamentarism but to an even greater degree. It cannot be accepted as a means of action against bourgeois power for two reasons: 1) these local bodies have no real power but are subjected to the state machine, and 2) although the assertion of the principle of local autonomy can cause some embarrassment for the ruling bourgeoisie, such a method would have the result of providing it with a base of operations in its struggle against the establishment of proletarian power and is contrary to the communist principle of centralised action.
9. In the revolutionary period, all the efforts of the communists concentrate on enabling the action of the masses to attain a maximum of intensity and efficiency. Communists combine propaganda and revolutionary preparation with the organisation of large and frequent proletarian demonstrations above all in the major centres and strive to use economic movements in order to organise demonstrations of a political character in which the proletariat reaffirms and strengthens its will to overthrow the bourgeois power.
10. The Communist Party carries its propaganda into the ranks of the bourgeois army. Communist anti-militarism is not based on a sterile humanitarianism. Its aim instead is to convince proletarians that the bourgeoisie arms them to defend its own interests and to use their force against the cause of the proletariat.
11. The Communist Party trains itself to act as the general staff of the proletariat in the revolutionary war. For this reason it prepares and organises its own network of intelligence and communication. Above all, it supports and organises the arming of the proletariat.
12. The Communist Party concludes no agreements or alliances with other
political movements which share with it a specific immediate objective,
but diverge from it in their programme of further action. It must equally
refuse the alliance otherwise known as the "united front" with all
working class tendencies which accept insurrectionary action against the
bourgeoisie but diverge from the communist programme in the development
of subsequent action.
Communists have no reason to consider the growth
of forces tending to overthrow bourgeois power as a favourable condition
when the forces working for the constitution of proletarian power on communist
directives remain insufficient, since only a communist leadership can assure
its success.
13. The soviets or councils of workers, peasants and soldiers, constitute
the organs of proletarian power and can exercise their true function only
after the overthrow of bourgeois rule.
Soviets are not in themselves organs of revolutionary
struggle. They become revolutionary when the Communist Party wins a majority
within them.
Workers’ councils can also arise before the revolution,
in a period of acute crisis in which the state power is seriously threatened.
In a revolutionary situation, it may be necessary
for the party to take the initiative in forming soviets, but this cannot
be a means of precipitating such a situation. If the power of the bourgeoisie
is strengthened, the survival of councils can present a serious danger
to the revolutionary struggle the danger of a conciliation and a combination
of proletarian organs with the organs of bourgeois democracy.
14. What distinguishes communists is not that, in every situation and
in every episode of the class struggle, they call for the immediate mobilisation
of all proletarian forces for a general insurrection. What distinguishes
them is that they clearly say that the phase of insurrection is an inevitable
outcome of the struggle, and that they prepare the proletariat to face
it in conditions favourable to the success and the further development
of the revolution.
Depending on the situation which the party can
better assess than the rest of the proletariat the party can therefore
find itself confronted with the necessity to act in order to hasten or
to delay the moment of the decisive battle. In any event, the specific
task of the party is to fight against those who, desiring to hasten revolutionary
action at any price, could drive the proletariat into disaster, and against
the opportunists who exploit every occasion in which decisive action is
undesirable in order to block the revolutionary movement by diverting the
action of the masses towards other objectives. The Communist Party, on
the contrary, must lead the action of the masses always further in an effective
preparation for the final and inevitable armed struggle against the defensive
forces of bourgeois rule.