The past of our being

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The past of our being[1]

Only one human practice is immediately theory: revolution.
Human knowledge advances through social revolutions.
The rest is silence.

Amadeo Bordiga

The purpose of this text is to return to a fundamental debate that took place during the founding of the III International, almost a hundred years ago. A debate between the official communist movement and those who were infected by the virus of «leftist childishness», in the controversial words of Lenin. A debate between well-known characters, like Lenin or Trotsky, and some lesser known, but also largely misrepresented, like Pannekoek, Gorter, Otto Rühle or Amadeo Bordiga.

But why return to this debate? What is the use of discussing debates from almost a hundred years ago? Actually, the big problem of those who consider themselves to be «radical left» is the complete ignorance of these debates and discussions. Without memory of these events, they live in a continuous present that leads them, unwittingly, to make the same mistakes over and over, doomed to be the capital’s left.

In the early stages of the III International key elements were discussed around what is a revolution, what is the nature of communism, the essence of bourgeois political institutions, what is the utility of achieving hegemony within the proletariat before the outbreak of a revolutionary process, or also which tactics and strategies to adopt to terminate with capitalist social relations: the intervention (or not) of the communists in parliaments and unions, strategies such as the united front or the need to build Workers Governments within capitalist regimes, the defense (or not) of the right to self-determination of peoples…

As we understand, these are issues that always resurface for anyone and any organization that wants to radically change this decaying society that is the realm of capital. What is there to do at a time when a revolutionary perspective of the transformation of society is neither current nor immediate? When its need has never been greater, but at the same time its immediate horizon is nowhere to be seen? Wouldn’t it be useful, at least, to try to carry through a minimum programme of improvement of the living conditions of “the social majorities”, “getting our hands dirty” within bourgeois parliaments and unions, in the construction of national independence (as the CUP do), in the alliance with sectors less reactionary than others…? We must leave the alleged ivory tower in which we, the maximalists, the leftists, live delighted by our abstract doctrinalism. The rise of Podemos has led to a tide that dragged a good part of the organizations of the so-called «radical left», especially in its «Trotskyist» version (see the case of Anticapitalistas). For us, the form of neo-reformism that Podemos embodies is an anticipated failure; its only virtue is ideological, in order to reinforce the (harmful) hopes of our class in the democratic regime and therefore in the impersonal realm of capital. In Podemos and its different civic ramifications, a multitude of currents from the radical left have been submerged; not just Trotskyists (used to as they are to harmful entryism operations, harmful, above all, to their militants) but also autonomous and libertarian. It is increasingly evident how Podemos resembles just another party of the regime. Hopes for change (even if moderate and small-scale) have found (from the experiences of Syriza or municipal governments) that evictions continue, that the municipal police of Madrid and Barcelona persecute and detain the most disadvantaged, the undocumented immigrants, and that they take pride in paying the debt more promptly than the political rivals.

To face this neo reformism we only know one remedy, one weapon, one instrument: theory. A theory that, in our case, starts from understanding one of Marx’s main contributions: his theory on capital and value. We have explained in numerous texts published on our website that the great limit of these forms of neo-reformism comes from their idea of the autonomy of politics, from the belief that there can be a government outside the course and needs of capital and its impersonal movements[2]. The function determines the organ. The alleged rulers are officials of the movements of the market, and have gotten a bad time, an era in which the real bases of capital tend to run out due to the expulsion of living work -from whose vampire suction the capital lives – that the technological revolution entails. The real impossibility -and not only ideological- of a reform of capital leads to a dynamic of social and human barbarism that extends like an unstoppable oil stain.

But then, a theory that describes the necrology of capital and its catastrophic tendency to collapse is not enough. As Bordiga said, Marx’s Capital is an anticipatory theory of communism. But, as Bordiga himself knew, an organic reflection on the communist program is necessary for this. And in this we have a substantial difference with authors such as Robert Kurz or Anselm Jappe, on who we rely for their reflection on the internal limits of capital, but whose catastrophism -in the absence of a programmatic reflection, of communist nature, that sustains itself in the historical thread which is essential we reappropriate to continue bashing it- leads to a «social democracy of the catastrophe»[3].

Because of this, it is essential to address one of the main sources of that historical thread. The one that was knotted a hundred years ago, when, for almost a decade, millions of proletarians everywhere shuddered the established order.

The revolutionary wave of 1917-1927

We will focus on the period that goes from the Russian February Revolution, whose centenary is about to be met, to the failure of the 1927 Chinese revolution, massacred by the Kuomintang in Shanghai, precisely because of the stubborn search for progressive alliances that characterized the politics of International Stalinism.

Actually, the revolutionary wave begins to decrease decisively from 1921, which is the last moment of rise of the German revolution, with the March Action creating decisive clashes in Saxony. The year before, the workers ‘council movement in Italy had washed up. Even so, there would be decisive moments of social confrontation in Germany and Bulgaria in 1923, in the United Kingdom in 1926, until arriving in China in 1927. That change of trajectory of the revolutionary wave is fundamental to understand the programmatic debates that constitute the root of our article. The German revolution bursts in November 1918, from the Kiel sailors. Immediately, the workers’ councils spread everywhere, through all German cities, forcing the fall of the II Reich. Within a few days, World War I ended, on November 11 at 11 hours. The extension of the revolutionary wave to the heart of central Europe was too much for the economic elites of the international bourgeoisie to handle. The bloody conflict that caused more than ten million deaths among workers had to be stopped before the revolution terminated the elites. The German social democracy, as in 1914, would be fundamental to end the revolution and lead the counter-revolution that would kill more than one hundred thousand proletarians between 1918 and 1923.

But there is a first aspect that we think is very important to acknowledge. Revolutions are not made or prepared, they arise, they create themselves, they are an expression of creativity and social imaginary, of human autonomy and of their capacity for self-institution. Which party created the soviets? That wonderful form of social community in revolution that, from Russia, would invade the world, from Petrograd to Seattle, from Vienna to Torino, from Finland to Brazil… One form -the tendency to constitute massive and open assemblies, which arises every time there is a movement of insurrection or social struggle of our class- that has been repeated permanently in revolutions and past revolts: from the Barcelona committees of 1936 to the Hungarian Councils of 1956, from the workers‘ revolt of East Berlin in 1953 to the massive assemblies of Polish workers of 1980, from the commissions of neighbors of Portugal in 1974 to the Tahrir Square of Egypt in 2011, or otherwise the massive assemblies of 15M. What these forms state is the seed of communism. Faced with the separation and atomization that prevails in the realm of capital and its form of representative democracy -where we vote as idiots, in the Greek sense, isolated from each other, in the councils the common being is rediscovered, the other as the one on whom I base myself, the strength and the beauty of being together. We obviously do not fetishize the council form -it would be one of the main limits of the DutchGerman left, as we will see-, but its form expresses, without a doubt, that the communist project is not an ideology but a real movement that tends to deny and to overcome the existing conditions of capital, from which the contradiction and antagonism –inseparable- of the relationship between capital and wage labor, in some occasions, class movements awaken that tend to deny the isolation and the consubstantial separations to the realm of capital, and that, in this sense, tend to express forms of social organization that contain in germs a communist, community content, and in its forms show a new form, not alienated or fictitious, of human community.

As Bordiga used to say, in normal periods what dominates is social atomization, the separation of a fragmented social fabric. The revolution supposes a human ionization: what once were citizen and democratic particles and atoms, separated from each other, tend to converge in a joint dynamic, breaking with social and citizen fragmentation. The important thing is to understand that this dynamic is “spontaneous”, meaning, it is born from the same dynamic of self-activity and social creation that emerges from a process of social revolution. It’s normal, on the other hand, that it’s like that, because if capital is based on our separations, any process of social ascent which has an anti-capitalist component, finds its lifeblood in denying such separations.

Revolutions are not made, they just arise. Hence the absurdity of building parties for the revolution. Virtually all revolutions have instituted themselves, in the absence of the famous revolutionary party so beloved to Leninists and Trotskyists. The possibility of triumph and the deployment of a communist revolution is a completely different thing. Communism, as a possibility, has to be born from the process of communization and transformation of social relations and the daily life that unfolds concomitantly with the destruction of the State and the struggle against capital, value and their different metamorphosis. The function of a communist organization is not to inject consciousness from the outside, that is, the Leninist model of What is to be done?; but to be a catalyst that accelerates the development of communist consciousness and perspective within the class, that is, to favor the process of constitution of the proletariat in class, in a party -following Marx in the Communist Manifesto-. As Bordiga defended, the party is the class: the class that self-emancipates, as Marx pointed out in the Statutes of the First International.

Thus, the task of a communist organization is no less than in the Leninist model. On the contrary, it is harder, since it’s not about replacing the class, trying to achieve their trust and acquiescence and being their recognized direction. It’s about being an organ within the class that does not overcome it but tries to get the class to deepen itself in the perspective of the struggle for communism. As we will see throughout this extensive essay, it is not a semantic issue. Its profound meaning, what we ultimately understand by communism (and whether it is an autonomous or heteronomous society, a distant society or a goal to fight from now on) deeply connects with the idea of the organization to be built and how to relate to the State, politics, trade unions, parliaments, immediate struggles, etc.

The foundation of the III International

The III International held its I Congress in 1919 in Moscow. It was founded in the heat of a revolutionary wave that extended through Russia, Finland, the Baltic States, Italy, Austria, Hungary, and a long list of territories that culminated in Germany. Hence, it would actually be at the II Congress of the International, in 1920, at the same time that the Bolshevik Red Army was at the gates of Warsaw, when they would begin to raise some of the most important issues that concern the sense of this writing. It’s not by chance that it was in this Congress when one of Lenin’s worst texts is presented: «Left-Wing» Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

But, as we said in the previous paragraph, it is essential that we turn to Germany, because the result of the revolution in that country, and the different currents that would arise from the German process, are essential to recover the historical thread we were talking about at the beginning of our work.

In November 1918 the German revolution broke out after the insurrection of the Kiel sailors, who refused to go into combat as the Imperial High General Staff wanted. The spontaneous creation of the German councils saw the immediate reaction of the German SPD[4], which would control their constitution process -which is a warning against the formal fetishism of these institutions, as if they were communists themselves.

The revolutionaries were then divided between anarchists and Marxists. The weight of German anarchism was important – and in part converged with the Unionen fed by the German communist left, the KAPD, as we will see – through the creation in 1918 of the FAUD (Free Workers Union of Germany). While the Marxist forces to the left of the SPD and the USPD[5] were constituted by two main  currents: the Spartacus League, around Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and the IKD (Internationalist Communists of Germany), influenced by Herman Gorter and Anton Pannekoek, who directed the Dutch newspaper Die Tribune.

But in this collective discussion, Pannekoek’s elaborations were particularly important, who not only highlighted, like Rosa Luxemburg, the importance of the spontaneous dynamics of the revolutionary process, but also drew and developed decisive lessons from the point of view of the principles of a communist program[6]. Pannekoek in particular recovered the lessons Marx had developed on the State, in The Civil War in France, from the experience of the Paris Commune: the State does not have to be conquered or taken, but destroyed and replaced by a Staless-State, supported by the self-organization of the revolutionary process itself. The Soviet and councilist dynamic of the revolution was a development in the line of the Marxian revolutionary perspective. In fact, Pannekoek’s theses came to influence the communist left of the Bolshevik party, Bukharin and Piatakov, who made them their own. At first, Lenin’s (good) book, The State and the Revolution, was a controversy against Bukharin and Pannekoek, and their «anarchist» deviations, but later Lenin became convinced of their arguments and endorsed their theses[7]. With this, what we want to highlight is that the main leaders of the German and Dutch Communist Left were not newcomers to revolutionary politics, as evidenced, with malice, from the accusations of the Leninist pamphlet «Left-Wing» Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

The Leninist pamphlet, written shortly before the sessions of the II Congress, is a true misrepresentation of the positions of the left. In any case, what is the quid of the debate? Something that everyone, the leading center of the Communist International (Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, etc.) and the left (KAPD, PCdI, Sylvia Pankhurst, etc.) agreed: there is a reflux of revolutionary dynamics. The wave that started in 1917 had begun its slow and progressive decline. What the center of the III International intended to do was to avoid such reflux, and to do so carried out a series of tactical measures, all of them connoted by achieving the majority of the working class before the revolution.

This is what the entire left spectrum opposed to, that without being a revolutionary period, they strive to achieve a majority within the class. They considered that Leninist tactics cause the dissolution of the communist program within the old reformism, within the society of capital. The class is either revolutionary or nothing, and revolutions are not made. They arise. On this point all lefts agreed. In this regard, the attempts to force a situation only in a voluntarist way lead to disorienting the communists at the moment when a revolutionary situation or class advancement arises, as well as disorienting the same masses. What revolutionaries have to do at the time of reflux of struggles is to maintain a programmatic cohesion that becomes the thread of the present that prepares the future communist rise. Let’s see how Pannekoek perfectly summarizes the differences in a memorable text:

One of these tendencies wants to clarify and revolutionize the spirits by word and action and, consequently, tries to oppose in the most categorical way the new principles to the old ideologies; the other one tries to attract, for practical action, the masses that remain on the sidelines and intends, as far as possible, to avoid what can contradict them, and instead of differences always emphasizes what can unite them. The first one aims to a make a clear and precise distinction, the second one aims to bring the masses together; the first one should be designated as radical and the second one as opportunist.[8]

Pannekoek perfectly sums up the differences. One tendency finds the conscious factors of the subjective process of the constitution of the class more relevant: it’s fundamental how the new principles that challenge the forms of organization of the II International (parliaments, democracy, unions, hierarchy of bosses before the masses in the parties, etc.) arise; while the other one adapts to them, emphasizing on the similarities rather than on differences, and tries to adapt to them as they are in a reflux period. For the left tendency this is opportunism, since the proletariat as such only exists through its struggle, its combat, and its convergent force from a common and subversive objective. There is a basic difference in the conception of revolution and communism:

The nature of opportunism is to consider only the moment, and not the further development, staying on the surface of phenomena rather than worrying about the root causes. When it doesn’t have enough forces to immediately achieve an objective, opportunism doesn’t attempt to strengthen the forces but studies the way of achieving the objective by other means, skirting the difficulties. Since its aim is momentary success, opportunism sacrifices the conditions for a future and lasting success […] but only what is gained as clarity, insight, cohesion, autonomy of the masses will have lasting value as the basis of the further evolution towards communism.[9]

Once again, Pannekoek perfectly sums up the differences. Leninist opportunism lives of the present and its contingent success but doesn’t think which is its possible development in a communist perspective. The left does not doubt that social struggles can develop alongside the reformist left -for example, those experienced in 1923 in Germany under the governments of the SPD and the KPD in Thuringia and Saxony-, what it truly affirms is that these are struggles that will not transcend in a communist perspective in the future. Since the appearance of immediate struggle is preferred to its necessary development and deployment in a future perspective, the left tries to think of the present from the future of communist society, and Leninist and Trotskyist opportunism submits these principles and goals to the flexibility of tactics, of each concrete moment, of each scenario. Leninism is a thinking of the continuous and permanent scenario. However, for revolutionary communists there are few scenarios[10]. Scenarios arise, to say it with Bordiga, when silence is broken, when theory becomes social revolution. The main point of the deep Leninist limit is that it just theorizes that «our tactics need maximum flexibility», because the important thing would be «to bring the broad masses -to this day, for the most part, dormant, apathetic, inert, unawakened- to this new position”[11]. Meaning, to achieve the majority of the class when it is dormant, apathetic, inert, when it is not a class in combat, when it’s not class at all, in the historical and subjective sense. This is surely a means of failure, of defeat, of opportunist adaptation to the bourgeois forms of capital, since the social passivity cannot be separated from the ideology that reproduces the «social class» as a category of capital at that moment. Leninism, as Camatte affirms[12], is an idealistic ideology, which separates being and consciousness, body and mind. It pretends to “inject class consciousness” from the outside, which is supposed to be property of the professional revolutionaries. Leninism doesn’t understand that it is the being -in movement, in revolution- who creates consciousness. Leninism, that thinks it has the monopoly of effective consciousness, puts itself like a demiurge above the masses, playing the role of sorcerer’s apprentice. As Camatte says:

Only with the movement of the proletariat for the struggle against the capitalist mode of production is consciousness produced, it becomes effective, both for class and for some elements (not separated from it) that had recognized and defended the theory in its invariance[13].

Hence the awry of the Leninist obstinacy to intervene constantly, in times of social passivity, in enemy’s ground. It’s in this sense that Lenin argues, for example, that it’s necessary to intervene in the splits and crises of the bourgeois political apparatus in order to support «friction, disputes, conflicts and the total divorce» within bourgeois politics, and then to support Labor governments against liberal governments, because after that would be the turn of the communists, if they are intelligent and not doctrinaire. For them, revolution is a matter of tactics, of Machiavellianism, of political intelligence. Leninism is an ideology of entanglement and maneuvers[14]. Actually, is acting this way what generates a great confusion when facing the possible development of the communist perspective. Confusion is generated instead of clarity.

Moreover, Leninism greatly undervalues the political forms of capital. Lenin goes so far as to say that «leftist doctrinarism persists in unconditionally rejecting certain old ways, without seeing that the new content comes through all sorts of forms and that our duty as communists is to dominate them all»[15]. Not every form adapts to a communist content, on the contrary, only forms that express social self-activity potentially adapt to it, as the German-Dutch left did. But the political forms of capital inevitably carry a mercantile content. In the same way that we cannot use merchandise and money against the logic of capital – the great error of proudhonism – we can’t either turn the State, political parties and unions as apparatuses of the State against merchandise and capital. These are not just simply forms coopted by bureaucracies that put them at the service of the bourgeoisie. These forms are already part of the movement of capital, of its metamorphosis. The modern capitalist state is a result of the separation and social fragmentation that production and the capitalist market implies – between different companies, between workers who compete against each other -; that separation, that war of all against all, implies that the only «universal» community that can subsist is representative, fictitious… Hence the functionality to mercantile oppression. So we are dealing with a citizen community that lives not only separated in the level of the material production of life, but also in the symbolic world of politics and citizen representation. We are all equal citizens under the law, because in material life we belong to antagonistic classes, one of which – the proletariat – cannot recognize itself as such if it is not to deny capital and its own self. Under the realm of capital it can only be partially recognized, in a corporate and union way, as a merchandise that sells its labour power. Unions are a necessary mediation with capital in this view. Parties, parliaments, trade unions… and the State are therefore a metamorphosis of the dynamic opened up by capital: a metamorphosis of the separation of people from the means of reproduction and production of life. Politics and democracy codify and unite this separation. They exist because of this separation. To break this separation is to subvert politics and State. Therefore, unlike what Lenin said, it is not a question of intelligently doing the dirty work, of using those forms to spread them with a content that helps social subversion. Function determines the organ. The function of politics is inseparable from the material and ideological reproduction of capital, just as the form of value is inseparable from its content: in this case, abstract work is the result of the separation of the means of production and reproduction of life, that is, of the historical process of expulsion of medieval peasants from their lands and the destruction of their secular communities, which implies that the social expression of material wealth can only be given in a mediated way, through the market. The form of politics is also inseparable from this content. It is an a priori form, representative and fictitious, because it makes abstraction of the material conditions of existence – conditions of exploitation, social antagonism and of subalternity of life -, and doing so is why it can reproduce them. In feudalism the lord was at the same time the holder of economic, jurisdictional and political rights. In the realm of capital, the separation between private and public that modern politics imply makes the State assume the functioning of capital and its dynamics as something natural. In the same way that material wealth can only be expressed through the market, the social fragmentation that modern individualization entails, the fact that we are all citizens separated from each other, means that the human and material community cannot express its universality in an autonomous and immanent way. Capitalism requires a fictitious and alienated community, the State, which artificially reconstructs, through sovereignty and representation, the social community. This is the essence of modern politics. On the other hand, the separation between private and public makes precisely the material foundations of capital naturalized, obscured, and reified. The effects of mercantile dynamics can be redistributed, but without ever questioning the production of capital. Every social uprising faces this codified separation that is the State and democratic politics. A form that, far from being able to be used wisely -Lenin dixit-, is one of the most stubborn enemies of the communist movement, the emancipatory movement.

Therefore, the great limit of Leninism is the inability to understand the unquestionable –determinist- contents that bourgeois politics implies. Its form is inseparable from bourgeois content[16]. Function determines the organ. Participation in such institutions is inseparable from their bourgeois content. Hence the Leninist fallacy of the capability of using them for the benefit of an emancipatory discourse. A fallacy that has never been fulfilled: the Leninist strategy has never been verified in the stage of facts. On the contrary, the bourgeoisie has used this type of agencies, at all times and in all places, as mechanisms of integration of the subversive contents that permanently grow in this society, from the antagonism between capital and the proletariat. Politics subsumes and masterfully integrates this antagonism. In short, with Leninist tactics we see the story of the hunted hunter, of how «intelligence is opportunist» (Bordiga), that is to say, the so presumed tactical intelligence, without principles and always ready to get its hands dirty, fully receives the logic it aims to fight.

So, as we said before, the revolutionary possibilities arise in another stage, in the stage of social earthquakes, of convergence and human ionization of social particles that were previously confronted against each other and that, from the experience of the oppression, the struggle, and a slow underground maturation of the consciousness, burst into the authentic scene of the collective life, questioning the constitutive separation of the world of capital. It is then that the proletariat begins to constitute itself as a class when revolutionaries can act as catalysts of the social process for the class to accelerate the conscious perspective of its selfemancipation. As Pannekoek points out in the text mentioned above:

In the same way that a small radical party cannot make a revolution, neither can a big mass party or a coalition of diverse parties. Revolution arises spontaneously from the masses; the actions decided by a revolutionary party can sometimes give the impulse (although rarely), but the decisive forces are found elsewhere, in psychic factors, at the bottom of the subconscious of the masses and at the bottom of the great events of world politics. The task of a revolutionary party is to spread clear notions in advance so that everywhere within the masses there are elements that know what to do at such times and can judge the situation for themselves[17].

Pannekoek is once again of enviable clairvoyance. Revolutions are neither made by a small party – such as the KAPD, 40,000 militants at the time of its birth in 1920 – nor by much larger parties such as the VKPD[18]. Revolutions spring spontaneously from the masses: revolutions arise. Communism has to be a conscious plan of the species – to put it in Bordiga’s words. The decisive forces of the possible development of a communist dynamic are found in the consciousness of the ends and principles that are achieved by the proletarian masses themselves in the revolution process. The function of communists is not to replace this dynamic, but to be a catalyst that allows the very subject of history -the class, who constitutes itself in a party- to deepen this conscious dynamic. That’s why the Leninist tactic is only, in the best case, a huge element of confusion, with its heteronomous tacticism, property of a general staff of the revolution -the vanguard party- that is the one that knows history in advance and leads the way of the unconscious and amorphous masses due to its clairvoyance -the clairvoyance of the so called intellectuals who are supposed to “inject” consciousness from the outside. From deceit only deceit arises; from lack of clarity we only get confusion. In real life -as Umberto Terracini of the PCdI replied to Lenin- it’s of no use saying one thing, such as that the masses should trust in a unity with social democracy, in participating in reactionary unions, in bourgeois parliaments, so that they do something else, because in reality it is a hook thrown by the clairvoyant vanguard. The Leninist perspective starts from the constitutive impotence of the class. And from that impotence only impotence arises. No autonomous process of social self-emancipation can emerge from a heteronomous tactic.

The left tendency, on the other hand, trusts that the dynamic of social emancipation comes from the capability of creativity, of social self-institution of the proletariat, permanently demonstrated in every revolutionary uprising and in very authentic revolt. The communist program seeks an end -the selfemancipation of the species- through according principles -the autonomy andinstituting capacity of the class- and the tactics of the communist program must be harmonious to those ends and principles.

This requires a separation from the tactics inherited from the II International which, as Gorter and Pannekoek insisted, continued impregnating the tactics of the majority of the III International. Let’s keep on reasoning with Pannekoek:

As long as the masses remain amorphous, it may seem that such work is ineffective; but the clarity of the principles acts internally on many people who first stay away from the revolution, and shows its active force by giving them a clear guideline. If, on the other hand, one tries to form a great party by toning down the principles, making coalitions and concessions, then when the revolution comes some doubtful elements are given the possibility of gaining influence without the masses perceiving their insufficiency.

«As long as the masses remain amorphous» any communist activity in the immediate is ineffective, because in addition:

Adaptation to traditional viewpoints is an attempt to achieve power without verifying the precondition, the subversion of ideas. This acts, then, in the sense of retaining the course of the revolution. Moreover, it is an illusion, because the masses, when they put themselves into revolution, can only grasp the most radical ideas; on the contrary, while the revolution doesn’t arrive, they only grasp moderate ideas. A revolution is, at the same time, a period of commotion of the ideas of the masses; it creates the conditions of such commotion and is conditioned, at the same time, by it; and it is for this reason, by the force of clear principles which must transform the whole world, that the leadership of the revolution relies on the communist party[19].

Pannekoek is still immersed in a paradigm in which the leadership of the revolution relies on the communist party[20], but, in reality, in his thinking and his practice he goes in another direction. Revolutions involve an enormous social cataclysm, which also causes a revolution of life, and of human and class practice, an acceleration of consciousness. As Trotsky himself indicated, in times of social normality decades seem days, but during the social revolution times and spaces are expanded, each day is worth a decade of social normality, times accelerate to the rhythm of the communization of social relations and lives. This is the fertile space for a communist perspective to germinate. Then, in those moments in which times expand with unparalleled strength and creativity, is when one has to dive right into action -as Bordiga pointed out-, but to do so it’s fundamental to be «armed» with a communist program made of clear ends and principles, ends and principles that have to be apprehended and developed by the masses in revolution. In those moments of social revolution, the virtue of previous theoretical isolation is uncovered, when silence and human practice are broken, when theory is made in the revolution. In those moments when we risk everything it’s essential to struggle with intransigence to affirm a massive perspective that destroys the mercantile and political powers of capital, affirming the autonomous power of the proletarian multitudes in revolution and recognizing, at the same time, that the aim is the dissolution of all social classes, the communist society. For those who have previously lived in confusion and permanent connivance with the political and economic institutions of capital, it is impossible to improvise the necessary strength and clarity. This is another one of Leninism’s great problems, which contributed to a whole generation of cadres from the III International becoming leaders of the Stalinist parties of the late 1920s and 1930s[21].

The communist revolution is a great discontinuity of the oppressive past. The previous schism of the communists prepares the future at the very moment it’s fertilized with the masses in revolution. The isolation of the present is what guarantees the future of tomorrow. The communist party is the line of the future in the present, and it’s essential to keep that thread, against the current, because it is the only way for us to know when the current flows in our favor, and we will have to let ourselves be swept away.

On tactical flexibility

Life in the new humanity lies in the revolution, 
the revolution is born of the schism.

Amadeo Bordiga

As we have seen throughout this text, what all the lefts of the III International blamed on the center of the Moscow leadership of the International was a tactical flexibility that went against the communist nature of the parties, and the possibilities of development of the proletarian revolution in Western Europe. The important thing was to stick to the programmatic principles, in order to take advantage of the coming opportunities that the last social and class promotions would create. The worst thing that could be done at that time was to adapt the principles in an opportunistic manner. In this regard, Amadeo Bordiga was particularly clear:

But the worst of all the remedies that can be used to repair unfavorable situations would be to periodically carry out a process to the theoretical and organizational principles on which the party is based, with the aim of modifying the extension of its contact area with the masses. In situations where the revolutionary predisposition of the masses decreases, what many defend as leading the party to the masses, is actually equivalent to denaturalizing the character of the party, to expel precisely those qualities that are appropriate as vectors that influence the masses at the moment they resume the offensive movement[22].

As we can see, the orientations of Bordiga and the Communist Party of Italy (PCdI) are very similar, on the key issues, to the Dutch-German left. For them, it is essential to maintain intransigence around theoretical and programmatic principles. To deviate from that path is the worst service that a revolutionary can do to the communist perspective, since it means distorting the character of the party, performing an invaluable service to the bourgeoisie and maintaining the status quo. To know how to keep perspective of what is essential and not be diverted by the contingent is a must:

The international communist movement must be composed not only of those who are firmly convinced of the need for the revolution, who are willing to fight for it at the cost of any sacrifice, but of those who are determined to continue on a revolutionary ground when the difficulties of the struggle show that the goal is tougher and less immediate[23].

That is, being a communist is a very difficult choice. Simple conviction and sacrifice are not enough, a solid and theoretical intransigence is needed to help stay on the ground of revolution when the force of the masses refluxes. In a revolutionary period, lots of people, following the wave, tend to the revolutionary perspective, but nevertheless, there are few who remain when the wave goes against the tide. That is why it is essential not to be blinded about contingent issues and try -at any costs- to bring the party to the masses, when they are atomized and passive. The programmatic perspective of communism must be defended so that, when the social ionization of revolutionary materiality returns, we the communists can be not only a passive product but an active factor, a catalyst of the immanent intensification by the class of that perspective.

If the revolutionary possibilities were less immediate, we will not take the risk – not even for a moment – of being distracted from the need to continue weaving the thread of (communist) preparation or of retreating, on the contrary, towards the solution of other contingent problems, something that only the bourgeoisie would benefit from. [24]

Bordiga builds a reciprocal relationship, from greater to lesser importance, following a strict hierarchy between theory, ends, principles, program, tactics and organization. As we can see the organization is the last in importance, or seen otherwise, is the synthesis between multiple abstract determinations: theory, principles, program and communist tactics live within it. The communist organization can only exist as a living organism of its program, hence the delicate construction of revolutionary organizations. It’s important to notice that tactics must be subordinated to the communist program, to the principles and ends. I.e., we cannot apply a tactic contrary to the principles. Hence the importance of the battle of the lefts in relation to Leninist flexibility. At the same time, Marxist theory does not exist outside the struggle to meet ends -the community of free women and men, the society where social classes disappear- and for principles which have been acquired throughout the secular proletarian struggle -for example, the necessary destruction of the bourgeois state, or that the communist perspective cannot exist outside a revolutionary dynamic of the masses. Nor can it dispense of the program, that is, the compass and the map that guide us to meet the ends and the principles of communism in the practice of the multitudes in revolution. The program is enriched in the light of past experiences. For example, at this time it was decisive to be clear about how communists cannot participate in bourgeois parliaments or unions; or how the national matter is inseparable from the political and material strengthening of fractions of the bourgeoisie and the capital. On the other hand, in the communist practice and theory there is also the questions of tactics, the particular issues that in specific contexts are presented to revolutionaries. Many issues that at that time Bordiga considered tactics nowadays have to be part of the communist program, such as abstentionism, since they are part of the path that the communist thread woven by the proletariat turned into class has to draw. An finally, the organization: a  key part of the battle of the European communist lefts was against the autonomization of the tactical, of the contingent, which dissolved the communist perspective, its principles and its program in the spontaneous realm of capital’s fetishism.

Bordiga always criticized the idea of «lesser evil» as a deadly infection on «the corpus of doctrine and the will to action» of the communists. And, in fact, it is trivial to distinguish better or worse moments from the perspective of proletarian self-emancipation -that is to say, the self-denial as a class-, since:

The capitalist offensive against the proletariat exists from before I was born and from before the labor movement was born. It is the way of capitalism. The simple presence of the despicables who manage the economy and society in a mercantile way, is already an offensive and we are forced to live under this oppression. What other kind of offensive do the bourgeois have to launch rather than the one they need daily to preserve capitalism? The class struggle is a permanently offensive fact. There is a moment in history in which the offensive is reversed, but this moment needs, as an essential condition, for a genuinely communist party to exist. The contrary is not true. We can’t say: we have the party and then we launch the offensive. The party is a necessary but not sufficient condition. [25]

The offensive of capitalism is permanent, but sometimes there is an inversion of the praxis that breaks with mercantile fetishism. Unlike Trotskyist doctrine, for Bordiga it is a contradiction to say that we need the party to solve «the crisis of humanity» or that with the existence of that party «a revolution could take place.» Revolutions are not made, they just arise, the party is an organ of the class, it feeds on ascents of the class combats, and it can be an active factor only from the self-activity of the class, but for this it is necessary that the revolution explodes, arises:

What we need are the conditions that we have defined, borrowing the language of physics, as «social polarization», as in electric fields, in crystallin solids, and in the ionization of a gas. The number of electrons and atoms involved does not matter to trigger the event, but it needs to be produced to expand quantitatively. The conquest of the so-called majority occurs after the initial conditions of theory, action and environment are verified. We can experience all the tactics we want, as long as in our revolutionary slogan there are no words that may be in contrast, contempt or simply forgetting our principles. That is why we did not want the condition of the majority [in the debates of the III International, NdA]. The «conquest of the majority» may be verified, but it is not a bridge through which it is necessary to pass before the revolution has ionized the social molecules […]. Are we many or few today? What does it matter if we manage to be on the line that unites hundreds of millions of men who have fought with the hundreds of millions who will fight? This is the real problem, the historical arc that combines the revolutions of original communism with developed communism. [26]

The important thing for a communist organization is to join the historical program of our perspective, which brings, as Walter Benjamin would say, to the generations of the past with the possibilities of emancipatory redemption. The party is «the line of the future in the present.» That is the decisive question.

As we have seen, there was a communion of principles and intentions between the German-Dutch communist left and the Italians, plus other tendencies of the communist left like the British of Sylvia Pankhurst or the Bulgarians. This does not mean that on a number of issues -for example, the trade-union problem or the national question in the peripheries of capitalism- there were no differences between them. These differences have largely increased in the formal currents that are claimed of one of the two main wings of the communist left. The Dutch Germans saw in Bordiga nothing but an ultra-Leninist, while the Italian left sawin them a councilism that fetishizes self-organization at the expense of the  content of the communist program -without understanding that, precisely in this period we are talking about, Gorter, Pannekoek, etc. built a party like the KAPD. However, there have been organizations and more individual personalities that have tried to achieve a confluence between both currents, defining -in the differences and perspectives- the legitimacy of the existence of an international communist left. We support this option.

Also in the 20’s, when the theoretical perspectives had not yet been rigorized, the confluence was very evident. Il Soviet, the newspaper directed by Bordiga in Naples, published Pannekoek’s (widely cited in our article) text on The Development of the World Revolution and the Tactic of Communism. In fact, and as Jean Barrot and Denis Authier[27] remember, Il Soviet published not only Pannekoek but Gorter and Pankhurst.[28] They didn’t publish any article by Lenin, and as for the Russians, they published mostly the leftists, such as Alexandra Kollontai. This is what Bordiga had to say about Pannekoek to introduce the aforementioned article that was published in Il Soviet:

As you know, Comrade Lenin, in his admirable activity, has recently found time to devote, in a special booklet written on the eve of the Moscow Congress, to the radical movement within international communism, defining it as a childhood disease of communism. In this booklet, especially our infantilism and that of our newspaper are highlighted; and, after the spanking of the father, we have resigned ourselves to patiently endure the reprimands of our beloved brothers of our house, that will not lack.

But in the same way that impertinent children who have been punished never lack a protective uncle who comforts them with a treat, here is that we have also received a treat in the form of a long article – which will be edited also as a booklet— published with the title indicated above.

We think it’s appropriate to remember that Pannekoek clearly affirmed since 1912, before Lenin, what has become a reference of international communism: the destruction of the democratic-parliamentary state as the first task of the proletarian revolution. We must remember as well that a competent and not very suspicious witness, Karl Radek, has defined Pannekoek as «the clearest spirit of international socialism»[29].

The strength and irony of words speak for themselves. Later it will be the International Communist Left in exile, which through Bilan magazine will begin to make that confluence, influenced by some of the positions of the Dutch- German left -in relation to Russia, the State, the unions, etc.-, although it will be the magazine directed by Marc Chiric in the 40s and 50s, Internationalisme -organ of the Gauche Communiste de France-, that makes this synthesis more strongly.

In a following article, we will discuss the specific importance of some of the tactical issues concerned in this decisive programmatic passage of the communist movement. We refer, as we said at the beginning of our essay, to issues such as the possibility (or not) of revolutionary parliamentarism or the nature of trade unions, or tactics such as the United Front and the Workers Government.

In any case, throughout this article we have tried to make clear the essential question of this debate on tactics, strategy and communist perspective in the beginnings of the III International. Actually, the communist lefts, in their plurality, were not childish defenders of a continuous offensive, of a war of blind and visceral movements -as Gramsci would later accuse, not only Bordiga or Pannekoek, but also Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, performing an indigestible polpettone. Actually, the international communist left is a western left that understands, as Gorter constantly recalls in his Response to comrade Lenin, that in the countries of advanced capitalism the tactics that the Bolsheviks carried out in Russia cannot be reproduced. They are not childish, quite the opposite. They recognize, unlike Lenin, the greatest strength of the political institutions of the bourgeoisie in the West. They are aware of the determinism that these institutions entail, that not all forms can be used. As Bordiga remembered Lenin in the debates in Moscow, Western parliamentarism is virulent.[30]

The Russian comrades could not even imagine, because they hadn’t experienced it, what parliamentarism was. They couldn’t imagine the role of social cohesion and deviation from the revolutionary energies that parliamentary democracy entailed. Bordiga experienced it himself during the bienio rosso (1919-1920). Giolitti, the Italian bourgeois liberal political boogeyman, knew it perfectly well: 150 socialist deputies in parliament. Fear? None. As if they were 300.

To finish this article, we want to highlight the strength of Gorter’s summary of the differences between the lefts and the Leninist center:

For the International, the Western European revolution will develop according to the laws and tactics of the Russian revolution.

For the Left, the Western European revolution has its own rules and will abide by them.

For the International, the Western European revolution will be able to make commitments and alliances with small peasant and petit bourgeois parties, even with parties of the great bourgeoisie.

For the Left it’s impossible.

According to the International, in Western Europe there will be «splits» and schisms between bourgeois, petit-bourgeois and poor peasant parties during the revolution.

According to the Left, bourgeois parties and petit-bourgeois parties will form, until the end of the revolution, a united front.

The III International underestimates the power of Western and North American European capital.

The Left conceives its tactics based on this enormous power.

The III International does not see in any way in financial capital, large capital, the power capable of unifying all the bourgeois classes.

The Left elaborates its tactics in relation to that power.

The III International, by not admitting that the proletariat of Western Europe is reduced to its own forces, doesn’t attempt to spiritually develop this proletariat, which, however, continues in all domains living under the influence of bourgeois ideology, and adopts a tactic that lets the submission to the ideas of the bourgeoisie persist.

The Left adopts a tactic that aims first to emancipate the spirit of the proletariat.

The III International, not seeing the need to emancipate the spirits, nor the union of all bourgeois and petit-bourgeois parties, bases its tactics on commitments and «splits», lets unions subsist and tries to attract them.

The Left, aiming firstly the emancipation of the spirits and convinced of the unity of the bourgeois formations, considers that it is necessary to end the unions and that the proletariat needs better weapons.

For the same reasons, the III International doesn’t attack parliamentarism.

The Left, for the same reasons, wants the abolition of parliamentarism.

The III International leaves ideological slavery in the state it was at the time of the Second International. 

The Left intends to remove it from the spirits. It Takes evil by the root.

The III International, by not admitting the first need, in Western Europe, to emancipate the spirits, and also the unity of all bourgeois formations in times of revolution, tries to group the masses as masses, therefore, without asking if they are truly communist, nor guide their tactics so that they are.

The Left wants to form in all the countries parties that gather only communists and conceives its tactics accordingly. It is through the example of these parties, small at the beginning, that he wants to transform the majority of the proletarians into communists, that is to say, the masses.

The III International considers, then, the masses of Western Europe as a means.

The Left considers them as an end.

Because of this tactic (perfectly justified in Russia), the III International practices a boss policy.

The Left, on the other hand, practices a mass policy.

Because of this tactic, the III International brings to its ruin not only the Western European revolution, but also and especially the Russian revolution. The Left, on the contrary, due to its tactics leads the international proletariat to victory.

In order to allow the workers to better understand our tactics, I will also summarize my presentation in the form of short theses, to read, well understood, in the light of the whole:

1. The tactic of the Western European revolution must be absolutely different from the tactic of the Russian revolution.

2. For among us, the proletariat is alone.

3. The proletariat needs, then, to make the revolution totally by itself, against all other classes.

4. Therefore, the importance of the proletarian masses is proportionately greater and that of the bosses lesser than in Russia.

5. The proletariat must have, to make the revolution, the best weapons of all.

6. Since unions are ineffective weapons, they must be replaced or transformed through factory organizations, called to unify.

7. When the proletariat is constrained to make the revolution alone and without help, it needs the highest evolution of intelligences and hearts. This is why it is better not to appeal to parliamentarism in times of revolution[31].

 

_____________

[1] The present text was written and published in September 2016.

[2] See our publication: Auge y estallido de una burbuja. Sobre Podemos y otras consideraciones contra el Estado (only available in Spanish).

[3] See in this respect the letter of J.C. published in the Italian magazine Il Lato Cativo and available at illatocattivo.blogspot.com.es/2014/01/a-proposito-di-critica-del-valore-una.html. See also the article by Federico Corriente: «Jacques Camatte and the missing link of social criticism», Salamandra, n. 21-22, where he precisely indicates that said link is the theory of the revolutionary proletariat. By visualizing it only as variable capital, Kurz fetishizes capital as a thing, which is not born or reproduced from a permanently contradictory social relation, such as the one between capital and wage labor. Capital is born from the exploitation of wage labour, this is what creates the condition of possibility, in fact the only condition of possibility, for the proletariat to overcome capital by denying itself.

[4] German Social Democratic Party, the strongest of the entire II International.

[5] The Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany was a centrist split of the SPD, between reformism and revolution, in which personalities of social democracy such as Bernstein, Kautsky, Hilferding, etc., converged.

[6] On the history of the German-Dutch left, from its beginnings to its end, see the well-documented ICC book: La gauche hollandaise.

[7] With evident limits, as could be seen in the revolutionary dynamics opened in 1917 in Russia. Obviously, we do not want to deny that the unprecedented experience and difficulties of the revolutionary process itself and its subsequent isolation created an extremely complex and difficult situation, but the fact that Lenin did not relate his theory of the state and its extinction with that of the party, helped the party to finally lead the revolutionary process and replace it, confusing it with the state, and carrying out the counter-revolutionary process itself. This counter-revolution did not come from outside the revolutionary dynamic, as during the Paris Commune or in 1905, but from the Bolshevik party itself.

[8] Anton Pannekoek: «El desarrollo de la revolución mundial y la táctica de los comunistas», en Contra el nacionalismo, contra el imperialismo y la guerra: ¡Revolución proletaria mundial!, Ediciones Espartaco Internacional, pág. 227.

[9] Ibid., pp. 228-229.

[10] See our article Las instituciones son el límite, available at barbaria.net/2018/04/25/germinal-las-instituciones-son-el-limite

[11] This quotation and the previous one are taken from V.I. Lenin: «Left-Wing» Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

[12] See Jacques Camatte: The KAPD and the Proletarian Movement.

[13] Here Camatte also makes a synthetic explanation of how the communist party is an organic expression of the class (a product that can therefore be an active factor in the times of revolution), which at the moment of revolutionary ascent can go from being a historical element to a formal, active factor, as long as it does not separate itself from the class, because the class in revolution becomes a party (Marx: Communist Manifesto).

[14] Leninism is an ideology of maneuvering, will strongly say the French communist (friend of Bordiga and further critic of the Leninist strands of the Neapolitan communist), Lucien Laugier. See in this respect his extraordinary text L’anEkapdédisme du PCI, a text about which we will return later.

[15] V.I. Lenin: op. cit.

[16] In the text already quoted by Laugier, he makes a very pertinent criticism of Amadeo Bordiga himself. His communist radicalism when it comes to questioning value, money, the market, the company, etc. is not transferred to politics, to the criticism of the State above all. It is important to keep in mind that capitalism is based on a duality, economy and politics, with which the communist revolution must consciously break.

[17] Ibid., pp. 229-230.

[18] Unified Communist Party, merger between the former KPD and the USPD, the independent social democracy.

[19] Anton Pannekoek: op. cit., p.230.

[20] A paradigm with which Pannekoek will quickly take distance but, unfortunately, in a councilist direction that dissolves the function of the party as an organ of the class, an organ internal to the class and not substitutionist, as Camatte indicated in the above quotation.

[21] We refer to characters such as Togliatti, Thorez, Rakosi, or even Gramsci himself, not to the second generation of Stalinist leaders who had not gone through the previous «heroic period», such as Dolores Ibarruri, Thälmann or Santiago Carrillo. As far as we know, this is something that has not yet been sufficiently developed from a theoretical point of view, i.e. how Leninist tacticism in the III International, the constant search for zigzags and muddles helped the subsequent emergence of Stalinist politics in the Komintern, different from the politics of Lenin and Trotsky, but which found its foundations in them, as well as helping a series of communist party cadres, without theoretical solidity, to initiate the process of «Bolshevization» and Stalinization of the communist parties. The example of the PCdI is paradigmatic in this respect and Gramsci’s role in it is nefarious, although obviously not as nefarious and perfidious as was the case of that «professional of the counter-revolution» that Palmiro Togliatti became.

[22] Amadeo Bordiga: «Partito ed azione di clase», in Scri; 1911-1926, Fondazione Amadeo Bordiga, vol. 5, p. 362.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Amadeo Bordiga: «1919-1926: Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione in Europa», n+1. This is the transcription of a report by Bordiga in one of the periodic meetings of the Partito Comunista Internazionale. As the comrades of n+1 say, the tapes were found by chance in a second-hand market, and are of extraordinary value for the theoretical and historical reconstruction of the debates of the III International carried out by Bordiga. Available at www.quinterna.org/pubblicazioni/rivista/32/1919_1926_rivoluzione_e_controrivoluzione.htm

[26] Ibid.

[27] Jean Barrot (Gilles Dauv.) and Denis Authier: The Communist Left in Germany. 1919-1921, Zero ZYX, Madrid 1978. This is a highly recommended book.

[28] In fact, Bordiga made a fiery Pankhurst defense when she was expelled from the Communist International. See volume 6 of his Scritti: «Il Partito Comunista Inglese e Sylvia Pankhurst», p. 152.

[29] This is a note rescued by Invariance (Jacques Camatte’s magazine) when it published Pannekoek’s text mentioned above, and published in the Spanish edition of Espartaco Internacional.

[30] Amadeo Bordiga: «.1919–1926: Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione in Europa”, op. cit.

[31] Herman Gorter: Open Letter to Comrade Lenin.