Programmatic theses

Traducido por los compañeros de la LIC

1. Historical Materialism

The desire for revolution is intuitive. It is enough to have experienced the violence of this system in one of its various forms and to have projected, ephemerally or with conscious resolve, the need for a radical transformation of things. On the other hand, acting as revolutionaries is not intuitive. It entails putting our feet on a social reality that appears inverted to us in order to know not only how to put an end to this system, but above all what it means to put an end to it. That is why the method we use to interpret the functioning of society is fundamental.

Historical materialism understands the evolution of human societies through the concept of the mode of production, i.e. the idea that we can only understand a society, its institutions, its cultural, religious and ideological expressions through the way it produces and reproduces its material life: the means it uses and the way in which its members organise themselves to do so. In short, social and historical being determines consciousness.

The mode of production defines the social totality. Its intrinsic contradictions will mark the historical development of society. In capitalism, the inability to overcome these contradictions, synthesised in the clash of the productive forces and the social relations of production, gives rise to the next mode of production, communism, in a catastrophic way, i.e., not gradually or in a curve of ascent and decay. However, it does not appear out of nowhere: the transition to a new mode of production does not take place without its historical foundations, the conditions of its emergence, having been gestated beforehand. Thus capitalism, the most destructive and alienating mode of production our species has ever known, nevertheless prepares the material basis for communism.

2. Capitalism

Capitalism is, among class societies, the ultimate mode of production, existing today all over the planet. It is not merely a system of economic exploitation, which accompanies or intersects with other systems of domination such as race, gender or techno-industrialism. It is the way in which society produces and reproduces its life—in all its aspects—on the basis of commodity production. It is not a trivial matter that the social purpose is the production of commodities and not of goods destined to the satisfaction of needs, since that same imperative induces an automatism where social relations take the form of things and where the movement of the products determines the movement and life of the producers. Reality is inverted: it is commodity fetishism.

The international nature of capitalism is expressed in terms of competing nations competing with each other for the world market and the political-military predominance that come with that. In other words: it expresses itself in national bourgeoisies competing with each other for a larger share of the surplus value exploited from the world proletariat. Like any struggle, there are stronger and weaker nations. The international dimension of capitalism is fragmented and hierarchical, but this does not mean that there are oppressed nations and oppressor nations; there are only nations that perform better than others within global competition. This configuration makes nationalism and racism a structural feature of capitalism. It also makes every state imperialist and war between states a necessary and permanent product of the system.

Capitalism is the last class society: it presents continuities and discontinuities with the previous ones. The emergence of private property and social classes demanded a patriarchal structure of reproduction, whose basic cell is in the family and where control of women’s bodies is key. Capitalism, as a class society, continues to have a patriarchal structure, but it reproduces it according to its mercantile and abstract logic, which separates production and reproduction, public and private space, and makes the biological an obstacle to the unlimited production of value or, at best, a cost to be borne.

Therefore, a mode of production that has turned human beings into a commodity cannot be any less destructive for the natural environment. The more capitalism develops, the more it boosts its productive capacity, the more labour it expels and the more raw materials and energy it requires in its production: in short, the development of capitalism is accompanied by an increase in social misery (surplus population) and the rapid destruction of the natural world, thus undermining the very foundations of our existence as a species.

At the basis of this is the exhaustion of value. The high degree of socialisation and development of productive capacity that this system has reached renders historically obsolete not only the specific categories of capitalism (value, commodity, wage labour), but also those that have been the backbone of the class modes of production (private property, family, state). However, this exhaustion does not imply a slow decline towards a new mode of production, but rather increases the catastrophic consequences of persevering with it: since the productive forces cannot stop growing, their contradiction with the relations of production—that is, the contradiction between an increasingly social production and a private appropriation of the product—becomes more and more violent. Capitalism is an automatic machine that dies by killing, and it will not stop unless we revolutionarily subvert the existing social relations.

3. Communism

This next mode of production, communism, has nothing to do with the Soviet Union, Maoist China or Castro and Guevara’s Cuba. What the counter-revolution has presented as communism is the direct negation of the revolutionary programme that had begun to develop from the League of Communists and the IWA out of the struggle of the proletariat, especially with the great historical experience of the Paris Commune, and which Marx and Engels synthesised theoretically. There has been nothing worse for our revolutionary movement than for the counter-revolution to present itself in the garb of revolution and to invert, point by point,  the terminology of communism. We claim for ourselves those comrades who made a physical and programmatic fight against opportunism in the Second and Third Internationals and against the Stalinist counter-revolution, and who drew from the midnight of the century the indispensable lessons for the next revolutionary assault of our class: we speak especially of the Italian communist left, but also of the earlier contributions of the Bolsheviks and Lenin, of Rosa Luxemburg and the German-Dutch left, as well as the positions of the internationalists who broke with the Fourth International during World War II, such as G. Munis, who later founded the FOR, Agis Stinas and Ngo Van Xuyet.

Communism is a society without money, commodities and private property, and therefore without social classes, family and state. The only way to abolish these categories is through the constitution of a world community in which all borders are destroyed, production is planned according to human needs on the basis of the different capacities of its members, and the product of labour is distributed according to these members’ needs. In contrast to capitalism, which is based on production for production’s sake because it aims at a permanent increase in value; communism is anti-productivist, because it is aimed at the human needs of present and future generations. The transition to communism will involve a process of both the reduction and transformation of production and the elimination of the permanent wastefulness of consumption in this system, one of the central elements of which is the separation of town and country.

Communism is not only desirable and possible; it is more relevant than ever today. The very cause of the social and ecological crisis we are increasingly experiencing: the depletion of value, is the confession that human development can no longer maintain the existence of private property and its logical derivations (commodity, money, wage labour, social classes, family, state). There is less and less work, we are surrounded by worthless money, the capitalist class is becoming more and more impersonal, the family is in permanent crisis, the state sees its sovereignty challenged from within by nationalist forces and by the compulsion of international capital from without. Capitalism itself is calling its social categories into question. No mode of production arises out of nothing but is rather built upon the contradictions of the previous one. Communism has been possible for over a century, but today its actuality is manifest and peremptory.

4. World Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat

It is not possible to transform existing relations from within the bourgeois state, through slow legislative work that expands workers’ power within this system. Nor can they be transformed in parallel to the state, through the slow social work of building cooperatives, ecovillages, squats and similar formulas: self-management is a trap that makes us internalise capitalist exploitation with the idea that if there is no boss, there is no exploitation. The only way to end capitalism is through a violent insurrection in which the proletariat establishes its own organs of power—class assemblies and the communist international—takes up arms and destroys the bourgeois state to establish its class dictatorship.

Capitalism has an international nature. As long as the revolution does not spread worldwide, it is not possible to do away with value in any territory: there is no socialism in any one country. For the same reason, the existence of social classes cannot be ended and a class dictatorship is necessary. Within the insurgent territory, this dictatorship must impose itself authoritatively against bourgeois reaction and against the development of mercantile relations, starting from day one with the maximum reduction and distribution of working time, the free provision of the basic means of subsistence, the disinvestment in the production of means of production and their redirection towards consumption. Outwardly, as the only safeguard against the process degenerating, the International must by all means push for the extension of the world revolution and the extension of the class dictatorship without borders to cover the entire capitalist world. To this end, the International cannot be a federation of national parties, but a single world party with a single programme to which its various sections, especially those where the proletarian insurrection has been victorious, are subordinated. Only then, the revolution having triumphed internationally, will it be possible to put an end to value and, consequently, to social classes. And thus, the organ which was born to manage a society fractured into classes, the state, will be consigned to the dustbin of history.

5. Minimum Programme and Maximum Programme

Communism is the minimum that we must realise: since the first world assault of the proletariat which began in 1917, preceded by the revolutions of 1848 and 1871, the communist revolution is materially possible all over the world. Any bourgeois-democratic or reformist demand will work against the revolution, because it will serve to re-establish a system which should already be dead. Consequently, revolutionaries cannot take up these demands as part of their minimum programme, if they do not want it to end up working against their maximum programme: the struggle for communism.

That is why we are oppose support for any national “liberation” movement which, by definition, promotes the constitution of a new bourgeois state and bases its struggle, not on the confrontation between classes, but between races and nations, dividing the proletariat, pushing it to defend the interests of “its” bourgeoisie in its imperialist struggles, and confusing internationalism with “solidarity between peoples”, i.e., with support from abroad for that bourgeoisie.

The defence of democracy, as the most characteristic form of organisation of the capitalist state, always entails the reinforcement of that same state and is always against the interests of the proletariat: whether this defence is given directly, by promoting parliamentary participation or legislative changes, or indirectly as a “lesser evil” in the face of a military or fascist dictatorship. Historically, anti-fascism was a profound defeat for the proletariat. It implied its union with the liberal bourgeoisie—for the defence of the state which it had itself left in the hands of fascism—the abandonment of internationalism and its use as cannon fodder in a new imperialist war.

Trade unionism is not the same as the struggle of the proletariat in the workplace: it consists in the specialisation of militant activity in labour demands, leading a few workers to build permanent bodies which end up autonomising themselves from the rest and constituting themselves, with greater or lesser success, into negotiating bodies—that is to say, mediating with capital. Whether through trade unions or other more horizontal formulas, trade unionism has always implied a tendency to separate workers’ immediate interests from their historical interests. The trade union is the form which consolidates this separation: since its function consists in negotiating the value of labour power with capital, it will never have an interest in fighting against wage labour, to which it owes its existence. If the trade unions are against the revolution, it is not because of the trade union leaderships, but because of the very activity that generates them again and again.

The so-called “social justice movements” such as feminism, the LGTBI+ movement, environmentalism, anti-racism or the housing movement always lead, in one way or another, to the reform of the state and not to the struggle against it. On the one hand, because they ideologically separate—even if they claim not to—their specific issues from the global struggle against capitalism. On the other hand, because their very nature as a united front leads militants who honestly want revolution to work with others who are clearly reformist or moderate: an alliance where, as the communist left warned the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the Third International, those who stand to lose are revolutionaries, who end up moulding their tactics to those who are more “reasonable”, more amenable to the system and, therefore, in the majority in times of social peace.

These “social justice movements” have nothing to do with class movements in which, starting from the defence of certain immediate needs, a struggle is produced which spreads like an oil slick to other sections of the proletariat and to other territories, generalising its content from the motive that made it break out to a more general challenge of the system, and which does this by generating in the process its own organisms of action—workers’ and territorial assemblies, etc.—where revolutionaries can play a role. However, the passage from an immediate struggle to its extension and generalisation into a movement is beyond our control; nobody can know what will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, nor can they provoke it. For the same reason, neither can we confuse the organisms that the proletariat creates as it moves towards becoming a class—and therefore a party—with the groups and co-ordinating bodies that make up the “social justice movements”. Focused as they are on their partial struggle in the absence of any real movement, these cannot evolve into anything else and always find themselves in the agitation of blind activity, which leads either to the exhaustion and frustration of their members or, as is often the case, to the search for possibilist solutions to their demands: again, to the state.

6. Party and Class

Communism is not an ideology, but a physical fact, a real movement born from the very soil of capitalist society. The contradictions of this mode of production permanently generate social antagonisms that push classes into confrontation long before their protagonists have time to reason it out. Thus, the initiation of an immediate struggle may be motivated by the will of a group of individuals, but its generalisation into a class movement is beyond their control. This does not prevent revolutionary minorities, as part of the class, from intervening in such struggles. This intervention will always be made from a programmatic perspective in order to favour the clarification of the essential elements of the struggle over and above concrete and circumstantial demands, promoting its self-organisation, extension and generalisation—all this from the development of class independence and internationalism.  But class struggle is not created, just as revolution is not created. Precisely because social being determines consciousness, consciousness is not the product of the agitation and proselytising of revolutionary minorities who, with the right tactics and strategy, achieve “hegemony” in the class and thus set it in motion.

That is why the revolution is not a question of consciousness, of ideas, but the product of an immediate and material struggle which breaks out spontaneously and which, in a process of generalisation and extension, transforms the consciousness of those who participate in it. In this process, the proletariat ceases to be a class in the sociological sense, a class for capital, and becomes a social force opposed to the ruling class: in Marx’s sense, the proletariat becomes a class and therefore a party.

Thus, our notion of class differs completely from bourgeois sociology. The latter understands the proletarian class as a category which lumps together a sum of workers in a specific position in production, with a certain level of income and with a series of ideologies which are identified according to the vote each proletarian casts in the ballot box or the answer he or she gives according to survey statistics. But in the absence of class movements, the consciousness of each individual proletarian is different and subject to the weight of the dominant ideology, which is the ideology of the ruling class—whether in its left-wing or right-wing variant. On the contrary, when social peace is disrupted and the proletariat struggles through its own class organisms, its consciousness tends to converge towards the same direction: that of a conflict of class against class, which expresses the conflict between the forces of preservation of the existing order and the forces of social transformation towards the next mode of production. And in this very process, the class in turn generates its own revolutionary minorities, its own party, which are the most determined defenders of the general and international interests of the proletariat and which, in so doing, act as a factor of programmatic clarification within the class in struggle itself. The party, thus understood, is the theoretical and programmatic repository which synthesises the history, experience, victories and defeats of the class.

On the historical level, this is a process of permanent feedback. Revolutionary groups are the product of the class struggle but they in turn precede these social outbursts, they strive to link themselves to the communist programme—which is itself the product of theoretical clarification from the previous class struggles, at its highest peaks—and when the proletariat struggles in a general way, they act from within as an active and conscious factor which accelerates the linking of their own class to its historical programme. And when the proletariat struggles in a general way, these revolutionary minorities act from within as an active and conscious factor which accelerates the linking of the class to its own historical programme, in order to link the defence of the immediate needs of the class which triggered the movement to the historical interests of the proletariat: the dissolution of all social classes through the violent transformation of the whole system.

This idea of the party, in turn, differs from the Leninist and councilist views, which are two sides of the same coin because both understand class and party as separate entities. For the Leninist and Trotskyist view, which does not exactly coincide with Lenin’s, the class is an indeterminate matter which the party shapes by injecting consciousness from without. In the councilist view, the party is the bureaucratic obstacle that prevents the class from becoming revolutionary. For us, on the contrary, there is an inseparable unity between class and party: the party is a product of the moments when the proletariat constitutes itself as a class and, in turn, acts as a factor of acceleration and precision of its revolutionary consciousness, i.e., as a specific organ linking its immediate interests to its historical interests through the affirmation of the communist programme. Class and party are not the same thing, but it is impossible to understand the one without the other and vice versa: the revolution is not created, but whenever the proletariat struggles as a class it generates its own revolutionary leadership, its own party. Thus, the Bolsheviks did not provoke the proletarian insurrection of 1917, nor was it the product of their slow work of implantation and propaganda in the factories of Petrograd and Moscow, but their previous preparation as an independent organisation and their uncompromising defence of class autonomy and revolutionary defeatism during the First World War, allowed them to be a vector for mass radicalisation and deepening of the revolutionary perspective of the class. At the same time, the mass entry of the revolutionary proletariat into the Bolshevik party allowed the firm commitment to communist insurrection to prevail over the more conservative sectors within the Bolshevik party, among them Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin, who limited themselves to defending the provisional government.

The party in its historical sense, in the sense in which we have been using it so far and in which Marx uses it in the Manifesto, does not coincide with a specific formal organisation. The vicissitudes of formal parties are broken up by processes of degeneration from which no formal and contingent group is safe. The function of the communist minorities is always to defend and implement the communist programme. This apparent contradiction between the formal party and the historical party is resolved at the opening of the revolutionary crisis, when the proletariat constitutes itself as a class, produces its own organisms of action and generates its revolutionary leadership. It is then that the party in the historical and programmatic sense tends to become a formal organisation towards which revolutionaries converge, as a vector for centralisation: this was the case with the Bolshevik party itself, which between February and October 1917 quadrupled its membership. Among them were many revolutionaries who came from other formal organisations and proletarian currents—including anarchism—and whose most well-known case is Trotsky. This process has nothing to do with that in which the formal organisation dilutes its principles in order to grow quantitatively: on the contrary, it is the historical programme of communism which acts as a vector of convergence and centralisation for revolutionaries.

Social being determines consciousness and no part of this historical process can be created or provoked by the will of revolutionary minorities. The revolution is not created; it is coordinated. For the same reason, the party is not created; it is coordinated. And yet, it is in revolutionary crises that will and consciousness matter more than ever. It is in processes like this, in which the class and revolutionaries tend to converge towards the struggle for the communist programme, that the inversion of praxis can occur: the accumulation of material contradictions of capitalism provokes the revolutionary outbreak, but once this has happened it will be the programmatic clarity and will organised in the world party that will determine the victory of the revolution, just as it will be the collective consciousness and will that will begin to determine social relations in the passage into communism. For communism is the first society that consciously produces and reproduces its life according to a plan for the species, and where human beings are in control of their own social life.

7. Present Situation and the Tasks of Revolutionaries

Since revolution, class and party are not the fruit of the conscious construction of a series of individuals, but material, physical phenomena produced by the contradictions of this mode of production, an understanding of the historical period of struggle is a fundamental element for revolutionaries.

Ours is the period of the exhaustion of capital as a social relation, the period when value is historically reaching its internal limits. Economic crises are deepening and intensifying, social misery is increasing in absolute terms, the basic means of subsistence (food, housing, electricity, transport, etc.) are becoming more and more expensive while the supply of labour is shrinking and becoming more precarious, environmental catastrophes follow one after the other, new health crises emerge, and imperialist conflicts are exacerbated, the capitalist powers are preparing for the next big war. In this context, ever more intense class movements are breaking out and will continue to do so, since the contradictions that make them break out are irresolvable for capital, which, in the process of its own exhaustion, is undermining the very material basis of reformism.

However, these outbursts are still taking place in the absence of an emancipatory perspective. This is due to the deep historical break brought about by the Stalinist counter-revolution, whose darkest moments occurred between the 1930s and the 1960s. During these years, consecrated on the sacrificial altar of the Second World War, the meaning of words like communism, internationalism or class independence became their opposite, while revolutionaries who were not killed or defected to Moscow or Washington could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The wave of struggles that was roused worldwide in the 1960s to 1980s would begin the slow process of erosion of the counter-revolution and, after the ebb of the 1990s, we find ourselves at the beginning of this century in an ‘amphibious’ situation, typical of a historic period between counter-revolution and the opening of a new stage of revolutionary upswing. Amphibious because it is characterised by the historical and programmatic disorientation left by the erosion of the counter-revolution, but not immediately accompanied by a revolutionary restoration of the communist programme, and with the social power of the resumption of class struggle when capitalism is running out of expedients to attempt to channel it.

The tasks of revolutionaries are always the same, but they acquire a different prioritisation depending on the historical period in which they find themselves. It cannot be the same in a period of open class struggle or a revolutionary situation, where the core of our activity is to intervene in combat, to promote the self-organisation of the movement and its autonomy from the forces of recuperation, to promote the centralisation of the revolutionary currents at the international level and to organise the armed insurrection for the destruction of the bourgeois state, than in a period of counter-revolution, where our work will concentrate on the balance of the defeat and the maintenance of the programme, without ceasing to participate in the struggles of the proletariat which tend to go beyond the existing framework. In these times of transition in which we are living, where the characteristic feature is the programmatic disorientation of the social outbursts which are nevertheless occurring with increasing intensity, the work of clarifying and defending revolutionary positions remains the key element. To this is added the search for contact and discussion with revolutionary minorities in other territories, together with participation in the class movements that may be unleashed, the work in them of criticising the reformist illusions they harbour and reinforcing their class autonomy vis-à-vis the trade unions and bourgeois parties.

We are in a very incipient and therefore very confused phase of what we believe will be the next revolutionary upsurge. There is still a long way to go before the proletariat re-engages with its programme in an active and conscious way, but the agony of this mode of production leaves little choice. Thus, it is incumbent upon revolutionaries today to be a fully active part of the proletariat in the decisive moments of confrontation that will unfold, fighting uncompromisingly for our class to reappropriate its programme and put it into action through the only human practice that is immediately theory: revolution.

List of texts referenced by order of appearance:

1) Barbaria: Determinism and Revolution
2) Barbaria: Intersecting Capitalism?
3) Barbaria: Commodity Fetishism
4) Rosa Luxemburg: The National Question and Autonomy
5) Barbaria: Race, Racism, Racialisation: A Communist Perspective
6) Barbaria: Why Revolutionary Defeatism?
7) Barbaria: Women, Patriarchy and Capitalism
8) Barbaria: [Talk] Austerity will be Green: on the Green New Deal and the Capitalist Catastrophe.
9) Barbaria: Stalinism: Red Flag of Capital
10) Barbaria: Notes on Communism as a Real Movement
11) Barbaria: Robin Hood in Capital’s Forest
12) Barbaria: Stalin’s Capitalism
13) Vercesi: The Question of the State
14) Amadeo Bordiga: The Immediate Revolutionary Programme
15) Barbaria: On the Decline of Capitalism, Permanent Revolution and Double Revolution
16) Jacques Camatte: The Democratic Mystification
Italian Left: Fascism and Anti-fascism. Two Sides of the Same Coin
17) G. Munis: The Unions against Revolution
18) Barbaria: Why We are not Feminists
19) Barbaria: Degrowthism and the Management of Misery
20) Barbaria: The Past of our Being
21) Barbaria: Capitalist Catastrophe and Revolutionary Theory
22) Roger Dangeville: Introduction to Marx-Engels: “Le parti de classe”.
23) Barbaria: [Audio] The Relationship between Class and Party
24) Jacques Camatte: Origin and Function of the Party Form
25) Amadeo Bordiga: Theory and Action in Marxist Doctrine
26) Barbaria: Ten Notes on the Revolutionary Perspective
27) Barbaria: Land in the Crisis of Value
28) Barbaria: The Pandemics of capital
29) Amadeo Bordiga: Considerations on the Organic Activity of the Party when the General Situation is Historically Unfavourable.