[The following is our English translation of two written responses from L’Ouvrier Communiste to the anarchists of Lotta Anarchica.]
Response to Lotta Anarchica
Under the title Signs of the Time, the organ of the Anarchist-Communist Groups belonging to the Italian Anarchist Union devotes an important article by P. Felcino to us on the front page. We thank this comrade for the effort of objectivity that this article shows. His good faith as a proletarian revolutionary is a respite from the “Leninist” methods of discussion employed by the Bolsheviks. Comrade Felcino, on the other hand, attempts a serious exposition of our principles, makes precise reservations about them, and proposes, in the name of the Lotta Anarchica, to establish an ongoing discussion, through the press, and by direct means that can be envisaged in common. We gladly accept these proposals, as well as any others of the same kind that may be extended to us in the future.
As Comrade Felcino notes at the outset:
“[T]he war and the post-war period have exposed so many errors, shortcomings and failures, and raised so many new problems in the proletarian camp, that they make us consider as a more than natural fact the general crisis of the currents and groupings of proletarian struggle in every country”.
In our opinion, it would be fair to add that these events, insofar as they involve a mortal crisis of world capitalism, the repercussions of which are constantly spreading, impose on the proletarian struggle the necessity of putting an end to all national particularism and of placing itself directly on the terrain of world revolution. As we shall see later, we regard the internationalisation of the consequences of the crisis, the unification of the various economic strata of the proletariat and the disappearance of national borders in the workers’ movement, as the basis for any ideological deepening and unification of the revolution. Because of this, we do not believe ourselves entitled, in reply to the comrades of the Lotta Anarchica, to “limit the debate to the terrain and the Italian problem, to be a political group and a current in emigration.” Our movement is international by its nature and by its elements, and if certain elements play a particularly active role in it, the fact remains that we consider Germany as the theatre of the most decisive experiences acquired, and France, where we live, as the current terrain of our internationalist propaganda and action.
The Communist-Worker Groups give Gorter credit for having fully appreciated the element of historical novelty contained in the German revolution of 1918-21, an element which far surpasses the Russian October in international value. What Marx had done for the revolutions of the 19th century, in particular for the Paris Commune, Pannekoek and Gorter did for the German revolution to the extent of their ability. In this respect, we readily acknowledge that there is a community of “fundamental inspiration” between them and ourselves, although we do not consider ourselves to be their “disciples” or “Marxists” in the sense that Marx himself also repudiated the term.
As Felcino points out, the essential thing for us is “to advance in our understanding of the problems of social revolution and the tasks it entails”, not to remain faithful to this or that scholastic tradition. But precisely because of this, it would be futile to regard us as elements on the march towards traditional anarchism. Not only are we “still a long way from it”, as Lotta Anarchica sincerely notes, but we also consider it to be a stage that has already been overcome. It is neither state communism nor libertarian anarchism as we know them that represent, in our eyes, the ideology developed by the proletariat through the permanent world revolution: it is a question of overcoming all such limited ideologies, and not of the victory of one revolutionary tradition over another.
We are not, as others might confuse us to be, proponents of “a particular programme”, but rather of the definitive programme. And Felcino is right to regard the “informative principles” on which our propaganda is currently based as the building blocks of an international programme for the Communist Workers’ movement; as milestones laid down by history, which history alone can complete. His articulation is not always joyful, nor is it without ambiguity. But it will be an opportunity for us to clarify the essential points of our ideology.
What you will read now is taken from La Lotta Anarchica:
“And now let us come to the facts. What are the formational principles of the Communist-Worker groups? We can sum them up as follows:
1) There is no programme capable of preventing a politico-social grouping from sliding into counter-revolutionary terrain;
2) Parliamentarianism, an institution of the bourgeois regime, with an obvious aim of corruption and class collaboration, cannot be the means of struggle of the revolutionary proletariat for the struggle against the bourgeois regime and for its overthrow, nor the instrument for the functioning of the social organisms of tomorrow;
3) Trade unionism—since trade-union action on the part of the broad masses in defence of their immediate material interests is now confined by the trade-union bureaucracy into the swamp of compulsory arbitration and is resolved by the whole gamut of officials and the aristocracy of labour, into class collaboration, corruption, divisions and friction in the ranks of the proletariat—cannot be the organ that meets the demands of today’s struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeois regime. This aim is better served by the proletarian revolutionary factory committees, which are not the expression of a party, but of all the classist and revolutionary currents within the proletariat. The class concept of the proletariat denies all value to the intellectual elements of the bourgeoisie which have passed over to proletarian ideology, “whose work would consist in illustrating material states of affairs and vital elements of the class that would spontaneously emerge, and, on the other hand, in bringing to a successful conclusion the construction of communist society”.
Having broadly outlined the thinking of the Communist-Worker groups, we will now clarify this further. Let us begin by saying that we agree with the first point, adding that the danger of political-social groupings slipping away is all the greater when their leading functional apparatus is concentrated and removed from the control and criticism of the members. The second point, needless to say, meets with our full approval. On the third point, we have a few objections to make. We agree with the criticism of trade unions and trade-union action in relation to the current situation. We believe that above all through the development of rationalisation and the armed defence of its privileges the bourgeoisie has reduced the trade union to a situation where its specific role is exhausted and that consequently it is urgent to set up organs better suited to the situation and more capable of the task; organs which could be precisely the revolutionary proletarian factory committees. Where we disagree is in the interrogative formula: “Should the unions be conquered or destroyed?” For our part, we answer this question as follows: “neither the one nor the other.”
In fact, we, conscious of the need to propagate our principles among the masses, cannot and must not neglect any environment, and consequently not even the trade-unionist one, in the pursuit of our aim. If afterwards, by putting this task into practice, we are thrown out of the unions, then there would be no great harm, since we will be able to continue to explain our revolutionary activity in the proletarian revolutionary factory committees. The greatest harm, it seems to us, could be, on the contrary, to assume the role of Maramaldo, which would provide our reformist-collaborationist adversaries with the pretext of pointing us out as enemies of the people and its institutions, with effects that are easy to foresee.
On the subject of revolutionary proletarian factory committees, we can even say that the idea is not a novelty to us. We supported it at the Conference for Proletarian Unity which took place in the middle of the countryside near Legnano in the summer of 1925. The proposal was supported by delegates from all over Italy, but met with hostility from Communist Party representatives, since it thwarted their attempts at political speculation.
Let us now conclude this essay, which is already too long, with a few remarks on our concept of class. In our opinion, the existence of the working/proletarian class, although it is not easy to define its boundaries, is an obvious fact. Less obvious, on the other hand, is the existence of a section of the working/proletarian class which is consciously revolutionary or even capable of becoming so. If, indeed, such a possibility existed, it would vindicate the reformist conception over the revolutionary conception, for, if this section of the working class makes up the great majority of society, then social transformation would not require an insurrectionary upheaval. It is rather the case that this class finds its expression and its mission in its consciously revolutionary minority, which must act consciously as such, without, however, rejecting the contribution of the originally bourgeois elements, defectors to their class for reasons of ideas and feelings, with the aim of fighting for a higher ideal of justice and freedom. To deny such elements any will or capacity to fight is to deny the evidence of the idealist factor and to fall back on the flattest economic determinism. This is the historical truth, and it is illustrated by admirable examples of self-denial and sacrifice handed down to us by giants such as Marx, Bakunin, Liebknecht, Kurt Eisner, and so many others, who, although not proletarians in the common sense of the word, devoted themselves entirely to the cause of the proletariat.
These are our conceptions, which we summarise as follows: “the proletariat has potentially all the qualities and attributes to bring about a communist society, and it will achieve this all the sooner if it introduces greater theoretical clarity and ruthlessness into its struggle”.”
After quoting the essential passages of Comrade Felcino’s presentation and criticism, we are led to clarify the following essential points:
1) not only do the programmatic and organisational statutes of a group or party have no value independently of the active and conscious content of the organisation, but they only have value in relation to a given situation and a given revolutionary stage, and their subsequent conservation automatically tends to become reactionary;
2) this is precisely the case with ideological and organisational forms relating to the period of pre-imperialist capitalism, such as parliamentary parties. The democratic conquest of power had a revolutionary proletarian meaning in the middle of the last century in the sense of a historical shortcut to highly developed capitalism, a liquidation of the backward classes with the help of the radical bourgeoisie, and a socialisation of capitalism, itself making the suppression of all capitalism objectively possible. Today, these same formulas have only an openly reactionary meaning, capitalism having arrived by its own line of development at the insoluble contradictions of the world crisis, which can only be negated by the suppression of all capitalism;
3) In the second half of the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels themselves revised their political principles after the failure of revolutionary attempts to conquer the capitalist state. They recognised the primordial role of the economic drive of the working classes in the evolution of capitalism towards maturity. They then adopted an increasingly radical point of view, gradually recognising the spontaneous and immediately communist anti-state character of the proletarian revolution, as objective conditions in Western Europe and practical experience (such as the Paris Commune) led them to such conclusions.
In their political evolution, the great founders of libertarian collectivism, Bakunin in particular, followed the same general line. If these revolutionaries were more radical in their doctrinal positions, it was above all insofar as the simplism of the theory, leaving its appointed interpreters ample room for manoeuvre, was complemented by a certain de facto opportunism (which they pushed in some cases to an almost unbelievable degree).
However, it is necessary to note that the role of anarchism as a movement, as a demand for an autonomous struggle of the masses, as a critique of State socialism, was, in general, quite beneficial and progressive, and this at a time which is not yet very distant. Around 1900, there was a sort of remarkable flowering of the class spirit in Italy, Spain, France and, finally, in America. But who today, reading Sorel, Berth, Lagardelle or Payet, is not struck by the reformist sterility that underlies all the literary apologies for violence? It suffices to read, for example, Pataud and Payet’s well-known work, How we will Make the Revolution, to be convinced of the extreme ideological and practical shallowness of a conception in which the revolution:
1) emerges out of a brawl at the end of a meeting, amid high conjecture and in full swing of the movement for wages;
2) liquidates its opponents in three swift moves by the bourgeoisie’s religious fear and the government’s panicked irresponsibility (the government hides the truth from the bourgeoisie to stay in office, then exiles itself without a second thought);
3) turns society upside down in two months, within the framework of the nation, and to the enthusiastic applause of the petty bourgeois, merchants, petty rentiers, and petty industrialists who immediately rallied round it, and then;
4) immediately establishes freedom in the field of production and consumption, in the form of freely federated associations; in other words, a return to a petty bourgeois production, while the major public services remain under management by a trade-union state. If such daydreams were already pitiful in a country which had seen the Commune, then the same holds for those who, today, still insist on seeing in the unions the free and sacred expression of proletarian consciousness—that is to say the workers’ organisation in itself—whereas in reality the union is a product of capitalist constraint, and a form of adaptation and integration into capitalist society.
From these considerations we are careful not to draw the conclusion that the anarchist tradition must be rejected in its entirety as having become historically reactionary. But we should note that almost the entire revolutionary anarchist movement has been lost in the sands of trade-union reformism, that even the anti-syndicalist anarchists of Lotta Anarchica still consider the trade union (or, failing that, the factory committee) as the natural working ground for the proletarian elites and, finally, that they refuse to destroy the unions by boycott, but wish to conquer their content, supposedly by carrying out a trade-union activity which is “more revolutionary” than that of the leaders in office.
All this means that the welding together of anarchism and trade-union reformism, which shortly succeeded the struggle of anarchism against parliamentary reformism, is today an almost universal fact, and since the old anarchism can no more be resurrected or used in the present situation than can the old syndicalism, or the theories abandoned by Marx regarding the transitional people’s state, etc. The conclusion, in so many words, is that anarchism can only be revived by breaking with the trade-union tradition, by renewing itself from top to bottom, and ultimately, by overcoming itself and its traditional antagonists.
Strictly speaking, it is not a discussion that we would like to conduct with elements such as those of Lotta Anarchica, but which must be joint product, in light of practice and international historical experience. We shall consider, upon another occasion, clarifying the unitary conception towards which we are oriented, a conception which alone can bring to light the close interdependence of the various questions that have been discussed here.
We believe that a matter such as that of the role of the bourgeois, i.e., of the aspiring professional-intellectual leaders of the proletariat, can hardly be presented as a special point of our basic principles, but must be explained together with the rest of our conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a permanent class revolution.
This last formula shall be the theme of our forthcoming explanation.
L’Ouvrier Communiste no.11 – August 1930
The Anarchists and Ourselves – Biaggio’s response
We continue our discussion with the comrades of the Lotta Anarchica in a cordial manner, of course, but not to the point where cordiality becomes diplomacy, because then the frequency of such discussions would amount to a manoeuvre. The comrades of L.A. say that the spirit of international collaboration which animates us is right, but they only find that this position of ours is to be taken with circumspection, that is to say with due reservations. We do not know where the comrades of L.A. find the reason for these reservations, at least with regard to us, since they come to the point of considering that we could possibly participate in the manipulation of the whole international movement, constraining it to a national standpoint, as the Bolsheviks have done. It is obvious that the comrades in L.A. have not read our papers carefully and that they have not fully understood the substance of Gorter’s criticism of Lenin. It is obvious that, if Bolshevism ended in nationalism, it was due to its hybrid content from a class perspective due to the immaturity of its economic base and its subjective, ideological content. In our criticism of Lenin and Zinoviev’s counter-current in the second issue of our journal, we clearly demonstrated that our position on this subject was diametrically opposed to that of Leninism, and we showed that the latter was contaminated by nationalism, even before the revolution. This is why we highlighted that the proletariat has no fatherland, and that consequently all fatherlands, i.e., all capitalisms, are its enemies. It is also why we are not concerned by the ethical differences which exist, as well as by the subsequent differences of character and language, because all this has no revolutionary value, but a reactionary value. These are elements that the bourgeois class can insist on, but not the conscious proletariat, which intends to overcome them. Our position on the revolutionary war is a product of our intransigent internationalism, which can be summed up in one sentence: “Wherever we proletarians are, the capitalists are our enemies, be they French, English, Italian or from any other country.” We see that after the revolution in one country, the proletariat of that country, having destroyed its bourgeoisie, has the capitalisms of all the other countries as its enemies. Contrariwise, if this proletariat retained within the struggle a national particularism—a certain pride in its particular qualities as a ‘people’—then it would already be on the wrong track. But history is bringing about a proletarian revolution in the West which, even if tainted at the beginning by national particularism, as was the case with the Paris Commune, later acquires an increasingly internationalist character. This is because the circumstances of the proletariat eventually triumphs over national particularism, which is thus forced to surrender to the passion of the exploited class in search of its freedom.
The monstrosity of national-Bolshevism is a product of historical conditions, and the Western revolution cannot follow the same path. The pure internationalism which followed the revolution, and which was then extinguished by Leninism through the hegemony of Bolshevism over the international revolutionary movement, is proof of this. And we believe that, in the future, the proletarian spirit will be able to give new strength to this internationalism of which we declare ourselves to be staunch supporters and heirs.
Lotta Anarchica, therefore, asks for a more explicit historical justification of our conception of the transitional character of certain programmes, specifically as regards the positive value of the social-democratic movement in history. First of all, we do not see this movement as a simple manifestation of parliamentary collaboration: for us, reformism has its origins in the economic struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Parliamentary collaboration is only one aspect of this struggle. Marx was late in grasping the nature of reformism, which for us is synonymous with syndicalism, as we said in the last issue in Italian. It has a dual character, evolving, progressive, and at the same time a counter-revolutionary tendency. The first aspect, or tendency, asserts itself in a period when capitalism was developing and when, consequently, wage increases were still possible, and thus, as a result, the relative economic and intellectual improvement of the working class was possible as well. The economic movement, the parliamentary reflection of which is social democracy or ‘socialism’, has as its consequence a psychological evolution of the international proletariat or, to put it better, a development of the mental faculties of the proletarian masses. Since we are dialectical materialists, we consider the mind, i.e., the intellectual forces of humankind, not as something that is given from the beginning as immanent, but as something that is the result of the age-old experience of primitive humans. And this intellectual force, which is something akin to life itself, appearing like crystalloids and albuminoids, this thought—which is becoming an increasingly collective force—is painfully subjected to the laws of the merciless contradiction which has its origins in the economic foundation. And it is from this contradiction that the negative aspect of the spiritual development of the proletarian masses also derives: the economic hegemony of capitalism creates the possibility of its intellectual and ethical hegemony.
L’Ouvrier Communiste No.13 – January 1931
League of Internationalist Communists 