Revolutionary Class, Political Organisation, Dictatorship of the Proletariat – Grandizo Munis

[We publish here our English translation of a text from Grandizo Munis, the original can be found in Spanish here.]

I

Is revolutionary theory to be introduced into the working class from outside, as Lenin said, or must it come from within the class itself? Neither is true in the full sense, or rather, both are true in their full interpretation, which varies substantially from the one that is attributed to it by the advocates of both interpretations. It is not a question of theses as such, but of ways of seeing something that has been produced by the accumulation of multiple social factors. The contradiction seems absurd since we have been talking about proletarian revolution for a long century, and no one is unaware that the idea of it and all that is communist theory have not been discovered by the working class. But it loses all absurdity as soon as it becomes a question of determining the relationship between revolution and organisation from any present situation up to the future dictatorship of the proletariat.

The bourgeoisie generated its own revolutionary theory because long before it took over the whole state it was already a possessing class and in general more cultured than the nobility of the absolute monarchy. On the contrary, the proletariat is not and never will be a possessing class, and to be imbued with culture it needs to cease to be a proletariat. However, to ask whether or not the whole of communist theory with its corresponding praxis must come from the wage-earners is more absurd than to ask whether or not chemistry, physics, genetics, automobiles, cybernetics, etc., must be proletarian creations. Quite simply, none of the sciences would have acquired their present development without the presence of the working class, or more precisely, without the enormous wealth that its social position obliges it to create as alien wealth. Even if for the time being each and every science is used to clip its wings, its development can only be optimal and fully scientific through the proletariat, and within communism. There is thus a palpable relationship between the proletariat and the sciences, however much it may ignore them, and the relationship will become possession once capitalism is abolished.

Much closer is the relationship between the proletariat and revolutionary theory, regardless of the margin of error possible in the latter, for it is simultaneously a margin for rectification and development. Rather than a relationship, we must speak of rapport. It does not appear, in fact, as a knowledge belonging capital, the refinement of which ultimately demands to be turned against it, as in the case of the sciences and their technical applications. Rather, that relationship stands from the beginning against society founded on capital and the wage-earning system and is enriched through the struggles of the proletariat against capital. It is the condition of the working class in today’s society that directly provokes the emergence of revolutionary theory. Without the previous development of philosophy, of the social sciences, of the natural sciences and of capitalist society itself, this would have been impossible. But it would have been completely unthinkable without the struggles and insurrectionary attacks of the workers, from the most remote to Babeuf’s “Conspiracy of the Equals”, rebellions like that of Lyons in 1830 and the insurrection of the proletariat which has been raging almost everywhere in Europe since 1848. The interweaving of the material, intellectual and human factors given by historical evolution, with the passionate, subjective, but no less indispensable as a factor of history, activity of the workers, gave rise to revolutionary theory. Thus, in this relation, there is both exteriority and interiority with regard to the proletariat, but that which presents itself as exterior, as much as the other classes, indeed any kind of knowledge, also represents its own interiority in development.

Because it does not exist for the industrial world of today, the proletariat is the (anti-)class par excellence: the cipher of communism. But this communist potential reveals above all, as long as it does not manifest itself in action, the strict economic and cultural dependence of the class on capitalism. Such a dependence bars the majority of wage-earners from theoretical knowledge, without which there will never be any revolution. The individual exceptions which there may be at any given moment escape, as such, the general condition, just as the revolutionaries who come from the bourgeoisie escape the condition of the bourgeoisie. In both cases they can only be minorities. And so, a distinction between the revolutionary class and revolutionaries appears from the very beginning. This is the case to such an extent that even if we were to imagine all past, present, and future revolutionaries as coming entirely from the ranks of the proletariat, they would still appear distinct from the revolutionary class, as long as the revolutionary class itself does not pass from the potential to the dynamic, from its communist potential to the communist transformation of society. And in epochs dominated by reaction such as the one we have been living through since 1937, within which all sorts of swindlers and false friends of the proletariat pretend to be communists, the barrier between class and revolutionaries becomes nearly insurmountable, until the situation is finally resolved.

Lenin’s statement in “What is to be done?” is a simplification of another simplification by Kautsky in “The Three Sources of Marxism”. The erudite as opposed to dialectical mind of this social-democratic theoretician led him to see revolutionary thought as a pure distillation of science and philosophy, only subsequently applicable to the workers’ movement. Rosa Luxemburg was even more correct in her assertion that Marx had not waited to write “Capital” before he became a communist, but that he was enabled to write it by the fact that he was a communist. Indeed, the existence of workers’ struggles and within them the existence of revolutionaries was the primary condition for the use of science and philosophy to elaborate revolutionary theory. The distinction between revolutionary class and revolutionaries is imposed by capitalism, which widens it in times of quiescence. But to deny its existence is the same as denying the possibility of revolution and entrusting the future to economic-social automatism; it is to revert to evolutionism.

This makes it possible to address the connection between class and revolutionaries, between revolution and organisation, between party and dictatorship of the proletariat; and this, not in the abstract, imagining ideal conditions, but in the concrete, on the basis of the existing factual situation and experience, which are independent of anybody’s will.

The simplism of Lenin’s interpretation is not the only source of his democratic centralism, about which so much has been said. The tactical idea of responding to the discipline and centralisation imposed on the working class in the factories by a parallel centralisation and discipline is also added on to it. This conception overlooks without realising it that the revolutionary action of the class aims at overthrowing the forms of organisation and mechanisms of obedience inseparable from the system. Moreover, there remains in this idea a hint of the revolutionary use of the present state, which has been discredited since the Commune. Thirdly, there was also the illegal political work in Tsarist Russia, which in most cases excluded democratic discussions and decisions. In practice, the leadership was invested with even greater powers than democratic centralism gave it. The same will be true, by the force of repressive reality, in any situation of illegality. However, democratic centralism was not a temporary expedient. It was intended to be, under normal conditions, the best form of organisation for the revolutionaries and their links with the working class.

The powers granted to the central leadership, even between congresses, would prove to be despotic and one of the most hurtful instruments of the counter-revolution in Russia. The criticisms of it formulated at the time by Rosa Luxemburg and even Trotsky have had the most tragic of confirmations. And it was no slight error on the part of the latter to have adhered to democratic centralism and to have maintained this adherence even after Stalinism had consolidated himself. Trotsky realised this only a short time before he was assassinated, for he felt the need to recall, approvingly, this first and most energetic opposition. However, it was of no consequence for what continues to call itself Trotskyism. More inclined to stagnate than to learn, in this as in other respects, it continues to see democratic centralism as an organisational talisman and often uses it as a cudgel.

It would be superfluous to consider here the whole period inaugurated by the Stalinist counter-revolution, for it was not a question of democratic centralism or of any conception of the relationship between class and party, but of a bureaucracy becoming fully entrenched within its new economic and political positions. Consequently, the brutal and reactionary dictatorship still prevailing in Russia is of interest in this investigation only to the extent that democratic centralism as such contributed to its emergence.

The Bolshevik party never identified the dictatorship of the proletariat with the dictatorship of the party. The sophistry “one class, one party” was a lie of the counter-revolution. On the other hand, even the decree which banned fractions within the Bolshevik party, drawn up by Lenin, was careful to warn that the measure was not a revolutionary principle, but a simple emergency and provisional expedient, to ameliorate a difficult situation. Such a precaution is cruel sarcasm today but that will not prevent it from being an important testimony against the one-party conception, whatever bias it may adopt. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks never had an unequivocal conception of the relationship between revolutionary class and revolutionaries and tended early on, in their day-to-day actions, to take the place of the proletariat as a party. At the end of the Tenth Congress in 1921, the degeneration of the party was already more complete than Lenin, Trotsky and the best militants, both in the leadership and in the rank and file, believed. The Bolshevik rank and file itself were supplanted by the leadership and the leadership would soon be supplanted by the Secretariat of Organisation, where they were then ambushed by Stalin and his henchmen. This secretariat emanated and imposed an increasingly undemocratic centralism.

It is in this process that Bolshevik centralism plays a disastrous role. Thanks to the powers statutorily conferred on the leadership, the organisational secretary was able, by means of simple secretarial diktat: to eliminate troublesome people and committees; to replace them with their own; to fabricate majorities at will; to isolate and deprive the most prominent leaders, beginning with Trotsky, of opposition resources. In short, to gain absolute and exclusive leadership for life in a manner befitting the worst despots of history.

The absence of a clear and accurate conception of the dialectical unity of the proletariat and its revolutionary party blinded the best Bolsheviks from seeing where the counter-revolution was coming from and prevented them from reacting accordingly. Thus, as Lenin realised that Stalin was a dangerous and disloyal beast, and that the political counterposition between him and Trotsky threatened to split the party in two, his main concern was to avoid that division and he recommended as a remedy (Political Testament) to increase the membership of the Central Committee. We now have sufficient historical perspective to affirm that the split would have been, at best, a lesser evil. Indeed, even if it would certainly not have straightened out the course of the revolution, it would have forced the counterrevolutionaries to come out of their bureaucratic burrow and show themselves in the open. Since long before, it is now clear, there was no other recourse than to appeal to the rank and file against the leadership and to the proletariat against the Bolshevik party. Already in the Kronstadt insurrection the leaders saw a grave threat to the revolution in what was only a stumbling block and a warning, without, however, perceiving that counter-revolution was brewing in their own party and that the repression of the insurrectionists favoured it. And so, even when the Left Opposition was formed, Trotsky and his followers refrained from appealing to the working class against a party which they themselves considered to have degenerated. The fact is that surreptitiously, without any clear theory, the supplanting of the revolutionary class by the party had taken root in each and every mind. By such means it was possible to pass, with no apparent thread of continuity, from democratic centralism to the most police-like and reactionary centralism of all time.

What was said above about Kronstadt applies, to a lesser degree, to the other Soviet oppositions, meaning those which had advocated that power be in the hands of the soviets. A proletarian regime must know how to deal with internal class problems in a different way from the Bolsheviks, even in the case of rightist deviations of some of its sections. If the class as a whole is not able to overcome these deviations within the organs of power, then the impositions of the ruling revolutionaries will not meet success either. Wanting to play the role of the revolutionary class, the latter would establish themselves as a power independent of the class, and the very thing which they had intended to fight infiltrates their own organisms like an invasion of termites. For in times of revolution there is nothing so accommodating and self-righteous as bourgeois mentalities in search of a new lease of life. And these are certainly not exclusive attributes of the bourgeoisie.

However, none of the opposition in the soviets that the Bolsheviks encountered deserved political approval, save for the demand for freedom in the soviets. They had not even a hazy vision of what the revolution in Russia, let alone internationally, was to be. At the same time, the Workers’ Opposition, which is so much vaunted today by some groups, was in reality an opposition to the trade union bureaucracy, which is transparent in its programme. Kollontai and other of its leaders soon found their place in the counter-revolution. But in the turmoil then prevailing, not a few alarmed revolutionaries embraced it. They would soon be shipped out to die in Siberia in the company of many within Trotsky’s Opposition.

Before proceeding further, it is necessary to interject an internationalist reflection. It is hard to believe that the Russian revolution could have been saved once the NEP gave free rein to mercantile relations. But the world revolution could have been saved, and it continued to roam from one country to another until Spain in 1936-37. Had the world proletariat unmistakably witnessed the end of the Russian revolution, it would have turned its back on Moscow and its parties, which were already primed to control workers everywhere, and new revolutionary organisations would have sprung up with ease. But Russia lacked something similar to the French Thermidor, when, the day after the dismissal of the Public Health Committee, the heads of its members rolled into the guillotine basket, and with them the revolution. It was certainly not the fear of death on the part of the enemies of Stalinism that prevented them from taking any course that would mark, for anybody, the undeniable thread of continuity that would aid in safeguarding the international revolution; it was rather the de facto identification between class dictatorship and party dictatorship. Fifty years of catastrophic proletarian defeats and an ideological prostitution that still continues to haunt the collective consciousness have their origin in that failure.

Nothing in what has been said prevents us from denying categorically that the counter-revolution was prefigured in democratic centralism or that it was engendered by its extreme application with the suppression of parties and factions. The facts have shown that such measures served not the revolution but its enemies. But the counter-revolution can in no case prosper without economic and social bases. They give it its first impetus, progress by widening it, and to this end, it makes use of everything in its power. This is to say that the counter-revolution was engendered by capital, not by placing it on the shoulders of the bourgeoisie, but by centralising it at the discretion of the state. The characteristic indeterminacy of the Russian revolution, neither bourgeois nor communist, made it entirely dependent on the passage from its first (anti-feudal) democratic phase to the communist phase in which instruments of production and distribution are collectively vested in the working class. Far from reaching that stage, the revolution officially regressed with the NEP and disarmed itself by surrendering to the state, which was to dispose of existing and future surplus value at its own discretion. Lenin’s idea of strategic retreat—state capitalism governed by soviet democracy pending the European revolution—did not and could not even begin to be applied. All capitalism is necessarily administered by those who collect surplus value. In this case, it was not only the bureaucracy that proliferated from the local committees to the Kremlin, but also merchants of new and better crumbs from the bureaucracy thanks to the NEP, a bourgeoisie eager for a good living, technicians and intellectuals who had boycotted the revolution, and even aristocrats in humble reverence for the upstart rulers. Such was the social basis of the counter-revolution.

On the other hand, if the bourgeoisie had proved incapable of making its revolution and extending its system in Russia, it was not only because of the communist threat represented by the proletariat, but also because the development of private capital was already overtaken by the concentration in large international trusts and in the state. The Stalinist counter-revolution empirically discovered that the state capitalist form was the most efficient, both to ward off communist revolution and to compete with international capitalism. The very thing that had allowed the proletariat to seize power in a backward country, plagued by economic, social, religious, etc., anachronisms, later allowed the counter-revolution to concentrate capital to the maximum extent permitted by the capitalist system as a whole. Two dialectical movements moving in opposite directions were taking place there: one towards communist revolution going through the democratic revolution by the proletariat, the other towards state capitalism without individual property. The proletarian revolution remained limited to politics, and accordingly, the counter-revolution only needed to be political, though this did not make it any less bloody.

In the economic field, the identification of class and party dictatorship also did harm to the proletariat and its revolutionaries, a situation badly compounded by equating socialist property with state property, already a base falsification. Consequently, the organic methods of Bolshevism and any substitution of the revolutionary class by one or several combined organisations are to be discarded. However, the richest lesson that the revolution and counter-revolution in Russia offer us is the impossibility of making a revolution in two stages: the first bourgeois-democratic and the second socialist. Capitalism will always reassert itself so long as its foundations, production and distribution based on wage-labour, are not shattered from the outset. Without this, permanent revolution is as much a pipedream as the permanence of revolution. What matters for each proletariat is the industrial development in the entire world, not that of “its” nation alone.

From bad to worse, democratic centralism has become almost a bourgeois jurist’s perfume in the eyes of the organic centralism proclaimed by the tendency inspired by Bordiga. Its simple formulation indicates that the term “democratic” has been outlawed with a vengeance, leaving centralism as the only domiciliary of the conception. The other word, organic, does not add anything, but is rather redundant to it. Together with the first, it means nothing more than centralist centralism. This is, in fact, what is meant by this tendency, which delights in reprising the errors of Bolshevism and in raising them as a revolutionary panacea. It sees in democracy a hindrance to the revolution and to the proletariat, for how can the revolutionary validity of a particular theory or measure be decided by a majority vote? This is a discovery of Bordigism. No one, indeed, can answer yes to such a truism. But to make it the basis of an organic conception is to assert implicitly that this validity can and must be decided by a minority, with or without a vote. Bordigism evades the problem by assuring us without batting an eyelid that “if the directives given are fair, there can be no conflict between the rank and file and the leadership”. It is for a particular reason that they speak of an organic centralism, that is to say, of a relationship between base and party centre, between proletariat and party, between ruled and rulers after the revolution, which regulates itself, like a bodily metabolism. This is yet another Bordigist discovery which allows his faithful the most haughty and hollow contempt for a democracy which they believe they have scientifically surpassed with such nonsense.

On the contrary, it is clear that there can be conflict with correct directives, and conversely, no conflict with mistaken directives. But the working class, the organs of power, the party, are seen by organic centralism as a beehive where, barring secondary accidents, everything runs smoothly as long as the hormone distribution between the female workers, the drones and the centre of the hive, the queen, maintains the requisite dose and quality. In the case under discussion here, it is understood that instead of hormones, the revolutionary thought secreted by the Centre, the leadership of the party, must be internalised. The effect has the same value and the same inevitability as a chemical reaction. This assimilation of a revolutionary party and the working class to an organism or a colony of animal organisms falls entirely within naturalism, not materialist dialectics, and if it has philosophical antecedents, it is certainly not in the revolutionary movement.

Ancient Chinese philosophy established a natural or spiritual but constant relationship between the Empire and the Emperor (which Mao Tse-Tung still uses loosely) and postulated the same oneness of health or degeneration, of efficiency or dullness, which renders any form of democracy or supervision of leadership illusory and superfluous. Such organicism applied to what is not a physiological complex is the wisdom of oriental despotism. It is also found in India and still has glimpses of it in the medieval ties that bound vassals to their lord. Bordigism has refined this idea with proletarianising and economistic concoctions, and once more wants us to have a smell of it, as though it were an effluvium of the purest Marxism. And so forth, to the point of mental delirium.

Bordigism has undeniable merits. Firstly, to have maintained an internationalist attitude during the war. Secondly, it has always denounced Stalinism without any appeasement, even if treating it as reformist, which it is not, and it has also recognised state capitalism in Russia, although its analysis leaves something to be desired. It is not a question of sparing it this value. But we must say “absolutely not!” when, by dint of self-conceit, it self-sacralises. The Historical Party of the Revolution, as they say, the blue-blooded revolutionaries, the cream of the crop, the only ones capable of saying and deciding what is and isn’t, not just in theory but in practice, and to impose it on us if one day they get their hands on the lever of power. For, in the Bordigist conception, and there can be no other, the proletarian dictatorship is exercised by the party, the brain of the class by self-appointment, and the party itself hinges and depends upon its Centre, the brain of brains. Thus, Bordigism crowns itself with its chief discovery: it alone is the historic party of the proletariat; it alone is the party which must carry out the proletarian dictatorship; to doubt this constitutes in itself an opportunist attack on the party, and therefore on the proletariat as a class and the revolution itself. By dint of subjectivising itself as a revolutionary tendency, it abandons Marxism in favour of a redemptive pontification. Following such a path, it is quite evident, the proletariat would continue to be the object and not the subject of history, until its disappearance in the communism that the Party of that time would have endowed to it philanthropically, graciously, and whether it accepts it or not.

Even supposing that this or any other organisation were absolutely unassailable from the revolutionary point of view, the claim would still be a preposterous one, and in concrete terms a vulgar usurpation. For the historical party can never be anything other than the proletariat itself in revolutionary action. No organisation will succeed in usurping this function, as Bordigism proposes, without destroying it, because what the movement of a class entails, its evolution, does not admit domination by forces or party impositions, no matter how wise and quintessential they may be. That moment is the conquest of freedom in the face of necessity, and consequently it is only through the freedom of the proletariat that the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transition to the freedom of all human beings, will be realised. And—let it be said, in vain for them—that the Bordigists should abandon their ridiculous and idealistic claim to be ones anointed to do the revolutionary task of the working masses. If they were to govern, their dictatorship would immediately begin to play a reactionary role, regardless of what they might have done beforehand in a positive way. Fortunately, the danger hardly exists. Their conception is repellent, and they themselves do not expect to be able to gift their proletarian ruling sapience until the final collapse of capitalism arrives, with the catastrophic fall in the rate of profit, i.e., the day when there is no more capitalist business possible. Communists can either be scientific or not.

II

“The revolution is not a party affair” (Der Revolution ist keine Partei Sache) said Otto Rühle in his time with the German left-communists, and years later Pannekoek articulated that same thesis in his little book entitled “Council Communism”. In both, the Bordigist conception of the party is inverted into a councilist conception of ‘no party’, which today is still flourishing here and there in militant groups scalded by the Russian experience, although in general without the revolutionary accentuation of the original councilists.

Examined with rigour, these are not diametrical conceptions, but one and the same naturalistic approach which starts, in one case from revolutionary theory as a historical absolute embedded in The Party, in the other case from an empirical manifestation of the proletariat, raised to a historical absolute by means of the councils. Hence, the guarantee that the communist revolution is in The Party or in The Councils, whichever one chooses. And just as the naturalism of the Bordigist conception proceeds from an assimilation of proletariat and party to a physiological complex, that of the councilist conception walls this same complex in the boundaries of the proletarian class, to the exclusion of any party. In the eyes of the former, democracy is a mockery, while it is supreme for the latter in its working-class or councilist form, the exclusive agent of revolution and communism.

An insurmountable difficulty of the councilist ideation lies in the fact that its first measure would have to be the prohibition of any party, decapitating at the same stroke its famous revolutionary agent: workers’ democracy. A party is any grouping of people by affinity of ideas or theoretical conceptions. The anarchists have always been a sort of political party, in spite of their denials. Neither the councilists nor any conceivable grouping, whether a theory nucleus or anything else, can make a different case. In short, the non-party conception would lead the councilists to exercise the dictatorship themselves and not the proletariat, just like Bordigism, which claims the exclusive right for itself in advance.

Even before a post-revolutionary stage, the councilist project has a serious enough flaw to render it inoperative. The appearance of the workers’ organisations or councils must, in this view, occur well before the moment of the seizure of political power, and it must enjoy, still within capitalist society, optimal conditions of freedom for an indefinite period of time. Without this, in fact, it would be impossible for the councils to arrive at the moment and the decision to seize power, let alone other more far-reaching decisions, through their own experience and deliberation, outside of the past experience and theory of the revolutionary party or parties. Imagining such a case possible, the revolution itself becomes superfluous. The transformation of capitalism into communism would be a reformist, evolutionary and non-revolutionary process. All the more so since the empiricism of the councils would have to continue until the disappearance of social classes along with their innumerable consequences. In the name of an experience which, for the most part, is limited to that of the Russian revolution and subsequent counter-revolution, councilism throws overboard all the revolutionary theory and experience acquired in the course of a century and a half, which, even if only fragmentarily and with errors, reflect definite revolutionary tendencies.

On the other hand, it is far from being indubitable, and even more far from being obligatory, that the workers’ organs of power or councils should be organised before the annihilation of capitalist power, however much the present revolutionary tendencies, who are too attached, in spite of everything, to the Russian model, live in expectation of their creation. A revolution is too deep and too protean to be subject to schematic rules of development. That is how spontaneity truly appears, not in the manner that so-called spontaneism claims. In the German revolution of 1918-19, where the councils arose as an offshoot of the Russian soviets, they were immediately mediatised by various pseudo- or semi-revolutionary currents. Instead of progressing experimentally, they regressed to the point of nullifying their revolutionary potential. In China, too, they did not overcome the dissolution order issued by Stalin via Mao Tse-Tung and his cohorts. On the other hand, there was not a single council in Spain in 1936, before the proletariat tore apart the national army and with it all the capitalist structures. Calling themselves committees, councils arose, not as a condition of insurrectionary action but rather as its instantaneous result. For several months they gained local economic and political prerogatives, then declined until their extinction, owing to the same revolutionary inadequacy as in the above cases. The example of Spain informs the councilist conception even better than the others, but, as far as the emergence of the organs of power is concerned, the appearance of councils will probably tend to repeat itself with variations, as the situation of May 1968 hinted at in France.

In short, lacking the most certain revolutionary inspiration, however far they venture, the councils or workers’ organs of power are no more than an important episode in the class struggle, which is circumscribed within capitalism or even retrograde to it, as the case of Spain and Russia itself shows, though in a different way in the latter. By their very nature, the existence of the councils, and hence their experience, cannot exist for too long without achieving the first revolutionary objective: to uproot capitalism. The revolutionary class-theory relationship (in its acting aspect of councils-party) is not an artificial grafting of two factors of different origin together, but the dialectical manifestation, the dual unity of a single historical development. It alone will open the way, through revolution and communism, to a higher dialectical unity between nature and the human species.

It can rightly be argued that parties are to blame for the failure of the councils, and the councilists illustrate this with the example of the Russian revolution. Some of their conceptions stem from a distorted understanding, but this does not detract from the fact that the Bolsheviks, by monopolising the soviets, substituted themselves as a party for the proletariat and facilitated the counter-revolution, the very thing they sought to prevent. Without considering here the peculiarity of the Russian revolution, the defect lies in the Bolsheviks’ conception of the party and the organs of power. This defect calls for another kind of conception, but it reaffirms rather than annuls the necessary unicity between the organs of power and the party. Without the Bolsheviks’ ideas of world revolution, the soviets would not have exercised power for even a moment. For better or for worse, this relationship will always play out, because there will never be any lasting revolutionary practice without ideas, nor any valid revolutionary idea without corresponding practice.

The partisans of councilism believe they have discovered the infallible remedy against bureaucratisation, as if this virus could not infect the councils as well as a party, or a worker no less than an intellectual. The class as such is safe from bureaucratisation, but not any of its component parts. Examples abound. The remedy must address the causes, and not merely the effects. Wherever there are special functions to be performed, different from the daily life of the majority, the bureaucratic virus will germinate all the more easily the smaller the revolutionary composition of those who perform them. For the ultimate cause of bureaucratisation, psychological dispositions included, lies in the artificial, ephemeral, purely vain satisfaction which people seek out to cover up the absence of true individual satisfaction; the lack of personality which, in general, they cannot escape in the society of exploitation. It is a manifestation of humanity’s alienation and will only disappear completely with its passing. The important thing is for a revolution to structure society in such a way that the law of value and the state disappear. With the resulting disalienation, the stupefying bureaucratic satisfactions and the grave dangers they entail will vanish.

No councilist tendency, new or old, seems to have realised that the workers’ councils are a transient, interim form of organisation, like the social domination of the working class itself. If the working class is to disappear, the only sign of the accession to communism, the councils or organs of power will disappear too. So, these will only last as long as it takes for the infamous mark of the classes to disappear. On the other hand, the grouping of people by tendencies, that is to say, by parties, will acquire greater importance and fruitfulness thanks to the generalised culture which will sweep away the age-old division of labour into intellectual and manual. These will not be parties in the present sense of the word, with opposing material interests, or simply prestige, but large groups of thought, in loyal struggle for this or that solution to this or that problem. Today’s society stereotypes people by categories and diminishes, suppresses or perverts the personality of almost everyone. On the other hand, the maximum individuation of each individual, which will be extended and affirmed as communism is organised and realised, will bring into play capacities of determination and creativity in all fields which are not available to anyone today. The division and struggle between parties will take place without material or moral damage to either party, and will be to the benefit of the collective future. Long before that, the councils will have been dissolved, along with social classes, into the broader human conglomerate.

Of the two terms of the dialectical unity: workers’ councils-revolutionary party (proletariat-revolutionary theory in its most general form) the first one is perishable, while the second will be revived and diversified in content and amount as the collective knowledge of humankind, insofar as this knowledge is a complementary antithesis of the capitalist world, deepens and widens. For this very reason it is superlatively important to reaffirm that no party can supplant the councils or manage them without destroying them and destroying itself as a revolutionary factor. It is only for ease of expression and incorporating various shades of meaning in a single colour, that we can speak of a party in the singular, like the Third Estate taken as a party before the French revolution. Although it is to be expected that in some cases the revolution will be mainly inspired by, or identified with, a single party, it carries within it the germ of several others, the outlines of which will become clearer in the post-revolutionary period. They may also emerge on the fringes. Whatever the case, the struggle of tendencies in the workers’ organs of power must be free and subject to majority rule. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over society has found its highest expression in the simultaneous or successive exercise of power by several of its parties. The proletariat is much more homogeneous than the bourgeoisie. Its material cohesion will increase after the seizure of power, as it ceases to be a class, and at the same time the possibilities of taking initiatives in the social domain and elsewhere will multiply. The plurality of parties will be all the more favourable to it because it prefigures the infinite range of unalienated knowledge, and because it also prefigures the conquest of freedom in the face of necessity, without making excuses for the detractors of freedom in the name of party dictatorship. The dictatorship of the proletariat has nothing in common, in fact, with individual or collegial tyranny. It is a social situation induced, like the current of one electric circuit in another, by the preceding class relations, provisional by consequence, and instead of excluding democracy, it must give it a veracity and breadth unknown before.

The problem of a possible counter-revolution can be solved neither organically nor morally. The forms of organisation, the honesty and aptitude of those who perform leading functions will always be of great importance, but it is necessary to go beyond that, to a point where organisational defects, bureaucratic flaws, ineptitude and the very malice of certain characters cannot result in material damage for some, advantage for others, and even less in social domination of some by others. The current mercantile system always presupposes dishonesty and individual defects in varying proportions. As it survives, it makes them a condition of power and wealth. In the end, its institutions and representatives act legally or illegally like high-handed thugs. This is becoming more and more evident every day and is an inseparable correlation of capitalism. However, the revolution will not suddenly cleanse the faults and defects instilled in men, and on the eve of its victory, it will be infiltrated by calculating individuals. To expect otherwise is a clumsy idealisation. It does not matter. In contrast to the capitalist system, revolution and communism imperatively demand, sine qua non of their existence, the elimination from each mind of the residual dregs of the previous economic-political stratification. It is therefore indispensable for the revolution to equip itself with social relations which by their very function make it impossible for old ideologies and bureaucratism in general to be concretised in material advantages or privileges of another kind for their bearers, a source of counter-revolution. And since the whole complex of social relations, including scientific and artistic ones, rests on the most fundamental relations of all, and from it the others branch out and spread, radically modifying them is the only prevention against any counter-revolutionary threat. Universal mercantilism and the corruption of the present system, more so of the people, stem from the initial operation of buying labour power for a wage; it is its most basic social relation. Without abolishing wage labour, no revolution will succeed in developing and leading to communism. On the contrary, neither bureaucratism nor individual defects will be able to divert it, the functional basis being productive labour guided by the material, intellectual and mental satisfaction of each individual. As long as the law of value is not abolished, no organic combination (centralism, federalism, verticalism, horizontalism, councilism, autonomism, partisanship) nor the most pristine honesty of the most fit human beings will be able to avert the danger of a reversal.

In this respect, it is of great, if not decisive, importance to define what is to be understood by a revolutionary party. To speak of revolution and communism for the distant future, is in some cases avaricious charlatanism (e.g., Stalinism) and in others a warmed-over economist conservatism. The former intentionally seek state capitalism; the latter do not but would fall into it through their conceptions and atavisms. Nor is it enough to accept and advocate the political power of the workers’ councils, the arming of the workers’ councils and the nationalisation of the economy. It is still necessary to refine our demands:

1. that the power of the councils should not be assimilated to that of a party or of several parties linked together;
2. the armament of the class excludes the formation of a professional army or police force;
3. that socialisation means the handing over to society of the instruments of production, including indirect and auxiliary ones (educational, information centres, etc.), through the working class as a whole, and the immediate suppression of the law of value (exchange of equivalents) until its final disappearance, the whole as opposed to state ownership nor any ‘workers’ control’ or ‘self-management’.

Ultimately, a revolutionary party defending a minority position against other parties within this general outline must accept its place. Moreover, it must issue a call to arms against those who would violate this outline, even if they represent the majority position, and against those who would claim the communist task of the proletariat for their own.

However, neither this nor any other precaution will constitute a total guarantee against the counter-revolutionary threat, not even a well-established right of insurrection. So long as capitalist relations of distribution, which presuppose those of production, are not being suppressed until their disappearance, that threat will remain present with us. Hence, any future revolution must be concerned, before anything else, with putting an end to wage-labour, the chief way to attack the economic law of value and all the moral values of capitalism, in its decadent putrefaction, often stupidly presented as revolutionary.

In short, the distinction between the revolutionary class and its revolutionaries, which appears so visible in times of political lethargy, will begin to be reabsorbed with the revolution and will gradually dissipate with the present economic-cultural situation, which is, in the last analysis, where it derives from. But it will not be the revolutionaries, and hence their parties, that will become extinct, no; rather society as a whole, coming into possession of itself and through its own functioning, will have to become revolutionary.

As for the particular organisational structure of a revolutionary party, I can only imagine it as inspired by the post-revolutionary tasks, as set out above, from which the pre-revolutionary tasks themselves flow. The strategy engenders its own tactics; the aim, its own means. It is not necessary, nor is it within the scope of this work, to formulate statutes for a party. But it is appropriate to lay down a few important points borne from experience:

1. With the exception of what could be used for police repression, political or theoretical polemics must be public, not internal and reserved to the affiliates. Even if it takes place in special bulletins, these must be made available to any worker, with or without a tendency. Revolutionary thought is not reconcilable with any kind of esotericism, not even the formal esotericism of “for our militants only”.
2. The right of fraction must be guaranteed by the rules of organisation, to the extent compatible with the principles of organisation.
3. In all elected bodies, minorities should be proportionally represented, from the local to the global level where there is one.
4. The selection of committees should be by direct vote to the maximum extent that the relationship between appointors and potential appointees allows, avoiding the appointment of a select committee by one or more other committees elected by direct or second-degree vote.
5. The congress elects the party leadership, and it also, if necessary, elects a select committee to deal with day-to-day affairs, but without decision-making power.
6. No committee shall have the right to add new members by its own decision, even provisionally, until ratification by the militants or their delegates. This right, like that of dismissal, belongs constantly and exclusively to the members.
7. Expulsion of a section or fraction shall be subject to a two-thirds majority. The leadership shall only have the power to reason a request for expulsion. In the case of individuals, the leadership shall have the power to suspend their external activities as a member of the party until a final decision is taken by the assemblies, but without in the meantime depriving them of their right to speak and vote.
8. As a general rule, from which other very concrete rules must be drawn, the leadership must be prevented from being in a position to take organisational measures and political attitudes which, once decided upon, are difficult to rectify; it must avoid a fait accompli. It is not the example set out by the militants as a whole that makes the strength of a revolutionary party, but the common militant, political, theoretical, philosophical and moral inspiration. This will give a revolutionary party a cohesion and a radiating force unattainable by any disciplinary regulations.
9. It must be written that the party is an instrument and part of the revolutionary class, and cannot, under any circumstances, take its place or carry out its task. The confidence of the class must be won; it is destroyed when decreed from above. Therefore, the right of the class to agitate against the revolutionary party or parties, including itself, must be guaranteed.

What drives the working class to revolution and communism is not its theoretical knowledge, nor an ideal aspiration, but the need to cease to be a wage-earning class—a class, nothing else. This need is becoming more pressing and palpable every day and coincides with humanity’s progression. Everything that stands in its way is mistaken, apocryphal, or much worse, the abject deceit of social climbers or those already perched.

If ideas, tactics, and learned strategies stand between the aforementioned revolutionary necessity of the class—in sum, its historical task—and revolutionaries of any background, then these things must be thrown overboard for those revolutionaries to earn the title.

In Spain in 1936, Durruti famously said: “We renounce everything except victory”. This was the origin of the anarchist slip to the side of Stalinism and its allies, who said: “First the war, then the revolution”. The outcome of that situation would probably have been very different if the anarchists had rectified their own position by saying rather:

“WE RENOUNCE ANYTHING BUT REVOLUTION AND COMMUNISM”.

The capitalist state would have been formally abolished, and power would have remained, in its entirety, in the government of workers’ committees. Thus today, the motto of all those who can be regarded as revolutionaries, in spite of their childish conservatism, must be:

“WE RENOUNCE EVERYTHING EXCEPT REVOLUTION AND THE ABOLITION OF WAGE LABOUR, SIGNPOST OF COMMUNISM”.

Herein lies the synthesis of class and revolutionary minority. To overcome the distinction is to overcome theory, which can only be accomplished by transposing it into social reality.

Grandizo Munis – Alarma n° 24, 2nd quarter 1973.