[We publish here a translation into English of a new text from our comrades in Barbaria skewering the Second Internationalist idea of the mass party, which ends up liquidating the communist programme and revolutionary practice in exchange for gaining an ephemeral mass appeal among sectors of the working class under the sway of social democracy and the unions.
We quite happily share this translation without any ‘original’ commentary of our own because we agree wholeheartedly with every sentence written. We believe, moreover, that it is a badly-needed corrective, written from an authentically communist perspective, to the reheated Kautskyism so in vogue among some quarters of capital’s left-wing apparatus today.
The original Spanish version of the article may be found here.]
Critique of the Mass Party from a Revolutionary Perspective
Lately, there has been renewed talk about the need to build mass parties of the proletariat. We are told that the defeat of the communist movement is the result of the communist worldview becoming less hegemonic and attractive to the proletariat. Therefore, the determination and capacity to build a socialist alternative would once again make the communist horizon a reality. The realisation of all this would be the development of mass communist parties. Thus, for example, the Socialist Movement (MS), the Socialist Youth Coordinating Committee (CJS) states in its Political Document when discussing its notion of the Party:
“Its hegemonic and mass character, which makes it the party of the revolutionary class, diametrically opposed to the Blanquist-Bakuninist model of conspiratorial minorities. The Communist Party can only be a mass Communist Party; it only becomes so when it is the party of broad sectors of the proletariat, when class consciousness has spread within it, and it can only be considered the revolutionary offensive party, capable of taking power, when it represents the concrete historical will of the majority of the revolutionary class.”
As we can see, not only is reference made to a mass party, but its hegemonic character (Gramsci and his voluntarist approach) is affirmed by the alleged need to reach the majority of the working class. All this, in the logic of these positions, is work that must be done prior to the development of the revolutionary process. These are by no means new ideas. As we shall see, they are positions that have clear antecedents in the positions first of the Second International and then in the debates of the Third International from its Second Congress onwards.
Mass parties in the Second International
For the Second International and its social democratic parties, the party represented the entire working class. The socialist party was the formal party that embodied the national proletariat. The premise of all this is that the working class always exists as a revolutionary proletarian class. And that, therefore, it organises itself politically around its party, economically in its single trade union and, according to its economic needs, in cooperatives. This is the premise that Kautsky defended within the Second International in the debates on the mass strike, a debate that brought him into conflict with our historical comrades, first and foremost Anton Pannekoek and Rosa Luxemburg. We returned to all of this last year in the debates on the Second International and the mass strike. We believe it is important to highlight, as our Scandinavian comrades from the former Scandinavian section of the ICP have done, that:
“The concept of the “working class” responded to the reality of capitalist economy and politics; it was an economic, pacifist, gradualist, democratic and reformist conception. Workers were to organise themselves as consumers (hence the cooperatives) and as producers (hence the trade unions) and finally as voters (hence the parliamentary and municipal groups). All this represented the great “workers’ movement” which lived and prospered in the midst of the counter-revolution by “winning advantages” and “wresting concessions” in the labour market or in parliament. In the early 1890s it was still said that when the majority of workers were organised, a revolution could be made, but this was quickly replaced by “socialisation”: the normal conclusion of this fundamentally evolutionary view.”
In other words, this idea of achieving power through a strategy of attrition (Ermattungsstrategie), of progressive hegemony over the proletariat, was not in fact paving the long road to power and social revolution (as Kautsky and his political allies believed). What it was paving was the process of integrating the proletariat into the mechanisms of capitalist socialisation. All this was shown in all its brutality in August 1914, when almost all the socialist parties of the Second International supported the war effort of their national bourgeoisies and were an essential factor in leading the proletariat into the slaughterhouse of war.
The fact is that this notion of the existence of an eternal ‘workers’ movement’ could only lead to its integration into the world of capital. The proletariat does not always exist as a revolutionary class in action but is normally socialised by the mechanisms of capital and social peace. As Marx elaborated at length in his work, the ideology of the ruling class is the dominant ideology. And later, with his theory of commodity fetishism, he explained even more precisely the mechanisms of impersonal and social reproduction of capital. In other words, how we proletarians naturalise the categories of capital because of how social relations are clothed and hidden within things. Social relations disguise themselves as things and, in so doing, social antagonism is neutralised and hidden. The socialisation of capital brought this logic of neutralisation and social integration to the whole of life. In this process, the mass and parliamentary political parties of social democracy, the trade unions and their mediating role between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and the cooperatives and their role in the production and distribution of commercial wealth played a fundamental role. The entire framework of the Second International played a fundamental role, on a historical level, in the process of socialisation and integration of the proletariat into the world of capital. That is why, when the Great War broke out, the leaders of the socialist parties were clear. The ‘conquests achieved’, that is, the process of integrating the proletariat into their own national state, could not be called into question.
That is why the battle waged within the Second International by the internationalist revolutionary minorities was so important. This was a battle that was fought unevenly and discontinuously. In that battle, Rosa Luxemburg was right to take up the fight against Kautsky in the first place and to defend the universal character of the mass strike. On the contrary, Lenin and the Bolsheviks continued to claim to be disciples of Kautsky until 1914, as did Trotsky. However, from 1914 onwards, the position of the Bolsheviks would be decisive and would programmatically prepare the ground for the subsequent revolutionary wave and the proletarian triumph of October 1917. Decisive in this regard would be the strategy of revolutionary defeatism in the face of the First World War and the recognition of the need to break politically with the Second International and social democracy. The need to form new proletarian political organisations in rupture—in short, communist parties. In this task, however, Rosa Luxemburg lagged behind the Bolsheviks, the Italian left and the German-Dutch left, as our comrades from the former Scandinavian section of the ICP point out once again:
“However, the open reformism of the 1890s and the sabotage of the struggles of the beginning of the century by the Second International had generated an opposition which first criticised Bernstein and then Kautsky. However, R. Luxemburg, A. Pannekoek and L. Trotsky failed to understand the historical role of the Second International. They simply criticised the theories which showed the expression of this role. Fighting against Bissolati’s chauvinism during the Libyan campaign in 1912, the Italian left (A. Bordiga) adopted an oppositional position in the same direction, although, like the Bolsheviks, it did not come to adopt a general critical position against the Second International from its origins until 1914. It was only with the Zimmerwald Left (1915-1916), with the Bolsheviks and the Bremerlinke, plus some Swedish, Norwegian and Swiss groups, not counting the Berlin “Lichtstrahlen” group (whose existence was short-lived), we witnessed the beginning of the settling of scores with the Second International, absolutely necessary for the existence of a new revolutionary movement. The essential point of this reaction was revolutionary defeatism: “to transform the imperialist war into a civil war “. Both the Italian Left and the Dutch tribunists were in this position. Meanwhile, the Spartacists did not seem to want to go that far, especially when it came to drawing the natural conclusion, i.e., the break with the Second International and the constitution of a new International (see the parallel criticisms of Lenin and Knief towards R. Luxemburg’s Junius Pamphlet.)”
In short, we can draw three lessons from all this.
1. The proletariat constitutes itself as a class and as a party through its struggle. There is no such thing as a naturally constituted class. There is no eternal working class, as Kautsky argued. That is why the processes of historical acceleration that arise from the generalised developments of the class struggle, the discontinuous processes of breaking with the bourgeois order and its social peace, are so important. The greatest of these discontinuities is revolution. Revolution is where the proletariat takes centre stage in history thanks to the fact that it is constituted and led by its communist party. We have discussed all this in our notebook on the Capitalist Catastrophe and Revolutionary Theory.
2. In its struggle, the proletariat permanently segregates revolutionary minorities who try to defend and advance the communist programme. These revolutionary minorities are no longer the party. The party is constituted in the generalised process of class struggle, in the revolution, but of course those minorities are part of its historical party. In the process of segregation, there are obviously some minorities that are more conscious and clear-sighted than others. But there is no coherent and compact party from the beginning of time that the revolution will simply confirm, in the face of all the sceptics of the past. History does not operate under such theological schemes. As we have seen before, Lenin was not always correct, but he had fundamental understanding at the programmatic level that allowed him to direct the revolutionary energy that erupted in 1917, even though he later made fundamental mistakes from 1920 onwards. The same can be said of Rosa Luxemburg, or any other historical comrade. There are no ‘great men’ free of contradictions. We are communist militants who try to defend and develop our historical programme for the benefit of the emancipation of the proletariat, and the crossroads of principles at the beginning of the 20th century was particularly complex, with the process of socialisation of capital underway, and implied the need to break with several of the tactics that the workers’ movement had developed within the Second International.
3. In fact, as Mitchell argues in his Communisme text on the ‘Critique of the Genesis of the Parties of the Third International’, the Communist Party is always a minority of the working class for us. Two conceptions of the party are thus opposed:
“In Bulgaria, at the same time as the Bolshevik faction was forming at the London Congress of 1903, the left, the “narrows”, split from the official party of the “broad”. As in the Russian party, two conceptions of the party were opposed: the mass party and the centralised party, the latter aiming at theoretical precision and political firmness (…) On the one hand, we see the Bolshevik faction, almost isolated, reaping the fruits of its principled intransigence in October 1917. On the other hand, all parties will strive to follow in the footsteps of the German ‘mass party,’ thus paralysing or slowing down the maturation of Marxist currents.”
In this way, the class party can help the process of clarification of the proletariat in struggle, becoming a vector that programmatically helps the class that constitutes itself as a party. The programmatic delineation of the party, in a communist sense, is essential for its constitution. This is in contrast to the diffuse, eclectic and diluted nature of the programmatic elements in mass parties, as already seen in the era of the Second International.
The birth of the Communist International and the defence of mass parties
The birth of the Communist International in 1919 was an essential element that accompanied the development of the revolutionary wave, both programmatically and organisationally, which, triumphing in the former Tsarist Russia, spread like wildfire throughout Europe. At the beginning, the communist parties that were born in the heat of the Russian Revolution spontaneously assumed left-wing (communist) positions. We have seen this in the case of Spain, and it is a fairly widespread process in newly formed communist parties. Only in the Russian, Italian and German-Dutch cases were there more mature and profound tendencies towards the communist left, although in other cases, such as England and Bulgaria, these tendencies were real and not just instinctive or spontaneous. The years 1919-1920 mark a turning point in relation to the revolutionary wave. The initial outbreak swept across Europe and ended the war in November 1918. This outbreak led to limited experiences of proletarian dictatorship in Hungary, Bavaria and Slovakia (briefly), but soon tended to go on the defensive. The triumph of the world revolution was going to be much more complicated than our comrades in 1918 thought.
We already know the reaction to this ebb in the revolutionary wave on the part of the leadership of the Communist International. A reaction that begins with one of the worst texts written by Lenin: “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder. We have already discussed all this at length in our text The Past of Our Being. The revolution was in retreat, its driving force was temporarily in retreat, which could prepare for a new offensive and further assault. Revolutions are discontinuous, as comrades such as Marx and Rosa Luxemburg had already pointed out; like the old mole, they appear and disappear, only to reappear, from defeat to defeat until final victory. However, the decision taken by the leadership of the Communist International was not one of slow and patient waiting. It was not one of uncompromising defence of the communist and internationalist positions that had allowed us to advance so far on the path to achieving our goals. Instead, they opted to return to some of the historical positions of social democracy and the Second International: the defence of work within bourgeois institutions and in parliament, the defence of hard work in the trade unions, the united front with social democracy and even the possibility of forming a workers’ government with them and, finally, the merger with the left wings of social democracy. The break with social democracy and Kautskyism had not been profound enough or complete. The renegade Kautsky, expelled from the revolutionary sphere since 1914, reappeared hiding behind the banners of the Communist International and Bolshevism. All this prepared the ground internationally for the counter-revolutionary break that subsequently led to Bolshevization from the Fifth Congress of the International and the Stalinism that reigned from 1926 onwards with the theory of socialism in one country (in reality in none).
But let’s take it step by step. After Lenin’s criticism of the communist left (at the Second Congress of the Communist International), the Third Congress in 1921 defended the perspective of the united front: unity of action with the rest of the so-called organisations of the workers’ movement, at the economic and political levels. With this, the ‘socialist’ parties were no longer class enemies, who had helped kill thousands of comrades around the world, but potential allies. At the Enlarged Plenary of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) in December 1921 and January 1922, dedicated to the theme of the united front, the idea of a workers’ government was discussed for the first time. It was at the Fourth Congress of the Communist International in 1922 that the theme of the workers’ government as a transitional form towards Soviet power was developed theoretically and politically. And at the Fifth Congress in 1924, there was a leap from all this towards Bolshevization, which in truth was a discontinuity that was already irreversibly leading into counter-revolution. The old revolutionaries who, like Trotsky, had been protagonists of this opportunist policy in the International, were displaced by a new course aimed at defending the geopolitical interests of the Russian state. The International ceased to be a revolutionary organ (although it was increasingly so in an opportunist sense) and became an international instrument at the service of the interests of the Russian state.
We will return to these issues – the united front and the workers’ government – in a later contribution. For now, let us focus on the topic at hand: the construction of mass communist parties through fusion with the ‘left’ currents of social democracy. This was a universal tactic that the leadership of the Communist International had wanted to apply since 1920. To this end, they had expelled the majority of the KPD in 1919 (giving rise to the KAPD) and in October 1920 they merged with the left wing of the USPD after the Halle Congress. We have already seen, in our notebook on the PCE, that in the Spanish case, the Spanish Communist Party, with much clearer positions, was also forced to merge with the PCOE, which had clearly opportunist tendencies. And in the Italian case, one of the most important, the Communist International began to exert pressure for a merger with Serrati’s PSI from at least the end of 1922. For Zinoviev, after the Fourth Congress of the International in November-December 1922, the split in Livorno, which gave rise to the PCd’I (Communist Party of Italy), had been very hasty. It was a party with very clear and determined communist and intransigent positions, but it constituted a minority of the proletariat. The International’s obsession, in the face of the ebb of the revolutionary wave (and in Italy after the defeat of the Biennio Rosso and the rise of fascism), was to win over the majority of the working class. The leadership of the PCd’I headed by Bordiga (but also the sectors that came from the Ordine Nuovo, such as Terracini, Gramsci and Togliatti) opposed the pressure from the International. The coherent proposal put forth by Bordiga, who at that same time was arrested by the police of the fascist regime, was to resign from the leadership of the PCd’I in order to wage the political battle (all in line with the centralist positions of the communist programme). Gramsci, under pressure from the Communist International, opposed fighting the battle outside the leadership of the PCd’I, which began the slow process of Bolshevization and Stalinization of the Italian party led by Gramsci himself.
The Italian left within the International opposed this degenerative course. We believe that their battle is an example and a lesson that we revolutionaries of the present must learn. It differs from the German-Dutch left, which, based on its differences with the International, decided to create a Communist Workers’ International (KAI) led by Gorter, a decision that was marked by voluntarism and haste. In contrast to this position of the German-Dutch left, the Italian left decided to fight within the International. This battle was fought as long as possible, even though they were fully aware of the degenerative course the International was undergoing. But within it there were still many genuinely communist elements, and of course the International was not yet a directly counter-revolutionary force (as it clearly began to be from 1926/7 onwards).
As a summary of this battle, we consider a report made by Bordiga in the early 1960s at a meeting of the ICP to be very important: 1919-1926. Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione in Europa. In it, he explains how the positions and origins of the Italian left were much clearer (compared to the Bolsheviks) and the defects of Second Internationalism that affected the Bolshevik leadership of the International throughout this debate.
“That is why we must start, first of all, from the fact that the historical origins of our current have the same foundations as the Bolsheviks, the same as those of the Russian Communist Party. And, in fact, we can perhaps claim even clearer origins. Why do we say even clearer? [Because we were determined by a more mature capitalist situation. The Bolsheviks deserve recognition for having been able to maintain great consistency at the beginning, despite the extremely difficult conditions in backward Russia].”
As we said before, Bordiga denounces how the positions of the Second International are returning within the communist camp:
“The reasons that caused the collapse of the Second International were still valid. The dictatorship of the proletariat was the litmus test that revealed the Second Internationalist who at that moment swore by the Communist International. We wrote in Rassegna Comunista in 1921 that every structure, like a mechanism, responds to inviolable functional laws. If we demonstrate that it is impossible to gradually conquer power and transform the bourgeois state for the benefit of the proletariat and communism, we must have the courage to affirm that it is also impossible to transform the structure of the social democratic parties, their parliamentary and trade union- corporate objectives, into a structure compatible with the revolutionary class party, an organ predisposed to the violent conquest of power.”
Haste and impatience led to compromise and to revolutionary positions being called into question. Everything seemed to be a matter of simple political expediency. It was necessary to outsmart social democracy. It was necessary to deceive them with the tactics of the united front and the workers’ government, to seek alliances, even political and organisational ones, in order to create mass parties that would win over the majority of the working class. The aim was to use workers’ governments in alliance with social democracy to create hybrid situations that would anticipate the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. We already know that all this was an absolute failure. It suffices to study not the Russian October but the German October of 1923, preceded by the workers’ governments of Saxony and Thuringia. All such tactics only created confusion in the revolutionary organ and meant destroying everything positive that had already been achieved in terms of programmatic and organisational clarity. As Bordiga pointed out:
“The split that occurred in Livorno was the epilogue to an important historical development. Its decisions were more powerful not only than those of all the Lazzaris, Serratis and Mussolinis in the world, but also than those of the Communist International itself and the men responsible for its leadership, who behaved in a tragically contradictory manner in this regard. If Livorno was christened by the aforementioned decisions, the Moscow Conditions were confirmed by its example. Neither of these two episodes of the revolution gave rise to “legislation” drafted by any oligarchy, but rather to a norm that emerged from all proletarian activity worldwide over the course of a century. There was nothing artificial about the separation of the communists from the reformists and maximalists who defended them; if anything, it was artificial to try to stop it.”
The tragedy of the International was that it did not attach sufficient importance to revolutionary clarity. Revolutions are not made, they are led. Revolutionary situations cannot be created artificially. After a defeat and a revolutionary ebb, as was the case in 1920, it was simply necessary to have the patience to wait and to remain steadfast in our revolutionary convictions. Wanting to artificially create the conditions for revolution through numbers only helped to degenerate everything. First of all, it degenerated the most precious thing that had been built up to that point: a formal world communist party.
“This short circuit had generated a distorted conception of revolutionary progress within the leadership of the Communist International. Little by little, but with increasing clarity, this structure gave greater importance to purely quantitative factors, in the sense of achievements and successes within society as it is. Not surprisingly, Levi, who came to Livorno to flirt with Serrati and tried to do the same with me, wrote a letter to the International praising the PSI, all figures, knowing that the recipients were very susceptible to this music. Therefore, parties were evaluated according to unrealistic criteria, based on data that changed in a matter of months, sacrificing the criteria of reliability linked to programmatic and organisational continuity, adherence to principles, rigour, the physical organisational capacity of workers, and not just prestige among voters.”
Growth at all costs appeared to the leadership of the Comintern as a symptom of approaching the revolutionary goal. The analogy with what had already happened within the Second International seems obvious. Growth at a time of decline only meant that influences external to programmatic clarity were entering the revolutionary body. A tendency towards homologation with the world of capital prevailed over the necessary revolutionary and communist rupture.
And the fact is that, contrary to Kautskyist visions of a workers’ movement that always exists, it was very important to understand that revolutionary parties are always and necessarily minoritarian. Even in the stage of revolutionary development, where the formal party is constituted and obviously acquires very significant numbers, its reality is simply that of a minority of the class. The decisive factor is not the arithmetic of the revolution but the dialectical relationship that is established between class and party. What is important is the party’s ability to direct the revolutionary energies of the proletariat. As we recently wrote in a correspondence with a comrade on the dictatorship of the proletariat:
“Being determines consciousness, and capitalism produces its own historical gravedigger: the proletariat, along with its revolutionary theory—its program, the compass of its action—embodied in revolutionary minorities and, at key moments, in its party. (…) For while the insurrection is not carried out by the entirety of the proletariat but by a very large minority, expressed through its class organs and finding political direction in the party, the subsequent dictatorship can only be maintained with the active support of the majority of the proletariat.”
Bordiga pointed out the same thing when he stated that the victory of the revolution is a qualitative and not a quantitative fact. And that communism is anticipated not by large mass parties, but by revolutionary minorities:
“Revolutions can only be anticipated by minorities. The mutant germ of the new society that is beginning to take root in the old one can only be part of a temporarily isolated, even misunderstood, group.”
There was no need to fear the temporary defeat of the first phase of the proletarian assault that began in 1917. The strength of our class remained intact; it had not yet been defeated. It was only a momentary retreat, as the class assaults everywhere subsequently demonstrated: from Germany to England, from China to Spain, etc. But those assaults, that energy of our class, could no longer converge with the class party that had been integrated and swallowed up by the political logic of capital: the counter-revolution had won. But in that battle in the early 1920s, the Italian left was right against Lenin and Trotsky:
“The counter-revolution has triumphed and capitalism now completely controls all countries, including Russia itself. Today, it is easy to say that mistakes were made then, but we said so at the time. Was Lenin wrong? He knew as well as we did that the frontist policy was dangerous and, in fact, he never adopted it in Russia. But at the time it seemed that there was no time to lose, that the masses would soon rise up to fight, if not globally, then at least in Europe; so we had to take the risk of not distancing ourselves more than necessary from the parties that had popular support. Evidently, the revolution had not yet inspired a policy rational enough to address the need for drastic change. The centre in Moscow was crushed by this presumed responsibility; it wanted to discipline the centrifugal forces and ensure that the fundamental forces accompanying us, which showed formidable momentum, would drag along all the others, including those that had already betrayed us on more than one occasion. Perhaps at that moment the International did not want to be too precise, it wanted to leave flexibility because it believed that we were too close to the battle to lay down rigid rules and be too strict. Time has passed without such favourable opportunities arising, and today we can say that we were right and Lenin was wrong. Obviously, history is not written that way. As we have seen, there were justifications for revolutionary haste. After all, we remained in the struggle precisely because we did not consider all the doors to revolution closed, at least until 1926, although by 1921 and even earlier, there were already many signs to the contrary.”
Conclusions
As we have already seen, revolutionary haste and voluntarism prevailed over patience and programmatic clarity. The desire to create artificial revolutionary situations became increasingly dominant. It seemed that if one was flexible enough, one could attract the masses of the proletariat who were still dominated by political opportunism and social democracy in one way or another. If one was not sufficiently rigid in the process of integration; if one managed to incorporate large masses of social democratic militants, even if there was a gap between their revolutionary affirmations and their opportunistic and bourgeois practice; if one deceived the right wing of social democracy through the policy of the united front, etc., the final result would be the triumph of the revolutionary perspective. Some shortcuts had to be taken, but the result would eventually arrive all the same. The shortcut ultimately proved to be a cul-de-sac. It turned out to be a dead end for the revolution, a path that led to a counter-revolution whose effects we still feel today. As Mitchell said:
“Lenin could not have anticipated the colossal opportunist hype that would surround his directive (…). For these compromises to be plausible, it was therefore necessary to view reality with optimism, which led Lenin to declare that “the left wing, the proletarian wing of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany [USPD], was waging a relentless struggle against the opportunism and lack of character of Kautsky, Hilferding, Ledebour”, although it was later shown that Daumig and Stocker, the designated representatives of this left wing, were strangely similar to Kautsky and his ilk in theory and practice. All this amounted to confusing, once again, the revolutionary workers with the counter-revolutionary currents that continued to influence and direct them.”
The fact is that the Communist Party cannot survive without the dialectical combination of the clarity of the Communist programme and the energy and vital impetus created by the self-activity of the class. It feeds on the rupture that the proletariat brings about through its generalised and extensive struggle, breaking with the social peace of the capitalist order. The relationship between class and party is a dialectical and reciprocal one, a unitary but not identical relationship (the tasks of the party, as an organ of the class, are decisive in directing the energy released by the class). In the absence of that energy and vitality of class struggle, without that privileged terrain created by social polarisation and ionisation, the voluntarism of the party only worsens the situation. Revolutionary situations are not created. Activism and voluntarism lead to an involution of revolutionary energies. Only the vitality of the class allows the party to intervene in a coherent way in the social situation in accordance with its principles. Only this dynamic enables the necessary inversion of praxis that characterises the meaning of the party and the real development of revolutionary situations. When this comes about, it is the class, through its historical and formal party, that carries out its intervention against capitalist society. It alone can try to reverse capitalist logic and destroy the premises of its social reproduction. When this generalised struggle does not take place, any intervention within capitalist society is dominated by its material logic, by integration into its mechanisms of social reproduction. Parliamentarianism, trade unionism, the united front with social democracy, the creation of cooperatives (as had already been demonstrated with social democracy), etc., are not neutral organisms that can be used intelligently by the party of the proletariat. They are institutions that are integrated into the world of capital, colonising those who fought against capitalism. As Mitchell pointed out in the aforementioned text, unity with the ‘left socialists’ was nothing more than convergence with the ‘street vendors’ of communism among the proletariat, that is, unity with communists in name but not in fact. This only created a huge amount of confusion and improvisation. The tasks at hand were different. It was a matter of taking stock of the situation:
“Efforts had to be concentrated on the political and organisational strengthening of the already established communist minorities, helping them to create solid cadres through the natural selection that takes place in the class struggle itself (…). It was necessary to continue with political splits and rigorous ideological clarification.”
Along the same lines, Bordiga later argued in a widely quoted text. It was a question of being a vector of polarisation and clarification:
“It is the enunciation of a method: the historical party is not a quantitative entity; it can find its material expression in a few or in many men, it does not matter. The quantitative and formal element that makes us speak of “mass movements” is a consequence. But the conditions we have defined, borrowing the language of physics, as “social polarisation”, as in electric fields, crystalline solids or the ionisation of a gas, are necessary. The number of electrons and atoms involved is irrelevant to triggering the event, but it must occur for it to expand quantitatively. The conquest of the so-called majority, therefore, comes after the initial conditions of theory, action, and environment are met. We can experiment with all the tactics we want, as long as our revolutionary mission does not contain words that may sound contradictory, derogatory, or even simply forgetful of our principles. Therefore, we did not want the question of the majority to be raised as a condition. The ‘conquest of the majority’ may well occur, but it is not a bridge that must be crossed before the revolution has ionised the social molecules. We have cited the Russian example thousands of times: at the last meeting of the party’s Central Committee before the insurrection, the leading group dissolves just as social polarisation reaches its peak. Lenin must treat everyone as traitors and make the concept understood: if this hour passes, all is lost. Does he proclaim action alone? No. At that moment, action is proclaimed by this mysterious field of forces, by the irresistible physics of the revolution that chooses Lenin as its instrument. It is the social brain in motion. You see, sometimes it seems that we invent terms, that we distil new formulas from our brains, when in fact they were already anticipated by Marx, and it is excellent that you, French comrades, have brought them to light, unearthing them in the palimpsest of the revolution, where they had already been written for more than a century.”
In that example of social physics that is revolution, the element of quantitative growth comes from social polarisation and ionisation, when the proletarian masses enter the historical scene en masse. That is the moment when the proletariat in struggle can converge with its party. A historical party that becomes formal precisely because it is dialectically formed in harmony and relation to the class movement itself. Any attempt to anticipate this fact, to seek intermediate paths, to grow artificially, is only done at the cost of abandoning revolutionary positions and perspectives. The programme will gradually fade, first into opportunism and then into integration into the world of capital. That is why mass parties always rhyme with the left of capital.
Barbaria (2025)
¹ Bordiga refers to Jacques Camatte and Roger Dangeville. [Note from Barbaria]
League of Internationalist Communists 