Beyond the Party: The Evolution of the Concept of “the Party” since Marx –Junius Collective (Pour une Intervention Communiste)
Note to the reader
The text published in this issue is the product of a collective project undertaken over a period of three years by the group“Pour une Intervention Communiste” (which published the journal, Jeune Taupe). Originally intended to comprise the first part of a larger work on the topic of revolutionary organization, it nonetheless constitutes a Whole that may be read on its own, independently of its sequels, which, for the time being, remain unfinished.
As a result of the dissolution of Pour une Intervention Communiste in November 1981, the members who had resigned from the group six months earlier and who had since that time been publishing the journal, Révolution sociale, assumed responsibility for the further political dissemination of this text and express their sincere gratitude to Cahiers Spartacus which ensured that the text would be published. In order to show our respect for the collective nature of the text’s production, however, we have decided, in agreement with René Lefeuvre, to attribute its authorship to a pseudonymous collective.
Révolution sociale
March 1982
***
No saviour from on high delivers,
No faith have we in prince or peer.
Our own right hand the chains must shiver….
“The Internationale” (lyrics by E. Pottier, music by P. Degeyter)
Preface to the Spanish edition
Proletarian organization and the role of revolutionary minorities
With respect to this Spanish edition, which retains the title of the work originally published in 1982 by Editions Spartacus (8 impasse Crozatier, 75012, Paris, France),Au-delà du Parti (Beyond the Party), it is necessary to provide—twenty years after it was first published—some indispensable explanations in order to help the reader understand this text.
I. History
In France, under the influence of the general strike of May-June 1968 and the proletarian movements that took place in various European countries (Italy, Poland, England, Portugal, Spain…), a group of revolutionaries formed an organization that existed between 1974 and December of 1981. It was called “Pour une Intervention Communiste” (PIC) (For a Communist Intervention) and published a quarterly journal calledJeune Taupe (Young Mole) (a total of 38 issues were published). Primarily concerned with activity on the terrain of contemporary struggles, this group engaged in a process of reflection on the question of organization, seeking to derive lessons from the experiences of the past. Considering itself to be a product of class confrontations, it sought to be an active factor in contemporary and future movements by contributing, in the class struggle, to revolutionary consciousness. It rejected both the Leninist concept of the Party, according to which the Party brought consciousness from “outside” the proletariat, as well as the concept of the councilists, who denied the necessity of any role for revolutionary minorities.
It gradually dawned on the members of the group that this was an immense task, since they had to go all the way back to Marx in order to clarify the situation. After having established a general plan for study, divided into four major parts, its militants set to work, without claiming, as others did, that they were “the skeleton of the future communist Party” that the other minorities only needed to join. Each member of the group shared the task of writing the text, always aware of its purposes and the discoveries of previous research. Once written, all the texts had to be read by all the members of the group and then submitted to collective debate. One comrade wrote the first part, which bears the title, “The Evolution of the Concept of the Party since Marx”, and, after it was discussed, another comrade added a three-page note on anarchism. The other, unfinished, parts remained in the condition of rough drafts, and only the articles, “On Organization” were published in the group’s journal as preparatory contributions toPart Three: Current Perspectives on Organization.
PIC was swept up by the storm of the social movement in Poland (August 1980-December 1981), which led to divergent interpretations, and then analytical disagreements that crystallized into tendencies and finally resulted in a split (May 1981). After a few months and after two more issues of Jeune Taupe(Nos. 37 and 38), the majority fraction decided to dissolve the group. In the meantime, those who supported the split had already formed another group, “Volonté Communiste”, which published 17 issues of a monthly journal entitled, Révolution sociale. It was the members of this group whoasked Editions Spartacusto publish Part One under the title, “Au-delà du Parti”, with its authorship attributed to “Collectif Junius”, to show respect for the principle of the work’s collective production (see “Note to the Reader”, above).
II. The contents of the Spanish edition
After this Preface, the reader will find the translation of Part One: “The Evolution of the Concept of the Party since Marx”, which was published by Editions Spartacus under the title, Beyond the Party.
After the main body of the text below, the reader will discover, as added appendices that did not appear in the original French edition, the articles collected under the title, “On Organization”, which were originally published in issues 35 and 36 of the journal, Jeune Taupe. These articles were originally intended to be included in Part Three: “Current Perspectives on Organization” (see the outline of the general plan for the text, above).
We hope that all of this will still be able to contribute some elements of a theoretical response to the vital problem of proletarian revolutionary organization. Unfortunately, it would be very difficult to take up the thread of this text where it left off—at least in the foreseeable future—and carry on with the task it sought to perform, in such a way as to fill in the gaps and complete the project as it was initially conceived, due to the dissolution of the successive groups that were engaged in this project and the scattering of their members. However, because this problem of organization has not been relegated to a secondary place in our concerns, we shall attempt to clarify the points that seem most essential and that are elaborated throughout this Spanish edition translated by comrade Emilio, to whom we express our thanks. For it is the case that, with respect to both proletarian organization as well as the role of revolutionary minorities, important critiques can be articulated concerning what should not be done, in the light of the erroneous concepts of Marxism, social democracy, Bolshevism, anarchism, and also the ultra-left (that is, the different varieties of the communist left: Luxemburgism, Bordiguism, councilism). Beyond these critiques, it is also possible to discern certain signposts that point towards what should be donein order for proletarian organization to be independent of the ruling ideology, the vehicle of the class consciousness of the immense majority of the exploited, and therefore effective as a means to destroy, from the bottom up, in a revolutionary way, the entire capitalist apparatus (States, borders, law of value, commodities, money…).
III. An organization produced by the revolutionary movement of the proletariat
All historical experience, and all the analyses derived from that experience, clearly prove that the organization of the proletariat, that is, the unitary organization of the class, cannot be created prior to the revolutionary movement…. Otherwise, it becomes a “mass party” that seeks to enroll the proletarians for reformist goals (the so-called minimum program) and goals that are counterrevolutionary in the long run (the ideology of the so-called maximum program). Especially noteworthy for their performance of this anti-proletarian role were the German Social Democratic Party and the Second International before 1914 (dragging the world proletariat into the first imperialist slaughterhouse), and then the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party-Bolshevik (Majority), which later called itself the “Communist Party”, and the Third International after 1917-1919 (dragging the world proletariat into the counterrevolution of 1920-1930, and then the second imperialist slaughterhouse). We recall that the delegate of the German Communist Party-Spartacus League, Eberlein, had been mandated to vote against the founding of the Third International if the latter were to have its headquarters in Moscow,so that the German Party would face the prospect of being under the boot of the Bolshevik-Leninists. (As it turned out, by the time Eberlein arrived in the Russian capital, the Commune of Berlin and the Spartacists had already been massacred by the Social Democrats and their “bloodhound” Noske, and he chose to merely abstain from the vote because the leadership of his Party had been decapitated: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, assassinated in cold blood after having been captured on January 15, 1919; and Leo Jogisches, kidnapped and held in a secret location between January and March of 1919, and then imprisoned and liquidated in his cell.)
The unitary organization of the class is instead the product of the activity of the revolutionary movement, which assumes its structural forms in the general struggle and which can thus become an active factor for the destruction of the capitalist system and its various States. In fact, the proletarian organization “grows everywhere spontaneously from the soil of modern society”, as Karl Marx had proposed in the middle of the 19th century and as historical practice would then demonstrate by way of the spontaneous emergence of the Workers Councils in Russia (the “Soviets” in 1905, and then again in 1917-1918), in Germany (the “Räte” of 1918-1919, and then the “Unionen”), etc. Thus, even in 1904 when,comparedto Lenin’s What Is To Be Done, Luxemburg was right when she wrote in her text, “Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy”, published in both Iskra and Neue Zeit:
“In time we see appear on the scene and even more ‘legitimate’ child of history – the Russian labor movement. For the first time, bases for the formation of a real ‘people’s will’ are laid in Russian soil.
“But here is the ‘ego’ of the Russian revolutionary again! Pirouetting on its head, it once more proclaims itself to be the all-powerful director of history – this time with the title of His Excellency the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party of Russia.
“The nimble acrobat fails to perceive that the only ‘subject’ which merits today the role of director is the collective ‘ego’ of the working class. The working class demands the right to make its mistakes and learn the dialectic of history.
“Let us speak plainly. Historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest Central Committee.”
(See the anthology entitled, Marxisme contre dictature [Marxism versus Dictatorship][1], edited by Lucien Laurat, Editions Spartacus, Series B, No. 55 [in English, see “Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy”, at:
One year later, the first Russian Revolution fully confirmed her assertions, for whereas the Soviets represented the movement of the proletariat’s self-organization, the Bolshevik Party remained isolated, outside of these mass organizations, not understanding that it had to act within them. Only Leon Trotsky, who only joined the Bolshevik Party in 1917, recognized the historical importance of this phenomenon and, furthermore, was elected to serve as President of the Petrograd Soviet.
Although Karl Marx referred to this proletarian organization emerging from the spontaneous mass movement as a political Party, the further unfolding of revolutionary history has unfortunately demonstrated that the idea of the Party, with its bureaucratic and hierarchical apparatus, had a tendency to supplant that of the Workers Councils, vacating them of their unitary class content. In this respect, the revolt of the sailors at Kronstadt in 1921 against the rule of the Bolshevik dictatorship was exemplary. Effectively responding to Trotsky—a field marshal in the “red army”—who wanted to kill them all “like partridges” (!), the rebels proclaimed a revealing and symbolic rallying cry: “All power to the Soviets, not to the Party!” They denounced the attempt to definitively transform the dictatorship of the proletariat exercised by the unitary organization of the class into the dictatorship over the proletariat that was sought by the Party. Contrary to the proletarian expression of the Paris Commune, cited by Marx as an “example” of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks (repression of left social revolutionaries and anarchists beginning in 1918; the slogan, “One party in power, the others in prison”) was identified with the conquest of the State rather than the imperative to “do away with all the old repressive machinery” (Marx, The Civil War in France). Instead of a bourgeoisie acting in its private capacity, the bureaucrats of the Bolshevik Party—since the time of Lenin—have been the managers of the State capitalism that was installed in Russia and which Stalin subsequently designated as “socialism in one country”, thus concluding the process of counterrevolution that would deceive the proletarians of the entire world. Otto Rühle, however, who had learned a thing or two from the German Revolution, wrote a text entitled, “The Revolution is Not a Party Affair!”[2] (see La gauche allemande. Textes. Pour l'histoire du mouvement communiste en Allemagne de 1918 a 1921. (Textes du KAPD, de L'AAUD, de L'AAUE et de la KAI 1920 - 1922. Avec notes et présentation)[The German Left. Texts. Towards a history of the communist movement in Germany, 1918-1921. With notes and introduction. Texts of the KAPD, AAUD, AAU-E and KAI (1920-1922)], supplement to the second issue of the journal, Invariance, Vol. V, Series 2, 1973, published in a paperback edtion by La Vecchia Talpa/Invariance, Naples, 1973, 169 p.).[3]He criticized the KAPD (German Communist Workers Party)—which, moreover, claimed that it was “not a traditional party” because of its links with the workers Unionen—and he called for the unitary organization of the proletariat, demanding the immediate dissolution of the Party as a separate institution distinct from the class as a whole. Later, in 1946, Anton Pannekoek attempted to carry out a comprehensive analysis of this question in his text, Workers Councils (see Editions Spartacus, Vols. I and II [in English translation, available online as of August 2017 at:
IV. The role of revolutionary minorities
The historical movement of the proletariat in its struggle against world capitalism, and therefore of the revolutionary proletariat itself (according to Marx’s famous formula: “The proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing!”), also produces within its unitary organization diverse revolutionary minorities corresponding to the various degrees of its class consciousness. They can form separate, minority organizations whose task is to contribute, in the class struggle, to this unitary consciousness before dissolving into the framework of the organization of the proletariat as a whole. None of these minorities can claim to be the vanguard Party (the “historic Party”, according to Marxist tradition), the only possessor of “the” truth, “the” program, that is, “all consciousness”, the consciousness that would somehow be introduced “from outside” to a proletarian movement considered to be incapable of proceeding beyond a trade unionist consciousness, that is, a syndicalist consciousness (see Lenin’s view as expressed in What Is To Be Done?, which attributes to professional revolutionaries the role of being the leaders of a proletariat considered to be “infantile”). To the contrary, these minorities must not assume any role whatsoever in the sense of acting as a “political leadership” (of the kind represented by the Bolshevik Party), or a “spiritual leadership” (of the kind represented by the KAPD), or any other kind of leadership substituting for the proletariat, but must instead seek to gradually merge into the unitary class organization as the counterrevolutionary danger recedes and as the realization of integral communism proceeds (extension of the world revolution, destruction of States and borders, abolition of wage labor, money and social classes…).
Currently, with the dawning of the 21st century, the relation of forces is in favor of capitalism despite the economic crisis that is undermining this system on an international scale and even though the proletarians, who are more numerous than ever (wage workers, precarious workers, unemployed…), still have the potential for offensive action despite the ideological campaigns of every kind, from the never-ending media bombardment, the terrorist threat, intensive war propaganda, etc. For this reason, the tasks of those minority factions that still exist in the world (political groups, discussion circles and networks…) are many and various. These tasks include the exchange of information, correspondence, translations, publications (journals, newspapers…), but also the organization of meetings, debates, etc.; all of these things are indispensable. But the most important task of all, however, remains theoretical elaboration that addresses the profound changes in the evolution of the capitalist system and a reality that has refuted most of the older perspectives. This labor will allow for a more effective intervention in the future proletarian revolutionary movement and will contribute to the clarification of class consciousness.