Contents "The internationalist proletarian" n.17
Introduction to the body of Theses of the Party of 1965-66
The body of the 1965-66[1] Theses condenses the balance of the 14 years that separate them from the Characteristic Theses (1951) and is directed against two disparate but complementary currents: the activist current that wanted to reintroduce democratic centralism into the Party, which gave rise to the organization that publishes the review “Rivoluzione Comunista” and the mystical-idealist current that gave rise to the review “Invariance”.
The historically unfavorable situation
We must start from an assessment of the situation after 40 years of counterrevolution, which can be described in the following terms: "Abandoning pedantic ‘distinctions,’ we can ask ourselves what the objective situation of today's society is. Certainly, the answer is the worst possible, and that a large part of the proletariat, rather than being crushed by the bourgeoisie, is controlled by parties that work in the service of the latter and prevent the proletariat itself from any revolutionary class movement, so that it is impossible to anticipate how long it will be before this dead and amorphous situation is once again followed by what we have previously defined as the ‘polarization’ or ‘ionization’ of social molecules, which precedes the explosion of the great class antagonism." (Considerations on the organic activity of the party when the general situation is historically unfavorable, 1965).
This situation is essentially the same as that described in “Activism (Short dictionary of the revisionist nails)” in 1952[2], when the Party was getting rid of the damenian current (which must be defined as such because of its personalism and rejection of the slogan of anonymity) that defended the maintenance of parliamentary tactics, tactical-organizational eclecticism (united fronts, heterogeneous mergers, etc.), rejected the necessity/possibility of the resurgence of the class union outside the influence of the bourgeois state, and embraced the theory of the decline of capitalism in order to ignore the bourgeois revolutions underway and join the enrichment (revisionism) of Marxism with the discovery of “new classes” such as the bureaucracy.
We were therefore in the same situation, but a little more than a decade later. Could the Party be immune to the prolongation of this historically unfavorable situation? Evidently not, as the Considerations reaffirm after claiming complete continuity with the Theses of Rome (1922), the Theses of Lyon (1926), and the line of the Communist Left in its struggle against the degeneration of the International: "What are the consequences in this unfavorable period on the internal organic dynamics of the party? We have always said, in all the texts mentioned above, that the party cannot fail to be influenced by the character of the real situation surrounding it." (Considerations, 1965).
Democratic activism and humanistoid mysticism
The prolongation of this historically unfavorable situation manifested itself —beyond the limitation of the Party's external projection and influence, as well as the specific weight of each of its fundamental activities— in the generation of two deviations:
- The rebirth of the activist trend that saw the reintroduction of democratic mechanisms as the key that would remove what they called the “elderly element” and would allow, through a pure act of will, the subversion of the historical process and the weight of the counterrevolution.
- The birth of a mystical-idealistic current that transformed class positions into humanistoid positions and which derived from the impossibility of immediate revolutionary action a rejection of the formal Party and the starting point to live communism today, a mixture of gradualism and conformism cloaked in a mystical mantle.
The activist deviation: “Rivoluzione Comunista”
The first split occurred within the Party at the end of 1964, following the publication of Notes for the theses on the question of organisation (1964), which reaffirmed our rejection of the democratic deception once and for all. After the Florence meeting, this activist current revived democratic centralism and formed the review "Rivoluzione Comunista", which presented itself as the organ of the Internationalist Communist Party. This is how Rivoluzione Comunista explains the split: "Dominated by the obsessive idea of an ever-prevailing counterrevolution, of the absolute domination of American imperialism, of a proletariat chained and subjugated by opportunist lies, the old leadership was reeling in the face of the new reality. With the influx of new militants, the gap between theory and practice became increasingly strident. (...) This struggle, in the conditions in which “il programma” then existed, clashed with the traditionalist mentality of the leadership group and the elderly element. So there was no other way but to split. This took place at the end of a general conference held in Florence in November 1964. From this split, our group, Rivoluzione Comunista, was formally born. Its distinctive feature is that there can be no revolutionary organization that does not do revolutionary work. (What we are, what we want[3], Rivoluzione Comunista).
Instead of Lenin's correct position that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement” (What is to be done? Lenin, 1902), here we have the crudest activism that seeks to deploy, always and everywhere, an undefined “revolutionary activity.” The question of the Party's activity in historically unfavorable situations had already been resolved in the Lyon Theses (1926) and the Characteristic Theses (1951) [4], among other texts, and was reiterated after the split in the Considerations of 1965, as we shall see later. The Party's activity is revolutionary insofar as it is linked to the program of the revolution, without prejudice to the different proportions and weights that the different fields of that activity may have at one historical moment or another. But obviously “Rivoluzione Comunista” was not referring to that activity[5], which the Party had been carrying out (and which included theoretical restoration, proselytism, the review, intervention in the immediate struggle, agitation, etc.), but to voluntarist activism, to agitation for agitation's sake.
His democratic activist approach is sufficiently clear in his own summary, as is the observation that a series of new elements alien to the Party line joined the Party, sought to modify it, and split off when they failed to do so. The parallelism between his positions and those of the activist current that retained Battaglia Comunista in the 1952 split is also clear, and – as we shall see elsewhere – the parallels with the positions of the “new course” taken by the Party leadership from 1974 onwards, which then exploded into pieces in a process of cannibalism between the different activist currents that had made up the leadership during that period[6].
At that time, not only the damenian of Battaglia Comunista but also this new neo-damenian activist group and a third Trotskyist party in France called themselves by the same name as our Party at the time: the Internationalist Communist Party.
It was in n. 1 of 1965 of “il Programma Comunista” that the decision to rename the Party as the International Communist Party was published: “due to the reality of dialectical development, our organization is the same inside and outside Italian borders, and it is not a novelty that it acts, although within quantitatively limited boundaries, as an international body.”
The mystical-humanistoid deviation: “Invariance”
This second current left the Party in November 1966, after the publication of the 1965-66 Theses, and shortly thereafter founded the review Invariance. The first issue of Invariance published as its re-founding text an article entitled “Origin and function of the party form.”
This article was published in “il Programma Comunista” n. 13 in 1961, signed by the Internationalist Groups from France (written by Jacques Camatte and Roger Dangeville[7]). It contains the embryonic (and also very explicit) positions that would be developed in the review Invariance and that would lead this journal – in record time – to deny class struggle and to renounce Marxism.
After seeing in May 1968 the “opening of a new revolutionary phase”, “the emergence of communism”, a “total rejection of capitalist society, the call for human affirmation, a leap toward another type of society”, blaming the Party for failing to see the emergence of the revolution, the main author of Origin and function withdrew from Paris to reconnect with nature. He “discovered” that the proletariat had been defeated in 1945 (or even earlier, in 1923) and inevitably integrated into capitalism, so that it was no longer the potentially revolutionary class. Therefore, neither class struggle nor Marxism make sense, but are instruments of capitalist preservation, notwithstanding which the revolution has been underway since before 1968.
We apologize in advance for subjecting the reader to the following quotations, but we consider it necessary to see how J. Camatte's real thinking manifested itself shortly after leaving the Party, once he was free from the burden of having to camouflage his real positions and hide them behind Marxist phraseology or by forcing other theoretical works of the Left to the point of absurdity:
“All of humanity has a tendency to oppose capital, to rebel against it.” (Invariance n. 6, 1969).
“This implies a complete break with everything that was the theory and practice of the labor movement before 1945, and given that from 1923 to 1945 there was nothing more than a repetition of what happened between 1917 and 1923, we can modify our proposition by saying that we must break with the theory and practice of the labor movement up to 1923 (...). This perspective has been realized and the revolutionary potential of 1848 has been definitively exhausted. (...) We wait in vain for the revolution, for it is already underway. It goes unnoticed by those who await it, waiting for a particular sign, a ‘crisis’ that will unleash the vast insurrectionary movement that would produce another essential sign, the formation of the party, etc... In reality, the imbalance began before May 1968, and May was its externalization." (Capital and Community, Invariance Serie 2, n. 2, 1972, J. Camatte).
“The emergence of these deep desires, even if they are incorporated into representations that remain within the frameworks of capital, has exposed another essential component of our world: Marxism as repressive consciousness. This is the most effective force everywhere in the world that opposes the burning desire to live; anarchism, in its individualistic and non-violent forms, still retains a certain charge of rebellion. It is thanks to Marxism that the Capitalist Mode of Production (CMP) was able to effect its transformation into real domination, to become universal. Indeed, without it, the CMP would not have been able to penetrate areas such as those currently dominated by the USSR, China, or African countries. (...) The profound phenomenon is, as we said in 1968, the search for the Gemeinwesen and, we could now say, the search of the being and of the immediate life through the recovery of gesture, speech, and imagination; this can be seen in the attraction that craftsmanship exerts on a multitude of young people (recoverable by capital, as we have already indicated) and in the various attempts to create communities." (Mai-June 1968: le devoilement, published in Invariance, Serie III, 1977).
"From which we can deduce the shameful but real relationship between Marx, Lenin, and Stalin! (...) One of the ways in which the revolutionary power of the proletariat has been reabsorbed has been to perfect its consumerist nature, thus trapping it in the web of capital. The proletariat ceases to be the class that denies; after the formation of the working class, it dissolves into the social body." (Decline of the capitalist mode of production or decline of humanity, J. Camatte, 1973).
"And capitalism itself was described in manichean terms: on the one hand, the positive pole, the proletariat, the liberating class; on the other, the negative pole, capital. It was claimed that capital was necessary and had revolutionized human life, but it was described as an absolute evil in relation to the good, the proletariat. (...) In the world of capitalist despotism (which is how society appears today), neither good nor evil can be distinguished. Everything is reprehensible. Negative forces can only arise outside of capital. Since capital has absorbed all the old contradictions, the revolutionary movement must reject all the products of the development of class societies.“ (Decline of the Capitalist Mode of Production or Decline of Humanity, J. Camatte, 1973). ”We must stop rambling and destroy the repressive consciousness[8] that inhibits the emergence of communism. To do this, we must stop perceiving communism as an extension of the capitalist mode of production, and stop thinking that it is enough to suppress exchange value and make use value triumph. (...) It is becoming increasingly foolish to proclaim oneself a Marxist." (Repressive Consciousness – Communism, J. Camatte, 1973).
Regarding Origin and Function, J. Camatte himself writes: "This text was published in 1961 as ‘Report of the Internationalist Groups in France’ and was not the contribution of party militants because, at that time, the small organization that originated from what is called the Italian left did not really consider itself a party on an international scale. In fact, the text was the work of two people, Roger Dangeville and myself. (...) The various studies carried out since 1969, some of which appeared in Invariance Serie II, have led to a complete overcoming of the classist position and also of any theorization about the party. (...) We say this to show where we were locked into Marx's scheme and where we have developed and, in a way, exhausted its possibilities. This prevented us from overcoming the Marxian vision in 1961, even though reality already imposed it. But this is also true for our predecessors, since such an overcoming should have been done since the 1920s. (...) Here we are forced to consider the second pillar of Origin and Function: the Gemeinwesen. But that also means that there was a certain contradiction between the theory of the proletariat and the research on the Gemeinwesen." (Invariance, 1974, J. Camatte).
The positions of Origin and function
We will now focus on certain passages from the article Origin and function in order to see its embryonic or literal relationship with what its author started saying more clearly when he left the Party, and also to see how the Considerations and the Naples Theses mark an end point and a refutation of the positions taken in that article.
Origin and function begins with this general premise:
“The central thesis we wish to affirm and illustrate is the following: it is from their description of communist society that Marx and Engels extracted the features of the party form.” (Origin and function…, 1961) and, later on, it is reiterated: “Quite simply, it has been demonstrated that the party form is the most suitable for representing the program, for defending it. In that case, the rules of organization are not borrowed from bourgeois society, but derive from the vision of future society, which we will demonstrate below." (Origin and function..., 1961).
This Bakuninist position had already been categorically rejected by Engels: "But the struggle for the emancipation of the working class is, for Bakunin and his comrades, nothing more than a simple pretext: their real goal is another.
‘The future society must be nothing other than the generalization of the organization that the International has given itself. Therefore, we must ensure that this organization comes as close as possible to its ideal (...). The International, the seed of the future society, must from now on be a faithful copy of our principles of liberty and federalism and must expel from its midst any principle that tends toward authority and dictatorship.’
We Germans are criticized for our mysticism, but we are far from reaching such mysticism. The International, a model in which there would be no more Versailles executions, military tribunals, standing armies, mail interceptions, Brunswick criminal courts! Precisely now that we must defend our skin with tooth and nail, the proletariat should not organize itself according to the struggle imposed on it every day, every hour, but according to the representations that certain chimerical spirits make of a vague future society! Let us imagine what our own German organization would become if it were organized according to this model. (...) If Stieber and his cronies, if the entire cabinet noir, if all Prussian officers were ordered to join the Social Democratic organization in order to destroy it, the Committee, or rather the Correspondence and Statistics Office, should in no way defend itself, as this would be to introduce a hierarchical and authoritarian organization! And above all, no disciplined sections! No party discipline, no centralization of forces in one place, no weapons of struggle! In short, where would we end up with such an organization? To the cowardly and servile organization of the early Christians, those slaves who gratefully accepted every kick and who, thanks to flattery, brought victory to their religion three centuries later, it is true. It is a method of revolution that the proletariat will certainly not imitate. (F. Engels, The Sonvillier Congress and the International, 1872).
Very symptomatically, this quote from Engels, which directly contradicts the entire approach of Origin and function, is quoted in its entirety in that same article (!) to support the opposite position. This cynical method is shared by our Bakunin-Camatte with most opportunists.
It all begins with an intuition, with an idea that materializes and how the proletariat is a mere accessory mean through which someone not better defined proposes his program to humanity:
"Marx had an intuition about the future society. From this knowledge, he drew the theory of the State and the Party. (...) Our task today is to try to explain how this brilliant intuition became reality: the communist program; how this program was proposed to humanity through the mediation of the proletariat." (Origin and function..., 1961).
As can be seen, he is one step away from saying that it is humanity as a whole that opposes capital and that the struggle for the emancipation of the exploited class was nothing more than a disposable pretext. This is the step he took when the path to his positions within the Party was closed to him. It is anarchism that proposes to use the proletariat (Engels has just explained to us: “But the struggle for the emancipation of the working class is, for Bakunin and his comrades, nothing more than a simple pretext: their real goal is another”). This is why we have seen before that while Marxism is considered a repressor of impulses, J. Camatte sees non-violent anarchism as a genuine rebellion.
And, if the Party, say the mystics, must be organized according to the vision of communist society (contrary to everything Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the Left have always said and written), the dictatorship of the proletariat is transformed into “the Human Being”:
“It is evident that the State of the proletariat will not be a special organism, governed by clearly defined rules, by any law, but will be the Human Being.” (Origin and function…, 1961).
The dictatorship of the proletariat, a transitional period carried out by subhuman men with subhuman means[9] to eradicate social privilege forever, is directly equated with superior communism. This mystified vision of the dictatorship of the proletariat is complemented by the conception of revolution as a political moment that, once accomplished, renders unnecessary the systematic application of repression by the triumphant proletariat, the dictatorship of the proletariat: “The revolution carries out a political act to put an end to the old world, but from that moment on, it is oriented toward establishing the reign of humanity over nature, the reign of man over the planet; it no longer needs political force, since its problem is not that of governing men; the species governs, dominates, possesses.” [10]
Another pearl: “From this point of view, it can be said that only reactionary dictatorships, which aim to maintain class oppression, are authoritarian, because they are rejected by man (because they are not necessary for his development and because they monopolize the Gemeinwesen in order to exploit it).” (Origin and function…, 1961).
Engels himself responds: “But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon —authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.” (On authority, Engels, 1873).
Let us return to Origin and function. If previously someone had proposed a program to humanity through the proletariat, now it is the proletariat that “proposes” (where has the class struggle, the violent revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat gone?) its State, which once again identifies with the human being, that is, with communism. And if it does not make this proposal, it becomes a thing of this society[11]: “The proletariat proposes[12] its State, that is, the human being, to bourgeois society. Otherwise, it vilifies itself and its soul is bourgeois. It becomes a thing of this society.” (Origin and function…, 1961).
The next step, as we have seen in the subsequent development of Invariance, will be to speak plainly in the coming years and say plainly that neither the proletariat, nor class struggle, nor Marxism have had any meaning since 1923, if indeed they ever had any. And the gradualism that will later be affirmed is anticipated: “For us, capitalism no longer exists, only communist society exists” (Origin and function…, 1961). On the contrary, the Marxist position is that capitalism exists and must be killed so that communist society, whose material foundations have been developed within capitalism, can be born through a revolutionary process.
The formation of the body of Thesis of 1965–66
And, despite everything we have pointed out, in that same issue n. 1 of 1965 of “il Programma Comunista” that we have mentioned, an article was published entitled “First results of the contributions received from the whole party for the elaboration of the definitive theses of its organization” in which one of those contributions is precisely “Origin and function of the party form”.
But in the very next issue, n. 2 of 1965 of “il Programma Comunista”, Considerations on the organic activity of the party when the general situation is historically unfavorable (1965) was published.
The Considerations are an initial refutation of the political positions of Origin and function of the Party form and its authors, a refutation that will be completed with the Naples Theses. The formation of this body of Theses, which will include the supplementary Milan Theses in 1966, was accompanied by the publication in the review of all the material used in its formation, as we shall see later.
The Considerations of 1965
After assessing the situation mentioned at the beginning and the inevitable effects it will have on the formal organization, the Considerations state in point 7 that “a fundamental thesis of the Left is that our party must not give up resistance, but must survive and pass on the flame throughout the historical ‘thread of time’” and in the following point (8) it is reiterated: “We therefore defend all forms of activity appropriate to favorable moments, to the extent that the real balance of power allows”, in line with the Characteristic Theses of 1951.
In point 1, the distinction between historical party and formal party is addressed. The article Origin and function speculated on Marx's decision not to join a formal (ephemeral) party in the period following the dissolution of the Communist League, in order to justify the contemplative fatalism of its authors. The Considerations address the issue with clear definitions: “historical party, that is, in terms of content (historical program, invariant) and contingent party, that is, in terms of the form that acts as a physical force and praxis” and "Marx says: party in its historical sense, in the historical sense, and formal party, or ephemeral party. In the first concept there is continuity, and from it we have derived our thesis as a characteristic of the invariance of the doctrine since Marx formulated it, not as an invention of genius, but as a discovery of a result of human evolution." And they state no less clearly that “no current militant can infer the right to a choice: to have their papers in order with the ‘historical party’ and to disengage from the formal party” given that “the two concepts are not in metaphysical opposition, and it would be foolish to express them with the little doctrine: I turn my back on the formal party and go to the historical party” (Considerations, 1965). The approach that is criticized is precisely the real approach of the authors of Origin and function, an approach that they put into practice – each in their own way – when they left the Party in November 1966, after the publication of the Milan Theses.
Finally, where Origin and function revels in expressions such as “brilliant intuition becomes reality...” (where has materialism gone?) or “Marx had the brilliant intuition of future society...”, the Considerations respond: “not as an invention of genius”.
Materials for the Naples Theses of 1965
The Naples Theses were published in issue n. 14 of 1965 of “il Programma Comunista” under the title “Theses on the historical task, action, and structure of the world communist party, according to the positions that for more than half a century have formed the historical heritage of the communist left”.
That issue included a short list of the texts used as references. The Theses themselves begin with a list of texts on the Left's struggle against the degeneration of the Third International. And in the following issues (from n. 15 to n. 18 of 1965), the “Documentary material presented and illustrated for the commentary on the general theses of the Naples meeting” was published in the form of partial reproductions or extracts (all published without the author's name) from the following texts:
- Thesis of the abstentionist communist faction of the Italian Socialist Party (1920)
- Party and class (1921)
- Party and class action (1921)
- The Democratic Principle (1922)
- Thesis on Tactics of the II Congress of the Italian Communist Party (Rome, 1922)
- Project of Thesis on Tactics Presented by the Italian Communist Party to the IV Congress in Moscow, November-December 1922
- Speech by the representative of the Left at the IV Congress of the Communist International (1922)
- Declaration of the Left on the project for the organization of the International (1924)
- Communist organization and discipline (1924)
- Lenin on the path of revolution (1924)
- Motion of the Left of the Italian Communist Party at the clandestine national conference of 1924
- V World Congress (1924):
- speech by the representative of the Left
- reply of the Left to Zinoviev
- statement of the Left on Bukharin's speech
- statements of the Left on the organization
- The Opportunist Danger and the International (1925)
- The Platform of the Left (1925)
- The Committee of Agreement (1925)
- Theses of the Left of the Italian Communist Party to the III Congress (1926)
- Sixth Session of the Enlarged Executive of the Communist International (1926)
- Force, Violence and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle (1948)
- Dialogue with the Dead (1956)
- Marxism and Authority (1956)
Origin and function of the party form is conspicuous by its absence. Not only does it not appear in the list, but the Naples Theses – following the process initiated by the Considerations – clearly refute its expressions and approaches.
The Naples Theses: against the two deviations
The Theses simultaneously combat democratic mystification and idealistic-humanistoid mystification.
In point 7, after vindicating dialectical materialism and economic determinism, it vindicates overcoming the democratic mechanism: “the only path to follow was the one that, in the historical process, would have increasingly freed us from the lethal democratic mechanism, not only in society and in the various bodies that organize within it, but also within the revolutionary class itself and, above all, within its political party”. Immediately afterwards, it launches an attack on the attempt to approach this result from a mystical-humanistoid point of view: “This aspiration of the Left – which cannot be traced back to a miraculous intuition or a rational enlightenment of thinkers, but has been the result of a chain of real, violent, bloody, and ruthless struggles, even when they ended in the defeat of the revolutionary forces – has its historical traces in the entire series of manifestations of the Left.” It concludes the point by reaffirming not only his rejection of the deceptive mechanism but also of the very word democracy: “At the same time, this aspiration to free oneself from all influence, even from the very word democracy, is enshrined in countless texts of the Left, which we briefly mentioned at the beginning of these theses.”
Moving on to review the characteristic points of the Party in point 9, the Theses emphasize that these points are the product of material facts and, with a single blow, attack both deviations: “not discoveries by useless geniuses or solemn resolutions of ‘sovereign’ congresses”.
The Theses go on to reject the isolationist position of the mystical-idealist deviation: “the position whereby the small party is reduced to closed circles with no connection to the outside world, or limited to seeking support in the world of opinions alone, which for the Marxist is a false world unless it is treated as a superstructure of the world of economic conflicts”, while rejecting the acrobatics and tactical maneuvers of the activist deviation: “We reject outright all proposals to expand our membership and base through calls for joint constituent congresses with other circles or groups, which have been swarming everywhere since the end of the war, elaborating disconnected and distorted theories, or asserting as the only positive fact the condemnation of Russian Stalinism and all its local derivatives.”
Point 12 recalls the Left's position in the sense that “if disciplinary crises multiply and become the norm, this means that something is wrong with the general leadership of the party”, rejecting once again the solution of democratic deception: “Naturally, we will not renegade ourselves by committing the childish act of returning to seek salvation in the election of the best men or in the election of leaders and semi-leaders, all of which we maintain is characteristic of the opportunist phenomenon, the historical antagonist of the path of revolutionary Marxism of the Left”; nor in organizational recipes: “it cannot be found in a constitutional or organizational formula that has the magical virtue of saving us from degenerations”. And then it is time to settle accounts with mystical-idealist deviation: "The effort of left-wing Marxists is to work on the broken curve of contingent parties, to redirect it to the continuous and harmonious curve of the historical party. This is a position of principle, but it is childish to want to transform it into organizational recipes". In other words, the complete negation of the central thesis of Origin and function.
And the theses continue by refuting the mystical-humanistoid position that sought to revise Marxist theory of the state, stretching and abusing of the word Gemeinwesen:
"Engels' proposal to adopt the good old German word Gemeinwesen (common being, or social community) in place of the word State was linked to Marx's judgment that the Comune was no longer a State, precisely because it was no longer a democratic corporation. The theoretical question after Lenin needs no further clarification. (...) The revolutionary dictatorship is a real state equipped with armed forces, a repressive police force, and a political and terrorist justice system that does not tie its hands with legal tricks. (...) It has not been a question, therefore, of finding a “model” for the future state in constitutional or organizational guidelines, which on the other hand would be foolish, like the attempt to build a model of socialist states and societies in other countries in the first country conquered by the dictatorship.”
That is, the Theses reject any attempt to revise the theory after the clarification made by Lenin, vindicate the repressive nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and reject the search for a stable model of dictatorship. Thus, they completely shut the door on positions of Origin and function such as that “the state of the proletariat (...) will be the Human being”.
And the Theses return to the question of the Party: “But equally futile, and perhaps more so than all the others, would be the idea of creating a model of the perfect party, an idea that suffers from the decadent weaknesses of the bourgeoisie”. This is because the Party is never perfect and always perfectible[13], because it does not derive from communist society, but is an organism that fights here and now for the overthrow of capitalism, the last class-divided society, with the aim of abolishing class division and bringing about the birth of Communism, the Society of the Species, the true beginning of Social Humanity.
We fought for this great historical transfer, as established in point 11 of the 1965 Considerations: "A militant communist and revolutionary comrade is someone who has been able to forget, renounce, and tear from their mind and heart the classification in which they were inscribed by the registry of this rotten society, and sees and confuses himself in the entire millennial arc that links the ancestral tribal man fighting with wild beasts to the member of the future community, fraternal in the harmonious joy of social man". Communist militants see and confuse themselves in the historical arc that leads to higher communism, after the defeat of capitalism, a defeat to which we dedicate our lives and our energies.
The Theses have claimed before and continue to claim that “According to the historical line, we use not only knowledge of the past and present of humanity, of the capitalist class and even of the proletarian class, but also direct and certain knowledge of the future of society and humanity, as outlined in the certainty of our doctrine”. In the same sense, the Theses affirm that “The first truth that man will be able to conquer is the notion of the future communist society” and that only “after having killed capitalism, its civilization, its school, its science, its technology of thieves, will man be able for the first time to also write the science and history of physical nature and know the great problems of the life of the universe”.
This is a fundamental position of Marxism as a scientific approach and of the Left's struggle against the lie of “real socialism,” which denied the possibility of foreseeing the broad outlines of the development of post-capitalist society. Stalinism thus claimed that Marx and Engels had never said anything about socialism, because they were not utopians, and therefore we all had to swallow the idea that the development of capitalism in Russia was “real” socialism. One of the most profound refutations of this approach is found in Property and Capital (Utopia, Science, Action, 1952):
“Utopianism is an anticipation of the future; scientific communism refers it to the knowledge of the past and the present, simply because an arbitrary and romantic anticipation of the future is not enough, but rather scientific foresight is necessary; that specific foresight that has been made possible by the full maturation of the capitalist mode of production, and which is closely connected to the characteristics of this mode, its development, and the peculiar antagonisms that arise within it. (...) If a general knowledge of nature and history, or part of it, is possible, it includes, inseparable from itself, the investigation of the future: any well-founded polemic against Marxism can only be on the ground of the denial of human knowledge and science".[14]
But here, in point 13 of the Naples Theses, comes the refutation of the mystical-humanistoid position of Origin and function: "such developments cannot be used to explain how the way of life of the party free from opportunism, which is contained in organic centralism and cannot arise from a ‘revelation,’ gradually asserts itself.
As part of the heritage of the Left, this obvious Marxist thesis can be found again in all the polemics conducted against the degeneration of the Moscow center. The party is both a factor and a product of the historical development of situations, and can never be considered as a foreign and abstract element that can dominate the surrounding environment, without falling into a new and more lamentable utopianism.
That the party may tend to give rise to a fiercely anti-bourgeois environment, which largely anticipates the characteristics of communist society, is an old statement and an example of the young Italian communists since 1912.
But this worthy aspiration cannot be reduced to considering the ideal party as a phalanstery surrounded by impregnable walls.”
The Naples Theses end as follows: "The party perseveres in sculpting the outlines of its doctrine, its action, and its tactics with a unity of methods above space and time. All those who find themselves uncomfortable with these outlines have at their disposal the obvious option of leaving the party ranks. (...) Those who, seeing the party continue on its clear path, which has been summarized in these theses for presentation at the general meeting in Naples in July 1965, do not yet feel themselves to be at such a historic height, know very well that they can take any other direction divergent from ours. We have no other procedure to adopt in this matter."
And so it was. Just as the deviation that sought to reintroduce democratic centralism had left the Party in 1964, the mystical-humanistoid deviation of a contemplative fatalist nature left the Party once the Supplementary Theses of Milan were published in n. 7 of 1966.
The Supplementary Theses of Milan
The compact Milan Theses of 1966 added a series of supplementary points that developed as fundamental characteristics of opportunism “preferring a shorter, more comfortable, and less arduous path over a longer, more uncomfortable one fraught with difficulties,” “combining the worst degeneration of party principles with an ostentatious admiration for classical texts, for the dictates and works of great masters and great leaders”; they reaffirmed that “in the party there are no competitions in which one fights to achieve more or less brilliant or visible positions”, recalling that “abusing organizational formalities without a vital reason has been and always will be a defect and a suspicious and stupid danger.” They also reiterated our longstanding anti-personalist position and the Party's determination to “free itself forever from the treacherous influence that seemed to emanate from illustrious men, and from the despicable function of fabricating, in order to achieve its objectives and victories, stupid notoriety and publicity for other personal names”.
[1] Considerations on the organic activity of the party when the general situation is historically unfavorable (1965), Thesis on the historical task, action, and structure of the world communist party, according to the positions that for more than half a century have formed the historical heritage of the communist left (Naples Theses, 1965) and the Supplementary Theses on the historical task, action, and structure of the world communist party (Milan Theses, 1966).
[2] “We are constantly accused of «abstracting ourselves from the situation», just as Bukharin said. Well, let us take a moment to look at this famous situation. Here is how the bourgeois world presents itself, current year: The ruling class has managed, by maneuvering the levers of opportunism, to crush the revolutionary movement to the core, in a damned war that was supposed to conclude the process of counterrevolutionary involution of the workers' parties. A state machine of unprecedented proportions and repressive capabilities keeps the masses chained to exploitation, worse than the stocks around the body of a condemned man. The chaotic confusion and suffering of the masses are such that the working class has been transformed into a bleeding trunk that moves unconsciously: its brain is clouded and intoxicated, its sensitivity numbed, its eyes blind, its hands twisted upon themselves. In place of class struggle, there is the horrifying ravages of infighting, typical of shipwrecked people on a liferaft at the mercy of the waves. In the factories, and this is nothing new in history, espionage, denunciation, rancor, petty and mischievous revenge, the most stupid and bestial opportunism, arrogance, and neurotic abuse prevail, but among the masses oppressed by the consequences of thirty years of tremendous defeats, there is not even the strength to feel genuine nausea, because this is expressed in the miasmic exhalations of company unionism, corporatism and, on the political level, social conciliationism and impotent pacifism.”
[3] As published on its website in 2026.
[4] “IV.4.- Today, in the midst of depression, despite greatly restricted possibilities for action, the party, following revolutionary tradition, does not seek to break with the historical line of preparing for a future large-scale resumption of the class movement, which will build on the results of all past experiences. From the restriction of practical activity does not derive the renunciation of revolutionary postulates. The party recognizes that the restriction of certain sectors is quantitatively accentuated, but this does not change the overall elements of its activity, nor does it expressly renounce them. (Characteristic Theses, 1951).
[5] As stated in the Lyon Thesis (1926): "The activity of the party cannot and must not be limited only to the preservation of the purity of theoretical principles and the purity of the organizational complex, or only to the achievement of immediate success and numerical popularity at all costs. It must always and in all situations encompass the following three points:
- a) the defense and refinement, in relation to new groups of facts that arise, of the fundamental programmatic postulates, that is, of the theoretical consciousness of the working-class movement;
- b) ensuring the continuity of the party's organizational structure and its efficiency, and defending it against the infection of foreign influences opposed to the revolutionary interests of the proletariat;
- c) active participation in all the struggles of the working class, including those arising from partial and limited interests, in order to encourage their development, but constantly linking them to the final revolutionary objectives and presenting the conquests of the class struggle as pathways to the indispensable struggles of the future, denouncing the danger of settling for partial achievements, considered as points of arrival, and of sacrificing the conditions of the proletariat's class activity and combativeness, such as the autonomy and independence of its ideology and its organizations, foremost among which is the party.
The supreme objective of this complex activity of the Party is to prepare the subjective conditions for the preparation of the proletariat to put it in a position to take advantage of the objective revolutionary possibilities that history will present, as soon as they manifest themselves, so that it emerges victorious from the struggle, and not defeated.”
[6] This degeneration of the Party leadership (or rather leaderships) developed between 1974 and 1982, not without strong opposition from multiple sections within the Party. These sections were expelled anti-organically (such as southern France, Turin, Ivrea in 1981) or forced to break formal discipline with the degenerate center, such as the Spanish section and the Schio section in 1982, in order to remain in line with the historical party without renouncing the formal existence of the Party. Also opposed to the “new course” and breaking with the degenerate formal organization during that period were other sections such as Benevento-Adriano, Torre Anunziata, etc.
It did not take long for further confirmation that the leadership of that formal organization no longer represented the historical thread of the Party. That leadership, against whose degeneration we had fought, gradually fell apart a few months later: in October 1982 (when El-Oumami, Proletarier, and the Parisian center of the Party, which a few months earlier had taken disciplinary action against us, broke away on increasingly activist grounds); in June 1983, when the openly democratic “internal debate” was given free rein and part of the editorial staff stepped aside; in January 1984, when the latter part (which had been effectively displaced well before June 1983) regained control of the magazine in court and the other part began publishing "Combat"; in 1985, when Il Comunista broke away from "Combat" and merged with "le Prolétaire".
[7] We are mentioning their names because, throughout the subsequent developments, they themselves have used them (breaking the rule of anonymity) and have claimed authorship of this article.
[8] Marxism, as he has clarified to us before.
[9] See “Humanitas” (“L'Avanguardia,” n. 497, July 7, 1917), selected as supplementary material in the first volume of History of the Left: "War is subhuman for us. And revolution is also subhuman. But while the former is subhuman in its ends and means, the latter is subhuman only in the means it will have to employ. According to Marx, it is with the proletarian revolution that the period of human prehistory will come to an end, and therefore the communist proletarians who are preparing the revolution are still men of the subhuman era. On the other hand, among the social classes that have alternated on the stage of history, the modern working class is the first to be conscious of the goals it wants to achieve. (...) Only under the communist regime will the resources of nature be mastered and guided by humanity toward the achievement of ever-increasing collective well-being. The victory of the proletariat will mark not the dawn of a new class domination, but the advent of solidarity and human equality. That is why Karl Marx was able to say, as the crowning achievement of his gigantic dialectical construction, that the cause of the working class is the cause of all humanity, and that the proletarian class struggle is therefore the last of the class struggles, just as the revolution that will overthrow bourgeois capitalism will be the last revolution. (...) Give us the new communist economic environment and you will have no more wars, attacks, or revolutions. But until then, the fatal cycle of violence will not have run its course.
Under a capitalist and militaristic regime, Man does not yet exist, only pre-man, the slave. You cannot expect the slave to become a man by virtue of ascetic abstractions, before the historical advent of the first humanity. In this period of transition and upheaval, the slave will take a single step —a grandiose and fruitful step: he will become a rebel. In many historical periods, pre-man has rebelled against the chains that held him captive. And often he has confidently set out toward the promises of new and great ideals. But the socialist proletariat, the last and greatest of the rebels, will make up for all the disappointments of the past, because it no longer waits for any Messiah other than its own strength and its own consciousness of historical becoming, boldly opposed to the theoretical ones accredited by official sociology.”
[10] Before reading the response to these positions in the Theses themselves, it is obvious that two “errors” are being made (they are not really errors, they are anti-Marxist positions that one is unwilling to renounce). First, the dictatorship of the proletariat is identified with communism itself (Stalinist conception), in order to accommodate, secondly, its abolition after the “act” (anarchist conception). The Marxist position is summarized in a classic text of the Left, “Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party” (Battaglia Comunista, nos. 3, 4, and 5, 1951):
"In the historical phase following the destruction of the apparatus of capitalist domination, the task of the workers' political party remains equally fundamental, since the class struggle continues, dialectically inverted. (...)
Every social class whose power has been defeated, even through terror, survives for a long time in the fabric of the social organism and does not abandon the hope of revenge or attempts at political reorganization, violent and still masked restoration. It has gone from being a ruling class to a defeated and dominated class, but it has not disappeared overnight. (...)
To move beyond the capitalist system, the first condition was to overthrow bourgeois power and destroy its state. For the profound and radical social transformation that is beginning, the condition is the creation of a new, proletarian State apparatus, capable, like any historical State, of using force and coercion.
The presence of such an apparatus does not characterize communist society, but rather its phase of construction. Once this is accomplished, there will be no more classes or class domination. But the organ for class domination is the State, and it cannot be anything else. That is why the proletarian State proclaimed by the communists —without this claim having in any way the value of a mystical belief, an absolute, an ideal— will be a dialectical tool, a class weapon, and will slowly dissolve (Engels) through the very performance of its functions, as, in a long process, social organization will be transformed from a social system of constraint on men (as it has always been since prehistory) into a unified, scientifically constructed network of administration of things and natural forces."
[11] The correct thesis is as follows, as set out in the Theses of Lyon (1926) as necessary preparation for the entire subsequent period of counterrevolution: "There are situations which, as a result of the balance of forces, are objectively unfavorable for the revolution (although they may be less distant from it than others in time, since historical evolution —as Marxism teaches— proceeds at very different speeds) in which the desire to be mass and majority parties at all costs, the desire to have predominant political influence at all costs, can only be achieved by renouncing communist principles and methods and pursuing social democratic and petty-bourgeois policies.
It must be said loud and clear that, in certain situations, past, present, and future, the proletariat has been, is, and will be, for the most part, necessarily in a non-revolutionary position, one of inertia and collaboration with the enemy, depending on the circumstances. But that, despite everything, the proletariat continues to be, always and everywhere, the potentially revolutionary class and the repository of the revolution's redemption, as long as the Communist Party exists within it, which, without ever renouncing all possibilities of asserting itself and manifesting itself in a coherent manner, knows how to avoid the paths that appear easiest for the purposes of immediate popularity, but which would divert the party from its task and deprive the proletariat of the indispensable support for its resumption.” (Lyon Thesis, I-General Issues, 3.- Action and Tactics of the Party, 1926).
[12] In the version published in “il Programma Comunista” in 1961, at least, the verb oppose was used, but in the original version republished by its author in Invariance, the verb propose is used: Il propose son État, c’est-à-dire l’être humain, à la société bourgeoise.
[13] “since the party itself is something perfectible and not perfect" (Lyon Thesis, 1926).
[14] This same fundamental text asserts the two elements without which there can be no Party: will and doctrine. "Prophesying a future, or wanting to realize a future, are both inappropriate positions for communists. All this is replaced by the history of the struggle of a class considered as a unitary course, of which only one section has been developed at each contingent moment, the other is awaited. The data of the subsequent course are just as fundamental and indispensable as those of the past course. Moreover, errors and deviations are equally possible in the assessment of the preceding movement and in that of the subsequent movement: and all the controversies of parties and of the party prove this. Consequently, the problem of party praxis is not that of knowing the future, which would be too little, nor that of wanting the future, which would be too much, but that of “preserving the future line of its own class.” It is clear that if the movement does not know how to study, investigate, and understand it, it will not even be in a position to preserve it. It is no less clear that if the movement does not know how to distinguish between the will of the established and enemy classes and its own, the game is equally lost, and the line is lost. The communist movement is not a matter of pure doctrine; it is not a matter of pure will: however, the lack of doctrine paralyzes it, the lack of will paralyzes it. And lack means absorption of foreign doctrines, of foreign wills". (Property and Capital, Utopia, Science, Action, 1952).