On the other hand, the post WWI revolutionary movement in Britain called for social soviets, partly as a result of rising unemployment which expelled revolutionaries from the workplace. Society as he says does indeed proceed in “conflicts and contradictions”, and that is why revolutionary struggles break out without all workers becoming communist. Its task will not become clear as the result of enlightenment from above; it must discover its tasks through hard work, through thought and conflict of opinions. Therefore the concept of class must not suggest to us a static image, but instead a dynamic one. DB. Furthermore, Bordiga saw no substantial differences between bourgeois democracy and a Bonapartist or fascist dictatorship, as both were forms of domination by capital. But the masses are inactive only because they cannot yet comprehend the course of the struggle and the unity of class interests, although they instinctively sense the great power of the enemy and the immenseness of their task. The left split organisationally only as they made a principled break between revolutionaries and Maximalists1 to form their own communist party in 1921. In Germany the Workers’ Councils or Raete were dominated by the Social Democrats, the party of counter-revolution, which neutralised these councils, and prepared for the creation of the Weimar Republic. Soviets and factory organisations appeared at the end of a phase of capital accumulation based on the skilled factory worker and at the beginning of a phase based on the mass worker11. He was influential on the left communist movement, especially in Germany, but also further afield. Workers have less of a tendency to find meaning in their particular trade or particular industry. Certainly, it is possible to look at differing tendencies and attempt to go beyond them in some way, but it cannot be ignored that they are expressions of a time now past. In opposition to this, we maintain that the working class can rise to victory only when it independently attacks its problems and decides its own fate. However, following the degeneracy of the Russian revolution and the victory of the counter-revolution in Western Europe, this tendency to cohere reversed. In contrast to widespread confusion about the soviets, this represented an important recognition that they were social and proletarian, and not simply workers organisations. If, in this situation, persons with the same fundamental conceptions unite for the discussion of practical steps and seek clarification through discussions and propagandise their conclusions, such groups might be called parties, but they would be parties in an entirely different sense from those of today. The occupants organized their own activities. The Russian party increasingly favoured the right wings of the various national sections of the International, and sought an accommodation with the capitalist powers, especially through an alliance with the Social Democratic parties. Any real social transformation was to begin only after this point. Confusion of these two concepts -- party and class -- can lead to the greatest mistakes and bewilderment. Therefore, in order to state that a class exists and acts at a given moment in history, it will not be enough to know, for instance, how many merchants there were in Paris under Louis XIV, or the number of English landlords in the Eighteenth Century, or the number of workers in the Belgian manufacturing industry at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. That is, they no longer acted as the vanguard preceding the class but as its mechanical expression in an electoral and corporative system, where equal importance and influence is given to the strata that are the least conscious and the most dependent on egotistical claims of the proletarian class itself. Only through moderation, concessions and yielding can it maintain that it is insanity for the workers to try to force impossible demands. For example, many class struggle anarchists try to deal with the problem by designating their party “the revolutionary organisation” assuming that by changing the name they exorcise the beast. They cannot realize that the failure of these parties is due to the fundamental conflict between the self-emancipation of the working class through its own power and the pacifying of the revolution through a new sympathetic ruling clique. But after that, as after every victory, come differences on the question: what next? This apparently straightforward statement, which almost all modern Marxist tendencies adhere to is actually interpreted in subtly different ways. The fact that soviets operate on the social terrain, rather than just the economic, may mean that they are even more a target of manipulation by political tendencies than are factory organisations (although the latter were far from being immune to such manipulation). Instead, we will have to submit an entire historical period to our logical investigations; we will have to make out a social, and therefore political, movement which searches for its way through the ups and downs, the errors and successes, all the while obviously adhering to the set of interests of a strata of people who have been placed in a particular situation by the mode of production and by its developments.”. In most situations, the members of the radical minorities are not all grouped in the same organisations. The material party is a product of the class, and can only remain so. To maintain that the party is a ‘part’ and not an ‘organ’ indicates a concern to identify the party and the class in a statistical manner, and is symptomatic of an opportunistic deviation. Bordiga, in “Party and Class”, makes the opposite error of overemphasizing the subjective condition, the class in struggle, the class for itself2. Bordiga summarised this condition with the phrase “without-reserves” to indicate the reproduction of the proletariat, and the cyclical, dynamic reproduction of poverty. Party and Class, by Amadeo Bordiga Party and Class, by Anton Pannekoek. The problem with self-management was already being grasped by Bordiga in 1920, even if with a statist perspective. Both echoed the sentiments of Marx at certain points: “The League, like the Society of Friends in Paris and a hundred other associations, was only an episode in the history of the party which grows everywhere spontaneously from the soil of modern society… Under the term ‘party’, I understand party in the great historical sense”18. Bordiga is little-known in English-speaking countries, but so, too, in Italy. Gramsci had thrown himself enthusiastically into support of the factory council movement in Turin, identifying it as the beginning of a movement of soviets. Bordiga is viewed as one of the most notable representatives of Left communism in Europe. That is the minorities, which form the material party (see below) may also lead the class in the sense of defining a course which the most combatative elements of the class sees as the best to follow. According to Pannekoek, “The workers must … think out and decide for themselves.” But workers, individuals employed in thousands of separate enterprises, think, act and decide individually, or at best sectionally, for the most part. Contrary to Lenin’s concept, according to which the party is a part of the working class, its organised vanguard Bordiga stated that the party had to be ‘an organ’ of the working class which consisted of those different elements, of the offsprings of all social layers of the society who accept and support general principles of Communism. He was later to oppose the policy of Bolshevization, which ordered a mechanical unity, enforced by the “top executives”, preferring an “organic centralism” in which all members were to participate actively. In this situation, the factory organisations provided a basis for revolutionary opposition. Click to read more about Party and Class door Amadeo Bordiga. Our method does not amount to a mere description of the social structure as it exists at a given moment, nor does it merely draw an abstract line dividing all the individuals composing society into two groups, as is done in the scholastic classifications of the naturalists. The councilists theorise themselves out of existence. For Bordiga, consciousness appears first of all in small groups of workers. Thus their political understanding obscured the roots of their social misery, it falsified their insight into their real goal, their political understanding deceived their social instincts”21. But partly this concept is based on the idea that the party nevertheless plays an essential and important part in the struggle of the proletariat. He correctly saw that factory organisations could not play the same radical role as soviets, that they could not transform the whole of society. This perhaps is the origin of the Italian Left’s emphasis on organisational continuity and programme. Although both the Italian and the Dutch/German Lefts had already disagreed with the Bolsheviks over “tactics”, and been denounced by Lenin, both tendencies still saw themselves as part of the same movement. In fact there are no guarantees against degeneracy. He who considers a static and abstract image of society, and sees the class as a zone with a small nucleus, the party, within it, might easily be led to the following conclusion: since the whole section of the class remaining outside the party is almost always the majority, it might have a greater weight and a greater right. This tendency is characterised by such terms as councilism, workerism, “at the point of production”, immediatism and an emphasis on spontaneity. This phenomenon was to reoccur again with the degeneration of the communist parties. Therefore, that remedy which was wrong theoretically also proved inefficient in actuality. 10. It looked toward all of the class in itself (defined, according to Pannekoek, by economic interests) developing into the class for itself (defined by its struggle against capital) and doing this formally, before actually, that is organisational unity first, unity in revolutionary struggle later. These tactical inadequacies in fact verifies elements of Bordiga’s theory of the party. In the period following the Russian revolution, the different minority groups did in fact tend to cohere into a formal party. If only a minority of the class is conscious of its position, interests and revolutionary aim and possesses a will to achieve the aim, then the majority of the class does not possess these attributes. The material party has a dialectical relationship with the class movement, and cannot continue to exist as a mass organisation outside of a mass movement. The bourgeoisie in these countries can be vanquished only by repeated and united action of the masses in which they seize the mills and factories and build up their council organizations. Support for the state’s war aims was thus far more pervasive. The statistical identification of party and class has always been one of the characteristics of opportunistic workerism”15. Class needs to be grasped in its dialectical unity, of class for itself and class in itself, of its economic conditions as a foundation for its antagonistic position within society. Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin persists as a somewhat elusive character in the history of the Russian Revolution. “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. Therefore, in order to state that a class exists and acts at a given moment in history, it will not be enough to know … how many merchants there were in Paris under Louis XIV, or the number of English landlords in the Eighteenth Century, or the number of workers in the Belgian manufacturing industry at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. What is important is not the form of organisation, but what exactly is being organised; the essential is communisation, humanity’s collective re-appropriation and transformation of the whole of life now alienated through capital. Bordiga was correct to point out the deficiencies of factory organisations. This was important in the analysis of the Soviet Union, a society with capital, but without a (local) bourgeoisie as such. But our present purpose is not to draw out a complete critical analysis of the syndicalist doctrines. This makes a comparison of their differences easier, but perhaps obscures some of their underlying convergences. Are particular groups of workers, or even individual workers, to emancipate themselves, or does the class as an entity emancipate itself? In spite of everything, such recipes are constantly being sought for even today. After failing to win over the party, the left was forced to split and form their own organisations. Poverty [miseria] grows and wealth concentrates, because there is a disproportionate increase in the absolute and relative number of property-less proletarians who must every day eat what every day they earn. According to these illusions, such a device by itself would be enough to make the mass ready to move towards revolution with the maximum revolutionary efficiency. In tearing away the object of his production from man, estranged labour therefore tears away from him his species-life…”. Every new situation, every new problem will find minds diverging and uniting in new groups with new programs. This was not true in Marx’s day. Let us remember that it is a typical bourgeois cliche to oppose the good “common sense” of the masses to the “evil” of a “minority of agitators”, and to pretend to be most favourably disposed towards the exploited’s interests. We can state it otherwise: in the term “revolutionary party,” “revolutionary” always means a bourgeois revolution. They think they are the revolutionary vanguard because they see the masses indifferent and inactive. Revolution requires an organisation of active and positive forces united by a doctrine and a final aim. Marx: “The more developed and the more comprehensive is the political understanding of a nation, the more the proletariat will squander its energies – at least in the initial stages of the movement – in senseless, futile uprisings that will be drowned in blood. When the Socialist and Communist parties became organs of bourgeois rule for the perpetuation of exploitation, these well-meaning people merely concluded that they would have to do better. This dissolution of classes, in the sociological sense, has continued leaving us not with working class and bourgeoisie but with an ever growing proletariat and an increasingly proletarianised humanity facing capital and its functionaries (CEO’s, directors, high-up state officials and so on), who as individuals are more and more disposable. Past and present syndicalists, however, have always been conscious of the fact that most trade unions are controlled by right wing elements and that the dictatorship of the petty bourgeois leaders over the masses is based on the union bureaucracy even more than on the electoral mechanism of the social-democratic pseudo-parties. These aspects reappear again and again in different contexts, and in different movements: Workers Autonomy, situationist ideas, the Industrial Workers of the World, some anarchist currents, and in German, Dutch and British left communism. The old labour movement is organized in parties. The council communists put faith in “the workers themselves” and tended to assume that communism was immanent in all workplace struggles. First Published: “Partito e classe”, Rassegna Comunista, no 2, April 15, 1921; Amadeo Bordiga (1889-1970) was the first leader of the Italian communist party, which he helped found in 1921, along with Antonio Gramsci, who became better known. This dialectical concept of the class allows us to overcome the statistician’s pale objections. One important feature of the last couple of decades that is particularly relevant here is the development of the “new economy” of lean production, of flexibilisation, with its increase in temporary and contract labour, and general decrease in job security. From then on they can conflate their own organisation with the organisation of the class. The actual form of the movement was a division into party, soviets and factory organisations. Read 3 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. Factory organisations tended to represent this sector of the class, the skilled worker. LibraryThing is a cataloging and social networking site for booklovers If one goes back to Trotsky’s quarrel with Lenin in 1903-4 and in the following years, in the “Menshevik” period of his life, one must admit that he rightly saw the flaw in the Kautsky-Lenin view that “class consciousness” arises outside the workers’ movement, and is then introduced into it by the “party.” Its own program was revised or reinterpreted. From this can be seen the importance of alienation, ahead of simple impoverishment in Marx’s theory. Self-management operates therefore as a weapon of capitalist crisis management. This understanding of wealth and poverty as being something other than purely the level of consumption is suggestive of the situationist analysis of the “new poverty” existing among proletarians in modern societies alongside the refrigerators, colour TVs and package holidays. He correctly emphasises the necessity for class action, both during the revolution and after it as necessary for defeating the bourgeoisie, and ensuring victory (with or without the formal party). Archived. 4 years ago. He does not have the right any longer to view the opposed classes as being clearly divided on the scene of history as are the different choral groups on a theatre scene. By a Prussian’”.↩︎, Bordiga, “Doctrine of the Body Possessed by the Devil”.↩︎, Marx, Capital, volume II, chapter 1.↩︎, Marx and Engels, The German Ideology.↩︎, https://www.oocities.org/capitolhill/lobby/3909/bordiga/bvptoc.html, https://www.oocities.org/cordobakaf/bologna.html, https://www.oocities.org/~johngray/comrus01.htm, https://web.archive.org/web/20091021091514/https://www.geocities.com/antagonism1/etoc.html, https://www.oocities.org/CapitolHill/Lobby/2379/gold62.htm, https://www.oocities.org/~johngray/peractil.htm, https://web.archive.org/web/20040707164303/http://kurasje.tripod.com/arkiv/3100f.htm, https://web.archive.org/web/20030513112327/http://www.geocities.com/antagonism1/bordtdp.html, https://www.oocities.org/~johngray/lip.htm, https://www.oocities.org/CapitolHill/Lobby/2379/, https://www.oocities.org/~johngray/borpro.htm, http://www.angelfire.com/pop2/pkv/OATU.html. Soviets were, at least potentially, fighting organisations of the whole class, and formed an alternate power to the bourgeois state. Pannekoek was a communist from the Netherlands active in both Dutch and German social democratic parties and later the Communist Party of Holland, and the Group of International Communists. The workers were thus relied on to liberate themselves in isolation, factory by factory: “By telling themselves that it was ‘up to the workers’ to take the factories, a ‘substitution’ did in fact take place, but it was the opposite ‘substitution’ from the one the anarchists feared. Or, the party, with the help of bourgeois elements defeats the workers. It is no more revolutionary than were the creators of the Third Reich. The Bolsheviks were revolutionary vis-a-vis Russian Autocracy but they retained the organisational and economic programme, that is, capitalist programme, of the Second International. The party may exist as a more diffuse movement, perhaps of several groups, all or none of whom may be called parties. The class, defined by common interests, exists as an object, as a factor of capital, but also with separate interests from, and against, capital. In this article from 1951, Amadeo Bordiga presents a master-summary of various bourgeois ideologies and their underlying social dynamics, before outlining the Marxist conception of party, praxis, and the Marxist approach to the unions. A party lives when there is the existence of a doctrine and a method of action. Later still he was to criticise Lenin. It is possible to learn from the theory developed by previous class movements, but only a future movement can resolve or supersede the dilemmas that Pannekoek and Bordiga pose. It is impossible that all workers, all strata and groups, with their often still diverse interests should, at this stage, agree on all matters and be ready for united and decisive further action. 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