Translated from Prometeo Series VI No.1, June 2000

Before we can talk about a new International we need to be clear about two things: the first is the reason why an International is necessary and the second is what were the main characteristics of previous Internationals.

Why Do We Need an International?

The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels concludes with the words, “Workers of the World, Unite!” This alone would be a good enough argument for the advanced part of the working class, the communists, to unite immediately in a political organisation which went beyond national boundaries and identities, to embrace all countries. Even in Marx and Engels’ time, well before “globalisation”, capital was international. It was already a relation of production which dominated the greater part of the countries that existed and where the two great conflicting classes were the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. If the communists of all countries had a tendency to unite internationally at that time, as well as in the first half of the twentieth century, the International is even more necessary today.

Furthermore, today’s dominant capitals are by definition and form international. The fact that five or six industrial-financial centres control 75% of world production says it all. In other issues of this magazine we have examined the forms and the effects of “financialisation”, of the internationalisation of the markets for commodities and labour, and for the overcoming of national and even state boundaries.

If the October Revolution was able to keep up a revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism and build socialism for a few years whilst waiting for it to be repeated elsewhere, today there is no such time for any working class, save – and then with a big “perhaps” – the United States.

The revolutionary crisis in Russia and the later tremors in Italy and Germany took place without a general collapse of world capitalism. The other aspect of this very same historical phenomenon was that the objective conditions which were present in Russia, Italy and Germany, and which had pushed the proletarian masses into action didn’t exist in the USA or in Britain. Markets were still largely national and foreign investments or rather the financial connections between countries were not such that a crisis in one country would lead to an immediate repeat in another.⁽¹⁾

These conditions have profoundly changed. The objective conditions which might create a revolutionary crisis in one country will be the same, or nearly the same, in all the others. In short, a complete banking collapse and sudden drop in living standards in any one country will be part of an international chain which embraces many other countries, if not all of them. This unity of the objective situation and the unity of the classes, both proletarian and bourgeois, demands the unity of the political organ which leads the proletariat’s assault.

Towards the First Congress of the Third International

We should immediately make it clear that we don’t consider the so-called Fourth International as part of the historic course of the revolutionary movement. Rather it has its origins in the outright defence, however critical, of the experience of the Soviet Union. It therefore represents the new counter-revolutionary course which arose from the shining example of the October Revolution. It has to be recognised and fought as such.

The rupture between the Trotskyist movement and our “political ancestors” dates from 1933. The deep reasons behind it appeared more clearly in 1939-40 when the Communist Left recognised that the USSR had entered the Second World War as a new imperialist power whilst the Fourth International called for the defence of the “socialist fatherland”, however deformed or bureaucratically degenerate it might be, in the war against nazism-fascism.

We must therefore look to the Third International to find a genuine forerunner of an international revolutionary organisation of our class in both rationale and shape. It has long been established as an accepted fact that the Third International was born as a healthy reaction of the proletarian revolution, of communism, to the degeneration of the Second International, when the latter lined up its parties in support of the first imperialist war. And like all such accepted truths this slips from our consciousness like water on marble. Evidently it doesn’t lead us to pose the same question about the Third International which, in 1943, ended up in largely the same way. True, the issue is different, as this time a “socialist fatherland” was involved in the war...

There were warning signs after 1914 when the German socialists voted war credits. Only a few militants, led by Lenin, remained true to the principles of the Communist Manifesto.⁽²⁾

They defined the war as imperialist and whilst calling for revolutionary defeatism declared themselves for the creation of a new International. Based on opposition to the Second International and understanding its failure, the new International would start again on a new, more solid, basis.

The collapse of the Second International is the collapse of opportunism which was growing on the soil of the specific (the so-called “peaceful”) historic epoch now passed, and which practically dominated the International in the last years. The opportunists have long been preparing this collapse by rejecting the socialist revolution and substituting for it bourgeois reformism; by repudiating the class struggle with its inevitable transformation into civil war at certain moments and by preaching class collaboration, by preaching chauvinism...⁽³⁾

It’s worth observing in passing that the slogan of revolutionary defeatism was opposed even by such figures as Bukharin, Krylenko and Kamenev. Trotsky himself was critical of “revolutionary defeatism”.

The Bolsheviks who gathered around Lenin in Switzerland were largely isolated in their appeal for “a proletarian International freed from opportunism”.⁽⁴⁾

This is why, as Broué correctly observes, the first initiative for a meaningful international alignment originated not with the revolutionary left wing of the socialist movement but from the “centrist” or “pacifist” tendencies. They were particularly influential in the neutral countries but after one year of war they were not so unimportant in belligerent countries like France, and above all Germany, where those like Haase, Bernstein and Kautsky who were divided on both the war and political perspectives, were re-united.⁽⁵⁾ The first meeting took place in Lugano (27th September, 1914) between delegates of the Italian Socialist Party and other socialist parties to discuss the possibility of calling an international socialist conference.

Zimmerwald

36 delegates from “workers' parties and organisations ready to struggle against the war with the methods of proletarian class struggle” participated in the Zimmerwald Conference (5th-8th September 1915). In the manifesto which it issued, at the second conference in the Swiss village of Kienthal (24th-30th April, 1916), and in its final resolution, the “Zimmerwald Left” was always in a minority. Neither the centrists nor, to an even lesser extent, the pacifists considered a split from the Second International practicable. The final Kienthal resolution limited itself to predict – or announce – the splits which would take place in the different parties of the International themselves.⁽⁶⁾

We have to wait for 1917 and the two Russian Revolutions of February and October for the problem of the formation of a new international to be reintroduced by Lenin under the weight of a revolution in progress and in open polemic with the failed “Zimmerwald International”.

From the very outset, the Zimmerwald International adopted a vacillating “Kautskyite”, “Centrist” position, which immediately compelled the Zimmerwald Left to dissociate itself, to separate itself from the rest and to issue its own manifesto... Although social pacifism was condemned by the Keinthal Manifesto, the whole Zimmerwald Right, the entire Zimmerwald majority sank into social pacifism: Kautsky and Co. in a series of utterances in January and February 1917; Bourderon and Merrheim in France, who cast their votes in unanimity with the social-chauvinists for the pacifist resolutions of the Socialist Party (December 1916)... Turati and Co. in Italy where the entire party took up a social pacifist position, while Turati himself, in a speech delivered on December 17th 1916 “slipped” (not by accident of course) into nationalist phrases whitewashing the imperialist war.⁽⁷⁾ Therefore:

Our Party must not “wait” [for Congresses called by the Zimmerwald Commission - ed.], but must immediately found a Third International.⁽⁸⁾

It is therefore wrong to say, as Jules Humbert-Droz does out of loyalty to the International, that “the Communist International was born out of the Zimmerwald Movement” because in reality, as Droz himself points out,

the split in the International took place over the issues of the struggle against the war and fidelity to internationalism.⁽⁹⁾

Despite Lenin’s hard struggle in April 1917 the All-Russian Congress of the Bolshevik Party (24th-29th April) decided to “remain in Zimmerwald”, to await its Congresses forcing the Party to “wait passively” until the Third Zimmerwald Conference. Thus there is a substantial gulf between the “Zimmerwald movement”, in which Lenin also took part and where his party was stuck for a longer period than necessary, and his actual opinion and the subsequent political process which led to the birth of the Comintern.⁽¹⁰⁾

From April 1917 to February 1919 there were a succession of spasmodic attempts to regroup the “objectively internationalist” forces in various countries around the Bolshevik Platform. But the political events themselves in that period (the rise of workers’ and soldiers’ councils in Germany on November 18th, the formation of the KPD and of the Communist Parties of Poland, Austria, Hungary, Finland and Latvia, and the enthusiastic adherence of the revolutionary Social Democratic Federation of the Balkans to Bolshevik perspectives), demanded what Lenin had always fought for: the foundation of a Communist International. It is Lenin who sketched out the birth of this International in his Letter to the Workers of Europe and America (21st January 1919) rather than in his speech at the opening of the First Congress.

On August 20th, 1918 our party, the Bolshevik Party was the only party to have definitely broken with the old Second International of 1889-1914, which had suffered such ignominious bankruptcy during the imperialist war 1914-18. Ours was the only party to have completely taken the new path, away from socialism and social-democratism, which had disgraced itself by an alliance with the piratical bourgeoisie, to communism; from petty-bourgeois reformism and opportunism, with which the official Social-Democratic and Socialist parties were and are so thoroughly imbued, to real proletarian revolutionary tactics. Now on 12th January 1919, we have a number of Communist, proletarian parties, not only within the confines of the former tsarist empire, as, for example, in Latvia, Finland and Poland but also in Western Europe - in Austria, Hungary, Holland and lastly, in Germany. When the German Spartakus League, headed by such world-renowned leaders, such loyal champions of the working class as Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring, completely broke with all socialists of the Schiedemann type... when the Spartakus League took the name of the Communist Party of Germany, the foundation of a really proletarian, really internationalist, really revolutionary Third International, the Communist International, became a fact. This foundation has not yet been formally endorsed but actually the Third International already exists.⁽¹¹⁾

The First Congress and the International

An advanced guard which had taken on revolutionary internationalist principles certainly existed both within and without the big social democratic parties, but there was not yet a network of autonomous national parties. At the time when Lenin wrote his Letter to the Workers of Europe and America the German Communist Party was eighteen days old.⁽¹²⁾

The formal constitution of the International was now posed as an urgent matter for those vanguards. Trotsky drafted the Letter of Invitation to the Congress which was also published in Pravda on 24th January 1919. It begins

The undersigned parties and organisations consider the convocation of the first Congress of the new International an urgent necessity.

The letter outlines the principles and tasks of the yet-to-be constituted International.⁽¹³⁾ And it ends,

As a function of all these considerations we propose that all the fraternal organisations and parties put on their agendas the question of calling an international communist congress.

There follows the “signatures” of eight bodies (parties and offices abroad). On March 2nd 1919 the International Conference, which only at its conclusion would be recognised as the First Congress of the Communist International, opened.

The German Spartakus League, a few days previously constituted as the German Communist Party had mandated their delegate Eberlein (Albert) to oppose the expected proposal for the immediate formation of the International and he expressed this in his opening speech. On the other hand, the report of the delegate of the Norwegian Workers’ Party, Stange speaking on the first day, in the name of a current of that party said, significantly,

It is obvious the Norwegian Workers' Party faces a problem of the greatest importance: it is dealing with the issue of whether to abandon completely the social democratic line to side with the dictatorship of the proletariat through the workers’ councils. I am personally convinced that, thanks to the development of the world revolution, the party will adopt a definite position in this regard.⁽¹⁴⁾

Wouldn’t it have been better to leave things to mature in the Norwegian Workers' Party by reinforcing the tendency towards a Communist Party through political support to its left fraction and then integrating it into the International? Instead it was followed by the enthusiastic and erroneous report (erroneous because it was out-of-date) of the Austrian delegate, and on the basis of his motion presented in the sitting of March 4th (together with the representatives of the Left Social-Democratic Party of Sweden, of the Balkans Workers’ Federation of Revolutionary Social-Democrats and the Hungarian Communist Party) that the Conference unanimously “decided to constitute itself as the Third International and adopted the name Communist International”. Thus the initial indecision of the Bolsheviks and the opposition of the Germans were overcome, to the point where Eberlein withdrew his own opposition, and abstained.⁽¹⁵⁾

We ask readers to check for themselves the different documents we have quoted in order to move on to the central point of our argument.

In one respect the transformation of the International Conference at the beginning of March 1919 into the First Congress of the International – following five years of propaganda for the Communist International by Lenin and the so-called “Zimmerwald Left” and the first victorious proletarian revolution – acted as a powerful stimulus to break the revolutionary vanguard from the social-democratic parties of the Second International. In another respect that very haste played more on the emotion of the events and on the Bolshevik experience’s capacity for attraction, even against the maximalists in words in the Socialist parties, rather than on a real maturation of the revolutionary vanguard on a methodological, theoretical and political level, which – as subsequent events demonstrated – was a long way from being complete. In the event the rapid succession of revolts, general strikes, revolutionary attempts, between 1919 and 1921 were not enough to do in other countries what the Bolsheviks had achieved before 1914: a clear separation in method, principles and platform from the Second International and its parties, and the building of an organisation capable of autonomous revolutionary leadership of the proletarian masses.

The Communist Party of Italy itself was formed by a definite break with the PSI only in 1921, two years after the “First Congress of the International” and after the Second Congress, having missed chances at the Congress of Bologna in 1919 and the Imola Convention in 1920. There was, on the one hand, the delay of the revolutionaries in the West, and on the other, a weak theoretical tactic of an International formed to regroup formally as many forces as possible.

It is not just today that we maintain that the lateness of the formation of the Communist Party of Italy was also due to the attitude of the leading organs of the International which:

in the face of the task of selection, of splits and of adhesions had adopted the tactical criteria of achieving maximum quantitative results with the least political discrimination thus favouring, when they didn’t impose it, a breach as far to the right as possible.⁽¹⁶⁾

Bordiga expressed the same idea in different words in his Letter to Korsch in 1926:

Lenin put a stop to much of the work of “spontaneous” elaboration, counting on materially uniting the various groups and only later forging homogeneity in the heat of the Russian revolution. To a large extent he didn’t succeed.⁽¹⁷⁾

Between the First and Second Congress various parties were formed in order to adhere to the Third International. The Socialist Workers’ Party (Communist) of Yugoslavia which was formed in July 1919 came from the fusion of different socialist parties in the country. It was headed by centrists with a strong minority that openly called for rejoining the Second International. The above-mentioned Norwegian Party decided to adhere to the Third International safeguarding, however, its own independence. The Mexican Socialist Party became communist in September 1919 and adhered to the Third International but was largely made up of anarcho-syndicalists. The Indonesian Party constituted in May 1920 in fact consisted of syndicalists linked to the nationalist movement. The only Communist Party formed by changing its name in May 1919 and made up of communists was the Bulgarian and which, as the Social Democratic Labour Party (Tesnyaki), had already given evidence for some time of its internationalist and “Bolshevik” positions.⁽¹⁸⁾

The Third International thus immediately took shape as an amalgam of heterogeneous forces, unified only through strong and authoritative Russian leadership. It was therefore ready to follow a tactics-dominated policy from the start and the order for Bolshevisation given by Stalin. It was fundamentally incapable of exercising the function that we would expect from an International: revolutionary leadership of its sections in every country and therefore in Soviet Russia itself.

Balance Sheet and Perspectives

Without claiming to have exhausted all the elements to study in the experience of the Third International, but only having underlined the general lines, as well having furnished a brief bibliography, we can now draw up a useful balance and a new perspective. The Third International – in Lenin’s scheme – should have aided the maturation and political homogeneity of the different national organisations on a revolutionary basis. The driving force for this maturity, the catalyst for the fusion of revolutionary strength, was the Bolshevik Party as the guiding force of the only revolutionary process which was materially underway. The continuing isolation of the soviet experience and the urgency imposed by continuous resistance presented this party enormous problems under which it was easy to succumb. Particularly as the Bolshevik Party was almost exclusively the only political and theoretical reference point on an international scale. The International as such wasn’t capable of contributing to the political direction of Russian matters. In fact the Russian Party – and State – were directing the International. The retreat of the Russian Revolution, having accomplished only the state ownership of the means of production, dragged the State and Party along with it to a counter-revolutionary terrain. This situation was mirrored by the International becoming a tool of the Russian state’s foreign policy. If the Russian Opposition could do nothing, the international revolutionary minority, and especially the Italian Communist Left, could do even less – not so much due to an absence of political vigour [the Italian Left was vigorous enough to represent the reference point for rebuilding the International] – as for the lack of political weight it had in Russia and in the International itself.

We come thus to the lessons.

1. We surely cannot risk repeating, even if in a new form, the experience of an initial revolutionary success in one country which stimulates the birth of similar proletarian political organisations in other countries and acts as their centre of unification in a new International. We won’t have the time – either the Revolution will spread rapidly or we face another certain defeat.
2. The future International, however far away it may be, cannot be a Federation of more or less independent parties with differentiated policies based on claims for different national situations. Therefore it is more correct to speak of an International Party. The nature, structure and statutes of this International Proletarian Party must homogeneously shape each and every national section. Its political platform must be the common patrimony, homogeneously developed together by all sections and all militants.
3. Our idea of the party/class/proletarian semi-state relationship demands the political centralisation of the international party – though this not an absolute guarantee since by definition there are no guarantees in social and political affairs – it is the surest contribution to a proletarian historic perspective, independent of the particular national circumstances in which the first proletarian state or states, will be established. This centralisation is along the lines repeated at our last Congress.⁽¹⁹⁾ It is the centralisation of political cadres dedicated to the cause of the final overthrow of capitalism. Thus, until that occurs they will understand how to carry out the role of political leadership of the “national” semi-state as part of the international revolution and therefore – even in case of the defeat of that initial experience – will know how to safeguard the programme and the perspectives for recovery, without the tragic break in continuity which took place in Russia and with the Third International.
4. The formation of the new International, i.e. the Party, as it would be understood today, coincides with “the development of the real political forces which emerge, regroup and mature within the theoretical and political struggle in the different countries”.⁽²⁰⁾

It was along these lines that the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party was formed. It is the first form of coordination and centralisation between organisations which have matured in the political struggles carried out on a national level – within their respective sections of the working class – and on an international level it is based on a body of solid homogeneous theses for building the International party.

The IBRP and the International Party

The IBRP was formed as the only possible organisational form of coordination between the isolated operation of revolutionary organisations in different countries, and the existence of a real International Party, which as we have already stated is, for us, an indispensable tool for the victory of the revolution. It originates in the preliminary process of decantation and selection of political forces which opened with the First International Conference of the Communist Left in the now distant year of 1977. The proletarian political camp which we talked of then was made up of all the forces which looked back to the (non-Trotskyist) revolutionary currents of the inter-war period and from which they were, directly or indirectly, descended. The recent dynamic of capitalism and its class relations has accelerated the process of decantation of the “proletarian political camp” excluding from it all those organisations which, in one way or another, have fallen into support for war and who have thus abandoned the principle of revolutionary defeatism.

Other political elements in this arena, although not falling into the tragic mistakes of supporting one of the warring parties have, in the name of a fake anti-imperialism or because of historically and economically impossible progressive visions, equally distanced themselves from the methods and perspectives of work which leads to regroupment in the future revolutionary party.

They are beyond saving and are the victims of their own idealistic or mechanistic frameworks, incapable of recognising the peculiarities of the explosion of the perennial economic contradictions of modern capitalism. They are more ready to wait messianically for the revolution or, in blind invariance, they cannot grasp the specifics of the present situation, whether in terms of the crisis and capitalism’s responses to it or in the changing relations between capital and labour over the intervening years.⁽²¹⁾

In other words we think that, under present conditions, the category “proletarian political camp” is no longer valid. On the other hand it would be, at the very least, astonishing, if capitalist crisis, technological revolution, implosion of the imperialist soviet bloc and the totality of social and economic phenomena which the bourgeoisie summarises in the stupid term “globalisation”, left the framework of the real or assumed revolutionary vanguard unchanged and confined to that camp the only potential for building of the party. On the contrary what has been put “out of the game” are the greater part of the old constituents of the “proletarian political camp”, and at the same time the new situation has led to, and will lead to, still more new organisations emerging which – freed from schemas to explain current reality and projects for the future which are now old and ineffectual, are setting about the task of building the party on the basis of strict adherence to the critique of political economy, historical materialism and the principles of proletarian internationalism.

These organisations have the duty, which they are accepting, of taking up positions and growing on the basis of a body of theses, a platform and an organisational framework agreed between them and the Bureau, which in this sense acts as a reference point for the necessary homogenisation of the forces of the future party. The Bureau doesn’t intend to artificially accelerate the time when the international unity of the revolutionary forces will take place beyond the “natural” period of the political growth of the communist organisations in different countries. The only contribution which any national or international body can possibly, indeed indispensably, make to the maturation of similar forces in other countries is the political one of comparing views, and if necessary polemicising on both theoretical and practical issues, with the goal of fostering the formation of nuclei of genuine revolutionary forces rooted in the political life of their class. We reject, on principle, as well as on the basis of different Congress resolutions, the idea of creating national sections as clones of one already-existing organisation, even ours. National sections of the international party of the proletariat cannot be built in a largely artificial way in a country by creating a centre for translating publications edited elsewhere and, moreover, outside the real political and social struggles of the country itself.

The Bureau isn’t the Party. We have said it, written it and repeated it many times. Nor have we ever said, though it is a strong probability, that a straight line will run from the Bureau to the Party. But neither is it a simple Federation of forces (or weaknesses). The Bureau is the beginning of the centralisation of politically homogenous forces on the way to the Party. It practices organisational centralisation between its members to a degree which these, as yet weak, organisational bodies make it possible. Closer political agreement in the Bureau means therefore the progressive integration of the forms of centralisation of the Bureau. An essential element in this centralisation is the party press which is edited centrally and collectively by its central bodies, just as the local and peripheral organs are. They represent however the collective positions of the Party on a national and international level.

The International Party will be organised in national sections which will bring together all internationalists in any given country. Whilst not denying the possibility/necessity of political work towards the country of origin this means that, just as someone from Naples living in Milan belongs to the Milan section of the PCInt., a group of revolutionaries originally from a different country will be part of the national section where they live, participating in the struggles of the internationalist organisation within the local working class and participating as active members responsible for the work of organisation in that country. And what goes for the International Party also goes for the Bureau today.

In conclusion we believe, especially following the recent pan-American conference, that we have set out on the stretch of road that leads towards the International Party of the Proletariat, furnished with the basic equipment and carrying enough supplies (method, theses, programme) to allow us to reach our destination, so long as the proletariat decides to react to the barbaric course along which capitalism is pushing society.

(1) Lenin’s classic Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is a good reference for the presence and operation of foreign investment capital at the beginning of the century.

(2)

The communists are distinguished from the other proletarian parties by this only:
1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independent of all nationality.
2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

Op.cit., Pekin 1975 edition, p.49

(3) “The War and Russian Social-Democracy - Theses of the Central Committee of the RSDLP 28.9.1914” from V.I.Lenin, Collected Works (Martin Lawrence 1930) p.80.

(4) Ibidem p.83.

(5) Preliminaire a Premier Congres de L’Internationale Comuniste, Textes Integraux, EDI Paris 1974.

(6) Qu. ibidem p.30.

(7) Turati’s speech is still dear today to the Italian bourgeoisie. Reprinted in quite a few scholarly anthologies it has always inspired the most narrow-minded social patriots. Lenin’s response is from The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution (April 1917) and can be found in Selected Works Vol II (Moscow 1977) pp. 56-7.

(8) Ibidem p.58.

(9) J. Humbert-Droz, Il contrasto fra l’Internazionale e il P.C.I. 1921-28, Feltrinelli 1969 p.8.

(10) This is how Lenin put it when reproaching the Party Central Committee for its delay in The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution op cit pp. 63-4:

In the eyes of the other workers’ parties in the whole world, our party’s position is now such that we are obliged immediately to found a Third International without delay. Today there is nobody but us to do it, and procrastination can only do harm. If we remain in Zimmerwald for information only, we shall have our hands freed to establish the new International (and at the same time be able to use Zimmerwald should circumstances make it possible).

(11) Letter to the Workers of Europe and America, V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol XXIII (Lawrence and Wishart 1945) pp.519-20.

(12) “The 3rd January 1919, to the Conference of the Spartakus League in Berlin, we have founded the German Communist Party” from the report of Albert to the First Congress of the International, First Day cf. Premier congres de l’Internationale Comuniste p.60.

(13) Premier congres de l’Internationale Comuniste, p.39. See also Aldo Agosti, La Terza Internazionale - Storia documentaria, Vol I, Editori Riuniti, 1974, p.45.

(14) See Premier congres de l’Internationale Comuniste p.82.

(15) See Aldo Agosti op cit p.42.

(16) See Onorato Damen, “Al Congresso di Bologna ebbero paura di dire no alla politica possibilista dell’Internazionale” in Prometeo Serie II No.8, January-June 1966.

(17) cf Letter of Bordiga to Korsch in Danilo Montalvi, Korsch e i comunisti italiani, Appendix 1 (Savelli, 1975) p.45.

(18) See P. Broué, Introduction a Du premier au deuxième congres de l’Internationale Comuniste Etudes et documentation internationales (Paris, 1979) p. 11 seq.

(19)

II. The democratic centralism of the revolutionary organisation isn’t the application of bourgeois democracy to a revolutionary political organisation of the working class; it is rather the formula which expresses the necessary organisational centralisation of the one hand and the particular nature of communist organisation on the other.
III. The communist organisation is characterised by the fact that it is made up entirely of militants (men and women) that not only adhere to the political platform/programme of the party but who have really made a class “viewpoint”, and the method and principles which lie behind the platform - historical materialism and the critique of political economy - their own. They have chosen to fit their own militancy to these principles and to the programme of action which follows from them.

From the “Theses on the Statutes of the PCInt. Amended at the VI Party Congress”, April 1997

(20) From the “Resolution on International Work” of the VI Congress of the PCInt.

(21) “Revolutionaries Faced with the Prospect of War and the Current Situation of the Working Class, Resolution of the IBRP January 2000”. Quoted from Internationalist Communist 18 p.19.