Lately I've been quite taken with the Situationists description of what the activity of militants means in a revolutionary organization, combined with the absence of a Party bureaucracy and democratic fetishism of the PCI. I'm curious what other 'pro-Party' Marxists conceive as the 'duties' or activities of a Party militant, and the internal structure of the Party, in our era, in these times we're living through right now. Same with related aspects such as what size should the party be (I read some people on calling for new mass parties), if historical examples of the class party have been overcome by new innovations and activities.
Examples:
Quote:
There is no other way to be faithful to, or even simply to understand, the actions of our comrades of the past than to profoundly reconceive the problem of revolution, which has been increasingly deprived of thought as it has become posed more intensely in concrete reality. . .
It is thus necessary to leave the terrain of specialized revolutionary activity- the terrain of the self-mystification of 'serious politics'- because it has long been seen that such specialization encourages even the best people to demonstrate stupidity regarding all other questions, with the result that they end up failing even in their merely political struggles. . .
Specialization and pseudo-seriousness are among the primary defensive outposts that the organization of the old world occupies everyone's mind. A revolutionary association of a new type will also break with the old world by permitting and demanding of its members an authentic and creative participation, instead of expecting a participation of militants measurable in attendance time, which amounts to recreating the sole control possible in the dominant society: the quantitative criterion of hours of labor. A genuine enthusiastic participation on the part of everyone is necessitated by the fact that the classical political militant, who 'devotes himself' to his radical duties, is everywhere disappearing along with classical politics itself; and even more by the fact that devotion and sacrifice always engender authority (even if only purely moral authority). Boredom is counterrevolutionary. In every way.
-Internationale Situationniste #7, 1962
Quote:
Just as the Communist party, from its very beginnings, has always tended to have its own kind of natural and voluntary unicity of movement, confirmed in the seperation of the First international from federalism and from anarchist individualism, so the party reborn during the Second World War learnt the lesson of the degeneration of Third International through Stalinism, which destroyed the world communist party by tearing the organisation apart through its systematic use of fractionism from above, hidden behind the conventions of internal democracy.
This is demonstrated in the way we go about our work, a style which wasn’t invented or revealed by some great leader but which just arose spontanously, embodying the natural attitude of generations of militants without the need for any rules or internal regulations to prescribe it or to punish their infraction. Further proof is the quality of our studies, which even though very complex, are all inter-connected within a coherent whole; and all of it carried out unostentatiously, and without engaging in all the unhealthy infighting and petty intrigues that characterise petty bourgeois and opportunist circles.
-Meeting Report of the PCI (Il Partito), June 2009
Quote:
Opportunism, when it accuses the ruling class of betraying its own principles, has constantly called on the proletariat to devote itself not to the overthrowing of the capitalist regime but to the reinstatement of neglected democratic rules, whose values, considered eternal, are held to be indispensable if social equality is to be obtained in the future. Communist revolutionaries instead perceive democracy, especially in its ideal, “theoretical” manifestation rather than in its practical “realisation”, as the enemy to be overthrown; as the false myth from which the proletariat needs to be freed.
If it is true that revolutionary Marxists accepted the participation of the Communist Party in bourgeois elections, even when capitalist power was not in danger (think of the revolutionary parliamentarism advocated by Lenin), they participated only in order to use the space conceded by democracy for class agitation and their aim was to destroy democratic institutions.
Following the victory of the Stalinian counter-revolution the exact opposite of what Lenin wanted would happen: having once adhered to the rules of the democratic game, of which the electoral “battle” is the maximum expression, all revolutionary communist positions, and even classist ones, were progressively abandoned so that a political platform could be adopted that shared planks with bourgeois parties.
Even regarding internal matters, the party has never maintained that pronouncements of the majority are necessarily the best. As far back as 1922 the Italian Left was proposing that the formula of democratic centralism should be replaced with organic centralism.
Today, in our party, a party based on a unity of theory, principles, final aims and tactics, in which we exclude the practice of mergers with, or infiltrations of, other political organisations, and where we only allow people to join as individuals, there is not only no longer a role for the democratic principle – i.e. the struggle of currents and fractions with a view to establishing the orientation of the party by selecting from a list of illustrious comrades – but no role either for the banal and rudimentary democratic mechanism.
-Meeting Report of the PCI, January 2010
This is just a sample of work by communists in favor of a minority organization encompassing only the most advanced and communist workers- taking on Lenin's conception of the party as a starting point to understand the role and form of communist organization. I also agree with the opposition to creating democratic mechanisms within a communist organization (which is the bureaucracy; creating the form and practice of vote counting, faction and slate forming, top-down heirarchy).
Many have expressed disbelief in opposition to democracy in a communist organization/Party, or minoritarian conceptions of the revolutionary organization/class party (the next International). It'd be helpful if some of these points could be drawn out to greater depth (and hopefully inform some of us a little better about our own ideas and those of others with whom we disagree). So-
Thoughts on a strictly minoritarian, internationally centralized Party/revolutionary organization? Democracy and whether it has a place in a communist organization? The size of the class party, who it should have as members, and what they do?