On the Operations of the Central Committee of the Party
Source: L’Unità, December 20 ,1925;
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2008.
Translated: by Mitchell Abidor;
CopyLeft: Creative Commons (Attribute & ShareAlike) marxists.org 2008.
1. The political line adopted by the Central Committee and after that by the Fifth Congress , one in complete alignment with the Italian political situation, has allowed our party to develop its forces and has raised it to a degree of real political influence that it has never had. It has allowed the party to make great progress along the road of effective political preparation. We are today connected to the working class in a way far superior to any other in the life of our Party. What is more, favored by the objective situation, we have resolutely commenced and set out on the path to a solution to the problem of political ties with the peasant class in a way that has never before been done.
We can affirm that the line followed by the Party during the first period of its existence, and especially when the disagreements with the International were acute, could never have brought us to the point we are now at. If the party had adopted the tactics that Bordiga proposed it could never have profited from the situation after the Matteoti crime; would, in fact, never have succeeded in exercising in every moment of its activity an influence over wide strata of the masses, would not have been as able to wrest the laboring masses from the influence of the middle of the road counter-revolutionary parties and to thus gradually extend its influence to the current degree.We affirm that only the tactics that the Central Committee has followed, in conformity with the deliberations of the world congresses of the last two years, has allowed it to pose in real terms the problem of creating in Italy the party of the working class as a mass party and not as a sect completely cut off from the masses and fossilized in the repetition of empty revolutionary phraseology. What is more, we affirm that a return to the “Bordigan” tactics would have us rapidly lose all that we have obtained, and would thus have the gravest consequences not only for the party, but also for the working class.
Placed among the “Bordigan” sectarian organization and the counter-revolutionary formations in a state of ruin (Maximalists, Unitarists, Aventiani and their like) the working class would fall into passivity, inertia, disintegration, from which we have instead rescued them.
2) As regards the policies of the party in the period between the Fourth and Fifth World Congresses, if it is true that in this period there was, insofar as it was a matter of the same general directives, uncertainty and oscillation, it is even more true that the responsibility for this fact falls on he who, in order to carry on a struggle against the International, didn’t hesitate to open a serious crisis in the party, above all favoring the formation of a “Right” that had no other a raison d’etre than its “fidelity” to the directives of the International against which the party was deployed. To follow Bordiga today would mean reproducing a situation like that of the past. But fortunately there are no signs that the party wants to follow him.
3) As regards organization, we don’t hesitate to affirm that an organization such as ours was in the first period of its existence represented an enormous progress compared to the Social Democrat’s and Maximalist’s routine of the time. If this met the situation of that time it would not be at all appropriate in resolving the problems which are now posed for the party, in the first place the problem of maintaining in working condition its contact with the widest strata of the working class, as well as the problem of its functioning as a party of the working class itself. The problem of organizing the Communist Party as a party of the working class and mass party was only posed at the current Central Committee. As a consequence of its general political direction the Central Committee led by Bordiga didn’t see this problem. We can’t say that this has today been resolved, but the process has certainly been begun and enormous progress has been made towards its resolution.
4) As for practical organizational work, we don’t believe that everything done by the current Central Committee was good. We believe that there were defects and failings and that these still exist. However, if we take into account the conditions in which the work of the party has developed after the Fifth World Congress, we can do no less than say that these defects vanish when placed before the enormous work of reorganization carried out in order to arrive at the present situation, since we started from a situation in which the entire old framework had collapsed and had to be reconstructed with new criteria and employing new “material.”
Comrade Bordiga knows of these things, just has he knows that, taking into account the various objective conditions (today, in order to have a letter go from the center to the periphery requires a “labor” ten times greater than that needed in Bordiga’s time) the current party apparatus is smaller than it once was, which means that the number of functionaries is relatively smaller. But even if there were more of them we affirm that they would be chosen based on the most rigorous of criteria, and that their work would be controlled based on the most rigorous criteria. We are certain that the so despised party “functionaries” are today a disciplined and conscious group of “professional revolutionaries” who are entirely devoted to the cause of the party and the class.5) It remains to be seen if it is true that the Central Committee has “poisoned the living arrangements” of the party with sectarianism. Well, if Bordiga is referring, as he doubtless is, to the energetic and implacable actions of the Central Committee to smash the fractionalist attempt which took the name of “Entente Committee,” we can only say that if another endeavor of this kind were attempted we are ready today, tomorrow and always to smash it with the same implacable energy.
But we are convinced when all of the comrades will have taken note of how far the actions of the “Entente Committee” would have taken us on the road to breaking up the party, they will find that they should have been even more harsh in their stigmatizing of their actions. Whoever is in the Communist Party and wants to work in a disciplined fashion, under the directives that the International has laid out and who works for their application will never find that the living arrangements are “poisoned.” But he who wants to repeat the mad endeavor of breaking up the unity of the party, to oppose it to the International, to dissolve the assembly; for these people there is no doubt that the air of our party, after the Third Congress, will not be breathable.
