Om organisk centralism
Från Krigsmaskinen
Citat
Från The Italian Communist Left, 1926-45.
- To use an expression dear to the Italian Fraction itself, each militant reaffirmed himself within the organisation, just as the organisation reaffirmed itself in each one of its militants. If it extolled "proletarian leaders" such as Lenin, it was in order to show that these "leaders" synthesised the organic life of their party. For this reason, it tried as much as possible to give an anonymous form to those militants who were most in view. In doing so it was responding to a preoccupation of Bordiga in the 20s, who had always tried to ensure that the life of the party was based not on a passive following of its leaders, but on its political programme. (9)
- It condemned the politics of "manoeuvres and expediency" which aimed at the creation of a mass party on artificial basis, "given that the relationship between the party and the masses depends essentially on the objective conditions of the situation." It condemned the system of factory cells, "negation of the centralisation of the communist parties". In an article published the same day as the platform, Bordiga emphasised that the function of these cells was to stifle any internal life and to imprison the workers in the narrow boundaries of the factory. In the name of the struggle against "intellectuals", the power of the functionaries was being reinforced. It would be worth pausing to examine the arguments of the left which most systematically criticised the policy of Bolshevisation:
- The replacement of territorial sections by cells was the abolition of the organic life of a revolutionary party, which had to present itself "as an active collectivity with a unitary leadership." It was the negation of centralisation and the bureaucratic triumph of federalism, in which the party's body would be partitioned off into watertight cells.
- "Bolshevisation" favoured particularism and individualism. The party became a sum of individual workers, attached to their professional branch. The consequebce if this was corporatism and workerism, breaking the organic unity of the collectivity of the party, which must go beyond all professional categories.
- Instead of limiting the role of "intellectuals" in the party, the system of cells hade the opposite effect:
- "The worker, in the cell, will have a tendency to discuss only particular economic questions of interest to the workers in his enterprise. The intellectual will continue to intervene in it, not thanks to the strenght of his eloquence, but more thanks to the monopoly of authority granted to him by the party centre, to 'settle' whatever question comes up."
- Furthermore, the "proletarianisation" of the party leadership, a goal proclaimed by the "Bolsheviks", was so little a reality that the new leadership, in contrast to the old one, did not have one worker on the Executive.
- Having leaders with a working class origin was no guarantee of the proletarian character of the party, because "leaders from a working class extraction have shown themselves to be at least as capable as the intellectuals of opportunism and treason and, in general, more susceptible to being absorbed by bourgeois influences." (24-25)
- In its critique of the Comintern it rejected the concept of "democratic centralism", which it saw as one of the causes of the exclusion of revolutionary elements, through the free play of the vote. It stood instead for "organic centralism", which had to flow from the party's programme, and not from an electoral mechanism. It did not however deny, that divergences about the programme could arise; this would necessarily be expressed in the form of fractions, whose existence would also be something organic rather than being based on a "right" recognized by the party. They would be reabsorbed through the victory of that fraction which defended the revolutionary programme. (126)
Från Call.
- The Party is a collection of places, infrastructures, communised means; and the dreams, bodies, murmurs, thoughts, desires that circulate among those places, the use of those means, the sharing of those infrastructures. (66)
- This is the way the Party will be built, as a trail of habitable places left behind by each situation of exception that empire meets. (83)
