HOW MUST THE CURRENT MILITANT BE
What is paramount now, therefore, is not trying to unify the proletariat emphasising the defensive struggles of the class as a whole, but to contribute to generate a new paradigm of proletarian communist militant that annihilates without piety and forever the traditional practical militant engendered by the partisan bureaucracies that drove the movement to defeat. What is meant to be done is to start working to eradicate from the political organizations of the worker’s movement the classist division of labour, typical of the capitalist companies. That odious and ominous abyss between those who order because they think - very often with the left lobe of the bourgeoisie - and those who obey because through the "literature for the worker" are educated no to think with their own but with that of their occasional chiefs. The point here is to never again make concessions to the bourgeoisie in the conscience of the wage-earners; to fight to impose in the worker’s movement two fundamental ideas:
The first, that a truly revolutionary party can only incarnate one theory: historical materialism. The second, to limit the access to the proletarians that have proven to be prepared to associate their class instinct to the vocation of becoming effective social scientists.
Therefore the recruitment policy will inflexibly demand a certain theoretical level to the supporters
This was Lenin’s struggle in giving the first step in the direction of building what became the Bolshevik party:
<<Thus, we see that high-sounding phrases against the ossification of thought, etc., conceal unconcern and helplessness with regard to the development of theoretical thought. The case of the Russian Social-Democrats manifestly illustrates the general European phenomenon (long ago noted also by the German Marxists) that the much vaunted freedom of criticism does not imply substitution of one theory for another, but freedom from all integral and pondered theory; it implies eclecticism and lack of principle. Those who have the slightest acquaintance with the actual state of our movement cannot but see that the wide spread of Marxism was accompanied by a certain lowering of the theoretical level. Quite a number of people with very little, and even a total lack of theoretical training joined the movement because of its practical significance and its practical successes.>>(V.I.Lenin: “What Is To Be Done?” Chapter 1)
Far from paying attention to these wise principles, the behaviour of the worker’s parties without exception during the last fifty years, consisted in assimilating their recruitment policy to the typical vote winning technique in the election campaigns of the formal bourgeois democracy. Where the potential electorate is promised everything without being demanded anything in return.
More shameless this behaviour becomes when bigger is the ideological confusion and more difficult it is, therefore, to find people willing to fight for the revolution, because – as it happens nowadays - the indifference and disdain of the wage-earners for political action of any nature gets worst.
In this sense, the idea that the construction of a communist international does not consist in an enlighten elite devoted to politically organize those most combatant class elements, means to follow the spirit of Lenin in rejecting every recruitment policy exclusively based on the predisposition for open combat against the class enemy.
The tactic of an alternative revolutionary policy - at domestic level as well as at international scale - means the self-organization of the proletariat in connection with the ideas of historical materialism, where those who direct - but do not give orders - have to be the best exponents in this obligatory collective task.
This way of reasoning make us agree in that we are only willing to work with those who today feel more horror to the ideological vacuum in their consciences than to the social vacuum around them.
This is, as we see it, the most important and transcendent teaching than one must draw from the debacle of the so called real socialism. This is where we must start from.
With the same spirit that Marx put forward after the defeat of the 1848 revolution:
<<The proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Show what you are capable of doing.>> (K.Marx: " 18 Brumarie of Luis Bonaparte" Chapter . I)
To fulfil this task of starting everything again conscientiously and cruelly mocking the mistakes of the past, such is the spirit and the intention laid down in this written presentation; conscious of the fact that to complete this indispensable task, those of us who are committed with evolution haven’t got too much time if we truly want to make useful our work of accumulation of political forces before the "old mole" pushes to a new revolutionary rise of the worker’s masses at planetary level.
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