We publish here the Resolution on the period of transition that the ICC had adopted in 1979 and we accompany it with a criticism, translated by us, made by the PCint-Battaglia Comunista – today part of the Internationalist Communist Tendency (www.leftcom.org) – which, as far as we know, has never been published in English or French. Their publication follows the theses on the period of transition presented in the previous issue of this journal. They were written by one comrade of our group to launch a reflection and a debate within our ranks on this question.

It may seem odd to consider the clarification of this question as fundamental today even though any revolutionary perspective and, even less, any dynamic of revolutionary struggle of the proletariat seem – only apparently in our opinion – to have fully disappeared. Yet, and we won’t develop this point further in this introduction, the evolution and the exacerbation of capitalism’s contradictions carry in them, more or less rapidly, inevitable massive confrontations between classes at the international and historical levels. Depending on the outcome of this confrontation, the return of the revolutionary perspective may well be imposed very quickly through one of these historical upheavals and shocks of which the class struggle has the secret and from which only Marxism, the revolutionary theory of the proletariat, can remove the veil. And then the questions on how to put an end to capitalism, beyond the simple insurrectional act against the bourgeois state, will come back with force and speed such that the few lessons the revolutionaries could draw from the two previous experiences, the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution, of the exercise of the Dictatorship of the proletariat, will be precious. If the revolutionary turmoil were to arrive, the revolutionaries and above all the party grouping them would be interested having a minimum of readiness – it will always be insufficient in itself – to confront the issues they will face and to define the best political measures the proletariat will have to adopt in the fire and whirlwind of the events. The main debates and lessons, however limited they may be, condensed, carried, clarified, and materialized in the political orientations of the Communist Party, will be essential so that it can best guide the struggle of the proletariat once it is exercising power and even before its seizure of power in the pre-revolutionary phase and in the insurrection – we don’t develop either this particular point which makes the success of the proletarian insurrection depend on the revolutionaries’ abilities, on the party’s ability, to have a minimum of clarity on the question of the period of transition that will follow.

The theses of the previous issue incorporated the concept of the transitional state as a non-proletarian state that the ICC had largely adopted in the late 1970s. It is precisely on this point that our internal discussion revealed disagreements, still not frozen or definitive. So we are going back to the debates of the day. There was some of this debate within the ICC, which can be seen in the brochure of this organization on the subject. But, for the most part, the internal critiques had been limited to defending a classic Bordigist point of view (so to speak) and, as such, are relatively uninteresting today to the extent that any contradiction and antagonism between the proletariat and the ruling party were denied in principle, ignoring the Russian experience and its internal dramas – the bloody repression of Kronstadt in particular. On the other hand, it is not the same for the criticism that the PCInt of the so-called "Damenist" current, Battaglia Comunista, today the ICT, had made at the time. Unfortunately, it remained largely unknown and ignored. The reader will be able to take note today and thus participate in our reflection and debate.

Resolution accepted at the 3rd Congress of the ICC (1979)

During the period of transition the division of society into classes with antagonistic interests will give rise to a state. Such a state will have the task of guaranteeing the advances of this transitional society both against any external or internal attempt to restore the power of the old exploiting classes and maintaining the cohesion of society against any disintegration of the social fabric resulting from conflicts between the non—exploiting classes which still subsist.

The state of the period of transition has a certain number of differences from previous states:

1. For the first time in history, it is not a state in the service of an exploiting minority for the oppression of the majority, but is on the contrary, a state in the service of the majority of the exploited and non—exploiting classes and strata against the old ruling minority.

2. It is not the emanation of a stable society and relations of production, but on the contrary of a society whose permanent characteristic is a constant transformation on a greater scale than anything else in history.

3. It cannot identify itself with any economically dominant class because there is no such class in the society of the period of transition.

4. In contrast to states in past societies, the transitional state does not have a monopoly of arms.

For all these reasons, marxists have talked of a “semi-state” when referring to the organ that will arise in the transition period.

On the other hand, this state still retains a number of the characteristics of past states. In particular, it will still be the guardian of the status quo, the task of which will be to codify, legalise and sanction an already existing economic order, to give it a legal force which has to be acknowledged by every member of society.

In the period of transition, the state will tend to conserve the existing state of affairs. Because of this, the state remains a fundamentally conservative organ that will tend:

a) not to favour social transformation but to act against it;

b) to maintain the conditions on which its own life depends: the division of society into classes;

c) to detach itself from society, to impose itself on society, to perpetuate its own existence and to develop its own prerogatives;

d) to bind its existence to the coercion and violence which it will of necessity use during the period of transition, and to try to maintain and reinforce this method of regulating social relations;

e) to be a fertile soil for the formation of a bureaucracy, providing a rallying point for elements coming from the old classes and offices which have been destroyed by the revolution.

This is why from the beginning marxists have always considered the state of the period of transition to be a “scourge”, a “necessary evil”, whose “worst sides” the proletariat will have to “lop off as much as possible” (Engels). For all these reasons, and in contrast to what has happened in the past, the revolutionary class cannot identify itself with the state in the period of transition.

To begin with the proletariat is not an economically dominant class, either in capitalist society or the transitional society. During the transition period it will possess neither an economy nor any property, not even collectively: it will struggle for the abolition of economy and property. Secondly, the proletariat, the communist class, the subject which transforms the economic and social conditions of the transitional society, will necessarily come up against an organ whose task is to perpetuate these conditions. This is why one cannot talk about a “socialist state”, a “workers’ state” nor a “proletarian state” during the period of transition.

This antagonism between the proletariat and the state manifests itself both on the immediate and the historic level.

On the immediate level, the proletariat will have to oppose the encroachments and the pressure of a state which is the manifestation of a society divided into antagonistic classes. On the historic level, the necessary disappearance of the state in communist society, which is a perspective which marxism always defended, will not be the result of the state’s own dynamic, but the fruit of the pressure mounted on it by the proletariat in its own movement forward, which will progressively deprive it of all its attributes as the progress towards a classless society unfolds. For these reasons, while the proletariat will have to use the state during the transition period, it must retain a complete independence from it. In this sense the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be confused with the state. Between the two there is a constant relation of force which the proletariat will have to maintain in its favour: the dictatorship of the proletariat is exerted by the working class itself through its own independent armed unitary organs: the workers’ councils. The workers’ councils will participate in the territorial soviets (in which the whole non—exploiting population is represented and from which the state structure will emanate) without confusing themselves with them, in order to ensure its class hegemony over all the structures of the society of the transitional period.

Elements for a Criticism of the Resolution of the ICC on the Period of Transition (PCint – Battaglia Comunista)

Although it is not our intention to deal fully with the problem of the transitional state (from the bourgeois capitalist society to communist society), we critically address the resolution adopted by the International Communist Current at its last 1979 congress on this question, which was published in its International Review #18.

Regarding our precise positions we refer to our fundamental documents, in particular to the Program Outline of 1944 and to the Political Platform of 1952. The very fact that we refer to these texts means that, for us, the problem of the state of transition has been fundamentally solved for much longer than "a few years" and cannot be considered an “open question”. That is to say, while this question always deserves secondary enrichment and subsequent definitions – always of an accessory character – in their fundamental lines and from past experience, the answers to it are for us definitive and discriminating for the political forces aspiring to the leadership of the proletarian movement.

What we will say then has the value of re-proposing these same positions of ours in a critical comparison with a false position and its erroneous theoretical consequences. It also has the merit of being a concrete contribution to discussion and clarification between forces of the Communist Left. The disagreements between organizations engaged in the work we have initiated with the International Conferences are the main terrain on which they must confront themselves in the search for the path that leads to the construction of the international party of the proletariat.

This is especially true when such disagreements are found on essential subjects of the platform itself, on its raison d’être; that is on what kind of party we all formally agree to build.

For convenience and lack of space, our critical examination will refer directly to the text of the ICC resolution. As much as possible, we’ll quote the text. But we recommend that the following be read in direct comparison with the resolution (see International Review# 18 of the ICC, Resolution on the Period of Transition, http://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/transition/resolution_1979.html).

It is first of all affirmed that the state “ will have the task of guaranteeing the advances of this transitional society both against any external or internal attempt to restore the power of the old exploiting classes and maintaining the cohesion of society against any disintegration of the social fabric resulting from conflicts between the non-exploiting classes which still subsist ”

This assertion implies the notion of a state as an organ of society. This concept is wrong, already refuted by Marx and Engels. They fought their whole lives against the typically bourgeois concept of the function of the state as an element of mediation between classes. This concept is precisely the one the ICC expresses in the last part of the quotation (“maintaining the cohesion of society”, etc.).

It turns out that, for the ICC, the state is no longer the organ of domination of one class over another. This amounts to considering it as an instrument of mediation between the classes, as the organizing element of society exactly as in the conception already fought in the 19th century.

The fact that the State of which we speak is the State resulting from the proletarian revolution is not enough to justify such a new definition, and on the other hand, the resolution of the ICC does not give any other element of justification.

On the contrary, the revolutionary and proletarian origin of the state is that it limits its function to the elimination of the bourgeoisie and the capitalist economic and social relations according to the exclusive interests of the working class, as well as to the administration and the planning of “the things” (Lenin). Tactical alliances with other classes, distinct from the proletariat, are possible and conceivable only on the basis of proletarian interests. That these classes are not exploitative is only the elementary condition on which the evaluation of the opportunity can be founded, in the moment and in the given situation, of an alliance such as that which the Russian proletariat was forced into with the peasantry.

What does the state of transition mean? That this state is in the reality of things the negation of the other function typical of any state that preceded it: to guarantee the reproduction and the preservation of the conditions of exploitation of the other classes by the class of which the state is the instrument.

The function of the state has always been twofold in fact: firstly, to guarantee the ruling class against the reaction of the defeated class which preceded it (the bourgeoisie against the feudal aristocracy – the bourgeois state destroys the remnants of the feudal and aristocratic order that preceded it); on the other hand, it guarantees the conditions of domination and exploitation of the exploited classes (bourgeoisie against the proletariat – the bourgeois state in defence of the relation of exploitation of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat).

Any state historically preceding the workers’ state is the instrument of domination of an exploiting class. In contrast, the proletariat is an exploited class, the last exploited class. Its state does not have to ensure any exploitation by the proletariat over any other class.

The suppression from history of the relations of exploitation between classes, thus the abolition of the classes themselves, exhausts the political tasks of the state (administration of the relations between human beings). The workers’ state thereby ceases to be a state to retain the sole function of administration of things. This is the true reason that Marxists apply the definition of semi-state to the workers’ state.

But as such, the workers’ state is the political instrument of domination and the revolutionary task of a class, the proletariat, which brings in itself not only its own emancipation but also the liberation of society from all relations of exploitation.

Point 1 of the Resolution fully confirms the validity of the previous criticism. It specifies that the state is “ in the service of the majority of the exploited and non-exploiting classes and strata against the old ruling minority ”.

Thus it is not a proletarian state but an amorphous state, deprived of precise class characteristics, which brings together diverse classes, and even strata, destined to confront each other.

Here the controversy is not that there may be conflicts between the proletariat and other social strata, distinct from the defeated bourgeoisie, in the period of transition. Certainly, such conflicts will exist because they are “immanent” to the diversity of roles played in the very process of production and distribution – within capitalist society, diversity, which, at least in the first post-insurrectional phase, inevitably re-emerges. It is nonetheless true that such conflicts must be settled. But, and this is the point, these regulations do not occur within the state, as if it were an arena of simple mediation between equals, but by the state; that is by means of the state as instrument of the proletarian interests that ultimately, but only ultimately, coincide with those of the whole society.

The interests of the peasants (literally and to the exclusion of agricultural proletarians) are in the immediate future different from the interests of the proletariat and to a great extent they are opposed to it. The mediation between peasant interests and proletarian communist interests is possible only in the sense of tactical concessions on the part of the proletariat in the context of an economic struggle led towards the peasantry and tending to the elimination of the peasantry as a class. But tactical concessions presuppose substantial power. This power is that of the proletariat, organized autonomously in its state, freed from the peasants’ own conditions.

What do we mean by peasantry? We mean all the workers of the land who are independent of wage relations, therefore owners or share-croppers. This very condition makes them strive, as far as possible on the basis of availability and individual capacities, to establish exploitation relationships with other workers, at the same time as they tend to hire workers on their own account on the land they own or aspire to possess. It is evident, therefore, that the peasantry is a distinct class, with interests peculiar to itself and different from those of the proletariat. In this sense, it does not matter that it is not a historical class, namely a carrier of its own theory and social practice. On the contrary, it is one of the reasons why the peasantry has always been recognized by Marxists as a class tendentially inclined to an alliance with the bourgeoisie, which has always managed to impose its own domination on it.

Supposing the presence of the peasantry within the state of transition therefore means two things:
 either consciously counter-revolutionary preparation for the conditions of the defeat – first of all – of the state of transition as such;
 or an appalling ignorance of the classical Marxist positions, which have been verified by a centuries-old historical experience.

Point 2 is an attempt to avoid the pitfall by means of the statement according to which the state “is not the emanation of a stable society and relations of production, but on the contrary of a society whose permanent characteristic is a constant transformation on a greater scale than anything else in history”.

Here we are in the verbal expedient, grandiloquent but dialectical only in appearance. How such transformations could happen is in fact a mystery. For Marxism, it follows that they will be implemented by the proletariat, which utilizes for this purpose the most powerful instrument: the semi-state. Otherwise, it remains to explain the very necessity of a state that would be the expression of all that is not directly bourgeois, but also of the classes and strata that – like the peasantry – are above all the intermediaries of a bourgeois policy. The only active subject of the revolutionary transformation – unless we are to fall into the vertigo of new discoveries of unprecedented revolutionary subjects – is the proletariat. So either the state is the expression of the proletarian power and instrument of transformation according to the proletarian interests and program, or it is useless (for the anarchists), or it is still-born (for the confusionists of the ICC).

But it is exactly the conception of the state as an expression of the proletariat and its instrument of transformation in society that is rejected in the following point in the resolution: the state “ cannot identify itself with any economically dominant class because there is no such class in the society of the period of transition ”.

That would be enough to conclude. But we are armed with holy patience and continue to consider this pearl as one of many.

While it is true that in the period of transition there is no class with economic power based on exploitation of other classes, it is also true that the proletariat will have to assume the full management of the economy during the course of the revolution itself. In this, the proletariat becomes the ruling class of the economy based on the strength that comes from the combination of its political power and its character as a productive class. Furthermore, the revolution is precisely the act by which the working class becomes a ruling class, at least according to Marx.

“The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class” (The Communist Manifesto, www.marxist.org). And Marx specifies that “the proletariat (nobody else) will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class” (idem).

On the basis of Marx’s teachings and historical experience, we can now say that the concentration of the means of production in the hands of the state is not sufficient since it is not in itself contrary to the global interests of capital and may be – as it can also happen outside Russia [1] – the form of existence of capital itself and its domination. With this clarification, we make an advance on one point and one formulation. But to deny that the state is anything other than the organization of the proletariat as a ruling class, that it is something more vague, that it consists of other classes already identified as non-revolutionary, would mean to retreat, to fall into bourgeois idealist ideology or, more sadly, into the most absolute void.

If there is no dominant and ruling class, as the ICC asserts, it must be admitted that this mysterious transitional state survives and develops its tasks according to a program that is not that of the working class but of a formless accumulation of classes and layers united against the old society by the mere force of anti-capitalist idea and hatred – which is also an idea. There are some who openly theorize similar fads. They do so from the thesis that the working class has dissolved in society, that it has lost its precise characteristics, inoculating its subversive function to the layers of society up to the bourgeoisie itself under the pressure of an ever more subtle and total oppression by capital itself. The driving force of this process of dissolving the proletariat and at the same time widening the revolutionary area to other "subjects" leads to the oblivion of capitalist domination itself and its oppression on society. The one who theorizes this aestheticism, comes to conceive the revolution as the act of liberation of the whole society from the power of oppression of capital, which would immediately be followed by the more or less harmonious organization of the ’community’ independently of a division into classes now out of date.

Here at least there is coherence; there is the pleasure (a bit perverse), the capacity and the courage to unleash the brain of the aesthete intellectual of history to the ultimate consequences, no matter then that the bourgeoisie can use such theorizations through its more radical forces to disarm the working class and its struggles.

But the ICC, which lacks such “courage”, does not seem to be willing to jump so radically over the barricade.

So it must explain to its members and to the whole communist movement why there is no longer a ruling class with all the means of leadership, notably the state. It must explain how the revolutionary class leads and achieves the destruction of the bourgeois state as the first step of the revolutionary process, then how by renouncing the state, it allows the other classes, other “strata”, to continue this process.

The working class “directs and completes the destruction of the bourgeois state”. It is worth stopping for a moment. That the working class is directly implicated in the work of destruction does not seem to be questioned (by the ICC), nor debatable. But also, what does it mean to lead the act of destruction? In first place, this means that effectively the strata of other classes that are not simply assimilable to the proletariat actually participate in this act. Well, the essential fact is that such a participation in action, such implication, in the subversion is based on the class communist program of the proletariat, which includes the destruction of the bourgeois state, directly linked with the fact that only the proletariat can produce the conditions of its own emancipation, the affirmation of its own interests, in the destruction of the bourgeois state. Historically, all the other classes, which as such are reduced almost only to the peasantry (the other classes of the population being assimilable to one or another of the fundamental classes), have no need for the destruction of the bourgeois society to defend their own interests. Whether it is the peasantry, whether it is the commercial or artisan petty bourgeoisie, their defence as class or class strata lies within the framework of the capitalist state, and it is only in the dramatic moments of the catastrophic crisis of the system that they can be dragged on to the revolutionary terrain thanks to the tactical alliance that the proletariat can realize precisely when capital takes any future away from them. But it is the proletariat that, on the basis of its own autonomous and precise revolutionary program, makes such alliances. The immediate aim is the regrouping and the organization of the forces of impact of the revolution; the final goal is the assimilation of these same forces either politically, or at the more direct social economic level, to the socialist camp. Both ends are realizable on the sole condition that the proletariat exerts its own direction, that the advance of the state emerging from the revolution is realized according to the communist program of the proletarian class.

That the state is the instrument of the revolutionary transformations after the act of the insurrection is demonstrated still by the history of the bourgeoisie itself, which in its ascendant phase as a class in power used its state to realize the economic and social transformations necessary for the affirmation of the capitalist mode of production as the universal and exclusive system in the world.

In summary, either we acknowledge that the communist program is carried only by the working class, which can find allies in its affirmation but which remains its unique holder (we do not speak of those individuals who come to the knowledge and possession of the communist program and who betray their own class of origin) and then the working class must use its state to carry out its work; or it is speculated that, during the period of transition, the communist program, the elimination of the classes, the abolition of wage labour may be during the transition period the objective of these other amalgamated classes and strata of which the state is the expression – and then it has to been explained how the devil these classes would become revolutionary and communist after the insurrection. Or (given this absurdity), it must be admitted that it is not true that the proletariat is the only revolutionary class who bears a program of liberation of all of humanity – with all the unfortunate consequences that this would imply. On the other hand, many people, in particular among the best bourgeois intellectuals, are engaged precisely in these “demonstrations” – as already mentioned.

Monopoly of Weapons?

Point 4 concludes “crescendo” the series of novelties in the theory of the state of transition: “In contrast to states in past societies, the transitional state does not have a monopoly of arms”.

First of all, it is necessary to note the flagrant contradiction: on the one hand, the ICC decrees that the state is not proletarian, that is to say that the proletariat is not organized into a dominant class, and with that it abdicates also the role of catalyst of the consciousness with which, or according to which, the state will have to act; on the other hand, it decrees that the same state with which neither the proletariat nor the ICC will have anything to do will not hold the monopoly of arms. It is largely enough to be confused. Let’s try to see the contradiction we have underlined.

The revolution is made when the proletariat wins on the military level (in theory, the possession of the monopoly of the weapons, the army’s ones included, and their exhibition without great shootings could suffice even though there will always be situations in which these weapons will have to be used; but it is not something that counts). More precisely, to return to the foregoing, the revolution is made when the weapons are ready to fire in the direction indicated by the proletariat’s communist program, even if physically held by diverse strata of the population.

What becomes of the weapons?

We should expect that they remain in the proletariat’s hands outside the state (and actually, as we shall see, the ICC speaks of armed proletarian organs). But what a strange state is the one that leaves to others the monopoly of arms! And vice-versa, whoever possesses the monopoly of arms, are they not forced to be the state? Obviously, theses like these cast off towards confusion and become confused. But let’s continue.

“For all these reasons, marxists have talked of a ’semi-state’ when referring to the organ that will arise in the transition period”.

Here we don’t know if we are dealing with blissful ignorance or simple bad faith.

We have pointed out previously, in criticism of the first paragraph of the resolution, why Marxists (and especially Lenin) have always spoken of a semi-state. As such, the above affirmation of the ICC is simply a… novelty (obviously the “innovative” tendencies are strongly felt in this organization). Here it is not about defending an abstract “conservatism”, but of rejecting absolutely concepts and principles that are in insuperable opposition to the core of the consolidated doctrine of Marxism. The state of transition has always been regarded as a semi-state and it remains so simply because it lacks the function of defending the privilege of exploitation, but has the function of the revolutionary transformation of society according to the interests and the program of one class, the proletariat, which moreover coincides with the very extinction of the state. All the ICC has previously rejected as characteristics of the transitional state is what characterizes the very role of the semi-state. In the best of circumstances, therefore, for the ICC any state comes to just not exist.

Revolutionary State and Conservative State

The resolution goes on to tackle the problem “from another angle”: “On the other hand (it says), this state still retains a number of the characteristics of past states. In particular, it will still be the guardian of the status quo, the task of which will be to codify, legalise and sanction an already existing economic order, to give it a legal force which has to be acknowledged by every member of society.”

The confusion continues unabated. If everything that has been asserted can obey, and in fact does obey, the ICC’s argument that the transitional state will not be a proletarian state, it has no historical, let alone political, basis.

All successive states have gone through a revolutionary phase during which they played precisely a revolutionary role by eliminating the old social relations, by transforming the economic, social, and political structures. The bourgeoisie had a state of its own, different from the previous one because it tended toward the elimination of the social relations that the latter defended. Thus, the bourgeois state, as the other states, was born to transform the society along lines adapted to the interests of the ruling class. This revolutionary function accomplished, all states have always maintained their particular function of conservation and defence of the relation of exploitation of one class by another. The first state, for instance, in ancient Greece, did not behave differently unless… we reinterpret the very clear text of Engels on this subject. As an example and about the transformations :

“The smooth functioning of the organs of the gentile constitution was thus thrown so much out of gear that even in the heroic age remedies had to be found. The constitution ascribed to Theseus was introduced. The principal change which it made was to set up a central authority in Athens – that is, part of the affairs hitherto administered by the tribes independently were declared common affairs and entrusted to the common council sitting in Athens.”

A revolutionary transformation is accomplished through the work of the state. In fact, “ the first step had been taken towards undermining the gentile constitution…” (Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State [2]).

If all this holds for the succession of states in the “Western Civilization” of the so-called ancient community, it is not less valid for the different forms of primitive communities that, before the imperialist conquest of the world, went through a different path in the modes of production and social organization.

To be clear, we refer to the civilizations that gave life to the Asiatic mode of production (that of ancient Egypt, China, India…).

We thus understand that the function of revolutionary instrument of transformation that each state assumes in its first phase is a constant in the history of societies. The proletarian state exhausts its own existence with the depletion of this function, unlike the states that preceded it which, on the other hand, continue to play the role of an instrument of conservation of class exploitative relations.

On the other hand, the ICC claims that the permanent and original characteristic, and the only function, of each state is conservation; it assigns this sole function to the state of transition and thus by assimilating it to all other states, it considers it as a competing, if not antithetical, factor in its function within the revolutionary process itself.

It should be noted that the core of the discussion is there. It follows effectively for the ICC that its initial theses are confirmed, that they can’t be “purely and simply” rejected because they contain an element of truth that it is the task of revolutionaries to assess at its true value.

The “Conservatism” of the State

“In the period of transition, the state will tend to conserve the existing state of affairs” continues the text that we’re examining. This is not wrong in the absolute. But still we must agree on the use of the word state. If we understand by this all the people integrated in the state, the particular organizational institutions in which they participate, the statement is certainly correct. The function of the bourgeois state (to respect, defend, and represent the general class interests of the bourgeoisie) is an objective and a real fact, as is the objective and real resistance of such organs, of the bureaucratic apparatus as a whole, to all modifications and “innovations” as minor as they may be, that bourgeois conservation itself requires within its own state and in its relations with the “public”.

For one thing, such an affirmation is simply banal. On the other hand, it is fraught with… idealist dangers. Its approach is idealist. In other terms, for the idealists of all kinds, the ’innate tendencies of man’ (otherwise the legacy of the division of society into classes) assume the role of motive force of history, the ultimate basis of social determination. It follows for the idealists of all kinds that phenomena such as certain “ways of being” (for us just as historically determined) are not limited to existing and influencing the ground to which they belong – that of the superstructure, of subjectivity – but become the distinctive feature of society and its history.

From there, and only from there, one can come to claim that the state is either simply and always an enemy (as the anarchists say) or that the state must be controlled by the dictatorship of the proletariat (as the ICC says).

However, this does not mean that the tendency of the state structure to rise above the classes themselves is not the result of the bourgeois tendency (destined to disappear only gradually in the long period of real construction of socialism) of men integrated into the organizations of power to maintain their own privileges and their own ’prestige’.

The real problem is “to render impossible the spreading and the development of any bureaucracy” and instead make it accept “its gradual suppression”.

This is not a point we directly deal with in our 1952 Platform. But, on the other hand, there is no magic recipe that could provide its guarantee since it is true that the so-called new recipe of the ICC can be finally summed up in the elimination of the class attributes of the state itself and in the “suppression” of its necessity. And on this point, it is worth quoting again the 1944 schema of our party program:

“The state, bourgeois remnant that the proletariat can do no less than use to eliminate the residues of a society divided into classes, even though it must hasten its dissolution, tends even more to survive and be reinforced, rather than whither away, if it isolates itself from the international proletariat’s movement by pretending to build socialism in its own zone, and to oppose itself as a workers’ state to the bourgeois states in the international arena” (translated by the IGCL).

The inattentive reader, reading the subsequent points in the ICC resolution, might conclude that the tendency toward survival and strengthening of the state are spelled out there and that, in the final analysis, we agree. Instead, the contrast is profound. And it is not so much in the recognition of these tendencies of the bureaucratic-administrative organs, which the state must nevertheless use, but in the weight attributed to these tendencies.

For us, they are present and active but they are not characteristic from the class point of view. They are and have always been present in any form of state independently not only of the classes that have become ruling classes, for whom the state is the instrument, but even in the states, also having a class nature of course, characteristic of societies with different courses. The bureaucracy of the Chinese empire, perfectly organic with the characteristic state of “Asian despotism”, always represented a problem for the despot through whom, moreover, the class power of the mandarins [3] was embodied.

Can one thus affirm that the whole state apparatus constituted something (a power) different from the power of the upper class (to use a Confucian term) and to reduce it to that of the despot?

For the ICC on the contrary, as for anarchist idealism, the tendencies that we can define as “autonomous” of the state bureaucracy become the fundamental characteristic of the state itself. The ICC concludes that the state is quite necessary – unlike the Anarchists – but that it is different from the organization of the proletariat’s power. As a result, for the ICC, the formulation that the revolutionary class cannot identify with the state of the period of transition – behind its ambiguity – actually means, as we have explained, that the state is not that of the working class.

After that, the resolution moves on to the “argumentation” of the second thesis according to which the proletariat is not the ruling class “either in capitalist society or the transitional society”. During the period of transition, the proletariat “possesses neither an economy nor any property, not even collectively: it will struggle for the abolition of economy and property.”

Already this formulation is, to say the least, incorrect. If it is indeed true that socialization means the elimination of all property relations, it is just as true that all the productive sectors, that all the means of production cannot be socialized at once, in the moment of the seizure of power. Let’s return to the peasant problem. Will the land remain the peasants’ property? The resolution does not say but we can think it would respond negatively. Can it be socialized everywhere and in any situation? Common sense says no, that areas and situations will be maintained where the socialization of the land will be one of the intermediate objectives of the transition period. To whom does the land return then? To the state, which will therefore be the owner. Then we can consider the proletariat as not owning, even collectively, only on the condition that the state is the peasants’ state. In other words, either the proletariat presents itself as the owner of the land through the state in its relation with the peasants, or the state will seize the land with the intervention of the peasants themselves by “granting the socialization”. On the contrary, the land is really socialized through a large process throughout which the proletariat will have to choose the best means to ensure that the peasant class sides with it and its program.

However, beyond the imprecision, the assertion of the ICC contains a background of truth: it is certain in fact that the proletariat will fight for the abolition of property. But that does not mean at all what the examined resolution wants to make believe, that is to say that the proletariat would not be a ruling class.

If the proletariat, which is the only class to have for its historic program the abolition of property and the division of society into classes which result from it, does not dominate the whole of the economic and social relations, then these relations can in no way change.

Either we reach the idealist thesis according to which it is all people, finally recognizing themselves in a new and superior ’Gemeinwesen’ [a ’community’] that would assert itself within capitalism, who want a new society or new relations, or we must recognize that the de facto domination by the bourgeoisie, resulting from the economic and social relations characteristic of capitalist society, must be opposed by the political and economic domination by the proletariat, by the class historically antagonistic to the bourgeoisie and the only one capable of breaking these relations.

If the proletariat does not have the property [4], how can we consider it as ruling in the economic sense? The catch, for the ICC, is all about this Hamlet-like problem. The societies that have existed to date have seen economic domination accompanied by property, by the fact that the people who exercised this domination were those that owned the essential means of production, in their respective areas and epochs, which resulted from property relations. For the ICC and for the debates that ensue – property relations vanishing, the relations of domination vanish too – the dictatorship of the proletariat would become then a dictatorship based solely on the willingness for a different future; and not on the material possibility of seizing the means of production.

On the contrary, the reality is quite different. The property relations of the means of industrial production, within the limits already indicated, vanish. But even so, the domination that the working class must exert on them does not disappear. This is possible only due to the particularity of the proletarian revolution in relation to all previous revolutions, since for the first time the revolutionary class is also the class directly employed in the means of production.

The bourgeoisie was not the productive class in the sense of its direct and material engagement in the means of production. It matured within aristocratic society as a ruling class.

On the other hand, the proletariat must conquer its own domination with the revolution itself.

The bourgeoisie made its revolution at the very moment when the contradiction between its property and its economic domination on the one hand, and the political power on the other, reached maturity. But the proletariat comes to revolution because of the contradiction between the socialized character of labour and the private ownership of the means of production. Both revolutions (the bourgeois and the proletarian) rely above all on the means of production (or the relation of domination between human beings and nature) but they are qualitatively different because of the starting positions “of power”. For in order for the transformations of economic and social relations to take place, it is always necessary for a class to push in this direction with all the instruments that its domination confers on it. Otherwise, it only remains to wait for the maturation of Man and the Gemeinwesen of so many idealists who, as they often do while they wait, find themselves on the side of those who exercise the power today, that is to say the bourgeoisie.

What Control?

And then we come to the second argument according to which the proletariat has nothing to do with the transitional state. “The proletariat, the communist class, the subject which transforms the economic and social conditions of the transitional society, will necessarily come up against an organ whose task is to perpetuate these conditions”.

Here we are simply faced with a corollary of an earlier incorrect thesis: that the state is only a conservative organ. Having already examined and dealt with it, we need not return to it, just to add, for the tranquility of the ICC, that the working masses, organized into factory and territorial soviets, will certainly have to keep attentive watch over the correct functioning of the administrative, bureaucratic, hierarchical – if you will – organs of the state apparatus, according to the indications of Lenin against the bureaucracy. It is a task that we consider acquired by past experience, but which, with its formulation, does not guarantee a victorious march towards communism. The only guarantee is internationalism and the internationalization of the revolution, the existence of concrete conditions that reject the socialist homeland as socialist state. It is not by chance that the struggle for the affirmation of the theory of socialism in one country was accompanied by the bureaucratization of the state and vice-versa. It is not by chance that in Russia, the state “bureaucratization”, the identification of the state and party apparatuses, were marked by the real liquidation of the function of the organs of power that are the soviets.

We then learn from the resolution that “this antagonism between the proletariat and the state manifests itself both on the immediate and the historic level.” Developing its argument, the ICC expresses its more serious mistake in another form : “On the immediate level, the proletariat will have to oppose the encroachments and the pressure of a state which is the manifestation of a society divided into antagonistic classes”.

This means again that for the ICC, the transitional state is a historical necessity because classes exist but it is not the instrument of the proletariat. The reasoning appears to be the following: where there have been antagonistic classes, a state has existed, so a state must also exist in the transition period. What may have been the global function of states and what the function of the transitional state should be is a problem that obviously does not concern the ICC.

It is important to recall Lenin’s concise words in The State and the Revolution : “To confine Marxism to the theory of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. (…) Opportunism does not extend recognition of the class struggle to the cardinal point, to the period of transition from capitalism to communism, of the overthrow and the complete abolition of the bourgeoisie. In reality, this period inevitably is a period of an unprecedentedly violent class struggle in unprecedentedly acute forms, and, consequently, during this period the state must inevitably be a state that is democratic in a new way (for the proletariat and the propertyless in general) and dictatorial in a new way (against the bourgeoisie).” (www.marxism.org)

These words were addressed particularly to right-wing opportunism, especially to Kautskyism; but we can today turn them against these new “left” opportunists who, from the same premises, fall into symmetrically opposed deviations.

In fact, for the ICC, the state is the product of the class struggle but it is not the instrument that the ruling class uses in this struggle, or it is in the capitalist regime and for the bourgeoisie, but no longer – rising up to the skies far above the petty material existence of classes – in the period of transition. Effectively, and fundamentally, the ICC does not extend the theory of class struggle to the point of recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the state of the workers’ councils as is its instrument.

But what happens at the historical level according to the resolution? “On the historic level, the necessary disappearance of the state in communist society, which is a perspective which Marxism always defended, will not be the result of the state’s own dynamic, but the fruit of the pressure mounted on it by the proletariat in its own movement forward, which will progressively deprive it of all its attributes as the progress towards a classless society unfolds.”

It is another way to express the same distortion of Marxism. Even here, in fact, the state appears as something completely distinct from and antagonistic to the proletariat, as something against which the proletariat must fight. The enemy is not the always possible tendencies toward bureaucratization of its apparatus that are present in its very structure, in the human material that composes it, but the enemy is the state itself, its structures that would rise above the classes to regulate the relations between them. That is why “if the proletariat will have to use the state during the transition period, it must retain a complete independence from it”.

One may wonder how the proletariat can use the transitional state while remaining completely independent of it, but it would be wasted effort. Except to admit, something that is difficult in the case of the ICC, which is certainly recalcitrant, that the state can be used independently of holding it, which would sadly lead to the reformist, indeed counter-revolutionary, terrain.

On the other hand, we can make the banal observation that it is very difficult that the holders of a thing, if we don’t play verbal and formal games, can declare themselves independent of this very thing...

And we approach the conclusion. We have already seen and underlined the general, theoretical deviations from Marxism. But in the conclusion, and not only in the conclusion, we find the, so to speak, “practical” implications.

Reaffirming that, in the sense above, “the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be confused with the state. Between the two there is a constant relation of force which the proletariat will have to maintain in its favour: the dictatorship of the proletariat is exerted by the working class itself through its own independent armed unitary organs: the workers’ councils”.

From this it emerges that the organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat are one thing, the state another. Who will exercise the legal power, sadly still necessary? If it is the hypothetical state of the ICC, the dictatorship of the proletariat will be a very strange dictatorship. If instead it will be the dictatorship of the proletariat, there will be a very strange state. Since we continue to navigate in the darkest confusion we have to make hypotheses. The only hypothesis on which such a mess can be sustained, with many salutations to the proletarian dictatorship, is a division of powers according to the best bourgeois tradition. Example: the ’State’ (still the ideal one of the ICC) makes the laws (legislative power); the dictatorship of the proletariat carries them out (executive power) if it pleases them. In this desperate case, the ICC should adopt a hundred new resolutions to anticipate the complexity of relations. If instead it is not so and the taste of the paradox has pushed us too far, there is the resolution of the obvious bickering of the ICC.

For us, the state is the dictatorship of the proletariat and its articulations are the articulations of the soviets, from the lowest level to the higher level, and the soviets are the workers’ councils, proletarian organs.

On the other hand, and here is the other practical implication of the theory of the Current, “the workers’ councils will participate in the territorial soviets (in which the whole non-exploiting population is represented and from which the state structure will emanate) without confusing themselves with them, in order to ensure its class hegemony over all the structures of the society of the transitional period”.

We have seen that, for the ICC at the theoretical level, the state is not the exclusive instrument of the working class. Here we see that, in practice, it is the expression of the non-exploiting “classes and strata”, and not the workers’ councils. The revision is clear and complete.

The idea of a soviet representing a generic non-exploiting population is directly borrowed from bourgeois democratism, which has nothing to do with the proletarian revolution and is highly opposed by the proletarian revolution. In addition to presenting the conspicuous contradictions already seen, the “state of the ICC” will no longer be the expression of the class of producers organized as the ruling class but the expression of a jumble of sterile popular strata which will converge on the basis of their residence and non-ownership of the means of production. The workers’ councils, no longer the backbone of the state, will no longer exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat, but a generic hegemony that too closely resembles Gramscian hegemony.

It remains only to observe, if it is not clear in the foregoing, that the maintenance of the ICC on these positions will progressively distance it from the terrain for the construction of the international party of the proletariat, as and when its acceleration, or at least the consciousness of its necessity, will deepen.

Nor is the opportunistic attitude that wishes to present this resolution as a simple contribution to the discussion on an ’open question’ acceptable.

The nature of the state of transition is a key question for the revolutionary party by the simple fact that it is fundamental for the party to define its task and its functions during the period of transition with respect to the state itself.

The very insistence on considering such a question open, with the subtle aim of introducing positions that are theoretically and politically deviant, is increasingly becoming one of the forms of opportunism that it is the duty of revolutionaries to eradicate forever from their camp.

(http://www.leftcom.org/it/articles/1979-12-01/elementi-per-la-critica-alla-risoluzione-della-cci-sul-periodo-di-transizione).