New Orientation on the Path of the Reconstitution of the Communist Party

This document is the result of a period of reflection and global evaluation of the experience in the application, development and dissemination of our project for the Reconstitution of the Communist Party over a decade (1994-2003).

Self-criticism

The vanguard today

Before addressing these new requirements which complicate the Reconstitution Plan, we will point out some of a different nature which will allow us to show that it is not only the theoretical and organizational premises which have been modified by the course of history, but also other premises which are objective and of a sociological and political nature, located in spheres far removed from the direct influence of our activity, and which determine to a great extent the nature of the problem of the preparation of a new revolutionary cycle, conditioning from the first moment the way in which it must be approached and the character of the tasks and the instruments needed to fulfill them. We are talking in particular about the point of departure that the vanguard adopts before the revolutionary cycle and, more specifically, about the political consequences that its different starting position in history entails.

It is clear that, during the preparatory stage of the October Cycle,‭ ‬the ideological vanguard of the proletariat was mainly made up of intellectuals of bourgeois social extraction.‭ ‬Hence, the kind of‭ ‘‬bourgeois ideologists who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole’¹, described by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, prevailed.‭ ‬This ideological vanguard assumed and elaborated scientific socialism and the revolutionary program and took them to the workers' movement, merging with it in the form of a revolutionary organization.‭ ‬The tactics of party building during the First Revolutionary Cycle were closely determined by this historical circumstance. Both the working class organizations that played a leading role in the period of accumulation of forces (parties of the Second International) and the party of a new type that led the assault on power were built on that same historical premise, a premise that defined a tactic of political construction (constitution of the Party) based on the association of two fully configured elements, but external in principle to each other. The ideological manifestos and political programs of the revolutionaries were debated, drafted and proclaimed by Marxist circles and subsequently brought to the class in its spontaneous movement. This mechanics of fusion of external political factors had the advantage for the proletariat that the revolutionary theory, as something assumed and elaborated, formed an integral part of its movement from the very beginning. The drawback, however, was that the fusion as a revolutionary class of these two foreign factors crystallized above all in the form of organization, of political apparatus (more agitative than propagandistic and more propagandistic than theoretical), while the problem of the collective assumption of revolutionary theory by the advanced sectors of the workers' movement was incompletely approached and solved. This, naturally, entailed the payment of a high price in the long term; but in the short term, the rapid implementation of the revolutionary movement cleared up any doubts, especially when —as in the case of the party that opened the First Cycle of the World Proletarian Revolution, the Bolshevik party— historical events —rapid rise of the democratic revolution and of the mass workers' movement in Russia— were pressing and getting ahead of them was necessary.

With the October Cycle over, the question arises: does the vanguard at present, in the preliminary period to the next revolutionary cycle, enjoy the same starting position? The answer is no. At present, and from the experience of the last decades (especially since the end of the last great proletarian offensive, at the end of the 70's), there are no declassed sectors of the bourgeoisie willing to gather the theoretical baggage of scientific socialism to contribute it to the workers' movement. There may be isolated cases, individuals who are willing to fulfill this role, but it is no longer a social phenomenon as in the First Revolutionary Cycle. However, the starting problem remains the same: revolutionary theory, as the sum of universal knowledge and the synthesis of the experience of the class struggle of the proletariat, cannot be elaborated within the workers' movement, but outside of it². Therefore, the mechanism of fusion of external political factors that once transformed the proletariat into a revolutionary class is still in force; but, at present, the proletariat does not dominate those factors: the historical desertion from the revolution by the bourgeois intellectual has left it orphaned of the main one, the vanguard theory. A historically new problem is then posed to the working class in the most pressing way, a problem which it will have to face and solve with its own forces and resources and that consists in replacing the role of ideological vanguard played in its day by the bourgeois intelligentsia. The conscious worker of our times must rise to the position of depositary and guardian of theory, studying, elaborating and assimilating the ideology in order to fulfill the first requirement of the revolution, its fusion with the practical movement. Our epoch is characterized —at least in the imperialist countries— by the fact that the majority of those who fight for the recovery of the objective of Communism and for the recomposition of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat are workers, which obliges us to think that the new processes of revolutionary construction carry for the working class the added burden of replacing those who from the outside brought the ideology necessary for the working class emancipation. The advanced sectors of the proletariat must, therefore and consequently with all that this implies from the point of view of political work, cover the transition that will lead it to leave the spontaneous movement of the class and assimilate the ideology consummating the function of ideological (theoretical) vanguard of the old intellectual, to return, then, to merge with the class as effective revolutionary vanguard. The Reconstitution of the proletarian party must dedicate an ample part of its tasks to satisfy the requirements of this transition, mainly during its first stages. In the new revolutionary era that opens, the contradiction between theory and practice is thus resolved within the working class after a process of split-fusion with its vanguard, a longer process (politically and also, in all probability, in time) than the simple fusion of the First Revolutionary Cycle, but that will allow us to undertake the processes of construction of the Party and Socialism from a deeper vision and with greater guarantees of success.

The complete conquest of the position of ideological vanguard by the most conscious sector of the proletariat -a conquest that implies a whole period of struggles among its various detachments- means a certain retreat from the point of view of the Reconstitution Thesis, since in this political thesis it is presupposed that this position has already been conquered. Nevertheless it has precisely been its application through the Reconstitution Plan which has led us to the conclusion that it is necessary to take a step back in the political expectations and to reconsider or, better said, to consider in a concrete way the problem of the necessary preconditions for the question related to the dialectics of the ideological vanguard-practical vanguard, the question of its unity in the form of the Communist Party, to bear fruit in the best way. We are talking, after all, about how to achieve the unity of these two bodies through the Communist Party. All this implies a longer political path for the Reconstitution process, but, at the same time, a much broader framework to solve, in a more satisfactory way and with greater guarantees than the revolutionaries who led the First Cycle had, the question of always placing ideology in command of the whole process of revolutionary construction and transformation up to Communism. And, in particular, right now, this new perspective gives us a better vision and a greater room to correctly implement the Reconstitution Plan.

Being and consciousness

But there is another aspect in this whole matter that allows us to affirm that, although the requirements for the Reconstitution of the Communist Party today are broader and demand greater effort for their fulfillment, its starting point is situated on a historically superior plane to that of the period prior to 1917. We are talking about the causes and consequences that accompany that abandonment of the vanguard positions by the bourgeois intelligentsia that we have highlighted as characteristic of our epoch. It is not that the Marxist thesis that explains this phenomenon of the passage of certain sectors of the bourgeois intelligentsia to the ranks of the proletariat has lost its validity, a thesis that states that ‘the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.’³; put it simply, this "section" no longer holds, as it did at the time this quote was written, the role of ideological vanguard. Naturally, the process of decomposition of capitalism and its ruling class continues. Perhaps there is no better proof of this than the fact that it can no longer manage the system without the help of the labor aristocracy. Its crisis has provoked the false reflection of a reversal of the process of social decomposition, as if it were affecting more the working class (all the pseudo-debates on the supposed disappearance of the working class or its transformation into a middle class, etc... have this background); but the arriviste declassing of a fraction of the proletariat only demonstrates its vigor and its possibilities for the future, while the growing dependence on its antagonistic class that capital experiences in order to give continuity to its system of exploitation (either because it needs the active support of the labor aristocracy, or because of the revolutionary passivity of the masses, for which said labor aristocracy plays a not negligible role) is evidence of the state of disintegration of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, just as during the period of the decomposition of the Ancient Régime and the political promotion of the bourgeoisie, the fact that some of its wealthiest elements bought noble titles expressed more the rise of the new and future ruling class than the validity of the feudal classes as a political-social reference, the participation of a privileged sector of the working class in the sharing of the cake of capitalist exploitation and domination does not mean that the bourgeoisie maintains its prestige and solid social position, but, on the contrary, it is the sign that gives way, once again in history, to the rise of a new revolutionary class. On the other hand, however, in certain political conjunctures of withdrawal of the Proletarian Revolution, such as the present one, the process of disintegration and declassing of the ruling class slows down, and the social and intellectual abyss between the two main classes opens up, giving the erroneous impression that the defeat of the proletariat in the First Revolutionary Cycle has been definitive and its proposal for progress has lost all value and validity, even for that part of the bourgeois intelligentsia that seeks a way out of the disintegration of the capitalist mode of production. But, we insist, this remains a mirage: the root cause is not that these elements of bourgeois origin are unwilling to adopt the position of the ideological vanguard, but rather that they can no longer do so. For this reason, the contribution of the bourgeois intelligentsia to the cause of the Proletarian Revolution will be more significant in stages following the Reconstitution of the Communist Party and in tasks related to the application and development, in its broad sense, of its Line and Program (and less in the original elaboration of both). It is also for this reason that during unfavorable conjunctures the trickle of bourgeois elements towards the proletariat is reduced or disappears, because the field in which the seeds that they could sow towards the abolition of classes can germinate has not yet been cleared.

The Reconstitution Thesis already noted the importance of paying attention to the historical originality of the proletariat when it comes to understanding the qualitative leaps in social development. The unity of means (class struggle of the proletariat as such a class) and objectives (emancipation of humanity) that this social class bears as a peculiarity when it steps on the stage of history entails global implications for the class struggle as a whole, but also for certain special sectors within the classes, such as the intelligentsia and the educated sectors of the possessing classes. The foresight of social crisis and the need for historical change, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether in a favorable or contrary way, has always been an attribute of these social strata, from Antiquity to capitalism. But here intellectual activity with respect to change is presented outside the process of social transformation; the intellectual movement is alien to the social movement and observes it simply as an object, from an external and passive attitude of a contemplative subject. The stoicism, individualism and social nihilism with which the philosophers of the Hellenistic and Latin schools revealed the crisis of the ancient world, or the rationalist criticism with which the Enlightenment thinkers destroyed the spiritual foundations of feudal society, summarize the way in which the educated elites participated in two important epochs of transition between different societies. Under the rule of the bourgeoisie, however, the philanthropic observer attitude of the social reformers reaches its limit when Marx places the imperative of the transformation of the world above that of its interpretation or simple contemplation. But Marx himself -as well as all the socialists of his time- could not overcome that limit. Before 1917, Marxism is the most advanced critical theory of the epoch (revolutionary critique), it is the highest expression of social consciousness (the vanguard theory, as Lenin defined it), but it has not yet been able to realize itself as a truly transforming theory, it has not yet been able to join the process of social development: far from having merged with the social being in a single historical totality, it still contemplates it from the outside.

The unity between social being and consciousness, a unity that implies the mutual dialectical transformation of both elements and that sets in motion a process of self-transformation (conscious development) of society, will take place with the constitution of the social organism capable of achieving the fusion between theory and social practice, of the social organism capable of giving at the same time a material content to theory and of inducing a conscious direction to historical evolution. This social organism is the party of a new type that Lenin designed in its fundamental features (and which, probably, constitutes his main contribution to Marxism). In the Leninist party of a new type, in the Communist Party, theory, pure intellectual work, is fused with immediate practice in an activity of progressive transformation of reality. The social being here is no longer contemplated, governed or dictated from outside by the conscience; here, we find ourselves before the self-conscious social being in the process of self-transformation and development. Here, finally, the old intellectual who turned into a social reformer, the best legacy of the educated elites of the dominant classes and the last expression of subjective knowledge, of the conscious subject that does not merge with the object, disappears as such, as an independent figure in history. From this moment on this figure surrenders his banner of the standard-bearer of progress and submits to the implacable dialectic of the class struggle: either he joins the revolutionary organism, where he will lose his title of individual intellectual, but will join the collective intellectual who leads the movement of conscious transformation of the world, or else, his stupid narcissist vanity will lead him to place himself at the service of the reactionary classes and the counterrevolution, under the pretext of a pretended intellectual freedom.

Before the revolutionary experience of the October Cycle, being and consciousness developed along parallel channels. Technology, the form of application of experimental sciences to reality, mainly to capitalist production, is the way in which the bourgeoisie has gone furthest in the problem of unifying theory and practice. The representation of reality through objective laws and the abstraction of the world through the rules that govern its movement facilitated the rationalization of experience through the intervention of those laws and rules (science) with instruments inspired by them (technology). Technique, then, would be the point of convergence between a rationalist conception of the world and the rationalization of a world that the subject transforms in his own image and likeness. But this is a spurious method, since the application of technology is based on the principle of verification and reproduction of objective laws, and does not admit any principle of transformation of these laws as reality by the conscious subject, which, in turn, is conceived as a separate entity from the object on which it exercises its activity. On the contrary, from 1917 onwards, when for the first time in history there is a process provoked, led and directed by an ideologically-cohesive and collective political organism (unlike all previous similar processes, which had a high component of spontaneity and were to a large extent the end products of the aggregate of innumerable random events —and never of a single conscious initiative with defined means and ends—), those two parallel channels converge in a revolutionary process of transformation of the social totality, where cognitive activity is no longer an activity of apprehension and verification of reality, but of change of that reality, and where the development of that reality cannot be separated from the constant revolutionization of our conceptual premises, of our conception of the world. The October Revolution opens a new era in which the conscious subject is a social organism with the capacity to transform objective reality in a creative process of integration that will open new stages of development and organization for human communities. After the end of the revolutionary cycle opened by October, the individual intellectual armed with his critical theory is no longer at the starting point of the new cycle: the historical development requires that at the starting point stands the organism capable of clearing the path of social progress through a total transformation of the world, the Communist Party. Historically, the debate on the role of the intellectual in society or in the face of progress has therefore lost its validity: it has expired and it is no longer on the agenda. Having consummated the First Revolutionary Cycle, to raise the question of emancipation means to put in the foreground the problem of the Communist Party, that of its nature and all the questions related to the requirements for its construction.

Taking all this into consideration, we affirm that the preparation of the second cycle is placed on a higher plane in comparison with the First Cycle. The conquest of the position of revolutionary vanguard can no longer be in the hands of a pretended ideological vanguard that has not acquired the capacity to influence the social process, that has not built social links with the class that generates all the wealth and that serves as the motor of society that allows it to exercise a transforming practice. Before 1917, the isolated vanguard nucleus formed by daring intellectuals ready to put themselves at the head of the revolutionary events could still play some role. But the Leninist conception of the party of a new type, its role throughout the historical cycle of the October Revolution and, above all, the work of transformation and new social construction that was forged around that party, demand today that the starting point of any future revolutionary process should be occupied by such a party, exponent of the qualitative leap in the requirements that the preparation of the revolutionary cycle demands nowadays; a qualitative leap that is expressed in the fact that it is no longer enough for the subjective factor of the revolution to present itself as pure ideological vanguard, but it needs to have gone through a phase of socialization, of fusion with the practical movement in the form of the Communist Party. It is for this reason, because the historical experience of the Revolution since 1917 places the proletariat at a higher stage of political maturity, that the complete and most coherent vision of the Communist Party (our Reconstitution Thesis) could only be formulated once the First Revolutionary Cycle was over, applying this experience to the requisites of the next revolutionary cycle.

However, the fact that the intellectual's debate before society and progress is outdated or surpassed does not mean that the intellectual function has ceased to play a role before that progress, a role that the Party must take up again, assimilating and surpassing it in the broader context of the preparation of Communism. This is the background problem faced by the vanguard (including our organization) nowadays, a problem that must be resolved and which implies the necessity, firstly, of conquering the ideological vanguard position (something which is necessary but not sufficient to initiate the Revolutionary Cycle) as the first step towards the Reconstitution of the Party as the real revolutionary vanguard.

Character of the present moment

The most immediate consequences, in the practical sphere, derived from the necessity of reconquering the vanguard position by Marxism-Leninism (and the fact that this reconquest will have to be done by the working class itself) are the following: first, from an organizational point of view (within the vanguard detachments), the necessary promotion of the cultural and intellectual formation of communist militants, beyond the routine initiation programs with which the formal compromise with the proletarian ideology is commonly resolved; in the second place, from a political point of view, the understanding of the fact that no truly revolutionary political line exists or can exist if it is not built on the formation of the vanguard in that ideology, on the reconstitution of its revolutionary theoretical discourse and on its development and application through debate and two-line struggle within the vanguard; the understanding that, nowadays, the field of consciousness —and, therefore, the field of the questions around its class nature, its internal coherence, etc. — is the core from where a proletarian politics is built. In other words, the theoretical and ideological questions occupy the foreground, and will do so for an undetermined period. Since the PCR outlined its Reconstitution Plan (1993), already oriented by this criterion — although, as we have seen and as we will continue to verify, in an insufficient manner— there has not been in all these years any political or social displacement between the classes, nor within the working class including its vanguard sectors, that justifies a displacement of the axis around which the revolutionary political projects must continue to be built (and the political impotence shown by the last important events led by the masses, such as the mobilizations on the occasion of the Prestige case and, above all, those against the Iraq war and the ones that took place after the terrorist attacks on March 11th, have only endorsed this thesis.) The theoretical and ideological problems that the vanguard must solve in the perspective of the Proletarian Revolution and Communism configure that axis, so we can say that, from the point of view of the general proletarian movement and the leadership of its class struggle, we are in a moment of accumulation of vanguard forces.

The sources from which we draw the requirements that must necessarily be fulfilled in order to achieve the goal of Reconstitution are twofold in nature. In the first place, it is the analysis of the consequences of the liquidation at the hands of revisionism of consciousness and of all the development achieved by communism (both as a political line and organization and from the perspective of the organization of the new society). The results of this analysis form the central body of what until today has been our activity (Reconstitution Plan and Reconstitution Thesis) and the theoretical and practical developments that we have derived from it (political line and organizational line). In the second place, the analysis of the political peculiarities of the second revolutionary cycle, especially compared to those of the first one. In this field, even though we adopted the theory of the cyclical development of the World Proletarian Revolution on a historical scale almost since it was established by the Communist Party of Peru, in the context of the formulation of the thesis of a bend in the road (‘tesis del recodo’) for the Peruvian Revolution after the fall of the party leadership in 1990 and the debate around Chairman Gonzalo’s letters, it is now that we are becoming aware — also in the light of certain conclusions drawn from the studies on the construction of socialism in the USSR— of the importance of the comparative analysis of the premises necessary for the commencement of each revolutionary cycle. Thus, regarding the question of the vanguard, we see that, historically, before the First Revolutionary Cycle, it gets organized in short periods of time: from 1895 until 1903 in Russia and, in the rest of the countries, through single constituent acts, which were almost always reduced to the assumption —formal in most cases— of the Komintern‘s twenty-one conditions. As we explained before, the conditions to build the vanguard were completely different to those of today, mostly due to the position adopted by a sector of the bourgeois intelligentsia towards the Revolution and to the presence of a revolutionary movement on the offensive and of an international vanguard organization (the Communist International). These conditions facilitated the fulfillment of the mentioned requisites for the organization of the vanguard party, but also established, in turn, a certain conception in the communist imaginary that caused defects of a strategic nature, like the insufficient ideological split from opportunism (which paved the way for opportunistic policies), and the extremely weak policy in terms of education of cadres among the proletariat, that went hand in hand with the scarce penetration in the ideological problems which are directly related to the construction of the vanguard (and which in the long run weakened the proletarian stance in the two-line struggle within the communist parties). It was from these political constitutions that the communist parties started to consider straight away how to win the masses and how to seize the power, getting involved in class struggle at a large scale. In this situation, the counter-revolutionary events that caused retreats were seen as an accumulation of forces for the whole class, particularly regarding the ties and influence of the vanguard over the masses and, especially, the struggle of the vanguard to preserve the cadres and the ideological and programmatic principles of the party. Today, in contrast, the historical circumstances from which the second revolutionary cycle can be prepared show us that, in its prolegomena, during the stage of the Reconstitution of the revolutionary party, the accumulation of forces concerns mainly the vanguard circles organized around the ideological and political problems related to the development of the revolution and the construction of the party. We are thus not talking about a conservative task, but about a creative one, as the first objective of the Reconstitution is to recover the revolutionary ideology of communism and to build cadres that will bring it again to the forefront of the Revolution.

The circumstances surrounding the formation of what in the heart of the vanguard will consequently serve as the basis for the Reconstitution of the Communist Party show clearly its theoretical and educational background; in other words, the main problems which we now face have this double nature, and the practical problems that we will face will be closely related to the provision of means and the creation of the necessary instruments to solve those problems. Its solution, then, will entail the political strengthening of the vanguard in general and of our organization in particular, since it will mean that we are progressing in the task of reconstituting Communism from the ideological point of view, a process in which the communist militant will find enough spur, inspiration and initiative for his work —let us not forget that the strength of the vanguard resides in its ideology—, as well as a revitalizing source for his organization. Our ideology, with all the problems that surround it nowadays, must then be, in the present situation, the starting point and the purpose of the main activity carried out by the vanguard.

More self-criticism

As it can be clearly seen, the assessment of our own trajectory forced us to perceive, in a more mature and coherent way, the role of ideology and the character of the tasks derived from it; but it has also forced us to improve the way we perceive our practical work and to subject it to a severe criticism; the conclusions drawn from this criticism lead us to rectify certain fundamental elements of our previous mass line, which was the product of two kinds of mistakes: method-related mistakes and conception-related mistakes.

The mistakes related to our method are the ones linked to the analysis of the dialectical elements of the Reconstitution process in its present stage and which led us to separate our theoretical activity from our practical activity.

In particular, the cause of the mistakes consisted, first, in absolutizing the fundamental contradiction that dominates all the process of Reconstitution (the one between the theoretical and practical vanguard); we did not observe this contradiction as the principal one, but as the only one, and we considered the theoretical and practical problems related to the organization of the theoretical vanguard as their principal aspect, while the mass work with the practical vanguard moved to a secondary level. In the second place, we reduced mechanically the tasks of the Plan in its present stage to that dichotomy, dividing them into principal ones (including here the theoretical tasks: formation, investigation, elaboration, etc.), on one side, and secondary ones (or practical tasks: principally the mass work above the propaganda level), on the other. Doing so, we broke the organic unity that must exist between organized vanguard and mass line, divorcing theory from practice in our political line, through a process of internalization of theoretical activity and a process of externalization of our practical activity. The lack of an analysis of the underlying dialectical complex in the process of Reconstitution and the reduction of this complex to its general form, to the contradiction between theoretical vanguard and practical vanguard in which the secondary aspect was presented as something not capable of being influenced by the principal one, as something external to it —because, taken as a whole, as an homogeneous block, as practical vanguard in general, it did not satisfy the political needs of the present stage of the Reconstitution (those of theoretical nature in particular)—, led us to assume the internal activity as something exclusively internal, while the objective of the mass work was more and more perceived as something unrelated to the most urgent political needs; therefore, the practical work was increasingly appreciated as a simple experience, something to consider in the future, when we would start addressing the questions related to the third stage of the Reconstitution (closer links with the practical vanguard integrated in the spontaneous mass movement and development of the Program). The necessary political line, identified with the most theoretical points of the Plan, on the one hand, and, on the other, the mass practice, increasingly seen as a secondary and experimental activity, only useful when the theoretical demands of the Plan were mainly addressed, entailed not only a separation between theory and practice within our political activity, something that emptied our mass line; it also ended up reducing, from a conceptual point of view, our vision of the mass work to the form of mass work in general, without any nuances, with no capacity to apprehend the difference between the different sectors of the proletarian vanguard, which were more and more perceived as a homogeneous and grey block. The increasingly consolidated conception of a mass line applied as mass work in general hence projected its abstract mediocrity over its own object: the average worker of the practical vanguard, the militant of the resistance movement and, especially, the trade union member with class consciousness in-itself became, this way, the prototype of the future communist militant whose consciousness would be won once we took the mass work up again in a more serious way, already armed with an elaborated revolutionary theory (line and principles, the two main products coming from the first two stages of the Reconstitution Plan). Our mass line became useless for the Reconstitution since it became a trade unionist mass line.

The mistakes of our method in the application of the guidelines of the Reconstitution Thesis to fulfill the Plan brought, as a consequence, misconceptions of the same nature as the matters we had been dealing with; in particular, the way of understanding how the course of the Reconstitution can prosper or which are the mechanisms that make it possible and allow its development. More specifically, we didn’t properly understand the nature of dialectic mediation in mass work. This mediation implies that we cannot transform the consciousness of the masses —neither the consciousness of the masses in general, neither the consciousness of the sectors of the vanguard that conform our masses at the moment— in a direct way through the communist ideology; we need the mediation of certain factors and of a certain practice for this subjective transformation to take place.

The misunderstanding of the dialectic mediation is the philosophical form adopted by the spontaneism that began to dominate our method of work, by which we tried to establish a direct and immediate relationship between our organization as an ideological vanguard group and the practical vanguard. This led us to idealist misconceptions, and, when planning our mass work, we put that practical vanguard before us as the objective of our mass line, in a way in which we not only reduced all the contradictions of the Reconstitution stage to one (theoretical vanguard-practical vanguard); we also reduced all the organizational atomization of the theoretical vanguard to our organization. Therefore, we made up an artificial contradiction (Revolutionary Communist Party-practical vanguard) that lacked a material base which could be the object of a scientific analysis and with which we mentally performed our mass work; it was rather an antinomy, a false contradiction.

From the perspective of dialectical materialism, mediation implies the acknowledgment of the interaction and interrelation between elements, of the fact that nothing is immediately identical to itself, but through the other and its contrary; mediation, ultimately, is the acknowledgment of contradiction⁴. Marxism, therefore, demands from us an analytical effort when dealing with contradictions and interrelations, and it presents itself as opposed to any intellectual and political spontaneism, like, for instance, anarchist direct action.

Contrary to popular belief, direct action is not a call to immediate violence, but a political concept that advocates that those affected resolve their problems directly and by themselves, which implies the negation of all mediation, of any intermediaries between the cause of the problem and the affected, including politics or any external ideology that, from the outside, could influence in its solution. Anarchist spontaneism thus denies the role of any political organization and politics themselves (i.e. political power) as a necessary part of revolutionary practical activity. Moreover, as it rejects any mediating theoretical construction, anarchism is intellectually spontaneist —to the extreme of embracing political nihilism, as Nechayev— and disregards any contribution which does not come from the movement itself. Communism, as a conception that integrates the great contributions of human knowledge, is rejected as a political inspiration because, as an external referent, imposes a hiatus that would separate the subject from the direct path towards the revolutionary objective. Indeed, Communism creates a scientific vision (historical materialism and dialectical materialism) and, from the assimilation of the objective laws that regulate the development of matter, builds the necessary instruments that allow the revolutionary subject to reach its emancipative objective. As we can see, Marxism and anarchism differ from each other from the very beginning, in the way they approach the phenomenon of consciousness. Anarchism rejects the complex problem regarding the development of the proletarian consciousness posed by Marxism, a development that leads to the theory of vanguard, since anarchism assumes that the proletariat will acquire revolutionary consciousness through its economic experience. Logically, the differences between both schools widen with derived topics, such as the revolutionary party or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, mediating stages which Marxism considers necessary to clear the way between the proletariat and communism.

Marxism follows the etymological meaning of the word consciousness, which is built upon the Latin preposition cum, which means with, and the verb scire, which means to know. Consciousness means, then, with the knowledge, that is to say, consciousness is not the immediate product of the reflex of reality on our mind, as it could be inferred from any spontaneist conception of the world as Anarchism (mechanistic materialism); on the contrary, consciousness is the acquisition with knowledge, with science, of all perception of experience. Marxism thus builds its doctrinal body from science, something that can also be said about all its political instruments. This relation between the real movement and science is the procedure by which the class ideology is presented as the first necessary mediation and as the condition of possibility of said real movement as a revolutionary movement, as a conscious movement led by a vanguard ideology. The return to the scientific-ideological aspect implies a separation from the movement, a projection from itself as a spontaneous movement that compels to address fundamental questions not directly related to the progress of the movement, but necessary to activate its revolutionary aspect (ideological reconstitution of communism —theoretical aspect— and construction of the vanguard —practical and organizational aspect—, first, and Reconstitution of the Communist Party, later). Ideology is what gives us this long-term perspective of transformation and what informs us of the revolutionary potential of the spontaneous social process. That is why, for Marxism, the political strength comes from ideological firmness⁵, while, for anarchism, ideological representations seldom are of any importance and limit themselves to the opportunities of the movement itself.

Our organization has always been aware, since its foundation, of the importance of the ideological-conscious part and therefore of the particular tasks that came along with it. In fact, the importance given to organizational activities related to this ideological aspect, like the priority of formation of cadres, was the first element that differentiated us from the rest of the organizations that said to follow our same objectives. Nevertheless, as we have pointed out, in the light of the results of our last experiences during the last period, we have become aware of the fact that the ideological-conscious element has an even greater transcendence in the preparation and development of the revolution. We will further develop this later on. What interests us the most now is to underline the importance of the mediation of the elements through which the continuity of the historical revolutionary process is resolved, specially the ideological sphere, whose reconstitution is a mandatory step in order to restore the ideological vanguard position of communism, for Marxism-Leninism to recover the guidance of the workers’ movement; all of this will be impossible without the acquisition of consciousness, of the necessary theoretical instruments through science. This is a basic demand for the construction of the vanguard; without it, we will not be able to educate the masses, and consequently, the fundamental elevation of the second major and mediating element in the revolutionary process, the Communist Party, will also be impossible. We were drifting away in such a way from a deep understanding of the ideological and scientific requirements (also in its practical, educative dimension) of revolutionary consciousness that we were slowly sliding towards what we had already criticized about other organizations (like the Frente Marxista-Leninista de España (Spanish Marxist-Leninist Front) and the Comité de Organización (Organization Committee)). The false contradiction (antinomy) that we had made up between our organization and the practical vanguard, and which we had considered the principal contradiction in the present stage of the development of the Reconstitution process, led us to underestimate, unconsciously but de facto, the way in which revisionism had liquidated our political, ideological and organizational tradition, and, consequently, to overestimate the impact that our political line, in the present degree of elaboration and application, could exert over the current consciousness of the workers that already have class consciousness (in itself). We ended up thinking that there is no intermediate step between solving the main theoretical tasks and reaching the masses that make up the practical vanguard, and that the pure, quantitative development of that theoretical elaboration sufficed, at a given time, to take a leap towards practice as our main activity.

Our limited assimilation of Marxism-Leninism and our extreme focus on our daily tasks made us lose the global picture and forget the meaning of the lessons that Leninism had explicitly taught us (like Lenin’s thesis on winning the masses not just propagandizing the principles of communism, but through the mediation of the practical experience) and those with which we ourselves built such important political bases like the Reconstitution Thesis, which insists precisely in the necessary transitions that make the translation and assimilation of the principles of communism by the masses possible. The successive steps that lead from the Principles to the Political Line, and, lastly, to the Program, constitute the successive links of the chain that allow the assimilation of communism through concentric circles that are increasingly wider, whose scope includes progressively bigger sections of the most advanced sectors of the masses. Each of those transitions requires however a concrete analysis and a definition of the theoretical and practical tasks, as well as a link between them, a mass line. Our mistake, which came from the separation in our minds of the theoretical and practical problems of the Reconstitution as principal and secondary problems, led us to the false conception that these transitions were kept and resolved, fundamentally, in the field of theory, and that there was not any practical activity with the masses linked to it, except, at the most, when we would face the last transition in the search for the practical vanguard and the revolutionary Program. The trade unionist mentality, and thus the false idea that there can only be one, truly real, mass work, exerted —and exerts— so much pressure over our consciousness, that we were already impatiently preparing the third stage of the Reconstitution (the “political-practical” stage of winning the practical vanguard). Eager to address the task we were most familiar with —to work elbow to elbow with the masses—, we had our sight set more in the future than in the present, and with such intellectual attitude we neglected the analysis of the singularities of the current stage. Now we have rectified on this matter and we have tried to rearrange our vision towards the order and interrelation of the contradictions which are at the base of the Reconstitution process. With that in mind, we have gotten rid of the idea that the average union worker, the worker with trade unionist consciousness, must be the main political target for our mass work. The most urgent task from the point of view of a correct mass line, that is to say, from the perspective of the recuperation of the unity between theory and practice in our political work, is that of defining the immediate vanguard circle that we must win for the cause of the Reconstitution and Communism, as well as the environment and the means needed for that. Likewise, and in order to fulfill that unity between theory and practice, in the future we must consider those circles, which are the objective of our mass line, both as an object and as a subject of the tasks of the Reconstitution Plan.

Due to its scientific character, Marxism-Leninism cannot be assimilated neither spontaneously nor directly by the proletariat. Like other sciences, Marxism-Leninism can be initially apprehended only by certain individuals who are predisposed to it, but it requires a series of instruments so that it can become part of the class and its movement. Those instruments are the means through which Marxism-Leninism adapts itself to the language and the intellectual reception of an increasing base of the proletarian masses. If we are allowed to introduce such an analogy, this process is really similar to the one we can observe in the food chain. The food chain is based on the organization of species according to a predatory scale, in which each one of them feeds on its predecessor and serves, in turn, as food to the next species. The trophic chain is regulated by a dialectical process based on the contradiction between organic and inorganic matter; that is to say: the cycle of transformation of one into another. In this cycle, minerals (calcium, phosphorus, iron, etc.) and other substances which are essential for life are transformed into organic matter thanks to the photosynthesis mechanism of plants; when plants are ingested by herbivorous animals, they metabolize those substances thanks to the organic form in which they present themselves; the same way happens when herbivores are hunted by carnivores: the latter will assimilate the basic materials necessary for life in the only way possible for them, that is, not directly, but through the physiology of the herbivore. Something similar happens with proletarian ideology: it cannot be assimilated directly by the class, but through its most theoretically and culturally advanced sectors, which in turn expand their influence to sectors that are even wider and even more linked to the deepest strata of the class; proletarian ideology thus traverses this kind of food chain of communism through which the pure principles of Marxism-Leninism are metabolized until they become comprehensible to the great majority of the proletarian masses, through a successive hierarchy of problems, concerns and demands. In this process, Marxism-Leninism starts by solving the fundamental theoretical problems that the next resumption of the labor movement as a revolutionary movement requires (ideological reconstitution), regaining its ideological vanguard nature struggling, ideologically and politically, against the opportunistic way of resolving these problems. Then, by defeating these opportunistic movements and incorporating the best masses from them, their most honest and valid members, the construction of the proletarian vanguard continues. It is in this way that our mass line, aimed at the conquest of these theoretically advanced circles of the class (theoretical vanguard), considers them as a political objective: to incorporate them as subjects of the Reconstitution.

We will unravel, later on, the meaning of all these new aspects that have emerged in our vision of the Reconstitution process. We will now explain broadly, without paying attention to the particular, more or less incorrect way in which we dealt with it, the meaning it acquires from the historical perspective of the social process, in order to finish explaining the problem of mediation and to give a general idea of the role it plays in a process such as the Proletarian Revolution. We will use the following diagram to help us do this:

At the top level we have a summary of the history of Humanity, which, from a certain point of view, can be interpreted as the passage from a classless society, but in a state of need (Primitive Communism), to a classless society in a state of freedom (Communism). This step, however, can only be taken through class society, whose main task is the development of the productive forces; we have summarized this step as Communist Revolution, because all the contradictions of society that must be resolved before reaching a superior historical stage are condensed in it. In a way, the history of Humanity can then be considered as a simple interval towards a stage in which Humanity can develop fully and freely, freed from the servitudes of scarcity and inequality. In reality, it would only be what Marx himself defined as "the prehistory of Humanity".

But the Communist Revolution requires another interim: the construction of those instruments necessary to carry it out. History and the Revolution are certainly made by the masses, yet not directly, but through those instruments. We can see them represented in the second level, and we have focused mainly on them when dealing with the insufficient understanding of the concept of dialectic mediation in our work as organization. These instruments are Ideology, the Communist Party and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, but we have underlined the transition from the first to the second instrument because, likewise, the transformation of Ideology into the Communist Party requires another political interval with its specific tasks dedicated to the reformulation and reaffirmation of the Principles of Communism and its concretion in Political Line and then, in a more profound sense, in Revolutionary Program. This brings us to the last level, where we are, so to speak, nowadays: the necessary intermediate stage to solve the theoretical and practical problems of the ideological reconstitution of Communism and the construction of its vanguard, problems whose solution can be found within the field of two-line struggle carried out at all levels by Marxist-Leninists against all kinds of tendencies that try to lead the proletarian movement, and whose solution is presented to us as a necessary premise for Communism to become the vanguard ideology of the proletariat.

In conclusion, Marxism demands that any enterprise aimed at the emancipation of Humanity must constantly make the critical effort to analyze the dialectical nature of the process in every given moment in order to elucidate the means that its continuity requires as necessary.

The system of contradictions in the Reconstitution process

The dialectical complexity that underlies the Reconstitution process cannot be reduced to a single contradiction, much less be split into its elements to designate one as the main one over the other. And nevertheless, we made both mistakes, as it has been explained. In doing so, we broke with dialectical materialism, for, first of all, it was not a question of elucidating the main and secondary aspects of the contradiction, but of discerning the main contradiction from the secondary contradictions in the process; in the second place, we erroneously separated the two aspects of the contradiction —the first one as principal, the second one as secondary—, that is, we understood it in the metaphysical way of two unites into one, instead of approaching it in the dialectical way of one divides into two. In this sense, we must remember that the Reconstitution Thesis shows that, for there to be a revolutionary movement (at whatever level, before or after the Communist Party exists), the link between the vanguard organization and the masses (mass line) is necessary. This means that there can be no separation between the two aspects of the contradiction (vanguard-masses): mass work must be conceived and applied according to the tasks necessary for the organization of the vanguard and for the fulfillment of its tasks. The priority is therefore to define the content of these tasks at each moment or in each phase of the Reconstitution, the way to organize their fulfillment and the sector of the proletariat on which we are going to rely to carry them out. The vanguard must remain attentive to every change in the content of the tasks throughout the process in order to readjust the organizational relations and links with the masses that each moment requires. This vigilance excludes any dogmatism and any static conception of the various elements that play a role in the Reconstitution, and we fell into dogmatism by unilaterally valuing the main current political tasks only from the point of view of our vanguard organization, without any organic relationship with the masses, and by unilaterally valuing the system of contradictions of the Reconstitution process.

Mao said that “There are many contradictions in the course of development of any major thing”⁶. This is what we are going to call system of contradictions, the characterization of which is now of the greatest importance in order to overcome the analytical errors we committed, which have led us to unsuccessful political paths. As we know, the Reconstitution Thesis states that the contradiction that governs the development of the process of Reconstitution of the Communist Party is the one between the theoretical vanguard and the practical vanguard. This definition is correct in general because it places at the center of the process its fundamental elements, the union of theory and practice, the idea of merging Communism with the workers' movement, but it takes for granted the overcoming of other contradictions related to the ideological reconstitution of the vanguard. This reconstitution has a mainly theoretical content, and the political problems that accompany it are those that now demand our attention. In any case, it is part of the dialectical system that organizes and hierarchizes the contradictions that structure the Reconstitution process. We now offer this system in its main elements and levels expressed graphically:

Mao also said that “In order to reveal the particularity of the contradictions in any process in the development of a thing, in their totality or interconnections, that is, in order to reveal the essence of the process, it is necessary to reveal the particularity of the two aspects of each of the contradictions in that process”⁷. In the graphic we can see, in the first place, the order of contradictions that participate in the process of Reconstitution, and the main internal relationships established between them, in a way that its position in the system will facilitate us the discovery of the “particularity of the two aspects of each of the contradictions”, as stated by Mao.

The chart is built from top to bottom, sorted from less to more immediate from the point of view of the need and possibility of development and solution of each of the contradictions in the system. It is formed by the assembly of superimposed triangular units whose vertices show a dialectical element whose position determines its internal relationship with all the elements of the system.

Starting at the top, we observe a triadic module composed of a base on which the contradiction Vanguard-Masses is situated and, at the top, another base led by the Proletariat and the Bourgeoisie. The latter, the bourgeoisie, is left out of the system (that is why it is not included in any triangle), because it is a system that describes the contradictions at the heart of the revolution in its pre-revolutionary historical stage: This is the system of contradictions that the vanguard must resolve and overcome, as a precondition for the great open confrontation between the main classes of modern society. The system, then, describes —as graphically expressed in the diagram— the contradictions that are within or behind the proletariat as a revolutionary class. The Proletariat-Bourgeoisie contradiction can only be resolved with the Proletarian Revolution; but first, the proletariat must successively resolve the fundamental contradictions —from the bottom to the top in the chart— that will make it a mature class to initiate the revolutionary war against the bourgeoisie. The Proletariat as a political entity, on the other hand, develops according to the Vanguard-Masses contradiction (which we have placed at the base of the upper triangle), which is resolved with the construction of the Communist Party (that is, the revolutionary period that goes from the constitution of the Party to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, when it tackles tasks belonging to this phase of the revolution, such as the construction of the United Front, the Red Army with masses belonging to other classes or the construction of Communism). This is the fundamental contradiction that explains the nature of the proletarian party (Communist Party), and the proper treatment of the unity of its two contradictory aspects is what will enable the political development of the proletariat as a revolutionary class. Finally, the position of the different dialectical elements at the top of the drawing tells us that the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is not the central problem at this stage of the revolutionary process (the Bourgeoisie is left out of the system); that place is reserved to the struggle to solve the different problems that are related to the Vanguard-Masses contradiction, and, above all, the problems that affect its main aspect, the Vanguard. In particular, we are talking here about the questions related to the establishment of the necessary links to achieve the unity of this contradiction in the form of a revolutionary process, for which purpose the class struggle is mainly developed within the working class between the vanguard and opportunism, reformism and revisionism, which seek to prevent the political and organizational approach between the masses of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard.

The questions that surround the vanguard generally are those that focus the attention of communism in the current period. For this reason, the Vanguard occupies the upper vertex of the next triangular module. The contradiction that, within it, determines its essence is the one that exists between the Theoretical Vanguard and the Practical Vanguard; for this reason, this contradiction occupies the base of this second triangle. The development and solution of this contradiction are linked to the process of Reconstitution of the Communist Party, which is the period that our organization considers to be a necessary preamble to the existence of the party of a new type and its subsequent process of construction. The main aspect of this contradiction is the Theoretical Vanguard, and it is the questions related to the recovery and consolidation of this vanguard that must be solved in order to prepare its fusion with the Practical Vanguard in the form of the Communist Party. For this reason, the latter stays at the top of the last contradiction, the one that is at the base of the whole system: the contradiction between Marxist-Leninist Vanguard and Non Marxist-Leninist Theoretical Vanguard.

One of the main consequences of the summation of the last political period of our organization has been, precisely, the awareness of the existence and importance of the contradiction between the Marxist-Leninist Theoretical Vanguard and the Non Marxist-Leninist Theoretical Vanguard. One of the main causes of our mistakes was to overlook this contradiction and to focus our attention on the superior contradictions of the system, especially the immediately superior (Theoretical Vanguard - Practical Vanguard) which, seen in perspective, dominates the political process of Reconstitution, in which we have placed all our longings. For this reason, we erred at assessing the conditions and possibilities for resolving this contradiction. Since we did not carry out a proper analysis of its main aspect (the Theoretical Vanguard), we did not discover that within it there is a series of contradictions that must be developed. These contradictions can be summarized in the dialectic that must be developed between the Marxist-Leninist vanguard and those sectors of the theoretical vanguard that propose political conceptions, ideas and theses in conflict with it. The solution to this contradiction is the reconstitution of communism as the vanguard ideology of the proletariat. Only if Marxism-Leninism succeeds in hegemonizing the ideology and politics of the theoretical vanguard of the proletariat will it be able to conquer the sectors of the class that lead its struggles of resistance and its spontaneous movement (practical vanguard). It is, therefore, the theoretical and practical problems posed by the two-line struggle within the theoretical vanguard which should be the focus of our most immediate attention from now on, because the contradiction between the Marxist-Leninist vanguard and the Non-Marxist-Leninist theoretical vanguard is the main contradiction of the dialectical system in which the process of Reconstitution is currently situated. Before, we characterized the present moment from the point of view of our organization (deepening in the study of the communist ideology —and which we extend to all the vanguard detachments that claim to be Marxist-Leninist) and from the point of view of the proletariat in general (accumulation of vanguard forces). Well, now we can add too that from the point of view of the vanguard —or, if you will, of the communist movement— we are at a moment in which the implementation and development of the two-line struggle within the theoretical vanguard is crucial in order to bring Marxism-Leninism back to its hegemonic position.

The reconstitution of Marxism-Leninism to its place of ideological vanguard of the proletariat is by no means an exclusively theoretical problem. On the contrary, it can only be the result of that two-line struggle. It would therefore be counterproductive to separate the theoretical from the practical aspects in the current political moment. We must not be fooled by the vulgar, colloquial meaning of words. The fact that the current stage poses problems mainly related to theoretical questions of the revolution does not mean that there is no mass practice to help us in this task. In the same way, the word practice should not only be linked —as we have almost always done— with the activity among the masses of the practical, spontaneous movement; there is also a mass line to solve the problems of the theoretical vanguard, which is none other than the links that Marxism-Leninism must establish with the rest of the theoretical vanguard. Ultimately, it is a question of overcoming the vice (to which our mistakes had led us) of radically separating our theoretical activity from our practical activity, a vice of which we have already spoken; in short, it is a question of restoring the unity of the two aspects of the contradiction, which our analysis has defined as the main one, as a concrete and actual form of theoretical-practical unity. This unit entails redefining the main tasks and the character and purpose of the mass work to be carried out to accomplish them. In other words, what is now presented to us as the fundamental problem is to clarify politically and organizationally the essence and forms of the links, within the theoretical vanguard, between Marxism-Leninism and the rest of that vanguard, and the mass line necessary to elevate them to revolutionary positions.

We have already depicted the mechanism of the development of the main contradiction described above: it is a question of developing the two-line struggle and the organizational links with the circles of the theoretical vanguard in a successive manner in order to move forward, from those with more general and abstract approaches and with a longer reach from the point of view of the interests of the Proletarian Revolution, to those others whose concerns are closer to the problems related to the needs of the practical movement. In this case, when we speak of circles of the theoretical vanguard we are not referring to concrete organizations —although it is in this form in which we are going to find them in reality—, but to the degree of closeness that each set of theoretical problems has in relation to the needs of the ideological reconstitution of communism, being the Marxist-Leninist vanguard the point of reference around which those needs are nucleated and articulated. Thus, the original Marxist-Leninist nucleus will gradually conquer these circles, solving the theoretical problems they pose from the two-line struggle and incorporating them into the cause of Reconstitution from their mass line. This is the form that the theory-practice unit takes at the present time and given the nature of the main contradiction that now drives the process towards the Communist Party. Our practical work or our mass work should not therefore resemble typical union work, although the unions will be probably, at some point, one of the places to look for some of these vanguard circles. But this should not confuse us to the point of letting ourselves be carried away by the inertia of the union's own activity and losing sight of our role and our perspective, as it has been happening until now. Precisely, one of the prejudices that we must fight most vigorously in our future mass work is our trade union mentality. There is no doubt that the revisionist tradition in which we have been educated and in which most of us have been active for many years, practicing and absorbing utilitarian forms of work that taught us more to bow down to the march of the labor movement than to prepare ourselves to become its vanguard, has left a deep mark on our conception of politics and mass work, a conception that can be summed up as trade unionism, workerism, economism or any other concept that indicates political spontaneism. And we have carried this burden until here, thereby contributing to the shortcomings of our work. We must, therefore, implement the measures to combat this heritage and retake the Leninist spirit in the work of building cadres, in the perspective of creating the tribunes and leaders that the Proletarian Revolution needs.

But we cannot conclude this point, which refers to the analysis of the contradictions that directly concern the proletarian vanguard, without alluding, even if only briefly, to the relationship that exists between the system that immediately determines the most pressing tasks of the vanguard, the tasks of Reconstitution, and the system of contradictions that directly involve the masses, the one that governs the real, material march of the class struggle: the system composed of the capital-labor contradiction, the contradiction between imperialist countries-oppressed countries and the inter-imperialist contradictions. This system is currently characterized by the fact that the main contradiction is that between the imperialist countries and the oppressed countries, while the other two are attenuated, above all because the capital-labor dialectic does not go beyond the level of the economic class struggle, due to the hegemony that reformism holds in the workers' movement, on the one hand, and because, on the other, the system of international relations is configured in a unipolar way, is dominated by a single hegemonic power (which is why it is absolutely false to put the inter-imperialist contradiction in the foreground, since there are no other imperialist alliance centers or blocs that can compete with the US economic and military superpower, nor are we facing a period of preparation for a new world imperialist war —as a sector of the international communist movement erroneously defends— but of collusion between powers). On the other hand, the relationship between the world system of contradictions and the system of contradictions of the revolutionary working class is characterized by the fact that they develop in parallel, with little or no mutual contact, without ties that allow the influence of the latter on the former. This divorce is but the supreme expression of the prevailing split within the proletarian class between its vanguard and the masses. Only from the solution of the conglomerate of contradictions that make up the process of constitution of the working class into a revolutionary class can the antagonism between capital and labor rise to the revolutionary political level of the class struggle; and only in this way will this contradiction recover the leading role in the social process, and it will be around its axis that the other contradictions of our era will be developed and resolved. In this way also, with the return to the forefront of the capital-labor dialectic (the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat), there will be an opportunity to once again highlight the concrete form that best expresses and from which the general contradiction that drives the whole development of capitalism and capitalism itself as a mode of production can best be resolved: the one that becomes increasingly acute between the progressive social character of production and the private form of appropriation⁸.

The reconstitution of the proletarian ideology

One of the central problems in the reconstitution of the proletarian ideology is the construction of cadres and, first of all, the clarification of the political nature of the communist militant. To the extent that the main aspect of the main contradiction in the current phase of the Reconstitution process obliges us to focus our attention on the current state of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard, the definition of its individual components and the requirements they must meet as the bearers and defenders of the vanguard theory takes on the greatest importance. If once the Communist Party has been reconstituted the problem of the individual militant is relegated to the background, as it is subsumed in a higher entity such as the organic collectivity of the party (precisely because its existence presupposes that the problems we are facing here and now have already been solved and that the correct mechanism for the integration of the militant will be established), in the Reconstitution stage the formation of the vanguard member, the proletarian leader or the communist cadre, is crucial, as it represents the basic pillar of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard detachment. While this detachment does not yet constitute the qualitatively superior proletarian political organism, as a collective it is still largely a sum of wills, and therefore individual attitude and aptitude acquire the greatest importance. The transformation of the individual communist will into revolutionary consciousness is, then, one of the most important and pressing tasks for the strengthening of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard and for the success of its struggle to regain the ideological vanguard position of the proletariat.

In this sense, the elements inherited from the revisionist style of work that we still carry along, together with the trade unionist drift in our mass line, have forced us to recall the terms of Lenin's polemic with economists and Mensheviks about the nature of the member of the Communist Party. In 1902, in What is to be done, and in the face of the proposal made by the economists of presenting trade unionism as the main activity, Lenin argued that “We must train our Social-Democratic practical workers to become political leaders”⁹, and stressed that “our task is not to champion the degrading of the revolutionary to the level of an amateur, but to raise the amateurs to the level of revolutionaries.”¹⁰; the following year, at the Second Congress of the Russian Workers' Party, Lenin again confronted those who wanted to lower the political qualification of the revolutionary militants. This time against the Menshevik leader Martov, and talking about the first article of the Statute, which defined the membership of the party, he asked the assembly if they considered that any striker or charlatan could be considered members of the party. In a way, we now face a similar dilemma and some pressing questions too: What do we understand by vanguard militants when taking into account the current needs of the Reconstitution? The practical leaders? Or the cadres trained in all aspects, theoretical and practical, of the proletarian leadership? And how do we educate this vanguard? With the broad perspective of the historical process of emancipation of the proletariat, or in the immediacy of practical work? Do we educate the vanguard in the school of the strategist or in that of the leader of a strike?

Georg Lukács, prominent Hungarian communist, once said that for his generation Lenin had been a true revelation from the point of view of the revolutionary leader model. And it should come as no surprise, because Lenin is the first great revolutionary leader to adopt the position of the strategist in the political leadership of the proletarian class struggle. Indeed, since 1830, the revolutionary leader was the head of a narrow clandestine and conspiratorial circle and the barricade leader. Not even the most powerful and organized workers' party in Europe, the German Social Democratic Party, was able to oppose any alternative to this type of leadership outside the parliamentary tribune. Lenin, on the other hand, represents the leader of the masses in motion, the leader of the hundreds of thousands and millions of workers in action; he is the perfect depiction of the leader of the vast masses that the proletarian revolution sets in motion. Unlike the barricade leader, who can only direct a military action, who identifies himself with it and who makes the entire course of the struggle depend on that action alone, thereby reducing all the capacity, intensity and depth of the political movement to the extent that a few tactical maneuvers can confer, Lenin, on the other hand, applies to the leadership of the movement a strategic perspective, that is, the method of combining tactical actions according to the strategic objective, always subordinating the former to the latter and using absolutely all possible means, political and military, in relation to each phase of the movement. Lenin taught us that there can be no true method of class leadership if we do not combat the spontaneous tendency to see class struggle from the perspective of the tactical instrument we are using at any given time: the tendency to unionism or, in general, economism when we try to conquer the masses on the fronts of resistance and build the United Front; the tendency to parliamentarism when we open the front of class struggle in the bourgeois parliament; the tendency to militarism when we declare open the war against capital, etc.

If we can establish a parallel with the art of war, we can say that Lenin means, for the art of proletarian political leadership, the pinnacle of military history represented by the figure of the commander of the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861-1864), Ulysses S. Grant. Until the Napoleonic wars, war was dominated by the tactical element. Although, unlike Alexander, Napoleon did not personally intervene in the battle and remained in the rearguard, the Corsican was in a position to observe the battlefield and dominate the entire course of the operations. Thus, the commanders were directly involved in the battle, and tactical maneuvers were the main element in the way the war was conducted, so that it was almost always dependent on the outcome of a battle. But Grant transformed this concept of war by reversing the strategic-tactical relationship by giving the former the primary function. This way, Grant begins by including in the balance of military power those external factors that are the basis of a nation's way of life, beginning with its industrial power and its human resources; secondly, he emphasizes the logistics necessary for the nation's material potential to serve as a permanent support for a huge and powerful war machine. The battlefield is therefore the last point of the military command's attention. In fact, Grant was always in the back of the battlefield, not making physical contact with the front, and operated on the basis of reports that kept him abreast of the state of all fronts. The ongoing battle is subordinated to the overall military plan: the war no longer depends on a single battle, but on a whole set of operations aimed at achieving a single strategic objective. The new concept of war corresponded to the conditions of the new era of industrial capitalism, whose purest and most advanced expression was taking place, and not by chance, precisely on the same ground as the most advanced form of military art management.

Translating the military terms into those of Lenin's debate with the Mensheviks, it is a question of adopting the “tactics-as-plan” versus the “tactics-as-process” that they defended. Thus, we conclude that the Bolshevik leader represents a higher stage of development, similar to that achieved by Grant in the art of war, in the methods of political leadership of the class struggle of the proletariat. And this must be the model that will inspire us in our approach to the questions of communist formation and the elevation of our militants to the level of the revolutionary, in the task of building the future leading cadres of the proletariat. We must therefore educate strategists, not military barricade chiefs, nor trade unionists, strike organizers or agitators (the development of the movement will already ensure that the masses themselves will create, when necessary, chiefs of this type); we must rise in our formation to the height of that qualitative leap that historically put strategy before tactics in military art, revolution before strike in the field of the class struggle of the proletariat, and Party before Union (or the workers party of an old type) in the field of organization.

It is in this sense that Lenin insisted on his What is to be done that the good revolutionary leader is not the "trade union secretary"¹¹, who guides the economic struggle of the workers, since it is not only a question of the capital-labor contradiction. On the contrary, the worker can only be endowed with class political consciousness, Lenin said, from the sphere of “relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes”¹², and he added: “if [the revolutionary] really believes it necessary to develop comprehensively the political consciousness of the proletariat, he must “go among all classes of the population””¹³. The vanguard cadre, then, must be raised to a higher perspective that allows him to observe and study from above the whole scenario of the class struggle, and to combat any tendency that pushes towards the perspective of the movement for the sake of movement, the perspective from below that prevents a complete contemplation of all the events related to the struggle between the classes. However, such an elevation requires a certain intellectual stature, a mental attitude that must be acquired in some way, because it is not innate, it is not spontaneous; it requires preparation, training, instruction that will enable the communist cadre to educate and lead the masses in revolutionary terms.

In recent times, the bourgeoisie has made it clear that it is very much aware of the importance of the qualification of the cadres for the direction of social development. There is no doubt that, in this qualification, cultural formation and instruction in knowledge play a great role, and all the more so for the proletariat, since its conscience is built —as we have already said— on science. Without a doubt, the regulations promulgated by the previous PP government, the Ley Orgánica de Universidades (Organic Law of Universities (LOU)), a law that restricts the access of the masses to higher education, and the Ley Orgánica de Calidad de la Educación (Organic Law for the Quality of Teaching (LOCE)), which distances them from the possibility of receiving an integral cultural formation, promoting the premature —and, if possible, purely technical and practical— specialization of students, are aimed precisely at hindering the relationship of the proletariat with culture, and thus hindering the development of its consciousness as a class and the construction of its political cadres. With these laws¹⁴, the bourgeoisie is telling us that it prefers the future leaders of the proletariat to be trained in the trade union and the practical mass movement; the bourgeoisie also prefers the university to not have any influence whatsoever on this training; the bourgeoisie is telling us to form agitators rather than propagandists, to cultivate practical and not theoretical leaders, to train tacticians, not strategists; in short, the bourgeoisie is inducing the working class to educate its leaders in the solution of its immediate problems and not in the understanding of the global problems of social transformation and the direction of that transformation, in the elevation towards the revolutionary perspective, to the point of view of communism, that point of view which Marx and Engels already demanded it to express "the interests of the movement as a whole"¹⁵. The offensive of the bourgeoisie against the participation of the masses in culture coincides precisely with a time when the most advanced detachments of the proletariat are beginning to rethink the problems related to the role of science in the formation of class consciousness and in the construction of its ruling cadres from a broad and integral, non-economist perspective, and the problems related to the link between culture and the ideological reconstitution of communism. This may be a coincidence, but unfortunately it coincides with a situation of withdrawal and weakening of the proletariat and a strong bourgeoisie. What is clear, at least to the bourgeoisie —and it must begin to be clear to us as well— is the importance to the class struggle in general of the question of what class possesses the knowledge and the educational levers necessary to spread it, and to whom it is willing to do so; what is clear, too, is that this is a crucial class battle, of strategic importance, the outcome of which will largely determine the future long-term success of the Proletarian Revolution.

Not only do we draw lessons from the present-day class struggle that show us the importance of the preparation of cadres as a condition for giving every future mass movement a revolutionary character; history also points us in the same direction. Without going any further, some conclusions derived from our analysis of the October Revolution show us how decisive it can be that the masses learn, already during capitalism, as much as possible about the management and direction of the productive forces as a requirement of class independence and as a first step for their learning in the future management and direction of the entire social economy. We concluded that this teaching should in due course be taken into account in our trade union policy in the form of concrete demands that make this objective possible. Well, why not apply this lesson to the whole problem of the political leadership of the working class, both before and after the seizure of power? Is it not true that there is some learning required to be a leader? Is it not true that the leadership of the Party, the leadership of the masses by the Party and, subsequently, the leadership of the society as a whole require, at each of these stages, the mastery of certain leadership techniques and requires knowledge that cannot be acquired spontaneously, but only through learning, study and experience?

The very idea of preparation, of learning, related to the primordial task of the construction of cadres as a means of strengthening the Marxist-Leninist vanguard and its position in the two-line struggle within the theoretical vanguard, informs us that the nature of the starting point on which we must situate ourselves is essentially theoretical. This is also confirmed by the objective we have set ourselves when defining the qualities of the communist cadre following the model that Lenin represents: the qualities of the strategist. But how should we understand this? Of course, in the way of moving away from practical learning, from the teachings of street level struggles. We must combat any proposal or tendency that favors the cultivation of practice over theory, that brings with it the political education in the school of practice, organization and daily work (practicalism) over education in the school of theoretical study and the intellectual elevation of the militant; we must combat any theoretical or practical attitude that leads to the underestimation of the role of theory in the formation of communist cadres and that implies the underestimation of any effort, individual or collective, to raise the cultural and ideological level of the militants of the vanguard. But we must also combat the idea of theoretical training in the purely formal sense, which tells us that the instruction of communists consists of an indiscriminate aggregation of data and knowledge. Quite on the contrary, it is a question of forming in and from the perspective of the proletarian ideology, in and from Marxism-Leninism, but not understood as political philosophy, but as a conception of the world. The aim is for communists to end up assuming Marxism-Leninism as Weltanschauung (worldview), which is the true way of conceiving proletarian ideology, superior to the traditional —we could even label as spontaneous— way of apprehending it that was dominant during most of the First Revolutionary Cycle: communism understood almost exclusively as a political theory. This implies a reductionist practice of the whole rich ideological complex of Marxism-Leninism and leads to a unilateral conception of it. Precisely and in all probability, one of the root causes of the defeat of the proletariat in this cycle is to be found in this ideological deficit. At least this works as an explanation to the extent that some of the problems stemmed from the ideological inability to provide political responses in line with the new historical situations presented by the process of social transformation.

The predominance of the narrow conception of Marxism as a political philosophy was a general trend throughout the October Cycle within the international communist movement. The fundamental cause was that the communist parties were always founded on a programmatic basis and under external tutelage (the Communist International). Even many of the ideological developments of the main party of that movement, the Bolshevik party —which was formed and developed by virtue of the solution of deep-seated theoretical debates— take place, especially after Lenin's death —but also, in part, under his leadership— on the basis of conjunctural problems, problems which, moreover, were often resolved in an unsatisfactory way from the point of view of the relationship between overcoming those particular political situations and the long-term demands of the movement towards Communism.

Examples of these problems, which were insufficiently solved and which we are only pointing out here in this last sense, are: the question of state capitalism —the state-owned economy— in the transitional society, which was left in the air at the 10th Congress of the Bolshevik party and which, by the 15th Congress, had already disappeared as a problem almost magically, as state capitalism was identified with socialism or, if preferred, statization with socialization of the means of production; the unresolved debate on how to conduct the transformation of social relations in the Russian countryside from 1924 onwards (one of Lenin's last essays, On Cooperation, was considered as the Leninist plan for collectivizing the countryside, when, on the one hand, it was only a reflection text intended for debate and not a proposal for a resolution, and, on the other hand, it did not address all aspects of the problem —such as, for example, the class struggle in the countryside); the insufficient development of the theory of Socialism in one country in response to the needs of the progress of the World Proletarian Revolution since the second half of the 1920s, which fed a marked tendency to nationalism (social-chauvinism) in the Soviet Communist Party and its deviation into the theory of the productive forces; the renunciation of the political independence of communism for the sake of an alliance at any price against fascism with social democracy and liberalism (a tactic endorsed by the 7th Congress of the Komintern); the subordination of science to the interests of politics to the point of manipulating the results of the former and distorting the essence of Marxism (the Lysenko case, in Biology, the Kozyrev case, in Astrophysics), etc. All these debates refer to the Soviet case and, although they never end in breaking the ties with the needs of theoretical foundation that all development requires as a premise, there is a marked tendency towards the predominance of the conjunctural, towards the urge to provide a solution dependent on the immediate needs of the political line or the current state of affairs.

If this happened in the vanguard organization of the international communist movement, much more accentuated was the tendency towards political reductionism of Marxist analysis in the sister parties, where on many occasions they simply translated the political results of the debates that had taken place within the Soviet Communist Party.

In Spain, on the other hand, these peculiarities common to the general movement are joined by other particular ones due to the very conditions of the socio-economic and political evolution of the country, and, in particular, to the scarce influence that Marxism always had in the workers' movement. First, because of the hegemony of anarchism during the IWA era; then, when Marxist-inspired socialism ended up hegemonizing the workers' movement in Europe (although almost always in a more formal rather than real way), because Spain was left out of this process. Indeed, when in the mid-19th century Julián Sanz del Río (an intellectual with some reputation among the progressive sectors that had influence in the incipient workers' movement) visited Germany, a nation with a vibrant philosophical tradition, with the intention of seeking a philosophy that could frame the political projects of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, he found that two schools were in fashion among the intellectual elites: socialism (especially Hess, Weitling and the school of true socialism) and krausism. He chose this last line of thought and introduced it in Spain, later providing the theoretical basis for the political discourse of some sectors of opposition to the system of Restoration and liberal reformism of the late nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century. At the time when Sanz del Río was pensioned by the Spanish government in Germany, neither Marxism had yet set in as an alternative current of socialism, nor in the Spanish state was the development of the proletariat sufficiently important for the advanced intelligentsia to be sensitive to its theoretical needs. In Spain, the bourgeois revolution had not yet been consummated, and the democratic party had not even entered the scene (all of this happened before the Glorious Revolution of 1868). However, since the Pyrenean border remained impermeable to the penetration of any influence of French socialism, a good opportunity was missed to create an early school of socialist thought in Spain that would have facilitated the creation of cultural conditions for the subsequent reception of Marxism. On the contrary, humanistic and personalistic thinking flourished, which placed all hope of renewal in the education of the individual. When the first workers' party and trade union were created in Spain (in 1879 and 1888, respectively), Marxism was not seriously present in the intellectual environment of the time. The influence of reformism and bourgeois ideology was, therefore, too important in the founding of these organs of the already solid workers' movement in Spain. In fact, Marxism was never the only source of inspiration for the politics of the PSOE (Guesde influences more than Marx in the theoretical and political elaboration of the party in its early stages), and when its left wing splits to form the PCE, it does so more by virtue of the events that had provoked in the international scene an event like the October Revolution, than as a result of an internal process of political and ideological separation. Subsequently, only during the historical junctures of the rise of the class struggle of the proletariat did Marxism recover its leading role in the Spanish political proscenium: during the Second Republic and in Late Francoism, Marxism was placed as a first-line reference for the vanguard sectors of society and for the workers' movement; however, on both occasions it was presented in its biased aspect of political thought: it fed the programs of countless groups and parties, but its political lines were not based on a settled philosophical tradition that would have familiarized intellectuals and generations of workers leaders with the Marxist worldview. This deficiency had serious consequences when in the Transition the rupturist option (already thought the petty-bourgeois way) was defeated, and with the parliamentary monarchy the whole of this revolutionary political movement gradually disappeared, after which there was absolutely nothing left of the proletarian discourse.

In short, in the contemporary history of Spain, Marxism has never taken shape as a school of thought, and its political history has left little testimony. The fact that we cannot mention any Kautsky, Labriola or Plekhanov here speaks volumes for itself about the role that Marx's ideas may have played in the orientation of the Spanish proletariat in its class struggle, poor in the political arena and void in the theoretical one. With this we do not mean to imply that one of the current tasks has to be to implant Marxism as a philosophical school in Spain. Not at all. Perhaps in the prelude to the first great wave of the World Proletarian Revolution there was certain autonomy between theoretical and political struggle. The almost exclusive monopoly of knowledge in the hands of the intelligentsia allowed certain individuals to resolve the more theoretical fundamental questions, while the party dealt with agitation and propaganda. But from the moment the new Leninist party of a new type has become the starting point for the start of the next revolutionary wave, this division of labor is out of place. Now, it is with the Communist Party as the center that the proletariat wages class struggle on the three levels that Engels described: economic, political and theoretical. It no longer makes sense to speak of Marxism as philosophy and of Marxism as a political line or program in a separate way. If we distinguished it that way in our small historical assessment of the validity of Marxism in the international workers' movement during the First Revolutionary Cycle, it was because, in addition to constituting a fact, it allowed us to explain the reasons for the political reductionism to which Marx's thought was submitted in a generalized manner in the world and even more in Spain. But the new cycle of the Proletarian Revolution presupposes that the bourgeois intellectuality-worker movement dichotomy that characterized the October Cycle has been overcome and, therefore, also the tendency towards the autonomy of the leadership of the struggle in the different spheres of social confrontation. On the contrary, they will all be articulated through the Party. However, this brings with it the challenge of assuming Marxism as a totality, as a worldview, as a Weltanschauung. The preservation of the existing links and interrelationships between the different levels of the class struggle will allow for greater guarantees in the ideological cohesion between the theoretical foundations and the political resolutions, and a deeper critical vision that will at all times allow the adaptation of the political line to the needs of the real development of society, without jeopardizing the revolutionary future for the political needs of the moment, however pressing these may seem to us.

The obligation currently imposed on us by the tasks related to the Proletarian Revolution to assume Marxism-Leninism as a whole, as a worldview, does not mean that politics has ceased to be the decisive terrain of the class struggle in general; nor that the Reconstitution of the Communist Party has ceased to be the most pressing political task for the conscious proletariat, in particular. On the contrary, politics remains the concentrated expression of the class struggle and the point that allows the transition from social criticism to social practice, the place of settlement therefore necessary for the work of transformation of the proletariat. That politics is the main element and the struggle for political power is truly important is one thing, but it is quite another to consider that it is in political terms that all forms of the class struggle are resolved or that it is the point of view of the current political needs which dominates the analyses of the problems posed by the class struggle. The dominance of the politics for politics' sake viewpoint has shown that it generates a tendency towards pragmatism and tacticism which is too dangerous. The way to overcome it is to adopt the global point of view that allows us to frame each moment in the process in which it is included, always keeping in mind the perspective of the final objective; and this point of view can only be brought to us by Marxism-Leninism as cosmology.

Bildung und Wissenschaft: the proletarian university

The construction of good leading cadres and the assumption, on their part, of Marxism-Leninism as a worldview are two of the essential basic pillars for the task of reconstituting communist ideology. But how do we train this kind of communist militant? What tools do we need to equip ourselves for this?

Since it is a question of education, of formation, the first thing we need is instruction (Bildung), but instruction in science (Wissenschaft). The needs of the struggle of Marxism to regain its theoretical vanguard position are at the moment different from those of other historical moments, such as, for example, the Russia of the debates around the Second Congress of the RSDRP. At that time, as Lenin would say, the link in the chain which communists had to hold on to was the foundation of a revolutionary newspaper for the whole of Russia. Today, for us, this link is different, or rather, it corresponds to the needs of a different, earlier stage of the process. In Russia in 1903, the work of struggle and separation from other political currents, although not consummated, had long since been initiated by revolutionary Marxism, and the mood of the masses, in the midst of an upward movement since 1895 —a movement that would culminate in the 1905 revolution— was different, while we are still at the beginning of that struggle, barely restored from the stun caused by the last defeat of the international proletariat. And what could we say about the current mood of the masses! If by 1903 the Russian Marxist revolutionaries were to cover the last part of their struggle to unmask the opportunist political currents of the time, to immediately move on to the conquest of the most conscious elements of the proletarian masses (hence the importance of the central press media), we must go back even further, when the Russian Marxists —to continue the parallelism with the Russian experience— led by Plekhanov, began the struggle against the populists (anarchists) at least from 1883. Our first and foremost task nowadays is similar. We must also combat political opportunism, which offers the masses false revolutionary ways and which only offers them a reformist way out. But since the state of liquidation of the Marxist consciousness is severe —something our Russian counterparts did not go through— we must also prepare for this combat. For this reason, the link in the chain that we have to hold on to is different; it does not respond to tasks whose nature would correspond to those that a newspaper or political propaganda in general can fulfill, but with tasks of a more elementary nature: to form Marxist-Leninist cadres, educating them in theory and in the two-line struggle against opportunism.

Instruction and science are the key elements that will enable us to create good foundations and good conditions for the construction of communist cadres. But we must understand these words in a particular way. That is why we have used the corresponding words in German in order to designate them, because in this language they have semantic connotations that they acquired, especially in a certain historical period, that modify the meaning of these words in the sense that we wish to underline. When, after the liquidation of the Holy Empire by Napoleon, a reforming fever, a mixture of Enlightenment and resentful nationalism, took hold in Germany, the emerging sectors of the German society belonging to the new middle classes, linked more to the liberal professions than to industry, tried to take over, with the permission of the aristocracy, the changes needed to bring Germany up to the level of the needs of the modern world that had developed since the French Revolution (which even the Restoration that followed Napoleon's defeat had failed to tackle); then the idea of the need for Germany's spiritual and moral renewal and political reform appeared, to be led by a new cultural elite of leaders trained to govern the country: the men of Bildung. Bildung means instruction, education; but unlike the term Erziehung, which denotes a passive assimilation of knowledge, the word Bildung indicates self-formation, direction of oneself in the cultivation of knowledge, search for knowledge, cultural self-development. This active element reveals a conscious predetermination when it comes to initiating an educational task, that is to say, the awareness that this task is only a means to reach a predetermined end, which is fundamental when it comes to defining the character of the ideological and cultural formation of the communist cadre, because educating in terms of Bildung implies the necessary critical training that will allow its permanent self-education. The meaning of the word Bildung therefore presents us with a new challenge: the one of teaching how to learn. If, moreover, the main content of this learning corresponds to the proletarian worldview, then we will be laying the foundation for building true revolutionary consciousnesses.

For the middle-class German intellectual elite of the early 19th century, education understood as Bildung implied an idea of functionality: a wise cultural self-direction enabled political leadership (as opposed to the pretensions based on the birth and social position of the tradition of the time); the same way, we can say that the intellectual formation of the proletarian leader should not be understood in terms of academic scholarship, of the search for knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but in terms of knowledge of the world as a condition for its transformation. To put it in a more immediate way, related to practical politics, and to Lenin's words, the Bildung instruction of the communist militants will enable them to be "able to guide all the manifestations of this all-round struggle, [and] able at the right time to “dictate a positive program of action'"¹⁶ on each of the fronts of the class struggle on which they are entrusted with revolutionary tasks. The intellectual autonomy that will give the communist cadre the ability to act for himself and to meet the new challenges posed by the struggle of the masses, both theoretically and practically, especially in the task of creatively applying and translating the revolutionary political line on each of these fronts, will enable him to act as the vanguard and, through it, will enable the Party to act as the effective leadership of the mass movement (something to be taken into account and of vital importance when dealing with the third phase of the Reconstitution: the work among the masses to conquer the practical vanguard). The intellectual autonomy that comes along with the idea of Bildung should not be understood in the petty-bourgeois sense of freedom of criticism, but in that of acquired critical capacity as a sine qua non condition for exercising conscious vanguard activity. Similarly, the idea of Bildung, while emphasizing individual initiative and activity in formation, does not seek to dispense with —and in our case should not dispense with— collective learning and practical experience. What it seeks to emphasize is the idea of permanent formation, even (or, rather, above all) outside the framework of organizational activity, the idea of continuing formation by other means, by one's own means, the idea of a permanent reflection on the world in the light of Marxism and on Marxism in the light of that world, to imbue us with a critical spirit and a desire to learn in order to understand, to imbue us with the idea that the permanent movement of reality demands from us a constant learning and a permanent individual intellectual effort; it demands from us, in short, to practice the Bildung.

The relationship between the individual and the collective aspects of learning has been raised by us quite unilaterally so far. In considering the collective assumption of the learning materials as the true form of assimilation, we have come to understand that it is also the only one, which is false. Naturally, from the point of view of the debate, synthesis and elaboration of day-to-day politics, the collective framework of intellectual activity is the main one; it is also the case when it comes to assimilating in the best and most complete way possible concrete theoretical questions and themes directly related to Marxist thought or to the needs of its politics. But in this field, we are talking about what the organization is dealing with from the point of view of the most immediate or peremptory theoretical or political needs, whether it be to provide militants with the theoretical-conceptual elements essential for the knowledge of Marxism-Leninism or its practical application. However, a fundamental question remains forgotten, or at least remains to be resolved: the one concerning the fact that the mental assimilation of the Marxist-Leninist worldview is a prolonged process of intellectual sedimentation, and in addition it is an individual process in the first instance. The collective formative context is important as the most adequate uterus of gestation of the individual Marxist as an intellectual guide and as an environment from which to link the theoretical formation of the individual with the practical needs of the real movement of class struggle (needs that are the real material basis of the problems with a theoretical solution in which the communist must participate as an intellectual individuality); but this cannot replace —and we have partially made this mistake— the originality of the individual experience in the study of Marxism-Leninism, or in the particular assimilation of the proletarian worldview. In general, we have not been able to make our comrades aware of the importance of their personal experience as students of the communist doctrine. In fact, the stage of individual preparation of the study topics prior to the formation meetings (collective stage) has been underestimated and even suppressed in many cases. We have as a result turned study into a formality and our method of study, in fact, into a passive method of education (Erziehung) in which the generality of the comrades has been limited to listening and trying to understand the ideas and comments of others who were more informed previously. In such a situation, we have unconsciously and involuntarily reproduced the scheme that we precisely wanted to overcome with the Formation Program: the separation between the communist militant and the communist ideology in general, and, in particular, the separation between those who knew something of Marxism-Leninism and those who knew nothing (with all the repercussions that this may have on the organization from the point of view of reproducing the bourgeois division of manual and intellectual work).

The problem of an active attitude towards formation (Bildung) is therefore of the utmost importance from now on. And this attitude can only come from the awareness of the fact that the individual education is as important as the collective one. In fact, they are complementary. Firstly, because the assimilation of Marxism-Leninism as Weltanschauung cannot be reduced to learning some philosophical or political theses. Heraclitus' remark is entirely relevant to us here: to know one thing it is not enough to have learned it¹⁷; that is, learning does not mean knowing. Learning a series of principles, ideological or political theses, or reading a few important Marxist books does not mean that Marxism has been assimilated as a worldview. To this end it is necessary to study in the full meaning of the word, reflecting and gathering with a critical sense our knowledge to the point of imbuing ourselves with the spirit of ideology, of becoming familiar with its particular approach to reality. Moreover, it is important not to limit the interest of our formation to the Marxist-Leninist political-philosophical doctrine itself, but to extend it to all facets of reality and science (Wissenschaft) by virtue of the integrating vocation and the global point of view that Marxism-Leninism projects on the world. The individual effort to amalgamate all these cognitive contents in a homogeneous and unique block, in a worldview, from a Marxist critical perspective, will greatly contribute to the forging of minds carrying the proletarian cosmology. The results of this individual effort can and must be contrasted collectively —although not from a rigorous agenda, but insofar as practical needs make it necessary to offer these results according to concrete problems— so that these individual proletarian minds gradually shape a collective mind —that beloved collective intellectual— as a true support and propagator of this new conception of the world.

But while this process accompanies the Reconstitution process in parallel, from the point of view of our immediate needs as an ideological vanguard detachment, we must find a new balance between the individual and collective aspects in the formation of the communist militant. In this sense, it is important to note that sharing the same worldview does not mean professing a single thought. As limited individuals, the proletarian worldview can only be partially represented in the consciousness of communists. This limitation requires a certain complementarity of the different degrees and modes of individual assumption of Marxism-Leninism. This will be the case, at least, until we complete the process of Reconstitution. But what will endure —even within the Communist Party— will be the importance of this difference and unequal individual assumption of the proletarian worldview from the perspective of the theoretical development of communism. It is certainly in the long term that the individual contribution to the ideological development of the proletariat acquires its true significance. If in the immediate it is the collective context that is decisive for the resolution of the theoretical and practical problems of the movement from the application of the unity-criticism-unity scheme, in the long run it is the novel (individual) contribution to a new problem which allows this ideological-political development in qualitative terms, when precisely the conceptual premises from which we operated do not allow us to correctly confront these new problems and it is necessary to break with them, revolutionize them, raise in all its dimension the central element of that dialectic of the political-ideological development of communism: the criticism, the struggle. And the internal capacity of the political organism to resort to novel contributions in order to confront what is new comes precisely from the differentiation and richness of nuances, from the different versions of thought in which the same conception of the world has been assimilated individually. This diversity, so to speak, fulfills the function that the genetic variability of species in nature fulfills: to ensure their adaptation and evolution. The contribution of partial and innovative individual elements in the solution of the practical problems of the revolution and their collective assimilation into the logic of class ideological discourse is the way in which the Communist Party develops from the perspective of the contradiction between individuality and collectivity in the intellectual sphere. But, on the other hand, in this field, the individual can never replace the collective as the depository of the ideological totality, of the whole cosmological horizon of the proletariat's conception of the world; individuality serves the needs of permanent ideological development and the constant vocation of vanguard theory of Marxism-Leninism, but individuality cannot replace the vanguard organization or the Communist Party as the collective conscious repository of the Weltanschauung of the proletarian class, as an intellectual environment where the fragments of the class consciousness of the world are patiently welded together at the same rate as it develops. This is why some political theses defended by certain sectors of the communist movement seem to us to be completely wrong, since they appear as unilateral and dogmatic to us. Theses such as the theory of jefatura (leadership), defended by some Maoist organizations, completely break the dialectical unity between the individual and the collective on the question of the theoretical development of proletarian ideology, ending by allowing the boss to supplant the Party, and by anointing the individual conscience with the monopoly and privilege of theoretical creativity, without any reference to the collective and above the Party. When, in addition, this individual consciousness is personalized, that is to say, it is considered that the creative intellectual individuality is always the same and consequently the only and true bearer of the proletarian worldview, we obtain the complementary theory of the pensamiento guía (guiding thought). Both theses, therefore, must be denounced as idealistic and individualistic, because they impede the understanding of the true role played by the individual in the process of development of proletarian thought and his correct relationship with the collective in this matter (not to mention the harmful reflection of the rigid division of labor in bourgeois society that it provokes within the vanguard organization), and because after all they are the sons of an era, that of the First Revolutionary Cycle, where the conception of Marxism as a political philosophy was prevalent and the need to train all communists in the proletarian world outlook was never raised (except for the short period of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and we are being condescending with its declarations of intent and not too severe with the prospect, at least naïve, of extending the proletarian conception of the world among the masses by means of recipe books of quotations such as the Red Book.) Not even this was raised as a problem to be solved with the appropriate political means.

Marxism-Leninism as Weltanschauung implies a unitary cosmology, a vision of the world as an integrated whole, as organon. The multidisciplinary formation of the Marxist militant pursues the intellectual representation of this worldview, its comprehension and its integration in his practical activity. The Weltanschauung thus conceived demands a Wissenschaft, a science; but not a science understood as a novel discipline of its own, or as a particular experimental practice, but as the result of universal knowledge, as assimilation and systematized synthesis of the progress of the sciences and their critical integration into the Marxist-Leninist gnoseological framework. The enlightened idea of Wissenschaft appeared as a negation of the humanistic-literary domain in the contents of the dominant cultural formation (based on classical, Greek and Latin language and literature) that in Europe dated back to the Renaissance, and as opposed to any superstition, esotericism or spontaneity in the process of knowledge. This can only be the result of science, and it is in its spirit and in the knowledge of the regulatory laws of the universe that it reveals to us where the source of our instruction must reside. The Wissenschaft thus understood becomes then the object of the Bildung (that is to say, to be educated in science), the general and permanent framework of its development and of its activity, under the critical guidance of Marxism-Leninism. The unity of both —Bildung und Wissenschaft— will express the continuous effort to assimilate the progress of science to the proletarian Weltanschauung and to permanently update Marxism-Leninism as a vanguard theory. This unity will constitute the main foundation to provide the adequate context for the attainment of that fundamental objective which is the construction of communist cadres: the workers' university. This idea of a workers' university should not be interpreted in the organizational-institutional sense, but rather as the generic vision that would encompass the common background of the present period’s main political tasks.

The idea of a workers' university corresponds to a common historical need for cultural self-management of the proletariat in a new pre-revolutionary era and on a new level. The same way that, in the preliminaries of the October Cycle, the consequences of the impossibility of access to education for the great masses tried to be alleviated by mitigating illiteracy and imparting notions of general culture to the rank and file of the trade union or workers' party in the so-called People's Houses, at the present time, the growing impossibility of having access to a high level of education for the masses and their most educated elements, in general, and the impossibility of obtaining, in particular, an autonomous conception of the world, independent of the bourgeoisie, within the educational system in force, oblige the conscious proletariat to equip itself with the necessary instruments to elevate itself intellectually to the point demanded by the degree of civilization attained by social development. If during the First Revolutionary Cycle the People's Houses corresponded to a situation in which it was necessary to bring the masses culturally closer to the activity of their vanguard, because while the vanguard was educated, the masses were semi-literate, in the face of the next revolutionary cycle the need for the workers' university is an exponent of an inverse situation, where relatively speaking, the masses are very educated and the vanguard, on the other hand, is not up to the demands of the leadership in building a new society, nor of the political leadership of the masses, nor even of the leadership of their revolutionary party. If in the October Cycle the great problem of the revolution, from the point of view of culture, was the participation of the masses in the work of building the new, precisely their participation in the process of their emancipation —which placed a strong question mark over the nature of the revolutionary process as a process of self-emancipation of the proletariat—, at present the proletarian class struggle and the needs imposed by the increase in the technical composition of capital have forced the bourgeoisie to train the children of the working class up to high levels of education (generalization of secondary education), but they are prevented from gaining access to higher education as leading cadres. This is what the proletariat must supply in a self-sufficient and independent way in the face of the future revolutionary cycle, just as at the time of the preparation for the first revolutionary assault it taught itself to read. This will certainly result in a better correspondence between the cultural preparation of the vanguard and that of the masses of the class, and in a correspondence at a higher level, which will in turn give greater future possibilities for the proletariat to provide the revolution with the autonomy it will need as a process of self-emancipation.

Building the vanguard

To build cadres is not the same as to build the vanguard, the same way as to build the vanguard is not the same as to build the Party (or, in our case, to reconstitute it). We must prepare the communist militant as a revolutionary leader, training him in as many fields of knowledge as possible and equipping him with the proletarian worldview, as well as making him a good propagandist of the proletarian political line and the principles that inspire it. This must be our main activity as an organization that pursues the development of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard. But while necessary, this is not enough. As a vanguard detachment and therefore as a nuclear reference point of the proletarian vanguard, the Marxist-Leninist organization must assume the responsibility of that development in the direction of Reconstitution, and must always be vigilant not to deviate from this path, anticipating its present and long-term needs, always trying to ensure that they are covered or to prepare the conditions for them to be satisfied. However, the capacity and political training of the vanguard organization, both from the individual and the collective point of view, are not sufficient ingredients —although they are the necessary basis to give substance to the process of building that (theoretical) vanguard capable of winning over the conscious sectors of the mass movement (practical vanguard) in the future as a step prior to the Reconstitution of the Communist Party. To speak of building the vanguard we cannot neglect the treatment of the secondary aspect of what we have defined as the current main contradiction of the Reconstitution process: the link that unites its main side, the Marxist-Leninist vanguard, with the rest of the theoretical vanguard: the mass line that it must apply to establish the system of organizational and political relationships with it from which to undertake a dialectical process (unity and struggle) that allows to solve this contradiction. Such a process will be the process of building the vanguard itself. That is to say, a process of construction where the result is a vanguard situated at a level higher than its individual form of construction as cadres or sum of cadres, but still at a lower level than the superior, social form, the form capable of expressing the interests and movement of the class as a whole: the Party.

But the process of building the Marxist-Leninist theoretical vanguard is only the formal aspect through which the solution of the present main contradiction is presented; its content is manifested as the process of ideological reconstitution of communism or, if you prefer, as the Marxist-Leninist struggle for the reconquest of the ideological vanguard position of the proletariat, which are two different ways of expressing the same necessary phenomenon. There is no true construction of the vanguard without the interrelationship of Marxism-Leninism with the rest of the theoretical currents that influence the proletariat, without the two-line struggle between them and without the process of transformation by virtue of which Marxism-Leninism phagocytes these currents, that is, it destroys them by assimilating them, it overcomes them by including them. In German, there is a verb that perfectly expresses the meaning we want to give to this action: aufheben, which means to elevate, suppress and preserve at the same time. The contradictions between Marxism-Leninism and the other theoretical currents will then be resolved successively as a synthesis (Aufhebung, or, to put it in Marxist language, negation of the negation) in which Marxism-Leninism will be enriched by elevating itself, at the same time as it suppresses these currents by defeating them politically and preserving what they have been able to contribute to the ideological reconstitution of communism. In doing so, Marxism-Leninism shapes up as a theoretical-political discourse (ideological reconstitution) and is constructed as a vanguard movement. This is the essence of the struggle for hegemony among the ideologically advanced sectors of the proletariat. It is in the unfolding of this process that Marxism-Leninism takes shape and grows in all its facets (theoretical, political and organizational) as an ideological vanguard, according to the practical needs of the vanguard movement itself, practical needs which, by the way, are nothing but the theoretical needs of the proletariat as a revolutionary movement. It is through the practical solution of the problems that the two-line struggle imposes on Marxism-Leninism within the theoretical vanguard of the proletariat that it will conquer the position of a qualified interlocutor with its practical vanguard; and it is by conquering the greatest of the advanced sectors influenced by that theoretical vanguard that Marxism-Leninism will create the organizational conditions to undertake the future conquest of that practical vanguard on each and every one of the fronts that it can open in its struggle of resistance against capital. In short, ideological reconstitution and construction of the vanguard are inseparable questions from the point of view of Marxism-Leninism: both are inextricably linked in a process in which they feed each other.

Similarly, the idea of ideological reconstitution cannot be understood differently from that of the ideological hegemony of Marxism-Leninism within the vanguard. The ideological reconstitution is not an exclusively theoretical process, as it does not aim to solve abstract or academically posed problems according to the supposed needs of Marxist-Leninist theory as a self-enclosed theoretical system. Not at all. The ideological reconstitution of Marxism-Leninism can only be carried out in relation to the theoretical and political solution of concrete problems, the problems that the march of the workers' movement as a revolutionary movement puts on the agenda, beginning with the problems that concern the conscious leadership of that movement, and, first of all, those related to the class nature of that leading consciousness. And those solutions cannot be ratified and assumed as solutions in accordance with the requirements demanded by the revolutionary vanguard if they are not confronted with other solutions to the same problems presented by other currents of thought, and if in that confrontation, in that struggle, the Marxist-Leninist responses do not come out victorious, they are not the only valid and satisfactory responses for the majority of the theoretical vanguard. The incorporation of these successive responses into the theoretical and political discourse, the ideological separation that they will produce with respect to the bourgeois ideological influence and the displacement of these other alternative political currents will simultaneously bring the hegemony and the ideological reconstitution of Marxism-Leninism.

The ideological reconstitution must be understood as a process, and as a living process above all. In fact, in the first place, its nature is more political than purely theoretical. Indeed, when the Marxist-Leninist theoretical-political discourse is organized according to the concrete problems that the class movement presents to the revolutionary vanguard, its discursive construction can only be presented as a political line, in response to the needs of practical action as its first condition; although the universalist vocation of Marxism-Leninism as Weltanschauung will later promote the articulation of all these discursive elements within its unitary worldview. The ideological reconstitution of communism then does not consist of the construction of any theoretical system —although, in the long run, the development of Marxism-Leninism as a theory does crystallize into a system—; it is expressed in a real, living way, as the direction of the practical movement of the (theoretical) vanguard along the path of Reconstitution and the Proletarian Revolution. It is not, then, a question of covering the supposed theoretical needs of theory, but the theoretical needs of practice, of the practical movement of building the ideological vanguard. For this reason, there is a close link between ideological reconstitution and political hegemony of Marxism-Leninism, because hegemony means leadership, and this implies authority and prestige: qualities that can only be the result of the capacity to offer answers to the pressing questions for which its solution is a condition for any true vanguard theory. The ideological reconstitution of communism is therefore not an academic exercise, and that is why it is something that is not carried out from theory for theory, that is to say, in function of the complete assembly of a supposed pre-established theoretical corpus that would remain as a hidden theoretical entelechy that we would need to unveil and recover from the limbo of pure thought. On the contrary, the ideological reconstitution is carried out from theory for practice, that is, according to the concrete and real interests of the political Reconstitution movement, according to the real problems that the vanguard needs to solve in order to give continuity to this movement and to broaden it at its base. It is thus not a question of completing a particular theoretical system, or of purifying it of revisionism, but of building a real practical movement with political bases from which the monolithic and coherent theoretical corpus of Marxism-Leninism can be recovered.

From the point of view of the main contradiction that governs the Reconstitution process, the mass line that the Marxist-Leninist vanguard must apply at the present time is the system of relations that it must establish with the rest of the theoretical vanguard in order to solve the fundamental problems of the first two phases of the Reconstitution (when the ideological bases and the general political line are established), of an eminently theoretical nature. This is the main content of our current mass work. This system of relations, for its part, has two aspects. On the one hand, the main aspect, on which we have already insisted enough: the development of the two-line struggle with the different detachments of that non-Marxist-Leninist theoretical vanguard. But, on the other hand, the relations between this vanguard and the Marxist-Leninist one can be established, at certain moments, as an alliance, as a unity, with some sectors of that same vanguard. Everything depends on the situation of the general two-line struggle within the theoretical vanguard, on the position that Marxism-Leninism occupies at each moment, on the need to neutralize or isolate the influence of some particular current, etc. The important thing is not to forget that the struggle for principles also requires the intelligent use of tactical resources.

The objective of our work towards our masses, the theoretical vanguard, can be represented as a series of concentric circles that move away from the center occupied by the Marxist-Leninist nucleus depending on whether their relationship with the theoretical problems and the practical, political and organizational tasks posed by the Reconstitution Thesis and the Reconstitution Plan is closer or farther away at every given moment. It is a question of approaching, in a consecutive way, those who can help us to solve these problems and to culminate these tasks; it is, of course, a question of solving political tasks with the support of the masses —as is obligatory in any correct conception of the communist style of work—, but we are dealing with very particular problems that affect also very special masses: the theoretical vanguard of the proletariat. Therefore, we are not talking about the problems of the great masses of the class, nor about the theoretical problems of the workers' resistance movement, but about the resolution of the theoretical and political premises necessary for the transformation of that resistance movement into a revolutionary movement: the ideological reconstitution and the political reconstitution (Communist Party) of the proletariat, taking into account that the former is a prerequisite for the latter. The content of the mass line must retain a unity with the character of the tasks of the political stage in which we find ourselves at any given time. We must go to the masses to fulfill these same tasks and consequently find the type of masses that interests us in terms of such fulfillment. Up until now, we, as a detachment of the ideological vanguard, had been saying that we had to solve the theoretical and principle-related questions in a fundamental —and almost summary— way and that, in the future, the masses (that is, the masses to whom the reconstituted Party is already addressing) would be in charge of the developments and details. Well, we were wrong in the sense that we need the masses to accomplish the tasks even at their fundamental, basic level. It is surely the only way that the activity of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard is not an isolated activity, without any relation to the objective needs of the revolutionary movement —configured today as vanguard—, and the only way that the fruits of that activity truly serve as a basis for the Reconstitution.

The need for ideological reconstitution evidently presupposes the loss of the ideological hegemony that Marxism-Leninism once enjoyed, its disappearance as an important political reference (neither absolute, nor unique: the concept of hegemony must be understood in a relative sense, especially when applied to Western history) for the conscious sectors of the mass movement (practical vanguard); it therefore presupposes a historical process of liquidation and a political state of retreat. And it is precisely through the revision of the solutions that communism gave to the problems, both of the masses and of the vanguard, that its hegemonic position within the workers movement was gradually liquidated. Revisionism, in general, and Eurocommunism, in particular, carried out this work of erosion of the foundations on which the revolutionary character of the proletarian movement and the communist guidance of its vanguard were built. On the other hand, this process was also developed by dogmatism, which, although it did not revise those solutions, absolutized them so much that it ended up replacing the living and updated analysis based on Marxism-Leninism as a conception of the world with those concrete solutions given at a particular moment as recipes, which sclerotized communist policies and facilitated the work of revisionism.

The experience of the first political constitution of a revolutionary party of the proletariat can help us to understand the nature of this process of conquest of the theoretical vanguard and the hegemony in the leadership of the masses by Marxism-Leninism, since in the Russia between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Marxists had to solve political tasks very similar to those we have now posed, although relatively more difficult in our case, given the current crisis of Marxism and the imperatives imposed by the end of the first cycle of the World Proletarian Revolution. Thus, the first important political struggle the Russian Marxists had to attend was that of elucidating, against populist anarchism, the character of the Russian revolution and the ideology that should guide the masses in that revolution. Between the mid-1880s and the 1890s, Marxists knew how to give the right answer to the Russian Narodniki and made it clear that semi-feudal Russia had to go through a capitalist stage, already in its infancy, which would engender a powerful proletariat, so that the imminent revolution would have to be bourgeois. In addition, the ideological instruments adequate for the vanguard to guide itself and the masses in this revolutionary process could only come from the only scientific theory, Marxism. In the early years of the 20th century, populism, defeated as a revolutionary political alternative, would transform into an eclectic bourgeois party. Next, revolutionary Marxists had to confront the so-called legal Marxists in the dispute over what should be the real purpose of Marxist theory: it would either politically support the frank implementation of capitalism in Russia that it anticipated, or serve as a political-ideological instrument of revolutionary education of the proletarian class. Revolutionary Marxists had allied with legal Marxists against populism, but the instrumentalization of Marx's thought which they wanted to carry out in favor of the bourgeoisie (P. Struve, an outstanding representative of legal Marxism, went so far as to say that one could be a Marxist without being a socialist) led to the inevitable rupture. The next vanguard circle confronted by Marxism was within socialism: the economists. This time, it was a question of resolving what the means of struggle and organization of the proletariat should be. The economists opted for the strike and the union, respectively, while the revolutionary Marxists (iskrists) bet on the political struggle and the constitution of a revolutionary party. The economists were defeated in the two-line struggle within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, and the next problem the revolutionary Marxists had to face (already as Bolsheviks) was to elucidate what would be the driving force of the Russian revolution. While the Mensheviks wanted to leave the whole initiative to the bourgeoisie, Lenin and his supporters insisted that the proletariat should play a leading role in the Russian bourgeois revolution. As it is known, in the struggle for the latter revolutionary way, the path leading to the constitution of the first proletarian party of a new type was culminated, which crowned its course with the October Revolution and the first experience of construction of socialism.

All these questions, posed in a context of fierce struggle between currents of thought and political alternatives, were the ones that, when resolved in a revolutionary way, filled with theoretical and political content the process of construction of the revolutionary vanguard of the Russian proletariat. In the same way, we must undertake a process of a similar nature in our particular historical circumstances, now that we face the tasks of building the Marxist-Leninist vanguard of the proletariat of Spain. Naturally, the questions that will have to be resolved will not be the same, because they are closely related to the peculiarities of each revolution, which today includes addressing the demands posed by the end of the first revolutionary cycle. We can however, from the experience we have had so far, glimpse on the horizon of the political struggles that the currents with which Marxism-Leninism will have to confront are similar in the content of their positions to those that the Russian revolutionary Marxists had to fight. Certainly, the populists, legal Marxists, economists and Mensheviks of yesterday seem to reincarnate today in anarchists, revisionists and Trotskyists, who are the current political reflexes in which the spontaneous consciousness of the vanguard sectors of the proletariat (theoretical vanguard, but also practical), mainly of the Western proletariat, is manifested in a dominant way. If their shared philosophical roots allow us to immediately understand the affinity between old Russian populism and current anarchism, the familiarity between legal Marxism or economism and modern revisionism does not seem so evident until we compare their political theses in favor of reformism. In the same sense, at first glance Menshevism and Trotskyism do not appear to be comparable either, until we verify their same theoretical foundations and political practices (connivance with revisionism, electoralism, bourgeois-type party construction...). In the hope that our mass work will enable us to fulfill these expectations —or in the hope that it will indicate to us, on the contrary, their erroneousness— we can advance that the circles of the theoretical vanguard that we are going to confront in the first instance are placed —without forgetting, of course, the Maoists— in the orbit of each one of these political currents.

The great questions that the two-line struggle within the theoretical vanguard against these currents must clarify will have to be formulated, naturally, by that same vanguard. This does not exclude that we, as one of the detachments of that vanguard, pose what we already consider to be those unavoidable questions, including, if possible, the answers to them. In any case, our experience allows us once again to anticipate that the vanguard will have to resolve what alternative there is to capitalism (its reform, some form of petty-bourgeois socialism or communism), something closely related to the results coming from the summation of the October Cycle, in the sense of its validity as a historical experience that shows a path of progress for humanity; we will likewise have to resolve the nature of the essential political instruments to make that alternative a reality (which is why it is necessary to confront our Reconstitution Thesis with all the other points of view, trade unionists as well as any others), just as the nature of the political processes to achieve it (debates on the strategy and tactics of the revolution, on the class nature of the new power —socialism or transition stage— and on the form of the new State —Republic of Councils or a new bourgeois Republic), etc.

But where will we find that vanguard that will help us solve all these problems and that will allow us to develop that process of construction of the vanguard? If we are consistent with the premises that structure our analysis, especially that which warns us about the futility of seeking elements of the ideological vanguard outside the proletariat, we must establish that we have to refer to the proletarian class. Here we must however warn against the mistakes that can be made by the spontaneous and uncritical tendency, characteristic of political mentalities educated in unionism, to identify the class with the workers' movement and above all to identify the latter with the union. To summarize, the union is the general resistance front of the proletariat, its purest form of organization for its economic struggle against capital; but there are sectors of the proletariat that do not fall within those struggles or those modes of organization and yet open up other fronts of combat: students, neighborhood movements, women's associations, anti-globalization movement, etc. are also forms of the spontaneous struggle of the proletarian class determined by specific circumstances. As a political concept, the workers' movement must therefore be understood as the sum of the trade union movement and all those other partial movements of the proletariat. Finally, the proletariat as a class cannot be identified solely and exclusively with its purely material, economic manifestation, but also with its conscious form. The working class is not only an economic movement: it also contains a revolutionary movement in its bosom; the working class, therefore, is also a vanguard movement as bearer of social progress through its most conscious sectors. The working class is, then, the sum of the workers’ movement plus its movement of vanguard. But as long as the process of Reconstitution is not completed, these two main forms of the class movement will remain splintered, and the class will show itself predominantly from its materiality, as an economic movement, not yet as a conscious movement, as a revolutionary movement.

So where is that vanguard that Marxism-Leninism needs to reconstitute communist ideology and build the theoretical vanguard needed to experience a qualitative leap in the process of Reconstitution? When we say that the vanguard proletarian movement and the workers’ movement are divided, divorced, we say so in political rather than physical terms. We want to say that the vanguard does not speak the same political language as the masses, that it does not have the same problems, nor the same concerns (and so it will be during the process of Reconstitution); and this is manifested politically in the sense that the vanguard organizes itself apart and even poses struggles apart from the workers' movement (organizations in support of the Peruvian revolution, political prisoners, platform for the Republic,...). However, this is not always the case. In fact, the most usual form of existence of the vanguard movement is in physical symbiosis with the workers' movement. For this reason, the Marxist-Leninist vanguard should not exclude any of the spheres of the class (trade union, workers' movement or vanguard movement in the different detachments that make it up) to resolve its contradictions with the theoretical vanguard of the proletariat in the orientation of transforming the vanguard movement of the proletariat, now ideologically and organizationally fragmented, and also fragmented into a multitude of political projects, into a homogeneous movement and with the sole direction of Reconstitution.

This is the general orientation for our mass work. But we must remain vigilant in its application, in order to avoid falling into that almost innate tendency —which we have denounced ad nauseam, although in this matter there is no such a thing as excesses— towards economism or trade unionism, to divert our attention from the immediate tasks of the (theoretical) vanguard and to fix it on the immediate needs of the workers' movement (or, if you like, of the practical vanguard). This is a mistake that we have already made and about which we have already exposed our self-criticism here. In any case, if the criterion to locate the theoretical vanguard is flexible and open, this is not the case with the order we must follow for its treatment. In this sense, we must be guided by the idea of the theoretical vanguard ideally organized in concentric circles with political problems that are placed more or less close to the needs of the Reconstitution Plan. Unless the two-line struggle ends up putting concrete problems of another kind on the agenda of the process of construction of the theoretical vanguard of the proletariat, we must rigorously follow the order marked by the Plan in its development, giving priority to resolving the contradictions with those sectors of the theoretical vanguard concerned with the issues closest to those we are now addressing or on which we have already elaborated our political position (summation of the October Cycle, Reconstitution Thesis, etc.).

Although we have defined the objective of our mass work as the theoretical vanguard of the proletariat, this does not mean that is the only one. We must also contemplate how to conduct our relationship with the practical vanguard and the masses in general, in the first place because, as it has been said, we will meet them precisely when we go in search of that theoretical vanguard.

In the following graph we offer represented the two ways of understanding and applying the communist mass line in the current period, understanding, in this case, the mass line as an application of both propaganda work and mass work itself. Figure 1 shows the concept of mass work that, in fact, we applied until now, before the rectification; Figure 2 shows how it should be applied from now on.

Each rectangle represents the proletariat, and is subdivided into the sectors that make it up from the point of view of its degree of class consciousness or, if you like, from the point of view of the process of Reconstitution (Marxist-Leninist vanguard, theoretical vanguard, practical vanguard and masses). The arrows express the direction in which our mass line is applied and the expectations we have as to what can be expected as a response, as a result of that work in terms of contacts, recruitment, etc.: if the arrow is double, it means that there are expectations that this work will produce concrete results, that our action on a given sector of the working class will find a positive response within it; if the arrow, on the other hand, is unidirectional, it means that we will only carry out propaganda work on that sector, without expecting any political reciprocity.

Fig. 1 shows, in the first place, that our analysis did not take into consideration the differentiation, within the theoretical vanguard, between the Marxist-Leninist vanguard and the rest of the theoretical vanguard (our relationship with the rest of the theoretical vanguard was only considered from the two-line struggle, but without a mass line, exclusively as ideological-political competition: it was about convincing the practical vanguard that our line of direction was the most correct, that we were the true theoretical vanguard, and nothing else), and that, secondly, in our mass line we maintained the same expectations with propaganda among the masses as with work among the practical vanguard. This required our presence both in the regular activity of organisms and movements such as the trade union, the platforms against imperialist wars and all other specific mobilizations by reason of any aggression perpetrated by capital at any level, or, at least, the absorption of our practical work by this kind of activity. Moreover, the recruitment of new members was only possible through the work of individual contacts and on the condition of the ideological-political formation of the new candidates. In Fig. 2, on the other hand, we observe that a hierarchy has already been established in the application of the mass line. Firstly, the relationship between the Marxist-Leninist vanguard and the theoretical vanguard as the main link that must be developed according to the mature of the moment in which we find ourselves within the Reconstitution process, a link that must yield political results in the field of theory and the political line, and organizational results in the recruitment of new members for the Marxist-Leninist vanguard (and not only individually as contacts, but also as collectives or groups). Let us not forget the dialectical point of view in this matter: the main contradiction is resolved as struggle, but also, and at the same time, as unity, as an alliance of Marxism-Leninism with the theoretical vanguard of the proletariat to build its ideological vanguard.

Secondly, the relationship of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard with the practical vanguard, which must also open a two-way street; on this occasion, however, political and organizational expectations must be much less demanding. This is so because the link between the Marxist-Leninist vanguard and the practical vanguard will be in the immediate predominantly individual, to be realized through personal contact, and not in function of concrete objective problems, but of subjective concerns and specific, particular problems. This will make mandatory the conquest of those elements of the practical vanguard for communism to be carried out mainly, not by means of the two-line struggle, but by means of the ideological-political formation. Meanwhile, for its part, the relationship between the Marxist-Leninist vanguard and the theoretical vanguard will be established according to the objective problems of the construction of the ideological vanguard of the proletariat, and in a supra-individual sphere, between collectives, which will allow the application of the two-line struggle in the direction of theoretical-political clarification and organic development on a larger scale of the communist ideological vanguard. Finally, these developments among the most conscious sectors of the class will exert a certain indirect influence on the practical vanguard, since they will place in front of it new theoretical referents, this time really revolutionary. It is however not convenient to have too many expectations about the receptivity shown by the practical vanguard, since the subsequent fight of the Marxist-Leninist ideological vanguard to conquer it is irreplaceable.

Finally, we have the relationship of the Marxist-Leninist vanguard with the masses in general. Here, we can only contemplate the propaganda activity to be carried out towards this sector of the class without proselytizing in the short term, but, rather, with a long-term intention of laying the foundations for the political education of the masses, of creating communist public opinion among certain spheres of the class so that they become familiar with the discourse and the way of approaching reality and problems of the revolutionary proletariat.