Resolution

The proletariat can only act as a revolutionary class on condition that it has constituted itself as an independent political party. Independent means, and can only mean for a Marxist, independent from the bourgeoisie. This sort of activity is therefore constituted upon the basis of a thorough demarcation from all forms proper to bourgeois society—relations of production, social relations, and the ideas that emerge from these relations. Revolutionary criticism thus prepares the intellectual conditions for the proletarian revolution and progressively crystallizes as a vanguard theory, as the specific form of understanding, ordering, and rationalizing the revolutionary process as an independent historical work.

This historical work, which began with the October Revolution, can only be measured and resumed from the higher perspective of its ultimate goal—communism—and the necessary steps to traverse this path. Bourgeois thought is unable to adopt this perspective because it is structured around the notion of the individual as the fundamental actor of history and society, and it can only conceive complex social phenomena (such as parties or classes) as, at most, a sum of individuals, as a contract among individuals. This is the world outlook of all social reformers who, as outsiders, address the oppressed with a political program of reform. Conversely, Marxism–Leninism is the only theory that can fulfill the aforementioned requirements because its approach is centered around classes as the fundamental historical subjects, because it is the only world outlook that provides a scientific foundation for the historical mission of the proletariat (historical and dialectical materialism), and because it allows the integration of this outlook into the development of its revolutionary class struggle (theory of the Working-Class Party of a New Type). But the vanguard theory does not exist in a Platonic world. It cannot be assumed to be invariably equal to itself or to maintain the same form, because its exacting requirements include its own unity with social development, that is, rising to the level of its era as a precondition for revolutionizing it. This contradiction is expressed more vividly in our time: the continuity between the revolution and proletarian thought has been broken, but, in turn, our class holds a great wealth of experience as a revolutionary class, spanning nearly two centuries.

Such longevity entails the problems that come with every tradition: the sclerosis and fossilization of Marxist thought, including the circumstantial solutions that were once adopted to drive the movement forward. This is symptomatic of the prestige it has achieved as the only doctrine to have headed a conscious, planned process of human liberation. However, in any case, Marxism—the class doctrine of the revolutionary proletariat—is no longer the way to think the social question nowadays. Its place as a social reference has been taken over by countless bourgeois and petty-bourgeois theories. It would be naive and idealistic to segregate the former from the latter—the reconstitution of Marxism as a coherent and rational theoretical corpus from the restoration of its place as an intellectual and political reference at the general, social level, as that would separate posing the revolutionary solution to social problems from the construction of the political-social movement that must carry it out.

The common, stereotyped understanding of Marxism as a political theory—i.e. as a theory focused on the issues related to leading the movement—cannot meet the full extent of the requirements of the revolution. Today, there is less room than ever to presuppose a proletarian basis upon which it is immediately possible to build a revolutionary movement. To do so would be to deny the necessity of the reconstitution of communism and the necessity of the Communist Party, since the very instrument that must be restored is taken for granted.

But this is exactly what happens when Marxism is reduced to a political philosophy, to a set of political theses concerning how to conquer and lead the spontaneous movement rather than the conditions for transforming it into a communist movement. On the ideological plane, this is expressed in the revision of the Marxist thesis which states that the subjects are the classes and its replacement by the spontaneist thesis which states that the subjects are the masses, or the political-social organizations standing as their representatives. This, today, is a manifestation of an epoch in which the political problems faced by bourgeois society are not historical problems, but expressions of its continuous revolving around itself. Neither the victory over pre-capitalist modes of production nor an alternative development of civilization are at stake. Day-to-day politics—both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary—can do without references to the radical reorganization of all social life, because the tendency of bourgeois society toward dissolving itself does not intrinsically imply a revolutionary questioning of its own foundations. The end of the October Cycle has dispelled, among other things, this persistent mirage that has cost the communist movement so dearly.

For the communist proletariat, theory appears as the first line of demarcation between itself and the bourgeoisie. For labor opportunism, it appears as the ideological cover for the multiples turns involved in its maneuvers through the saturated market of radical politics. Underneath the Western Marxist denunciation of the idea of a proletarian world outlook, on the allegation of totalitarianism, lay the rejection of the possibility that the magic wand of ideology could sanction any form of arbitrariness. But it was unable to grasp that the notion of a world outlook expresses that a principled politics requires that the principles not be subjected to the politics of the moment, and that theoretical class struggle (Engels) is what provides the best guarantees against the instrumentalization of revolutionary theory for the sake of circumstantial compromises and for its due depuration once the ideas adopted no longer correspond to the necessities of the revolutionary class struggle. The battle against the general form of worldview was the ideological expression of the agonizing decline of the proletariat’s revolutionary class struggle and its return to its most elemental and basic forms of resistance, whose content is unconnected to the general problems of human liberation. Today, with the ideal of social emancipation completely swept away, the dominant tendency within the workers’ vanguard is to fit, to adapt, to adjust Marxism to any more or less activist movement, be it trade unionist or of any other nature, presupposing its “revolutionary potentiality” and thrusting revolutionary theory into the task of “actualizing” it by providing the right “political leadership.” In other words: the tendency will be toward the reform of a movement whose class roots and content are bourgeois, and toward the liquidation of Marxism as a revolutionary class doctrine, as the blueprint for the proletariat’s own independent historical project (a liquidation that, politically, is expressed in the liberal labor party). Theory becomes conditioned by the imperatives of the urgent competition against other contenders for hegemony in the movement; political calculations push aside all references to the ultimate purpose and class foundation of theory and neutralize its radical criticism. This is why, on the philosophical-ontological plane, the preaching and practice of relativism as a principle is accompanied by the attribution of revolutionary substantiality to the spontaneous movement for what it is in and of itself, in isolation from the whole of social relations, from history, and from the history of this very own movement. Since the theoretical theses and categories of Marxism (classes, revolution, consciousness, party…) essentially refer to the historical plane and viewpoint, they understandably have no place here, unless it is for the purpose of ideologically sanctioning a policy that was adopted beforehand, imposed by circumstances. All of this is an expression of the tendency, dominant in our era, toward conciliating with the bourgeoisie and compromising with the contradictions that make up the entirety of the bourgeois mode of production.

The coherent bid for the restoration of the independent foundations of communism, the Line of Reconstitution (LR), is not exempt from this danger. The Thesis of Reconstitution of the Communist Party located the question of the reconstitution of the proletarian Party in the right place, on the historical plane, on the plane of the correlation of forces between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie—superior to the immediate political plane of the turf wars among little vanguard groups for carving out a space for themselves within the resistance movement. The New Orientation then outlined the appropriate instruments to bridge the gap between the subjective state of the class (temporary defeat, liquidation of proletarian ideology) and the objective requirements of the World Proletarian Revolution (WPR), assigning a central place to the reconstitution of proletarian thought as the first political task of the reconstitution of communism. But decades of hegemony of revisionism, of the vanguard being educated in schematism and dogmatism, of decanting Marxism into an arbitrary set of political theses, push in the direction of degrading our educational and ideological tasks, of accommodating them to the transient mood in the communist movement (hegemonized by opportunism) at one time or another.

This pressure was necessarily felt, even more so, with the change in the dimensions of the reconstitution that took place in 2011–2014. That increase in the scale of the reconstitution tended to be based on the formal acceptance of the LR (thesis of the closed Cycle, Summation), instead of on its conscious assimilation. To this must be added that generation’s own experience of its political birth, largely marked by the combat against revisionism. Even if this baptism by fire may be proudly claimed, it is no less true that the defense and assimilation of the LR was often mediated by the necessities of the struggle against the representatives of revisionism and the differentiation from them, rather than by the independent necessities of the revolutionary class. The youthfulness and inexperience of this batch of militants was as much of a determining factor. The education of a communist cadre is a lifelong process—it takes years and cannot be hastily dispatched by accepting a few theses, as is customary in opportunist environments. All in all, everything pushed toward adapting the LR to the necessities of the self-sufficient political reproduction of each detachment and its subjective relations with other vanguard organizations.

This pressure is characteristic of the intrinsic difficulty of every unprecedented task. The development of the proletariat as a class is concurrent with the development of its revolutionary consciousness. The vanguard reconstituting the proletarian world outlook expresses the form in which the proletariat raises its consciousness to the heights historically reached by its revolutionary class struggle; the class solves this task via its vanguard. Although this process assumes a political form, as every class struggle is a political struggle, its keys and references are located at the highest, historical-universal level—the only level where the Marxist maxim of practice as the criterion of truth wholly presents itself and the only level where it is possible to separate the wheat from the chaff, which also requires settling accounts with the theoretical, ideological foundations of the Marxism we have received. But the necessities of constituting a pre-party political space and the acute imperatives of defending it push toward elevating tactical moments to principles, toward blurring the line between tactical expedients and the principles of Marxism. Workerist spontaneism used to carry the echo of the status of the proletariat as a historical subject, by virtue of its special position in the capitalist mode of production. As insufficient as this schema may have proven, at least political action referred to a certain degree of universality inscribed in an objective being, in the international reality that was the rising working class. It provided a scale, a set of independent coordinates with which the progress of proletarian politics and ideology could be measured. This does not exist today. Otherwise, there would be no need to reconstitute the Communist Party. And, since that does not exist today, the tendency is toward restricting the criterion of truth even further—toward identifying the development of revolutionary ideology and politics not with the development of a universal class, but rather with that of a particular organization or detachment (usually, one’s own). The tendency is thus toward tacticism and political empiricism, toward subjectivism and voluntarism when it comes to defining and addressing the requirements for devising the revolutionary proletarian line.

The birth of the New Orientation itself involved fighting and triumphing over the temptation to dilute the independence of the conscious vanguard activity into the spontaneous movement—a temptation that acquired a solid existence as a Right Opportunist Line (ROL) within the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), back in the beginning of the millennium. The phenomenon of the ROL is the finished form of the reflection of the bourgeoisie within present revolutionary communism. The ROL is a) in general, a manifestation of the pressure that the old world and its customs exert on the proletarian vanguard organizing for the reconstitution of communism; and b) in particular, a manifestation of the labor aristocracy excluded from the official political and union bureaucracy.

The new Right Opportunist Line in the history of the reconstitution—which is only new because it developed within a movement for reconstitution that did not exist 20 years ago—established itself as a faction in a local organization of the Marxist–Leninist vanguard in the summer of 2022. But it did not emerge from a critical demarcation from the LR. It did not sprout from the exhaustion of the Plan of Reconstitution, so to speak. Like its predecessors, it found its form and content ready-made in the dominant, revisionist political culture: on the theoretical plane, eclecticism; on the political plane, unity of communists; on the organizational plane, democratism and factionalist conception of the party.

For acting, individuals make use of the available materials produced by the preceding generations. The same happens with the communist proletarians who carry out the Summation of the October Cycle, of the revolutionary practice of their class. And the same also happens with Marxist opportunism, including reconstitutionist opportunism, which finds its ready-made world outlook and tools in the hegemonic spontaneist practice. It finds them ready to be applied, and confirms their truth with the fact that they respond to the dominant habits and codes of revisionism.

For the ROL, revolutionary theory is worthless if it is not directly expressed as immediate political results, if it does not produce visible and palpable returns. As twenty years ago, the first form assumed by the battle that the ROL waged against the Marxist–Leninist vanguard was precisely the questioning of the strategic role of education as the foundation of all proletarian politics at the present time. In their tactics and their programmatic writings, the Right subordinated revolutionary theory to the necessities dictated by the struggle for carving out a space for themselves among the offers of radical politicking—or, which is the same, for carving out a space for themselves among revisionism. By absolutizing the secondary aspect of the Plan of Reconstitution (the mass line and building the vanguard), the Right arrived at the denial of the Plan of Reconstitution in its very debut as an opposition group. For the factionalists, education and theory no longer revolve around “content that is universal and at the vanguard” (RCP), and the (self-)education of the class vanguard is no longer the general backdrop of all our tasks and line of action (Workers’ University). Education and theory become defined in the combat against the concrete political enemy. That is, they make up an ad hoc argument, a partial and tailor-made response that justifies saying A to contradict those who say B. This means the liquidation of Marxism as an integral and harmonious world outlook (Lenin), and therefore of its reconstitution, because it becomes impossible to even pose the question of restoring it as a single universal, international, coherent discourse, with its internal and independent problems, as it would instead consist of a Frankensteinish sum of the answers that a particular detachment produces depending on whatever listeners are to be sweet-talked, and that is being generous. In line with the Rightists’ politicist conceptions, the Summation of the Cycle would become another excuse, the production of a self-serving discourse appropriate (that is, adapted) for the corresponding audience, doctrinally sanctioned with references to the history of communism. Just another day at any revisionist office, in essence. Ultimately, by extending this logic to the Communist Party, the political line of the revolution will not be devised by the vanguard, but it will instead be dictated by the masses.

The New Orientation systematizes a new way to understand the proletarian revolution. In this conception, against which the ROL of the RCP already rose, the core element is revolutionary consciousness, its nature and construction. Throughout two decades, the LR has applied this conception of a new type to the definition of the General Line and the Political Line of the communist revolution. From the last numbers of La Forja to El Martinete to Línea Proletaria, this work of criticism and Summation has progressively collimated into an array of elements that express our highest degree of comprehension of the WPR at the present time: the Communist Party as its fundamental problem, People's War as its universal military strategy, the theoretical nature of Marxism—as opposed to the scientistic-positivist understanding of it—, the ideas of masses–state and vanguard–Party dialectics, etc.

This theoretical wealth accumulated by the Marxism of our days is, to put it succinctly, the synthesis of the acquired consciousness about the conditions and mechanisms of the revolution in the present. Every proletarian who genuinely advocates for the reconstitution of communism must entirely assimilate and handle this patrimony, as it is the starting point for its development as well as its criticism. This extensive theoretical production does not erase the problem of elevating every member to its full comprehension, but instead it makes it more pressing. This is, in fact, the main problem we have found in our experience of eight years. The dread of facing the vast extension of Marxist thought and revolutionary proletarian practice is undoubtedly one of the main psychological factors that, nowadays, drive the communists to be satisfied with a few slogans and a narrow understanding of Marxism as a political philosophy, instead of as a whole world outlook. Communist theory and practice accumulate two hundred years of history, and it is impossible to dispatch their assimilation with routine study plans meant to be covered in a short time.

However, a sector of the organization was in a hurry and became impatient. In this predicament, the relatively complete articulation of the key ideas of the LR offered what appeared as a finished system, ready for its real practical application and its political embodiment, as well as being something to hang on to in these times of uncertainty. To the point that, after all, the theoretical stuff could already be considered wrapped up and now was finally the time to move on to real politics, to the real political objectives and to real practice—the good one, the one that is about incorporating many masses and “confronting revisionism vis-à-vis,” according to the Rightists’ cryptic expression. As the counterpart for the limited grasp of ideology, a part of the organization ended up considering all those theoretical elements as the finished ideology, irrespective of how much they had been assimilated and in glaring contradiction to the fact that the LR is not the hegemonic trend within the vanguard. And the ROL—today the new one, as yesterday the old one—has explained this by discovering the theoreticism and lack of politics of the LR, in the same way that revisionism had done before them.

By politics, the Rightists do not mean the political line of the proletariat as a class, or its action as an independent political party, but the relations between a particular vanguard organization and the rest of detachments in the communist movement. Who are the friends and enemies of the revolution, which in Mao referred to the problem of the class alliances when the October Cycle was underway and the proletariat was acting as a historical subject, is turned by the new ROL into a code for referring to the circumstantial relations which its particular detachment establishes with other political organizations. In the Rightists’ short-sighted and empiricist conception, ideology becomes mere theory if it is not connected to concrete political tasks for competing against whatever revisionist organization has been subjectively designated as the main enemy. In this manner, revolutionary theory is no longer the center of our tasks or the fundamental mediation for building a revolutionary movement. Neither does it express the degree of maturity of the proletariat as a class. It is but an appendix, a resourceful tool for the tug-of-war between vanguard detachments with predefined interests—factually, the true political subjects in the Rightists’ conception. The LR becomes yet another offer, a variety of new clichés that, like any other novelty, should have a greater appeal in the contest for a bigger share of the market. Consequently, theory does not appear as the primary element of demarcation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, between revisionism and communism, but as an excuse for their unity: the ROL is the radicalized aristocracy of labor which finds in revolutionary Marxism a novel instrument for competing for a niche in the spontaneous movement.

Revisionism is labor opportunism disguised as Marxism—it is the bourgeois line expressed with Marxist terminology. The Line of Reconstitution was originally defined in the struggle against the line of reconstruction. The concept of the line of reconstruction comprised an array of proposals that, back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, recognized that the working class in the Spanish state was missing its Communist Party, practically understood as the unity of communists around a minimum political program with room for the most varied range of opportunist trends (trade unionism, republicanism, feminism, ecologism, etc.). The notion that the Communist Party was missing did indeed sound like Marxism–Leninism—which is defined by putting the question of the Party at the forefront—and was, at the time, common to all those opportunist groups. After all, if revisionism did not sound like Marxism, it would not be revisionism, because it would not fulfill its role of dulling the consciousness of those proletarians who desire something beyond reforming capitalism, its role as the bourgeoisie’s transmission belt in the more or less radicalized working-class movement. The fact that vast sectors of the communist movement spoke back then of restoring the Communist Party was no pretext, for the founders of the LR, for defining the reconstitution in dependence of revisionism and of concrete political proposals around it.

Nonetheless, our Rightists have found out that, besides the LR, there are sectors of the communism movement who speak of Summation, of reconstitution of the Communist Party, and even of ideological reconstitution, and this has become a mainstay of their so-called analysis of the vanguard. Since they are idealists, they judge classes according to what they say about themselves, and since they are voluntarists, it has not been a problem for them to fit reality into their preconceived ideas and wishes: within the ranks of revisionism—they told their former comrades—there is a “generalized acceptance” of our “political theses” and, thanks to that, the LR has wiped out the “orthodox” sectors of communism, forcing them to “break” with their “adherence to the ideological trends of the Cycle.” How no one, not even themselves, was able to realize this earlier remains a complete mystery.

With this “analysis,” triumphalist and dissociated from reality, the Rightists intended to justify their aprioristic conclusions, i.e. that what must be done now is to cut the theoreticism and move on to concrete proposals for politically organizing those masses in the ranks of revisionism that, according to them, we have already conquered ideologically. However, what they have actually demonstrated is that their conception of politics is the same as the one that is common among revisionists: minimum unity proposals in order to gain access to the masses organized by others. As the new ROL emerged within an organization that subscribes to the New Orientation, it had to be very careful to keep up appearances and avoid openly showing its contempt for revolutionary theory. It had to follow protocol and clarify that, when it says that now is the time for political proposals and not for education it is because, in fact, the common sense of revisionism is already ideologically in tune with the LR; because, in fact, there is already a “generalized acceptance” of the “political theses” of the LR. The explanation does not make this any less anti-Marxist, but only less coherent: the harder the Rightists try to seem close to Marxism, the more evident it is how far away they have stepped from it. Because, no matter how much the Rightists invoke struggle and demarcation, a couple of words from revisionism have been enough for them to throw down the flag and revise the whole Plan of Reconstitution—and even reality itself!—in order to justify vague assertions that, at best, belong in the field of tactics. And that is what the line of the unity of communists is all about.

The theory of productive forces of the Second International assumed that the development of production would transform men’s consciousness into a socialist consciousness. The Bolshevik Party adapted it to the WPR with the idea of the “socialist mode of production.” In both approaches, the transformation of people’s consciousness is a more or less automatic effect of the transformation in the economic base. Industrialization was the highest experience of social organization and, as such, it allowed the assumption that there was a corresponding form of consciousness, superior to the natural, pre-capitalist modes of production and leading directly into the construction of the communist society. The more the proletariat exhausted this historical platform and created its own path, the more weight fell on the shoulders of revolutionary consciousness as the blueprint of the communist movement: the potentiality of an aprioristic economic-productive schema that pointed the way forward was running dry. It was no longer possible to presuppose, as the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union dramatically demonstrated, that applying the industrialist plan under a proletarian leadership would create a communist consciousness.

The Chinese revolutionaries, aware of this conundrum, located the change in world outlook as the cardinal problem of the Cultural Revolutions that would periodically need to shake the transition society. Nevertheless, there was no break with the conception of socialism as a specific mode of production, so that change was still broadly understood in terms of the economistic-structuralist problem of adjusting the ideological superstructure to the socialist base. Mao Tse-tung thought summarized the cream of the historical achievements of the WPR, but, even at the very beginning of the Cultural Revolution, it was assumed to be the unifying element of the transition society, which severely limited the actual scope of this transformation of people’s consciousness. All of this precluded posing the problem of disseminating and cementing communist consciousness on a social scale and updating it in the light of the international experience of revolutionary class struggle. The ideological corpus of the Chinese revolutionaries—in addition to the subjectivist and spontaneist way that it was presumed to have been assimilated by the vast masses—came to be insufficient to draw a line of demarcation between themselves and the bourgeois line, which spoke the same language and was backed by all the inertia of the military and state apparatus. And it came to be insufficient not because of its maladjustment with respect to the economic base, but precisely because it was unable to force it out of adjustment, because it was unable to see beyond it and the way it was configured in the Chinese society of the ‘60s.

Today, there is not even a socialist mode of production that can allow us to think of solving the problem of consciousness automatically, and the historical experience of the WPR compels us to pose it in a different way. If socialism is not a mode of production, then it cannot be presumed that the class’s consciousness will “match” it. There is no unconscious element to translate into consciousness. It must be produced from science and universal knowledge. According to the materialism of the New Orientation, consciousness is material and the change in world outlook is fundamental (Mao). The transformation of the vanguard’s consciousness implies the transformation of all its internal relationships and of the whole dominant ideological and cultural picture. It is the fundamental mediation that allows us to reinstate communism as the beacon of human emancipation and, from a more political standpoint, as a reference for the practical vanguard—the sector of the class that is at the front of resistance struggles, and today thinks and acts according to the terms of the dominant intellectual trends, that is, of the bourgeoisie. For that purpose, not just any theory works, and neither does some set of theses that are accepted and perhaps even signed in some statutory document, because the point is no less than to transform the way that the vanguard sees, understands, and relates to the world and the whole contemporary social formation—the interrelations between all classes, in Lenin’s words. That is to say, it is a change that targets the deepest roots of the culture and habits that the bourgeois world ingrains in ourselves. And routine is invisible for those who are immersed in it. Becoming aware of it and freeing oneself from it involves, in the first place, critically distancing oneself. This distance is only offered by Marxism–Leninism as an integral world outlook, and today we can no longer presume any historical mechanism that exempts us from solving this question in every stage of the revolution.

Plekhanov once said that the success of the revolution is the highest law. As opposed to routine and its automatisms, the attribute of conscious that defines the activity of the revolutionary proletariat implies that each of its actions is not justified by itself, or as a reaction to something else (such as hunger or political oppression), but must instead be justified on the grounds of the very same universal and vanguard contents that make up the theory of the proletarian revolution, the theory that summarizes the conditions and mechanisms of the proletarian revolution. And the existence of such a theory, at the present time, cannot be in any way presumed. It cannot be a product of the confluence around a set of theses or of the spontaneous flow of class society (including here the transition society to communism). This is why revolutionary politics can only be accurately understood as a transmission belt of the communist world outlook. This is why the only possible proletarian politics is a principled politics. And this is why the ideological reconstitution consists in making the proletarian vanguard learn how to think and act based on principles—what we call educating the vanguard in Marxism–Leninism or, from a more political standpoint, building the vanguard. The point is that communist proletarians attain the capacity to think the revolution of our era, to conceive the project of an original and independent historical process, to cement that consciousness as a source of social dissemination that develops the practice of their class to a higher level without, however, imagining that it was the plan or the destiny of previous generations to give them material (Marx). Ultimately, to put themselves at the vanguard of social development and be able to lead it.

The Right presents itself as the champion of the practical aspect of the Plan of Reconstitution. However, its revision demonstrates that it sees Marxist theory as a bunch of labels that revisionism already shares with a “generalized acceptance.” Ideology is not only taken for granted—it is used as an excuse, a pretext for justifying unity, to bind the communist proletarians to revisionism. The ROL may talk about ideology, but for it this premise is already a given thanks to the “generalized acceptance” of a bunch of theses; it is the presupposed basis of its whole line of action. And, even if the Rightists had not gone that far in claiming their coincidence with revisionism, the difference would have been meaningless: theory would still be just something to check off the list before moving on to real politics. That is why they cannot take it into account when they devise their roadmaps and ramble about proposing proposals. They thus prove that for them, and against dialectical materialism, consciousness is not material and may be ignored while they design their little self-serving clubs, covering it up with general, acceptable sentences. It is no surprise that they outrageously degrade revolutionary theory when the time comes for them to propose something concrete, to the point that a few words are enough for them to celebrate their ideological communion with the revisionists. And the fact that both share a world outlook is something we will not argue with.

After ideological eclecticism, what follows as a consequence is political voluntarism. In the approach of the New Orientation, consciousness is “the core from where a proletarian politics is built,” and the class character of a political line is organically determined by the world outlook. Politics, for Marxism, ultimately refers to the power of the state, to the management of society when it is split by class contradictions. That is why, when we speak of politics, we will be chiefly referring to questions concerning the leadership of the revolutionary movement in its different stages or the determination of the direction of society as a whole (when the revolutionary class holds the power of the state, when it builds the dictatorship of the proletariat). However, politics, as the LR has persistently insisted, is not where the class content of this direction—bourgeois or proletarian, reformist or revolutionary—is decided, as it is instead dependent on previous premises, both logically and historically.

For the Rightists, the question of the world outlook, its construction and class nature (bourgeois or proletarian) is irrelevant for devising their schemes. Naturally, they will be unable to find a concrete connection between ideology and politics. The latter then appears as an independent substance. Fully consistently with this, they end up speaking of a “reformist politics” and a “communist politics” as a given fact, as a starting point that is only theoretically justified a posteriori, as a fait accompli of the contemporary social process and irrespective of the state of the revolutionary subject—which is now marked by its defeat and crisis. This is the spontaneist thesis that affirms the revolutionary character of the spontaneous course of class struggle under capitalism.

With respect to this problem, the thesis of the closed Cycle means that the proletariat is not acting as a class, or as a political party. It means that there is no social actor that embodies a “communist politics” and that may be recognized as such. Logically, there can be no politics without an actor to apply it. From presupposing revolutionary ideology, one may very easily reach the conclusion that its bearer is one’s own detachment, regardless of the entire correlation between classes—a much easier feat once revolutionary theory has been replaced with slogans because one is unable to think in terms of social classes. Revolutionary practice as the criterion of truth gives way to feudal allegiance as a measure of virtue, membership in a revolutionary organization becomes about personal relationships and cronyism as the foundations of political construction, the revolutionary leader is supplanted by the shepherd, revolutionary politics are displaced by tacticist maneuvers.

In one of their shop papers, the Rightists complained about the “abstractness,” “vulgarity” and “unilaterality” of the Marxist conception of politics. They intended to “concretize” it, as we were saying, by decreeing the existence of a “reformist politics” and a “communist politics” without any consideration of the state of the working-class movement. And so that this “communist politics” may be assumed to exist at any point in time and so that it may encompass everything, from the activity of any small vanguard group to the dictatorship of the proletariat, they have summarized their conception of revolutionary politics in a phrase excerpted from Trotsky and Leninism: “influencing the events themselves.” Concrete revolutionary politics, which the Right has come to save from the theoreticists’ clutches, are about doing things. After such a generic abstraction, which is applicable to any class, party, and sect in history, they can add all the tags they want; they may swear in the name of “Marxism,” of “conscious action,” and even of the “concrete analysis of concrete conditions,” but that only demonstrates that they are unable to say anything specific about the content of that Marxism and that consciousness... besides the “generalized acceptance” of a handful of theses. It demonstrates that, put simply, they are the ones who conceive politics as an abstraction, as the simple need to lead, without even being able to consider the class content of that leadership or its (re)constitution. Revolutionary theory is replaced with voluntarism, because their world outlook is unable to depersonalize their own activity and universalize it, tied as it is to their personal and non-transferable doing. It is logical that all they saw in the criticism from their former comrades was slander and personal defamation, and that all their proposals for the Marxist–Leninist vanguard consisted of… proposing proposals. That is as much as we can expect from their bourgeois and completely individualistic position, from their parody of subjective criticism.

10.

Since, for the ROL, politics is everything, then everything is politics—everything can be resolved in political terms, and merely invoking the idea of doing is more than enough to exorcize the theoreticist abstractions. The Rightists’ voluntarist and subjectivist “philosophy of action” is nothing more than the scholastic formalization of the line of the unity of communists, which always seeks to highlight unity and, if possible, unity around practice. The matter of the world outlook is swiftly dealt with by speaking soothing and “generalized” phrases. In this manner, the Rightists cannot even begin to consider what direction their “influence” imparts on “the events themselves.” They are forced to assume that, as long as the “events” are “influenced” by their presence, the process shall head toward communism. Hence, the definition of revolutionary theory and even the content of their propositional proposals are absolutely irrelevant; they cannot and need not say anything concrete about them, because communist ideology and politics are already taken for granted in the Rightists’ doing and influencing. The LR was forged in battle against this very same practicism, which dissolves everything into a pseudo-activity that has been stripped of any political, class, or conscious attribute. Just one damn thing after another: this is the empiricist and spontaneist conception with which the new ROL has summarized its outlook on social development and with which it intends to think the practical problems of the revolutionary movement.

With this, they have not only liquidated the thesis of the Cycle and the ideological reconstitution. Since they have dissolved the entire revolutionary process into the continuum of politics, of that doing things themselves, the reconstitution of the Communist Party itself ends up liquidated, turned into just another circumstantial event. It is a formal checkpoint within a quantitative evolution of the same thing—politics—instead of a leap between two qualitatively different forms of activity. The difference between the periods before and after the reconstitution of the Party is ultimately a matter of scale, of extending that politics that is always, at every single moment, defined by the mere fact of acting under certain slogans.

11.

The Rightist mandarinate expelled the members who were critical toward their ringleaders, forbade their bases from contacting anyone outside the spaces under their personal control, and formalized its faction with sham Conferences—built on hiding documents, conducted behind the back of the organization, and used as a means to secure the involvement of the members under their jurisdiction in their schemes. When the proletarian line broke through the cordon sanitaire with which they enclosed their members and delivered them the writings and propaganda of the revolutionary majority, the Rightist chieftains recommended that they should not waste their time reading them. The new ROL called this “overseeing comprehension.” Translated from revisionist–bureaucratese into English, this means ensuring the personal loyalty of their flock before taking a single step, involving their people in dubious endeavors while hiding from them what they are committing to, and gradually predispose them, by gossiping and lying, against the political enemy of the moment (the Marxist–Leninist vanguard).

In this case, those who walk into the scam are just as guilty as the scammers. And the fact that self-proclaimed communists allow themselves to be fooled like this speaks worse of us than it does of them. One of the most complicated challenges with which the proletariat must deal at the present time is that of its self-education, its instruction in science (Bildung und Wissenchaft), and the social organization of the Summation of the Cycle. This is not only about the elevation of a class defined by manual, partial labor to the intellectual heights required by the proletarian revolution. It is also about the fact that this class must undertake this elevation by itself, with its own strength, which is truly unprecedented—unlike during the preparation of the October Cycle, today we cannot rely on the social phenomenon of a declassed bourgeois intelligentsia that produces the revolutionary theory from outside the labor movement. It is something we must organize ourselves. Well, as we said, the sad role played in all this farce by the rank-and-file members of the Right speaks worse of us than of them, because it means we failed to teach how to learn, we failed to encourage a critical view of the world, we failed to instill in the members their responsibility toward communism and Marxism–Leninism. We allowed such culture to take root in a local organization of a line that foregrounds the dimension of Marxism as a world outlook and the necessity of its reconstitution as an integral, coherent discourse, without any sort of dogmatism or personalism. In the eyes of a part of the organization, the Summation ended up being the responsibility of those at the top, instead of the axis of the organizations that must assemble and mobilize the theoretical vanguard. The ROL represents the worst of our mistakes; it represents the mediocre, self-satisfied members who never saw the LR as anything more than another political option, another identity in the flea market of radical politics; it represents the members who did not assume the vital, personal, and existential commitment to the scientific, materialist, rational, and rigorous substantiation of the revolution; the upstart members who always have an answer for everything and everyone but, at the same time, treat the clarification of theoretical problems, either for others or for themselves, as a waste of time.

“The Committee for Reconstitution has not even cared to regulate the collective study of its publications: what must we study, how, why, and for what objectives?”, wrote the Rightists in their failed opposition electoral program. It is hard to write a more convincing sentence than the own words of these politicians, who claim to be hardened leaders but whine because no one tells them what to read, what to think, and how to study… the publications of their own organization! This is the school in which these demagogues and liberals instruct the vanguard. Instead of educating the members of the communist organization in their own constant self-growth, in hatred toward the darkness of ignorance, in the hunger to learn and know, in self-education and intellectual autonomy, in the rigorous and systematic study of the publications of their own party, which they supposedly represent; instead of all that, they have erected a monument to conformity and complacency, to guiding thought and mental laziness. All for the sake of winning an argument.

The members of the communist organization become separated from communist ideology. “Overseeing comprehension” is, for the Rightists, logical and necessary: since the members have been deprived of knowledge and contact with revolutionary ideology and reality, their only criterion is personal affinity. The fact that this has happened within the organization of the Marxist–Leninist vanguard can only be an incentive to raise our requirements concerning theoretical education. There is no better guarantee against the formation of clienteles and the aspirations of political climbers.

12.

On the organizational plane, and in the combat against the Marxist–Leninist vanguard, the Rightist leadership coherently applied its conceptions: what matters is that the Rightist ringleaders’ little group has a right to organize on their own according to their ideas, intuitions, and wills, and everyone else must conform and consent to that. And, should we ever come together, it will be around minimum action programs for “isolating” and “defeating” the perceived common enemy. What matters here is not the progress of revolutionary ideas, but federalism and democratism of the worst type—the majority must adapt to my minority, my ideas, my laws, and my pace. The party is no longer independent and cannot take a single step without asking permission from each of its parts or their representatives (and that was the paper centralism for which the ringleaders of the new ROL longed). And, in the meantime, we can talk about how we can talk, even if we do not speak the same language.

With the practical denial of the proletarian world outlook, with its amorphism and with its denial of the principle that the minority must submit to the majority, the Rightist faction liquidated democratic centralism as the organizational principle of the revolutionary proletariat. Democratic centralism is the way in which the proletariat organizes around the revolutionary world outlook and produces the party tactics by considering the interrelations between all classes. The different bodies of the Leninist organization apply this line, as they are its transmission belts. But they are in no way legal subjects whose agreement gives birth to it. The ideological and political line is produced on the grounds of Summation, of science, of critical analysis, and there is no place for democracy there. Hence ideology, the theoretical wealth accumulated by the LR, and party tactics are the centralizing, unifying element that every member has an obligation to study, know, defend, and watch over as their first party duty. Only once this central, vanguard moment has been established is it time to introduce democracy, whose purpose is none other than incorporating the masses for the sake of elevating them to this position by all means. The point is to prepare them for taking part in defining the ideological and political line and leading their party. This dialectic assumes the concrete form of what Lenin called a chain of links, which are structured according to the level of consciousness of each sector of the class and ensure the vanguard’s connection with the masses while simultaneously raising this level.

With their liberal and Martovist–Menshevik conception of the vanguard organization, the ROL has replaced the Leninist conception of the chain of links with the amorphism of the so-called “field of the reconstitution,” of the common home of different sensitivities and trends of sovereign organizations with predefined interests, which converge through agreements between cliques and minimum unity-of-action programs designed apart from, and above, revolutionary theory. Since ideology and class struggle have been removed from their place as the guide for articulating the relations between the different sectors of the proletariat—that is, as the guide for party building—, the whole affair is confined to the petty squabbles for the position that each member occupies in a bureaucratic structure designed apart from the class and its current necessities: the Leninist conception of the party as a sum of organizations is replaced with the organicist conception of the party as a sum of individuals. It is logical that the Rightists began their demolition of the Plan of Reconstitution by questioning the strategic place of education, because the elevation of every member to the levels reached by the revolutionary line is antagonistic to their conception of the party, which requires descending to the level of the rearguard party member and shelter, in the name of democracy, their aspirations to make the whole life of the party conditional on fancies and problems unrelated to the point that the revolutionary world outlook has currently reached.

13.

Such is the objective role played by the ROL in the vanguard: an advocate of the common home of the reconstitution, of the “field of the reconstitution” where any “striker” who invokes the name of the reconstitution or the Summation is accepted, where there is room for multiples sensitivities, multiple sovereign organizations which, under cover of having different shades of opinion, are not accountable to anyone and gladly become entangled in joint action programs that establish “concrete political tasks” for “isolating and defeating” their common “political enemies.” Like the Frente Revolucionario Marxista-Leninista (FRML) or Vientos de Octubre in their day, the function of the Rightist faction and whatever branches come out of it will be to attract all those who flirt with the reconstitution but refuse to assume the vital, militant commitment it demands. This includes keeping their sovereign right to self-complacency, distorting the reconstitution and adapting it to their prejudices—be they trade unionist, feminist, or of any other kind. That is, the only role that the ROL may fulfill is to hold back the Left of the communist movement, drown the red shoots, prevent them from consistently breaking away from the old dogmas, and form a buffer, a first-line trench against the reconstitution of communism under the cover provided by the amorphism of freedom of criticism and the “field of reconstitution” (or, perhaps, of “reconstitutionism”). And this will be necessarily so because the Marxist–Leninist vanguard is their “concrete political enemy” to be beaten, and against which the ROL will summon the waverers, the hesitaters, the opportunists, the disoriented, and other inhabitants of the marsh. All while they lag behind the conquests and achievements of the reconstitution, claiming a legacy which they have renounced and which they have liquidated wherever their paws have reached.

14.

The emergence of the new ROL marks the closure of a stage; that is, that of the first great blossoming of the LR, which spans a little more than a decade (2011–2023). With the advantage of historical perspective, and from an objective standpoint, we can subdivide this stage into three main periods:

First period (2011–2014): boom and expansion, with the proliferation of propagandist circles who come from revisionism and accept the LR. Change in the scale of the reconstitution, and change in the scale of the educational and training tasks of the Marxist–Leninist vanguard, which can consider building its own space and transforming itself into an operational political magnitude.

Second period (2014–2018): compaction and consolidation of this space. Common organization around the Summation of the October Cycle and the application of the party tactics. Rightist and conciliator groups who intend to usurp the place of the LR—such as the FRML, Vientos de Octubre or the former Unión de Comunistas para la Construcción del Partido—are wiped off the map. The ground is cleared, and Línea Proletaria becomes the only organ acknowledged by all those who adhere to the LR.

Third period (2019–2023): crisis and struggle for life. The development of the Summation and the party tactics continues but, simultaneously, there is a noticeable stagnation among the members. Increasing mismatch between the ideological accomplishments of the LR and its political-organizational articulation. The insufficient education of our cadres begins to reveal itself as our greatest shortcoming at the moment. On the outside, the LR is no longer trendy. The period of over-excitement gives way to a period of disappointment due to the alleged lack of tangible, concrete results. Circumstantial friends abandon ship to go home or embrace creeds that seem more valuable in the stock market. All of this converges in the formation of a Right Opportunist Line, perfectly defined in terms of its physiognomy and its certainties, which launches a visceral attack against its own organization and against the Committee for Reconstitution, recognized until the day before yesterday by the seditious ringleaders as their only ideological-political authority. Finally, victory of the proletarian line which, as opposed to twenty years ago, was able to win over the majority of the organization and accomplish the defeat and fracture of the right wing.

15.

We have referred to the last period of our political experience as a crisis. But the crisis of communism is the permanent backdrop after the closing of the October Cycle. The dominant tendency pushes toward the Right deviation, toward the liquidation of the independence of communism and its adaptation to the frameworks, certainties, and paces of the bourgeoisie and its deputies in the labor movement. The programmatic and practical line of the ROL gathers all the revisionist ideological-political paraphernalia in struggle against which the LR was forged, and demonstrates to what extent the acceptance of the reconstitution in our own ranks has been only formal—a crisis has been enough for a re-edition, in reconstitutionist terms, of every revisionist cliché and of a fully-formed liquidationist line.

The education of the communist vanguard is the main task. Our experience confirms that memorizing a handful of theses is insufficient. Opportunism, whether honest or not, presents itself in new forms at every turn. The fact that the vanguard is the determining element of the proletarian revolution means that it must pay particular attention to itself, as any attempt to transform the world and the class is mediated by it, by its internal constitution and its worldview. Our organization was able to crush the ROL, but it is no less true that the latter emerged from within the former in a finished form. No social phenomenon, no matter how small its scale, develops completely overnight. It requires, on the contrary, a period of incubation, in which errors become tendencies, tendencies become deviations, and finally, this makes the leap to a finished line, which in this case presented itself as a faction. Regardless of the objective circumstances that push in the direction followed by the Rightist clique, the ROL expresses to what extent proletarian ideology was losing its place in the building of the communist organization and was replaced by routinism and a lack of revolutionary vigilance.

A vanguard that cannot anticipate problems before they fully develop is not at the vanguard. But this problem is not exclusive to the Marxist–Leninist vanguard; it is not, so to speak, a political problem. It is a historical problem, and the LR does not exist apart from the communist vanguard of our time, but is part of it. The ROL, and the errors that led to it, express the universal problem of the immaturity of the vanguard in the interregnum between two revolutionary Cycles, its inability to think and see the world in the terms of Marxism and of the historical, independent program of the proletariat. The LR is not, as we have insisted, foreign to this epoch-making problem. It partakes in it, responds to it and is the means to resolve it. The Summation remains the main instrument to elevate Marxism to the level of the revolutionary experience achieved by our class, and propaganda remains the primary practical task of communists. The education of the theoretical vanguard in Marxism is the cornerstone for enabling the communists to think and lead the revolution, to elevate them to the intellectual heights required by those tasks. The ROL merely revalidates the tactics-as-Plan of the Reconstitution, the New Orientation, as its very existence as a small group that came out of our organization reflects the fact that we have not put in place the collective means to promote such elevation, even only within the Marxist–Leninist vanguard after the change in the scale of the reconstitution. Today, as two decades ago, the struggle against the ROL and the branches it may inaugurate among the vanguard is not an obstacle on the road, but part of the battle—which spans our entire era—for the New Orientation and for reinstating Marxism–Leninism as the reference for social emancipation. The first step of combating the bourgeoisie is laying out all the ideological, political, and organizational means to fight the spontaneous certainties, routines, and habits that the old world forces on the communists, as that is precisely what revisionism is. That is what the ideological reconstitution is about. It is a cultural revolution, one without which our class cannot tackle the most elevated and demanding tasks that await it in the path to emancipation.