1. In the current phase of the process of Reconstitution of the Communist Party, the greatest danger haunting the proletarian line originates from the prevalence of all sorts of conditions pushing toward a conciliation of communist policy with bourgeois positions. This danger of a right-wing deviation is none other than the expression in revolutionary policy of the present period of general withdrawal of the proletarian class struggle and of hegemony of imperialism and reaction, the reflection of the current historical context in the disposition of broad sections of the working class, both in its vanguard and among the masses, in the form of different political versions of defeatism, revolutionary pessimism and apostasy from principles. As Lenin demonstrated after the defeat of the 1905–1907 Revolution, the offensive of counterrevolution translates into the hesitation of broad sectors of the labor movement and into their tendency to adapt to the new situation by seeking conciliation with the class enemy, leaving behind their commitment to the theoretical, programmatic and tactical principles of the revolution. In today’s world, ruled by the new order, when the counterrevolutionary offensive unfolds at a never-before-seen scale, the political and moral pressure on the vanguard likewise translates, inevitably, into hesitation and into a strong, recurring tendency to adopt and adapt to bourgeois politics. Like the Mensheviks, after the defeat of the first revolution in Russia, were willing to liquidate the clandestine organization of the party and abandon its revolutionary program in exchange for being able to openly work among the masses (trade-unionism and parliamentarism), the same temptation now presents itself before the detachments of the proletarian vanguard in the form of renunciation of the intransigent struggle for the recovery of revolutionary thought and principles and for the construction of the political instruments of the proletariat—all of that in exchange for the right to take part in the distribution of spheres of influence within the legally permissible labor movement. The temptation to abandon the cold theoretical struggle and the political struggle to draw a line of demarcation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, in exchange for immediately rushing to the warmth of the herd in the unions’ bureaucratic apparatuses or the works councils, is so strong and prevalent nowadays that it is imperative to affirm that the danger of a Right deviation from the just proletarian policy is the main danger in the current phase of the class struggle.
In addition to this context, we must consider, in particular, the nature of the correct proletarian line in its current stage of development and application, the Reconstitution of the Communist Party according to the Plan guided by the New Orientation: the necessary moment of splitting from the spontaneous working-class movement, a moment that demands that we break away from the theoretical and practical problems of the resistance struggle against capital in order to pay attention to the theoretical problems of the revolutionary struggle of the working class. This particularity introduces a new, historically original element that feeds the opposite tendency—seeking an immediate fusion with the spontaneous working-class movement, a premature return of conscious workers to their natural environment, before completing their education in the school of theory and the intellectual forge in the two-line struggle for the ideological reconstitution of communism and the hegemony of Marxism among the ranks of the proletarian vanguard.
The reactionary influence of the global scenario, as well as the one exerted by the pressure to counteract the extent and results of the application and fulfillment of our tasks as a vanguard detachment, are transmitted among workers by the bourgeoisie using all possible means and resources. Among these, the most effective and lethal instrument at the disposal of the bourgeoisie is the labor aristocracy, a loyal and obliging transmitter of the bourgeois influence on the proletarian ranks.
2. On top of all these conditions, we must consider the scarce education in the study of Marxism–Leninism and the lingering weight of the dogmatic and vulgarizing conceptions of Marxism, characteristic of the trends that revisionism has taught communist militants for decades, in our consciousnesses. Moreover, there have been certain deficiencies, errors and concessions in the application of the agreements of the 6th Party Conference. The combination of all these factors has favored an all-out attack from the right-wing tendency against the whole policy of the party from its directing bodies.
The current battle against the right-wing tendency can be traced back to the debates that have taken place in our organization since late 2000, motivated by the state of political stagnation and moral disheartenment that we had been led to by the application of the rightist slogan “prepare the transition to the third stage of the Reconstitution”—the practical stage of programmatic elaboration among the masses—that dominated the work of the 5th Conference, in 1998. Those debates were resolved with the defeat of the right-wing tendency and with the New Orientation as the correct proletarian line guiding the party. However, although the representatives of the Right formally recognized the New Orientation, the truth is that they began to surreptitiously work against its practical application along several of its fundamental lines.
3. In general, the Rightist strategy to obstruct the New Orientation consisted in insisting on the importance of its secondary aspects to the extreme, under the pretense of preventing an alleged leftist tendency. This strategy was articulated around three essential axes: the mass line, communitarization and opening a false debate on the militant’s individual attitude toward their tasks.
Regarding the mass line, the Right blocked the organizational preparations for the implementation of our work within the theoretical vanguard, whereas at the same time, in practice, it continued to advocate for articulating our mass work mainly toward the practical vanguard. Behind these maneuvers lay the fear of splitting from the practical mass movement, the incomprehension of the pressing tasks of the vanguard and the reactionary dread of the extent of the political and ideological results of their application. In the same manner hid—and still hides—the empiricist conception of the working class, which can only observe it as a quantitative expression, in its purely economic existence, as well as the economistic–trade-unionist view of proletarian politics, according to which it is only possible to elaborate a policy for workers in direct contact with practical struggles, according to which it is impossible to develop a communist policy in the general scenario of the class struggle—as Lenin defended—if not on the basis of the direct connections with the resistance struggles, according to which proletarian policy is dictated by the masses instead of the former guiding the latter.
Furthermore, our work on the international front, which had begun with drawing a line of demarcation between ourselves and the right wing of the international communist movement, wound up being used to revert the offensive of the New Orientation on this tendency and start the opportunist counteroffensive within our party. By imposing the tactics of seeking conciliation with revisionist and reformist positions, instead of basing our tactics on the criticism of such positions, the right-wing sector ended up sympathizing with them and embracing them, until they felt reinforced enough to orchestrate a direct all-out attack against our policy.
4. From a certain point of view, the New Orientation is the policy and the method that contemplates the correct solution of the contradiction between the objective necessities and requirements of the Proletarian Revolution, on the one hand, and the state of the subjective conditions and possibilities of the revolutionary class, on the other. In the most immediate realm of the social relations that affect the revolutionary subject as an individual existence, the New Orientation assumes the concrete form of communitarization. But communitarization is a secondary aspect of the New Orientation, which mainly refers to the social realm of the class and the vanguard, rather than the realm of the existence of the communist or the worker as individuals. However, the Right has insisted on imposing this aspect as the principal one and has striven to build an overall interpretation of the New Orientation upon this appreciation, diverting attention from the essential elements of the party policy for the sake of creating the conditions for its liquidation. For right-wing opportunism, as conservative as it is foolish, it is about “undertaking the practical transformation of family relations, gaining supporters and militants for our cause;” that is, applying the theory of the integration of the family into the party, of bourgeois social relations into communism—an echo of the Rightist-Bukharinist thesis of the integration of the kulak into socialism. This theory rests on the subversion of the actual relation that exists between the dialectical elements that govern the New Orientation and, in particular, communitarization: by attributing the main and leading role, as the guide for policy, to the subjective possibilities as opposed to the objective necessities of the reconstitution of the communist movement, one loses sight of the most immediate among the fundamental objectives of the New Orientation, namely the vanguard-building associated with the ideological reconstitution as the axis structuring the process of recomposition of the communist movement. In return, they propose building a grassroots movement starting from the most immediate environment of the militant (family, work…) by virtue of a gradualist, evolutionist—non-revolutionary—view of the social process, according to which “self-transformation, in all its stages, is inseparable from the transformation of the social relations in which we are immersed.” This deterministic and mechanistic point of view—typical of vulgar materialism and absolutely anti-dialectical, denying the relative autonomy of the conscious subject to freely decide to adopt a critical stance toward the social determination in which it is “immersed” (which basically means that one cannot be a revolutionary until the revolution is already underway)—is thereby combined with the subjective idealism involved in imposing one’s personal limitations on the whole social process. The Right accuses the New Orientation of idealism because it places the emphasis on theory and consciousness, but there is no greater idealism than constraining the real world to the narrow horizon of one’s own existence and imposing one’s own possibilities on the objective necessities of the revolution. To abide by the result of the concrete analysis of objective conditions, which are independent of our will: this is the coherent materialism applied by the New Orientation, and not the Talmudic reminder of general theses on the preeminence of matter over consciousness whose Marxist origin is sometimes dubious.
5. After the New Orientation, the next target that the right-wing sector in our organization attempted to liquidate was the thesis of the Leninist party of a new type. In the first place, by shutting down the possibility—even theoretical—of the revolutionary professional and, consequently, in the long term, obstructing in practice the construction of the future vanguard organization according to Leninist criteria. Indeed, if we can only be what the impositions of the environment in which we are “immersed” make us, then there is no possibility at all for a sector of the vanguard to organize independently of that environment and be able to act as a revolutionary spur on it.
The denial of the autonomy of consciousness is the theory of the liquidation of the Party and the Proletarian Revolution, and seeks the submission of communist work to the amateurish methods characteristic of bureaucratic unionism and gatherings of politics enthusiasts. This logic can only lead to the revision of the Marxist–Leninist of the origin of revolutionary consciousness as the synthesis of the most advanced knowledge of humankind and the lessons from the class struggle of the proletariat, as Lenin defended in his Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, in order to substitute it with the opposite, economistic-Menshevik thesis according to which “the spontaneous element represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form.” This leaves the liquidationists in a position to deny the necessity of reconstituting the Communist Party, as well as all the problematic that guides our political line and is set forth in our Thesis of Reconstitution; which, in turn, leaves them outside the tradition of the Communist International and its resolutions on the Party and the Bolshevization of communist parties, which clearly state that the constitution of authentic Leninist parties is a requirement for the success of the revolution. But now, for the liquidators of the Party, the Bolshevik party is no less appropriate for carrying out revolutionary praxis than the League of the Just, the IWA, or the mass parties of the Second International.
6. On the question of the Party, Leninism places the emphasis on consciousness, on the necessity of building a political movement from vanguard theory, as opposed to from the spontaneous mass movement. Since the foundation of our party, we have defended the idea that there can be no vanguard theory without the results of the summation of the historical experience of the construction of socialism. The Right liquidators’ call for an immediate fusion with the masses means breaking this precept and relegating every activity directed toward studying this experience to the sphere of academic knowledge. If policy is to be built from the direct contact with the masses and the participation in their struggles, then the historical summation is emptied of all practical political purpose and diluted as a political task. And denying the necessity of summation and summation itself inevitably implies subverting the results obtained so far by the 5th Central Education School, mainly the thesis of the revolutionary Cycle. Therefore, once one has discarded the necessity of studying the limits of the revolutionary theory and practice of the October Cycle with the aim of overcoming them and placing the proletariat in better conditions for the start of the next cycle, it is natural to claim the absolute validity of a so-called “orthodox Marxism–Leninism”—the universal and eternal truth, the guarantee against any intellectualist deviation and, better yet, the once-and-for-all solution to the problem of the theoretical reconstitution of communism, ready to be presented before neophytes like a whitewashed tomb.
In addition to undermining the first fundamental requirement of the Party, which is a vanguard theory (and the mechanism for the permanent updating of this vanguard theory as such—in our case, historical summation), the liquidators have subsequently moved on to call into question another of its essential premises, this time concerning the field of practice: the historical split of the working-class movement into two wings—an opportunist wing and a revolutionary wing—in the epoch of imperialism, as a consequence of the class struggle waged by the international proletariat. This historical result implies the necessity of the ideological and political demarcation between revolution and opportunism as a condition for revolutionary policy building. But since the right wing in our party wants to immediately go to the spontaneous movement, where the first requirement is seeking unity of action—in order to gain access to the masses organized by others—and, therefore, the prevalence of the criterion of seeking the lowest common denominator and practical unity over the criterion of drawing a line of ideological demarcation between revolution and opportunism, and because they wish to liquidate this work of demarcation beforehand (or subordinate it “to the needs of the development of the class”, which means the same) due to a delirious, petty-bourgeois phobia toward intellectual work (“it is bourgeois precisely because it is purely intellectual,” say the dishonorable right-wingers, referring to the two-line struggle amid the theoretical vanguard and thereby demonstrating their incomprehension of the New Orientation), then we will have time to see for ourselves how their meager pseudo-communist propaganda is diluted little by little, like a sugar cube, in the vortex and the imperatives of practical work, and loses itself in the twists and turns of union bureaucracy. We will be able to watch, in short, the liquidation of communism as an aspiring vanguard theory. With these tactics of political building from below and from unity of action (instead of from above and from struggle), the only possible result is a mass party, a rearguard party, a reformist party with parliamentary aspirations (after the search for unity with opportunism, what comes next is the search for unity with capital, by virtue of the theory of the integration of opposites) or, which is more likely, yet another trend within the union or some liberal labor party.
7. Mao used to say that, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the social relations of production, the former generally play the principal role and, when social relations hinder their development, then these become the principal aspect of the contradiction, and their necessary transformation opens a historical period of revolutions. We could state the same from a more elevated perspective: in the matter–consciousness contradiction, matter generally plays the principal role, until the forms of consciousness obstruct its development (slowing down the revolutionization of social relations) and the necessity of transforming the sphere of consciousness becomes imperative. This begins a period of unfolding and struggle of ideas and between trends of thought for reaching the position that allows to lead the subsequent development of matter. The New Orientation proposes that Marxism–Leninism be the one to fulfill this mission, through the conquest of ideological hegemony and its crystallization into the Party. For the liquidators, this is all “idealist” trickery, and they resolve to push the movement of social matter with the point of view of a discourse (that “orthodox Marxism–Leninism”) long displaced from the vanguard position.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China was based on this problematic of the consciousness–social being relation: it was an attempt to adapt the consciousness of the masses, by revolutionizing it, to the demands of a society in constant transformation in order to guarantee its permanent progress toward communism. But this perspective supposes considering social consciousness as an autonomous sphere for which one may pose specific political tasks and from which one may act to build reality—something too heretical for the bourgeois, mechanist materialism professed by our liquidators, who, from their “orthodoxy,” refuse to understand experiences crucial for the international proletariat.
8. Finally, once the objective of the party of a new type has been liquidated as an immediate strategical task, the next step is the delegitimization of the Plan of Reconstitution. And not only because it is a plan for reconstituting a political instrument that has been rejected, but also because it follows the Leninist method of devising proletarian tactics from the organization of political tasks into a plan (tactics-as-plan), whereas the proposal of the liquidators draws inspiration from the spontaneist approach of simultaneously carrying out every task at every level of class struggle—theoretical, political, and economic (tactics-as-process): “let us prepare the fusion with the working-class movement in its multiple manifestations, at the same time that we continue the theoretical tasks: studying the classics, summation of the historical experience, learning science, philosophical speculation, etc.” The planned character of political tasks does not come from their mere enumeration, but from the logical order of a process meant to be contrasted with reality. This is how the fundamental fulfillment of a set of tasks paves the way and creates the conditions for achieving the subsequent objectives in the best possible manner. This is, therefore, about an organic process of political building in which advancing upon previously established solid foundations is by all means essential; it is about a process in which the next stage depends on the success of the previous stage. The holistic ambition of the liquidators, who intend to tackle all tasks at the same time, demonstrates not only their impatience and their inability to organize a minimally coherent order of battle that can serve the interests of the proletariat (which makes them undeserving of being its representatives), but it also shows, at last, their true demagogic and shameful face and the collapse of their proposal of political rectification. Will they abandon “the practical transformation of family relations” to go to all the “multiple manifestations” of the workers’ movement? Or will they integrate family into said movement? Or will they, perhaps, abandon the former (vade retro!) in a selfless act of solidarity, so that they may cover everything? (when the ones who have most demonstrated that, in the current conditions, it is impossible to cover all tasks are precisely the right-wing ringleaders, who have particularly insisted on rejecting and curbing our spirit of offensive when tackling tasks and who have mocked every possible interpretation of Lenin’s mandate do not say, “I can’t”; say, “I shan’t”). Thus is revealed the fraud of a scheme that proposes everything and speaks of everything in order to hide its true intention of directing all work exclusively toward the practical resistance movement and, more specifically, toward working within the trade union apparatus—the most comfortable way to pretend to fight while remaining settled and more and more immersed in the bourgeois way of life (…integrating it into the movement, perhaps?).
9. The liquidation of the Plan of Reconstitution includes the implicit abjuration of the fundamental thesis that inspired the struggle against revisionism in our organization, even before our constitution as a party: we cannot be revolutionary if we do not know revolutionary theory; there is no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory. Thus, education constituted the axis and epicenter of the Plan since the beginning, and has been the foundation of all its development, at least as far as its positive outcomes are concerned. Ultimately, the New Orientation is built upon education—it is its genuine and necessary product after a period of applying the principles learned. Relegating theoretical education to an activity like any other, as the right wing intends, will in fact mean its subordination to the needs of the practical movement, following the model that its ringleaders want to import from other organizations with which they have strengthened their ties. In this way, the educational content will not be universal and at the vanguard, but specific and unilateral; in this way, the theory sought will not be Marxism–Leninism, and the spontaneous element will be the one to lead the movement instead of proletarian consciousness. The specific analysis of the concrete problems that push the masses to the struggle can only be integrated into a vanguard political program if the cadres carrying out this mass work have previously been through the school of the theoretical learning of the revolutionary doctrine (through all its developments and without an “orthodoxy”) and of the critical knowledge of science. A political program devised from the theorization of partial struggles can only be a trade-unionist, non-revolutionary program, dictated by the masses, with no projection beyond the established framework (the red, green and purple Izquierda Unida [United Left] is possibly the best model for our Rightists). Indeed, for this purpose, there is no need to go to great lengths, nor is there any need for a Communist Party—the bourgeois parliament is enough.
10. The Right deviation pursues the liquidation of the process of Reconstitution of the Communist Party through the application of a trade-unionist line. What once manifested for some time as an exaggeration in the consideration of the role of personal relationships and one’s most immediate environment (communitarization), has finally revealed itself openly and unmasked, showing what it was actually hiding: a total rectification of the political line that the party has been carrying out since its foundation, the liquidation of this line and the most shameless apostasy of the results of the work performed, to the point of repudiating Marxism–Leninism. The Right wants to disguise the metaphysical materialism it professes as Marxism–Leninism, reciting some general notions and trying to pass off its interpretation as Marxist. Thus, under the semblance of defending the Marxist thesis that practice is the criterion of truth, the liquidators are in fact introducing the revisionist thesis that the masses are the criterion of truth (incidentally, has any other tactic ever been more refuted by practice than the one that these men want to unearth? Please, step aside and make way for the new). And all their tactics are based on these principle—related to philosophical pragmatism and alien to Marxism, but injected into the latter by revisionism—that leads to what Lenin criticized over a hundred years ago: bowing to spontaneity, exalting the average worker in the union or the striker as the ideal conscious worker, gravitating toward the most backward of the masses and forgetting the necessary work among its advanced sectors.
However, deep down, this apparent tribute to the average worker hides, once more, the actual contempt that the labor aristocracy feels toward the masses and their political doctrine. According to the liquidators’ libel, Marxism–Leninism must go to the workers’ movement to “counteract the corrupting influence of the bourgeoisie and its opportunist agents” and to provide “the elements of consciousness that allow it to take off.” This standpoint gives away the opportunists’ absolute lack of trust toward our class’s ability to organize autonomously in order to conduct its resistance struggles, which often transcend the bounds of official unionism. Despite the overwhelming domination and the suffocating weight of the union apparatus of the capitalist state, the proletariat has some capacity to self-organize in its struggles for demands and acquire consciousness in itself. Marxism–Leninism is not needed for this—at least, definitely not for saving the workers from the corrupt opportunists in the union bureaucracy (which they know to avoid on their own, without the help of any enlightened benefactor), nor for the workers’ movement to “take off.” This means degrading Marxism–Leninism to the level of vulgar trade-unionism, liquidating the revolutionary consciousness (for itself) of the proletariat by equating it to its consciousness as an economic class. Furthermore, Lenin also demonstrated that any direct “take-off” of the working-class movement directly from economy to politics is a bourgeois movement (the basis of the liberal labor party: PSOE [Spanish Socialist Workers' Party], PCE [Communist Party of Spain], PCPE [Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain]…). Marxism–Leninism is not meant for making the trade union struggle “take off” or for radicalizing it, it is meant for revolutionizing it. And it would not need to be revolutionized if it were already revolutionary (instead of bourgeois), as our liquidators insinuate, thus reducing communism to trade-unionism.
Since the renegades have renounced the Leninist thesis of the split of the working-class movement into two wings—according to which the consciousness in itself of the proletariat is and may only be bourgeois consciousness—, in order to substitute it, they have adhered to the latest revisionist theory—birthed by a veteran of the adulteration of Marxism, M. Harnecker—, which states that there is a third form of consciousness other than the “enlightened class consciousness or socialist consciousness” and the “spontaneous or naive consciousness” deformed by the ruling ideology: strictly class consciousness as such, neither bourgeois nor socialist. This is the pure (resistance) working-class consciousness from which the Chilean proposes to build her counterrevolutionary political project. In the same vein, from their gradualist and evolutionist view of social processes, the new trade-unionists shall approach the average worker with a pure and neutral class consciousness and fill it will their “orthodox Marxism,” so that they “will thus elevate their spontaneous consciousness toward communism.” But the truth is that that presumed immaculate class consciousness is pregnant with bourgeois thought.
When Marxism–Leninism has finalized its ideological recomposition and is once again strong enough to fight to become the first ideological and political reference of the vanguard of proletarian struggles, it will do so by confronting the spontaneous, bourgeois working-class consciousness in a dialectical contradiction. It is from this struggle that the Communist Party will emerge. But this is dialectical materialism—something which is far from the comprehension of our postulants to workerism, who now find themselves interpreting the New Orientation as “contempt, reproach and split [of/from the spontaneous working-class movement] as something fully bourgeois.” Only narrow mindsets, alien to Marxism, hopeful toward the self-delusion of the “take-off” of consciousness in itself and its gradual transformation into consciousness for itself, can interpret in such a black-and-white manner the search (split), on the part of communism, of the position that allows it to face the labor movement as its dialectical opposite, with a view to implementing its development on the basis of the struggle between both elements, instead of the metaphysical and spontaneist integration of one into the other. The synthesis of this dialectic is the Party, which implies the revolutionization of the spontaneous movement—something higher and qualitatively different from the simple “boosting its development,” which is the purpose to which Marxism–Leninism has been degraded by the trade-unionists in our party. [In particular, the liquidators’ libel states that we must go to the spontaneous movement “to lend it the consciousness it lacks so as to boost its development (and that of the Party).” That is, not only has Marxism–Leninism been relegated to the sad mission of boosting trade union struggles, spontaneity from itself and not against itself, but the Party also needs to be boosted by Marxist–Leninist consciousness. In other words, the Party is only understood as an organization like any other, as a mere apparatus organizing the resistance struggles—not even as the vanguard organization that is the bearer of the ideology, in the old-fashioned way, since it cannot “boost” anything if it must in turn be “boosted.” Abstract ideas, such as “orthodox Marxism–Leninism,” are then left as the only motor to “boost” anything. Can anyone conceive a greater idealism than this?]
11. The theory of boosting the resistance struggle so that it may “take off” and become a revolutionary struggle is the revolutionary theory of the Second International—and, to a large extent, of the Comintern—, which only sought to understand social processes mechanically as gradual (quantitative) evolution and without (qualitative) leaps in their development elements. This theory is founded upon the economistic reduction of the Marxist theory of revolution. For this reductionism, “capitalism engenders the material conditions for its revolutionization,” which, expressed like this, without the slightest mention of the role of the revolutionary subject, may only be interpreted in the spontaneist terms of the old Austro-Marxist school (and of the not-so-old Trotskyist school): revolution is a spontaneous result of social development, the economic crisis or the social outburst “engender” revolution, what this is about is crouching among the masses until the time comes to lead them when they rise up. This discourse is, incidentally, fully coherent with our Rightists’ belief that there is no vanguard until the revolution breaks out and that, in the meantime, there is no possible vanguard work, no possible revolutionary work, aside from union work. The denial of the prior necessity of the Party as a condition for the possibility of revolutionary praxis, along with the application of the tabula rasa approach regarding the typology of workers’ organizations—equating the party of a new type to any other type of workers’ organization—and the spontaneist thesis that the revolutionary character of a social process comes from the critical nature of capitalism (economic crisis = social revolt = revolution), mean in fact reducing revolutionary work to union work, equating them theoretically and practically. Naturally, all these considerations and their inevitable conclusions are nothing more than the logical corollary of the application of the deterministic theory of the productive forces—also descended from the Second International—to the theory of the Proletarian Revolution.
By stressing the objective aspect of revolution, its economic conditions, the Rightists liquidate the Marxist–Leninist theory of the Proletarian Revolution, which focuses on the revolutionary subject and the problems of building it. The proletarian theory of revolution is based on the Leninist thesis on imperialism, which allows to assume the permanent ripeness of the objective conditions and rejects this requirement as sufficient for considering a particular process of social or political crisis as a revolutionary process, even potentially. Marxism–Leninism demands the solution of the question of the subject, of the class character (ideological, not economic) of the leadership of those processes, and understands that, without the leadership of a Marxist–Leninist political program, workers’ spontaneity (Argentinian piqueteros, for example) is insufficient for being able to think of a true “revolutionization of capitalism.”
Completely divorced from Marxism–Leninism, in their effort to deny every possibility of political building from ideology, the Rightists have ended up burying the most elementary thesis of Leninism—that there can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory—… as an idealist abomination!
12. We have already seen how, in order to liquidate the New Orientation, the Right has been forced to take so many steps backward that it has had to reject extremely valuable experiences from the World Proletarian Revolution, such as the Cultural Revolution in China, and fundamental pillars of Marxism–Leninism, such as dialectics (both vindicators of the active role of consciousness and the social subject), thus returning to materialist determinism (bourgeois materialism) and empiricism. We have also seen how the Right, affected by its new conception of the world, has proceeded to its theoretical, conceptual self-recycling in economistic terms with a view to a tactical rectification, which has begun precisely by defining the object of revolutionary work, the working class, whose content has been reduced to that of a mere economic mass, and the practical resistance struggle is left as the only possible stage for class struggle.
Finally, we have seen that all this view stands on a sort of philosophy of the integration of opposites, which is but the product of a unilateral interpretation of dialectics. This philosophy of integration is the systematic method of the metaphysical distortion of dialectics, for which, as we have observed, what is secondary always becomes principal. In this way and in general, for the dialectics of integration, the principal aspect is the unity of opposites instead of the struggle of opposites; what is important is to find the common ground to smooth out antagonism, to integrate the opposites. It is a philosophy of that which is static, an enemy of struggle—the motor of all movement. This is an eclectic and conciliating philosophy that prefers to foresightedly (or rather, forcibly) anticipate the result of the contradiction, without regard for the real, practical results of the development of its struggle. This philosophy interprets the negation of the negation as the confirmation of the first, positive moment of the contradiction, not as the higher result of its critical negation up to the point of the crisis and the necessity of sublating it into a true synthesis or negation of the negation. This philosophy arbitrarily chooses what it considers positive in each aspect of the contradiction and seeks a false synthesis by adding them together. This is the metaphysical philosophy of two become one, rather than the dialectics of one divides into two. It is a metaphysical and idealist mode of thought, which understands processes as gradual developments, as evolution, as quantitative accumulations without leaps.
The clearest evidence of the dialectical limits of this mode of thought is its theory of the eternal nature of the being–consciousness contradiction, according to which its cancelation into a higher synthesis (into communism, as coherent materialism proposes and the New Orientation reminds) would imply “the end of the movement of matter.” This thesis encompasses all the dialectical deficiencies of this conception: its metaphysical perception, which separates the elements of the contradiction; its idealist ambition of anticipating the results of this dialectical relation; its conservative lack of inspiration for understanding the ability of matter to find new, higher forms of movement; and its staticist, narrow-minded eclecticism. If the movement of matter always depends on the being–consciousness contradiction, as our metaphysicians say, how did it move before the appearance of the human brain? Or is it that consciousness is eternal and predates matter and we should involve some god in all this? And, if there was movement before there was consciousness, why would there not be movement afterward, even if the being–consciousness contradiction were to be dialectically canceled?
Thus, we find ourselves before a form of conservative thinking, fearful of radical criticism, which instead of antagonism prefers to speak of the integration of opposites and, finally, denies movement as the essential principle of the universe because it abhors progress and the role that the revolutionary proletariat may play in it. It is therefore logical for it to uphold “orthodox Marxism–Leninism,” that is, Soviet scholasticism, modern revisionism, the conservative thinking of the Soviet bureaucratic bourgeoisie.
13. The condemnation of the New Orientation, on the part of its liquidators, as intellectualist or as idealism is the manifestation of the panic that the labor aristocracy feels before the conscious worker; it is the expression of its fear and hatred toward the cultural education and intellectual elevation of the worker, of its wish and stubbornness about keeping the worker lying prostrate among its immediate problems and tied to the dead end of economic struggles, with its horizon reduced to the miserable demands that the union bureaucrat will offer as bargains; it is the expression of the dread it feels about the intellectual emancipation of the combative sectors of our class, about their emancipation from bourgeois ideology and from trade-unionism that fawns over workerism, and about the future collapse of reformist doctrines based on capitulation and social conciliation.
14. A sector of the labor aristocracy, which was connected to the bureaucratic apparatuses of the old revisionist parties, and which arrived too late to take shelter under the wings of the functional or institutional Left after the fall of the Wall, sought a temporary alliance with the revolutionary proletariat so as to forge an identity that would eventually allow it to earn the right to get a piece of the pie in the reformist market, to take part in the competition to become the highest bidder in the trade union, the NGO or some electoral coalition (hence its metaphysical conception of dialectics as unity and conciliation of opposites; hence its precipitation and impatience to “fuse” with the masses; hence its permanent orientation toward the right wing of the working-class movement, and its hopes in the “revolutionary potential of revisionism”). The development of the proletarian line, made possible by this alliance, reached an intolerable point for these representatives of the privileged fraction of the working class, who decided to break its common bloc with the proletarian vanguard. The latter, for its part, needs to split, after a long period of political development that it largely inherits as its legitimate custodian, in order to finish purging the inconsistent elements of this line and demolishing the obstacles for the ample and coherent application of the New Orientation—the true revolutionary tactics of the proletariat, adequate for the tasks required by its class struggle in the current phase of the Proletarian Revolution.