Personal reflections and notes on the invariance of Marxist doctrine and method, as elaborated in the tradition of the Communist Left
The materialist denial that a theoretical “system” that had arisen at a particular moment in time (and, worse yet, one that had arisen in the mind and took shape in the works of a particular man, a thinker or historical leader, or both at the same time) could irrevocably apply to the whole course of the historical future, its rules and its principles, must not be understood in the sense that there are no stable systems of principles that are applicable to very long stretches of historical time. To the contrary, a system’s stability and its powers of resistance against being mutilated and even against being “improved”, constitute a primordial element of the power of the “social class” to which that system pertains and whose historical mission and interests it reflects. The succession of such systems and bodies of doctrine and praxis is not connected with the advent of men who define the stages, but with the succession of “modes of production”, that is, of the varieties of the material organization of life of human collectivities.
Amadeo Bordiga, Milan’s Theses no. 5 (1952)
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845).
[1] The stable foundation of the entire Marxist political edifice is a specific understanding of capitalism as a global mode of production. For the Marxist Left, following Marx’s critique of political economy, capitalism appears to us as a closed, antagonistic totality that shapes all spheres of life, an “organic system” whose parts have no independent meaning outside of their function within the whole. This totality possesses an internal, logical consistency operating according to historically determinate laws, foremost among them the law of value and the exploitation of labor-power to produce surplus-value. This systematic character is global from its inception; capital, in its imperialist height, subsumes every corner and exhausts every frontier of the globe, creating a unified, if hierarchically structured and internally stratified, world market. At the heart of the capitalist mode of production is the capital-labor tension, substantially, the tension between the forces of production and relations of production, embodied in the structural determinations of political and economic struggle between workers and capitalists. The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, wherever they may find themselves in, is a singular world-historical conflict from which only two existential-civilizational possibilities emerge: the common ruin of the contending classes, and the advent of communism. The proletariat itself exists, with both its feet in two worlds at once, as a global class, both as statistical variable capital within the international circuit of production, as a “class in itself”, and as the potential revolutionary subject negating that circuit, as a “class for itself”, containing, in its activity, the possibility of communism.
[2] The caveat is that this appearance of capitalism as a fully stable, self-enclosed totality is exposed to us, although in partial ways corresponding to our determinate position within the whole, as ideology unmasked by capitalism’s own internal instabilities, manifest in crises across the board (social, political, economic). From this conception of capitalist totality springs the principle of invariance. Contra the popular dismissiveness of intellectualists against this glue which coheres Marxism, invariance is not the dogmatic adherence to the holy texts of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Bordiga, or some other set of names, neither even exegetical consistency nor the specific tactical prescriptions of a given historical moment, but the fundamental method and core principles derived from the analysis of capitalism’s unchanging logical structure, continually reaffirmed in each cycle of class struggle.
Communism is indeed, as Marx insisted, the “real movement which abolishes the present state of things”, thus this abolition must first be grounded in the determinate content of the “present state of things”. Invariance is that horizon which grounds the activity of abolition to the capitalist mode of production itself. If capitalism is a global system with an identifiable, coherent, internal logic, then the political, ultimately social, response necessary to abolish it must itself possess an internally coherent, logically deducible, if negative, core. The content of this invariance is discovered through the historical experience of the proletariat engaged in struggle, principally through its defeats. Each major historical defeat of the workers since 1848, the Paris Commune, the betrayal of German Social Democracy in 1914, hollowing-out of the Soviets in 1921, the Stalinist degeneration in 1926, Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany, World War 2, Paris 1968, and innumerable struggles up to this day do not give us positive prescriptions for victory, rather negative, prohibitive theses: what must not be done and what lines must not be crossed to avoid the integration of the proletariat and the dissolution of its doctrine into bourgeois civil society.
Invariance is not the systemization of ideas of particular great men in history but of the sedimented content of the communist program itself baked into the very substrate of capitalism. The claim is simple: capitalism has fundamental unchanging foundations which makes it capitalism, which allows us to identify it as capitalism throughout all its forms in the history of bourgeois society, which then allows us to produce a systematic, immanent critique of capitalism as such. The communist program is the political remainder of that critique; invariance is that continuously reconfirmed core of negative determinations whose validity rests on the persistence of capitalism’s fundamental relations, reaffirmed and re-established through concrete, painstaking analysis in each new historical conjuncture.
A brief detour on mathematical invariance
Jean-Pierre Luminet, 1978
Mathematical invariance identifies some persistent determinate property under a defined class of transformations, such that an object’s identity is secured by those structural relations that remain unchanged across alterations in form. Suppose you have an object or an equation, which you decide to rotate, stretch, or swap its parts around according to some given set of rules. An invariant is a characteristic or a quality that stays exactly the same despite these alterations. It is a relational criterion that presupposes variation elsewhere and becomes meaningful only in reference to transformation, and not some metaphysical immutability of that object’s properties. In algebra, for instance, the determinant of a matrix is an invariant; no matter how you change the coordinate system, this single number captures something essential about the transformation the matrix represents. Objects are equivalent insofar as they share the same invariants within a given transformation group.
This logic extends into physics through the concept of symmetry. Emmy Noether’s first theorem demonstrated that every continuous symmetry of a physical system corresponds to some conserved quantity: time-symmetry yields conservation of energy; rotational symmetry yields conservation of angular momentum. The formalization of invariance within group theory makes explicit that invariance is always indexed to a determinate set of transformations, and that objecthood itself is defined by the relations preserved under those transformations. In this sense, invariance does not describe what an object is in itself, but determines the criteria by which its identity is maintained across systematic change. It is precisely by abstracting from representational diversity that mathematics isolates essential structures which is necessary for grounding analysis in stability under transformations.
The search for invariants is a search for the permanent, essential “truths” within a system, providing a stable framework to understand the nature and consistency of change. Marxism, in its historically specific register, operates analogically by seeking to identify those structural determinations of capitalist society (its object) that persist across its changing political, institutional, and ideological forms in the unfolding of class struggle, as the invariant relations which necessarily define the horizon of communism.
[3] The bedrock of all invariant principles of communist politics is unconditional class independence. This was the most valuable lesson of 1848, where the proletariat, fighting on the terrain and for the objectives of the democratic anti-feudal bourgeoisie, was isolated and crushed once that bourgeoisie achieved its aims, and has only been re-confirmed with remarkable consistency ever since.
Class independence asserts that the proletariat cannot achieve its historical mission through alliances with any fraction of the bourgeoisie, no matter how “progressive”, “anti-imperialist”, or “democratic”. Such alliances subordinate proletarian interests to bourgeois ones, channeling revolutionary antagonism into the restructuration, reinforcement, and continual perfecting of capitalist social relations and methods of counter-revolution in modernized and oppressive forms. This principle is invariant because the fundamental class antagonism between wage-labor and capital is invariant. Any political form that blurs this antagonism, from popular fronts, to national liberation movements, to interclassist “people’s democracies”, is therefore a counter-revolutionary trap.
Other invariant principles logically flow from this: the rejection of the parliamentary road as a strategy for socialism, the refusal to confound the conquest of the existing State machine with the communist revolution (the State being the inherently conservative and reifying structural condensation of bourgeois social relations), and the non-negotiability of internationalism. These are not arbitrary tactical preferences or abstract ethico-moral universal principles pulled out of the asses of Enlightenment or modernist political philosophy geniuses but strictly logical deductions from the consistent nature of the enemy and the concrete suffering of our class under capitalism. They are therefore as inflexible as the laws of capital.
[4] When we speak of communism as a “stateless, moneyless, classless” society, we intuit that the communist program is an inverted picture of capitalist society, but that the categories proper to the capitalist mode of production are inadequate to capture the positive dimension of communism (that is, of communism in its “highest phase”). As it does not proceed from positivist assertions, the program, not to be confused with tactics and strategies, is neither a detailed utopian blueprint to be established for the future nor a list of minimum democratic, transitional reforms to be won today; rather it is the highest, most condensed expression of the historical aims and tasks of the proletariat; the ruthless expropriation of the bourgeoisie, the dissolution of the old state machinery, armed defense against counter-revolution, and the construction of a global, stateless communist society.
Yet seemingly contradictory to this positive formulation is the overwhelming negativity of the concrete, actionable content of the program. It is a monument of past suffering and hence necessarily a repository of prohibitions. “The dictatorship of the proletariat” means, in its negative, invariant content, no coalition government, no sharing of power with bourgeois parties (any class which does not break from bourgeois property relations is bourgeois from the revolutionary standpoint of the proletariat), no submission to legality. “The abolition of private property” means no support for programs of national bourgeois development or substantial reformism in the language of revolution.
The program is thus a photographic negative of the proletariat’s historical defeats, its sharpest contours etched by the scars of past betrayals and failures. We come to know it by what it forbids rather than by what it describes, for the positive content of communism (ie., the free association of producers) can only emerge from the successful negation of the existing capitalist order in whatever form it might take today and in the future.
[5] This understanding dictates a specific role for theory as a process of self-clarification through a process of subtraction. Theory is the critical activity of distilling the invariant from the contingent within the torrent of historical and immediate moments of class struggle. It is a continuous process of ruthless self-critique aimed at the movement’s own potential deviations and carcinogenic outgrowths. The more insidious enemy of the class, indeed more than the open bourgeois deniers, is the constant threat of bourgeois ideology and practice saturating within the proletarian camp, or what we aptly identify as opportunism. This is a constant threat precisely because “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”, as such theoretical work is a labor of vigilance and distillation. It examines every new phenomenon (eg., the rise of Fascism, state-capitalism in the USSR, the Cultural Revolution, 20th century national liberation struggles, new forms of trade-unionism) and indexes them against the criteria derived from the immanent critique of political economy. Does this phenomenon represent a genuine expression of independent class action, or does it, in form or content, tie the proletariat to the reproduction of capital?
Theory thus functions as a filter which eliminates options that lead to the known swamps of defeat. Its conclusions are only rediscoveries and reaffirmations of the fundamental prohibitions, with increasing clarity, “sculpted” overtime by militants of the Party and workers alike. A “new” theoretical position is almost always the recognition that a contemporary fad (eg., supporting an “anti-imperialist” bourgeoisie) is but an old error (ie., supporting an “anti-feudal” bourgeoisie) in the costume of modernity. For instance: Stalinism emerged in objectively stark conditions of geopolitical isolation, social and economic backwardness, and the defeat of international revolution. Yet rather than treating these conditions as tragic limits imposed on revolutionary possibility, they became theorized, officially State mythology, as positive stages and programmatic advances. At the same time, a crucial nuance: each new phenomenon must be examined both as a possible reiteration of an old error and as a historically specific configuration that may sharpen or further determine existing prohibitions. Theory thus functions as a continuous process of critical mediation between invariant principles and historical conditions of the present.
[6] The relationship between invariant principles and momentary tactics is one of strict unambiguous hierarchy. Tactics are the contingent means employed in specific historical and geographical contexts to advance the struggle. They may include agitation in workplaces, participation in economic strikes, the formation of factory committees, specific slogans, or forms of organization suited to repressive conditions. However, this flexibility is bounded by an iron cage: no tactic can contradict an invariant principle. A tactic is valid only insofar as it facilitates the development of the autonomous, internationalist, revolutionary class movement. The moment a tactic requires the violation of a principle (eg., tailing—or, most condemnable of all, LEADING—a bourgeois-nationalist movement; seeking to administer the capitalist state) it ceases to be a communist measure and becomes a function of counter-revolution, regardless of the individual intentions of class militants and activists.
Stalinist and Maoist theory resolve this contradiction by, first, taking the world-capitalist system as a heterogeneous field of nationally-bounded trajectories of accumulation, whose contradictions can be selectively managed, postponed, or bypassed through political will and state planning. Where economic planning would have been a dictatorial constraint on capital, part and parcel of the whole contradictory process of transition, instead becomes the principal content of “socialism” in one country. Then, redefining internationalism as inter-state solidarity (inter-nationalism) rather than the abolition of the nation-form logically follows, much closer to the idealism of Liberal-internationalism. This substitution is rarely made explicit, but once internationalism becomes diplomatic geopolitical alignment rather than class unity, the proletariat is immediately subordinated to national accumulation strategies. Invariance is broken because the proletariat ceases to appear as a world-historical subject and is absorbed into national development.
[7] A necessary word on so-called “minimal programs”: minimal democratic programs, specifically those which put forward an intermediary stage between the repressive capital in the periphery of world-capitalism today and the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat tomorrow, treat democracy as a neutral indeterminate political form that can be tactically occupied and progressively transformed in the direction of communism and “service of the revolution”. Here democracy is instrumentalizable; provisional demands that expand political space, weaken repression, and enable proletarian self-organization, which will later overload the democratic shell and culminate in revolutionary rupture. But in truth what this does service to is the abstraction of democracy from its historical constitution and social function. Minimal democratic programs therefore proceed, at the onset, from a fundamental categorical error. Democracy operates through abstraction. Its universality is achieved only by suppressing determinate social antagonisms and presenting individuals as formally equal bearers of rights and votes.
This abstraction is constitutive more than it is ideological (though, of course, they are mutually constitutive in themselves, in dialectical fashion). Class antagonism cannot appear within democratic form as antagonism without destabilizing the form itself. Democracy is an identity-form that symbolically reconciles material contradictions innate to capitalist society; neutralizes non-identity in the process of dissolving antagonism into formal equality. Thus the proletariat ceases to appear as a class confronting capital, but becomes a demographic, if internally differentiated, aggregate whose interests are to be represented and managed in the State. This is often justified by the claim that democratic reforms create space for organizing. Repression is treated as the primary obstacle to proletarian organization, and democratic freedoms as the condition of its possibility. This view misconstrues the nature of both repression and organization. Democratic rights do not suspend the contradictory and antagonistic processes of capitalist production and domination through wage-labor, competition, fragmentation, and ideology but rather presuppose and stabilize them. The freedom to associate as citizens does not generate the capacity to organize as a class against capital. On the contrary, democratic freedoms channel organizational energies into forms that are legible to the state, compatible with legal mediation, and ultimately integrated into capitalist reproduction.
In light of the particular conditions of capitalist domination in the peripheries, mass political struggle often takes the form of the most elementary democratic demands. As the Internationalist Communist Tendency’s Theses on Communist Tactics in the Periphery (1997) states in its 5th thesis:
“In the peripheral countries conditions are different. Here capital cannot dominate in the same way as it does in its birthplace, in its metropolitan centres. Bourgeois democracy – “the most effective weapon for the preservation of capital” – has a precarious and therefore “different” existence in the peripheral countries. Here there is no democratic opium to lull the masses into submission, only the harshness of repression. Thus even the demand for the most elementary of bourgeois freedoms is likely to be the political form taken by the struggles which are unleashed by the dire material situation. The South American experience – El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico, Colombia – confirms this likelihood.
Nevertheless it is still likely to be the case that the circulation of the communist programme will be easier and the “level of attention” received by revolutionary communists will be higher than in advanced capitalist societies. Such ‘better’ conditions certainly translate into the possibility of organising a greater number of militants around the revolutionary party than in the countries at the centre.”
Once democracy is grasped as a specific form of capitalist mediation, the distinction between “minimal” (democratic) and “maximal” (revolutionary) programs collapses. The idea that democratic demands can function as mere means toward a communist end presupposes a separation between form and content that Marxist critique has always rejected. Social forms are not neutral instruments; they shape the practices, consciousness, and horizons of those who act within them. Democracy trains the proletariat to act as a collectivity of citizens rather than as a class defined by its structurally determinate antagonistic position at the point of production. Movements like those of the Marxist-Leninist milieu (including Trotskyists to the left and Maoists to the right) which habituate themselves to these mediations actively postpone communism by producing a subject structurally incapable of realizing it. Communist militants are reduced to (unconscious or otherwise) bureaucrats and petty-politicians perfecting the counter-revolutionary apparatus of the State for it.
[8] Communist praxis is the determinate application of the negative program to the concrete, constrained field of present possibilities, shaped simultaneously by invariant prohibitions and the objective balance of class forces. The supreme criterion for all revolutionary activity is their defense, consolidation, and extension of the autonomous organizational and political capacity of the proletariat in opposition to all bourgeois forces. This practical enactment of the principle of class independence involves building, within the shell of capitalist society, embryonic forms of the future human community in their negative pole, ie., strictly as organs of struggle without illusions of prefiguration. Factory committees, rank-and-file networks, and territorial assemblies are schools of class struggle in that their function are as structures separating the workers from the institutions of capital, allowing them to develop necessary class power to wage civil war. A primary component of this praxis is the strategic, active refusal to participate in the political and ideological rituals of bourgeois society such as elections. Communist praxis short-circuits the mechanisms through which capital recovers and administers social conflict which creates a political vacuum for proletarian self-activity.
Within this bounded field, tactics are defensive-offensive maneuvers, the art of the possible delimited by invariance. In a period of reaction, praxis may be almost entirely defensive and propagandistic, focused on preserving theoretical clarity and doctrinal continuity. In a pre-revolutionary upturn, tactics become increasingly offensive, advocating for the generalization of strikes and the federation of autonomous mass committees. These shifts are but different modes of applying the same invariant principles under different conditions of the class struggle following the movements of capital. For instance, the principle of internationalism dictates that during an imperialist war, the primary tactical duty is revolutionary defeatism and fraternization, a prelude to the active dissolution of borders by associating the workers at the limit-points of the nations.
This negative praxis extends into the class’ eventual conquest of power. The dictatorship of the proletariat is not the beginning of socialist administration but the intensification and globalization of the class war. This leads us directly to the class Party: the Party’s role within this dictatorship is to wage an unceasing political struggle against every tendency toward compromise, bureaucratization, or national isolation, given that it never succumbs to the reifying gravitational pull of the State, in this scenario the mass organizations of the workers, advocating for the immediate extension of the revolution. The positive content of communism (ie., the free association of producers) emerges only from this organized, conscious process of dismantling bourgeois social relations of production, and hence of social existence.
This entire political edifice of the proletariat as a revolutionary subject finds its necessary organ in the class Party;
[9] The Left defines a party as follows: at once a school of thought and a method of action. In each cycle of class struggle there are sections of the class who, through their particular uneven material circumstances, past experiences in struggle and social reproduction, and fragile transmission of theoretical and programmatic continuity, emerge as having a more complete (though not necessarily exhaustive) vision of the general path of the revolutionary process to be taken by the proletariat. This minority necessarily comes from the class itself, whether as individual proletarians themselves or through the proletariat’s social practice and historical movement as an object of critique (in the case of bourgeois intellectuals). Hence the Party is not a minority outside or above the class and its struggle but its direct product.
[10] But the ruling ideas of each historical epoch are the ruling ideas of the ruling classes, and the movement toward communism is neither linear nor inevitable; it is repeatedly interrupted, reversed, and derailed by counterrevolutionary forces that are themselves immanent to capitalist society. The proletariat, being itself a class of capital, is not autonomous from ideology as such, manifesting as a camera-obscura.
In normal periods the class is passive variable capital thoroughly exploited by the bourgeoisie, and acts in accordance to this nature. Its prevailing ideology is that of the bourgeoisie’s, and during normal (reactionary, non-revolutionary) times, its most radical workerist elements are those who still do not wish to go beyond the encasing of bourgeois society. Only in increasingly revolutionary times does the class, along with the entire movement of the tectonic plates of class society, become primed to escalate and develop its consciousness increasingly as a “class”, ie., not merely variable capital but an active participant in class struggle, as “class against capital”. It begins to break away from traditional moulds and increasingly take a political turn in its struggles, and the entire class itself is tending towards a general movement of centralization, of a class party-building movement. The movements of the whole global substrate of capital itself compels the workers to struggle against it and in the midst of struggle (action) develop its consciousness, en masse, as an increasingly coherent singularity, finding the negative contours of the working class’ political program [communism] in the process, as “class for itself”. Crisis opens a recurrent structural window in which proletarian militancy generalizes.
These surges however confront objective limits that do not disappear with militancy. Capitalist social relations do not collapse spontaneously; they persist through the state, money, legality, nationalism, and the global market. In the absence of a successful rupture, revolutionary upticks are forced to resolve their contradictions internally. This resolution has taken the same predictable forms over and again: stabilization through reform, repression, or counterrevolution. The class is demobilized, organizations are integrated or destroyed, and revolutionary content is reabsorbed into capital. This degeneration is the predictable outcome of attempting to resolve global contradictions on a partial (eg., national) basis.
Theoretical coherence and political direction, for these very reasons, cannot be generated spontaneously at the mass level, but must nonetheless remain immanent to the class. This determinate point is occupied by the class Party.
The communist program, even in its negative contours, is a singularity point within capitalism itself which generates a field of gravity so enormous in times of revolutionary uptick that it moves the entire class towards it. We can think of this the way a black hole moves; naturally, there are bodies who are farther away relative to the singularity, orbiting at the accretion disk, and those who are closer to the event-horizon, inevitably falling into it much faster. Being closer to the communist program, these are the minority which constitute the class Party.
[11] The historical Party constitutes the theoretical and programmatic continuity of the proletariat’s negative experience, distilled from the defeats of the class struggle. This is what makes the Party the foremost weapon of our class. Capitalism generates determinate pressures and limit-points that constrain possible futures, even if those futures are not guaranteed. History is thus neither open-ended nor predetermined, but structured by objective tendencies that delimit the field of action. The historical Party does not posit continuity at the level of proletarian subjectivity or communism as a positive project. If one insists, on one’s unmaterialist materialism, that only presently active relations count as real, then “the Party”, that phenomena so oft-accused as deus-ex machina, dissolves into conceptual overreach and becomes a useless abstraction of a sword, blunt, chipped, and brittle. But Marxism already rejects this empiricism by positing continuity at the level of negative determination (is value not operating at the same register here?). We know well enough, as responsible Marxist catechumen, that subjectivity is, foremost, derivative; consciousness is a function of material positioning within the ensemble of relations which constitute capital’s totality, rather than a semi-autonomous domain capable of initiating historical rupture independently. Capital appears to constantly reproduce itself materially and the proletariat is only reproduced as a limit it can never rid itself of. This is capitalism’s only guarantee, while the proletariat’s tendency to associate and centralize is merely epiphenomenal; the historical Party treads this tension; without a mechanism for retaining the negative determinations produced by past defeats, every new upsurge must rediscover the same catastrophic limits (which, let us not mistake, is what counts as (anti-)political (anti-)program for the in-vogue “critical” theories of revolution as the communisation milieu).
This, in a nutshell, is the Left’s ‘reversal of praxis’ thesis:
“In the party, the contribution made by all the individual and class influences which flow into it from below are shaped into the means of establishing a critical and theoretical view, and a will to act, which makes it possible to instill into individual proletarians and militants an explanation of situations and historical processes, and an ability to make correct decisions about actions and struggles (Report, 10).
Amadeo Bordiga, Theory and Action in Marxist Doctrine (1952).
Thus, whilst determinism denies the individual the possibility of achieving will and consciousness prior to action, the reversal of praxis does allow this within the party, and only within the party, as a result of a general historical elaboration.”
Strictly speaking, the “continuity” which the historical Party embodies exists precisely as the persistence of determinate negations, the residue, the sediment, generated by capital’s reproduction. In a word, what persists is not the proletariat as “revolutionary subject” in the active sense, with a guaranteed increasing rate of unification of practice and consciousness, for this remains historically contingent, but the structure of what cannot be done without reproducing capital. This is why the Party’s content is prohibitive rather than affirmative, and why it is not contemporaneous with struggle in most periods. The direct antagonism of class struggle is immediate and blind while the Party is internally mediated and retrospective. The historical Party exists not to affirm communism but precisely to remember why communism failed.
[12] The formal Party is its ephemeral, contingent organizational expression, a moment of the historical Party which appears in acute crises within the substratum of capitalist totality. No proclamationism of any membership roster can claim to embody this party and exhaust the program as its monopoly, for the Party is just as much of a product of its subjective constitution as it is of the material contradictions of capital accumulation, in its natural course dialectically bound up within each cycle of class struggles. The formal Party’s sole raison d’être is to serve as the practical instrument for executing the negative, custodial function of the invariant program, whose work is a militant discipline of collective (hence anonymous) critique, perpetually distinguishing genuine proletarian interests in accordance to its historical tasks from bourgeois diversion. This presents itself in manifold ways.
(1) Its intervention in spontaneous struggles is to act as a critical irritant by introducing the memory of past defeats and the logical consequences of immediate actions to deepen their implicit negative content that pushes conflicts from demands within capitalism toward a confrontation with its totality; (2) the formal Party is the bearer of the program, so crucially, its most vital struggle is internal; it must institutionalize a relentless critique of its own practice against the gravitational pull of bourgeois ideology on its ranks; (3) when its leading organs begins to ossify, bureaucratize, or deviate programmatically, it becomes an obstacle to communism, its sole reason for existing; it must be abandoned and reconstituted as the formal expression of the historical Party elsewhere in space and time; (4) in periods of heightened struggle, its role expands, but never into a fusion with state power; within the dictatorship of the proletariat, the party’s task would be to prevent the ossification of workers’ councils into a new bureaucracy, to wage the political struggle against the persistent specters of capitalist relations; and (5) to maintain unwavering focus on the international extension of the revolution.
[13] The invariance of Marxist doctrine and its consequent politics rejects all shortcuts, all emotional appeals, all ethico-moralist sentimentalities, and all strategic compromises. It takes the long, hitherto defeat-strewn history of the communist workers’ movement as a bleak laboratory from which the intransigence of revolutionary politics can be deduced and where retroactive tragedy and suffering becomes the raw material of theoretical and programmatic elaboration in grand hindsight. In an age where the left of capital is perpetually tempted by, and itself an active advocate of, the siren calls of populist alliances, essentially capitalist reforms, resolving social antagonism, and managing decadence, the doctrine of invariance stands its ground as a bulwark of the communist program against its falsifiers and modernizers, the red thread that, whenever cut off or broken, can always be picked back up once more and retraced where it has left off. To avoid the failures of the past, one must first remember, with unsparing precision, what they were, and upon that memory reorient itself over and over again towards the north star which points beyond capitalism, unto victory. The proletariat in struggle, in constituting itself as a Party and hence as a fighting class, is that subject that has looked into the abyss of the counter-revolution and chosen to build its theory from the negative imprint left behind. Communism gropes its way out of history.
References
- Amadeo Bordiga – Milan’s Theses (The Historical Invariance of Marxism)
- Amadeo Bordiga – The Democratic Principle
- Amadeo Bordiga – Lessons of the Counterrevolutions
- Amadeo Bordiga – Theory and Action in Marxist Doctrine
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – The German Ideology
- Karl Marx – Capital
- Karl Marx – Paris Manuscripts
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – The Communist Manifesto
- Jacques Camatte – Origin and Function of the Party Form
- Theodor Adorno – Negative Dialectics
- Grupo Barbaria – The Past of Our Being
- ICP – Introductory Notes to the Party Theses, 1976-1998
- ICT – Theses on Communist Tactics in the Periphery of Capitalism
- GCI-ICG – Theses on Communism against Democracy