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THE HISTORICAL INVARIANCE OF MARXISM

International Communist Party | 17.09.2006 16:59

THE HISTORICAL INVARIANCE OF MARXISM
(Reunion of Milan, September 7, 1952)

1. We do not use the expression "Marxism" in the sense of a doctrine discovered or introduced by the person Karl Marx, but in reference to the doctrine which arises with the modern industrial proletariat and which "accompanies" it throughout the course of a social revolution – and although the term "Marxism" has been speculated upon and massively exploited by a series of anti-revolutionary movements, we nevertheless retain it.

2. Marxism, in the only valid sense of the word, is faced today by three principal groups of adversaries. First group: those bourgeois who claim that the mercantile capitalist type of economy is definitive, that its historical surpassing by the socialist mode of production is a false perspective, and who coherently reject the entire doctrine of economic determinism and class struggle. Second group: the so-called Stalinist communists, who claim to accept the Marxist historical and economic doctrines and yet propound and defend, even in the advanced capitalist countries, not revolutionary demands, but ones which are identical to the politics (democracy) and economics (popular progressivism) of the traditional reformists, if not worse. Third group: the declared followers of the revolutionary doctrine and method who nevertheless attribute its present abandonment by the majority of the proletariat to initial defects and deficiencies in the theory, which has to be, therefore, corrected and updated.
Negators – falsifiers – modernizers. We fight all three, but think that today the last lot are the worst.

3. The history of the Marxist left, or radical Marxism, or more precisely, of Marxism, consists of a series of battles against each of the revisionist "waves" which have attacked various aspects of its doctrine and method, starting with the organic monolithic formation whose appearance roughly corresponds with the 1848 Manifesto. Other writings have recalled the history of these struggles within the three historic Internationals: against utopians, workerists, libertarians, reformist and gradualist social-democrats, syndicalists of the left and right, social-patriots, and today against national-communists and populist-communists. This struggle, which has spanned four generations and gone through various phases, is the heritage not of a few big names, but of a well-defined, compact school, and in the historical sense, of a well-defined party.

4. We would lose the connection between this long and difficult struggle and the recovery to come if, rather than drawing the lesson of "invariance" from it, we accepted the banal idea that Marxism is a theory in "continuous historical elaboration" which should adapt and draw lessons from changing circumstances. Invariably this is the justification used to excuse all the betrayals of which there is such abundant evidence, and every revolutionary defeat.

5. The materialist rejection of the idea that a theoretical "system", which arose at a given moment (or worse still, arose from the mind, and was systemized within the work of, a given man, thinker, or historical leader, or any of those things combined) can contain within it the entire course of future history and all its laws and principles in an irrevocable way, shouldn't be understood as rejecting the notion that systems of principles can be stable over extremely long periods of time. In fact their stability and resistance to attack, and to being "improved" as well, means they constitute a major weapon in the armory of the "social class" to which they belong, whose historical task and interests they reflect. The succession of such systems and bodies of doctrine and praxis, is tied not to the advent of outstanding men, but rather to the succession of “modes of production”, that is, of the types of material organization of the living human collectivity.

6. Although obviously having recognized the formal content of the bodies of doctrine of all the great historical eras as wrong, dialectical materialism does not deny that they were necessary in their time; much less does it imagine that the error could have been avoided by better thinking on the part of sages and legislators, or that their errors could have been noticed beforehand, and corrections made. The reason and explanation for every system is contained within its cycle; the most significant ones being those which have remained most unchanged organically over the course of a long period of struggle.

7. According to Marxism, historical progress in the realm (above all) of the organization of productive resources is not continuous and gradual, but is rather a series of consecutive, widely spaced leaps forward which cause profound disruption in the entire social-economic apparatus and shake it to its very foundations. These are genuine cataclysms, disasters, rapid crises, in which everything changes very quickly after having stayed the same for a very long time, as with the physical world, with the stars in the cosmos, with geology and with phylogenesis itself of living organisms.

8. Since class ideology is a superstructure to the modes of production, it is not shaped by the daily flow of grains of knowledge either, but appears within the chasm produced by a violent clash, and it guides the class whose expression it is, in a substantially monolithic and stable form, through a long series of struggles and convulsions until the next critical phase is reached, until the next historical revolution.

9. Indeed it was capitalist doctrines, after having justified all past social revolutions up to the bourgeois one, which would declare that history, from then on, would proceed along a slowly ascending path with no further social catastrophes, and that ideological systems would, by a process of gradual evolution, absorb the flow of new conquests made in the realm of pure and applied knowledge. Marxism has shown the fallaciousness of such a vision of the future.

10. Marxism itself isn't a doctrine which can be moulded and remoulded each day by adding and changing "bits" of it (patching it up more like) because it is still counted amongst those doctrines (although the last) which function as a weapon of a dominated and exploited class which needs to overturn social relations; in the process of which it is subjected, in a thousand and one ways, to the conservative influences of the traditional forms and ideologies of the enemy classes.

11. Although it is now possible – or rather it was possible from when the proletariat first appeared on the great historical stage – to catch a glimpse of the future society without classes and therefore without revolutions, it must be stated that the revolutionary class, in the long period leading up to that time, will only have completed its task insofar as it had moved forward using a doctrine and methodology which had remained stable and been stabilized in a monolithic program for the duration of the terrible struggle – with the number of followers, and successfulness of particular phases and particular social battles, remaining all the while extremely variable.

12. Although, therefore, the ideological endowment of the revolutionary working class is no longer revelation, myth and idealism as it was for previous classes, but positive "science" instead, there is still need for a stable formulation of its principles, and of its rules of action as well, which serve the purpose and has the same efficacy as the dogmas, catechisms, tables, constitutions, and the 'books of guidance' such as the Vedas, the Talmud, the Bible, the Quran, or the Bills of Rights, had in the past. The profound errors of form and substance contained in those collections did not detract from, indeed in many cases they contributed to, their enormous organizational and social force, first revolutionary, then counterrevolutionary, in dialectical succession.

13. In the same way that Marxism excludes any kind of search for "absolute truth", by seeing doctrine not as evidence of a timeless spirit or abstract reason, but as an "instrument" of work and a "weapon" of combat, it postulates that, when exerting yourself to the utmost and in a pitched battle, you don't send your tools or your weapons "off for repair", but rather, in order to win in both peace and war, you need from the beginning the right equipment and weapons to brandish.

14. A new doctrine cannot appear at just any historical moment. There are given, very characteristic – and also very rare – periods in history when it can appear like a dazzling beam of light; and if the crucial moment is not recognized and the terrible light not faced, it is no good resorting to little candles; by which the way is lit for academic pedants and fighters of little faith.

15. For the modern proletarian class which arose in those countries where the great capitalist industrial development first got underway the darkness was pierced shortly before the middle of the nineteenth century. From then on, the integral doctrine which we believe in, which we must, and want to, believe in, contained all the necessary data to shape and describe the centuries long course which will be needed to verify it and reaffirm it following countless struggles. Either this position remains valid, or the doctrine will have been proven false, and the announced appearance of a new class with its own character, program, and revolutionary function in history will have been in vain. Whoever therefore sets out to change parts, theses, essential articles of the Marxist "corpus", which has been in our possession for a century or so now, is sapping its strength far more than he who renounces it in full and declares it aborted.

16. After the "explosive" period, in which the very novelty of the new revendication gave it a clear and sharply delineated form, there followed, due to the worsening situation, a period which may be, in fact is, characterized by an equilibrium in which we don't have enhancement and development but rather involution and degeneration of so-called class "consciousness". The moments when class struggle becomes accentuated are – as the entire history of Marxism proves – the moments when the theory comes back to make glorious affirmations of its origins and of its first complete expression: suffice to recall the Paris Commune, the Bolshevik Revolution and the first post world war period in the West.

17. The principle of the historical invariance of the doctrines which reflect the tasks of protagonist classes, and also all the potent referring back to founding principles, is opposed to the gossipy assumption that every generation and every season of intellectual fashion is more powerful than the previous one. Rejecting the whole silly film show which portrays the relentless advance of civil progress and other such bourgeois prejudices, from which very few of those who lay claim to the adjective 'Marxist' are really free, it is a principle which applies to every great historical period.

18. All the myths are an expression of this, and above all the ones about demigods, or sages, who had an audience with the Supreme Being. Laughing at such figurations is stupid, and Marxism alone has discovered the real and material sub-structures which underlie them. Rama, Moses, Christ, Muhammad, all the Prophets and Heroes who initiated centuries of history for the various peoples, are diverse expressions of this real fact, which corresponds to an enormous leap in the "mode of production". In the pagan myth, wisdom, namely Minerva, emerges from the brain of Jupiter not via the dictation of entire volumes to flabby scribes, but due to the hammering of the worker-god Vulcan, called on to alleviate an uncontrollable migraine. At the other historical extreme, faced with the illuminist doctrine of the new Goddess Reason, there arises the gigantic figure of Gracchus Babeuf, rough in his theoretical presentation, to tell us that physical material force drives us forward more than reason and knowledge.

19. There is no lack of examples of restorers in the face of revisionist degenerations; as is Francis to Christ when Christianity, arisen to redeem the meek, made itself comfortable in the courts of the medieval signori, as were the Gracchi to Brutus; and as so often had the standard-bearers of an up and coming class to be with respect to the revolutionary renegades from the heroic phase of previous classes: struggles in France, 1831, 1848, 1849 and innumerable other phases throughout Europe.

20. Our stance is that all the great events of recent times are just so many clear-cut and conclusive confirmations of Marxism's theory and predictions. We relate this above all to those points which have provoked (yet again) major defections on the class terrain and caused embarrassment even to those who deem Stalinist positions to be completely opportunist: these points are the advent of totalitarian and centralized capitalist forms in the economic as well as the political field, the managed economy, state capitalism, the open bourgeois dictatorships; and on the other hand the process of Russian and Asian social and political development. We see therefore confirmed both our doctrine, and the fact of its birth in monolithic form at a crucial time.

21. Whoever succeeds in pitting the historical events of this volcanic period agaist the Marxist theory will have proved it wrong, completely defeated and with it all attempts to deduce the main features of historical progress from economic relationships. At the same time he would have successfully proved that in every phase new events require new deductions, explanations, and theories, and consequently proved the viability of new, different means of action.

22. One illusory way out of a current difficulty is to allow that the basic theory should remain subject to change, and to decide that actually today is the day to write a new chapter of said theory, this act of thought being thought capable of turning the unfavourable situation around. And then it is an aberration when such a task is taken on by small groups of derisory strength, or worse still, emerges from a free discussion which, Lilliput like, mimics bourgeois parliamentarism with its famous clash of individual opinions; which is ancient foolishness rather than the latest, most up-to-date resource.

23. At present we are at the lowest point of the curve of revolutionary potential, and therefore centuries away from the next of those moments which will be conducive to the appearance of a new historical theory. In the present situation, with no imminent prospect of a great social upheaval, it is not just the political disintegration of the global proletarian class which is a logical result; just as logical is the existence of small groups capable of maintaining the guiding historical thread of the great revolutionary course, which stretches like a great arc between two social revolutions; on condition, that is, that these groups have no desire to spread ideas which are new but remain strictly attached to the traditional formulations of Marxism.

24. Criticism, doubt, and questioning of all the old entrenched positions was a decisive feature of the great modern, bourgeois revolution whose gigantic shock waves would overwhelm the natural sciences, the social order, and the political and military powers, and then go on, in much less iconoclastic leaps, to come up with the sciences of human society and of historical progress. All this the result of an epoch of profound turmoil which straddled the feudal and landed Middle ages, and industrial and capitalist modernity. The critique was the effect and not the driving force of this immense and complex struggle.

25. Doubt and examination of individual consciousness are expressions of the bourgeois reformation of the compact tradition and authority of the Christian Church. Transformed into the most hypocritical Puritanism, and under the banner of bourgeois conformity to religious morality or individual rights they would launch and protect the new class domination, and the new form of subjection of the masses. The proletarian revolution takes the opposite path: individual consciousness is nothing and concordant direction of collective action is everything.

26. When in the famous Theses on Feuerbach Marx said that the philosophers had done enough interpreting of the world, and the time had come to change it, he did not mean to say that willing change conditions the change itself, but that change, determined by the clash of collective forces, comes first and only then critical consciousness of it by individual subjects. Indeed, the latter don't act on the basis of decisions which each has developed separately, but on the basis of influences which precede science and precede consciousness.

And in passing from the weapon of criticism, to the criticism of weapons, one actually transfers everything from the thinking subject to the militant mass, in such a way that not only rifles and cannons serve as weapons but, above all, that real instrument which is the common, uniform, monolithic and steadfast doctrine of the party, to which we are all subordinated and bound, bringing gossipy and know-it-all discussion to an end.



(From the pamphlet "Sul Filo del Tempo - n° 1 - Contributions to the organic historical representation of the marxist revolutionary theory", may 1953).

International Communist Party
- e-mail: ic.party@wanadoo.fr
- Homepage: http://perso.orange.fr/italian.left

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  1. Still into dogma not science? — Ilyan
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