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The implicit rejection of the Russian Revolution and the contribution of the bolshevik party in 1917 leaded the
author of the Theses to identify 1917 bolshevism with stalinism. The only difference between bolshevism and
social democracy in setting up a “state planned economy”, “is one of method”.
The definition of the role of the party, and of revolutionary intervention, was more original. Taking up the
KAPD’s conception of the 1920s, the Bond emphasized that the Party’s role was neither to guide, educate, nor to
substitute itself for the working class: “The role of the party is now limited to an organisation of clarification and
propaganda. Nor does it aspire to establish a domination over the class”.
The genesis of the party was closely dependent on the changes within capitalism – where “the period of liberal
capitalism is definitively closed” – and on the transformation of the workers’ class consciousness. The
revolutionary struggle, which produced the party, was above all a struggle against the state produced by the
action of the masses, and a conscious struggle for the organisation:
“The state has clearly become the mortal enemy of the working class. [...] In every case, the workers’ struggle is
irreconcilably opposed to this state, not only to the governments but to the entire [state] apparatus, including the
old parties and unions [...] There is an indissoluble link between the three elements of the struggle for the
workers’ emancipation: the upsurge of mass action, of organisation, and of consciousness.” 1206
The Theses established a dialectical interaction between the development of the revolutionary organisation and
the revolutionary struggle: “Thus the organisation develops within the struggle, materially and spiritually; and
with the organisation, the struggle also develops”.
The most significant aspect of the Theses was that they demonstrated the ‘positive role of the revolutionary
party’ in the mass movement, and that they defined the kind of revolutionary militant that should correspond to
the ‘new period’.
c) The necessity of the Party: coming to consciousness
The Theses showed that the party was necessary, for it is a dialectical product of the development of class
consciousness, and consequently an active factor in this process of development. We were far, here, from the
vision which was to be developed later, where ‘unorganised revolutionaries’ dissolve themselves into the ‘class
movement’. The Leninist vision, where the party is a general staff of the revolution, to which the workers are
blindly subordinate, was also rejected. The necessity of the party also flowed, not from a relationship of force
between the organisation and the class, but from an ‘organic relation’ between party and class, born from the
development of class consciousness:
“In the process of coming to consciousness through the struggle, where the struggle becomes conscious of itself,
the party has an important and necessary role to play. In the first place, it supports this coming to consciousness.
The lessons that must be drawn, as much from victory as from defeat, and of which the workers, taken
individually, are more or less aware, are formulated by the party and spread among the masses by means of its
propaganda. This is the idea, which, once it seizes hold of the masses, becomes a material force.
“The party is neither a general staff detached from the class, nor the workers’ ‘thinking brain’; it is the focal
point for the expression of the workers’ growing consciousness.”
(Paris: Bélibaste, 1974), p. 184; English: The Workers Councils (Boston: Root and Branch, 1975). Web:
]
1206 See: Bordiga, in: Partito e Classe, 1921 (reprinted in Le Fil du Temps, No. 8, ‘Parti et Classe’, Brussels, October 1971):
“A party lives when there is a living doctrine and method of action. A party is a school of political thought, and
consequently an organisation of struggle. First, there is an act of consciousness: then an act of will, or more exactly a
tendency towards a finality”.
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