The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

the ‘right’ to speak in the Berlin Council, on the pretext that she was an ‘intellectual’. The supporters of the
motion of exclusion were members of the SPD, fully aware of Luxemburgs political weight. Here, the Theses
seem to consider the ‘intellectual’ party members as ‘foreign’ to the proletariat, despite the party being defined
as “a part of the class”.
Moreover, it is characteristic that the party’s intervention in the councils should be focused right from the start
on the economic problems of the period of transition: the management of production, and “the organisation of
the economy by the democracy of the workers’ councils, whose basis is the calculation of labour time”. When it
declared that “the necessity of the organisation of a planned communist economy must be clearly demonstrated”,
the Spartacusbond revealed a tendency to underestimate the political problems which are posed first in the
proletarian revolution: the seizure of power by the councils, as a precondition for the ‘period of transition
towards communism’.
• The party’s functioning
The Theses remained silent on the question of the party’s centralisation. They deal neither with the question of
fractions and tendencies, nor with the question of internal democracy. The Bond revealed a tendency to idealise
the party’s homogeneity. Like the post-war bordigist PCInt, it did not envisage divergences appearing within the
organisation. 1208 But whereas the bordigist Party sought its ‘guarantee’ against divergence in an ideal and
immutable programme, the Spartacusbond thought it could be found in the existence of ideal militants.
According to the Bond, the militant is always capable of autonomous understanding and judgement: “[Party
members] must be autonomous workers, with their own powers of judgement and comprehension”.
This definition of the militant looks like a ‘categorical imperative’, and an individual ethic within the party. It
should be emphasised that the Bond thought that its proletarian membership and the high quality of each militant
shielded the party from the risks of bureaucratic degeneration. And yet, was a purely working class membership
really a guarantee? The CPs’ ‘working-class’ make-up during the 1920s and 30s did not save them from stalinist
bureaucratisation, and the Parties’ organisation in factory cells stifled even the best militants’ political capacity
for ‘understanding and judgement’. 1209 Moreover, in a revolutionary party there is no formal equality of ability.
Real equality is political, because the party is above all a political body, whose cohesion is reflected in each of
its members.
More deep-seated was the Bond’s rejection of the Jesuitical ‘corpse-like discipline’ – the ‘famous’ perinde ac
cadaver of the Society of Jesus – which breaks the deepest convictions of each militant:
“Linked to the Party’s general conceptions and principles, which are at the same time their own conceptions, [the
militants] must apply and defend them in all circumstances. They do not suffer the discipline of the corpse, the
unthinking submission to decisions; they know only an obedience on the basis of personal conviction, drawn
from a fundamental conception, and in the case of a conflict within the organisation, it is this conviction which
settles the matter.”
A freely agreed discipline, flowing from the defence of the Party’s principles, was thus accepted. It is this notion
of discipline that the Bond rejected (see below) a few years later, on the grounds that it was opposed to the free
activity of each individual as “a free man thinking for himself”.
1208 See Bordiga, in: L’Unità, No. 172, 26 th July 1925: “...the leaders from a working class background have shown
themselves at least as capable as the intellectuals of opportunism and betrayal, and in general more susceptible to absorption
by bourgeois influences [...] We declare that the worker, in his factory cell, will tend to discuss only those particular
questions that concern the workers in his enterprise”.
1209 A second proposed draft of the Theses on the party raised the question. It explicitly rejected the conception of the party
seizing and exercising power. See: ‘Stellingen, taak en wezen van de Partij, Thesis 9’, in: UEK, No. 7, Dec. 1945.
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