Some considerations concerning our objectives

Periodically, peremptory announcements are diffused in order to tetanize the workers' movement. According to cases, we should considerate that the end of history arrived, or that the proletariat has disappeared, or that society and power are two independent spheres. A primordial question is that related to the necessity of a political party assuming direction in the struggle of the working class.

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Contribution à la question d'une nouvelle Internationale

Written: February 2006
Last modification: April 2007

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One of the characteristics of the period we go through as Marxist Leninist militants is the extreme weakening of the ties of historical continuity that bind us to the Marxist Leninist movement of the epoch opened by the First International built under the leadership of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Their work has been pursued by the CP(b)SU under Vladimir I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin as well as the PLA under Enver Hoxha. However, at present, there is no more organizational basis for the continuation of the labor of edification of the Communist Marxist-Leninist movement, in the strict sense of the word “continue”, that is, by consolidating, deepening and broadening existing organizational structures. For sure, organizations declaring themselves “Marxist Leninist party” subsist. In fact these are at most groups, circles, associations. Anyhow, as far as the activity of authentic Marxist Leninist militants is concerned, it has become progressively ‑ yet not smoothly ‑ ever more reduced and eventually bounded to the field of individual efforts, reaching at the very best extremely limited groupings between a few persons, extended by endeavors of hypothetical co-ordinations on international level.

Expressed in a global and succinct way, the task of Marxist-Leninist militants consists in building, in each country, a party as the organized avant-garde of the proletariat. This, concurrently, necessitates achieving that workers constitute themselves as class for itself. From the organizational point of view, these efforts start virtually from scratch, since all that existed in this field belongs to the past. However, Marxism-Leninism as scientific theory guiding the movement towards establishment of socialist society exists and nothing erases the past constituting a cumulated experience of the workers movement and the communist movement (except in case a protracted regressive evolution ends up in making sink all that into absolute oblivion, to such a point that the work of the founders of Marxism-Leninism be struck out of all libraries in the world).

As for the enemy, that is bourgeoisie and its political representatives, of course continuity is preserved. She exercises power, and she leans on a certain number of forces of various natures, the role of which is to prevent the march ahead of the workers movement.

Within this present context, certain particular factors take on importance. The task of Marxist-Leninist militants is to construct a Party. The objective of bourgeoisie is to prevent this. In her efforts in this sense, she always leaned on political currents tending to take revolutionary activities towards defeat. One stage in that struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat was the transformation of the social-democratic parties (in the time of Marx and Lenin) into revisionist parties, an evolution which subsequently touched the communist parties (notably the CP(b)SU). In other respects, anarchism attempts to shut up the workers movement in the deadlock of the “auto-organized" struggle rejecting direction of a Party. In addition to the persistence of explicit anarchism, are asserted different versions of that very same idea ‑ that the proletariat, in the course of his struggle for throwing over the bourgeoisie's power, does not need a Party. All this contributes actually in rendering difficult at present time the task of Marxist-Leninist militants.

From the point of view of program, the Trotskyist organizations affirm to be working in favor of the constitution of revolutionary Parties or, at least, have not repudiated explicitly this objective. Still, the fundamental characteristics of their orientation imply that in reality they participate in that tendency consisting in depriving the workers movement of an avant-garde Party capable of leading it in the revolutionary struggle. Three salient aspects can be underlined with respect to this. In the first place, Trotskyism differentiates itself from the Marxist-Leninist position in that it assigns essentially to the Party a role of education of the masses while rejecting under the qualifier “Stalinist” the affirmation that the Party ought to play an effective leading role in the course of revolutionary struggle. Next, in a more general matter, Trotskyism propagates the idea that the Party ought to be a mass party, which brings it close to the position advocated about this issue by Rosa Luxemburg. In the third place, it can be noted that in the practice that orientation takes Trotskyists to privilege “autonomous” action of workers, which signifies on the one hand that they attempt to dissimulate their own intervention at this level and on the other hand that they aim at shutting up these struggles within the scheme of self-management.

We insist here in the first place on the negative role played by certain political currents. However, it must be underlined too that the bourgeoisie, whilst leaning on the help thus provided to it, acts itself to protect the conditions of its domination. Whether this is about the evolution of the general structure of capitalism or the organisational mechanisms established at all levels, from the big transnational corporations to individual enterprises of reduced size, capitalists employ all means to hinder both development of class consciousness amidst the workers as well as the reinforcement of their organisational ties with a view to common struggle.

Faced with these multiple obstacles, Marxist-Leninist militants ought to persist in assuming continuity with the past of the workers' movement. There were fallacious theories about so-called disappearing of the working class. In a similar way, have appeared more recently the interpretations following which all organisational schemes of the workers' movement known up to now had become obsolete. Counting with the modifications having taken place in the conditions of the confrontation with the enemy, the working class for sure ought to deploy differently its forces, but the “updating” of any kind to which those peoples want to induce us amount to scuttling.