Critical Remarks About Prometeo's Resolution on Democratic Demands

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… And now a few words about our Bordigist friends. If you leave out the third paragraph of their resolution, which has been put in by them in a completely mechanical way, without any connection with the text, then the matter looks this way to them: democracy is a principle of the exploiters; the revolutionary parties have not hitherto understood this; the Russians in 1917 hesitated between democracy and dictatorship; the Bordigists were the first to discover the true principle of dictatorship. Now that this principle has been discovered, any use of democratic slogans becomes reactionary; in other words, the dialectic of social development is replaced by the metaphysics of the development of a sectarian group. The Bordigists' train of thought is in complete accord with the spirit of rationed Enlightenment of the eighteenth century: formerly errors and prejudices prevailed, but now the true principle of society has been discovered, and it must continue existing on that basis; since now we, the Enlighteners, have understood that, there remains only a detail — to reconstruct society. The curious thing is that the Enlighteners discovered precisely the principle of democracy, which they formally contrasted to the entire preceding development of humanity as an absolute beginning. The Bordigists have discovered nothing, but merely borrowed from the Russian Revolution the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat, so as to oppose it, freed of any historical reality, as an absolute truth against the absolute error of democracy. This proves that they have understood absolutely nothing either of the theory and practice of the Russian Revolution or, for that matter, of Marxism as a whole. They do not take the trouble to explain what they actually understand by democracy. Apparently only parliamentarism. But what is to happen with such a detail as for example the independence of India from Great Britain? That is a purely democratic slogan. It concerns the liberation of one nation from another one. (The Bordigists will of course immediately explain to us that there are class-nations, which we poor sinners have never dreamt of; but the essence of the matter is precisely that it is a case of the liberation of a nation of the bourgeois-feudal colonial type from another of the bourgeois imperialist type.) What then is to happen with the democratic slogan of national independence? Our wise critics have overlooked that question.

Should communists fight against violence and provocations by the police, directed against the freedom of the press, strike, and assembly? And what does that mean if not the struggle for democracy?

What is to happen in that same India or in Hungary or in many other countries with the agrarian question? We know that the peasants' land hunger can make them support the dictatorship of the proletariat even in such a backward country as India. But in order to realize this possibility there must be a series of concrete historical conditions, including a correct understanding of the agrarian-democratic problem. The Indian peasants do not know the dictatorship of the proletariat, and will not get to know it until it has been realized, with their half-conscious support. I say half-conscious, because the Indian peasant, with all the unclarity of his political views, still very consciously wants to take the land into his own hands, and expresses this desire in the formula that the land should belong not to the landlords but to the people. That is not a pure revolutionary program, which means the liquidation of all kinds and vestiges of feudalism. What will the Bordigists say to the peasants? Your program is democratic, and therefore reactionary; we propose to you a program of proletarian dictatorship and socialism. No doubt the peasant will answer them with some Indian strong language. But what do we say to the peasant? Your democratic land program means a big historical step forward in social development. We communists are pursuing a more radical historical goal, but we support your democratic task fully and completely and for the present period make it our own. Only in this way can one bring the peasantry round to supporting the dictatorship of the proletariat in the course of their own struggle.

The curious thing is that the Bordigists are here serving up as a discovery of their own the same humbug that the Stalinists and Zinovievists imputed to me as permanent revolution (skipping over democracy, the peasantry, etc.).

It has already been remarked above that the Bordigists evince an inverse parliamentary cretinism by apparently completely reducing the problem of democracy to the question of the national assembly and of parliament in general. But even within the limits of the parliamentary frame of reference they are completely in the wrong. Their antidemocratic metaphysics inevitably implies the tactic of boycotting parliament. Comrade Bordiga took this stand at the time of the Second Congress, but later he departed from it. (I think in general that in polemic one should strictly distinguish Bordiga from the Bordigists. We do not know his views, since the conditions in which he exists deprive him of the opportunity of expressing himself. But we believe that Bordiga would hardly take on the responsibility for the parody-like views of the group of his pupils concerned.) It would not be a bad thing to ask the Bordigists outright whether they are for a boycott or for participation in parliament. If a communist deputy is arrested in violation of his immunity, will the Bordigists then call upon the workers to protest against this treading on our democratic rights?

These doctrinaires refuse to understand that we carry on half, three-quarters, or, in certain periods, even 99 percent of the preparation of the dictatorship on the basis of democracy, and in doing this we defend every inch of democratic positions under our feet. But if one can defend the democratic positions of the working class, then perhaps one may fight for them where they do not yet exist?

Democracy is a weapon of capitalism, our critics tell us; yes, but a contradictory one, just as capitalism as a whole is contradictory. Democracy serves the bourgeoisie, but within certain limits it can also serve the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. The unfortunate thing is that the Bordigists do not grasp democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat as historical institutions which can replace one another dialectically, but as two naked principles of which one embodies good, the other evil.

Finally, I should like to refer to point 5, concerning Russia, as an incredible curiosity. It is asserted there that the Bolsheviks supported the slogan of a national assembly "for a fairly short period, from the fall of czarism to the attempt at restoration of capitalist rule. …" In reality, the social democracy put forward the slogan of a national assembly from the start of its existence, i. e., from 1883. This slogan played a gigantic role in the education of the proletariat and the party from the first years of this century. The 1905 revolution grew under this slogan. The whole work of the Bolsheviks between the two revolutions went under the slogans of: 1. a democratic republic; 2. the land to the peasants (democratic-agrarian reform); 3. the eight-hour day (demand for workers' democracy).

The Bordigists will certainly explain that all this was a complete error, that it belongs to the dark period in which the truth of the proletarian dictatorship had not yet been discovered.