Programme

World Communist Group

1989

The World Communist Group has or had its origins in the group around Jacques Camatte. See url for more details. The original text has been cleaned up some for this red texts version. Certain words that were mistranslated into English have been corrected. Theorically becomes theoretically, egality becomes equality, inconditionnal becomes unconditional, etc. Obvious typos have been fixed. From http://groupe-communiste-mondial.org/en/publications/publications3.html.

Programme

“Before achieving a socialist change, a dictatorship of the Proletariat, a first condition of which is the proletarian army, is needed. The working classes will have to conquer on the battle field their right to their own emancipation. The work of the International is to organize and to coordinate the workers’ forces for the fight awaiting them.” - Marx, 1871.

The World Communist Group is based on the following historical, theoretical and programmatic principles,

1. The historical development of the capitalist production accumulates a rising contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, that engenders the class struggle between the Proletariat and the Capital.

2. The Bourgeois economic system follows a progressive development and develops its own negation as a final result. When the relations of production have become too tight and hinder the productive forces’ development; when the material and spiritual conditions coming out from the bosom of the old society are fulfilled for new and superior relations of production, an era of social revolution starts up for the conservation or destruction of the actual capitalist production mode, indissolubly linked to the upholding or the overthrow of the present Bourgeois State.

3. Based on the representative system of social and political democracy, the Bourgeois State of class domination constitutes the organ of the Capital’s dictatorship.

4. Defended by the Bourgeois State, the conservation of the present relations of production is assured by the scientific continuity of the process of the capitalist production, to which the Proletariat is submitted, because the process accumulates the Capital’s wealth and produces the latter’s destitution.

5. The Proletariat can neither break nor modify the capitalist relations of production from which ensue its exploitation and the oppression of mankind, without slaughtering the state power of the Capital, nor struggle against this power and overthrow this state without forming itself into a class, therefore into Communist Party.

6. The Capital is the value in process, having reached autonomy, whose being consists in its movement as a value endlessly multiplying itself. Linking the productive forces’ development to their periodic destruction, the phase of real domination of the Capital – imperialist and fascist – breeds economic and social crisis, catastrophes and cataclysms.

7. As necessary to its conservation, as moments of its vital process, as conditions of its regeneration, the regular and cyclic destruction of Capital restores the continuity of the capitalist production process, then brought back, by violence, to the point where – without killing itself – it is able again to make full use of its productive capacities and to still expand its accumulation process.

8. The expansion of the Capital, punctuated by the periodical and universal convulsions still more extreme and universal, necessarily determines the come-back of the capitalist system’s catastrophic crisis, which unleashes the social and political explosions, gathers the historical conditions for its violent overthrow – among them the revival of the Communist Party opening the historical cycle of the proletarian revolution – and gives way to the classical alternative: world imperialist war – means of the historical regeneration of the capitalist production process – or/and world communist revolution.

9. Unable to overcome its economic anarchy – which is its law – and to remove the division of society into classes and the State, Capitalism – production and reproduction of the specifically capitalist relations of production – progressively achieves the political, economic, and social democracy: it is interest that unites the members of the Bourgeois Society, whose real link is made up by civil life and not by political life; by suppressing the Capital, the social classes and the State, Communism suppresses democracy and therefore achieves the Human Community.

10. With the political democracy, the Bourgeoisie takes possession of the state, and appropriates its community. The Capital frees itself from the ideological, social, political and economic remnants of the previous historical formations; it destroys them and institutes its dictatorship as a representative system of the parliamentary democracy. With its accession to the real domination, the Capital constitutes itself into a material community that subjects to itself all the economic and social productive forces. As the Capital’s properties, the determined relations into which enter the classes within the production process of their social life, emerge as the omnipowered natural law, crushing the individual’s free will, mastered by the economic process as well as by the Capital’s ideological representations. The capitalist class owns and rules the production and trade means. The ancient petty-bourgeoisie collapses and disappears while the peasantry dissolves itself into the wage-system. The Capital produces new-middle stratas, stratas for consumption, unproductive and parasitic, linked to the development of the social production of work and indispensable to the realization of value and to the movement of the Capital. The exploitation of the working-class power work produces surplus value, extorted by overwork, thanks to which the Capital accrues. The political democracy vanishes; the parliamentary institutions decline. The economic and social democracy regulates thus the working-classes’ subservience to their own products and trades, that have been erected into independent material powers: the Capital. Having reached the extreme stage of the Bourgeois Society, the Proletariat can only acquire an identity as a class with the Capital’s catastrophic crisis that breaks the scientific continuity of the capitalist production process. Then, the Proletariat constitutes itself into Communist Party, clashing with the Capital the Human Community it foreshadows and from which man is utterly isolated: Human Being, the genuine Gemeinwesen of man. The Human Community is possible only after the destruction of the Capital, which can be achieved only by the Proletariat’s dictatorship.

11. Reaching a real domination, the Capital generalizes the democratic mystification thanks to which: as revolutionary, it set itself free from it; as reformist it got developed; as counter-revolutionary it lives on, starving communism that lies in its womb. The Capital, thus, dissolves the class struggle into the process of its everlasting accumulation. The Proletariat as a class is historically wiped out; its praxis is led astray, then destroyed; the programme of its historical mission is evacuated; its economic organizations are mastered, and its revolutionary organ, the Communist Party, destroyed.

12. The proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing. During the historical cycles of the counter-revolutions (1852-1864; 1871-1889; 1906-1912; 1926 – until the return of the future Communist Party (subject of the prediction)) – the Proletariat, apart from the Communist Programme, is wiped out, reduced to its mere economic functions. The party of class as a form, splits up, deteriorates, breaks up and disappears. Until the next formation of the formal party, the continuity of the Marxist Programme is theoretically maintained by the faithful elements of the historical party (Marx – Engels – Lenin – The Communist Left of Italy) which have to

draw the lesson of the counter-revolution by dismissing the wrong solutions, such as the immediatist, activist, and the voluntarist ones;

restore the body of the Marxist doctrine by the demonstration of its invariance;

forecast and describe the historical genesis of the Communist Party-to-come reappearing from the catastrophic crisis of the capitalist system (characteristics, epicentre, date);

establish the theoretical, organizational and tactical characteristics of the working-class’s future revolutionary party.

13. With the counter-revolution, begun in 1919 by the social-democracy, carried out by fascism and democracy, organized and ruled on a world-scale by the American imperialism of 1945, supported by Stalinism edifying capitalism in Russia, fascism carried out the reformist programme and democracy fulfilled fascism.

14. Democracy is the solved enigma of all the Constitutions. It creates the Proletariat’s political helplessness and the economic power of the Capital. All the movements submitted to the political and parliamentary democracy or to the social and union democracy of the Capital, constitute the organs of the counter-revolution. Based on the historical principles of the Capital: Liberty – Equality – Fraternity, the bourgeois, petty-bourgeois and labour democracies carry out by their actions and their claims the anticommunist programme of the capitalist domination: which is economically destructive, socially conservative and politically counter-revolutionary.

15. The achievement of the counter-revolution, the catastrophic crisis of the capitalist system and its universal market, will re-create the class-struggle out of which the Communist Party will be reformed, world-wide and monolithic.

16. In the conditions of the Capital’s extreme domination, described by Marx, the labour movement stops organising itself parallel to the capitalist accumulation process, but reappears from the Capital’s catastrophic crisis, for its violent overthrow and its historical elimination by the exercise of the Proletariat’s dictatorship and the institution of Socialism. Those conditions have ruined, with the social-democratic distinction (maximum programme/minimum programme, based on the liberal phase of the bourgeois domination cycle), the relative immaturity of the socialist economic conditions, the permanence of the labour movement, the ancient historical meaning of the economic and union associations for the defence of the immediate and permanent interests of the working-class, integrated nowadays to the Capital as factors of its accumulation, containing the wages, until the communist struggle for the abolition of the wages, within the limits in keeping with the laws of the Capital’s valorisation.

17. The class-party is the material strength of the Communist Programme – criticism of the political economy, doctrine of the economic, social and political conditions of the Proletariat’s emancipation; theory of its historical and international praxis; programme, description and prediction of the Communist classless and stateless society.

born in 1847 with The Manifesto of the Communist Party;

elaborated by the dialectical materialism in the classical texts of the scientific socialism integrating while surpassing the critico-utopian communism;

developed by Marx-Engels for the 1st International of 1864;

confirmed during the Commune of Paris in 1871 against anarchism;

defended against reformism by the socialist Lefts in the 2nd International of 1889 (Germany, Italy, Russia);

defended by Lenin against Bernstein’s revisionism in 1899 and against the social-chauvinism betraying the Sacred Union of 1914;

triumphs in Russia in 1917 and internationally: in 1919 constitution of the Communist International, in 1921 formation of the Italian Communist Party stemming from the communist abstentionist fraction of the Italian Socialist Party;

defended by the Communist Left of Italy against the degeneration of the 3rd International of 1926 opportunist and tactical first (parliamentarism/single-front) then revisionist and organizational-programmatic (Bolshevisation/Labour government/Socialism in one and single country/Popular fronts/Anti-fascist resistance and Sacred Union in the Imperialist war of 1939-45/National reconstitution/Legalitarism);

safeguarded by the Communist Left of Italy against the revisionist doubt as far as the foundation of the Marxist revolutionary theory is concerned; and

restored during the counter-revolution by the Communist Left of Italy.

18. As the indispensable and sole organ of the proletarian class-struggle for the violent overthrow of the capitalist state and production mode, the Communist Party organizes and rules the advanced fraction, radical and conscious of the labour class: the proletariat in its historical meaning. Founding the real effect of its action on the historical crisis of the capitalist system, the function of the communist party is:

the defence of the continuity of the Communist Programme and the invariance of Marxism on the historical axis from the birth in 1847 of the revolutionary Programme to the Communist society;

the prediction, preparation, organization and unification of the proletarian struggles, in order to guide the revolutionary action of partial and national movements for fortuitous interests towards general and world-wide struggles for the historical results of the universal emancipation of the proletariat, thus of Mankind;

the elaboration of a strategic and tactical system both stable and coherent, with a rational and voluntary dependence of the revolutionary programme to the historical conditions: since 1871, the phase of the progressive national war is finished in Europe: since 1919, final rupture with democracy, parliamentarism and any electoralism whatever;

the diffusion of the Marxist theory in the proletarian masses and specifically in the economic associations and the immediate forms of organization by and for the revolutionary struggle;

the defence of the independence and the continuity of the organization of the class-party in space and time by the obedience to the rules of organic centralism assuring the Communist Party as an unity of structure and movement: refusal of the mechanism of the democratic centralism; recognition of the Marxist theory as a total and complete system: no revision or doctrinal enrichment; the Communist Party’s directives are in keeping with the precise limits drawn by the doctrine and the historical perspective and settled according to the large historical and geographical subdivisions that determine the fundamental cycles of the proletarian action, stretching to half-continents and half-centuries; forbidding to local peripheral groups of the Party to create programmes and independent movements; unconditional execution of the unitary and central action; the Party is not defined by an organization machinery but by its being: the programme; the class-party foreshadows the Communist Society.

the struggle for the transformation of the capitalist system crisis into a social revolution: the Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains and a world to conquer;

the proletarian internationalism; appealing to the working classes of all the countries to avert by civil war – or to turn into civil war – any imperialist war: the Proletarians have no homeland;

the political organization and the technical direction of the revolutionary armed insurrection: the insurrection is an art;

the institution and exercise of the Proletariat’s dictatorship; any government of the working class can only be the government of the Communist Party;

Thus, while fighting for the immediate interests and aims of the working class, the Communists defend and represent, in the present movement, its future. The Communists have over the rest of the Proletariat the advantage of the understanding of the conditions, the course and the general results of the proletarian movement.

19. The Proletariat is revolutionary in relation to the Bourgeoisie as soon as it is bound to remove from production the capitalistic nature that Bourgeoisie wants to perpetuate. Between the capitalist society and Communism, there is an historical phase of revolutionary transformation of the former into the latter, to which corresponds a State that cannot be anything else but the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. With the revolutionary insurrection – for which will be settled the secret organs of the Communist Party’s military apparatus – and after the overthrow and destruction of the capitalist State, the Proletariat sets itself up as the dominant class. With its state organs the Communist Party institutes and exercises its dictatorship:

for its despotic intervention in the capitalist relations of production in order to progressively and systematically destroy them;

against any economic, political, social, military and ideological endeavours of bourgeois and capitalist counter-revolution;

for the generalization of a world-wide proletarian revolution, an essential condition for the victorious institution of Socialism.

20. In the conditions of the truly proletarian and anti-capitalist revolution, peculiar to the phase of the Capital’s real domination, the Proletariat is the only revolutionary class, against which the other classes and social stratas are an indistinguishable or reactionary mass. The Proletariat achieves its historical mission by itself. The Communist Party will not exercise its dictatorship indirectly by the machinery of popular organizations with a majority vocation, such as the pseudo workers-councils – thanks to which the historical experience has shown that the Bourgeoisie could reconquer power, restore its class-domination and organize the counter-revolution – but directly: with the exclusion of any representative democracy apparatus.

The Communist Party do not share power with any other party. The Communist Party and the Proletarian State hold from the Marxist Programme and from themselves only their function of the working class’s political and governmental organ.

21. The Russian soviets were the shape of the democratic proletarians’ and peasants’ dictatorship. The Proletarian State is nor Republic nor working parliament but a work organ. The Proletarian State does not rest on any Constitution because it is not bound by any law. The Proletarian State founds the exercise of its absolute and universal power from its historically transient necessity. The proletarian revolution is not a matter of form of organization but a matter of Programme: the functioning of the Communist Party and of the Proletarian State goes beyond the fetishism of the democratic consultations thanks to which the Bourgeois State legalizes and conceals the Capital’s dictatorship – by the domination and the preservation of antagonistic class-divided society. Communism does not aim at erecting a model State, but at suppressing the existence of classes and therefore the necessity of any state whatever: a military organ with bureaucratic framework and with police screening of the dominant class dictatorship over the dominated class. The guarantees against its counter-revolutionary elimination, of which history provided us with two classic examples:

the Commune of Paris in 1871 knocked down against its wall;

the progressive political involution in 1926 of the Soviet State applying the capitalist social programme of the Russian double revolution, economically bourgeois and politically socialist; economic victory of the Capital, generalizing its domination to the Slavic area; social and political failure of the Proletariat, involved in the European defeat of the Communist revolution,

do neither reside in the arrival of providential prophets nor in the formula of elective mechanisms, conditioned by opinion, number and arbitrary. The Proletarian State will not decay, provided that the Communist Party, that rules it, keeps both with the vision of its aim, the science of its means, and that it maintains its dictatorship for the deepening and the extension of the proletarian revolution, the destruction of the capitalist system, in relation with the decline of the Proletarian State and the emergence of the Communist society. The revolution will be anonymous or won’t be. The proletarian State is the one that openly asserts the necessity of its dictatorship and its vanishing as its aim.

22. Society entering into possession of the production means, the trade production is wiped out, and by then the domination of the product over the producer with the following alienation and reification of the human species. The Communist Party, as the agent of the socialist transformation of society, gathering the revolutionary avant-garde and working at pacifically convincing the stratas of non-communist workers and producers with which and for which Socialism will be instituted, rules the Proletarian State that, exercising terror on the open agents of the Capital until their final destruction, economically wiping out and reducing to political helplessness the ancient petty-bourgeois classes (partially wiped out by the Capital), and the new middle-stratas (products of the Capital), executes the organic system of political, economic, and social measures of the Communist Programme, necessary to the gradual destruction of the capitalist exploitation regime, the rival to the progressive emergence of the Communist Society.

Political Measures

Armament of the Proletariat. Settling of communist permanent militias and creation of the Proletarian State’s Red Army.

Disarmament of the capitalist class and of its allies.

Dissolution of the institutional, economic, judicial and military organs of the Bourgeois State.

Abrogation of the Constitution and the fundamental laws of the Bourgeois State.

Dismissing of all the elected assemblies and abolition of the universal suffrage.

Ban on all the political parties.

Ban on the bourgeois and counter-revolutionary trade-unions.

Communist management of the working-class partnership in charge of the implementation and control of the social norms of production and distribution.

Merging of the legislative, executive and judicial powers within the Proletarian State.

Submission of education, information, culture and spare-time to the State.

Establishment of state tribunals to exercise the revolutionary terror.

Ban on cults, secret societies, private associations and leagues and any anti-social parasitic activities, forms of exploitation man by man.

Suppression of the freedom of press and requisition of the propaganda means.

Economic Measures

Compulsory purchase of the Bourgeoisie. Collectivization of all the means of production, trade and movement; common land property.

Abolition of wages; institution of the work voucher: those vouchers are not money, they do not circulate. No one can give anything else but his work. Nothing else but items for the individual consumption can belong to the individual: within the cooperative society based on the common property of the production means, the producers don’t trade their products; the work that is applied to them does not show up as the value of those products. Destruction of the law of value; elimination of the mercantile monetary aspect of production; physical accounting.

Plan of human consumption reducing, reconverting and redeploying the universal productive forces, a condition for their development and diversity to come.

Rupture of the national and firm limits.

Capitalism starves man: policy of a scientific development of agriculture; recasting of the system of distribution: suppression of parasitic middle-men.

Elimination of the capitalist wasting by a rational use of raw materials and energy resources applied to the only useful products whose quantity and quality will be determined according to the genuine needs of mankind.

Social Measures

Obligation of work for all the members of society. Drastic reduction of the day’s work. Generalization of automation; levelling of remunerations.

Confiscation of land and property ownership from the capital and Bourgeoisie, that will be given back to and managed by the territorial authorities of the Proletarian State who will decide on their letting redistribution.

Creation of the collective substructure appropriate for the institution and practise of life in community; dissolution of the official link of marriage.

Demographic planning. Action of the state for free, compulsory and periodic health. Socialist orientation of sport against all careerism whatever.

Removability and rotation of functions. Abolition of careers and titles, of specializations and capitalist forms of the division of labour.

Suppression of the manual work/intellectual work antagonism.

Suppression of the town/country antagonism.

Socialistic orientation of the scientific policy open to investigation fields having for criterion security and blooming of man.

Pacific integration into the communist evolution of mankind of the remaining ancestral traditions of the African, American, Asian and Oceanic peoples.

Elimination of the buildings, symbols and representations of the capital.

Search for the development of form of communist creativity. Realisation of art by suppressing its aspect of specialized activity.

23. The accomplishment of those measures presupposes an international and historical phase of struggles, violent and pacific, that will eliminate both the existence of classes and the necessity of the political state whose machinery will lie dormant and will confine to the conscious and rational administration of human activities. The historically transitional State of the Proletariat will pass away, freeing the social soul of the proletarian political revolution: Communism – a conscious reappropriation of the human being, genuine Gemeinwesen of man, whose material basis is the historical result of the system of capitalist production: communism opens the era of its history to Mankind.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” - Marx, 1875.

Redaction 1975, Recast edition 1989.