acute political and economic tensions leading to the outbreak of new movements and struggles, it can dispense with raising special demands and appeal in simple and popular language directly to the members of the socialist parties and trade unions not to abstain from the struggles necessitated by their misery and increasing oppression at the hands of the employers. Even if their bureaucratic leaders are opposed, the ranks must fight if they are to avoid being driven to complete ruin. The partys press organs, especially its daily newspapers, must emphatically prove day after day during such a party campaign that the communists are ready to intervene as leaders in the current and impending struggles of the pauperized proletariat, and that in the immediate acute situation their combativeness will, wherever possible, come to the aid of all the oppressed. It must be proved day in and day out that without these struggles the working class will no longer have any possibilities for existence and that, despite this fact, the old organizations are trying to avoid and obstruct these struggles.
The plant and trade-union fractions, continually pointing to the communists combativeness and willingness to sacrifice, must make it clear to their fellow workers in meetings that abstention from the struggle is no longer possible. The main task in such a campaign, however, is to organizationally consolidate and unify all struggles and movements born of the situation. Not only must the cells and fractions in the trades and plants involved in the struggles continually maintain close organic contact among themselves, but the leading bodies must also (both through the district committees and through the central leadership) immediately place functionaries and responsible party workers at the disposal of all movements which break out. Working directly with those in struggle, they must lead, broaden, intensify, generalize and link up the movements. The organizations primary job is to place what is common to these various struggles in sharp relief and bring it into the foreground, in order to urge a general solution to the struggle, by political means if necessary.
As the struggles become more intense and generalized, it will be necessary to create unified bodies to lead them. If the bureaucratic strike leaderships of some unions cave in prematurely, we must be quick to push for their replacement by communists, who must assure a firm, resolute leadership of the struggle. In cases where we have succeeded in combining several struggles, we must push for setting up a joint leadership for the campaign, in which the communists should obtain the leading positions to the extent possible. With proper organizational preparation, a joint leadership for the campaign can often easily be set up through the trade-union fractions as well as through plant fractions, plant councils, plant council plenary meetings and especially through general meetings of strikers.
If the movement assumes a political character as a result of becoming generalized and as a result of the intervention of employers organizations and government authorities, then the election of workers councils may become possible and necessary, and propaganda and organizational preparation must be initiated for this. All party publications must then intensively put forward the idea that only through such organs of its own, arising directly from the workers struggles, can the working class achieve its real liberation with the necessary ruthlessness, even without the trade-union bureaucracy and its socialist party satellites.
35. Communist parties which have already grown strong, particularly the large mass parties, should also take organizational measures to be continually armed for political mass actions. In demonstration campaigns and economic mass movements, in all partial actions, one must constantly bear in mind the need to energetically and tenaciously consolidate the organizational experience of these movements in order to achieve ever more solid ties with the broader masses. The experience of all new major movements must repeatedly be discussed and reviewed at broad conferences which bring the leading functionaries and responsible party workers together with the shop stewards from the large and medium-sized plants, so that the network of ties through the shop stewards can be made ever more solid and organized ever more securely. Close bonds of mutual trust between the leading functionaries and responsible party workers on the one hand, and the shop stewards on the other, are organizationally the best guarantee that political mass actions will not be initiated prematurely and that their scope will correspond to the circumstances and the current level of party influence.
Unless the party organization maintains the closest ties with the proletarian masses employed in the large and medium-sized factories, the Communist Party will not be able to achieve major mass actions and genuinely revolutionary movements. If the uprising in Italy last year—which was unquestionably revolutionary in character and found its strongest expression in the factory occupations—collapsed prematurely, then this was no doubt in part due to the betrayal of the trade-union bureaucracy and the inadequacy of the partys political leaders, but also partly because no intimate, organized ties existed at all between the party and the plants through factory shop stewards who were politically informed and interested in party life. It is also beyond doubt that the attempt to aggressively utilize the political potential of the great English miners movement this year suffered extraordinarily from this same failing.
36. The communist press must be developed and improved by the party with tireless energy.
No newspaper may be recognized as a communist organ if it does not submit to the directives of the party. Analogously, this principle is to be applied to all literary products such as periodicals, books, pamphlets, etc., with due regard for their theoretical, propagandistic or other character.
The party must be more concerned with having good papers than with having many of them. Above all, every communist party must have a good, if possible daily, central organ.
37. A communist newspaper must never become a capitalist enterprise like the bourgeois press and often even the so-called socialist papers. Our paper must keep itself independent from the capitalist credit institutions. Skillful solicitation of advertising—which in the case of legal mass parties can greatly help in keeping our press afloat—must never lead, for example, to our becoming dependent in any way on the major advertisers. Rather, the press of our mass parties will most quickly win unconditional respect through its intransigent attitude on all proletarian social questions. Our paper should not pander to an appetite for sensationalism or serve as entertainment for the public at large. It cannot yield to the criticism of petty-bourgeois literati or journalistic virtuosi in order to make itself respectable.
38. The communist newspaper must above all look after the interests of the oppressed struggling workers. It should be our best propagandist and agitator, the leading propagandist of the proletarian revolution.
Our paper has the task of collecting valuable experiences from the entirety of the work of party members and then of presenting these to party comrades as a guide for the continued review and improvement of communist methods of work. These experiences should be exchanged at joint meetings of editors from the entire country; mutual discussion there will also yield the greatest possible uniformity of tone and thrust throughout the entire party press. In this way the party press, including every individual newspaper, will be the best organizer of our revolutionary work.
Without this unifying, purposive organizational work of the communist press, particularly the main newspaper, it will hardly be possible to achieve democratic centralism, to implement an effective division of labor in the Communist Party or, consequently, to fulfill the partys historic mission.
39. The communist newspaper must strive to become a communist enterprise, i.e., a proletarian combat organization, a working collective of revolutionary workers, of all those who regularly write for the paper, typeset and print it, manage, circulate and sell it, those who collect local material for articles, discuss this material in the cells and write it up, those who are active daily in the papers distribution, etc.
A number of practical measures are required to turn the paper into this kind of genuine combat organization and into a strong, vital working collective of communists.
A communist develops the closest ties with his paper if he must work and make sacrifices for it. It is his daily weapon which must constantly be tempered and sharpened anew in order to be usable. The communist newspaper can be maintained only by heavy, ongoing material and financial sacrifices. The means for its expansion and for internal improvements will constantly have to be supplied from the ranks of party members until, in legal mass parties, it ultimately attains such wide circulation and organizational solidity that it itself begins to serve as a material support for the communist movement.
In the meantime it is not enough for a communist to be an active salesman and agitator for the paper; he must be an equally useful contributor to it. Every socially or economically noteworthy incident from the plant fraction or cell—from a shopfloor accident to a plant meeting, from the mistreatment of apprentices to the company financial report—is to be reported at once to the newspaper by the quickest route. The trade-union fractions must communicate all important resolutions and measures from the membership meetings and executive bodies of their unions, and they must report on any characteristic activity of our opponents succinctly and accurately. What one sees of life in public—at meetings and in the streets—often provides an alert party worker the opportunity to observe details with a sense of social criticism which can be used in the paper to make clear even to the indifferent our intimate knowledge of the problems of everyday life.
The editorial staff must treat this information, coming as it does from the life of the working class and workers organizations, with great warmth and affection. The editors should either use such material as short news items to give our paper the character of a vital working collective acquainted with real life; or they should use this material to make the teachings of communism comprehensible by means of these practical examples from the workers daily existence, which is the quickest way to make the great ideas of communism immediate and vivid to the broad working masses. If at all possible, the editorial staff should hold office hours at a convenient time of day for any worker who visits our newspaper, to listen to his requests and his complaints about lifes troubles, diligently note them down and use them to enliven the paper.
Obviously, under capitalist conditions, none of our newspapers can become a perfect communist working collective. However, even under very difficult conditions it is possible to successfully organize a revolutionary workers newspaper along these lines. That is proved by the example of our Russian comrades Pravda in 1912-13. It did in fact constitute an ongoing and active organization of conscious, revolutionary workers in the most important centers of the Russian empire. These comrades collectively edited, published and distributed the newspaper—most of them, of course, doing this in addition to working for a living—and they scrimped to pay for its expenses from their wages. The newspaper in turn was able to give them the best of what they wanted, what they needed at the time in the movement, and what is still of use today in their work and struggle. For the party ranks as well as many other revolutionary workers, such a newspaper was really able to become our newspaper.
40. The militant communist press is in its true element when it directly participates in campaigns led by the party. If the partys work during a period of time is concentrated on a particular campaign, the party paper must place all of its space, not just the political lead articles, at the service of this campaign. The editorial department must draw on material from all areas to nourish this campaign and must saturate the whole paper with it in a suitable form and style.
41. Sales of subscriptions to our newspaper must be systematized on a formal basis. First, use must be made of every situation in which there is increased motion among the workers and where political or social life is further inflamed by any sort of political and economic events. Thus, immediately after every major strike or lockout where the paper has openly and energetically represented the interests of the struggling workers, a subscription drive should be organized to approach each individual who had been out on strike. The communist plant and trade-union fractions within the trades involved in the strike movement must not only propagandize for the newspaper with lists and subscription blanks in their own arenas but, if they possibly can, they must also obtain lists of addresses of the workers who took part in the struggle, so that special working groups for the press can conduct energetic door-to-door agitation.
Likewise, after every political electoral campaign which arouses the workers interest, systematic door-to-door canvassing must be carried out in the proletarian districts by the designated working groups.
At times of latent political or economic crises whose effects are felt by the broader working masses as inflation, unemployment and other hardships, after making skillful propagandistic use of these developments every effort should be made to obtain (as much as possible through the trade-union fractions) extensive lists of the unionized workers in the various trades, so that the working group for the press can productively follow up with sustained, systematic door-to-door agitation. Experience has shown that the last week of each month is best suited for this regular canvassing. Any local organization that allows the last week of even one month to pass without using it for agitation for the press is guilty of a serious omission in extending the communist movement. The working group for the press must also not let any public meeting of workers or any major demonstration go by without being there pushing our paper with subscription blanks at the beginning, during the breaks and at the end. The same duties are incumbent both on the trade-union fractions at every single meeting of their union, and on the cells and plant fractions at plant meetings.
42. Our newspaper must be continually defended by party members against all enemies.
All party members must lead a fierce struggle against the capitalist press; its venality, its lies, its wretched silence and all its intrigues must be clearly exposed and unmistakably branded.
The social-democratic and independent-socialist press must be defeated through a continuous offensive: without getting lost in petty factional polemics, we must expose, through numerous examples from daily life, their treacherous attitude of concealing class antagonisms. The trade-union and other fractions must strive through organizational measures to free the members of trade unions and other workers organizations from the confusion and paralyzing influence of these social-democratic papers. Both in door-to-door agitation and particularly in the plants, subscription work for our paper must be skillfully and deliberately aimed directly against the press of the social-traitors.
VII. ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF THE PARTY ORGANISM
43. The extension and consolidation of the party must not proceed according to a formal scheme of geographic divisions but according to the real economic, political and transport/communications structure of the given areas of the country. Stress is to be placed primarily on the main cities and on the major centers of the industrial proletariat.
In beginning to build a new party there is often a tendency to immediately extend the network of party organizations over the entire country. Limited as the available forces are, they are thereby scattered to the four winds. This weakens the ability of the party to recruit and grow. After a few years the party may often in fact have built up an extensive system of offices, but it may not have succeeded in gaining a firm foothold in even the most important industrial cities of the country.
44. To attain the greatest possible centralization of party work it makes no sense to chop up the party leadership into a schematic hierarchy with many levels, each completely subordinate to the next. Optimally, from every major city which constitutes an economic, political or transport/communications center, a network of organizational threads should extend throughout the greater metropolitan area and the economic or political district belonging to it. The party committee which directs the entire organizational work of the district from the major city (the city being the head, as it were, of this party organism), and which constitutes the political leadership of the district, must establish the closest ties with the masses of party members working in the main urban area.
The full-time organizers of such a district, who are to be elected by the district conference or the district party congress and approved by the party central committee, must be required to participate regularly in the party life of the districts main city. The district party committee should always be reinforced by party workers drawn from the members in the main urban area, so that close and vital contact really exists between the party committee which runs the district politically, and the large membership of the districts urban center. As organizational forms develop further, the districts leading party committee should optimally also constitute the political leadership of the main urban center in the district. In this way, the leading party committees of the district organizations, together with the central committee, will serve as the bodies which actually lead in the overall party organization.
The area of a party district is of course not limited only by the geographical extent of the area. The key point is that the party district committee must be able to lead all local organizations in the district as a unit. When this is no longer possible, the district must be divided and a new district party committee founded.