The Thesis of Reconstitution of the CP is the political answer of the revolutionary proletariat to the problem of the creation, or recovery, of the main revolutionary instrument of the worker class in the Spanish State; This answer consists of solving, theorically and politically, the nature of the objective conditions - ideological, political and organizative - that may allow the existence of that party instrument. It does not have to do, therefore, with the "objective conditions" of the Revolution in its most narrow sense, that is to say, the Revolution understood as the conquer of power by the proletariat and the preparation of that conquest; it has to do with the carrying out of the most important "subjective condition" of the Revolution understood in its superior form, when the masses achieve and hold the power, i.e. the carrying out of the existence of the CP as the main "subjective" factor of that Revolution.
In short, the Thesis of Reconstitution is part of the revolutionary process as a historical and general process, but, at the same time, it dissociate itself from the process, for the Thesis centers in one stage of it - the first stage - and solves the political tasks of that particular stage of the Revolution. It has to do, to sum up, with creating the "subjective factor" of the Revolution, understanding that this implies to study and solve objective problems -not only ideological, but also political and organizative problems- and understanding that this task already belongs to the general process of the Revolution - in its widest sense, i.e., comprehending that the Revolution is every process that begins with the task of constituting the CP and only ends with Communism-.
In the first place, therefore, the Thesis of Reconstitution is about the minimum objective requisites that are to achieve in order to consider that the existence of the CP is fulfilled. Until now we have expounded the nature of these requisites.
In second place, the Thesis of Reconstitution is about the concrete political conditions that serve as a context for those requisites, which have to be fulfilled within those conditions. This means that the formulation of the Thesis of Reconstitution does not refer to the universal and absolute principles of the marxism-leninism about the Party; The Thesis tries to, starting from them, apply those principles to the historical and political concrete conditions of a given country and time. Because of that, the Thesis of Reconstitution must explore, first of all, the current state of the World Proletarian Revolution and the stage of the Revolution in which that country is as a component of that World Revolution, for it is about describing the concrete political context, at least in its general trends, in which the tasks of the Reconstitution must be established and fulfilled depending on that national and international context.
In this sense, it is essential to mention that the World Proletarian Revolution is in a phase of circumstantial recoil, due to the end of the revolutionary cycle opened by the October Revolution and the counteroffensive started by the imperialism, taking advantage from this circumstance. The first cycle of the World Proletarian Revolution starts in 1917, with the soviet revolution in Russia. This happened after the previous stage of preparation, which begins in 1848 with the publication of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels, and the role played by the French proletariat in the bourgeoisie revolution in that same year; that role is deeply important, because, for the first time in history, the worker class acts politically in an independent way. The World Proletarian Revolution takes an ascendant way with the beginning of the construction of Socialism in the USSR in the 30's decade, and the victory over fascism and the triumph of the Chinese CP in the 40s; it becomes slower between 1956 and 1976, when the USSR, with Khrushchev, becomes part of Imperialism, which is relatively compensated by a new, but brief and localized, proletarian offensive in the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Finally, the triumph of Den Xiaoping in China, and the consolidation of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie in the USSR and its revisionist influence in most of the Communist Parties of the world, indicated the descending trend and the fall or critical phase of that first revolutionary cycle from the second half of the 70s. The reestructurations that, at every level, have taken place in the 80s and beginnings of the 90s in the so-called "socialist field", do not express nothing but the final point of the cycle.
The triumph of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat in the socialist countries has had its projection all over the world in the form of a new offensive of the capital, an offensive which is shown by the fact that a new distribution of the world has begun, which is creating the conditions for a new imperialist war, in one hand, and by the progressive loss of rights and conquests of the workers in almost every country, in the other hand.
The Spanish State is one of those countries. Carrillo's party, which was stripped of every revolutionary content, wasted away all the chances of a revolutionary means in the so-called "democratic transition"; but, unlike the capitulating positions of the party which said to represent the workers, these conquered in the streets certain concessions to a bourgeoisie that knew that it had won the main battle and was willing to give in some scraps while it centered in drawing the master lines of the new political structure of its domination, on the condition that the worker class did not try to interfere in this new design. In that design, however, it was defined a structure of classist representation for the bourgeoisie. The trade unions and the worker parties had to act as the means of transmission of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. Then, when the bourgeoisie had consolidated a new State and when the proletarian revolutionary cycle ended definitely at world level, the Spanish bourgeoisie joined the offensive of the international capital against the worker class, using the legal means of its Constitution, mainly the tradeunionist structures in force. The proletariat of the Spanish State, without a party, sold its political capacity, its right to take part as an independent class, for scraps, for partial economical and social improvements. Now, under new circumstances, the bourgeoisie, through the trade unions and the political legalism of the "left parties", denies the proletariat even the right to those scraps. The industrial restructurings, the liberalization of the job market, the policies of economical adjustments that freeze the wages, are clear signs of the impunity achieved by the bourgeoisie in its supremacy over the proletariat, with its "right" to exploit and oppress the worker class.
The proletariat of the Spanish State is, therefore, on the defensive, and the worker movement in recoil. This is the background which the communists in the Spanish State have to work with, in order to tackle the most burning question of our Revolution, the question of the recovery of the Spanish Communist Party; and that background is the one which determines, in the first place, the conditions and, therefore, the nature, of that process of recovery of our vanguard party.
The International Communist Movement, as a practical reality, is born with the October Revolution, with the foundation of communist parties all over the world. The foundation of these parties, which was sponsored by the CI and the Bolshevik Party, represents one of the models of party building given by history. The other model, mainly, is, precisely, the one of the Bolshevik party. About this last model, if we compare the situation of the class struggle and the worker movement in Russia at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century with the one of the Spanish State nowadays, we can check that they are essentially different. If nowadays we see a recoil and a defensive attitude in the worker class, in Russia the worker movement was rising and the proletariat adopted a more and more offensive position each and every year. This forced Lenin and his supporters to use the tactics of the unity of action with all the marxists in order to create the proletarian party. And not only unity of political action, but even unity of organic action. No doubt, to maintain dogmatic attitudes would have been a political suicide, which would have only ended in isolationism, and would have allowed the movement to overcome the proletarian vanguard.
The specific necessities of the proletarian movement in Russia were another of the peculiarities of the RSDLP foundation that explain the tactic of constitution of the Russian vanguard proletarian organization. We have already seen that one of the first tasks that must be tackled and fulfilled by the proletariat is the one of becoming a class through the unity of all its struggles at the national level, and we've also seen that the organic form which adopts the foundation as a class is shown by the national trade unions or the worker parties. In Russia, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, this task was not yet fulfilled, which implied that, because the development of capitalism at world level and particularly in Russia had reached its monopolist or imperialist stage - a stage that demands the organization of the revolutionary party of the proletarian vanguard - the foundation tasks of the Russian worker party are interconnected in a peculiar and original way with the ones of the foundation of this vanguard party. This also explains the richness of the debates within the Russian marxist movement of that time, the nature of two-line struggle inside the movement, and also the fact of Russia being the native land of the development of marxism, the native land of leninism, because in this country the revolutionary theory found the spot of the Revolution and found the answers to its future development. However, this also explains, to a great extent, the tactic adopted by the revolutionary vanguard to found the party of a new type, a tactic which remained on the unity of action of the marxists to create the worker party as the base to found the vanguard party. This experience, on the other hand, was subsequently translated to the rest of the countries for the foundation of the Communist Parties in form of a split of the worker parties' left wing as the first step for their foundation.
All this explains the form which adopted the foundation of the Bolshevik Party. But, this way, it is necessary to get to the bottom, to the essence of the process. That is why we consider that the correct is to understand the essence of the Party foundation process and to find the appropriate political form for the concrete conditions in which the vanguard moves; that is why we consider that the historical ways can not be copied without taking into account the context in which those were given and without paying any attention to its real political background, exactly as the ones proclaiming the "communist unity" or the ones for the thesis of reconstruction of the CP do; that is why we consider that the future political party of a new type of the proletariat in the Spanish State can only be achieved by tackling the problem that poses its recovery in terms of Reconstitution, because the Thesis of Reconstitution pays attention, primarily, to the nature of the creation process of the Party, to the political essence of that process, and after that, looks for the way of politically shaping that process depending on the concrete objective conditions.
The Reconstitution of the SCP, therefore, can not be achieved by following, one by one, the steps given by the Bolsheviks; nor can it be achieved by following the model of the first foundation of the SCP, in 1920. In that year, every worker could clearly see the failure of the social democracy, the soviet Revolution had succeeded and the world proletarian movement had created the Communist International. That is to say, the World Proletarian Revolution started an ascendant movement. This, along with the maturity of the proletariat in the Spanish State, which had been shaped as a class during half a century of struggles, allowed the CP to be created through a split and a constituent act or congress. But nowadays, neither the World Proletarian Revolution is in an offensive act, as it was above stated, nor is there a CI that can sponsor, endorse or guide a SCP that could be founded in a "unity of all the marxist-leninists" congress.
In general terms, the vision of the recovery of the CP from the perspective of the "unity of the communists" or the Party "Reconstruction" is a dogmatic one, for it only takes into account the form of the historical models of foundation, without paying attention to its requisites or the external political conditions which permitted those experiences. This dogmatic vision is a product of the mechanical extrapolation, without any criticism, of the 3rd International thesis and their application, outside any time and place, to any political situation and independently from any historical circumstance. The thesis of the CI related to the party foundation are the synthesis of the Soviet Revolution experience and, though they are pretty much general laws, they also contribute a lot from the elements related to a time, elements that we can not introduce in those laws, which can not prevent us from being able to penetrate the essence of the processes of foundation of the Communist Parties in the first half of the century, independently from the historical circumstances surrounding them, in order to apply, coherently and correctly, those laws to the conditions in which the class struggle of the proletariat is currently developing.
It is about overcoming a static and absolute conception about the organization of the Party and understanding that its development is a permanent process, a process both for its Constitution or Reconstitution and for its subsequent edification once reconstituted; it also deals with the fact that the Party is not created from an intellectual construction predefined: it is the organization of the vanguard for the fulfilling of the political tasks that the Revolution demands in its different stages, following the general ideological principles that the marxism-leninism has established for the creation of the proletarian party of a new type.
If we pay attention to what we have stated so far, and we compare it with the plans of those who reject the Thesis of Reconstitution, we can not only check that they do not understand it, but also that they are guided by models and methods of party foundation that correspond to conditions of national and international class struggles that are not the current ones, and, therefore, they deny themselves the opportunity of understanding the meaning of the Reconstitution. For example - and this is deeply important -, they presuppose the ideological guide. They do not realize that, in 1920, the CI played the role of the organic trustee of the ideology and political orientation, and that meant that the foundation of the national parties didn't have to demand this requisite at the local level as a sine qua non condition, for its relative absence could be replaced by the CI. They do not see either that, in 1903, when the first revolutionary marxist party was created, the question of the ideology and the political maturity was relatively guaranteed by 10 years of political experience of the Russian marxists and by the deep knowledge of the doctrine by the founders of the RSDLP; most of them were eminent intellectuals who had spent many years of their lives studying the works by Marx and Engels. They do not see, therefore, that a marxist-leninist party can not be created without the base of the marxist-leninist ideology; they do not see that, nowadays, there is not any acknowledged trustee of this theory that can endorse the creation of Communist Parties. They do not either see that the current revolutionary vanguard is composed of workers that, although are sincerely determined communists, have not acquired, on the whole, a deep knowledge of the scientific theory of socialism, and most of them have not updated the latest developments of that theory after the Lenin and Stalin times. The CP must be founded from the ideology and, in order to do so, the ideology must guide our whole work of Reconstitution. Presuppose that the marxism-leninism is defined to its most extents does not suffice, as those who talk about "unity" or "reconstruction" do, because, at the present, there is not any clear ideological-political reference that could be used the same way the Russian marxists at the beginning of the 20th century or the communists in the Spanish State in 1920 did. Therefore, the first requisite for the Reconstitution, in the current conditions of the international and national class struggle, consists of recovering and reassuming the revolutionary ideology, formulating and defining it once again up to the full synthesizing of all its progresses. We must emulate the Bolsheviks and the fathers of the Communism of the Spanish State and fulfill the same requisites which permitted them to initiate the way of the international and national communist movement, but we can not copy the forms in a mechanical way, only its deep meaning and its real revolutionary spirit.
On the other side, the frame of mind of the masses - from the end of the 19th century in Russia, and from 1918 in almost the whole Europe, as a consequence of the October Revolution and the social crisis caused by the war -, which was in commotion and in a rising agitation, created a suitable breeding ground for the mass work of the vanguard, what made the vanguard able to give the masses a not necessarily very elaborated program (most of the time basic political thesis) and address them in an agitative way with the hope of obtaining results. Nowadays, on the contrary, the symbiosis between the communist program and the masses can not be done in a so direct way, for the frame of mind of the masses is not so inclined to the revolutionary agitation; quite the contrary, they are more inclined to postration and calm and a horrifying conservatism. The communist program, in these conditions, must work immediately, must get ahead, step by step, approaching first the most advanced elements of the masses, and, after and through them, the rest of the class. Those who believe that the foundation consists only of a willing act of organization and, once done so, the masses will have their heart and understanding fully open to the direction and the program of the communist vanguard, are making the serious mistake of not understanding what is all about: activate the revolutionary movement that, some decades ago, was almost presupposed to be able to follow the action of the vanguard; they are making the mistake of not seeing that this movement is the product and can only be the product of a mass program of the vanguard (mass line) and that this movement can only be understood as CP, as the previous condition to its transmission to the rest of the class (Proletarian Revolution)
In short, the social and political reality does not offer to the Reconstitution of the CP the same conditions as at the beginning of the century, but it demands the fulfilling of the same requisites. The communists must be able to understand these requisites and create the political conditions which may allow the requisites to be carried out. This question can only be tackled from the point of view of the Thesis of Reconstitution .
(April 1996)