There’s no shortage of political groups denouncing the progression of world capitalism toward an imminent world war. But the problem, as always, besides understanding what’s really going on, is knowing how to respond.

Large pacifist movements are forming in support of given political parties. Because of their “big tent” structure, these fronts are unable to express unambiguous positions: their real purpose is recruitment for their target parties.

«The Marxist thesis states: it isn’t possible, first of all, for consciousness of the historical road to appear, in advance, within a single human brain. This is for two reasons: firstly, consciousness follows, rather than precedes, being, that is, the material conditions which surround the subject of consciousness itself; secondly, all forms of social consciousness – with a given delay allowing them time to get generally established – emerge out of circumstances which are analogous and parallel to the economic relations in which masses of individuals find themselves, thereby forming a social class. Historically the latter are then led to “act together” long before they can “think together”. The theory of this relationship between class conditions, and class action and its future point of arrival, isn’t required of persons, in the sense it isn’t required of a particular author or leader; nor is it asked of “the class as whole”, in the sense of a fleeting lump sum of individuals in existence at a certain time or place; and much less can it be deduced from an extremely bourgeois “consultation” of the class» (“The False Resource of Activism”, from the General Meeting of Sept. 7, 1952).

The activist waits for class consciousness to arise spontaneously from the pacifist movement and sees in these small isolated groups the first steps of revolution, in the bankrupt spirit of anarchist propaganda of the deed. Instead, revolutionary action against the war requires a unified international understanding, otherwise every effort is dispersed in the particular demands and supposed specificities of local groups.

«The Party must be able to control every aspect of its life, carry out each of its organizational roles in such a way that nothing strikes it as unexpected, incomprehensible or mysterious. Passing off as positions of the Left that terrorism is a “gleam of light” for the proletariat; that the folksy political traditions of extremist factions, with their lumpen-intellectual student base, represent a “revolutionary camp”; that the idea of “workers committees” is fanciful and that working within them is “activism” or “economism”, and then immediately to state exactly the opposite, not because anything has actually changed but due to impatience and disappointment that no immediate gains have been made; that such oscillations represent the “tactics” of the Left only disorientates militants, sows discord in the Party, erodes the organization, and compromises decades of hard-earned, consistent work» (“The Party Does not Arise from ‘Circles’”, 1980).

The small activist circle is the practical equivalent of the broad united front: it seeks to recruit people of all kinds not into a cohesive and defined party but into action for action’s sake. It claims to compensate for its political inconsistency with numbers.

«From the fourth congress, which took place at the end of 1922, the Left stood by its pessimistic prediction and its vigorous struggle to denounce dangerous tactics (united front between communist and socialist parties, the watchword of “workers’ government”) and organizational errors (attempts to increase the size of the parties not simply through an influx of those proletarians who had abandoned the other parties with a social democratic programme of action and structure, but by means of fusions that accepted entire parties and portions of parties after negotiations with their leadership, and also by admitting to the Comintern, as national sections, parties claiming to be “sympathizers”, which was clearly an error in its drift towards federalism. Taking the initiative on a third issue it was from this time that the Left denounced, and ever more vigorously in the years that followed, the growth of the opportunist danger: this third issue was the international’s method of internal working, whereby the centre, represented by the Moscow executive, resorted not only to the use of “ideological terror” in its dealings with the parties, or the parts of them that had made political errors, but above all to organizational pressure; which amounted to an erroneous application, and eventually a total falsification, of the correct principles of centralization and absolute discipline with no exceptions» (“Theses of Naples”, 1965).