History and Class Consciousness

The more deeply ingrained these tendencies become, the sooner the harsh unrelenting contrast between leader and the masses, that has survived as a vestige of bourgeois party politics, will disappear. This will be accelerated by reshuffles in the official hierarchy. And the post festum criticism — which is inevitable at the moment — will be transformed into an exchange of concrete and general, tactical and organisational experiences that will be increasingly oriented towards the future. Freedom — as the classical German philosophers realised — is something practical, it is an activity. And only by becoming a world of activity for every one of its members can the Communist Party really hope to overcome the passive role assumed by bourgeois man when he is confronted by the inevitable course of events that he cannot understand. Only then will it be able to eliminate its ideological form, the formal freedom of bourgeois democracy. The separation of rights and duties is only feasible where the leaders are divorced from the masses, and act as their representatives, i.e. where the stance adopted by the masses is one of contemplative fatalism. True democracy, the abolition of the split between rights and duties is, however, no formal freedom but the activity of the members of a collective will, closely integrated and collaborating in a spirit of solidarity.

The fact that proletarian class consciousness becomes autonomous and assumes objective form is only meaningful for the proletariat if at every moment it really embodies for the proletariat the revolutionary meaning of precisely that moment.

“the concept of the masses changes in the course of the struggle,” Lenin observes. The Communist Party is an autonomous form of proletarian class consciousness serving the interests of the revolution. It is essential to gain a correct theoretical understanding of it in its twofold dialectical relation: as both the form of this consciousness and the form of this consciousness, i.e. as both an independent and a subordinate phenomenon.