THEORY OF THE REVOLUTIONARY POLITICAL PARTY

Debates on the origin, foundation, types and functions of political parties, as part of the institutionality of bourgeois democracy, attract much attention and studies on the subject proliferate. The same is not true of the theory of the revolutionary political party, a field of study that is often marginalized, which is seen as outdated or even irrelevant to contemporary political science.

However, nothing is as urgent as the development of this theory of revolutionary organization. It can be said that the crisis of the subjective factor remains the most important and that it hinders the struggle against capital, preventing the waves of the masses from consolidating their victories. The triumph of the socialist revolution can only be achieved if there is an adequate organizational instrument; that is, mass revolutionary parties, armed with an adequate class consciousness and with the best strategies of struggle.

On the other hand, within the mass movement there tends to be a frequent and majority position that believes that political parties should be dispensed with and that spontaneous crowds resisting capital or the struggles of social movements are enough to stop the capitalist offensive.

These reflections on the workers' party, as a revolutionary party, try to update the essential issues for its understanding and construction; for this, before analyzing concrete cases of organizational developments, the main theses proposed by the most advanced moments of the class struggle are presented, especially the experience of the Third Communist International.

Political economy is taken as its starting point and shows how the question of the workers' party, which has its first world expression in the International Working Men's Association, emerges from the beginning of the formation of capitalism. It was Marx who wrote its main documents and declarations, and actively participated in its struggles.

The Third Communist International elaborates a long document on the revolutionary parties, which are considered valid until now as general guidelines for the constitution of workers' organizations. However, in a dynamic of continuity and change, it becomes essential to introduce the debates and challenges of the twenty-first century, which make it possible to update the classical theses in accordance with the demands of the class struggle of this period.

In this expanded version of the revolutionary party, it is a matter of going deeper and finding an image of the workers' organization that is not reduced to its classic components, as a political expression of the social class. The aim is to incorporate those elements that refer to the understanding of the party as a way of life that anticipates the society that is proposed.

The experience that a member of the revolutionary organization carries out is much more than just the definition and concretization of a strategy, although political action is the main nucleus. Precisely, in order to achieve the full realization of the transitional program, the incorporation of other aspects is required, in addition to the issues of direct political intervention. 

The workers' party, as an alternative way of life to the capitalist one, becomes the meeting place for the diversity of workers and the attempt to build community spaces, where solidarity between comrades prevails. It is the place where one learns to detach oneself from the dominant prejudices and ideology and life opens up to an emancipatory horizon, even as a possibility of full realization of individuals.

It is not a utopian approach, but the permanent struggle to make real, with all the difficulties, limitations and setbacks, the socialist way of life that is proposed to society. Its realization will always be provisional and precarious, but this does not invalidate that it is a goal towards which we are heading collectively.

ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF THE REVOLUTIONARY POLITICAL PARTY

1. The political constitution of the working class.

The first forms of working-class politics arise in conjunction with the social formation of the working class in the process of production. The dispersion of jobs that produce use values, centered on the particularity of each producer, undergoes a process of abstraction that transforms labor power into a strictly social phenomenon.

Therefore, we arrive at the constitution of undifferentiated human labor: "Nothing has remained of them except the same spectral objectivity, a mere jelly of undifferentiated human labor, that is, of expenditure of human labor power without regard to the way in which it was spent." In such a way that he can conclude: "As crystallizations of that social substance common to them, they are values." (Marx, Capital, 1975, p. 47)

It is important to emphasize, because it is often passed without perceiving it, that the essence of value is the common social substance; that is, the conformation of the social forms inherent in the production process or, in other words, the presence of sociality, as a fundamental characteristic of all work. In such a way that, from the beginning, the existence of the working class is radically social.

Marx goes even further in the formulation of sociality and affirms the universality of the sociality of labor power, which acquires this world dimension and in which individual labors are part of the same human labor power. As we shall see later, this finding will have important consequences for the international organization of workers.

However, the labor that generates the substance of values is undifferentiated human labor, the expenditure of human labor power itself. The whole of the labour-power of society, represented in the values of the commodity world, here takes the place of one and the same human labour-power, even though it is composed of innumerable individual labour-powers. (Marx, Capital, 1975, p. 48)

This social existence of labour takes on a concrete form by which it enters the capitalist process of production and becomes calculable, in such a way that the entrepreneur can appropriate a fragment of the expenditure of labour-power and convert it into surplus value.

Then, this central notion of socially necessary labor time appears, as the average time required to make a commodity. In the critique of the capitalist mode of production, the whole process is discarded, leaving aside this socially necessary labor as well. However, the universal sociality of labor power, although it arises in the midst of the capitalist production process, is independent and is the foundation for the construction of a socialist society.

A third level of deployment occurs at the moment when this labor power, abstracted from use value and individual labor powers, is transformed into socially necessary labor time: Each of these individual labour-powers is the same human labour-power as the others, in so far as it possesses the character of a social media-labour power and operates as such a social labour-power, i.e., in so far as it uses only the average labour-time necessary in the production of a commodity.  or socially necessary work time. The socially necessary labor time is that required to produce any use-value, under the normal conditions of production in force in a society and with the average social degree of skill and labor intensity. (Marx, Capital, 1975, p. 48)

This process of social constitution of the working class is the starting point and the foundation of its formation as a subject. Let us see how the passage from the social substance to the emergence of the political subject is made, which leads to the emergence of the workers' parties.

The universal existence of the working social class as an expression of socially necessary labour time ends up meeting the corresponding class consciousness; From there, the forms of struggle deepen and are concretized in a variety of expressions; For example, insurrectionary strikes, duality of power, protracted people's war, battles for hegemony and various organizational strategies, such as class coalitions with allied sectors, communes, workers' councils, united front and soviets.

The class struggle, in its various forms, accompanied by its respective class consciousness, leads from the first moment to the constitution of the social class as a political class, whose central concretization is the revolutionary political party.

They should not be placed at the levels, socially necessary labor time and political subjectivity, as separate processes, but their continuity and the dialectical need for a permanent coming and going between one and the other must be shown. For this reason, the far-reaching tendencies aimed at socialist revolution, which are contained in socially necessary labour, converge, at some point, in the revolutionary party, especially in its world form, as a communist international.

The following table shows the relationship between the fields of use value, socially necessary labour time and value form, with their respective party formations.

TABLE 1. Objectifications, Subjectivations and the Revolutionary Political Party.

Plane of objectifications	Plane of subjectivations	Revolutionary political party
Use Value	Teleologically inclined subject	Transitional programs that signal the passage from democratic struggles to socialist struggles
	Formation of the particular intellect	Initial Forms of Class Consciousness
	Particular existence of social class	First forms of political organization of the working class
Socially Necessary Working Time	Subjects inclined towards universalization	Creation of Communist Internationals
	General Intellect Formation	Class consciousness as the world consciousness of the working class
	Universal existence of social classes	Internationally valid transition program
Value Form	Subjects inclined towards the false universalization of a particular. Claim of universality	Distorted consciousness of objectifications and creation of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties
	Subjects inclined towards negativity, prevented from teleology and universalization	Alienation
	Subjects mediated by things and virtualities	Schizophrenia of capital

Own elaboration. 2026.

 

Since the beginning of the working class, the political party has been present. Marx and Engels discover this process, participate fully in it, although they do not manage to theorize it. The political practice of the two will be articulated with the International Workingmen's Association, as the First Communist International; Marx will write his main documents. Revolutionary Marxism implies the creation of workers' parties, because to constitute oneself as a political subject means to acquire class consciousness and to be able to take one's destiny into one's own hands.

Considering:

that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves; that the struggle for the emancipation of the working class is not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for the establishment of equal rights and duties and for the abolition of all class privileges.

http://www.marxists.org/espanol/m-e/1860s/1864-est.htm page 1

The necessary character of the workers' international follows from the fact that the ruling classes are politically organized; and their parties aim to maintain and deepen exploitation and domination; moreover, no social revolution can succeed without a political party. Thus, the conquest of political power is placed as part of the indispensable strategy of the working class. Therefore, the workers' movement cannot limit itself to spontaneous economic action.

7. In its struggle against the united power of the possessing classes, the proletariat can act as a class only by constituting itself as a political party distinct from and opposed to all the old political parties created by the possessing classes. This constitution of the proletariat into a political party is indispensable to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its supreme goal: the abolition of classes. The coalition of the forces of the working class, already achieved by the economic struggle, must also serve as a lever in its struggle against the political power of its exploiters. Since the lords of land and capital always use their political privileges to defend and perpetuate their economic monopolies and to subjugate labor, the conquest of political power has become the great duty of the proletariat.  http://www.marxists.org/espanol/m-e/1860s/1864-est.htm page 3

 

2. The workers' party as a bearer.

The concept of carrier is taken directly from Karl Marx's Capital, where it plays an important role in expressing both the relations between the different moments that lead from the commodity to money and the personification of economic categories in concrete individuals, who appear, for example, as buyers or sellers.

Two words to avoid possible misunderstandings. I do not paint the figures of the capitalist and the landowner in rose-coloured. But here we are dealing with people only insofar as they are the personification of economic categories, bearers of certain class relations and interests.

Marx, K. (1975). Capital. Critique of Political Economy. Book One: The Process of Capital Production (Vol. 1). (P. Scaron, Ed. & Trans.). Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores. Page 8

The social and political constitution of the working class is personified through bearers, as vehicles that allow its concrete existence, which are social organizations and political parties. The latter, therefore, are manifestations of social class and depend entirely on it.

The character of the workers' party, at its international and national level, is given in a triple aspect:

a.    Bearer of class relations: the workers' party is formed to dispute the political space that has been hijacked by the bourgeois parties and the State; In this sense, political organization arises from the antagonism between social classes.

b.   Bearer of class consciousness: the organization of the workers, as the concretization of their consciousness, represents the general and immediate interests of the class, which finally take the form of a transitional program.

c.    Bearer of the emancipatory project of all forms of oppression of the capitalist system: as shown by the inherent tendency to socially necessary labor time, workers struggle not only for their liberation, but for the liberation of all humanity; for which capitalism must be defeated, using all political instruments. The political party, in addition to transforming the interests of the working class into strategies for class struggle, is also an anticipation of the society to come.

This set of elements of the portability of the class in the political party is the origin and foundation of revolutionary organization; For this reason, the revolutionary party is not something external to the class, but belongs entirely to it, and its function is to be completely at the service of the workers.

Parties exist as expressions of class relations, structured by a ruling class that not only appropriates the labor force, but also the instruments of political representation. The party cannot be separated from the fact that it lives in an unequal society, divided between exploiters and exploited. For this reason, when socialism is achieved and an egalitarian society is achieved, political parties and the State will disappear.

THE REVOLUTIONARY PARTY AT THE FIRST FOUR CONGRESSES OF THE THIRD COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL

The first four congresses of the Communist International signify the synthesis of revolutionary conceptions on the question of revolutionary parties, which collects the debates prior to the Russian Revolution, the experience of the Russian Revolution itself and projects it into the future. In any case, it must be borne in mind that this enormous experience was cut short with the triumph of Stalinism.

The Theses on the Structure, Methods and Action of the Communist Parties, which is the most comprehensive and profound resolution on the question of the party, are adopted at the Third Congress of the Communist International, also known as the Third Communist International. The following table summarizes the eight theses it contains.

Table 2. Theses on the Structure, Methods and Action of the Communist Parties

Nº	Thesis	Summary
I	General	The organization of the party must be adapted to the concrete conditions of the struggle and its objectives. There is no single, immutable or valid organizational form for all countries; However, all communist parties share a common basis: to build an organization capable of leading the proletariat, conquering power and consolidating the revolution.
II	Democratic centralism	Democratic centralism is defined as a synthesis between centralization and proletarian democracy. It must not be a bureaucratic or mechanical centralization, but a centralization of revolutionary activity. Its aim is to unite strong leadership, discipline, direct contact with the masses and active participation of the militants.
III	The Communists' Duty to Work	The party must be a "working school of revolutionary Marxism." Militancy cannot be limited to accepting a program or paying contributions: each member must participate in daily political work. To do this, members must be organized into cells, fractions, commissions or small working groups, with concrete tasks, accountability and systematic training.
IV	Propaganda and agitation	Communist propaganda must be rooted in the concrete life of the proletariat, starting from its immediate struggles and interests and raising them towards a revolutionary consciousness. It includes personal interviews, house-to-house agitation, intervention in factories, trade unions, national minorities, the army, the countryside and workers' organisations. It must not be reduced to general formulas, but must translate communism into concrete problems of the class struggle.
V	Organization of political struggles	The party must not remain politically inactive. It must use every political or economic situation to organize campaigns, meetings, demonstrations, strikes, mass actions and common struggles. The task is to transform scattered struggles into unified movements, to concentrate forces, to dispute the leadership of reformists and bureaucrats, and to prepare higher forms of proletarian organization.
VI	The party press	The communist press must be subject to the directives of the party and function as an instrument of propaganda, agitation and organization. The newspaper must not be a capitalist enterprise or a sensationalist media, but a proletarian organization of combat. It must collect the experiences of the militants, intervene in campaigns, defend workers' interests and serve as a daily link between the party and the masses.
VII	The overall structure of the party	The structure of the party should not be built according to a formal geographical scheme, but on the basis of the economic, political and organizational reality of the country. The base must be in the proletarian and industrial centers. Centralization, effective regional leadership, division of labor, control, reporting, discipline, and subordination of the party organizations to the Communist International are demanded.
VIII	The Nexus Between Legal Work and Illegal Work	There must be no essential separation between legal and illegal parties: both must be prepared to adapt quickly to the changes of the struggle. The legal party must prepare for clandestinity, repression and insurrection; The illegal party must take advantage of all legal possibilities to maintain contact with the masses. The direction of legal and illegal labor must be unified in the same central direction.

Prepared by the author based on the Theses on the structure of the parties.

Within the framework of the general validity of the premises for the construction and organization of revolutionary parties, a set of debates is generated that have not been clearly resolved throughout the experiences of the workers' struggles. Then, before an extensive treatment of these problems, we will synthetically point out the core of the discussion.

General guidelines and forms of organization: this is, without a doubt, one of the most difficult issues to resolve; For this reason, it ended up consolidating a general model, valid for all countries, regardless of the concrete situations of the class struggle. This tendency towards organisational homogenisation was also driven by the counter-revolution suffered at the hands of the bureaucracies that expropriated power from the workers in the so-called socialist societies.

Finding the organizational form that combines the principles of the revolutionary party, such as building an organization capable of leading the proletariat, conquering power and consolidating the revolution, with the conditions of the class struggle in each country, is the main challenge. There are no party formulas or models, although all organizations in a country must be open to learning from the experiences of other revolutionary parties. The structure of the party must be adapted to the reality of each country.

Democratic centralism: developing a real democracy and not merely a formal one, which clearly establishes the modalities of the exercise of internal democracy, for example, the debates around the crucial issues of the class struggle at a given juncture.

At the same time, to build a solid revolutionary leadership; that is, the formation of a collective leadership capable of leading the entire organization towards the seizure of power and the construction of socialism. This point is strongly pointed out and to which he will return insistently, and introduces into the dynamics of the construction of the party the challenge of providing itself with a leadership in accordance with the challenges of the class struggle. The revolutionary party not only has to equip itself with a model and strategies for construction within the mass movement, but also has to develop the guidelines for the construction of its leadership.

Class consciousness, program and propaganda: the propaganda of the workers' party is the place where the program is concretized and transformed into the call to actions that a political conjuncture demands; in addition, it acquires a constant educational dimension, which combats the ideological propaganda of the ruling class.

The revolutionary party's primary function is to organize the struggles of the workers, creating higher structures that unify their efforts and provide them with a transitional orientation, adapted to each specific struggle. But it has a double task, which consists of strengthening the revolutionary organization at each moment of the class struggle and in building the organization of the working class; Of course, these are two moments that are intimately related.

CURRENT DEBATES AROUND THE REVOLUTIONARY POLITICAL PARTY

The question of the political party is marked by a high level of conflict, both in theory and in practice.  It is difficult to find a topic that causes extreme polarization and where reality and conceptualization are opposed with that radicalism. While the bourgeoisie takes over the parties without limit, the social movements and many currents of the left deny them. Even the masses live the paradox of hating the parties and, nevertheless, blindly surrendering to them at election time.

For this reason, two delimitations are chosen that are considered necessary: firstly, only the parties will be analysed from the perspective of the socialist revolution and the emancipation of all forms of oppression; and, secondly, it will be restricted to those elements of a general nature and that are considered as basic principles, without going into empirical details. It will try to answer the question: what are revolutionary parties and what role do they play in the radical transformation of society?

Establishing what the revolutionary party consists of means taking into account the following issues:

1. The revolutionary party form and the party forms.

The discussion about the party must take place on a double plane, so as not to be trapped in a long casuistic and conjunctural discussion that distorts the perception of what political organizations are; An adequate understanding of what the party form is and its different historical concretions, which lead to the emergence of party forms, is necessary.

The party form concerns the very essence of political organization, as an institution that detaches itself from democracy and is constitutive of it; and, for the revolutionary party form, it alludes to the set of fundamental characteristics of this type of political organization, which remains its valid nucleus through the historical vicissitudes of the class struggle.

These essential attributes of the revolutionary party are not abstract and timeless postulates; on the contrary, they are detached from the character, the program and the policies of the socialist revolution, in the epoch of the profound decomposition of capitalism and its society.

From the establishment of these premises, it is possible to analyze the party forms that occur in societies, the way in which they evolve, the methods of action, along with the historical triumphs and failures. The construction of revolutionary parties must start by clearly establishing the indissoluble link between the revolutionary party form and the specific form it must adopt for the construction of an international and national parties, taking into account the experiences of class struggles, organizational traditions and national cultures. 

2. The character and types of revolutions of the twenty-first century.

The character of the coming revolutions will be socialist or it will not be. An anti-capitalist and democratic dynamic is articulated in a process of permanent revolution with the socialist horizon. Although this premise remains valid, it is not defined with equal clarity what the revolutions of the 21st century will be like, what forms they will take, what mass organizations they will invent in the midst of the struggle, what will be the dual-power organizations that will emerge and how the construction of socialism will take place.

After the end of the period opened by the Russian Revolution and the failure to open a new revolutionary cycle, despite the great mass mobilizations, the party forms are also affected by this vacuum of perspectives, by the difficulty of finding the appropriate organizational forms and the type of organizations for the tasks that the workers have to face.

This is the great strategic challenge we face: to invent the best party forms based on the revolutionary party form, which remains valid for this historical period. Therefore, it is not a question of discarding the political party, but of reinventing it in a dynamic of continuity and change.

Debates about what kind of revolutionary party we need are intimately intertwined with discussions about socialism and strategies to combat capitalism. The development of revolutionary theory is the indispensable condition for the construction of the revolutionary party.

3. The construction of the revolutionary international and the articulation with the national parties.

The unstoppable advance of the globalization of capital and inter-imperialist confrontations puts the construction of a revolutionary international on the order of the day. The existence of social classes worldwide is no longer just a Marxist prediction, but a fact that we verify day by day.

For their part, especially in the European Union, bourgeois parties tend to converge and organize internationally, as is the case of the European People's Party and the Party of European Socialists; And, although they do not achieve an organicity at this level, there have already been several attempts to create an international of far-right parties, which drag the conservative parties in their authoritarian drift.

How to build a revolutionary international of the masses? What political currents can and should converge in this initiative? Should we wait for the best conditions to do so, or should we create a nucleus of the revolutionary international, however weak they may be?

The demand for leadership and coordination of world struggles imperatively demands the resolution of the crisis of revolutionary leadership on a world scale, that it be built with a clear socialist program and class independence, especially in relation to the social democratic and progressive currents.

4. The dialectical relationship between the transitional program and the revolutionary party form.

The revolutionary party is the bearer of the transitional program; therefore, its task is the construction and realization of this program in the mobilizations of democratic and anti-capitalist masses. As a political subject, the revolutionary party is built from the guidelines of the program; however, there is no obvious and easy to establish link between the two levels.

The discussion of the forms of political party that emerge from the transitional program is not unilateral and there may be different responses or different ways of concretizing the transitional slogans at the organizational level. For its part, the program also depends on the ability to elaborate a revolutionary theory and on the lessons learned from the experiences of the class struggle that the political party makes and from which it formulates the program.

Several questions are formulated based on these considerations: does the party express the guidelines of the transitional program? How did you take the step from the program to the construction of the party? To what extent does the party form adopted allow the program to be carried out? What transformations in the program are produced as demands of the party structure? And, in a special way, how are the other aspects that intervene in its construction, such as the experiences of the class struggle or the organizational traditions of a country, integrated into the relationship between party and program?

5. The double link between mass mobilization and political organization.

The mobilization of the masses, especially the great social outbursts, has its own dynamics and rhythms; In addition, although they have been semi-spontaneous uprisings, they end up providing themselves with some kind of leadership or leaderships, which make decisions about the course of the struggles. Moreover, in most cases they lead to organizational forms that try to ensure that the movement is not ephemeral and that the struggles can continue beyond the insurrectionary moments.

So far, the political leaderships of mass mobilization have not been up to the demands and possibilities of the peoples' struggles against authoritarian regimes and the defense of democratic rights. These leaderships turned their backs on the masses and eventually led to their immediate, or medium-term, defeat.

From the perspective of building a revolutionary party, it is essential to be actively involved in the cycles of mass mobilization, regardless of the political leadership they have; but, we must ask ourselves about the way to articulate these uprisings with the construction of a revolutionary organization, which detaches itself from the dynamics and characteristics of the masses.

Maximum political and organizational flexibility is required to build the revolutionary party in the midst of the insurrectionary wave of the masses; and, in this case, it is the structures of the party that have to be transformed, in order to dispute the leadership of the struggles in progress and to promote an uninterrupted course of struggles.

6. The organizational expression of alliances in the revolutionary party.

The question of the alliances of the workers with the oppressed sectors has been, for a long time, an unresolved question. Starting with the worker-peasant alliance of the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution, to the present day, where these alliances have not been properly realized.

The disagreements between the working class and contemporary social movements show a fracture that remains unresolved. This field has been plagued by misunderstandings, confrontations, oppositions, without there being a resolution that comes from the opposing parties. The disputes between Marxism and feminism are already classic, and the distances between the environmental movements and the workers' parties.

Questions about how to articulate these struggles remain present and the question of how to build unified parties and organizations between the main social movements and revolutionary parties remains one of the main weaknesses of the revolutionary left.

What types of alliances should there be between workers' parties and social movement organizations? Is it preferable to adopt a path of organizational independence that is only found in unity of action? What transformations are necessary in the revolutionary parties, so that they can attract and incorporate all the workers from the other social movements and whose first identity is not that of work? What structures should be created in the parties to account for social diversities and their multiple demands, certainly not reducible in a schematic or simplifying way to the struggle against capitalist oppression? What battles must be fought within social movements to include the class perspective, not as an alien element attached to their fundamental concerns, but as a constitutive element of their conformation as social and political subjects, and as part of their specific consciousness, whether gender, blackness or ecological?

7. Legal, illegal and non-legal party.

The system of political parties is imposed by bourgeois democracies, as a mechanism for controlling representation and the demands of the citizenry; in this way, the struggles are framed within the institutionality of the State and it is hoped that from there they can be controlled.

On the other hand, when there are dictatorial regimes or democracies with a high degree of authoritarianism, it becomes practically impossible for revolutionary parties to participate in the bourgeois-democratic system. In such scenarios, the possibility of fighting at this level is excluded.

The construction of the revolutionary party requires considering the conditions of the class struggle and establishing the degree of desirability for the effectiveness of the participatory struggles within the legal electoral system and, consequently, legalizing the party and entering the game imposed by the state. Participation requires a constant process of vigilance and submission to the interests of the working class.

In those cases where it is not possible, due to the conditions of repression and authoritarianism, the option is to build an illegal party, which can survive the repression and keep in touch with the masses, to fight from there against the dictatorial forms of the regime.

Finally, there is another possibility that occurs quite frequently. It is possible that, given the weakness of the organization, it is not able to legalize itself; In this situation, the construction of the revolutionary party privileges its insertion in the masses and struggles to incorporate the most conscious and mobilized sectors into its ranks. It also often happens that, although there are conditions for legalization, the level of mobilization of the masses and the important changes in the relationship of forces between the social classes show that it is preferable to maintain and strengthen a non-legal party, which privileges the battles that take place in the streets and in the territories, rather than in bourgeois institutions. This type of non-legal party must be differentiated from the illegal party.

8. Discussing democratic centralism.

One of the central theses on the functioning of the revolutionary party, established by the Third Congress of the Third Communist International, is democratic centralism. This principle responds to the need to guarantee an iron unity of action of the party in its intervention in the mass movement; for this reason, centralism is established as a permanent requirement. But centralism has to be accompanied by the broadest democracy, which guarantees the expression of diverse points of view and unfettered internal debate.

However, this formula has historically proven to be insufficient; While it is true that there has to be a solid unitary leadership at the moment when decisions have already been made, centralism can get out of control and lead to authoritarian practices.

The discussion about how to understand and apply democratic centralism in the revolutionary party is still to be resolved. So the questions around this issue are still valid: how is the predominance of internal democracy guaranteed, which has to be the driving force and which is set aside exclusively in absolutely exceptional moments, such as a situation of open war? Should democratic centralism be reformulated and replaced by a principle of democracy, which is accompanied by mechanisms of centralization or direction? What should be the character of the leadership of the revolutionary party to avoid the breakdown of internal democracy? By what procedures is real democracy guaranteed within the party? Are collective addresses the answer to the problem?

We can even go deeper into this debate: what kind of internal democracy should be implemented? Is socialist democracy the guide to democratic centralism? Does the internal life of the organization prefigure the socialist way of life? Does internal democracy create the appropriate environment for the expression of gender, ethnic, transgender, black, and ecological diversities?

Are community elements taken into account when organizing the internal life of political organizations? Is the revolutionary party a form of community? How are forms of solidarity and camaraderie promoted and created among party members? What are the limits of the party's collective existence?

Democracy with centralization procedures is much more than an organizational issue; in reality, it is the foreseen image of an egalitarian society that is to come. It expresses collective and diverse intelligence together with the formation of a single will.

9. Political action. 

Political action defines what the revolutionary party is; For this reason, the Party establishes, for each historical period, the forms and methods of its practice in the mass movement and in society. This aspect is linked, preferentially, to propaganda, agitation and the education of the masses and which, in addition, leads to the definition of sufficiently differentiated party-building strategies, depending on the sector in which one intervenes.

It is not possible to separate the methods of political action from the conception of the socialist revolution, from the definition of the moment of the class struggle, from the concretization of the transitional program and from the experience of the working class and the party.

Although propaganda and agitation are the tools that are placed in the first place, the education of the workers, oriented towards the understanding of class antagonisms and the revolutionary socialist perspective, should not be underestimated as part of the fight against the influence of the dominant ideology. In this same sense, the systematic and continuous training of the most advanced sectors of the working class and of the members of the party must be an unavoidable priority.

10. To oppose the bourgeois parties with revolutionary mass political organizations.

The world is governed by political parties, which are the instruments of the world and national bourgeoisie to guarantee its interests and, above all, the expanded reproduction of capital. In fact, a few parties control the planet, imposing their designs on all of humanity. They have appropriated the present and the future, leaving no room for safety.

The great party machines decide the course of the world economy, declare wars, launch waves of neocolonial interventionism, appropriate cultures, attack the rights won by the masses and roll back democracy. Our fate is played out in the hands of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party of the United States, the Chinese Communist Party, United Russia,  Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party of India, and the European People's Party.

How can we respond to this situation of the almost absolute predominance of the imperialist parties? Is the semi-spontaneous mobilization of social groups enough? Is it enough for the mass outbursts that occur periodically? Is the political position of rejecting the building of mass revolutionary parties both internationally and nationally correct? Is the strategy of trying to place oneself on the margins of the capitalist system and maintain that there is an outside from which capital can act and resist effective?

On the contrary, the strategy of the world bourgeoisie and of the national businessmen is very clear: to appropriate party structures and deficient democracies to implement authoritarian regimes, crush the mass movement and enable the uninterrupted accumulation of capital.

So the real question is not how to escape from the party system that structures domination throughout the world, but what kind of revolutionary political parties we should build, which are radically different in their programs and modes of operation from the bourgeois parties.

Beyond the theoretical debates that will have to take place, from the point of view of the strategy of resistance and socialist revolution, there is no alternative but to pose the question of the revolutionary party; otherwise, the struggles end up being devoured by the State and devastated by repression.

11. Theory of the digital party.

Digital technologies reconfigure social spaces and affect all their components. The process of virtualization of social life transforms networks into a space for communication, information, and organization of society; and, therefore, it becomes a field of dispute between social classes. This is a field in which the dominant ideology is imposed, although it also tends to overwhelm any structured system of control.

Several questions arise around the impacts of social networks on revolutionary parties: are social networks capable of replacing political parties? Instead of a democracy organized around political parties, do we now have a society made up of networks? Is it possible and necessary to transform revolutionary parties into digital parties?

Are the networks only instruments at the service of the propaganda and agitation of the revolutionary party? Are forms of belonging and militancy exclusively on digital platforms acceptable and viable? To what extent does the revolutionary party also have to organize itself in the networks and not only in the territories? What is the impact on internal democracy, communication and discussions that take place on the networks? Are revolutionary parties organized around a digital democracy? What is the relationship between the multitudes of the networks and the political organization? In what way does the dialectic between the spontaneity of the masses and the party organization have to be rethought?

A line of work for the construction of revolutionary parties that takes into account the transformations in social relations, caused by the explosion of new information and communication technologies, is visible in digital communities.

Within digital networks, virtual communities are formed, which share spaces, interests, motivations, where solidarity and camaraderie work, despite the distances. In fact, these large collectives that populate the networks end up inventing new experiences of community life, beyond bourgeois individualism. They also tend to become politicized spontaneously, as many of them discuss the national and international situation, even if they do not necessarily lead to political action.

However, digital communities and revolutionary political parties are separated by barriers that seem insurmountable. Communities do not tend to evolve towards more developed models of organization; and the parties largely ignore the communities and do not see them as part of the strategies and methods for their construction.

The constitution of any type of digital political organization must go through the indispensable step of characterizing exactly what "digital" refers to. In both the colloquial and academic understanding of the term, there is a tendency to flatten all kinds of forms of organization as "digital communities", even when there are enormous differences between them. Let's just look at how Internet communication has become ubiquitous, there should be no group, much less something as large as a party, that does not have a group on a digital messaging application such as WhatsApp or Telegram.

The internet itself, with its websites, apps, news, and email, has already vastly changed the way we get organized. There has been a lot of talk about the immediacy of communication, now international news can be translated and shared globally in a matter of minutes, without depending on the intermediation of large traditional media conglomerates. Clearly, there is still a dependency in terms of infrastructure on other types of transnational corporations, in that sense there has not really been a democratization of digital communication, but it is difficult to say that nothing has changed, or that the possibilities of transmitting messages, disseminating propaganda and international coordination are the same as they were thirty years ago.

While it is still dominated, at all levels, by the interests of capital, it is important not to assume that this control is absolute. Obviously, there are forms of persecution and censorship; however, it is enough to compare the difficulty of disseminating a message in a traditional medium with the possibility of doing so through digital means to notice a substantial discrepancy. The use of digital dissemination channels, such as social media, to share revolutionary propaganda does not arouse the same mass interest as other types of content, such as those focused on entertainment or sports. This is due both to the disposition of modern audiences and to the way in which messages are disseminated, since those contents that generate greater profits for the large companies that operate these platforms tend to be prioritized.

If the irruption of the internet in the revolutionary organization has already modified its ways of acting, why is the "digital party" still thought of as something different, strange and that must be built from scratch? The first step should be to understand how practice has already changed beyond the understanding of the movements themselves, only to develop a series of strategies focused on overcoming the inherent limits of digital communication mediated by capitalist interests.

As for purely digital forms of organization, two steps are necessary: first, to differentiate them from "analog" organizations that have partially migrated to digital; and second, categorize them depending on the type of structure (or lack of) they have. In this first point we can see how left-wing organizations, from communist parties, socialists to social democracy, have a considerable digital presence, especially the largest ones such as the American Socialist Democracy (DSA). However, they have not managed to transform this presence into a true integration in digital communities, nor have they modified their forms of party membership to include digital members. For organizations that have migrated to digital, the on-premise, "real-world" organization remains the primary focus beyond any digital strategy.

It is not the same for true digital communities, which are fully integrated into the struggle for digital spaces, and even individual members can have a much greater reach and effectiveness because they understand the way in which discourse is structured on social networks. They are divided into three categories: radicalized communities, communities of opinion leaders, and communities of belonging.

Radicalized communities are those forms of digital organization that act relatively autonomously based on a defined ideological position in the face of specific problems. Unlike traditional parties or organizations, they do not necessarily depend on a formal structure, a centralized leadership, or a stable militancy, but on discursive affinities, dynamics of spontaneous participation, and processes of collective radicalization. The far right has managed to consolidate this type of community with greater force on platforms such as Kiwi Farms, 4chan or Forocoches, where the production of reactionary, misogynist, racist or conspiratorial discourses is articulated with forms of coordinated digital action. However, this phenomenon is not limited exclusively to the radical right. There are also digital communities linked to causes understood as progressive or left-wing, although not always organized around the question of class, but rather around environmental, gender, identity or cultural problems.

Communities of opinion leaders are organized around figures with the capacity for discursive concentration, public influence, and constant content production. In this field, the far right was also configured early and with great effectiveness, especially from creators from entertainment, humor, video games or cultural criticism, who later incorporated ideological themes into their platforms. The particularity of these communities is that they are not structured solely by a political doctrine, but by the relationship between an audience and a central figure who establishes the frameworks from which their followers understand social conflicts. In the case of the left, revolutionary, and even explicitly communist, propaganda appears more clearly in these types of communities than in radicalized communities. Examples such as Hasan Piker, The Deprogram, Red Scare or Chapo Trap House show how certain digital spaces can combine entertainment, political analysis, ideological formation and a sense of belonging. These communities tend to receive more public attention because their referents have greater visibility, capacity for media intervention and possibilities of connecting with broad audiences.

The communities of belonging are those that are articulated around a true "market of ideologies", in which individuals choose, by subjective proximity and their own will, a political identity to which they adhere. In these cases, political belonging does not necessarily arise from participation in grassroots organizations, unions, parties or territorial movements, but from digital identification processes. Users find an ideological current, adopt its codes, consume its content, reproduce its symbols and seek to connect with other individuals who share the same orientation. This type of community functions as a space of political socialization in which ideology is experienced first as an identity, discursive style and form of belonging, rather than as an organized practice. Its main weakness is that it often lacks mechanisms for sustained collective action outside the digital environment; however, its importance lies in the fact that it produces links, imaginaries and political dispositions that can precede or replace more traditional forms of militancy.

How to open up political parties to make them attractive to digital communities? How can parties equip themselves with internal environments and structures that promote the entry of these communities? What debates should we have with the communities to propose the question of the political party, although it will surely have to undergo major transformations?

12. Camaraderie.

The internal life and relations between the members of a workers' party are guided by camaraderie. The starting point of this reflection are the theses on camaraderie elaborated by Jodi Dean, in which some modifications and interpretations are introduced, in order to adapt them to the reality of revolutionary political organizations and to specify the meaning of the theses. Jodi Dean, Comrade 91

Thesis 1. The comrade defines a relationship characterized by identity and equality, solidarity. For communists, this unity, equality and solidarity are utopian in character, cutting across the determinations of capitalist society.

Anti-capitalism and the perspective of an alternative society, which will be socialist, provide the first frame of reference for the shared identity of the members of the revolutionary party. Equality and solidarity are part of that future society, in which the modes of oppression of the capitalist system have been overcome.

It will be necessary to redefine the utopian character that Jodi Dean gives it, in the sense of placing it rather as the anticipation of socialist values, which penetrate as sketches and guides in the present. For this reason, equality and solidarity, although they cannot be complete in a society based on exploitation, must be part of the daily practice of the organization.

The battle to maintain and deepen the egalitarian and solidary character among the members of the organization is a permanent battle and the party is structured in such a way that it takes these aspects into account, in addition to educating the militants within this perspective.

Thesis 2. Anyone can be a comrade, although not everyone can be one.

This political and social thesis has a profoundly delimiting character when it comes to drawing a clear dividing line between true comrades and those who are definitely not; that is, it establishes an unbreakable boundary between those individuals who act as exploiters or stand as direct accomplices of the dynamics of exploitation, and those who suffer them in their daily lives, that is, the broad group of workers and historically oppressed sectors.

Likewise, this approach has to do directly with the complex process of the acquisition and consolidation of class consciousness, an indispensable conceptual tool that allows us to recognize who is firmly on this side accompanying the just causes of the subordinates and who, on the contrary, consciously places himself on the other side, defending the interests of the ruling class.

Thesis 3. The individual (as the center of identity) is the comrade's Other.

This thesis proposes the recognition and full respect of the other; The identity of each member is, in reality, a shared identity. Each looks at the other party member and finds that the world is given to him in a similar way; that is, both suffer the effects of exploitation, in different ways and degrees.

However, this thesis requires a significant expansion in several directions. Although the starting point is the recognition of the other, this otherness is made up of a diversity of identities, which have to be made explicit, because they constitute different modes of existence.

This means introducing the perspectives of gender, blackness, transgender, ethnicity and ecology into the perception of the other; otherwise, the other may remain hidden and inaccessible under the appearance of a certain uniformizing equality. In each case, the question arises about the character of that otherness, in which imagination plays a fundamental role, because it is essential to imagine the other for himself, using all possible means. 

Thesis 4. The relationship between comrades is mediated by fidelity to a truth. The practices of camaraderie materialize this fidelity, incorporating its truth into the world.

While it is true that fidelity to the truth sustains camaraderie, in a world plagued by lies and conspiracies, it alone is insufficient to support the relationship between comrades. For this reason, the reference to the set of truths articulating the class struggle and the existence of the party occurs at this time.

By this we mean that camaraderie also occurs when transitional programmatic orientations, methods of struggle, strategic visions and, especially, the emancipatory horizon of all forms of capitalist oppression are shared.

The comrades look to the future together and dispute with the bourgeoisie the idea of a time to come, endowing themselves, so to speak, with a secular eschatology. The end of times, not as the end of history, but as the

fulfillment and realization of human liberation.