The Communist International

A workers’ party should bar the parties of capital and let its own members organize, because the ban of 1921 outlived its emergency and shielded the leaderships it was never meant to serve.

From Okabe Shizuka, member of the Presidium of the Executive Committee and of the Japanese Communist Party

On 10 December the Tokyo District Court will receive final submissions in a suit against the Japanese Communist Party brought by a man it expelled. In January 2023 the journalist Matsutake Nobuyuki, then a member, published a book proposing that the membership elect the party chair by open ballot, and announced that he would stand. The party expelled him the next month under its rule against factions. It found the factional act in his urging another member to bring forward a book critical of the party. When the leadership of the party congress rejected his appeal in January 2024, it added that a contested election for the chair risked “the formation of factions.” Last December his lawyers asked the party to define the faction it had expelled him for forming. The party gave no definition, and it told them the committee that expelled him had kept no minutes.

In Fukuoka, a full-time party worker named Kamiya Takayuki moved in his prefectural committee to reopen the case and lost the vote. He described the meeting on his blog and wrote that he would abide by the decision. The committee charged him with breaking the rules and demanded self-criticism. In August 2024 it struck him off the rolls and dismissed him from his job.

No emergency triggered any of this. The Japanese party holds no state power and fights no civil war. The Communist Party of China holds a great deal of state power, and on 26 October its Central Committee meets in Beijing to adopt a decision on “strengthening full and rigorous Party self-governance.” Its constitution obliges every member to “resolutely oppose all factional organizations and small-group activities,” and it allows a member who disagrees with a decision to declare reservations while carrying the decision out. The constitution thus protects a disagreement held by one member and forbids the same disagreement once several members organize around it. Both parties joined the Communist International in 1922, the year after the Tenth Congress of the Russian party passed its resolution “On Party Unity.” Each received the rule through the International, whose statutes of 1928 required every decision to be “unreservedly carried out” even where part of the membership opposed it. The International’s own archive shows what the rule had become thirteen years after its adoption.

The English edition of International Press Correspondence for 29 December 1934 opens with an article by Karl Radek titled “In the Cesspool of Counter-Revolution.” Four weeks earlier Leonid Nikolaev had shot Sergei Kirov in Leningrad. Radek writes that the assassin took his orders from “the vile dregs of the former Zinoviev anti-party group.” He traces their descent from “differences with the Party leadership on a number of fundamental questions” to “fraction work” and a bloc with the Trotskyists, and from there to “terroristic attacks on the Soviet Power.” He keeps his sharpest contempt for the oppositionists who rejoined the Party after their defeat without renouncing their views. They came back, he writes, “to wait there ‘for better times,’” and they “went there with a dagger up their sleeve.” Radek knew the type from the inside. The Party had expelled him with the Opposition in 1927, and in July 1929 he signed a capitulation with Preobrazhensky and Smilga that brought him back. Seven pages after his article, the same issue prints a TASS notice dated 24 December. It names Zinoviev, Kamenev and thirteen others as arrested in the case, and it states that for seven of them, Zinoviev and Kamenev included, the inquiry had found no “material sufficient for a committal to trial.” Their cases went to the Commissariat for Home Affairs for “administrative banishment.” On the date the issue carries, a court in Leningrad sentenced Nikolaev and thirteen codefendants to death.

In March 1921, at the Tenth Congress, Radek had voted for the resolution “On Party Unity” while warning the delegates that he could not say against whom it would be used. He added that it might be turned on the people voting for it. In January 1937, he stood in the dock at the second Moscow trial and confessed to a Trotskyist conspiracy. The court gave him ten years. Zinoviev and Kamenev had been shot the previous August. Radek died in the Verkhneuralsk isolator in May 1939, killed by a fellow prisoner in an attack that a post-Stalin party investigation found the NKVD had organized. In 1988 the Supreme Court of the USSR found him not guilty. His article of 1934 lays out, in his own words, the route by which the Party turned a disagreement over policy into a charge of murder. The International printed it on its front page, under the name from which this publication takes its own.

The case against the ban has to begin by granting what its defenders get right. A workers’ republic cannot put the ownership of production to a periodic vote. France showed how such a vote works even inside a capitalist state. In June 1981 a Socialist majority took the National Assembly, and four Communist ministers entered the government. The government’s nationalization law transferred 39 banks, two financial companies and five industrial groups to the state, which gave the state control of some 95 percent of credit distribution. The Constitutional Council struck down parts of the first version on 16 January 1982. It ruled that property held “pleine valeur constitutionnelle” and required “une juste et préalable indemnité,” so Parliament raised the compensation owed to shareholders and passed the law again in February. Speculation against the franc forced three devaluations between October 1981 and March 1983, and with the third the government turned to austerity. The Communist ministers left in 1984. In March 1986 the parties of the right won the legislative elections, and the laws of 2 July and 6 August 1986 opened the nationalized sector to sale. Every stage, from the compensation ruling to the first share offering, took place inside bourgeois legality. A workers’ republic that let the parties of capital contest its elections would face the same sequence with the whole of production at stake. Barring those parties takes their program at its word.

The ban’s defenders go further and claim the single party as the only form proletarian rule can take. Their own canon refutes them. Engels ended his 1891 introduction to The Civil War in France with the words “Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” The Commune was a coalition. Its majority were Blanquists, socialist in Engels’s phrase “only by revolutionary and proletarian instinct,” and its minority came chiefly from the Proudhonist wing of the International. When the majority set up a Committee of Public Safety in May 1871, twenty-one members of the minority, Varlin and Frankel among them, signed a declaration on 15 May refusing to shelter behind a dictatorship and withdrew to their arrondissements. Most were back at the Hôtel de Ville within two days. Whatever bar a workers’ republic sets against the parties of capital, the Commune gives no warrant for extending it into the workers’ movement itself.

The Tenth Congress of the Russian party sat from 8 to 16 March 1921 while the Kronstadt garrison was in revolt. More than a quarter of the delegates, some three hundred, volunteered for the assault across the ice. Lenin told the congress on 9 March, “Comrades, this is no time to have an opposition.” Six days later he moved the tax in kind that opened the New Economic Policy. On the final day the congress passed the resolution “On Party Unity,” which ordered the dissolution of “all groups without exception” formed on separate platforms. A seventh point, withheld from publication, allowed a joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Control Commission to expel even members of the Central Committee by a two-thirds vote. Lenin did not present this as principle. “This is an extreme measure that is being adopted specially, in view of the dangerous situation,” he said. “I hope we shall not have to apply it.”

The same day he rejected an amendment from Ryazanov that would have barred elections to future congresses by platform. If a question as grave as the Brest peace divided the party again, he argued, “We cannot deprive the Party and the members of the Central Committee of the right to appeal to the Party.”

The civil war ended, and the rule stayed in force with a new use. On 17 January 1924, in the middle of the dispute with the Opposition of 1923, Stalin told the Thirteenth Party Conference that “the time has come when we must make public” the secret point. It entered public life as a warning to the Opposition. In the autumn of 1927 the United Opposition asked to circulate its platform before the Fifteenth Congress. On 23 October Stalin explained the refusal to a joint plenum of the Central Committee and Control Commission. The Central Committee, he said, “did not want and had no right to legalise Trotsky’s faction.” He reminded the plenum that Lenin had called the existence of a “platform” “one of the principal signs of factionalism.” The Opposition printed its platform on a clandestine press, and Stalin cited the press as proof of the charge. In November the Central Committee and Control Commission expelled Trotsky and Zinoviev. By then the possession of a platform was itself the offense. The emergency that licensed the measure in 1921 had passed years before, and no one could lift the measure except the leadership it now protected.

The International’s theses for instructors of 1934 treat Trotskyism as a counter-revolutionary current, and the Editorial Board has said it will contest what follows. The witness deserves a hearing all the same, because he argued his way to this position from its opposite. In 1920, in Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky defended the dictatorship of the party as the only form the dictatorship of the soviets could take. In December 1923 he still refused any rival party. “We are the only party in the country and, in the present period of dictatorship, it could not be otherwise,” he wrote, and “the party does not want factions and will not tolerate them.” Inside the party he now saw the danger running the other way. He called it “organizational fetishism” to believe that a written decision could prevent groupings regardless of how the party developed. The Tenth Congress ban “can have only an auxiliary character.” The cause of factions lay in the apparatus. “Bureaucratism of the apparatus is precisely one of the principal sources of factionalism,” he wrote in his letter to party meetings of 8 December. It “ruthlessly represses criticism and drives discontent back into the depths of the organization,” and meets objection with “Let’s have your membership card!” He offered a case from Petrograd shortly after the Tenth Congress, where the Central Committee acted as arbitrator between two hostile groupings and secured “their complete fusion in the organization.”

Against the apparatus he set his definition of a Bolshevik, who “is not merely a disciplined person.” He “forges a firm opinion of his own and defends it courageously and independently, not only against his enemies, but inside his own party.” Outvoted, “he will submit, because it is his party. But this does not always signify that he is in the wrong,” and he “will persistently raise the question a second, a third, a tenth time, if need be.” Kamiya in Fukuoka did what Trotsky prescribed. He lost the vote and said in writing that he would submit. His party struck him off over the blog post in which he said it.

This contribution goes further than Trotsky did in 1923, and the Board should know it. The position argued here is a single party with legal factions. A group of members would have the right to publish its platform in the party press and to campaign for it. Sections would elect congress delegates by platform, the practice Lenin declined to outlaw in 1921 and the Central Committee would not “legalise” in 1927. A defeated minority would carry out the majority’s decision and keep both its views and its representation. What separates a faction from a party is the floor it stands on. Factions accept that the means of production stay socialized and that the owning class does not return. They argue over the balance of plan and market and over how hard accumulation may press on consumption. A group that organizes for the return of private property has left that floor, and the bar against the parties of capital applies to it.

A communist reader will object at once. The Soviet party went into its Twenty-Eighth Congress in July 1990 with open platforms for the first time since 1921, and within eighteen months it was gone. The Chinese party kept the ban and it endures. The record answers the objection. The floor had moved before the platforms appeared. The Law on Cooperatives of May 1988 opened the economy to non-state enterprise. In February 1990 the Central Committee voted to surrender the party’s constitutional monopoly, and in March the Congress of People’s Deputies rewrote Article 6. The Democratic Platform’s declaration called for “a market economy regulated by society instead of command planning” and for “pluralism of forms of ownership.” By the test above it was a party of restoration organized inside the party, and Yeltsin resigned from the party at the congress on 12 July. In Beijing the ban held while the party oversaw the return of private capital, as this publication’s statement on China has documented. When the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress passed the Private Economy Promotion Law in April 2025, official figures credited private firms with more than 60 percent of GDP and 80 percent of urban employment. In Moscow and in Beijing alike, the ban shielded those who went on to reopen the economy to private capital.

The harder objection comes from the left. Luxemburg made it in 1918, three years before the ban, against the Bolsheviks’ curbs on the press and on rival parties. “Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party,” she wrote, “is no freedom at all.” Without “a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution,” until “only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.” The case made here against the ban is hers, read backward from its fulfillment, and her objection reaches past factions to parties. This contribution cannot prove that factions can do the work of parties. It offers a wager instead. While the expropriated class survives and the socialized economy is young, open factions inside one party may carry the free struggle of opinion without cutting a legal channel for restoration. No clause in any statute secures the line between a faction and a party of restoration. Stalin erased it by naming his opponents agents of alien classes, and Radek’s article of 1934 shows how fast the erasure traveled. The only safeguard is a leadership that arbitrates between contending groups, as the Central Committee did in Petrograd, and a membership that will not accept the equation of dissent with treason. Pluralism has no cleaner record. The parties that took the Eurocommunist road did not hold the floor either, and the largest of them, the Italian party, voted at Rimini on 3 February 1991 to dissolve itself into the Democratic Party of the Left.

A Tokyo court may soon rule on what a faction is, because the party that expelled Matsutake would not define one. This contribution asks the Executive Committee to publish in these pages, before the World Congress, the platform of any group of members that submits one, and to let the sections elect their delegates on those platforms.