Dialogue with the Dead, 1956

Dialogue with the Dead, 1956
International Communist Party
Texts on Russia
Dialogue with the Dead
The 20
th
Congress of the Communist Party of Russia
1956
Table of Contents
-
Viaticum
for Readers
First Day
–
Recalling Cornerstones
–
Ideological Earthquake
from the East –
Lacerated Historiography
– Bari,
Let the Truth Through
– Myth and
Cult of the Person
–
Incurable Scoliosis
–
Lead in the Asses
–
Cautious Glances
at the New Route
Second Day
–
Cult of Wastepaper
–
Confessed Turning Points
–
Clashing Forces
in the World 1956 –
First the Aim
, then the Means –
Means: Violence
–
The Philosopher’s Stone
–
The Essentials
in Marx-Lenin – Aftermath of
the Conquest of Power
–
Kautskyian Leninists
–
The Three-Way Scene
–
Withdrawal of Concessions
Third Day: Morning
–
Interim Report
–
History and Historiography
–
Parliamentarism Equals Personalism
–
Superstructure and Economic Base
–
Mikoyan’s Criticism
–
Blue Marks
for Stalin –
Stalin’s Asinine Laws
–
We Extinguished
the Flamethrower –
Another Vain Fetish
: Technique –
The Mummy-Abortion
of Mercantilism –
The Race
to Accumulate –
The Age of Capitalism
–
Per Capita Indices
–
With the Vanquished
or the Victors?
Third Day: Early Afternoon
–
Agriculture
: Reduced Pace –
The Burning Agrarian Question
–
Russian Rural Society
–
An American Announcement
–
The Price ‘Spread’
–
The Insoluble Antithesis
–
Asinine Revolution
–
What Did Stalin Think?
–
Anti-Marxist ‘Emulation’
–
Lenin and Bukharin
–
To You, ‘Leninists’!
–
From Production
to Consumption –
A Mad and Lost Challenge
–
Savings and Enjoyment
–
‘Popular’ Consumption
–
The Modern Convict
–
Lean Dance of Calories
–
Figures and Pacifism!
Third Day: Afternoon
–
Questions of Principle
–
Coexistence Without War
–
The Turning Point of 1926
–
Flames of the Eve
–
Stalin’s Testament
–
Viva Stalin, Then?
–
Competition and Emulation
–
Markets and Trade
–
Exchange of Capital
–
Yes, War is Avoidable
–
Bleak Utopianism
–
Birth of the Counter-October
Third Day: Evening
–
Poor and Naked You Go, Philosophy!
–
The Dogmatists, the Talmudists, Josif’s Refrain
–
To You, Little Schoolboys!
–
Stand Up, You Down There!
–
Noises Outside the Classroom
–
Shady Use of Lenin
–
What is Left Inviolable?
–
How They Have Enriched Marx
–
Stalin’s Rejected Contributions
–
The Function of the Party
–
Textbook of Principles
–
Elementary Little Scheme
–
Sense of Determinism
–
Where Are the ‘Guarantees’
–
Wickedness of Man?
–
Breath of Fresh Air
–
Experts of the Market
–
The First International
–
The English Industrial Revolution
–
The Other Capitalisms
–
Law of Accumulation
–
Marx and Gladstone
–
The Extremes of a Century
COMPLEMENTS TO THE DIALOGUE
A
) Retreat and Decline of the Bolshevik Revolution
–
The Internal Struggle in the Russian Party
–
The Great Clash of 1926
–
Trotsky’s Fifty Years
–
Stalin’s Position
–
Lenin’s ‘Twenty Years’
–
Revolutions That Carry Out the Backlog of Tasks
–
American Anti-Slavery Revolution
–
Dialectical Parallel
–
Why Was There No Recourse to Arms?
–
Bureaucracy, the Wrong Target
–
Why Was There No Appeal to the Proletariat?
B
) The False Opposition Between the Russian and Western Social Forms
–
The Pace of Industrialisation
–
Dantean View of the Bourgeois Hell
–
TABLE
–
Laws of Accumulation
–
Scanning the Table
–
Crises Worse Than Wars
–
Objections of the Counter-Thesis
C
) The Socialist System at ‘FIAT’?
–
A Sign of the Soul of Little Italy
–
Augustae Taurinorum
–
Valleta-Bulganin
–
The Threatened Labour Force
–
Five-Year Plan for the Great FIAT
Viaticum for Readers
A clear understanding of the present work entails (almost necessarily) knowledge of the ‘Dialogue with Stalin’, printed in 1953 by the same movement, from which the present publication derives.
In the opening pages, enough is said about the chronological connections and the very special nature of the ‘debate’ that follows.
With the 1953 preface to the ‘Dialogue with Stalin’ we gave clear reasons for three stages of those longstanding and profound differences.
In the first period, which lasted from 1918 to 1926, it can be said that it was a divergence of
tactics
, within a movement that tended towards the same common end, of the Third Communist International, founded on the ruins of the Second that had fallen into social-patriotic opportunism, in the wake of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. The left wing of Italian socialism, from which we derive, struggled in the war and post-war period from 1914 to break with every democratic and pacifist version of socialism, and crowned its struggle with the foundation in Livorno in January 1921 of the Communist Party of Italy. Within the international movement, our current argued theses that differed from those of the Communist International and Lenin himself regarding parliamentary tactics and the tactics aimed at eradicating opportunist workers’ parties. These theses denied that the methods then known as the
united front
, and worse,
workers’ government
, were valid for eradicating opportunist workers’ parties.
These contributions, which contained an explicit denunciation of the dangers of degeneration, had as stages; the Moscow congresses from 1920 to 1926 and the Communist Party of Italy congresses in Rome in 1922 and Lyon in 1926.
In the second period, after 1926, the disagreement unfolded to the point of organisational and political separation, in which the left-wing position was everywhere fiercely beaten, while its predictions of the involution of the ruling majority in Russia, Europe and Italy were severely confirmed. In Russia, the false theory of constructing a Russian socialist society outside and without the international proletarian revolution prevailed, and the opposition that remained faithful to the Bolshevik and Lenin traditions on this and other points succumbed, was vilified, and exterminated. In Europe, the postponement of the revolutionary wave and the insolent consolidation of capitalism had as its defeatist and cowardly response the communists’ move into the ranks of blocs with non-proletarian parties and classes, aiming not to overthrow the bourgeoisie but to save bourgeois liberal democracy.
In the third period, with the Second World War, it became clear that the dissension had widened to an unbridgeable gulf of doctrines and principles, with the total disavowal by the Kremlin and its foreign aggregations of revolutionary Marxism, in the cornerstones defended and claimed after the first war by those who fought like Lenin and with Lenin. Foreign parties were thrown into social-national collaboration, first in Germany, and then in France, England, and America. Lenin’s directions to develop defeatism within each belligerent imperialist country and the overthrow of the military and civil power of the capitalists resulted in a league with the States that were belligerently allied with Moscow, while against the States that were enemies of Moscow they fought not to destroy the bourgeoisie, but to restore its liberal forms, killed in theory by Marx and Lenin, crushed forever materially within Russia, both revolutionary and imperial.
This period marked the organisational and theoretical liquidation of Lenin’s International and of October: the corollaries of the total transition to counter-revolution were seen. In small numbers, but with a mighty baggage of historical and doctrinal continuity, we proclaimed, out of the clamour that surrounded in a false intoxication of crowds the followers of what was then called on all sides
Stalinism
, that we had for many years been facing no longer a lost dissident from yesterday and from us Marxists long-standing, but an openly sworn mortal enemy of the working class and its historic path to communism. And at the same time, the proof of the capitalist nature of the economic society established in Russia and the central infamy of boasting of it in the world as a socialist society was becoming clear; in which, of so many and such clamorous betrayals, we recognise the supreme summit, the masterpiece of counter-revolutionary infamy.
* * *
In ‘Dialogue with Stalin’ we set out to chart the future ‘stages’ of this historical debate – which we call such, however much one of the contending parties lacks illustrious credentials – and foresaw the future
confession
in which two links will be declared broken: between the Russian production structure and socialism; between the politics of the Russian State and that of the class struggle of workers in all States against the world capitalist form.
After three years, the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, if it did not give us the end of this historic future stage, nevertheless represented a huge leap, and perhaps one closer than we had anticipated. Since, however, the scandalous admissions, which make a worldwide clamour for detachment from the dead Stalin, are still embedded in the pretence of speaking the language of Marx and Lenin, the
Dialogue
with the phantom-adversary must continue: the total Confession, which will one day come, we do not know if in another mere three years, from the Kremlin, will reduce it to their monologue. In vain,
they
had hoped so much with the Confessions they extracted from torturing the revolutionaries. The
Confessors
shall confess.
The stance we take today, in the face of the distress exaggerated to the point of obscenity of the idol of three years ago, and which is far from any applause for the iconoclasts, is consistent with what we established then, well foreseeing that the terrifying descent would be met by the sneering cry of the bourgeois world against the grandiose conceptions of our revolutionary doctrine. We wrote the following:
‘The methods of repression, of crushing that Stalinism applied to those who resisted it on all sides, finding ample explanation in all the criticism of its development that has just been recalled, must not give any foothold to any kind of condemnation that would in the least air repentance with respect to our theses on Violence, Dictatorship, and Terror as historical weapons of proclaimed use: that would remotely be the first step towards the hypocritical propaganda of the currents of the “free world” and their lying claim to tolerance and sacred respect for the
human person
. Marxists, unable to be protagonists in history today, can wish for nothing better than the catastrophe, social, political and military, of American dominion over the capitalist world. We therefore have nothing to do with the call for more liberal or democratic methods, flaunted by ultra-equivocal political groups and proclaimed by States that in reality had the most ferocious origins, such as Tito’s’.
Already from these clear words, as from our entire construction, which is all the more compact and cannot be confused with any other the less it is recited in front of sound and television chambers by farcical figures, it became clear then what reception the pitiful contortions of the 20th Congress and the comedy of the abjuration from Stalin, shown as a return to the classics of our great School, were to receive from us; while in reality it is a stage in the backward march towards the most fallacious superstitions of bourgeois ideology, a cowardly genuflection to the superpowers of the contemporary capitalist brothel.
* * *
We have prefixed the short epigraph on the cover, which, together with this glimpse of our historical origin, saves our small group from undesirable confusion.
Let us add another discriminating factor. Indeed, each step of the aforementioned
sinking
of the Kremlin’s men into the quicksand of bourgeois counter-revolution brings closer the hard, bitter goal of the reconstitution of the revolutionary party, to which we dedicate all our powers, except a hollow impatience.
When the hour will be marked by history, the formation of the class organ will not take place in a laughable
constituency
of little groups and cenacles that said and say they were anti-Stalinist or that today say they are ‘anti-20th Congress’.
The Party, killed drop by drop by thirty years of adverse storm, does not recompose itself like the
cocktails
of bourgeois doping. Such a result, such a supreme event, can only be placed at the end of an unbroken single line, not marked by the thought of one man or a group of men, present ‘in the square’, but by the coherent history of a series of generations.
Above all, it must not arise from nostalgic illusions of success, not based on the unshakeable doctrinal certainty of the revolutionary course, which we have possessed for centuries, but on the base subjective exploitation of the fumbling, of the wavering of others; which is a miserable, stupid, illusory path to an immense and historic result.
First Day
Recalling Cornerstones
The recent discussions of the Communist Congress of the Soviet Union, which have been echoed in every field, have a profound historical significance. The relationship between all these words and the historical
background
is to be sought in a different way: we are much better prepared for this than the followers – who have indeed been unsettled for a long time – and the Western adversaries, who are ardent but armed with very poor polemical and critical means.
We say this today to the few who are familiar with the background of our non-noisy, yet well-founded, coherent research and presentation. Other events, which will make noise in a much wider circle than ours, will find us welding, even amidst the silence, other links in this solid, if now barely visible, chain.
With the dates of 1 February, 21 April, 22 May, 28 September 1952, Stalin published a series of not lengthy writings, with which he considered it necessary to intervene in the economic discussion that had arisen within the party in the year 1951, regarding the preparation of the new ‘Textbook of Political Economy’, which had recently been published in the West, and which we hope to learn about before it is done away with
(
1
)
. The purpose of the writing was to establish which economic laws should be applied to the structure of Russian society today, and to argue that these laws were those of a socialist economy. And, of course, the content was also to recall the laws that apply in the contemporary economy of international capitalism, comparing them with the way Marxist economics has formulated them for a century.
The
Dialogue with Stalin
, published by our movement in a small volume in 1953, argued that this construction, while misrepresenting the reality of economic progress in both Russia and the West, contains several serious doctrinal errors; it is irreconcilable with the fundamentals of Marxist doctrine. There were collected ‘Threads of Time’ given in this periodical in No. 1 of 10-24 October 1952 and in the following Nos. 2, 3, 4, with supplementary extracts in Nos. 2 and 3 of 1953.
It was at this very time, from 5-15 October 1952, that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held its 19th Congress, at which, as is well remembered, Stalin did not so much dominate as leader, as he was considered by all and sundry to be the originator of the party’s entire historical, economic, political, and philosophical theory, officially referred to as the ‘doctrine of Lenin and Stalin’.
This position remained unchallenged in the Russian party (and among brethren) until 5 March 1953, on which day Stalin died. And from that day to the present (14 February 1956).
In the discussion on Russia in the pages of
Il Programma Comunista
from November 1954
(
2
)
we have presented the materials of our critical view, developed over years and decades, in an organic order. According to this, the ‘Stalinist’ positions in historiography, economics, politics, and even philosophy are false and anti-Marxist.
Of all this, may those who follow us today, friend or foe, consider above all the discussion of Marxist economics in that
Dialogue
, and the recent exposition of the revolutionary history of Russia, of the great struggles of 1917 and the following glorious years, of the historical construction of the Bolsheviks and Lenin on the development of the Russian social structure, and of the Russian and world revolution; especially insofar as they counter the so-called
theory of the construction of socialism in one country
, the persecutory, infamous, and defeatist deeds of its wretched proponents from thirty years ago to the present.
From the 14th to the 25th of this February 1956, the 20th
Stalin
party Congress took place: its language is a thousand miles away from ours, but
it is no longer
that of the 19th Congress and the living Stalin: it is always about the immortal Lenin, no longer about an immortal Stalin.
No one for Marxism is immortal – no one is dead. Life dialogues with all those whom vulgar rhetoric calls thus. All will answer! With them the living, and those who will come after.
Ideological Earthquake from the East
From various rumours it appears that the immense
society of propaganda
constituted by the party and government in Moscow, which for thirty years has filled the Earth’s surface with a formidable literature forged on a constant mould, even if it is careful from time to time to run an implacable Index that withdraws and burns wayward emissions – and let it not be said to the detriment of the Roman Index behind which it stands, indelibly nailed on the plates atop of the stakes of the auto-da-fé, a mighty coherence to a bimillenial doctrine – it turns out then that this gigantic
society
suddenly puts everything under revision, and launches the announcement of new
texts
on all disciplines to replace the ancients. Nothing is passed over in silence: history and economics, philosophy and politics, art and biology, technology and ethnology...
Has this Congress of unbelievable abjuration firmly established the pedestal of a new faith, on whose cornerstones the new stelae of a different construction can be expected to be erected, and can anything be expected to arise tomorrow from that aggregate of historical forces? The materials of the Congress, which came from all sources, presented in different lights by all the ‘churches’, give us enough to answer resoundingly and irrevocably that
no
.
Has this confession of dreadful and gangrenous heresy in the slightest, kneeling under the ashes of an unbelievable Canossa, meant a return to the long-trampled and prostituted orthodox positions, a washing away of bloody guilt, and a renewed baptism into salvation? Never. These figures of generous legends, themselves forged from the subconsciousness of ancient historical addresses, offer no key for us today; only a new phase of the incurable disease is to be announced, a further step towards the bottom of the abyss of unredeemable damnation. In reciting the most clumsy and inept
mea culpa
of Stalinist blindness, the shouting from all angles of a return to the great sources of Marxism and Leninism, traditions of the purest historical blood boasted today by unrecognisable bastards, is but one more blasphemy in the unworthy series, a new – but by god a hundred times more impotent than the previous ones – insult to the height of the revolutionary faith of the world Proletariat. The blasphemy, the insult, worthily crowns a third of a century of obscene practices celebrating a secular black coven of priests of the phallus, smeared with lies and fraternal blood, with indelible stains for the history of the centuries.
This ideological earthquake, which shows and prepares only ruins, leaving to other forces the raising of new structures, and with wholly different materials, must be explained by the tremors of the social subsoil, not only in Russia but throughout the entire world. It is vain to speak of it as a new fabrication of other propaganda scenes, for the same purposes of the same monstrous but still very strong power, as bourgeois imbecility does on all sides; vainer will it be, after drawing breath (among the ranks of the henchmen who for years have been catching the crumbs of the orgiastic banquets of the piecardesque Sanhedrin, unbelievably surviving its own deeds), to dare to still babble of it as the prelude to a better calibrated formation of ranks meant to defend classes sacrificed by the accursed present society. The class meaning of what is unfolding is quite different; in the not-too-distant future, it will be evident, and we preface it with further examination.
The ‘new’ formula of the alliance in the capitalist world between the class of wage-labour and the classes of minimal and petty wealth does not historically ‘emerge’, as a third way, from the antithesis – which we gave at the end of our first part of the Russian treatise and which our editors placed at the head of the first announcement of the Moscow logorrhoea – between dictatorship of capital and dictatorship of the proletariat. It ‘enters’ into the counter-revolutionary
horn
of the insoluble antithesis, and passes into the service of the forces of big world capital. Stalinism dies, but is reborn under the unmasked appearance of what for us is not idiotic cause for scandal and horror, but a happy herald of revolutionary dissolution: world totalitarianism, the philistinely deplored ‘fascism’.
The disgraced middle classes of this modern pestilential society, as we have seen so many times, open themselves
only
towards the right, and those who probe and lure them are but a maintainer of the counter-revolution.
This is what they said in Moscow, without knowing it or wanting it; and not by wielding, with diabolical resources, the rudder which Western comrades attribute to the Russians of holding with firm hands.
‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past’.
‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language’.
Far left of the Congress, Anastas Mikoyan; you said that one must now search not in the newspapers of today’s edition, but in the archives. The words quoted above opened a ‘little work’ – according to the author, a poor emigrant to London – that reached the German magazine ‘Die Revolution’ published in New York in February 1852 by a loyal adherent of our school: Joseph Weydemeyer: a study written in one go during the very days of the events. It is the opening of the ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’, by
Karl Marx
.
Lacerated Historiography
A few times in our study we have highlighted the historical falsifications, the reading of which, and after so many years of bitter experience, leaves one rubbing one’s eyes, and not only those who have lived through those events firsthand. We have not done this with much effort: our naivety has not wavered enough in so many decades under the incredible series of desecrating jabs levelled at the sacred history of the Revolution and its Party, and we have never been able to come to terms with the fact that masses of working-class children now swear by that Himalaya of shit.
Such confidence from so few was just. The materials of that mountain collapse by the hand of whoever raised the heap: but what a foul stench!
The ‘Short Course’ of the History of the Bolshevik Communist Party, on which an entire Russian generation was
educated
, as on the basic text, is disqualified in Khrushchev’s report.
The moderate secretary, although not included among the authors of the text, merely said (according to
l’Unità
) that the current C.C. wanted to improve the ideological work by disseminating the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin (dark silence on those of Stalin!), and then that ‘for the last seventeen years our propaganda has been based mainly on the “Short Course”’, but that ‘it is necessary to publish a popular Marxist textbook (again!) of the history of the Party’, another on the ‘principles of Marxist-Leninist doctrine’, and a ‘popular exposition (don’t count on being able to
choose
between popular and Marxist) of the fundamentals of Marxist philosophy’.
More resolute was Mikoyan, the full text of whose speech will not be given by
l’Unità
. In its version, the speaker merely accused the Short Course of ignoring the last twenty years of history. And how will those twenty years be written in a materialist manner? How will the supreme disgrace of 1939 be recounted, the imperial agreement first with Nazi Germany, then with the plutocratic democracies today execrated, the ‘bitter necessities’ of the foreign parties, who first made themselves Hitler’s servants and defeatists (according to Lenin’s theory!) only of the imperialisms of Paris, London, etc.; and, at the stroke of a wand, shameless partisans of the anti-German war for democracy, to the point of making one regret the chauvinists of 1914, bloodily flayed by Vladimir’s inexorable blade? And will it be hypocritically charged on the one surprising scapegoat, Dzhugashvili, the attempted (and not even successful) coup of cutting the hamstrings of the American allies in 1945, the ‘double blow’ boldly announced in the report to the 18th Congress in 1939, now that idiotic diplomatic pageants are being staged for those same allies? Is that the head being offered? A skull is not enough, gentlemen.
Mikoyan said much more about the disgrace of that ‘history’. In the
Associated Press
report, it states: ‘Mikoyan rapped Stalin on several counts: 1) He (Mikoyan) declared the former
Premier’s
writings ignore the history of the last two decades and called for new teaching texts on Communism. 2) He assailed treason charges Stalin brought many years later
against the onetime heroes of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
. 3) He declared Russian foreign policy had become active, flexible, and calm after Stalin’s death in March 1953’.
As for this point, it certainly does not smack of a return to the Marxist historical method! Our few readers can attest that neither in 1953 nor in the years after 1945 did we ever believe a Russia-America war was near. But the historical reasons for this have not a damn thing to do with Stalin’s death! One does not fight against the
personal myth
by uttering, in reverse, the same nonsense. And we do not stop here on the part, known even to
l’Unità
, that demolishes (rightly, but without deducing the clear consequence that nullifies the other conclusions of all these brazen
neo-anti-Stalinists
) the ‘Economic Writings’.
Bari, Let the Truth Through
However, let us lift the cover of that
Short Course
, of boundless falsehoods, as if it were a serious thing. ‘The History was compiled by a commission appointed by the Central Committee of the C.P. (b) of the U.S.S.R., of which
Kalinin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Zhdanov, Beria
were members, under the direction of STALIN’. All either died well, died badly, or were left ill-living. And today there is talk of having ‘rehabilitated’ the 32 of the great
October Committee
, of whom, after a few natural deaths, the sole survivor for many years, was the great Dead One, now debeatified, of 1953!
It is a breath of fresh air to read what the eminent historiographer Pankratova said, who (see, among others,
Tempo
, 24 February) ‘highlighted the profound crisis from which Soviet historiography suffered for some thirty years, due to the large number of topics made “taboo” under Stalin’.
She compiled a lengthy list of facts that were either required to be kept silent or completely distorted. Like rewriting the history of the Civil War (1918-1920) as if Trotsky had never been Commissar of War. Or omitting, in the commemorative book of the
Hungarian Commune
of 1919, bloodily overthrown after a desperate defence, the name of its great leader, Béla Kun. Today an official communiqué
rehabilitates
this name of an incomparable comrade, a complete Marxist, a true revolutionary hero, who simply and modestly wandered the corridors of the Moscow congresses, among so many pompous schemers of manoeuvres with the social-traitors of Europe, as if the bitter defeat of the magnificent Hungarian party, as proud in its theoretical doctrine as in its valour on the barricades, were a fault; and only because, when the capitalist beasts were clawing at the throat, at the crucial moment, of the Moscow Revolution, he had not hesitated to throw everything into battle, in the great red Danubian citadel, rising against the furious wind of all the bourgeois bloodhounds of Europe, against the venemous rage of all the renegades and social-traitors, German and Entente, fascist and democrat alike. He would never have returned to Europe to negotiate, even by order of Lenin, who loved him dearly, with the executioners of betrayed socialism: declared an
enemy of the people
in 1937, it is not known where he was sent to die in Siberia a few years ago; while only because the crime was committed outside Russia is it known the day and place where the pickaxe raised by a still-living scoundrel, who had approached him in the guise of a disciple, sank into the skull of the red leader of Victory, Leon Trotsky. He can now leave prison more peacefully: he has no more secrets to reveal.
Let us follow some of Professor Pankratova’s references. Order not to let be known in Russia the historic correspondence of Lenin with Trotsky, which is held by Harvard University. Order to remove from libraries and museums all documents relating to the prominent role, in the Revolution, of those executed in the great ‘purges’. Order given to the historiographers Shliapnikov, Yaroslavsky, and Pokrovsky in 1931 to make Trotsky appear as a secret imperialist agent in the history of the Civil War. The speaker was ordered to minimise the Allied landing in Normandy in the Second European War, modifying a 1946 work of hers. It was with good reason that in 1949 Stalin had himself designated in treatises as ‘the founder of Soviet historiography’.
And finally, the most astounding and astonishing thing – there are things that fall below the limit of any possible indignation! In the history texts relating to the October Revolution, the fable was inserted that an attempt to assassinate Lenin was made by Bukharin! The upright, simple, smiling, virginal Bukharin, whose moistened blue eyes we saw so many times flash with enthusiasm and joy, when the teacher, whom he idolised like a child, dealt with the issues of the revolution at the Moscow congresses, and the most splendid mutual trust hovered above the most ardent disagreements! How far from the despicable unanimities of a college of flunkeys!
Pankratova has affirmed that the reaction of historiographers has largely contributed to the dropping of these ignoble ‘taboos’.
On rare occasions, science and courage go hand in hand.
The Communists, it is written in the ‘Manifesto’, ‘disdain to conceal their views and aims’. For Marxists, the defence of truth is not an ethical imperative. But it is
physically
the only oxygen of the Revolution.
Myth and Cult of the Person
One cannot help but rejoice at the blows delivered against what is the true counter-revolutionary plague of the contemporary world, deadly whether it exalts the role (pardon the ugly word for the silly thing) of the exceptional Person, the loyalty and the gratitude supposedly owed to Them – or when one raves and ideologically degenerates over the generic
human person
, never so much exalted and bowed down to as in an epoch of history that crushes them en masse like dust in a mortar.
But what value is to be placed on the proclamations of Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Molotov, Bulganin, and almost everyone else?! The obvious admissions that the cult of personality is contrary to the
spirit
of Marx and Lenin fall flat, presented as if they were new and extraordinary revelations. Contrary to
the spirit?!
That’s the least of it! – Anyone who had shown such revolting superstition to such men, and worse still, directed it toward them themselves, would not have escaped their clutches without leaving behind burning shreds of his reptilian skin.
For decades, this filthy breed has been stuffing skulls with the history of the deeds of the Great, of the Most High, of the Big, be they geniuses of good or evil. The kaleidoscopic modern capitalist society would occasionally let itself be
steered
by a clique of three or four more or less feeble-minded illustrious men; the rickety Franklin Delano, the paranoid Winston, the now hollowed-out maniac of greatness and blood Joseph. And, in reverse, until yesterday, millions of men were thrown and immolated for the sake of success, consisting in burning the carcass of the sadistic Adolf; in hanging the good
miles gloriosus
Benito by his feet. Is this Marxism, or are you fools sick with the cult of fools?
And is it really so easy for these little idols to tumble down from such cumbersome, smoke-suffused altars? Wretches, listen.
Seventeen years later, Karl Marx reprinted that little work we have already mentioned, and he was able to write: “The concluding words of my work: ‘But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendôme column’, have already been fulfilled”. In 1869, the Napoleonic legend had already received the coup de grace. As for the Vendôme column itself, it was the Paris Commune that was to knock it down two years later.
We shall therefore see the great statue of Dzhugashvili fall from the so fiercely contested Stalingrad stands. Perhaps it will be a slight advantage – if it is true that the great mass gathering at the close of the Congress was cancelled so as not to give the newly elected leaders a flavour of flattery – not to have to hear and read any more of the vulgar scenes where servile delegations of workers bear gifts of homage to a few fools seated under a silly row of big heads on a red background.
But much higher still lies Marxism than this filthy game of great names, which dulls, blinds, and intoxicates the vanguard class.
In that same preface, Marx wrote these words about the fashion, which he indignantly saw coming, of
Caesarism
.
‘Lastly, I hope that my work will contribute toward eliminating the school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called Caesarism (of you, Jerusalem, the parable speaks!). In this superficial historical analogy the main point is forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants. People forget Sismondi’s significant saying: the Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society (we are tempted to boldly add: above all in its
middle
classes) lives at the expense of the proletariat’.
Are these ridiculous gentlemen who waffle on, even with Stalin liquidated, about a new Marxism that they
create
every morning, so bold as to attribute a meaning to this language, which they would not hesitate to call, trivially,
popular
? We shall see, by quoting them, that absolutely not!
This is not the historical epoch, Marx teaches, of the individual leadership of society, of great civil struggles within its midst. And in other equivalent words: the revolution of the working class cannot be led by Personalities.
Many times we have used the term
romanticism
to designate the condemnation that weighed upon the Russian Revolution for its anti-feudal, and thus bourgeois ‘face’, in retracing the lines of the Great Western Revolutions. Just as these took from classical antiquity the legal doctrine (forgetting the difference, that the Roman
jus
made among the free alone and left the mass of slaves, who sustained everything, outside its protections, i.e. the basic difference, noted above, by Marx and Sismondi), so too they took from it politically as much as literally (
qui nous delivrera des Grecs et des Romains?
) the rigid schema of the Republic yielding to imperial Caesarism.
On the tremendous problems of the Moscow Revolution, which ought to have been reduced to the truly mighty framework of Lenin’s Marxist construction, there were cast, with the force of a terrible suggestion, the shadows of that of Paris. Against the ardent and impetuous, but by no means tainted by personalism, Trotsky, the insult of Bonapartism and the vile historiographic invention of the preparation of a Thermidor was directed against him, the magnificent theorist and commander of the most splendid proletarian, and solely proletarian, Terror.
But just as the liberal bourgeoisie had foolishly and out of time, and after the sole example of the Great Bonaparte (who may perhaps stand to Robespierre as Julius Caesar stood to Brutus, and Alexander the Great to Leonidas) extinguished its collective revolutionary force in Caesarism and in the marionettes into which it crystallised in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stunted abortions of history, so too did the magnificent Russian Revolution, which had a formidable phalanx of captains and masters, enact, with its drunkenness over the name of Stalin and the bloody sacrifices to his greatness – which no one, perhaps not even we, believed to be so transient – its obligatory farce, with the Personality as protagonist.
Everywhere the bourgeois revolution has devoured its own children, and nevertheless we never shouted at it to stop, whatever its nation or its race may have been – or will be. But the Revolution that will finally be proletarian, and
only
proletarian, if it will certainly cut away its own dross with iron and fire, will not follow such a path.
We said that the French bourgeoisie provided the exception with the great Corsican. But how much even of that individual greatness was not the determination of historical forces? Marx, in that text, recalls that ‘Colonel Charras opened the attack on the Napoleon cult in his work on the campaign of 1815. Subsequently, and especially in the past few years, French literature has made an end of the Napoleon legend with the weapons of historical research, criticism, satire, and wit’, and other times we quoted the wise Engels on the subject. Today, a young, forty-year-old historiographer from France, Jean Savant, has erected in his no less than fifteen works a theory that debunks the person of Bonaparte and reads in his famous deeds the work of three leading men: the political agitator Barras, the policeman Fouché, and the great capitalist Ouvrard. Official science gnaws at its liver, but at frequent stages bows before the power of Marxism.
Let us close the digression and ask ourselves whether we have witnessed a congress of Marxist demolishers of the cult of Personality, or rather of professional bootlickers, reacting to unemployment by constituting a co-operative of dime-a-dozen geniuses.
Incurable Scoliosis
The courtly phrases of the 19th Congress have not been forgotten, and the matter is too recent for friends and foes alike to have done so. The most ferment, most vehement of the iconoclasts, the oft-named Mikoyan, has in his personal file notes of this sort:
Stalin, the Great Architect of Communism
! Here is another explanation of the magnetic storm underway: from the Sun, they heard this man thunder for Marxism-Leninism, which wants no worship of Man!
Obscene romanticism, here, of a Masonic kind, that apes the Great Architect of the Universe: the bourgeois were too philistine to put God to rest, so they gave him a salaried post. Communism has no
architects
! And if it were so, that post would have been occupied centuries ago, since the time of Cabet, Campanella, More, and even Plato.
The
Associated Press
couldn’t help but to go after the head of our renegade incense-burner: it’s worth recounting, although the question of the authorship of conflicting statements is of little importance to us, precisely because we do not care about the steadfastness of the person on any front, and we hold that light can come from the blasphemer just as darkness from the orthodox, so long as only a morsel goes straight through or down the wrong way.
‘At the 19th Party Congress in 1952 (...) [Mikoyan] declared [that Stalin’s work] “lights up with His genius both the great historical path we have traversed as well as the road toward a more and more tangible Communist future”. Mikoyan shouted “Glory to the great Stalin” at the end of his 1952 speech. At that time he also referred to Stalin’s works as a “treasury of ideas” and said that in the books “Comrade Stalin illuminates our life with the brilliant light of science”!’.
Today, for people with such stomachs, just as Tito went from being a knife-in-the-teeth bandit to a revolutionary hero, Stalin is reduced to a ragamuffin. But Stalin was a fighter, a conspirator, and an organiser of the highest order: his negative sides are now frighteningly well known, now that Trotsky’s book on his biography is peacefully accepted as not being the work of a ‘secret agent’:
theorist
and
scientist
, that is what no one should ever had believed him to be, not today, not yesterday, not the day before! Who, then, will believe a doctrinal and scientific reconstruction, entrusted to those people who had the greatest light held aloft for them precisely by him? Extinguish the lamp under his icon, people, and go to bed in the dark. Do not praise Lenin and Marx: they might just leap out of the grave.
Let’s quote the bourgeois press, eh, tovarisch Tecoppa? In accordance with the order to turn to the archives, given by the grand secretary, let us leaf through the collection of
l’Unità
.
The 19th Congress announced the printing of one and a half million copies of Stalin’s ‘Problems of Socialism’ (we shall discuss the present demolition of this work at the 20th Congress later). It is, in the
l’Unità
of the time, quoted by
Pravda
that ‘this is the greatest phase in the development of Marxist-Leninist political economy (...), which will exert an enormous influence on the development of advanced Soviet science’, that ‘for the first time formulates the fundamental economic law of socialism’ (it was the law of value and that of geometrically increasing production!), and all of this by ‘developing in a creative manner (we’ll deal with this creativity too, which even today they’ve tried to trace back to Lenin) the teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin’.
Malenkov closed thus: ‘Under the banner of the immortal Lenin (he was already dead, good for him), under the wise leadership of the great Stalin, forward, etc.’.
Molotov was more sonorous: ‘Long live the party of Lenin and Stalin! May our great Stalin live in good health for many years! Glory to comrade Stalin, great leader of the party and of the people! Long live dear Stalin!’
Kaganovich (issue of 15 October 1952) spoke at length about the genial leader Stalin, who
enriched
the theory of Marx, Engels, and Lenin with new
discoveries
; of the
leader
and
teacher
Stalin, of his brilliant theoretical work, and so on. As for Mikoyan’s speech, it can be read on page 3 of the 16 October issue, with the effusive expressions already mentioned.
Such use of rhetoric and repulsive courtesanship is, fortunately, also pernicious to the success of the defeatist work of the revolutionary preparation of the working class: will it not open its eyes, in Italy and elsewhere, even to this scandalous turn of events today?
We will await just the same effects of those, Marxistically investigable, events that will occur tomorrow, and that will mark the long, arduous path of the historical rising of the red tide.
And we shall see the connection between today’s congressual earthquake and the proclamations that historical reality will inevitably impose tomorrow on those who today, with unparalleled audacity, throw away the sworn teachings of the teacher Stalin, the one and a half million copies of the new
Economics
that replaced those of Marx and Lenin, the volumes of Stalin’s
Collected Works
that were still advertised in Italy until today, and which as of today are removed from the shop.
As we have already said, we are moving towards the
Congress of Confession
. The force of facts is a physical force, and it also imposes itself on men even when presenting itself as the force of a theory, to which one may lie for entire cycles, but to which one is ultimately forced to bow.
A great turning point will come when it will have to be declared that the structure of Russia’s social economy is a capitalist structure.
Stalin’s pseudo-scientific economics would then be inconvenient to manoeuvre. It will even be useful to draw on authentic Marxism for this proof, supporting the historical necessity of this situation, in order to preserve the stability – of which we will speak later – of State power.
It will be fitting then to mention that Trotsky, Zinoviev, and so many of us had said this until the shutter came down in 1926. And then it will no longer be convenient to have spread the claim that they said it because they were secret agents of Capital.
Here is the framework of an objective Marxist explanation of the 20th Congress, and of the frightening ideological lability of what had to be formulated within it.
Lead in the Asses
Another one of our treatments, which readers will recall, considered the recent abjuration of Molotov – whom his ‘dear Stalin’ had graced with the epithet of
lead ass
– at the statement, which escaped him out of too much haste, perhaps because for a moment the diplomatic lead seams had come undone, that in Russia nothing but ‘the bases’ of socialism had been built, and not ‘socialism’.
Molotov would apparently repeat this abjuration, and with it others, such as that of having underestimated the uprising of the peoples of Asia and Africa against the white colonial yoke.
But we had the right to make this evidently exact thesis align with those that had been developed in the debate at the Enlarged Executive of August 1926 between Stalin, Trotsky, and Zinoviev, which was on that occasion particularly successful and comprehensive, well redeeming the tactical vacillations of earlier years. Stalin resisted then rather weakly, the overwhelming historical and theoretical proof that Lenin had never admitted that socialist transformation was possible (he never spoke of
construction
, nor can Marxism speak of it) without the advent of the Workers’ Revolution in the West. Stalin himself then fell back on the military victory over the domestic bourgeoisie and the building of the
bases
of socialism. The basis of socialism, as Lenin always explained, is monopolist and statist capitalism in industry, and a step towards it is the most modest
rung
of capitalism, whatever it may be, replacing small-scale rural production and small-scale trade. This a centralised State can build, where it is lacking, and thus construct
capitalist
economic forms.
The transition to socialist forms is not a construction, but
a demolition
of production relations, possible beyond a certain
quantitative
level of the productive forces, which Bulganin will confess to us, further on, of not being able to reach even in 1960.
We tied the correct Marxist formula, not slipped out by chance from a diplomat of Molotov’s calibre, to his strength as a militant and scholar of Marxist science, which goes back to the early times of Lenin and which he poorly subordinated to the dubious teachings of Stalin in 1952.
This question could not fail to resonate at this Congress. But it is not yet ripe: we will hear it spoken of in a few years’ time, just as we today here so much about distorted historiography, of collegial and not personal leadership, and all the others that await us, and you, on the next day: the economic laws that explain the current Russian economy in heavy and light industry, agriculture and trade – and the great central question on which the deserters will break their own teeth and backs: the international transfer of power to the proletariat, and the alleged
new paths
of it. We have seen two generations of Marxists pass by: we had barely begun to repeat the doctrine on the path to socialism, when already we had to go toe to toe with those who foresaw
new paths
(back in 1910, the
popular-frontist
Bonomi).
The instruction in this Congress is to hold firm on the construction of socialism in Russia, affirmed since 1936, even if in other countries the ‘popular will’ regulates their ‘internal affairs’ in the sense of remaining capitalist.
In a further stage, the thesis on ‘coexistence’, another anti-Leninist blasphemy, will be desperately held up, indeed ‘will become Marxistically true’ because that of ‘construction’ will be tossed aside, onto the pile of Joseph’s unsold works. Then, a Molotov will tell the West, we coexist because we are building the same thing: quantitatively increasing capitalism.
But then the voice of Lenin will rise, from everything except the congresses of that party: precisely for this reason,
you will not coexist
, because the various imperialisms can only move towards confrontation and war.
On the oscillating ground, Khrushchev’s speech has also had, amidst the shadows, a flash of brilliance. For example, when he described a Washington-Bonn
axis of affairs
, which he contrasted with a London-Paris axis. Perhaps the incurable
frontist
has seen the play of a crusade, convenient still, against the Reichswehr of the hated Germany, which more formidably than after the first war is now rising to its feet. But we have recalled that since 1919, the cannon shooting of the First World War not yet silenced, Lenin pointed to the imperial conflict between the United States and Japan, as if he felt the tremendous, if not atomic, bombs of Pearl Harbour crashing on stone and steel.
The Revolution will return with the not-so-near general war. But Lenin, in outlining this shining doctrine, did not so much link the military defeat, the belated bourgeois revolution, and the proletariat’s descent into the fray of this drama, as he did the return of the situation ruined by the traitors of 1914, and which was then again to be ruined by those, flesh of his flesh, of 1939. He saw the revolution
that halts mobilisation and war
and overthrows the powers of the imperial beastly monsters thirsting for blood.
The prospect of the next war is grim if the first
missiles
are fired. But perhaps, in some eventuality not close in history, they will not be fired at all. One such possibility could concern the Bonn-Washington axis, especially if there will be, feared by both the Kremlin’s and Pentagon’s atomic war ministries, German unification. If that party of just a few men beyond Marx and Engels, of the long-distant 1852, were to rise again, of those who cast their eyes, anxious and full of the grand visions of ‘48, upon the appearance of the new glimmers of war on the horizon of an idiotic peace, the revolutionary drama, which in the first half of the twentieth century revolved around Russia, may in the second half revolve around Germany.
Cautious Glances at the New Route
The measured words of Khrushchev’s report directed at Molotov’s thesis were counterbalanced by a statement that appeared to professional observers as directed against Malenkov, who prior to, and worse than Molotov, had been censured by the party for having glimpsed a shift from a production economy to one of consumption, a brake on heavy industry in favour of light industry, a phase which evidently in doctrine lies much further ahead in time than that of the total construction of industrial
bases
.
Even Malenkov did not fail to rectify and formally retract this: neither Molotov nor Malenkov have been or will be guillotined, not even in effigy, as the journalistic riff-raff was expecting and will expect, and Bulganin even less so. The case of Beria does not concern economic programmes: it is tied to the liquidation of the Stalinist period, of infamy and gallows upon the healthy revolutionary wing of the Russian party. That wing would never have tolerated, aiming not at constructive plans but at the revolutionary destruction of Western capitalism, the disgrace of military alliance pacts, of embraces of coexistence, of an international support – which, by visibly giving way, dismantled the laughable game – upon the social scum of the middle classes, where the revolution against feudalism, the only one in which they can serve as cannon fodder, was made and forgotten. And today, Beria is
historiographed
as an
imperialist agent
.
But among Khrushchev’s own formulas one reads, if one looks closely, the other
reversal
of tomorrow, which will restore to the Trotskys, the Zinovievs, the Bukharins not only the honour of forerunning militants of communism, but the recognition of the powerful theoretical and scientific clarity of Marxists, while their murderers and supposed critics will go to the fate that awaits them, in the embrace with the toothed steel arms of the other imperial monsters.
We will use the text of
l’Unità
, in the summary and excerpts from the report that
TASS
has circulated.
In comparison with the potential of Western countries, the figures will confirm that Khrushchev was right to say that Russia is still far behind – he said ‘the industrial base of the socialist system becomes more and more powerful’. To the letter, the formula is as Marxist as the Molotovian one!
Khrushchev has decidedly more than once alluded to a ‘failure’ in the agricultural plan and in the low yields of kolkhozian production, hinting at the extent to which this delays an increase in the production of consumer goods. But this has to be reserved for the economic section. In this too, he leaned towards Molotov.
Even the formula:
to consolidate the economic power of our socialist country
, is toned down in comparison to that of the accomplished socialist
construction
: in the former, Russia is socialist politically, in the latter, economically. Two falsehoods, but theoretically different.
‘Economic progress, raising the material and cultural level of workers’, are no longer formulas that fit a
socialist
society!
Molotov’s condemnation stands out for its coldness: ‘To claim that we have only laid the foundations of socialism means to mislead the party and the people’. So then there is still a
people
when socialism with its ‘relations of production’ is already ‘built’, i.e. when not even the
proletariat
should exist anymore?
But the blow from the other side hits much deeper: ‘We encounter another extreme in the way of treating the question of socialist development. For we have some leading officials who interpret the gradual transition from socialism to communism as a signal for the implementation of the principles of communist society already at the present stage. Some hotheads have decided
that the construction of socialism is already completed
(so then, has the
construction
begun or is it completed? Does it only have the foundations or also the roof?) and have begun to compile a detailed timetable for the transition to communism’.
This second formula is extraordinarily
timidist
. In capitalism itself, certain economic functions are performed, albeit within limits of time and space, with communist economic principles, that is, without monetary remuneration: putting out fires, fighting epidemics, floods, (geological!) earthquakes, even the cold. In a
socialist
country, would one not even sneeze without a quid pro quo of money and labour-time?
A few more nudges and we’re there, Secretary to whom –
honi soit qui mal y pense
– there shall be rendered, neither today nor ever, any
cult
whatsoever.
(
1
) See further, ‘Dialogue with the Dead’, ‘Day Three: Evening’: ‘How They Have Enriched Marx’.
(
2
) See, in No. 4, 1956 of
Il Programma Comunista
, the recapitulation of all this development in the header to the 2nd part of the report of our meetings in Naples and Genoa: the treatment is then regularly continued in subsequent issues.
Second Day
Cult of Wastepaper
Time and again we will have to reduce the positions of the Moscow
movement to the outright counterfactual denial of the cornerstones of
communism. It’s enough now to see the crude banality of the paper
manoeuvre by which they truly believe they can surmount today’s seismic
shock while still keeping upright (and if it
happens, it will be thanks to other and clearly identifiable factors) the global charade.
All the ‘Stalin material’ is suddenly swept away, raked
back from every outpost stall. In its place is suddenly spilled,
line by line, the literature of this Twentieth Congress, more
disconnected still, in its filiation from many fathers, than the
‘scientific’ and truly pitiful offspring of that
bogeyman
Stalin. The
trash heap of the century, the scribblers would say; the biggest trash heap
in history, we would say: millions and millions of roubles, in the value
of pulp paper alone. Billions spent on printing in all languages;
presses running at a pace worthy of this atomic, and asinine, age.
Not even medieval scholasticism went so far when it burned,
along with the condemned authors, perhaps in black cassock, the piles of
their writings, excommunicated those who would read or touch them in the
future, and imposed on the faithful the recitation, by the millions, of prayers
for implored forgiveness for heresy, for the reconsecration of
pulpits profaned and of chairs ascended by Satan.
Scholasticism, a far more respectable historical phase than this present one,
had the justification of being entirely coherent with its own organic doctrine of
human action and knowledge. For it, the masses are guided
through consciousness
, and this is accessible to the operations of the
‘propaganda fide’ when the organisation delegated by the supreme Entity
expresses in its formulations the dictation and light of Grace.
Modern bourgeois critical thought, which still hasn’t cleared the
stage despite its string of disgraceful appearances on all fronts, rejected the
Entity, Grace, and the investiture of infallibility, but intended
to replace them with a guidance of human action that was no different,
that is, it took men
by the head
, raved about the printing
press, about literacy and the mass-produced book, and – alas for him –
about the flood of gazettes; about the Teacher-torch against the
Priest-extinguisher.
He who translates this grasp of the
man-citizen by the head, into a real grasp by the dialectical, albeit
scurrilous, opposite, does not err.
Greatly sinning, we socialists of yesteryear exchanged our movement
for a new
propaganda fide
, not realising that the Marxist
militant is no longer one who knows how to convince and teach, but one
who knows how to learn from the facts, which run ahead of man’s head,
while it, faltering, has been trying to chase after them for millennia.
The most mature understanding of determinism has nothing to do with
passivism, but clarifies that man acts before he has willed to act, and
wills before he knows why he wills, his head being the last and least
certain of his limbs. The best use a group of men can make of it will be
to foresee the historical moment in which – far from passivism! – they
will be catapulted, for the first time headfirst, into a
whirlwind of action and battle.
The know-it-alls with their inexhaustible resources and manoeuvres that can be
contrived in any tight spot with cunning success, the superactivists, we have
been watching them proceed obscenely for years and years, their faces
undaunted, but
le-cul-le-premier
.
We reconsult, in their presence, the crumpled, unparalleled pamphlets that have guided
us for nearly a century: those gentlemen, meanwhile, put on a display of their
return to Marxism
by changing from one day to
the next, at the whistle of the foreman, all their printed
paraphernalia, of historical, economic, political, and philosophical
criticism, certain that in doing so they will, in their own way, change the face of the
world.
Precisely because we certainly did not learn only today how to dodge the cult of
personality, we will consult Stalin’s work whenever we see fit; we
will not value it a penny more than this Florilegium of
congressional bullshit that overflows today.
Confessed Turning Points
On the First Day of this Dialogue we examined two aspects of the
erasures and rewritings of dogmas carried out at this modern Council, not
of Nicaea or Trent, but of Moscow. What chiefly concerns us is this
false creed: ‘the Russian economy today is of a socialist structure’,
which has not yet been thrown overboard, and equally concerning is
Stalin’s other, no less foolish creed: ‘in the socialist economy, the
law of exchange between equivalents (misnamed law of value) is in
force’, on which point things remain as they were.
On the economic points that were most closely dealt with in the
Mikoyan speech, we will pause later. We have so far taken note of the changed
positions which, already contained in the party secretary’s report, were developed extensively in other speeches concerning
historiography
and
personality.
The first alteration consists in dismissing as slander all the
accusations of treason levelled against the anti-Stalinist Bolsheviks
exterminated in the obscene ‘purges’. The murdered remain murdered, and
their massacre retains the form of the destruction of the revolutionary
workers’ vanguard: the error of ‘historiography’ is not corrected by a
rehabilitation
(we supremely
cherish being called traitors and fascist bandits by such people, while we would regard any rehabilitation from them a sacred horror!).
The error
will reveal itself in its proper historical light on the day it becomes clear that the Marxist
position belonged to that mighty movement (it concerned
tens of thousands of tried and tested militants selected and executed across the board
in a counter-revolution that has since become blatant, as true
Marxist historiography will record), that is to say, when the economic fabric of
Russian society
will have to be
declared
not socialist. This is not yet fully confessed. But the hour will come.
The second alteration examined so far is that of the condemnation of
the cult of personality, which is likewise merely the effect of a forced
determination, and entirely inadequate to the Marxist position. The cult
of Stalin is dismissed, with the grim interpretation that Stalin himself had
founded it, and the assertion that in the place of the sole Leader must
be put the leading ‘college’ of the State and the party. Here too, the
new position is flimsy, and the correct solution of the relationship
between class and party does not live in it. If it were possible for one
man to force an entire collectivity into the myth of his personal power,
this would not be the mistake of a bad Marxist, but a decisive historical
proof
against
Marxism.
Since the first speech circulated was Khrushchev’s, more striking
than the alterations (which later appeared resounding) on the first two
points mentioned, was his position regarding the task of the communist
parties (very few have not changed this name; and it would be more accurate to
say the parties linked to Moscow) in the countries ‘outside the
Curtain’. In all countries – he said – our programme remains the advent
of communist society; we have by no means renounced it (this confession
will be even more delayed). But as for the historical process that leads
from capitalist society to communism, we do not believe that it must
necessarily pass through civil war, the use of violence, the proletarian
dictatorship, as Lenin advocated in 1917 (Khrushchev also made
reservations on this point) and we admit that there may be different
paths
, and different from country to country. He
argued that there may also be the path of winning a parliamentary
majority, and that the parties must utilise in this struggle not the support
of the wage-labourers alone, but their alliance with the middle
classes, the consensus of the
people
and of all
educated
men of goodwill. He did not, however,
rule out the possibility that in certain situations, instead of taking
this peaceful path, or when this is barred by capitalism, civil war may
be resorted to.
This crass declaration entirely originated from the necessity of supporting the
well-known theses of international politics: coexistence with capitalist
countries, and the avoidability of war with them.
Here (
for
the most part
) there are no
breakthroughs
with respect to Stalin’s
position, and therefore it was not a dramatic change, as in the case of the
history of betrayals and one-man leadership. It was a matter of
lowering the mask and stating, just as the earlier points claimed a return from those errors and deviations to orthodox Marxism and Leninism, that the same political action would be conducted, in
foreign countries, as has always been conducted by the social-democratic and petty-bourgeois
parties.
Logical, therefore, to note the convergence of the new with the old
opportunism, and the complicity of both with the salvation of the
bourgeois order. But it is not enough for us Marxists to say that the
first wave and the second wave of opportunism are the same, nor is it to
hastily deduce that the capitalism of the West and that of the East are,
indifferently, the same. The historical paths of the two
opportunisms are different (the second is much worse), and the path through
which capitalism has developed in the two camps and through which the revolution will
overcome it is different; different, but in neither case peaceful.
Is
this
confession by Khrushchev then perhaps unprecedented? It is
necessary to look again, naturally repeating what we have
always
said, at the question of the road to
power, and of class power.
Clashing Forces in the World 1956
If human society throughout its history presents a series of clashes and
conflicts, its murky present picture certainly does not escape such a
fate.
This Congress could not escape such scrutiny. And the issue of the
social and political struggle in those countries outside the frontier of
the U.S.S.R. and the famous ‘Curtain’, the issue of the ‘internal
politics’ of the ‘capitalist’ countries, is not, in everyone’s view,
the only one. There is that of Russian politics, to which we know how
Khrushchev and his comrades answer: there are no classes and no class
struggle, there is concord around the socialist government, completely
unanimous. The reply lies in the entire analysis we are making of the
Russian economic and social structure. In the deformed figuration of
Stalin’s converts (to everything but Marx and Lenin), in Russia and its
brother countries, there would no longer be a clash between State and
Society, in the sense of Engels, but only in the Atlantic
countries, where class struggle still prevails (and even this in a bastardised
sense).
Having thus divided the
S
tates
of the world
into two groups, the problem of the relationship of forces between them
arises. This arises in three forms. Relations between the States of one
group and those of the other – relations between the States of the Eastern
group – relations between the States of the Western group. Here we are fully in
the midst of the problems dealt with in the
Dialogue with
Stalin
. In economics: single world market or dual market? In
politics: peace or war? A question that also concerns the latter two
cases, within homogeneous groups.
The alterations here seem to us to be the following. Coexistence, in the sense
of ‘no war’ and ‘each one minds his own house’s affairs’, was affirmed at
the 19th and is affirmed at the 20th Congress.
Emulation
or economic
competition
, in the sense of a descent into a
single market (we demonstrated how rigorous was a bourgeois economist’s
demonstration that this is tantamount to an admission of the analogous
mercantile and capitalist nature of the economies on both sides),
appears clearly accepted at the 20th Congress, whereas it was strongly
reserved under Stalin. Was this Congress a Marxist academy, as it
claims, or did it not rather smash the idol Stalin to satisfy the
demands of the Chamber of Affairs of World Capitalism?
As for inter-State relations within the Eastern group, the
impossibility of conflicts among them is emphasised, and external displays of affection are effusively warm. But who will believe in such warmth between cold-blooded
animals? Who will take Gronchi for a crab? Among the reasons, however,
why Stalin and his remains are being removed, is perhaps that of some
toes being stepped on from the Asian side, where the
role of satellite seems to be played less eagerly than on the European side.
The third problem, of clashes between Western States, between
those where it is a matter of Big Crabs with real claws, also seems to
be shifting. But, illustrious Twentieth-Congressmen, here it was Stalin, the
ci-devant
(you reek of bourgeois Jacobinism from a thousand miles away!), the star of science, who was more Leninist (we dialogued with him on this claim of his)! War
between
the capitalist
imperialist States in the Western group remained
inevitable
. And
the oriflamme of the Social Revolution, even if by then already reduced
to a hollow scarecrow, was only lowered halfway.
We gave Khrushchev credit for a robust prophecy on inter-Western
relations, although he spoke more of clashes between business
axes
than of war
axes
. But undoubtedly
this gentleman has taken in other reefs in the sails of the revolutionary
threat, tied to the spectre of war, and the banner has been
lowered by three-quarters.
Who will be left to carry out these operations, of such navigators with
precarious careers, when, without pay and without mercy, the wind of the
Great Storm begins to blow again? Go on playing for a little while longer, leaders of a
neo-bourgeois Russia, with your ‘Marianna’ cyclone, perfumed with Coty.
For now, let us devote ourselves to the classic problem of power in a
capitalist country and take your ‘creative’ newborn theories with a
grain of salt: they smell rotten.
First the Aim, then the Means
Naturally, the first comment of the international capitalist press was one of feigned astonishment: how is it that, after such a rush towards general détente, the very first thing Khrushchev says is that his movement is always
for
socialism and communism in every country?
No more war, neither hot nor cold, but still propaganda for revolution
within the countries, with which relations of proper friendship are
maintained? This game from both sides will last for many, many years to
come: delightful pretend-simpletons.
But where are you, Trotsky, who proclaimed that with the Polish war –
although in your military capacity you feared it premature – the
Proletarian Revolution was to be brought into the heart of bourgeois
Europe? The way Khrushchev declared himself always a communist
is quite peculiar. He lashed out at the foreign bourgeois who see a
contradiction between the declared peaceful coexistence and the claim to
have communism everywhere as a programme. According to him, ‘bourgeois
ideologues confuse the questions of
ideological
struggle with those of relations between States’ and instead
‘the great Marxist-Leninist doctrine’ s
tates ‘that the establishment of
a social regime in this or that country is an internal matter of the
peoples of the respective countries’.
All Khrushchev admits is that
communists are not supporters of
capitalism
! Did that strike the
bourgeois scribblers as thunderous language from Jupiter himself? But he added that
communists do not meddle in
the internal affairs of countries with capitalist systems
. Well then, Don
Karl Marx, what were you
meddling
in back in
that distant 1850? Were you snoring, waiting for them to found the State of Israel,
the only one, it seems, whose affairs you’d supposedly have had the right to pontificate on? And tell us then,
where did this Scythian learn the ‘great doctrine’, for heaven’s sake?
Let us leave these pearls.
We, in our modesty, interpret the speech as follows: I, secretary, in Russia am not only an ideological, but a
constructive
(a fine word in today’s
fashion that, as in a hundred other cases,
competes
, in
yellow gloves, in parallel style, on both sides of the
Curtain) communist, but abroad I am an ‘ideological’ communist, and that’s all. Now, with coexistence, mutual
tourism
is born:
the
Yankee
traveller will say, upon seeing the hotel bill (apparently rather steep): Pay? Heavens no, in your
home I am a capitalist, but purely
ideologically
.
So, let us be content, then, with ideological communism, but let us look at
it against the light for a moment. Of socialism, we know enough from
our conversation with Big Moustache: it is based on the law of market
exchange. Nothing remains but to wait for communism, once its
‘ideologues’ will have
constructed
it,
according to the great doctrine of... Fourier-Owen. For now, the
ideologue-secretary explains it thus:
communism... will be a
social regime... in which every man will work with enthusiasm according
to his ability and will receive, IN EXCHANGE FOR HIS LABOUR, according to his
needs.
But this is the
great doctrine
of the
junk dealer and the delicatessen owner on the corner! The
exchange
of labour for consumption
survives, society keeps the accounting ledger for each individual, it
does not even dream of doing what, in restricted sectors, present society already does; collecting labour, and distributing objects and services
that satisfy needs, even when the one in need does not provide adequate labour, no
longer getting lost in writing the mercantile equation! If Khrushchev’s
goal is
ideologically
so easy, then perhaps
his torturous equivocal ways are worthwhile to achieve it!
Means: Violence
The phrase is correct:
our enemies like to present us Leninists as partisans of violence, always and in all cases
. For us, the
element of violence is not the one ‘discriminative’ between the Marxist revolutionary and him who is not such. One cannot be a
partisan
of violence because it is not an end,
but a means, a passage. Communist society will be without exchange and
only then
, in the end, without violence. For
only then will it be classless.
There may however – this is the point! – be the
partisan of non-violence
who
will say: ideologically I want the emancipation of the proletariat, but
if violence is necessary to achieve it, I abandon that claim. Whoever says
this is not a Marxist: every ‘immediate’ pacifist is rejected from Marxism. And
Lenin rejected, on the word of Marx, those who are against all war,
always and everywhere; we explained this at length in Part One of the
‘Structure of Russia’.
But Marxism equally condemns these ancient theses: that civil violence
was a means suitable for the emancipation of citizens from feudal and
despotic rule, and becomes so again if the conquests of personal
liberty and democracy are threatened; but as long as democracy is
respected, the political struggle
must
be
peaceful.
It no less condemns this other one: that from the time of the Paris Commune,
or at least from the founding of the Second International, the transformation
of bourgeois society into a socialist one will take place gradually and
without recourse to violence, through measures implemented by the
proletariat with the weapon of suffrage, which will lead its party to
power.
These are already theses not moral or philosophical or ‘ideological’,
but strictly historical. Lenin himself clarified the long-debated
doubts about the statements of Marx and Engels, the version according to
which, until 1865, they thought a peaceful victory of the proletariat was
possible in England, or that, at his death, Engels considered it
possible in Germany. In theory, it may be admitted that a
bourgeoisie in unfavourable conditions might relinquish political
power to a party with a socialist programme: but the violent clash will
arise immediately afterwards. Lenin notes how Marx (replying after a conference
in Holland) denied even the possibility in England of a ‘resignation’ of
the bourgeoisie from power, and as for Engels, his much-discussed preface only suggests, in 1890s Germany, leaving the initiative for the conflict to the government.
What we say here regarding the means of
violence
applies to the
means of
insurrection, civil war.
In theory, they are not, in
all cases, thinkable and desirable. Their use has historical limits.
This limit was identified by Lenin and all radical Marxists within a
second European cycle following the
classical
one of 1848-1871, at the beginning of the imperialist phase of the
1900s, and they demonstrated it had been crossed in all developed countries by the time
of the First World War.
These historical premises would have changed, according to
Khrushchev, and thus cases could arise in which the proletarian seizure of
power might occur without violence and civil war.
We contest, first of all, the factual circumstances invoked:
The forces
of socialism and democracy have grown.
False. At the time when
Lenin established the historical theory, all of Europe was parliamentary,
and the followers of socialist parties numerous in all countries.
Economic imperialism, as Marx and Lenin correctly pointed out,
later
gave rise to
totalitarian political forms, defeated in the war, but not in the social type of superdeveloped
capitalism: for is it not in those very same pages that the danger threatening
democracy in America, England, France, Germany, etc. is declared, whose governments,
yesterday’s allies, are so often depicted as
fascist brigands
? Or
was this
Stalin’s music
?
Will the insertion, after the 1890-1910 ‘idyllic period’, of two
ferocious wars count for nothing?
‘
The camp of the countries of socialism numbers over 900 million
’. Socialism is contested – and democracy, which we care
little about – as a
new form
in such a camp. A
historical
novelty
has stirred these 900 million
people, only a blind man could deny it. But how? Thanks to bursts of
violence and civil war. Either of the two terms is enough to rule out
that, nice and gently, the rest of the world will turn itself upside down without
cannon fire.
As for the ‘
force of attraction
’ and the ‘
ideas that
have conquered minds...
’ we graciously leave that... to the new Marxist
philosophy.
However, if we admit for a moment what has been contested, let us
also grant, for dialectical purposes, that in some countries capitalism
might relinquish the helm out of shame for its past, out of Christian
resignation, out of paralysis from dropsy, out of
fair play
, out
of whatever the heck the supreme secretary wishes; that it relinquishes it
shouting: by Jove, you have emulated me in a peaceful competition, I admit defeat, you
have regularly outclassed me: I recognise you... as more capitalist than
me!
The Philosopher’s Stone
So let us accept for a moment the hypothesis of political power taken
by the proletariat, for once,
sine effusione sanguinis
, without
violence, without riot, without putsch, without Blanquism, without
insurrection. None of these are discriminating elements: let Khrushchev
be right.
There is another, the ONLY, the GREAT, the IRREPLACEABLE, the
UNMENTIONED at the 20th Congress: THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT.
Something – in the great doctrine of Marx and Lenin – has not changed
between 1848 and 1917, although in the interval the bourgeois world took
a quarter-century plunge into milk and honey.
Would it have changed afterwards? In the time of two wars that set
the entire planet ablaze? Of the greatest revolutionary victory in
history, that of October, longer and more bristling with arms than
that epic of 1793, which made the heroic cry of the bourgeois
Carmagnole echo more thunderously:
vive le son, vive le son, vive le
son, du canon!
? Of the drowning in blood not only of the Communes
of Berlin, Budapest, and Munich – after the first war – and of Warsaw,
Berlin again, after the second? Of the Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Radek Commune sent before firing squads, of tens
and tens of other supreme masters, of hundreds and hundreds of sergeants and
veterans of Bolshevism, of thousands and thousands of class soldiers,
sons of the glorious war waged by the Russian proletariat? Of that same
bloody, though bourgeois, mask that degeneration set upon the faces of
European proletarians in the false partisan uprising against the
massacres of the capitalist dictatorship in Italy, Germany, France,
Spain, the Balkans and everywhere? Of forty years of civil strife in
China, in which immense armies raged back and forth from the extreme north to
the south? Of a hundred episodes of colonial struggles in eight or ten
empires, oozing with blood, in which the deeds of the most democratic
Europeans pale in comparison to those of reactionary regimes, in the unspeakable
series that goes from the Belgian massacres of the Negroes of Congo, before the tearful 1914 over the
martyred people
, to the recent sinister Albionite
deportation of the Cypriot bishop, with all the rest?
Everything that passed across the historical canvas between the two
dates that
connected
the two colossi, whose
names are besmirched by Kremlin quotations, was but a romance for young
maidens, when compared to the cannibalistic events that has
unfolded in the world ever since the tremendous example of the October
Dictatorship launched such a challenge to the mammonistic world of
Capital, whose only stake is Death.
Although at this very Congress, in boasting of new beginnings and
deviations, and in touting a chain of discoveries that
broaden
Marxism, it was repeatedly admitted
that there are certain
principles
that cannot
be touched or changed, here is an attack on the
principle of principles
, without which we, from the last
to the first, we, millions of revolutionaries of yesterday, today, and
tomorrow, cease to exist.
The new word of the Party which raises its
Manifesto
against
the world in the convulsive 1848, focuses on the
transition to
socialism
, treated at the 20th Congress in a boorish manner. ‘All
these
social measures
(which loosen the knots
of bourgeois oppression) have as their premise
the organisation of
the proletariat into a ruling class
– after having become a
political party
– and the
DESPOTIC intervention into
all bourgeois relations of production
’.
Despotism
– or force of persuasion, O gentlemen?!
The
Manifesto
is silent (on the cited page) on armed
insurrection. It is more than a slave revolt. It is the impersonal
productive forces that revolt, and the expropriation of the
expropriators is born by the dissolution of a scientific equation. No cannon resounds
here, in the
Manifesto
. But the Dictatorship
lays its steel fist upon the enemy, even when defeated, imprisoned, or surrendered.
In the epic of the defeat of the Parisian proletariat in 1848, the
word and Order echo:
destruction of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of
the working class!
It echoes because, as has happened a hundred other times and will happen again, the middle class,
having risen up
against the right, drowns in blood,
after the victory gained, the confident advance, the feeble, naive ‘emulative
competition’ of the proletariat. Then, against these agents of the
bourgeois system, condemned by historical inertia to act as executioners
of the socialist revolution, as already in 1831, rises the cry, which with
equally unfortunate heroism will rise in 1871: dictatorship of the working
class! Silence in the throat of every other section of the
people
! Not only of the
patrons
and
banquiers
, but of the filthy, usurious
épiciers
of the streets of
Paris! Silence in the throat of
Jacques Bonhomme
(the French peasant) with his
bas de laine
, the stocking
swollen with bourgeois gold.
And the supposed anti-insurrectionist Engels, many years later, at
the end of the persecution of the German socialists, cries out: You ask,
O philistines, what dictatorship is? The Paris Commune: that was the
dictatorship of the proletariat! Even for an abdicating
(and even if it were in the hands of a Khrushchev!) and defenceless bourgeoisie,
hostages will be taken
, and the
proletariat, as dictator, under given conditions, will make use of them as it did
in 1871 in Paris, responding lionheartedly, in the death-throes of the
Federates, and in the apologia that Karl Marx made for them in the face of
the executioners, before history.
The Essentials in Marx‑Lenin
In the second edition of ‘The State and Revolution’, written by Lenin in
1918, were included the passages from Marx’s letter to comrade Weydemeyer,
already mentioned by us, because he believed that they ‘express what
substantially and radically distinguishes Marx’s doctrine from that of bourgeois thinkers, and the essence of his doctrine on the
State’.
We want to concede that the
essential
point does not lie in the use of violence, civil
war, insurrection, that is, that there may be a historical case of a
bloodless dissolution of the class struggle. But the original,
essential point of the ‘great doctrine of Marx and Lenin’ is not even class
struggle; it is
dictatorship
, and it is
the destruction of the State
. How could this be better said than by
Lenin himself?
‘In 1907, Mehring, in the magazine
Neue Zeit
, published
extracts from Marx’s letter to Weydemeyer dated March 5, 1852. This
letter, among other things, contains the following remarkable
observation: “And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for
discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle
between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the
historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists,
the economic anatomy of classes (in which foolishly, we note in passing,
certain very recent groups with a very old error want to read the whole
of communism). What I (Marx) did that was new was to prove: (1)
that
the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular,
historical phases in the development of production
(a thesis
concerning the non-eternity of classes: there have been and there will
be forms of human society without classes); (2) that the class struggle
necessarily leads to the
dictatorship of the proletariat
, (3)
that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the
abolition of all classes
and to a
classless society...
”.
Lenin, after describing it as an essential, substantial, and radical doctrine,
makes it the ‘touchstone’ for the understanding and
actual
recognition of Marxism. He adds: only he
is a Marxist
who extends the
recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the
dictatorship of the proletariat
.
It is crystal clear that all purported
paths
to
socialism that do not extend the recognition of class
struggle to that of the dictatorship, characterise opportunism, against
which Lenin’s theoretical and material battle was waged in those years,
and that this is a basic principle valid for all times and all
revolutions. This original discovery of Marxism is not a ‘creative
conquest’ of historical experience, about which so much chatter has been
made: Marx established it when a proletarian dictatorship, let alone an
abolition of classes, had not yet been seen in history. Lenin made it
an unrenounceable principle (after Engels had pointed to the Paris Commune
as the first historical example of a proletarian dictatorship), shortly
after the first stable dictatorship had triumphantly prevailed, but it was
exercised amid the most violent enemy assaults, and long before any
historical example, still very far off today, of the disappearance of
classes and the State could be seen.
Anyone may come and say that history
has disproved Marx and shown that the development of the forms of
production will proceed without dictatorship; but what
cannot
be sustained
is the proclamation of a
return
to the doctrine of
Marx and Lenin, who on this page, 70 years apart, agree on the ‘distinctive character’ of the common theory, the
recognition today from Moscow of a form of class struggle which
develops on the world stage as
peaceful coexistence
and
emulative competition
, and in some national areas,
as ‘ideological struggle’ and as the
parliamentary conquest
of the State.
Because, here’s the crucial point, when you say that through movements
within the constitutional framework in certain countries (which would only be
two in the whole world, France and Italy) you hope to gain power (even
if you do not exclude, strictly speaking, recourse to armed struggle if,
in violation of the Constitution, they refuse to hand it over after
an electoral victory), you do not say at all, indeed you deny in theory
and in practice, that you will destroy the apparatus of the old State,
nor even that you will rule out the parliamentary loss of power in later
stages, suppressing all political rights to the non-working classes:
dictatorship is this and nothing else.
Aftermath of the Conquest of Power
Making another concession – no less fictitious than that of
coming to power without insurrectionary struggle – namely, that you
tend, as is said in some passages, towards
stable
power after the ‘popular’ conquest, and that you make a
commitment to defend such stability by force in the event that the
electoral majority fails you, it is easy to see that this is a
commitment impossible to maintain, and therefore to make.
These concessions and absurd historical assumptions we immediately
take back: let the reader not fear that we in any way believe we are really
dealing with socialists and communists ‘in the ends’, guilty only of
making blatant blunders concerning ‘the means’. The very title of ‘transition
to socialism’ is nonsense. The term
transition
serves what the elegant modern jargon (of the young gentlemen whom
Lenin slaps) calls
petting
: back off, you dirty
petters
of the Revolution! She is a clash, a collision, an
explosion, a fruitful bloody breach in history!
We have therefore
assumed
that a
‘socialist’ government has come to power by the ‘constitutional’ route
‘by uniting around the working class, the
working
peasantry
and the
intellectuals
, all the
patriotic
forces’. Can the government founded
on such a majority retain it – indeed: could it ever have
achieved it? – if it says: we will not allow subsequent elections to
take it away from us, and we will remain permanently in power, either by
not holding any more elections, or by holding them in the way that has
now been learned by all sides: vote freely, voters, but only in favour
of the government?
What will the
peasants
say, what will the
intellectuals
say, what will the
patriotic
forces say (read, to clarify matters, in
Italy, the ‘pseudo left-wing’, or rather centre-left, Catholics)? Evidently,
they, imbued with constitutionality at all costs, might even take up
arms if history repeated the situation of a right-wing dictatorship
before or after a popularly won election, but they will not do so for a
dictatorship of proletarians that suspends the sacred guarantees in the
name of which the whole binge was mounted. But what will the
authentic proletarians themselves, endowed with a revolutionary and
Marxist spirit, say? They will say nothing, because there will be none,
otherwise the hypothesis of the elephantine popular front would not even
have been reached.
Khrushchev, therefore, carefully avoids the scandalous word
Dictatorship. He speaks in a purged edition of ‘political leadership of
the working class headed by its vanguard’. He echoes Marx’s translators
who, instead of revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, wrote
critique
of the proletariat.
Indeed, he goes so far as to say that ‘where capitalism has a huge
military and police apparatus at its disposal, the reactionary (?) forces will offer
serious resistance’. Here, in this country of exception, grace is given that ‘the transition to socialism will be attended by a
sharp class, revolutionary struggle’.
We have therefore arrived at the recognition of class struggle in
some special cases, but not at the recognition of dictatorship after the
conquest of power. This is what Lenin calls reducing Marx to a
common liberal. Even the most conservative liberal jurist admits that
citizens may use force when their
constitutional
rights are violated. We will therefore allow ourselves to
fight bitterly against
reactionary forces
only after we have shown them that they do not have a parliamentary
majority!
We are neither repeating here the demonstration of the impossibility
of using Parliament for class purposes, nor explaining to
Khrushchev-Togliatti that their method will disappoint them. We know full well
that this is how they must speak and why they must speak this way. They
are organ pipes through which the very will not to let the proletariat come
to power blows, and if there were anyone among them who did so without
being fully aware of it, that too would say nothing to us.
Only one point matters to us: this resounding repudiation of
Stalinism can be explained in every way, with the relevant deductions from the interplay of international and internal social forces in Russia, and
we are doing it well, but it cannot be passed off, even to the most
naive, under the banner of a
return to the doctrine of Marx and
Lenin
.
The inept and sloppy formulations of the Twentieth Congress, even taken as
‘literature’, openly contain the rejection of the central point of the
invoked doctrine: ‘dictatorship as a transition to the abolition of classes’,
i.e. dictatorship
after
the conquest of power.
The thesis that
they
might achieve this without a
struggle could also be true, because such a fact could be entirely convenient for
the bourgeois order.
Kautskyian Leninists
This much-vaunted new edition of Leninism is easily answered with the
voice of Lenin himself, as though he could speak after the 20th Congress.
Quotations from Lenin have, of course, been made by many of these
gentlemen. The passage on which Khrushchev’s speech is based, according to which it
would be a false application of historical materialism to give a general
scheme of a succession of pre-established stages that must
identically occur in
all
countries, is, as usual, invoked separated from
the author’s integral development. Lenin was writing in open polemic with the
right-wing socialists who, in the name of Marx, had idiotically established
that Russia, and within it the proletariat, the Bolshevik Party, ought not to
move, because historical materialism dictated that the Russian Revolution
could only be proletarian after all the other European revolutions; and that it
had to be directed by the bourgeoisie until the Russian economy had
been raised to the level of those of the West. For forty years we too have waged
this battle against the absurd idea that the Russian revolutionary form
had to be democratic and not dictatorial, for reasons of ‘economic
determinism’. In our study of Russia, we are analysing the following
paragraphs of Lenin’s writings, which construct this theory of the Russian
Revolution as a true masterpiece of consistent continuity since the
beginning of the century. Lenin is not cited with two figures:
volume and page. We are not to saying this to Khrushchev, to whom we are only metaphorical
interlocutors: Lenin says it to him, when he
says it in his writing
The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade
Kautsky
.
Kautsky said that the whole question of dictatorship comes from a
‘little word’ that Marx once wrote. With a pandering series of
quotations, he attempted to empty this concept of its fundamental weight
in Marx, reducing it to an unfortunate choice of vocabulary. That is why, in
the other world, the face of this theorist, who had long defended
Marx against the right-wing revisionists, and on whose pages Lenin had trained himself, as much on those of Plekhanov, who ended up like
him, the face of this spectre bears the indelible mark of the
scar from the lash of Vladimir’s hand, which at
the time seemed to so many unjustly bloody.
‘To call this classical reasoning of Marx’s, which sums up the whole of
his revolutionary teaching, “a single word” and even “a
little word
”, is an insult to and
complete renunciation of Marxism.
It must not be forgotten that Kautsky knows Marx almost by heart, and, judging by all he has written, he has in his desk, or in his head, a number of pigeon-holes in which all that was ever written by Marx is most carefully filed so as to be ready at hand for quotation. Kautsky must know that both Marx and Engels, in their letters as well as in their published works repeatedly spoke about the dictatorship of the proletariat (...) that the formula “dictatorship of the proletariat” is merely a more historically concrete and scientifically exact formulation of the proletariat’s task of “smashing” the bourgeois S
tate
machine, about which both Marx and Engels spoke, in summing up the
experience of the Revolution in 1848, and, still more so, of 1871, spoke
for forty years, between 1852 to 1891.
‘Since the outbreak of the war, Kautsky has made increasingly rapid
progress in this art of being a Marxist in words and a lackey of the
bourgeoisie in deeds, until he has become a virtuoso at it’
.
The speakers at the 20th Congress had a better
pigeon-hole
of
Lenin’s Works than Kautsky had for Marx, perhaps even an electronic one, as an outlet
for the silly envy that surfaces in all their speeches for the often
clownish American technology. They have thus far surpassed
the then-prevailing ‘rapid progress in this art of being Marxist-Leninist in words and
lackeys of the bourgeoisie in deeds’.
Kautsky explained the
little word
like this: dictatorship
means the abolition of democracy. Lenin, with a lengthy historical analysis,
shows that it will even come to abolish, in the end,
any
democracy: once classes and the State have
disappeared, the word will be meaningless, and the fact long
unknown.
But he corrects, with scientific rigour, Kautsky’s dirty ‘liberalism’:
‘Dictatorship does not
necessarily
mean the
abolition of democracy for the class that exercises the dictatorship
over other classes, but it does
necessarily
mean the abolition of democracy for the class over which, or against which,
the dictatorship is exercised’.
This is very clear and applies to the two opposing dictatorships of
modern times: bourgeois and proletarian. Can you hear
Khrushchev-Togliatti saying to the bourgeoisie: We will exercise
dictatorship after we have overthrown you by means of democracy, but if
you suppress democracy for us when we are a minority, you are a
reactionary force
?
The Three-Way Scene
All of Lenin’s passages that are misrepresented refer not to capitalism in
modern Western countries, but to those places and times where
three
forces are in struggle: feudalism, the
bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. It is then that there are multiple
paths of
transition to socialism in one country
: when there are only
two
forces on the scene, the historical problem now consists
entirely in the victory of the socialist revolution in developed
capitalist society. The
novel
of the isolated
national country, on the other hand, must necessarily be written when
feudalism is overcome and national State centres arise. Here lies a bridge
to socialism, and here, and here alone, are multiple aspects ‘with this or that
form of democracy, with this or that variety of dictatorship of the
proletariat’.
In the text we have referred to, Lenin, after scientifically defining
dictatorship
in general
, goes on to define
proletarian
dictatorship as: ‘rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie,
rule that is not bound by any law
’.
How does this strong citrus taste to you, intellectuals,
patriots, and other insects?
Further on, the author refers again to the
three-way
scene,
recalling that before 1905 in Russia all Marxists defined the revolution
as bourgeois: the Mensheviks inferred from this a policy of agreement with
the bourgeoisie, while the Bolsheviks envisaged the struggle of the proletariat
allied with the peasantry, first against feudalism and then against the
bourgeoisie. Kautsky invoked Russia’s social
backwardness
to assert, as Lenin sarcastically says, ‘this
new
idea: that in a bourgeois revolution one
must not go farther than the bourgeoisie!’. He
adds: ‘And this in spite of all that Marx and Engels said when comparing
the bourgeois revolution of 1789-93 in France with the bourgeois
revolution of 1848 in Germany!’
Between the
Leninists
of the 20th Congress
and Leninism, there lies this difference: Lenin and history proved that the
proletariat
cannot do without dictatorship
in
the course of a
bourgeois revolution
without being defeated. Today’s Leninists affirm that it
must do
without it
in revolutions that are exclusively
proletarian
, in which it is no
longer a question of overthrowing feudalism, but capitalism!!
They render insurrection inessential, and suppress dictatorship in
every case, even erasing the ‘little word’. And they call themselves
Leninists
? Let Lenin speak again (still in ‘
Kautsky
’, at the beginning): ‘If Kautsky had wanted to argue in a serious and honest
manner he would have asked himself: Are there historical laws relating
to revolution which know of no exception? And the reply would have been:
No, there are no such laws. Such laws only apply to the typical, to what
Marx once termed the “ideal”, meaning average, normal, typical
capitalism’.
(In the margin of our old copy of ‘
Kautsky
’, we had noted
here: find this passage by Marx. We have indicated a series of them in the
text, not printed in full, of the report to the Milan meeting on the
‘invariance’ of Marxism and even of the revolutionary class
theories preceding it; and they are cited in connection with the question of the ‘model’ of
bourgeois society in the series on the agrarian question from three years
ago).
The
historical law
of
dictatorship is therefore inseparable from the doctrine as a whole.
Against falsification, Lenin formulates it thus: ‘Proletarian revolution
is impossible without the forcible destruction of the bourgeois State
machine and the substitution for it of a
new one
’.
Withdrawal of
Concessions
Having unmasked the false
theorists
–
worse than those found in Stalin’s economic texts – we can
‘withdraw’ the concessionary historical hypotheses and denounce the no
less sensational
historical
falsifications.
Kautsky, like Khrushchev, also tried to speculate that Marx and
Engels would have made an
exception
for England and America, until the decade 1870-1880.
Lenin’s response is fundamental. The necessity of dictatorship is above
all linked to the existence of
militarism
and
bureaucracy
. These forms
did not exist
in those two countries at that time. ‘Today, however (1918)
they do exist, as much in Britain as in America’.
Does Mr. Khrushchev know whether such forms have disappeared in those
two countries since then? Did he and his colleagues, and their mentor Stalin,
see such monstrous forms clearly, both when they treated them
as fraternal allies and as
cold
enemies?
But here we must strike another blow to the astonishing description of
today’s world, which is claimed to be, for the most part or nearly so, brimming
with
democracy
and
socialism
.
Opportunism, the denial of dictatorship, the renunciation of Marxism,
had long employed this argument, which Kautsky incredibly copied from
his longtime adversary Bernstein: we have passed from the era in
which the proletariat aimed at
violent revolution
, to that of possible
peaceful revolution
!
What different historical reading did Khrushchev, and several others
with him, use in 1956 to astound the world? Were they armed with
Lenin’s pigeon-holes as Kautsky was with Marx’s?
Let them answer with the same pigeon-hole: and let the
world of foolish consumers of advertising novelties learn.
‘Kautsky the “historian” so shamelessly falsifies history that he
“forgets” the fundamental fact that
pre-monopoly
capitalism – which actually reached its zenith precisely in the
decade 1870-1880 – was by virtue of its fundamental economic traits,
which found a most typical expression in Britain and in America,
distinguished by a, relatively speaking, maximum fondness for
peace
and
freedom. Imperialism
, on
the other hand, i.e.
monopoly
capitalism,
which finally matured only in the 20th century, is, by virtue of its
fundamental economic traits, distinguished by a minimum fondness for
peace
and
freedom
and by a maximum and universal development of
militarism
. To “fail to notice” this in discussing the extent
to which a
peaceful
or
violent
revolution is
typical or probable is to stoop to the level of
a most
ordinary lackey of the bourgeoisie
’.
We have enough to draw the final conclusions on the laughable
‘transition to socialism’ of the countries ‘in disarray’.
False
historiography
was
invented long before Stalin, and it is far from dead after his
expulsion from glory.
For Marx and Lenin, dictatorship is a general law. And with it
terror, another sinful word put out of use. And yet Engels used this other
little word
, no less forgotten at the 20th Congress, in the
Italian Almanacco Republicano
:
‘If the
victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain
this rule by means of the
terror
which its
arms inspire in the reactionists’ (1874: at the time, this was a
refutation of the anarchists, who would dismantle the armed force an hour after
victory).
In Marxism-Leninism, the fundamental law concerning the conquest of political
power is the necessity of dictatorship after conquest. An exception to this law
could
perhaps
have existed
precisely
under
the conditions of Russia. The global value (Khrushchev’s adjective) of
October lies in the grandiose fact that it was
precisely in
Russia
that dictatorship
historically imposed itself. Tomorrow, it will therefore impose itself
everywhere, with no exceptions.
In
Twentieth-Congressism,
the
democratic road to power becomes a general law, just as it already was for
the worst, oldest, and surviving social democrats.
An exception is made for cases where
capitalism has a large
military and police apparatus
.
Is this an exception? Where are these modern countries
without
bureaucracy, militarism, and a police
apparatus? In the only two modern countries where the
rule
of parliamentary majority
could be verified, France and Italy,
one can ask the rebels of Algeria and the field hands of Venosa and
Barletta about such apparatuses (apart from the laws for the herd of
State bureaucrats staunchly defended by the Kremlin’s cronies). And
more briefly, from the Kremlinist press itself.
But the optimism that resurrects the Kautskyian prospect of
peaceful revolution
, buried by Lenin, is based entirely on the countries
of the East, of people’s democracy, of socialism.
So is it on that side that there are no armies of officials,
soldiers, and policemen? The General Secretary evidently believes that
these bodies are not called such when they depend on the branches of his
Central Committee. And, knowing how the public delights in the dramatic version
of political events, he hopes to make people believe that they have
disappeared ever since civil death was inflicted on Generalissimo Stalin, and
death on the gallows on chief executioner Beria.
Will history be able to write different and better things about the current Russian ‘leaders of
the vanguard’ than it has about those two figures? Untie
the knot that for so many years has bound them to the same function?
Third Day: Morning
Interim Report
As dawn breaks upon the new toil, it is the worker’s custom to review the
work accomplished and to look ahead to what he will face in the new
day. It is true that in the capitalist epoch neither the one nor the other
concern him in the least. So it was only in the time of primitive
communism, and so it was again in that of free productive
individualism, even in their admirable aspects long since disappeared,
and, insofar as they are not entirely so, are to be helped to disappear. In
today’s worlds of
east
and
west
, which strive to
oppose each other, that sweet joy is forbidden to all humans, increasingly reduced
to passive little cogs in an immense machine of production, the
secret of which completely eludes them.
In communism, which is non-mercantile, it will be possible for society to make
‘a marvellous deal’ by saying, each morning that the planet has lazily turned on itself: let whoever wishes announce that
today they will add nothing to the social product. I accept it,
just as I accept the labour of whoever wishes to make a tenfold effort:
both will sit equally at the common table. Only then will we be done
hearing, from both sides, the nauseating strumming to the falsified idol of
Liberty.
On the First Day (amid the anticipations and reiterations that are
indispensable ingredients for digesting meals like this), we dealt with
the points of confessed historiographical falsehood and of the
renegade cult of the Great One (which we have for years commonly referred to as
the ‘Theory of the Battilocchio’; the Battilocchio being a gangly, disjointed
type, who towers over everyone because he is as tall as he is stupid).
On the Second, we passed judgement on that ‘transition to socialism’ which
boasted
new
paths, and in essence, only that constitutional,
social-pacifist and parliamentary path.
Taking as a general outline for this first part of the Third Day
the question of economics (theory of capitalism – theory of socialism),
and for the next, the question of world imperialism and war, let us
pause for a moment to show how the cornerstones of the construction laid out
at the recent Moscow Congress are askew and veer off in arbitrary
directions, making it certain that nothing ‘stable’ will rest upon them.
Let the bourgeois of all shades search for the
meaning
of such unexpected proclamations, in their investigation
of what the communists (!) will do in the near future, both on the world stage
and within the internal affairs of various countries. Our research,
evidently as obscure as it is unique, seeks only to draw from the state
of
necessity
that dictated those new proclamations,
confirmation for an explanation of the ongoing historical fact that
altogether refutes the positions of that crowd, yesterday and today, from
1924 to 1956. The conclusion is, among other things, that all the
bourgeois
fear
of Moscow’s plotting is not only useless, but
totally false.
History and Historiography
It is equally true that the literature of the 20th Congress,
and that which followed it as its development, is valuable material for
a Marxist historical investigation of a critical nature, ever more
effective in the demolition of Stalinist degeneration and
post-Stalinist super-degeneration; and that, considered as a system,
as a new platform, it lacks connection and solidarity between its parts, it
is a field full of distortions, humps, and fractures, it is the
disastrous result of a series of pitiful patchworks.
We ended the previous day’s text by asking ourselves how history
can make a distinction between Stalin and those who today so
loudly condemn his work, unmask his sesquipedalian lies, denounce,
after decades of calling him the ‘master of those who know’, his
theoretical errors worthy – and this was true – of the ‘class of
asses’.
And indeed, only by suddenly fabricating a ‘historiography’
no less false than the one denounced can such a thing be hoped for;
relying on a dissemination machine of paper and words that is of the
same overwhelming power as the one that was able to sustain Stalin’s lies. These, however, are today, before
the astonished eyes of the world, being torn apart by history.
What greater historiographical falsehood is there than to make people
believe that Marx and Lenin had considered the principle of the proletarian
dictatorship as something ‘retractable’ in situations not only after 1850, but after 1900,
when capitalism was advancing towards concentration, that is, towards
imperialism?
What greater falsehood is there than to attribute to Lenin the ‘theory of
the construction of socialism in Russia alone’, at the very moment when
it is admitted false that Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev were agents
of foreign imperialism – when precisely these two theorists, at the
culminant moment of their doctrinal cycle, at the
Enlarged Executive in the autumn of 1926, drove Stalin, alive,
powerful, and young to the dunce’s desk, proved to him that neither Lenin
nor anyone else, nor even he, Stalin, had said such a thing before 1924?
And when precisely in order to win this game, were the two great comrades –
already in the spring of 1926, when they had not yet reconciled after
the 1924 struggle in which Zinoviev supported Stalin (as did, in 1926,
the other doomed man Bukharin), only the delegates
of the Italian Communist Left in Moscow declared, to the astonishment of even the
Bolshevik milieu itself, that Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were on the
same side of the barricade (oh poor, poor formula of the personal
key
to unlocking politics!) – the two, and so many others,
persecuted and finally slaughtered? By Stalin? Oh no, oh no! By the
cause of the theory of the construction of socialism in Russia, by the
gang of lies by which that society still declares itself non-capitalist.
And what greater falsification than that which ascribes to Lenin, in
the words of Mikoyan and others, the authorship of Stalin’s most fetid
theory, that of
coexistence
? A wretched
theory
, which
in the edition launched at the 20th Congress degenerates even further into a
shameful aberration.
Thus a phase of false historiography has not been killed off, only to
open up a new one, and, as the future will tell, one much worse.
Parliamentarism Equals Personalism
The
corpus
, built on the compact Stalinist mechanism of the
Twentieth Congress, would have suddenly stripped itself of the infamous cloak of
personal servility: but how? According to every newspaper,
all rose to their feet applauding when the
Presidium
entered the hall
already occupied by the 1350 delegates. But Khrushchev loudly begged
them not to applaud: we are among communists: the real masters are you,
comrade delegates! If the phrase is true, it is basely demo-American; the
elected representative who is the servant of the ordinary citizen!
Among communists, there would be neither masters nor servants. In any
case, that corpus, balanced on a very dubious basis, would have
turned up its nose at the myth of the Person. How is it, notes the
not-so-stupid journalist, that in the official report, Khrushchev’s speech
is greeted by 23 rounds of ‘applause’, 6 of ‘impetuous applause’, 35 of
‘prolonged applause’, 12 of ‘impetuous and prolonged applause’ and
finally ‘impetuous and prolonged applause, which becomes a true
ovation’?
But that same
corpus
, with equal unanimous decision and
enthusiasm, proclaimed that the path to socialism, in the 1956 model,
is the
parliamentary
one. This, in the ‘gourmande’ version of the
illiterate Nenni, ‘implies respect for democratic legality as enshrined
in the Constitution, when one is in
opposition
and when one is
in the
majority
’. Marx in his grave, Marx who made the two cries
(‘18th Brumaire’) equivalent:
Vive la Constitution
! and
À
bas la Révolution
!
Nenni and Togliatti, both consistently illiterate in Marxism,
even if the latter is not
entirely
so, take pleasure in saying that
the proletariat nevertheless reserves the right to take to the streets should
democracy
be in danger. The former’s charming formula is ‘against
the threat capitalism poses to democratic life and institutions’. These
people, therefore, being certain that democracy is eternal, thereby guarantee the
eternity of capitalism, while the two eternities are in equal measure
blasphemy and treason. Both, with those of the 20th, nevertheless swear that
this
is not reformism
. But reformism differs from this for
one reason alone: it was a serious thing. As for the declaration that, if
democratic liberty were violated, they would reach for the rifle, we already heard
it from Bissolati and Turati – credible people – in the days when
Togliatti was in the school of bourgeois philosophy and Nenni was on the payroll as a
journalist for the Agraria.
Thus parliamentarism is the ‘principle’, and violence a desperate recourse to which one resorts
only to save it if someone threatens it. Very well! One can,
however, avoid the ‘hernia of nonsense’ of adding that the one
threatening to devour it, with the proletariat castrated, is the very
capitalism
that begot it. And that one fights to save
Parliament, not to overthrow Capital.
We do not want to return to this point, only to note the jarring
contradiction between the move that puts down personalism, and that which
lifts up electoralism, as further proof of the instability of the subsoil
beneath the feet of the 1350, who tremble when their hands clap. How
can votes be won – and those people will have to win more – if the
basic means of
rooting
for the
politician
are not used? How
can the waves of sympathy for the symbols of the popular front or
of labour unity (is that what it is called, or what else?) be maintained
if not through the frenzy for the exploits of the more-than-mediocre human
material, of national, provincial, or village origin, aroused by the
usual means in the amorphous masses, and diluted in the flock of the
‘honest’, the good-willed, and the like?
Therefore, no less apocryphal than the renunciation of the weapon of
historical falsification is the renunciation of the principal means of
infatuation with people, launched by a special advertising machine,
puffing up listed fools.
Only one renunciation is not apocryphal, and it is not new: the renunciation
of the Revolution. Was it necessary to renounce Stalin’s tradition to do
this? Is that why his glaring economic blunders have been marked in blue? And
have they really been marked? And in any case, to what end?
Superstructure and Economic Base
It is obvious that for the press and the parties of
order
the whole question lies in finding by what rule ‘succession’ is
provided for in post-revolutionary regimes. The advent of
‘Caesarism’ is the norm, an idiotic term that raised the just ire of Karl Marx, as
we mentioned on the First Day. Of that Caesarism which, after the
nineteenth-century champions, at the head of which was the nicknamed
Boustrafa
,
Scapin
,
Badinguet
(Napoleon III), has in this twentieth
century given us a magnificent collection that seeks its own Plutarch:
Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Tito, Perón, Pavelich, Horthy, and others
forgotten: above all Stalin, whose plunge from the zenith to the
nadir of memory appears truly abysmal. Killer of comrades in life and in
honour, brute in his professorial chair of science, generalissimo only of
defeats, he too will soon be cited by derogatory epithets, such as
Bagnasciuga.
All these people, and no less than them the Very Famous who
have credentials with democratic bigotry, do not make history
for us, and the weight of their subjective will to power, which blinds
others, is negligible for us Marxists: these splendours and these
eclipses, which everyone must today admit, are in our view: for better or
worse, not the cause of events, they are merely a passive
consequence.
The key that we employ is clearly elsewhere: in the progress of
the facts of the economic base, of the social relations of production.
It is the development of these that must explain to us, once again, the
coups de théâtre of the 20th Congress.
The material substructure made the 20th Congress speak as it spoke;
forces acted within it that compelled it to say what was said: but the real
relations of the substructure are quite different from those that were
theorised and declared in the Congress texts.
Particularly striking, however, was seeing what, in economic
matters, the Congress had to ‘change’ with respect to Stalin’s constructions, which
until a month ago passed as valid for the Russian Communist Party, for
the Russian government, for all foreign parties in solidarity with both.
We must recall our commentary on Stalin’s writing on the
Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.
We pointed out
the economic errors both in the laws that were claimed to be applicable
to the Russian economy and in those that applied to the Western economy.
It should be clarified immediately that these egregious errors are
today denounced in only a cursory manner, and in no logical order, in the same speech by
Mikoyan, which dealt with them most extensively, but which, as we
predicted, is not given in full by the Italian newspapers. Nor is the
correction indicated by those accused, nor is it
stated that it consists in returning to the formulae, the classic ones, of
Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
As for the deductions not strictly economic, regarding the
course of capitalism in the West, the world market, imperialism, and war,
all the corrections to the Stalinist theses are FURTHER
COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY STEPS, and are far
more distant
from Marx and
Lenin.
We dialogued in 1953 with the living Stalin and convinced him that he had
blasphemed against Marxism.
In 1956, the 20th Congress throws Stalin’s text overboard, with
Stalin now dead, and topples his statue from its pedestal. The philistine
formula is that it is to remedy the insult to Marxism-Leninism. The
proof, on the contrary, that can be drawn from the theoretical and
political unfolding is that Stalin is struck down for not having
blasphemed enough. Stalin’s authority, long since fallen for us, is
today destroyed. But Marx-Lenin’s authority will only be put back on its
feet when the present sinister, shameless restorers are swept away.
Stalin, despite himself, contributed so much to it then; today, they themselves
do it, with the materials we have the right and the
will to use.
Mikoyan’s Criticism
It does not follow directly from what has been said on economic
matters – nor even indirectly – that there is anything ‘withdrawn’
regarding Stalin’s theses on the Russian economy, and mainly those to which
we gave a good pounding:
the Russian economy is that of a socialist
society – in socialist society, the reproduction of commodities and the
law of value persist
.
Indeed, we already know that Khrushchev reiterated the rejection of the
thesis, in substance acceptable, of Molotov:
in Russia, the construction of the bases of
socialism is taking place
.
We will make another interposition, noting that the shift from
‘construction of the (industrial) bases’ to ‘construction of
socialism’ corresponds, as far as the economic substructure is
concerned, to the no less underhanded shift from ‘steps towards
socialism’ (Lenin) to ‘transition to socialism’ (Khrushchev).
We are documenting the exposition of Lenin’s remarkably organic
positions throughout the course of the Revolution, positions which Mikoyan
himself insidiously expounds: according to him, Lenin changed his perspective on the
revolutionary course every few months; yet he was
always right! We reply, in our lengthy analysis, that no one, neither
Lenin nor Jehovah, is always right, but that Lenin was tremendously
right precisely because he
never changed
, amidst the most
tragic successive situations, the incomparable doctrine of the course of
revolution in Russia.
The rigorous expression of
steps
towards socialism, no less than
that of work on the industrial
bases
of socialism,
held its scientific place in Lenin’s mouth for as long as he lived,
as it did in Trotsky’s and Zinoviev’s until they were strangled.
In the anti-feudal revolution, the task of the proletariat is to carry out
a series of
steps
towards socialism, which the bourgeoisie and
the opportunists fear. The Proletariat takes the first series of steps
together with the poor peasants, passing from bourgeois parliamentary
democracy to the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and
peasantry. It carries out further
steps
, organising State capitalist
industry (
the final rung
), continuing in the dictatorship of
the proletarian party alone, against all other parties and classes.
Socialism in Russia is not this yet: it will come after the
international socialist revolution (which lies beyond
intermediate forms between democracy and dictatorship).
Then in Europe (or America) and in Russia, it will no longer be a matter
of building, but of demolishing. All of Lenin’s ardent appeals for
the work of registering, organising, raising yields, and productive power were
powerful revolutionary drives for the
steps
towards socialism, for
equipping the
bases
of socialism. It was neither a matter of
building
socialism, a spurious economic formula, nor of
transitioning
to socialism, a defective historical formula.
Two powerful forces of demolition, which are one
and the same, lead to socialism: Revolution and Dictatorship. When these hold the countries
of advanced industrialism in their iron grip, and when they have
destroyed and eradicated enough, Socialism will
come about by itself, it will rise by itself.
Perfectly heterodox to Marxism, purely Stalinist and sub-Stalinist is
this conclusion of Mikoyan’s: ‘It is important to note that, according
to Lenin, even in cases where the proletariat is forced to resort to
violence, the fundamental and permanent character of the revolution, the
premise of its victories is the work of organisation, of education, and
not that of destruction’.
Such a concept of revolution, historically inconsistent and empty, is
far further from Marxism than the classical reformists. It would have been
rejected by the Turatis and Bebels, by the Bernsteins no less, with the
arguments with which they demolished the constructions of the Mazzinis, the
Webbs, Malons, and the De Amicises.
Blue Marks for Stalin
What, in substance, was it about Stalin’s economics that caused such offence? The point that
provoked Mikoyan’s indignation concerns the doctrine on the course of
contemporary capitalism. For the rest, we have at our disposal a very generic statement: ‘It should be noted in this regard that
certain
other theses of the Economic Problems
, if subjected to close
scrutiny, require from our economists a thorough analysis, and a
critical revision in the light of Marxism-Leninism’. What are these
other
theses? And in what sense are they to be corrected,
according to Marxism-Leninism, and not according to new blunders, which,
according to the ostentatious statements of these wreckers, Marx and Lenin
would have authorised those who were in the presence of the rich, fertile,
unpredictable new data of new future situations to make? Here lies the blasphemy of
blasphemies, and it is the same one that for more than half a century,
in more or less varied words, every opportunism has put forward.
Mikoyan does not tell us this, nor does the 20th Congress. And we
will read it when the speaker’s request has been fulfilled: ‘It would be
wrong not to say that the chapters of the
Textbook of Political
Economy
on the current phase of the development of capitalism, and in
particular the problem of the nature and periodicity of cyclical
crises, as well as the problems of the political economy of socialism,
need to be studied more thoroughly and reworked’.
On the economics of socialism, we can therefore only dialogue with the
dead Stalin, and we will mention it; on the course of capitalism, we can
hear what Mikoyan rectifies in Stalin, and whether he does so in the
sense in which we did.
‘The theory of the absolute stagnation of capitalism is alien to
Marxism-Leninism. It cannot be thought that the general crisis of
capitalism determines an absolute stagnation of production and technical
progress in capitalist countries’.
This unequivocal condemnation follows the question: ‘Is technical progress
and an increase in production in capitalist countries possible today or
tomorrow?’
And this is followed by the more specific censure of Stalin:
‘Can perhaps, in analysing the economic situation of
contemporary capitalism, the well-known
thesis formulated by Stalin in the
Problems
in relation to the
United States, England and France, according to which, after the
division of the world market, “the volume of production in those
countries will be reduced” help us, and is it perhaps correct? This statement does not explain the complex
and contradictory phenomena of contemporary capitalism, nor does it
explain the increase in capitalist production that occurred in many
countries after the war’.
So this would be Stalin’s fault. He was writing in the year 1952, in
which the U.S. economy had shown a downturn compared to the peak indices reached during
the heyday of the Korean War. He saw the moment was approaching, still distant even according
to the data of the 20th Congress and the
forecasts discussed by Bulganin in the Sixth Five-Year Plan extending to 1960, when
Soviet production potential could have reached that of the
strongest industrial countries; meanwhile, West Germany has entered the
race and seems on track to get there first. And in the years after
Stalin’s death, American production and national income indices began
to rise again, reaching an all-time high in 1955. So what now?
Stalin’s Asinine Laws
Indeed, Stalin had deduced from the split in the world
market after the war, and from the loss of Asian, African, and European
outlets for the large capitalist States, that market conditions would worsen and company production would decline. And he added: this
is precisely what constitutes the deepening of the general crisis of the world
capitalist system as concerns the disintegration of the world
market.
In that writing as in many other culpably superficial ones, such as
those on materialism, Stalin shows himself to be truly convinced that
party doctrine evolves in history and that some of its parts must be discarded
and replaced with others (and here those of the 20th Congress sin
as he did and much more than he did); to this correction and alteration of
principles presides a
supreme pontiff
and this was him (the
20th Congress would like to withdraw this second point, due to serious
confusion in the face of a real scientific bankruptcy, but the
remedies for ideological work that are being proposed are very
small indeed).
So Stalin, on that occasion, takes the axe and chops down entire
chapters of Lenin, Marx, and... (this was really funny) in parallel, of
Stalin!
In fact, he declares unfounded a theory of his ‘enunciated before the
Second World War, on the relative stability of markets in the period
of the general crisis of capitalism’. Since this curious and useless
thesis is dismissed by the author, and since it means nothing and, as
usual, places well-known and solid terms out of place, there is no point in
wasting time on it.
The thesis dismissed at the same time was Lenin’s, enunciated in the
spring of 1916, that, despite the decay of capitalism, ‘on the whole
(reader, pay attention to the words:
on the whole
) capitalism is
growing at an incomparably faster rate than before’.
Now this thesis constitutes the very core of Marxism, and it was sheer
folly to think it could be eradicated. The Marxist concept of the fall
of capitalism is not that it, for one historical phase, accumulates, and in
another collapses and empties itself on its own. This was the thesis of the
pacifist revisionists. For Marx, capitalism grows ceaselessly beyond all
limits, the curve of world capitalist potential does not have a gentle
ascent that then slows down and leads to a gentle decline; on the
contrary, it rises to an abrupt, immense explosion that breaks every
rule of the progression of the ‘historical diagram’ and closes the epoch of the
capitalist form of production. In this revolutionary turn of events, it
is the political machine of the capitalist State that shatters, and
another proletarian one is formed, which in the course of development
will fade and die out. Just as Stalin arbitrarily expunged from Marxism
(all impositions of
necessity
; his State swelled and
did not empty itself, because it was a capitalist State!) the law of the
withering away of the State, so he threw into it, to justify his party’s
renunciation of civil revolution and revolutionary war, the inconclusive
thesis of the ‘withering away of capitalism’. This, however, was careful not to wither
away.
At this point, the Pontiff and his priestly retinue turned to another doctrine, this time Marx’s. It is the same
mistake, and everything suggests that if Mikoyan were to dialogue with us,
he would take note of what we contested in the first Dialogue with the Dead.
The law of capitalist development is said to be that of
the fall in the average rate of profit; but it is not true
. So
says Stalin, and changes the law into the truly astonishing one of the
realisation of
maximum
profit.
We Extinguished the Flamethrower
Having reached this point – we regret, not to quote ourselves, but to
have to refer to the
Dialogue with Stalin
for the entire economic
demonstration that we outlined, admittedly in polemical form and always in
our capacity as defenders of known, old, and inviolable laws, not as coiners
of new doctrines and peddlers of treatises or scientific manuals
– we did not refrain from writing: ‘
If the flamethrower in the library goes a little further, not even the operator’s mustache will be left
’.
At the time of
Big Moustache
they all trembled. Perhaps we would
not have written the derisive sentence today, when one sees the moustached
portraits being thrown into the fire everywhere by despicable purifiers, cynical and
recidivist in their disgraceful
trade of principles
, branded
by Karl Marx in his ruthless exegesis of the
Gotha Programme
.
We showed how Marx’s law was that of the ‘general fall of the rate of
profit’, how it was only confirmed throughout the
entire
historical
course of the capitalist form of production, even in the modern
monopolistic, imperialist stage, in the first and second post-war
periods; and how, correctly understood and applied to the data of the
world economy, it was reconciled: with the increase of the rate of
surplus value (the rate of extraction of labour from the working
class), with the incessant increase in the
mass
of product, the
mass of surplus value, and the mass of profit, since the
mass of capital invested in production and accumulated grows so
overwhelmingly that, even at a progressively lower rate, the total volume of
profit is always magnified.
Stalin needed the bogus law of ‘maximum profit’ to prove that the
proletariat is impoverished by the excessive profiteering of capitalists
(which in Russia they claim does not exist). We had to once again put
the Marxist law of
increasing misery
back in its place, with
arguments that go far beyond Stalin’s timid one about the unemployed
mass (reserve army) – always to boast that in Russia it is assumed not to exist
–; and to establish that it does not preclude the
national income, the per capita income, and the standard
of living not only of the average citizen but also of the average worker
from growing over the course of capitalism.
Nevertheless, the original and unaltered doctrines of Marxism,
silenced not only by the Pontiffs, but also by the Councils, on crises
and on the final catastrophe, remain standing because they are cast in a different
bronze than the ephemeral statues of dictators, in a different steel than the
vaults of accumulation.
In our conclusion, the task of the socialist revolution was not to
continue organising the race to increase production, but the opposite;
to rely on the highest technology and labour productivity, no longer for the
exaltation of production, but for the drastic reduction of labour effort, of
its time, of its torment.
We showed that, faced with the boasts of American economic
science about the race for
welfare
based on the exacerbation
of consumption, which makes its indices proportional to the inflation of
the volume of production, little would the Marxist critique hold up if
it were to fall back on Stalin’s nonsense about the division of production
between consumption and reinvestment.
Another Vain Fetish: Technique
We would like to ask ourselves in what better situation, in such a
controversy over mountains and seas, will those of the 20th Congress find
themselves, wrapped as they are in their clumsy ideology of comparison,
of competition, of emulation, of ineffable persuasive
choice and preference between the capitalist and the
‘socialist’ way of organising production, which, country by country will be
selected after consulting professors and university faculties, listening
to experts, mobilising the technicians by dint of crash courses,
missions abroad and the like. Having placed themselves on this pitiful
terrain, it is laughable to then detect, in the little speeches of the little
men of Moscow, the foolish
inferiority complex
towards the carefree,
boozy boors from across the Atlantic.
According to Mikoyan, nothing works in Russia: scientists,
universities, laboratories, research institutes, statistical services.
Everything must be redone and restarted in a frantic race with the
wonders of America. This defeatist mood goes hand in hand with the
stupefaction with which the Italian public gets excited over the
ramshackle transplantation, onto television screens, of American-style game shows with
dollar prizes awarded to the culture of a gullible public.
Stalin had written scandalous things on this subject, always on the
basis of his doctrine of maximum profit, arguing that capitalism tended
to become not only more unproductive in mass but also in quality, and to
re-establish slave-like forms of labour of the earliest wage-paying companies, if
this (and he did not see the absurdity of the economic hypothesis) had given
it greater ‘profits’. He had written this: ‘Capitalism is in favour of new
techniques when this promises the highest profit. Capitalism is against
new techniques and for the return to manual labour (?!) when
new techniques do not promise (or
allow
?) the highest
profit’. Then would come: ‘the technical arrest of capitalism’. This
banal conception of personified capitalism, which makes its own
calculations and distorts economic laws at will was no longer
liked, not because it trampled Marxism underfoot, but because it left one
without arguments in the face of mechanical and machinistic elephantiasis,
the splendours of American ‘automation’, and the incessant launch onto the
world market of ever more refined artefacts of technical titillation.
All the speakers have therefore called for Western methods of technical
preparation and improvement to be taken as a model and imitated in
every field, because they are in every case the optimum, and it is not
even permissible to think that in some sector, for reasons of class or
as an effect of economic laws, one should not learn from them. Therefore, in the staged emulative
competition between Russia and America, the latter would have already won from the
start, and only by following it can one do well.
But this is true, not because it was an aberration of Stalin’s to
disregard capitalist technique subjugated by profit, but because in the
two camps the aim is the same: to build industrial capitalism, to
accelerate accumulation, to increase the volume of production; and the
path followed in the East, as we said at every step in the
Dialogue
, is the same as that followed in the West almost a
century in advance.
So the Russians have arrived at the same formula: to throw
commodities onto the market that are more attractive to the buyer, to induce a higher level of
consumption, because the bourgeois formula prevails there too:
consumption is the means, production the end.
The Mummy-Abortion of Mercantilism
Thus, the Congress’s criticism of Stalinist economics was limited to
the part describing capitalism, and in a certain sense to a defence of
capitalism against the accusation of neglecting, for reasons of high profit,
the resources of science and the highest efficiency of production techniques.
But in addition to revolutionising the Marxist laws of capitalist
economics, Stalin, in the indicted book, had also harshly dealt with the
laws of socialist economics, and this was the first
and most serious contradiction in the
Dialogue
with him.
We would have expected that on these burning issues, the 20th Congress, with its interminable speeches, would have shed some light. Nothing. But neither is
there anything to suggest that the dangerous ‘mercantilism’ we denounced
in Stalin is any less correct. On the contrary, in many other statements
made when describing Russia’s economic progress and in presenting new
programmes and plans, the commercial nature of the Russian economy is
emphasised to the bitter end. And since the tone of Stalinised formulae on
socialist society, the socialist country, and the completed construction
of socialism is not changed either, it must be assumed that Stalin’s
favoured thesis on the economy remains entirely in force: in the socialist
economy, products are commodities, and consumption is bought and paid for
in money.
Stalin points out that in the socialist economy, the law of exchange
of equivalents prevails first and foremost – and the
flood of quotations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin need not be repeated with which it was shown
that socialism, even at a lower stage, is not mercantilism, and as
long as commodities are consumed and produced, one remains within the precise
social and historical confines of capitalism: that every time
wages are paid in money, labour power is also commodity, and Stalin’s sophistic
argument that the wage-payer is the proletarian State is worth
nothing in denying this. The correct thesis is that the State is the
proletariat’s when its intervention in the economy is aimed at reducing
and ultimately abolishing the wage-form, not to spread it. There does,
however, exist a historical stage in societies such as Russia, beginning
from pre-capitalism, in which the proletarian State builds
wage-based enterprises (steps towards socialism): but then this State,
as Trotsky and Zinoviev demanded in 1926, does not pass off as socialism
what is capitalism, and calls forms by their names.
Silence on this at the Congress. But beneath the silence, it is clear,
the worst Stalinism!
Another law that Stalin applies to socialism is that of the geometric growth
in the volume of products. We argued that this
was the law of capitalism, it was the law of accumulation itself, and it
ran counter to the only
socialist
plan: to halt the increase in product
and bring down labour time. The structure of the new Five-Year Plan
presented at the Congress, like those before it, is enough here to show
that they are Stalinist to the core, in economics.
And in his conclusion, Stalin, after having issued his new law of maximum
profit capitalism, establishes the ‘fundamental law of socialist
economics’ in these terms: ‘securing the maximum satisfaction of the
ever-growing material and cultural needs of the whole of society
through the uninterrupted increase and perfecting of socialist
production on the basis of superior technique’.
This law, which Stalin crudely contrasts with the one he invented of
the maximum rate of profit, is silent on the reduction of labour effort.
The 20th Congress didn’t say whether this part of the economic formulae
in the
Problems
will also be reformed, nor did it say whether
it will be in the direction of Marxism-Leninism. On such points no clarity can be found except in the presentation of the Five-Year Plan,
and in the indices it promises to change in the Russian economy by
1960.
In nothing, then, can it be found that Stalin’s egregious errors
in the field of economic science have been eliminated in the Marxist
sense, or that they will be in the future, in the new economic
studies. These would have to be redone from scratch: Mikoyan has
not understood how enormous it is to say that the statistical research
of the mighty administrative apparatus of the State lags behind those that Marx
and Lenin carried out in their time, with their means as personal scholars
working in the harshest poverty, and yet achieved greater results. What
greater shame for a socialist State?
Here, too, it therefore remains the case that what is happening, and
the theoretical snub inflicted on Stalin, cannot be taken as a
return
to Marxism-Leninism at any cited step: that a turn of the
helm is made on Stalin’s course, only to distort the path even more,
in all fields, away from that marked out by the great masters of
the revolutionary doctrine!
In essence, here is the historical series and its milestones.
Lenin places at the forefront the general struggle of the proletariat of all
countries to overthrow capitalism, which will die.
Stalin – first phase – the construction of the Russian State, without
renouncing war with the West, which will be overwhelmed.
Stalin – second phase – the productive, technical, and cultural
surpassing of the West, which will wither away, collapsing.
Stalin’s wreckers – the march in peaceful competition with Western
capitalism, to which is granted superiority and the right to life.
The Race to Accumulate
Not the flare-up of class struggle and the contrast between
productive forces and social relations that should determine capitalism, but
the
persuasion
of His Evanescence, the National Public Opinion
of each country in the world, based on the ‘comparison’ between the
data and rates of the West and the East. And thus everything is based
on comparative figures.
While Bulganin, in presenting the programme for the next five years,
outlined the terms of the situation as it would be in 1960, Khrushchev, in
his opening report, made the comparison, using 1955 data, between the
various nations. He provided neither absolute industrial
production indices nor
per capita
indices, i.e. those obtained by
dividing the former by the number of inhabitants of each State.
He merely indicated what today’s production is in relation to that
of 1929, i.e. after 25 years, in the time of the five Russian
Five-Year Plans, setting production in 1929 in each country equal to one
hundred. It is then striking to see that while in Russia today’s index
is about two thousand, i.e. industrialisation is about 20 times greater,
in Western countries the index is ten times smaller; about 200, i.e.
only twice as large.
Here, all the talk gravitates towards Stalin’s marvellous law of
geometric
proportion, purportedly the law ‘of socialism’,
whereas it is nothing other than that of capitalism with integral
accumulation, the
actuarial
law of every bourgeois accountant,
found in the tables of compound interest.
If I want to double the capital (i.e. the income, i.e. the product)
in 25 years, it is enough for
me to set aside and add each year not 4 per cent, as it would seem
by arithmetic division, but about 3 per cent. I do not find
after 25 years 175, but, by the play of compound interest, 200.
In order to have in 25 years not double, but twenty times the
starting figure, it is necessary to increase by 13% every year (not, as it
would seem, by the naive calculation of 76%). The overall result is
therefore that the ‘rate’ of accumulation is more than three times as
high in Russia than in the most developed capitalist countries.
The laughably demagogic effect being sought is to give the impression that
‘socialism’ accelerates production three times as much as capitalism, and
thus triples human welfare and happiness. And so all that remains is for
free peoples and free citizens – of all classes – to freely choose to
apply it everywhere without resistance.
But this would be such economic and Marxist nonsense that not even
Joseph Stalin would have written it.
The Age of Capitalism
Nascent capitalism accumulates at a rapid rate, mature capitalism at
a slow rate. Historically, the ‘rate of accumulation’ decreases (as does
the average rate of profit) – and yet the
mass
of product, of
capital, of income and profit increase, and, as stated above with Lenin,
the world power of Capital. With
socialism
, the rate falls
to a minimum, and in theory, if not to zero, at the same rate as the
annual increase in population (in the most prolific countries, about one
per cent). These are the Marxist conclusions.
In Russia, capitalism was indeed born well before 1929. But
in that year, after the First World War and the years of civil war,
industrialisation was resumed by Soviet power through State
initiative.
At the time of the 1936 Constitution, it was declared that industry
was seven times stronger than it had been before the war, in 1913. Since in the
figures given today at the 20th Congress, the index for 1937, setting
that of 1929 as 100, is 429; it turns out that Russian industry in 1929 was
only slightly stronger than in 1914, about one and a half times
stronger.
If then for all countries we start from 1913, the period becomes 42
years and the rates of the capitalist countries can be considered roughly
the same, i.e. 4 per cent, while that of Russia falls to an average of
7.5 per cent: it was probably already the rate at which... the Tsar
was proceeding (
see below, at the end
).
If we could examine the 40 years of early capitalism, say in England, or
in France (late 17th and 18th centuries), we would find no
less than the Russian 7.5 per cent, and even the 13 per cent of the plans
(
see above
).
So the rule is that a country that has just emerged from feudalism
and entered capitalism has a higher rate of industrialisation than a
country that has long been capitalist. If the rate of industrialisation
were proportional to welfare (in effect, it is to the exploitation
and torment of the wage-earners), the emulative competition being
blathered about would not only be won by the capitalist system, but even
by the feudal one: and this is neither an economic nor a historical
paradox, for those who do not depend on our indigenous illiterate.
Therefore, not only historically but economically, we can verify that Russia
is poorly industrialised, and
runs
for this reason, to emulate the
Western countries, not for the sake of socialism, but for the normal
competition between national capitalisms that
subsequently
descends into the imperialist arena.
Per Capita Indices
Let us suppose that we have arrived at 1960 with the rate of
prosperity that 1955 gave for Russia; and let us also suppose that that
same present good trend for America and Western Europe comes
to a halt, pretending to believe that here there is capitalism and
‘crises’ occur, while in Russia they have been abolished by the
‘socialism’ built there.
Russia will then produce, on the word of Bulganin, 593 million tonnes of
coal, compared to England’s 222 and the United States’ 465. It will
therefore be in first place. That is, in terms of the
absolute
figure.
But, warned the super-capitalist planners in Moscow, we must compete
to beat the West in ‘per capita’ figures. And so let us consider for
Russia 220 million inhabitants (of today), for England 50, and for
America 160. The indices stand in this order: England 4.4 tonnes per
inhabitant, United States 3 tonnes per inhabitant, Russia 2.7 tonnes per
inhabitant. Russia will – except for the
Stalin
formula
! – always be in the rear, in 1960.
The comparison to date is: England 4.4; United States 3; Russia
1.8.
Run then, industrial capitalist Russia!
Take electricity: 1960, United States 612 billion kilowatt-hours,
Russia 320, England 77. Per inhabitant 3.8; 1.54; 1.45 in decreasing
order, i.e., U.S.A., England, Russia. Hence absolute, and relative,
inferiority. But today 3.8; 1.54; 0.77. Run, then, Russia!
A more probative index is steel,
His Majesty Steel
, which dominates
War and Peace, heavy and light Industry, the House as construction and
furnishing; even if it is not eaten.
According to the 1960 plan: Russia 68 million tonnes (45 produced in 1955);
England 20, United States 106. Indices per inhabitant: America 0.66;
England 0.40; Russia 0.31, today only 0.20. So run, Russia, eat
less, produce more.
In all this we have assumed, with the good opinion that
Bulganin-Khrushchev have of Russia, but with the bad one that Stalin
had of the West (corrected in favour of capitalist industry at the 20th
Congress!), that in the West
production
stops,
as will the
population
in Russia, in the five-year period that awaits us.
Khrushchev has shown us that there is a new character on the scene, Bonn’s
Germany, which has rebuilt industry at a robust pace, and with technique
and culture that Russians and Americans can tip their hats to.
Population 52 million (8 million have flocked there from the East and
from abroad). Twenty million or so tonnes of steel produced in 1955;
index, like England, about 0.40. Growth rate equal not to the
low English one, but to the high Russian one! First-rate figures, absolute and
relative, in mass and in speed.
An America-Germany industrial axis surpasses today, and in 1960, a
Russia, England, France axis. After these champions follows Japan.
With the Vanquished or the Victors?
Another law is that the industrial States that were beaten in the war
start to
race
ahead, while the victors move slowly.
The gigantic capitalist octopus, when some of its tentacles have been cut
off, regenerates them with youthful reproductive vigour.
Let us take from Khrushchev’s table the growth rate of
industrial production, as an annual average over the last five years.
America produces calmly at 4.3 per cent per year. England even
more so at 3.5. France, thoroughly battered by war, goes to 6;
vanquished-victor.
Vanquished Italy, a poorly equipped country industrially, already
stands at 9.3 per cent. Utterly vanquished Japan and utterly vanquished
Germany advance at the pace of Russia, that is, at the impressive rates
of 15% and 12.5% per year. At a rate of 15% over the five-year period, one
gains not 75% (a naive calculation), but 100 per cent. In fact, according to
Khrushchev’s table, Russia went from 1082 to 2049 (from 100 to 189),
Germany from 117 to 213 (from 100 to 182), Japan from 115 to 239 (from
100 to 208!). Are these perhaps miracles of
socialism
?! Does Bulganin
propose and expect such miracles from the next plan, with its 65 per
cent increase, from 100 to 165, and thus at the modest rate of 10 and a half per
cent? In the pre-war plans, this rate fluctuated between 10.5 and 13 per
cent. The said figures for the five-year period 1950-55 differ only
slightly from those mentioned below for the nine-year period
1946-55.
The meaning of such a brake on investment in industry, in relation to the
condemnation of Stalin, might appear to be, propagandistic baloney aside,
a socialist one, if it were directed at achieving an improvement in the
disastrous standard of living, an area in which the comparison with Western
indices is defeatist. In effect, it is only a matter of yielding to
proletarian pressure on the one hand, and acknowledging military inferiority to the
imperial West on the other.
Something must be said about the first point in the next part of the
Day, on agriculture and
consumption. And to emphasise, in the economic speeches of the 20th
Congress, that behind the word of a return to Marxist economics there is an
envious homage to American economics, to the modern Keynes, and (as can be
demonstrated) to the troglodytically
pre-Marxist
Malthus.
The laws of historical materialism, no longer mere playthings on the
work desk of the Battilocchi, bend ideology to settle, vainly recalcitrant amid
its mass-produced editorial formulations for the
world market, on the fabric of the basic social structure. This is the
Confession
, not those that were disseminated, obtained from the
defendants in the
purge
trials, and whose bestial extortion is
today being luridly disavowed! Bourgeois society, bourgeois-style congressual
attitudes, bourgeois economic science. Not, to be clear, in the
classical
sense, but in the
vulgar
,
neo-vulgar
,
super-vulgar sense of the expression, which Marx used with
insurmountable contempt.
Third Day: Early Afternoon
Agriculture: Reduced Pace
The glorious figures of the industrial plans, both for the past
five-year period and for the one now beginning (more modest than the
previous one: it promises 65 per cent and not 70, although for 1951-55
it is claimed to have achieved more: 85; so why stop there?), give way
to tones of embarrassment and to blatant reticence when it comes to
agriculture.
As usual, it is not the absolute data that are given, but those
relative to the starting year of the plans. In the past five years
there have been three years of stagnation, and even recoil
(especially in the key positions: cereals and textiles), and the last two years,
especially the last one, have seen a certain recovery that is boasted to be
due to skillful
measures
, while it is well known that there
have been favourable seasons everywhere, and the last one even
exceptional.
In any case,
over the five-year period
, one cannot boast more than
29 per cent for cereals, 9 per cent for cotton, 49 per cent for fibre
flax. We spare ourselves the irony of 107 per cent for
sunflower
: we are not in the habit of feasting on corpses; this Third
Day
of ours, amidst so much evocative material, obliges us to
beg the
lamp of the world
to turn more slowly...
Those growth figures, reduced to an annual rate, are far more
modest than those extolled for industry, where 13.1 per cent was
achieved (against the promised 12; whereas today, as we mentioned in the morning, only a more moderate
11.5 per cent is promised). As a matter of
fact, the annual rate for cereals is only 5 per cent, for flax 8 per
cent, for cotton 1.8.
Nor should it be forgotten that at the same time the population is
growing at a rate well above 1 per cent, such that it is reasonable
to adjust the above figures accordingly.
This is what Khrushchev reports; and what does Bulganin prophesy in the meantime?
The figures are not entirely explicit. The growth rates
expected for the period 1956-1960 are not provided. However, an impressive
figure is given, to the point that it cannot be described as anything other than purely
impressionistic: the aim is to increase overall agricultural production by 70
per cent over the five-year period, i.e., at an average rate of 11 per
cent per year!
If it were true that the Russian proletariat has as many calories at
its disposal today as in England and America (italicised in
l’Unità
of 28 March, which we have already
silenced
on
the industrial point in the last part), in 1960 this would lead to indigestion
and an epidemic of hepatitis (a record in proteins): but more on
this on the subject of the economics of consumption.
In 1960, the global cereal harvest – this is the key figure –
must
be brought to 11 billion poods, a figure which,
among other things, ‘will allow the growing demand for bread from the population to be satisfied’.
Doesn’t that remind you of the historic phase:
qu’ils mangent de la brioche
?
Since livestock production is expected to almost double (which in
the past five-year period has stagnated in terms of livestock and product
statistics, after the first few years of decline; we will not joke about
the figures, encouraging only for swine), there is talk of a
great deal of virgin land being cleared for animal feed, especially
maize, which would take 4 of those 11 billion poods (1800 million
quintals). But the serious fact is that this target
was the same as
that of the 5th Five-Year Plan
, missed
entirely! If, therefore, in 1960, the promised 70 per cent were to be
achieved, one would still have the right to refer to a ten-year and
not a five-year plan: the rate would drop to only 5 and a half per cent.
But there is no risk in predicting that at the call: ‘run’, the Russian countryside will
remain deaf.
The pre-war plans had kept to a modest 1.4 per cent. The
5th Plan promised 8.5 per cent! A genuine
bluff
.
The Burning Agrarian Question
Our entire school has always presented the theory of the agrarian
question as the true cornerstone of the ingenious Marxist construction: we
have done a lot to show how in it we are true to the letter of Marx’s
classical formulation, and how it was held to be the basis of the
historical and social vision in Russia, thesis by thesis, with gigantic
orthodoxy – and
zero
innovations – by Lenin, in all phases.
This superb scientific endeavour is crowned by a historical thesis of
first rank: the capitalist form of production achieved the
immense feat of making it easy for man to consume the most varied
manufactured products, but made it relatively more difficult for him to
consume food and agricultural products.
In modern mercantile bourgeois civilisation, men have plenty of iron
and little bread: hence the cry of the great agitator Blanqui, who
called on the proletarians to overturn this condemnation:
he who has
iron, has bread
! All they have to do, therefore, is to cease using the
magic metal in the workshop and learn how to wield it in the class
war. This Marx and Lenin did not renounce, but elevated, from a
generous spirit of desperate revolt, to the science of Revolution and
class Dictatorship.
The very data presented by the speakers of the Twentieth Congress, read according
to that Marxism which they have forever forgotten, classify them within
the boundary of bourgeois civilisation.
Marx develops the luminous theory by constructing that
ternary
model
of bourgeois society (which is not
two-class
!) adopted
and affirmed by Lenin at every step; and only fools are embarrassed,
considering that Marx’s discovery was made in the examination of mid-19th century English
society, which seemed forever free of
feudal, regurgitated spurious rural forms; and Lenin’s more than
ingenious application is made in early 20th century Russia, where at every step one
moves through the fetters of a prolonged Middle Ages.
The
landowner
has the legal monopoly of
access
to the land
, he collects the
rent
.
The capitalist
entrepreneur
has the means of production in agricultural
industry (as in manufacturing): he collects the
profit
. The
wage-labourer
(in agriculture as in industry), devoid of
land and capital, has nothing but his labour power, and receives the
wage
.
All modern bourgeois countries are full of
spurious
forms of
society that
fall outside
the three types of the
model
. The
tenant farmer
and the
sharecropper
are hybrids between
the second and third types: they provide operating capital and personal
labour, they receive in kind or in money that which combines profit
and wage. The peasant-owner is a hybrid of the three types: he has
ownership of the land, operating capital, and labour power: he should
receive rent, profit, and wage. The accounts of these equivocal forms
show that, in the end, their subjects are below, and not above, the
wage-labourer.
The latter towers above them from a height of a thousand cubits in
full bourgeois society, because it
alone
has the
magical
potential, which Marx discovered, to burst its
shell; and the
spurious
ones are hopelessly nailed to
conservation today, to counter-revolution tomorrow. Marx and Lenin knew,
without this in any way clouding the magnificent doctrinal and
programmatic construction of the Communist Party, that in
pre-bourgeois
societies and in transitions
to
capitalism
– but no further – those agrarian strata play lofty
revolutionary roles.
Russian Rural Society
Let us describe today’s Russian agrarian society according to these
unwavering characteristics in two words (referring to our studies on the ‘agrarian
question’ and on Russia and its revolution for a more extensive
repetition of school and party views).
The function of the landowner would have passed to the State. The same is
declared for the function of the capitalist entrepreneur. Would the entire
agrarian population then consist of wage-labourers?
This may at most refer to a minority, still small, who work in
the sovkhozy, or government-run collective agrarian farms.
A small (?) minority remains distributed in the old spurious
petty-bourgeois peasant forms, apart from other survivals of even older forms,
such as to evade statistics, for reasons that are lengthy to discuss.
The majority are in the
kolkhoz
. The kolkhoznik has a double
figure: insofar as he works in the collective
enterprise of the kolkhoz and insofar as he works in his small family business.
Let us compare the two moments with the classical
ternary
model
.
The land is owned by the State. Therefore, the kolkhoznik would
not be an owner, neither in a collective nor in a personal form.
However, it should be noted that, as developed in the Genoa Meeting of
our movement, the distinction between
ownership
and
enjoyment
in concrete economic terms is meaningless. The
kolkhoz as a collective enterprise is the real owner of the land on
a large scale: it sells its products to the State, it does not pay it
agrarian rent. The kolkhoznik is the owner of his field: he eats or
sells the products and pays no rent to either the kolkhoz or the State.
But, even after renouncing such a formal position, we see today that before
and after the Twentieth Congress, the dwelling-house of the kolkhoz family
(
based on hereditary transmission
) is given as real
property
. See Stalin in
Economic Problems
, his
response to Notkin, and the reference to the 1936 Constitution of the USSR:
and see the promises of recent speakers to increase construction for
the rural population, with the granting of land loans similar to
those in the West, to the massive system of U.S.
mortgages
.
We predict that, as a result of the
emulative competition
,
we shall soon see this system extended to cities and to
industrial wage-earners who are homeowners. Indisputable, then, is the
landed
aspect of the kolkhoznik.
Second:
capitalist
aspect. We do not see that the 20th
Congress denied Stalin on these points. The kolkhoz has a
capital of tools and various materials, which is corporate and not
State-owned
. Only the large machines belong to the State, and
the kolkhoz pays a rental fee for them. As for the individual kolkhoznik, the
stock capital (animals, tools, seeds)
belongs to him in
ownership
. Owner of agricultural operating capital means
entrepreneur, and enjoyer of profit, like the Western tenant farmer.
Third aspect:
wage-earner
. The kolkhoznik is such when he
leaves his little field and does days and hours of work for the kolkhoz, which
records and credits them for the time when the general enterprise
distributes its gross product according to established rules.
Why then should the kolkhoznik, that is, the Russian farmer (for brevity’s sake, let us
offset those of the sovkhozy with those of the lands not
yet kolkhozified) differ from the peasant of other countries,
petty bourgeois to the core? What sense does it make to speak, for the
property of the kolkhoz as a whole, and for that of the kolkhozian family, as
socialist property
? Even less sense than for the State
industrial factories: in industry, our objection is to the wage-form for
production and to the market-form for distribution, and the Marxist
expression is
State capitalism
. In agriculture, we are at the
‘rung’ of State capitalism
only
for the sovkhozy: the kolkhoz-form
is semi-capitalist, because the co-operative aspect alone is capitalist,
insofar as it is
associated
, not yet
State-owned
; the family aspect is a
mixture of private capitalism and of a ‘spurious form’ between ground rent,
stock capital profit, and individual labour.
In this context, what did the 20th Congress have to say? Did it also
overturn
Stalin’s positions here?
An American Announcement
On 21 March (the 20th Congress had
closed on 25 February), the
Associated Press
issued a communiqué from Moscow, which we have
no way of confirming with Soviet sources, but which we reproduce here verbatim.
‘
The Reds administer a bitter pill to the peasants
. – The
Kremlin has now launched the decisive phase of its 39-year war against
the Soviet peasant.
‘The objective is to transform the entire Soviet agricultural population into
landless wage laborers who work for the State.
‘(...) [T]he Soviet government published in Moscow a new set of directives to collective
farms. The most important points were instructions to
reduce sharply the size of private garden and house plots belonging to
Soviet collective farmers and to limit – and eventually end – the rights of farmers to own private livestock.
‘Collective farmers make up the overwhelming majority of the Soviet rural
population with their families. With their families they constitute nearly half the total
population.
‘At present by far the greater part of the land is farmed collectively by
members. The distribution of products from collectivised lands is
closely controlled by the State.
‘(...) [A] large percentage of collective farmers cannot live on what they
get for work on the collective and survive by farming
small private plots of land left to them round their house from private livestock consisting often
of a cow, a pig and some chickens.
‘The new Communist directives aim to reduce drastically the size of
these plots and eliminate the private livestock. The goal is to force the
farmers either to work all the time on collective fields and be completely
dependent on the State or else get off the farm entirely and work in
factories.
‘This is a bitter pill for the Soviet farmers.
‘(...) In the last analysis the Kremlin may be prepared to use brute force to carry
out its plan as it did once before under Joseph Stalin when farms were
collectivized and millions of peasants whose grain had been confiscated
starved until the peasantry as a whole submitted.
‘The government probably will not have to use brute force this time’.
This news raises two difficult questions. Is the general
collectivisation of agriculture by the State part of the Soviet
government’s plans? And if it is, would such a plan have any chance of success?
From these two would follow a third, in the unlikely case of a double
affirmative: would this be an economic transformation with socialist
content? We, as is evident, answer all three in the negative.
The Price ‘Spread’
Undoubtedly, enough was said at the 20th Congress to establish that
the question of the relationship between industry and agriculture is
a troubling one, and its future very unclear.
While many speakers at the Congress deplored the fact that industrial
production costs are too high compared to the bourgeois countries, there is
no doubt that the price of consumer goods – abnormally high in 1924 when
Trotsky came to deplore the grave disorganisation and low output of
industrial production – is falling, and it is this that allows one to
State, amidst obvious exaggerations, that the average standard of
living, and that of urban workers, is rising somewhat.
But the retail cost of foodstuffs sold by the State warehouses could only
be kept low at the expense of a serious sacrifice in the State budget.
Today, therefore, two proposals are emerging: to end the reduction in
retail prices; to raise, as has already been done, the procurement prices
at which the State buys wholesale the products of the kolkhoz farms. At
the same time, the alarm is sounded because the direct products of the
sovkhoz network are too costly, and it has been decided that the third
type of agricultural institution, the State Motorisation Stations, should become
economically autonomous, that is, they must survive on the rentals that the
kolkhozy pay for the large agricultural machines provided on a seasonal basis.
Evidently, all this can only fall back on the State economy and on all State
employees, both urban and rural wage-earners, and is difficult to reconcile with the
projected rise in the average real wage.
The one who can generally fare well in these straits as a
consumer – and saver: perhaps accumulator:
(accumulation only dies
when the right to save is abolished; and only with that is socialism
born!)
– is the member of the kolkhoz who supplements their
share of the labour premium with direct family consumption from their small
private plot.
At the Congress, however, no threats were heard towards the
kolkhozniks that would hurt their growing attachment to rural possession.
In addition to rural homesteads, there was insistent talk of improving,
not reducing – as in the American news – the supply of livestock and other stocks. The
kolkhozy as a whole were strongly urged to improve yields and overall
products, in both agriculture and livestock farming, citing the usual good
examples, as
emulative
as they are sporadic.
Therefore, the drastic transition of all the kolkhozy to sovkhozy does not seem to have
been officially planned. We only find news that the sovkhozy
have developed considerably, cultivating 24.5 million hectares in 1955
compared to 14.5 million two years earlier. However, it cannot be said
that this land has been lost by the kolkhozy, given the even greater area
claimed to have been brought under new cultivation, and the lack, among so
many figures, of a real statistic of the population and land distribution,
known with contradictory data, the analysis of which cannot now be
developed.
The figures given refer to the sown areas. The sovkhozy developed significantly in
the first two Five-Year Plans, and then the kolkhozy developed even more. In
1935, the areas sown by the sovkhozy were already 10 million hectares, and therefore
not much less than in 1955, twenty years later. In 1938, though, it was,
according to another Soviet source, 8.5 million.
The kolkhoz-form has therefore triumphed in Russia. However, the leap in
sovkhoz development announced for the two-year period 1953-55 is remarkable. Why is there silence on
their extension target for 1960? Is there a desire to move towards a
State agrarian capitalism? Certainly, by 1938, the kolkhozy already had
over 500 million hectares, of which almost
two hundred
were
sown, and the State agrarian economy was by far the minority. According
to FAO data, in 1947 the cultivated Russian area would have been 225
million hectares; today it is much greater, but the kolkhoz system
clearly predominates, and this is the fundamental fact.
In the 1938-39 campaign, the industrial State bought 88 per
cent of its grain from the kolkhozy, 11 per cent from
its
sovkhozy, and 0.2 per cent from individual farms. This total amount
was, according to Stalin, 40 per cent of total production.
Historical data on the area sown: 1913, 105 million hectares; 1941, 137
million hectares. Of these, cereals accounted for 94 to 102 million
hectares. Khrushchev admits that the area in 1950 was the same: 102.9;
increased in 1955 to 126.4.
With improved yields, the total cereal harvest, which was 800 million
quintals in 1913, reached 1200 million in 1937 (
La Coltura
Sovietica
, Einaudi, no. 1, July 1945).
One and a half times in 24 years means just one and a half per cent
per year on average. The same order of magnitude as the
increase in population!
If, by 1960, we will be at 1800 million quintals of cereals as announced,
this means that today we are only at around 1050: where is the
progress
?
Let us also remember that the ‘Stalin Target’ before the war that
devastated Russian ‘granaries’ was 8 billion poods (about 1300
million quintals) of cereals. We are in open regression!
The Russian worker eats today by virtue of a single historical fact –
half bourgeois revolution, half
sub-bourgeois
– and we will
leave it to Pavlovsky, author of the above-mentioned writings, to say it.
‘Industrialisation has made it so that agriculture in the Soviet Union is
no longer forced
by a lack of domestic demand to sell its products on
the world market at very low prices for the producer
’.
Industrialisation, and the Iron Curtain!
The Russian worker made the revolution, but pays more for his bread
than the foreign capitalist.
However (
Dialogue with Stalin
), to form, in Asiatic-feudal
economies, national markets, is a genuine
revolution
!
The Insoluble Antithesis
The uncertainty as to whether the Moscow regime’s
‘agrarian policy’ will take a direction towards big capitalism or
small sub-capitalism expresses for us the impossibility for a
decidedly mercantile and bourgeois social form to escape the
stranglehold of the conflict between agriculture and manufacturing. In
Mikoyan’s resolute presentation, the petty-bourgeois remedy seems to
prevail, and not the bold and ‘Ricardian’ one that responds to the
Associated Press
news: totalitarianism of wage-earning
enterprise in the countryside. Ricardo, at the time, wanted the capitalist State
to confiscate all ground rent, reducing bourgeois-type society to a
binary
: entrepreneurs and wage-earners. Marx prophetically
demonstrated that this, while not being a victory for the proletarians on whom
the entire burden would always fall, was a utopia, within the limits of
mercantile capitalism: in fact, no bourgeois code has ever abolished the right
to land ownership. Nor has the Soviet one. According to the same
doctrine, it will not be able to exit the kolkhoz-form, in which
a considerable part of the land remains fragmented, and with it the
capital invested in it.
Here are Mikoyan’s words. ‘The main task (read: after Stalin’s death)
consisted in liquidating the backwardness in agriculture, in eliminating the
imbalance between the development of industry and that of agriculture,
an imbalance
particularly dangerous
for our country, the
further accentuation of which would have been a
serious obstacle
to our development’. And how to do this? ‘This task was accomplished
with a series of measures, such as the raising of the
material
interest of the kolkhozniks,
the conquest of virgin and
uncultivated land for agriculture. In two years, 33 million hectares of
new land were brought under cultivation. Could we have dreamed of
such a thing in the past?’.
What these gentlemen cannot
dream
of is maintaining the
mercantile link between industry and land, while at the same time
resolving the insoluble contradiction between the two fields of the
economy.
Mikoyan comforts himself in the comparison with America, where the
government does not resolve problems by clearing new land, but by
taking 10 million hectares out of cultivation because too much food is
produced. He infers that these are the contradictions of capitalism,
incurable ones. But this explanation also applies Marxistically
to Russia: will the
emulative
competition be about who sows the most,
or who sows the least? It’s not pure rhetoric when even Mikoyan
breaks his lance for the emulative cause in the most exaggerated form: ‘We
Soviet citizens and the American people fully approve of this emulation!’.
Asinine Revolution
News of the appeal to the kolkhozy is reported in
l’Unità
of
the 10th in the form of a call to
double
(sic!) agrarian
production in
three
or even
two
years, and for the
Ukraine, fertile as it may be, in just
one
.
This is the
science of planning
, after a binge of emulative
whisky. What is the forecast on the
pace
to be maintained, which, in
practice, we have seen limited to a maximum of 1.5 per cent per year?
After extensive preliminary calculations, has the doubling in
three
years been planned instead of 70 per cent in five years? Then the average
pace
was calculated to be 26 per cent per year. If
it is
two
years, it accelerates to 41 per cent! If in
one
, clearly, one hundred per cent. If
programmes
exist, how can an ‘appeal’ quadruple even the estimated
rate
? Multiply the cumbersome Sixth Plan by
twelve
?
It would then be certain that
meat production
would
double in 1956. One can only deduce from this that whisky consumption
has quadrupled (it would be unemulative to speak of the vulgar
vodka
). If you want to double the meat, you need to double the
national livestock population. This plan can be done for rabbits or for mice: not at
all for pigs. As for
cattle
, in addition to breeding cows, there are
bulls, oxen, calves, and heifers. Each cow takes almost a year to have a
calf, and produces milk for almost as long. Anyone who wishes to have
a larger number of animals in a year, even in their dreams, cannot go beyond these limits. Even the
technique of artificial insemination cannot yield much
gain. To avoid boring with calculations, we will simply say that
the most skilled livestock farmer has only one way to produce double the
meat: either buy animals abroad, or
eat the livestock
and... see the
herd reduced by one hundred per cent!
A first-rate livestock-raising country is Holland. In 1939, it had
2,817,000 head of cattle: the Germans gobbled up a large part of them, and by
1948, there were only 2,222,000 left. By 1953, they had brought the number back up to
2,930,000. We believe this to be a technically unsurpassable
‘pace’: it amounts to a 31 per cent increase over five years; average annual rate of about
five and a half
per
cent.
How can we explain the enormous lies of 26, 42, 100 per cent, which take off
at supersonic speed from the columns of
l’Unità
? It is, however,
possible; without joking about the miracle of doubling the number of donkeys in a year...
in Italy, towards which that wretched rag is heading, all the
while babbling that there has been a
crop revolution
in
Muscovy! To be
emulated
(of course). In worthy competition
with
Yankee
donkeydom.
The appeal to the kolkhozniks could be of a tone reminiscent of the
news released by the
Associated Press
. There are animals in Russia in quantities not
much lower than in Holland, and in the countryside, there are the
famous
proteins
of
l’Unità
. Perhaps it is a matter of
threatening the peasants so that they do not eat, in the very bourgeois
sanctity of their homes
, the meat that does not reach the
proletariat in the factories. In that case, it becomes plausible that within a year
the worker, who has no ‘livestock’ or food reserves, will receive
double. What can we deduce from this? Immense conclusions!
Individual peasant property in the hybrid
form
of the
kolkhoz generates, in Stalin’s view and against Yaroshenko,
relations of production
and therefore
of class
. The
wage-earning proletariat, in the factories as well as in the
sovkhozy
–
to whom we learn would be extended the concession of small private
gardens – is the class exploited not only by State capitalism but also
by a privileged peasantry. While it starves, as we know, not for
meat
, but for
bread
, it can no longer mobilise into the
countryside the historically glorious armed requisition squads of the great years
– even Stalin’s!
This would be scandalous today, now that
dictatorship
is
rejected, and a Nenni couldn’t
bray
that it is a
matter of liquidating ‘war communism’ in order to introduce
constitutional democracy and superimpose on the State, and more so on
the
party
, a
robed
judiciary!
What therefore stands before global emulation is a low,
cowardly, lousy, and idiotic rural democracy, playing servant to big
international capitalism, selling the skin of the heroic Russian
and world working class, stabbed in the back, worse than in 1914, by
trade union and electoral leaders, who fatten themselves on its demoralisation. The time has not yet come to drown the career of that group in the mud: this joy
belongs to the rising generation.
What Did Stalin Think?
Stalin was decidedly in favour of preserving the kolkhozian agrarian
form, and in his writing he rejected all proposals for ‘reform’ of this
system. Comrades Sanina and Venzher had demanded that ‘the kolkhoz be
expropriated’, i.e. that kolkhoz property be declared the
property ‘of the whole people’, and this ‘following the example of what
was at the time done with capitalist property (read: industry)’. Stalin is
adamant: this proposal is absolutely wrong, unquestionably
unacceptable!
This proposal would be that of the
Associated Press
news,
but we must reiterate that there is no evidence whatsoever that the 20th
Congress sided with those two comrades, against Stalin’s
quos
ego
.
Ineffable, however, are the arguments of these people: kolkhoz property
is
socialist
property (see above), and we can in no way proceed
with it as we did with capitalist property. And he adds: from the fact that
kolkhoz property is not the property of the whole people, it in no way
follows that kolkhoz property is not socialist property.
Evidently, we are in the regime of the High Priest who, wherever he chooses to
touch, renders everything stamped as ‘socialist’. The factory owned by
the State, the territory of the kolkhoz and its tools, the peasants’ small plots and their
few reserves are all indeed property, but with the ‘socialist’ stamp. And we, who
have always believed that socialism means no one’s property, a system of
non-ownership!
So Stalin, in order to defeat the idea of nationalising the kolkhoz,
pontificates, allowing himself to quote Engels, that the transfer of
property from groups and individuals to the State is not the best form of
socialisation! And he dares to explain this on the grounds that the State
will wither away! In the first
Dialogue
, we showed that the same
critique of nationalisation by Engels (at that time, of Bismarck’s on the railways)
proves that formulas for the transfer of property to the
Nation
, to the
People
, and even that (which would
be better) of property to
Society
, have nothing to do with
the socialist programme. Marxistically, one could have spoken of
‘property’ of the class-State, of the dominant and dictatorial
Proletariat. But they will all die together: Class Divisions – Political
State and Dictatorship – Property, whatever form it takes.
According to the 20th Congress, are Stalin’s formulas acceptable? Without
a doubt; and at most, even more pro-capitalist formulas will be
given.
Anti-Marxist
‘Emulation’
One of Stalin’s longest and harshest chapters in the
Problems
was dedicated to L. D. Yaroshenko. The non-Soviet press
now reports that this same Yaroshenko had, after the 20th Congress,
reared his head again (he had offered to compile the treatise on
Political Economy; and Stalin had refused permission in his usual boorish
manner).
Pravda
has now warned that it was not enough today to
join in the chorus of insults against Stalin in order to win applause, and has called those
statements anti-Marxist, ‘provocative and directed against the party’,
recalling that at the time Stalin accused Yaroshenko of
following the economic ideas of Bukharin, which had been condemned by Lenin.
We would take neither Stalin nor the editor of yesterday’s or today’s
Pravda
as arbiter or judge. For every verdict issued, at least
four falsifications.
Lenin’s condemnation of Bukharin regarding his theory on the Russian economy and
the new programme of the Bolshevik Party dates back to 1919; it is contained in a
document of extraordinary interest, which we will use extensively in
the report on Russia currently being published. Stalin killed
Bukharin later, in 1938; very well. But between 1919 and 1938, Bukharin
was Stalin’s ‘great economist’, when it was a matter, after Lenin’s death,
of strangling Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and other valiant Marxist economists
with the usual methods. When the no less valiant Bukharin opened his
eyes to the theoretical and political ruin, he too was murdered and
disgraced as a Marxist.
The name of Bukharin therefore shuts no one’s mouth; the dead and the living
rinse
their own, as in a popular southern saying, before
using that name as the title of a degenerate doctrine. The cake between
Stalin and Yaroshenko must otherwise be shared, as, if the news is correct, between
Pravda
in the style of the 20th Congress and Yaroshenko.
What did this one claim? Convinced, like Stalin, that Russian
society was the pure image of socialism, he assumed that one should no
longer speak of political economy, even Marxist political economy,
because there is only one political economy, the one applicable to
capitalism! Today, Yaroshenko said, only a science of ‘rational
planning’, or something similar, is needed. Continuing in this vein,
he argued that there was no longer any need to speak in Russia of
productive forces
coming into conflict
with relations of
production
, or forms of ownership, and that it was only a question of
the existence and presence
of the former
, without the latter!
Stalin rightly replied that in Russia there are still relations of
production ‘between men’, and not just problems of ‘things’, as
this will only happen after the total disappearance of the social
classes:
only then
will men not be slaves to the force
of economic laws and will control production and allocation in rational
forms. Relations of production are
forms of ownership
; in Russia, these are State ownership of factories, and precisely, the
property of kolkhozy and kolkhozniks.
It was a great piece of stupidity on the part of Yaroshenko not to see a ‘relation of
production’ in the pay given to the industrial worker in exchange for his
labour-time, or in the purchase of a cow by the kolkhoznik in exchange for the
produce of his land, or his wage-share in the kolkhoz.
But Stalin was incorrect in saying that, in a
socialist
society,
the laws of Marxist political economy, which describe mercantile capitalism
and the wage system, would nonetheless have a concrete existence.
It is easy to settle the verbose debate. They were
both
wrong, provided that the true Marxist thesis is restored: Russian
society is a class society, mercantile and capitalist, and within it the
laws of Marxist economics relating to the capitalist mode of production
apply, and which Marx was the first to demonstrate were ‘not eternal
like the laws of physical nature, and destined to fall’. Then the
relations of production, or forms of ownership, are clearly identified in
Russia along with the productive forces, and in fierce conflict with them.
The alleged accomplished ‘construction’ of socialism, in
which both Stalin and Yaroshenko believe, is no longer identified there.
Stalin, compelled by his Marxist subconscious, strives in this
strange debate to argue that the bourgeoisie itself, in its revolution,
conscious of economic laws, built industrial capitalism,
contributing even more (and even supporting a correct concrete argument against Yaroshenko)
to that dreadful disorder in doctrine, which will weigh
on his memory more than the series of murders, and which the
survivors of his court will never be able to shake off.
Lenin and Bukharin
Lenin was often fierce with Bukharin, and the moments were
equally tragic for Russia and the Party, but it was a different
atmosphere, among tried and tested Marxists; those discussions have left a
valid and still valuable mark, and, as urgent as it may be now, to use an
unpleasant word, ‘topical’.
Bukharin had prepared the report on the programme for the 8th Congress of
the Bolshevik Communist Party on 19 March 1919. Lenin, who was co-rapporteur with him
for the commission, criticised Bukharin’s draft.
He, influenced by two great contemporary events, the
spread of the imperialist phase of capitalism throughout the world and
the advent of the full dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, had
presented the entire struggle that constituted the task of the
proletarian party as a struggle against that form of capitalism, and
described the structure, the historical process, and fall of
capitalism solely according to the characteristics of the monopolist era,
completely omitting the part relating to the ‘old capitalism’ of
competition and liberalism.
Lenin’s theoretical line on that occasion is a true jewel of
doctrine and vigorous realism.
Don’t run too fast, Bukharin! – the Teacher had to warn. Hence the
ideological parasite Stalin, many years later, calls Yaroshenko a
Bukharinite, rushing into arguments about full communism where one is only
at
socialism
(according to him): don’t rush, Yaroshenko!
First of all, Lenin clarified something we hold so dear: capitalism
is always the same;
imperialism
is not a new typical social
form, but only a
superstructure
of capitalism.
Interpret: imperialism is a new
political
form, based on
aggression and war, of the only
mode of production: capitalism
,
which remains unchanged.
Then, as for Russia, he explains to Bukharin that Russia had
not yet reached fully monopolist and imperialist capitalism, but that it was still a matter of
gobbling down minimal and competitive capitalism,
even wishing for
it
. But what revolutionary vigour in this diagnosis,
which will be more ruthless in the fundamental speech of 1921 on the tax
in kind, another milestone in the great course and in our study! When
Stalin apes him and says to Yaroshenko, not that we have finally reached,
at least for industry, the imperialist superstructure of capitalism,
which Bukharin already saw 35 years earlier, but that we are in full
socialism
, both make one sick.
We have already deferred this completed analysis to its proper
place: but certain quotations have such force, against the shameless who have
labelled their filthy posturing at the 20th Congress as a return to Lenin,
that they prove unavoidable here.
‘Nowhere in the world has monopoly capitalism existed in a whole
series of branches without free competition, nor will it exist.
‘We say that we have arrived at the dictatorship. But we must know
how
we arrived at it. The past keeps fast hold of us,
grasps us with a thousand tentacles
, and does not allow us to
take a single forward step, or compels us to take these steps badly in
the way we are taking them (...) Capitalism, in its primordial forms of the
mercantile economy, leads, and has been leading us’.
We repeat that it is not here that we provide the analysis of this powerful
development, in which Bukharin is once again brought into line on the
question of the self-determination of peoples, where, Lenin
explains, one must indeed say
people
and not
proletarian
class
! No, dear many friends of the left, who will certainly not take
offence at being compared to the formidable Marxist Bukharin: Marxism is
never simple!
To You,
‘Leninists’!
Lenin goes straight to the point in his demonstrations. We are lagging behind
even in highly advanced Germany! Why?
‘Take, for instance, Germany (1919), the model of an advanced
capitalist country whose organisation of capitalism,
finance
capitalism
, was superior to that of America (...) She is a
model
, it would seem. But what is taking place there? Has the
German proletariat become differentiated from the bourgeoisie? No! It
was reported that the majority of the workers are opposed to Scheidemann
(right-wing Social-Democrat, slayer of Liebknecht and Luxemburg) in only
a few of the large towns’.
How could this happen
? Cries Lenin, intent on curbing the
ultra-leftism
of the incandescent Bukharin. May these words fall upon the
disgusting faces of those who weld to the blasphemy of a return to Lenin,
the slimy invitation to popular fronts, to left-wing
majorities:
‘IT WAS OWING TO THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN THE SPARTACISTS AND THE
THRICE-ACCURSED GERMAN MENSHEVIK-INDEPENDENTS, WHO MAKE A MUDDLE OF
EVERYTHING AND WANT TO WED THE SYSTEM OF WORKERS’ COUNCILS TO A
CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY!’
Lenin the theorist classifies Russia as being under the primordial capitalist stage.
Lenin the revolutionary, at the same time, lashes out against contact with the
left-wing independents, duly pounded into the mortar at the 2nd World
Congress. Today they would like to pay, with the profanation of a more-than-whitewashed sepulchre, for the right to invoke Lenin’s name, while at
the same time affirming, with the language of that corpse, that the
Russian economy is full socialism, extending in Europe the
monstrous embrace even further than today’s Scheidemanns, discrediting
the proletarian Dictatorship in the shady corner under the bourgeois
Constitution.
In due time, another writing will be useful to us, from October 1919: Economics
and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. But even
here it is impossible not to write down some of Lenin’s words, which
ought to be tattooed with a fiery tip on the snout of the ‘returners
to Lenin from Stalin’:
‘If we compare all the basic forces or classes and their
interrelations (Leninist, of course, blasphemes to be Yaroshenko too,
forerunner
of the asses kicking the Lion!...), as modified by
the dictatorship of the proletariat, WE SHALL REALISE HOW UNUTTERABLY
NONSENSICAL AND THEORETICALLY STUPID IS THE COMMON PETTY-BOURGEOIS IDEA
SHARED BY ALL REPRESENTATIVES OF THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL, THAT THE
TRAN-SI-TION TO SO-CIA-LISM IS POSSIBLE “BY MEANS OF DE-MO-CRA-CY” IN
GENERAL’.
The dashes are ours, but the quotation marks around the words
by means of democracy
are from the original, or absurd, obtuse,
Leninist
gravediggers!
It is not at all strange then that, in the camp of the renegades, one is
devoted to the mercantile fetish in Russia, and to the liberal one
abroad. These, which we are offering, are the Marxist keys to history;
and not the foolish astonishment of journalists who get excited about elections and
legalisms here, while up there it would simply be a matter of
finding someone who can skilfully regain the same power, which allowed
Big Moustache, as in ‘Domenica del Corriere’, to give
Khrushchev the runs
, shouting at him with a sneer: ‘dance,
khokhol, go on and dance the ghopak!’.
Wheezing still under one last quotation: ‘GENERAL TALK ABOUT
FREEDOM, EQUALITY, AND DEMOCRACY IS IN FACT BUT A BLIND REPETITION OF
CONCEPTS
SHAPED
BY THE RELATIONS OF COMMODITY PRODUCTION’.
Let these envoys from Moscow go ahead and devote themselves to the elections. They will get votes,
let all those who, on whatever side, want to speculate on it
know that. The more dirty tricks they pull, the more ghopaks they
dance, the more votes they get.
It is enough for us to know from which origin comes the
shape
affixed to their repugnant livery, and the strict
magic
of
Marxist determinism tells us so: from the
relations of
production
which not only prevail in Russia, despite Yaroshenko,
but are
mercantile
relations for which it is easy merchandise,
to be bought for cheap, and with figures lower than Stalin prizes, the
slutty vanity of a flock of candidates.
From Production to Consumption
When Stalin wants to convince Yaroshenko that even in a socialist
system an economic calculation must be applied, he cites Marx’s
demonstration in the famous letter on the Gotha Programme, in which Marx
explains how in social production, various shares of the total product must always be deducted
in order to satisfy, before providing for the
consumption of workers, a series of general and public needs, and
among other things a share for the amortisation of worn-out means of
production. But Marx, in saying this, did not intend to concede that such
calculations, after which the consumers will be allocated their shares, should
be carried out by means of the mercantile and monetary mechanism, and on the basis of enterprise and
individual balance sheets. He only wanted to show the futility of the Lassallean and
petty-bourgeois formula of the ‘undiminished fruit of labour’, which
should be due to every participant in the productive force,
showing that even in a non-bourgeois economy, concrete
deductions will have to be made from the ‘fruit’ and product – no longer
individual or enterprise-based, but
social
– before passing on what
remains to
general social
consumption.
Developing in the
Dialogue with Stalin
and elsewhere this
abyssal distinction between bourgeois and socialist economic mechanics,
we said that it is not a matter of setting the
surplus value
left by each worker to zero, equalising the necessary, remunerated labour
with the total labour provided: this is a false expression of
socialism, and is only an
unsustainable
version of individualistic
economics. And we expressed ourselves with the crude formula that
socialism does not suppress surplus value at all, but tends to lower
precisely the hours of necessary,
paid
labour to the minimum
possible, and finally to zero.
Quantitative economic analysis shows that the socialist problem does
not lie in a different partition of income, but in the global
socialisation of all labour and product, for a social satisfaction of
mass consumption: bourgeois law and accounting, after
surviving a transitional phase, remain suppressed.
This obvious result – not understood by 95 socialists out of 100 –
ties in with Marx’s statements in
Capital
: the higher the
national wealth (a theme on which Adam Smith erected the mighty
construction of capitalist economic science) and hence the national
income, the more the working class is beaten down and nailed to the
servitude of capital, the more the general increase in product for the
same amount of labour, ensured by science and technology, is, not so much
absorbed by the personal collegiate of capitalists in large part,
and to a lesser extent by the working class, but for the most part
squandered in the disorder and absurdity of the individual
mercantile management of relations.
Given that in Russia the bourgeois collegiate and the State are one and
the same, what sense will they give in the ‘Textbook’ to the theory of
national income
, in the chapter demanded by Stalin and the 20th
Congress? How will this doctrine present the distribution of income between
consumption and new investment, for reproducing capital and expanding its
accumulation?
Evidently, this chapter will not be written in the language of Marx
in the Gotha letter, but in the style of the Keyneses and the ‘welfare’ and
‘prosperity’ economists. The formula of global emulation, the apex of the
vacillating construction of the 20th Congress, means, in economics, only
this, that in both camps the race for income, total or ‘per capita’,
and for the margin of productive reinvestment, at a rate that
exceeds population growth (here is the link with the
decrepit Malthus!), is implanted in a direction opposite to the
immediate and historical interest of the proletariat, to the
revolutionary realisation of world socialism, to the liquidation of
class servitude.
A Mad and Lost Challenge
The challenge that the 6th Five-Year Plan wants to issue to the West
is not only defeatist for socialism because it shifts class antagonisms
to national rivalries, and because it flaunts the transition from a clash of
military forces to a peaceful economic confrontation, but because on
this terrain the game is lost before it is even played. For three reasons,
therefore.
Bulganin announces that Russian ‘national income’ will rise by 60 per cent in the
five-year period to 1960, equivalent to 10 per cent annually. The
forecasts of the
euphorics
on the other side of the Atlantic
are much more measured, although a rigorous Marxist analysis has the task of
proving that even their optimism runs on stilts.
A hypothesis like Bulganin’s depends on three points: adequate
increase in gross industrial product – adequate increase in gross
agricultural product – division of the net product between consumption
and reinvestment.
The mere fact that reinvestment in productive facilities is referred to,
even in the Russian schemes, as income
saving
, is further proof of the
common nature of the two economies. In State capitalism, all enterprise
income should accrue not to individuals but to the State-owner, and we
therefore have the strange economic figure of the State, not an absorber
of citizens’ savings on their incomes, but itself a saver. This is nothing more
than forced saving, and not of the socialistic veto on every private – and
in the end also public – possibility of accumulation.
Savings and Enjoyment
The concepts are arduous, the concrete figures perhaps less so. Here’s
how the race begins.
We know that industrially, the first condition can hold. The American
rate is about 5 per cent annually, the Russian rate 10 per cent. How
much is consumed? A report from the same old
Associated
Press
on the successful year 1955 – in Russia, the satellite
countries, and Western Europe – gives us this comparison regarding the
consumption of the typical product, steel, after confirming the
favourable figures for the increase in production. In the United States
and Western Europe, 40 per cent would be used for consumer goods and
building construction, the rest for new industrial machinery and military
uses.
In Russia, only 9 million tonnes of the known 45, from 1955, would go
to consumption, and the rest (80 per cent) to industry and war.
Bulganin may respond here that by reaching the well-known 68 in 1960, the
increase of 23 million tonnes will be distributed differently. There is
only one way: disarmament.
As for agricultural production, the case is different. The
rate of increase in the United States is minimal: 0.5 per cent, according to a
table from the
Manchester Guardian
, which confirms Khrushchev’s
criticism. But Russia itself was moderate in the pre-war Plans: it
achieved
no more than 1.4 per cent
. Old Marx, you said
it; under capitalism, agriculture does not
run
, industry does.
Inverse theorem: where statistics say as much, there capitalism
flourishes!
Therefore, the planned 11 per cent for five years, as we have said, cannot
happen. And without the planned 70 per cent over the five-year
agricultural period, the second condition not being met, the 60 per cent rise
in
income
will remain an illusion.
Therefore, no rosy predictions can be made regarding the increase in
average consumption and the standard of living.
Western economists seem to be right in establishing that the percentage of
funds set aside for capital investment is much higher in Russia than in the
West. Until 1950, it hovered around one-fifth in Great Britain and the
United States, in Russia almost double that (38 per cent). In Italy, if
the ‘Vanoni Plan’ were to be followed, the rate would be high, but not
at the level of the Russian one.
It is not a matter here of a comparison between capitalism and
socialism (in which case the latter would be screwed), but between
capitalism in mature countries and – damn them – victors of all
hegemonic wars, and capitalism in
beginner
countries,
or of those resurgent after the devastation of defeat.
‘Popular’ Consumption
The equivocal side of
euphoric
theories is that they chase
the
average
index, and if pressed about the
extreme
indices, they assume that the national
levelling
of income and consumption is improving. Americans and
Russians are both very suspect in this regard. In any case, for a true Marxist,
distributive injustice is the last of capitalism’s evils, and
those who have understood this much can, for now, give free rein to
emulation in lying.
According to Bulganin – and relying on the 70 per cent five-year
increase in agricultural product – given the 60 per cent increase in
income, it will be possible to improve real wages by 30 per cent, while
the incomes of the kolkhozniks will increase by 40 per cent. We would thus still be within
the cut of the capitalist scissors, in that those who produce abundant
manufactured goods receive less, and those who produce scarce foodstuffs
receive more. Where, even in an immediate sense, is the
leading
function of the working class over the petty bourgeois?
According to Khrushchev, the 5th Five-Year Plan would have seen overall
income rise by 68 per cent, workers’ wages by 39 per cent, and rural
earnings by 50 per cent. The ratio is the same. Thus, no ‘turning point’ in
this economy of industrial capitalism, stingy with the workers, and of a
relatively
prosperous
petty-bourgeois peasantry.
Khrushchev claimed that three-quarters of the income is used to satisfy
the
needs
of the population, thus contrasting 25
per cent with the 38 per cent deduced by the Oxford economists. But can
one, by setting aside, through a bureaucratic and wasteful mechanism (as even recent
criticisms note), only a quarter of the
net
product of one
year, achieve a 12 per cent increase in the
gross
product the following
year, which means adding the same amount, or slightly less, to the entire capital value of the means of
production, to increase technical productivity? The total
product would have to reach half the capital (understood in the bourgeois sense), and
this, especially in Russia, is absurd. The madness that rages there is to exalt
investment, to trample on consumption.
The Modern Convict
If, therefore, the figures on the improvement in consumption are to be taken
with a grain of salt, the same must be said of the promises to
reduce working hours.
Should one have to wait until 1957 to achieve six seven-hour days, i.e. 42
hours per week, or five eight-hour days, i.e. 40? Apart from the serious
doubt concerning the calculation assumptions, this is a goal already known,
for example, to Italian industry, and the consideration of the ‘absence
of unemployment’ is not enough to make up for the paltriness of such
results. The delights of modern mercantile civilisation and welfare
and credit assistance – another field in which a vast aping of the West is
announced – consists in making the human army of labour swing, amidst
terrifying uncertainties, between the extremes of the full freedom to starve to
death, and the slave-like form of employment, which is as
total
as it is
forced
, and which, in this world that, according to those gentlemen, has become conquerable by ‘persuasion’, tends more and more
to spread from the atmosphere of war, in which it arose terrifyingly,
to that of peace. Of
their
horrible peace.
The ancient slave and serf are beginning to be able to look down on the
modern worker. They, it’s true, could not move from their place of
employment; but neither were they required to go to war. The modern worker lives
under the nightmare of war and the high probability of death, injury,
imprisonment, and forced labour. Whereas ancient warfare moved at a pace similar to that
of civil life, modern warfare
flies
. And it starves every
non-combatant thousands of miles ahead of the front lines (while the
soldier, under certain modern aspects, even enjoys himself). In peacetime,
they stuff him with
statistical
prosperity and commercial
freedom: we see that even here at the Kremlin they dream of a real
emulative orgy: queue-free department stores, various and enticing goods,
titillation of fashions and tastes, pros and cons. Soon we will
arrive at America’s masterpiece: consumption on credit. With this system,
the worker, perhaps deluded into thinking that he is a shareholder in
the company’s capital, is no longer the owner, but a debtor of his
home furnishings, and if he also owns the house, of its value.
He is practically like the slave, who was indebted for the net value of
his person, after being fed.
This American system of credit, which binds the worker to his
workplace and to debt, has already been defined as industrial feudalism. A
further step in the ‘growing misery’, which means the loss of all economic
‘reserves’. The classic proletarian has zero reserve, the modern one
has
negative
reserves: he must pay a large sum to be able to
go naked wherever he wants. How to pay, if not, Shylock-style, with a
slice of buttock?
The necklace of high living standards and welfare, ideals common
to the two competing worlds of contemporary ‘quantitative’ civilisation,
is worth the barbed wire of concentration camps, watched over by all the
flags.
Lean Dance of Calories
We were saying that, according to
l’Unità
, today, and not in
1960, the food consumption of the Russian people would be at the level
of 3020 calories, compared to the 2340 of the Italians, while only America and England
are slightly higher, at 3100. The Russian would have 92 grams of protein
per day, compared to 75 for the Italian; he would be beaten only by the
Frenchman with 99.
At the 20th Congress, no figures were given on food
consumption except to state that it had doubled over the five-year period,
not in terms of consumption quantities, but in terms of distribution through State
and co-operative networks, a very different thing.
Statistics show that every poorly fed population, such as
the Italian, while on average endowed with grains and sugars, is
deficient in meat, milk, and fats. Above them are England, the United States, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, the Scandinavian countries, and also France,
especially as they have a strong livestock supply. Countries with
a predominantly plant-based diet have below 2500 calories.
The meat supply depends, especially in closed economies, on the number
of cattle, pigs, etc., relative to the population.
Let us limit ourselves to a comparison between the United States and
Russia, and... Italy.
Cattle: United States 0.66 head per inhabitant. Russia 0.25. Italy
0.20. Pigs: United States 0.34. Russia 0.13. Italy 0.10.
We can make a cereals comparison; accepting for Russia
Bulganin’s
1800 million quintals, in 1960, today they are – as already
mentioned – 1050 million, which makes 4.7 quintals per inhabitant.
United States 1400 million quintals, 9 per inhabitant. Italy 160
million, 3.5 per inhabitant.
There is enough to establish that, while Russia’s supply is greater
than Italy’s, it is certainly vastly below America’s (and similar
countries), and it is pure invention that food calories are at the
American level of over three thousand: they cannot be, given the Italian intake of
2340, more than 2500 at most, even deliberately exaggerating.
It is well known how these indices vary in Italy between the North and the
South. The cause of this has recently been attributed once again to the spectacular
prolificacy of the South. An additional 891,000 inhabitants in five years,
out of 12 million: 7.5 per cent!
Khrushchev has said that in the five years of the 5th Plan, the Russian
population (we always mean the entire USSR) has increased by an impressive
16.3 million.
Assuming that in 1950 it was 202 million, the increase is 8
per cent
in five years, or about
one and a half per cent per year
(If – as recently announced – the population of the U.S.S.R. was only 200
million, it is clear
today
that the annual rate of increase would be
even higher).
Khrushchev concludes that this proves that Russians eat a lot! Even here
at this trivial level, one speaks like anti-Marxists! Where much is begotten,
there little is eaten. Does Khrushchev want the
indices of England, America, New Zealand, and Scandinavia as concerns new
babies? In Russia, not only is little eaten, but rations are hardly improving,
because agricultural production barely grows at the same rate (in
reality, not in boasts) as the population.
Russian hunger is on the same level as that (which the gentlemen
of
l’Unità
season in quite different, but always pharisaical,
literature) of Partinico, Venosa, Barletta.
Emulation
would lead, once again, to the doffing of the hat
to the most ignoble, crassly bourgeois and anti-revolutionary countries
in the world.
And it will quickly lead to that.
Figures and Pacifism!
A strong argument from the American side, to which, as far as we know, no Soviet response has been
given, welcomes the Russian announcement, following the 20th
Congress, of a reduction in Russian armed forces personnel by
millions of men.
Over the last eight years, the Russian population has been growing at
an overwhelming rate, as it did before the last war. But the birth rate
and growth abruptly came to a halt in 1942, 1943, and 1944 due to
the terrible massacres in the struggle with the Germans. Those ‘classes’
are now reaching military conscription age. The curve of the decline of available sixteen-year-old
males from 1956 to 1960 will be frightening.
We do not endorse the figures, but they are as follows (
Rome Daily
American
, 29 May 1956). Males born in Russia in one year rose from
1,300,000 in 1934 to 2,400,000 in 1939 (the increase seems to us
too artificial). They fell in 1940 to 2,100,000, in 1941 to 1,800,000, in 1942
to 800,000, in 1943 to 300,000, in 1944 to 300,000. Not only is the
1960 prospect, say the Americans, one of few soldiers, but also of few
workers.
Whatever the true figures may be, one fact is certain. Russia is a
capitalist State because it has sacrificed millions of proletarian lives,
which constituted a
payment of surplus value
in enormous masses,
to Western capital. This then saved millions and millions of
lives, which today are translated into billions and billions of
dollars for its benefit. Even the truculent Stalin was swindled here. Only a
world league of the workers can overturn this bloody credit balance of international
capitalist infamy.
Today’s Russia is populated, but above all by the elderly and children. It
can consume a lot, produce less, fight less.
It offers peace to those who should be offered social war, in their
heart of hearts.
Third Day: Afternoon
Questions of Principle
We are approaching the great questions of living history: world politics, peace and war.
Khrushchev, echoed by all the others, said that he had to settle ‘certain questions of principle’ at the 20th Congress. It is at least something that it is still acknowledged that
questions of principle
exist: for so many years now, the
slogan
entrenched in the entire monstrous apparatus, with its summit in the Kremlin, has been: ‘Enough of bringing questions of theory among the masses!’ Among the masses one brings only passing situations, ‘concrete’ problems, and one has the right, when it is useful to the success of the moment, to mobilise ‘principles’, perhaps from Marx, Engels, and Lenin, but equally from Robespierre or from Christ, from... Cavour and Garibaldi or from the Pope; the sole condition is that expedients of the sort find standing and vogue in the trend of Opinions, in popular favour...
Those
questions of principle
were ostentatiously placed on a new plane compared to the previous period, to the 19th Congress, to Stalin; and this could even be admitted in part. What we are instead dismantling here is that the ‘new course’ (a formula, by experimental law, suspect one hundred times out of a hundred) is in the direction of the
principles
that historically followed Marx, Lenin, Bolshevism, the Communist International.
This new course merely tears up some of the last
cards
of principles that ‘under Stalin’ had not yet been decided to renounce: here is our clear evaluation of the 20th Congress.
We believe to have given this proof regarding Khrushchev’s third question:
The forms of transition of the various countries to socialism
. Not a single page of Marxism-Leninism is saved here. Even if one did not dare to say (the 21st Congress will say it) that the violent and dictatorial form of the
transition
is now ‘forbidden’, it has certainly been established that ‘by means of democracy’ is the rule in all the States today, with which Moscow has an open diplomatic dialogue.
The corollary to this step was then given with the unrestrained abjuration – declaration of the liquidation of the
Cominform
. When Lenin’s historic work against the shameful adhesion to the ‘democratic’ wars of 1914 was destroyed by embracing the social-patriotic policy for the war of 1942, the
Communist International
, founded by him, was liquidated. Today, they equally repudiate all the work of the ‘split’ in the first post-war period between social democracy and world communism, while regretting
the unity
that emerged against the backdrop of the worst of the 2nd International, that of class collaboration on a global scale. Indeed, it is also indicated as a consequence of ‘the changes that have taken place in the international situation’, ‘the task of overcoming the
split in the workers’ movement
, and strengthening the unity of the working class in order to bring success to the struggle for peace and socialism’. But this
new
goal is not – as it would appear on the surface – a party of the working class
alone
, but rather the submersion of it in a far broader front of the pacifist middle classes, nationally and socially. Subjection of the communist movement to a front of the popular classes is, we repeat, a historical formula that can only have one content:
subjection of the whole of society to high capitalism
.
Let it be understood: it may well be argued by some, by anyone, that the ‘changes in the world historical situation’ between 1919 and 1956 lead to conclusions and perspectives opposite to those that determined and directed the international communist struggle then.
We will not go into detail here to demonstrate that, on the contrary, in our firm opinion, only drastic confirmations can be drawn from them.
But in the meantime let us demonstrate the lack of a right to existence – which in a given future will be demonstrated not with words but with acts of force – of those who wish to link the aforementioned
changes in the situation
to
this
new direction, and do
not
declare at the same time failed and fallen, not for forty years but forever, the historical construction to which Marx and Lenin are linked.
Coexistence Without War
There remain, apart from that of the
transition
, two other great questions, which Khrushchev heads: ‘
The peaceful coexistence of the two systems
’ and: ‘
The possibility of avoiding wars in the present epoch
’.
It is necessary to see if there has been anything new on these points, and in what sense. We can quickly summarise what is new: in addition to renouncing Marx and Lenin,
even
Stalin has been renounced.
We have reported the position of the Congress regarding the ‘non-interference’ of the Soviet State in the ‘internal political affairs’ of other countries; and thus the non-interference of the party, sitting in congress in Moscow; and the strange claim that State, party, and Congress continue to
predict
that socialism will replace capitalism in all those countries, and to
desire it
, ‘with clean hands’. Unfortunately, this insanely defeatist attitude continues to find credence among the working masses of the world, since all bourgeois opinion and propaganda accredit it, continuing to skilfully confuse their real terror of communism with the campaign of agitation against the policy of Moscow. The end of this is still a long way off: what is needed to clarify relations is not more congresses like this one, but new, original, and different alignments of interests and fronts of conflict within imperialism; as emerges, among many examples, from the recent words of the semi-accidental president of America.
Here we must point to the historical unfolding of this question of coexistence, or even cohabitation (no one is so blind as to claim that the two groups of States can go on ‘ignoring each other’).
And in fact, the coexistence envisaged today does not only mean: abstention from class and State warfare, international peace, revolutionary and even
partisan
disarmament, it clearly means: economic, social, political collaboration.
Historically, this question stems from another that today is silenced, that is feigned to be considered settled: whereas it is the only true one that we place on the table, in a circle of silence, but in expectation that after another three years or so, it will be loudly, clamorously disputed by both sides. It is the question of
socialism in one country
.
Indeed, before taking a position on the curious question: must a country with a socialist system and one with a capitalist system necessarily wage war against each other? One must ask whether such a historical situation can arise, and whether it has already arisen today.
Regarding this great question, we observe three stages: 1926, at the December Enlarged Executive of the Moscow International (Seventh Session) – 1939, at the 18th Congress of the Russian Communist Party, on the eve of the Second War – 1952, at the 19th Congress, and before Stalin’s death.
The Turning Point of 1926
That first discussion reflects a decisive moment. The great organisation that in Russia firmly held the State abandons the effort to provoke the world proletarian revolution and sets itself two tasks: its own internal and external defence by armed force – management of the social economy, which the proponents of the winning thesis call ‘building socialism’.
Two theses were, at the time, correct, and history has confirmed them: the revolution in the capitalist countries was ‘postponed’ – an armed assault on Russia by them was possible, and probable.
Stalin’s thesis, and Bukharin’s too at the time, was that (even if that situation were to continue for a long time: passive international proletariat, active capitalist States) it was possible in Russia, while retaining power, to carry out the transformation of the economy into a ‘socialist system’.
Particularly vigorous was the counter-demonstration of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, which we repeat is still worthy of most attentive study
today
. They incontrovertibly clarified Marx and Lenin’s doctrine on those points: we certainly remember it.
Capitalism appears and develops in the world at unequal times and at unequal rates.
The same applies to the formation of the proletarian class and its political and revolutionary strength.
The conquest of political power by the proletariat can take place not only in a
single
country but also in one that is
less
developed than others, which remain under capitalist power.
The presence in the world of countries where the proletarian political revolution has already taken place accelerates the revolutionary struggle in all the others to the maximum.
In the ascendant phase of this revolutionary struggle, it is possible that the armed forces of the proletarian States intervene in defence and offence.
Where civil and State wars persist, a single country can only carry out the
steps
permitted by the economic development that has been achieved in it ‘in the direction’ of socialism.
If it were one of the large, more advanced countries, before its complete socialist economic transformation, which in doctrine is not impossible, the general civil and State war would occur.
If it is, as in the case of Russia, a country just emerged from feudalism, this, with the proletarian political victory, will be unable to take any
steps
other than the realisation of the ‘bases’ of socialism, i.e. a progressive strong industrialisation; and will define its programme as waiting and working for the foreign political revolution, and as an economic construction of State capitalism on a mercantile basis.
Without world revolution, socialism in Russia was, and is, impossible.
We have deliberately summarised the position in a crude manner. The most remarkable thing in that 1926 was the proof that, until 1924, no one had been of any other opinion; the false interpretation of one or two passages of Lenin’s (see our series on Russia and the Revolution, Part One) was foiled, and it was shown that Stalin and Bukharin themselves had always spoken and written along those lines.
For the purposes of the development we are now pursuing, we will not return to the economic part. Today it is much easier than then to prove that Russian society is capitalist. It will only be a little longer to hear it
confessed
.
While today Khrushchev speaks of a ‘Leninist’ theory of peaceful coexistence, not only do we establish that the theory of building socialism in Russia alone was never a
Leninist
theory, but that the theory of
pacifism between the two systems
, in 1926, was
not even
a Stalinist, or Bukharinist, theory.
In the weak speeches of the cold Stalin and the warm Bukharin, this can be seen beyond doubt. A single passage from Bukharin: ‘The perpetual existence of proletarian organisations and capitalist States is a utopia. Such simultaneous existence is a temporary phenomenon. Therefore, inevitably, in our perspective,
we envisage an armed struggle between the capitalists and us
. I categorically declare that the definitive victory of socialism is the victory of the world revolution, at least the victory of the proletariat in all the decisive centres of capitalism’. This was in 1926; today, one flirts with the ‘non-decisive’, the
negligible
capitalist
Uncle Sam
!
These words of Bukharin were Marxist. He was only too ardent, unwilling to wait any longer to see socialism implemented in the vast expanse of Russia, and with such total power. He then redeemed with his very life the right to be called a great, true revolutionary communist.
Even Stalin must partly be grateful for something, if it is true that they caused his death. Soon we shall see.
Flames of the Eve
On 10 May 1939, Stalin delivers his report in Moscow at the 18th Russian Party Congress. In the struggle between 1926 and 1939 in Russia, the proponents of
building socialism
have won bloodily. Not only Zinoviev and Kamenev but Bukharin himself have been killed, Trotsky in exile will have little time left to live. In his style of rhetorical repetition, their enemy, not a dull-witted man but a stubborn one, who missed an excellent opportunity to prove how stubbornness is a quality of the revolutionary, is sure that they will never again speak from their graves, whether closed or still open: ‘the purge of the handful of spies, murderers, and saboteurs of the kind of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Yakir, Tukhachevsky, Rosengoltz, Bukharin and other monsters, who crawled before the enemy...’.
But what then does Stalin think about coexistence and war? Well, in that speech by Stalin, war is certain, imminent,
inevitable
.
It is insisted by the
handful
of cowardly adulators of the time, today intent on the demolition of the figure of Stalin, that he supposedly would not have seen, a few hours beforehand, the German offensive of 1942. Was that of 1939 then a trusting Russian-German embrace, and was it really only the Germans who dealt the low blow to their friend? These hirelings reduce the historical dialectic to a stinking rag. Such immense forces are not set in motion by moves plotted in the shadows the night before! We must hold to the document in which Stalin demonstrates, six months before the Hitlerian invasion of Poland, a confident vision. It is most strange, the impudent levity with which today they disqualify him, precisely by those who have built their political conduct throughout the entire war and post-war period on this perspective!
Stalin describes the game of world imperialism as undoubtedly directed towards the outbreak of war. His words are explicit: ‘The new imperialist war has become a fact’. The capitalist States, however, fear it because ‘it can lead to the victory of the revolution in one or more countries’. Stalin again refers to Lenin’s doctrine on imperialism.
What is indeed strange, and deserving of criticism from us Marxists, not from the
unprincipled
who from then on surrounded him, is that Stalin fully establishes the distinction between ‘aggressor States’ and ‘democratic States’ upon which the defeatist policy of Anti-Fascism and Liberation would later be built.
For him, ‘the aggressor States, Germany, Italy and Japan’ mask their intention of attacking the ‘democratic States, England, France, America’ with their famous ‘Anti-Comintern Pact’. He even lashes out at the (Munich) appeasement in the face of Hitler’s bullying! He then stigmatises, after vaguely saying that Russia is for peace, the pilatesque policy of ‘non-intervention’ in war. As for Russia, it prepares its weapons: ‘No one believes any more the mellifluous speeches that the Munich concessions to the aggressors would usher in a new era of
pacification
’; in any case: ‘we do not fear the threats of the aggressors and are ready to respond
with a double blow
to those warmongers who seek to violate our borders’.
We are Marxistically far removed from the ‘theory of aggression’ and the distinction between warmongering countries and demo-peaceful countries, which completely obscures Marx and Lenin’s true doctrine of war, child of bourgeois relations of production, which has no need at all to be ‘willed’ by
criminals
.
But we cannot remain silent about the fact that today’s language on peaceful coexistence and the avoidability of war is much, much more degenerate and nauseating than that held on the eve of the Second World War.
If the alternative of alliance first with the
aggressors
and then with the
peaceful
is a masterpiece beyond the abolition of
principles
, this does not detract from the fact that today’s way of recounting the drama from Danzig to Stalingrad is even more smoky and suspicious, it remains the case for us that it was equally treasonous to shake the armed hand of Hitler as it was to shake that of Churchill and Roosevelt, equal genuflection of a power already become capitalist to the imperatives of imperialism, equal obedience to the superior forces of determinism, to which international politics is subject, entrusted, according to fools and charlatans, to the fragile, feeble hands of the ‘Great Few’.
Stalin’s Testament
The biography of the figure moves us no more than that of any other, distant or near, friend or foe. We make use of it as a historical road map because it serves to clear the field of the new lie, no less despicable than that which made ‘monsters’ of our great Brothers exterminated in the Russian
purges
: the lie that in all this more-than-futile shaking off of the responsibilities linked to the name of Stalin, one can envisage a sound return to the grandiose times when the Marx-Lenin line was held high, unfailing, to the boundless terror of the capitalist world.
In Stalin’s writing on ‘Economic Problems’, we noted how the thesis of imperialist war, which only the destruction of capitalism can put an end to, even if stated with visible contradictory concessions to coexistence and pacifism, already affirmed at the time, still seemed to hold water.
Today we see that writing condemned, but why, in essence? Not because the character of the already achieved
socialism
of the Soviet economy is questioned in the slightest, nor because the thesis of the validity of market laws in the midst of socialism is denounced as foolish and false. We have seen that what is condemned is solely Stalin’s claim that, already from that time, an increase in Western capitalist production was ruled out. Today, we see that another point is condemned: the outcome of imperialism and the crisis in the
third
war.
To await an economic and political catastrophe of the bourgeois world, and then not to see it arrive, is a
felix culpa
for revolutionaries.
So many times, crises and catastrophes have disappointed Marx and Engels. And so many times, the outcome of predicted international wars has done the same.
In 1926, the first concert of insults against the future
monsters
tends to suffocate them under the infamy of
pessimism
, and as theoreticians of the
stabilisation
of capitalism. For this a Trotsky is risibly mocked even by a Togliatti.
In the aforementioned speech, Stalin deduces the war of September 1939 from a visible crisis in world production, which, after that of 1929-1932, followed by a robust recovery, clearly emerges in 1937; the year in which in Russia alone production does not decline.
Stalin’s last mistake in 1952, consisting in expecting a Western depression, while the unpredictable ‘boom’ followed, before which the CPs go unctuously genuflecting around the world, is, if anything, the least of all his shames. Unfortunately, this shows that the students have far surpassed the master.
So if the accumulation curve had bent downwards, would the transition have been from the cold war to an open conflict? But this might have given rise to the hope that history would finally have seen the defeat of either England or America, or both of these powers, which, always victorious for two centuries, stifle the becoming of humanity.
The curve has, for now, turned upwards; and it has not only done so in Russia, as Stalin’s figures showed at the time during the transition between the 1937 and 1938 indices. Hence the filthy pacifist and tearful idyll, to which, with blasphemies of Marxism-Leninism ten times more horrific, the General Staff of the 20th Congress has devoted itself.
We again quote Stalin’s phrases that we reported in the ‘Dialogue’ with him. ‘To eliminate the inevitability of wars, it is necessary to destroy imperialism’. This drastic conclusion of Stalin closes a resolute refutation of ‘some comrades who claim that due to the development of new international conditions after the Second World War, wars between capitalist countries have ceased to be inevitable’. Stalin not only opposes this Khrushchev-style thesis, but also the other one, that ‘the contrasts between the camp of socialism and the camp of capitalism are stronger than the contrasts between capitalist countries’.
And here is the position for which the 20th Congress detaches Josif’s embalmed head from the cold corpse, and bears it on a golden platter today to London and tomorrow, no doubt, to the foregone conclusion of the presidential election, to New York.
‘Hence the inevitability of wars between capitalist countries continues to exist. It is said that Lenin’s thesis, that imperialism inevitably generates wars, must be considered outdated, because at present powerful popular forces, acting in defence of peace, have developed against a new world war.
This is not true
’.
This was not true,
and is not true
. This: what Khrushchev says: ‘Wars are no longer fatally inevitable because today... partisans of peace exist’. And these, and similar things, did not yet exist when
‘a’ Marxist-Leninist thesis was elaborated according to which wars are inevitable as long as imperialism exists
.
A
, you scoundrels?
The
thesis; without which Marxism and Leninism would fall into nothingness.
Viva Stalin, Then?
In the
Dialogue with Stalin
, we showed the serious weaknesses in his presentation. He did not yet believe it possible to throw overboard what is, as we said,
THE
thesis of Lenin, not
A
thesis of Lenin. He nevertheless wanted to explain why ‘coexistence’, which had already been invented, had for several years been assured as possible. Meanwhile, he wanted to throw out Bukharin’s thesis, and his own, on the inevitable war between the two systems. He therefore set out to declare war
BETWEEN
the capitalist States as more probable. He recalls, not without consistency, his position in 1939: why, he says, did the capitalist States attack each other before attacking us? He shows that he still possesses some glimmer of that dialectic, for which the 20th Congress shrouded itself in absolute blindness: it is an unceasing descent into darkness, it is the evening, the night that looms over the great historic days of October. It is Stalin’s weary eye that registers the last rays. For him, the Western States helped the reorganisation of German capitalism after the catastrophe of 1918, in order to launch it against the Russian Revolution, he claims. And yet, even while falling into the rhetorical classification of 1939 between pacifists and aggressors, in 1952, he explains the irresistible motive for that German resurgence with the economic reason of the lack of markets and outlets, à la Lenin, and not with the historical criminology of imbeciles.
The weakness in theory of this man of iron action was already marked by the insurmountable pen of Trotsky.
In effect, Stalin’s shaky construction already contained all the elements of a further descent down the counter-revolutionary ladder, which at the 20th Congress they have consummated in a pretence of dishonouring him; and four years ago, we were able to clearly indicate how. He must rid himself of every remnant of the naive Bukharinian tendency towards a revolutionary
holy
war. He maintains the inevitable derivation of war from imperialism, and points to this as the enemy. But he prepares the total distortion of the Leninist ‘theory of defeatism’ by saying, after having minimised the effects of the ‘movement for peace’ to a kind of hindrance and postponement, that ‘this differs from the movement which took place during the First World War to transform imperialist war into civil war, because that went further and pursued socialist aims’.
The thesis remained in half shadow and half light. Marx’s thesis against the bourgeois democrats of ‘peace and freedom’ in 1848 was the same as that of Lenin against the warmongering socialists in 1914. We deny that there exists an objective
PEACE
distinct from that of
SOCIALISM
, from the emancipation of the working class. We would rather wait for Revolution from War than Peace from Capitalism. We know of no other way to ‘bury the war’ than by killing the bourgeois system.
Stalin already separates a movement for peace from action for socialism, and says
that the former
is possible, albeit not irrevocably, before
the latter
. Khrushchev and his followers have plunged to the bottom of the abyss, they want Peace
without
Socialism. An idiotic demand, and at the same time impossible!
All the entanglement and imbroglio are at once, yesterday and today, dissolved by our position. Russia is as capitalist as the other Western States, and war will
also
come between it and other States. Stalin saw it coming and preferred not to be the first to fire, he hoped to wait, with the
people’s movement
, for it to go the same way as in 1939. He therefore assured the bourgeois States that the clashes between them were more pressing than those between the systems: he wished them internal crisis and external war. Final illusion. Those of today no longer believe in the crisis within capitalism and between capitalisms: they have lost the last glimmers that Stalin found useful to refer to. They offer desistance from any disturbance, elevating as an eternal rule the avoidability of war catastrophe through popular will and conscience, through global persuasion, they cynically liquidate the last vestiges of shame to which the very harsh scowl of a Joseph Stalin was still sensitive.
Greatness and smallness of men, harshness and sensitivity of souls, have nothing to do with this. Stalin was, in effect, wrong, and did not see that the third war was still a long way off; he manoeuvred as if it were closer. In equal measure, he and his followers and successors do not believe in the Revolution, which can stop it anywhere, and they live day by day in the infamous and cocksure long bourgeois peace that lies ahead of us for perhaps twenty years.
Competition and Emulation
Trotsky’s powerful prophetic speech in 1926 was on a level so high that he was cut off. Perhaps later, he did not adequately complete that construction, even though he wrote in a marvellous manner. He insisted on other aspects of the Russian tragedy: the greed of the State and party bureaucracy, Stalin’s ferocity: small things compared to the themes he had touched on.
Today the wretched Khrushchev, in order to detach himself from the conditions to which ‘a’ thesis of Lenin is bound, barters away the last glimmers of Marxism that ever may have reached him, and affirms that in 1914 the economic factors were at play, in 1956 other factors, moral and volitional, would
also
be at play. ‘War is not an exclusively economic phenomenon’. ‘In the question of whether there should or should not be a war (but what kind of question is that?),
class relations
,
political
forces, the
degree of organisation
and the
conscious will
of men are of great importance’.
What a terrible mess have we fallen into, to
return from Stalin to Marx
?! Stalin advanced into the library with the flamethrower, but in that light, some fragments of pages could still be read; the various Khrushchevs burst in like bulls, which, to cover the risk that they might have learned to read, had their eyes blindfolded after all the lights had been turned off.
Are we, by any chance, Marxists, and after this, have we lined up on one side, ‘the economic factors’, on the other, in suggestive order, the
class relations
, the
political
and
organisational forces
, the
consciousness
, the
will
?! And, in starting up an ‘emulative competition’ between these adversaries, we hear a ‘to you gentlemen’ being thrown out, while Marshal Bulganin, with the most photogenic smile, stands there lost?!
Trotsky, as poor a fool as us, brought the discussion onto the ‘economic factors’ of the moment. He was great. You can do nothing more, he said, than to develop the transition from our pre-capitalist society to mercantilism, to move closer to the capitalist model. The more steps you take to achieve this, the more
irresistible its influences on you will be
. It is not only through war that it can subjugate you. Either we will snuff it out in its Western hideouts, or it will be here to deal with us. Neither militarily nor economically can the two developments run without intersecting. Casting a giant’s gaze from the historical doctrine into the distant future, Trotsky responded to some idiotic interruption: I believe in the world revolution more than anyone, but if we looked things in the face, we may have to wait even fifty years. The condition is that during all this time, we will not have
separated
the realisation of the socialist economy in Russia from the overthrow of the capitalist social form in the West.
Internationalism, Trotsky taught at the time in the words of the inviolable doctrine, is based on the internationality of exchange which the capitalist form has introduced everywhere, and into whose vortex we will be drawn. No illusion of remaining outside its influences will avail. When they put the gag on him, he could not defend himself. He came down from the tribune for the last time saying: the International will continue to discuss... With him dead, we can still follow the ‘dialogue’ with which his luminous mind refuted, in advance, the Khrushchevs.
Markets and Trade
Coexistence means ‘no war’, but it cannot mean no contact, no exchange. Trotsky had warned of it well. History confirms it.
At the time of Stalin, the formula was that of the dual world market, which we, in proving it false, rectified into the claimed existence of two semi-world markets. Stalin’s perspective was as naive as it was bold. Cut off half the world from Western capitalism, it drowns in its own overproduction, tears itself apart with wars of fourfold venomousness, and we remain, we pass. But who are
we
? The other half capitalism, only more vital than the first?
Today, the illusory theory of two compartmentalised markets is resolutely thrown out: the
socialist fatherland
not only lowers the veil, but decisively tightens its belt. It buries with Stalin the last threats of drawing a deadly blade from under its skirts, after the invitation.
Here we must listen to the economist on duty, Mikoyan. ‘We are firmly convinced that
a stable coexistence is inconceivable without trade
(italicised in the text in ‘Rinascita’, February 1956), which can be the basis of this coexistence even after the formation of two world markets. The existence of two world markets – the socialist one and the capitalist one – not only does not exclude, but on the contrary presupposes mutually beneficial trade among all countries. The exact interpretation of this problem has value in principle, under the aspect of coexistence between the two worlds, but it also has a practical, economic importance’.
Avoiding our italics and exclamatives on this extremely derelict, reckless formulation, which is like someone running confidently on very thin sheets of ice, we quote again: ‘we believe that our trade with capitalist countries is advantageous for both sides... This is imposed by the very necessity of the social division of labour... by the fact that it is not equally advantageous to produce all types of commodities in all countries...’.
Has Mikoyan ever doubted, will any of the thousand of those who read ‘Rinascita’ ever doubt, that in the
socialist system
, apart from the old fact that there is no trade, there is no market, must be overcome, if not the technical division of labour in manufacturing, certainly the division, as much professional and corporate as regional and national, of labour in society? That all these formulae are nailed to the capitalist type of production relations, and supremely that ‘production must be
advantageous
’? Advantage and capital profit are terms that say the same thing.
At the time we made this critique of Stalin’s still cautious view of trade, on the
comparison
between the two systems, and we also mentioned how the bourgeois economists of the liberal school adhered to this confluence of the two productions upon the same outlets and accepted that the winner would be the one of the two who had made the most profit. But then what doubt remains that the argument that in Russia ‘the exploiters have been annihilated’ and ‘there are no longer any bourgeois’ loses all value, once it is admitted that, through international channels, capital profits, anonymous and all the more greedy because of this, freely cross every border?
Exchange of Capital
This spate of frightening admissions about the ever-widening relations between the alleged
two economies
, the alleged
two systems
, shows how the manoeuvre of ‘coexistence’ and ‘emulation’ can be entirely read in its economic content, and that the boastfulness of prevailing with the pressure of ‘popular’ opinions, spread in the ‘consciousness’ of the world masses, and similar homilies, change nothing at all. At the end of all this colourful ‘fringe of interference’, which one wishes to see established on the boundary between two opposing and heterogeneous
systems
, only one conclusion is possible, if one has regard to their internal aspects. This embrace to which the
persuasion
of the peoples would like to lead, as the usual
alternative
to violent conflict, is purely an embrace between homosexual natures, between identical systems. It is but a stage in the foolish claim of global trade
liberalisation
, cherished by all ‘economic operators’. Even in these days, in America, business circles are calling for the lifting of import bans on foreign products; if we want, they say, the Japanese, for example, to buy raw cotton from us, we must allow them to ‘earn dollars’ by selling their cheap cotton products here.
Earning on both sides
, the formula of the 20th Congress and Mikoyan, a formula in which anyone who can barely read Marx can read
all
of capitalism.
Once these things have fallen into the mouths of the various Nennis, they fire blank shots: the ‘capital market’ must also be established with Russia. It must therefore be allowed to export ‘socialist’ capital from Russia and then import... capitalist capital. This too is placed upon Mikoyan’s conscience, and it makes it seem true that K. and B. are offering Elizabeth two billion dollars in gold between cups of tea, albeit on account of commodity purchases.
Naturally, when these gigantic exports of finance capital are implemented, it will continue to be said that
it is no longer
the phenomenon characteristic of the most sadistic imperialism, as described by Lenin: yes; yes; back then it was the time of vulgar, crude
economic factors
: today it’s quite a different matter, there are
moral
values, the drive to
emulate
each other for mutual
benefit
; and the general consciousness of these gentle and graceful times no longer allows the manoeuvres of the past to cheat each other across borders:
war is avoidable
.
A world that is entirely a network of commodity exchanges and capital exchanges is evidently just as absurd to call socialist as it is to call it semi-socialist. But it is even more illusory to envisage it as a world in which what Lenin ruled out is possible: to prevent the outbreak of a third general war solely for the purpose of assuring peace, and keeping capitalism alive.
In 1947, therefore, the United States would have had a monopoly on the capital market, and today it would have lost it (along with its monopoly on nuclear weapons; and this is said by the American Lippman). Therefore it is increasingly difficult for the United States to demand, in return for economic aid, both military and political agreements.
Well, we are therefore in full idyll. Indeed, it is so easy for Russia to demand, in exchange for as much as two billion dollars, barely a smile from Her Gracious British Majesty!
Yes, War is Avoidable
We are, it is quite clear, for the full validity, even today, of Lenin’s doctrine on war, which is none other than Marx’s doctrine enounced at its historical birth, after the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune, with which the revolutionary wars of liberal settlement had ended:
all national armies are now confederated against the Proletariat!
Since 1848, Marx had annihilated any pacifist-humanitarian ideology that envisaged the end of wars through ‘general persuasion’ about their futility. From 1848 to 1871, a series of wars were still useful, due to the same bourgeois radicalism of the Mazzinis, Blancs, Kossuths and the like, who did not understand it. War between nations would not have ended with Universal Peace, but with the supranational class revolution.
The Marxists of the Second International themselves, as Lenin contested them for a decade, had sincerely believed that war could be prevented by the world proletariat. However, even in that idyllic and evolutionist period, when socialist votes were amassing in the world’s parliaments, not even the most brazen reformists thought of stopping the war with ‘moral’ and persuasive forces. For them, preventing the war meant preventing, through the national general strike to the bitter end, the general mobilisation on all sides of the borders, taking power into their own hands, in order to establish socialism in a united Europe.
When Lenin established that the imperialist stage of capitalism leads to war, he did not yet believe in a successive series of world wars, but expected that when the first one loomed, the proletariat, at least in Europe, would rise up and stop it. His formula was ‘to turn the imperialist war into civil war’. But the formula was alternant: either the war between nations begins and develops, or civil war breaks out in each, the bourgeoisies are overthrown, and the war does not ‘break out’.
The great Leninist
opportunity
was thus lost
in 1914
because all or almost all the workers’ parties not only did not block the shipyards, railways, and army corps, but marched with the national war. The Russian Revolution arose from the combination of two unique conditions; the survival of a feudal regime and a series of military defeats. The cycle that should have unfolded in just a few years failed to materialise: condemnation and defeat of the social-traitor parties, resurgence of the proletariat in European countries, overthrow of the imperial bourgeoisie, whether victorious or vanquished. And the Russian Revolution stood alone.
The start of the Second World War was met by no resistance from the working classes, and no revolution followed: in the way of the imperialist monsters the proletarian parties were not to be found: those communist parties born after 1914 in the twenty years between the two wars had totally degenerated, and their greatest lost battle was the one given to them with Stalin’s repressions.
Today, those who still uphold Lenin’s thesis say that, once the imperialist-type conditions have been reconstituted even in the defeated countries, after a certain cycle, war will arise, with only one alternative (completely unfeasible if it were to break out
today
): that the proletarian revolution can nip it in the bud.
The revolution would be born from the third war if, before its outbreak, which by all indications is still a long way off, the class movement had arisen again.
The first
condition
for this arduous result is the rejection of the alleged
socialist character
of present-day Russia.
To the thesis of the 20th Congress on the present avoidability of war, we answer not that it is
inevitable
in an absolute sense, but that it cannot be avoided by a vaguely ideological movement of proletarians and poor and middle classes, over which it would pass like a whirlwind without encountering resistance. General war is therefore historically
avoidable
, but on the sole condition that it is opposed by a movement of the pure wage-earning class, and that this awaits it not to
replace it with peace
but to overthrow, with it newly born, the old, infamous capitalism.
Bleak Utopianism
The historic goal of
stable peace
in a capitalist world – and worse would be to say in a world half-capitalist, half-socialist! – together with the other one of the 20th Congress of ‘choosing’ between capitalism and socialism on the basis of an emulative comparison, judged by the general consciousness of men, amounts, in conclusion, to having
regressed
from Lenin by a long way,
beyond
that by which Stalin had regressed, who when he died still left hope to the lost, and more than ever lacking in consciousness and will, workers of the world, that in a coming conflagration the Red Army would attempt to spread beyond the capitalist borders, to
persuade
with the language of cannon and bombs: a last remnant of Marxism, though already obscured by the degeneration of economic theories, remained in this vain hope of the workers, who murmured the vain phrase: Big Moustache will yet come!
The
degringolade
from the 19th to the 20th Congress ruins, beyond Lenin and beyond Marx, a conception of historical struggle which, taking as its pretext the revelations of the new times, and the ‘creations’ dictated by new situations, lies at the height of times more distant than the ‘Manifesto’, and is lost in the mists of Utopia.
The idea that the world decides itself from the comparison between two
models
of economic societies, testing, with these artificial ‘scale models’ of living humanity, where there is greater material welfare with all its trappings, and then orients itself toward one of the two proposed forms, can only be likened to the first stirrings of utopian socialism, with the enormous difference in favour of the latter, that in its time it boldly anticipated the historical demands of tomorrow, whereas today it would be the result of a fabulous retreat and recoil.
Marx and Engels have indeed written of the utopians without any contempt, and for some of them, like Saint Simon, Fourier, Owen, with true admiration.
But their entire theoretical construction, upon which the European socialism of the late nineteenth century, and the Russian communism of Plekhanov and Lenin, was formed, had two cornerstones: the critique of socialist utopianism – and the critique of bourgeois democracy, of democracy, as Lenin puts it,
in general
.
These were two paths of the
emulative
and
persuasive
kind. The old utopians like Cabet thought that everyone would become a socialist through visits to Icaria, to the Phalansteries; those deluded by the Enlightenment intoxication of the 18th century swore that egalitarian justice and social liberty would be adopted by the legal consultations of the sovereign people, deriving as a corollary of peaceful civilisation from the glorious revolution that the bourgeois class had conducted, in the name of those principles.
These are two great constructions of history, but the socialists of the preceding generations have passed over their noble ruins to arrive at the scientific determinism of Marx, and claim, alongside Lenin, his theory of the new Revolution and the Dictatorship.
Dictatorship – or persuasion. Either/or. One dictates to whom there is neither time nor way to reach by consensus. And the more capitalism becomes entrenched in history, the more its end is only possible through force.
Reason
, in its then truly vivid and seductive forms, led us by the hand. When the bourgeoisie raised altars to it, already the glorious precursors of the Conspiracy of the Equals dared to oppose it with
Force
.
This other affront is there today in the proclamations of the Russian Congress, under the latest lies of a return to Lenin and Marx. Not only the transition to communism through
democracy
, but even through
utopia
.
At the 20th Congress, they even tore apart the ‘Manifesto’ of 1848. In its pages on the socialist and communist ‘literature’ of other doctrines, it forever marked the break from the utopianism of the modern workers’ struggle. We cannot reproduce here the theoretical texts of Marx and Engels on this point. A few sentences suffice, in which the naive fallacy of the utopians is depicted:
‘It is enough, according to them, to
understand
their
system
in order to recognise that it is the best possible plan of the best possible State of society’.
‘Hence they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by
peaceful
means, and therefore seek by small and therefore inane experiments (let us concede that the Russian one is a large-scale experiment... to build capitalism), and by the
force of example
to pave the way for the new social gospel’.
Every now and then we stumble upon these ‘scouts of the future’, who, in order to endorse betrayal and abjuration, prattle on about brand new developments that have
creatively
forged previously unknown forms of historical transition, deducing from changes in situations the
revision
of formulae they claim are outdated. They invariably end up with the same end, convinced of shameful backwardness, of the most mouldy conservatism. With your results that have so excited the lovers of the latest novelties, go therefore, gentlemen of the 20th Congress, at least one hundred and twenty years backwards, and let us hang on the
infamous column
of retrograde, fallacious, and hostile ideologies your latest ideas; coexistence, emulation, competition; the blocking, in homosexuality, of a fertile and living history.
Birth of the Counter-October
Of all the anti-Stalinism presented to the world, only the points we have already discussed at the beginning of these days remain dubiously standing: the ‘cult of personality’ and the ‘manipulation of history’. On everything else, they have only gone in the direction in which Stalin was sinking, and further below him, but even on those two points the correction is by no means in the direction of orthodoxy, and one must talk about them again before closing the epicedium on those buried in the same swamp.
It is declared that Stalin lied when he labelled the Trotskyist ‘monsters’ as
agents of foreign espionage
. So they were not. What were they then?
Rehabilitation
is a remedy for single, individual cases of moral, penal judgement, but never a correction of critical, historical judgement.
Stalin, according to today’s Soviet magazines (‘
l’Unità
’ of 15 April 1956) would have done wrong not in lying (it cannot in fact be theorised that in certain contingencies the revolutionary would not be led to have to lie), but in making, with those atrocious slanders, less clear the ‘battle of ideas’ that was waged against ‘Trotskyism’.
Here again, Stalin is a more consistent Marxist than his current critics! What does ideological struggle mean? For the Marxist, there can be no ideological struggle without political struggle, and without this deriving from the interplay of class forces. Thus, the great extermination, not of a few
monsters
, but of a large stratum of the actual members of the Bolshevik Party, since it was not based on the influence of enlistment by foreign States, must otherwise be explained as a clash of social forces. Stalin said the only thing he could say, so as not to admit that the partisan of the anti-revolutionary movement was, with all his followers, precisely he himself, it being evident that he was not in the presence of uprisings against power: he had to speak of espionage, assassination attempts, sabotage on a grand scale. It is therefore fallacious to say: ‘Stalin’s thesis, according to which the class struggle becomes more acute each time the socialist country takes a step forward, was wrong. This thesis, put forward in 1937, when class antagonisms had already disappeared, led to the unjust repressions’.
For the umpteenth time, Stalin lied less anti-Marxistically than they did. It was precisely a phase of class struggle in which the bulk of the party and its leadership, with Stalin, won.
How else to explain that the Russian journal says, as quoted by ‘
l’Unità
’: ‘the Trotskyists, etc., expressed the interests of the exploiting classes that were putting up resistance, and the tendencies of the petty-bourgeois strata of the population’?
Those massacred in 1934 and 1937 expressed the interests of the international proletarian classes against the Russian State’s policy of detachment from the world proletarian struggle, masked by the lie of building socialism: in all that remains of their declarations, carefully concealed after the suppression, and in the very speeches of 1926, they reclaim Lenin’s line that it is a matter of passing to a long struggle of the proletarian dictatorship against the internal forces of petty-bourgeois classes, sustained by the multiple influences of international capitalism. Here, for Marxists, lies the
whole
controversy to be resolved.
That was the great turning point, the reversal of the revolutionary struggle in Russia. The explanation of this imposing episode that erupted in the historical subsoil cannot, without Marx collapsing, be drawn from an act of villainy, an error, or a
distraction
of the named Stalin. The struggle was what it was, and it is fair to call it a class struggle, in both its ideological and violent forms. Stalin’s corpse will not cry out if it has to choose a place. But
that same place
belongs to his gravediggers of the 20th Congress, who are very careful not to
ideologically
justify today those murdered then.
The place common to the dead and the living is therefore only one: that of the capitalist counter-revolution.
It is precisely the counter-revolution that is ‘creative’, and one discovers in living history its newest and most unexpected forms and manifestations. In this sense, we have learned much from half a century of betrayals of the socialist proletariat.
It is the Revolution that is
one
; and it is always
she
, in the course of an immense historical arc that will close as it opened and where she has promised, where she has an appointment perhaps with many of the living, but certainly with the unborn, as with the dead: they knew that she never fails, never deceives. She, in the light of doctrine, is already taken for granted as something seen, something alive.
Third Day: Evening
Poor and Naked You Go, Philosophy!
In Khrushchev’s report to the Central Committee, the foundational text of the 20th Congress, after the corrosive criticisms of decades of theoretical work by historians and economists, the State ‘philosophers’ were hit in turn. That Marxism is to be regarded as one ‘philosophy’ among many others, i.e.,
like
so many others, is something we have on another occasion made ample reservations about, and therefore this governmental philosophical
service
, which is in any case proclaimed to be totally bankrupt, does not seem to us a very serious matter.
Khrushchev said it best: ‘The training and education of our cadres in higher schools and Party study courses requires a textbook in which the cardinal principles of Marxism-Leninist theory would be set out in concise, simple and lucid language. Another book we need is a popular exposition of
the principles of Marxist philosophy
. These books would be very valuable in popularising the scientific materialist conception and combatting reactionary idealist philosophy’.
From this situation, it emerges that, to prevent the super-professors of the philosophical academies from talking nonsense, it is necessary to refine them on the basis of little textbooks, needless to say ‘popular’ ones, of propaganda against, oh dear,
reactionary
philosophies.
The bourgeois themselves have long since abolished courses in theoretical philosophy to replace them with those in the
history of philosophy
, and if you like, of philosophies. In any scheme, by reactionary philosophy is understood to be that which served as a superstructure for the feudal forms of production: fideism. Idealism is the philosophy of the bourgeois revolution, and the purportedly scientific materialists of Moscow show themselves to be thoroughly steeped in it at every turn: far from branding it from above as reactionary and, horror! – anti-popular. It is, par excellence, the only
popular philosophy
.
Here, in the country of Khrushchev, neither the
popular
school functions, nor the teacher training institute, nor the supreme academy from which come out the pedagogues of the pedagogues: better to say, in fashionable cosmopolitan style, the
trainers
, the coaches of the
activists
assigned to propaganda among the masses.
In any case, the historic Congress has said that this apparatus has
deviated
: let us try to see in what sense.
It is not difficult to find the key to the
quiz
. It concerns the faithful pupils of the little country schoolteacher Stalin, who, at the same time, disqualify him as commissar for popular education, and (perhaps unconsciously) repeat the little bits he had them memorise.
The Dogmatists, the Talmudists, Josif’s Refrain
Anyone who understands anything knows that we are anything but ‘Trotskyists’; and we will also recall here that everyone admits that Leon was the strongest contemporary Russian-language writer – after all, for revolutionary writings the national language is of little importance, and it can even be believed that Stalin’s ‘Linguistics’, according to which the mother tongue ‘is not a superstructure’ and remains sovereign even as the forms of production and class relations change, will be removed from the sacristy.
Stalin’s writing style, without being weak or inept, is, unsurpassedly, pedestrian. He has a primary school style, in fact, and if you like, of a ‘double or nothing’ game show feel. Dry question and answer, with a series of repetition worthy of microgroove records.
Now, if we try, from such lengthy speeches by Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Suslov, Shepilov and other minor figures, to draw out the new philosophical word of the 20th Congress, we find nothing more in our hands than three or four words from Stalin: dogmatic, Talmudic, pedantry, scholasticism and the like, with which everyone, in the most monotonous tone, attacks not Stalin, but a countless flock of philosopher and scientist functionaries – and political leaders – whom they accuse living off their salaries for nothing. Against this deplorable state of affairs, everyone raises banners – of extremely old acquaintance – which we have seen in the hands of all true ‘rebels’; reality, life, constructiveness, concreteness, and if we really want to draw out from it the highest ‘new’ theses, we will only find these, no less hackneyed:
creative
Marxism, or what one might call ‘recreated’ Marxism, and
the enrichment
of Marxism, phenomena that would repeat themselves at every step along the historical path.
Well then, since we ultimately claim to be
clear
,
simple
,
and concise
, like those polemicists serially supplied to the ‘cadres’, let us be so.
Let us take the side of the dogmatists, Talmudists, also the scholastics, and even of the pedants; let us assume the defence of a Marxism that never creates anything new and constitutes a constellation of precise, unshakable theses, and let us resolutely refuse,
unguibus et rostro
, to give it up to those who want to
enrich
it, claiming it to be
rigid
and
poor
as it was born not from the inflexible poverty of Marx but from the womb of history, when and only when it had be pregnant with it.
Coinciding instead with periods of counter-revolution, of class recoil, of the long historical involution of social forms, is the empty discourse of the
creativists
, and the so-called creators; of the vaunted discoverers of rich, unprecedented conquests, since it regurgitates stale and miserable formulas, the last peddler of which was Josif, and which poorly disguise the very well-known ones with which Marxism has leoninely struggled in the times – in waves – of Proudhon, Lassalle, Bakunin, Dühring, Bernstein, Sorel, and the dreadful tide of mud in 1914, when, above all, an athlete, a gladiator of revolutionary orthodoxy, made those countless people who wanted to
create
falsifications,
enriching
it with the Judaic price of betrayals, bite the dust: Lenin.
To You, Little Schoolboys!
Let us pause to show how the students have in their blood the style, the phrasing, the pompous manner of the little schoolmaster.
Khrushchev, first of all: ‘Struggling against the manifestations of
negligence in the further elaboration
(!) of Marxist theory, we cannot look at theory in a dogmatic way, as people detached from life... theory is not a collection of dead formulas and dogmas... but a combative guide for action... theory detached from practice is dead’.
None
of the proletarian leaders who went on to serve the bourgeois governments, the national war, spoke differently from this tone, or from that of the passages we are about to glean. But neither did any of them ever phrase themselves as trivially as these ones today.
And afterwards: ‘Those who think that communism can only be built with propaganda (but the beast is he who thinks of any
recipe
for
building
it in a construction site like a bourgeois artefact!) without a practical struggle to increase production (a ticket to the ‘flogger’ of the classical galleys!) to raise welfare (ten tickets to the school of Keynes!) they slip down the path of Talmudism and dogmatism’.
To you, Mikoyan, demolisher of Josif: ‘The party, the Central Committee,
creatively
apply the theory of Leninism in the current phase of society’s development and at the same time
enrich
Marxism-Leninism’.
Of these ‘riches’ we already know much: democratic transfer of power, imperialism without war, renunciation of violence, constitutional discipline, imitation of capitalism’s victories as a factory of welfare, honest competition with it, promissory note signed (today in London, tomorrow in Washington) not to mock it any more.
Enrich
Marxism a tad more (do you have the corresponding index in the Sixth Five-Year Plan?), and you will have ‘sent it packing!’
Mikoyan is too brilliant to be quoted without interruption. ‘Most of our theorists only repeat and disguise in different forms quotations, formulas and theses already known’. Huge scandal! But what does theory mean? It means an ordered sequence of conclusions; literally a ‘cortege’ of people of whom one line does not bypass the other. This criticism may apply to poets, not to disseminators of organised doctrine. But we know that, above all, artists are disgusting: Mikoyan himself says so elsewhere. And let him continue.
‘Can there be science without creation? No, without
creation
there is only
scholasticism
, scholastic drill, not science, which is first and foremost creation, construction of the new, and not repetition of the old’.
If we poor souls were to write the
textbook
of Marxist philosophy (from Moscow, given these prodromes, it is certain that
textbooks
will be written... with feet), we would welcome this well-founded formula;
Science is repetition of the old
. As for ‘scholasticism’, we would write that it is that philosophy which hinges on ‘creation’; and
without creation
,
scholasticism
ends. We put the theory of creation in order as follows. We doubt that God created Mikoyan: he, after all, has created nothing; unless one reads what he says backwards.
‘The 20th Congress will give a serious boost to the militants of the ideological front (a front where even the corporal is invited to
serve
, improvising his moves!) so that they embark on a
creative
work...
enrich
the ideal heritage of Marxism-Leninism... (and finally, in a third phase, created... ruminating) to ensure the
creative enrichment
of Marxism’. Fever for originality!
Stand Up, You Down There!
Enough, let’s call those at the back. Suslov: ‘Our work consists of... a mechanical repetition of well-worn formulas and theses, with the result that pedants, dogmatists are formed, detached from life. Our propaganda was previously directed towards the past, towards history (!), to the detriment of
current affairs
’. Here we are, by all the devils! Here is an authentic
emulator
of the disgusting fashions of the bourgeois
parvenu
, who know nothing, but are able to beat us with their idiotic question: ah, haven’t you heard
the latest
? Keep up to date!
‘The party has never tolerated dogmatism, but the struggle against it has today assumed a particular acuity’. And here is a cry from the heart, in which lies the whole rot of careerism, of the personal race to ‘make it’:
‘There is no doubt that the
cult of personality
has greatly contributed to the spread of dogmatism and pedantry. The proponents of this cult attributed the development of Marxist theory solely to a few people whom they blindly followed. The only task of the other mortals (
who were they, then
?) was to assimilate and popularise the creations of these individuals’.
Magnificent! These gentlemen have decided to liquidate the ‘few people’. But they can only recite the same
lesson
. If only they had
assimilated
! If only they had
popularised
! Meanwhile, they dishonour Stalin, insofar as the worst that he dictated they carry nailed in their blockheads precisely when they babble: away, make way for us, we want to
create
too.
Jehovah, you are nothing but a miserable demiurge
! says the classic devil of Anatole France, exiled on earth.
Shepilov ‘falls into line’: when will these impatient ‘creators’, kept on a leash until now, bring us a fistful of flour from their own sack? They merely profit from the fact that the master has been embalmed, and cannot shout: zero profit: homework copied word for word!
‘We Marxist communists are not passive custodians of the Marxist-Leninist heritage, we are not archivists of ideology (bravo! You are heirs who, in order not to be vulgar custodians of your father’s legacy,
enrich
it by eating it down to the last penny!). Ideological work not tied to the vital tasks of economic and cultural edification turns either into a
Talmudic and dogmatic
repetition of well-known truths and theses, or into empty talk and incense-burning’. On the first ‘day’, we gave the reader a modest sample of the ‘incense-burning’ to Stalin carried out by all his appointed
disciples
‘
ad litteram
’
of anti-Talmudism and anti-dogmatism
.
Is the
season of empty talk
coming to an end, or rather beginning more fruitfully?
Noises Outside the Classroom
If all these faithful students have uniformly used fire extinguishers of the same brand, and sprayed jets of the same equivocal foam, there is certainly a reason. All is not dead in the Russia of the Revolution, and a flame still burns there! There are still old Marxists, comrades-in-arms of Lenin, and of all the others who today, with supremely pharisaic gesture, are ‘rehabilitated’, authentic thoroughbred Bolsheviks, believers in the
dogma
of the revolution that transcends all borders: there lives, in the young generation, the indelible tradition of this whole dynamic of the ‘past’, before which the arrogant present is sinister, pale, and vile.
There are annoying, pedantic
quotations
from Marx, Engels, Lenin, even though for years those of other theorists of the calibre of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin have been ‘illegal’. There are still comrades who have faith in an
archive
, and who do not believe that they are ‘detaching themselves from life’ by nourishing themselves on the history of the world struggle of Bolshevism, when its goals were Berlin and Vienna, Paris and Rome, and Lenin’s alternative was its own: in the world, either rule of the bourgeoisie, or of the proletariat! No middle ground!
There are still, fortunately, and by historical law,
dogmatic
ones believing in what Lenin wrote and promised; and even if those formulas were repeated with naivety, and even
blindness
, they would stand higher than the congressional cuisine of tailor-made attitudes, with its vomit-inducing
modern
and watchful recipes.
The same strenuous defence by the ‘creativists’ of a residual doctrinal fidelity, in sounding false and out of tune, confirms this situation.
Khrushchev: ‘Scrupulously safeguard the purity of Marxist theory, conduct a determined struggle against the survivals of bourgeois ideology in the consciousness of men’. Suslov: ‘Marxism Leninism must develop... respecting its inviolable principles, fighting intransigently against all attempts to revise them’. And so do others, from the benches.
Equally false is the half-hearted attempt to save oneself, after having so deplored the sanctification of texts, with quotations from Lenin, whom one pretends to make up as author of so many inauspicious ‘creations’ subsequent to him (and today it is confessed that a selection was made for this sole purpose; and a large mass of his writings remained outside the gigantic Organisation in order to produce his
Collected Works
).
Here, too, the little schoolboys show their hand. The basic quotation, more than exploited, is
blatantly copied
from Stalin, and using Stalin’s
classic
system.
Shady Use of Lenin
This is the true system of the second-hand dealers of doctrine: pointing to a volume from the official series, and to a page of the volume, being certain that purges and censorship have sifted through the entire edition, as when the Catholic quotes the canonical text of the Gospels. And artfully concealing the date and theme of the writing, that is, its historical background, the direction of battle in which it was written by someone who was not a builder of archives, but a fighter, yes, of revolutionary action.
When
Lenin wrote these words (subject to verification): ‘We do not regard Marx’s theory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it has only laid
the cornerstones
of that science which socialists must develop in all directions if they wish to keep pace with life. We think that an
independent
elaboration of Marx’s theory is especially essential for Russian socialists; for this theory provides only general
guiding
principles, which, in
particular
, are applied in England differently than in France, in France differently than in Germany, and in Germany differently than in Russia’?
Lenin was then in a fierce struggle with two wings of the Russian anti-tsarist movement: the populists, who refused to accept Marxism, claiming that in Russia the peasant proprietors and not the workers had the
socialist
task – the ‘legal Marxists’, who, with the usual version of economic England and political Europe, deduced, from Marxism, the conclusion that in Russia, in order to fight against capitalist enterprises, it was necessary to maintain a neutral legality towards the autocratic government. To Lenin, it was necessary already then to construct the revolutionary method which united immediate armed action with classist proletarian aims, and he laid the foundations of his monumental historical edifice against them.
Young Lenin could not know, as we know from the adult Lenin, that theory is from the outset ‘completed and inviolable’, and that whoever lets go of a small part, loses it all. In any case, already in his youthful formula, the
cornerstones
and the
general directives
of Marx’s theory are placed at the centre. What are these? The entire work and life of Lenin answer, and not two sentences.
What, we will ask the distant descendant Shepilov, are then the ‘inviolable principles’ even in the realm of
creativity
and
enrichment
? What remains of Lenin’s
cornerstones
for the 20th Congress?
Against this unfair way of quoting Lenin, we have opposed the study, in historical order, of his writings in the course of the revolutionary struggle in Russia, and readers will find therein, for example, enough concerning the fable of Mikoyan and Co., of Stalinist hand, about Lenin’s position in 1917 on a peaceful conquest of power.
Here it suffices to say that, just as all the quotations wielded at the 20th Congress are second-hand from Stalin the master (while it is precisely on the basis of them that one claims to leave Stalin to return to Lenin!), so we took that first date from Stalin’s own speech at the 18th Congress, delivered, as we have already said, on 10 March 1939.
What is Left Inviolable?
Our right to keep Lenin on the side of the ‘dogmatists’ lies in the fact that he himself, as long as he lived, held this term as a title of honour, and as the opposite of
opportunist
and ‘free critic’.
The first chapter of the classic ‘WHAT IS TO BE DONE?’, which dates from 1902, is precisely entitled: ‘Dogmatism and “Freedom of Criticism”’. It is entirely an attack against Russian and international revisionism, and the footnote at the bottom of the first page says precisely: ‘At the present time the English Fabians, the French ministerialists, the German Bernsteinians and the Russian critics... together they
take up arms against “dogmatic” Marxism
... [It is the] first really international battle with socialist opportunism’.
In the exposition of the agrarian question, and in showing Lenin’s Marxist orthodoxy in this, we have once again reproduced (from ‘The Agrarian Question and the “
Critics of Marx
”’, 1901) the opening passage and invective against Chernov, who boasted of having ousted ‘dogmatic Marxism’ from the field of agrarian questions. This
dogmatic Marxism
, Lenin writes, has a strange property: scientists always declare it dead, and then the bombardment against it begins again...
Subsequently, the old bombard passed into the hands of Stalin, who ingeniously
created
the supplement: Talmudic – then to those of the 20th Congress, who, however hysterically itching to
enrich
, have created nothing else.
All we want to establish is that in making this banner of
dogmatism
our own, we do not credit ourselves with any
creation
, nor
enrichment
of the theory, nor even of the theory and history of opportunism, an inexhaustible blight.
And yet some of the ‘cornerstones’ were still saved from Stalin’s big grubby hands, and some
principle
was still left intact; whereas it is clear that for the
glacé
gloves of the travelling envoys of the 20th Congress, nothing remains
inviolable
, if, as per the headline of ‘
l’Unità
’, Eden has fittingly ‘donné la réplique’ of peaceful coexistence to them, with the historic words: ‘the world today can feel safer’!
In fact, in that very text, Stalin cannot but quote Lenin again in the words (Works – almost – Complete, XXV, 390): ‘Bourgeois States are most varied in form, but
their essence is the same
: all these States, whatever their form, in the final analysis are
inevitably
the
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie
. (here he emphasised it, i.e., not us: Lenin, or Stalin himself!). The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms,
but the essence will inevitably be
the same: the
dictatorship of the proletariat
(id. as above)’.
Pure bad faith then, when it is said that there remains a certain thing that one does not wish to touch, revise, recreate, enrich. And who had to be the most tacky, and say: ‘the path that you Russians, faithful to Lenin’s teachings, have followed, is not
obligatory
for the other countries’?
Easy easy question; one lira for the correct answer: the Italian party delegate.
How They Have Enriched Marx
Our comrades of France have procured, with a rescue in extremis, a copy of the second edition of the ‘
Textbook of Political Economy
’, ‘achevé d’imprimer le 17 mars 1956’... pour vivre
l’espace d’un matin
; edited by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Institute of Economics.
A split Stalinist text, with half of it dedicated to the ‘political economy of the socialist mode of production’. It may well be that all this remains official, but not what we are about to extract from it, in order to settle this question
of the evolving of theory
.
Preface: having given Marx and Engels their due, well or poorly formulated, Lenin is credited with having
enriched
the Marxist economic science with the theory of imperialism, furnishing ‘the first elements for the fundamental economic law of modern capitalism’. What’s this? A law that Marx did not even dream of, leaving the task of discovering it in full... to Stalin. Lenin is then the author of a
new
, complete theory of the socialist revolution (it is understood, unless we see a
newer
one from Stalin, and from Khrushchev-Togliatti). He would then have provided a scientific solution to the problems
of building
socialism and communism... and after all this, it is not surprising that among the high-level academics who have drafted the text is our dear Shepilov.
In fact, to avoid
flattery
, it is added later that ‘Stalin, Lenin’s great comrade-in-arms and disciple, put forward and developed a number
of new theses
’(!).
The additional ones, though, we think the Academy will submit for international competition, accompanied by a brass band.
Naturally (p. 287. ff.), there is the chapter on the law
of unequal development
. There is the formidable lie that ‘Marx and Engels, studying
pre-monopolist
capitalism in the middle of the 19th century (see above our quotation of Lenin on unique capitalism, of which imperialism is simply a
political, military, dictatorial
‘superstructure’ foreseen throughout by Marx), were led to conclude that the socialist revolution could only win simultaneously in all or in the majority of the civilised countries’. Lenin would later have arrived at the conclusion that
the old formula of Marx and Engels no longer corresponded
to historical conditions, and not only that the socialist revolution could triumph in a single country alone, but even (listen!) that victory in all countries or in most of them WAS IMPOSSIBLE (!!!). We have therefore heard such nonsense from that line of Vladimir Lenin in the years after 1918, in which he nearly took us all with holy kicks for not bringing him the revolution into all of Europe! But what if he had scientifically discovered that it was IMPOSSIBLE? By the law of unequal development?!
Do you know the law of unequal development of academies? Stalin must not have known it: it is in a nineteenth-century Italian comedy by the good Ferrari: academies are made, or are not made!
We must serve you more academic prose. In the following mess, Lenin figures to have discovered that in the imperialist period, the capitalist countries form a
tighter
chain, and that the revolution can seize the
weakest
link. Fine, but to what end? To declare to the others that it is impossible to break them? For this it takes Stalin, and worse than Stalin, it takes Khrushchev, Shepilov, Togliatti, or Thorez. A subsequent palinode attributes to Lenin a vision of the path of world revolution, which is presented as a preview of the method of
detaching
satellites for Russia from the ‘imperialist camp’.
But today, even they, under Tito’s auspices, seem to want to break away, using them as ballast!
In any case, here one is always playing on the misunderstanding between the triumph of political revolution and economic-social transformation, while advancing undercover the false card of building a socialist economy, of ‘prefabricated’ socialism.
Stalin’s Rejected Contributions
At the end of the part on the capitalist economy, the
Textbook
takes up Stalin’s theses that got on Mikoyan’s nerves. For Stalin, the final historical crisis of capitalism reopened after the Second World War, and the formula of the chronic underproduction of capitalist enterprises and permanent unemployment is invoked; imprudent theses which at the 20th Congress, with an outstretched hand to Western economic science, are – these alone – decisively taken back.
It follows that the
Textbook
will be withdrawn and redone, as was announced at the Congress; and that the same fate must befall the Programme of the Russian Party.
We believe that the entire part on the false Stalinist economic doctrine will remain, in a worse form, standing, i.e. the description of Russian society as a type of socialist economy. Lenin’s apocryphal new theory of the socialist revolution and Stalin’s on the economy, in which the classes of the proletariat and the peasantry figure as
definitively
friendly classes, in the political struggle as in the economic ‘construction’, will remain standing.
Step by step, the
Textbook
quotes the well-known phrases from Lenin’s writings to make them into the sad government we know.
The most insidious aspect of the shift outlined at the 20th Congress consists in the supposed return to a link, tighter than in Stalin’s time, with the doctrine of Marx and Lenin. But this is treated in the same way as it was under Stalin and the whole gang. It is undoubtedly predictable that the step being taken today towards the declaration of an ideological identity and social programmes with capitalist countries, towards what we have for years called the Great Confession, will be presented with theoretical arguments drawn from the Marxist school: and indeed a substantially authentic relationship will be declared. But historically and politically, the two transitions have gone in the same direction: from the declaration to capitalism of wanting to overthrow it everywhere on the class front, to that of wanting to coexist with it on the State front, while still believing that imperialism would lead it to war and collapse – and then from this position to that of peaceful emulation and comparison, in the expectation of the definitive peace of the States, and the internal democratic peace of classes in every State.
Both historical developments prove Marx and Lenin
right
. But it is inevitable, horrifying as it is, that in all this, the great pages of Lenin, and also of Marx, will for a long time to come serve as fig leaves upon the pathological shame of a new and more infamous opportunism, which, thanks to the charm of those names, will once again attempt to drag the world proletariat into the abyss.
The Function of the Party
Reading the Moscow speeches, it seems that at least one of the
cornerstones
of Marx and Lenin remains in place: the necessity and frontline function of the class political party.
The question of the party and its relationship to the State was at the heart of the ruthless struggle with the Russian opposition. While the latter reacted to the fact that the State apparatus and its police were attacking and putting out of action members of the Communist Party, which was to be considered the bearer of the class dictatorship within the State and the true ‘subject of sovereignty’, Trotsky and Zinoviev were, as usual, insulted as those who wanted to break the party in its unity, and to sabotage it. They responded fiercely by claiming the doctrine of Marx and Lenin on the nature and function of the class political Party, to which they had always been faithful.
Today, while nothing is said (and even Stalin confronted in previous congresses, however infrequent, the problem) on the question of the State and its massive permanence, while contradictorily claiming to have achieved a classless society destined to disappear, and ‘object of sovereignty’, today it is still affirmed, however, and after having found among all the usual, even parrot-like, agreement that the party must continue to be the supreme organ that manages, in accordance with its programmatic directives and decisions, the State machine.
But it is clear that even this position is breaking down. The symptom is easily found among the foreign bootlickers. In fact, how to maintain such a position, and launch beyond the border, with the others, the watchword of remedying the Leninist splits, reconstituting the unity of the ‘workers’ parties, and drawing into their front even those of the
middle
classes? The lability even in this of the statements given in Moscow is most evident from the behaviour of the more cynical followers. The worst comes from Italy, as usual. Nenni has made harsh declarations on what, for him and his short-sightedness, forms the new course: in his very triviality he spoke the truth. He is not on par with his peers in terms of theoretical scruples, nor does he have or know enough to feign them.
The concept of the relationship between party and State, which is all solidly contained in Marxist texts and in the history of the class struggle, from the ‘Manifesto’ onwards, is shaken by a series of blows.
‘Is the Leninist concept of the Party’s leading function in the State still valid? Is the party still the proper instrument’ to guide the vaunted creative action of the masses? ‘Should the party stand, as it does, above the State, even in the hierarchy that places (but just look at this!) the party secretary before the President of the Council?’
The answer is given without hesitation: the party must cease to be unique, it must to the same degree as any other return under the parliamentary State, and worse, it must submit, rather than to the
democratic
succession of parties, to the superior leadership of a
robed judiciary
.
These robed cretinisms are the height of the ridicule that the painful affair in Russia brings, together with infamy, upon the proletarian achievements concerning the party, the State, and the dictatorship, which shone with dazzling light thirty years ago, and which today are clouded if even the tail of a braying quadruped wags.
Textbook of Principles
It is not fair to say that the ideological mess only comes from beyond the Curtain. The theoretical wretchedness is inherent in the transition that the 20th Congress flaunted between Stalin’s personal leadership, sustained by the
cult
of personality, and the new
collegial
leadership, linked, who knows how, to a new
communist legality
in the State and to
internal democracy
in the party. Here not a single word is in its proper place, and this fight against the cult of personality would give us no cause for satisfaction, even if it were not, as we have shown at the beginning, merely a nauseating comedy.
What does
cult of personality
mean, and who established and affirmed it, in Russia or elsewhere? Did this individual superpower really exist? It is nothing but a romanticised fairy tale for the sole purpose of defaming the healthy and robust concept of dictatorship, which philistines wish to reduce to that of autocratic imposition. The fideist reserves worship for figures beyond nature and beyond life, and does not deify the social leader. The Enlightenment thinker and the critical idealist dismantle the authority that is transmitted from otherworldly power to a man who, even if he is King Log, personifies an outdated institution: they put everyone on the same footing, deifying, if anything, the people’s will, the dubious character of Demos. Marxism, and here you would need the little historical-philosophical treatise, does not hinge either on a Person to be exalted, nor on a collective system of persons, as subjects of historical decision, because it draws historical relations and the causes of events from relations of things with men, such that the results
common to any individual
are brought to light; no longer thinking about his personal, individual attributes.
Just as Marxism rejects, as resolver of the ‘social question’, every ‘constitutional’ and ‘juridical’ formulation premised on the concrete historical course, so it will have no preference and will give no answer to poorly posed questions: must everything be decided by one man, a college of men, the whole
corpus
of the party, the whole
corpus
of the class? First of all, no one decides, but a field of economic-productive relations common to large human groups. It is not a matter of steering, but of deciphering history, of discovering its currents, and the sole means of participating in their dynamics is to have a certain degree of knowledge of them, which is possible in very different ways in various historical phases.
So who best deciphers it, who best explains its science, its necessity? It depends. It may even be one person, better than the committee, than the party, than the class. And consulting ‘all the workers’ does no more than consulting all the citizens with the senseless ‘head count’. Marxism combats labourism, workerism, in the sense that it knows that in many cases, in most, the decision would be counter-revolutionary and opportunist. Today it is not known whether the vote would go to the frying pan or the fire: Stalin or the Anti-Stalins. It is even difficult to rule out that the latter would be the bigger swindle. As for the party, even after its election by those who deny the ‘cornerstones’ of its programme on principle, its historical mechanics are not resolved with ‘the base is always right’. The party is a real historical unity, not a colony of microbe-men. The Communist Left has always proposed replacing Lenin’s alleged formula of ‘democratic centralism’ with that of
organic
centralism. As for
committees
, there are a great many historical cases that discredit collegial leadership: we need not repeat here the relationship between Lenin and the party, Lenin and the Central Committee, in April 1917 and October 1917.
The best
detector
of revolutionary influences in the field of historical forces can, in given social and productive relations, be the mass, the crowd, a council of men, or a single man. The discriminating factor lies elsewhere.
Elementary Little Scheme
It is well known that we are schematic. Regarding this, one can see the theses of the Italian and world communist congresses, supported by the Left at the time of the Communist International. There were also very healthy revolts of parties against committees, as at the 1924 illegal conference in the Alps of the Communist Party of Italy, held for over a year by the centrist current: not only did the vast majority of the members vote for the opposition of the Left, but even the central apparatus did as well. No one was surprised, and the committee did not ‘fall’ because of this. It
fell
by quite other means: it still commands, with Stalin and without.
Thus, the question
of action
and what drives it (?) can be reduced into three main stages.
Appearance of a new mode of production, such as the industrial capitalist one. Political revolution through which the class in it that controls the means of production comes to power, and establishes its State. Appearance of the class that, in that new form, gives its labour without participating in social control: the proletariat. The concept of
class
for Marx is not in this descriptive observation, but in the manifestation of common actions (which are determined by common conditions), at first neither desired nor deliberated by anyone. Formation of a new theory-programme of society, which opposes the apologetic one of the ruling class. Only from this point (understood with infinite complications, advances and retreats) do we have the ‘constitution of the proletariat into a political party’, and only from this moment a historical
class
. Therefore, historical conditions for a new class to act: theory – political organisation of class.
Second stage. With these conditions, the new class conducts the struggle to oust the other from power. In the case we examine, constitution of the proletariat into the ruling class. Destruction of the old State. New State. Class dictatorship, the subject of which is the party. Terror (the bourgeois revolution also had such stages, like every revolution).
Third stage. Transitory in a historical sense, but long and complex. Under the dictatorship of the party, the relations of production defended by the old class, and which barred the way for new productive forces, are successively broken down. Ideological influences of all kinds and customs to which the proletarian class was subject are gradually eradicated. Classes disappear after the revolution of the modern proletariat, but before disappearing, they continue to struggle in a reversed position. With them disappears the apparatus of State power.
All this seems like pointless repetition. We have for a moment placed all the black and white pieces in their proper places to ask ourselves the age-old question: where do we get the consciousness, the will, the ‘guidance’ for action? And, if you like,
the authority
? We have left no piece unemployed, off the chessboard.
In quoting Lenin they failed to notice one of his magnificent constructions, which goes far beyond the... Central Committee. (Vol. II, pp. 374-75, Pravda, 28-3-1956)
‘The working class, which
all over the world
is waging a hard and persistent struggle (...) needs
authorities
(...) only in the way that
young
workers need the experience of
veteran
fighters against oppression and exploitation, of those who have organised many strikes, have taken part in
a number of revolutions
, who are wise in revolutionary
traditions
, and have
a broad political outlook
. The proletarians of every country need
the authority
of the
world-wide
struggle of the proletariat (...) The collective spirit of the progressive class-conscious workers immediately engaged in the struggle in each country will always remain the highest authority on all such questions’.
Central to this passage are the concepts of
time
and
space
taken to their maximum extent; the historical tradition of the struggle and its international scope. We add to the tradition the
future
, the programme of tomorrow’s struggle. How will this Leninist
corpus
, to which we give supreme power in the party, be convened from all continents and across all times? It is made up of the living, the dead, and the unborn: this formula of ours, then, we did not ‘create’: here it is in Marxism, here it is in Lenin.
Who now babbles about powers and authority entrusted to a leader, to a steering committee, to a consultation of contingent bodies in contingent territories? Every decision will be good for us if it aligns with that
broad and global vision
. It can be grasped by a single eye or by millions of eyes.
This theory was erected by Marx and Engels, from the moment they argued against the libertarians, in what sense the processes of class revolutions are
authoritarian
, in which the individual disappears, as a
quantité negligeable
, with his whims of autonomy, but does not subordinate himself to a leader, to a hero, or to a hierarchy of past institutions.
A far cry from the phoney and petty history of Stalin’s ferocious and sinister orders, and the reverence for him, factors that, if the fools are to be believed, would have shaped decades of history!
Sense of Determinism
For determinism, an individual’s consciousness and will count for nothing: his action is determined by his needs and interests, and it matters little how he formulates the impulse that he believes, after the fact, to have awakened his will, which he realises too late. This holds for those at the bottom and at the top, the poor and the rich, the humble and the powerful. Therefore, we Marxists find nothing in the person, in persons; and in the ‘personality’, poor puppet of history, even less so. The more known it is, the more strings it is pulled by. For our grandiose game, it is not a
piece
, not even a modest
pawn
. But is there a
King
in chess? Yes, with the sole function of getting screwed.
In the
class
, the uniformity, the parallelism of situations creates a historical force, a cause of historical development. But
action
equally precedes
will
, and even more so class
consciousness
.
The class rises to a subject of consciousness (of programmatic ends) when the party has been formed, and the doctrine has been formed. In the narrower circle that is the party, as a unitary organ, one begins to find an interpreting subject of the historical path, of its possibilities and routes. Not always, but only in certain rare situations due to the fullness of contrasts in the world of the productive base, in the ‘party’ subject we admit, in addition to
science
, also
will
, in the sense of a possibility of choice between different acts, influencing the motion of events. For the first time,
freedom
, not the
dignity of persons
, appears. The class has a
guide
in history insofar as the material factors that move it are crystallised in the party, insofar as it possesses a complete and continuous theory, an organisation that is in turn universal and continuous, that does not break down and recompose itself at every turn with aggregations and splits; these, however, are the fever that constitutes the reaction of such an organism to its pathological crises.
Where Are the ‘Guarantees’
Where, then, to find the
guarantees
against the degeneration, the disintegration of the course of the movement, of its party? In one man it is not much; man is mortal, is vulnerable to enemies. He is, if alone, a terrible, fragile guarantee, even if it were ever believed to be inherent in one alone.
Would we, however, take seriously the great boast of having found the collegial guarantee, after the disappearance of a leader who led at his own discretion? All this is not serious. In Russia, everything has been lost, and nothing remains to be saved. In any case, the disintegration under Stalin shows less deteriorated aspects than those which now, by deviating from him, are being shown, while none of his flaws appears, nor could they appear, corrected.
Our
guarantees
are well-known and simple.
Theory. As we have said, it is not born in just any historical phase, nor does it await the advent of the Great Man, of the Genius. Only at certain junctures can it be born: of its ‘generalities’, the date is known, not the paternity. Ours
had
to be born after 1830 on the basis of the English economy. It guarantees, insofar as (even admitting that complete truth and science are vain objectives, and that one can only advance in the struggle against the
magnitude of error
) it is held
firm in the backbone, forming a complete system
. During its historical course, it has only two alternatives: to be realised or to disappear. The theory of the party is a system of laws that govern history and its past, and future, course. Guarantee therefore proposed: no permission to revise, or even to enrich the theory. No
creativity
.
Organisation. It must be continuous in history, in terms of fidelity to the same theory and to the continuity of the thread of experiences of struggle. Only when this is realised across vast spaces of the world and long stretches of time do great victories come. The guarantee against the
centre
is that it has no right to create, but is obeyed only insofar as its provisions for action fall within the precise limits of the doctrine, of the historical perspective of the movement, established over long periods of time, for the world stage. The guarantee is that the exploitation of the ‘special’ local or national situation, of the unexpected emergency, of the particular contingency, is suppressed. Either it is possible to establish general concomitances between distant spaces and times in history, or it is pointless to speak of a revolutionary party fighting for a future form of society. As we have always discussed, there are major historical and ‘geographical’ subdivisions that give fundamental junctures to party action: in fields spanning half continents and half centuries: no party leadership can announce such junctures from one year to the next. We possess this theorem, tested by a thousand experimental verifications: announcer of ‘new course’ equals traitor.
Guarantee against the base and against the mass is that unitary and central action, the famous ‘discipline’, is achieved when the leadership is firmly bound to those canons of theory and practice, and when local groups are forbidden from ‘creating’ their own autonomous programmes, perspectives, and movements.
This dialectical relationship between the base and the summit of the
pyramid
(which in Moscow thirty years ago we demanded to
renverser
, to be overturned) is the key that ensures the party, as impersonal as it is unique, the exclusive faculty of reading history, the possibility of intervening in it, and the signal that such a possibility has arisen.
From Stalin to a committee of sub-Stalinists, nothing has been overturned
.
Tactics. Strategic ‘creativity’ is forbidden by the party mechanism. The plan of operations is public and well-known and describes its precise limits, that is, the historical and territorial fields. An obvious example: in Europe, since 1871, the party does not support any war between States. In Europe, since 1919, the party does not participate (should not have...) in elections. In Asia and the East, even today, the party supports the democratic and national revolutionary movements, as well as an alliance of struggle between the proletariat and other classes up to the local bourgeoisie. We give these stark examples in order to avoid the claim that the schema is one and the same, rigid always and everywhere, and to elude the famous accusation that this construction, historical materialist in its entirety, derives from immutable, ethical or aesthetic or even mystical postulates. Class and party dictatorship does not degenerate into forms vilified as oligarchies, provided it is
open
and publicly declared in relation to a predicted broad historical perspective, without hypocritically conditioning it to majoritarian controls, but to the sole test of enemy force. The Marxist party does not blush at the sharp conclusions of its materialist doctrine; it is not held back in drawing them by sentimental and decorative positions.
The programme must clearly outline the framework of the future society as a negation of the entire present framework, the declared point of arrival for all times and places. Describing the present society is only a part of the revolutionary task. Deprecating and defaming it is not our business. Nor is constructing the future society in its flanks. But the ruthless rupture of present relations of production must take place according to a clear programme, which scientifically foresees how new forms of social organisation, exactly known to party doctrine, will arise from these broken obstacles.
Wickedness of Man?
It cannot be denied that in the future, resurgent revolutionary proletarian parties will suffer further involutions, crises and degeneration, and there will never be any recipes to rule it out.
But it is obvious that, after having once again proposed, and after a distant future has built all the
guarantees
that we have called for only to accept current polemical invitations, most of those on the other side, and many of our own, believing themselves to be such, will come out shaking their heads: ‘Useless! No measure will remedy man’s lust for power. The State, the Party, the organisation, in every situation, time and place, end up consolidating the privileges of the supreme hierarchy, which clings to wealth, welfare, and the satisfaction of inexhaustible vanity. Man is a scoundrel. He seeks joy and dominance and tramples on his fellow man, his body and his hunger’.
This argument does not deserve a line of response. If this is believed, if this were remotely true, if man were not virtually as good as the vilified mother ‘beast’, and if the scoundrel is not precisely the social organisation (which dialectically arises from a historical sequence of inevitable and therefore useful phases of
villainy
) then it’s over, we are done for; we, with Marx, Engels, and Lenin, have all collapsed, and our illustrious or unknown literature can go up in a single bonfire.
Those who fill the world with this new legend of
criminologist
history: ‘Stalin’s mistakes were
avoidable
; he just needed to be less harsh, severe, and vicious’, will have easy success. But the history of the tremendous path of the communist revolution will record that this is the most infamous spittle they have so far hurled at the effigies of Marx and Lenin, which, they foolishly, as well as falsely, still plaster on the walls at the street corners, where they sold off the ancient faith.
These people want to attach to the immense figure of Lenin the trick with which they hope to continue peddling for years to come, claiming that it is right to deviate from the firm line of doctrine in order to implement
creativity
and
enrichment
, insofar as he would have been the first to affirm it. But it is only by eliminating this original fallacy that the movement will truly move beyond the shoals of the cult of personality, and of the worse
cult
and vile courtship of the crowd, of the mass.
The old Marxist who, for many decades, works and studies Lenin’s great work, his living word and action, proves that he has done so thoroughly in that he strips away the false myth of Lenin himself, of the legend that he
recreated
and
enriched
the common doctrine, whereas, like a lion he defended every verse of it until his last breath.
But when he then hears that such a task, which must be contested against giants, and no less against the non-pygmy Joseph Stalin, would pass with equal right of manipulation to today’s homunculi, children of a putrescent era in which theory, science, and art decay, find no echoes similar to those raised by the legions of ringing voices in the fertile epochs of history, most recently the Renaissance and the bourgeois liberation struggles, which we overcame a century ago, and finally, above and beyond them all, the Russian and world epic of October 1917... then the dialectical weapons fall from the hands of the simple militant of an inviolable doctrine; he, unheroically, lowers them to hold his stomach, to stave off the risk of pissing himself.
Breath of Fresh Air
The ‘provocateurs’ could not fail to have a field day on the tempting terrain of ‘philosophy’, and we believe we have found something they can sink their teeth into, erecting high barriers against the mania for unravelling today’s knot with the usual insipid, tremulous inquiry: who will be tomorrow’s master? And of giving names to the tragedy played out on the stages of Moscow. We have found another, fundamental meaning for them.
Finally, to close our day, let us return to our solid ground: the physics of economic facts, the hand-to-hand struggle of material class interests, at the apex of whose ferment our school has placed the keys to the present, the past and the future, in the unitary framework of which we have gained a complete vision, if we are not afflicted by total blindness.
The colossal construction of the emulative ‘theory’, according to which the rate of the Russian
system’s
productive progress beats the rate of the
system
of contemporary Western capitalism and will eventually surpass it in absolute terms – leaving the decision on the fate of the world to the Platonic outcome of this comparison – is draped in a crazy thesis: that this rate
is seen for the first time
in the world and in history, and that its numerical indices attest to the advent of a new principle, replacing the old ones.
This gigantic mystification is all part of the game of defending and preserving the capitalist system, which it ostensibly wants to defeat. How else to explain that the most outspoken Western publications and media outlets echo it?
In America, there is a
Research Institute, Inc., of New York
, that has issued a
special report
to ‘thirty thousand firms, most of them industrial corporations, for which the Institute is a consultant in matters of economics, legislation, corporate leadership (management), industrial and human relations, sales techniques, and market conquest (Sales and Marketing)’. The title is suggestive: ‘Il cimento supremo’ which could perhaps be translated as ‘The toughest challenge’.
The work is prefaced by a significant statement: this research is based on facts, without adherence to any
economic school
or any
government policy
.
All the material we have studied here from a completely different perspective is presented as extremely serious and well-founded, and the figures of Khrushchev and Bulganin are weighed with respect and extreme commitment. These experts on capitalism close by admitting that the prize may even go to the Soviet system, they do not call for repression or war, they only study in depth the resources available to
firms
for waves of arms orders, and finally recommend open access to the invitation to ‘marketing’ with the dreaded Reds. They also set about calculating in how many years, with the known plans, Western production indices, both in terms of mass and
per capita
, could be overtaken by the U.S.S.R. While they do not gloss over the weaknesses of the Eastern system, especially in agriculture, they also expose those of the West, assess the course of the economic rates, the possible crisis, and take a decisive stance on the ‘détente’ plan.
The consultancy of high capitalism, therefore, says that the invitation to emulation should be welcomed, because of the parallelism of the two systems; that for the two imperialisms, there is plenty of work to be done before fighting.
In this not-insignificant study, we found a coincidence of perspective with our own (twenty years of peace). From calculations on the volume of raw materials available in the two camps and on the extent of industrialisation in the underdeveloped areas of the world, it is assumed that the dual capitalist accumulation will have a secure outlet for the next twenty years. By 1975, will war or revolution decide? Between now and then, the theoretical struggle will decide between the economy of
explosion
, and that of growing
welfare
. Two
progressive
adversaries align themselves in the ‘Challenge’: theoretically, they fight side by side.
Experts of the Market
Economists and institutes offer their services to both sides for a fee. We don’t believe that those at
Research
also send their invoice to Moscow, but certainly the authors of the opinions do, which, among the alignments of the same and now annoying tables of figures, are reported in ‘
l’Unità
’ of 12 April. This French magazine ‘
La Nef
’ has a suspicious editorial policy: but we don’t care. The colossal falsity of economic science is that written under the table that fixes at 10 per cent per year and above the
rate
of Russian
industrial production
and
national income
, data accepted to be about triple that of the American, as we have already explained. ‘
Nothing like this has ever occurred in the history of capitalist economies
’. According to these experts, bourgeois economists have lost the game, their only salvation was to prove that the Russian figures were false, and the rates lower.
If the riff-raff who compile and host such material had ever just opened at random the first volume of
Capital
, they would know two things: First:
Completely similar things have occurred in the history of all capitalist economies
. Second:
When these things first occurred, we deduced that the capitalist economy is destined to collapse, and proletarian Marxism declared war on it to the death
.
The First International
Are there
Marxist-Leninists
who are unaware of the Inaugural Address of the International Workingmen’s Association, written by the hand of Karl Marx?
The historic rally at Martin’s Hall was held on 28 September 1864. Marx’s text begins thus:
‘It is a great fact that the misery of the working masses has not diminished from 1848 to 1864, and yet this period is unrivaled for the development of its industry and the growth of its commerce. In 1850 a moderate organ of the British middle class, of more than average information, predicted that if the exports and imports of England were to rise 50 per cent, English pauperism would sink to zero.
‘Alas! On April 7, 1864, the Chancellor of the Exchequer delighted his parliamentary audience by the statement that the total import and export of England had grown in 1863 to 443,955,000 pounds! That astonishing sum about three times the trade of the comparatively recent epoch of 1843! With all that, he was eloquent upon “poverty”’.
Let us stop. The threefold increase in twenty years, using the usual little calculation, and without playing the game (which the courtly Varga sometimes plays today) of dividing two hundred by twenty to obtain ten per cent, is equivalent to an annual
average
of 5.6 per cent.
This is not yet the highest index, but it is enough to establish how early capitalism runs fast, like today’s
Russian example
, and then inevitably slows down.
The consultants at ‘l’Unità’ play a useless game when they give the rates of capitalist countries from 1870 onwards. They themselves cannot hide the fact that in certain periods, which they call ‘cyclical upswing’, there has, even recently, been about 8 per cent annual progress. Great Britain 1946-50 (post-war). Japan 1907-1913 (after the war with Russia; but today Japan, no longer the victor but the vanquished, we seen running even faster, surpassing Russia). United States 1880-85. And, lo and behold: Russia 1890-1900, under the... tsarist system!
What’s the point of establishing that in future ‘long-term’ periods Western capitalism will grow at a
rate
of 3 to 5%? So will Russia, if in twenty years its
per capita
production matches that of America, England and Germany, and... barring complications.
Emulation
cannot go beyond that.
Here we are debunking the lower part of the table which, referring to countries ‘at an early stage of industrial development’, bundles together Russia, Sweden, the United States, and Germany for the years 1855-1913 (!) and finds 5 per cent...
The English Industrial Revolution
The parallel of early capitalism between today’s Russia and England brings us back to the admirable thirty-year period 1830-1860, when Great Britain was almost the first and only one to flood the rest of the world with manufactures from its mechanical industry. Continental Europe was to it what immense Asia is to the U.S.S.R. today. The anti-feudal political revolution had taken place in the previous century, periods of great wars had followed, and the subsequent international crisis of 1848 had been overcome. The analogies are remarkable: the revolutionary seeks the
constants
of historical functions, which confirm to him (and all the better if centuries pass in between) that history can be harnessed into general lines of uniformity, due to uniform developments of the economic base. The opportunist seeks discrepancies in order to endorse his deviations: the conservative rejoices with him if he sees the foundation of the forecast weakening, according to which flourishing high industrialism is followed by a new powerful social subversion.
The consideration of rhythms, of rates of increase, was something well-known to Marx. Let us stay with the indices of foreign trade, a reliable parameter of irruptive industrialisation. Marx discusses this in the First Volume of
Capital
, in Section 5 of Chapter 25:
Illustrations of the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation: England from 1846 to 1866
. Could you want anything more basic?
The total exports and imports are given, on page 620 of the Italian edition, for 1854, as 268 million pounds sterling and for 1865 as 490 million pounds sterling. The usual simple calculation says that from ‘54 to ‘65 the average annual rate was 5.6 per cent. But the table of exports alone in that period brings us to rates of the... Russian kind. From 1849 to 1856 it advances from 66 to 116 million pounds: 8.4 per cent rate. From 1865 to 1866, a crazy leap forward: 13 per cent in a single year (from 167 to 189 million pounds sterling). Engels observes: this was the prelude to the crisis that broke out immediately. We know that the previous crisis occurred in 1856: before that in 1846. The figures confirm this, and the rates fluctuate, but hold over the total period.
Shall we ask what has happened since Marx’s table up to the present day? In 1953 total British trade was 5 billion 925 million pounds sterling. Since Gladstone’s 1863 it has grown more than 13 times greater. The capitalist system has had a lot of work to do! But the average rate, duly researched, as we know, is that of adult capitalism:
three per cent
.
On the same page, Marx studies the figures for coal and iron production, as well as the length of the railways. Between 1855 and 1864, he obtains figures that would take too long to report here, but which give rates of around 4 and 5 per cent.
Marx himself then determines the total and annual rates, of course using the correct procedure, for the same period in the income of certain industries: houses 3.5 per cent; quarries 7.7; mines 6.3; ironworks 3.6; fishing 5.2; gas 11.5; railways 7.6. Miracles, but not of the ‘socialist’ system!
He goes on to point out that the increase in income, as shown by the recorded taxes, and therefore as always lower than the actual figure, grew by 9.30 per cent annually between 1861 and 1864.
Here, however, Marx does not deal with the figures peculiar to the early period, from 1830 onwards, and perhaps earlier; which he nevertheless discusses at length in all his works, as does Engels. But the figures are in all the history books, for example, (not to go too far) Barbagallo (an old Marxist). Here are a few.
Cotton 1796-1800, 11.2 per cent. Wool 1829-1830, 11.5 per cent. Machines exported 1855-1865, 8.5 per cent. And so on.
The Other Capitalisms
The phenomenon, which would only be seen in Russia a century later, is widespread.
The capital invested in the United States in the burgeoning wool industry rose at the rate of 31 per cent per year (those who copy the techniques of others, international domination in bourgeois times, exceed the speed of the original example). Coal extracted from 1835 to 1850: from half a million tonnes to 6.266 million, 12 and a half times in 15 years,
18 per cent rate
. And if we went back to 1820 with the meagre 365
tonnes
, we’d calculate a staggering rate: 1,500 times in 15 years. Today? We know:
465 million tonnes
: more than
a million
times as much. Average, over 140 years, only
eleven per cent
. See the little trick, Moscow? Push the starting years back to those of nascent production.
France: in the thirty-year period 1830-1860, cast iron increased 8-fold: 7 per cent rate. The horsepower of steam engines 58-fold: 15 per cent rate.
Germany: here the years are rightly later. From 1871 to 1913, coal is 7.5 times more: long-term rate 4.9 per cent. If we want more, we need only go back in time: sugar produced in Prussia was about a thousand tonnes in 1831, in 1843 about 9 thousand. Ninefold in twelve years gives the rate of 20 per cent.
The idiotic invention of emulation is taken from the ‘new phenomena’ of very recent years, which are supposed to justify the trumpeted idea of
creating
a new Marxism and
enriching
the old one. But it is enough to treat it with the Marxist science of a hundred years ago, and behold, emulation flipped on its head and ridiculed!
Let us return to Japan: even before the war with Russia, between 1863 and 1907, in 14 years it began to flood the world with its magnificent silk: from 38 to 450 million yen: about 12 times, which gives the annual rate of 19 per cent. Other indices are even more spectacular. Perhaps the Mikado thought, even back then, about
building a socialist society
?
Law of Accumulation
The fundamental Marxist law stands more
inviolable
than ever. The more strangely different the countries and the more distant the historical times, the more precise and uniform the relationship between causes and effects becomes.
With the advent of capitalist industry, the annual rate of accumulation is at its maximum, it then declines.
Since the rate is not uniform but very sporadic, it tends to be lower over long periods and becomes pronounced again after economic crises, after wars, and especially after wars that are lost and devastating for the country in question.
The rate is higher at the same
age
of the capitalist form in countries that enter into the industrial and mechanical arena later. This is due to the more advanced technology immediately available and to the changed
organic composition
of capital in relation to this; for the same amount of labour, more materials are processed.
American news from the aforementioned source expects South America to grow at a super-Russian pace in the coming years: over the next twenty years,
provided there is peace
.
The little tale of the miracle of rapid accumulation due to planning, i.e. to the monopolistic and imperial form of capitalism, and to State industrialism itself (in this there can only be a certain equalisation of the rate over time, a certain compensation for the shocks of crisis: but not only in Russia, but everywhere: a subject we will leave for another occasion), is of Stalinist manufacture. The usual tables are also included in the 1939 speech-report.
In confirmation of our old well-known Marxist laws, we have compiled a single table from those of Stalin and Bulganin – with some from Varga – for the various countries, covering the following periods: 1880-1900, peace; 1900-1913, peace; 1913-1920, First World War; 1920-1929, first ‘reconstruction’; 1929-1932, general crisis; 1932-1937, recovery; 1937-1946, Second World War; 1946-1955, second reconstruction.
Let us follow the course of the various countries through these phases, always giving the annual rates.
Great Britain
: 1880-1900, 3.5; 1900-1913, 2.6; first war: zero (production unchanged); first reconstruction: idem. Crisis 1929-1932: decline to 11 per cent!; recovery 1932-1937: increase to 9! Second war: stagnation, zero rate, strictly speaking: minus 0.6. Current phase: increase of 4.8%.
France
: pre-war 6.5% and 6.6%; first war: fall, to 6.6 per cent; post-war, rise, to 9.5 per cent! Crisis 1929-1932: decline, to a rate of 11.6; recovery 1932-1937, slow rise (one per cent); second war: further decline to 3 per cent; latest phase: rise again, to 8 per cent.
Germany
: early pre-war 7.2 and 7.3; first war: fall, to 8.2 per cent; first reconstruction: recovery to 7.2 per cent; 1929-1932 crisis: plunge to 13.8 per cent!; recovery: rise again to 13.7!; second war: fall to 12.2!; current phase: recovery at a
record
rate: 22.3 per cent! Without any socialism, and with a little
dirigisme
.
United States
: early pre-war 8.4 and 7.3; first war:
increase
to 3.4 per cent (ah, old and foolish Europe!). Post-war: continues at 3.6; 1929 crisis: tumble, to 18.6 per cent!; recovery: to 11; second war: further recovery (and Europe as above) to 4.7 per cent; present phase: impassive advance at the same pace!
Japan
: rapid advance up until the first war; during the war,
advance
to around 7% (Europe, etc.); post-war: same rate. Pause in the crisis, rate at 12 per cent during the recovery; second war: decline to 12.5 per cent; current phase: sharp rise to 18.8 per cent: Russian time.
Russia
: from 1880 to 1913: rates of high initial industrialisation; from 1913 to 1920: war, industrial dissolution. From 1920 to 1929: intense industrialisation, at a rate of 34 per cent! (effect of starting
from the bottom
); from 1929 to 1937: unaffected by the foreign crisis, rise to 20 per cent; second war: practically, stagnation. Current phase: 18 per cent, similar to Japan, much less than Germany.
Italy
? Let’s limit ourselves to saying that from the 1929 crisis to the second war it was stationary (decline and then rise); during the war it fell to 3 per cent; today it rises to a decent 12 per cent. In 1955 motor vehicle production increased by 69%; oil (early stage!) 83%; FIAT’s capital increased today by 19 billion, 32%.
The overview, in the form of a table, is included at the end of this
text
.
Who can read anything in this table about the advantage of the (Russian) socialist system over the others? No one: all the data are from Russian sources, and therefore quite comparable. They forever deflate the exorbitant expedient
of emulation
, confirming the
coexistence
of analogous capitalist forms of various ages and origins and histories.
The keys to deciphering the table, eloquent in itself in its meaning as a platform for the future course, are three: Crisis, War, Revolution.
Our work is at an end, and its concluding thesis is the
rout
of emulation. The more the competitors outdo each other, the more the Revolution becomes possible, with its mandate, a corollary of the original theory:
blockage of production
.
For broader conclusions, we dare not make a prophecy, only a wish.
The post-war decade of progress in world capitalist production will continue for a few more years. Then the interwar crisis, similar to the one that broke out in America in 1929. Social slaughter of the middle classes and the bourgeoisified workers. Resurgence of a global working-class movement, rejecting all allies. Brand new theoretical victory for its old theses. One Communist Party for all the States of the world.
Towards the end of the twenty-year period, the alternative of the difficult century: third war of the imperial monsters – or international communist revolution. Only if the war does not pass will the
emulators
die!
Marx and Gladstone
We have reduced all the Russian statistical vainglory to a phenomenon of vigorous capitalism, like that which England offered Marx a century ago.
How did Marx view it at the time?
Even then, he knew very well that in the hell of Capital, one does not cry
begone Satan
, but awaits the conquest of the world. He waited for British industrialism to attack, growing out of all proportion, setting Europe ablaze. We have the right to wait for the furnace of Russian production to ignite all of the East. It is not the failure of the five-year plans we wish for. It is the
declaration of socialism
that we hope will be torn from that system.
The British progressive rates measured by Marx’s far-seeing eye enabled him to recognise the direct enemy, and he declared global class war, drawing its accents from the reading of those figures.
Because the 1864 speech, the
Dialogue with Gladstone
, was not limited to what we have said.
As the figures for foreign trade grew wildly, Marx, in the Address, contrasts the data of the infamous exploitation of that model of the modern proletariat. He writes the equation between the grandeur of Capitalism and the slavery of the wage-earner. He lifts the tribune’s excommunication against the cynical Chancellor of the Exchequer.
‘Dazzled by the “progress of the nation”,
statistics dancing before his eyes
, the Chancellor of the Exchequer exclaims in wild ecstasy: in the years 1842-1852 the taxable (
income
) of the country increased by 6 per cent: in the eight years from 1853 to 1861, it has increased from the basis taken in 1853, 20 per cent! This fact is so astonishing as to be almost incredible’.
Marx wrote the same in ‘
Capital
’ in 1866, except that then in his table he was able to note the leap in income
of over ten per cent
in the single year 7 April 1864 – 7 April 1865! His quote in the address continues: ‘“This intoxicating augmentation of strength and power”, adds Mr Gladstone, “is entirely confined to the classes of property”’. The demonstration of the plight of the English proletariat and its unfortunate struggles concludes with the powerful thesis: ‘In all the countries of Europe it has now become a truth demonstrable to every unprejudiced mind... that, on the present false base,
every fresh development of the productive powers of labour must tend to deepen social contrasts and sharpen social antagonisms
’.
In the pages of ‘
Capital
’, the quotation from Gladstone’s speech of 16 April 1863 extends further to his assertion: ‘this augmentation of wealth... must be an indirect benefit to the labouring population, because it cheapens the commodities of general consumption. While the rich have been growing richer, the poor have been growing less poor. At any rate, whether the extremes of poverty
are less
, I do not presume to say’. Marx’s harsh sarcasm strikes at the hypocrisy of this strange statement. The chapter ended with a note calling for the continuation of Engels’ 1845 study on the conditions of the English working classes. Engels removed the note and wrote at the foot of his manuscript: this was done by Marx in the first volume of
Capital
.
Returnees, in defiance of Stalin, to ‘Marxism’, have you ever known anything about this?
The Extremes of a Century
The minister of the world’s first bourgeoisie felt the mighty blows of the unknown Dr. Marx, the
red terror Doctor
of the English press, the poor and almost solitary emigrant who had repeated the cry of 1848:
Working Men of All Countries, Unite
! at the close of his fiery address.
The controversy became famous, and stretched on for years and years; after Marx died. The German anti-socialist Brentano, corresponding with the English minister, insinuated in one of his publications that Karl Marx was guilty of ‘false quotation’. Gladstone had said that the figures for taxable income (our
mobile wealth
) concerned only the possessing classes, as wage incomes were not taxed: the figures, therefore, did not concern what is today called ‘national income’ but only income and profits from property and business. Gladstone had admitted nothing about the growing misery of the working classes, as Marx claimed. But Marx’s demonstration did not need Gladstone’s
confessions
: it stood and stands, and affects every form of wage-labour. Misery does not mean low wages, it means the destitution of the only ones who have generated rampant wealth by ‘rowing’ in the grim factory of industrial enterprise. Marx’s figures trace the pace of accumulation, of the concentration of capital into increasingly fewer hands and heads, up to its depersonalisation, which reigns supreme everywhere today.
But the accusation of forgery was no small matter at the time! Eleanor, Marx’s daughter, replied indignantly, Brentano issued another publication: finally, Engels, in a special treatise of his own, summarised the whole affair, reporting all the opposing allegations, facsimiles of the German and English texts, of the pages invoked by both sides from the ‘Times’, the
Proceedings
of the House of Commons, and other press reports. Today, members of the Russian party who declare themselves utterly fed up with these rehashings of old stories (who cares about the
Bund
? About the populists? These are the
existential
-sounding phrases with which the bigwigs had the Congress laughing heartily), are being courted demagogically: today such types, incited by the Stalinist
attack the pedant
: what a pedant, they would say, that Friedrich Engels!
The newspapers have published photographs of Marx’s grave in London Highgate Cemetery, to whose bareness the Russians have superimposed a heavy monument: not content with the one inflicted upon Vladimir Lenin, another unforgettable model of boundless simplicity, shy of all pomp and splendour.
At the grave, Messrs. Bulganin and Khrushchev appeared confident in reaffirming their historic rapprochement with Marx at the 20th Congress. They showed no doubt that, from that assembly, they had laid bare before the world the same glories that Marx had shoved back down the throat of the English minister of the time, at the height of the historic first industrial revolution, model for all others, including that of Russia.
Marx then countered the mad orgy of mechanical hyper-production with the founding of the First Revolutionary International: the two who greeted his grave had, just recently, buried the last poor ruins of the Third, founded by Lenin.
And while we lay out the final pages of this hurried work as simple students of that giant school, which alone can invoke the two names, the radios broadcast from Moscow the statements of the two travellers, just returned from London: Mr. Eden, the impeccable minister of Her Gracious Britannic Majesty, a pupil (he, indeed, with head held high) of his classic predecessor Gladstone, received them with the utmost and friendly
cordiality
.
Quite unlike their living contemporary
emulators
, the Dead converse...
END OF THE ‘DIALOGUE WITH THE DEAD’
COMPLEMENTS TO THE DIALOGUE
(General Meeting in Torino, may 1956,
Il Programma Comunista
n.11‑12‑13, 1956)
A) Retreat and Decline of the Bolshevik Revolution
The Internal Struggle in the Russian Party
History does not enter man through the head; it does not lead him to act by that path; such that the poor wretch deludes himself into thinking that it is he who manipulates it. That is why, in savouring and digesting the lessons of history, every poor wretch among us cannot resist the itch to change what was the inexorable event, and only after repeated chewing and rumination does he manage to grasp the meaning of what was, because that is how it had to be.
The crushing events of the social tragedy are not like some productions of Pirandello and some commercially released films, which have two alternate endings, so that, in the audience rows, the hysteria of the, perhaps mature, old gals and geezers, can choose the one that thrills them the most.
It therefore makes little sense to ask ‘what should have been done’ to prevent Stalin and Stalinism from winning the day, and the party that had won the October Revolution, the State it had founded, from meeting the miserable end that we have shown throughout the course.
The impression is harsher today that even the damned apologists of that solution, which history has consigned to the past, have been forced to admit that all was not well in the best possible revolution, that a constellation of mistakes, atrocities, infamies, of useless (!?) hallucinatory massacres has been linked to the course of events.
The meeting had as its theme the entirety of the work and studies dedicated by the movement to the questions of the Revolution and the social structure in Russia.
If we more reasonably ask ourselves the causes that have influenced the different path that the movement took at the time, we can first of all identify the main one in the defeat of the proletariat in Western countries, which, repeatedly beaten, clearly showed that it was not in a position to win the struggle for power. Europe had already for several years entered into a situation more unfavourable to all the communist parties, and bourgeois power had everywhere consolidated itself after the difficult post-war period, having gathered the alternative between workers’ dictatorship and capitalist dictatorship, having employed without hesitation the means of repression that any country would have clearly resorted to in the emergency of preventing communist power, and without exceptions.
In the stagnation of the revolution abroad, the problem of the Russian Revolution revealed all the difficulties, which to understand it is by no means necessary to even slightly modify the firm vision held by Lenin in the long stages we have described. It was astride two forces, one of which, the proletarian, was still quantitatively maimed by the decomposition of industry after the national and civil war, the other, the quantitatively immense peasant one, qualitatively had revolutionary efficiency only in a transitional phase, until non-socialist postulates, typical of an extreme bourgeois revolution, but bourgeois nonetheless, were to be fulfilled. It had always been said (and we have proven when this is the case) that in the further phase, the ally would necessarily become the enemy. The domestic peasantry as an ally could not replace the
natural
ally of the Bolshevik Revolution, namely the working class abroad: it was an inferior substitute, and effective only for a period that allowed for a catch of breath, to restore mass prevalence to the authentic proletarians.
The Great Clash of 1926
It was clear that in order to sustain proletarian energy in the cities, it was necessary to reconstitute industry and expand it: this had been clear since before Lenin’s death – whom we do not at all line up among the ‘causes’ of what occurred. In this, all were in agreement. But in the countryside it was necessary, in essence, if one wanted to have the help of the peasants in the civil war and in the general economy, not to proceed in the direction of a rural proletarianisation. Lenin had harshly admitted to having had to
stand
by the programme of the Socialist Revolutionaries, beaten by Bolshevism in doctrine and on the social battlefield. In fact, it was necessary to act in such a way that the number of workers in the countryside with personal and familial disposal over cultivated land, with disposal over the product, increased. From this arose the enormous revolutionary potential of the broken disposal over the product by the landowning, semi-feudal, and semi-bourgeois gentlemen, and without this shifting of forces, the civil war would not have been won: no room for regrets. As we have shown and are showing, the theoretical declaration that the land was nationalised, property of the workers’ State, is a poor remedy, because it is not legal ownership, but economic management with its sharp relations that provokes the social reflexes of political and combative activity.
Nor had Lenin ever kept silent about the fact that, once the capitalist incursions had been beaten by force of arms, in order to accelerate industrial reconstruction, the oxygen of revolutionary life, it was necessary to obtain from foreign industry, machinery, experts, technicians, and ultimately capital in various forms, which could not be obtained without offering something in return (concessions). These could consist of nothing other than domestic labour power and domestic raw materials.
The healthy and proletarian part, the
left
(here we must express ourselves briefly) of the Russian party, faithful to class traditions, posed the question in the oft-quoted (and read in suggestive excerpts at the meeting we are referring to) speeches by Zinoviev, Trotsky, Kamenev (who was also particularly decisive, explicit, and most courageous, against the howls of rage of the assembly) before the December 1926 session of the Enlarged Executive of the Communist International.
With decisive quotations on the subject of the international revolution, these great comrades of ours proved that until the victory of workers’ dictatorship in at least some of the developed capitalist countries, the Russian Revolution could remain, for more or less long, only in a phase of transitional tasks. And this not only in the sense that Stalin’s formula of ‘construction of socialism in one country’ had to be rejected; worse still, in a country like Russia. In fact, in the delay of proletarian Europe, not only could there not appear in Russia a society, a form of
socialist
production, but even the class relations could not be those of a pure proletarian dictatorship, that is, directed against
every
surviving class, bourgeois and semi-bourgeois. The task of the proletarian and communist State would have been to build a State-industrial capitalism, indispensable also for the purposes of armed defence of the territory, and of conducting in the countryside a social policy capable of ensuring the supply of basic necessities to the cities and of evolving, fighting against the danger of a private rural capitalist accumulation, towards a State agrarian industry, which was still in its infancy.
Trotsky’s Fifty Years
Not for the first time, we insist on the high revolutionary vision of Trotsky’s cut-off speech, which showed with magnificent clarity how the unfolding of the primordial Russian economy towards more modern forms would have made the economic and political influences of world capitalism increasingly more tremendous, and this would have constituted a threat always capable of attacking the very life of Red Russia, until its internal proletariat had beaten it on some fronts.
Let us emphasise again here the already established fact that in the speeches of Bukharin and Stalin (aside from the rehashings of the various centrist henchmen), in boasting of the possible advent of integral socialism in a Russia encircled by the bourgeois world, a deadly war between socialist Russia and the bourgeois West was not at all excluded, indeed it was held as certain, on the basis of Lenin’s doctrine, and the line to follow in such a war was established, aiming at world revolution: a war of classes and States, which Stalin (we showed) made reference to later, both on the threshold of the Second Imperialist War of 1939, and in his ‘testament’ of 1953, which the 20th Congress has, along with everything else, thrown to the nettles.
Trotsky and the others showed without hesitation (see in particular Kamenev) that the boast of building socialism was nothing other than a return of the worst opportunism, and that whoever had raised such a banner (Stalin and today’s anti-Stalinists) would in fact have ended up in the arms of imperialist capitalism, as was the case. When confronted with the insidious question of what they ‘would have done’ in the event of a long stabilisation of capitalism, they replied that in that virile and non-hypocritical position, the party could, even while admitting to directing, with its own political State, an economy still capitalist and mercantile, hold out in the trenches of the communist revolution for decades and decades.
It had seemed to some comrades that such an ultimate deadline had been formulated by Lenin in only twenty years, and this in connection with our acceptance of Trotsky’s fifty years leading up to 1976, a date which we roughly attribute to the possible advent of the next great general crisis of the capitalist system in the world, or rather, to the third immense imperialist war. It was therefore necessary to provide quotations relating to this point. It is not serious if the revolutionary sees the revolution closer than it is; our school has already anticipated it many times: 1848, 1870, 1919. Deformed visions expected it in 1945. It is serious when the revolutionary sets a
deadline
for obtaining historical proof: opportunism has never had any other origin, nor has it ever conducted its campaigns of sophistry in any other way, the most poisonous of which was that of socialism in Russia.
Trotsky had spoken at the 15th Conference of the Bolshevik Communist Party, defending the thesis of the opposition. In the session of the Enlarged, Stalin responds to his speech at the time. Trotsky had reached this point in his reply when he was ruthlessly cut off. We are forced to find Trotsky’s thesis in the words of his opponent.
Stalin’s Position
Stalin in that speech, as we know, toned down the economic argument (proof that this was from the outset a demagogic sham) by saying that his formula of the construction of socialism meant victory over the bourgeoisie, and the subsequent building of the economic
bases
of socialism. His adversaries tried to wear him down, forced by the overwhelming evidence that his formula is not in Lenin, nor even in Stalin, or anyone else, before 1924, cunning, and masked as (today we can say)
Molotovian
.
Stalin then preferred, as was his custom, to defame the opponent with arguments as banal as they were effective on the public: the opponents not only did not believe in socialism in Russia but not even in the not-distant revolution in the capitalist countries: they wanted to admit a capitalist development in Russia, therefore they sympathised with foreign capitalism.
A Trotsky could not respond to him like a buffoon. As a great dialectician, he told him that he would have believed and fought for the European revolution even in a near future, but that, if it had not risen or prevailed, Bolshevik Russia could resist without falsifying traditions, doctrine, and revolutionary programme for
even fifty years
.
Ever since the Genoa meeting, we noted amid the laughter of the audience that among the fierce stigmatisers of the ‘pessimism’ of Trotsky towards the revolution was then, among other Pharisees, Ercoli, who guaranteed an imminent revolution; where Ercoli is none other than Togliatti, and where already last year, but with more tacky triviality today, after having also spat on Stalin, he made and makes historical constitutional and legalitarian plans, within the current republic and in collaboration with filthy democracy, with deadlines of more than fifty years from today; what can we say? He assures, in unison with the Moscow gang, the bourgeois world of an
unlimited
existence, in peaceful and emulative coexistence!
Let us then quote Trotsky in the mouth of Stalin. ‘
The sixth question
concerns the problem of the prospects of the proletarian revolution. In his speech at the 15th Party Conference, Trotsky said:
Lenin considered that we cannot possibly build socialism in 20 years, that in view of the backwardness of our peasant country we shall not build it even in 30 years. Let us take 30-50 years as a minimum
.
‘I must say here, comrades, that this prospect, invented by Trotsky, has nothing in common with Comrade Lenin’s prospect of the revolution in the U.S.S.R. A few minutes later, Trotsky himself, in his speech, began to challenge this perspective. But that is his affair’.
It is clear that Trotsky had not contradicted himself, rather, he had first of all hoped for a rapid foreign revolution. He had then added that the delay of this did not prohibit the party from holding its integral position, without Stalin’s foolish alternative: either we immediately implement the maximum socialist programme, or we leave power and return to the opposition, pursuing a new revolution. Trotsky had destroyed the insidious alternative with the authority of Lenin, who, though always and at every moment declaring that Russian social transformation would have been able to proceed rapidly after the European workers’ revolution, and even a German one alone, had formulated the clear eventuality of Russia alone, and predicted the time required, decades and decades,
not to build socialism, but something far less, and preliminary!
We couldn’t read the speech from the 15th Conference at the meeting, so we limited ourselves to giving Lenin’s passage as proof, since Stalin himself quotes it immediately after.
Lenin’s ‘Twenty Years’
Here are Lenin’s words, as they are in the stenogram of Stalin’s speech on 2 December 1926, and which there is no need to find in the source text, so eloquent are they and of colossal importance in dispelling anyone’s doubts and hesitations. They are referred to Vol. IV p. 374 of the
Complete Works
in Russian:
‘
Ten or 20 years of correct relations with the peasantry, and victory on a world scale is assured
(we take the liberty of reading: before or against the whole world),
even if the proletarian revolutions, which are growing, are delayed; otherwise, 20-40 years of the torments of white guard terrorism
’.
Here we beg Stalin to step aside with the laughable gloss that he adds, even though we do not wish to be as boorish as those of the 20th Congress, as proved by the fact that we have not removed his texts from the archives.
Stalin in fact deduces that twenty years is a sufficient time to do all the socialism.
Oh, que nenni!
Lenin says this. Good relations with the peasants are necessary, and for a very long time. This is not contradicted by the obvious fact that when there are peasants, relations with the peasants, and worse, good relations, there is neither socialism nor its complete basis. But in the meantime, it is the only way to resist, with the armed support of the peasantry, respected in their
bourgeois
interests, the efforts of the encircling and aggressing capitalist world, not yet overthrown by the Western revolution.
Nothing else can be done, and if one had doctrinal or sentimental scruples about embracing the peasantry, destined (we quoted a hundred passages from Lenin on this) to a future counter-revolutionary task, our armed forces would be beaten by the bourgeois and tsarist reaction, and we would be back to 40 years of white terror.
Twenty years later, Lenin admits that by now the external and internal armed enemy will no longer be the No. 1 danger. Then, says Stalin, socialism is here! But no, wretched idol now shattered: then one passes to another phase that not even – again on the assumption of the Western revolutionary delay – can be called
socialism
. All good relations with the peasants are denounced, they are placed, from comrades in the dictatorship,
under
the dictatorship, and on the basis of the powerful urban State industry a new phase of total State capitalism begins, even in the countryside. In other words, even the farm peasants are expropriated and become genuine proletarians. What the
Associated Press
report ascribed to today’s intentions of the Soviet regime: in theory it is right, because the forty years have passed: but that power is now declassed and bourgeois, and not even the bourgeois statisation of the countryside is within its power!
Lenin’s perspective is, as always, impressive in strength and courage. It ties in with the old prediction: democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. In other words, he declares: if the revolution in Europe does not come, we will not see socialism in Russia. That does not mean we will relinquish power, nor will we say, with a formula as blatantly Menshevik in 1903 as Stalinist in 1926 (purely polemical!): ‘bourgeoisie, go ahead and govern, and we’ll pass nicely to being opponents’; but we will follow our luminous path: a few decades with the allied peasantry (whom, if the allied foreign workers were to rise up first, we would send to the pulp in fourth gear) and struggle, directed by the proletariat, against revolts against the new State, against attacks from abroad, and to lay the industrial bases of future socialism. Then, after this first transitional phase, but without other internal political revolutions, the phase of total State capitalism, urban and rural. From this classic last step of Lenin’s to non-mercantile socialism (beyond the puzzle of the ‘exchange’ between industry and agriculture, reduced to the obvious collaboration of two industrial branches in the general social plan), we will one day rise alongside the victorious workers of all Europe.
And hence the glittering corollary of Leon Trotsky: even after
fifty years
, if necessary, because not even half a century will ever see us, unless overwhelmed with arms in hand, abdicate the power conquered by a generation of proletarian – and peasant – martyrs, or take the even more cowardly step of lowering the Flag of dictatorship and communism!
As is happening today, Stalin himself steeped in shame, with the dishonourable offer of peace to universal capitalism.
Revolutions That Carry Out the Backlog of Tasks
In the course of the presentation, the speaker wanted to give a few historical examples to remove any remaining dialectical uncertainties about the logic behind the chosen solution: proletarian, socialist, communist power, which lives and struggles with its party and in the revolutionary State, while all economic tasks are of inferior content, capitalist, and even pre-capitalist.
A similar question must be distinguished from the other, quite natural in its emergence, to which we have responded for many years with examples of a historical nature: Given that it is claimed that class power in Russia today no longer belongs to the proletariat, and not even to an alliance between the proletariat and poor peasants, but is bourgeois and capitalistic power (despite the assumed physical destruction of the components of a bourgeois social class), how has there not been an open struggle for the possession and conquest of power, which evidently could only be accomplished in armed forms? To this second question (apart from noting that the destruction of the opposition within the party in power was extremely bloody and widespread, even if there was no collective resistance to the repression) we responded then also with the historical method, citing cases of classes that have fallen from power without losing it in a struggle, among them that of the Italian Communes, first example of the domination of the bourgeoisie as a class, which disappeared without a general struggle, giving way to feudal-type Seignories and to a landed nobility that came from the countryside surrounding the cities. By quite another route the bourgeois class was then to return to power centuries later, and this time after insurrections and wars.
Now we do not want to merely prove that the historical event under examination, namely the degeneration of social power, is not contradictory to the general theory, but also the other historical hypothesis constructed in doctrine and not verified due to repeated conditions; that is, the persistence of a class power, that for a long phase does not implement its characteristic social forms, and is forced by historical determination to implement different, and historically anterior, more backward forms, and to carry out what we would like to define as a wave of regurgitation of revolutions. For it is not consistent with our defence of the validity of a doctrine of history born with materialist Marxism to admit an exceptional course for a single country, Russia; or for a single historical phase, such as the destruction of the tsarist system at the beginning of the current century.
And we assume that other classes, different from the proletariat, and in countries other than Russia, have had to attend to analogous tasks, imposed on them by the progress of economic and social causes and by the unfolding of the relations of production. We have therefore referred to the United States of America and the Civil War of 1866.
American Anti-Slavery Revolution
In other reflections, we have spoken of the American national revolution of the late 18th century. Marx drew a parallel between this war of independence, which he called a
signal
of the French-European revolution at the turn of the two centuries, and the war of secession between the Northern and Southern States, from which he expected another signal to a proletarian social movement in Europe, which, with the national wars of those years 1866-71, did not break out.
The war of liberation from the English of the New England colonists was a war of independence, but it cannot even be properly called a national revolution-war like those European ones of Italy, Germany, etc. The element of race was lacking since the colonists were of mixed nationality, and predominantly identical to that of the metropolitan State, and above all, economic and commercial factors raised them to political emancipation.
Still less could such a war be called a bourgeois revolution, since capitalism in America did not arise from local feudal or dynastic forms, there was no aristocracy and no true clergy, and on the other hand, England, against which it revolted, had been completely bourgeois since the 16th-17th centuries and had radically overthrown feudalism since then.
The theory of the class struggle, and that of the historical series of modes of production followed similarly by all human societies, must never be understood as trivial and formal symmetries, and their application cannot be done without an Engelsian training in the handling of the dialectic. Still on the subject of North American independence, the Marxist school noted repeatedly how the still-feudal France of pre-1789 sympathised in positive ways with the insurgents against capitalist England; which was then to repay itself in the anti-revolutionary coalitions, and finally by winning at Waterloo with the feudal Holy Alliance.
In the example of the Civil War of 1866, there were no factors of national freedom at stake, and not even, fundamentally, a racial factor. The Northern States fought to abolish the slavery of the Negroes, widespread and defended in the South, but this was not a rebellion of the Negroes, who for the most part fought in Southern formations alongside their masters
(
3
)
. It was not a slave revolution to abolish the slave mode of production, to which would succeed the aristocratic form and serfdom in the countryside, and free artisanry in the cities. Nothing comparable to the great historical transition between these two modes of production, which occurred at the fall of the Roman Empire and with the advent of Christianity and the barbarian invasions, all factors leading to the abolition, in law, of ownership over the human person.
In America, the industrial bourgeoisie of the North waged a social and revolutionary war not to seize power to the detriment of the feudal aristocracy, which had never existed in America, but to provide for a transition in the forms of production that was greatly delayed compared to that with which historically gave rise to bourgeois society: the substitution of production by slave labour with that by wage-earners, or free artisans and peasants, whereas the European bourgeoisies had only had to struggle to eliminate the form of serfdom of the glebe, much more modern and less backward than slavery.
This proves that a class is not ‘predestined’ to a single task of transition between social forms. The American bourgeoisie did not have to dedicate itself to abolishing feudal privileges and serfdom, but to go back and liberate society from slavery.
Dialectical Parallel
There is in this example the analogy with the task of the Russian proletarian class, which was not the transition from the capitalist form to the socialist one, but the preceding historical regurgitation of the
leap
from feudal despotism to mercantile capitalism; without this in any way undermining the doctrine of the class struggle between wage-earners and capitalists, and of the succession of the socialist form to the capitalist one, by the modern wage-earning class.
The Southern landowners were beaten in the 1866 revolution by the industrial bourgeoisie, albeit further back in history than the feudal nobles in that they were slave-owners, and albeit further ahead of them in that there already existed a mercantile social fabric. The Northern bourgeoisie did not hesitate to take on a regurgitated task, and one fulfilled elsewhere by very different classes; by the feudal and Germanic knights, or by the apostles of Judea: to free the slaves.
One may object that this work of historical cleansing left Northern capitalism with no other revolutionary tasks. But if the South had won in the Civil War, as there was some likelihood of it, on the one hand the task would have remained for the future, on the other hand the bursting forth of American capitalism, launched into first place in the world, would have been very different.
In Russia, the task of destroying the last vestiges of feudalism was no small one for a working class victorious amidst such terrible trials, as it was certainly too much to ask what Stalin pretended was wanted from it, namely, the overthrow of capitalism in all countries. This had to remain, did remain, and remains the proper task of the working class in the large, most advanced industrial States of the world.
Why Was There No Recourse to Arms?
This question was posed by Trotsky, who had, with other valiant Bolsheviks, until Lenin’s death and after, the armed forces under his command. Neither he nor any others of the current in solidarity with him, then and afterwards, resorted to force, nor did they think of unleashing it with State formations, or of organising new ones. The official police and the complete control of the army enabled the current that had prevailed in the party to defeat its opponents and later carry out their actual extermination, as those who were sent to the firing squads were far from being limited to the notorious defendants, but reached thousands and tens of thousands of workers and Bolsheviks, old and young.
Arms therefore decided, but this time they had their muzzles aimed in only one direction. Stalin said, and had to say, that it was a class direction: but today, in 1956, his cronies of that time failed to prove that the defeated were militating for the foreign bourgeoisie. Today, the evidence of Kamenev, a powerful orator, stands out, showing that the opportunist right were the victors and that the bloody battle was won by Stalinism, by the ‘Russia-only’ faction, today more than ever bound to those origins, in service of international capitalism.
Stalin played hardball with the unfortunate Bukharin, arguing that the opposition lacked a clear line and was a shapeless bloc of saboteurs. Bukharin paid for his mistake, not with the repentance of a fool or coward, but by joining what was not a
bloc
, but was the only party of the revolution, adding his proud head to those that had fallen; and it was he who did not bend an inch in the most ferocious inquisitions.
But in effect, the line of the Russian oppositions was not
continuous
. At the time of Lenin, of Kollontai, of the Brest-Litovsk peace (always Bukharin!), of the resistance to Lenin’s NEP, painted as weakness towards the peasants, of the obscure Kronstadt uprising, with the reasons for opposition to the Bolshevik party’s first acts of government, there were joined, amid generous naiveties, grave errors, anarchoids, syndicalists, and labourists; aversion to the cardinal principles: dictatorship, centralism, the relationship between class and party.
In Trotsky’s first opposition in 1924, when Zinoviev and Kamenev led the struggle with Stalin that ousted him from military command, the position was not exhaustive. The danger from the right within the party was not denounced and the radical insidiousness of the constructive theory of Russian socialism, backs turned to the international revolution, was not yet identified as magnificently as in 1926. Stalinist oppression was denounced with the correct reaction to the imposition of the State against dissenting members of the party, while in the revolutionary dictatorship the party is sovereign over the State. This lent itself to being confused with banal demands for ‘democracy’.
Bureaucracy, the Wrong Target
But a mistaken and dangerous theory was also stated at the time. Power in Russia was now removed from the bourgeoisie and fully proletarian, but it fell into the hands of a new and third class, the State and even party
bureaucracy
.
We have devoted a great deal of effort to proving that bureaucracy
is not a class
and cannot become a subject of power, just as in Marxism, the leader, the tyrant, the clique, or the oligarchy are not subjects of power! Bureaucracy is an instrument of power for all historical classes, and is the first to decay when these are decrepit, like the Pharisees and scribes of Judea, the praetorians and freedmen of Rome. To administer the transition from tsarism to industrial capitalism, mixed with free agriculture, nothing can be done without a vast bureaucratic apparatus, which contains weaknesses and dangers. A centralised party with strong traditions should not fear bureaucracy per se, and can confront it with the measures of the Commune extolled by Marx and Lenin: inexpensive government, rotation and not careerism, worker-level wages. All the innumerable degenerations have been the effect and not the cause of the overturned relations of political forces.
It is not socialism that should fear the weight of bureaucracy, but rather the direct economy based on enterprises isolated in accounting but State-owned; State capitalism that swims in the mercantile pool.
This mercantile statism-dirigisme does not escape all the useless anarchic operations of double-entry accounting and of the individual rights of natural and legal persons. In a mercantile environment, the cumbersome public apparatus moves only on individual and private initiative: everything is done based on requests that come from the periphery to the centre, contend the field, require painful comparisons and calculations even to be rejected. In socialist management, everything is arranged from the centre without discussion, as simply as the withdrawal of six hundred rations by the company quartermaster is compared to six hundred purchases of different things of quality and quantity, their deliberation, registration, collection, complaint, acceptance or rejection and replacement, and so on and so forth.
A capitalist and monetary system may fear bureaucracy as a social evil, but not as a third classist force. Even socialism at the lower and non-communist stage, i.e. still with rationed consumption, as it is outside the monetary and market instrument, leaves bureaucracy in the attic among the old irons, as Engels rightly said it will do with the State.
The Russian opposition saw its enemy too late, and therefore had to succumb without a putting up much of a fight. In 1926 it could do nothing but consign its doctrinal weapons to history and fall heroically. But those were enough, years later, for us to witness the death of many of the executioners and the liquidation of the leader Stalin who, having emerged badly from this last clash of theories, had nevertheless triumphed over the corpses of his adversaries, in such a way that the world believed him not only ferocious, but also unassailable.
Why Was There No Appeal to the Proletariat?
This last naive question may refer to the world proletariat and the Russian proletariat. It was precisely the Trotsky group that was accused of appealing against the Russian party’s decision to the Communist International: whereas they had been warned by the party not to do so, and were accused of having promised and failed. Elsewhere we have reported how as far back as February 1926, in a previous Enlarged Executive of the Comintern, the struggle was open in the Russian party and it was brought before a commission, but not to the
Plenum
. Present for the last time, before the mass arrests, were delegates from the Italian Left. At the time, there was no talk of the ‘bloc’ with Trotsky, and we were the only ones to foresee it, or rather to define the positions of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev as identical, mocked by those who knew the secrets of Bolshevik life.
Well, the Italian Left’s delegates, after being the only ones to argue against Stalin that the problem of Russia’s direction was an international problem, were warned against raising it in the Enlarged
Plenum
with the very ‘political’ argument that they had a right to do so, but that the discussion (which took place the following December) would result in
more severe disciplinary measures
against the oppositionist comrades within the Russian party. Although paralysed by this heavy responsibility, the Italian leftists went to the congress tribune, but their intervention only provoked an uproar and the closure of the discussion, under the pretext that this was what the Russian party, unanimous between majority and opposition, demanded!
In those same months, the German oppositionists – among whom, however, anarchist and syndicalist tendencies were not lacking – proposed to the Italians to exit from the International, denouncing it as non-revolutionary and founding a new movement (later the Trotskyists were to found the
Fourth
).
The Italian Left, which had for years denounced the opportunist danger, predicting its spread, though then not as manifest as today, on the basis of its precise Marxist line, did not believe itself in a condition to accept such an invitation. Nor, afterwards, that of the Trotskyists.
As for deferring judgement on the serious historical issue to a consultation not of the mass of the party but of the Russian proletariat, this seemingly obvious proposal has no basis whatsoever. Ever since then, and increasingly so, party and Soviet congresses sang the praises of Stalin and his methods, which were not personal whims but the direction of collective historical forces, able, in this case, to prevail.
The victory of Stalinism, a modern and deteriorated form of betrayal of the communist revolution, was therefore, with the struggle of 1926, a foregone conclusion, and it was clear even then to the international communist opposition that the distant salvation could come only through the total cycle of the degeneration of the Russian State and party, and of the remnants of the International; not before being able to take stock, theoretically already set at that time, of the jettisoning, one after another, of all the cardinal principles of the revolution of Marx and Lenin.
After the shames of the Second World War and the fornication with the two bourgeois imperialisms, came the more serious one of truce, of peace and, tomorrow, of identification with them.
This, after such bitter and lengthy travail, renders the great resurgence not immediate, but certainly less distant.
(
3
) Subsequent Party studies on the American Civil War has revealed the inaccuracy of this statement. While it is indeed true that the Civil War was not a revolt by the slaves, nor one even made primarily in the interests of the slaves, in the South, slaves – until the end of the war, where the victory of the North was a fait accompli – were prohibited from enlisting in the Confederate Army, their labour however was still utilised but only in supporting roles, that is, in cooking, building fortifications, setting up trenches etc.
B) The False Opposition Between the Russian and Western Social Forms
We will go beyond the need for a balance of proportions between the various parts of a well-conducted discourse. What follows repeats in another form the content of the ‘Evening’ of the Third Day of the ‘Dialogue with the Dead’, the text of which is in the preceding pages. Nevertheless, we neither remove nor modify either of the two versions, except in the correction of some arithmetically unsound figures. It does not matter, indeed it is an advantage, the repetition, the
bis in idem
. At the meeting in Turin, a slightly different version was presented concerning the points indicated by the convened readers of the periodical in which the
Dialogue
had appeared in instalments, closely following what fools have called a crisis of communism, whereas it is a crisis of anti-communism, in its noisy unfolding.
Since there is therefore no author figure here, rather impersonal work, which we do not call ‘collegial’ so as not to use even remotely terminology of the Pharisees of the time, we can violate the norms of Rhetoric, which in worthy times was a scientific discipline, today it is an unhealthy drug practice. The ruling class in agony devotes itself to it in temples, such as that in Rome, on which it had raised as an epigraph the expressive inscription: ‘The Sewer’.
May the shade of Cicero forgive us, of whom they made Italian high school graduates translate this solemn passage:
‘Hoc in omnibus item partibus orationes evenit, ut utilitatem et prope necessitatem suavitas quaedam et lepos consequatur’.
Which would translate as:
‘This (i.e. the link discussed in previous periods, and as... a historical materialist, between the decorative dignity of a work, and its better correspondence to practical aims, to what today is called
functionality
) also happens for the different parts of a speech, so that from the efficacy and almost from the compulsory construction of it there follows a certain pleasant and flavourful elegance’.
We are here as muscular workers, hammerers of nails, not conceived and forged by us; we can violate the aesthetic ‘modules’ that bind parts of the speech, but we do not give up hammering home the ultimate nail on the capitalist nature of Russian society: down comrades, more blows!
The Pace of Industrialisation
The crux of the matter lies in the claim of present-day Russians that the proof of the
diversity
of the
Soviet
system from the
capitalist
one, and moreover, of the former’s
superiority
, lies in the fact that year after year Russia’s industrial production increases more, and at a higher percentage rate than the total product of the previous year, than in any country in the world and in any epoch of history.
It has been demonstrated to those who, busy with quite different affairs (embraces in the local councils in Italy, with the Titos in Moscow), will not respond, and who cannot respond, to the following:
1) False that this high rate exists only in Russia.
2) False that this high rate exists only
today
in history.
3) False that even if Russia were at the maximum rate, and at a rate higher than any historical case, this would prove that it is not capitalist.
Putting facts and figures in order, the conclusion is one and certain: the social economic structure in Russia is exquisite capitalism.
And we have, in the final part of the
Dialogue
, based on the cold figures, an ardent deduction: precisely because early English capitalism, a model to the world, presented those phenomena that today flourish in Russia and have been exalted with equal zeal in the time of Stalin the demigod and Stalin the demi-man, Karl Marx in 1866 launched an impetuous historic assault on the drunken with satanic bourgeois joy, forerunner of today’s masters of the Kremlin, Chancellor of H. M. Capital, Mr. William Ewart Gladstone.
Of this almost coeval (1809-1898), old and capital enemy, Marx in note 185/a to the first volume of
Capital
says thus: ‘The capitalists threatened with being subjected to factory legislation, and
“losing their freedom” to exploit women and children without restraint, have found in the English liberal minister Gladstone a servant of goodwill’.
To vaunt the pyrotechnic marvels of burgeoning industrial production is therefore no historical proof of being socialists, but rather of being devoted servants of capitalism, and nothing changes the place, London or Moscow, the date, 1856 or 1956. At the very least, those who still dare to speak in the name of Marx’s doctrine, which we have drawn on here in the supreme and cardinal work and in the founding address of the Workers’ International, must keep this in mind.
Dantean View of the Bourgeois Hell
The figures published on that occasion, and that were reread and commented on at the Turin meeting, are gathered here in an overview, which the groups of the organisation will certainly devote further work to.
We have indicated the sources, all of which are Russian, and wish to warn of one thing. As a rule we do not report the annual indices of the tables from which we start, but only the relative increases. For example, in the table at the beginning of the Khrushchev report, the index of Russian industrial production is set at 100 in 1929. We find the figure 466 for production in 1946 and the figure 2049 for that of 1955. Without re-reporting them, we give the increase over the nine years that separate them, which is 340 per cent (in other words in 1955, 4.40 times the product of 1946 was produced) and from it we deduce the
average annual
increase which is 18 per cent (whereupon, let it be said for the tenth time, there is no objection to nine times eighteen giving 162 instead of 340).
The method used to draw up our simple table is not risibly protected by patents filed under the name of a given fool. We have only separated the typical periods chronologically, first of all, in order to note that if they prove the fact (not
law
)
of unequal capitalist development
, they also prove the Marxist discovery of the internationality of the process.
With such an obvious system, we have eliminated the little tricks that are played by Moscow (and its sub-services) nonstop by mixing up periods. For example, Russian production is twenty times greater than in 1929, while American production is only 2.34 times greater. Passing to 1913, the Russian ratio becomes 36 against the American 3.5. The relation is not too different. But it changes if we start from the major depressions: from the Russian one in 1920, the run is even more spectacular: 160 times (!) in 35 years.
If we take the maximum American depression of 1932, however, we also see a sharp jump: 4.4 times in just 23 years (from 54 to 234). But we read in the Khrushchev table (suppressed Bulletin
For a Stable Peace
, no. 7, 1956) another peak in American production: 215, in 1943 (at the height of the war, when arms were being produced for use by Russian proletarians) which, compared to 1932, gives the ratio of 4 times in just 11 years. At the same time, Russia goes from 185 (since 1932 production, according to the Varga tables, varies with respect to 1929, the base year of the Khrushchev table, as 233 divided by 126, i.e. 185 divided by 100) to 573. Here the ratios are quite different, indeed reversed: Russia 3.1; America 4.0.
And finally, if we take the Khrushchev table alone, fresh from 1937 to 1943, in six years, we will have for Russia from 428 to 573, ratio 1.33, while for the United States from 103 to 215, ratio 2.1,
much greater
. The thesis ‘à sensation’ has been turned on its head.
Total and average annual increases in industrial production
in countries and periods typical of the historical development of capitalism
expressed as a percentage of the previous annual product
[An update of this table with data available as of 2007 can be found
here
]
Years
1880-
1900
1900-
1913
1913-
1920
1920-
1929
1929-
1932
1932-
1937
1937-
1946
1946-
1955
20
13
7
9
3
5
9
9
Coun-
tries
Periods
Peace
Impe-
ria-
lism
First
War
Re-
con-
struc-
tion
Cri-
sis
Re-
cov-
ery
Sec-
ond
War
Re-
con-
struc-
tion
Great
Britain
In the period
100
40
0
0
-30
55
-5
53
Yearly average
3.5
2.6
0.0
0.0
-11.2
9.2
-0.6
4.8
France
In the period
250
130
-38
126
-31
5
-23
98
Yearly average
6.5
6.6
-6.6
9.5
-11.6
1.0
-2.9
7.9
Ger-
many
In the period
300
150
-45
87
-36
90
-69
510
Yearly average
7.2
7.3
-8.2
7.2
-13.8
13.7
-12.2
22.3
United
States
In the period
400
150
26
37
-46
69
51
53
Yearly average
8.4
7.3
3.4
3.6
-18.6
11.1
4.7
4.8
Japan
In the period
800
250
57
89
0
75
-70
370
Yearly average
11.6
10.1
6.7
7.3
0.0
11.8
-12.5
18.8
Russia
In the period
–
–
-87
1300
85
150
0
340
Yearly average
circa 13
circa 10
-25.3
34.1
22.8
20.1
0.0
17.9
This framework is elaborated only on data from Russian sources (Varga, Stalin, Khrushchev). The indices for the first two periods are taken from the figures for basic industries given by Varga.
From the
verticals
, with States arranged from top to bottom according to the
age
of their industrial form, it emerges that younger capitalism has faster average growth.
From the
horizontals
, it emerges that in the
normal
phase, the rate of increase of each country decreases over time.
From the
war
and
crisis
phases, it emerges that mature and victorious capitalisms
withstand wars
(imperialism) well and even advance; but they are more susceptible
to crises
.
From the
post-war
and
post-crisis
phases, it emerges that the stronger the recovery, the younger the capitalism, and the more violent the decline.
The Russian horizontal confirms all the trends of other forms of capitalism.
By ordering our table, all based on Russian data, we have therefore put the matter beyond the dishonest little games, typical of all official broadcasts from political centres, whether from the East or the West. Here everything.
Laws of Accumulation
We have reported at the bottom of the table the harmonious and regular deductions that can be drawn by whoever consults it having one eye on the world map and the other on the 60-70 years of history that have engraved themselves on the sturdy or fragile carcasses of the generation that is about to preserve them.
Such concomitances repeat in other words the general law of capitalist accumulation established at the beginning of the entire cycle by Marxism.
This simple law, distorted by most of those who invoke it, and fearfully so in Stalin’s senile economic writings (which the 20th Congress has not corrected, but on the contrary further deviated from Marx’s line), can be expressed as follows: capitalist production increases ‘wealth’ in the form of an ever greater ‘accumulation of commodities’, with the continual increase of production. But the measure of such an increase not only does not give the measure of a societal advantage (unless this is understood to mean a minority class), but rather that of the risk of greater ruin and misery. The race for accumulation is made with the concentration of wealth in ‘an ever fewer number of hands’ and in the end (Marx) in a single hand, which is no longer of man (Russia). The
hands
of the former possessors of parts of wealth swell the army of labour, that is, of those who live, if and when they work, and (over time) a little better
if and when they work
, solely from the sale of their labour power. Herein lies the sense of growing misery.
With alternating events, the pace of accumulation reverses into a recoil, with immense destruction of products and instruments of labour, either through crises of overproduction or through bloody wars of mercantile competition (imperialism).
The
secret
of the
pace
of accumulation, which excites the Gladstones and Stalins-Khrushchevs alike, is this. Let the rate be positive: capital concentrates, and as other masses of expropriated (artisans, peasants, small businessmen) are formed, misery
grows
with
wealth
because the impoverished grow disproportionately (in Marx: Die Masse des Elends; literally: the Mass of Misery). Let us now take the rate to be negative: diminished production means unemployment, the mercantile crisis equally brings down the smaller companies and the lesser
rentiers
: all burn through their last reserves. Wealth does not go up, but down. Thanks to capitalism, misery, in this case as in the other,
grows
, everywhere and always!
Therefore the euphoria for periods of ascent, in all times and places, is an euphoria appropriate only for the friends and servants of Capital.
Regardless of the effects and cycles of general market crises and world wars, the ‘geometric’ or
progressive proportion
law of production, as dear to Stalin as to Bulganin (but which in their hands, as in Bentham-Gladstone’s, twists like a viper when one goes from the manufacturing field to the agricultural one) would lead to such a fabulous mountain of unconsumable commodities that the life of capitalism is only possible thanks to its internal law of the
historical descent
of
its average rate of profit
.
For Marxist economics, the rate of profit is proportional to that of accumulation. We call profit the part of the total product that remains to the capitalist, whether it be destined for consumption by the ruling class or whether it be directed to new investment in capital. It is clear that the second destination prevails throughout the course.
Rate
of profit is the ratio of this owner’s share – in Marx’s terms – to the total
product
(for us
capital
, for the bourgeois,
turnover
) and not to the value, real or nominal, of the instruments of production (the producing company’s equipment), which the bourgeois sometimes confuse with the
assets
, sometimes with the company’s
capital
itself – in the joint-stock ones expressed by the total number of
shares
, which however give different figures according to the nominal value at which they were issued, or according to their market value quoted on the stock exchange.
In any case, the profit a company makes and that part it distributes, vary like the product obtained each year after deducting every expense (in Marx, deducting variable and constant capital).
The general law of the historical slowdown in production growth thus expresses, in principle, the other basic law of the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall, which, with gigantic error, is believed by Stalin and Sons to be replaced by a
law of maximum profit
. And with even greater stupidity, they pretend to read such nonsense in the Leninist history of imperialism, of superprofit, of monopoly profit, a theory in which all the theorems of Marx’s economics remain firm and immutable, for whoever has not been drinking. These drunken economists did not read in Marx how Capitalism, far from being saved for eternity by the Angel of Free Competition, is damned to fall under the Nemesis of Monopoly. This process is read – in economic science – not with the law of profit alone, but with the same law combined with the Theory of Rent.
Scanning the Table
The given indications need no further comment: the table, as usual, is an
instrument
: everyone can handle it.
In it it is clear, the first steps of the older capitalisms, and above all of the English one, do not appear. This one already enters the scene at a slow pace of accumulation: about three per cent, lower than all the competitors. Wars will not reverse the rate: here our old despair over the military invincibility of that island comes to the surface. If we believed in the
if
in history, we would say that Bonaparte’s misplayed card cost us a century of socialism.
In the first war, all the European combatants are ruined, even the victorious France, but those overseas did better than England: not only do they not stagnate, but they advance with a slow but positive increase! America, Japan.
English capitalism, satiated with wealth and power, sleeps for 17 years upon the laurels of Gladstone’s time. We showed that Marx calculates increases of more than 7-8 per cent around 1860, equal to those with which France and Germany began in our table, at the end of the century. But we also showed how even earlier, in the thirty-year period 1830-1860, Great Britain also had higher rates, equal to those of the United States, Japan, and Russia at the end of the century.
The United States will also traverse the second war with a strong rate of profit, and will maintain it in the current phase of
reconstruction
: lower, however, than at the beginning of the 20th century. England will experience a slight downturn during this, less grandiose for her, second war, and will respond with a relatively concurrent acceleration, at a rate equal to, or almost, that of the American.
France, a second-time victor but fiercely tested, will suffer a decline during the war, and then recover with an exceptional increase, as in the previous reconstruction of 1920.
Powerful Germany, with its model equipment, will fall wildly during the two wars, but equally audaciously will rise again. In the second recovery it beats everyone, including Russia itself, with an average annual rate of 22.3 compared to 17.9. But there is more: in the last year Russia is at 12, and for the next five years it plans 11.5. In 1955 however, Germany reached its highest rate, exceeding 23 per cent. Today, Bonn’s Germany industrialises at
twice the speed
of Russia. In agricultural production it quadruples it,
to say the least
. So, where is the socialism? Neither in the one nor the other: but it will come first in Germany!
It is in Japan that the effect of the second war reverses that of the first. The decline is as precipitous as the German one. The current recovery is slightly less than that, but equal to the Russian one. With the same difference that in Japan, the last few years have been better than the previous ones, and this will continue. Russia, on the other hand, is falling back at an incremental rate: it is falling back, as the table shows – or rather, as the Russian rulers say so – since 1920, when it began to climb out of the precipice into which it had fallen in the first war, followed by the terrible, even if victorious, 1917-20 civil war. The worst negative rate we see in the two wars is 12: Russia in the first presented 20, which in ten years crushed production from an index of 100 to 12.5:
one eighth
.
Crises Worse Than Wars
The table has a vertical more impressive than those of war. It refers to the American
Black Friday
of 1929, which from 1930 to 1932 caused production to decline disastrously, with a string of bankruptcies, company closures, general unemployment.
The crisis had its greatest effect in the United States and produced the only negative index in their historical course. But it is a tremendous negative: 18.6! What is the explanation? For us it is clear: the only country that not only won the war but continued to develop the machine of industrial production is damned by the law of Dante-Marx to descend into a worse circle of Hell. And so be it.
Germany, which had already collapsed in the war, fiercely feels the crisis, and falls rapidly to 13.8. France falls at a slower rate to 11.6. Great Britain, then closely linked to the American economy (much more so than today) can hold out just a little better. However, between the 1932 crisis and the new war, there is a new general recovery. The United States rises with a powerful 11 per cent positive annual rate. Great Britain accompanies them with 9.2, emerging from its economic slumber caused by half a century of excess, and Gladstone seems to rise anxiously from his grave. France however, after so many hardships, reacts very little. Germany performs another miracle, and rises again (we are at the time of Hitler and of a State capitalism, reminiscent of the Russian structure) with 13.4.
What is the effect of the American crisis outside Europe? Japan felt it, remaining static for those three years, only to recover quickly in the good years: 12 per cent. Applying the total increase of 75 to the 8-year period 1929-37: the average rate of growth is just over 7 per cent per year and fits in with the historical law of horizontal decline. In these same last 18 years, Japan’s indices, first falling then recovering, vary (Khrushchev) from 169 to 239, a total increase of 41 per cent. The average rate is lower: 2 per cent. Japan’s impressive recovery does not disprove the law of slowdown. Not even the German one: 18 years from 114 to 213 gives 87 per cent; only about 3.5 per cent annually. But Russia itself, from 1937 to 1955, from 429 to 2049, with 370 per cent, has an annual rate of only 9 per cent, while in previous periods we read 20, 22.8, 34 per cent. The general law subsists in full.
Objections of the Counter-Thesis
Faced with this robust 34.1 per cent, the opponent might argue that this Russian number is still the highest in the table. How can this be explained?
First of all, we are dealing with the youngest of the competing capitalisms, which is a first factor concomitant with the general process. Finally, we are immediately following the most spectacular decline in the whole table: 25.3 per cent per year, for the reasons already mentioned. And if, as we have done in other cases, we sum the two contiguous periods, forming a single one from 1913 to 1929 of 16 years, the extreme indices according to our data are 72 and 126, or rather 100 and 175. The 75 per cent increase in 16 years is not huge: it corresponds to an average annual rate of about 4 per cent; a rate that slowed steadily after the previous years of tsarist capitalism. The high figure of 34.1 derives from the
very low
level of 1920. In effect, the new Russian capitalism is still in its infancy. The old tsarist capitalism was
extinct
in 1920: a decline of 87, a reduction to one eighth in seven years, which we do not find anywhere else in the table: Germany and Japan, crushed in the second war, still saved 30 and 31 per cent of their production after 9 years, and they had a platform from which to recover.
But there is another objection which, since no one pays us, we will certainly not keep quiet about. Russia passes through the interwar world crisis of 1929-32 like a salamander. It does not do as Japan did, limiting itself to three years of steady production, but continues its advance at an extremely high level: 22.8 per cent, equal to the best we know of, even in exceptional cases; and only slightly lower than the record just discussed for the period 1920-29, which had been one of worldwide recovery, save for England alone.
Is this phenomenon of ‘indifference to crisis’ sufficient to speak of a non-capitalist economy?
In 1929, the nascent and super-young Soviet capitalism had no channels of communication with capitalism and the international market. They resumed in appreciable measure ten years later, with the 1939 war.
This explains why the crisis did not spread to Russia, which was in a phase of severe underproduction (one-twentieth of the current level, less than one-tenth of the per capita output of capitalist countries at the time). A crisis of overproduction could therefore neither appear internally nor enter from abroad. The crisis unfolded in all its tragedy outside its borders. To explain this, there is no need to admit the benefits of a hypothetical economic system, different in its internal structure. The merit of this original phenomenon in (modern) history dates back to... Joseph Stalin.
Between 1926 and 1939 the key to Russian politics, which the force of history
dictates
to the ‘dictator’, is that of the Iron Curtain. Let the old world of the West rejoice that the flames of revolution do not pass through it: Russia, newly born to a capitalist revolution without historical precedent, will rejoice that the flames of the anarchic fire of overripe capitalism cannot pass through it. The old Leader died believing that, if one day the Curtain were to be lifted, the flames of war would pass, as they had in 1939; he believed, perhaps, that another Black Friday would soon come, before German capitalism was once again clad in steel, as well as dollars; then he would have returned to arms for the ‘second blow’, which he had prophesied in a moment of genius in 1939, and would have sunk his teeth into the throat of an America in crisis, staring into the whites of its eyes in the drama of Yalta.
The cult of this myth, which we considered in the decades stained with the blood of revolutionaries and destined to collapse ignobly, as is the case today, has given way to a position even more ignoble: the crisis of the West will no longer come, according to the emulative and coexistencist theories of the Mikoyans.
If the crisis never comes, they, arm in arm with Keynes and Spengler and the drunken science of America, will have defeated us, Marx, Lenin and us, distant chicks of the red Chanteclair. And we will lower our crests.
But if crisis comes, as it will, Marxism will not only have won. Stalin’s fierce laughter will no longer ring out behind the hiss of the first missiles, but it will be of no use if, in keeping with their dirty fashion, Khrushchev & Co. blaspheme themselves. For the Curtain, turned into an emulative spider’s web, the universal mercantile crisis will bite at the heart of even young Russian industry. This will be the result of having unified the markets and made the vital circulation of the capitalist monster one! But whoever unifies its beastly heart unifies the Revolution, which could, after the second
interwar
crisis and before a third war, find its global moment.
C) The Socialist System at ‘FIAT’?
A Sign of the Soul of Little Italy
In the table we have not included Italy, of which there are some figures in the
Dialogue
at the aforementioned place. Firstly, we do not have any Russian figures prior to 1929, and regarding the indigenous ones, there is too much to distinguish and discern; something to be done at another time. And secondly, what age should be assigned to Italian capitalism, and where should it be placed on the horizontal axis? It is (as in Russia) another case of capitalism born twice: we are not the first to compare capital to the phoenix: Papa Marx must have done so. Our homeland would deserve the highest rung on the ladder, in homage to the great and proud maritime and commercial republics of the coast and the banking cities of the interior, not to mention the first centralised State monarchies in the South and North, with very ancient and centuries-old lineages and illustrious names such as Frederick of Swabia, Berengar, Arduin, Cesare Borgia...
Then, rather than a return to feudalism in its deep structure, national and provincial political servitude took over; and the bourgeois system was reborn as a pale political import from France at the opening of the 19th century, and from England in the middle of the same century: a capitalism with passive colonial tones, belated and poorly risen to imperial ambitions, and today fallen into servitude to America, and into small-shop attitudes.
Quite intriguing, the historical little ladder of this country of shining titles, which even further back saw the summits of the first slave capitalism, from Magna Graecia to plutocratic Rome!
We will not be accused of national arrogance if we have not admitted it into the circles of the bourgeois hell; let it await the new Dante whom the indulgent Uncle Engels once ventured to prophesy for it, in homage to its rusted glories.
However, we read about Italy in Khrushchev’s tables, which serve as our gospel at this pass.
Between 1929 and 1937, the bourgeois world took a plunge down its damned
toboggan
. It rolled down the slope of the 1929-32 crisis, and cheerfully climbed back up between 1932 and 1937 towards war. According to Khrushchev, between these extremes of 8 years, while Russia took the lead, quadrupling its production at a rate of about 21 per cent per year, Satan-Capital was sleeping elsewhere. And as it slept in America, so it did in Italy: from 100 to 99. France even fell from 100 to 82, while from the same plunge-rise, Germany went from 100 to 114, Great Britain 100 to 124, and the quivering Japan 100 to 169.
Benito, who dreamed of eclipsing Pyrgopolynices, was the only serious pacifist we have ever known. In the din of the years 1937-46, Italy (whose submission to the 1929 crisis of the then-defamed ‘demoplutocracies’ we will discuss on another occasion) declined only from 99 to 72, a trifle, an annual negative of just 3.5. A ‘guerre en dentelles’.
From 1946 to 1955 is a triumphant march. While the miserable seven or eight parties and the twenty little parties reproach one another for the ruin of the fatherland, in the race to ruin it themselves, the figures of the euphoria (bourgeois, and therefore of all of them) rise at a galloping pace. Throughout the whole period, from 72 to 194, we have a gain of 170 per cent which is worth the nice round 12 per cent annual average. The order of the race (to the future ruin of all) today is as follows: Germany, Japan, Russia, Italy, France, the United States, England.
The intermediate steps in Italy are interesting. From 1946 to 1949 it advances at 14.3 per cent! Then a little less: 1949-50 at 11.5; 1950-52 at 9.1; 1952-55 at 9.5.
Is it declining perhaps? Italy, siren of the sea, smile but do not tremble. The governor of the Bank of Italy has just told us (which means that Khrushchev’s figures are not just random: it has not happened to us, Neapolitan-style, that ‘si hanno ditte na fesseria a me, ve ne dico doie a vuie’ or ‘you tell me one nonsense, I’ll tell you two’) that industrial production in 1955 increased by the same degree as in 1954: 9.3 per cent.
He added something noteworthy: that in the same year, 1955, agricultural production rose by six per cent. In a five-year plan (but let’s see how we hold up with the icy 1956!) we would have 134 against 100, which any Bulganin would sign off on.
Soon, however, Menichella began to speak of the Vanoni plan, which focuses more on national income and labour employment rather than on industrial production indices. The comparison between the two methods must be deferred to our future party work on the Western economy. In any case, for Vanoni, in ten years there must be a 5 per cent annual increase (163 against 100) in capitalistic investments and in the employment of workers. Having seen the total national income rise by 7.2 per cent in 1955 (first in Europe after Germany, which is at 10), 78.8 per cent of the 1955 income was consumed, investing 21.2 per cent of it in new plants if construction is included, and 15.8 if it is excluded. With these margins, fixed assets in industry proper increased by 6.9 per cent during the year (1.9 per cent more than the Vanoni plan) and if construction is included, by as much as 9.7 per cent.
The issue of construction is a key issue in the modern Italian economy. Is a house fixed capital, or is it a consumer good? That elegant question is for another time. Suffice it to add that, returning to the Stalin-Khrushchevian industrial product indices (turnover), another figure comes to mind, Fascetti, with the progress of the indices of the companies managed by I.R.I. Spectacular: an average of 6 per cent in 1950-55, in the final year, 19 per cent.
The analogy between the Italian I.R.I. and the Soviet ‘system’, due to its disdain for profits, is for another discussion; for the first year, it broke even today.
Augustae Taurinorum
The industrial capital of Italy, which hosted our last meeting, deserved special treatment.
The speaker refers to the report at the meeting in Asti, held on 26 and 27 June 1954. FIAT had recently held its annual shareholders’ meeting, and Prof. Valletta had presented the results and financial statements for the year 1953. This year, we were not far from the 1955 shareholders’ meeting and financial statements.
The passage from the Asti report illustrating the significance of Turin and FIAT in the history of the workers’ movement and of Italian communism was read at the meeting. The general title is ‘Volcano of Production or Swamp of the Market?’; the paragraph, in No. 15, 7 August 1954 of
Il Programma Comunista
, was ‘The monstrous FIAT’.
It was a critique of the matrix of current Italian communist opportunism:
ordinovism
, Gramscianism. Another self-quotation:
‘[T]hese groups, as soon as they set foot outside the neat and shiny warehouses of the Turinese automobile factory and came into contact with the less industrialised part of Italy, with its agrarian and backward sores, with the peasant and regional problem, suddenly fell into defending the same positions as the most colourless petty-bourgeois parties of half a century earlier,
they no longer concerned themselves with revolutionising Turin, but with bourgeoisifying Italy
, so that it might be entirely worthy of bearing the Turinese factory brand, of being administered and governed in its impeccable style’.
Let us return today to said style, which is the style of myths, of cults. The myth of Stalin has suffered severe blows; the myth of
super-companies
and motorised hysteria is about to suffer the same fate: already today, the miraculous FIAT assembly ‘chains’ across the Atlantic, of
General Motors
, have had to be stopped in their sleepless and perpetual rolling.
For now, new factories are being built here, and a growing stream of cars pours onto already congested roads and increasingly often cuts a path through pedestrian flesh. But the dead consecrate themselves to the myth of the modern rubberised Juggernaut. The old gods are blasphemed, not Progress!
Valletta-Bulganin
We can immediately compare the figures for ‘turnover’, i.e. the value of production for one year, and the two reports provide them to us for four years. In 1952, 200 billion; in 1953, 240 billion: annual leap 20 per cent. In 1954, 275: annual leap 14.6 per cent. In 1955, 310 billion: annual leap 12.7 per cent. In the three years, 155 against one hundred: average annual increase 15.7 per cent, much higher than the Russian 11.5 per cent. Valletta surpasses Khrushchev.
FIAT beats DYNAMO 15 to 11!
In the Asti report, the FIAT data did not serve us for the discussion of the purported definition as
socialist
of every industrial system with a
high
rate of incremental product growth, but to contrast the terminology and economic calculation in Marx and in the bourgeoisie.
FIAT’s turnover is for us its ‘capital’: today, 310 billion. We must, as at Asti, break it down into variable capital, constant capital, and surplus value. Then we determined, using the Valletta data on personnel and investments in new plants, this partition: Variable capital or personnel expenditure, 70 billion. Constant capital, i.e. raw materials and wear and tear, 110 billion; surplus value, 60 billion. Total capital or product at the end of the annual cycle: 240 billion.
Of the surplus value, only 10 billion went to the shareholders, the other 50, as Valletta announced at the time, to new plants.
The new year’s figures give similar results; but first let us recall how different bourgeois language is from ours. FIAT’s
nominal
capital, whose long history we gave at the time, stands today at 152 million shares at 500 each, amounting to 76 billion compared to the 57 of 1953 and the 36 of 1952. It has gained 58 per cent in the first of the three years, remained stable in the second, and gained 33.3 in the third. The average rate was 28 per cent per year. But the
actual
capital depends on the stock market price of the shares. This, which was 660 in 1953, is today as much as 1354 lire, again compared to the nominal 500. The real capital, even in current parlance, has thus gone from 75.5 billion to 205 billion. Biennial increase 172 per cent, annual increase
65 per cent
.
If this figure indicates the actual ‘credit’ of the shareholders ‘against’ the company, of which they are the ‘owners’, their annual dividend, or profit in the official economist’s sense, should have increased by the same amount. Far from it! Valletta and Co. paid shareholders only 7.3 billion in 1953 and 10.6 in 1955. That is, shareholder profit fell from 9.7 per cent to 5.1. Frenzy of productive investment, law of the fall of the rate of profit!
All of FIAT today, however, is worth neither the nominal 76 billion nor the real 205 billion. At Asti, we ‘estimated’ it at no less than a
thousand billion
, in terms of its real estate and machinery, which we Marxists would call: value of the means of production; not to be confused with constant capital, mentioned earlier.
Valletta today has said that between 1946 and 1955 they invested 300 billion in new plants, and he has announced the prestigious ‘Mirafiori Sud’ for 1956. The figure of 50 billion is still valid today as an annual rate. Today’s FIAT would be worth 1100 billion, for sure, no less. Get rid of the shareholders, who cover less than a fifth of the real value with their scraps of paper, and you will pass from FIAT-socialism to the higher IRI-socialism.
The Threatened Labour Force
To date, one thing is remarkable: the personnel has only grown from 71,000 units to 74,000, i.e. by 5 per cent, barely two and a half per year! And then the variable capital will have risen from 70 to 80, even exaggerating the much-vaunted handouts to staff, highly praised for not having gone on strike for a single hour in a year (ah, the very red Turin!). Even if we allocate 12 to the shareholders, and 50 to investments in new plants, the 1955 account ‘à la Marx’ becomes: Variable capital 80 billion. Constant capital 168 billion. Surplus value 62 billion. Total 310 billion, as known. The surplus value is divided into 12 for profit to the shareholders, and 50 for new plants; the total rate of it is 62 against 80, i.e. 78 per cent, in Marx’s sense.
The organic composition of capital would have gone from 110/70 (i.e. 1.57) in 1953, to 168/80 (i.e. 2.10) in 1955. We showed that it is low because FIAT is a
vertically
integrated company that buys the original raw materials and transforms them over and over again. In any case, is there not perhaps a trick in Valletta’s figures, if the
constant
capital, which was 46 per cent of the
product
in 1953, is in 1955, 64 per cent? Are we beginning to see the benefits of automation? Even if a large slice of surplus value to be taken to new plants was hidden (in fact, the 1956 figure was not disclosed at this time), the fact remains that the product rises by 30 per cent in the two years in which the labour force rises by only 5 per cent.
And here falls the donkey – we would say the donkey Vanoni, if the poor wretch were not dead. We have certainly exceeded 5 per cent in new investment, but with employment we are not there, we remain at 2.50 per cent only!
Stay down there at zero, wretched Italy, and gaze again upon the proletarian aristocracy of Turin, huddled around its Valletta! Who shortly afterwards performs the Soviet miracle of the weekly hours and, outclassing once again the Bulganins, reduces them from 48 to 46, from 45 to 44, and from 42 to 40. Without reducing wages in the slightest, it is proclaimed; but also
without increasing the number of workers in the slightest
.
Five-Year Plan for the Great FIAT
From the clandestine little meeting room in Turin came the homage to the socialist merits of the High Administrators, of a Five-Year Plan, Russian-style, nice and done.
If the rate maintained over the past three years was 15.7 per cent, this corresponds to a 106 per cent increase in production over a five-year period. The index will have to rise from
one hundred
to 206. The 200 billion-turnover of 1952 will have to be 412 in 1957, and, if you like, in 1960 the 310 of 1955 will have to be as much as 640.
The 250 thousand motorised vehicles of today will become 515 thousand, even if we disregard the fact that in one year they went from 190,142 to 250,299, rising by 31.6 per cent (and why did sales only rise by 14 per cent? Would the warehouses be jammed, as in the case of
General Motors
?)
There are
nine hundred thousand
unsold cars from 1955 production. G.M. has five makes: ‘Chevrolet’, ‘Pontiac’, ‘Oldsmobile’, ‘Buick’, and ‘Cadillac’. Four years of FIAT’s work!
What is G.M.’s 1955 turnover? 9 billion 924 million
dollars
, over 6000 billion lire.
Twenty FIATs!
Personnel? 577 thousand units. Eight FIATs. The organic composition, the mechanisation, the automatism, are only
two and a half times
that of FIAT.
How do they plan to stop this insane march?
1) Two hundred thousand laid off in Detroit
2) Five million tonnes less steel demanded (and the steelworkers’ strike in the hands of traitors!)
3) One third of television advertising is paid for by automobile factories.
4) ‘It is enough to be employed for a fortnight to be able to walk into a dealership and walk out a few minutes later at the wheel of a brand new car, without having paid a single dollar in advance’.
5) ‘The G.M. Technical Center cost 10 million dollars; it is a monument to Progress’.
Out of it comes, while planning to throw a million new cars into the scrap heap, the turbine automobile – secret designs – called ‘
Firebird
’.
Can the historical-economic equation of this
Progress
not demonstrate when the
knot
, the catastrophe, the Revolution, the social ‘Firebird’ will come?
It is of no interest to us now – returning to FIAT – to establish how much, according to the plan, the dividends for 1960 will be, the nominal capital updates, and its weight at stock exchange values. And the mystery of advancing
automation
only allows us to pose the questions: how many workers? How much is their pay? How many hours per week?
Bourgeois economics knows only one thing: that everyone will have the small car, the refrigerator, the television, and perhaps a FIAT share certificate.
And we shall settle those accounts another time; our grandchildren will do them better.
Given such prospects, the Soviet-style economy knows (it is quite clear) one more thing; that in Turin one lives under a...
socialist system
, and at FIAT one produces under a...
socialist system!
Indeed, it is the leading place in the Soviet world that belongs to the young and giant automobile industry in Italy. Automotive capitalism, whatever the mysterious year of birth of Italian capitalism may be, is very young; the road motor vehicle is little more than half a century old: we said at Asti that FIAT’s date of birth is 1899 (the founding capital was 800,000 lire! which today would be 300 million at most, i.e. one thousandth of today’s. A thousandfold increase in 56 years is achieved with 13 per cent per year, which over such a long period is another defeat for Russian rates; since 1899 Russian production has only increased about 400 times, not 1000).
The decisive comparison is this.
Russian Five-Year Plan 1955-1960: from 100 to 170, 11.2 per cent;
The same, actual realisation; from 100 to 185, 13.1 per cent;
Russian Five-Year Plan 1960-1965; from 100 to 165, 10.5 per cent.
FIAT Five-Year Plan 1960-65: from 100 to 206, 15.6 per cent.
And glory to the great... socialist fatherland of the motor industry! And glory to the no less great fatherland of degenerate Italian communism.