Property and Capital, 1948

Property and Capital, 1948
International Communist Party
English language press
Property and Capital
(from
Prometeo
, 1948‑52)
1 -
PRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND LEGAL FORMS OF PRODUCTION
2 -
THE ADVENT OF CAPITALISM AND PROPERTY RELATIONS
3 -
THE TERMS OF THE SOCIALIST DEMAND
4 -
THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION AND OWNERSHIP OF REAL ESTATE
Note
: THE ALLEGED FEUDALISM OF SOUTHERN ITALY
5 -
THE CAPITALIST ECONOMY WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF ROMAN LAW
Note
: THE MIRAGE OF AGRARIAN REFORM IN ITALY
6 -
CAPITALISM AND URBAN PROPERTY
Note
: Theses Related to Chapters 1‑6
Note to Chapter 6
: The Real Estate Problem in Italy
7 -
THE OWNERSHIP OF MOVABLE PROPERTY
8 -
INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISE
9 -
ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN ENTERPRISES AND MONOPOLIES
10 -
FINANCE CAPITAL
11 -
CAPITAL AND IMPERIALIST POLITICS
12 -
THE MODERN ENTERPRISE, WITHOUT PROPERTY AND WITHOUT FINANCE: CONTRACTS AND CONCESSIONS
13 -
INTERVENTIONISM AND ECONOMIC DIRIGISM AS MANAGEMENT OF THE STATE BY CAPITAL
14 -
STATE CAPITALISM
15 -
THE FORMATION OF THE COMMUNIST ECONOMY
16 -
STAGES OF TRANSFORMATION IN RUSSIA AFTER 1917
17 -
UTOPIA, SCIENCE, ACTION
Note for Readers of the First English Edition, 2023
The text we are presenting here in the English language appears to be
quite irregular in the extension of the various chapters. It was
actually published in our theoretical journal of the time, “Prometeo”,
over a long period, from issue 10, series 1 (June‑July 1948), to issue
3, series 2 (July 1952). Thus, only the chapters from 1 to 6, and
chapter 17, can be considered fully developed; the others are more or
less large summaries.
The intention was eventually to develop the summarized chapters.
However, this could not be done immediately, but the subjects were to be
addressed in other general, organic party works, especially those in the
1950s that would deal with Soviet Russia, which the Party is translating
and publishing.
“Property and Capital”, nonetheless, does not lose in any way its
importance and central position among fundamental party texts.
The question of property, which is always at the heart of party
propaganda, is a subject easily understood by proletarians approaching
the party, and whose abolition will be a central objective of the
dictatorship of the proletariat following the seizure of power.
Nevertheless resents itself in less simple forms than one might commonly
imagine; forms that are some‑times compound, which will have multiple
consequences both in the course of the struggle for the conquest of
power, and in the path that will follow to realize the communist
society.
The text we present here, published over a period immediately after
the end of the Second World Massacre, is an initial contribution to the
re‑establishment of the correct cornerstones of Marxism, at a time when
the major Stalinist parties were bending the true revolutionary doctrine
to the demands of reconstruction, of the subjugation of the class to the
interests of the bourgeoisie, of the directing of the generous energies
of the proletariat towards the acceptance of the democratic/republican
society, presented as a historic achievement of resistantial
anti‑fascism.
This deliberate theoretical illumination, fortified by the bedrock of
Marxist science, has not only equipped us to delve profoundly into the
intricate property question, dissecting it comprehensively in all its
multifaceted forms and definitions, but has also empowered us to
ruthlessly dismantle the bourgeois and reformist misconceptions
surrounding property that have long obstructed the revolutionary
path.
Within the pages of this text, we grapple with pivotal matters, most
notably debunking the fallacious labeling of State capitalism as
Communism and delving into the true nature of nationalization. Yet, our
exploration extends beyond the confines of present‑day concerns: it
ventures into the realm of to‑morrow’s challenges, concretely outlining
the contours of a future society, the formation of a communist
order.
In the context of State capitalism and nationalization, we confront
head‑on the claim that adopting nationalization serves as a path to
addressing societal needs and represents a transition toward a socialist
society. This thesis, widely championed by the contemporary left,
remains largely unaltered, asserting that the final political revolution
is yet to come.
Furthermore, it is incorrect to assert that Marxists have avoided
providing concrete details about the characteristics of future societal
organization following their critique of Utopian systems. Revolutionary
movements traditionally identify and aim to eliminate traditional forms
hindering progress, much like the abolition of slavery or feudal serfdom
in the past. In our case, we advocate for the abolition of wage labor,
equating it to ending private ownership of the means of production,
extending to the abolition of ownership of products, the commodity
nature of goods, money, the market, and the separation between
companies, as well as the dissolution of class divisions and the
State.
Through examination, it becomes evident that contemporary human
activity underscores the feasibility and necessity of communism, poised
to become a historical reality. This realization does not hinge on State
control over production, industry, or land assets but emerges when we
break free from the traditional “mercantile equation” that calculates
labor expended against value produced.
This departure from traditional economic norms extends to the very
core of the communist party. The communist party, as an organic fighting
body, mirrors the structure of the future communist society.
Capitalist society already contains the new communist social order
within it. Under favorable conditions, created by the ongoing crisis of
capitalism, this material potential will allow the proletariat to attain
its inevitable goal of statehood and the ultimate dissolution of the
class itself.
At the time of the penning of this introduction, a century has passed
since the anti‑revolutionary turn of the Russian government in 1926,
when the proletariat was robbed of its rightful revolutionary party and
its class organs smashed to pieces.
As the class now begins to dust itself off, after a century of
immobilization, defeat, darkness, and massacre it is now more important
than ever that we address the issue of property. This question, brought
now and scrutinized with ruthless examination, will be addressed in full
materiality when the workers movement reaches full maturity, that is,
after the proletariat organizes in its class unions and when the best
working class elements join the ranks of the revolutionary party.
1. - PRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND LEGAL FORMS OF PRODUCTION
Socialism has always been defined, with a simple formula justified by
the needs of propaganda, as the abolition of private property, adding to
this the specification: of the means of production, and then another: of
the means of exchange.
Although this formula is incomplete and not entirely adequate, it
should not be rejected. But the old and recent fundamental questions
about personal, collective, national and social property make it
necessary to clarify the issue of property in respect of the historical
theoretical antithesis and struggle between capitalism and
socialism.
Every economic and social relationship is projected into legal
formulations, and starting from this position the
Manifesto
says that communists bring the “property question” to the fore at every
stage of the movement, because they bring the production question to the
fore, and more generally that of production, distribution and
consumption, i.e. that of the economy.
In an era when the great historical antithesis between the feudal and
bourgeois regimes first appeared as a conflict based on ideology and
legal rights, rather than as an economic relationship and a change in
the forms of production, it was impossible not to put the legal form of
proletarian economic and social claims in the sharpest relief, even in
the most elementary utterances. In the fundamental passage of the
preface to the
Critique of Political Economy
Marx sets out the
doctrine of the contrast between the
forces
of production and
the
forms
of production and immediately adds: «or –
this
merely expresses the same thing in legal terms
– with the property
relations within the framework of which they have operated
hitherto».
The correct meaning of the legal formulation can therefore only be
based on the correct presentation of the productive and economic
relations that socialism seeks to break.
Therefore, insofar as it is useful to adopt the language of the
current science of law, it is a question of recalling the discriminating
characteristics of the capitalist type of production – which must be
defined in relation to the types of production that preceded it – and
further distinguishing within these characteristics between those which
socialism will preserve, and those which it will have to overcome and
suppress in the revolutionary process. This distinction must obviously
be established in the field of economic analysis.
Capitalism does not coincide with property. Various socio-economic
forms that preceded capitalism had their own specific institutions of
ownership. We will see at once that it was convenient for the new system
of production to base its legal framework on formulas and canons derived
directly from previous regimes, despite the fact that in those regimes
the relations of appropriation were very different. And no less
elementary is the thesis that in the socialist vision capitalism appears
as the last of the economies founded on the legal form of property, so
that socialism in abolishing capitalism will also abolish property. But
that first abolition, and, to put it better, violent and revolutionary
suppression, is a clearly dialectical relationship, as stated with
greater fidelity to our own Marxist language, than the abolition of
property of a somewhat metaphysical and apocalyptic flavor.
Let us, however, refer back to the start of our well‑known concepts.
Property is a relationship between man, the human person, and things.
Jurists call it the faculty to dispose of the thing in the most
extensive and absolute way, and classically to use and abuse it. It is
known that we Marxists do not like these eternal definitions, and we
could better give a dialectical and scientific definition of the right
of property by saying that it is the power of another person or group to
“prevent” a human person from using a thing.
The historical variability of the relationship can be seen, for
example, in the fact that for centuries and millennia the same human
person was susceptible to being himself the object of property
(slavery). On the other hand, we have proved a thousand times, by
referring to the primitive communist society in which property did not
exist, since everything was acquired and used in common by the first
human groupings, that the institution of property cannot claim the
apologetic prerogative of being natural and eternal.
In the relative primordial economy, or you could say, pre‑economy,
the relationship between man and thing was as simple as possible.
Because of the limited number of human beings and the limited range of
needs, which are barely greater than the animal need for food, the
things that satisfy these needs, which the law later called goods, are
made available by nature without limit and the only productive act is to
take them when they are needed. They are limited to the fruits of wild
vegetation and later to hunting and fishing and so on. There were useful
objects in abundance, there were not yet “products” that came out of an
embryonic physical, technical, manufacturing intervention of man on the
material offered by the natural environment.
With work, the technology of production, the increase in population,
and the shortage of free virgin land on which to expand, distribution
problems arise, and it becomes difficult to cope with all the demands
for the use and consumption of products. Conflict arises between
individual and individual, tribe and tribe, people and people. There is
no need to recall these stages of the origin of property, that is, the
appropriation of what has been produced through the work of humans and
communities for consumption, for building up reserves, for the initial
exchange to satisfy other, ever‑expanding needs.
Commerce appears in various processes, things that were formerly only
objects of use become merchandise, currency appears, and exchange value
is superimposed on use value.
We have to understand, in the various peoples and in the various
periods of history, how productive technology evolved with regard to the
capacity of human work to be applied to objects or raw materials, what
was the mechanism of production and distribution of productive acts and
efforts among the various members of society, how did the circulation of
products play out from hand to hand, from house to house, from country
to country with respect to consumption. We can move on from these facts
to understand the corresponding legal forms, which tended to coordinate
the rules of these processes, assigning their regulation to given
organizations, together with the possibility of imposing constraints and
sanctions against transgressors.
Just as the ownership of things or commodities for consumption and
the ownership of slaves does not go back to primitive humanity, the same
applies to the ownership of the
soil
, that is to say, the land
and all that man adds to it and builds upon it,
immovable
property
, as it is referred to in law. Such property, in its
privately owned form, comes later than movable property and slaves,
because at the beginning everything that is not commonly owned is at
least attributed to the head of the familial grouping or tribe or city
and region.
But even if we want to dispute that all peoples started from this
first communistic form and even if we want to talk ironically about such
a “golden age”, the analysis that interests us about the derivation of
the legal institution from the stages of technology is not affected by
it, and it is enough to refer to the great importance that Engels and
Marx placed on these studies on prehistory from the very start, pushing
us to go much further.
If we limit ourselves to the skeletal outlines and the things known
to all, the relations as to the ownership of the consumable and
otherwise usable movable object, of the slave or serf, and of the land,
this will suffice to define the fundamental outlines of successive
historical types of class society.
Property, says the jurist, arises from ownership. He says this with
immovable property (real estate) in mind, but the formula also applies
to ownership of the slave and the commodity object. In fact,
“movable things belong to the possessor”.
No less obvious is
the transition from possession to ownership. If I have anything in my
hands, in general even another man or a piece of land (in which case I
do not literally hold it with my hands – nor do I constantly hold the
man and the commodity in my hands) without another being able to replace
me, I am the possessor. Material possession, still. But possession
becomes legitimate and lawful, and is elevated to the right of
ownership, when I have the possibility, against a potential claimant or
troublemaker, of obtaining the support of the law and authority, that
is, the material force organized through the State, which will come to
protect me. For movable property or goods, mere possession proves legal
ownership until someone proves that I have taken the thing from him by
force or fraud. For the slave in the well‑ordered states there was a
family registry that registered him or her with the master. For real
estate, even in modern times, the legal machinery is much more complex,
depending on titles in given forms and public records, and so the legal
control of transfers of ownership is more complex. However, material
possession is always a great resource for its expeditious effect, and
the law defends it in the first instance, unless in the second there
comes the difficult full investigation of the property right. It is said
as a legal paradox that even the thief can ask the law for possessory
protection, if thrown out (perhaps by the actual owner, for theoretical
absurdity), and the shrewdest legal advocates say that all codes can be
reduced to just “article five, he who holds has won”
(“articolo
quinto, chi tiene in mano ha vinto”)
Thus, at the basis of any property regime there is a material reality
about the appropriation of property in general. The slave’s children
remained with the master, and if they escaped, he could have the law
chase them back to him.
Under the medieval feudal regime, the method of production using
slave labor and the related legal framework governing the ownership of
human beings generally appears to be abolished. The disposition of
agrarian land takes on a more complex form than that of classical Roman
law, in that a hierarchy of lords is laid upon it, culminating in the
political sovereign, who distributes land to dependent vassals within a
highly complex legal regime. The economic basis is agricultural work by
means not of slaves, but of serfs, who are no longer the object of true
ownership and alienation from master to master, but who cannot in
general leave the fief on which they work with their families. Who
appropriates the products of labor? The serf appropriates a certain
part, generally being granted a small plot of land, the fruits of which
must suffice to feed himself and his own, while he is required to work
alone or with others on the much larger lands of the lord, the more
abundant produce of which is delivered to the latter. Such work was
bonded labor. In more recent forms the serf is more like a homesteader
in that all the land of the feudal lord is divided into small family
farms, but a large share of the product of each is rendered to the
master.
In this regime the worker has a partial right to use the products of
his labor to consume as he pleases. Partial insofar as it is impacted by
the payment of tributes, whether in labor time or in foodstuffs, to the
feudal master, the clergy and so on.
Non‑agricultural production has little development, due to the still
underdeveloped technology, poor urbanization and the general
primitiveness of people’s lives and needs. But the workers producing
manufactured objects are free men, that is, not bound to the place of
birth and work. They are the artisans, shackled by organizational
fetters and guild rules, but nevertheless economically completely
autonomous. In artisan production, of the small and minimal enterprise
and workshop, we have the worker’s ownership of several kinds of goods:
the uncomplicated tools of his labor, the raw materials he buys to
process them, and the manufactured products he sells. Apart from the
burdens of guilds and communes and given feudal rights over villages,
the artisan works only for himself and enjoys the fruit of all the time
and all the result of his labor.
The circulation network of this social system is scarcely intricate.
The great mass of farm workers consume what they produce in the place
where they work and sell only a small amount to buy the limited items of
clothing or other things they use. Artisans and merchants trade with
peasants and with each other mostly within narrow circles of towns,
villages and countryside; a small minority of privileged lords draw the
objects of their enjoyment from greater distances, and until a few
centuries ago were themselves virtually ignorant of forks and soap etc.,
to say nothing of a hundred other things used by everyone today.
Gradually, however, the foundations of the new capitalist era were
being laid, with technical and scientific discoveries enriching the
processes of product handling in a thousand ways, with geographical
discoveries and the inventions of new means of transportation of people
and goods continually widening the reach of circulation and the
distances between the places where products are manufactured and those
where they are used.
The progress of these transformations is extremely varied and can
entail both inexplicable sluggishness and overwhelming growth. While
from the beginning of the modern epoch already millions of consumers
were learning about and using previously unknown and exotic spices and
commodities, causing new needs to emerge (coffee, tobacco, etc., etc.)
it was still possible at the time of World War I to hear that a lady
from Calabria, a large landowner, had in one year spent a total of “one
penny” for needles, everything else being provided by her estate.
Having arrived at this solid position based on the recollection of
these few signs, deliberately simplified but attempting to put the right
words in their proper place, let us ask what are the real
characteristics that differentiate the new capitalist production and
economy and the bourgeois regime for which it provides the basis. And we
see at once, in what really constitutes the transformation that the new
technological systems, the new forces of production placed at man’s
disposal, induce after a long and hard struggle in the relations of
production, that is, in the possibilities and faculties of appropriation
of the various goods, as opposed to what took place in the previous,
feudal and artisan society.
We will thus begin to clearly establish the basis of our further
inquiry into the actual relations between the capitalist system and the
form of the appropriation of various goods: ready-to-consume
commodities, tools of labor, land, houses and various fixed
installations, and extend it to the process of the development of the
capitalist era and that of its end.
2. - THE ADVENT OF CAPITALISM AND PROPERTY RELATIONS
The rise of the capitalist economy in its effects on property
relations appears not as an establishment of private property rights,
but as their widespread abolition. The thesis formulated in this way
should appear neither strange nor new, as it is entirely in accordance,
in substance and in form, with Marx’s exposition.
With regard to the feudal landlords, the bourgeois revolution
consisted in a radical abolition of privileges, but not in a suppression
of the right of ownership over land. We should not think here of the
revolution in the sense of a brief period of struggle, the measures
against rebels and émigrés, or even the subsequent measures to suppress
the privileges on the land of religious bodies but refer to the social
economic content of the great transformation, which in its unfolding
begins long before and ends long after the classic dates of
insurrections, proclamations and promulgations of new statutes.
The advent of capitalism has the character of a wide‑ranging
destruction of property rights with regard to the substantial class of
small‑scale artisanal producers and to a large degree and especially in
given nations, also at the expense of the working peasant owners.
The story of the birth of capitalism and primitive accumulation
coincides with the story of the fierce, inhuman
expropriation
of producers and is delivered in the most finely sculpted pages of
Capital
The concluding chapter of the first volume, like other fundamental
writings of Marxism, presents the future overthrow of capitalism as the
expropriation of the erstwhile expropriators and even – but we shall
deal with this in the latter part of this text – as a vindication of the
erstwhile “property” destroyed and trampled underfoot.
For all this to be clearly understood it is precisely necessary to
follow the investigation into the correct application of our method, and
never to lose sight of the relations that run between the formulations
of current language or law, and those specific to us Marxist
socialists.
The explanation of the establishment of capitalism in the field of
productive technology is related to the manifold refinements of the
application of human labor to processed materials; it begins with the
first technological innovations born on the workbench of the patient and
skillful individual craftsman, runs through a formidable cycle with the
rise of the first factories, working at first by hand, then based on the
machines that are controlled by an operator but replace the hand of the
worker, and later on with the use of powerful mechanical driving
forces.
In modern times capitalism appears to us as the formidable complex of
plants, constructions, works and machinery with which technology has
covered the ground of the most advanced countries, and therefore it
seems obvious to define the capitalist system as that of ownership and
monopoly of these colossal modern means of production, a definition
which is only partially accurate.
The technical conditions of the new economy consist of new methods
based on the differentiation of tasks and the division of labor, but
historically even before this phenomenon we have the simpler one of the
coming together of many workers in a common place of work; they continue
to work with the same technology and using the same simple tools they
used when they were isolated and autonomous.
Thus, the truly distinctive character of innovation does not lie in
the appearance of a possessor or conqueror of new equipment or great
machinery, which, by producing the manufactured goods more easily,
supplant traditional craft production. These large plants come later,
since as Marx says, for simple cooperation, i.e., the grouping together
of many workers, all that is needed is primitive premises that can be
easily hired by the “master”, and indeed, in the “sweating system”
workers can remain in their homes (domestic labor). The distinctive
characteristic is therefore elsewhere; it is a negative characteristic,
and therefore destructive and revolutionary. Workers have been deprived
of the possibility of owning the raw materials and the tools of labor on
their own behalf and are thus no longer the owners of what they produce
by their labor and are no longer free to consume or sell it as they
please. Therefore, to recognize an early capitalist economy in
operation, it is sufficient for us to note that there are masses of
artisan producers who have lost the ability to procure materials and
tools – and, as a further condition, buying power has been concentrated
in considerable volumes in the hands of new economic actors, the
capitalists, enabling them on the one hand to hoard the materials and
tools of labor, and on the other hand to purchase the labor power of
artisans who have become wage earners, leaving the capitalists as the
absolute possessors and owners of the product of labor in its
entirety.
Corresponding to this second condition is the primitive accumulation
of capital, whose origin is studied in other contributions to the
knowledge of Marxism, and which arises from multiple historical and
economic factors.
That the mere act of bringing workers closer together is enough to
make the new system superior and enables it to supplant the old system
is explained by the reduced effort involved in transportation and
procurement, as well as the better utilization of the time that
producers devote to the (still technologically very simple) stages of
production. We have an initial breakthrough in performance compared with
artisan labor in isolated workshops. But this is conclusively overtaken
by further developments resulting from the division of labor. It is no
longer the single craftsman, assisted by one or two apprentices, who
assembles the manufactured product; rather, this arises from the
successive contributions of different tradesmen, none of whom would know
how to do it, nor be able to do it, alone. Further still, many of the
most difficult operations previously done by hand after a long
apprenticeship are carried out using a machine, and the same outcome in
production is achieved with much less effort, in the physical and mental
sense, expended by the operator.
Following this process we see the rapid expansion of the factory’s
mass of equipment, which of course does not legally belong to the
worker, just as when simple hand tools already did not belong to him (in
general) in the initial stage either. But the legal ownership of these
large facilities by the capitalist and employer is not a necessary
condition; we have proved this by recalling that even before such
facilities appeared, we had true social and economic capitalism with
early manufacturing; we can observe many cases where, in the modern
economy, the production plants are
not
the legal property of
the business owner. For now, let it suffice to mention rents,
concessions, contracts and so on in industry, and in agriculture the
great capitalist tenancies.
The real circumstance that allows us to confirm the advent of
capitalism thus lies, in addition to primitive accumulation, in the
“violent separation of the producer from the tools and products of his
labor”.
Capitalism, economically and socially, appears as a destruction of
the workers’ ability to appropriate
products
, and their
appropriation by capitalists.
With the loss of all rights over the goods produced, obviously the
worker lost all rights over tools, raw materials and the workplace.
These rights were an individual property relationship that capitalism
destroyed, to replace them with a new right of appropriation, of
ownership, which is
necessarily
a right over the products of
labor, but not necessarily a similar right over the means of production.
The legal ownership of the latter can also change without the company
ceasing to be capitalist in character. What is more, the new kind of
appropriation is not
necessarily
(since we are talking about
capitalism in Marxist terms) a right of an individual and personal kind,
as it was in the artisanal economy, which seldom extended beyond the
confines of the family.
Capitalism, according to Marx – since we are merely expounding the
doctrine as it has always been professed – is not only established by
expropriation
, but also establishes an economy and thus a type
of
social
property. We could classically speak of personal
property when it means the ownership of productive and economic
activities by a single person, but when labor becomes the collective and
associated function of many producers – which is a fundamental and
indispensable feature of capitalism – ownership over the whole of the
new enterprise is a fact of social scope and order, even if the legal
title mentions only one person.
This concept, essential in Marxism, unfolds directly into that of the
class struggle and the class antagonism inherent in the capitalist
system. The appropriation of products by the employer, who no longer has
slaves and serfs but “free” wage laborers, is a relationship that has
shifted to the social level, and which no longer affects only the one
master and one hundred workers, but the whole working class pitted
against the new system of rulers, and the political force it founded
with the new type of State. This social function is made clear in the
Marxist law of accumulation and progressive reproduction of capital. The
slave master and the feudal landowner derived their personal income from
the surplus labor provided by their employees, but they could very
easily consume it all without the economic system ceasing to function at
the social level. The portion of the products of their labor left to the
slaves and serfs was enough for them to survive and perpetuate the
system. Therefore, the property right of the master of slaves and serfs
is a true individual right. No less individual is the right of the free
peasant and the artisan, who do not render surplus labor to anyone
(there was not yet any taxation – in those regimes the State came
“cheap”) and can consume all the fruits of their labor, which coincides
with that of their meager possession of a little land or small workshop
(in the sense of a business as opposed to the actual premises). The
capitalist does indeed derive a profit from the unpaid surplus labor of
his workers, whom he only pays enough to live on, but the fundamental
feature of the new economy is not that he, in theory and according to
the written law, can consume all the profit personally; instead, it is
the general and social fact that capitalists
must reserve
an
increasingly large part of the profit for new investments, for the
reproduction
of capital. This new and fundamental fact has more
importance than that of profit consumed by those who do not work. While
this relationship is more suggestive and has always lent itself more to
counterpropaganda on legal or moral grounds against apologists for the
bourgeois regime, the fundamental law of capitalism is for us the other,
namely, the allocation of a large part of profit to the accumulation of
capital.
Distinguishing features of the emergence of the capitalist economy
are thus the accumulation, in the hands of a few individuals, of masses
of means of acquisition, which can be used to purchase work materials
and tools on the market, and the suppression of the very possibility of
owning materials, tools and products of labor for the broad strata of
autonomous producers.
In our Marxist language, this is valid to explain the genesis of the
industrial capitalist on the one hand, and the masses of wage‑laborers
with no income on the other. And this, we are wont to say, was the
result of a social and political economic revolution.
However, we do not pretend that the bourgeoisie and neo‑capitalists
accomplished the process by winning power in the civil war, and then
enacting a law that said: it is forbidden for those who do not belong to
the victorious capitalist class to buy raw materials, implements and
machines and to sell manufactured products. Things happened quite
differently. Today it is still not forbidden by law to be an artisan;
not only that, but today, as capitalist accumulation accelerates its
truly hellish pace before our very eyes, we see the fascists, national
socialists and Christian socialists competing in their apologia for the
artisan, in chorus with an old infatuation
(béguin)
of the
Mazzinians. And the same must be said for the autonomous agricultural
producer who owns his own plot of land.
The actual process of primitive accumulation was different, and it
can be presented using the language of current philosophy and ethics,
along with that of positive law, which is not a good fit with the
language of Marxism.
Property as the right to dispose of the product of one’s own labor,
in the early dawn of capitalism, was still defended by conservative
ideologues and theologians, satirized by Marx for their embarrassment at
the passage of property into the hands of those who do nothing. However,
all their theories on the justification of capitalist profit from
savings, abstinence and previous personal labor, failed to moralize the
fact that the pin maker cannot pocket one when leaving the workshop
without making himself guilty of grand larceny.
In the prevailing legal system, the ownership by a single person of a
store, a factory, a stock of materials to be processed, as well as the
finished products, was a property relationship excluded neither by the
old codes of the feudal regime nor by those elaborated by the bourgeois
revolution.
However, the socio-economic relationship is made clear in the light
of Marxism by the consideration of the value of the product relative to
the amount of labor-power required to make it. If that product can be
produced in four hours when manufactured, whereas the artisan produces
it in eight, the artisan, endowed with his full right of ownership, will
be able to take it to the market, but he will collect a price reduced by
half, with which he will not be able purchase enough to cover his daily
subsistence. Since he cannot physically work sixteen hours a day, in
order to balance his budget he will be forced to accept the capitalist’s
conditions, that is, to work, say, twelve hours for the capitalist and
hand over the products of his labor, receiving in wages the equivalent
of six hours of work, with which he can live, albeit more miserably.
This brutal and fierce transition contains within itself the
necessary condition for the progress of productive technology: only by
subtracting from the artisan enslaved to capital that margin of value of
his labor power can the social basis of capital accumulation be created,
an economic fact that accompanies the technical one of the spread of
manufacturing facilities and the means of production characteristic of
the new scientific and mechanical age.
Why, then, did the establishment of the new system of production and
appropriation of the fruits of labor have to, in order to triumph, break
certain obstacles in the forms of production, i.e., in the property
relations of the old regime? Because there existed a series of sanctions
and limiting norms that were contradictory to the new requirements,
i.e., the freedom of movement of capitalists, and the availability of a
mass of competing suppliers of wage labor. On the one hand, the monopoly
of State power by the nobility and the church exposed the first
accumulators of capital, merchants, moneylenders or bankers, to the risk
of continual harassment and sometimes spoliation; on the other hand,
corporative laws and regulations left the bodies of master craftsmen in
the cities with monopoly privileges over the production of certain
manufactured articles and thus over their sale in given territories. And
the masses of workers in industry could not have been formed except by
freeing the serfs from serfdom and the apprentices and ruined artisan
masters from the workshops.
Thus, the revolution did not lead to a new positive property code,
but it was essential to abolish the old feudal laws that framed the
relations of production and trade in the countryside and cities.
Considering the capitalist system as opposed to the feudal regime on
whose ruins it arose, we must not see the foundation of a new property
right, whether attributed to natural or legal persons, over the machine,
the factory, the railroad, the system of canals or whatever, as its
distinguishing feature.
Instead, we must see clearly what the discriminating features are,
the true attributes of the capitalist economy, for otherwise we will not
be able to follow with certainty the process of its evolution and judge
the features of its overcoming.
With respect to the evolution of property relations, and remaining
for now in the field of the right of ownership over movable things, as
we shall say immediately afterwards about the ownership of land and
fixed assets, the essential and necessary features of capitalism are as
follows:
First
. The existence of a market economy, in which workers
must purchase all the basic necessities of life, in general terms.
Second
. The impossibility for workers to appropriate and
bring directly to market the movable things created as the products of
their labor, that is, the prohibition of the worker’s personal ownership
of the product.
Third
. The payment to workers of the means to acquire the
goods and services, generally in amounts less than the value added by
them to the products, and the investment of a large part of that surplus
in new facilities (accumulation).
Based on these basic criteria, it is necessary to look into whether
personal title to ownership over the factory and production facilities
is indispensable for the existence of capitalism, and whether there can
be not only a purely capitalist economy without such ownership, but even
whether at given stages it is convenient for capitalism to disguise it
under other forms.
Such an investigation will have to be premised by some notable
considerations regarding the economic importance and legal evolution of
property rights over land, subsoil and topsoil by private individuals
and firms in contemporary times.
3. - THE TERMS OF THE SOCIALIST DEMAND
Before delving into the topic of this research, which concerns the
legal institutions of property accompanying the capitalist economy in
its historical course, it is however necessary to recall again what have
always been the true terms of the great socialist demand.
This consists historically, leaving aside the literary and
philosophical hints of communism regarding goods that existed in
pre‑bourgeois regimes ever since antiquity, and also related to special
reflections on class upheavals, in the movement that has invested from
its inception the social underpinnings of the capitalist regime and
system. A movement of critique and combat, whose complete form is
inseparable from the actual intervention in the social struggles of the
wage‑earning working class and from its organization into an
international class party adhering to the doctrine of the
Communist
Manifesto
and Marx.
The socialist demand, enunciated millions of times in the pages of
volumes of theory or in the modest words of speeches and agitational
leaflets, cannot be alive and real unless the dialectical method of
Marxism is applied, both in its simple immediacy and in its mighty
depth.
The cry of protest against the absurdities, injustices, inequalities,
and infamies with which the bourgeois capitalist regime is materially
endowed is not enough to build the proletarian socialist demand. And in
this sense the innumerable pseudo socialist or semisocialist postures of
humanitarian philanthropists, utopians, libertarians, apostles, all of
them more or less excited by new ethics and social mysticisms, were
insufficient.
The cry of the proletariat and Marxism to the bourgeois regime is not
vade retro Satana!
It is simultaneously a welcome, and in a
given historical epoch an offer of alliance, as well as a declaration of
war and a proclamation of destruction. An incomprehensible position to
all those who base the explanation of history and its struggles on
religious beliefs and moral systems, or more generally on non‑scientific
and even unconsciously metaphysical methods, seeking in every event and
at every stage of the history of human society the play of fixed
criteria duly capitalized as Good, Evil, Justice, Violence, Freedom,
Authority...
Of all the features of social organization that capitalism has
brought into being with its advent, some are acquisitions that
proletarian socialism not only accepts but without which it could not
exist; others are forms and structures that it sets out to annihilate
after their spread.
Its demands must therefore be defined in relation to the various
points in which we have rearranged the typical elements, the distinctive
features of capitalism at the time of its victory. This is a revolution,
and it is a first general historical prerequisite for the advent of the
regime for which socialists will fight. The almost immediate taking of
an anti‑capitalist stance, no matter how radical and crude, does not
have the character of a restoration, an apologia for pre‑capitalist
conditions and forms in general. It is necessary today to reassert all
this clearly, even though it is more than a century since the repeated
efforts of our school have driven to the same end, for at every step in
the history of the class struggle dangerous deviations have given rise
to movements and doctrines that falsify very important positions of
revolutionary socialism.
In the previous chapter we first recalled the well‑known
technical-organizational characteristics of capitalist production as
opposed to artisan and feudal production. As a whole, these
characteristics are preserved and integrally claimed by the socialist
movement. The cooperation of numerous workers in the production of the
same type of object, the successive division of labor, that is, the
allocation of workers among the various and successive stages of the
production process, culminating in the same finished product, and the
introduction into productive technology of all the resources of applied
science with engines and operational machinery, are contributions from
the capitalist epoch that we certainly do not propose to renounce and
which will indeed be the basis of the new socialist organization. A no
less important and irrevocable gain is the release of technological
processes from mystery, secrecy and corporative exclusivity, a certain
starting point, in the determinist view, of the difficult development of
science from the ancient fetters of witchcraft, religions and
philosophies. The demonstration that the bourgeoisie has implemented
these advances by overpowering and barbaric methods and by plunging the
productive masses into misery and wage‑slavery remains always essential.
But this is certainly not to propose a return to the free production of
the self‑employed artisan.
The moment he, together with the small peasant, was stripped of all
possessions and reduced to a wage laborer, his immiseration came about
and his resistance was overcome by violence. But the new criteria for
organizing the productive effort made it possible to enhance its outcome
and performance in the social sense. In spite of the industrial master’s
levies, on the general scale the masses were enabled to satisfy new and
more varied needs with the same labor time. Even before we consider the
enormous advantages in productive output to which the division of labor
and mechanization led, we consider a definite advantage and one from
which we do not presume to exclude the simple economy of transportation,
business operations and management which manufacturing leads to as
compared with mere workshops. Every craftsman was the bookkeeper,
cashier, salesman, and clerk for himself with enormous waste of labor
time, while in the large factory one employee does this same service for
every hundred workers. Any proposal for a new fragmentation of the
productive forces concentrated by capital is reactionary for socialists.
And we speak of productive forces not only in regard to the men engaged
in the work we are now discussing, but also of course the masses of
materials to be worked and processed, the tools of labor, and all the
complex modern facilities useful for mass and serial production.
It should not be seen as a digression to note that the acceptance in
the socialist demand of the progressive concentration of plants and
workplaces as opposed to the small business economy, does not at all
mean acceptance of that consequence of the capitalist system which
consists in the accelerated technical industrialization of given areas
while leaving others in retrograde conditions, and this as much country
to country as city to country. This relationship historically subsists
until the bourgeois regime has exhausted its phase of despoliation and
reduction of the old productive classes to propertyless wage earners.
Dialectically, the socialist position cannot fail to leverage the
revolutionary leadership function of the workers whom capitalism has
urbanized into huge masses, but tends to spread modern technical
resources into all territories together with a modern way of life richer
in expression, as we have enunciated since point 9 of the immediate
program in the
Manifesto:
“gradual abolition of all the
distinction between town and country”
without contrast, with all
the other measures of a clearly centralizing nature in the
organizational sense. The same criterion guides the socialist position
on the relations between metropolises and colonies, which latter are to
be relieved of their exploitation by the former, without forgetting that
only capitalism and its developments could accelerate this result by
centuries and centuries, although in this field it has exceeded all
limits in the use of ruthless methods of conquest.
Having thus inherited the enormous development of the forces of
production from the capitalist revolution, socialists set out to upset
the corresponding apparatus of
forms, relations
of
production, which is reflected in juridical institutions, and this after
having accepted that proletarians, the fourth estate, fought in alliance
with the bourgeoisie when it broke the forms and institutions of the
previous regime, to found and consolidate its own, and to extend them
into the advanced and backward world. But in what precise sense does our
historical demand involve breaking down and overcoming those forms?
The capitalist productive revolution has violently separated workers
from their product, from their instruments of labor, from all the means
of production, in the sense that it has suppressed their right to
dispose of them directly, individually. Socialism condemns this
despoliation, but it certainly does not postulate giving back to every
artificer his paraphernalia and the consumable object he fashioned with
it, for him to go to the market and exchange it for his subsistence. In
a sense, the separation brutally enacted by capitalism is historically
final. But in our dialectical perspective this separation will be
superseded on a more distant and broader plane. The paraphernalia and
end product used to be at the individual disposal of the free and
autonomous artificer; they have now passed to the disposal of the
capitalist master. They will have to return to the producer
class
. It will be a social arrangement, not an individual or
even a corporative one. It will no longer be a form of property, but of
general technical organization, and if we wanted as of now to refine the
formula by anticipating the process, we should speak of being at the
disposal of society and not of a class, since such organization tends
toward a form of society that is classless.
However, without for now talking about disposition and “ownership” by
the individual over the object he is about to consume, we cannot include
in the socialist demand the worker’s personal discretion over the object
he has manipulated.
If the worker in a shoe factory under bourgeois rule takes away a
shoe, he will not avoid jail time by proving that it matched his foot
size well, and all the worse if he intended instead to sell it for say,
bread. Socialism will not consist in allowing the worker to leave with a
pair of shoes on his shoulder, but this is not because they were stolen
from the master, but because it would constitute a ridiculously slow and
cumbersome system of distributing shoes to everyone. And before we see
in this a problem of law or morality, we see in it a materially
technical problem, for which we need only think of the workers in a
railroad wheel factory, or, to provide even more obvious examples that
illustrate the revolutions to which the innovations of technology and
life are leading, we need only think of people who work in power plants
or a radio transmitter stations, and have no reason, as in a hundred
other cases, to be searched on the way out...
Now the question of ownership over the complete or even semi‑finished
product is actually the crucial one, and it is much more important than
ownership over the production tool, factory, workshop or plant.
The real characteristic of capitalism is the allocation of products
and the consequent power to sell them on the market to a private master.
In general at the beginning of the bourgeois era this attribution
derives from that of the mill, factory or plant to a private owner, the
industrial capitalist, in a form treated legally like that which
attributes ownership of agrarian land or of houses.
But such individual private property is a static, formal fact; it is
the mask of the real relationship that interests us, which is dynamic
and dialectical, and consists in the characters of the productive
movement, in the grafting of the incessant economic cycles.
Thus the socialist demand, while it had to accept the substitution of
associated labor for individual labor, proposed to suppress the
attribution in private ownership of the products of collective labor to
a single owner, head of the company, free to dispose of them at his
pleasure. It logically expressed this postulate, relative to the whole
economic dynamic, as abolition of the industrialist’s free private right
over the productive plant.
However, this formulation is incomplete, even on the level to which
we adhere in this paragraph, i.e., of the negative and destructive
content of the socialist economic position, since it does not yet deal
with the type of productive and distributive organization of the
socialist regime, and the way to get there, in the field of economic
measures and political struggle.
The formulation is incomplete in that it does not say what is
required to happen to the other forms peculiar to the capitalist
economy, having made it clear that the intention is to suppress the
attribution of all final products in a complex organization to a single
master of both the former and the latter.
In fact, the capitalist economy became possible because the
separation of workers from means and products found a mercantile
distributive mechanism already in place, so that the capitalist could
take the products to the market and create the wage system, giving the
workers a share of the proceeds so that they could obtain subsistence on
that same market. The artisan approaches the market as both buyer and
seller, whereas the wage‑laborer can approach the market only as a
buyer, and with limited means, owing to the law of capital gain.
The socialist demand classically consists in abolishing the
wage‑laborer. Only the abolition of the wage‑laborer leads to the
abolition of capitalism. But being unable to abolish the wage laborer in
the sense of restoring the absurdly backward figure of the worker as a
seller of his product to the market, socialism, from its origins,
calls for the abolition of the market economy
As we have already mentioned, the mercantile framework for the
distribution of goods preceded capitalism and encompassed earlier
economies of all sorts, going all the way back to the one in which there
was market for human persons (slavery).
Modern mercantile economy means monetary economy. Thus the
anti‑mercantile demand of socialism equally entails the abolition of
money as a medium of exchange as well as a means for the practical
formation of capital.
Capitalism inevitably tends to resurrect in the economic environment
of mercantile and monetary distribution. If this were not true, we could
agree to tear up all the pages of Marx’s
Capital
The anti‑mercantilist assertion lies in all the texts of Marxism and
especially in Marx’s polemics against Proudhon and all forms of
petty-bourgeois socialism. It is to the credit of the communist program,
drafted, albeit in a very verbose text, by Bukharin to have put this
most vital point back into full relief.
But at the end of the previous section we set out a third distinctive
point of capitalism compared with the regimes it vanquished: the
deduction from the product of workers’ labor effort of a large share
that is destined for the bosses’ profits, and above all the allocation
of a major part of this share to the accumulation of new capital.
It is obvious that the socialist demand, if it wanted to take away
from the bourgeois master the right to dispose of the product and take
it to market, would take away his right over the ownership of the
factory, and at the same time also the availability of capital gain and
profit. More than a century ago it proclaimed that the wage laborer
could be abolished, and this meant overcoming the kind of market economy
that existed hitherto. By destroying the market for goods where the
small medieval craftsman timidly arrived with a few manufactured
articles, and where the products of modern collaborative labor arrive
with the capitalist character of commodities, it is no less clear that
the market for capital goods and the capital market itself, and
therefore the accumulation of capital, are also destroyed.
But even all this does not suffice.
We have already said that in the process of accumulation there is a
social side. We have recalled that in sentimental propaganda – and which
of us socialists did not abuse it?... – we used to put forward the
inequity, in the face of an abstract distributive justice, of the levy
of capital gain going to the consumption of the capitalist or his
family, to live on a far different standard of living than that of the
workers. Abolition of profit, we cried out then, and it was most right.
As right as it was little. For a hundred years bourgeois economists have
been presenting us with the account showing that all the national income
of a country divided by the number of its citizens gives one a living
barely higher than the humble laborer. The account is accurate, but the
refutation is as old as the socialist system, although one will never
find a Pareto or Einaudi capable of understanding it.
The various provisions that the capitalist makes before drawing his
last profit, with which he amuses himself, are partly for rational and
for social purposes. In a collective economy, too, one will have to set
aside products and tools in such portions as will preserve and advance
general organization. In a sense there will be social accumulation.
Would we socialists then say that we want to substitute social
accumulation for private personal accumulation? We still would not. If
the capitalist’s consumption of a share of capital gain is a private
matter, which we call for to be abolished, but is nevertheless of little
quantitative weight,
even capitalist
accumulation is already a
social matter, and a factor that tends to be useful to all on the social
level.
Old economies that only hoarded have stood still for whole millennia,
whereas the capitalist economy that accumulates has, in a few decades,
increased the productive forces a hundredfold, working towards our
revolution.
But
the anarchy
that Marx imputes to the capitalist regime
lies in the fact that the capitalist accumulates by
companies
by
enterprises
, which operate and live in a
market
environment.
This system, and we shall see more of this challenging but central
techno-economic thesis in a few examples that follow, this system only
strives to organize itself in pursuit of the maximum profit
of the
firm
, which is frequently achieved by subtracting profits from
other firms. At the outset, and here the classical economists of the
bourgeois school were right, the superiority of the large, organized
firm over the super-anarchy of small production led to so much greater
profitability that, in addition to the profit of the individual
capitalist and an excellent provision for new plants and new progress,
the worker in advanced industry placed dishes unknown to the small
artisan on his table.
But by running each company as an entity closed in on itself with its
own accounting of payments and receipts on the market with the aim of
generating maximum profit, in the course of development the problems
relating to the general performance of human labor are addressed badly,
and things can even go backwards.
The capitalist system avoids posing the question of maximizing not
profit
but
output
for the same amount of effort and
labor time, so that, having taken the shares of social accumulation,
consumption can be enhanced, and labor, labor effort, and labor
obligation reduced. Concerned only with realizing the marketability of
the company’s product at a high price and paying as little as possible
for the products of other companies, the capitalist system cannot come
toward the general alignment of production to consumption and plunges
into successive crises.
Thus
the socialist demand
aims to tear down not only the
legal right and economy of
private property
but at the same
time the
market economy
and the
enterprise
economy
Only when we go in the direction that leads to overcoming all three
of these forms of the present economy: private ownership of products,
the money-based market and the organization of production by firms, can
we be said to be moving toward socialist organization.
In what follows we will see how by suppressing any one of these the
socialist objective is lost. The criterion of individual and personal
private economy can be largely overcome even in the midst of capitalism.
We fight capitalism as a class and not just capitalists as individuals.
There is capitalism whenever products are taken to market or otherwise
“accounted for” on the assets side of the business, understood as a
distinct economic island, albeit a very large one, whereas wages are on
the liabilities side of the balance sheet.
Bourgeois economics is double-entry economics. The bourgeois
individual is not a man, he is a firm. We want to destroy every firm. We
want to suppress the double-entry economy and to establish the
simple-entry economy, which history already knows from the time when the
troglodyte went out to pick as many coconuts as he had companions in the
cave and went out bearing only his hands.
We already knew all this in 1848, which does not prevent us from
continuing to say it with youthful ardor.
We shall see that many things have happened for a hundred years in
the interplay of the relations under consideration, all of which have
made us even tougher in upholding the same theses.
After warning the reader that even the general pronoun becomes, in
the socialist system, a social pronoun.
4. - THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION AND OWNERSHIP OF REAL ESTATE
Immovable property, in the current meaning, is land and the man‑made
buildings and installations on it that are not transportable from place
to place. At the start of the capitalist regime, fixed assets could only
consist of mainly agrarian land, residential buildings and factory
buildings; only later, with the spread of fixed or transportable
machinery, and then transport communication networks and the
transmission and distribution of different types of energy, did
increasingly complex cases arise in which the technical, social and
legal distinction between fixed and movable assets gave rise to greater
subtleties.
For clarity, we will focus at first on land ownership. The
distribution of this in the last days of the feudal regime was rather
complex, with the existence of areas of collective public property
belonging to the commons or the State, large fiefdoms assigned by
central political powers to families of the nobility, and also small
independent properties of peasant farmers. The first form was a
derivation of the very ancient communist management of land, subject to
constant attack by the lords and the peasants, and the nascent
bourgeoisie; it drew its origins primarily from the Germanic peoples and
systems of law, among whom it developed through military and dynastic
feudalism at the time of the migrations and invasions in the south.
The third form of the small autonomous property derived from the
Roman empire and its law, in that Rome’s order in the mother country and
in the conquered countries was based on the distribution of agrarian
land to free citizens, soldiers in time of war, while there then
subsisted other much larger parcels of land in the possession of the
patrician class, who exploited them using the labor of masses of slaves,
who were deprived of political rights but also exempt from the
obligation of military service. In the Roman system, lacking both the
communal management of land and the institution of a sovereign right
that could move it at will from one lord to another, apart from State
control in the subdivision of newly occupied territories, a precise
delimitation and parcellation of land plots had been arrived at,
classically governed by the civil law in force throughout the empire and
historically regulated in the Eastern Empire as well. Having thus
referred to the two collateral forms of feudal property, let us now
observe what the characteristics of feudal property are. It is the
victorious leader, the chosen one of a group of allied chiefs and
princes, then the absolute monarch and also the ecclesiastical hierarchy
who allocate and partition authority among the various lords and
vassals, distributed in successive orders of hierarchy, arbitrarily and
frequently fixing and changing the limits of each jurisdiction. Within
these more or less intricate forms the whole assemblage of warriors,
lords and priests lives off the labor of the peasant masses, who are
bound not to abandon the fiefdom to which they belong.
As Marx repeatedly observes, the legal relationship between the
holder of the fief, and the accompanying noble title, and the mass of
the families of his serfs, prevails in this social system more than that
between the landowner and the land. It matters less to the lord to have
a lot of land than it does to have many serfs, as a certain part of the
product of the labor of all of them is at his disposal. Another
cornerstone of the feudal system is that however bad his economic
management, the lord cannot lose his fief; it cannot be alienated, it
cannot be expropriated, and the system giving ownership to the eldest
son also avoids its hereditary subdivision, an important institution, by
contrast, in the Roman system. As a result, and at least as far as the
huge expanses of land subject to feudal investiture are concerned, there
is no
market
for land; land cannot be exchanged for money.
This assessment of the pre‑bourgeois regime, which is our starting
point for evaluating the position of triumphant capital with respect to
land ownership, is fundamental to Marxist analysis. Chapter XXIV of
Capital
states, with reference to the era of serfdom:
«In all the countries of Europe feudal production is characterized by
the distribution of land among as many vassals as possible. The power of
the feudal lord, like that of any ruler, rested not on the length of his
rent register, but on the number of his subjects, and this depended on
the number of small independent farmers».
Since we would not want it to seem as though we are drawing new or
original insights from these premises, we also recall, regarding the
relationship between soil and money, a fundamental passage from Chapter
II of
Capital:
«Men have often made man himself into the primitive material of
money, in the shape of the slave, but they have never done this with the
land and the soil. Such an idea could only arise in a bourgeois society,
and one which was already well developed. It dates from the last third
of the seventeenth century, and the first attempt to implement the idea
on a national scale was made a century later, during the French
bourgeois revolution».
Modern capital is thus not the same thing as property in general, and
it is not enough to abolish this, in theory and in law, to have
eradicated it. Capital is a social force whose dynamics have far more
complex aspects than a Platonic property right. It shows up as opposed
to traditional land ownership, and one of the main elements of the
antithesis is that while the latter is truly personal, the former goes
outside the limits of the private individual’s faculty:
«Historically speaking, capital invariably first confronts landed
property in the form of money; in the form of monetary wealth,
merchants’ capital and usurers’ capital»,
says Marx in Chapter IV, to establish that mercantile circulation has
money as its final product and that this is the first form under which
capital appears (which we will later encounter as a factory, as
machinery, as a supply of raw materials, as a mass of wages). In one of
the evocative notes to the text it is then said:
«The antagonism between the power of [feudal] landed property, based
on
personal
relations of domination and servitude, and the
power of money, which is impersonal, is clearly expressed in the two
French proverbs:
“Nulle terre sans seigneur”
and
“L’argent
n’a pas de maître”».
The sense then of the modern economy succeeding the destruction of
feudal relations is encapsulated in another quote we will draw from
Chapter XXII:
«We arrive, therefore, at this general result: by incorporating with
itself the two primary creators of wealth, labor-power and land, capital
acquires a power of expansion that permits it to augment the elements of
its accumulation beyond the limits apparently fixed by its own
magnitude. or by the value and the mass of the means of production which
have already been produced, and in which it has its being».
When Marx then deals extensively with the interregnum of prosperity
that lies in English history between the abolition of medieval serfdom
and the brutal onset of large scale capitalist accumulation, which
founded bourgeois wealth on the rampant ruthless misery of the masses,
another note reminds us that the Japanese society of the time, with a
feudal organization of land ownership flanked by widespread small rural
property, offered a more faithful picture of the European Middle Ages
than history books imbued with bourgeois prejudices.
Let the punchline in this note by Marx give a slap to the
thick-skinned faces of opportunist contemporaries, who are
horror-stricken whenever they claim (in their immeasurable asininity)
that the medieval order is about to return, endangering the
civilized achievements
of the capitalist era and who have
forgotten how else to knead together their bastardized combinations of
bourgeois ideals and socialist positions. «It is far too easy to be
“liberal” at the expense of the Middle Ages».
In the last years of the
ancien régime
, when the power of
the bourgeoisie in the economic field was already significant, the
liquid capital gathered in the hands of merchants and bankers exerted
violent pressure to suppress the obstacles that prevented them from
taking possession of real estate. Undoubtedly, the central fact of
capitalist accumulation consists in using the money that has been piled
up to supply the raw materials and pay the subsistence wages of the
laborers who work on them. But it is also necessary for the formation of
the first factories to have workplaces and acquire buildings to be
converted into manufacturing plants and land to be able to build on
them. Moreover, the new wealth-owning class is driven to compete with
the old feudal lords whom it aspires to surpass and dispossess even in
having houses, palaces and agrarian land at its disposal, while the
enriched tenant farmers tend to remove themselves from a position of
dependence by acquiring the landlord’s property and exercising as
absolute masters the agricultural enterprise which, as Marx repeatedly
notes, is a veritable industry.
All of the history and literature of the last periods before the
bourgeois revolution are full of the manifestations of this struggle
that the bourgeois, the enriched, the
parvenus
, conducted to
compete even in prestige with the nobles. The latter, even when they are
short of money and have to resort to wheeler-dealers and moneylenders to
maintain their luxurious life, not only despise and humiliate those who
live by trade and commerce, but the very law in force helps them in
defending themselves against them, in denying the repayment of loans; a
traditional scene is the vexatious creditor’s back being thrashed by the
noble’s servants.
The third estate will not be able to free itself completely from this
state of subjugation and inferiority except through the revolutionary
conquest of political power, and until then it will in vain compete
foolishly with the luxury of its class rivals, squandering the fruits of
its speculations.
In Molière’s comedy
The Bourgeois Gentleman
we see the
merchant who wants to pose as a nobleman being fiercely satirized. The
playwright shows him mocked in a fake knightly investiture by a troupe
of comedians, who sing to him in the kind of Italian particular to the
commedia dell’arte
“Ti star nobile, non star fabbola,
pigghiar schiabbola” [Be brave, don’t be a scoundrel, take the
sword].
The bourgeois, as if to demonstrate well in advance the
Marxist thesis that it is not work that allows one to accumulate
capital, would like to gird the knight’s sword, and make us forget that
he has handled the blacksmith’s hammer.
But soon the capitalist class made up for the humiliations of all the
beatings and mockery by defeating the classes of nobles and priests in
the social revolution, establishing its dominance and finding no further
restraints to the expansion of its economic forces. The feudal property
system then collapsed and the purchase of real estate by holders of
monetary capital, who until then had been very unlikely to fulfill this
particular need, became rampant. This is one of the most important
features of the capitalist revolution, which, in the terse sentences of
Karl Marx, came to
«transform the ground into a pure commercial
article”;
just as it could boast of having freed the peasants from
serfdom and the workers in the cities from the shackles of guilds in
order to bring them into its own dependence and exploit them, it could
also boast of having
“incorporated the soil into capital”
».
We could refer to this first consolidation period of victorious
capitalism as the period of immobilization of movable capital, meaning
immobilization as large-scale investment in the acquisition of property
in arable land and urban buildings, an essential economic complement to
the possession of large industrial means of production. This economic
necessity became at the same time a political necessity, because in
order to defeat the feudal lords and the demand for feudal restoration
definitively, they had to be humiliated, even in the positions of
prestige that they had acquired in the great metropolises, which had
developed as a result of the emergence of capitalist forms, and in which
the monarch and the courtiers, the military leaders and the churchmen
occupied the stateliest homes. Another symbol of rule and prestige of
those classes was to reserve large stretches of arable land in the
counties for their various luxurious needs, their pleasures, hunting,
summer recreation, religious life, etc., while for the bourgeois economy
capital investment was a priority, both for further business investments
as well as for the intensified production that provided the industrial
workers’ army with the means of subsistence.
We wanted to recall this first period of acquisition of immovable
property by capital, because, as we continue to work ahead, we will see
that it is opposed to an ultra-modern period in which enterprise capital
will become more and more detached from the ownership of immovable
property (real estate, etc.) because it can exercise its functions in
the best possible way and realize the formation of dizzying profits
without needing to possess immovable goods locally and without, on the
other hand, having to worry about them falling back into the hands of a
now vanished lordship.
In the intermediate period of stable capitalism, which it is
worthwhile examining briefly before coming to the analysis of this
third, modern period to which we have alluded for the sake of clarity,
the relations between property and the enterprise arise in a variety of
ways. However, when the various economic forms and the corresponding
social forces are carefully examined, it is always clear that the
distinctive character of the capitalist era must be found in the
enterprise and not in ownership.
We can only imagine the bourgeois of this first romantic period as a
kind of sole patron in whose hands all the components and factors of
production are concentrated. He owns the land on which the factory
stands, as well as the mine that supplies him with iron ore, the factory
where work is carried out, the machinery and the tools. He buys all the
raw materials and all the accessories that go into the labor process,
and by hiring the workers he buys labor power. He is therefore the
exclusive owner of the entire product, which he sells where he believes
it will bring him the most profit. He is a specialist in the
manufacturing sector in which he also works himself, but nevertheless
hires as his employees technicians and accountants. In this early period
the so‑called overheads are rather low, since the workshop has to
produce everything itself: light, heating and energy, and even the taxes
to be paid to the State are hardly significant, because in the liberal
regimes of that time the bourgeoisie applies the economic policy of the
laissez faire, laissez passer
and sweeps away all the barriers
and taxes that may hinder its production and trading activities. The
bookkeeping is therefore simple and unitary, and all the profit
resulting from the surplus of revenues over expenses ends up in the
pockets of the capitalist, who does not have to deduct any rents and
leases from it for the rooms, facilities and buildings he uses. In this
first classic case, the capitalist also has plenty of cash to be his own
banker and therefore does not pay interest on the cash capital he needs
for his purchases of goods and advances on wages.
If we wanted to look at the parallel of this business model in
agriculture, we would find it when the farm manager is at the same time
the proprietor of the land and of the dead stock and livestock, i.e. the
machines, tools, seed and fertilizer supplies, livestock herds, etc.,
and he also has enough cash to advance the wages of the day laborers, or
the workers employed yearly. In all these cases, the only active
difference, which the proprietor realizes as an excess of the proceeds
from the sale of the products over the sum of all the payments on
account, includes the land rent, the interest on financial capital, and
the profits of the enterprise; economic elements that can be considered
distinct from each other.
The bourgeois economist sees them as separate because he says they
come from sources, each of which is sufficient to generate wealth: the
land as the producer of land rent, money as the producer of interest
income and the enterprise as the producer of profit, which is the reward
for the activity, skill and shrewdness of the person who has been able
to bring together rationally the various components of production.
For the Marxist economist, all these surpluses are the result of
human labor; they represent the difference between the value produced by
labor and the lesser sum paid to wage‑laborers for their expended labor
power.
However, the distinction between the various components of
entrepreneurial profit is a historical distinction, according to the
division of capital gain squeezed from the working class between the
landowner, the finance capitalist and the entrepreneur.
The distinction is historical in nature because even before the rise
of fully fledged capitalist industry employing wage earners, land was
likely to yield a useful return to the landowner, just as mere money
could bear fruit for those who had access to it, whether banker or loan
shark.
It is now a question of seeing the real nature of capitalist
production in relation to these different components when they are
separated, instead of being united in the hands of a single owner, that
is to say, from the time when the legal owner of the land or factory,
the banker advancing the cash and the entrepreneur are different
persons; the entrepreneur, who, after satisfying the first two and all
the other various public and semi‑public entities that are overlapping
in the modern economy, remains the sole arbiter for collecting his own
earnings and benefits from the commercial price of the products thrown
onto the market.
In all these cases, the proprietor of the land, the physical
workplace, the building and sometimes also the machinery are compensated
with the corresponding lease money, the banker receives an interest on
the borrowed money; the State or possibly other concessionary bodies are
paid various taxes and fees, and all that remains constitutes a profit
of the pure enterprise, which capitalist accounting tends falsely to
highlight as something that only emerges after the various moving and
immovable assets have already been “remunerated”.
Marxism now asserts that this third form, corporate profit, which is
disguised in class apologia as a vehicle of progress, science,
civilization, is more vicious and meaner than the two other forms,
glorifying as it does exploitation, oppression and misery. Socialism
does not consist in taking possession of the capitalist
enterprise
by factory workers, but its essence is rather in the
revolutionary and total negation of the capitalist enterprise.
The various components and their relationships to each other are
divided into modern capitalist forms in different ways; and it is
anything but a new relationship when we come across capitalist
enterprises that have no immovable property of any kind, and in some
cases no company headquarters and no noteworthy machinery or equipment –
the dynamics of the capitalist process here, however, exists completely
and in the purest form. Thus a kind of divorce is emerging between
property and capital, as a result of which the latter is increasingly
turning into money, while property is blurred, withdrawn from view, or
represented as the property of social institutions – as a result of
nationalizations, socializations that are intended to pass as no longer
capitalist forms of governance.
Note: The Alleged Feudalism of Southern Italy
A formidably repugnant “idée fixe” of the worst opportunism that
reigns in the Italian socialist and communist movement is that of the
deprecated existence and survival of feudalism in southern Italy and the
islands, especially with regard to the abused issue of the southern
agrarian latifundium, the real warhorse of rhetorical histrionics and
sycophantic Italian political posturing. The inference from this
imaginary and invented affirmation, that a tactic of political blocs and
collaboration with the radical bourgeois parties is needed, even in
northern Italy (which these gentlemen hesitantly grant the status of
capitalist) on the level and within the framework of the shady unitary
Roman State, was and is enough to qualify them as renegades of
revolutionary doctrine and action. But these people, our
social-communists, the champions of democratic bourgeois collaboration,
are simply showing their contempt for our principles; for them,
everything comes from an assessment of the immediate situation, and they
demand that the weapon of compromise be used. We must therefore make it
clear that their assessment of semi‑feudal conditions in southern Italy
tramples underfoot any serious knowledge of the real economic and
agricultural situation in the south, as well as knowledge of the
different characteristics of feudal land management and, finally, of the
fundamentals of the historical vicissitudes of the Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies.
What is considered, in this banal fashion, to be a backwardness of
the social development of the Mezzogiorno, analogous to the supposedly
weak and poor development in Italy in general, has nothing to do with a
late removal of feudal institutions, and even where it presents the
famous
underdeveloped areas
it’s the direct product of the
worst aspects and consequences of the development of capitalism in the
Mediterranean Europe of the post‑feudal era. If we look at the history
of political struggles, we find that feudalism, understood as the
authority of the landowners’ aristocracy, was fought against, defeated
and eradicated in a few countries, as it was in the Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies, by the authority of the central State administration, both
under the reign of the Bourbons and Spanish domination, and under
previous monarchies, going all the way back to Emperor Frederick II of
Swabia. The repeated struggle was often supported by uprisings of
peasant and urban masses, and soon the administrators and governors of
the united kingdoms of Palermo and Naples became the arbiters of the
situation. The results of the struggle resulted in legislation far in
advance of that in other Italian statelets, including the very backward
Piedmont, and the same can be said in regard to the control to which
religious communities and the secular church were subjected by political
authority; nor need we color this obvious reenactment with the struggles
in Naples of the people’s elected officials and the impossibility of
establishing the court of inquisition in that city. After the republican
revolution of 1789, led by a bold and keen bourgeoisie, the historical
and legal process was perfected under Murat’s robust exercise of power,
and the restored Bourbon dynasty refrained from modifying the compact
and prudent legislation left by this regime in public and private law.
It is therefore a trivial mistake to confuse the social history of the
Mezzogiorno with that of the Bojars and Junkers in northeastern Europe,
who continued to dominate the serfs within independent feudal estates in
order to plunder and judge them at will, while the inhabitants of
southern Italy have for centuries been citizens of a modern, albeit
absolutist State legal system.
As far as the structure of agriculture is concerned, the image of a
feudal country is the inverse of what constitutes the shortcomings of
the southern Italian latifundia region. This picture in fact presents an
agriculture which, although not intensive, is nevertheless homogeneously
and broadly organized with small farms; the working population is evenly
distributed on the arable land, in scattered dwellings and small
farmhouses. The village, which is unfortunately unknown to our
Mezzogiorno, is the basic cell of agrarian wealth of many European
countries; the feudal lords exploited it to increase their grandeur and
the rapacious bourgeoisie rushed in, at times leaving behind only
desolate land and peat bogs, as Marx explains in reference to England,
and at other times allowing this rich source of income to endure,
content to milk it dry, as in the flat countryside of France.
The latifundia of the south and the islands are large semi‑cultivated
areas where people are unable to settle, and no farmhouses or villages
are to be found there, as the population has been herded by a
pre‑industrial and yet distinctly anti‑feudal urbanism into large
centers of tens and tens of thousands of inhabitants, as is the case in
Apulia and Sicily. There is an overabundance of population, but the land
cannot be inhabited due to the meager organization and investment in
labor and technology, a situation which for centuries no regime, whether
at the national level or lower, has been able to remedy or found
appropriate to the needs of the ruling class. There are no houses, there
is no water, there are no roads, the mountains have been deforested,
there are natural and unregulated waters in the plains, and malaria is
rife everywhere. The origin of this decay in agricultural techniques
goes back a long way, farther than feudalism, which, had it been strong,
would have counteracted it (as technical and economic reclaiming of the
land would have better enabled a true regime of decentralized and
autonomous feudal lordship in the Middle Ages). In view of the fact that
these regions were the most prosperous and civilized of the known world
at the time of Magna Grecia, and that they remained the most fertile
under Roman rule, one must see the reasons for their decline, which have
to do both with their peripheral position when Germanic feudalism spread
with the fall of the Roman Empire (which exposed them to invasion and
destruction by the peoples of both the north and of the south), as well
as the economic decline of the Mediterranean economy resulting from
geographic discoveries overseas, and precisely the bursting forth of the
modern industrial and colonial capitalist regime, which shifted its
production centers and important transport routes elsewhere in line with
the location of raw materials, basis of imperialism, and finally to the
establishment of the unified Italian State whose analysis would take us
very far and which established a typically modern, capitalistic and
imperialistic relationship, which is also the precursor of more recent
times.
In any case, before and after this unification, the mechanism of
economic forces and relations was more than consistent with the
characteristics of the bourgeois era, for it constituted an essential
area of capitalist accumulation in Italy, the limitations of which
are to be found in quantity, not quality
Indeed, the economic climate, before and after 1860, is completely
bourgeois, despite the weak industrial development (although it must not
be overlooked that the effect of national unification was noticeably
negative, inasmuch as important workshops decayed and had to close
down). We can say about the Italian south and its alleged feudalism what
Marx said about the Germany of 1849, when he spoke at the trial in
Cologne, precisely, we note, to make it clear that the political
bourgeois and liberal revolution would still have to triumph:
«Big landed property was indeed the foundation of medieval, feudal
society. Modern bourgeois society, our own society, is however based on
industry and commerce. Landed property itself has lost all its former
conditions of existence, it has become dependent on commerce and
industry. Agriculture, therefore, is carried on nowadays on industrial
lines, and the old feudal lords have now become producers of cattle,
wool, corn, beetroot, spirits, etc., i.e., people who trade in
industrial products just as any other merchant. However much they may
cling to their old prejudices, they are in fact being turned into
bourgeois, who manufacture as much as possible and as cheaply as
possible, who buy where they can get goods at the lowest price and sell
where they can obtain the highest price. The mode of living, production
and income of these gentlemen therefore gives the lie to their
traditional pompous notions. Landed property, as the predominant social
factor, presupposes a
medieval mode of production and
commerce».
However, if the availability of coal and iron ore in particular
turned Germany into a large mining and mechanical engineering country
after this period of time (and also after drafting
Capital
which had to take England as a model of a fully capitalist society), as
well as a country operating agriculture in an economic and modern way,
it is clear that the assessment of the environment and the social
situation after 100 years applies even more radically to southern Italy,
which has had a completely bourgeois liberal-democratic regime for more
than 90 years, a regime for which, after the defeats of 1848, Germany
had to wait until 1871 and, according to the usual deflated chatterers
about Teutonic feudalism, until much later.
In southern Italy there is a very active land market, with certainly
much higher frequency of land transfers than in provinces of high
industrialism; and this is the crucial criterion discriminating feudal
from modern economies. This is accompanied by a no less brisk trade in
large and small leases and, of course, in products of the soil.
Precisely where cultivation is managed on latifundia, i.e. extensive
landed estates, it is done by large economic units employing exclusively
day wage laborers and hired hands, and for many decades the figure of
the large capitalist tenant farmer, a large holder of cash and stock,
has excelled economically over that of the landowner, often in severe
cash flow difficulties and burdened with mortgages. Whether only cereals
are grown or backward and even primitive livestock breeding prevails,
not only is movable capital in the hands of large tenant farmers rather
than landowners, but many of the former are also cashing in and
acquiring land belonging to different owners, whereby the land is not
necessarily improved, but may even decrease in value.
The examination of urban property management leads to similar
considerations. Apart from the industrial activity in the developed
zones around the principal cities and ports, all this movement of
markets, today according to a modern turn and cycle, has for decades and
decades resulted in an accumulation of capital that has largely served
as a base for the free, semi‑protected and protected industries in the
north (long before Mussolini, Italy was one of the foremost
protectionist countries). Not only have the bank deposits of southern
bourgeois, landlords, entrepreneurs and speculators always fed national
private finance with their strong capital flows, but the resources of
the south have been largely tapped by the tax authorities, which far
more readily reach for real estate wealth and every land‑related
economic movement than for industrial, commercial and business profits
and surplus profits. The Italian capitalist economy thus straddles these
relations of an entirely modern character, which makes it simply
laughable to want to compare it to a feudal situation, and to present it
under the guise of a nonexistent conflict between an evolved and
conscious bourgeoisie, still eager for perfected and renewed
liberal
or southern revolutions
, and the legendary “backward classes” and
“reactionary strata” of fashionable dirty demagoguery, instead of
depicting a solid alliance between the two.
The despicable role of the
ruling class
in the south is
grounded in this clear framing of economic relationships. The remnants
of the impoverished historic aristocracy live on in some semi‑derelict
palace in the major cities; throughout the region, it is not feudal
lords but enriched bourgeois, landlords, merchants, bankers,
businessmen, of a more boorish than genteel slant, who rule. On the
fringes of their wealth, the so‑called “intelligentsia” has descended to
the rank of intermediary and middleman of the central power of the
bourgeois State of Rome, to which it offers the best of its bloated
personnel, leeches on the productive forces of all the provinces, from
the commissioner of public security to the toga‑clad judge, from the
member of parliament supported by all the prefects and voting for all
governments, to the statesman ready to serve both capitalist monarchies
and republics.
Before, during and after the much‑abused
ventennio
[the
twenty years of fascist rule] the social struggle in the Mezzogiorno, no
less than that against the Italian State in general, has put the
overcoming of the last and most recent historical forms of capitalist
order on the agenda for real Marxists, and never again the modernization
of relations and institutions that have been “left behind”.
This thesis of southern feudalist survival deserves to be paired with
the one that interpreted the fascist movement as a counterattack of the
agrarian classes against the industrial bourgeoisie. The direction of
the group that took control of the Communist Party of Italy away from
the revolutionary Marxists (the so‑called
Ordine Nuovo
group)
rests from the earliest years on these two blunders, on these two basic
mistakes. They were enough in the beginning to build a whole practice
and policy of alliance between industrial capitalists and traitorous
representatives of the proletariat, such as was later seen in action in
Italy. The degenerating injection of the defeatist virus by the
Stalinist headquarters of the International, with its global policy of
collaboration and accommodation between the powers of capitalism and
that of the State, falsely called socialist and proletarian, was not
unavoidable.
5. - THE CAPITALIST ECONOMY WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF ROMAN LAW
The bourgeois revolution settled land tenure by restoring the legal
concept of
freedom of the land
that was the basis of Rome’s
civil law.
«In the late Middle Ages almost all of Europe, occupied by the
Germanic conquerors, had seen the concept of freedom of land, which had
made the economic prosperity of the Roman Empire, reduced to minimal
proportions. Feudalism had then been superimposed on it, dictated by the
necessity of defending the weak from the invasions of Normans,
Hungarians and Saracens so that the Germans would accommodate themselves
to a powerful person, receiving from him recognition of their own tenure
with the obligation of a leaseholder and even to render personal
services, provided he would defend them from greater troubles; whence
the maxim had come in good time:
Nulle terre sans Seigneur
. By
contrast, Roman law recognized legal title as the sole basis for
ownership, that is, the contract freely entered into between those
entitled to it».
The French motto, which we have already found quoted by Marx as the
opposite to that of the economy in movable goods, “money has no master”,
finds its opposite in countries where feudalism does not dominate in the
Roman motto: “No property without title”. It will not hurt to note that
the country where the centuries old period of the personal rights of
feudalism has been least profound is precisely Italy.
«In fact, our language [i.e., Italian] has never had a word
corresponding to the French word
Suzeraineté
, meaning the
feudal lord’s dominion over the land. In Italy”not all forms of Roman
law perished, indeed, in some parts of the Mezzogiorno forms of Roman
law had to remain without interruption, because they were not occupied
by the barbarians and remained within the Byzantine empire, guardian of
the Roman tradition, or returned to it after the break‑up of the Duchy
of Benevento [the vassal State of the Kingdom of Lombardy, founded in
571 AD]».
«The enjoyment of land in absolute freedom by its possessors does not
date elsewhere from as long ago as it does with us. In France, for
example, it had complete application only since the abolition of feudal
serfs on the famous night of August 4, 1789. Then and by subsequent
laws, the National Assembly simply abolished personal servitudes
(corvées)
but made real rights
(cens, champarts, lods,
ventes, rentes foncières, etc.)
redeemable by right. However,
peasant uprisings and the burning down of several lordly castles forced
their abolition without compensation, although many were not feudal in
origin. The small and medium-sized estates that already existed were
thus freed from an infinity of encumbrances and entanglements”.
Leaving now the author mentioned so far, an agrarian economist of
non‑socialist orientation, we will now quote the words with which Marx
refers to this French agrarian revolution in
Class Struggles in
France
«The country folk – over two‑thirds of the total French population – consist for the most part of so‑called free
landowners
. The
first generation, gratuitously freed by the Revolution of 1789 from its
feudal burdens, had paid no price for the soil. But the following
generations paid, under the form of the
price of land
, what
their semi‑serf forefathers had paid in the form of rent, tithes,
corvée, etc. The more, on the one hand, the population grew and the
more, on the other hand, the partition of the soil increased, the higher
became the price of the parcels, for the demand for them increased with
their smallness».
This passage by Marx continues with a close examination of the
impoverishment of the peasant in the parcel system, which reduces
agrarian technology and drives down the gross product, raises the cost
of land and all liabilities for mortgages, bank and usurious interest,
taxes, etc., and reduces the ostensible owner to lose to the capitalists
even a portion of the wages that would accrue to his labor if he were a
legal nobody, and concludes:
«Only the fall of capital can raise the peasant; only an
anti‑capitalist, proletarian government can break his economic misery,
his social degradation.
The constitutional republic
is the
dictatorship of his united exploiters; the
social-democratic
the
red
republic, is the dictatorship of his allies».
This political position is what Marx, writing in 1850, attributes to
the French Socialist Revolutionaries
of 1848
. And here is the
classic phrase: revolutions
are the locomotive of history
As proof of the fact that the correct Marxist evaluation considers
the extreme parceling of peasant property as one of the many vehicles
capital accumulation uses to expropriate the peasant and not as a
jump‑start to the postulates of an alleged social justice, there is also this passage, relative to England, taken from a text by Engels of
1850:
«The tendency of every bourgeois revolution to destroy large-scale
landed property might make this division into smallholdings appear to
the English workers for a while as something very revolutionary,
although it is regularly accompanied by the unfailing tendency of small
property to become concentrated and to meet with economic ruin in the
face of large-scale agriculture. The revolutionary Chartist tendency
opposes this demand for division of the land with a demand for the
confiscation of all landed property. The land is not to be distributed
but to remain national property».
In contrast, the bourgeois revolution in France had poured immense
national assets from confiscations and forfeitures of church property
onto the market.
This followed a different process to England which, after the defeat
of feudalism and the abolition of serfdom, decisively led to the
formation of the great bourgeois agrarian property of today’s landlords,
see Marx in
Capital
Ch. XXIV, and in the exposition, which this
journal is publishing, on the elements of Marxist economics.
In place of the democratic apologia of the Great Revolutions, Marxist
language, on the basis of dialectical acceptance of the new conditions
they produced, denounces the infamies of the rise of the capitalist
regime, both where it relied on the parcelization of land and where it
founded instead the great bourgeois properties,
“freeing”
the
one and the other.
«The spoliation of the church’s property, the fraudulent alienation
of the State domains, the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of
feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private
property under circumstances of ruthless terrorism, all these things
were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation».
The quotation is fundamental and many times repeated, but today’s
alleged socialists, be it said à la Scelba, sees reaction, usurpation
and terror, and rings the bells for the salvation of capitalist freedom,
only when under the action of the narcotic drugs of electoral
demagoguery it dreams of a Freudian return of feudalism from an
intrauterine history of our modern society, far more obscene than the
former.
* * *
The vaunted bourgeois conquest of the
freedom of the land
and the liberation of serfs, equivalent in concrete terms to the
conquest by pecuniary capital of the unlimited possibility of acquiring
real estate assets, found its systemization in civil law with the return
to the classical Roman mechanism, in that Napoleonic code which,
extolled as a monument of wisdom, served as a model for the legislation
of all modern States. The whole system revolves around the principle of
property derived from title and accessible to every citizen, the famous
“whoever” with which the articles of bourgeois codes begin. It is no
longer necessary for the lord of the land to belong to a privileged and
oligarchic caste or order. It is sufficient for “whoever” to bring an
adequate amount of cash to acquire the title.
When the locomotive of the bourgeois revolution roared into motion,
however, the material occupation of the strip of land by those who had
worked hard on it for years and generations sufficed as a starting
title. But as soon as the revolution consolidated its victory in a new
system with stable rules, either hereditary derivation or payment of a
market price was necessary for the purchase of the property and its
title. Land was thus free since
whoever
could buy it, by which
is meant
whoever
possessed sufficient
money
This return to the legal framework proper to Roman law, which
followed the abolition of the feudal and Germanic systems of law, by no
means meant, as is obvious, a return to the relations of production and
social economy of the ancient epoch. Suffice it to recall that in
Greece, Rome, and the countries dominated by them, alongside the
democracy that made
free citizens
equal before the law, slavery
was in force, which therefore meant there was an entire class obliged to
work the land, whose members not only could not aspire to own any of it,
but were themselves considered someone else’s property, exchangeable
against money and passed on through the family inheritance of the
masters. While there existed, among the free citizens before the law,
the different classes of large patrician landlords, peasants owning
small lots, mostly without slaves and therefore direct laborers,
artisans and even merchants and early capitalists who were masters of
cash, it is clear that the presence of an exploited class at the bottom
of the social ladder created quite different relationships, leading all
the way to the great revolutionary attempts of the slaves.
Consequently, the classic written law governing titular ownership of
land and in general of real estate, and transmission by inheritance, by
purchase and sale, etc., with all other complex predial relations, must
be read with the proviso that the subject referred to by the usual
pronoun
whoever
is not, even virtually, any member of the
social complex, but must belong to the limited and privileged upper
class of free citizens, the non‑slaves.
This means that common law, the theoretical expression of a physical
relationship between man and things, and in our case between man and the
soil, only in the abstract it appears to have given way to a preeminent
system of personal rights peculiar to the feudal Middle Ages, rights
that are the expression of a relationship of force between man and man
(such as forbidding the abandonment of the worked land or the change of
trade). In the Roman world, personal law dominated the broad social
field constituted by production through slave labor, extending the
relationship between master and slave to the power of deprivation of
life. However, the master has a direct interest in the life, strength,
and health of the slave, and it is suggestive of Marx’s remark that in
ancient Rome the
villicus
, as the estate manager in charge of
the agricultural slaves, received a smaller ration than the latter did,
because his work was less burdensome (quoting from Theodore
Mommsen).
The revolution that stood between the two social eras, in the
economic aspect of the ceased productivity of slave labor in relation to
its cost, in the political aspect of the great uprisings, including
classically that of Spartacus, who fell after two years of civil war in
the battle near Vesuvius, when six thousand of his followers were
slaughtered, and in the ideological aspect of the moral equality of men
preached by Christians, eliminated in large measure the rules of
personal rights, forbidding that the human person could be treated as a
commodity.
The revival therefore of theoretical Roman law, made by the bourgeois
revolution for the regulation of relations between man and property,
presented this substantial innovation, that the new common law concerns
all component citizens of society and not just a privileged part as in
antiquity. This modern law prides itself on having integrated the
achievement of freedom from slavery with that of freedom from serfdom
and corporate shackles; it prides itself on having made all members of
society equal and free from personal constraints before the law.
But in reality, the legal forms guaranteed by State power and its
material forces always sanction and protect relations of force and
dependence between man and man, and man’s actual right over things
remains an abstract form. Citizen Titius was able to become the owner of
the Tullian estate because he disposed of the sum of money sufficient to
obtain title by paying it to citizen Sempronio, since, the freedom of
land being in force, the Tullian estate could be alienated at the will
of the previous owner. What is the meaning of the legal title of Titius,
a free citizen in a free bourgeois republic, to the freehold he bought?
It means that he can enclose it and, even without incurring the expense
of a material fence, he can keep all free citizens, including Sempronio,
outside the boundary, and if they transgress, the title allows him to
call in the State forces and, under certain conditions, even kill them.
The freedom of Titius and his free right to property, taken out of
philosophy or theoretical law, are expressed in the personal
relationship of restricting, even by violent means, the undertakings of
others.
The new regime of bourgeois freedom is one of property reconsecrated
in the tables of law, albeit property no longer precluded to castes of
slaves, serfs or the bourgeoisie. It is therefore always a regime of
power relations between man and man, and socially speaking, all the
“whosoever” of the code are divided into two classes, that of the
possessors of land and that of the non‑possessors of land, deprived of
legal title and deprived of the economic means necessary to obtain
it.
* * *
Christianity abolished
castes
, the liberal revolution
abolished
orders
, but classes remained, not in written law but
in economic reality. Marx did not discover their existence and their
struggle, which were noted and observed before him, but the fact that
there exists between them an economic gap, antagonism, and social war
that is worse than existed between the ancient castes and the medieval
orders.
In Chapter II, Section 3, of
State and Revolution
, Lenin
fundamentally pointed out that Marx, in a letter dated 5 March 1852,
himself specifies the original content of his theory in these precise
words:
«What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the
existence of
classes
is only bound up with
particular historical phases in
the development of production
(historische Entwicklungsphasen der
Production), (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the
dictatorship of the proletariat
, (3) that this dictatorship
itself only constitute the transition to the
abolition of all
classes
and to a
classless society
».
Lenin establishes at this point, as the basis of his historic
crushing of the opportunists, that the essential in Marx’s doctrine is
not the class struggle, but the dictatorship of the proletariat.
«This is the touchstone on which the
real
understanding and
recognition of Marxism must be tested».
No less essential is the third point in its relation to the first, in
that Marx’s dialectic comes to establish that the great historical facts
of the class struggle, of class dictatorship, are not immanent to every
society and every historical period, having not been deduced from empty
speculations on the “nature of man” or the “nature of society”. Man is
by nature neither good nor bad, neither owner nor slave, neither
authoritarian nor libertarian; the human species is not insuperably
predestined to be classist or egalitarian, State‑run or anarchist! Far
beyond all these philosophical niceties, the Marxist school, by
investigating the successive developments of production phases,
establishes that the modern proletarian class, given the social
relations in which it moves, is led to make use of class struggle,
revolutionary violence, and the dictatorial State, to make possible the
development towards a system of production and collective life
increasingly free of servitude, violence and the authoritarian State
framework.
Returning to the initial constitution of capitalist society, what we
have said about the revolutionary change in the relationship between
money capital and land ownership establishes that there would be a
one‑sided vision of the historical process where, neglecting this
fundamental field, one referred only to the victorious spread of
manufacturing and capitalist industry and the establishment of the
entrepreneurial class as a ruling class in society and in the State.
The old socialists, and we will recall among them the good Costantino
Lazzari, even though he was not a theorist, just as they avoided
speaking generically about the abolition of property, so they did not
limit themselves to the conflict between the wage‑workers in the
workshops and their bosses, and used the formula (formulas have their
great importance, and Lenin’s clarification mentioned above is
sufficient to prove it) of:
struggle against the established order
of property and capital
Writing to Bracke about his outspoken critique of the Gotha Program
of German social democracy, Marx condemned the expression: «In
present‑day society, the instruments of labor are the monopoly of the
capitalist class» Marx resolutely objects:
«In present‑day society the instruments of labor are the monopoly of the landowners (the monopoly of property in land is even the basis of
the monopoly of capital)
and
of the capitalists. In the passage
in question, the Rules of the International do not mention either the
one or the other class of monopolists. They speak of the
“monopolizer of the means of labor
, that is,
the sources of
life”.
The addition,
“sources of life”
makes it
sufficiently clear that land is included in the instruments of
labor».
In this passage there is a sentence by Marx of extraordinary
importance for the analysis we have conducted to establish: «In England,
the capitalist class is usually not even the owner of the land on which
his factory stands». The reminder is directed against Lassalle, who
disregarded the struggle against landowners in Germany, and even thought
that Bismarck’s State might not oppose the workers’ struggle against
factory industrialists. The whole letter is dictated by concern about
the theoretical confusion arising from the party’s unification with the
Lassalleans: «One knows that the mere fact of unification is satisfying
to the workers, but it is a mistake to believe that this momentary
success is not bought too dearly». The outcome of the prediction made by
Marx on May 5, 1875, can be drawn from the condemnation of the
opportunism of the Social Democrats signed by Lenin on November 30,
1917, in interrupting his writing on
The State and Revolution
due to the
hindrance
of the Russian Revolution.
* * *
The bourgeois regime is thus constituted by the domination of the
class of factory entrepreneurs, the capitalists of commerce and banking,
and the owners of real estate. The latter are
as bourgeois as the
rest
having
nothing to do with feudal
aristocracy
, already socially and politically dispersed; they de‑
rive from ancient money-holders, merchants, financiers, loan sharks, who
have finally been able to buy land that has become legally accessible to
capital, and centralize successive purchases of lots of varying
size.
As the
Manifesto
says, the proletariat cannot rise up
without breaking up the whole mass of the upper strata that constitute
official society.
We have already mentioned that bourgeois economics itself
distinguishes qualitatively between the three proceeds: land rent,
interest of money capital, and business profit. Together they constitute
for us Marxists the product of the exploitation of proletarian labor. At
the end of this chapter on the bourgeois legal regulation of land
privilege we shall pose an essential qualitative distinction on the
extent of the three elements of capitalist gain, which stands to show
how the third form, that is, business profit, besides being the most
modern, is the most efficient and virulent and is increasingly
quantitatively coming to co‑constitute the central mass of capitalist
oppression.
The income from land rent has a very low limit in relation to the
amount of assets (amount of money converted into purchase, market value
in free trade), and this limit is set by the seasonal nature of
agricultural production. The gross product over time can only be
increased up to a limit, which is reduced even for the few very fertile
lands and the most intensive crops. Economics must therefore always
speak of gross and net annual income, and the latter, in general, does
not exceed 5‑6% of the capital, asset value of the estate.
As a reflection of the enacted convertibility between land holdings
and money, even the interest earned by the owner of liquid capital when
he merely lends it to speculators, to landlords, to the State itself,
cannot exceed that time limit, and those annual rates of 5‑6%, except in
cases of exception and special risks of loss of wealth.
The two traditional forms that characterize the bourgeois landlord or
rentier
thus have limited power to exploit and extort surplus
value and are bound by the insuperable obstacle of the annual cycle.
Quite different, on the other hand, is the power of capital
reproduction and the size of profit in the modern enterprise, which we
must understand as having even greater magnitude than simple productive
organization in large factories and firms. No seasonal or temporal
limits are imposed in this case on the cycle of gross product and hence
net profit. The relationship between this and the capital value of the
enterprise can exceed any limit, and the regeneration of all the factors
of the reproductive cycle can take place multiple times within the
classic annual term.
Marx thus radically upset the algebra of bourgeois economics when in
his mighty investigation he related profit not to the convenient
bourgeois fiction of the factory asset value, but to the value of the
gross product itself, and subsequently to the only part of this value
which constitutes payments for wages to workers.
A given quantity of products (we have already dwelt on the criterion
that the real characteristic of capitalist privilege, rather than
ownership of the land of the building and the machine, which can be
subject to huge variations, is ownership over the product), which is,
for example, worth one million on the market, may include, say, nine
hundred thousand liras of costs (rents, interest, wear and tear,
overhead, wages and salaries) and then the enterprise profit will be one
hundred thousand liras, and thus 10% of the total value of the products.
The rate of surplus value according to Marx will be, if wages accounted
for two hundred thousand liras, 50%.
But the cycle that led to this mass of products can repeat itself
innumerable times in a business year, and the entrepreneur’s profits
will soar, the annual expenditure on property rentals and bank interest
remaining the same. The asset value of this business is something that
is difficult to define among the innumerable accounting tricks and
deceptions of modern business speculation; it even disappears, since the
value of the plant and cash fund assets already appear to be balanced by
the rents and interest brought in as liabilities.
The bourgeois entrepreneur-speculator can thus make a million using
nothing (using his skill!), whereas the bourgeois landowner or holder of
cash must, in order to attain equal benefit, have about twenty million
in his name, and what is more he must wait a year, while the other can
sometimes close his cycle over a very short period of time, and can
sometimes even get a return in advance during production.
With these criteria for distinguishing between asset balance sheets
and operational balance sheets it is necessary to decipher, which is not
easy, the historical tendency of the capitalist securities-based
enterprise in the shocking complexity of its modern forms, and its
relations to the forms of landed proprietary ownership and sources of
finance – forms already known to economies that are on the one hand
older, and on the other hand less fiercely exploitative of the poor
classes and less the bringer of disorder, of conflict, of incessant
destruction of socially useful assets in the machinery of production,
such as were the foundations of types of society that were not so
brigandish, bloodthirsty and vicious as that of modern‑day
capitalism.
Note: The Mirage of Agrarian Reform in Italy
There is a fundamental misunderstanding in all that is written and
said for political purposes about agrarian transformation, both when it
is presented as a revolution parallel to the bourgeois or workers’
revolution and when it is advanced as a reform within the framework of
existing order.
Revolutions break up the ancient property and legal relations that
prevent productive forces, which already exist and have developed the
necessary technological prerequisites, from moving forward in their
organization. In a great historical sense, we can call the radical
successive measures that a recent revolutionary power implements to make
this technical transition possible in practice reforms, but in the
common and current sense they are the patches promised again and again
to smooth out and conceal contradictions, conflicts and glitches in a
system that has lived for some time within its own conformist
framework.
In agriculture as in any other economic sector a distinction must be
made between the property and the firm, however and from whatever point
of view an innovative program wants to depict itself. Property is a fact
of law, protected by the State, a system of obligations superimposed on
social things. The firm and its operation is a fact of productive
organization, determined at its basis by technical conditions and
possibilities.
The feudalism swept away by the great agrarian revolutions was not a
network of corporate organization, it did not operate and manage rural
production from a technical perspective; it only exploited it by taking
kickbacks due from the peasants who provided all the elements of
production, labor, tools, raw materials and so on. The fiefdoms were
large and even immense, the farms very small in that they were held by
rural families, or medium in that they were set up by the first landed
peasants, the first landed bourgeoisie, also then an oppressed
class.
The revolution, which was in some countries only a major reform,
addressed the legal problem at its base by sweeping away the lord’s
right to levy those kickbacks. Nothing changed in the technical
organization of the holding since there was no organizational input to
it from the lord, who knew and practiced nothing of agronomy or
commerce, and if he had personal duties, they were military, at court or
in the judiciary.
There began an evolution and in given countries a series of reforms
in agrarian management, not insofar as the smallholding moved much from
centuries‑old methods of cultivation, but insofar as the capital brought
in on the land enabled the formation of the new bourgeois property and
medium and large holdings came into being over large areas, led by
capitalist tenant farmers possessing stock and machinery, and in some
cases by the landowners themselves who managed both the land and movable
capital assets at the same time.
As a great revolutionary deed, the shaking off of the feudal burden
from the shoulders of the peasants occurred with a single blow in the
France of 1789 and in the Russia of 1917, accompanying in the former
case the revolution of the capitalists, in the latter that of the
workers. From that starting point, the unraveling of the agrarian order
took place differently and under the influence of different forces, and
it is particularly interesting to investigate the Russian one, its
advances and retreats. Here we need only recall that the revolutionary
legal formula was, in France,
freedom of commerce in land
, and
in Russia,
national ownership of land and the concession of
management to the peasants
. But even in the second case, the rise
of a class of wealthy and middle agrarian bourgeois was not prevented,
and the struggle with them had its ups and downs, which started from the
fact that
free trade in commodities
had to be tolerated to a
large extent.
Another fact distinguishes the two major historical acts: for France
intensive production and high population density; for Russia extensive
production and low density. There is one fact they perhaps have in
common: harmonious spread of the rural population over the cultivated
area.
In Italy, as we have already said, there was no great and
simultaneous liberation from feudal serfdom, which was never socially
dominant. Depending on the technical features of the various areas, all
types of rural holdings lived in relative freedom, from small to medium
and large, from those based on intensive to those based on extensive
cultivation, and one came across all forms of private property: minimal,
medium and large, collective, in communal demesnes and rural
communities. A great battle to relieve farms and rural classes of the
burden of systems of seigneurial law was not necessary and did not take
place; where such forms did appear, they were from time to time
confronted by communes, by lordships, by monarchies and by foreign
administrations.
The affair was very complex, and we shall limit ourselves to quoting
once again the author, who is certainly not a Marxist and whose name
does not matter, not having worked his whole life on the problems of
Italian agriculture – showing that that these were problems for the
farmers
– in pursuit of political posts for himself or his
fellows:
«There is ample historical evidence of the continuation of the land
regime in Italy with the application of Roman law... It is undoubted
that in connection with estates governed by Roman law there must have
been a vast extension subject to feudal duties, the possessors of which
were restrained from making improvements, because they would have to
share the benefits with third parties who made no contribution to it,
and indeed residues of these obligations were liquidated, even by means
of legislation, in the 18th and 19th centuries. However, the greatest
part of the land was freed from the aforementioned constraints, as were
the serfs, in the communal period, making possible the great agrarian
transformations of reclamation and irrigation in the Po Valley and the
plantations in Tuscany, which assumed such wide‑scale development
precisely from the 12th to the 15th century. In that period the
institution of land consortia, inapplicable without the absolute freedom
of the land, which now, with few exceptions, can be said to be complete
in almost all civilized countries, took place and was fortified, thus
eliminating the obstacle of the co‑interest of a third party in the sole benefits of land improvement and cultivation [the writer, an open
advocate of personal ownership of land, insists on the fact that the
feudal form of privilege had to be overthrown because it prevented the
development of agrarian productive forces, that is, of the investment of
capital and labor in land improvements, ripe for the time, and thus
gives us a good argument for the validity of the Marxist method].
«The application of the Napoleonic code consolidated this regime
throughout our country, and the abolition of the feudal regime in the
Mezzogiorno in 1806, in Sicily in 1812, and in Sardinia from 1806 to
1838 likewise contributed to this. The civil legislation of the new
Italy affirmed this direction to a greater extent by suppressing
fideicommissum and primogeniture inheritances and then attempting to
liquidate all forms of co‑participation in a single property. Extensive leftovers of collective property remained, however, although the
tendency to proscribe all sorts of promiscuity in the ownership of land
prevailed; and the collection of land rent was made particularly
privileged by law. [All measures characteristic of the bourgeois and
liberal revolution, which the super-asses still demand, and for which
they await the effects!] Thus the liberation of land ownership in
particular supported the improvement in cultivation, which began in our
country as far back as the 12th century [without waiting for Minister
Segni and opposition expert Grieco Ruggero, wow!] making possible the
formation of a capitalist agriculture [ca-pi-ta-li-sti-ca, copied only
and not made into an adjective by those who have, like us, a phobia of
capitalism to the point of winking at seigneurial feudalism in the brief
parentheses of contingentism] with very high incomes, which another
regime would certainly not have allowed».
Let’s hope we have not annoyed with the historical method, but it’s
what’s needed, when the gazette of every hue writes, every ten lines,
about nobility, feudalism and the bourgeoisie, the poor dears, and
capitalism, unhappy, not having come to develop freely in this medieval
country (if only!); the point must be hammered home time and again...
and let’s see where we are today in the fundamentals.
«Agrarian wealth comes from the land that produces throughout its
expansion a certain quantity of produce with values fixed by the
respective market. The prevailing phenomenon of its limits imposes
itself on this, and in fact, for example, before the last annexations
[in 1918], out of the total surface area of 287,000 square kilometers,
of which 22,600 were totally unproductive or subtracted from cultivation
for various reasons, leaving for production about 264,000, i.e., 92%.
The population within those borders, with the data of 1921, was more
than 37 million inhabitants, that is, of 130 per square kilometer of
land and 141 per sq. km. of agricultural and forestry surfaces. We have
in fact a strong proportion of mountainous areas (over 800 to 1,000
meters above sea level) of which the Alps has vast expanses occupied by
perpetual snow, and there as well as in the Apennines and other ranges
from 1,500 to 2,000 and more, there exist only meager pastures and
woods. The hilly areas likewise include extensive tracts susceptible to
landslides, the lowlands include many coastal tracts consisting of sands
and dunes, marshy areas, etc. So that the most fruitful part, on which
most of our population is concentrated, is greatly reduced, with
territories feeding 3‑4‑500 inhabitants on a square kilometer, and some as many as 700 and 800.
«Therefore,
the not uncommon assertion of dilettantes
according to whom there are still extensive uncultivated lands in Italy
that are susceptible to profitable colonization, should be taken with a
rather large grain of salt. Certainly, there is no shortage of poorly
cultivated lands and Italian agricultural production could be increased.
However, the above figures show that the question of the so‑called
“uncultivated lands” has a very relative importance, otherwise such a
dense population would not be able to live here».
Even the dilettantes know that from 1921 to 1949 the figures changed.
In fact, out of 301,000 square kilometers, 278,000 are productive, that
is in the same ratio of about 92%, while the population is now 45
million, and the density figures have risen to 150 and 162, that’s by
15%!
Between the food sacrifices of the war years and the artful donations
of agricultural commodities in UNRRA and ERP times it seems clear that
the agricultural productivity of the meager flesh and ample bone
constituting the Italian boot achieved some additional increases in
yield of which it was capable, given the state of its equipment. As for
the population, its increase was unstoppable, passing the half‑million
mark in 1948, reaching the relative increase of 10‑11‑12 per thousand.
The annual excess of the born over the dead exceeded just over eight per
thousand at the time of Mussolini’s demographic exhortations, to whom
are attributed by today’s gossip good or bad faculties and powers, of
which he was entirely blameless. It was he who moved to ban emigration,
a measure that was but a weak tactical retaliation in the face of the
great capitalist powers that were slamming the doors in the face of
Italian workers. However, even this safety valve did not work as in the
past: between 1908 and 1912 emigration reached highs of 600,000 workers
in one year (20 per thousand), after the war in the years 1920‑1924 it
resumed at 300,000 and above, and then declined sharply; it seems that
in the last year, 1948, it returned to 137,000, but consisting to a
large extent in temporary workers (3 per thousand).
As for the part of the population devoted to agriculture, this was
about 25% according to early pre‑war statistics (1911) and would be at
least ten million today, but it should be noted that this is ten million
productive units, excluding boys under ten years of age, elderly
incapacitated people, and some of the women, so it is clear that the
great majority of the Italian population was still living off the
agrarian economy. More important is to see the breakdown of the working
agricultural population, which was believed to be roughly as follows
after the First World War: 19% owners - 8% tenant farmers - 17%
sharecroppers - 56% day laborers and field hands. The latter thus
constituted the majority, and it must be kept in mind that the largest
proportion of owners, tenant farmers and sharecroppers are in economic
conditions bordering on pennilessness. It is important to note that the
proportion of pure proletarian agricultural workers was stronger in the
Mezzogiorno than in the north and center: in Apulia about 79%, in Sicily
70%, in Calabria 69%.
This almost unique situation of Italian agriculture compared to other
countries in Europe, besides showing the serious social and political
error of treating it as pre‑bourgeois, is enough to make it clear that
the problem of changes (minimal or maximal) in the dynamism of
productive enterprises is rendered absurd when it is artfully reduced to
that of a general or exceptional redistribution of legal and personal
land ownership.
It is not easy to walk through the little garden of statistics... In
recent discussions of the Segni reform and on agrarian contracts, the
adversaries exchanged accusations that they were not able to read
through them. One would need to know how figures are manipulated. At the
time of the
Battle for Wheat
, the Ministry of Agriculture asked
the provincial inspectorates for figures of the area cultivated with
wheat and the relative production, while the party gave the federal
officials the production figures to be achieved. Party federal and
inspector had no desire either to break each other’s heads or to lose
their positions. In this all the world’s a village and all the “planning
offices” feast on lies. What the statistics put together in Italy today
by the disjointed multi-party and rolling public administration may
therefore be worth, is easy to see. Suffice it to say that we are in a
multi-party regime, and the degree of falsehood in public affairs grows
as the square of the number of parties in the field.
More recent figures from Serpieri, undoubtedly an authoritative
source if one consulted before and after the risorgimento, greatly
increase the number of landlords to whom they add a strong share of
emphyteusis leaseholders and the like, and after more or less confirming
the proportion of tenant farmers and sharecroppers they counter that day
laborers and farm hands amount to only 30% of the those working on the
land.
If we start from population censuses, we have to go back to the
fascist censuses that attempted a corporative-social survey of
professions and economic positions. But it is not easy to read in the
declarations the number of owners; it is not easy to sort out the urban
and rural owners; it is not easy to calculate whether all members of the
owner’s family, including women and minors, are declared to be
farmers-owners of the same property.
If one then goes back to the land registry, established undoubtedly
with precise elements, one has in hand a statistic relating not to
individuals but to firms. These include a variety of legal entities,
municipalities, cooperatives, corporations, and so on. That leaves
private firms, but while on the one hand in many cases a property which
is still undivided or whose division is not transcribed corresponds to
complicated collective titles to family heirs, it is by no means
possible to know whether a single owner has several properties in
various municipalities in the State, since the lists of owners exist
municipality by municipality. There are 7,800 communes and each of them
registers thousands of firms. If one wished to create the national
register of landholders, the work would be such that it would be
possible to establish with some agreeable degree of
combinatorial
calculation that the employees of the supreme
office assigned to it would consume an appreciable percentage of the
country’s agricultural product. As in the witty remark made about the
Fanfani-houses and Tupini-houses: you will build only the office
buildings for those housing schemes.
Hence the best writers of treatises to explain the meaning of
statistics about the surface of possessions in relation to the number of
possessors, with the corresponding ratios of heads, area, or land value
(which lend themselves to the usual propagandistic game: the 1% owns 50%
of the land and 80% must share just 20% of the surface area), or similar
tables of imaginary countries. Posit the system of titular ownership of
land, free trade in land, and hereditary transmission, and you cannot
have a distribution other than that, or tending irresistibly to revert
to that form if it is removed from it by foreign intervention, so that
the alarming progression of the very many to the few and the very few to
the many, on the one hand is an arithmetical effect of perspective, and
on the other is the characteristic of the civilized regime of free land
in a free country.
The very variable distribution of agrarian tenure in Italy in
relation to the various types of organized holdings presents the
well‑known regional picture, which sometimes brings the large extensive
tenure to within a few kilometers of the very small family property, the
large and medium-sized modern and well‑equipped farm close to the small
hill farm. The variety from region to region is unsurprising, if one
wants to infer the need to treat the technical problem regionally, but
even without wishing to take today’s contingent agricultural policy
seriously, it could be noted that precisely the regional variety and its
strange alternations are a reason for combating the drawbacks of extreme
cases with a national unified program...
It appearing to be self‑evident that the medium-sized and high‑value
homesteads of the Po Valley, with their flourishing animal husbandry and
irrigated cultivation, like the somewhat less extensive homesteads of
middle Italy with a prevalence of high‑income arboreal crops, and not a
few similar holdings in the south and Sicily, approach the optimum of
productive yield, there remains to be addressed not only the problem of
the infamous “latifundium” but rather two problems remain, that of the
latifundium, which today’s loudmouths will not eradicate, and that of
extreme pulverization, of the tiny property inseparable from the minimal
farm, the true disease of our agriculture, the greatest cause of
depression, misery, social and political conformity, as well as of
immeasurable wastage of labor.
Before looking at the two evils with their real data for a moment,
let us immediately point out how absurd it is that in the direction of
the dominant Christian Democratic party for the division of possessions,
for that stupid utopia of “everyone a property owner”, with the empty
prospect of apportioning among the poor peasants the uncultivated lands
– which are those that cannot be cultivated, and which every farmer who
may be illiterate but equipped with the rudiments of the trade will
refuse even if given away − the opposition is unable to oppose, not even
for the purpose of maneuvering and polemical sabotage, the otherwise
well‑founded criticism of the dispersion of the land in farms that are
too small and stuck in centuries‑old methods of primitive
management.
Everyone a property owner: let’s take the 270,000 square kilometers
and share them among the 45 million Italians. Each will have
three-fifths of a hectare, a space that if it were square would be just
under eighty-by-eighty meters. The imbecile grid that the regime of free
ownership and the geometric land registry survey mark on the surface of
the earth, will measure 300 meters for each possession, and if even
simple enclosures were to be placed, their economic cost would approach
the actual value of the patch of land... And this is but one of the
reasons for the destruction of productivity due to the scarcity of the
land to be worked, which bends man to the sweaty servitude of the
hoe.
The reasoning does not seem absurd since actual statistics give even
more extreme rates of fragmentation.
The statistics of the average extension of the parcel in the land
registry, i.e., of the area of land that not only belongs to the same
firm but has the same cultivation and the same class of merit, naturally
gives a surface area lower than the average of the lot, set of parcels
from the same firm, but gives a better idea of pulverization in the
sense of technical management. While we assumed that every Italian has
0.60 hectares, i.e., 60 ares, there are provinces where the average
parcel is even smaller: Aquila and Turin 35 ares, Naples 25, Imperia
22.
This is what the author, who defends the regime of free purchase of
land and family ownership because it «represents a most effective
stimulus to the improvement of the land and its cultivation with the
maximum utilization of the labor of the owner and his family members”
and because “it determines a better division of wealth and a lower
proportion of propertyless and (...) what comes from the small
landowning farmer, unlike the annuity and sometimes even the profit of
the agrarian capitalist in the large estate, remains entirely in the
country and contributes to the improvement of the land and its
cultivators” − and thus without any suspicion of socialist tendency –
says of fragmentation of the land:
«The fragmenting of possession corresponds to the analogous
fragmenting of cultivations, as a rule by the labor of the owner himself
and his family, which thus compensates the insufficiency of annuity and
profit to constitute the minimum necessary for existence (...) The class
of minimal possessors, as in general all the laboring classes, has a
very high birth rate, so that there is on average a greater number of
sharers in inheritances than in the large estates, and then the average
life of these farmers, assiduous workers who do not spare themselves at
all, is by necessity less than in the wealthy classes. Transfers by
inheritances are therefore more frequent, which are then divided so that
each heir has his share of the land, lacking on the other hand as a rule
the movable wealth with which in the wealthy classes the shares of
certain coheirs are liquidated (...) For these reasons the small
possession tends to divide much more quickly than the large, with the
serious drawback then that each coheir claims his share of arable land,
vineyard, olive grove etc., so that little by little plots of a few
acres and even square meters are formed, as well as possessions that
include several of these located at very distant points from each other
in the communal territory. One can immediately understand what an
enormous waste of time, energy, and labor such pulverization
determines».
«There is also in this way a real loss of productive land along the
development of the boundary lines, which, to calculate it at only 0.30
m. in width caused by the trampling of people, some enclosure, or other
means, represents 12% in the square plot of one are, whereas it is only
1.20% for that of one hectare. This multiplication of boundary lines
then increases in equal proportion the causes of litigation for
usurpations, boundary violations, removal of terms, unauthorized
plantations etc., in which much of the scarce income of small holders is
unproductively dispersed. It is perhaps not for nothing that Sardinia,
which, alongside its vast expanses of pastures, forests, communal
property etc., also has truly pulverized property, is the most litigious
region in our country. There are such small land parcels in Sardinia
that in pre‑war times there was a case of tax expropriation for debts of 5 liras of taxes!».
Will the State expropriate the nabobs today?!
«The inevitable pulverization of property, a consequence of the facts
now examined, may be unfavorable to the increase of agricultural
production, especially because the small holder cannot form a congruous
working capital due to the meagerness of his income. Therefore, he
usually lacks livestock for work and produce, is bound to the spade and
hoe, even where he could employ the plow, is reluctant to introduce
better tools, artificial fertilizers or other new means of agricultural
production, first because he does not have the wherewithal to procure
them, and then he is as a rule misoneistic and conservative due to lack
of culture. If he comes to create savings he prefers to buy, at who
knows what price, a few crumbs of land, rather than convert it into
working capital».
Let us interrupt for brevity the rest of the picture, with the
inevitable usurious indebtedness, misery, and homelessness, and the
description of the very poor regions, which we have not only in areas of
Campania, Abruzzo and Calabria but also Emilia and Veneto in uplands
«which by their division of tenure could be said to be countries of true
rural democracy». Democracy in fact very suitable to be of the Christian
variety, fertile ground for today’s government to sow political
seeds.
The other culprit, the latifundium, should now stand in the dock.
First of all, it should be noted that the large estate has the large
titular property but four times at least out of five no business or
cultivation units, being sorted into small leases or small
sharecroppers. It can equally be charged with all the same, or nearly
all the same, offenses related to pulverization.
What is not understood is that, by possibly abolishing legal title to
possession, one does not arrive at creating a minor and organized
cultivation unit in productive smallholdings, since all the causes that
gave rise to the latifundium phenomenon persist. One can only fall back
into a pulverization that, already harmful on good land, is brutal on
barren land and would lead back to a worse condition, and mostly, if the
freedom to buy and sell is not suppressed, to the restoration of the
latifundium.
The conditions that generated the latifundia are complex and here is
not the place to go into them in detail. They start with the natural
ones that are insuperable because they are due to the geological nature
of the soils (for example, the vast formations of Eocene clays in Sicily
are unsuitable for woody crops and allow only extensive cultivation of
grain; a short distance from these plains, intensive and subdivided
crops prevail in the province of Messina, lying on granite formations,
and in the volcanic province of Catania). Influences include the
predominance of malaria due to the disordered waterways of mountain
slopes and lowland rivers, sparse population, and the oft‑referenced
historical reasons for invasions from the coasts and little security
until not remote times. So not remote that the American liberators and
benefactors themselves, as soon as they arrived in Calabria, having
liquidated the Fascist forest militia for obvious reasons of democratic
morality, ruthlessly eviscerated the centuries‑old forests of the
Calabrian Apennines as spoils of war; and thus irreparably aggravated
the malady of the ruin of unregulated waters towards the unfortunate and
infected coastal lowlands. They then ran with DDT...
From an economic point of view, the economic relationship is defined
by the fact that the landowner mostly entrusts the management to a
speculative capitalist tenant, who needs only a small amount of working
capital and who exploits the land through a series of subleases of
pastures to shepherds and of arable land to small farmers, who, because
of competition, «give up almost all of the business profit to the large
tenant... they never dwell on the cultivated land, but go there even from
far away when the needs of the crop and harvests require it, taking
refuge in haystacks, caves, grottos, or in large rooms or under shelters
with the consequences we have already illustrated...» These cultivators
are in worse conditions than the day laborers, while on the other hand
they will never be able to organize, for lack of working capital, less
extensive agriculture.
The proposal to solve the problem of the latifundium with forced
parceling is very old, and has a number of precedents, which came down
from the earliest times to some cases of expropriation due to failure to
improve uncultivated lands. But there were almost always failures, and
this was especially the case in economically unfavorable times. Indeed,
it is not enough to expel the negligent landowner, to whom, however,
under the present regime a heavy indemnity is always paid by the public,
but the assignee should be provided not only with working capital but
with capital for equipment, for structures that are lacking and that
would far exceed the cost already paid for expropriation for each plot.
Indeed, it is necessary to provide for and finance houses, roads,
drainage, aqueducts and so on, to make it possible for the farmer to
stay on the land, and to anticipate the expected values of the
transformation that is very long term. A Crispi project was launched in
1894 after the Sicilian “fasci” uprisings; as early as 1883 a law for
the Agro Romano had sanctioned today’s “revolutionary” principle of
expropriation of large uncultivated lands which then passed from the
Serpieri laws of 1924 to today’s Segni law. Liberals, Fascists, and
Christian Democrats have dared so much, but cases of application over so
many years can be counted on one’s fingertips.
We omit a review of the Italian and foreign legislative proposals
tending instead to mitigate the pulverization of agrarian tenure, for it
is certainly not our aim to propose a reform in the opposite direction
to the government’s, but only to note that the very concrete and
contingentist technicians of the oppositions have not thought of this.
Convinced that the Russian agrarian revolution was a parceling into
shares of titular property, they do not go any further than their own
noses and know no better than to ask for land to be partitioned to the
peasants, even to the laborers, of course, and without equivocation, not
in collective management, but in personal ownership, yes, in absolute
ownership, this is the latest Cominform instruction, as taken from the
many articles in
Unità
on the agrarian question and southern
problems. That in Russia the feudal privileges of the nobility and the
clergy were not divided and expropriated at all but only abolished,
lifting them like a suffocating cloak from the existing small rural
holdings, which at first did not change demarcation, and then with
doubtful successes attempted grouping into larger, State or cooperative
holdings; that the historical problem is therefore a different matter
altogether, is of no concern for those writers, as nothing for them
matters about the proportion of uplands and plains in Russia; the
population density, which is 9 inhabitants per sq. km. and in European
Russia 30, instead of our 150; the ratio of cultivated land to the
total, which in place of our 92% is 25%, in spite of the immense plains
and apart from Asiatic Russia, and only in the Ukrainian black soil
lands rises to 60%; the practical non‑existence of the class of stable
agrarian wage earners etc. etc. etc., and this because these gentlemen
no longer follow maximal and principled objectives, but have given
themselves over to the study of the immediate concrete living conditions
of the people”..!!
Pausing for a moment on the Christian Democrat proposal − it was easy
to prophesy that no headache would be given to frightened large
landowners by the Social-Communists, even when they were in the
ministry, but a certain blow would have to be expected from the
Christian Democrats − its empty demagoguery is quite evident. We will
touch, they say, about eighty large estates, across the whole of Italy,
owned by multi-billionaires. We are going to remove them in part. It was
a matter of setting maximums... It was necessary to consider not only
the size of the property but also the wealth it represents, and to do
this they seem to set a maximum not of area but of taxable income
according to the land registry, which is supposed to indicate the value
of the land. But for the same area, a large farmstead managed in modern
fashion may be worth as much as 15 times more than a mountainous or
grazing tenement, especially by virtue of the installation of fixed
facilities. It would not be fair to expropriate 100 hectares where
nothing is to be improved in place of 1,500 barren or almost barren
hectares. And then there were two criteria on the legal ground, to hit
the properties of higher value and those of lower average revenue,
indicative of neglected cultivation. So the super-technicians were to
suggest to Segni a ranking of the eighty Croesuses to be slaughtered,
formed from a score obtained by multiplying the total taxable income of
the large possession by its size in hectares or, which is the same, by
dividing the square of the total taxable income by the average taxable
income. Algebra? Reformist and concretist algebra.
But the criteria for choosing the few rich people to cheat matters
little. The question is what to do with the land taken from them, albeit
in part − in which case it is easy to predict that they will take good
compensation and get the waste that plagues every large estate off their
chests − and how to equip it to make it possible for the “free” peasant
to manage it, in the new rural Christian Democracy. Someone will have to
contribute the working capital and even stronger capital for
improvement. This is the point. The individual or collective allotted
peasant will certainly not be able to do so. The State will defer to the
usual special laws, such as those on land improvement, of scarce
appropriations, available to the usual sly old foxes, and on the other
hand the State is not in a position to subsidize, let alone new plant
investments in the land, not even the repair of those damaged in the
war. International capital and the famous U.S. funds and plans all the
less since the basic criterion is to follow short and totally profitable
cycles − the Marshall Plan officially ends in 1952.
The problem goes back to issues of general economics and world
politics. Reshaping titular property (though we shall see this) solves
nothing. Agrarian reforms arise as feasible in times of prosperity and
supply of capital at favorable rates and long credit. For a country like
Italy there are only these solutions. First. Economic autarky, attempted
by our bourgeoisie after the favorable war, binding national capital and
partially obliging it to agricultural improvement. This eventuality,
conditioned by political autonomy, military strength and solid internal
power, is historically dismissed; fascism drew from it certain results
among which the Pontine reclamation was decisive, attempted many other
times in the history of the Caesars and popes. Second. Dependence on a
world power that has an interest in strong production of foodstuffs for
the Italian people in the domestic market, for commercial or military
purposes. This is not the case for America, which especially in view of
production crises relies heavily on planning food production, which has
now shifted from local cycles of direct consumption to a vast worldwide
movement as fruitful in speculative profits as that of industrial
products, and which in the event of war will drop atomic bombs spreading
tin cans to its mercenaries. It is not even the case for Russia, which
will not have Italy in its sphere and has no economic interest in having
countries with a high density of mouths to feed, and in any case does
not export capital but must import it and plays militarily and
politically to exploit the capital investments of the West on the
fringes of the Cold War. Nor is it then even the case if Italy will be
subjugated to a world constellation derived from the arrangement of the
big two or three, which will go on to colonize across all continents and
oceans rather than on the bony ribs of Ausonia.
Agrarian reform in Italy today is thus based on the propagation of
demagogic nonsense; it is not lifted from the base game of political
skirmishing between groups and interests which, by securing influence
over internal popular currents, hope to sell their services
advantageously to foreign principals.
Minister Segni boasts that he will fabricate with his famous “hiving
off” − a worthy term of low thaumaturgy − of the large estates another
couple of hundred thousand smallholders, that is, Italian ragamuffins
good for the parish and the barracks and the mockery of all civilized
capitalist countries on both sides of the Ocean. He produces thousands
of candles and bayonets in the nights of the Italian countryside, just
as Napoleon in those of Paris and Mussolini in those of our poorly
populated industrial cities, claimed to do. But assuming he really
succeeds in hiving off to pulverize and populate his allotments, how
does he count on regulating the process of property transfer and
regrouping? What will it do with the sacred modern civil canon of free
trade in land? Will it control the concentration, the “reincorporation”
of it with arithmetic limits to be verified every time a notary
notarizes a land sale or inheritance? The mere thought of such a harness
should be enough to make the hair on the head of the most ardent
proponent of economic
dirigisme
stand on end.
Do you think the Social-Communists, even though they are today, for
quite other reasons, proud enemies of the Christian Democrat reformers
after yesterday’s tryst, throw in Segni’s face the argument that every
reformist guile confirms that the capitalist regime must not be amended
but annihilated? Oh huzzah! They shout at them that we must reform more,
unbundle more, pulverize more, fertilize more the generation of
demo‑rurals which, by taking away personnel from the red forces of the
class struggle in the countryside, the glory of Italian proletarian
history, will create phalanxes of voters for government lists, armies of
conscripts for America’s general staff in the Russian Enterprise.
History teaches that with masterpieces of this kind they have always,
the renegades, served the new master.
No less edifying than the subject of land reform is that of agrarian
contracts. Antifascists of all hues presented themselves with tremendous
promises of reformism at the taking of crippled Italy from the hands of
fascism, not understanding that the only possible attempts at reformism
in today’s world are politically totalitarian. Neither Nazi‑fascism nor
Stalinism are revolutions; they are, however, serious reformisms and
have given convincing examples. The reformism of the new Italy only
makes rhinos sweat. They promised the study of three major areas: State
reform, industrial reform, agrarian reform. Majority and opposition,
into which the liberationist bloc of the time split, with contradictory
and intersecting approaches in every sense, and with the nullity of
implementation, prove their emptiness every day and do not even manage
to squabble to follow the compass of social and political positions in
the field of speech.
The agrarian lease, for which the demagogic thesis beats on the
simple-mindedness of the bloc, that is, the prohibition of the landlord
from expelling the tenant, hides very different economic and social
relations under the same legal scheme. Plagiarizing the position of the
housing rent freeze thesis – which, as will be shown in its place, is
more nonsense – does not mean having taken a serious direction on the
matter. With regard to small rent, the landowner, who for his part can
be a large, medium or small owner is faced by the tenant farmer who
employs his material labor in addition to a minimal and inappreciable
working capital, and is therefore a lender of work, despite the fact
that he pays out money instead of receiving it: with regard to large
rent the landowner is faced instead by an entrepreneurial capitalist,
who employs wage laborers in developed holdings, or sublets to small
settlers in backward-agricultural estates. Positioning gun batteries in
defense of him instead of against him is an appalling mistake, a
suicidal act of the workers’ parties even if they are moderate, a
repudiation of the historic class struggles of Italian agricultural
workers who in the Fasci Siciliani threw themselves against the tax
collectors, the swindlers, the country merchants, authentic and dirty
bourgeois, and before that, in Polesine, in 1884, rose up against the
entrepreneurs behind the famous battle cry:
la boje! E de boto la va
de fora
[It boils and it comes out (of the top)], and always, as
indeed even today despite the baseness of the leaders, against the
muskets of the national democratic Italian State.
Italian agrarian capitalism has much speculated, albeit to the
detriment of the landowner, as bourgeois as he is himself, though with
less clawed nails, on the protectionism given to agrarian rents through
legislation, without understanding a damn thing. An example is the
famous Gullo decrees that halved the rent of so‑called grain leases.
What is this contract? The rent to the owner normally is paid in money.
It can, however, be agreed in foodstuffs in the sense that the tenant
delivers each year a given – whatever the gross product, and we are
therefore always dealing with rent and not partial colonies – a quantity
of one or more foodstuffs. By this means the landlord makes himself safe
from the fluctuations in the value of the currency and the real
debasement of his income that follows the general rise in prices, as
occurs after wars. But many landlords are not comfortable with receiving
foodstuffs since, being a large rent, it would be a large mass of
merchandise that is not easy to transport, store etc. Also wanting to
place themselves safe from changes in the value of the currency, it is
established that the rent will be paid in money, but in a sum that is
not fixed, but rather corresponding to the annual rate of a conventional
product – wheat, paddy rice, hemp – mostly one of those officially
quoted with State prices, in a given quantity based on the extent of the
property. One hears that one has rented at four quintals of wheat per
hectare, but not only does the tenant not deliver wheat, as much as he
may not even have cultivated and harvested a single grain of wheat,
practicing animal husbandry or sowing other crops. One could, to the
same end, bargain the rent in dollars or pounds of gold, even in the
certainty that the tree that yields these fruits is yet to be found.
Well, by halving this rent no working peasant gained anything, because,
by its very nature, the system hardly ever applies to the small rent,
and agricultural entrepreneurs far richer than their landlords, and
sometimes themselves owners of immense urban and agrarian real estate,
cashed in millions. It is to be believed that today’s Solons have not
yet understood this simple relationship.
In the case of sharecropping, on the one hand, all the populist
arguments were spent in favor of sharecroppers, without taking into
account that even among them there are those who, as employers, keep
salaried employees. To defend them, the sharecropper’s share of the
product was increased. But in Italy the sharecropping contracts are of
very different types according to the crops, with various quotas and
different charges for advance payments, expenses and taxes for the
contracting parties, so that a worse mess has been created. At one point
the left thundered that this form of contract must disappear because it
was feudal in nature. We are still there, with the notion that the
proletarian and socialist party is not created to turn – whether by
means of caresses or beatings is another matter – capitalism into
socialism, but to ensure that capitalism does not revert to feudalism.
Thus not to shame but to praise the purified capitalist idol...
However, the argument, false in principle, is also false in fact.
«The sharecropping contract is of very ancient origin and peculiar to
all the countries in which Roman law reigned, so that it is particularly
extensive here and likewise in France and the Iberian countries...»
It developed long after the liberation of serfs and in Italy from the
13
th
century... Whether or not sharecropping contributes to
the technical development of agriculture and how it influences the
various types of cultivation is a very complicated problem; socially the
point that even the sharecropper must be seen not only as opposed to the
landowner, but also in contrast to the proletarian worker is important;
then he is an employer, a bourgeois, an enemy; and you find someone else
to get laws made in his favor, who then believes he is making them in
his favor and unwillingly cheats him... after stupidly taking him for a
serf or a fellow proletarian.
Another shriek at feudal leftovers, another case of searching for the
scapegoat, came when the Christian Democrats proposed the adjusting of
emphyteusis rents. The relationship of
emphyteusis
is when the
owner receives a fixed perpetual rent from the land user, and he cannot
send him away or ask for increases, rather it is the emphyteutist who
can redeem it by paying in coin twenty times the rent when he thinks
fit. The right is transmitted and sold like that of ownership. What on
earth has this strictly mercantile relationship to do with feudalism? It
is true that some nascent bourgeois legislation wanted to suppress this
form along with many other feudal ones, but:
«... emphyteusis arose in the times of the later Roman Empire from the
gradual transformation of public land grants in the form of
vectigal
, that is, in perpetuity to the settler with the
obligation to cultivate it and pay a fee, etc., etc., etc.»
However, this feudal obsession may be a historical foible, but the
bigger foible is that of the reformer who does not see that the benefits
are going into the pocket opposite to the one he is concerned about. The
social-communist leftists, by voting against the rent increase in the
ratio of one to ten were convinced that they were doing action in favor
of a mass of working peasants who owe the rent or fee to large
landlords. There are such cases, but the emphyteusis are but a few
thousand, and indeed the rents are so low that in the way of economic
relativism they were in effect privileged in comparison with every other
kind of agrarian administration, so that the new burden is certainly not
prohibitive. But in most cases, they are landowners who own other land
under emphyteusis and manage it in tenancy or colonies as the remainder.
The low emphyteutic rent goes to municipalities, welfare agencies, or
religious communities, which have in many cases seen their income wiped
out by inflation. If it had been possible to block the government’s
logical decree, the great bulk of the rents that will be paid extra from
this year would have gone instead into the pockets of the very class of
landowners whom you want to spite, whom you want to mortify and strike
down as a retrogressive and parasitic class...
These technocrats, reformists, legislativists, who have so prided
themselves on their shrewd foresight in the face of our blind fidelity
to maximalist principles, forget just one detail, that they have their
ocular globes in the backs of their heads, if not ruder locations.
They have been scrutinizing concrete problems for the past thirty
years, but in every case, they show themselves up; they do not know, for
example, how many large estates in the South arose by accumulating
emphyteutic shares bought cheaply from poor peasants, and how convenient
it was for the owners that the rent was still paid in early pre‑war lira
– sometimes still recorded in fractions of a lira. Every modest
practitioner of land surveying carried this predictable adjustment of
rents into account from the earliest days. All products of the civilized
regime of the freedom of the land, all effects that will go like this
until the unfettered circus of bourgeois capitalism blows up.
The great charlatan of this circus, from the waters of the Potomac [a
reference to Harry S. Truman] consecrated all freedoms. One he forgot to
enunciate, but his worthy followers, pupils and allies practice it
extensively, enthusiastically and, what is worse, not a few times in
delightfully good faith: the
freedom of humbug
6. - CAPITALISM AND URBAN PROPERTY
The organization of the economic and legal relationships that refer
to urban buildings and land in the era of modern capitalism may seem to
have a general weight lower than that represented by the agricultural
sector on the one hand, and by industrial production on the other.
Apart from the consideration that the volume of the economic movement
represented by the management of the house is not negligible, since it
represents a fairly high fraction of the budget of each family in the
average population (in Italy in normal times and for certain social
strata even more than a quarter), the question turns out to be very
interesting, since its examination allows us to elucidate in a very
expressive way the interplay of fundamental economic elements and
relations for understanding the current development of capitalism,
especially for the distinction between the relations of titular and
patrimonial property, which in a certain sense represent the
statics
of the private economy, and the continuous management
and operating relationships, of income and expenditure, which constitute
its
dynamics
For the sake of the order of the exposition, let us mention the
historical origin of private urban tenure, a topic worthy of lengthy
study and exposition.
The process is quite different from that which led to the definition
and limitation of agricultural possessions. When the nomadic tribes
settled on fertile lands there was a shift in various ways from communal
enjoyment and cultivation to the identification of individual and family
camps. Through innumerable upheavals and turmoil it came to the
classical and well‑codified Roman system, then to the feudal system,
until, as we have covered in the fourth and fifth chapters, with the
victory of the bourgeoisie the agrarian land became marketable, and the
legal discipline was again copied from the Roman one.
The vicissitudes of habitation cannot be identified with those of the
agrarian field. The ancient nomad or semi‑nomad, hunter, fisherman,
gatherer of wild fruit, then primordial cultivator, carries with him his
dwelling, wagon, leather tent, or easily improvises it in the
rudimentary hut or natural caves.
With the formation of stable private agrarian estates, the population
devoted to cultivation built the primitive fixed rural dwellings for the
most part by themselves; up to the present day these are to be treated,
from the point of view of land as well as from that of productive
management, in the same way as agricultural facilities with which human
work has furnished the bare vegetable land over the centuries. Instead,
we want here to follow the rise of urban habitation.
It is evident that the first agglomerations of stable buildings did
not arise out of the direct needs of non‑farm production technology, the
initial manufacture being in less developed eras well compatible with
the scattering of the population and the utilization of the daily and
seasonal margins of the farmer’s time. More, therefore, than the early
forms of handicrafts and the manufacture of non‑natural products, it was
the needs of political and military social organization that determined
the first rise of cities. It may therefore be held that the urban area
was born in a collective regime, and only later broke up into individual
domains, corresponding to the needs of administration, defense, and
domination, in relation to scattered masses or foreign invaders, and
thus the whole urban belt belonging to the king, the tyrant, the
military captain, the first forms of State, sometimes to priestly
associations. This is what tradition means by speaking of Romulus and
Remus drawing the city walls of Rome by transforming the first rural
tool, the plow, into a building machine. Then the needs were felt for
fortified defense; the Greek
polis
had at its heart the
acropolis or citadel; one of the Latin terms for city is
oppidum
, meaning fortified place, while
civitas
rather
than a topographical indication, is a legal term for statehood.
In the same Roman period, with the enlargement of the city in
ever‑widening city walls, with the rise of a ruling class of patricians
owning vast agricultural estates and numerous slaves, there were the
private
aedes
and
insulae
and also a fractioning of
urban property among lower class dwellings. The State, nevertheless,
whether republican or imperial, retained tight control over the whole
urban complex, demonstrated by the great importance of the magistracy of
the aediles; down to the other traditional reflection that tells us of
Nero, a fanatic for grandiose projects of urban renewal, who apparently
would not hesitate before the radical means of setting fire to the
quarters of the
urbs
In the Middle Ages the development of large centers was a retreat
from the splendor of the Asian and classical capitals. Feudal manors
sprang up, around them or at their foot clustered villages, lodging
first servants and serfs, then gradually master craftsmen and
independent merchants.
It was with the modern bourgeoisie that towns were born and enlarged.
They, surpassing all considerations of military defense of seigneurial
or dynastic powers, break down and overrun the narrow walls and
ramparts, and expand to form the huge contemporary agglomerations,
within whose circle are amassed in gigantic factories and establishments
the millions of workers that modern productive technology has
concentrated.
A fundamental Marxist thesis is the close relationship between the
spread of industrial production and bourgeois economy and the massive
social phenomenon of urbanism. «The bourgeoisie has subjected the
country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has
greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and
has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy
of rural life» (Manifesto).
Perhaps it was Italy, followed by the Netherlands, that provided the
first examples, in the late Middle Ages, of large cities of the modern
type. The great palaces, and the imposing complexes of civic houses, not
only bear the names and coats of arms of the great noble families, they
belong to firms formed by plebeian people who had accumulated the first
great capitals in banking, commerce, and navigation, and already
invested a considerable part of them in urban construction, while the
most important master craftsmen made themselves masters of the building
that housed their workshop, as the shopkeeper of Rome was of his
taberna
As modern capitalism spread to other States, there sprang up young
and newborn bourgeois industrial cities like Manchester or Essen, or
large suburbs of the historic capitals that after the fall of the old
regimes increased their population numbers disproportionately, becoming
the great Paris, great London, great Berlin of today; while overseas
other bourgeois cities were founded, bare of historic districts,
recognizable in their layout by the monotonous orthogonal grid, marked
by the standard of this mercantile time and the inhuman laws of the race
for profit.
* * *
As for the legal mechanism, that of the Roman and Justinian codes, as
it lent itself very well to capital’s conquest of agrarian land, it
served in the codes of the new bourgeois powers to regulate excellently
the possession, acquisition, and transfer of urban property, both with
regard to existing buildings and to land available for building. A
special legal discipline served the sorting of the rights of individual
private individuals over separate buildings, split into individual floor
or apartment properties, with the institution of condominium for divided
parts. If the capitalist speculation of the new masters of society had
wide‑ranging developments in the investment in agricultural estates and
their transformation according to the new demands of consumption and
utilizing the new means and productive forces, it was able to accomplish
even more resounding exercises everywhere with the “free” trade in
building sites and the continuous escalation of their value, which in
the old and new worlds reached hyperbolic heights.
Although the same rules of law dictate how the market for
agricultural land and urban land is to be conducted, establishing the
equivalence between the real estate land value and the sum of numeraire
into which it is converted, in economic reality the two things are very
different.
Agrarian land is attributed a value due to the legal owner, to whom,
remaining unchanged, flows the continuous annual revenue of a land
annuity. Starting from the physiocrats who wanted, in defense of the
feudal regime, to make an apologia for the productive force of the land
as opposed to that of manufacturing and industry, conservative economic
schools maintained the concept of a basic productivity of the land, even
the least endowed, which without and before the effort of labor bestows
a product. The improved crops, made possible by the contribution of
further investment of labor in the form of various facilities and
constructions and also periodic interventions with tillage,
fertilization and so on, add, for the official economy, to that basic
yield, a new revenue that constitutes the profit of the agrarian
enterprise.
Apart from the different Marxist position on the question – for
which, as we have seen, land has no productive force in itself and is an
instrument
of labor – the land rent cannot rise beyond certain
limits with respect to the given extent of land and the time of its
proceeds. If the same great land improvements make it possible, in the
present economic system, to greatly increase the production of
commodities, they nevertheless require the investment of capital still
higher than the basic land value and impose very long waits and even
annuity suspensions that brings a liability together with the interest
on the invested capital. Thus under the capitalist regime agricultural
land can increase in value but within fairly narrow limits. Agrarian
transformation, which would be of great interest for the common welfare,
is seldom convenient for the bourgeois ruling class, and will not reach
great development until after the end of capitalism.
Quite other phenomena determine the market for urban soils and all
that is built on them. In agrarian production we have a certain balance
between its importance as the patrimony of the one who claims title over
it, and as a contribution to production: land regimes were not the most
predatory. In the industrial economy, while the titular patrimonial
values remain limited, the value of products and the mass of profit are
enormously exalted.
This survey will be carried out to bring to light the very modern
trend toward capitalism without assets but with very high profits. But
let us return to our building land and find an example of a maximum of
assets concentrated on a small, completely inert extension, where not a
lettuce plant grows and not an hour of human labor is invested. As long
as the land is not sold for construction, there is no operating or
management budget, no movable capital is needed. No taxes are even paid,
until precisely the “property” tax was established. This was intended to
constitute a modern partial confiscation of private wealth, but in
reality, it too is paid for through the various incomes of the wealthy
classes, and in the case of our construction lot it is only a minimal
subtraction from the incessant increase in asset and market value, as a
rule much stronger than that of monetary assets to which interest is
allowed to be added.
Now this special form of enrichment of the bourgeois classes is but
one aspect of the primitive accumulation of capital, which starts from
the impoverishment and capture in the grip of industrial urbanism,
imposed on small producers, free peasants or artisans reduced to
propertyless proletarians. It is a social fact; through the
concentration in limited urban spaces of masses of productive forces,
ranging from man to machines and complex modern equipment; the basic
condition of the enormous profit that industry offers to the bosses is
the provision of areas in those privileged zones to house factories,
offices, housing for the masses of wage earners. It is therefore
possible that in the market for these areas higher and higher sums
correspond to the same expanses of land, and the marketable unit is no
longer the hectare or acre but the square meter or foot.
The evolution of the complex urban organism takes place in directions
that all lead to an increase in the cost of building land. As the
intensity of traffic in the streets increases, although the increased
speed of mechanical means facilitates the passage of a greater number of
people and volume of goods at the same time, the widening of streets
becomes necessary, and with each transformation the blocks become
smaller. At the same time, the advancement of technology makes it
possible to increase their height, and thus on the same area there is a
greater number of levels, rooms and inhabitants. Having thus increased
the exploitation and utility of the land, the price the owner demands
when he alienates it likewise increases. Using the criteria of current
economics, the value of a plot of land for construction is estimated by
calculating what the yield of the maximum building will be, and the
expense of carrying out the construction is deducted, which is generally
less than the value, previously mentioned, of the building. The
difference is a premium that is due to the landowner; it is a land
value, different in nature from that of rural real estate, which
nevertheless generates an annuity as well when the landowner remains
master of the edifice.
For the sake of clarity, we note that in the lease of homes for
living, no enterprise profit appears or results comparable to that of
the agricultural tenant who passes on a fee to the landowner and then
provides for the operation and cultivation of the land, remaining master
of the product.
The
enterprise
that built the building is not economically
comparable to the tenant farmer-entrepreneur; the former is satisfied
with what it earns and disappears from the relationship: when we spoke
of calculating the construction costs, we considered the profit of the
building contractor to be included in it, as well as the commercial
interest due to the liquid capital that remained frozen for the time of
construction. In all these economic processes the various figures may
coincide in the same person, but it is necessary to distinguish them
well in order to decipher the processes that economic determinism
studies. Thus in agriculture one does not always distinguish between the
landowner, the enterprising tenant farmer, and the salaried manual
laborer. The large direct-farming agrarian brings together the first two
figures in himself; the small settler the last two; the small peasant
landowner all three. Similarly in building property, the owner of land
can build there the little house he will inhabit, if not with his own
hands, at least on a time and materials basis, and by spending his own
money on it: he will not only be an owner, but at the same time a
banker, a building contractor, and his own tenant.
We already saw that one Marxist text recalls how in England the
industrialist often
does not
own the factory. In another text,
which we will deal with very extensively in a moment, it is even noted
that the owner of the house may not own the land on which it is built.
Certain legal systems in fact make it possible to grant permission to
build on the land, the owner of which receives a fee from the builder
and owner of the house. Similar very interesting forms, let us say in
passing, are spreading for constructions and installations made at their
own expense by private speculators on land that is not theirs, but
State-owned, that is, owned by public entities (municipalities,
provinces, States), thus we have the concession, an institution that is
spreading considerably, a type of
capitalism without
property
The sense of the economic movement of modern capitalist times is in
the distinction, separation, severing between the economic figures of a
production-consumption cycle, and not in their overlapping and
confusion. Not only is this a fundamental objective thesis, but it must
be accompanied by the other whereby this sense of development of the
capitalist world is what we Marxists, its implacable revolutionary
opponents, accept and develop as the basis of the transition to the
collective economy.
Getting back, then, to the edifice just built and belonging to a
private owner, and having seen how its patrimonial title arises and is
transmitted in the present order, let us examine its operation and
management. Let us preface this, however, with an important concept of
urban economics. Rural landed property is in a sense
perpetual
since in the cycle of operation the land physically reproduces its basic
productivity, unlike, for example, a mineral deposit whose depletion can
be calculated. The urban building, on the other hand, is not eternal. It
is only literature that sings of
exegi monumentum aere
perennius
, [I elevated a monument more eternal than bronze]; and
even the architectural colossi of times past have a life, albeit a long
one; they decay and die. The normal residential building has for diverse
reasons a limited life cycle. On the one hand, time wears out its
structures, bringing them closer to collapse and ruin; on the other
hand, the type of dwelling transforms with the progress of technology,
it has to meet new needs, and it does so sometimes with devices that are
less expensive than the old ones. As the text to which we refer also
recalls, it happens at a certain point that the building is worth
less
economically than the land it occupies, its dwellings
being worthy only of low rents, and its operating expenses having grown.
The life cycle of an urban residential building can be quite variable,
to give an example that contrasts poor with nabobs, losers with winners,
Naples will be 300 years; New York 30.
The landlord of the building derives his revenue from the rents paid
periodically by the tenants. This revenue is by no means eternal and
constant and is not entirely available to the landlord. Opposed to it,
which is usually called gross income, are a series of expenditures:
expenses for the custody of the building (doorman); for the lighting and
cleaning of the passages common to the tenants (hallways, staircase,
etc.); expenses for the maintenance of the parts that wear out; general
expenses for administration, and miscellaneous. In normal cases, an
average share of vacancy or uncollected rent should be added. And
finally, in order to provide for the deterioration of the building, it
is necessary to set aside the so‑called amortization quota, that is, a
periodic amount that, put to savings, can accumulate at the end of the
building the sum required to be spent on rebuilding it anew. Adding up
all these expenses and deducting their amount from the gross income,
also deducting the taxes that are paid to public bodies, there remains
the actual net income that the owner is free to enjoy. Current assessors
derive the figure for the property value of the building from that of
the capital value, which at current interest rates would reproduce the
net income. A closer analysis shows that this procedure runs into many
inaccuracies because it implicitly admits the constancy in the future of
many conditions that are in fact changeable.
We have recalled all this to show by easy comparison the economic and
social differences between the residential property business, and the
general productive businesses of agriculture and industry. These base
their operating income on the realization of
products
, which
they continuously generate and bring to sell in the market. With this
gross income they meet the various expenses among which there are two
very important categories, which for the residential property owner are
practically absent: the purchase of
raw materials
to be
processed; and the remuneration of wage
labor
. Thus the
relationship of letting homes lacks these three elements: production of
goods, wages, and purchase of raw materials. There is indeed wear and
tear and consumption of the house, but it is a small fraction of the
annual budget, a minimal part of the capital stock, and the indicated
economic provisions cover it. In contrast, in industry those three items
(products, wages, raw materials) not only represent the preponderant
part of the annual budget, but can reach higher figures, in some cases,
than the same asset value of the plant, even having provided in the
cycle to keep it intact. In common law and economics, however, a regular
and contractual exchange of benefits and values takes place for the
rental of houses, as happens when coins are given against a piece of
bread. What does the tenant get in return for his money? Certainly not
something he can take away or consume by destroying it. In the language
of the bourgeois code he gets the
use
of his dwelling, and he
pays for it at current prices per unit of time. So the landlord simply
sells the tenant the use, the
possession
of the house, the
right to enter and remain in it. We see immediately how this exchange in
Marxist economics is considered a commercial exchange, between
equivalents, in which it may well be that one party harms the other
because all bourgeois trade is a web of cheating, in which it is always
likely to be the better‑off who cheats the poorer. But there is no
application of
labor-power
to the transformation of materials,
and so this is
not
an area of the field in which, by purchasing
the particular commodity that is human labor-power, the formation of
surplus value
and
capitalist profit
is generated.
In the present mechanics of relations between contractors, these
peculiarities of the lease relationship produce appreciable practical
and legal disparities. They boil down to the material fact that the
agricultural or industrial producer holds his commodity well in his
hands, and to make him loosen his fingers it is usually necessary to
produce some money. That particular commodity, which is the possession
of the house, even if we want to call it a product, is in the hands not
of the master but of the tenant: if the latter does not pay, it takes a
complicated judicial-police mechanism evict him. This is what the drivel
and demagogy of bourgeois housing legislation in times of emergency, and
its exploitation by popularist and pseudo-socialist parties, is based
on. Before elucidating this point, however, we are obliged, in order to
illustrate our thesis that the tenancy relationship is not a capitalist
relationship, to prove firstly that we have not uttered a heresy or a
humbug, and secondly that we have not discovered anything new at
all.
* * *
Lenin, in his cardinal paper
State and Revolution
quotes
extensively from the best‑known works of Frederick Engels, such as
Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
and
Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science
, but in Chapter IV
he refers to a work by the same writer, much wrongly less known and less
used in socialist propaganda. The title of the work is
The Housing
Question
. Lenin makes use of what Engels says about the Communists’
program on housing to lay out with his usual perspicuity the task of the
State in the hands of the proletariat, the similarities and differences
that run between this State of tomorrow and the present State of the
bourgeoisie as to their form and as to the content of their activity.
Lenin’s concern is to arrive at two solid cornerstones.
First
the State that will emerge from the revolution is a new and different
machine that will be formed after having demolished and broken down that
of the present State;
second
: the functions of this new machine
of power and its class intervention in the body of the old economy will
be carried out in such a way as not to give rise to fear (as liberals
and libertarians insinuate) that a new form of overpowering, of
exploitation of the masses by a circle of the privileged few will be
built on the new power. The question of whether so far history has
confirmed the Marxist and Leninist doctrinal construction on this point
as well, surely cannot be approached without complete clarity in the
positive investigation of today’s economic and social relations. The
field of the housing sector serves admirably for Engels and Lenin to
measure the gulf that runs between the solutions proper to Marxist
revolutionary critique and those peddled either by puerile utopianisms
or by legalitarian and anti‑classist reformisms.
Engels’ study bears the date 1872 and collects three articles
published in the Leipzig
Volksstaat
, which the author brought
together with a preface in 1887. Engels wrote them in rebuttal to
writings by a certain Mülberger, hosted in the same journal and
completely deviating from the Marxist line in the Proudhonian sense.
Engels takes from this the opportunity for a critique of Proudhon’s
petty-bourgeois position, a position that under various names, before
and since, incessantly resurfaces and undermines the Marxist directive.
This is an exposition conducted with a master’s hand in which, as always
in Engels, the theoretical certainty accompanied by crystalline clarity
of development and form is astonishing. Perhaps Marxist literature does
not possess, in the field of agrarian production, a text as complete and
systematic as this one, which defines and exhausts the subject of urban
property. And even the incomparable man who was Engels cares to make it
clear, almost apologetically, that in the division of labor between Marx
and himself, it was up to him, Engels, to support their address in the
periodical press so that the former could devote himself entirely to his
masterpiece; and he adds that he wished, taking the opportunity
presented by the housing question, to update the critique of Proudhon
made in 1847 with
The Poverty of Philosophy
, concluding
verbatim: «Marx would have accomplished all this much better and more
convincingly».
The position against which from the outset Engels pins his critique
is the one that wants to solve the “housing crisis”, a modern phenomenon
that has affected and affects in repeated periods the most varied
countries, by a reform through which each tenant becomes the owner of
the dwelling in which he lives through a
redemption
that pays
its price to the landlord in installments. To this gross programmatic
error the refuted journalist arrives, of course, through blunders in
economics, which Engels eliminates by brilliantly taking the opportunity
to highlight the Marxist economic interpretation. One of the debunked
theses is this: «What the
wage laborer
is before the
capitalist
, so is the
tenant
before the
landlord
».
Marx would perhaps have spewed flames and hurled thunderbolts at
hearing these drumbeats; Engels calmly says: this is completely false.
And he patiently and limpidly explains how it is, recalling the simple
descriptive criteria we have set out above. He draws from this the
refutation of the baleful calculation whereby the tenant, as a result of
paying by the month, would pay two, three, five times the value of the
house. He also draws from this the opportunity to eviscerate not only
the economic critique of so‑called petty-bourgeois socialism, but also
its ethical-legal obsessions. The columnist, who like thousands of his
comrades in sin believed himself to be a Marxist, had let slip this
other
nonsense
: «The house, once it has been built, serves as a
perpetual legal title
”. For according to Proudhon everything
consists in successfully introducing into the economy “the eternal ideal
of justice». Engels shows the hollowness of such language that would
like to stigmatize the landlord’s exaggerated profiteering as one once
excommunicated that of the loan shark; and he quotes Marx:
«Do we really know any more about “usury”, when we say it contradicts
“justice éternelle”, “équité éternelle”, “mutualité éternelle”,
and other
“vérités éternelles”
than the fathers of the church
did when they said it was incompatible with
“grâce éternelle”, “foi
éternelle”,
and
“la volonté éternelle de Dieu”
?»
Between 1847 and 1887 an opponent was put down when convinced of
theism. Marx and Engels, athletes of the polemic, would have a tougher
task today, because Marxist scribes have slipped not only as far as
Proudhon, but as far as the Church Fathers themselves. They now practice
catch as catch can
!”
Since the incautious journalist is not content to design his
miraculous “structural reform” for inhabited houses but boasts of
possessing a similar recipe for all other sectors, Engels extends the
field of his fine‑tuning on the Marxist description of the production
process, even to the question of the interest rate of capital, mocking
the claim of «finally taking the productivity of capital by the horns»
with a
transitional law
to fix the interest of all capital at
one percent! And likewise still today how many present the socialist
struggle as a campaign to abolish house rent, land rent and the yield of
money, thinking that they have thus transported to earth the reign of
morality, by preventing those who do not work from earning; when instead
it is a question of eradicating a whole entanglement of social forms
protected and defended by the monstrous scaffolding of armed power
concentrated in the political State!
Engels’ response establishes that «
the “productivity of capital”
is an absurdity that Proudhonism uncritically borrows from bourgeois
economists
». In truth, the classical bourgeois economist is more
serious than the petty-bourgeois and reformist economist, for (after
disputing with the physiocrats that wealth arose from the productivity
of
land
, and with the mercantilists that it arose from the
productivity of
exchange
) he asserted precisely that it is
labor
that is the source of all wealth and the measure of the
value of all commodities. To explain, however, how the capitalist, who
commits his capital to industry, not only recovers it at the end of the
bargain, but in addition makes a profit from it, he enunciated, wrapping
himself in a thousand contradictions, a certain “productivity of
capital”. For Marxists, on the other hand, only labor is productive, not
the property owner’s fund or the house, or the banker’s money. The fund,
the house, the factory, the machine, are productive forces because they
are instruments and means of production, that is, they are used by man
to work. In the present arrangement, and until it is overthrown, the
faculty of money and capital is not a productive faculty but is the
social faculty
«pertaining to it to appropriate the unpaid labor of
wage laborers».
Though being in possession of only a poor translation, let us cease
paraphrasing and allow Engels to speak:
«The interest on loaned
money
capital is only a part of
profit; profit, whether on industrial or commercial capital, is only a
part of the surplus value taken by the capitalist class from the working
class in the form of unpaid labor (...) But as far as the distribution
of this surplus value among the individual capitalists is concerned, it
is clear that for industrialists and merchants who have in their
businesses large amounts of capital advanced by other capitalists, the
rate of profit must rise (...) to the same extent as the rate of interest
falls. The reduction and final abolition of interest would therefore by
no means really take the so‑called “productivity of capital” “by the
horns”. It would do no more than re‑arrange the distribution among the
individual capitalists of the unpaid surplus value taken from the
working class. It would not give an advantage to the worker as against
the industrial capitalist, but to the industrial capitalist as against
the rentier».
To return to the thesis we are arguing in these pages: it is not the
rentier
, the lord of lands and palaces who is ripping us off,
these poor leftovers of a bygone era, but the captain of industry, the
entrepreneur, very modern and
progressive
, and before the
latter we proclaim: here is the enemy!
The Proudhonist imagines that this compression and final suppression
of the interest of capital entails, in addition to a general wonderful
panacea for all other economic and social issues: credit, State debts,
private debts, taxes, precisely the abolition of the house rent for
ever. Engels shows him that even if this simplistic plan were possible,
it would not displace the fundamental capitalist economic relationship
between wage‑earners and owners of production enterprises; he refers him
over and over again to the foundations of Marxist economics and Marx’s
Capital: «The cornerstone of the capitalist mode of production is,
however, the fact that our present social order enables the capitalists
to buy the labor power of the worker at its value, but to extract from
it much more than its value by making the worker work longer than is
necessary in order to reproduce the price paid for the labor power. The
surplus value produced in this fashion is divided among the whole class
of capitalists and landowners together with their paid servants, from
the Pope and the Kaiser, down to the night watchman and below». Now the
commercial cost of the house like that of bread, clothing, etc., enters
into the expenses of reproducing labor power, into the part of this
force that wages remunerate, and constitutes the necessary labor, and it
is
beyond
this that we come into the realm of surplus value or
unpaid labor that appears in the price of the product along with that
which is paid. As in all exchanges with money, the worker and every
other buyer can be cheated; in the exchange of his labor for wages he
must
be cheated. The relationship in which the capitalist
character of the economy is caught is the one in which the worker
collects his wages, not the one in which he spends them between baker,
tailor, landlord and so on.
Having clarified the question of economic analysis Engels’ study
rebuts with no less energy the error of a social nature by accusing
Proudhonists of always emphasizing, in every way, those claims that are
common to wage‑laborers and the petty and middle bourgeois, but which,
as a class
, only the latter have an interest in defending, and
shows how reactionary such a position is. He plucks the following
nonsense from the opportunist rants: «In this respect we are far below
the savages. The troglodyte has his cave, the Australian aborigine has
his clay hut, the Indian has his own hearth – the modern proletarian is
practically suspended in midair», etc.
Still to be quoted in his text is Engels’ magnificent refutation of
the no less pestilential demand for rural parceling: «In this jeremiad
we have Proudhonism in its whole reactionary form. In order to create
the modern revolutionary class of the proletariat it was absolutely
necessary to cut the umbilical cord which still bound the worker of the
past to the land. The hand weaver who had his little house, garden and
field along with his loom, was a quiet, contented man ‘godly and
honorable’ despite all misery and despite all political pressure; he
doffed his cap to the rich, to the priests and to the officials of the
State; and inwardly was altogether a slave. It is precisely modern
large-scale industry, which has turned the worker, formerly chained to
the land, into a completely propertyless proletarian, liberated from all
traditional fetters and
free as a bird
; it is precisely this
economic revolution which has created the sole conditions under which
the exploitation of the working class in its final form, in capitalist
production, can be overthrown. And now comes this tearful Proudhonist
and bewails the driving of the workers from hearth and home as though it
were a great retrogression instead of being the very first condition of
their intellectual emancipation».
Engels recalls that he first described in his work
The Condition
of the Working Classes in England
how fierce this expulsion of
workers from home and hearth was, and continues: «But could it enter my
head to regard this, which was in the circumstances an absolutely
necessary historical process of development, as a retrogression ‘below
the savages’? Impossible! The English proletarian of 1872 is on an
infinitely higher level than the rural weaver of 1772 with his ‘hearth
and home’. Will the troglodyte with his cave, the Australian aborigine
with his clay hut, the Indian with his own hearth have ever produced a
June insurrection and a Paris commune?».
Then Engels satirizes with a delightful illustration – which one
could imagine was formed after reading today’s
Fanfani plan
the consequences of the imbecilic scheme (which was already being aired
even in America at that time, as per a letter from Marx’s daughter
Eleanor about the exorbitant sale of little houses in the suburbs to
workers) to make every industrial worker buy his own little house in
installments, and imagines a worker who, after working in various
cities, owns a fiftieth of a house in Berlin, a thirty-sixth in Hanover,
and even more complicated fractions in Switzerland and England, all so
that “eternal justice” may have no regrets.
In conclusion, «All these things which are held up to us here as
highly important questions for the working class are in reality of
essential interest only to the bourgeoisie, and in particular to the
petty bourgeoisie, and, despite Proudhon, we assert that the working
class is not called upon to look after the interests of these
classes».
Of course, at this point Engels, Lenin and those of us who are so
conservative that we have found nothing to overcome
seventy-seven-year-old positions are asked what is to be done about
housing. This is precisely the passage Lenin wanted to quote to show how
little there is in common between a utopian extremism and the coherent
positions of radical Marxism, as he says vividly about the outlook on
the future economy, «there is not even a grain of utopia in Marx».
Engels’ conclusion is this, «How is the housing question to be solved
then? In present‑day society just as any other social question is
solved: by the gradual economic adjustment of supply and demand, a
solution which ever reproduces the question itself anew and therefore is
no solution. How a social revolution would solve this question depends
not only on the circumstances which would exist in each case, but is
also connected with still more far‑reaching questions, among which one
of the most fundamental is the abolition of the antithesis between town
and country. As it is not our task to create utopian systems for the
arrangement of the future society, it would be more than idle to go into
the question here. But one thing is certain: there are already in
existence sufficient buildings for dwellings in the big towns to remedy
immediately any real ‘housing shortage’, given rational utilization of
them. This can naturally only take place by the expropriation of the
present owners and by quartering in their houses the homeless or those
workers excessively overcrowded in their former houses. Immediately the
proletariat has conquered political power such a measure dictated in the
public interests will be just as easy to carry out as other
expropriations and billetings are by the existing State».
Lenin illustrates that this example shows a formal analogy between
certain functions of the current bourgeois State and those that the
dictatorship of the proletariat will exercise.
But one thing is very remarkable. The war legislation of the
bourgeois States went as far as the limitation and freezing of rents,
the prohibition of the expulsion of tenants, just as in given cases the
present legal mechanism provides for the expropriation against
compensation of private buildings, for purposes of public utility. Marx
at another point notes that the law of expropriation provides for
compensation of the market value to the owner, but the tenant who has
been driven to the street by the great modern urban renovations is not
compensated for anything and is also subjected to transportation
expenses, to the payment of higher rents, in addition to the very modern
extortion of the so‑called down payment for the new house, if he is so
lucky as to find it. Moreover, during military operations the occupation
of apartments for war‑related uses or related services is now
permitted.
The measure envisaged by Engels to compensate for the social disease
of overcrowding, however, is radical and utterly original in comparison
with all reformist plans seen so far of changes in legal ownership and
the creation of new minuscule owners. It is a
revision
of
housing
use
. The dreaded post‑war housing commissioners could
put whoever they liked into available houses, but they had no power to
enforce cohabitation in apartments that were too large, and to criticize
the fact that a wealthy family had − by way of ownership or lease it
matters little − five rooms per individual in cities where the poor
occupy five to one room. Here is what will truly be a
despotic
intervention
, which will deal a terrible blow to the private
guarantee and security that has hitherto existed (words of the
Manifesto
) and which will make the revolutionary violation of
the sanctity of the hearth and home scream bloody murder!
The redistribution of the use of houses among the inhabitants of the
city is therefore envisaged as an immediate revolutionary measure, while
the de‑crowding of congested cities remains a further prospect.
What will not fail to astonish many who believe themselves to be
Marxists, however, is Engels’ economic concept that the use of the house
will not be immediately free, throughout that stage which Marx calls the
first stage of economic communism and on which Lenin in turn lingers
with reference to the famous letter to Bracke on the Gotha program. Here
is the other passage from Engels: «For the rest, it must be pointed out
that the “actual seizure” of all the instruments of labor, the seizure
of industry as a whole by the working people, is the exact contrary of
the Proudhonist theory of ‘gradual redemption’. Under the latter the
individual worker becomes the owner of the dwelling, the peasant farm,
the instruments of labor; under the former the “working people” remain
the collective owners of the houses, factories and instruments of labor
and would hardly permit their use, at least in a transitional period, by
individuals or associations
without compensation for the cost
Just as the abolition of property in land is not the abolition of ground
rent, but its transfer, although in a modified form, to society. The
actual seizure of all the instruments of labor by the working people
therefore does not at all exclude
the retention of the rent
relations
».
Only in the higher stage of communism, in which consumer goods and
various services will not be remunerated with money, will rent also
disappear, with a general organization also providing for the
maintenance and renovation of housing for all.
One can well see the profound contrast between such a clear
delineation and the
progressive
programs of the
people’s
democracies
, all of which consist of promising fragmentation of
land rents. Where, at the end of the day, there’s not to be shared the
hundredth part of what the enterprises make off with, and not the
thousandth part of what the mad disorder of production annihilates.
* * *
The part of the gross income of the house that does not correspond to
inevitable expenses, without which one would be deprived within a
certain period of time of habitable dwellings, and which can be
considered land annuity of the soil, a function of privilege over the
soil, even if this is, as we said, physically unproductive of fruits,
belongs, says Proudhon himself, to society, and that’s fine. This,
Engels replies, means the abolition of private ownership over land, an
argument that “would take us very far”.
Engels evidently meant that undoubtedly with the proletarian
revolution and the subsequent nationalization of the land rent all
private ownership of land is abolished, yet for urban land it is not to
be ruled out that such a “reform” could be done
first
by the
bourgeois State itself. This would be a more serious matter than
“redemption” by the individual tenant.
Indeed, we see that today not a few urban planners, certainly not of
the Marxist school, are proposing the “State ownership of urban areas”.
This would be by the State or municipal authority in large cities, after
full compensation to current owners, of course. These urban planners in
fact start from the phenomenon of the very rapid increase in the value
of land for building, in ever‑widening rings encircling large cities,
hence the apparent absurdity noted by Engels that it may be convenient
to tear down a good building in order to speculate on the land. This
makes urban reclamation and redevelopment very expensive and causes
capital to shy away from it. Now even a good bourgeois advocate of the
hereditary principle can say that this enormous reward, sometimes
realized in much less time than a generation, is not the accumulation of
wealth from father to son but is manifestly the passive result of a
series of social facts. All the land in the city would thus be off the
market; the municipality would sort it into the appropriate stages among
streets, squares, public buildings and dwelling houses; the construction
of these may be given in “concession” for a term of several years, after
which they revert to the municipal body.
It is clear that such a plan, while by no means precluding the
payment of rents by citizens, would not be revolutionary at all and
would not undermine capitalist social principles.
But can bourgeois society overcome the problems of urbanism with
these and other plans? Current urban science feeds on
technical-architectural exercises and forgets that the foundation of
this discipline is historical and social in nature.
Powerless to react to the fact of the concentration of an increasing
number of inhabitants on a minimal space, the urbanism of Le Corbusier
and others who pass for highly advanced pushes buildings to dizzying
heights and an absurd number of floors, fantastic vertical cities rising
to unnatural atmospheres, deploying metal structures that have
transformed the technology and consequently the aesthetics of buildings.
But this trend appears “futuristic” only insofar as it does not know how
to question whether the best direction of collective life and the forms
it will take in the future correspond to this ghastly crowding of people
thrust into an increasingly frenzied, sick and absurd life.
In the second of his articles Engels poses the theme precisely: how
the bourgeoisie solves the housing question; and he refutes the
hypocritically philanthropic bourgeois literature about unhealthy and
overcrowded neighborhoods in modern metropolitan areas. The petty
bourgeoisie is directly interested in the issue, and that point has been
elucidated enough. But it is also affected, Engels says, by the big
bourgeoisie. First, the dangers of infectious epidemics tend to spread
from the slums to these genteel folk. The bourgeois ideal, which in town
planning they call
zoning
, consists in a good discrimination
between working-class and rich houses; but in the old cities there are
still traces of the feudal organization that intermingled palaces and
cottages, nobles, commoners and serfs. «Capitalist rule cannot allow
itself the pleasure of creating epidemic diseases among the working
class with impunity». Let those who have depicted an old Engels as
inclined to soften class enmities take note of this lively quip.
A second point concerns the political policing of cities and the
suppression of armed insurrections, which until the second half of the
nineteenth century had their day in the narrow, winding streets of
capital cities. Engels sees a class motive in the realization of large,
wide, straight streets along which machine gun and artillery could wipe
out insurgents. The later experience, if it confirms that the center of
any insurrectionary effort is the conquest of large capitals and
industrial cities, also shows that illegal armed guerrilla formations
fare better and longer in the rugged countryside. A good technical
example is given by Giuliano’s forces [a famous Sicilian bandit of the
time], in that they must be held not to be an advance outpost of distant
staffs of regular forces.
Thirdly, Engels illustrates the great capitalist speculative ventures
supported by governments under the double aspect of building beehives to
house workers near colossal factories, which tends to turn the free wage
earner into a kind of “feudal slave of capital”; and of the
reconstruction and transformation of the streets in central districts in
large cities, citing several times the classic example of the
Haussmann
method with the great
curée
of the Second
Empire, which created the Parisian boulevards in a speculative orgy. All
other nations have offered striking examples of this.
The economic basis of these urban upheavals, examined in State
financing, in the supposed self‑help of workers, attacking their wages
in private enterprise, leads the author to conclude that the driving
force and outcome of it all is the social and political consolidation of
capitalism.
The fundamental Marxist theses on the urban real estate question are
thus summarized by Engels himself in five points of his rebuttal to the
Proudhonians:
Firstly: that the transfer of ground rent to the State is
identical with the abolition of individual property in land
Secondly: that the gradual redemption of the rented dwelling and
the transfer of property in the dwelling to the tenants does not at all
affect the capitalist mode of production
Thirdly: that with the present development of large-scale
industry and towns, this proposal is as absurd as it is reactionary, and
that the reintroduction of ownership of his dwelling by each individual
would be a step backward
Fourthly: that the compulsory reduction of the rate of interest
on capital would by no means attack the capitalist Mode of production,
and that, on the contrary, as the usury laws prove, the idea is as old
as it is impossible
Fifthly: that the abolition of interest on capital by no means
abolishes the payment of rent for houses
With respect then to the direction of big capitalism and the urban
planners in its service with regard to the unfolding of the life of
urban organisms and with regard to the scarcity of housing, here are in
two other points, taken from the text, which are Marxist theses:
Sixthly: A society in which the great working mass is obliged to
turn exclusively to wage labor in order to procure the means of living –
in which the house owner, in his capacity as capitalist has not only the
right, but, in view of the competition, to a certain extent also the
duty of ruthlessly making as much out of his property in house rent as
he possibly can – cannot exist without a shortage of housing. In such a
society the housing shortage is no accident, it is a necessary
institution and can only be removed when the whole social order that
gives rise to it is undermined from the foundations
Seventhly:
Every bourgeois solution of the housing
question comes to grief because of the antithesis between town and
country. Capitalist society far from being able to remove this
antithesis can only exacerbate it more and more. Wanting to solve the
housing question while wanting to maintain modern cities is nonsense.
But these will only be removed by the abolition of the capitalist mode
of production, by the appropriation for the working class of all the
means of life and labor
* * *
Deserving of a separate note are the masterpieces of Italy’s fascist
and fascistoid public administration on the subject of rent freezes and
housing reconstruction, and the corresponding attitudes of dirty
demagoguery on the part of the movements that, under the pretense of
representing it, shame the working class and its great traditions.
Every day we have seen electoral speculations and charlatanry grafted
onto the frequently tragic business of
factory
and
land
occupation.
We have not yet seen experimentation with the invasion and occupation
of homes. The reason is, among other things, that not only the
businesspeople of the super-bourgeoisie, and no more the ghosts of
barons, but also too many fresh demagogues and members of the elite, on
either side of the Iron Curtain, would be disturbed in their standard of
living as parasites.
Note: Theses Related to Chapters 1‑6
1. CLASS REVOLUTIONS
In social revolutions a class takes away the power from the one
which already held it whenever the collision between the old property
relations and the new forces of production leads to the shattering of
the former
2. THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION
The bourgeois revolution, when technical discoveries had imposed
large-scale production and mechanized industry, abolished the privileges
of the feudal proprietors over the personal work of serfs as well as the
corporate constraints on manual labor, expropriated in large measure
artisans and small peasants, stripping them of their land, of their
instruments of labor and of the products of their labor, in order to
transform them, like the serfs, into waged proletarians
3. THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION
The class of wage laborers struggles against the bourgeoisie to
abolish, along with the private ownership of land and production
facilities, the private ownership of the products of agriculture and
industry, suppressing the forms of production by companies and
commercial and monetary distribution
4. THE OWNERSHIP OF AGRARIAN SOIL
In place of the communal management of agricultural land and of
its distribution in feudal constituencies, the bourgeois revolution
established the free trade in land, making it, like that of the
industrial and commercial companies, a bourgeois possession acquired not
by birth but with money
Note. The alleged feudalism of the Mezzogiorno
The bourgeois order in the agriculture, like everywhere else in
Italy, is fully accomplished in the South. The alleged need for a
struggle against the baronial and feudal privileges constitutes a total
deviation from the struggle of the proletarian class against the regime
and bourgeois State of Rome
5. BOURGEOIS PROPERTY LAW
The legal discipline applied by the bourgeoisie to the purchase
and possession of land, with feudal bonds abolished, was taken from
Roman law, governing small peasant property and large bourgeois landed
property with the same formal rules
Note. Agrarian reform in Italy
The problems of Italian agriculture are not soluble by legal
reforms of the titular distribution of possessions, but only by the
revolutionary struggle to overthrow the national power of the
bourgeoisie, to eliminate the domination of capital over agriculture and
the pulverization of the land, a miserable form of exploitation of those
who work on it
6. URBAN PROPERTY
The property of the soil and of urban buildings has been
subjected to market discipline and private ownership in the capitalist
period
The concentration of the poor into cramped spaces is a condition
of capitalist accumulation; the expensiveness and lack of housing and
the excessive crowding therein are a characteristic of the bourgeois
epoch
The attribution of housing as property to the single tenant, the
suppression or reduction of rent, or even the nationalization of the
land and buildings, does not constitute a program corresponding to the
interests of the working class
The proletarian revolution will immediately begin a new
redistribution of housing for use, with the subsequent aim of
decongesting the large urban centers via a fundamental overturn of
relationship between city and country
Note. The housing question in Italy
The policy of freezing rents and plans to remedy unemployment by
building housing are reformist abortions and demagogic resources of a
beaten and vassal bourgeoisie such as the Italian bourgeoisie. They
confirm the subjection of the public administration to capitalism and to
its speculative requirements, and the absurdity of the implementation of
rational planning within mercantile economies, based on the profit of
enterprise
Note to Chapter 6: The Real Estate Problem in Italy
Like any regime at the approach and outbreak of war, Italy’s
all‑powerful, super-State fascism took to wielding all the levers of its
power to arrest the general rise in prices and the corresponding
depreciation of money. We are not concerned here with the issue that the
general rise in prices and monetary inflation are aligned with the
interests of the business class, its State and its government, and that
only reasons of conservative social policy and demagoguery inspire the
legislative arsenal of imperium to curb the rise.
The price freeze laws launched in 1940 covered everything: products
of land and industry, wages, salaries and remunerations, and ongoing
contracts the State had for works and supplies with the most diverse
enterprises.
Among the most interesting were the measures directed at freezing the
rents of both rural and urban real estate. The first relationship is
less simple: the tenant of arable land does not merely rent a site on
which he acquires the right to sojourn and reside, as would be the case
if it were a
jardin de délices
, but a real instrument of
production to which he applies his own labor or that of his salaried
employees, in order to draw from it fruits and products realizable in
money on the market. Elsewhere we have alluded to the foolish confusion
between the social and political scope of the struggle to compress the
agrarian tenancy, and the at first sight merciless “landowner income”,
depending on whether the beneficiary of the lesser paid rent is a parcel
laborer, a dirty fat bourgeois settler, or even a capitalist
entrepreneur in agricultural industry, who flays laborers and sometimes
subtenant laborers.
The case of urban real estate, and to be more exact the urban home,
because of its simplicity, lends itself in a crystalline way to the
proof of fundamental theses of Marxist economics.
It constitutes the only case in which the freeze was effective and
successful. Before we wonder whether this success corresponded to the
interests of the working class, as it appears at first glance and as it
is convenient to say when churning out agitprops by the dozen, we shall
note how it demonstrates, because of the relative narrowness of the
sector, along with the rightness of Marxist concepts, the inconsistency
and paucity of the controlling and planning capacities of the modern
State in the economic field, even where it shows itself to be solid as
concerns its political and police control.
While in all fields of agrarian and industrial labor what matters is
less, as we are going to show in these notes, the pompous proprietary
title to places and facilities than the mastery and possession of
products, the leased house produces nothing movable that can be carried
or sold, but only offers the convenience, the servitude, the use of it
as a shelter and living room.
The State can dictate, and already in this it has taken a step that
is a “theoretical” defeat of capitalist economics, that a product, such
as a hat, not be sold for more than a hundred liras. But by its very
historical and social nature, the present State cannot force one, two, a
thousand hats to be sold at a hundred liras if the producer and owner
does not bring them to the market of his own free will. The State, it is
said, can register and requisition all hats wherever they are found. In
practice there arises the difficulty of unearthing the hats and if they
are to be taken away, by paying for them all, albeit at a hundred liras.
That is why the economic fact known by all is that as soon as the price
of hats is frozen, capped and fixed by imperium, they disappear from
circulation and are hoarded not to be sold except secretly, at a price
increased still further by a fee to cover, for the seller, the risk of
fines and prison.
The buyer, therefore, is subjected to the black or illegal market
unless he wants to go without a hat. Many heads today go without a hat,
and many wander empty, especially those of the experts in political
economy; but it’s the stomachs that cannot go empty, as the legs would
fail: that’s why nothing could prevent the rise in prices, not only for
hats but also for foodstuffs and necessities.
Now, the house comes to the tenant from the landlord not brick by
brick, but all together as soon as the contract has run its course: the
same landlord cannot set foot in it without the tenant’s permission.
While in every other market sector, the seller is the price’s
arbitrator, as they can always say impassively: “Well, if you don’t like
the price, leave me the merchandise”, for houses, the arbitrator, once
inside, is the buyer who pays. Normally, if they don’t pay the
subsequent rents after the first one or the ones paid at the time of the
contract, or if they pay less, the landlord must resort to a long and
expensive legal eviction procedure, and rarely to the recovery of unpaid
rents.
In the general case, it is the buyer who has to give in or run to
whine to the State to force a sale; in the case of housing, it is the
seller of the house service who has no other alternative than to call
the State when they are not paid.
The State thus pulled a fine stunt: tenants, oppose any demand for a
rent increase: pay the old rent and not a penny more until the war is
over, and I will take care not to let the cops to drive you out. While
industrial, commercial and financial capitalism unleashed all the claws
of the wolf and the tiger, the terrible State, whether democratic,
popular or national, boasted on the cheap about its social and moral
credit for clipping the nails of the timid kitten of urban property. It
did not go so far as to control or discriminate one jot, freezing the
rent that a poor unemployed family paid to a billionaire housing
landlord just as much as that which, by chance, a large industrial
establishment paid to occupy the only small cottage in the possession of
family of starving petty bourgeois.
As we have mentioned, it was not the modern dirigiste and planning
approach of public powers for the general interest that triumphed, but
the traditional article that summarizes all the wisdom of bourgeois law:
articolo quinto, chi tiene in mano ha vinto
(“article five
states that whoever is in possession of something wins” – the Italian
equivalent of “possession is nine‑tenths of the law”).
This measure, which came effortlessly out of Benito’s cranium, has
been inherited, defended and paraded as an easy element of success,
especially electoral, by today’s socialists and communists, while the
capitalist State on the one hand and proletarian leaders on the other,
from then to now, with an equally common indifference and impotence,
have had to witness the dizzying rise of all costs and the progressive
depression of working people’s livings standards, both during the war
and after the war: an imbalance for which the one‑off of economized
housing falls far short of plugging the painful gaps.
This policy of rent compression, or its abolition by transforming the
tenant into a small property owner, is fundamentally non‑socialist, as
we thoroughly demonstrated with reference to Engels’ classic writings.
Engels ridiculed the analogy between the relationship of a tenant to a
landlord and the relationship of a worker to an employer, drawing
magnificent lessons on Marxist economics from it. The worker exchanges
his labor power for money, while the tenant exchanges his money, in
instalments, for the use of the house. Therefore, the tenant is not an
exploited producer but a consumer, even a privileged consumer, as he
holds the object of consumption in his grasp, whereas it is typically
the seller who holds it in his grasp.
However, the threepenny agitator says: on behalf of the worker, we
(Benito and I) have prevented expensive housing from being added to the
expensive bread, expensive hats and expensive shoes, so he is less
exploited.
But a brief analysis shows that the social burden on the working
class, on whom everything weighs and cannot help but weigh, has not
diminished because of the effects of the foolish, lopsided and trap‑like
Italian legislation on rents, signed by the justice ministers Grandi,
Togliatti or Grassi.
Having cut the landowner’s annuity, it has cut
in vivo
into
the contribution for social purposes that provides for the maintenance
of the housing endowment, the result of the work of generations. This
damage is of greater volume in Italy than that of wartime bombings. In
Italy the real estate stock, especially with regard to housing, is of
very high average age and very high is the cost of maintenance: omitting
it accelerates deterioration. This should be balanced by intensified new
construction, which in a capitalist environment comes to a complete halt
because the low rent prevents a return on investment, and before that
through the general effect of the wartime economic crisis.
Thus, the housing supply available to the Italian population has not
only decreased in absolute numbers, when it should be increasing for
demographic reasons and for reasons of de‑crowding and land reclamation,
but the pace of the decrease has been exacerbated by the rent‑freeze
policy.
This means that as the number of houses has decreased and the number
of inhabitants has grown, crowding, which was already one of the worst
in Europe, has grown frighteningly, and it has especially grown to the
detriment of the poor classes, squeezed into old and unhealthy houses,
who pay less for housing, but also consume less, and often lack it
altogether.
A strange inequality having thus been created between the rent‑frozen
houses and houses free of rent, it comes about that the few new‑build
constructions can be rented at any price: with today’s cost data,
capital abstains from all those new‑builds that cannot render more than
a 2,000 lire per room per month, to put it mildly; a net income of
20,000 lire per year only remunerates a capital of 400,000 lire at 5%,
which is not enough to build the room. The end result is that all the
subsidies of the special laws go to houses for the wealthy classes, and
none go to the poor: the appearance that the proletariat pays a lower
portion of its income for the mass of houses it once occupied gives way
to the reality that, between high prices and taxes and, by living in
ratholes, workers pay in a thousand ways for the houses built for the
gentry.
In France, they noted that while between 1914 and 1948 all economic
indices grew two hundred times, that of rents grew seven times! The
working class now pays 4 percent of the wage for housing, and they
propose to bring it back to 12 percent, which does not detract from the
fact that in construction, capital delivers only one‑fifth of the normal
yield, and therefore the State has to pay four‑fifths of it for new
working-class houses. Now it is more convenient for the worker to pay
for someone else’s house at a high price than to pay at an average price
for the house built “at his own expense”! That absurd diversity in the
adjustment of economic indices carried over to the currency is
balderdash, one of the many of the capitalist regime, one more element
for the burden that economic anarchy places on the shoulders of the
workers, never proof that even in the narrowest field the modern State
wants, can or knows how to deliver “justice” or even the mitigation of
the social divides.
Today’s Italian legislation offers another masterpiece. Couldn’t they
have in some city an annual
festival
of the laws of States
around the world, as in Venice for movies? We allude to the Fanfani
laws, which perhaps even beat the material offered by the Gullo-Segni
decrees and laws on land reform.
The Fanfani laws declare that they are not aimed at real estate
reconstruction or the general solution of the housing problem in Italy,
but at obviating the problem of unemployment.
The gimmick is not despicable, since the magnitude of the housing
problem in Italy ridicules the allocation figures of the various Tupini,
Aldisio laws and so on, while certainly every extra building project
puts someone to work. But, by the same logic, even the liberators, by
dropping bombs from flying fortresses, could say according to the same
logic say: let’s contribute to working‑class employment.
However, let us see the new arsenal in relation to building
necessities. Even before the wartime damage in Italy, without renovating
houses that were too old and unhealthy, without uncrowding from the
index of 1.4 persons for each inhabited room, it was estimated that,
because of the increase in population and the natural decay of houses,
400,000 new rooms would have to be built each year. Today, with a
minimum contribution to make up for the war damage and the backlog of
construction, and again without any pretense of de‑population and
improvement, thus scarcely benefiting the poorly housed classes, at
least 600 thousand rooms per year of housing should be achieved. Cost:
at least 250 billion annually.
There is one big problem that has not yet entered the heads of
central planners, of their observers and laboratories of economic and
statistical wisdom. Not only housing is needed, but buildings of all
kinds, because aging, war damage, and the renovation backlog also impact
upon these. Each dwelling space entails two others on average for
working in, supporting various activities, trading, and entertainment:
this despite the houses of ill repute being open.
The pre‑war public economist had already concluded that the State
should step in with 20 percent non‑repayable for housing; today he can
conclude that it must step in with at least 60 percent. But for the
other rooms, which would thus be 1,200,000 annually, it was previously
assumed that they would come into being by means of private investment,
outside of public aid: today this is not the case, except in a minority
of cases, and therefore other powerful amounts of money would go into
public budgets.
Let’s stay with the houses. Against the 250 billion needed to avoid
regressing, what do all the special laws give? Maybe the tenth part, on
paper.
The Fanfani law mobilizes 15 billion annually from the State, in
addition to contributions based on the volume of wages, two‑thirds of
which are paid by the bosses, one‑third by the workers. Without getting
bogged down in calculations, these would perhaps be as much at maximum
capacity of the plan, and thus 30 billion. This is not enough for one
hundred thousand housing units annually, one‑sixth of the
minimum
needed. The problem goes beyond the possibilities of
the current regime. In practice, it remains to be seen how much of the
30 billion lire, which is essentially paid by the working class in a
broad sense, will end up not in houses but in abundant profits for
entrepreneurs, all kinds of mediators, and members of financial and
construction cliques.
And so let’s look at the figures from the perspective of the
unemployment problem as well. Capitalism and its union organizing agents
have already told the destitute unemployed: Are you hungry? Do you want
to eat? Well,
invest
Invest, shout the ECA and Cominform in chorus to the Italian State
and the Italian working class. When the poor invest, the rich
pocket.
Fanfani, a man of genius, has another formula: are you hungry? Build
your own house. The formula is so clever that it leads to a further
economy: we’ll build the house without a kitchen.
Let’s describe the Fanfani society, the City of Shadows, where
everyone is a mason. One million inhabitants of Fanfània, following the
pre‑war Italian index, need 650,000 rooms. Let’s assume a house lasts 50
years, which is already a modern rate, surpassed only in America and
aspired to in France. However, in reality, we live in houses that are
centuries old. With the rate of one house built for every 50 per year,
the Italian program of 600,000 rooms a year should be sufficient if
compared with the approximately 29 million rooms that house 45 million
Italians.
The million fanfànians therefore build 13,000 rooms each year. How
many workers are needed for this task? Assuming a room
costs
340 thousand lire, and half of that amount (170 thousand lire) is for
labor, we can calculate an average of 200 working days. This means the
employment of at most one worker annually is required for each room.
Consequently, out of the million inhabitants, only 13 thousand people
are actively working, while the other 987 thousand do not work and stay
at home. They don’t eat, but after all, nobody eats in Fanfània.
We reach the conclusion that the Fanfània construction yards,
operating at full capacity, i.e., after the first seven‑year cycle, will
employ 100 thousand workers annually to build 100 thousand rooms. Pella
defended the plan against American criticisms, stating that the
population increase alone adds 200 thousand new workers to the market
each year. The Fanfani plan, therefore, dispels neither the housing nor
the social scourge.
The best part is that while it boasts that we will finally have
houses that will in fact be occupied by workers, the calculation leads
to rent so high that a worker with current wages cannot pay it.
When you then turn to the pinnacle of worker-owned housing, apart
from the labyrinth of arrangements for reserving, assigning, sorting,
inheriting, moving house if you change jobs and residence, etc. etc.,
you see that the assignee will, for 25 years, have to pay a huge
installment. It corresponds to the cost of construction, plus the
general expenses of the Fanfani-housing management, decreased by the
value of the State contribution of 1% per year, which will be
distributed in constant installments, plus taxes, contributions and
condominium expenses. An installment of 1100 lire per month was
provisionally announced, but a computation which we omit for brevity
leads to the sure prediction of
at least
1500 lire per month
per room, and thus for a very modest worker’s house 5 or 6 thousand. In
our calculations on net wages of less than a thousand liras, not all
working days, even with the French 12%, the worker should not and could
not spend more than three thousand liras on housing, apart from the
privileged and specialized categories.
It follows that since there will always be few ready houses, and many
contributing workers, the Italian worker will pray in the morning: God
of De Gasperi, let me win at bingo, but not at the Fanfani house
lottery.
If, as with the freeze, we consider that the burden of the State is
the burden of the working class and not of the rich, well it will be
seen how the worker, if the plan takes effect, will perhaps have a house
of his own, but will have paid a good double of its market value, in
waivers, sacrifices and cuts on his real wages.
These are the miracles of State intervention in the economy, which
are all the same with the Mussolinian, Hitlerian, Rooseveltian formulas,
and with the Labour Party and “Sovietist” ones of today.
Not only so long as the State is in the hands of the capitalist
class, but so long as there are powerful capitalist States in the world,
economic planning is a chimera, a universal fanfanity. Wherever and by
whomever it is attempted, it will fail to regulate the facts of human
satisfaction and well‑being, but will instead build pedestals to
privilege, exploitation and plunder, to the “torment of labor” to which
it subjects populations.
7. - THE OWNERSHIP OF MOVABLE PROPERTY
Movable goods, which are provided through production, are not the
object of titular ownership and are usable or exchangeable at the will
of the possessor; such is the legal formulation in bourgeois
society.
In essence, with mass production, the capitalist-entrepreneur has
possession and disposition of all movable things, products, and
commodities resulting from the work in his enterprise.
The socialist demand to abolish the class monopoly of entrepreneurial
capitalists over the means of production − presented as the abolition of
titular private ownership over business premises and facilities − has
the real scope of abolishing the monopoly of individual entrepreneurs
and the capitalist class over the masses of products.
Any measure which, by limiting the rights of the owner of the
workplace, plant, or machinery, preserves the direct or indirect
monopoly of persons or firms or the class of capitalists over products
and their destination and distribution, is not socialism.
8. - INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISE
The capitalist production company has as its owner an entrepreneur
who may be an individual or a legal person (firm, company, corporation,
joint stock company, cooperative, etc.) Even in cases where the firm has
fixed premises and facilities, the real estate, or even the machinery
and equipment, may belong to an owner other than the entrepreneur.
In classical bourgeois economics, the exchange value of each
commodity is measured in human labor time, but it is argued that there
is the same market and legal equilibrium in the buying and selling of
goods and in the remuneration of labor performed by the firm’s
employees. Profit would reward the superior technical organization of
the various factors.
Marx showed, with the doctrine of surplus value, that the wage, or
price paid for labor power, is less than the value it adds to the
commodity, when all value is expressed by labor time. The profit on
capital represents the unpaid labor of workers.
Modern production technology, which requires the substitution of
social for individual activity, is imprisoned in the forms of private
enterprise in order to guarantee the extortion of surplus value. The
industrial class that takes advantage of it preserves and defends,
thanks to the political power it holds, the system of production that
ensures maximum profit and accumulation, while the socially useful and
beneficial products (both available to the working class and to all
classes) are compressed to a minimum in relation to the enormous mass of
labor efforts.
The excess and wastage of the social labor of the proletarian class,
relative to the mass of useful consumer products, gives a passive ratio
tens of times
worse than the ratio of unpaid work to paid work,
or the surplus-value ratio for the individual wage‑earner.
The following theses are therefore inadequate: socialism consists in
the payment of the full fruit of their industry − with the abolition of
surplus labor and surplus value, the exploitation of wage earners would
be abolished − any economy without surplus value is a socialist economy
− a socialist economy can be accounted for in figures of money – a
socialist economy consists in the accounting of labor time.
Socialism is the social and historical elimination of capitalism, the
system of production driven by the initiative of enterprises or the
federation of enterprises, constituted by the bourgeois class and
State.
Even before the “higher” stage, in which each will levy according to
its need, a socialist economy and accounting can be said to have been
achieved only in those sectors in which double-entry accountancy and
corporate balance sheets will not appear, and only physical units of
measurement such as units of weight, capacity, force, and mechanical
energy will be used in organizational forecasting calculations.
9. - ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN ENTERPRISES AND MONOPOLIES
The fundamental position of bourgeois economics is that the selection
of the most socially useful enterprises is ensured by free market
phenomena and the equilibrium of prices according to the supply of, and
demand for, products.
Marxism showed that, even if we accept this bourgeois fiction and
petty-bourgeois illusion of the economics of free competition,
production and exchange for a moment, the laws of accumulation and
concentration operating within it lead it to frightening crises of
overproduction, destruction of products and labor forces, abandonment of
productive plants, unemployment and widespread misery. It is through the
waves of such crises that the antagonism between the rich and powerful
capitalist class and the misery of the employed and unemployed masses is
sharpened, driven to organize as a class and rise in revolt against the
system that oppresses them.
The bourgeoisie, the ruling class, first found sufficient basis for
its unity in the political and administrative State, its “committee of
interests”, despite the pretense of elective institutions, in which it
ruled through those parties which as revolutionary oppositions had led
the anti‑feudal revolution. The force of this power was immediately
directed against the first manifestations of workers’ class
pressure.
The organization of the workers into economic trade unions moves
within the limits of the struggle to reduce the rate of surplus value;
the further organization into political parties expresses their ability
to set themselves, as a class, the goal of overthrowing the power of the
bourgeoisie, of suppressing capitalism, with the radical reduction of
the quantity of labor, the increase of consumption and general
welfare.
For its part, the antagonistic bourgeois class, unable to stop
the acceleration of capital accumulation, managed to cope with the
enormous dispersion of productive forces, the consequences of periodic
crises, the effects of workers’ organization, by adopting at a certain
point of development the forms (known from the very history of primitive
accumulation) of understandings, agreements, associations and alliances
between entrepreneurs. These at first were limited to market relations,
both in the placement of products and in the purchase of labor, with
commitments to comply with given indices by avoiding competition; then
they extended to the whole productive machinery monopolies, trusts,
cartels, syndicates of enterprises making similar products (horizontal)
or providing for successive transformations leading to given products
(vertical).
The description of such a phase of capitalism, as a confirmation of
the rightness of Marxism, which proved that «free competition gives rise
to the concentration of production, which, in turn, at a certain stage
of development, leads to monopoly», is classic in Lenin:
Imperialism
10. - FINANCE CAPITAL
The entrepreneur needs, in addition to the factory and machines,
liquid monetary capital, which he advances to buy raw materials and pay
wages, and eventually gets back by selling products. As with the factory
and plants, he may not own this capital as well. Unless the entrepreneur
or the enterprise loses ownership of the business, protected by law, he
has such capital provided by banks, against an annual rate of
interest.
The bourgeois, having reached his ideal form, now reveals himself to
be naked and without real estate or movable property, without money, and
above all without scruples. He no longer invests and risks anything of
his own, but the mass of products legally remains in his hands, and
hence the profit. He has rid himself of property, gaining many other
advantages; it is his strategic position that needs to be wrested from
him. It is a social, historical and legal position, which only falls
with the political revolution, the premise for the economic
revolution.
The bourgeois class, through the apparent separation of industrial
and financial capital, actually tightens its bonds. The dominance of
financial operations causes the big corporations to control the small
ones, and minor companies, eventually to swallow them up, in the
national and international arena.
The financial oligarchy, which concentrates immense capital in a few
hands and exports and invests it from one country to another, is an
integral part of the entrepreneurial class itself, the center of whose
activity increasingly shifts from productive technique to business
maneuvering.
On the other hand, under the joint-stock company system, the capital
of the industrial enterprise consisting of real estate, tools and cash
is titularly owned by the stockholders who take the place of any real
estate owner, machine lessor, or anticipatory bank. Lease and rental
fees and interest from advances take the form of an always modest profit
or “dividend” distributed to shareholders by the “management” i.e., the
enterprise. This is an entity in its own right, which brings share
capital to its balance sheet
liabilities
, and plunders its
creditors by various maneuvers; the true central form of accumulation.
The banking maneuver, in turn with share capital, performs this service
of plundering the small holders of money on behalf of industrial and
business groups.
The production of ultra-profits magnifies as we move away from the
figure of the industrial boss, whose technical expertise brought
socially useful innovations. Capitalism becomes more and more
parasitic
, that is, instead of earning and accumulating little
by producing a lot and enabling a lot of people to consume, it earns and
accumulates enormously by producing little and satisfying social
consumption poorly.
11. - CAPITAL AND IMPERIALIST POLITICS
In the more industrially advanced countries, the entrepreneur class
finds limits to the investment of accumulated capital set either by the
shortage of local raw materials, or by that of metropolitan labor, or by
that of consumer markets.
The conquest of foreign markets, the hiring of foreign workers, the
import of raw materials, or finally the operation of the whole
capitalist enterprise in a foreign country with local elements and
factors, are processes that cannot in the capitalist world be carried
out by pure economic means, such as the game of competition; they imply
the attempt to regulate and control selling and buying prices, and hand
over privileges and protections with State measures or interstate
conventions. Thus economic expansionism becomes open or disguised
colonialism, backed by mighty military means. It is force that decides
rivalries for the grabbing of colonies and domination over small and
weak States, whether to control the great mineral deposits, the masses
to be proletarianized, or the strata of consumers capable of absorbing
the products of capitalist industrialism. The latter are in the modern
world, however, largely made up not only of the proletarian and
capitalist consumers of the advanced countries, but also of the middle
classes such as the agrarian and artisan classes, and of the populations
of countries with economies that are not yet capitalist, forming today
like so many islands that successively emerge from a local and autarkic
economic cycle, and are as if immersed in and surrounded by the general
fabric of the international capitalist economy. In this is the difficult
general framework of the reproduction and accumulation of capital,
crises of overproduction, and saturation of the possibilities of placing
products throughout the world on the basis of mercantile and monetary
distribution. It is evident to any Marxist that the complication of such
a historical relationship between super-industrial metropoles and
backward countries, of white race and of other races, can only generate
incessant conflicts, not only between colonizers and colonized, but
especially between groups of conquering States.
Proletarian theory rejects the following theses as
counterrevolutionary: a) that we can and must curb the diffusion of
industrial technology and large organized networks of communication and
transportation in the world (residual liberalism and petty-bourgeois
liberalism); b) that it is necessary to support the colonial and
imperial enterprises of the bourgeoisie socially and politically
(social-democratic opportunism, the corruption of labor leaders and a
“proletarian aristocracy”); c) that the colonial system based on
capitalism can lead to an economic and political balance among the
imperialist powers, or to a stable single imperial center, and avoid the
progressive arms race and militarism, and the strengthening of
oppressive and repressive systems of class policing (false
internationalism and federalism among bourgeois States, based on the
simulated autonomy and self‑determination of peoples and systems of
security and prevention of “aggression”).
«Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and of monopolies, which
introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom».
«Therefore, in the realities of the capitalist system (...)
‘inter-imperialist’ (...) whether of one imperialist coalition against
another, or of a general alliance embracing
all
the imperialist
powers, are
inevitably nothing
more than a ‘truce’ in periods
between wars». (Lenin)
The only way out of world imperialism is a world revolution.
12. - THE MODERN ENTERPRISE, WITHOUT PROPERTY AND WITHOUT FINANCE: CONTRACTS AND CONCESSIONS
Every new social form, which because of the development of productive
forces tends to become generalized, first appears among the traditional
forms with “examples” and “models” of the new approach. Today we can
study the form of the
propertyless enterprise
by analyzing the
construction industry, and more generally public works, whose relative
weight in the economy tends to increase more and more.
It is convenient to eliminate the figure of the “client”, the owner
of the land or buildings on which work is being done, and who will
become the owner of the completed project, regardless of whether it is a
private individual, an entity, or the State, for the purposes of the
economic dynamics of the “general contractor”.
The enterprise, or “contractor” of the works, has these
characteristics:
It does not have its own workshop, factory, or establishment, but
on each occasion sets up the “construction site” and offices on premises
made available by the client, which even charges itself an amount for
such plant, construction sites and temporary constructions in accounting
terms.
It may have tools or even its own machines, but more often,
moving to disparate and distant locations, it either rents them or buys
and resells them on the spot, or manages to charge for their full
depreciation.
It must in theory have liquid capital to advance for raw
materials and wages, but it should be noted: a) that it obtains this
easily from the banks when it proves that it has been awarded good work
by pledging warrants; b) that in modern forms the State often finances,
advances, or obliges credit institutions to do so by means of “special
laws”; c) that the “unit prices” on the basis of which the enterprise is
paid for units of work (i.e., the real products of the industry in
question, placed and priced at the outset and without any commercial
risk, while it is eventually very easy to achieve increases in
accounts), are formed by also adding to all expenses an amount for
“interest” on the capital advanced, and only after all this the profit
of the contractor.
In this typical form there subsists enterprise, surplus value, and
profit, which is generally very high, while all ownership of real
estate, moveable tools, and even cash disappears.
When all these relationships are handled by public bodies and the
State, capitalism breathes the best oxygen, the rates of remuneration
reach the maximum; and the overspending falls indirectly on other
classes; to a small extent on the property owners and smallholders, to a
large extent on the poor and proletarian classes.
In fact, the company does not pay land tax because it has no real
estate, and taxes on the movable assets are also reimbursed to it in the
“unit price analysis” by including them in the “overhead” item.
In these ways, the entrepreneurial class pays nothing to
maintain
the State
Similar to the contract is the concession. The concessionaire
receives an area, a building, sometimes a complete facility, from the
public body: he operates it, and makes his own products and earnings. He
is obliged to carry out further works, installations, or improvements,
and pays a certain fee in money, either at once or in periodic
installments. After a certain number of years, which is always
considerable, all the property, including the new works and
transformations, will revert to the granting estate or public body, in
whose name it has always remained.
The economic calculation regarding such a relationship demonstrates
its enormous benefit to the manager, where one well considers: the real
estate taxes he does not pay – the substantial interest or annuity that
accrues to the value of the original land and installations, which he
did not have to purchase – the “depreciation” payments to compensate for
wear and tear and aging, which he does not have to set aside, because he
will hand back installations that are not new but used and exploited for
a long time.
The concession implies an almost total absence of risk on the
concessionaire’s own investment, the same high profit as contracting,
and the important feature of being able to extend to all types of
production and supply of industries even with a fixed location; the
tendency, in this form, can thus cover all economic sectors while
retaining the principle of enterprise and profit.
The modern State never actually engages in direct economic activity,
but rather, activity that is always delegated, by contracts and
concessions to capitalist groups. This is not a process by which
capitalism and the bourgeois class are pushed back from positions of
privilege; the apparent abandonment of such positions is matched by an
increase in the mass of surplus value, profit and accumulation, and in
the excess power of capital; and, for all that, social antagonisms.
The mass of accumulated industrial and financial capital at the
disposal of the entrepreneurial maneuvering of the bourgeois class is
thus much greater than it appears by adding up the individual holdings,
both of movable and immovable values, titled to the individual
capitalists and owners, and this is expressed by Marx’s fundamental
theorem, which describes the capitalist system as a fact and as social
production, ever since it asserted itself under the armor of personal
law.
Capitalism is a class monopoly, and all capital accumulates more and
more as the endowment of a ruling class, and not as that of many
individuals and firms. Having introduced this principle, Marx’s schemes
and equations on the reproduction, accumulation and circulation of
capital cease to be mysterious and incomprehensible.
13. - INTERVENTIONISM AND ECONOMIC DIRIGISM AS MANAGEMENT OF THE STATE BY CAPITAL
The ensemble of countless modern actions by which the State
apparently disciplines events and activities of economic nature in
production, exchange and consumption is wrongly considered as a
reduction and a control of the capitalist characters of present
society.
The doctrine of the abstention of the State from assuming economic
functions and implementing interventions in the production and
circulation of goods is but an ideological mask suited to the period
when capitalism had to make its way as a revolutionary force, breaking
through the circle of all social and legal obstacles that prevented it
from unfolding its productive potential.
For Marxism, the bourgeois State, even as soon as it is formed, by
guaranteeing the appropriation of goods and products by those disposing
of accumulated money, by codifying the right of individual property and
its protection, exercises an openly economic function, and does not
merely witness from the outside a supposed “natural” spontaneity of the
phenomena of the private economy. In this is the whole history of
primitive accumulation, the cradle of modern capitalism.
As the capitalist type of organization invades the social fabric and
world territories and arouses, with the concentration of wealth and the
despoliation of the middle classes, the modern class contradictions and
contrasts, raising against itself the proletarian class, formerly its
ally in the anti‑feudal struggle, the bourgeoisie increasingly
transforms the class bond between its elements from a vaunted pure
ideological, philosophical, and legal solidarity into a unity of
organization for the control of the course of social relations, and does
not hesitate openly to admit that these arise not from opinions but from
material interests.
The State then takes to the productive field, and the economic field
in general, always by the class thrust and aims of the capitalists,
undertakers of economic activities and initiators of increasingly
broad-based business.
Every socio-economic measure of the State, even when it goes so far
as to effectively impose prices of foodstuffs or commodities, wage
levels, charges to the employer for “social security” etc., etc.,
responds to a mechanism in which capital acts as the engine and the
State as the “operating” machine.
For example, the contractor of a public work or the concessionaire,
say of a railroad or electric network, is ready to pay higher wages and
social security contributions, since the same are automatically factored
into the calculation of “unit prices” or “public tariffs”. Profit, being
valued as a percentage of the total, grows, surplus value grows as
mass
and grows as
rate
, since wage earners also pay
State taxes and use railways and electricity, and the wage index always
lags behind others.
The system also increasingly encourages companies whose products and
services serve little or no purpose or foster more or less anti‑social
and malign consumption, fomenting the irrationality and anarchy of
production, as opposed to the vulgar notion that sees in the system a
principle of scientific ordering and a victory for the famous “general
interest”.
It is not a question of partial subordination of capital to the
State, but further subordination of the State to capital. And, as
greater subordination of the
individual
capitalist to the
capitalists as a whole takes place, there follows greater strength and
power of the ruling class, and greater subjection of the small
capitalist to the greatly privileged.
Economic direction by the State responds, more or less effectively in
various times and places, with waves of advances and returns, to the
multiple class needs of the bourgeoisie: averting or overcoming crises
of under- and over‑production, preventing and suppressing the rebellions
of the exploited class, coping with the frightening socio-economic
effects of wars of expansion, conquest, the struggle for world
dominance, and the profound upheaval of the periods that follow
them.
Proletarian theory does not see State interventionism as an
anticipation of socialism, justifying political support for bourgeois
reformers, and slowing down the class struggle; it considers the
political-economic bourgeois State as a more developed, aggressive and
ferocious enemy than the abstract purely legal State, and pursues its
destruction, but it does not oppose this expected modern development of
capitalism with liberal or free‑trade demands, or hybrid theories based
on the virtue of production units, autonomous from central systematic
connections, and linked in exchange by free contractual agreements
(syndicalism, the economics of factory committees).
14. - STATE CAPITALISM
A fundamental distinction in describing the modern capitalist economy
is that between property, finance, and enterprise. These three factors,
which are encountered in any productive enterprise, can have different
or unique pertinence and ownership.
Property concerns the real estate in which the establishment is
located: the land, constructions, and buildings with a real estate
character. It produces a rent which, after deducting the landowner’s
(“dominical”) expenses, gives the annuity. We can also extend this
factor to fixed machines, plants or other stable works without altering
the economic distinction, and also to mobile machines, or various tools,
with the only consideration being that the latter are subject to rapid
wear and tear and require more frequent renewal with a significant
periodic expense (amortization) as well as costly maintenance. But
qualitatively it is the same for houses and buildings and also for
agricultural land, since the thesis that there is a basic
rent
proper to the land, which provides it outside of human work, is rejected
by Marxists. So first element:
property
that produces net
income
The second element is liquid working capital: with it must be
purchased, for each cycle, raw materials, and workers’ wages, as well as
salaries, overheads of all kinds and taxes. This money may be put out by
a special lender, a private individual or bank in the general case,
which is concerned with nothing more than collecting an annual interest
at a given rate. We call that element for brevity
finance
and
its remuneration
interest
The third characteristic element is the
enterprise
. The
entrepreneur is the real organizing factor in production, who makes the
plans, chooses the purchases and remains the arbiter of the products by
trying to place them on the market at the best terms and collects all
the proceeds from sales. The product belongs to the entrepreneur. With
its proceeds all the various advances of the previous elements are paid:
rental fees, capital interest, costs of raw materials, labor, etc.
However, there remains in general a margin, which is called business
profit. So third element:
enterprise
, which produces
profit
Property has its own value, which is called assets, finance its own
value, which is called (financial) capital, and finally the enterprise
also has a distinct and alienable value deriving, as they say, if not
from secrets and patents of technical workmanship, from “accoutrement”,
“goodwill”, “customer base”, and which is considered to be related to
the “firm” or “business name”.
Let us also recall that for Marx, real estate corresponds to the
class of landowners, working and business capital to the class of
entrepreneurial capitalists. These are then subdivided into bankers or
financiers and actual entrepreneurs: Marx and Lenin fully highlight the
importance of the former on the concentration of capital and
enterprises, and the possibility of clashes of interests between the two
groups.
In order to properly understand what is meant by the expression
capitalist State and State capitalism, and by the concepts of State
ownership, nationalization and socialization, reference must be made to
the assumption by organs of the State of each of the three essential
functions previously distinguished.
It does not give rise to serious contrast, even with traditional
economists, that all land ownership could become State-owned without
thereby departing from the limits of capitalism and without the
relations between bourgeois and proletarians having to change. The
property-owning class would disappear, and these, having been
compensated in cash by the expropriating State, would invest the money
by becoming bankers or entrepreneurs.
Nationalization of land or urban areas are therefore not
anti‑capitalist reforms: for example State ownership of the subsoil has
already been implemented in Italy. The operation of companies would be
done by lease or concession, as is the case with State-owned properties,
mines, etc. (ports and docks for example).
But the State can take over not only the ownership of plant and
various items of equipment, but also that of financial capital by
organizing and absorbing private banks. This process is fully developed
in capitalist times first by reserving the printing of paper money that
is guaranteed by the State to a single bank, then by compulsory cartels
of banks and their central regulation. The State can then more or less
directly represent not only ownership but also liquid capital in a
business.
Thus we have incrementally: private ownership, private finance,
private enterprise; State ownership, private finance and enterprise;
State ownership and finance, private enterprise.
In the next and complete form, the State also owns the enterprise: it
either expropriates and compensates the private owner, or, in the case
of joint-stock companies, it buys all the shares. We then have the
State-owned company in which all the transactions involved in purchasing
materials and payment for work are made with State money and all the
proceeds from the sale of products go to the State itself. Examples in
Italy are the tobacco monopoly or the State Railways.
Such forms have been known from ancient times, and Marxism has
repeatedly warned that there is no socialist character in them. It is no
less clear that the hypothetical integral nationalization of all sectors
of the productive economy does not constitute the implementation of the
socialist demand, as vulgar opinion so often repeats.
A system in which all collective labor enterprises were nationalized
and managed by the State is called State capitalism, and it is quite
different from socialism, being one of the historical forms of
capitalism past, present and future. Does it differ from so‑called
“State socialism”? The term “State capitalism” is meant to allude to the
economic aspect of the process and the assumption that rents, profits
and earnings all pass through the State’s coffers. With the term State
socialism (always fought by Marxists and considered in many cases as
reactionary even with respect to bourgeois liberal claims against
feudalism) we are brought back to the historical aspect: the replacement
of private property by collective property would take place without the
need for class struggle or the revolutionary transfer of power, but by
legislative measures enacted by the government, in which we find the
theoretical and political negation of Marxism. There can be no State
socialism, both because the State today does not represent the social
generality but the dominant class i.e. the capitalist, and because the
State of tomorrow will, yes, represent the proletariat, but as soon as
the productive organization is socialist there will no longer be either
proletariat or State, but rather a classless and stateless society.
From the economic side, the capitalist State is perhaps the first
form from which modern industrialism emerged. The first concentration of
workers, subsistence, raw materials, and tools was not possible to any
private individual, but was only within the reach of public power:
Commune, Seigniory, Republic, Monarchy. An obvious example is the
armament of merchant ships and fleets, the basis of the formation of the
universal market, which for the Mediterranean starts from the Crusades,
for the oceans from the great geographical discoveries of the late 15th
century. This initial form can reappear as the final form of capitalism,
and this is traced in the Marxist laws of accumulation and
concentration. Gathered into powerful masses by the State center,
property, finance and the domination of the market are energies kept at
the disposal of corporate initiative and dominant capitalist
profiteering, especially with the clear purposes of its struggle against
the onslaught of the proletariat.
Thus, to establish the unbridgeable distance between State capitalism
and socialism, these two current distinctions are not enough:
(a) that the State ownership of enterprises is not total but limited
to some of them, sometimes for the purpose of enhancing the market price
for the benefit of the State body, some other times for the purpose of
avoiding excessive price increases and political-social crises;
(b) that the State managing the few or many nationalized enterprises
is nevertheless the historic State of the capitalist class, not yet
overthrown by the proletariat, and their every policy follows the
counter-revolutionary interests of the ruling class.
To these two important criteria one must add the following, which are
no less important for concluding that we are in the midst of bourgeois
capitalism:
(a) the products of the State enterprises nevertheless have the
character of commodities, that is, they are placed on the market and
available for purchase with money by the consumer;
(b) workers are nevertheless remunerated with money; therefore they
remain wage laborers;
(c) the State treats the various enterprises it manages as separate
companies and businesses, each with its own revenue and expenditure
budgets computed in currency in its relations with other State-owned
enterprises and in any other relation and requires that these budgets
lead to a surplus profit.
15. - THE FORMATION OF THE COMMUNIST ECONOMY
It is preferable to use the term communist
production
and
even better
organization
, and not communist
economy
in order not to fall into the misunderstanding of bourgeois science,
which defines as an economic fact every process that does not simply
pertain to production with human labor and consumption for human needs,
but which contains a direction and a “drive” toward the attainment of an
advantage in an exchange transaction, thus excluding what is done either
by coercion or by spontaneous sociality.
It is inaccurate to say that Marxists, after their superseding
critique of utopian systems (not because these are too fantastic but
because they are always bad copies of the capitalist order) have shied
away from concrete explanation of the characteristics of future
organization.
It is very clear that every revolutionary movement first of all
specifies to the masses the traditional forms it wants to destroy, it
now having become clear that these are pure obstacles to an improvement,
already possible with the attained resources of the technology of labor.
So, for example: abolition of slavery, of feudal serfdom. Our formula
is: abolition of wage‑labor, and we have demonstrated how it is only a
paraphrase of the abolition of private ownership of the means of
production; and also how the negatively expressed claim (Ch. III) is
more complete and includes: abolition of ownership over products, of the
commodity character of products, of money, of the market, of the
separation between companies and (it must be added) of the division of
society into classes and the State.
The abolition of the separation between companies serves as a good
reminder of how different the Marxist view of a
single
productive association is from that of a complex of autonomous
associations of groups of producers, exchanging and bargaining with each
other, and whereby groups or councils of producers serve as arbiters.
This is a producer-owner ideology and is common to the most diverse
schools we criticize (Proudhon, Bakunin, Sorel, and also: Mazzinians,
Social Christians, “Ordinovists”). Such a formula was already in the
Rule of St. Benedict, and at the time, a truly grandiose one.
Thus the “single central plan”, which tends to be worldwide, is a
characteristic element of the communist organization of work and
consumption.
Having established that a single plan of today’s State, however
centralized and extended to interstate federations and unions with
unitary discipline of production and distribution, remains entirely
capitalist, it is necessary to re‑establish the set of features that
define a social organization that is no longer capitalist.
Having disputed that the presence of State-owned enterprises
authorizes one to say that society has become socialist, or that “it is
part socialist, part capitalist”; and contrasting this evaluation of
recent economic phenomena, entirely expected, with that of the
concentration of property, finance, capital, market, parallel to the
concentration of political, military, police force of capitalism, an
expression of revolutionary antagonism, it is necessary to clearly
establish what is the path of the developmental process that allows one
to find communist organization, at a given stage.
This is not the correct thesis:
everything
is more or less
concentrated or fragmented capitalism, liberal or dictatorial,
liberalist or planned, until the violent revolution that breaks the
bourgeois political State and raises that of proletarian dictatorship.
Only from that moment, sector by sector, will we begin to see communist
organizational forms take the place of capitalist ones, and we will then
have an economy, partly capitalist partly communist, in rapid
transformation. In reality, the urgency to overcome old forms of
production does not present itself in our understanding only as an ideal
claim, but as concrete evidence that condemns the old forms and shows
the infinitely superior performance of the new ones, even before the
political revolution.
For example, slavery falls due to slave revolts, but before that, and
before the State repudiates it, it becomes apparent that businesses
based on slave labor go into crisis, and both small and medium-sized
businesses of free producers or those who hire wage earners thrive.
Feudalism falters because, in its own time, technical and mechanical
discoveries show how products were produced with less effort by early
manufactures and agrarian farms with free workers than in the artisan
trades and feudal countryside. So in the midst of feudal rule there is
already an increasing part of production that is capitalistically
established.
It must therefore be possible to find in advanced capitalism the
traces of future communistic organization, which are not in State
enterprises as such, but in specific sectors.
One can take the example of the post office, which became a State‑run
service well before the bourgeois revolution. Only the highly powerful
private lord could have a special courier on foot or horseback for each
message. The postal service on the highways arose as an industry for
transporting people and things, and only later for correspondence. But
only at first was such a service free of charge; soon it was made
payable by the addressee, who could nevertheless refuse both the parcel
and the tax. It was clear that such a service was definitely not
profitable. The invention of the postage stamp remedied everything: the
service was everywhere and always State‑run, but mercantile.
Other more complex needs and discoveries lead further. The telegraph
may likewise be charged, but not radio: it has been held that the radio
subscribers’ license fee is a tax, not a price. Listening to
non‑national radio stations is free. Radio reporting by amateurs in
cases of danger or shipwreck has become free and voluntary.
From his earliest writings in 1844 Engels, in pointing out that the
basis of competitive mercantilism is monopoly, points out the correct
theory of the classical economists: anything susceptible to
monopolization has value. Thus atmospheric air is more vital than bread,
but since it cannot be monopolized it has no
value
, and you do
not pay for it. It will then be said that
nature
provides it in
unlimited
quantity.
However, there are examples where limits cannot even be set on
man‑made services. Trauma hospitals take in those who break their legs.
But they do not reject those who as they get out, break the other leg.
Not only is the firefighting service free of charge, but it does not
make its intervention conditional on any previous rescues in the same
place or for the same person. So there are non‑mercantile and unlimited
services. For that matter, passing through public streets and drinking
at the street fountain, etc. are such, without touching here on the
issue of taxes.
It may be noted that the fireman and the nurse are paid in wages and
currency, and thus their sector is not an example of a communist
relationship.
Resorting then to the example of the army, we see a community whose
members are held to provide a certain activity, not always destructive,
and not remunerated with money but with in‑kind and to a certain degree
unlimited provisions.
There is no relationship between the commitment to activities, be
they military or civilian, of a certain unit compared to another, and
the amount of munitions in the general sense, including those supplied
through the mouth, uniforms, means of transportation and so on, that
they consume at the expense of the central “superintendency”.
Thus human activities organized in given cases without monetary
compensation are evident and possible; in others without any proportion
between subsistence consumption, and work given or produced; in others
without the requirement that, company by company, more money must come
in than goes out. On the contrary, the broader and more modern needs of
collective life can
only
be met by moving out of the mercantile
and profit criteria that could be called “budgetary criteria”. In the
struggle, for example, against natural calamities, such as epidemics,
floods, earthquakes, eruptions, not only is remuneration not demanded
from those who are saved, but the work of all valid inhabitants in the
area is sought to be mobilized by central ordnances without
remuneration, and subsistence and other provisions are distributed to
anyone and without price.
There should be no doubt that capitalist “civilization”, which after
its phase of gigantic enhancement of the productivity of human labor,
begins to function as a producer of a series of destructions, conflicts
and wars of extermination even of noncombatants, must be treated today
as an
accident
that has run over the entire earth’s surface, a
permanent disaster.
In conclusion, in the organized human activity of the present day
there are activities and “services” whose structure makes it clear that
communism is not only feasible, but necessary and historically imminent;
however, these cases are not to be sought in the bringing of productive,
industrial, or land holdings under State control, but rather in those
cases where the “mercantile equation” between labor expended and value
produced has been overcome in order to implement the superior form of
management and “physical” discipline of human and social operations,
which cannot be represented in double-entry accounting and balance sheet
profits, but are instead rationally directed according to the best
general utility through projects and calculations in which the
monetary equivalent
is no longer involved.
16. - STAGES OF TRANSFORMATION IN RUSSIA AFTER 1917
Such an economic history has not been written, and there is no data
available to create it, not even by an author or a designated
independent research organization (a term that has lost all concrete
meaning in the present phase). There is a lack of a comprehensive
outline comparable to Marx’s depiction of the birth and life of English
and European capitalism in general. To begin with, the powers of the
victorious capitalist class did not emerge in a hermetic or esoteric
manner during the early period. They had no interest in concealing the
facts of their economy, which they naively believed to be “natural” and
eternal. In England, Marxism found not only economic theories that had
reached a remarkable level, only to subsequently decline, but also an
abundance of authentic and vast materials, which is not presently
feasible for Russia to replicate.
It is imperative to address and dispel the fundamental
misunderstanding of modelism. The correct doctrine advocates that the
political revolution, being the first proletarian battlefield, can and
must be waged at the point of least historical resistance. It is of
little significance that Petrograd in 1917 was the capital of a less
developed country compared to France during the time of the Paris
Commune. There is absolutely no reason to abandon this solid ground for
revolutionary communists to mock the position of those who might ask:
“Have you been to Russia? Then you propagandize the test of the
experiment that communism, as a productive organization, can function
exceptionally well”.
Lenin said and wrote a hundred times that first of all, an isolated
model is not a serious Marxist affair, but then he emphasized that in
order to move forward with overwhelming pace in implementing socialism,
it was necessary to take Berlin, Paris, and London – which did not
happen. Therefore, it is essential to understand clearly the economic
facts and social programmatic positions
during different
periods
, vindicating the Bolsheviks’ positions from 1903 to 1917
and from 1917 to about 1923, thus demonstrating the counterrevolutionary
nature of the Russian government’s positions from that point onward,
which became increasingly severe in subsequent phases: the destruction
of the Bolshevik revolutionary group – alliance with Western capitalist
powers, starting with Germany and later including the Anglo-Americans –
and the current phase of class collaborationist propaganda on a global
scale across all countries.
1. The rise of Russian capitalism in limited areas is due to the
initiative of the feudal State and not to the powerful formation of an
indigenous bourgeoisie (1700‑1900).
2. At the stage when Russia was the only European nation not ruled by
the bourgeoisie, which prevented a spread of capitalist production over
the immense territory, it was right for the proletariat and its
revolutionary party to take on the problems of two revolutions that were
immediately welded together. Politically, it turned out Russia was the
most favorable country for the tactic of revolutionary defeatism in the
war (1900‑1917).
3. The social measures in the period immediately following the
proletarian party’s seizure of power could only be empirical and
transitory, instead of being “propaganda models”, given that the primary
tasks were to defeat the counterrevolutionary forces: a) feudal; b)
bourgeois, democratic, and those of the internal opportunists; c)
external, not by indefinitely postponing armed interventions, which
would be an illusory historical perspective, but by attacking the
bourgeois metropolises with an internal class revolution.
As Lenin described, the Russian economic landscape encompassed a
blend of various economic forms: pre‑mercantile (primitive communism,
Asiatic lordship and theocracy, land baronetcy); mercantile (industrial,
commercial, and banking capitalism, free private land ownership); and
post‑mercantile (early implementations of “war” communism, i.e., “social warfare”, such as free bread, housing, transportation in large cities,
and similar provisions). Even within this transitional framework, the
nationalization of factories, companies, banks, and agrarian estates
constituted revolutionary measures, albeit belonging to the realm of
capitalist
revolution. Similarly, the requisitions of grain
without compensation, enforced upon peasants who had rapidly evolved
from serfs to autonomous producers. History shows that the bourgeois
revolutions did similar things (1917‑1921).
4. Lenin strongly asserted all of this during the N.E.P. period.
Trotski, who shared his directives, explained that it was socialism with
capitalist accounting; indeed, it is precisely the type of accounting
that defines the economic structure. The accurate Marxist expression was
capitalism with capitalist accounting, but with records maintained by
the proletarian State. The N.E.P. allowed for a free market and trade,
free artisan and petty-bourgeois production, and free small and
medium-scale land cultivation – all mature forms ready to break through,
yet until then suppressed by the feudal-Tsarist governmental framework.
A revolutionary social valve was opened.
In Lenin’s perspective, the danger of this shift was explicitly
clarified: the formation of a capitalist class and accumulation,
inevitable within the framework of market freedom. Lenin believed that
the proletarian revolution in the West
would take place sooner
Only then could further
despotic
measures of intervention in
the Russian economy take a socialist direction (1921‑1926).
5. Once abandoned, the perspective of a political revolution in
capitalist countries, the purported theory of socialism confined to a
single country, and the central interventions of State power aimed at
suppressing the forces of small and medium-sized agrarian cultivation,
trade, and industry to prevent them from becoming political forces, are
examples of State capitalism, devoid of the slightest proletarian and
socialist character. The overall maturity of technology, which is, in a
sense, an international heritage, and thus the starting up of capitalism
and industrialism at a level of technical productivity enormously higher
than that with which it started in England, France, Germany, and
America, abbreviated the stages of concentration and accumulation.
The State that had emerged as the State of the victorious proletariat
regressed into a capitalist State and established itself – the sole path
to achieving production for large enterprises – as an employer of the
Russian industrial proletariat and a significant portion of the
agricultural proletariat. From that moment onward, its policy no longer
followed the dynamics of relations with the proletarian class in
capitalist countries, but rather focused on relations with bourgeois
States, whether in terms of alliance, war, or negotiation
6. In the situation thus originally determined the capitalist market
and corporate economy persist in full force. The challenge of finding
the physical group of individuals to replace the bourgeoisie, which did
not form spontaneously, or since it had formed during the Czarist era
was eradicated after October 1917, poses a significant difficulty only
in relation to the effects of democratic and petty bourgeois thinking –
ideologies that have poisoned the working class for decades by its
purported masters. As bourgeois firms and enterprises evolve from
personal entities to collective, anonymous, and ultimately “public”
entities, the bourgeoisie, which was never a
caste
but arose by
advocating the concept of total “virtual” equality, transforms into “a
network of spheres of interests that emerge within the scope of each
enterprise”. The individuals within this network vary greatly – they are
no longer solely owners, bankers, or shareholders, but increasingly
encompass profiteers, economic consultants,
businessmen
. One of
the notable features of economic development is that the privileged
class experiences an ever‑changing and fluctuating pool of human
resources (such as the oil king who was once an usher, and so on).
As in all historical periods, this network of interests, and of
individuals who are more or less visible, has connections with the State
bureaucracy, but it is not the bureaucracy itself; it has ties with
“circles of politicians”, but it does not belong to the political
category.
Above all, in the era of capitalism, this network is “international”,
and today there are no longer national bourgeois classes, but rather a
global bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, there still exist national States of
the world capitalist class.
The Russian State today is one of them, but with its own distinctive
historical origin. It is, in fact, the only one that emerged from two
revolutions combined in political and insurrectional triumph. It is also
the only one that has deviated from the second revolutionary task but
has not yet completed the first: to transform all of Russia into a
region of
mercantile
economy. As a result, this has had
profound implications for Asia.
The fastest route to achieve this, without which one cannot
successfully fight – nor fornicate – with other national States, is that
of a State that owns land and capital, serving as the most fertile and
vibrant breeding ground for a robust, youthful mercantilism and
“enterprisism”.
Key to the Marxist critique is that capitalism does not destroy the
productive forces by means of a very limited consumption of surplus
value, as corporate masters do, but with the destructive and bestial
competition between companies and the groups of parasites (or even
popinjays) they nourish: in the anatomy of Russian society, where it is
not very convenient to go and insert the scalpel, such a parasitic
phenomenon is not only alive and kicking, but at its most virulent.
17. - UTOPIA, SCIENCE, ACTION
The expressions of socialism (scientific) and communism (critical)
are understood by all to encompass the entirety of an interpretation of
the process of human social events, the anticipation and demand that the
future process will exhibit specific characteristics, the struggle of
the working class to attain this, and the methods employed in this
struggle.
Implicit in this is the assertion that the broad outlines of future
development can be established, while simultaneously recognizing the
need for a mobilization of forces to promote and accelerate this
development.
Although all of these aspects are distinctly present in Marxism, to
the extent that since its formulation even those who have not embraced
it must grapple with it constantly, they also occur in an albeit
non‑organic form in all previous “systems”.
Leaving aside abstruse questions, such as whether it is a common
illusion among theorists, authors, propagandists, and party militants of
all persuasions that it is worthwhile to influence social events, study
their development, and fight for them, we will note that every
manifestation of anticipation for the future, every struggle to “change
things”, presupposes a certain experience and understanding of the past
and present situations. On the other hand, every study and description
of the past and the facts around us has never been undertaken solely for
its own sake but rather to arrive, in some way, at plausible predictions
and practical innovations. It is necessary to simply note that this has
been the case for all real movements, without boarding at the outset
(i.e., metaphysically and vainly) the usual puzzles of finality or
mechanics.
Beings, men, and groups indifferent to knowing “where one was going”
or to attempting to alter the direction of motion, have always been
equally inept when it comes to the allure of coldly cognitive and
descriptive research, which merely
records
the results without
caring for anything else and without any utility for the archive. If it
were only possible to capture a photograph of reality and the world,
there would be no need to go beyond the first photograph. However, when
one gathers a series of photographs, it indicates a search for rules of
uniformity and disuniformity among the various imprinted
clichés
. And if one engages in this process, it is to somehow
anticipate what a later photograph would reveal, before even taking
it.
Human groups have indeed embarked on attempts to know the future
before constructing even rudimentary systems of understanding the nature
and historical events of the past. The first system is the hereditary
transmission of notions on how to safeguard against mishaps, dangers,
and cataclysms; the embryonic recording of contemporary and past facts
and data comes later. The chronicle emerged after the pragmatics.
Similarly, animal instinct, which manifests as an early and
quantitatively limited form of knowledge, regulates behavior concerning
future events to be avoided or facilitated. A scholar of the subject
beautifully defines instinct as “hereditary knowledge of a specific plan
of life”. Every individual who formulates and possesses
plans
is working with data from the future. All the better if we understand
the adjective
specific
as connected to “species”, implying not
a determined plan but rather a “plan for the species”.
Flying through the entire cycle, communism is the “knowledge of a
life plan for the species”. That is, for the human species.
In the utopian sense, communism sought to elaborate the future while
forgetting or neglecting the past and the present. Marxism gave the most
complete and definitive critique of utopia as a plan or dream of an
enlightened author or sect, which seemed to say: “Now that we have
arrived, the problem is solved”, as it would have been had we arrived,
with the same plan, a thousand years earlier.
According to Marxism, all systems of thought and ideas, whether
religious or philosophical, are not products of individual brains,
rather expressions, albeit formless, of the data of knowledge of a
certain social epoch ordered for the purpose of its rules of behavior.
They are not causes but products of the general historical movement. In
their succession they are found to be aged, that is, to reflect in their
formulations the ancient conditions, and in other cases they are found
to be anticipatory, that is, to be the result of the decomposition of
those old forms and their contrasts, so that they express the future.
Thus in the time of slavery the claim before law and custom that one man
was not to be the property of another took the mysterious form of the
equality of souls before the one god. But this does not happen because
the god has decided to reveal himself, but because of the decomposition
and non‑convenience of slave production: Christians will apply it
against blacks when suitable conditions reappear, such as abundant free
land to a few occupiers, as a result of geographical discoveries.
Nevertheless, the theses concerning the unity of God and the
immortality of the soul are not randomly formulated; rather, they
express, in different words, the imminent era when every worker will be
personally free. For believers, ideologists, and jurists, this
represents a triumph for the
human person
. For us, it is a
triumph that has come at the right moment, signifying the emergence of a
new and more efficient “life plan for the species”.
Consequently, Marxism, while paying homage to the utopianism of the
18
th
century, which in turn approximately expressed a mature
condition, demonstrates its weakness in its failure to link the end of
the economy of private ownership, not only of man upon man, but also of
man upon man’s labor, to the accomplished evolution of a given social
form, capitalism.
Utopianism is an anticipation of the future; scientific communism
calls it to consider the knowledge of the past and the present because
an arbitrary and romantic anticipation of the future is insufficient.
Instead, a scientific forecast is needed – a specific forecast made
possible by the full maturation of the capitalist form of production.
This forecast is closely connected to the characteristics of this form,
its development, and the peculiar antagonisms that arise within it.
While in old doctrines, myth and mystery were expressions of the
description of past and current events, and while the modern philosophy
of the capitalist class boasts (with ever decreasing confidence) that it
has eliminated such fantastic elements from the science of the facts
recorded so far, the new proletarian doctrine constructs the lines of
the science of the future, entirely free from arbitrary and passionate
elements.
If a general knowledge of nature and history, part of it, is
possible, it includes, inseparable from itself, the search for the
future: any well‑founded polemic against Marxism can only stand on the
ground of the negation of human knowledge and science.
Here, it is not a matter of providing a complete picture of such a
problem, but of eliminating the distortions that claim to admit of
Marxism the incomparable original analysis of human history and the
present capitalist social structure, and then, through the
extinguishment of fervor, arrive at skeptical, agnostic, and flexible
positions regarding the precise
itinerary
of the revolutionary
future, and the possibility of having
essentially
known and
outlined it ever since the proletarian class has been effectively
present in society in efficient masses.
Having settled accounts with the prophets, the same was done with the
Heroes, whom the old conceptions of history placed at the summit, both
in the form of captains of arms and as legislators and organizers of
peoples and States. Also here, it is needless to say that, like every
prophetic system, every feat of conquerors or political innovators is
thoroughly examined by Marxist criticism as an expression or result that
translates profound effects of the “life plans” that come into
existence, develop over time, and assert their influence.
Therefore, the new doctrine cannot be tied to a system of tables or
texts, assumed to be definitive in the whole battle, nor can it rely on
the success of a leader or a vanguard of fighters, rich in will and
strength. Prophesying a future or wanting to realize a future are
inadequate positions for communists. All this is replaced by the history
of a class struggle considered as a unitary course, where only a segment
has been completed at any given moment, and the rest still awaits. The
data of the future course are equally fundamental and indispensable as
those of the past course. For that matter, errors and diversions are
equally possible in the evaluation of the previous movement, and in that
of the successive movement: and all polemics of parties and party stand
to prove it.
Consequently, the problem of party practice is not to know the
future, which would be little, nor to want the future, which would be
too much, but to “preserve the line of the future of one’s class”.
It is evident that if the movement does not possess the ability to
study, investigate, and comprehend this line, it will be incapable of
preserving it. Equally obvious is that if the movement is unable to
distinguish between the will of constituted and enemy classes and its
own, the game is lost, the line is misplaced. The communist movement is
not a matter of pure doctrine; it is not a matter of pure will: yet the
lack of doctrine paralyzes it, and the lack of will paralyzes it. And
lack implies absorption of
others’
doctrines, of
others’
wills.
Those who scoff at the possibility of tracing a great historical
itinerary by the midpoint of the course (as would be the case for those
who, having descended the river from the source to the middle, would
take to drawing the map of it to the ocean; an induction not
inaccessible to physical geographic science), are inclined either to
exclude all possibility of the influence of individuals and groups on
history, or to exaggerate it, so far as, however, it concerns an
immediate succession.
Voluntarist errors were in the two great revisionist deviations of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reformism, claiming
to preserve classical doctrine as the study of history and economics,
rejected as illusory the outline of the future course and was reduced to
working on detailed and short-lived purposes, to be renewed from time to
time. Its motto was, “The movement is everything, the final goal is
nothing”; and it is equivalent to saying, “principles are nothing,
movement is everything”. In such an address, doubt arises between the
end of a close working-class interest and that of its chiefs and
leaders: both can be found opposed to the distant and general class end.
This here is opportunism. The other school, syndicalism, rejected
determinism, assuming to accept the doctrine of economic class struggle
and the violent, but non‑political, method, which closed it out of the
struggle for the overarching class purpose. Reformism and syndicalism
converged in social-patriotic degeneration.
An entirely parallel degeneration is that of the Third International
and the Russian party in the second quarter of the present century:
abandonment of the line of the overall class objective in order to
follow proximate, local results, changing from phase to phase.
The question of communist action, strategy, tactics or praxis is the
same question, namely that of
preserving the line
for the
future of the class, and this question is posed from the moment the
proletarian class socially appears. Whether there are different
solutions from time to time and from country to country is not disputed,
but in this same succession of solutions there must be continuity and a
rule
, the abandonment of which makes the movement wander. In
this light, questions of organization, of discipline, come out of the
constitutionalism of legal formulas, which connect base, cadres, and
center, to commit the leading center not to abandon the “rule” of
action, without which there is no party and much less a revolutionary
party.
Thus, while no one disputes that in nations where the bourgeoisie had
yet to overthrow feudal power the proletariat could not fail to join
that struggle, the Marxist left wanted it to be made the rule that in
countries with capitalist power no alliances could be made with factions
of the bourgeoisie. In Lenin’s time, proletarian critique and politics
assimilated to these factions the parties that, while saying they were
workers’ parties, rejected the postulate of violent action and
proletarian dictatorship.
The left in the Third International had to fight, remaining beaten
organizationally, as a new gradualist and possibilist form, that of the
united front with the social democratic parties: theoretically it had a
winning game in the prediction that this method would lead to
collaboration with capitalist and imperialist parties, classes and
States, and to the destruction of the revolutionary movement.
This is enough to show that the revolutionary party and the
International can only have a rigid system of rules of practice, which
the centers (and so‑called leaders) must not be allowed to transgress
under the pretext of new and unforeseen situations. Either this
construction of rules from a group of well‑founded predictions about the
development of facts is possible, and then the left was right; or it is
not, but then not only would the Marxist left be wrong, but it would be
the Marxist method that would have fallen, since it would be reduced to
a record of social meteorology and a place-by-place and day-by-day
defense of contingent interests of the working classes, a claim
insufficient to distinguish itself from any other political party in
action today in any country.
The guarantee against the repeated, ruinous
landslides
of
the movement never lies in anything other than the historic
demonstration that the movement will rise again, not only with
established Marxist and determinist theory, but with a body of norms of
action drawn from centuries of accumulated experience and above all from
the most useful apprenticeship of failures and defeats, managing to keep
itself out of the drawbacks due to the sudden maneuvers, skills, and
political stratagems of the leaders, which if need be must be
relentlessly renewed, and put away as individuals, as soon as they
falter and fall into such degenerate praxis.
In other texts it was shown how every statutory or regulatory
resource for determining who stands on the great historical line is
illusory: until it is argued possible to summon to the supreme hypocrisy
of consultations, an exquisitely bourgeois form, the successive
historical generations of the class: the dead, the living and the
unborn!
As
theory
of the past, present and future we lay as our
basis the 1848
Manifesto
, Capital, the critical works of Marx
and Engels especially on the value of struggles for power and the Paris
Commune, and the anti‑revisionist restoration of Lenin and the
Bolsheviks at the time of World War I.
As a tactical practice one can solidly start from the
Manifesto
, noting the point that many capitalist revolutions
were yet to be accomplished, and that at that time no party called
itself a workers’ party unless it was on the ground of armed
anti‑bourgeois struggle. That later, in the course of a century,
workers’ parties arose with not only constitutional but
anti‑revolutionary programs, is not a new fact of history, but a
confirmation of the
course
of predictions that were built on
the
Manifesto
Two passages from the
Manifesto
suffice as our starting
point: «The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims,
for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but
in the movement of the present, they also represent and defend the
future of that movement».
Every present movement is for determinists a fact that cannot be
denied. But only communists add the datum of “defending the future of
the movement”, that is, of the struggling class, struggling to suppress
classes.
«Communists everywhere support every
revolutionary
movement
against the existing social and political order of things”. Two
conditions allow us to recognize revolutionary movements: they use
force, breaking with legality; and they change class power relations.
Communists “bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the
property question, no matter what its degree of development at the
time».
The property question means, in Marxist texts, the question of the
economy, the question of class:
forms of property
means
relations of production
The capitalist
revolution
in Germany, 1848 and Russia, 1917
was of interest to communists for two reasons:
first
, so that
it could initiate the immediate European proletarian revolution;
second
, so that, even in the hypothesis that the movement
stalled at the bourgeois revolution, it would shake the foundations of
feudal relations of production and unleash the irresistible initiation
of modern capitalist and mercantile forms of production and exchange, in
place of feudal slumber.
In 1848, 1917, or 1952, the existence of a party equally solid in
doctrine, organization and tactics is the only guarantee that these
two
genuine motives, reasons, goals rooted in historical
reality are not mistaken for a fictitious and ruinous
third
motive: that first and foremost, and
before
engaging in the
specific class struggle against each other, both the bourgeoisie and the
proletarians might have certain areas of shared theory and action based
on the postulates of a claimed human civilization, encompassing various
ideologies like liberalism, egalitarianism, pacifism, and
patriotism.
Whenever the movement has failed to grasp the dialectic of historical
positions, it has foundered in that same swamp.
We dealt with
Property and Capital
so that it would be well
evident that in the historical epoch we live in, after the fall of
feudalism not only in Germany, Russia and Japan, but also in China and
India, there is
only one
world historical question of Property,
and that is the question of Capital, of the death of Capital, of which
the history needs to be written in advance.
To write this history, once again theory and action, historical and
economic science and political program all proceed inseparably. And,
looking at the general end point of the movement, in time and space.
Therefore it is not only the study of the economic situation beyond
the curtain, and the social relations thereof, which, however obvious,
judges the false communism and the Russian State, but also the study and
simple observation of the active policy of such a party, of such a
State.
Within given
limits
of space and time, the thesis of a
victorious party of workers’ dictatorship, occupied in transitioning
feudal forms of property into capitalist forms, is not absurd from a
Marxist perspective. But such a party would NOT HIDE it, but rather
proclaim its own aims, as the
Manifesto
dictated; to bring
about revolution in the classical capitalist countries, holding power
and arms in its grasp until then, and then carrying out the social
transformation.
Opposition to the application of such a hypothesis to Russia today
lies in the degeneration of tactics since 1923, the policy of alliance
with States and parties of bourgeois forms of production on domestic and
international political levels, and on the military
one
of the
Second World War. There is no need for further evidence, and as
confirmation of the diagnosis, there is the overall shameful propaganda
within the ranks the working class for social and constitutional
pacifism within bourgeois countries, and for pacifism and emulation
internationally.
One cannot deny the importance of a situation of an imperialist war,
instead of involving two groups of
avowedly
capitalist States
in conflict, sees all of them on one side and, on the other side, only,
or almost only, the “crypto-capitalist” State, the heir to a proletarian
revolution; for such a situation would entail the “denunciation” of any
tactics of détente and social collaboration in the domestic politics of
all enemy States, and even the employment by the self‑styled communist
forces of means of sabotage and civil war.
The certainty that even in this hypothesis it will be a
counter-revolutionary policy, i.e. discordant with the general aim of
proletarian communism, does not derive from fraudulent economic and
social
chemisms
, but stands solidly in the established ruptures
and reversals of the course of history, and in the
conviction of
falsehood
to which are historically bound those who have presented
as a revolutionary policy the one tending to the illusory restoration of
democracy against world fascism, and present as a communist society a
banal industrial mercantilism that nevertheless sets fire to the heart
of the millenarian sleeper, Asia.
Either the phase of peace and the global market without barriers, or
that of the third world war will put Marxism to the test. If it emerges
out of it, this will be with the conquest that on the trajectory of the
great historical course, plotted as Columbus traced it towards the East
dialectically taken from the West; there are gruesome and risky
slowdowns, fearful obstacles, but the route must remain that of the day
in which the anchors were weighed, in a dazzling certainty shouted to a
hostile world.
Note:
There is no need to point out to the reader that the “summary” of the
last four chapters has been carried out in an almost total exposition of
the development of this study.
We have been induced to this not only by the urgency of the
conclusions with respect to the present world situation, but by the fact
of the serious difficulties opposing the publication of this journal. So
far it has reached readers at such intervals that we felt it necessary
to give them the presentation of the complete cycle of this work up to
its point of arrival.
If the effort to secure a better periodicity for
Prometeo
succeeds, widespread dissertations of chapters seven through seventeen
will follow.