Reunion Report: A Successful General Reunion of the Party in Turin, 1991

On June 1^st and 2^nd, 1991, our regular general meeting took place in Turin, the first one there for many years. Our local comrades there had obviously taken great pains to ensure that the meeting place would be in congenial surroundings and that there were good seating arrangements and a generally hospitable atmosphere. Those who attended were met on arrival at the station and were put up with comrades or sympathisers.

Attending were comrades from France, Switzerland and Britain as well as the main contingent from Italy.

On the Saturday morning, we discussed organisational and liason problems in an initial meeting. This tends to be small {without formally excluding anybody) and includes those comrades who perform most of the long-term collective work of the party. Here ongoing tasks, and new tasks, are discussed, reaffirmed and the work divided up. We also prioritise topics that will have to be covered at the next meeting and in the party press.

In the afternoon more of us were gathered and we heard the first of the reports. Almost the entire complement of our militants were gathered together along with certain long-term sympathisers, that is those who have shown that they are interested in the party not just out of idle curiosity or as something to gossip about.

A subject that we are always keen to keep alive at our conventions is the “History of the Left”; this was the theme of our first report which took off from where we had left off dealing with the German question at the last reunion. This time, the years 1931-2 were examined; or more precisely, up to January 1933, when Hindenburg on the advice of the outgoing chancellor, “social” general Von Schleicher, nominated Hitler chancellor of the Reich.

It is an indubitable fact that the Italian fraction abroad was the only political formation that understood the full import of the dramatic events taking place in Germany. It saw that the victory of the German counter-revolution would mean slavery for the national proletariat and its unconditional subjection to the rule of capital. That in itself though was only one side of the tragedy. A thousand times more serious was the fact that the fate of the international proletariat, of the revolution itself was being played out. The defeat of the German proletariat would mean the global victory of international capitalist reaction; it would enable capital to make preparations for, and launch, the next war; it would mean (and this was predicted by the Left as well) an alliance, aiming at the definitive suffocation of proletarian energies, between the two major counter-revolutionary regimes: the national socialism of Hitler and the socialist nationalism of Stalin.

“Far from breaking off with soviet Russia, there is nothing that excludes Hitler – given the highly tentative and indecisive moves thus far – from strenghtening ties with them in order to benefit German imperialism by buttressing up its defences. And as for the policy of socialism in one country, no one can predict what that will do – though we can see where it will lead in the end” (Prometeo, No. 54 – February 1933).

The anti-proletarian united front was most effective of all in Germany, The national bourgeoisie, seeing how urgently matters stood, and informed by the Italian experience, decided to get rid of the traditional bourgeois-democratic parties in order to concentrate their energy into another party; the one headed by the Austrian house-painter, until then spurned by virtually everybody. International capitalism, with democratic France and hyperdemocratic America at its head, would go along with the nazi solution to the German crisis. The chorus of enthusiasm from profane capital was bound to be, and indeed was, sanctified by the Vatican; in fact not only would an official nihil obstat be forthcoming, but also an outright benediction from future pope Pius XII.

There was also the reactionary and traitorous character of the Stalinist inspired politics of the German communist party. To demonstrate how far this was so, the speaker read a number of passages from the several contemporary articles and studies on the German situation which appeared in our fraction’s press. We saw how the German party, as well as having joined forces with nazism on more than one occasion (in a common front against the social-democratic parties), ended up hoping that Hitler would triumph – as this apparently would help stir things up and give rise to… revolution.

The so-called left opposition, thrashing about completely in the dark, was no less absurd and identified a choice between basing the proletariat’s salvation on the united front with social-democracy, or on the revolutionary potential of the stalinist party. Unable to decide, it would switch back and forth between the two.

The proletariat, then, received no clear revolutionary class directives from any quarter in Germany, and the result would be a defeat of truly tragic proportions. Indeed the dire repercussions this defeat would have on the Russian proletariat and on the working class of the entire world had been predicted already by the comrades of the Italian exile.

The next report was an in-depth examination of the economic crisis in Russia. It was based on the party position which sees this crisis not as a result of capitalist underdevelopment, or general social backwardness, but as a typical crisis of overproduction of commodities and capital with concomitant surplus labour. The report dealt in particular with the undeniable developments in animal husbandry which have taken place there in the post-war years. Statistical data relating to production and consumption per head showed how Russia now ranks alongside the older capitalist countries in this respect. It was brought to our attention that this has come about despite the enormous destruction of cattle, both in war and ’peace’, that occurred in Russia.

Data was provided on the production and consumption of milk and eggs and these too were on a par with the western countries. Currently there is much ado about the Russian prices for basic foodstuffs and commodities – even in Russia – which are seen as too high. But this is due not to the system of production, but to the system of distribution with its fixed price system. For although it redistributes some surplus-value, the mode of production based on exchange-value itself is left unharmed. The shops are empty for anyone who can’t pay, the worst-paid proletarians, but not for the bourgeoisie who buy on the black market. Some kind of ’price reform’ along Polish lines is therefore anticipated. But the problem consists, as already seen in connection with products directly of the earth, in the extremely low productivity of agricultural labour. Dramatic confirmation of this is found in the livestock sector. In Russia not only the ousted proletarian power but even big state capital has yet to ’settle accounts’ with the peasantry, dug into the kolkhozes as though they were veritable fortresses of resistance. In large measure they are protected from external competition, and can cloak their inertia within the rhetoric of phoney socialism and national planning. But the pundits of perestroika know that if they wish to ’crack’ the world market they will have to able to feed the city proletariat at lower cost, and that means they will have to storm the fortresses of ’kolkhozian socialism’ and remove yet more young workers from rural cooperativism and turn them into bona fida proletarians.

We were next informed how even in the Sovkozes the level of labour productivity is only little above that in the kolkhozes. The last statistical table expanded on the theme and showed, surprisingly, that even in the sovkhozes around half of all families possess a small livestock capital, and often of very good quality living in stalls adjacent to the house. The sovkhoz therefore falls way short of the theoretical model of the ’state factory on the land’; and the sovkhoz personnel still resemble the poor peasantry with little or no land which is forced to sell its labour on a day to day basis for a large part of the year.

Our next report was in response to the reunification of Germany, now a fait accompli. A connection was shown to exist between the assessments and predictions made by the party – in the postwar period and then during the crises of 1958 and 1959 – and the state of the world economic crisis in which East and West Germany came finally to be reincorporated. Ample citations from party texts were quoted to back this up. The speaker stressed the gravity of the recession which has hit the Eastern districts, which are easy prey for the gigantic financial pirates of Bonn. The main victim is the proletariat, paying with a rate of unemployment already running at 40%. Meanwhile wages are kept low, at 60% of the western rate just like in a colony. However, the greater ease with which reunification of the class struggle will take place in a united Germany (though the regime backed unions are doing everything to obstruct this) is, for us, the positive outcome.

During the final evening session, we were brought up to date on how the planned republication of the study we have entitled ’the Course of World Capitalism’ is progressing. The comrades involved in this work told us about the latest new and updated statistical tables that’ll be included, in particular those pertaining to the course of the steel industry in the capitalist epoch. These final modifications, which will be very important for future investigations by the party into economic matters, mean that the date of publication will be delayed and the final tome bulkier than we expected.

We then adjourned for our traditional ’nosh-up’ to a restaurant adjoining our meeting place and thereby avoided getting too dispersed and wasting too much time.

The first report of the following day continued the ongoing study on the dynamic between the party and the proletarian class struggle; a matter of considerable importance for marxism as it clearly defines the function of the party. The speaker started by referring to the transcendentalist schema, appropriate to scholasticism, characterising it as starting from preliminary concepts in order to deduce physical consequences; a logical and authoritarian hierarchy, from high to low. This was the philosophical model which would be turned on its head during the bourgeois revolution when the demoliberal schema would replace empirical experience, testable by anyone, with absolute and unchanging premisses. The inversion of the old method places the individual, and his senses, at the summit of the pyramid instead of the autocrat and revelation.

The theoretical separation still remains, however, both on the conceptual and social level. Marxism has resolved this dilemma with the reality of class struggle, and manifested itself historically in a party which is organ both of knowledge (impersonal, doctrine) and social battle against the parties of enemy classes.

The party of the proletariat, which arises before Marx with the proletariat itself, isn’t the doctrine of communism (as a theory) becoming action, but is rather a result of historical experience refining the means necessary to achieving the communism; a communism which is felt as a need. In point of fact we have always said that those who adhere to the party do not do so because they have passed exams in marxism, but because they have been propelled by their instincts to line-up on certain positions. Nowadays the bourgeoisie has even turned its back on its own ’scientific’ viewpoint, as far as human society is concerned anyway. Today the demoliberal model has triumphed everywhere, from East.to West. It is a model in which (and this is no accident) physical life is seen as least important of all. –

Next came a report on our history of the workers’ movement in the British Isles which told of the birth of the doltish and ineffective ’English socialism’ so-called, at the beginning of the century.

After a short break we reconvened and considered some diagrams and tables which clearly showed the scale of the incipient recession in the United States and the slowing up taking place in the economies of the European countries and Japan. Of particular interest was the diagram pertaining to industrial production in America. It showed a small, but nevertheless definate, rise in the otherwise downward curve on the graph which exactly corresponded to the month when the American mobilization took place in the Gulf. Unfortunately this has merely whetted the appetite for imperialist war and the war in the Gulf hasn’t yet ’cleared the shelves’; hasn’t yet got rid of the huge backlog of surplus commodities, nor has it resolved the general crisis of the capitalist system which both they and we see as bound to come to a head in the future.

The last report concerned our intervention in the breakaway unions in the schools; the COBAS, and we were given an account of discussions and struggles that have taken place over the last few months. As regards the struggles over the strike against the war, we were told how part of the school sector, and of the COBAS, would have liked to respond immediately, but due to the vacillations and sabotage of the leftists – who are ever present diverting workers’ struggles into safe channels, and who procrastinated through endless meetings – action was delayed until February 22^nd. 12% per cent of school workers participated in the strike.

Next we were told about the Italian government’s attacks against public employees; the logical outcome of the defeat of workers in the private sector over contracts. The government wants to ignore the expiry date of contracts, when they come up for renewal, also revise the system of calculating pensions, and reconsider so-called ’privatisation’, which, apart from fashionable ideological considerations, would mean withdrawing the right to strike in schools, all-out strikes without notification that is. Against these worsenings the COBAS went ahead and organised, in a highly dubious unity with two other unions not belonging one of the official Labour confederations, the strike on May 25^th with a national demonstration in Rome (dubious because one of these organisations was the result of a right-wing split in the COBAS and the other one ‘autonomous’ for reasons, we suspect, rather akin to the UDM in Britain). The federationists responded by declaring a farcical strike on the last day of the school term, which, as foreseen by the speaker, would end up being cancelled the day before on the strength of vague ministerial promises.

The reunion drew to a close in the early hours of the afternoon with discussions about our future commitments. We talked of subjects we need to cover, articles we need to publish, and when, and discussed possible dates and venues for our next reunion.