[GM91] Working Meeting at Florence
January 29th and 30th, 2005
On January 29 and 30th party comrades found themselves back at the editorial offices of our Florence branch for another of our periodic working meetings.
It is a well-known fact, in compliance with an old ambition which goes back to the very beginnings of the communist movement, that we entrust the performance of all party functions – from the embryonic ones of today to tomorrow’s more diversified ones – to the convergent, disciplined, and ordered work of all the groups and individuals which compose its militant body. In our meetings we don’t compare new theses, we bring contributions to the collective rediscovery and defence of the old theses and redraw the line of continuity which, beyond today’s individuals, links the past of the class and party to their future.
We prefigure a party without internal conflict; which works according to a unique plan which is known to all and accepted by all, and which makes best use of all its available forces.
The ways and means and the emotional aspects of working in the party, these are no less important or separable from the results achieved through correct evaluations of living history or through appropriate slogans and watchwords. We are not talking about an aesthetic Galateo (the title of an early Italian book on etiquette) or a hypocritical ritual, but of a natural and spontaneous party arrangement which allows for greater efficiency and consistency over time.
As expressed in specific bodies of theses, we deny that the struggle between the opposed classes of society also takes place within the party (indeed we are for a “closed” party), or that there must necessarily – constitutionally – be reflected in it a battle between individuals and groups. “Here we don’t make politics” is how Karl Marx put it. This the Left has never done (not even in the 3rd International when it was fast degenerating and when, under Stalin, the presence within the party of “traitors” and those who had been “corrupted by the bourgeoisie” suddenly started to be theorised), and it was in this spirit, and with the forces we presently have at our disposal, that we conducted our meeting.
The first comrades started arriving on the Thursday morning so they could have a bit of extra time to put the finishing touches to their reports. On the Saturday morning, there was the organizational meeting in which we prescribe the terms of our various lines of study and consider what issues need further attention, as well as looking at the possibility of external interventions. Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning were dedicated to listening to the reports of the various study groups. As usual, we will give a brief summary of them here, pending their publication in full in the July issue of Comunismo.
Course of capitalism
With the help of an overhead projector, graphs and statistics were used to illustrate our regular updating of the time series which describes the economic conjuncture of capitalism. The speaker paused to consider them one at a time in order to draw out historical comparisons and similarities between one country and another. Particular attention was paid to the course of the present crisis in various countries.
Relative, then, to the period from 1937 to now, and to the ‘six countries’ of old capitalism (over the last ten years it is to these we have dedicated most attention) the speaker tried to draw up a global balance sheet of the cycle which starts, in 1937, on the eve of an economic crisis leading to the Second World War, and which continues up to a point in time, now, which, without wishing to force the analogy, bears witness to new associated phenomena of widespread economic crisis and war preparations.
We were shown, therefore, various tables, relating to industrial production (this is data which is global and more easily obtainable). In particular, one chart showed the short cycles and the other the long cycles of capitalism. As periods of the latter, delineated by peak years, the extreme points, 1937 – 1973 – 2000, divided neatly into 36 and 27 year periods respectively.
Considering the 63 year period as a whole, including a war, reconstruction and a more serious protracted senile growth, we have the series running from the slowest to the most dynamic: Great Britain (+1.6% annual average) – France (+3.1%) – USA (+3.7%) – Germany (+3.8%) – Italy (+4.0%) – Japan (+5.6%). Our economic-political assumptions are confirmed for the umpteenth time, and despite post-industrialisms and globalisations: the rate of profit of a national capitalism becomes less and less the older it is.
If we look instead at the two separate periods, we observe that in each of the six countries the rate of profit declines inexorably over time.
On the other hand, whilst the series 1937-1973 perfectly confirms the course of a rising rate of profits from the oldest to the youngest of the capitalisms, there appears a certain irregularity in the 1973 – 2000 period: the average rate of profits for the United States is slightly higher, and that of Italy is much lower that the Marxist general law would have predicted. The exceptionally favourable course of American industry in its last short cycle, coinciding with the last decade of the last century, therefore requires an explanation. To be sure, certain super-structural explanations of political and military force may have something to do with it – of advantage to the USA but of disadvantage to the Italian bourgeoisie. However there remains an element of uncertainty over our having committed ourselves to the year 2000 as the final year in the cycle. Maybe it won’t mark the closure of this long capitalist cycle after all; accounts, all accounts, remain to be settled!
History of modern Iraq
The report described events between the July 1958 revolution and the Coup d’Etat in 1963.
On July 14, whilst the radio was transmitting the Marseillaise, the insurgent troops made their assault on the royal palace. After a brief bombardment the royal guard surrendered and King Faisal II, Abd al-Ilah the hereditary prince, and various other members of the royal family were immediately executed by firing squad. With the Coup D’Etat over, the military called on the people to take to the streets. The masses responded enthusiastically to the call. Baghdad and the other Iraqi cities immediately became the theatre for enormous demonstrations and widespread looting.
The social situation in Iraq was so explosive that the new government, which represented the rising bourgeois class, found itself, from the very outset, having to settle accounts with a combative and organised urban and rural proletariat on the one hand and a powerful and concentrated class of landed proprietors on the other. It was a matter of having to decide what stance to take on agrarian reform, on what relations to maintain with the foreign oil companies, and on freedom of association of the parties and trades unions. There was also the thorny problem of Kurdish independence to consider. It was a matter of choosing between a Pan-Arabic policy, which would shortly have led to the union with Egypt and Syria, and a nationalist one, which aimed at establishing Iraq as a regional power.
The first rift in the government was precisely between the Pan-Arabic tendency, supported by the Ba’ath Party and by Colonel Arif, which required immediate union with the UAR, and the Iraqi nationalist tendency, supported by the liberals, the Stalinists, and by the Kurdish Democratic Party. The struggle spilled onto the streets during the Mosul military revolt in March 1959.
In the way the different groups lined up during the revolt there was often a high level of coincidence between economic divisions and ethnic and religious ones. But where economic divisions didn’t coincide with that of ethnicity or faith, it would be the class factor, as opposed to racial or religious factors, which prevailed. The Arab soldiers sought solidarity not with the Arab officers but with the Kurdish soldiers. The heads of the landowning Kurdish clans united with the heads of the Arab landowning clans. The long-established, wealthy Christian merchant families did not make common cause with the Christian peasants. When acting under their own initiative, the peasants, whatever their ethnicity, directed their anger against the landowners in an indiscriminate way, and without taking account of individual political positions. For their part the poor, and the workers of the Arab quarters, united with the Kurdish peasants and Aramaic Christians against the Muslim landowners.
The agrarian reform inclined towards putting land onto the market and modernising land management in such a way as to allow an evolution towards capitalist relations of production and property in the countryside. It certainly wasn’t anything to do with relieving the misery of the millions of landless peasants. Only the worse land was actually confiscated, and the costs of acquiring this confiscated land put it beyond the means of the poor peasants, who were without capital and access to credit and therefore unable to benefit from it. Instead the class of peasants with small and medium-size holdings would be reinforced by this measure.
The al-Dawa organisation (“the Call”), composed of Shiite muslims and associated with the young Alim Muhammed Baqir al-Sadr (father of the al-Sadr who would make life so difficult for the American marines), maintained that the expropriation of private property was contrary to Sharia law, and whipped up protests against the agrarian reform law; this campaign would allow the government to carry through the payment of indemnities to landed proprietors, and lead to the decision to have waqf land (i.e. the property of religious institutions) excluded from the law, thereby reducing its impact.
In November 1960, ministers close to the CP were forced to resign and the principal mass organisations of the party, the Partisans of Peace, the Youth League and the Women’s league, were closed down.
The revolution had nevertheless set the whole of Iraqi society into motion. The poor peasants started to be transformed into proletarians and to move into the cities; relations between individuals and within the family were revolutionised, and women started to free themselves from an age-old oppression. Amongst often bloody conflicts the new Iraq was transformed, in the space of a few decades, into one of the most powerful States in the area; a regional power which the imperialist diplomatic corps didn’t hesitate to propel into a terrible war with neighbouring Iran in order to reduce its economic, financial and military weight.
Origins of trade unions in Italy
There continued the detailed examination of how trade unions were organised, in Italy, under fascism. Fascism boasts of having no theory but at the same time it ‘theorises’ its relativism, its borrowing from every party of what suits it and rejection of what doesn’t. In this respect it anticipates an attitude proclaimed by the entire spectrum of parties in the post-fascist period. Perhpas the one point of reference and ‘all-absorbing’ concept is ‘the idea of the hierarchically ordered nation’.
More precisely, though, and in terms of political practice, fascism theorises first of all the ‘identification’ of the party with the state and its disappearance into it. Thus the party goes, the State remains, revealing the real relation between fascist party, and any other bourgeois party, and the State, and the necessarily subordinate relation of the party to the State. “The party is just a civil and voluntary force subject to orders from the State” (Mussolini).
And with such instruments, declaredly opportunist, even fascism finds itself having to deal with the ‘union question’.
It is true that a workers’ union, even if inspired, formed, controlled and directed by the bourgeoisie, and even if communists maintain that it isn’t worth working within and advise workers to desert it, remains a body accepted as inevitable but potentially alien to and a source of conflict within the bourgeois regime, as well as being a source of disturbance on the conceptual, and certainly the economic, planes. All those ‘mystic’ notions about the State ‘absorbing’ the Nation can neither do without, or totally endorse, the economic representation of the workers.
The speaker therefore gave ample documentation, quoting passages from speeches made at meetings of the Grand Council of Fascism, which repeatedly expressed this concern. There was thus an oscillation between cries of alarm about the dangerousness of an evolution in ‘a class’ direction even of the fascist unions, and the adoption of provisions tending toward the most strict control over its organisation, and indeed nomination of its officials. Another guarantee was correctly identified as the cohabitating within the same organisation of unions of both workers and providers of work.
One example, although a fairly isolated one, of the aforementioned impossibility of suppressing class struggle entirely, was the strike of the Lombard metal-workers in March 1925, on which occasion the fascist trade-unionists put themselves at the head of the fight for the workers demands. And fascism had no choice but to put up with the strike and defend the workers’ gains.
With the Pact of Palazzo Vidoni on October 1925, the internal commissions were abolished, but the fascist unions continued to demand recognition of their network of factory fiduciaries and their legal protection before the bosses, a right which the regime refused to concede.
Rigola, ex-reformist trade-unionist, would write at this time: “the Labour Charter has been a bold step on the path to reforms, insofar as it serves to integrate and generalise those class conquests which, given the State’s lack of interest, free trade-unionism didn’t manage to ensure, or if so only to a small number of workers”. Rigola agrees with us on the continuity of trade-unionism, from that dreamt about by the reformists, to fascist trade-unionism and on to post-fascist trade-unionism.
Russian capitalism, post 1991
In the ex-Soviet Union, the counter-revolution’s most infamous masterstroke has been in disguising as communism as a variant of capitalism, and thereby achieving the inversion of the specific aims of the working class. In the realm of economy, it has contrived to make these aims coincide with the maximum and fastest development of capitalist accumulation, in domestic politics, with the acceptance of the bourgeois principles of democracy, coexistence of the classes, and proletarian subjection to nationhood, in foreign policy, with the defence of the fatherland Russia and support for all its imperialist and bellicose undertakings.
In 1991, all the nauseating iconography of red flags and gilded hammers and sickles – which now seem so hackneyed and incredible – was ditched, revealing the reality of a capitalism which was the twin brother of its global rivals. This fact, however, hasn’t prompted an admission that the previous Russian regime was capitalist as well.
Like certain creatures which are incapable of defending themselves by other means, capitalism must conceal itself from the proletariat. Monstrous though it is, it doesn’t want to be recognised for what it is. Its external metamorphoses and the ways it reforms itself are therefore continuous: from democracy to fascism to nazism, and vice versa, from capitalism to socialism, and vice versa. Sometimes it is simply enough to alternate the governments, every one of them bourgeois, in order to divert the attention of the global proletariat: and how easy it is then to write gigantic Black Books (reference is here made to the Black Book of Communism, an anti-communist, rather over-large, pamphlet published a few years ago in many western countries), used by this side or that as the occasion demands, to keep the masses in a state of confusion.
As everybody knows, our party has made its own consistent evaluation of social events in Russia. We interpreted from a Marxist viewpoint the cycle passing from feudal-autocratic forms to the 1917 revolution directed by the Communist party; to the ensuing counter-revolution which led to the degeneration of the party, in Russia and within the International; to the extermination of the communist old guard, and thence to capitalism’s bloody primitive accumulation, under the auspices of the State, in that boundless, heterogeneous empire.
This reading of ours of the history of capitalism in Russia, which we see as linked and running in parallel to capitalism on the international level, leads to an interpretation of the so-called ‘collapse of communism’ in 1991 as the latest involutional shift of that capitalist economy, and that bourgeois State regime. In the final analysis, what underlies this crisis is the inherent weakness of Russia’s economic structure, which is efficient and modern in the large-scale industrial sector but much less so in small-scale industry, and weakest of all in the agricultural sector.
The ‘original sin’ of the Stalinist counter-revolution, also in the bourgeois sense, even if historically inevitable, lay in the overthrow of the original revolutionary alliance between the industrial proletariat and the peasantry by means of the brutal political submission of the former, and the seeking of support from, and compromise with, the latter. This compromise between Russian capital, its State, and the peasant world would generate an appalling backwardness in the countryside which has now endured for over three quarters of a century.
The low fertility, on average, of these cold lands is the main cause of this. Another is the difficult and as yet unresolved issue of access to the seas.
The political weight of the peasantry, only very slowly reaching that level of impoverishment which tends towards a concentration of land holdings, and well protected behind a barrier of auto-consumption, managed to delay by half a century those liberalising reforms which at the 20th Congress of the CPSU were nevertheless deemed necessary.
This structural weakness of capitalism in Russia has likewise been at the root of its difficulties and general awkwardness in the inter-imperialist contest – with diplomatic and military defeat of the Russian giant at the hands of its biggest rivals, America (also in decline itself) and China (which is on the up) – and also its inability to reach the ‘fusion temperature’ required to meld together the various, ancient and dissimilar nationalities imprisoned within the same old ‘prison of the people’ which the Tsar used to be reproached about.
Thus it is incumbent upon us today to document the post-1991 economic course of those countries of the ex-Soviet Union which, as current demagoguery would have it, the conquest of multi-partyism and electoral and parliamentary practices would finally free from the stranglehold of state planning, centralised control of prices, and bureaucratic intrusiveness.
Following the period of disorganisation which came after the break up of the Soviet Union, the State Statistical Office has resumed publication of its yearbooks and it is from these that we can derive the data which interests us. Obviously the new series of figures only goes back to 1992, and it is not always easy to correlate it with the ‘Soviet’ data, which refers to the much more extensive territory of the Union. Every comparison, therefore, pre-supposes this discontinuity.
At the meeting, therefore, we were able to show and comment on a considerable number of numerical tables, extracted and condensed, without further elaboration for now, from the gigantic yearbooks – a more thoroughgoing study of which we will have to postpone to a future, larger work.
We were able, nevertheless, to make a general assessment of the raw data relative to: demographics; employment of labour power and its repartition amongst the sectors of production; consumption of the populace, in terms of value and physical quantity, of foodstuffs and the availability of housing; types of enterprise, with the Russians careful to distinguish between State and private property; development of the industrial sector in general and of particular sectors of it; repartition and extension of various types of land management; quotas of agricultural production per such arrangements; technical foundations of agricultural management expressed in terms of availability of machinery and use of fertilisers; harvest trends, in total and subdivided according to type of enterprise; livestock capital, in quantity and in production, also divided into type of enterprise; railways and road networks, and volume of merchandise transported; foreign investment in the Federation per country of origin; economic relations with the countries of the “Confederation of Independent States”, the ex-USSR, in terms of investments, migratory movements, reciprocal financial and commercial exchange; price trends; the import-export structure subdivided per country of origin-destination.
The conclusions we can draw for now are as follows:
- All the data concurs in confirming, some in truly dramatic fashion, the enormity of the crisis which has shaken this great country; a rift, in terms of the figures on population and production, of no lesser degree than that provoked by the First World War and the ensuing civil war, and by the invasion during the Second World War. Certainly not since 1929-33 in the United States of America has there been such ruin and catastrophe during ‘peacetime’.
- The recovery (referring now to the 2003 data) still appears unstable twelve years after the crash, and it is lagging behind compared to the maximum levels achieved before. Thus, in 1998, industrial production in the Federation dropped to 46% of what it was in 1990 and in 2003 it is still only at 70 %. All the figures covered by the speaker (transport, consumption, etc) confirmed the extreme difficulty of recovering from the trough.
- Agriculture has responded even worse to the crisis and has effectively retreated into auto-consumption. There has been a mass slaughter of livestock: between 1993 to 2004 there was a reduction from 52 to 25 million head of cattle; pigs, from 31 to 16 million; sheep, from 51 to 17 million head… contraction of agricultural land with a severe reduction in cereal crops and pasturage, market gardening has remained stable, the only increase has been amongst the industrial crops (flax, beet, oil seed).
- “Privatised” industrial concerns now employ 52% of the labour force, as opposed to 20% in 1992. In Agriculture, production in the “agricultural organisations” (Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes) is evidently being dismantled in favour of “family firms” (for the most part) and farms belonging to “peasants and individual entrepreneurs” (in small but growing numbers). In order to measure the level of agrarian development, it should be recalled that Marxism focuses on the technical form and the type of relations of labour more than on the title deed to the land.
In response to today’s facile demagogueries, we need to recall how misleading it is to ask whether “State planning” favours capitalist development or not, even when this is with the intention of showing how capital can, and does, allow itself to be “planned” from “without”. It isn’t the State which intervenes in the economy, but the capitalist economy which intervenes in its State, and uses it according to its requirements.
About our work in the trade union field, a rail-worker comrade gave a detailed report on the reactions of rail workers and their organisations in the aftermath of the accident at Crevalcore. He referred in particular to how difficult it has been for the OrSA trade union (Organizzazione Sindacati Autonomi e di Base), seriously culpable for having abandoned the spontaneous strike called by workers immediately after the accident, to keep to the correct line.
The latter report is published in full in issue No. 310 of Il Partito Comunista.