Life of the Party: Reunion Report, Bolzano, October 1989

he Party, which normally holds three Reunions per year, held its latest one at Bolzano (North East Italy) on the weekend of 7th and 8th October 1989. After some organisational business, such as the distribution of our latest publications in Italian and English, reference was made to the progress of this work, its development as well as the content and deadlines of the Party’s press.

The work got under way on the Saturday afternoon with an analysis of the bloated state of global capitalism, a work that brings up to date the statistical tables which were commenced by the Party in 1956. It was shown that the various figures relating to the index of industrial production in these tables over the last ten years still reinforce demonstrably the laws discovered by Marxism in the genesis of capitalism. In particular, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall was dealt with at some length and was confirmed beyond any shadow of doubt in the course of the economy over more than a century, certain analogies with this phenomenon of growth drawn from the physical and biological world were described.

Next, the present state of the carving-up of industrial power between the largest Imperialists was illustrated with percentages. In fact, all those who have taken the trouble to follow our work and who don’t require facile sensationalisms, will know that we have periodically evaluated these figures with the aim of understanding the relation of forces between our enemies – their trade, their peace and their wars. Our evaluations of the past and future, and the revolution to come, rely on this basis of production and not the stale idealist opposition that causes pestilence everywhere and according to which the driving force of history has always been and always will be the opposition between tyranny and democracy, with the latest manifestations being the various anti-fascisms and anti-stalinisms.

The speaker concluded his long study by observing that currently we are presented with a phase characterized by the absence of an imperialism that has a clear hegemony over the others in the economic, military and diplomatic sense. Thus we find the U.S.A., slowly but surely, condemned to the same destiny as Great Britain which it had previously overtaken in the epoch of the Two World Wars. Today, whilst no one Imperialism is able to be the dominant one, the others just as weak, do not wish to assume the honour of being the planetary policeman of capitalist conservation. We witness then as a result of this, a marshalling of the capitalist powers with each claiming a share of the imperialist profits whilst at the same time wishing to upset the equilibrium, unstable despite themselves, that they have imposed on the world and which no less laboriously they are struggling to maintain.

The next report was a continuation of the earlier study on the economic conditions in Russia which first gave the party a substantial set of statistics relative to agricultural production. A number of tables were shown which described the availability of land and their agricultural use, the legal form under which business is carried out – divided between Sovkhoses, Kolkhozes and private concerns – and the total production in each sector along with what is produced by the different types of company, by their personnel and by each individual inhabitant/consumer. In the long cycle from 1913 to 1987 it was easy to see the progress of various phenomena such as the tillage of virgin land and its consequent settlement with the worst land being discarded. Equally the average size of the company first grew to its maximum extension and then tended to shrink to the size most appropriate to the requirements of intensive cultivation. The same can be said for the average personnel per firm. Comparisons were made regarding the amount of land worked and in the different areas of production, these were divided according to conditions of membership of the firm, with cereals and fodder counterpoised to market-gardening and products used by industry.

A separate chart dealt with livestock resources and the average amount of meat consumed.

The data as a whole, derived from official Russian sources, describes an agricultural economy in evolution with a slow but steady increase in the relative importance of the sovcos, the state firms, to the detriment of the Kolkhoz, the co-operative of the small peasant proprietors. Also production destined for the use of consumers would finally overtake the pre-revolutionary level, sidling up ever closer to the purchasing power of those poor wretches, condemned to consume, in the Western countries.

Guided by the fundamental pamphlet by Lenin on the Tax in Kind that was written to explain to the party comrades the pressing necessity of taking up positions on mercantilism and the widespread nature of small peasant production, in a Russia that was in a crisis affecting even basic food items. It was totally inconsistent to claim as they do nowadays that this pamphlet contains any programme for a post-capitalist society, or that it accepts the conjunction of Socialism and Democracy in politics, and small peasant production and state capitalism in economics.

In reality, in Russia a bourgeois class capable of taking power in the first person was lacking, but in that Russian bourgeoisie there was to be found only counter-revolution and impotence, and the Russian bourgeoisie in its small peasant incarnation was to be led by the proletariat against feudalism. Thus came about the optical illusion of the ‘bureaucracy’, the state as a broody-hen hatching out capitalism.

But in a developed capitalism the anarchy of the market imposed itself much more powerfully than any secret police force or ministerial edict as the expression of the boiling over of the rate of profit. It gives birth to the ‘black’ markets and the various mafias. Above all in the post-war period, there has been the contradiction between the permanent necessity of one sole political control to prevent the breaking up of the empire and the tumultuous and deformed capitalist growth forced to march in step with the world market and intolerant of any forecasting or planning. In these last decades of peace, economics has slowly been subduing politics.

Finally in the evening we heard the continuation of the report on the history of the workers movement in Great Britain. There were two accounts, the first on Co-operativism in its bourgeois phase, and the other in a brief but clear synthesised form was on Chartism as an expression of the party of the working-class.

We recalled firstly the earlier reports in which Co-operativism had been described as an English branch of utopianism [see this edition], in which could be detected many intuitions of Communism, as well as the need for it, in the periods leading up to scientific Marxism. But when Marx and Engels found themselves in England after the revolts of 1848-9, the co-operative movement had ceased to oppose bourgeois society and had accepted mercantilism so as to be able to co-exist with it in rejecting class struggle. Against this new-fangled utopianism that could supposedly defeat capitalism with the peaceful arms of the Co-operatives, the speaker spoke about the brilliant polemic of Ernest Jones who wrote at this time under the direction of, and in collaboration with Marx. The inconsistency of the illusory ‘three roads’ to Socialism, the same illusions peddled up to not so long ago by the same swine of today, he held to be as follows: one, the collective management of land on behalf of the workers; two, societies of workers for industrial production; three, consumer co-operatives. We can conclude that such economic programmes become substantially opposed to the principles of “true co-operation”, in fact, instead of destroying the race for profits they recreate it by turning the workers into their own exploiters. The condemnation of Marxism is a double one: on the economic terrain it denies any possibility of emancipating labour from mercantile-wage relation if not on a national scale, (in England, we are in the centre of a planetary empire) anticipating thereby one agency alone that administers and distributes all wealth; on the political terrain, Jones is final: “I have shown that it remains within the power of the very wealthy the faculty of preventing or destroying the movement of association at any moment – unless the co-operative movement is sustained by a political power”.

The synthesis of the second part on Chartism has demonstrated that Communism wasn’t in England only a question of a vanguard, but also of a mass movement.

In 1842 there was an insurrection with the working-class assuming the leadership in large areas of Northern England. The insurrection had been exactly the product of the union between the class organised in a large union and the party – at this time the Chartists.

This attempt failed because there still wasn’t a clear separation of the class from the bourgeoisie let alone a clear and complete revolutionary doctrine. There will be another insurrection in 1848 as well – the famous ‘monster’ demonstration in London,

The speaker went on to demonstrate the relations between Chartism and the first communist organisms, that is for the most part with Marx and Engels.

In the backward conditions of Germany in 1848, the emigration was such that there came to be more skilled German workers outside Germany than within it: 85,000 in Paris and similar numbers in Brussels and London. Thus, the German working class assumed an international character from its very inception. It expressed first ‘The League of Outlaws’ and then ‘The League of the Just’. Of this latter organisation Engels would write “It was the first International movement of the workers of all time”.

In 1840 the organisation was mainly in London and was influenced by Blanqui, Engels in fact would introduce the leaders of the Left of Chartism, Harney and Jones into the League.

Meanwhile, Marx had started up the Communist Correspondence Committee to put the Socialists and Communists of different countries into contact with one another in order to discuss in a scientific way the revolutionary programme. After many discussions the League came over to most of Marx’s positions. In a Conference in 1847 the League of the Just became the Communist League, and it was at this Conference that Marx and Engels were asked to write “the Communist Manifesto”, The Correspondence Committee thus became a section of the League.

The League would then break into two parts. On the one side Schapper, Willich and the Blanquists, and open the other side Marx and Engels. Thus we witness right at the birth of the Communist movement a categorical rejection of political alliances even if the numbers concerned were tiny. From that day on, Communists haven’t thought to simply add up the number of membership cards. After the dissolution of the League, Marx returned to investigating the economy, convinced of the urgency of understanding it. He would, however, continue to work with Harney and Jones. Harney published the first translation of “the manifesto” in his paper, The Red Republican, introducing the authors as “citizens Charles Marx and Frederick Engels”.

After a split on the Left of Chartism Marx continued to work with Ernest Jones for many years, writing articles in Jones’ paper The People’s Paper. Marx also attended many of the meetings called by Jones. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie had taken over the leadership of the Chartist movement. There were now a whole host of organisations: ‘The National Reform League’, the ‘People’s Charter Union’, the ‘Social Reform League’, all of which more or less wished to extend the vote to ever wider layers of the bourgeoisie. Jones himself would finally capitulate to this trend causing no little disappointment to our Marx.

Six years later the First International would form out of the remnants of earlier organisations that had tried to form an international perspective, notably ‘the International Association’. The First International was a federation of various workers movements which united in order to struggle side by side. This doesn’t contradict the rejection by Marx of some years before of alliances with parties or fractions of other classes.

We inherit two important things from Chartism, one: it demonstrated the possibility of a mass organisation of the working class contradicting the tenets of Blanquism; two: it posed the fundamental tactical problem of the working-class of whether to use force or parliament for the attainment of Socialism. This was the question debated within Chartism to which history would give its definitive reply in the insurgent Paris of 1871.

The work got under way on Sunday with an account which comprised of a series of considerations that, taking into account our classical opposition to the impotent concepts of the now fashionable ecology movements, presented again our Marxist position of dialectical relations which for us go in the material sense as follows: non-living, living, humanity, communist party, revolution, in which the revolution and the party itself are particular expressions of natural history. All societies see nature as based on itself; all societies insofar as they are a part of nature modify it, both materially and by how they understand its laws. It was no accident that the ancients maintained that the stars in the sky had their cycles upset when the city that looked up at them from below was suffering.

In the condemnation of every simplification and mechanical organicism typical of ecological idealism – a deterrent of the first order to any real conservation – we reject every abstract scheme of good nature and bad nature, in competition or collaborating, friendly or merciless. We recognise the reality of selective processes in the story of living species and in human society which reduces itself to neither of the two extremes of a pure competition or of a pure harmony of collaboration but of a complex play of both forces.

From the examination of evolution, from which neither the party nor the future communist society escape, whereby its evolutive laws exclude neither selection, competition in the technical field, in the realm of ideas, nor even of individuals. We exclude only that form of selection represented by bourgeois mercantilism, and the competition of diverse wills. Organic centralism has this significance – it is opposed to politics and democracy.

A last report continued with the study on the Marxist condemnation of the moneyed society, two chapters of which we have already published under the title of Reason and Revolution, in the last issue of Comunismo. In this third part it was affirmed, with the support of numerous quotations of Marx and our current, that it wasn’t simply money that announced the historical epoch of capitalism, as money was also accumulated in massive amounts in many ancient societies, but rather it was wage labour, and it was this indeed that is the specific form assumed by work in the capitalist mode of production. “The condition of capital is wage labour” proclaims the manifesto, “capital presupposes wage-labour and wage-labour presupposes capital: they condition each other, to generate each other in turn” wrote Marx, rather than seeing “real socialism” as involving wage- labour and capital.

Communism doesn’t take up the cudgels on behalf of wage-labour as a form opposed to private property, but considers the one as much as the other as two poles of the same relations of capitalist production. As opposed to workerists and immediatists, there isn’t within its programme a wage-earning and mercantile society without private property, but the destruction of wage-earning all together.

Communism isn’t about a just wage or an equal wage for all, nor does it mean high wages, and neither does it propose that proletarians work for themselves with a corresponding annulment of surplus value. In fact, quite the contrary, all work is surplus-value, everything goes directly to society and nothing to the individual worker or his kinsfolk. Society sees to the needs of all its members, whether they are capable or have actually performed any work. The speaker recalled Lenin’s insistence on ’communist Saturdays’ that is unpaid work that was obligatory, and performed by militants of the party in power. In such quantitatively small social experiments, there resided the only economic communism realisable in backward Russia. None of this has been encouraged by Gorbachev – in fact quite the opposite.

The reunion finished up, after having arrived at the latest agreements on organisational matters, in the general conviction of the hardness and certain difficulty of our work in these times so deaf to communist propaganda. We are convinced of the importance of this work in view of the crises, and the final disintegration of present society undermined by world economic crises and sufferings that lead to a revival of a great, purely class struggle.