Reunion Report: Profitable work on the 3rd-4th February 1990

On the 3rd and 4th February in Florence, Italy, our small party held its working reunion. In these reunions, while shunning any of the ridiculous personal protagonism typical of the squalor of circles and sects, the party presents its activity and its researches on revolutionary science to itself and to those who follow it from outside. The historical moment does not call on us to lead great social movements, but to understand them in their catastrophic dynamic, by not losing the notion of the communist party. The latter is a fact of both will and consciousness combined: something that adversaries and deserters either know nothing of, or completely misunderstand. This activity does not require exceptional men, but a capacity to see communism, with which this monstrous and unhappy bourgeois world is pregnant.

As usual we dedicated the preceding days to welcoming the first arrivals, until Saturday morning, when the busier comrades related some results, explained their difficulties, and asked for collaboration. Plans of research in course were updated, the need for new research was raised, the realisation of publication commitments verified and their future agreed upon. In particular, the publication in English of translations on the falsified theme of Russian socialism, gathering old and recent documents in perfect continuity of our position. This is Text No. 5 of the English series, which will be presented under the title Revolution and counter-revolution in Russia: 70 years of organic Marxist evaluation. The summaries of the next issues of the party’s journals were set in working order, and confirmation given of the publication of the new Tactical Theses on Imperialist War in the party’s press. In the afternoon and on the following Sunday, after a brief introduction by the party’s Centre, we listened to the summaries of the studies commissioned.

History of the Communist Left, 1926-27

The first report referred to the history of our current in the inter-war years. In Bologna, on the evening of 31st October ’26, a pistol shot was fired at Mussolini. The fascist regime’s reaction, legal and illegal, was immediate. The one who was recognised as the would-be assassin was lynched on the spot; in all the cities and villages of Italy, Mussolini’s squads spread terror: branches of anti-fascist parties and journals were laid waste, oppositionists were arrested, beaten and murdered. All parties were declared illegal and their papers suppressed. Although the high ecclesiastical hierarchies promptly lined themselves up on the side of the Duce, the reaction did not even spare the Catholic organisations completely. It struck with all its force at the working class, and in particular at the Communist Party. The police chief gave precise instructions for the mass arrests of communists and of all parliamentary deputies belonging to the PCd’I (Communist Party of Italy).

In the course of 48 hours, hundreds of comrades – for the most part central and peripheral leaders – fell into the hands of the police. The party was taken completely by surprise, unprepared to confront such an eventuality, and this thanks precisely to that internal “reorganisation” which had been carried out for some years, under the name of “bolshevisation”. Old comrades of sound loyalty and proven abilities were forced to leave their positions of responsibility to those who replaced those qualities with “leninist suppleness”, and unconditional adherence to the struggle conducted against the Left.

However, the party had net only failed to elaborate any emergency plan, which could to a certain degree have allowed the safeguarding of the organisation and the possibility of escape of the office-holders of the party: it even came to say, during the first days of the repression, that the situation could be considered “objectively favorable to the party”, which was supposed to have immediately resumed its activity in full. A few days later, this unconsidered optimism was followed by an authentic defeatism: on the 10^th November, the few leaders of the Executive who had fled from arrest went so far as to deliberate the dissolution of the party, and its transformation into “study groups”. If it’s true that the dissolution came to be revoked, there remains the awkward fact that those who had pronounced themselves in favour of the dissolution were kept at the top of the party.

Following the repression, the party suffered an outright decimation not just from the effects of the “special laws”, but also from a series of politically fruitless and purely demonstrative actions, because the Executive held that any sacrifice would be justified. So after 1927, communist political activity could only continue abroad, thanks to the emigration. Even the leading Centre of the PCd’I was transferred to Paris, where the “foreign Office” came to be constituted. Here, taking up the Aventine themes again, it “elaborated” that tactic which, through a thousand counter-revolutionary vicissitudes, would end in full adherence to the capitalist system provided it was…anti-fascist.

In January 1927, the management of the CGL, having affirmed that the realisation of the fascist regime was also the fruit of social-democratic principles, and that the policy of fascist unionism was not unlike that of classical union reformism, dissolved the Confederation and invited proletarians to enter the Mussolinian organisations. Even on this occasion, the PCd’I did not unmask the reformist policy, which had really paved the way to fascism; nor did it call on the proletariat to reconstitute, as far as possible, an organisational network of economic defence on purely class bases. Rather, the PCd’I adopted that union policy which events themselves had clamorously defeated, finally going so far as to request the recognition of the ultra-reactionary yellow international in Amsterdam. This attitude in the union field, like that favoring an alliances with social-democratic and bourgeois parties defined as “anti-fascist” – and even with the Catholic organisations – could no longer be thought of as the passing mishaps of a communist party that was politically insufficiently equipped. On the contrary, this was a matter of a manifest democratic tactic, which had nothing to do with Marxist tradition and doctrine.

From every corner of the party, whether in Italy or in the emigration, the mass of comrades registered sharp protests against this wholesale clearance of the communist programme, which had the sole aim of obtaining admission to the club of democratic anti-fascism. Therefore the Stalinist leaders employed all their energies and resources, not to save the party or for revolutionary organisation, but with a view to inter-class collaboration. So everything in the party which still represented a call to the basic concepts of Marxism was opposed. The struggle came to be conducted inside the party and against the party.

With this goal, a ruthless campaign was organised against the Left. For years already, the leaders PCd’I had been unable to sustain a polemic against the Left (which expressed the proletarian reaction against their defeatist policy) on the basis of the communist tactics and doctrine. Besides falsifying positions of principle, the leaders had recourse to every kind of insinuation and insult, in order to obscure the Left’s criticisms from the party’s base. The principal arguments in the fight conducted by the Centrists were, at first, represented by ideological terror and scandal-mongering against the supporters of the “fraction” and the “split” in the party and the International. After 1926, the Stalinists proceeded from words to deeds, with the expulsion of all those who refused to yield to the party’s defeatism. Even if they were expelled from the party, the Left’s comrades were the only ones that carried out a lively political activity and got the approval and adherence of the emigrant proletariat. Give this fact, the stalinists had no qualms about accusing the Left of being an intermediary and tool of fascist infiltration in the heart of the working class. But it was precisely the comrades of the Fraction who were able to demonstrate how it came about that fascist provocateurs could enter the PCd’I and make a rapid career for themselves; and how these provocateurs served the stalinists in their struggle against the Left.

The Fraction, apart from the duty of fighting back against the infamous rascalities of the stalinists, always managed to avoid being drawn into sterile personal polemics; on the contrary, it continued its battle in defence of revolutionary Marxist doctrine and tactics with strength and enthusiasm.

Evaluation of the Economy and Current Events in Russia

 second report once again presented our evaluation of the economy and current events in Russia, a reading certainly not “adjusted” in the last months, years or even decades, but coherent with what has already been analysed, amply described and even explicitly foreseen by the party. The collapse of stalinism is neither the collapse of Marxism as a scientific doctrine, nor the collapse of a State dominated by the proletariat as a class. In Russia and its satellites, only the falsification of that doctrine and the lie of that class rule have fallen down; only the myth of a possible rational and social regulation of the capitalist mode of production has collapsed. It is the crisis, first of social-democratic, then fascist, then stalinist dogma, that a State or State-regulated capitalism would be something economically different from unrestrained capitalism, always and everywhere catastrophic and putrescent.

In the East – by reason of world historical maturity and the powerful shove given by the October revolution, and notwithstanding the following counter-revolution – the parliamentary-democratic and free-trade phase has been skipped over. In fact, this form of bourgeois government is not at all perfect and eternal, but characteristic of societies not yet equipped with big industry and finance. Capital’s dictatorship in Russia has directly adopted one-party rule and state-interventionism in the economy. On the economic terrain this intervention, besides being in no way destructive of the classical capitalist production relations of money, market and wage-labour, is not regarded by Marxism as always and in every situation progressive compared to the private juridical form of ownership of capital. Following our very precise Engels we recalled how his hoped-for statifications were to be foreseen in the sector of big industry. In this sector he would have normatively favored the maximum technical and administrative concentration, conscious that a central and total planning of the surplus-value-making machine is impossible: in fact we wanted it to be made as complete as possible for it to be negated in communism. In the major capitalist countries, this phase has today been well and truly reached, and its decline initiated. Here the alternative is absolutely not bureaucracy-entrepreneurs, but money system-socialism.

To statify insufficiently-developed artisan and peasant productive forces is only a political measure. Carried out by a State that is not especially revolutionary, this can work in the direction of economic and social preservation by impeding the “natural” selection of less efficient enterprises. In Russia, they say, one enterprise in four is in the red. Russia today is not turning back to democracy and free-trade. In economics, decentralisation is only a question of principle insofar as that which has never really been united is redivided. The principal of central planning is renounced, when, beyond big industry and big structures (railways, electricity, etc.) it was never in fact realised – except in a gigantic apparatus of old ministerial papers and functionaries. Petty production and commerce, their “tithes” paid, go their own way. This reactionary network of producers and traders, and very low output, is the first to be overwhelmed by the incipient crisis of world (and even Russian) overproduction.

In politics, if stalinist has been able to directly assume the modern bourgeois form of open dictatorship, post- stalinism is not the return to pre-fascist democracy. Instead it represents the tendency towards the real, unquestioned and irreversible triumph of fascism, which succeeds in subjugating the democratic forms themselves, the very parties and unions of the working class: one hundred parties, only one national capitalist programme; parliamentary cretinism and petty political personalism by the busload. The evolution of the Russian economy in recent months confirms what was diagnosed by us concerning its maturity and crisis. Production is growing at a considerable pace, alongside misery for the proletarians: precisely capitalism according to the canons of Marxism. There are already one million unemployed in Uzbekistan.

The difficulty verified in drawing up the much-promised economic reforms on the enterprise, on property and on land-leasing (and tomorrow in their actuation), have their explanation in the social factor, in latent opposition and in the open struggle of the Russian proletariat. The State-managed food shops are empty, while commodities abound on the stalls of the kolkhozians, but at unreachable prices for workers’ families. This represents a class battle which the State hesitates to engage in. Confirmation of this is given by press notices of continuous strikes, which boast 7,5 million work-days lost in the first eleven months of 1989; and of the existence of a “United Workers’ Front” of which we know only that it is an “enemy of perestroika”, which says a lot.

What are really lacking in the bourgeois power system are the centuries-old structures of opportunist parties and unions, formally opposed to the State and to the dominant class, in reality devoted to democracy and to the defence of the regime. In contrast to what the Polish bourgeoisie succeeded in with the help of intellectuals and priests, the Russian proletarians – we don’t know how instinctively – mistrust democracy, reformers and the middle classes. This is the key problem set before the Russian rulers: to turn the proletariat. For the moment they haven’t done it. It’s inevitable that all the remaining debate on economic programmes aims in Russia, as in the whole world already, at a plurality of forms of property, along with the State and big banks. The latter institutions manoeuvre prices, finance, credit and investments without any projects, plans or future – except a permanent state of emergency for the survival of a system which is only waiting to be struck down, in the East as in the West.

Critique of Bourgeois Reason and Economy

At the end of Saturday evening a comrade continued the exposition of our more general critique of bourgeois reason and economy, with ample recourse to the texts of Marx, Engels, Lenin and the Left. Readers of Italian can retrace the complete reports of the first two parts of this important work in issues 26 and 27 of Comunismo under the titles: Reason and Revolution; the Commodity Fetish and its Death; Wage-labour – Mystification of the Exploitation of the Proletariat. In the chapter expounded at the reunion, the classical criticisms of Marx against Proudhon were turned against the neo-Proudhonian Stalin, in particular on the supposed possibility of a socialism which uses money and the law of value as an intermediary between producers. Stalin, just like Proudhon, resolves the contradiction by affixing the adjective “socialist” to the same capitalist categories: thus there would be a “socialist market’.

Stalin’s successors, not through individual responsibility, but through historical maturity, are further away than Stalin from Marxism and socialism; for the bourgeois romanticism of the bourgeois revolutionary Stalin, they substitute a prosaic eclecticism. The latter is not concerned with aims and principles that aren’t the victorious bourgeois ones of accumulation and democracy, inscribed on unfurled banners.

The presenter then passed to concepts of personalism and property, the foundation of every democratic ideology. In a certain society to come – and not in this one – these concepts will be overcome by successfully affirming not only that the ownership of the means of production and the paid work of other people is excluded, but even of consumer goods themselves and of the individual person, connected by links of tender necessity and joyous collaboration with the whole community. It’s the bourgeois world which, among the so-called liberties, also allows that of the abuse of one’s body with drugs, justified as a “private” affair.

Not by chance, perestroika exalts individualism and laments its insufficient spread. It’s a capitalist necessity in Russia to inflame competition among bourgeois and among proletarians, in order to force the production of relative surplus value. Stalin, on the other hand, betted on the egalitarian admission of great masses into the nascent industries. Not by chance, perestroika is supported by every type of intellectual. Communism rejects both this individualism, and the earlier romantic egalitarianism.

Marx’s “Historical notes on commercial Capital”

On Sunday morning, the party members resumed work, by listening to the continuing re-reading of the Third Volume of Marx’s Capital, coming to the twentieth chapter of the fourth section: “Historical Notes on Commercial Capital”. We returned to the text to show how vulgar economy (which Marx dates from 1830) in its attempt to expel the merchants as a socially necessary and external function, would be unable to explain the origin and measure of commercial profit.

In the commercial function, Marxism recognises only a necessity of capitalist production; and if there will always be material production in every kind of human society, the same cannot be said for commercial activity. The average profit of capital employed in commerce derives from the average rate of profit of the whole social capital, as a result of competition between the holders of capital. Marx amply retraces the genesis of modern commercial capital, whose formation historically precedes the capitalist mode of production, of which it is an “embryonic” form: it even supports itself on previous modes of production. In the Marxist analysis, capitalism’s past explains the present, and indicates the ineluctable tendency towards its destruction.

The Party’s activity in the Cobas

A brief report followed on the party’s union activity inside the school worker’s movement in Italy, and in their base Committees (Cobas). In the absence of a general struggle our comrades, unconcerned with and condemning the various initiatives of scholastic reform, insisted in the national assemblies on the discussion of the unitary platform, in view of the not very far-off maturity of the contracts (in Il partito Comunista’s February edition there is a discussion of the very well-conducted struggle of the lecturers in the Italian teachers’ colleges).

Communism and ecology

Finally, in the field of the criticism of bourgeois thought, we listened to the condemnation of the contemporary bourgeois ideologies described as “ecologist”, which have the purpose of diverting the struggle of the working class from its real objectives. We oppose the pessimism of closed conceptions of the universe and society, according to which the goods at the disposal of the human species are fixed and finite. It’s therefore necessary, they say, to try to consume as little as possible, it being certain that these goods will not last. Instead of this notion we affirm the reality of a world and a society in expansion, which regenerate themselves, modifying their very laws of existence in a process we don’t see any limits to. The carpe diem is that of the petty-bourgeoisie condemned to death as a class. To the individualist mysticism of the petty-bourgeois, troubled by the necessities of their individual zoological conservation, of “biological”, healthy and uncontaminated nourishment, we oppose the future species physiology, when even functions such as meals return to their sense of sacredness: not as individual, but as species activities. We can advance another definition of communism, that of a mystical society, which literally sees with the eyes of the species.

The reunion was concluded on the Sunday afternoon, with the latest agreements on work, and with renewed commitment in our struggle for the rebirth of tomorrow.