[GM22] The Revolutionary Program of Communist Society Eliminates All Forms of Ownership of Land, the Instruments of Production and the Products of Labor (Pt. 2)

Marx and Landed Property

In the text by Karl Marx referred to above, the program of the communists is defined under two aspects. Historically and economically, it defends big agricultural estates, for which the term “cultivation on a large scale” is used, as opposed to the small farm and plot of land. In addition, the communist program calls for the disappearance or, as it is often less correctly expressed, the abolition of every form of landed property, which also implies every subject of property, whether individual or collective.

Marx did not spend a lot of time addressing the traditional philosophical and juridical justifications for man’s property relations as they affect the land. These justifications go back to the old triviality that property is an extension of the person. The rancid syllogism begins to be false in its very premise, which is passed over in silence: my person, my physical body, belongs to me; it is my property. We deny even this, which is at bottom nothing but a preconceived notion born from the hoary forms of slavery, in which land and human bodies together were seized by force. If I am a slave, my body has an alien owner, the master. If I am not a slave, I am the master of myself. It seems crystal clear and is also pure foolishness. In that development of the social structure in which the odious form of possession of another human being underwent a process of decline, instead of heralding the decline and fall of all subsequent forms of property, it was logical that the ideological superstructure – in the illustrious Ultimate of all real processes! – should only take this tiny little pygmy step: for it merely registered a simple change of the master of the slave, something that poor humanity was all-too-accustomed to. Before, I went from being a slave of Titus to being a slave of Sempronius; now I have become a slave of myself…. Perhaps that was not such a good deal!

This vulgar, anti‑socialist mode of reasoning is more foolish than the myth that there was an original solitary man who declared himself king of the universe. According to the Biblical construction, it must even be admitted that, due to the multiplication of humans, the system of relations between the ego and the others only became more dense, and the illusory autonomy of the ego became ever more dispersed. For us, Marxists, every step from simple to new and more complicated modes of production augments the network of multiple relations between the individual and all his kind, and reduces the conditions currently designated by the terms autonomy and freedom. This is how all individualism fades away.

The modern, atheist bourgeois who defends property sees the course of history according to his class ideology (whose debris are today the patrimony of only petty bourgeois and so many alleged Marxists). He sees the process upside‑down, as a succession of stages of a ridiculous disconnection of the individual‑man from social bonds (while, in reality, the bonds between man and external nature are becoming more and more dense over the course of history). The liberation of man from slavery, liberation from servitude and from despotism, liberation from exploitation!

In this construction that stands opposed to ours, the individual loosens his bonds, breaks free and constructs the autonomy and greatness of the Person! And many people interpret this series as the stages that lead to the revolution.

Individual, person and property all go well together. Given the false principle that we just examined (my body is mine, and so is my hand), the tool with which our powers are extended for the purposes of labor is also mine. The land, too, is a tool of human labor (here, the second premise logically follows). The products of my hand and of its various extensions are also mine: Property is therefore an indestructible attribute of the Person.

Just how contradictory such an argument really is, can be seen in the fact that, in the ideology of the defenders of the private ownership of agricultural land who preceded the enlightenment and the capitalists, the Earth is itself productive of wealth, before and even without the labor that man applies to it. How, then, is the right of possession of man over parcels of land converted into a mysterious “natural law”?

How Marx Responds

Asked for his view on the nationalization of the land, right from the start Marx liquidated all such impotent philosophical formulas.

«The property in the soil – that original source of all wealth – has become the great problem upon the solution of which depends the future of the working class.

«While not intending to discuss here all the argument put forward by the advocates of private property in land – jurists, philosophers, and political economists – we shall only state firstly that they disguise the original fact of conquest under the cloak of “natural right”. If conquest constitutes a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them.

«In the progress of history [Marx means that the first acts of violence created ownership of the land which, at the beginning, had been free, and which was later held in common], the conquerors attempt to give a sort of social sanction to their original title derived from brute force, through the instrumentality of laws imposed by themselves. Finally comes the philosopher who declares those laws to imply the universal consent of society. If indeed private property in land is based upon such a universal consent, it evidently becomes extinct from the moment the majority of a society dissent from warranting it. However, let us leave aside the so‑called “rights” of property».

Here, our proposal is to follow Marx’s thinking to the negation of “any kind” of property, that is, of any subject of property (private individual, associated individuals, State, nation, and, finally, society) as well as of any object of property (the land, concerning which we are speaking here, the instruments of labor in general, and the products of labor).

As we have always maintained, all of this is contained in the initial formula of the negation of private property, that is, in the consideration of such a form as a transitory characteristic in the history of human society which is destined to disappear in the present stage.

Even from a terminological, etymological point of view, property is only conceived as private. With regard to the land, this is most obvious since the characteristic of the institution is the enclosure within which no one may trespass without the consent of the owner. Private ownership means that the non owner is deprived of the right to enter (from Latin privatus ‘withdrawn from public life’). Regardless of the identity of the subject of this right, a single person or a multiple-person entity, this “deprivation, negation” character survives.

Against All Divided Property

Marx then goes on to take a position against the practice of agricultural production on small, individual farms.

Leaving aside the philosophical question, and after making a few sarcastic remarks, he continues as follows:

«We observe that the economical development of society, the increase and concentration of people, the necessity to agriculture of collective and organized labor as well as of machinery and similar contrivances, render the nationalization of land a “social necessity”, against which no amount of chattering about the rights of property will avail.

«Changes dictated by social necessity are sure to work their way sooner or later, because the imperative wants of society must be satisfied, and legislation will always be forced to adapt itself to them.

«What we require is a daily increasing production whose exigencies cannot be met by allowing a few individuals to regulate it according to their whims and private interests or to ignorantly exhaust the powers of the soil. All modern methods such as irrigation, drainage, steam plowing, chemical treatment, etc., ought to be applied to agriculture at last. But the scientific knowledge we possess, and the technical means of agriculture we command, such as machinery, etc., can never be successfully applied but by cultivating the land on a large scale. Cultivation on a large scale – even under its present capitalist form that degrades the producer himself to a mere beast of burden – has to show results so much superior to the small and piecemeal cultivation – would it then not, if applied on national dimension, be sure to give an immense impulse to production? The ever growing wants of the people on the one side, the ever increasing price of agricultural products on the other, afford the irrefutable proof that the nationalization of land has become a ‘social necessity’. The diminution of agricultural produce springing from individual abuse ceases to be possible as soon as cultivation is carried on under the control, at the cost, and for the benefit of the nation».

It is obvious that this text was intended to serve as propaganda and was aimed at a milieu that was not yet converted to Marxism. Very soon, however, he will arrive at the radical theses that we have denominated under the subheading of “Marx’s Great Pronouncement”. Here we can see displayed his preference for a national management of a State character, when he speaks of costs and benefits. Further along he will clarify that the bourgeois State will always be incapable of providing the necessary impulse to agriculture.

The author still deals with contemporary issues of his time, and it is interesting to see how he in 1868 poses them exactly the same way Engels did in 1894 (as discussed in the first part of this study). How can anyone today usurp the name of Marxist who has come to maintain that, first the sharecropper, and then the tenant farmer and finally the day laborer of the countryside, must become landowners, as the present‑day “communists” of Italy and Europe do? For us, this essential part of Marxism, just as it was between 1868 (actually, even before that) and 1894, remains completely valid today.

The Agrarian Question in France

Marx goes on to refute the cliché of the “rich” small-scale cultivator in France. His words require no commentary. The reader will discern their relation not only to the propositions of Engels, but also to those of Lenin, whose strict orthodoxy as an agrarian Marxist we have already demonstrated in depth in our study of Russia.

«France has often been alluded to, but with its peasantry proprietorship it is farther off the nationalization of land than England with its landlordism. In France, it is true, the soil is accessible to all who can buy it, but this very faculty has brought about the division of land into small plots cultivated by men with small means and mainly thrown on the resources of the bodily labor of both themselves and their families. This form of landed property and the piecemeal cultivation necessitated by it not only excludes all appliance of modern agricultural improvements, but simultaneously converts the tiller himself into the most decided enemy of all social progress, and above all, of the nationalization of the land. Enchained to the soil upon which he has to spend all his energy and life in order to get a relatively small return, bound to give away the greater part of his produce to the State in the form of taxes, to the law tribe in the form of judiciary costs, and to the usurer in the form of interest; utterly ignorant of the social movement outside his petty field of action; he still clings with frantic fondness to his spot of soil and his merely nominal proprietorship in the same. In this way, the French peasant has been thrown into a most fatal antagonism to the industrial working class. Peasantry proprietorship being thus the greatest obstacle to the ‘nationalization of land’. France, in its present state, is certainly not the place where we must look for a solution of this great problem.

«To nationalize the land and let it out in small plots to individuals or workingmen’s societies would, under a bourgeois government, only bring about a reckless competition among them, and cause a certain increase of “rent”, and thus lend new chances for the appropriators for feeding upon the producers».

The hypothesis advanced in the above paragraph foresaw the possibility that State measures in favor of nationalization would produce a class of tenant farmers who would take advantage of the wage laborers, and exploit them.

Classes of Producers

It is at this point in the manuscript where Marx inserted the fundamental passage on the debate at the international congress of 1868. Regarding this passage, we placed enormous emphasis on the thesis that the land is to be handed over to the ‘nation’ rather than to the associated agricultural workers. The latter formula is anti‑socialist because it would «surrender all society to one exclusive class of producers», an observation that we must always keep in mind. Socialism excludes not just the subjection of producer to owner, but also that of producer to producer.

The Russian agrarian formula, with its Kolkhozes, is spurious communism. The Kolkhozniki form a class of producers who have in their hands the subsistence of the entire “nation”. Their rights with respect to the “State” are expanding every year: exemption from price control, “economical”, i.e., at the whim of the associations, calculation of prices, etc. We shall clearly distinguish between the terms, State, nation and society; for now we have the right to say that, economically, competition and rent have reappeared in the Russian structure.

In the Sovkhozes, which will soon be liquidated, the agricultural workers are reduced to pure wage workers, like the industrial workers, without any rights over the disposal of the products of the countryside (to this date), and do not form a class of producers erected against society, just as the industrial workers do not form such a class, the industrial workers who are acclaimed as the owners (although this term makes them blush for shame in Russia!) of society itself, that is, as possessing hegemony over the peasants (!).

The classic Russian discussion concerning the question of the land was posed in three ways: Repartition (populists); Municipalization (Mensheviks); and Nationalization (Bolsheviks). Lenin always defended nationalization in revolutionary practice and in doctrine, just as Marx defended it in the passage quoted above. The repartition of the populists, an abject peasant ideal, is at about the same level as the policies of the modern communist parties, in Italy for example, where they adorn themselves with the adjective popular and are just as deserving of the adjective populist. Municipalization corresponds with the program of giving the monopoly over the land not to society, but only to the peasant class. The Russian municipality, as this theory views it, is understood to be the rural village whose entire population is composed of peasants and which has tenuous links to the communitarian tradition of the primitive Mir (see our series on the economic structure of Russia). The system of Kolkhozes is neither Marxist nor Leninist, and could very well be defined – especially in view of the “reforms” that are currently being implemented – as a provincialization of the land, over which the cities are increasingly losing all influence. This deformation, accentuated by the historical events of 1958, is in total contradiction to the doctrinal position of the party of 1868, according to which the land must not be given to “one exclusive class of producers” (the associates of the Kolkhozes), but to the entire collectivity of rural and urban workers.

The thesis of nationalization must not be understood in the manner of Ricardo: the land to the State, along with all the rent of the land. This means: the land to the industrial capitalist class or to its representative, the industrial capitalist State (like the Russian State). Marxist nationalization of the land is the dialectical contrary of its division into parcels and allotment to peasant cooperatives and associations. This dialectical opposition is just as applicable to the structure of communist society, without classes or State (see the fragment quoted above), as it is to the political struggle, with respect to both the party and the class, within capitalist society, where the demand for the division and re‑allotment of the land is much more indecent than it was when it was advocated under the Czarist regime. When the theses of the doctrine of the party are established as invariant and inviolable by both the party center and the militant rank and file, they constitute the defense against the future threat of the opportunist plague, and the thesis of nationalization is an appropriate and typical example.

Nation and Society

The term “nation”, however, presents an advantage with respect to the term “society”, whether it is employed in the context of theory or agitation. As an extension in space, it is well known that we consider socialist society international, and that internationalism is a concept that is firmly rooted in the class struggle. Marx advises us, however, whenever he engages in the critique of the capitalist economic structure, that he will be speaking of the nation in his study of the dynamic of the economic forces, even though society spans the different nations, but never with the intention of imprisoning the revolutionary transition to socialism within strict national limits. Furthermore, although it might be useful to speak of the nation rather than the State, we must not forget that, as long as the class State which expresses the rule of the capitalist class exists, the nation will not constitute the unity of all the inhabitants of a territory in a homogeneous complex, and this will not even be realized after the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in one or more countries.

The term “nation”, restrictive with respect to class, internationalist and revolutionary demands, is still useful as an expression of the position against the surrender of particular spheres of productive means (the land, in this case) to isolated parts and classes of national society, to local or enterprise-based groups, or to professional categories.

The other advantage that we mentioned, is reflected with respect to the limitation in time. “Nation” comes from latin nascere (to be born), and it includes the succession of living generations, future and even past. For us, the real subject of social activity becomes more extensive, in time, than the same society of living men at any given date. The idea of progeny (keeping in mind, of course, that we are referring to the progeny of the whole human race, the species, a word that was employed by Marx and Engels, and which is more powerful than the nation and society) goes beyond all the bourgeois ideologies of power and juridical sovereignty that are professed by democrats.

The concept of class is enough to refute the idea that the State represents all the living citizens, and we laugh at those who propose to draw such a bold conclusion from the grant of universal suffrage to all adults. We know quite well that the bourgeois State represents the interests and power of one single class, even when general elections give plebiscitary results.

There is more, however. Even if a representative or structural network is enclosed in the limits of a single class, that of the wage labor force (it would be worse if it assumed the generic designation of people, as the Russians do), we are not satisfied with a construction of sovereignty based on the mechanism of consultation of all the individual elements of the rank and file (assuming that this mechanism could exist). And the same is true both under bourgeois power, in order to direct the revolutionary struggle, and after it has been overthrown.

We have often proclaimed, especially in the “Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism”, that only the party – obviously a minority within society and the proletarian class – is the form that can express the historical influences of successive generations in the passage from one form of social production to another, in its unity in space and time, in its doctrinal, organizational and strategic unity.

Consequently, the proletarian revolutionary force is not expressed by a consultative democracy within the class, neither during the stage of the struggle nor after its victory, but by the uninterrupted course of the historical line of the party.

Obviously, not only do we admit that a minority of the living and present generation can direct, against the majority (even of the class), the historical advance, but, even more importantly, we think that only this minority can place itself on the track connecting it to the struggle and the efforts of the militants of past and future generations, acting in the capacity as guides of the program of the new society, as has been exactly and clearly pre‑established by the historical doctrine.

This construction that, in spite of all the philistines, leads us to proclaim the frank demand, dictatorship of the communist party, is undeniably contained in the system of Marx.

Not Even Society Will Own the Land

In the third volume of Capital, edited by Engels after the death of Marx, Chapter 46 bears the title: “Building Site Rent. Rent in Mining. Price of Land”. Its conclusions are especially striking in the powerful doctrine of land rent, reiterated line by line by the great combatant Lenin throughout his life. Since it is maintained and proven in our economic science that the rent extracted by the landlord has the character of an aliquot part of the surplus value that the class of wage laborers produces and which is converted into capitalist profit, it is clear that our adversaries may pose this objection: there are business transactions in which the owner receives the rent, as in the case of residential and commercial property transactions, while the land lies sleeping under the sun and not even one worker puts a shovel to it. From what labor, and from what resulting surplus value, does this owner’s profit derive?

Our economic science, however, is not invalidated by this objection. We are not an academic department, but an army formed in battle order, and we defend the cause of those who have worked and died as well as those who have not yet worked and have not yet been born.

If you seek to reason following the bureaucratic formulas of the debts and assets of corporations, or if you deduce legal power within the limits of the names and results of elections, please leave now.

Marx responds by bringing future generations onto the scene of the battle (this is an old aspect of our doctrine and not a clever invention on our part to make our thesis seem more correct, since, in opposition to the theory and practice of the revolution, the majority of the currently existing proletarian class could also be mistaken and could find itself in the ranks of the enemy):

«That it is only the title of a number of persons to the possession of the globe enabling them to appropriate to themselves as tribute a portion of the surplus-labour of society and furthermore to a constantly increasing extent with the development of production, is concealed by the fact that the capitalised rent, i.e., precisely this capitalised tribute, appears as the price of land, which may therefore be sold like any other article of commerce».

Is this clear? If I think that a piece of land, which in the future will presumably yield five thousand liras per year to its owner, can be sold for one hundred thousand liras, I have converted into an active force the surplus labor of the workers who will labor not twenty years from now, but in an infinite number of years from now.

«In the same way, the slave-holder considers a Negro, whom he has purchased, as his property, not because the institution of slavery [which was a gift to him from past generations] as such entitles him to that Negro, but because he has acquired him like any other commodity, through sale and purchase».

He will pay money for the future years of the negro and his descendants!

«But the title itself is simply transferred, and not created by the sale. The title must exist before it can be sold, and a series of sales can no more create this title through continued repetition than a single sale can”. [This allusion of the Doctor of Jurisprudence, Marx, refers to the fiction of the bourgeois legal codes which hold that the “proof of ownership” is obtained by presenting the documentation of title conveyances reflecting the chain of ownership for a certain number of years, twenty or thirty, for example]. What created it in the first place were the production relations. As soon as these have reached a point where they must shed their skin, the material source of the title, justified economically and historically and arising from the process which creates social life, falls by the wayside, along with all transactions based upon it».

For example, we shall add, in order to clarify the concept for the reader, when the slave system of production collapsed because it was no longer profitable and due to the revolt of the slaves, all the latter became free men, and all previous contracts of sales of slaves were nullified! Here, however, we shall invite the reader, once again, to read this powerful passage of the brilliant and original interpretation of history of human societies, which is no less applicable to the society of tomorrow:

«FROM THE STANDPOINT OF A HIGHER ECONOMIC FORM OF SOCIETY, PRIVATE OWNERSHIP OF ANY PARTICLE OF THE EARTH’S GLOBE BY SINGLE INDIVIDUALS WILL APPEAR QUITE AS ABSURD AS PRIVATE OWNERSHIP OF ONE MAN BY ANOTHER. EVEN A WHOLE SOCIETY, A NATION, OR EVEN ALL SIMULTANEOUSLY EXISTING SOCIETIES TAKEN TOGETHER, ARE NOT THE OWNERS OF THE GLOBE. THEY ARE ONLY ITS POSSESSORS, ITS USUFRUCTUARIES, AND, LIKE BONI PATRES FAMILIAS, THEY MUST HAND IT DOWN TO SUCCEEDING GENERATIONS IN AN IMPROVED CONDITION».

Utopia and Marxism

Marx’s method is also clearly displayed in this decisive passage. Our forecast of the death of property and capital, of its disappearance (which is a much higher goal than its inept transference from the individual subject to the social subject) and also our refusal to attribute it to the decision and the will of the individual-subject (even if it is the subject of the oppressed class), but only to the party-collectivity, a collectivity whose energy does not derive from quantity, but from quality, are constructed on the basis of a total scientific analysis of today’s society and its past. The capitalism that we want to hang from the gibbet and kill, must first be studied and understood with regard to its structure and its real development. It is a duty, not in the moral and personal sense, but an impersonal function of the party, an entity that is superior to the changing opinions of men and the confines of successive generations.

It is this point that provides the response to a possible objection to our acceptance of Marxism, the only one that captures its power and scope. The Marx that has been presented for decades by the revolutionary current when the latter champions the maximum program of the communist social structure, is precisely the Marx who went beyond, fought against and left behind all utopianism.

The opposition between utopianism and scientific socialism does not reside in the fact that the Marxist socialist declares that, with regard to the nature of the future society, he is looking out the window waiting for its forms to pass by before he describes them! The error of the utopian lies in the fact that, after verifying the defects of contemporary society (which, in some of the utopian masters, Marx respectfully praises), he does not deduce the framework of the future society from a concatenation of real processes that form a chain that links their previous course to the future, but from his own head, from human reason and not from the social and natural reality. The utopian believes that the destination point of the course of social evolution must be contained in the victory of certain general principles, innate in the spirit of man. Whether it is God the creator that has induced them in the spirit of man, or the introspective philosophical critique, it is ideological systems composed of Justice, Equality, Liberty, etc., that compose the colors of the palette in which the socialist idealist dips his paintbrush to depict the world of tomorrow as it should be.

This naïve, but not always ignoble, origin, causes utopianism to expect its utopia to come about from a labor of persuasion and emulation among men, according to the word that is so fashionable today to express in a truly inappropriate way the conflagration of history. The utopians, impelled by their good intentions, once thought they could be victorious by winning over the existing power centers to their rose‑colored projects. Their preconceived ideas prevented them from participating in the process of the struggle and the social conflict, of the overthrow of power and the use not of persuasion, but of unmitigated force, in the work from which the new society will emerge.

Our conception of the human problem is completely the opposite. Things are not the way they are because someone made a mistake, or was deceived, but because a causal and determinate series of forces has entered into play in the development of the human species: it is first of all a matter of understanding how, and why, and by what general laws; and then, to deduce its future directions.

Marxism, then, does not shrink from declaring in its battle programs what will be the characters of the society of tomorrow and, specifically, how the rigorously individualized characters that comprise today’s capitalist and mercantile social form measure up against each other. Marxism makes it possible to explicitly describe them with much greater validity and certitude than those who sketched out the pallid depictions of utopia, even if they were sometimes quite bold for their time.

To renounce the effort to engage in such anticipation of the features of the communist social structure is not Marxism, nor is it worthy of the powerful corpus of classical writings of our school. It is truly a regressive and conservative revisionism that parades as objectivity what is nothing but mean‑spirited cynicism, that is: waiting for the revelation, on a virgin background, of a mysterious design that would be a secret of history. In its philistine pride, this method is nothing but the alibi prepared in advance by the professional cliques that have never experienced life on the heights of the party form and have reduced it to a stage for the contortions of a handful of activists. If these features are to remain secrets, one might just as well wait for the fortunate turn of events in the sacristies for the revelation of the divine will, or in the antechambers of the powerful, for the lucky moment in which he will be allowed to lick the plates.

Property and Usufruct

One proof of the total opposition between Marxism and utopianism, which we have sought to highlight on the terrain of doctrine, is the passage where Marx traces the outlines of the future structure, a passage that is just as obligatory as the one that describes society as not being the owner of the land.

The administration of the cultivation of the land, in reality, must not be conducted in such a way as to only satisfy the appetites of the present generation. Marx’s accusation, constantly invoked against capitalism, that the prevailing form of production exhausts the resources of the soil and renders the problem of feeding the people insoluble, is correct. Now that people are becoming increasingly more numerous, “scientists” are studying – with the seriousness with which we are so familiar – new ways to end hunger among the inhabitants of the planet.

The management of the land, the cornerstone of the whole social problem, must be oriented in such a way that it will correspond to the best future development of the population of the globe. Human society today, even if we were to understand this term to transcend the limitations of States and nations (and when will be established a “superior form of organization”, to transcend classes; then we shall not only have advanced beyond the somewhat vulgar opposition between “leisure classes” and “productive classes”, but also beyond the opposition between urban and rural productive classes, and manual and intellectual classes, as Marx teaches), this society, which will consist in the aggregate of several billion men, will always be a set restricted to the “human species”, even though it is becoming increasingly more numerous due to the extension of the average lifespan of its members.

The management of the land will be voluntarily and scientifically subordinated, for the first time in history, to the species, that is, it will be organized in the forms that most effectively respond to the goals of the humanity of the future.

This is not fantasy – heaven preserve us from science-fiction! – or utopia, but is instead based on the realistic and practical criteria that Marx used: the difference between ownership and usufruct.

In modern legal theory, property is “perpetual”, while usufruct is temporary, limited to a pre‑established number of years or the natural life of the usufructuary. In bourgeois theory, property is defined as “ius utendi et abutendi”, that is, ownership confers the right to use and abuse. Theoretically, the owner could destroy the thing he owns; for example, irrigate his fields with salt water, sterilizing it, as the Romans did to Carthage after having burned it to the ground. Today’s jurists engage in subtle discussions about a social limit to property, but this is not science, only class fear. The usufructuary, on the other hand, has a more restricted right than the owner: the right to use, yes; the right to abuse, no. Once the term of the contract of usufruct has expired, or when the usufructuary dies, in the case of a life estate contract, the land reverts to the owner. Positive law requires that it be returned in the same condition that it was in when it was delivered into the power of the usufructuary. Even the modest peasant who rents his little piece of land cannot neglect its cultivation, but must administer it like a good paterfamilias, just as the good landowner does, for example, for whom the perpetuity of its use or enjoyment consists in its hereditary transmission to his children or heirs. In the Italian Civil Code, the sacramental formula of the good paterfamilias may be found in Article 1001 and also in Article 1587.

Therefore, society will have only the use and not the ownership of the land.

Utopianism is metaphysical, Marxist socialism is dialectical. In the respective stages of his gigantic theoretical construction, Marx can successively support:
     a) large-scale property (even capitalist large scale property, although the wage workers employed in such property are mere beasts of burden) against small-scale property, even when the latter does not hire wage labor (no reference is made, for the sake of decency, to the small farm, like that of the French tenant farmer of 1894 or the Italian tenant farmer of 1958 who, by employing human beasts of burden, adds to the reactionary trend of micro-parcelization);
     b) State property, even if it is capitalist, against large-scale private property (nationalization);
     c) State property after the victory of the proletarian dictatorship;
     d) for the higher organization of integral communism, only the rational use of the land by society, and putting the disgraced term of property in Engels’ museum of old rubbish.

Use Value and Exchange Value

The fundamental thesis of revolutionary Marxism easily extends the negation of individual ownership and then social ownership of the land to the other instruments of production that are the result of human labor, and to the products of labor, whether they are production or consumption goods.

There are capital goods on agrarian properties that are essential for their exploitation. One fundamental case, which is the source of the word, capital (as Marx frequently reminds us), is that of the draught animals and cattle. In Italian we call this, scorta viva; in French, cheptel, which is the same word as capital. The term for pigs raised commercially comes from caput, which means “head” in Latin. But the bourgeois do not delude themselves when it comes to the human head, and lead us to prepare another natural law: Capital, as the extension of the Person.

This is the head of the bull. The extension of the head of the bourgeoisie is not the eternal principles of human law, but only the horns.

It is clear that the person who administers the land cannot eat all his cattle – we have seen historical examples of this – without destroying that special instrument of production, capable of reproducing itself if it is wisely cared for.

Society will be the usufructuary, rather than the owner, of the animal species. In the book by Engels there is an amusing passage about the ludicrous proposal that the peasants should be allowed unrestricted rights to hunting and fishing in France, with regard to the danger posed by the destruction, which subsequently did take place, of certain species of game animals.

It might take some time, but it would not be difficult, to extend our deduction to all private capital in agriculture and industry. But we shall attempt to proceed by sketching the broad outlines of our position.

In his magisterial chapters on the land, Marx demonstrates that its price and value, derived from capitalized rent, does not enter into the working capital of the agrarian enterprise because, if there is no unfortunate devastation of the fertility of the soil, it will be intact at the end of the annual cycle. He also draws the obvious comparison with the “fixed part of industrial constant capital”, the part that only enters into the calculation of the circulating capital by the part that is expended in one cycle and is reintegrated (amortization). The land renews itself; and this is also true of the cattle (with a certain amount of labor on the part of the farmer). In agriculture, dead stock are replaced to a large extent each year from the total value of the products. In industry, on the other hand, they are only replaced annually to a very small extent.

Setting aside the quantitative examination, we want to draw attention to the fact that humanity also has dead stock or fixed capital that is amortized over very long cycles, as is the case with Roman bridges which, after two thousand years, are still in use. Criminal capitalism seeks to amortize its investments in very short terms and attempts to rapidly replace – at the expense of the proletariat – all the fixed capital. Why? Because it is the exclusive owner of the fixed capital, while over the circulating capital it only enjoys rights of usufruct. We refer the reader to the distinction between dead labor and living labor that is elaborated in the reports of Pentecost and Piombino.

Capitalism insists on the frenzied activation of the labor of the living, and makes the labor of the dead its inhuman property. In the communist economy we shall limit ourselves to what the bourgeois theoreticians call amortization, that is, replacement of fixed capital goods, in an opposite way, by revivifying them.

The antithesis between property and usufruct corresponds to that between fixed capital-circulating capital; and to that between dead labor-living labor.

We are on the side of the eternal life of the species; our enemies are on the sinister side of eternal death. And life will sweep them aside, synthesizing the opposed terms in the reality of communism.

We must add one more formula under this same antithesis: monetary exchange and physical use. Mercantile exchange value versus use value.

The communist revolution is the death of the world of mercantilism.

Objectified Labor and Living Labor

Our comrade readers, who, according to our method of work, collaborate in the common activity of the party, should refer at this point to the entire second part of the Piombino meeting, where the Grundrisse of Marx is thoroughly presented.

In this vast construction, economic individualism is annulled, and Social Man makes his appearance, whose confines are identical with those of Human Society in its entirety, or rather, those of the Human Species.

In the capitalist form, industrial fixed capital is counterposed to human labor, which is converted into a measure of the exchange value of the products or commodities. Fixed capital is the monstrous enemy – whether or not the capitalist as an individual person lies behind it, and with reference to this question our quotations from Marx have been innumerable – that weighs on the mass of the producers and monopolizes a product that not only concerns all, but is also of concern to the entire active course of the species for millennia, to Science and Technology elaborated and deposited in the Social Mind. Now that the capitalist Form is descending down the developmental scale into degeneracy, this Monster is killing Science itself; it mismanages it, it criminally administers its usufructuary rights by destroying the patrimony of future generations.

In these pages we see the current phenomenon of Automation predicted and theorized for the distant future. What we shall permit ourselves to call the Romance of objectivized labor has its metamorphosis for an epilogue, by means of which the Monster is transformed into a beneficent force for all of humanity, which will not allow the extortion of useless surplus labor, but will reduce necessary labor to a minimum, «for the total benefit of the artistic, scientific, etc., training of individuals», who will from that point on be elevated to the status of Social Individuals.

Here we would like to draw from the classic and authentic materials, which are more valid and obvious today than they were when they were first conceived, another no less authentic formulation. Once the proletarian revolution has put an end to the destruction of Science, which is the work of the Social Mind; once labor time has been compressed to a minimum that will be transformed into a pleasure; once Fixed Capital – today’s Monster – has been elevated to human forms, that is, once Capital – a transitory historical product – has been abolished, rather than conquered for man or for Society, then industry will be like the land, once the productive machinery, equipment and buildings as well as the land have been liberated of all ownership, regardless of the owner.

It would not be much of a conquest if the productive apparatus ceased to be a monopoly of a clique of non‑workers, which is a rather hollow phrase insofar as the bourgeois were, at first, a bold class that constituted the bearers of the Social Mind and the most advanced Social Praxis. For its part, society organized in a higher form – international communism – will not possess the productive apparatus in the form of property and Capital, but in usufruct, saving the future of the Species with each step it takes against the physical needs caused by Nature, which will be the only adversary then.

Once property and Capital have died out in both agriculture and industry, another commonplace, i.e., “individual ownership of consumer products”, which was a concession to the arduous task of traditional propaganda, must be tossed on the ash‑heap of the past. In reality, any revolutionary transformation will fail if every object does not shed its commodity character, and if labor does not cease to be the measure of “exchange value”, another form that, together with monetary measures, must die along with the capitalist mode of production.

Here we shall provide some textual citations: «As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well‑spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value».

Taking pity on the mediocrity of Stalin and the Russians who persist in claiming that the law of value prevails in socialism (!), we were led to conclude: May the lightning of the Final Judgment fall upon your heads!

The drunk who waves his bottle, saying, it’s mine, I bought it with the money from my wages (paid by private or State institutions), while he is a victim of the Capital form, is also a usufructuary traitor to the health of the species. And so is the idiot who smokes cigarettes! Such “property” will be eliminated from the higher organization of society.

The debasement of the wage slave reaches new lows in the crisis of unemployment. Engels wrote to Marx, on December 7, 1857: «Among the Philistines here, the crisis drives them terribly to drink. No one can endure his life at home, with the family and all its worries. The circles become agitated and the consumption of spirituous liquors undergoes a steep increase. The deeper they sink into boredom, the more they want entertainment. But on the next day they present the most discouraging spectacle of physical and moral complaints». 1857 or 1958?!

Therefore, man will not consume himself as a beast-person, in the name of the infamous ownership of the object of exchange; use, or consumption, will be conducted in accordance with the higher requirement of social man, the perpetuation of the species, and no longer under the influence of drugs, as is the rule today.

The Death of Individualism

It is not possible for the proletarian class party to orient itself in the correct revolutionary direction if its agitational material does not totally correspond with the stable, invariant foundations of the theory.

The questions of everyday action and the future program are only the two dialectical sides of the same problem, as has been demonstrated on so many occasions by Marx right up until his death, and by Engels and Lenin (“April Theses”, Central Committee of October!).

These men did not improvise or rely on revelations; they grasped the compass of our action, which is too easy to lose.

This clearly indicates the danger, and our questions are well posed when they go against the general mistaken directions. Its formulas and terms can be falsified by traitors and mental deficient; but their use always provides a sure compass when it is continuous and consistent.

If we employ the language of philosophy and history, our enemy is individualism, personalism. If we employ the language of politics, our enemy is democratic electoralism, regardless of the camp. If we employ the language of economics, our enemy is mercantilism.

Any tactic that seeks to utilize these insidious methods in an attempt to achieve an apparent advantage, is equivalent to the sacrifice of the future of the party to the success of one day, or one year; it is equivalent to unconditional surrender to the Monster of the counterrevolution.