The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Russia 

Viaticum for readers

A clear understanding of the present work entails (almost necessarily) knowledge of the «Dialogue with Stalin», printed in 1953 by the same movement, from which the present publication derives.

In the pages with which this paper opens, enough is said about the chronological connection and the very special nature of the «debate» that follows here.

With the 1953 preface to the «Dialogue with Stalin» we gave clear reasons for three stages of that ancient and profound contrast.

In the first period, which lasted from 1918 to 1926, it can be said that it was a divergence of tactics within a movement that tended towards the same common end, the Third Communist International, founded on the ruins of the Second that had fallen into social-patriotic opportunism, and in the wake of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. The left wing of Italian socialism, from which we derive, struggled in the war and post-war period from 1914 to break with every democratic and pacifist version of socialism, and crowned its struggle with the foundation in Livorno in January 1921 of the Communist Party of Italy. Within the international movement, this current argued theses that differed from those of the Communist International and Lenin himself, with regard to parliamentary tactics and the tactics aimed at eradicating opportunist workers’ parties, denying that the methods then known as the united front, and worse, workers’ government, were valid for this.

This baggage of contributions, which contained an explicit denunciation of the dangers of degeneration, had as stages the Moscow congresses from 1920 to 1926 and Italian party congresses in Rome in 1922 and Lyon in 1926.

In the second period, after 1926, the disagreement unfolded to the point of organisational and political separation, in which the left-wing position was everywhere fiercely beaten, while its predictions of involution of the ruling majority in Russia Europe and Italy were severely confirmed. In Russia the false theory of the construction of Russian socialist society without and outside the international proletarian revolution won the day, and the opposition that remained faithful to the Bolshevik and Lenin traditions on this and other points succumbed, vilified and exterminated. In Europe, the postponement of the revolutionary wave and the insolent consolidation of capitalism had as its defeatist and cowardly response the communists’ move into the ranks of blocs with non-proletarian parties and classes, with the aim not of overthrowing the bourgeoisie but of saving bourgeois liberal democracy.

In the third period, with the Second World War, it became clear that the dissension had widened to an unbridgeable gulf of doctrines and principles, with the total disavowal by the Kremlin and its foreign aggregations of revolutionary Marxism, in the cornerstones defended and claimed after the First War by those who fought like Lenin and with Lenin. Foreign parties were thrown into social-national collaboration, in the first phase in Germany, in the second phase in France, England and America. Lenin’s directions to develop defeatism within each belligerent imperialist country and the overthrow of the military and civil power of the capitalists resulted in a league with the states that were belligerently allied with Moscow, while against the states that were enemies of Moscow they fought not to destroy the bourgeoisie, but to restore its liberal forms, killed in theory by Marx and Lenin, crushed forever materially within Russia, both revolutionary and imperial.

This period marked the organisational and theoretical liquidation of the October and of Lenin’s International: the corollaries of the total transition to counter-revolution were seen. In small numbers, but with a mighty baggage of historical and doctrinal continuity, we proclaimed, out of the clamour that surrounded in a false intoxication of crowds the followers of what was then called on all sides Stalinism, that we had for many years been facing no longer a lost dissident from himself of yesterday and from us Marxists of all time, but an openly sworn mortal enemy of the working class and its historic path to communism. And at the same time the proof of the capitalist nature of the economic society established in Russia and the central infamy of boasting of it in the world as a socialist society was becoming clear; in which, of so many and such clamorous betrayals we recognise the supreme summit, the masterpiece of counter-revolutionary infamy.

• • •

In «Dialogue with Stalin» we set out to chart the future «times» of this historical debate – which we call such, however much one of the contending parties lacks illustrious credentials – and foresaw the future confession in which two links will be declared broken: between the Russian production structure and socialism; between the politics of the Russian state and that of the class struggle of workers in all states against the world capitalist form.

After three years, the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, if it did not give us the end of this historic future stage, nevertheless represented a huge leap, and perhaps closer than we expected. Since, however, the scandalous admissions, which make a world-wide clamour for detachment from the dead Stalin, are still embedded in the pretence of speaking the language of Marx and Lenin, the Dialogue with the contradictor-phantom must continue: the total Confession, which will come one day, we do not know if in another three years only, from the Kremlin, will reduce it to their monologue. In vain they had hoped so much with the Confessions they wrested from torturing revolutionaries. The Confessors will confess.

The stance we take today, in the face of the exaggerated to the point of obscenity of the idol of three years ago, and which is anything but one of applause for the iconoclasts, is consistent with what we established then, well foreseeing that on the course of the terrifying sinking the sneering cry of the bourgeois world would be raised against the grandiose conceptions of our revolutionary doctrine. We wrote the following:
«The methods of repression, of crushing, which Stalinism applies to those who resist it on all sides, finding ample explanation in all the criticism now recalled of its development, must not give any foothold to any kind of condemnation, which would even remotely arouse repentance with respect to our classical theses on Violence, Dictatorship and Terror as historical weapons of proclaimed use: repentance that remotely is the first step towards the hypocritical propaganda of the currents of the «free world» and their lying claims of tolerance and sacred respect for the human person. Marxists, unable to be protagonists in history today, can wish for nothing better than the political, social and wartime catastrophe of American lordship over the capitalist world. We therefore have nothing to do with the call for more liberal or democratic methods, flaunted by ultra-equivocal political groups, and proclaimed by states that in reality had the most ferocious origins, such as Tito’s».

Already from these clear words, as from our entire construction, which is all the more compact and cannot be confused with any other, the less it is recited in front of sound and television chambers by farcical figures, it became clear then what reception the pitiful contortions of the 20th congress and the comedy of the abjuration from Stalin, shown as a return to the classics of our great School, should have on our part; whereas it is a stage in the backward march towards the most fallacious superstitions of bourgeois ideology, a cowardly genuflection to the superpowers of the contemporary capitalist lupanare.

• • •

We have prefixed the short epigraph on the cover, which, together with this glimpse of our historical origin, saves our small group from undesirable confusion.

Let us add another discriminating factor. It is certain that each step of the aforementioned sinking of the Kremlin’s men into the quicksand of bourgeois counterrevolution brings closer the hard, bitter goal of the reconstitution of the revolutionary party, to which we devote everything of our possibilities, less than a bolder impatience.

When the hour will be marked by history, the formation of the class organ will not take place in a laughable constituency of little groups and cenacles that said and say they were anti-Stalinist or that today say they are «anti-20th Congress».

The Party, killed drop by drop by thirty years of adverse storm, does not recompose itself like the cocktails of bourgeois doping. Such a result, such a supreme event, can only be placed at the end of an unbroken single line, not marked by the thought of one man or a group of men, present «in the square», but by the coherent history of a series of generations.

Above all, it must not arise from nostalgic illusions of success, not founded on the unshakeable doctrinal certainty of the revolutionary course, which we have possessed for centuries, but on the low subjective exploitation of the fumbling, of the wavering of others; which is a miserable, stupid, illusory path to an immense, historical result. 

Day one

Recalling cornerstones

The recent discussions of the communist congress of the Soviet Union, which have been echoed in every field, have a profound historical significance. The relationship between all these words and the historical background is to be sought in a different way: we are much better prepared for this than the followers – who have been unsettled for not a short time, if at all – and the Western adversaries, who are ardent but armed with very poor polemical and critical means.

We say this today to the few who know the background of our non-noisy, but well-founded, coherent research and presentation. Other events, which will make noise in a much wider circle than ours, will find us welding, even amidst the silence, other links in this solid, if now barely visible, chain. 

With the dates of 1 February, 21 April, 22 May, 28 September 1952, Stalin published a series of not lengthy writings, with which he considered it necessary to intervene in the economic discussion that had arisen within the party in the year 1951, regarding the preparation of the new «Handbook of Political Economy», which had recently been published in the West, and which we hope to learn about before it is done away with¹. The purpose of the writing was to establish which economic laws should be applied to the structure of Russian society today, and to argue that these laws were those of a socialist economy. And, of course, the content was also to recall the laws that apply in the contemporary economy of international capitalism, comparing them with the way Marxist economics has formulated them for a century.

The «Dialogue with Stalin», published by our movement in a small volume in 1953, argued that this construction, while misrepresenting the reality of the progress of economic fact, both in Russia and in the West, contains a number of serious errors of doctrine; it is irreconcilable with the fundamentals of Marxist doctrine. There were collected «Threads of Time” given in this periodical in n. 1 of 10-24 October 1952 and in the following nos. 2, 3, 4, with supplementary extracts in nos. 2 and 3 of 1953.

It was at this very time, from 5-15 October 1952, that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held its 19th Congress, at which, as is well remembered, Stalin did not so much dominate as leader, as he was considered by all and sundry to be the originator of the party’s entire historical, economic, political and philosophical theory, officially referred to as the «doctrine of Lenin and Stalin».

This position remained unchallenged in the Russian party (and brethren) until 5 March 1953, on which day Stalin died. And from that day to the present (14 February 1956).

In the discussion on Russia in the pages of «Programma Comunista» from November 1954² we have put the materials of our critical view developed over years and decades in an organic order. According to this, the ‘Stalinist’ positions in historiography, economics, politics and even philosophy are false and anti-Marxist.

Of all this, may those who follow us today, friend or foe, consider above all the discussion of Marxist economics in that «Dialogue», and the recent exposition of the revolutionary history of Russia, of the great struggles of 1917 and the following glorious years, of the historical construction of the Bolsheviks and Lenin on the development of the Russian social structure, and of the Russian and world revolution; especially insofar as they counter the so-called theory of the construction of socialism in one country, the persecutory, infamous, and defeatist deeds of its wretched proponents from thirty years to the present.

From the 14th to the 25th of this February 1956, the 20th Stalin party congress took place: its language is a thousand miles away from ours, but it is no longer that of the 19th congress and the living Stalin: it is always about the immortal Lenin, no longer about an immortal Stalin. 

No one for Marxism is immortal – no one is dead. Life dialogues with all those it calls vulgar oratory. All will respond! With them the living, and those who will come after. 

From the East an ideological earthquake 

From various rumours it appears that the immense propaganda society constituted by the party and government in Moscow, which for thirty years has filled the earth’s surface with a formidable literature forged on a constant mould, even if it is careful from time to time to run an implacable Index that withdraws and burns straggling issues – and let it not be said to the detriment of the Roman Index behind which it stands, indelibly nailed on the plates on top of the auto-da-fé poles, a mighty consistency to bimillenary doctrine – it turns out, then, that this gigantic society suddenly puts everything under revision, and launches the announcement of new texts on all disciplines, to replace the ancients. Nothing is passed over in silence: history and economics, philosophy and politics, art and biology, technology and ethnology…

Has this congress of unbelievable abjuration highly founded the pedestal of a new faith, on whose cornerstones the new stelae of a different construction can be expected to be erected, and can anything be expected to arise tomorrow from that aggregate of historical forces? The materials of the congress, which came from all sources, presented in different lights by all the «churches», give us enough to answer resoundingly and irrevocably that no. 

Has this confession of dreadful and festering heresy in the slightest, kneeling under the ashes of an unbelievable Canossa, meant a return to the long-failed and prostituted orthodox positions, a washing away of bloody guilt, and a renewed baptism into salvation? Never. These figures of generous legends, themselves forged from subconsciousness of ancient historical addresses, hold no key for us today; only a new phase of the incurable disease is to be announced, a further step towards the bottom of the abyss of unredeemable damnation. The shouting from all angles, in reciting the most clumsy and inept mea culpa of Stalinist blindness, a return to the great sources of Marxism and Leninism, traditions of the purest historical blood boasted today by unrecognisable bastards, is but one more blasphemy in the unworthy series, a new – but by God a hundred times more impotent than the previous ones – insult to the height of the revolutionary faith of the world Proletariat. The blasphemy, the insult, worthily crowns a third of a century of obscene practices celebrating a secular black coven of priests of the phallus, smeared with lies and fraternal blood, with indelible stains for the history of the centuries. 

This ideological earthquake, which shows and prepares only ruins, leaving to other forces the raising of new structures, and with quite different materials, must be explained by the shaking of the social undercurrents, not only of Russia but of the entire world. It is vain to speak of it as a new fabrication of other propaganda scenes, for the same purposes of the same monstrous but still very strong power, as bourgeois imbecility does on all sides; Even more vain will it be, after drawing breath (in the ranks of the henchmen to whom the crumbs of the orgy banquets of the Bonzean sanhedrin incredibly surviving his exploits have been falling for years) to dare to still waffle on as a prelude to a better adjusted firing of ranks defending the classes sacrificed by the accursed present society. The sense of class of what is unfolding is quite another; in the not too distant future it will be evident, and we will premise it on further examination. 

The «new» formula of the alliance in the capitalist world between the class of wage-labour and the classes of minimal and petty wealth does not historically «exit», as a third way, from the antithesis – which we gave at the end of our first part of the Russian treatise and which our editors placed in front of the first announcement of the Moscow logorrhoea – between dictatorship of capital and dictatorship of the proletariat. It «enters» the counter-revolutionary horn of the insoluble antithesis, and passes into the service of the forces of big world capital. Stalinism dies, but is reborn under the unmasked appearance of what for us is not idiotic cause for scandal and horror, but a happy herald of revolutionary dissolution: world totalitarianism, the philistically deprecated «fascism».

The disgraced middle classes of this modern pestilential society, as we have seen so many times, only open up to the right, and those who grope and entice them are but a maintainer of the counter-revolution. 

This is what they said in Moscow, without knowing it or wanting it; and not by wielding with diabolical resources the rudder that their Western compatriots attribute to the Russians to hold firmly in their hands.

«Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past».

«The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language».

An extreme leftist of the congress, Anastas Mikoyan; you said that one must now search not in the current edition of newspapers, but in the archives. The words quoted above opened a «little work» – according to the author, a poor emigrant to London – that reached the German magazine «Die Revolution» published in New York in February 1852 by a loyal member of our school: Joseph Weydemeyer: a study written in one go in the same days as the events. This is the debut of «Eighteenth Brumaire», by Karl Marx. 

Lacerated historiography

A few times in our study we have highlighted historical falsifications, the reading of which, and after so many years of bitter experience, makes one’s eyes glaze over, and not only for those who lived through those events at close quarters. We have not done this with much effort: our naivety has not wavered enough in so many decades under the incredible series of desecrating jabs vibrated at the sacred history of the Revolution and its Party, and we have never been able to come to terms with the fact that masses of working-class children now swear by that Himalayan size shit.

Such confidence from so few was just. The materials of that mountain ruin at the hands of those who raised the heap: but what a foul stench!

The «Short Course» of the History of the Bolshevik Communist Party, on which an entire Russian generation was educated, as on the basic text, is in Khrushchev’s report disqualified.

The moderate secretary, although not one of the authors of the text, merely said (according to Unità) that the current C.C. wanted to improve the ideological work by disseminating the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin (black silence on those of Stalin!), and then that «for the last seventeen years our propaganda has been based mainly on the «Short Course», but that «it is necessary to publish a popular Marxist textbook (again!) of the Party’s history», another on the «principles of Marxist-Leninist doctrine», and a «popular exposition (don’t rely so much on the choice between popular and Marxist) of the fundamentals of Marxist philosophy». 

More resolute was Mikoyan, the full text of whose speech will not be given by Unità. In the version of this, the speaker only accused the Short Course of ignoring the last twenty years of history. And how will these twenty years be written with a materialist method? How will the supreme disgrace of 1939 be recounted, the imperial agreement first with Nazi Germany, then with the plutocratic democracies execrated today, the «sale bisogne» of the foreign parties that first became Hitler’s servants and defeatists (for Lenin’s theory!) only of the imperialisms of Paris, London, etc.; and, at a stroke, blatant partisans of the anti-German war for democracy, to the point of making one regret the chauvinists of 1914, bloodily flayed by Vladimir’s inexorable blade? And will one hypocritically charge the only surprising scapegoat, Djugasvili, with the attempted (and not even successful) coup of cutting off the hocks of the Allies of America in 1945, the «double blow» boldly announced in the report to the 18th Congress in 1939, now that idiotic diplomatic passerelles are being thrown at them? Is that head being offered for it? Not enough, gentlemen, is a skull.

Mikoyan said much more about the shame of that «history’. In the «Associated Press text is said: «Mikoyan criticised Stalin in several respects: 1) He (Mikoyan) declared that the writings of the former Premier ignored the last two decades; and therefore demanded new teaching texts on communism. 2) He attacked the accusations of treason that Stalin brought many years too late against the erstwhile heroes of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. 3) He declared that Russia’s foreign policy had become active, flexible and calm after Stalin’s death in March 1953». 

As for this point, it certainly does not smack of a return to the Marxist historical method! Our few readers can acknowledge that neither in 1953 nor in the years after 1945 did we ever believe the Russia-America war was close. But the historical reasons for this have not a damn thing to do with Stalin’s death! One does not fight against the personal myth by saying, in reverse, the same nonsense. And we will not stop here on the part, also known to Unità, that demolishes (rightly, but without deducing the clear consequence that annihilates the other conclusions of all these brazen neo-anti-Stalinists) the «Economic Writings».

Bari, the truth passes 

However, let us lift the cover of that Short Course, of limitless falsehood, as if it were a serious thing. «The History was compiled by a commission appointed by the Central Committee of the C.P. (b) of the C.C.C.P. of which Kalinin, Molotov, Voroscilov, Kaganovic, Mikoyan, Zdanov, Beria were members, under the direction of STALIN». All either well dead, or badly dead, or badly alive. And today there is talk of having «rehabilitated» the 32 of the great October Committee, of which, after a few natural deaths, only the great Dead, now debeatified, of 1953 had survived for many years!

It is better to read what the eminent historiographer Pankratova said, who (see, among others, Tempo of 24 February) «highlighted the profound crisis from which Soviet historiography suffered for some thirty years, due to the large number of topics made “taboo” under Stalin». 

She made a long list of events that it was obligatory to keep silent or turn upside down. To rewrite the history of the Civil War (1918-1920) as if Trotsky had ever been war commissioner. Keeping silent in the commemorative book of the Hungarian Commune of 1919, which bloody fell after desperate defence, the name of its great leader Bela Kun. Today an official communiqué rehabilitates this name of an incomparable comrade, a complete Marxist, a true revolutionary hero, who simply and modestly wandered the corridors of the Moscow congresses, among so many pompous schemers of manoeuvres with the social-traitors of Europe, as if the bitter defeat of the magnificent Hungarian party, as superb for theoretical doctrine as for valour on the barricades, were a fault; and only because, when the capitalist beasts were clawing at the throat, at the crucial moment, of the Moscow revolution, he had waited for nothing else to throw everything into the battle, in the great red Danube citadel, raised against the fierce wind of all the bourgeois fuzz of Europe, against the poisonous rage of all the renegades and social-traitors, German and of the Entente, fascists and democrats. He would never have returned to Europe to negotiate, perhaps on the orders of Lenin who loved him so much, with the executioners of renegade socialism: declared an enemy of the people in 1937, we do not know where he was sent to die in Siberia a few years ago; while only because the crime was committed outside Russia do we know the day and place where the axe raised by a still-living scoundrel, who had approached him as a disciple, sank into the skull of the red leader of Victory, Leon Trotsky. He can now leave jail more peacefully: he has no more mysteries to reveal. 

Let us follow some of Professor Pankratova’s references. Order not to make known in Russia Lenin’s historical correspondence with Trotsky, owned by Harvard University. Order to remove from libraries and museums all documents relating to the prominent role in the Revolution of those executed in the great «purges». Order to the historiographers Chliapnikov, Jaroslawsky and Popokov in 1931 to make Trotsky appear as a secret imperialist agent in the history of the civil war. She was ordered to play down the Allied Normandy landings in the Second European War, editing a 1946 work of hers. It was with good reason that in 1949 Stalin had himself described in treatises as «the founder of Soviet historiography». 

And finally the most astounding and astonishing thing – there are things that fall below the limit of any possible indignation! In the history texts relating to the October revolution, the fable was put in that an attempt to assassinate Lenin was made by Bucharin! The straightforward, simple, smiling, virginal Bucharin, whose moistened blue eyes we saw so many times flashing with enthusiasm and joy, when the master, whom he idolised as a child, dealt with the issues of the revolution at the Moscow congresses, and the most splendid mutual trust overcame the most ardent contradictors! How far from the despicable unanimity of a servant collegiate! 

Pankratova stated that the reaction of historiographers has largely contributed to the dropping of these vile «taboos». 

On rare occasions, science and courage go hand in hand.

Communists, it is written in the «Manifesto», «disdain to conceal their views and aims». It is not an ethical imperative for Marxists to defend the truth. But it is physically the only oxygen of the Revolution. 

Myth and the cult the person

One cannot help but rejoice at the blows delivered against what is the true counter-revolutionary plague of the contemporary world, deadly both insofar as it is a matter of bringing up the role (pass the ugly word for the silly thing) of the Person of Exception, the following and the gratitude one should owe it – and when one is ideologically raving and debauched about the generic human person, never so much hailed and bowed down as in an age of history that crushes it in masses like dust in a mortar. 

But what value is to be placed on the proclamations of Khrushchev, and Mikoyan, and Molotov, and Bulganin, and almost everyone! Falling cold, said as new and extraordinary things, are the obvious admissions that the cult of personality is contrary to the spirit of Marx and Lenin. So much for the spirit! – Whoever had manifested such a disgusting superstition to such men, and worse still if directed to themselves, would not have escaped from their clutches without leaving burning shreds of his reptilian skin.

For decades this filthy genie has been stuffing the skulls with the story of the exploits of the Great, the High, the Big, be they geniuses of good or evil. The kaleidoscopic modern capitalist society would occasionally let itself be set up by a clique of three or four more or less disabled illustrious men; the rakish Franklin Delano, the paranoid Winston, the now drained maniac of greatness and blood Josif. And, in reverse, until yesterday millions of men were thrown and immolated to the success of burning the carcass of the sadistic Adolf; of hanging the good miles gloriosus Benito by his feet. Is this Marxism, o fools sick of the cult of fools?

And is it so easy for these little idols hurtle down such bulky, suffumigated altars? Wretches, hear. 

After thirty-three years Karl Marx reprinted that little work we have already mentioned – after the Paris Commune, which had ordered the column in the Place Vendôme on which the bronze statue of the First Napoleon stood to be pulled down; and after the Third and Small had fallen. And he was able to write: «The prediction, with which I concluded, has already come true: if the imperial mantle falls on Louis Bonaparte’s humerus, this means that the bronze statue of Napoleon is about to be precipitated from the top of the Vendôme column». 

We shall therefore see the great statue of Djugasvili fall from the so fiercely contested Stalingrad stands. Perhaps it will be a slight advantage – if it is true that the great mass gathering at the close of the congress was cancelled so as not to give the elected leaders a taste of flattery – not to hear and read any more of the trivial scenes in which servile delegations of workers bear gifts of homage to a few fools entwined under a silly row of heads on a red background. 

But much higher still lies Marxism, than this stinking game about big names, which dulls, blinds and alcoholises the avant-garde class. 

In that same preface, Marx wrote these words about the fashion, which he indignantly saw coming, of Caesarism. 

«Lastly, I hope that my work will contribute toward eliminating the school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called Caesarism (of you, Jerusalem, the parabola speaks!). In this superficial historical analogy the main point is forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants. People forget Sismondi’s significant saying: the Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society (we are tempted to dare to add: above all in its middle classes) lives at the expense of the proletariat». 

Are these ridiculous gentlemen who waffle, even after Stalin has been liquidated, about a new Marxism that they create every morning, so much as to attribute to this language a meaning, which they would not fail to say is trivially popular? We shall see, quoting them, that never! 

This is not the historical epoch, Marx teaches, of individual leadership of society, of the great civil struggles within it. And in other equivalent words: the revolution of the working class cannot be directed by Eminent figures. 

Many times we have used the term romanticism to designate the condemnation, which weighed on the Russian revolution for its anti-feudal, and in so much bourgeois «face», to follow the lines of the Great Western Revolutions. Just as these took from classical antiquity the legal doctrine (forgetting the difference, that the Latin jus played among the free only and left the mass of slaves, who all supported, outside its guarantees, i.e. the basic difference, as above, of Marx and Sismondi), so they took from it politically as much as literally (qui nous delivrera des Grecs et des Romains?) the rigid scheme of the Republic yielding to imperial Caesarism. 

On the tremendous problems of the Moscow Revolution, which had to be reduced to the truly mighty plot of Lenin’s Marxist construction, the shadows of the Paris Revolution were projected with force of terrible suggestion. It was agitated against the ardent and impetuous, but by no means stained with personalism, Trotsky, the outrage of Bonapartism and the vile historiographic invention of the preparation of a Thermidor, to him, the magnificent theoriser and captain of the most splendid proletarian Terror, and only proletarian. 

But just as the liberal bourgeoisie had foolishly and out of time, and after the sole example of the Great Bonaparte (who may perhaps stand to Robespierre as Julius Caesar stood to Brutus, and Alexander the Great to Leonidas) extinguished its collective revolutionary force in the Caesarism and puppets in which it crystallised in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stunted abortions of history, so the magnificent Revolution of Russia, which had a formidable phalanx of captains and masters, played out with drunkenness in the name of Stalin, and bloody sacrifices to his greatness, which no one, perhaps not even we, believed to be so transient, its obligatory farce, starred by the Personality. 

Everywhere the bourgeois Revolution has devoured its own children, and nevertheless we never shouted at it to stop, whatever its nation and race was – or will be -. But the Revolution that will finally be proletarian, and only proletarian, if it will certainly cut the dross from itself with iron and fire, will not follow such a path. 

We said that the bourgeoisie of France gave the exception with the great Corsican. But how much even of that individual greatness was not a determination of historical forces? Marx in that text recalls that «Colonel Charras opened the attack against the Napoleonic cult in his book on the war of 1815, and since that time, particularly in recent years, French literature has with the weapons of history, and criticism, and satire, debunked the Napoleonic legend», and other times we quoted the wise Engels on the subject. Today, a young, forty-year-old historiographer of France, Jean Savant, has erected in his no less than fifteen works a theory that debunks the person of Bonaparte and reads in his famous deeds the work of three leading men: the political agitator Barras, the policeman Fouché, the great capitalist Ouvrard. Official science gnaws at its liver, but in frequent stages bows to the power of Marxism.

Let’s close the gap and ask ourselves whether we were in front of a congress of Marxist wreckers of the cult of Personality, or not rather of professional bootlickers, reacting to unemployment by setting up a cooperative of second-rate geniuses.

Incurable scoliosis

The courtly phrases of the 19th Congress have not been forgotten, and it is too recent for friends and foes alike to have done so. The most vehement, most burning of the iconoclasts, the oft-named Mikoyan, has in his personal file notes of this sort: Stalin, the Great Architect of Communism! Here is another explanation for the ongoing magnetic storm: from the Sun they have heard him thundering for Marxism-Leninism that does not want to worship Man!

Silly romanticism, here, mimicking the Great Architect of the Universe: the bourgeois were too philistine to put God to rest, and gave him a salaried post. Communism has no architects! and if were so, that place would have been occupied centuries ago, since the time of Cabet, Campanella, More and even Plato.

The «Associated Press» could not fail to pay the price for the head of our abjuring thurifer: it is worth telling it, although the argument of the authorship of coaxing statements is of little weight to us, precisely because we do without the steadfastness of the person on all sides, and we believe that light can come from the blasphemous as darkness from the orthodox, if only a morsel goes straight through or down the wrong way. 

«At the 19th congress in 1952 Mikoyan declared that Stalin’s work ‘illuminates with his genius both the great, historic road we have travelled and that which leads to an ever more tangible communist future’. At the end of his 1952 speech Mikoyan raised the cry of ‘Glory to the great Stalin!’. That time he also referred to Stalin’s works as a ‘treasure trove of ideas’ and said that in his books ‘Comrade Stalin illuminates our lives with the dazzling light of science’! ». 

Today, for people with such stomachs, as Tito went from being a knife-in-the-teeth bandit to a revolutionary hero, Stalin is reduced to a ragamuffin. But Stalin was a fighter, a conspirator and an organiser of the highest order: his negative sides are frighteningly well known, now that Trotsky’s book on his biography remains peacefully acquired as not due to a «secret agent»: theorist and scientist, that is what no one had to believe, not today, not yesterday, not the day before! Who, then, will believe a doctrinal and scientific reconstruction, committed to that people, who had the highest light held by him? Put out the lamp under his icon, people, and go to bed in the dark. Do not praise Lenin and Marx: they might jump out of their graves.

Let’s quote the bourgeois press, eh, tovarisch Tecoppa? According to instructions the grand secretary gave us, get to the archives, let us leaf through the collection of the Unità. 

The 19th congress announced the printing of one and a half million copies of Stalin’s «Problems of Socialism» (we shall discuss the actual demolition of this work at the 20th congress later). It was, in the Unità of the time, quoted by Pravda that «this is the greatest phase of development of Marxist-Leninist political economy…, which will exert an enormous influence on the development of advanced Soviet science», which «for the first time formulates the fundamental economic law of socialism» (it was the law of value and the law of increasing production in geometric reason!), and all of this by «creatively developing (we may as well get rid of this creativity, which is also nowadays traced back to Lenin) the teachings of Marx, Engels and Lenin».

Malenkov closed like this: «Under the banner of the immortal Lenin (he was already dead, good for him), under the wise leadership of the great Stalin, forward, etc.».

Molotov was more sonorous: «Long live the party of Lenin and Stalin! May our great Stalin live in good health for many years! Glory to comrade Stalin, great leader of the party and the people! Long live dear Stalin!»

Kaganovitch (issue of 15 October 1952) spoke at length of the genial leader Stalin, who enriched the theory of Marx, Engels and Lenin with new discoveries; of leader and master Stalin, of theoretical genius work, and so on. As for Mikoyan’s speech, you can read it on page 3 of the 16 October issue, with the effusive expressions already mentioned. 

Such use of rhetoric and repulsive courtesanship is also pernicious to the success of the defeatist work of the revolutionary preparation of the working class: will it not open its eyes, in Italy and elsewhere, even to this scandalous turn of events today?

We will still await the effects of those, Marxistically investigable, events which will occur tomorrow, and which will mark the long, hard path of the historical rise of the red tidal wave.

And we shall see the connection between today’s congressional earthquake and the proclamations that historical reality will inevitably impose tomorrow on those who today with unparalleled audacity throw away the sworn teachings of the master Stalin, the one and a half million copies of the new Economy that replaced Marx and Lenin, the volumes of Stalin’s «Complete Works» that were in advertising in Italy until today, and who as of today are being taken out of the shop. 

As we have already said, we are moving towards the Congress of Confession. The force of facts is a physical force, and it also imposes itself on men by presenting itself as the force of a theory, to which one can for whole cycles lie, but to which one is ultimately forced to bow.

A great turning point will come when it will have to be declared that the structure of Russia’s social economy is a capitalist structure.

Stalin’s pseudo-scientific economics would then be inconvenient to manoeuvre. It would also be convenient to draw this evidence from authentic Marxism, arguing the historical necessity of this situation, in order to save the stability – of which we will speak later – of state power.

It will be convenient then to mention that Trotsky, Zinoviev and so many of us had said this until the shutter came down in 1926. Then it will not be convenient to have spread that they said it because they were secret agents of capital.

Here is the plot for an objective Marxist explanation of the 20th Congress, and the frightening ideological lability of what had to be formulated in it.

Lead in the backsides 

Our readers will recall our recent abjuration of Molotov – whom his «dear Stalin» had graced with the epithet of leaden ass – to the statement, which escaped him in too much of a hurry, for perhaps one moment the diplomatic leads had loosened, that in Russia nothing but «the foundations» of socialism, and not «socialism», had been built.

Molotov would apparently repeat this abjuration, and with it others, such as that of having underestimated the uprising of the peoples of Asia and Africa against the white colonial yoke.

But we had the right to make this evidently exact thesis collimate with those that had been developed in the contradictory discussion at the Enlarged Executive in August 1926 between Stalin, Trotsky and Zinoviev, which was on that occasion particularly happy and complete, well redeeming the tactical swayings of earlier years. Stalin then resisted very weakly the overwhelming historical and theoretical proof that Lenin had never admitted that socialist transformation was possible (he never spoke of construction, nor can Marxism speak of it) without the advent of the workers’ revolution in the West. Stalin himself then fell back on military victory over the domestic bourgeoisie and the building of the basis of socialism. The basis of socialism, as Lenin always explained, is monopolist and statist capitalism in industry, and a step towards it is the most modest step of capitalism, whatever it may be, in place of small-scale rural production and small-scale trade. This a centralised state can build, where it is lacking, and thus build capitalist economic forms.

The transition to socialist forms is not a construction, but a demolition of production relations, which is possible beyond a certain quantitative level of the forces of production,  which Bulganin would later confess he could not reach even in 1960.

We tied the right Marxist formula, which did not escape a diplomat of Molotov’s calibre by chance, to his strength as a militant and scholar of Marxist science, which goes back to Lenin’s early days and which he badly postponed to Stalin’s dubious teachings in 1952.

This issue could not fail to resonate at this congress. But it is not ripe today: we will hear as much about it in a few years’ time as we do about those of distorted historiography, collegial and non-personal leadership, and the others that await us and you on the next day: the economic laws that explain the current Russian economy in heavy and light industry, agriculture and trade – and the great central question on which the defectors will break their own teeth and kidneys: the international transfer of power to the proletariat, and the alleged new ways of it. We have seen two generations of Marxists pass by: we had barely begun to repeat the doctrine on the road to socialism, that we already had to go toe to toe with those who foresaw new ways (back in 1910, the popularfrontist Bonomi).

The indication at this congress is to hold fast to the construction of socialism in Russia affirmed since 1936, even if in other countries the «will of the people» regulates their «internal affairs» in the sense of remaining capitalist. 

In a further stage the thesis on «coexistence», another anti-Leninist blasphemy, will be desperately held up, indeed «become Marxistically true» because it will be thrown off the edge, onto the pile of Josif’s unsold works, that of «construction». Then, a Molotov will tell the West, we coexist because we build the same thing: quantitatively growing capitalism.

But Lenin’s voice will then be raised, from everything except the congresses of that party: this is precisely why you will not co-exist, because the various imperialisms can only move towards confrontation and war.

On the shaky ground Khrushchev’s speech also had, amidst the shadows, a few twists and turns. For example when he described a Washington-Bonn business axis, which he contrasted with a London-Paris axis. Perhaps the incurable frontist saw the play of a crusade, comfortable still, against the Reichswehr of the hated Germany, which more formidably than after the first post-war period is now rising to its feet. But we have recalled that since 1919, the cannon shooting of the First World War not yet silenced, Lenin pointed to the imperial conflict between the United States and Japan, as if he felt the tremendous, if not atomic, bombs of Pearl Harbour crashing on stone and steel. 

The revolution will return with the not so near general war. But Lenin, in outlining this shining doctrine, did not so much link the military defeat, the delayed bourgeois revolution, and the proletariat’s descent into the struggle over this drama, as he did the return of the situation ruined by the traitors of 1914, and were still to ruin those, his own flesh and blood, of 1939. He saw the revolution that stops mobilisation and war and overthrows the powers of the belligerent, bloodthirsty imperial monsters. 

Difficult is the prospect of the next war if the first missiles are set off. But perhaps, in some non-next eventualities of history, they will not be set off. One of these might involve the Bonn-Washington axis, and especially if there is the feared, by the two atomic war ministries of the Kremlin and the Pentagon, German unification. If that party of a few men other than Marx and Engels, from the long-distant memory of 1852, who cast their eyes, anxious and full of the great visions of the 1848, on the appearance of the new glimmers of war on the horizon of an idiotic peace, will be resurrected, then the revolutionary drama, which in the first half of the twentieth century revolved around Russia, will be able to revolve in the second half around Germany.

Cautious glances at the new route

The measured words of Khrushchev’s report directed against Molotov’s thesis were counterbalanced by a statement that presented itself to trade observers as directed against Malenkov, before Molotov, and more seriously, censured by the party for having glimpsed a shift from the production economy to the consumer economy, a brake on heavy industry in favour of light industry, a phase that evidently in doctrine lies in time far beyond the total building of industrial bases.

Even Malenkov has not failed to formally rectify and retract this: neither Molotov nor Malenkov have been or will be guillotined, not even in effigy, as the journalists expected and will expect, and Bulganin even less so. Beria’s case is not about economic programmes: it is about the liquidation of the Stalinist period, of infamy and gallows on the healthy revolutionary wing of the Russian party. This would never have tolerated, aiming not at constructive plans but at the revolutionary destruction of western capitalism, the disgrace of military alliance pacts, of coexistence pacts, of international support – which by visibly yielding dismantled the laughable game – on the social scum of the middle classes, where the revolution against feudalism, the only one in which they could serve as cannon fodder, was made and forgotten. And today Beria is historiographed as an imperialist agent. 

But among Khrushchev’s own formulas one can read, if one looks closely, the other revirement of tomorrow, which will restore to the Trotskys, the Zinovievs, the Bucharins not only the honour of militant forerunners of communism, but the recognition of the powerful theoretical and scientific clarity of Marxists, while their murderers and alleged critics will go to the fate that awaits them, in the embrace with the toothed steel arms of the other imperial monsters.

We will use the text of the Unità, in the summary and excerpts from the report that Tass released.

In comparison with the potential of western countries, the figures will confirm that Khrushchev was right to say that Russia is still far behind – he said «the industrial base of the socialist system becomes more and more powerful». To the letter, the formula is as Marxist as the Molotovian one! 

Khrushchev decisively alluded several times to a «failure» in the agricultural plan and the low yields of Kholcosian production, hinting at the extent to which this delayed an increase in the production of consumer goods. But this has to be reserved for the economic side. In this too he leaned towards Molotov.

Even the formula: consolidating the economic power of our socialist country is toned down in comparison to that of the achieved socialist construction: in the former, Russia is socialist politically, in the latter economically. Two fakes, but theoretically different.

«Economic progress, raising the material and cultural level of workers» are no longer formulas that fit a socialist society!

Molotov’s cold condemnation is a contrast: «To claim that we have only laid the foundations of socialism is to mislead the party and the people». Is there therefore still people when socialism with its «relations of production» is already «built up», i.e. when not even the proletariat should exist anymore?

But the blow from the other side is much more thoroughly given: «We encounter another extreme in the way we deal with the question of socialist development. For we have some leading officials who interpret the gradual transition from socialism to communism as a signal for the implementation of the principles of communist society already at the present stage. Some hotheads have decided that the construction of socialism is already completed (in other words, has the construction begun or is completed? Does it only have the foundations or also the roof?) and have begun to compile a meticulous timetable for the transition to communism».

This second formula is extraordinarily timidist. In capitalism itself, certain economic functions are performed, in sectors closed in time and space albeit, with communist economic principles, i.e. without monetary remuneration: putting out fires, fighting epidemics, floods, (geological!) earthquakes, even the cold. In a socialist country, one would not even sneeze without compensation in give and take, of money and labour-time?

A few more nudges and we’re there, Secretary to whom – honi soit qui mal y pense – no worship will be paid, neither today nor ever.

The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Russia

Day two

Cult of waste paper

Time and again we will have to reduce the positions of the Moscow movement to the absolute counterfactual denial of the cornerstones of communism. It’s enough now to see the crude banality of the paper manoeuvre with which it is really thought to surmount today’s telluric tremor by keeping the worldwide fair booth still standing (and if it does, it will be by the grace of other, clearly identifiable factors). 

All the «Stalin material» is suddenly taken out of the way and raked back from all the suburban outlets. In its place is suddenly spilled, line by line, the literature of this twentieth congress, more disconnected still, in its filiation from more fathers, than the «scientific» and truly pitiful deliveries of hobgoblin Stalin. The trash heap of the century, the scribes would say; the biggest trash heap in history, we would say: millions and millions of roubles, to the value of waste paper alone. Billions spent on printing in all languages; presses at a pace worthy of this atomic, and asinine, age. 

Medieval scholasticism itself did not go that far when it burned, along with the condemned authors, at times in black robes, the piles of their writings, excommunicated those who read or touched them in the future, and required the faithful to recite by the millions the prayer of imploring forgiveness for heresy, of reconsecrating the violated pulpits and the seats ascended by Satan. 

Scholasticism, a far more respectable historical phase than this one, was justified in being entirely consistent with its organic doctrine of human action and knowledge. For it, the masses are piloted to consciousness, and this is accessible to the operations of «propaganda fide» when the organisation delegated by the supreme body expresses in its formulations the dictate and light of Grace.

Modern bourgeois critical thought, which still does not clear the ground despite the chain of sorry figures on all fronts, rejected the Being, the Grace, and the investiture of infallibility, but pretended to substitute for it a piloting of human action that was no different, i.e. it took men by the head, it raved about the printing press, alphabetism and the mass-produced book, and – ouch for him – about the flood of gazettes; about the Master- torch versus the Priest- snuffer. 

Are no mistaken those who translate this grasp of the man-citizen by the head, into real grasp by the dialectical, if scurrilous, body opposite. 

Very much sinning, we socialists of yesteryear mistook our movement for a new propaganda fide, not realising that the Marxist militant is no longer one who knows how to convince and teach, but one who knows how to learn from the facts, which run ahead of man’s head, while it, wavering, has been trying to chase them for millennia. 

The most mature understanding of determinism has nothing to do with passivism, but makes it clear that man acts before he wants to act, and wants before he knows why he wants, the head being the last and least secure of his limbs. The best use a group of men can make of it will be to foresee the historical moment in which – other than passivism! – they will be catapulted, for the first time with the head first, into a whirlwind of action and battle.

The pundits of inexhaustible resources and manoeuvres that can be contrived in any grasp with cunning success, the superactivists, we have been watching them obscenely proceed for years and years, their faces undaunted, but le-cul-le-premier. 

In the teeth of them we reconsult unparalleled books that have guided us for nearly a century: those gentlemen give an example of their return to Marxism by changing from one day to the next, at the whistle of the counter-master, all the printed paraphernalia, in historical, economic, political, philosophical criticism, certain that in this way they will change the face of the world in their own way.

Precisely because we have not today learnt to dodge the cult of personality, we will always compulse the work of Stalin as needed; we will not value a penny more than this the launched florilegium of congressional bullshit, which today overflows.

Confessed turning points 

On the first day of this Dialogue we examined two aspects of the erasures and rewriting of dogmas carried out at this modern Council, not of Nicaea or Trent, but of Moscow. We are especially concerned with this false creed: «the Russian economy today is of a socialist structure», which has not been thrown overboard so far, and we are concerned with Stalin’s other, no less foolish creed: «in the socialist economy, the law of exchange between equivalents (ill-named law of value) is in force», about which things are still in the same state.

On the economic points that were most closely dealt with in the Mikoyan speech we will pause later. We have so far taken note of changed positions that were already contained in the party secretary’s report and have been developed extensively in other speeches, on historiography and personality. 

The first mutation consists in eating one’s words as slander, i.e., all the accusations of treason levelled at the anti-Stalinist Bolsheviks exterminated in the obscene «purges». The murdered remain murdered, and their massacre retains the form of the destruction of the revolutionary workers’ vanguard: the error of «historiography» will not be saved by a rehabilitation (by those people we supremely cherish being called traitors and fascist bandits, while we would have sacred horror of a rehabilitation on their part!). The error will appear in its historical light on the day when the Marxist position of that mighty movement will shine through as exact (it was tens of thousands of proven militants everywhere selected and executed in the counterrevolution, which has since become blatant, as the true Marxist historiography will record), i.e., when the economic fabric of Russian society will have to be declared non-socialist. This is not yet fully confessed. But the hour will come. 

The second mutation examined so far is that of the condemnation of the cult of personality, which is also the mere effect of a forced determination, and totally inadequate, to the Marxist position. The cult of Stalin is dismissed, with the grim interpretation that Stalin himself founded it, and the assertion that in the place of the sole leader must be put the leading «college» of the state and the party. Here, too, the new position is flimsy, and the correct solution of the relationship between class and party does not live in it. If it were possible for one man to force an entire collectivity into the myth of his personal power, it would not be the mistake of a bad Marxist, but a decisive historical proof against Marxism. 

Since the first speech circulated was Khrushchev’s, more striking than the mutations (which later appeared resounding) on the first two points mentioned, was his position regarding the task of the communist parties (very few have not changed this name; and it would be better to say the parties linked with Moscow) in the countries «outside the Curtain». In all countries – he said – our programme remains the advent of communist society; we have by no means renounced it (this confession will take even more time). But as for the historical process that leads from capitalist society to communism, we do not believe that it must necessarily pass through civil war, the use of violence, the proletarian dictatorship, as Lenin advocated in 1917 (Khrushchev also made reservations about this) and we admit that there may be paths other than that, and different from country to country. He argued that there may also be the path of winning a parliamentary majority, and that the parties must use in this struggle not the support of the wage-earners alone, but the alliance with them of the middle classes, the consensus of the people and all educated men of goodwill. He did not, however, rule out the possibility that in certain situations instead of taking this peaceful path, or when this is barred by capitalism, civil war may be resorted to.

This crass statement was all prompted by the need to support the well-known theses of international politics: coexistence with capitalist countries, avoidance of war with them.

Here (for the most part) there are no breakthroughs with respect to Stalin’s position, and therefore it was not a clamorous mutation, as on the history of betrayals and the one-man leadership. It was a matter of lowering the mask and saying, just as the first points were being asserted to return to orthodox Marxism and Leninism from those errors and deviations, that the same political action would be conducted, in foreign countries, that the social-democratic and petit-bourgeois parties have always conducted.

Logical, therefore, to note the meeting of the new with the old opportunism and the complicity of both with the salvation of the bourgeois order. But it is not enough for us Marxists to say that the first wave and the second wave of opportunism are the same, nor is it to hastily deduce that the capitalism of the West and that of the East, indifferently, are the same. The historical paths of the two opportunisms are different (the second is much worse), and the way in which capitalism in the two camps has developed and the revolution will overcome it, is different; different, but in neither case peaceful.

Is this Khrushchev’s confession then perhaps brand new? We must look again, of course repeating what we have always said, at the question of the road to power, and class power.

Clashing forces in the world 1956 

If human society in its history presents a series of clashes and conflicts, its murky present picture certainly does not escape this fate. 

This congress could not escape such scrutiny. And the problem of the social and political struggle in those countries outside the frontier of the USSR and the famous «curtain», the problem of the «internal politics» of the «capitalist» countries, is not, in everyone’s opinion, the only one. There is that of Russian politics to which we know how Khrushchev and his comrades answer: there is no classes and class struggle, there is concord around the socialist government, completely unanimous. The answer is the whole examination we are making of the Russian economic and social structure. In the deformed figuration of Stalin’s converts (to everything but Marx and Lenin), in Russia and its sister countries there would no longer be a clash between state and society, in Engels’ sense, but there would only be this in the Atlantic countries, where there is class struggle (and that too in a bastard sense). 

Having thus divided the states of the world into two groups, the problem of the relationship of forces between them arises. This occurs in three ways. Relations between the states of one group and those of the other – relations among the states of the eastern group – relations among the states of the western group. We are here in the midst of the problems we dealt with in Dialogue with Stalin. In economics: single world market or double market? In politics: peace or war? A question that also concerns the two latter cases, within homogeneous groups. 

The mutations here seem to us to be these. Co-existence, in the sense of «non-war» and «everyone minding their own business», was affirmed at the 19th and is affirmed at the 20th congress. Emulation or economic competition in the sense of descent into a single market (we demonstrated how rigorous was a bourgeois economist’s demonstration that this is tantamount to admission of the similar mercantile and capitalist nature of the economies on both sides), appears clearly accepted at the 20th congress, whereas it was strongly reserved under Stalin. Was this congress a Marxist academy, as it claims, or did it not rather smash the Stalin idol to satisfy the demands of the Business Chamber of World Capitalism? 

As for inter-state relations within the Eastern Group, the impossibility of their contrasts is emphasised, and external gushes of joy are hot. But who will believe these ruts between cold-blooded animals? Who will catch Gronchi and granchi (crabs, for blunders)? Among the reasons, however, why Stalin and his bones get out of the way, is perhaps that of some corns treaded on the Asian side, where it seems that the satellite role is acted less leniently than on the European side. 

The third problem, of the clashes between states in the west, between those where it is a matter of big granchi with real pincers, also seems to be mutating. But, illustrious twenty-congressmen, here was more Leninist (we talked to him about this claim) the ci-devant (you reek from a thousand miles of bourgeois Jacobinism!) star of science Stalin! The war between the states of capitalist imperialism in the western group remained inevitable. It is the oriflamme of the Social Revolution, even if it was already reduced to a vain bogeyman then, was only half-lowered. 

We gave Khrushchev credit for a robust prophecy on inter-Western relations, although he spoke more of clashes between business axes than war axes. But undoubtedly this messenger has taken other reefs in the sails of the revolutionary threat, in connection with the spectre of war, and the canvas has been lowered three-quarters of the way.

Who will be left to do these operations, of such navigators with precarious careers, when without merit and without mercy the wind of the Great Storm starts blowing again? Play for a while, leaders of a neo-bourgeois Russia, with your Coty-scented «Marianne» cyclone.

For now, let us devote ourselves to the classic problem of power in a capitalist country, and take your newborn «creator» theories with a grain of salt: they smell rotten.

First the aim, then the means 

Naturally, the first comment the international capitalist press made was to feign astonishment: how, such a rush to general détente, and then the first thing Khrushchev says is that his movement is always for socialism and communism in every country? No more war, neither hot nor cold, but always propaganda for revolution within the countries, with which relations of correct friendship are maintained? This game on both sides will last for many, many years to come: deliciously playing dumbs.

But where are you, Trotsky, who proclaimed that with the Polish war – although in your military capacity you feared it precipitated – the Proletarian Revolution was to be brought to the heart of bourgeois Europe? The way in which Khrushchev always declared himself a communist is quite special. He lashed out at the foreign bourgeois who find contradiction between the declared peaceful coexistence and the claim to have communism everywhere as programme. According to him, «bourgeois ideologues confuse the questions of ideological struggle with those of relations between states» and instead «the great Marxist-Leninist doctrine» states «that the establishment of a social regime in this or that country is an internal question of the peoples of the respective countries». 

All Khrushchev admits is that communists are not supporters of capitalism! Did this sound like thundering Jupiter language to the bourgeois pen-pushers? But he added that communists do not meddle in the internal affairs of countries with capitalist systems. So, mr. Karl Marx, what were you meddling with back in 1850? Were you snoring, waiting for them to found the State of Israel, the only one on whose affairs you would have a voice to pontificate? So where did this scythian study the «great doctrine», by Adam’s horns?

Let us leave these pearls.

The speech, in our own modest interpretation, reads like this: I secretary, in Russia I am not only an ideological but a constructive communist (a fine word in today’s fashion that, as in a hundred other cases, competes, in yellow gloves, with parallel style, on both sides of the curtain) but abroad I am an «ideological» communist, and that’s it. By now, with coexistence comes reciprocal tourism: will the Yankee traveller say, at the sight of the hotel bill (it seems quite steep): pay? Oh ho, in your home I am a capitalist, but a purely ideological one. 

So let us be content with ideological communism, but let us look at it against the light for a moment. We know enough about socialism after our conversation with Baffone Stalin: it is based on the law of market exchange. We will only have to wait for communism, when its «ideologists» will have constructed it, according to the great doctrine of… Fourier-Owen. For now, the secretary ideologist explains it this way: communism… will be a social regime… in which every man will work enthusiastically according to his ability and receive, IN EXCHANGE FOR HIS WORK, according to his needs. 

But this is the great doctrine of the junkman and the grocer seller round the corner! The exchange of labour against consumption survives, society keeps the account book of each individual subject, it does not even dream of doing what today’s society does in narrow sectors; collecting labour, and distributing objects and services satisfying needs, even when those in need do not give adequate work, no longer getting lost in writing the mercantile equation! If Khrushchev’s goal is ideologically so easy, then perhaps his tortuous equivocal ways are worthwhile to achieve it!

Means: violence 

The phrase is right: our enemies like to present us Leninists as the partisans of violence, always and in all cases. For us, the element of violence is not the «discriminating» element between the revolutionary Marxist and those who are not. One cannot be a partisan of violence because it is not a goal, but a means, a passage. Communist society will be without exchange and only then without violence in the end. For only then will it be classless.

There may however – this is the point! – there may be the non-violence partisan who will say: ideologically I want the emancipation of the proletariat, but if violence is needed to achieve it, I abandon that claim. Whoever says this is not a Marxist: every «immediate» pacifist rejects Marxism. And Lenin rejected, on the word of Marx, those who are against all war, always and everywhere; we explained this at length in Part One of the «Structure of Russia». 

But Marxism equally condemns these very old theses: civil violence was a suitable means for the emancipation of citizens from feudal and despotic rule, and becomes so again if the achievements of personal freedom and democracy are threatened; but as long as democracy is respected, the political struggle must be peaceful.

It condemns no less this other: from the time of the Paris Commune, or at least the founding of the Second International, the transformation of bourgeois society into socialist will take place gradually and without recourse to violence, with measures implemented by the proletariat with the weapon of suffrage, which will lead its party to power. 

These are already theses not moral or philosophical or «ideological», but strictly historical. Lenin himself cleared up the long-debated doubts about Marx’s and Engels’ statements, the version according to which until 1865 they thought a peaceful victory of the proletariat was possible in England, and that at his death Engels thought it was possible in Germany. Theoretically, it can be admitted that a bourgeoisie under unfavourable conditions would relinquish political power to a party with a socialist programme: but the violent clash would arise soon afterwards. Lenin notes how Marx (replying after a conference in Holland) denied the possibility even in England of a «resignation» of the bourgeoisie from power, and as for Engels his much-discussed preface only suggests, in Germany 1890, that the initiative of the conflict should be left to the government.

What we say here for the medium of violence, applies to the medium of insurrection, civil war. In theory, they are not, in all cases, thinkable and desirable. Their use has historical limits.

This limitation was found by Lenin and all radical Marxists, in a second European cycle following the classical one of 1848-1871, in the beginning of the imperialist phase of 1900, and demonstrated it crossed in all developed countries at the date of the First World War.

These historical premises would have changed, according to Khrushchev, and thus cases could appear where the proletarian seizure of power could take place without violence and civil war. 

We first challenge the factual circumstances invoked: The forces of socialism and democracy have grown. False. At the time when Lenin established the historical theory all of Europe was parliamentary and the followers of socialist parties numerous in all countries. Economic imperialism, that’s according to Marx and Lenin, later generated the totalitarian political forms, beaten in the war, but not in the social type of super-developed capitalism: why is it declared in the same pages the danger threatening democracy in America, England, France, Germany, etc., whose governments, yesterday allies, are often depicted as fascist brigands? Or was this just Stalin music?

Will the insertion, after the 1890-1910 «idyllic period», of two fierce wars count for nothing? 

«The field of socialist countries numbers over 900 million people». We contested socialism – and democracy, which we care little about – as a new form in that field. A historical novelty has moved these 900 million men, only a blind man can contest it. But how? Through flashes of violence and civil war. It only takes one of these two terms to rule out that, softly softly, the rest of the world turns upside down without cannon shots.

As for the «force of attraction» and the «ideas that have conquered minds…» we leave them… to the new Marxist philosophy.

However, if we admit, for a moment, what has been contested, let us also grant, for dialectical purposes, that in some countries capitalism leaves the helm out of modesty for old events, out of Christian resignation, out of paralysis by dropsy, out of fair play, out of whatever the heck the hypersecretary wants; it would leave it shouting: by golly, you have emulated me in a peaceful competition, you have regularly outclassed me: I recognise you… more capitalists than me!

The philosopher’s Stone 

So let us accept for a moment the hypothesis of political power taken by the proletariat, for once, sine effusione sanguinis, without violence, without riot, without putsch, without blanquism, without insurrection. All these are not discriminatory elements: let Khrushchev be right.

There is one more, the ONE, the GREAT, the UNSTOPPABLE, the UNNOMINATED at the 20th Congress: THE DICTATORY OF PROLETARIAT.

Something – in the great doctrine of Marx and Lenin – did not change between 1848 and 1917, although in the interval the bourgeois world took a quarter-century plunge into milkweed. 

Would it have changed afterwards? In the time of two wars that set the entire planet ablaze? Of the greatest revolutionary victory in history, that of October, more and longer bristling with weapons than the epic one of 1793, which made the heroic cry of the bourgeois Carmagnole echo more thunderously: vive le son, vive le son, vive le son, du canon!? Of the drowning in blood not only of the Communes of Berlin, of Budapest, of Munich – after the first war – and of Warsaw, of Berlin again, after the second? Of the passing through the firing squads of Zinoviev, of Kamenev, of Bucharin, of Radek, of ten and ten other supreme masters, of a hundred and a hundred sergeants and veterans of Bolshevism, of a thousand and a thousand class soldiers, sons of the glorious war of the proletariat of Russia? Of the very bloody although bourgeois mask that degeneration placed on the faces of European proletarians in the false partisan uprising against the massacres of the capitalist dictatorship in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, the Balkans and everywhere? Of forty years of civil strife in China, in which immense armies in turn raged from the extreme north to the south? Of a hundred episodes of colonial struggles in eight or ten empires, dripping with blood, in which the deeds of the most democratic Europeans make those of the reactionary regimes pale, in the unspeakable series from the Belgian massacres of the Congo natives, before the 1914 tears over the martyred people, to the recent sinister Albion deportation of the Cyprus bishop, with all the rest?

Everything that passed on the historical canvas, between the two dates that connected the two giants, whose names are besmirchedby the Kremlin’s quotations, was romance for young girls, when compared to the cannibalistic events that have been unfolding in the world since the terrible example of the October Dictatorship launched such a challenge to the mammonist world of Capital, which has only Death as its stake. 

Although at this very congress, in boasting of new beginnings and diversions, and in boasting of chain breakthroughs that broaden Marxism, it was repeatedly admitted that there are certain principles that cannot be touched or changed, here is the principle of principles that is being attacked, and without which we, from the last to the first, we, millions of revolutionaries of yesterday, today and tomorrow, cease to exist. 

The new word of the Party that raises its Manifesto against the world in the convulsive 1848, is about the transition to socialism, treated at the 20th congress in an idiot manner. «All these social measures (which untie the knots of bourgeois oppression) have as their premise the organisation of the proletariat into a ruling class – afterwards into a political party – and the DESPOTIC intervention in all bourgeois relations of production». Despotism – or force of persuasion, oh gentlemen?!

The Manifesto is silent (on the cited page) about the armed insurrection. It is more than a revolt of slaves. It is the impersonal productive forces that revolt, and the expropriation of the expropriators comes about by solving a scientific equation. Not rumbling here in the Manifesto for the cannon. But the Dictatorship rests its steel fist on the enemy, even defeated, captive, surrendered. 

In the epic of the 1848 defeat of the Paris proletariat, the watchword echoes: destruction of the bourgeoisie! Dictatorship of the working class! It echoes because, as a hundred other times it has happened and will happen, the middle class insurgent against the right drowns in blood, after its victory, the confident advance, the naive «emulative competition» of the proletariat. Then, against these agents of the bourgeois system condemned by historical inertia to act as executioners of the socialist revolution, as in 1831, the cry is raised, which with equal unfortunate heroism will rise in 1871: dictatorship of the working class! Silence in the chokehold of every other section of the people! Not only of the patrons and banquiers, but of the filthy, épiciers of the streets of Paris! Silence in the chokehold of Jacques Bonhomme (the French peasant) with his bas de laine, the sock bulging with bourgeois gold. 

And the alleged anti-insurrectionist Engels, so many years later, at the end of the persecution of the German socialists, cries out: you ask, O philistines, what is dictatorship? The Paris Commune: this was the dictatorship of the proletariat! Even then for an abdicating bourgeoisie (and even if it were in the hands of a Khrushchev!) and defenceless, hostages will be taken, and the dictator proletariat, under the given conditions, will make use of them as it did in 1871 in Paris, responding lionheartedly, in the sacrifice of the Federates, and in the apology that Karl Marx made for it on the face of the executioners, before history.

The essentials in Marx – Lenin 

In the second edition of «The State and Revolution», by Lenin in 1918, he included the passages from Marx’s letter to Comrade Weydemeyer, already mentioned by us, because he felt that they «express what substantially and radically distinguishes Marx’s doctrine from that of the bourgeois thinkers, and the essence of his doctrine on the state».

We wanted to concede that the essential does not lie in the use of violence, civil war, insurrection, that is, that there can be a historical case of bloodless dissolution of the class struggle. But the original, the essential for the «great doctrine of Marx and Lenin» is not even class struggle, it is the dictatorship, and it is the destruction of the state. How better to say it than by Lenin himself?

«In 1907, Mehring, in the Neue Zeit, published extracts from Marx’s letter to Weydemeyer dated March 5, 1852. This letter, among other things, contains the following remarkable observation: «And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes (in which foolishly, we note in passing, certain very recent groups with very old errors want to read the whole of communism). What I (Marx) did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular, historical phases in the development of production (a thesis concerning the non-eternity of classes: there have been and there will be forms of human society without classes); (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society». 

Lenin, having said of essential, substantial, and radical doctrine, makes it the «touchstone» for the understanding and effective recognition of Marxism. He adds: he is not a Marxist unless he extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. 

It is crystal clear that all purported routes to socialism that do not extend the recognition of the class struggle to that of the dictatorship, characterise opportunism, against which Lenin’s theoretical and material battle was waged in those years, and that this is a basic principle that applies to all times and all revolutions. This original discovery of Marxism is not a «creative conquest» of historical experience, about which so much chatter has been made: Marx established it when a proletarian dictatorship, let alone a suppression of classes, had not yet been seen in history. Lenin makes it an inescapable principle (after Engels had pointed to the Paris Commune as the first historical example of a proletarian dictatorship), shortly after the first stable dictatorship had resoundingly triumphed, but exercised amidst violent enemy assaults, and always long before a historical example, still a long way off today, of the disappearance of classes and the state was seen. 

Whoever wants can come along and say that the lesson of history has disproved Marx and demonstrated that in the development of forms of production there will be dictatorship-free courses; but what cannot subsist is the proclaiming of a return to the doctrine of Marx and Lenin, who in this page proclaim in agreement at a distance of 70 years the «discriminative character» of the common theory, the recognition today by Moscow of a form of the class struggle, which develops in the world camp as peaceful coexistence and emulative competition, and in some national camps as «ideological struggle» and as parliamentary conquest of the state.

Because, here’s the great point, when you say that with constitutional upheavals in certain countries (which would then be only two in the whole world, France and Italy) you hope to have power (even if you do not exclude, strictly speaking, recourse to armed struggle if, in violation of the constitution, they do not hand it over to you after an electoral victory), you do not say at all, indeed you deny in theory and in practice, that you will destroy the apparatus of the old state, nor that you will imply the parliamentary loss of power in further stages, suppressing all political rights to the non-working classes: dictatorship is this and nothing else.

The aftermath of the conquest of power 

Having made another concession – no less fictitious than that of coming to power without an insurrectionary struggle – that is, that you tend, as is said in some passages, to stable power after the «popular» conquest, and that you make a commitment to defend such stability by force in the event that the electoral majority fails you, it is easy to see that this is a commitment impossible to maintain, and therefore to assume. 

These concessions and absurd historical assumptions we immediately take back: fear not the reader that we in any way believe we are really dealing with socialists and communists «in the ends», guilty only of making blatant blunders about «the means». The very title of «transition to socialism» is bestiality. The term transition serves what the elegant modern jargon (of the young gentlemen Lenin slaps down) calls petting: back off, you dirty petters of the Revolution! Which is clash, collision, explosion, fruitful bloody breach in history! 

We have therefore assumed that a «socialist» government has come to power by the «constitutional» route «by uniting around the working class the working peasantry and intellectuals, all the patriotic forces». Will the government founded on such a majority be able to retain it – indeed: will it ever be able to achieve it? – if it says: let us not allow subsequent elections to take it away from us, and let us stay permanently in power, either by not holding any more elections, or by holding them in the way that has now been learnt from all bands: vote, voters, freely, but only in favour of the government? 

What will the peasants say, what will the intellectuals say, what will the patriotic forces say (read, to make reference to Italy, the «left-wing», indeed centre-left, Catholics)? Evidently they, imbued with constitutionality at all costs, might even take up arms if history repeated the situation of a right-wing dictatorship before or after a popularly won election, but they will not do so for a dictatorship of proletarians that suspends the sacred guarantees in the name of which they will have mounted all the hype. But what will the genuine proletarians themselves, endowed with a revolutionary and Marxist spirit, say? They will say nothing, because there will be none, otherwise the hypothesis of the elephantine popular front would not even have been reached. 

Khrushchev therefore carefully avoids the scandalous word Dictatorship. He speaks in a purged edition of «political leadership of the working class headed by its vanguard». He echoes Marx’s translators who instead of revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat wrote critique of the proletariat.

Indeed, he goes so far as to say that «where capitalism has a huge military and police apparatus, the reactionary (?) forces will put up strong resistance». Here, in this country of exception, it is given grace that «the transition to socialism will take place through a bitter, revolutionary class struggle».

We have therefore arrived at the recognition of the class struggle in some special case, but not at the recognition of dictatorship after the conquest of power. This is what Lenin calls having reduced Marx to a common liberal. Even the most conservative liberal jurist admits that citizens use force when one of their constitutional rights is violated. We will therefore only allow ourselves to fight bitterly against the reactionary forces once we have shown them that they do not have a parliamentary majority!

We are neither repeating here the demonstration of the impossibility of using parliament for class purposes, nor explaining to the Khrushchev-Togliatti that their method will fail them. We know very well that this is how they must speak and why they must speak this way. They are organ pipes in which the very will to not let the proletariat come to power blows, and if there were anyone among them who does so without being fully aware of this, even this would say nothing to us.

Only one point is important to us: this resounding repudiation of Stalinism can be explained in any way, with the deductions of the case from the play of international and internal social forces in Russia, and we are certainly doing it, but it cannot be passed off, even to the most naive, under the banner of a return to Marx and Lenin doctrine.

The inept and sloppy formulations of the 20th Congress, even taken as «literature», openly contain a rejection of the central point of the invoked doctrine: «dictatorship as a transition to class suppression», i.e. dictatorship after the conquest of power. The thesis that they achieve this without a battle could also be true, because it could be entirely convenient for the bourgeois order.

Kautskyan Leninists

One easily responds to this vaunted new edition of Leninism with the voice of Lenin himself, as he could speak after the 20th Congress. 

Quotations from Lenin have of course been made by many of these gentlemen. The passage on which Khrushchev relies, according to which it would be a false application of historical materialism to give a general scheme of a succession of pre-established stages that should occur identically in all countries, is as usual invoked divorced from the author’s integral development. Lenin wrote in open polemic with the right-wing socialists who had in the name of Marx idiotically stipulated that Russia, and in it the proletariat, the Bolshevik party, should not move because historical materialism dictated that the Russian revolution could only be proletarian after all other European revolutions; and it had to be directed by the bourgeoisie until the Russian economy could catch up with those in the West. For forty years we too have been waging this battle, against the bestial idea that the Russian revolutionary form should be democratic and not dictatorial, for reasons of «economic determinism». In our study of Russia, we are analysing in the following paragraphs Lenin’s writings that construct this theory of the Russian revolution with a true masterpiece of consistent continuity from the beginning of the century. Lenin is not to be quoted with two figures: volume and page. It’s not us to say this to Khrushchev, whose interlocutors we are only in metaphor: Lenin says it to him, when he says it in his writing The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.

Kautsky said that the whole question of dictatorship comes from a «little word» that Marx once wrote. With a pandering series of quotations he attempted to empty the fundamental weight of this concept in Marx, reducing it to an unfortunate choice of lexicon. That is why in the other world the face of this theorist, who had at length defended Marx against the right-wing revisionists, and on whose pages Lenin had been trained, as much as on those of Plekhanov, who had ended up like him, the face of this spectre bears the indelible mark of the disfigurement of Vladimir’s whipping of his hand, which to so many at the time seemed unjustly bloody. 
«To call this famous inference of Marx’s, which constitutes the sum total of his entire revolutionary doctrine, a little word is to make a mockery of Marxism, it is to deny it completely. It must not be forgotten that Kautsky knows Marx almost by heart; that, judging by all his publications, he has in his desk or in his head a whole filing cabinet in which Marx’s writings are carefully classified, in the most convenient way to quote them. Kautsky cannot be unaware that both Marx and Engels spoke repeatedly of the dictatorship of the proletariat … that this formula is the most complete and scientifically exact exposition of the task of the proletariat to break up the bourgeois state machine, of which task Marx and Engels spoke, taking into account the revolutions of 1848 and 1871, from 1852 to 1891, for a good forty years». 
«From the beginning of the war onwards Kautsky, with increasingly rapid progression, achieved great virtuosity in the art of being a Marxist in words and a lackey of the bourgeoisie in deeds». 

The speakers at the 20th Congress had a better file of Lenin’s Works than Kautsky’s for Marx, electronic perhaps, as an outlet for the silly envy that surfaces in all their speeches for the often clownish American technology. They have thus well surpassed the then record «of virtuosity in the art of being Marxist-Leninist in words and lackey of the bourgeoisie in deeds». 

Kautsky explained the little word like this: dictatorship means the suppression of democracy. Lenin’s lengthy historical analysis shows that it will also eventually lead to the suppression of any democracy: once classes and the state have disappeared, the word will be meaningless, and the fact long since unknown. 

But he rectifies Kautsky’s dirty «liberalism» with scientific rigour: «Dictatorship does not necessarily mean the suppression of democracy for the class that exercises this dictatorship against other classes, but it does compulsorily mean the suppression of democracy for that class, against which the dictatorship is exercised».

This is very clear and applies to the two opposing dictatorships of modern times: bourgeois and proletarian. Can you hear Khrushchev-Togliatti saying to the bourgeoisie: we will exercise dictatorship after we have overthrown you by means of democracy, but if you suppress democracy for us when we are a minority, you are a reactionary force?

The threesome scene 

All of distorted Lenin’s passages refer not to the capitalism of modern western countries, but to those places and times where three forces struggle: feudalism, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It is then that there are multiple paths to socialism in a country: when there are only two, the historical problem now consists entirely of the victory of the socialist revolution in the developed capitalist society. The novel of the isolated national country, on the other hand, must necessarily be written when feudalism is exited and national state centres arise. Here is a bridge to socialism, and here alone are multiple aspects «with this or that form of democracy, with this or that variety of dictatorship of the proletariat».

In the text we have referred to, Lenin, after scientifically defining dictatorship in general, goes on to define proletarian dictatorship as follows: «a power won and maintained by the violence of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, a power not bound by any law».

How does this strong citrus fruit taste for you, intellectuals, patriots, and other insects? 

Further on, the author refers to the threesome scene, recalling that before 1905 in Russia all Marxists defined the revolution as bourgeois: the Mensheviks inferred the policy of understanding with the bourgeoisie, the Bolsheviks foresaw the struggle of the proletariat allied with the peasantry first against feudalism, then against the bourgeoisie. Kautsky invoked Russia’s social backwardness to assert «this new idea: that in a bourgeois revolution one cannot go further than the bourgeoisie», Lenin says sarcastically. He adds: «And this, despite everything Marx and Engels said comparing the bourgeois revolution of 1789-93 in France with the bourgeois revolution of 1848 in Germany!»

Between the Leninists of the 20th Congress, and Leninism, runs this difference: Lenin and history proved that the proletariat cannot do without dictatorship in the course of a bourgeois revolution, without being defeated. Those of today claim it must do without it in exclusively proletarian revolutions, in which it is no longer a question of overthrowing feudalism, but capitalism!!

They make insurrection inessential, they suppress dictatorship no matter what, they even delete the «little word». And are they Leninists? Speak, again, Lenin (again in Kautsky, at the beginning). «If Kautsky had wanted to reason seriously and honestly he could have asked himself: are there historical laws of revolution that know no exception? The answer would have been; no, there are no such laws. Such laws consider only the typical case, what Marx once designated as the “ideal”, in the sense of an average, normal, typical capitalism». 

(On the margin of our old copy of «Kautsky» we had marked here: find this passage from Marx. We indicated a number of them in the text, not printed in full, of the report to the Milan meeting on the «invariance» of Marxism and even of the earlier revolutionary class theories; and they are quoted on the question of the «model» of bourgeois society in the series on the agrarian question of three years ago).

The historical law of dictatorship is thus inseparable from the doctrine as a whole. Against falsification Lenin thus formulates it: «Proletarian revolution is impossible without the violent destruction of the bourgeois state machine and its replacement by a new one».

Withdrawal of concessions 

Having unmasked the theoretical fakes – worse than those found in Stalin’s texts on economics – we can «withdraw» the concessive historical assumptions, and proclaim the no less resounding historical fakes.

Kautsky, like Khrushchev, also tried to speculate that Marx and Engels would make an exception for England and America, until the 1870-1880s. Lenin’s answer is fundamental. The necessity of dictatorship is above all linked to the existence of militarism and bureaucracy. These forms did not exist in those two countries and at that time. «Today, however (1918) they do exist, as much in England as in America».

Has Mr. Khrushchev any news that such forms have disappeared in the two countries since then? Did he and his fellows and their master Stalin have such monstrous forms well in their eyes, whether they treated them as brotherly allies or as cold enemies?

But here we have to give another blow to the wondrous description of a world today that would be, for the most part or nearly so, brimming with democracy and socialism.

Opportunism, the denial of dictatorship, the denial of Marxism, had long since used this argument, which Kautsky incredibly copied from his opponent of many years Bernstein: we have passed from the era in which the proletariat aimed at violent upheaval, to the era of possible peaceful upheaval!

What different historical reading did Khrushchev, and several others with him, use in 1956 to astound the world? Them, armed as they are with Lenin’s filing cabinet as Kautsky was with Marx’s?

Let them answer themselves with the same filing cabinet: and that the world of advertising novelty consumers learn. 

«The ‘historiographer’ Kautsky so shamelessly falsifies history that he forgets the essential point: that pre-monopoly capitalism – which reached its apogee precisely in the decade 1870-1880 – was distinguished, by virtue of its essential economic traits, manifested in a typical manner particularly in England and America, by a relatively great love of peace and freedom. Imperialism, on the other hand, i.e. the monopoly capitalism that matured definitively only in the 20th century, is distinguished, by virtue of its essential economic traits, by a minimal love of peace and freedom and by the maximum and universal development of militarism. Not to note this, in examining to what extent a peaceful uprising or a violent uprising is likely or typical, means to descend to the level of the most vulgar lackey of the bourgeoisie».

We have enough to draw the final conclusions on the laughable «transition to socialism» of the countries «in no particular order».

False historiography was invented long before Stalin, and is all but dead after his expulsion from glory.

For Marx and Lenin, dictatorship is a general law. And with it terror, another sinful word put out of use. And yet Engels used it in the Italian Republican Almanac, this other little word, no less forgotten at the 20th congress: «The victorious party, if it does not want to have fought in vain, must continue its domination by authoritarian means, with the terror that its weapons inspire in the counter-revolutionaries». (1874: it was then a matter of refuting the anarchists, who disassemble the armed force an hour after victory). 

In Marxism-Leninism, the fundamental law on the conquest of political power is the necessity of dictatorship after conquest. An exception could perhaps have been made to this law precisely in the conditions of Russia. The world value (Khrushchev’s adjective) of October lies in the grandiose fact that it is precisely in Russia that dictatorship has historically imposed itself. Tomorrow it will therefore impose itself everywhere, with no other exceptions.

In twentycongressism, the democratic path to power becomes the general law, as it already was for the worst, old and surviving social democrats.

An exception is made for the case that capitalism has a huge military and police apparatus.

Is this an exception? Where are these modern countries without bureaucracy, militarism and police apparatus? In the only two modern countries where parliamentary majority rule might have occurred, France and Italy, one can ask the rebels of Algeria and the farm hands of Venosa and Barletta about such apparatuses (apart from the laws for the herd of state bureaucrats supported at swordpoint by the Kremlin’s cronies). And more briefly the press of Kremlinism itself.

But the optimism that resurrects the Kautskyan prospect of peaceful upheaval, buried by Lenin, is all about the countries of the East, popular democracy, socialism.

Is it therefore on that side that there are no armies of officials, armed men and police? The Secretary General evidently believes that those bodies are not called such when they depend on the branches of his Central Office. And, knowing how the public likes the dramatic version of political events, he hopes to make people believe that they have disappeared since civil death was inflicted on Generalissimo Stalin, and death on the gallows on superexecutioner Beria.

Will history be able to write about the current Russian «leaders of the avant-garde» as different and better than those two characters? Untie the knot that has tied them to the same function for so many years?

The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Russia

THIRD DAY: Morning

Stage assessment

As dawn breaks on the new toil, it is the worker’s norm to review the work he has done and to look forward to what he will face on the new day. Quite true, in the capitalist era neither the one nor the other concern him in the least. So much was it only in that of primitive communism, and so much was it still in that of free productive individualism, even in their admirable aspects long since disappeared, and, insofar as they are not entirely so, to be helped to disappear. In today’s worlds of east and west, which strive to oppose each other, that sweet joy is forbidden to all humans, reduced more and more to passive cogs in an immense machine of production, the secret of which escapes them completely. 

In non-mercantile communism, it will be possible for society to make «a marvellous bargain» by saying, every morning that the planet will have lazily turned in on itself: let those who want to announce that today they will add nothing to the social product do it. I accept it, just as I accept the work of those who want to make a tenfold effort: both will sit equally at the common table. Only then will we have finished hearing the nauseating catcalls to the falsified idol of Liberty from both sides. 

On the First Day (amidst the anticipations and reiterations that are indispensable ingredients for digesting meals like this one) we disposed of the points of the confessed historiographical falsehood, and of the renegade cult of the Great (which we have vulgarly treated for years as the «Battilocchio theory»; the Battilocchio being a disjointed, longish fellow, who towers over everyone because he is as long as he is dumb). In the second, we have judged that «transition to socialism» which has boasted new ways, and in essence that only constitutional, socialpacific and parliamentary way. 

Giving in principle as a plan for this first part of the Third Day the question of economics (theory of capitalism – theory of socialism), and for the other part the question of world imperialism and war, let us pause for a moment to show how the cornerstones of the construction set at the recent Moscow congress stand in the way and swerve in arbitrary directions, making it certain that nothing will rest on them as «stable». 

Let us leave the bourgeois of all colours to search for the meaning of such unexpected proclamations, in the investigation of what the communists (!) will do in the near future in the world arena and in the domestic ones of the various countries. Our research, evidently as obscure as it is unique, tends only to draw from the state of necessity that dictated those new proclamations, confirmation to an explanation of the current historical fact that refutes en bloc the positions of those people, yesterday and today, from 1924 to 1956. The conclusion is, among other things, that all the bourgeois fear of Moscow’s plotting is not only useless, but totally false.

History and historiography

It is at the same time true that the literature of the 20th congress, and that which comes after it as a development, is precious material for a Marxist historical investigation of a critical nature, ever more efficient in the demolition of Stalinist degeneration, and of post-Stalinist super-degeneration; and that if considered as a system, as a new platform, it lacks connection and integrality of the parts, it is a field full of crookedness, humps and fractures, it is the unsuccessful result of a series of pitiful patching up. 

We ended the previous day’s writing by asking ourselves how history can make a distinction between Stalin and those who today so vociferously condemn his work, unmask his sesquipedalian lies, denounce, after decades of calling him the «master of those who know», his theoretical errors worthy – and this was true – of the «dunces class».

And indeed, only by suddenly fabricating a «historiography» that is no less false than the denounced one can so much be hoped for; by relying on a dissemination machine of paper and words that is of the same overwhelming power as the one that was able to make Stalin’s lies stand up. These, however, are being shredded by history today, before the astonished eyes of the world.

What greater historiographical fake is there than to make people believe that Marx and Lenin had considered the principle of proletarian dictatorship «retractable» in post-1850, and even post-1900, situations of capitalism advancing towards concentration, i.e. towards imperialism?

What greater fake is there than to attribute to Lenin the «theory of the construction of socialism in Russia alone», at the very moment when it is admitted false that Leo Trotsky and Gregory Zinoviev were agents of foreign imperialism – when these two very theorists, at the culminating moment of the doctrinal cycle of one and the other, at the Enlarged Executive in the autumn of 1926, pushing Stalin alive, powerful, and young to the dunce desk, proved to him that neither Lenin nor anyone else, nor even he Stalin, had said this before 1924?

And when precisely in order to win this game the two great comrades – already in the spring of 1926, when they had not yet come close after the 1924 struggle in which Zinoviev supported Stalin (as still in 1926 he was supported by the other about to die Bucharin), only the delegates in Moscow of the Italian communist left claimed, to the amazement of the Bolshevik milieu itself, that Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev were on the same side of the fence (oh poor, poor formula of the personal key to unravel politics! ) – the two, and so many others, were prosecuted and eventually slaughtered? By Stalin? Oh no, oh no! By the cause of the theory of the construction of socialism in Russia, by the gang of lies for which that society still claims to be non-capitalist. 

And what greater falsification than that which ascribes to Lenin, in the words of Mikoyan and others, the paternity of Stalin’s most fetid theory, that of coexistence?! Wrecked theory, which in the edition launched at the 20th congress degenerates further, to shameful aberration.

Thus a phase of false historiography has been killed off, only to open a new one, and, as the future will tell, a much worse one.

Parliamentarism equals personalism 

The corpus, built on the compact Stalinist mechanism, of the twentieth congress, was suddenly stripped of the infamous garb of personal servility: but how? According to an ordinary newspaper, everyone stood applauding when the Presidium entered the hall already occupied by the 1350 delegates. But loudly Khrushchev begged them not to applaud: we are among communists: the real masters are you, comrade delegates! If the phrase is true, it is lowly demo-American; the elected being the servant of the ordinary citizen! 

Among communists, there would be neither masters nor servants. In any case, that corpus balanced on a very dubious basis would have turned a deaf ear to the myth of the Person. How is it that, notes the not-so-foolish journalist, in the official report Khrushchev’s report is greeted by 23 rounds of «applause», 6 of «impetuous applause», 35 of «prolonged applause», 12 of «impetuous and prolonged applause» and the final «impetuous and prolonged applause, which becomes a true ovation»?

But that same corpus, with equal unanimous resolve and enthusiasm, proclaimed that the path to socialism, in the 1956 version, is the parliamentary one. This, in the «gourmande» version of the illiterate Nenni, «implies respect for democratic legality as enshrined in the Constitution, when one is an opposition and when one is a majority». Marx in the grave, Marx who made the two cries equivalent («18th Brumaire»): Vive la Constitution! and À bas la Révolution!

Nenni and Togliatti, consistent in both being illiterate in Marxism, even if the latter is not entirely so, enjoy saying that nevertheless the proletariat reserves the right to take street action if democracy is in danger. The former’s pretty formula is «against the threat capitalism poses to democratic life and institutions». These people, therefore, being certain that democracy is eternal, assure eternal life to capitalism, while the two eternities are by the same right blasphemy and treason. Both, with those of the 20th, however, swear that this is not reformism. But reformism differs from this for only one reason: it was a serious thing. As for the statement that with democratic freedom infringed, they would reach for the rifle, we heard it from Bissolati and Turati – credible people – in the days when Togliatti was in the school of bourgeois philosophy and Nenni was a journalist. 

So parliamentarism is the «principle», and violence a desperate way out only to save it if someone threatens it. All right! One can, however, avoid the «hernia of nonsense» of adding that the one which threatens to eat it, with the proletariat castrated, is capitalism that farrowed it. Adding instead that one fights to save Parliament, not to overthrow Capital.

We don’t want to return to that point, only to note the jarring contradiction between the move that puts down personalism, and the one that raises up electoralism, as another proof of the subsoil disruption between the feet of the 1350s, who tremble when their hands clap. How would votes be taken – and those people will have more to take – if the basic means of rooting for the politician were not used? How would the waves of sympathy for the symbols of the popular front or labour unity (is that what it is called or what else?) be maintained if not with the frenzy for the exploits of the more than mediocre human material, of national, provincial or village origin, aroused by the usual means in the amorphoused masses, and diluted in the flock of the «honest», the goodwillers and the like?

Thus no less apocryphal than the renunciation of the weapon of historical falsehood is the renunciation of the principal means of infatuation for people, launched by a special publicity machine, blowing up listed fools.

Only one renunciation is not apocryphal, and it is not new: the renunciation of the Revolution. Was it necessary to renounce Stalin’s tradition to do this? Is that why Stalin’s economic blunders were marked in blue? And were they? And in what direction, anyway?

Superstructure and economic base 

It is obvious that for the press and the parties of order the whole question lies in finding out with what rule «succession» is provided in post-revolutionary regimes. It is usually the advent of «caesarism», an idiotic term that raised the just ire of Karl Marx, as we quoted in the first day. Of that Caesarism which, after the 19th-century champions, at the head of which was the nicknamed Boustrafa, Scapin, Badinguet (Napoleon III), has in this 20th century given us a magnificent collection that seeks its own Plutarch: Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Tito, Peron, Pavelich, Horthy, and other forgotten ones: above all Stalin, whose precipice from the zenith to the memorial nadir appears truly abysmal. Murderer of comrades in life and honour, beast in holding the chair of science, Generalissimo only of defeats, he won’t be late in being cited by derogatory epithets, such as Bagnasciuga (Foreshore). 

All these people, and no less than them the Super Well-Known who have their papers in order with democratic bigotry, do not make history for us, and the weight of their subjective will to power, which blinds others, is negligible for us Marxists: these splendours and these eclipses, which everyone must now admit, are for our view: for better or worse, they are not the cause of events, they are merely a passive consequence of them. 

The key that we employ is clearly elsewhere: in the development of the facts of the economic base, of the social relations of production. It is the development of these that must explain to us, once again, the twentieth congress’ theatrics. 

The material substructure made the 20th congress speak as it spoke; forces acted in it that forced to say what was said: but the real relations of the substructure are quite different from those that were theorised and declared in the congress texts. 

Particularly suggestive, however, was to see what, in economic matters, the congress had to «change» from Stalin’s constructions, which until a month ago passed as valid for the Russian Communist Party, for the Russian government, for all foreign parties sympathetic to the two. 

We must remember our commentary on Stalin’s writing on the Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. We pointed out its economic errors in both the laws that were claimed to be applicable to the Russian economy and those that applied to the western economy. 

It should be made clear immediately that these egregious errors are today denounced in only a cursory manner, and in no logical order, in Mikoyan’s own speech, which dealt with them the most, but which, as we predicted, is not given in the Italian newspapers in its full text. It is not then indicated the rectification of those mentioned, nor is it said that it consists in returning to the formulae, the classic ones, of Marx, Engels, Lenin.

As for the deductions that are not strictly economic, about the course of capitalism in the West, the world market, imperialism and war, all the corrections to the Stalinist theses are FURTHER CONTER-REVOLUTIONARY STEPS, and are by far more distant from Marx and Lenin.

We dialogued with the living Stalin in 1953 and convinced him of blasphemed Marxism.

In 1956, the 20th Congress throws Stalin’s text overboard, Stalin dead, and knocks his statue off the pedestal. The philistine formula is that it is to heal the insult to Marxism-Leninism. The evidence, on the contrary, that is drawn from the theoretical and political unfolding is that Stalin is being hit for not having blasphemed enough. Stalin’s authority, long since fallen for us, is today destroyed. But Marx-Lenin’s authority will only be put back on its feet when the present-day, shameless restorers are overcome.

Stalin contributed so much to it then, despite himself; they do so today, with the materials we have the right and the will to use.

Mikoyan’s criticism 

It does not appear directly from what has been said on economic matters – and not even indirectly – that there is anything «retracted» about Stalin’s theses on the Russian economy, and mainly those to which we gave a good pounding: the Russian economy is that of a socialist society – in socialist society the reproduction of commodities and the law of value persist.

We already know that Khrushchev reiterated the rejection of Molotov’s essentially acceptable thesis: the building of the foundations of socialism is taking place in Russia.

We will make another interposition, noting that the change from «construction of the (industrial) foundations» to «construction of socialism» corresponds, as far as the economic substructure is concerned, to the no less underhand change from «steps towards socialism» (Lenin) to «passage to socialism» (Khrushchev).

We are documenting the exposition of Lenin’s extraordinarily organic positions along the course of the revolution, expounded by Mikoyan himself in an insidious manner: Lenin changed the perspective of the revolutionary course every few months, according to him; but he was always right! We reply, in our lengthy analysis, that no one, neither Lenin nor Jehovah, is always right, but that Lenin was tremendously right precisely because he never changed, amidst the most tragic successive situations, the incomparable doctrine of the course of revolution in Russia.

The rigorous expression of steps to socialism, no less than that of work on the industrial foundations of socialism, remained in their scientific place in Lenin’s mouth as long as he lived, as it did in Trotsky’s and Zinoviev’s until they were strangled. 

In the anti-feudal revolution, the task of the proletariat is to take a series of steps towards socialism, which the bourgeoisie and opportunists fear. A first series of steps the proletariat takes together with the poor peasantry, moving from bourgeois parliamentary democracy to the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. It takes further steps, organising state capitalist industry (last step), continuing in the dictatorship of the proletarian party alone, against all other parties and classes. Socialism in Russia is not this yet: it will come after the international socialist revolution (which is beyond intermediate forms between democracy and dictatorship). 

Then in Europe (or America) and Russia it won’t be any more a matter of building, but rather of demolishing. All of Lenin’s ardent calls for work to register, organise, raise yields, and productive power, were powerful revolutionary thrusts for the steps to socialism, to equip the foundations of socialism. It was neither a matter of building socialism, a spurious economic formula, nor of shift to socialism, a defective historical formula.

Two powerful forces of demolition come to socialism, which are one and the same: Revolution and Dictatorship. When these hold the countries of advanced industrialism in their iron grip, and when they have sufficiently succeeded in destroying and eradicating, Socialism will take place by itself, will rise by itself. 

Perfectly heterodox to Marxism, purely Stalinist and sub-Stalinist is this conclusion of Mikoyan’s: «It is important to note that, according to Lenin, even in cases where the proletariat is forced to resort to violence, the fundamental and permanent character of the revolution, the premise of its victories is the work of organisation, of education, and not that of destruction».

Such a concept of revolution, historically inconsistent and empty, is far further from Marxism than the classical reformists. It would be rejected by the Turati and Bebel, by Bernstein no less, with the arguments with which they demolished the constructions of Mazzini, Webbs, Malon and De Amicis.

Blue marks to Stalin 

What substantial in Stalin’s economics was that annoyed? The point that raised Mikoyan’s outrage concerned the doctrine on the course of contemporary capitalism. For the rest, a very general sentence is available to us: «It should be noted in this connection that certain other theses of the Economic Problems, if subjected to close scrutiny, require from our economists a thorough analysis, and a critical revision in the light of Marxism-Leninism». What are these other theses? And in what sense are they to be corrected, according to Marxism-Leninism, and not according to new blunders, which, according to the ostentatious sayings of these spoilers, Marx and Lenin would have authorised those in the presence of the rich, fertile, unpredictable new data of future situations to do? Here is the blasphemy of blasphemies, and it is always the one that for half a century and more, in more or less varied words, every opportunism has been alleging.

Mikoyan does not tell us this, nor does the 20th Congress. And we will read it when the speaker’s request has been fulfilled: «It would be wrong not to say that the chapters of the Handbook of Political Economy on the present stage of development of capitalism, and in particular the problem of the character and periodicity of cyclical crises, as well as the problems of the political economy of socialism, should be studied in greater depth and reworked». 

On the economics of socialism we can therefore only converse with the dead Stalin, and we will mention it; on the course of capitalism we can hear in what Mikoyan rectifies Stalin, and whether he does so in the sense in which we did it. 

«The theory of the absolute stagnation of capitalism is alien to Marxism-Leninism. It cannot be thought that the general crisis of capitalism leads to absolute stagnation of production and technical progress in capitalist countries». 

This sharp condemnation follows the question: «Is technical progress and an increase in production in capitalist countries possible today or tomorrow?» 

And this is followed by the more specific condemnation of Stalin: «Can the well-known thesis formulated by Stalin in the Problems in relation to the USA, England and France, according to which, after the division of the world market, “the volume of production in those countries will be reduced”, perhaps help us in the analysis of the economic situation of contemporary capitalism? This statement does not explain the complex and contradictory phenomena of contemporary capitalism, it does not explain the increase in capitalist production that occurred in many countries after the war». 

So this would be Stalin’s fault. He was writing in the year 1952, in which the US economy had fallen back from the peak of the indices during the grace years of the Korean War. He saw the time approaching, still a long way off even according to the data of the 20th Congress and the forecasts treated by Bulganin of the Sixth Five-Year Plan to 1960, when the Soviet production potential could catch up with that of the strongest industrial countries; meanwhile West Germany had entered the race and it seemed it would get there first. And in the years after Stalin’s death, American indices of production and national income began to rise again, reaching an all-time high in 1955. And what now?

Stalin’s Dunce Laws 

Indeed, Stalin had deduced from the splitting in two of the world market after the war, and from the loss of Asian, African, and European outlets for the great capitalist states, the worsening of market outlet conditions and the reduction of corporate production. And he added: this is precisely where the deepening of the general crisis of the world capitalist system consists, as concerns the disintegration of the world market.

In that writing as in many other guiltily superficial ones, e.g. those on materialism, Stalin shows himself truly convinced that the party doctrine evolves in history and some of its parts must be thrown away and replaced with others (and here those of the 20th congress err like him and much more than him); at this correction and mutation of principles a pontifex maximus presides and this was he (the 20th congress would like to withdraw this second point, out of grave bewilderment in the face of a real scientific bankruptcy, but the remedies to the ideological work that are seen to be proposed are just mean, mean).

So Stalin on that occasion takes the axe and chops down whole chapters of Lenin, Marx, and … (this was funny really) in parallel, Stalin! 

In fact he declares unfounded a theory of his «enunciated before the Second World War, about the relative stability of markets in the period of the general crisis of capitalism». Since this curious and useless thesis is eliminated by the author, and since it means nothing and as usual puts well-known and solid terms out of place, there is no point in wasting time on it. 

The thesis dropped at the same time was Lenin’s, enunciated in the spring of 1916, that despite the decay of capitalism, «as a whole (reader, pay attention to the words: as a whole) capitalism is growing at an incomparably faster rate than before». 

Now this thesis constitutes the very core of Marxism, and it was sheer folly to think it could be eradicated. The Marxist concept of the fall of capitalism is not that it accumulates in one historical phase, and in another sags and empties out on its own. This was the thesis of the pacifist revisionists. For Marx, capitalism grows ceaselessly beyond all limits, the curve of world capitalist potential does not have a gentle ascent that then slows down and leads to a gentle decline; on the contrary, it rises to an abrupt, immense explosion that breaks every rule of the «historical diagram» course, and closes the epoch of the capitalist form of production. In this revolutionary turn of events, it is the political machine of the capitalist state that shatters, and another proletarian one is formed, which in the course of development will flounder and die out. Just as Stalin arbitrarily expunged from Marxism (all impositions of necessity; his state became enfeebled and did not empty itself, because it was a capitalist state!) the law of the decay of the state, so he threw into it, in order to justify his party’s renunciation of civil revolution and revolutionary war, the inconclusive thesis of the «decay of capitalism». Which made instead sure not to start decaying. 

It was at this point that another doctrine, and this time Marx’s, was given the boot by the Pontiff and his priestly escort. This is the same error, and everything suggests that if Mikoyan were to dialogue with us, he would take note of what we have in the first Dialogue challenged to the Dead. The law of development of capitalism is said to be that of the decrease in the average rate of profit; but it is not true. So sentences Stalin, and changes the law into the truly astonishing one of the realisation of maximum profit.

We extinguished the flamethrower 

Having reached this point – we regret not to quote ourselves, but to refer to the Dialogue with Stalin for the entire economic demonstration that we sketched out, of course in polemics, and always in the guise of defenders of known old and intangible laws, not of authors of newly coined doctrines and writers of treatises or scientific manuals – we did not refrain from writing: «If the flamethrower goes a little further in the bookshop, not even the operator’s moustache remains».

At the time of Baffone-Stalin they were all trembling. Perhaps we would not have written the derisive sentence today, when one sees moustachioed portraits set on fire everywhere by despicable, cynical purifiers, and habitual offenders in the unworthy trade of principles, branded by Karl Marx in his ruthless exegesis of the Gotha Programme. 

We showed how Marx’s law was that of the «general descent of the rate of profit», how it was only confirmed in the entire historical course of the capitalist form of production, even in the modern monopolistic, imperialist stage, in the first and second post-war period; and how, correctly understood and applied to the data of the world economy, it was reconciled: with the increase of the rate of surplus-value (the rate of subtraction of labour from the working class), with the incessant increase of the mass of the product, of the mass of surplus-value, and of the mass of profit, since the mass of capital invested in production and accumulated grows so overwhelmingly that, at a progressively lower rate, the volume of total profit is always magnified. 

Stalin needed the false law of «maximum profit» to prove that the proletariat is impoverished by the excessive profiteering of capitalists (which in Russia are claimed not to be there). We had once again to put the Marxist law of increasing misery back in place, with arguments that go far beyond Stalin’s timid one about the unemployed mass (reserve army) – again to boast that it is assumed not to exist in Russia -; and to establish that it does not take anything away from the fact that the national income, the per capita income, and the standard of living not only of the average citizen but of the average worker grows along the course of capitalism. 

Nevertheless, the original and unchanged doctrines of Marxism, silenced not only by the Pontiffs, but also by the Councils, on crises and final catastrophe, remain standing because they are cast in other bronze than the tumbling statues of dictators, in other steel than the vaults of accumulation. 

In our conclusion, the task of the socialist revolution was not to continue to organise the race to increase production, but to reverse it; to base on technology and the highest labour productivity no longer the exaltation of production but the drastic reduction of labour effort, of its time, of its torment. 

We showed that in the face of the boastfulness of American economic science about the race to prosperity based on the exasperation of consumption that makes its indices proportional to the inflation of the volume of the product, little would the Marxist polemic hold up if it fell back on Stalin’s nonsense about the partition of the product between consumption and reinvestment.

Another vain fetish: Technique 

We would like to ask ourselves in what better situation, in such a polemic over mountains and seas, will those of the 20th congress find themselves, all wrapped up in their clumsy ideology, of confrontation, of competition, of emulative contest, of ineffable persuasive decision-making and of preference between the capitalist and the «socialist» way of organising production, who country by country will be chosen after consulting professors and university faculties, listening to experts, mobilising the technicians by dint of crash courses, missions abroad and the like. Having placed themselves on this pitiful ground, it is laughable to measure among the small talk of the little men from Moscow the dull inferiority complex towards to the boozy boors from across the Atlantic. 

According to Mikoyan, nothing works in Russia: scientists, universities, laboratories, research institutes, statistical services. Everything has to be redone and started again in a frantic race with the wonders of America. This defeatist mood goes hand in hand with the stupefaction with which the Italian public gets excited over the ramshackle transplantation, on television screens, of American games on dollar prizes to the culture of the bamboozled public. 

Stalin had written scandalous things on this subject, again on the basis of his doctrine of maximum profit, arguing that capitalism tended to become not only more unproductive in mass but also in quality, and to restore the slave-like forms of labour of the early wage companies, if this (and he did not see the absurdity of the economic hypothesis) gave him greater «profits». He had written this: «Capitalism is for the new technique when it promises the highest profits. Capitalism is against the new technique and for the transition to manual labour (?!) when the new technique does not promise (or allow?) it the highest profits». Then it would be: «the technical arrest of capitalism». This banal conception of capitalism personified that makes its own calculations and of its own will deforms economic laws was no longer liked, not because it puts Marxism underfoot, but because it leaves one without arguments in the face of mechanical and machinist elephantiasis, the glories of American «automation», and the incessant launching to the world market of ever more refined artefacts of technical pimping. 

All the speakers therefore called for the methods of technical preparation and perfection of the West to be modelled and imitated in every field, because they are in every case the optimum, and it is not even permitted to think that in some field, for reasons of class or economic laws, one should not learn from them. So in the set emulative race between Russia and America the latter would have already won in the beginning, and only by following it can one do well. 

But this is true, not because it was an aberration of Stalin’s to disregard capitalist technique subjugated by profit, but because in the two camps the aim is the same: to build industrial capitalism, to accelerate accumulation, to increase the volume of production; and the path followed in the east, as we said at every step in the Dialogue, is the same as that followed in the west almost a century in advance.

So the Russians have arrived at the same formula: to put on sale goods that are more attractive to the buyer, to induce a higher level of consumption, because the bourgeois formula also applies there: consumption is the means, production the end.

The mummy-abortion of mercantilism 

Thus the Congress’s criticism of Stalinist economics was limited to the part describing capitalism, and in a certain sense to a defence of capitalism from the accusation of neglecting for reasons of high profit the resources of science and the highest efficiency of the technique of production.

But in addition to revolutionising the Marxist laws of capitalist economics, Stalin in the indicted book had also harshly dealt with the laws of socialist economics, and this was the Dialogue‘s first and most serious contradiction with him. 

We would have waited for the 20th Congress to shed light on these burning points with its interminable speeches. Nothing. But neither is there anything to suggest that the dangerous «mercantilism» we denounced in Stalin is any less correct. On the contrary, in many other utterances given when describing Russia’s economic progress and presenting new programmes and plans, the commercial character of the Russian economy is emphasised to the bitter end. And since the tone of Stalin’s formulae on socialist society, the socialist country and the completed construction of socialism is not changed either, it must be assumed that Stalin’s favourite thesis of the economy stands completely: in the socialist economy products are commodities, and consumption is bought and paid for in money. 

Stalin points out that in the socialist economy applies, first of all, the law of exchange of equivalents – and we need not repeat the profusion of quotations from Marx, Engels and Lenin with which we showed that socialism, even to a lesser degree, is not mercantilism, and as long as one consumes and produces commodities one is within the precise social and historical confines of capitalism: that every time one pays wages in money, labour power is also commodity, and Stalin’s sophistical argument that the wage provider is the proletarian state is worth nothing in denying this. The correct thesis is that the state is the proletariat’s when its intervention in the economy is aimed at reducing and ultimately suppressing the wage-form, not spreading it. There is, however, a historical stage in societies such as Russia, which started out from pre-capitalism, in which the state of the proletariat builds wage-based enterprises (steps towards socialism): but then this state, as Trotsky and Zinoviev demanded in 1926, does not label as socialism what is capitalism, and calls the forms by their names. 

Silence in Congress on this. But under the silence, it is clear, the worst Stalinism! 

Another law Stalin applied to socialism was that of the progression of the volume of products in geometric proportion. We argued that this was the law of capitalism, it was the law of accumulation itself, and it ran counter to the socialist plan alone: stop the increase of product and make the working time go down. The texture of the new five-year plan laid out in Congress, just like the former ones, is enough here to show that they are deep rooted Stalinists in economics. 

And in his conclusion Stalin, after issuing his new law of maximum profit capitalism, lays down the «fundamental law of socialist economics» in these terms: «securing the maximum satisfaction of the ever-increasing material and cultural needs of the whole of society through the uninterrupted increase and perfecting of socialist production on the basis of superior technology». 

This law, which Stalin crudely contrasts with the law he invented of the maximum rate of profit, is silent on the reduction of labour effort. The 20th Congress did not say whether this part of the economic formulae in the Problems will also be reformed, nor did it say whether it will be in the direction of Marxism-Leninism. No enlightenment can be found on these points except in the presentation of the five-year plan, and in the indices it promises to change in the Russian economy up to 1960. 

In nothing, therefore, can it be found that Stalin’s egregious errors in the field of economic science have been eliminated in the Marxist sense, or that they will be eliminated later, in the new economic studies. These would have to be redone from the ground up: Mikoyan has not understood how enormous it is to say that the statistical research of the mighty state administrative apparatus lags behind that which Marx and Lenin did in their time, with their means as personal scholars working in the harshest poverty, and yet achieved greater results. What greater shame for a socialist state? 

Here, too, it therefore remains the case that what is happening, and the theoretical snub inflicted on Stalin, cannot be taken as a return to Marxism-Leninism at every step mentioned: that an intervention is being made on Stalin’s course, only to turn further away, in all fields, from the path marked out by the great masters of revolutionary doctrine!

In essence, here is the historical series, and its goals. 

Lenin foregrounds the general struggle of the proletariat in all countries to overthrow capitalism, which will die.

Stalin – first part – the construction of the Russian state, without renouncing war with the West, which will be overwhelmed.

Stalin – second part – the productive, technical and cultural overtaking of the West, which will decay, succumbing. 

Stalin’s wreckers – the march in peaceful competition with the capitalism of the West, which is recognised as superior, and the right to life.

The race to accumulate 

Not the flare-up of class struggle and the contrast between productive forces and social relations should decide on capitalism, but the persuasion of His Evanescence the National Public Opinion of each country in the world based on the «comparison» between the figures and rhythms of the West and the East. And so everything is based on comparing figures. 

While Bulganin in presenting the programme for the next five years gave the terms of the situation as it would be in 1960, Khrushchev in his opening report made the comparison, with 1955 figures, between the various nations. He gave neither indices of absolute industrial production nor indices of it per capita, i.e. obtained by dividing the former by the number of inhabitants of each state. 

He has only indicated what today’s production is in relation to that of 1929, i.e. after 25 years, over the time of the five Russian five-year plans, setting 1929 production in each country equal to one hundred. It is then striking to see that while in Russia today’s index is about two thousand, i.e. industrialisation is about 20 times greater, in the western countries the index is ten times smaller; about 200, i.e. only twice as large. 

Here all the talk gravitates to Stalin’s marvellous law of geometric proportion, purportedly the law «of socialism», whereas it is none other than the law of capitalism with integral accumulation, the actuarial law of every bourgeois accountant, found in the tables of compound interest. 

If I want to double the capital (i.e. the income, i.e. the product) in 25 years, it is enough for me to set aside and add each year not 4 per cent, as would appear with the arithmetical division, but about 3 per cent. I do not find after 25 years 175, but, by the play of compound interest, 200. 

In order to have in 25 years not double, but twenty times the starting figure, it is necessary to go up every year by 13 per cent (not as it would seem with the naive account of 76 per cent). The whole result is therefore that the «rate» of accumulation is more than three times as high in Russia as in the most developed capitalist countries. 

The laughably demagogic effect sought is to give the impression that «socialism» speeds up production three times as much as capitalism, and thus triples human welfare and happiness. Then all that remains is, by the free choice of free peoples and free citizens – of all classes – to apply it everywhere without resistance.

But this would be such economic and Marxist bestiality that even Joseph Stalin would not have written it.

The age of capitalism 

Nascent capitalism accumulates at a rapid rate, mature capitalism at a slow rate. Historically, the «rate of accumulation» decreases (as does the average rate of profit) – and yet the mass of product, capital, income and profit increase, and, as said above with Lenin, so does the world power of capital. With socialism, the rate falls to a minimum, and in theory, if not to zero, at the same rate as the annual increase in population (in the most prolific countries about one per cent). These are the Marxist conclusions.

In Russia it is true that capitalism was born well before 1929. But in that year, after the First World War and the years of civil war, industrialisation was resumed by the Soviet power through state initiative. 

At the time of the Constitution of 1936, it was declared that industry was seven times stronger than before the war in 1913. Since in the figures given today at the 20th congress the index for 1937, considering 100 that of 1929, is 429; it turns out that Russian industry in 1929 was only slightly stronger than in 1914, about one and a half times stronger. 

If then for all countries we start from 1913 the period becomes 42 years and the rhythm of the capitalist countries can be considered about the same, i.e. 4 per cent, while that of Russia falls to an average of 7.5 per cent: this was probably already the rate at which … the Tsar proceeded (see below, at the end). 

If we could take the 40 years of early capitalism, say in England, or in France (17th and 18th centuries, towards the end), we would find no less than the Russian 7.5 per cent, and even 13 per cent of the plans (as above). 

So the rule is that a country that has just emerged from feudalism and entered capitalism has a higher rate of industrialisation than a country that has long been capitalist. If the rate of industrialisation were proportional to prosperity (actually it is so to the exploitation and torment of the wage-earners) the emulative race that is being blathered about would not only be won by the capitalist system, but even by the feudal system: and this is neither an economic nor a historical paradox, for those who do not depend on our illiterate natives.

Thus not only historically but economically we can verify that Russia is poorly industrialised, and runs for it, to emulate the western countries, not for the honour of socialism, but for the normal competition between national capitalisms that eventually descend into the imperialist arena.

Per capita indices 

Let us suppose that we have arrived at 1960 with the rhythm of prosperity that 1955 gave for Russia; and let us also suppose that that same present good conjuncture for America and the West of Europe comes to a halt, pretending to believe that here there is capitalism and the «crises» come, whereas in Russia they have been abolished by the «socialism» built there.

Russia will then produce, on Bulganin’s word, 593 million tons of hard coal, compared to England’s 222 and the US’s 465. It will therefore be in first place. This for the absolute figure.

But, warned the super-capitalist planners in Moscow, we must compete to beat the West in «per capita» figures. And so let us consider for Russia 220 million inhabitants (of today), for England 50, and for America 160. The indices stand in this order: England 4.4 tonnes per inhabitant, USA 3 tonnes per inhabitant, Russia 2.7 tonnes per inhabitant. Russia will always be – in spite of Stalin’s formula! – the taillight

The comparison to date is: England 4.4; US 3; Russia 1.8.

Run then, capitalist industrial Russia! 

Take electricity: 1960, USA 612 billion kilowatt-hours, Russia 320, England 77. Per inhabitant 3.8; 1.54; 1.45 in decreasing order, i.e., U.S.A., England, Russia. Hence absolute, and relative, inferiority. But today 3.8; 1.54; 0.77. Run, then, Russia!

A more probing index is steel, His Majesty Steel dominating War and Peace, heavy and light Industry, Home as construction and furnishing; even if you don’t eat it. 

With the 1960 plan: Russia 68 million tons (45 produced in 1955); England 20, USA 106. Indexes per inhabitant: America 0.66; England 0.40; Russia 0.31, today only 0.20. Run therefore, Russia, eat less, produce more. 

In all this we have assumed, with the good opinion that Bulganin-Khrushchev have of Russia, but with the bad opinion that Stalin had of the West (corrected in favour of capitalist industry at the 20th congress), that we will have a stop of production in the West, and of population in Russia, in the five years ahead. 

Khrushchev has shown us that a new figure is on the scene, Bonn’s Germany, which has rebuilt industry at a robust rate, and with technique and culture to which the Russians and Americans can take their hats off. Population 52 million (eight have flocked there from the east and abroad). Twenty million or nearly so tons of steel produced in 1955; index, like England, about 0.40. Rate of progress equal not to the English low, but to the Russian high! First rate figures, absolute and relative, as mass and speed. 

An industrial axis America-Germany exceeds today, and in 1960, an axis Russia, England, France. After these champions follows Japan.

With the vanquished or the vanquishers?

Another law is that the industrial states that were beaten in the war run in turn, the victors go slow.

The giant capitalist octopus, when it has had a few tentacles cut off, regenerates them with youthful reproductive force.

Let us take from Khrushchev’s table the rate of progress of industrial production, as an annual average over the last five years. 

America is calmly producing with 4.3 per cent per year. England even more so with 3.5 per cent. France, in the war well abused, goes to 6; loser-victor.

Vanquished Italy, industrially ill-equipped, is already at 9.3 per cent. The supervanquished Japan and the supervanquished Germany are advancing at the rate of Russia, i.e. at the impressive rate of 15 and 12.5 per cent per year. With a 15% rate over the five-year period, one gains not 75 % (a naive account), but 100 per cent. In fact, in Khrushchev’s table, Russia went from 1082 to 2049 (from 100 to 190), Germany from 117 to 213 (from 100 to 182), Japan from 115 to 239 (from 100 to 207!). Are these miracles of socialism?! Does Bulganin propose and expect such miracles from the next plan, with its 65 per cent increase, from 100 to 165, and thus at the modest rate of 11.5 per cent? In the pre-war plans, this rate ranged between 10.5 and 13 per cent. These figures for the five-year period 1950-55 differ only slightly from those, mentioned below, for the nine-year period 1946-55.

The sense of such a brake on investment in industry, in relation to Stalin’s condemnation, might appear to be, propaganda baloney aside, a socialist sense, if it were directed at achieving an improvement in the disastrous standard of living, an area in which comparison with western indices is defeatist. In fact, it is only a question of yielding to proletarian pressure on the one hand, and military inferiority to the imperial West on the other. 

Something must be said on the first point, in the next part of the Day, on agriculture and consumption. And point out, in the economic speeches of the 20th congress, that under the word return to Marxist economics there is an envious homage to American economics, to modern Keynes, and (as can be shown) to the troglodytically pre-Marxist Malthus.

The laws of historical materialism, no longer mere playthings on the Battilocchios’ work desk, bend the ideology to lie, vainly recalcitrant among its mass-produced editorial formulations for the outlets of the entire world, on the fabric of basic social structure. This is the Confession, not the ones divulged after being obtained from the defendants at the Great purge trials and whose bestial extortion is luridly portrayed today! Bourgeois society, bourgeois congressional attitudes, bourgeois economic science. Not, of course, in the classical sense, but in the vulgar, neo-volgar, super-volgar sense of the expression, which Marx used with insurmountable contempt.

The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Russia

DAY THREE: Early afternoon

Agriculture: reduced pace 

The glorious figures of industrial plans, both for the past five-year period and for the one now beginning (more modest than the previous one: it promises 65% and not 70%, although for 1951-55 it is claimed to have delivered more: 85%; so why mark the pace?), give way to tones of embarrassment and blatant reticence when it comes to agriculture. 

As usual, it is not the absolute figures that are given, but those relating to the year in which the plans started. In the past five years there have been three years of stagnation, and also of recoil (especially in the key positions: grain and textiles), and the last two, especially the last one, with a certain recovery that is boasted to be due to skillful measures, while it is well known that there have been favourable seasons everywhere, and the last one even exceptional. 

However, in the five-year period we can only boast 29 per cent for cereals, 9 per cent for cotton, 49 per cent for flax fibre. We spare ourselves the irony of the 107 per cent for sunflower: we are not in the style of corpse eaters; this third day of ours, amidst so much suggestive material, obliges us to beg the lamp of the world to turn more slowly … 

Those progress figures, reduced to an annual pace, are far more modest than the one extolled for industry, where 13.1 per cent was achieved (as against the promised 12; whereas today only a more moderate 11.5 per cent is promised, as we said in the morning). As a matter of fact for cereals the annual rate is only 5 per cent, for flax 8 per cent, for cotton 1.8. 

Nor should it be forgotten that at the same time the population is growing at a much faster rate than 1 per cent, therefore it’s all the more legitimate to insist on the above figures. 

Thus Khrushchev relates; and what meanwhile does Bulganin prophesy? 

The figures are not entirely explicit. The rates of progression expected for the period 1956-1960 are not given. However, an impressive figure is given on the point, which one cannot hesitate to call purely impressive: the aim is to increase overall agricultural production by 70 per cent over the five-year period, i.e., at an average rate of 12 per cent per year! 

If it were true that the Russian proletariat has as many calories at its disposal today as in England and America (short note in Unità of 28 March, which we have already silenced on the industrial point in the last part), this would lead to indigestion and an epidemic of hepatitis (a record in proteins) in 1960: but of this on the subject of consumer economics. 

In 1960, the global cereal harvest- this is the central fact –  must be increased to 11 billion poods, a figure which, among other things, «will make it possible to satisfy the population’s growing demand for bread». Can you not hear the historic phrase: qu’ils  mangent de la brioche? 

Since livestock production is expected to be almost doubled (which in the past five years has marked time in terms of livestock and product statistics, after the first years of retrocession; we will not joke about the figures, which are only encouraging for pigs), there is talk of a great deal of virgin land being cleared for animal feed, especially maize, which would take 4 of those 11 billion poods (1,800 million quintals). But the serious fact is that this goal was the same as that of the Fifth Five-Year Plan, which was completely missed! If, therefore, the promised 70 per cent were kept in 1960, one would still have the right to refer the march to ten and not five years: the rate would drop to only 5.5 per cent. But we do not take chances, if we expect that at the invitation: «run!», the Russian countryside will remain deaf. 

The pre-war plans had kept to a modest 1.4 per cent. The Fifth Plan promised 8.5 per cent! An authentic bluff.

The burning agrarian question 

Our entire school has always presented the theory of the agrarian question as the true keystone of the ingenious Marxist construction: we have done a lot to show how in it we are true to the letter of Marx’s classical formulation, and how it was held to be the basis of the historical and social vision in Russia, thesis by thesis, with gigantic orthodoxy – and zero innovation – by Lenin, at all stages.

This superb scientific endeavour is crowned by a first-rate historical thesis: the capitalist form of production achieved the immense feat of making it easy for man to consume the most varied manufactured products, but made it relatively more difficult for him to consume food and agrarian goods. 

In modern bourgeois mercantile civilisation, men have plenty of iron and little bread: hence the cry of the great agitator Blanqui, who invited the proletarians to overturn this condemnation: he who has iron, has bread! Only, then, let him ignore the use of the magical metal in the workshop, and know how to wield it in the class war. Which Marx and Lenin did not repudiate, but elevated, from a generous spirit of desperate revolt, to the science of Revolution and class Dictatorship.

The very figures of the speakers at the 20th Congress, read according to that Marxism which they have forever forgotten, classify them within the boundary of bourgeois civilisation. 

Marx develops the luminous theory by constructing that ternary model of bourgeois society (which is not biclass!) adopted and claimed by Lenin at every step; and only fools are embarrassed, considering that Marx’s discovery was made in the examination of English society in the middle of the 19th century, which seemed forever free of feudal, regurgitated spurious rural forms; and Lenin’s more than ingenious application is made in early 20th century Russia where one moves at every step between the fetters of a prolonged Middle Ages. 

The landlord has the legal monopoly of access to land, he collects the rent. The capitalist entrepreneur has that of the means of production in agricultural industry (as in manufacturing): he collects the profit. The wage-worker (in agriculture as in industry) without land and capital, has only his labour power, and receives a wage.

All modern bourgeois countries are full of spurious forms of society that escape the three types of the model. The tenant farmer and the sharecropper are hybrids between the second and third types: they give working capital and personal labour, they receive in kind or in money what they cumulate in profit and wages. The peasant-owner is a hybrid between the three types: he has ownership of the land, working capital, and labour power: he should receive income, profit, and wages. The accounts of these equivocal forms show that in the end their subjects are below and not above the wage-earner. 

The latter towers above them from a height of a thousand cubits in the full bourgeois society, because it alone has the magical potential, which Marx discovered, to blow up its envelope; and the spurious are hopelessly nailed to conservation today, to counter-revolution tomorrow. Marx and Lenin knew, without this in any way clouding the magnificent doctrinal and programmatic construction of the Communist Party, that in pre-bourgeois societies and in the transitions to capitalism – but not beyond – those agrarian layers play high revolutionary parts.

Russian rural society 

Let us describe today’s Russian agrarian society according to these unwavering characteristics in two words (referring for a more extensive repetition of school and party views to our studies on the «agrarian question» and on Russia and its revolution, published in Programma Comunista).

The task of the landlord would pass to the State. The same is declared for the task of the capitalist entrepreneur. Would the entire agrarian population then consist of wage labourers?

This may at most refer to a still small minority of them working in sovkhozes, or government-run collective agrarian farms.

A small (?) minority remains distributed in the old spurious peasant petty-bourgeois forms, apart from other survivals of even older forms, such as to evade statistics, for reasons that it is a long time to discuss. 

The bulk is in the kolkhoz . The kolkhozian has a double figure: as he operates in the Kolkhoz  large collective enterprise and as he operates in his small family business.

Let us compare the two moments with the classical ternary model. 

Ownership of the land belongs to the State. So the kolkhozian would not be an owner, neither in a collective nor in a personal figure. However, it should be noted that, as developed in the Genoa meeting of our movement, the distinction between ownership and enjoyment in concrete economic terms makes no sense. The kolkhoz  as a collective enterprise is the true master of the land in a big way: it sells the produce to the State, it does not pay to it an agrarian rent. The kolkhozian is the master of his field: he eats or sells the produce and pays no rent to either the kolkhoz or the State. But even if we give up this formal position, we see today that before and after the 20th Congress the kolkhoz family dwelling house (based on hereditary transmission) is given in true ownership. See Stalin in Economic Problems, response to Notkin, and reference to the 1936 Constitution of the USSR: and see the promises of recent speakers of increased construction for rural people, with the granting of land mortgages similar in this to those in the West, to the massive system of US mortgages. We foresee that as a result of the emulative race we will soon see this system extended to the cities, and to the industrial wage-earning, predicted as householders. Indisputable, then, is the landlord aspect of the kolkhozian. 

Second aspect: capitalist. We do not see that at the 20th Congress they contradicted Stalin on these points. The kolkhoz has a capital of tools and various materials, which is corporate and not State-owned. Only the large machines belong to the State, and the kolkhoz pays rent for them. As for the individual kolkhozian, the stock capital (animals, tools, seeds) belongs to him in ownership (See again: 1936 Constitution; Stalin’s Economic Writings). Owner of agricultural working capital, it means entrepreneur, and profit-earner, like the western settler.

Third aspect: wage earner. The kolkhozian is such when he leaves his field and does days and hours of work for the kolkhoz, which notes them down and credits them for the time when the general company distributes its gross product with given rules.

Why then should the kolkhozian, i.e. the Russian farmer (let us compensate for brevity those in sovkhoz with the others in the lands not yet in kolkhoz) differ from the peasant in other countries, petty-bourgeois to the core? What sense does it make to speak, for the kolkhoz property as a whole, and for that of the kolkhozian family, of socialist property? Even less sense than for the State industrial factories: in industry our objection is to the wage form for production and to the market form for distribution, and the Marxist expression is State capitalism. In agriculture we are at the «step» State capitalism only for the sovkhoz: the kolkhoz form is semi-capitalist, because the co-operative aspect alone is capitalist, but as associated, not yet state; the family form is a mixture of private capitalism and the «spurious form» between land rent, stock capital profit, and individual labour. 

In this context, what did the 20th Congress have to say? Did it also overrule Stalin’s positions?

An American announcement 

The Associated Press on March 21st (the 20th Congress had closed on February 25th) issued a communiqué from Moscow, which we find no way of confirming with Soviet sources, but which we translate word for word.

«The Reds administer a bitter pill to the peasants. – The Kremlin has now launched the decisive phase of its 29-year war against the Soviet peasantry.

The aim is to turn the entire Soviet agricultural population into landless workers who are salaried by the State.

The Soviet government issued a new set of directives to collective farms. The most important points consisted of instructions to severely reduce the size of the private fields and houses belonging to the kolkhoz peasants; and to limit – and possibly abolish – the peasants’ rights to own a private stock.

The kolkhoz peasants form the vast majority of the Soviet agrarian population, with their families: they make up about half of the total population.

At present, most of the country is cultivated collectively by the kolkhozians. The distribution of the products of the kolkhozian lands is strictly controlled by the State. 

A large percentage of kolkhozian peasants could not live on what they are entitled to for work on the collective land, and live by cultivating small private plots of land, and a small private stock often consisting of a cow, a pig and some chickens.

The new communist directives tend to drastically reduce the size of those plots and eliminate the private stock. The aim is to force peasants either to work exclusively on common land and be totally dependent on the State, or to leave the countryside and work in factories.

This is a bitter pill for the Soviet peasants.

Ultimately, the Kremlin can be prepared to use brute force to carry out its plan, as it once did under Joseph Stalin when small farms were collectivised, and millions of peasants whose grain had been confiscated languished in hunger until the entire peasant class was subjugated.

The government will probably not need to use force this time». 

This news gives rise to two difficult questions. Is general State collectivisation of agrarian cultivation in the plans of the Soviet government? And if it were, would such a plan be likely to succeed? After these two would come a third, in the unlikely case of double affirmative: would this be an economic transformation with socialist content? We, as is evident, are for the triple negation.

The price «spread» 

Undoubtedly, enough was said at the 20th Congress to establish that the question of the relationship between industry and agriculture is tormenting, and its future very unclear.

While many speakers at the congress deplored the fact that industrial production costs are too high, compared to bourgeois countries, there is no doubt that the price of consumer goods – abnormally high when in 1924 Trotzky had to deplore the grave disorganization and the low output of industrial production – is falling, and it is this that entitles one to state, amidst blatant exaggerations, that the average standard of living, and that of urban workers, is rising somewhat.

But the retail cost of food sold by the State warehouses could only be kept down on condition of a severe sacrifice of the State budget.

Today, therefore, two proposals are emerging: to end the reduction of retail prices; to increase, as has already been done, the storage prices at which the State buys the products of the kolkhozian farms in bulk. At the same time the alarm is sounded because the direct products of the sovkhoz network are too expensive, and it is stipulated that the third type of agricultural institute, the State Motor Stations, should become economically autonomous, i.e. they should live on the rentals that the kolkhoz pay for the large agricultural machines in seasonal supply.

Obviously, this can only fall on the State economy and all State employees, city and country wage earners, and is ill-suited to the projected rise in the average real wage.

The one who can generally come out well in these squeezes as a consumer – and saver, perhaps accumulator: (accumulation dies only when the right to save is suppressed; and only with that is socialism born!) – is the member of the Kolkhoz who supplements his or her share of the work premium with direct family consumption from the small private company. 

At the congress, however, no threats were heard towards the kolkhozians that would hurt their growing attachment to rural ownership. In addition to rural homesteads, there was insistent talk of improving, not reducing – as in the American news – livestock and other stocks. The kolkhoz as a whole were strongly urged to improve yields and total products, in agriculture and animal husbandry, citing the usual good examples, as emulative as they were sporadic. 

So the drastic switch of all kolkhoz to sovkhoz does not seem to have been officially anticipated. All we find is the news that the sovkhoz have developed considerably, cultivating 24.5 million hectares in 1955 compared to 14.5 million two years earlier. However, it cannot be said that this land has been lost by the kolkhoz, given the even greater area claimed to have been put under new cultivation, and the lack, among so many figures, of true statistics of population and land distribution, known with contradictory data, the analysis of which cannot now be developed.

The above figures are for sown areas. The sovkhoz developed a lot in the first two five-year plans, then the kolkhoz developed much more. In 1935, the sovkhoz sown area of was already 10 million hectares, and thus not much less than in 1955, twenty years later. In 1938, though, it was, from another soviet source, 8.5 million. 

The kolkhoz form thus triumphed in Russia. However, the jump in sovkhoz announced for 1953-55 is remarkable. Why is there silence about the goal, in 1960, of their extension? Is there or not a desire to move towards agrarian State capitalism? Certainly in 1938 the kolkhoz  already had over 500 million hectares, of which almost two hundred were sown, and the State agrarian economy was by far minoritarian. According to FAO data, in 1947 the Russian cultivated area would have been 225 million hectares; today it is much larger, but the kolkhoz system definitely predominates there, and this is the fundamental fact. 

In the 1938-39 marketing year, the industrial state bought 88 per cent of its grain from the kolkhoz, 11 per cent from its sovkhoz, and 0.2 per cent from individual companies. This overall total was, according to Stalin, 40 per cent of total production. 

Historical data of sown area: 1913, 105 million hectares; 1941, 137 million hectares. Of these, cereals accounted for 94 to 102 million hectares. Khrushchev admits that the area in 1950 was the same: 102.9; increased in 1955 to 126.4. 

With improved yields the total cereal harvest, from 800 million quintals in 1913, reached 1200 million in 1937 (La Coltura Sovietica, Einaudi, no. 1, July 1945). 

One and a half times in 24 years means just one and a half per cent per year on average. The order of magnitude of population increase!

If by 1960 we were at the announced 1800 million quintals of grain, this means that today we are only at around 1050: where is the advance?

Let us also remember that the «Stalin’s Goal» before the war devastated the Russian «granaries» was 8 billion poods (about 1300 million quintals) of grain. We are in open regression! 

The Russian worker only eats today by virtue of one historical fact – half bourgeois revolution, half sub-bourgeois – and we will leave it to Pawlowsky, author of the above-mentioned writings, to say. «Industrialisation has meant that the agriculture of the Soviet Union is no longer forced by lack of domestic demand to sell its products on the world market, realising very low producer prices» Industrialisation, and the iron curtain!

The Russian worker made the revolution, but pays more for his bread than the foreign capitalist.

However (Dialogue with Stalin) to form, in Asian-feudal economies, national markets, is genuine revolution!

The insoluble antithesis 

The uncertainty as to whether the direction that the Moscow regime’s «agrarian policy» will take is in the direction of big capitalism or small-scale sub-capitalism, expresses for us the impossibility for a decidedly mercantile and bourgeois social form to break out of the stranglehold of the contrast between agriculture and manufacturing. In Mikoyan’s resolute presentation, the petty-bourgeois remedy seems to prevail, and not the bold and «Ricardian» one that responds to the Associated Press news: totalitarianism of wage-earning enterprise in the countryside. Ricardo then wanted the capitalist State to confiscate all land rent by reducing the bourgeois type society to binary: entrepreneurs and wage earners. Marx prophetically demonstrated that this, while not a victory for the proletarians on whom all the burden would always fall, was a utopia, within the limits of mercantile capitalism: no bourgeois code has in fact abolished the right of ownership over land. Nor has the Soviet one. According to the same doctrine, it will not be able to get out of the kolkhozian form in which a considerable part of the land remains fragmented and with it the capital invested in it.

Here are Mikoyan’s words. «The main task (i.e., after Stalin’s death) was to liquidate the backwardness in agriculture, to eliminate the imbalance between the development of industry and that of agriculture, an imbalance particularly dangerous for our country, the further accentuation of which would be a serious obstacle to our development». And how to do this? «This task was accomplished with a series of measures, such as the raising of the material interest of the kolkhozians, the conquest of virgin and uncultivated land for agriculture. In two years, 33 million hectares of new land were brought under cultivation. Could we have dreamed of something like this in the past?».

What these gentlemen cannot dream of is maintaining the mercantile link between industry and land, and at the same time resolving the insoluble contradiction between the two fields of the economy. 

Mikoyan takes comfort in the comparison with America, where the government does not solve the problem by clearing new land, but by removing 10 million hectares from cultivation, because too much food is produced. It induces that these are the contradictions of capitalism, which are irremediable. But this explanation also applies Marxistically to Russia: will the emulative race be about who sows the most, or who sows the least? It is not pure rhetoric, when even Mikoyan strikes a blow for the emulative cause, in the most extreme form: «Is this emulation to the full liking of Soviet citizens and American people? ».

Asinine Revolution 

News of the appeal to the kolkhoz is given in April 10th Unità in the form of a call to double (sic) agrarian production in three or even two years, and for the Ukraine, fertile as far as one wants, even one.

This is the science of planning, after a binge of emulative whisky. What is the forecast on the pace to be kept, which in practice we have seen nailed down to a maximum of 1.5 per cent per year? After extensive calculations it was estimated, instead of 70 per cent in five years, to double it in three years? Then the average pace of 26 per cent per annum was calculated. If it is two years, it accelerates to 42 per cent! If then by one, of course, one hundred per cent. If programmes exist, how can an «appeal» even quadruple the estimated pace? Multiply that of the cumbersome 6th plan by twelve? 

It is also certain that in 1956 meat production will have doubled. One can only deduce from this that the consumption of whisky has quadrupled (it would be unemulative to speak of the vulgar vodka). If you want to double the meat, you have to double the national herd. This plan can be done for rabbits, or for rats: not even for pigs. As for cattle, in addition to mares, there are bulls, oxen, calves and heifers. Each cow takes almost a year to make a baby, and is almost as productive of milk. Anyone who wants to have more cows in a year, even dreaming, cannot go beyond these limits. The technique of artificial insemination itself cannot cause much improvement. In order not to bother with calculations, we will say that the most talented livestock producer has only one way to produce double meat: either buy cattle abroad, or eat the herd and … see the livestock endowment reduced by one hundred percent! 

A first-rate cattle breeding country is Holland. In 1939 it had 2,817,000 head of cattle: the Germans gobbled up most of them and by 1948 there were only 2,222,000. By 1953 they had raised them again to 2,930,000 million. We believe this is a technically insurmountable «step»: it is 31 per cent in four years; average rate seven per cent per year.

How to explain these enormous lies of 26, 42, 100 percent, taking off at supersonic speed from Unità pages? It is, however, possible; without joking about the miracle of the doubling in one year of the donkeys … in Italy, towards which that filthy press is walking, while it is babbling that there has been a crop revolution in Muscovy! To (one understands) emulate. In worthy competition with the Yankee donkeys.

The appeal to the kolchozians could be of a tone reminiscent of the Associated Press. There are animals in Russia in quantities not much less than in the Netherlands and there are in the countryside the famous Unità proteins. It is perhaps a question of threatening the peasants so that they do not, in the very bourgeois sanctity of their homes, eat meat that does not reach the proletariat in the factories. Then it becomes plausible that in a year’s time the worker, who has no «livestock» or food reserve, will receive twice as much. What can be deduced from this? Immense conclusions! 

Individual peasant property in the hybrid form of the kolkhoz  generates, in Stalin’s view and against Jaroscenko, relations of production and thus of class. The wage-earning proletariat, of the workshops as well as the sovkhoz – to whom we learn would be extended the concession of small private gardens – is the class exploited not only by State capitalism but also by a privileged peasantry. While it is hungry, as we know, not for meat but for bread, it can no longer launch into the countryside the historic glorious armed supply squads of the great years – even of Stalin!

This would be a scandal today, now that dictatorship is being repudiated, and could not a Nenni bray that it is a matter of liquidating «war communism» in order to introduce a constitutional democracy and superimpose on the State, and more so on the party, a gown-like judiciary!

The one that therefore stands before the world’s emulation is a low, cowardly, lousy, stupid rural democracy, playing servant to big international capitalism, and selling it the skin of the heroic Russian and world working class, stabbed in the back, worse than in 1914, by the trade union and electoral leaders, feeding on its demoralisation. The career of such a troop is not yet time to drown it in the mud in which it basks: this joy belongs to the rising generation. 

What did Stalin think?

Stalin was resolutely for the preservation of the kolkhozian agrarian form, and in his writing rejected all proposals for «reform» in this system. Comrades Sanina and Vengser had called for the «expropriation of the kolkhoz», i.e. for the kolkhozian property to be declared the property «of the whole people», and this «following the example of what has been done for capitalist property (read industry)». Stalin is adamant: this proposal is absolutely wrong, unquestionably unacceptable!

This proposal would be the one in the Associated Press news, but we must repeat that there is no evidence at all that the 20th Congress proved those two comrades right, against Stalin’s quos ego.

Ineffable, however, are the arguments of these: kolkhozian property is socialist property (see above), and we can in no way proceed with it as with capitalist property. He adds: from the fact that the kolkhozian property is not the property of all the people, it in no way follows that the kolkhozian property is not socialist property. Evidently, we are in the regime of the High Priest who, wherever he touches, makes everything stamped «socialist». There State-owned factories, the kolkhoz land and its tools, the peasants’ plots and their few stocks are property yes, but with the «socialist» stamp. And we, who have always believed that socialism means nobody’s property, system of non-ownership!

So Stalin, in order to defeat the idea of statifying the kolkhoz , pontificates, allowing himself to quote Engels, that the transfer of ownership of groups and individuals to the State is not the best form of socialisation! And he dares to explain it on the grounds that the State will become extinct! In the first Dialogue we showed that Engels’ critique of state control (then Bismarck’s on the railways) also proves that the formulas of transferring ownership to the Nation, to the People, and not even that (which would be better) of ownership to the Society have nothing to do with the socialist programme. Marxistically one could have said of a «property» of the class State, of the dominant and dictating Proletariat. But they will all die together: Divided Classes – Political State and Dictatorship – Property, whatever.

According to the 20th Congress, are those Stalin formulas OK? Without a doubt; at the most, even more pro-capitalist formulas will be given.

Anti-Marxist ”emulation” 

One of Stalin’s longest chapters in the Problems, and one of the most bitter, was devoted to L. D. Jaroscenko. The non-Soviet press is now reporting that this same Jaroscenko had, after the 20th Congress, reared his head again (he had offered to compile the treatise on Political Economy; and Stalin had refused consent in his usual crass manner). Pravda would now warn that it was not enough today to chorus insults to Stalin in order to win applause, and would call those statements anti-Marxist, «provocative and directed against the party», and it would be recalled that at the time Stalin accused Jaroscenko of having followed Bucharin’s economic ideas, condemned by Lenin.

We would take neither Stalin nor yesterday’s or today’s Pravda editor as arbiter or arbitrator. For every award issued, at least four falsifications. 

Lenin’s condemnation of Bucharin’s theory on the Russian economy and the Bolshevik party’s new programme dates from 1919; it is in a remarkably interesting piece of writing, which we will use in full in the report on Russia being published in full text. Stalin killed Bucharin later, in 1938; all right. But between 1919 and 1938, Bucharin was Stalin’s «great economist», when it came to, after Lenin’s death, rattling Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and other valiant Marxist economists with his usual methods. When the no less valiant Bucharin opened his eyes to the theoretical and political ruin, he too was murdered, and shamed as a Marxist.

Bucharin’s name therefore shuts no one’s mouth; corpses and living should rinse their own, as in a popular southern saying, before using that name as a support for a degenerate doctrine. The cake between Stalin and Jaroscenko must otherwise be shared, as, if the news is what it is, between Pravda-style 20th Congress and Jaroscenko.

What did he claim? Convinced as Stalin was that Russian society was the pure image of socialism, he assumed that one should no longer speak of political economy, even Marxist political economy, because there is only one political economy, the one applicable to capitalism! Today, Jaroscenko said, only a science of «rational planning», or something similar, is needed. And continuing in this vein, he argued that there was no longer any need to speak in Russia of productive forces coming into conflict with relations of production, or forms of ownership, and that it was only a matter of the existence and presence of the former, without the latter! 

Stalin rightly argued that in Russia there are still relations of production «between men», and not just problems of «things», because this will only happen after the total disappearance of the social classes: only then will men not be slaves to the force of economic laws and will control production and allocation in rational forms. The relations of production are the forms of ownership; in Russia, State ownership of factories, and precisely the ownership of kolkhoz  and kolkhozians, are such.

It was a big Jaroscenko stupidity not to see a «production relationship» in the wages given to the industrial worker against working time, or in the purchase of the cow by the kolkhozian against the produce of his soil, or the wage share in the kolkhoz .

But Stalin was wrong in saying that, in a socialist society, the laws of Marxist political economy describing mercantile capitalism and the wage system would nonetheless exist in practice.

It is easy to settle the verbose debate. They were both wrong, if the true Marxist thesis is set right: Russian society is a class society, mercantile and capitalist, and in it the laws of Marxist economics relating to the capitalist mode of production apply, and Marx was the first to demonstrate that they were «not eternal like the laws of physical nature, and destined to fall». Then the relations of production, or forms of ownership, are well identified in Russia with the productive forces, and fiercely contrasting with them. They no longer identify with the claimed «construction» of socialism, in which both Stalin and Jaroscenko believe.

Stalin, constrained by his Marxist subconscious, strives in this strange debate to argue that the bourgeoisie itself in its revolution, conscious of economic laws, constructed industrial capitalism, thus even more contributing (and even when arguing against Jaroscenko a just factual thesis) to that fearful disorder of doctrine, which will weigh on his memory more than the series of assassinations, and which the survivors of his court will never be able to wrest from themselves.

Lenin and Bucharin 

Lenin was several times fierce with Bucharin, and the moments were equally tragic for Russia and the Party, but it was in a different atmosphere, among tried and tested Marxists; those discussions left a valid and still valuable trace, and as much as it now urges, using the unpleasant word, «topical».

Bucharin had prepared the Programme Report for the 8th Congress of the Bolshevik Communist Party on 19 March 1919. Lenin, who was with him rapporteur for the committee, criticised Bucharin’s draft.

The latter, influenced by the two great contemporary facts, the spread of the imperialist phase of capitalism throughout the world and the advent of the full dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, had presented the entire struggle that constituted the task of the proletarian party as a struggle against that form of capitalism, and described the structure, the historical process, and the fall of capitalism according to the characteristics of monopolist times alone, completely omitting the part relating to the «old capitalism» of competition and liberalism.

Lenin’s theoretical development on that occasion is a real gem of doctrine and vigorous realism.

Don’t run too fast, Bucharin! – must have admonished the Master. That is why the ideological parasite Stalin, many years later, calls Jaroscenko a Bucharinite, running to full communist reasoning where one is only at socialism (according to him): don’t run, Jaroscenko!

First of all, Lenin clarified something we hold so dear: capitalism is still that; imperialism is not a new typical social form, but only a superstructure of capitalism.

Interpret: imperialism is a new political form, based on aggression and war, of the only mode of production: capitalism, which remains unchanged.

Then, as for Russia, he explained to Bucharin that in Russia it was not yet fully monopolist and imperialist capitalism, but they still had to deal with minimal and competitive capitalism, indeed they should hope for it. But what a revolutionary vigour in this diagnosis, which will be more ruthless in the fundamental speech of 1921 on the tax in kind, another milestone of the great course and of our study! When Stalin apes, and says to Jaroscenko, not that we have finally arrived, at least for industry, at the imperialist superstructure of capitalism, which Bucharin already saw 35 years earlier, but that we are in full socialism, they both make us vomit.

We have already postponed this accomplished analysis to its proper place: but certain quotations have such force, about the shameless who called their dirty posturing at the 20th Congress a return to Lenin, that they are unavoidable here.

«Nowhere in the world has monopoly capitalism existed in a whole series of branches without free competition, nor will it exist». 

«We say that we have arrived at the dictatorship. But we must know how we arrived at it. The past keeps fast hold of us, grasps us with a thousand tentacles, and does not allow us to take a single forward step, or compels us to take these steps badly in the way we are taking them… Capitalism, in its primordial forms of the mercantile economy, leads, and has been leading us».

Let us say again that we do not give here the analysis of this mighty unfolding, in which Bucharin is once again brought into line on the question of the self-determination of the peoples, where, Lenin explains, one really has to say people and not proletarian class! No, dear many left-wing friends who will certainly not take offence at being compared to the formidable Marxist Bucharin: Marxism is never simple!

Here’s to you, ‘Leninists’! 

Lenin goes in his demonstrations straight to the end. We are behind even in advanced Germany! Why? 

«Take, for instance, Germany (1919), the model of an advanced capitalist country whose organisation of capitalism, finance capitalism, was superior to that of America. … She is a model, it would seem. But what is taking place there? Has the German proletariat become differentiated from the bourgeoisie? No! It was reported that the majority of the workers are opposed to Scheidemann (right-wing social democrat, slayer of Liebknecht and Luxemburg) in only a few of the large towns».

How could this happen? cries Lenin, intent on curbing the extremism of the incandescent Bucharin. These words fall on the disgusted faces of those who weld to the blasphemy of a return to Lenin the muddy invitation to the popular fronts, to the left-wing majorities:

«IT WAS OWING TO THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN THE SPARTACISTS AND THE THRICE-ACCURSED GERMAN MENSHEVIK-INDEPENDENTS, WHO MAKE A MUDDLE OF EVERYTHING AND WANT TO WED THE SYSTEM OF WORKERS’ COUNCILS TO A CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY!»

Theoretical Lenin classifies Russia under the primordial capitalist stage. Revolutionary Lenin at the same time stirred up contact with the left-wing independents, duly pounded into the mortar at the Second World Congress. Today they would like to pay with the desecration of a more than whitewashed sepulchre for the right to lift Lenin’s name, when at the same time they affirm, with the language of that corpse, that the Russian economy is full socialism, and they extend in Europe the monstrous amplitude even further than today’s Scheidemann, running down the proletarian Dictatorship in a shady crouching under the bourgeois Constitution. 

We will need another paper in due course, from October 1919: Economy and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. But even here it is impossible not to write down some of Lenin’s words, which should be tattooed with a point of fire on the griffin of the «returners to Lenin from Stalin»: 

«If we compare all the basic forces or classes and their interrelations (even Jarushenko, of course, swears to be Leninist, devancier of the donkeys kicking the Lion!…), as modified by the dictatorship of the proletariat, WE SHALL REALISE HOW UNUTTERABLY NONSENSICAL AND THEORETICALLY STUPID IS THE COMMON PETTY-BOURGEOIS IDEA SHARED BY ALL REPRESENTATIVES OF THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL, THAT THE TRAN-SI-TION TO SO-CIA-LISM IS POSSIBLE “BY ME-ANS OF DE-MO-CRA-CY” IN GENERAL».

The hyphens are ours, but the inverted commas to the words through democracy, are the original’s, you absurd, obtuse, Leninist necrophorists! 

It is not at all strange then that in the renegade camp one is devoted to the mercantile fetish in Russia, to the liberal fetish outside. These, that we are offering, are the Marxist keys to history; and not the dumbfounded amazement of journalists that elections and legalisms are exalted here, while up there it would only be a matter of finding those who rightly regain the same power, which allowed Moustache/Baffone, as in an illustrated magazine, to have Khrushchev doing mushrooms in the body, shouting at him sneeringly: «dance, khokhòl, dance therefore the ghopak! ».

Rant another bit under one last quotation: «GENERAL PHRASES ABOUT FREEDOM, EQUALITY, DEMOCRACY EQUATE IN FACT TO A BLIND REPETITION OF CONDITIONS THAT ARE A CAST TAKEN FROM THE RELATIONSHIPS OF MERCHANT PRODUCTION».

Let these Moscow envoys devote themselves to the elections. Votes will be taken, let all those who, on whatever side, want to speculate about it, know that. The more dirty deeds they do, the more ghopak they dance, the more votes they will take.

It is enough for us to know from what origin comes the cast, affixed to their repugnant livery, and the narrow magic of Marxist determinism tells us so: from the relations of production that not only prevail in Russia, in spite of Jaroscenko, but are mercantile relations for which it is easy merchandise, to be bought for cheap, and with lower figures than Stalin prizes, the sluttish vanity of a flock of candidates.

From production to consumption 

When Stalin wants to convince Jaroscenko that even in a socialist system an economic calculation must be applied, he cites Marx’s demonstration in the famous letter on the Gotha programme, in which Marx explains how in social production various quotas must always be deducted from the total product in order to satisfy, before providing for the workers’ consumption, a series of general and public necessities, and among other things a quota for the amortization of worn-out means of production. But Marx in saying this did not intend to concede that these calculations, after which consumers will be allocated their shares, will be made by the mercantile and monetary mechanism, and on company and individual budgets. He only wished to show that the Lassallian and petit-bourgeois formula of the «undiminished fruit of labour», which should be due to every participant in the productive force, is futile. He wanted to show that even in a non-bourgeois economy, concrete provisions must be made from the «fruit» and product – no longer individual or corporate, but social – before passing on what remains to overall social consumption.

In the Dialogue with Stalin and elsewhere, we made this abysmal distinction between bourgeois and socialist economic mechanics, saying that it is not a question of setting the surplus value left by each worker at zero, equalising the necessary, paid labour with the total amount of labour performed: this is a false expression of socialism, and is only an unsustainable version of individualist economics. And we expressed ourselves with the crude formula that socialism does not suppress surplus value at all, but tends to lower precisely the hours of necessary, paid labour to the minimum possible, and finally to zero. 

Quantitative economic analysis shows that the socialist problem does not lie in a different partition of income, but in the global socialisation of all labour and product, for a social satisfaction of the mass of consumption: bourgeois law and accounting, after having survived in a transitional phase, remain suppressed. 

This obvious result – not understood by 95 out of 100 socialists – ties in with Marx’s statements in Capital: the higher the national wealth (the theme on which Adam Smith erected the mighty construction of capitalist economic science) and hence the national income, the more the working class is beaten, and nailed to the servitude of capital; the more the general increase in product at equal effort of labour, which science and technology ensure, is, not so much absorbed by the personal collegiate of the capitalists to the greatest extent, and to a minimum by the working class, but for the greatest extent squandered in the disorder and absurdity of the individual mercantile management of relations. 

Given that in Russia the bourgeoisie array and the State are one and the same, what sense will they give in the «Manual» to the theory of the national income, in the chapter claimed by Stalin and the 20th congress? How will this doctrine present the sorting of income between consumption and new investment, to reproduce capital and expand its accumulation?

Evidently, this chapter will not be written in the language of Marx in the Gotha letter, but in the style of Keynes and the «welfare» and «prosperity» economists. The formula of world emulation, the apex of the vacillating construction of the 20th congress, means, in economics, only this, that in both fields the race for income, total or «per capita», and for the margin of productive reinvestment, with a rhythm that overrides that of population increase (here is the link with the decrepit Malthus!) is implanted in the opposite direction to the immediate and historical interest of the proletariat, to the revolutionary realisation of world socialism, to the liquidation of class servitude. 

Mad and lost challenge 

The challenge that the Sixth Five-Year Plan wants to issue to the West is not only defeatist for socialism because it shifts class antagonisms to national rivalries, and because it flaunts a shift from a clash of military forces to a peaceful economic confrontation, but because on this ground the game is lost before it is played. For three reasons, then.

Bulganin announces that Russia’s «national income» will rise in the five years to 1960 by 60 per cent, or 11 per cent annually. The forecasts of the euphorists on the other side of the Atlantic are far more measured, although a rigorous Marxist analysis is bound to prove that even their optimism runs on stilts. 

A hypothesis like Bulganin’s depends on three points: adequate increase in gross industrial product – adequate increase in gross agricultural product – partition of the net product between consumption and reinvestment. 

The mere fact that reinvestment in productive facilities is called, even in Russian schemes, income-saving, is further proof of the common nature of the two economies. In State capitalism the enterprise income should all accrue not to individuals but to the State-master, and thus we have the strange economic figure of the State, not an absorber of citizens’ income savings, but itself a saver. This is nothing more than forced saving, and not the socialist veto to every private – and eventually public – possibility of accumulation.

Savings and enjoyment 

The concepts are hard, the concrete figures perhaps less so. This is how we start in the race.

We know that industrially the first condition can hold. The American rate is about 5 per cent per year, the Russian rate 11 per cent. How much of it is consumed? A report from the usual Associated Press on the successful year 1955 – in Russia, in the satellite countries, in Western Europe – gives us this comparison of the consumption of the typical product, steel, after confirming the favourable figures for the increase in production. In the USA and Western Europe, 40 per cent would be used for consumer goods and building construction, the rest for new industrial machines and military uses.

In Russia, only 9 million tonnes of the 45 known from 1955 would go to consumption, and the rest (80 per cent) to industry and war.

Bulganin can answer here that by going to the known 68 in 1960, the increase of 23 million tonnes will be distributed differently. There is only one way: disarmament.

With regard to agricultural production, the case is different. The US rate of increase is minimal: 0.5 per cent, according to a Manchester Guardian prospectus, which confirms Khrushchev’s criticism. But Russia itself in the pre-war plans was moderate: it achieved no more than 1.4 per cent. Old Marx, you said it; under capitalism agriculture does not run, industry does. Inverse theorem: where statistics say so much, there capitalism flourishes! 

So the planned 12 per cent over five years, as we have said, will not happen. And without the planned 70 per cent over the five-year agricultural period, without the second condition, the 60 per cent rise in income will remain an illusion.

Therefore, no rosy predictions can be made about the increase in average consumption and living standards.

Western economists seem to be right in stating that the percentage of provision for capital investment is much higher in Russia than in the West. Until 1950, it hovered around one fifth in Great Britain and the United States, in Russia almost double that (38 per cent). In Italy, if the «Vanoni Plan» were to be followed, the rate would be high, but not to the degree of the Russian rate.

It is not a question here of a comparison between capitalism and socialism (in which case the latter would be screwed), but between capitalism of mature countries and – damn them – winners of all hegemonic wars, and capitalism of countries that are newcomers, or resurgent after the devastation of defeats.

«Popular» consumption 

The equivocal side of euphoric theories is that they chase the average index, and if you study thoroughly the extreme indices, you’ll see that they assume that the national levelling of income and consumption improves. Americans and Russians are both very suspicious here. However, for a true Marxist, distributive injustice is the least of capitalism’s nefariousness, and those who have understood this much can, for now, give free rein to emulation in lying. 

According to Bulganin – and relying on the 70 per cent five-year increase in the product of the land – given the 60 per cent increase in income it will be possible to improve real wages by 30 per cent, while the incomes of kolkhozians will by 40 per cent. We would thus always be in the cut of the capitalist scissor in that those who make the abundant manufactured goods receive less, and those who make the few alimentary goods receive more. Where, even in an immediate sense, is the leading function of the working class over the petty-bourgeois? 

According to Khrushchev, the Fifth Five-Year Plan would see global income rise by 68 per cent, workers’ wages by 39 per cent and rural earnings by 50 per cent. The ratio is the same. So no «turnaround» in this economy of industrial capitalism, miserly with the workers, and relatively fat for petit-bourgeois peasantry. 

Khrushchev asserted that three quarters of the income is used to meet the needs of the population, and thus contrasts a 25 per cent with the 38 per cent deduced by the Oxford economists. But can one, by setting aside, by bureaucratic and wasteful gearing (as recent criticism has it), only a quarter of the net product of one year, achieve that in the following year the gross product rises by 12 per cent, which comes to mean that one has to add as much to the capital value of the means of production, or a little less, for increased technical productivity? The total product would have to reach half of the capital (in the bourgeois meaning), which, especially in Russia, is absurd. The madness raging there is to sublimate investment, trample on consumption.

The modern convict 

If, therefore, the figures on improved consumption should be taken with reservation, nothing else should be thought of the promises to reduce working hours. 

Should one wait until 1957 to arrive at six seven-hour days, i.e. 42 hours per week, or five eight-hour days, i.e. 40? Apart from the strong doubt as to the calculation assumptions, this is a goal already known, for example, to Italian industry, and the consideration of the «absence of unemployment» is not sufficient to overcome the paucity of such results. The delights of modern mercantile civilisation and the welfare and credit care – another field in which a vast aping of the West is announced – consists in making the human army of labour oscillate, among fearful uncertainties, between the extremes of full freedom to starve, and the slavish form of occupation, which is as total as it is forced, and which tends, in this world that has become, according to those gentlemen, conquerable by «persuasion», more and more to spread from the atmosphere of war, in which it emerged terrorising, to that of peace. Of their horrible peace. 

The ancient slave and serf begin to be able to look down on the modern worker. They, it is true, could not move from their place of employment; but nor were they required to go to war. The modern man is under the nightmare of war, and the high probability of death, injury, imprisonment and forced labour. Whereas ancient warfare also dealt with civilians gradually, modern warfare flies. And it starves every non-combatant thousands of miles ahead of the front lines (while the military in given modern situations may even have a good time). In peace they gorge him on statistical prosperity and commercial freedom: we see that even here in the Kremlin they dream of a true emulative orgy: queue-free emporiums, various and corrupting goods, titillation of fashions and tastes, straights and reverses. Soon they will come to America’s masterpiece: consumption on credit. With this system, the worker, perhaps deluded into thinking that he is a shareholder in the company’s capital, is no longer the owner, but a debtor of the furnishings of his house, and if he also owns the house, of its value. He is practically like the slave, who was indebted for the net value of his person, after being fed. 

Already this American system of credit, which binds the worker to his place of work, and of debt, has been called industrial feudalism. A further step in the «growing misery» that means the loss of all economic «reserve». The classical proletarian has zero reserve, the modern one has negative reserve: he has to pay a large sum to be able to go naked wherever he wants. How to pay, if not, as in Shylock, with a slice of buttock?

The necklace of high living standards and prosperity, ideals common to the two competing worlds of contemporary «quantitative» civilisation, is worth the barbed wire of concentration camps, watched over by all flags.

Lean dance of calories 

We were saying that according to Unità today, and not in 1960, the food consumption of the Russian people would be at the level of 3020 calories, against Italy’s 2340, while only America and England are slightly higher, 3100. The Russian would have 92 grams of protein per day, against 75 for the Italian; he would be beaten only by the French with 99.

At the 20th Congress they did not give any figures on food consumption, except to state that in the five-year period they doubled, not the quantities of consumption, but those of disposal through State and cooperative networks, which is quite different.

Statistics show that any population that is poorly nourished, such as the Italian, while on average endowed with grains and sugars, is deficient in meat, milk and fat. England, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Scandinavian countries, and even France are above this, especially as they have strong livestock endowments. The predominantly plant-fed countries stay below 2500 calories. 

The supply of meat depends, especially for closed economies, on that of cattle, pigs, etc., relative to the population.

Let us limit ourselves to a comparison between the United States and Russia, and … Italy.

Cattle: United States 0.66 head per inhabitant. Russia 0.25. Italy 0.20. Swine: United States 0.34. Russia 0.13. Italy 0.10.

We can make a grain comparison; accepted for Russia the 1800 million quintals of Bulganin, in 1960, they are today – as already said – 1050 million, which makes 4.7 quintals per inhabitant. United States 1400 million quintals, 9 per inhabitant. Italy 160 million, 3.5 per inhabitant.

There is enough to establish that, while Russia’s endowment is higher than Italy’s, it is certainly vastly below America’s (and related countries) and it is pure invention that food calories are at the American level of over three thousand: they cannot be, given Italy’s 2,340, more than 2,500 at most. 

It is well known how these indices vary in Italy between North and South. The cause of this was recently again referred to the spectacular prolificacy of the South. 891,000 more inhabitants in the five-year period, out of 12 million: 7.5 per cent!

Khrushchev said that in the five years of the Fifth Plan, Russia’s population (we always mean the entire USSR) increased by an impressive 16.3 million.

Assuming it was 202 million in 1950, the increase is 8 per cent in five years, or about one and a half per cent per year.

Khrushchev concludes that this proves that Russians eat a lot! Here too, at this trivial level, one speaks as an anti-Marxist! Where there is much delivering, there is little food. Does Khrushchev want the indices of England, America, New Zealand and Scandinavia as concerns new babies? In Russia not only does one eat little, but the ration is little improved, because agrarian production barely grows at the same rate (in reality, not in boasting) as the population.

The Russian hunger is on the same level as that (which the gentlemen of Unità season in quite different, but still pharisaical, literature) of Partinico, of Venosa, of Barletta.

Emulation would lead, once again, to hats being thrown off to the most ignobly, crassly bourgeois and anti-revolutionary countries in the world.

And to so much, quickly, it will lead.

Figures and pacifism!

A tough argument, to which we are not aware of any Soviet response, greets the American side to the Russian announcement, following the 20th Congress, of a reduction in the manpower of the Russian armed forces by millions.

In the last eight years, the Russian population has been growing at an overwhelming rate, as it did before the last war. But the birth rate and the increase came to an abrupt halt in 1942, 1943 and 1944 due to the terrible massacres in the struggle with the Germans. Those «classes» are now reaching military draft age. The decline curve of 16-year-old males available from 1956 to 1960 will be frightening.

We do not endorse the figures, but they are these (Rome Daily American, May 29, 1956). Males born in Russia in one year rose from 1934 to 1939, from 1,300,000 to 2,400,000 (seems to us too forced an increase). They fell in 1940 to 2,100,000, in 1941 to 1,800,000, in 1942 to 800,000, in 1943 to 300,000, in 1944 to 300,000. So not only is the 1960 perspective, say the Americans, of few soldiers, but also of few workers.

Whatever the true figures, one fact is certain. Russia is a capitalist state because it immolated millions of lives of proletarians, which constituted a payment of surplus value in enormous masses to the capital of the West. This then saved millions and millions of lives, now translated to its benefit in trillions and trillions of dollars. The truculent Stalin himself was swindled here. Only a workers’ world league can overturn this bloody account of international capitalist infamy.

Today’s Russia is populated mainly by the elderly and children. It can consume a lot, produce less, fight less.

It offers peace to those, to whom social war must be offered, in the heart of their hearts.

The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Russia

DAY THREE : Afternoon

Questions of Principle

We are about to broach the great questions of living history: the world politics of states, peace and war.

Khrushchev, echoed by all the others, said he had to settle, in the 20th Congress, «some questions of principle». It is already a lot that there are still questions of principle: for so many years now, the slogan entrenched in the entire monstrous apparatus with its summit in the Kremlin has been: «Enough of bringing questions of theory among the masses!» Among the masses one brings only passing situations, «concrete» problems, and one has the right, when it is useful to the success of the moment, to mobilise «principles», perhaps from Marx, Engels and Lenin, but equally from Robespierre or Christ, from… Cavour and Garibaldi or from the Pope; the only condition is that such expedients find quota and vogue in the trend of Opinions, in popular favour… 

Those questions of principle have been ostentatiously placed on a new plane compared to the previous period, to the 19th Congress, to Stalin; and this might even be admitted in part. What we are instead dismantling here is that the «new course» (a formula, by experimental law, that is suspect one hundred times out of a hundred) is in the direction of the principles that were historically followed by Marx, Lenin, Bolshevism, the Communist International. 

This new course merely tears up some last charters, of principles that «under Stalin» had not yet been decided to repudiate: here is our clear evaluation of the 20th congress.

We believe we have given this evidence about Khrushchev’s third question: The forms of transition of the various countries to socialism. Not a page of Marxism-Leninism has been saved here. Even if it was not dared to say (the 21st Congress will say so) that the violent and dictatorial form of transition is now «forbidden», it has certainly been established that that «through democracy» is the rule in all States today, with which Moscow has an open diplomatic debate. 

The corollary to this step was then given with the unbridled abjuration – declaration of the liquidation of the Cominform. When Lenin’s historic work against the shameful adherence to the «democratic» wars of 1914 was destroyed by embracing the social-patriotic policy for the 1942 war, the Communist International, which he founded, was liquidated. Today, the entire work of the «split» in the early post-war period between social democracy and world communism is likewise repudiated, and they miss and regret the unity which represented the worst of the Second International, that of class collaboration on a world scale. Indeed, it also points to «the task of overcoming the split in the workers’ movement and strengthening the unity of the working class in order to make the struggle for peace and socialism successful» as a consequence of «the changes that have taken place in the international situation». But this new goal is not – as it would appear on the surface – a party of the working class alone, but is the submergence of this into a much broader front of the pacifist middle classes, nationally and socially. Subjection of the communist movement to a front of the popular classes is, we repeat, a historical formula that can only have one content: subjection of the whole of society to high capitalism. 

Let it be understood: it may well be argued by some, by any one, that the «changes in the world historical situation» between 1919 and 1956 lead to conclusions and perspectives opposite to those that determined and directed the international communist struggle then.

We do not extend ourselves, now and here, to show that instead, as we firmly believe, only drastic confirmations can be drawn. 

But in the meantime let us demonstrate the absence of a right to existence – which in a given future will be demonstrated not with words but with acts of force – of those who wish to link the aforementioned changes in the situation to this new direction, and do not at the same time declare bankrupt and fallen, not for forty years but for ever, the historical construction to which Marx and Lenin are linked. 

Coexistence without War 

There remain, apart from that of the transition, two other great questions, which Khrushchev heads: «The peaceful coexistence of the two systems» and «The possibility of avoiding wars in the present epoch». It is necessary to see if there has been anything new on these points, and in what sense. What there was that was new, we will quickly say: in addition to repudiating Marx and Lenin, even Stalin was repudiated. 

We have reported the position of the congress regarding the «non-interference» of the Soviet state in the «internal political affairs» of other countries; and thus the non-interference of the party, sitting in congress in Moscow; and the strange pretence that state, party and congress continue to foresee that socialism will replace capitalism in all those countries, and to desire it, «with clean hands». Unfortunately, this insanely defeatist attitude continues to find credence among the working masses of the world, as all bourgeois opinion and propaganda accredits it, artfully continuing to confuse their real terror of communism with the campaign of agitation against Moscow policy. The end of this is still a long way off: what is needed for a clarification of relations is not more congresses like this one, but new, original and different alignments of imperialism’s interests and fronts of conflict; as, among many examples, emerges from the recent words of the semi-crippled president of America.

Here we must point to the historical unfolding of this question of coexistence, or even cohabitation (no one is so blind as to claim that the two groups of states can go on «ignoring each other»).

And in fact the coexistence designed today does not only mean: abstention from class and state war, international peace, revolutionary and even partisan disarmament, it clearly means: economic, social, political collaboration.

Historically, this question stems from another one that is hushed up today, that is pretended to be peaceful: whereas it is the only, true one that we place on the table, in a circle of silence, but waiting for it to be loudly, clamorously disputed on both sides in a few more three years periods. It is the question of socialism in one country.

Indeed, before taking a position on the curious question: must a country with a socialist system and one with a capitalist system necessarily wage war against each other? one must ask oneself whether such a historical situation can be determined, and whether it has already been determined today.

Of this great question we see three stages: 1926, at the December Enlarged Executive of the Moscow International (Seventh Session) – 1939, at the 18th congress of the Russian Communist Party, on the eve of the Second War – 1952, at the 19th congress, and before Stalin’s death.

The Turning Point of 1926 

That first discussion reflected a decisive moment. The great organisation that solidly held the state in Russia abandoned the effort to provoke the world proletarian revolution and set itself two tasks: its own internal and external defence with armed force – a direction of the social economy, which the proponents of the winning thesis called «building socialism».

Two theses were right then, and history has confirmed them: the revolution in the capitalist countries was «postponed» – the armed assault on Russia was possible, and likely.

Stalin’s thesis, and Bucharin’s too at the time, was that (even if this situation was prolonged for a long time: passive international proletariat, active capitalist states) it was possible in Russia, by retaining power, to implement the transformation of the economy into a «socialist system».

Particularly vigorous was the counter-demonstration of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, which we repeat is still worthy of careful study today. They incontrovertibly clarified Marx’s and Lenin’s doctrine on those points: we insist on recalling it. 

1. Capitalism appears and develops in the world at unequal times and in unequal rhythms.
2. The same applies to the formation of the proletarian class and its political and revolutionary strength.
3. The seizure of political power by the proletariat can take place not only in a single country but also in one that is less developed than others that remain in capitalist power.
4. The presence in the world of countries where proletarian political revolution has already taken place accelerates the revolutionary struggle in all others to the maximum.
5. In the ascendant phase of this revolutionary struggle it is possible for the armed forces of proletarian states to intervene in defence and offence.
6. Where civil and state wars stop, a single country can only take the steps permitted by the economic development that has been achieved in it «in the direction» of socialism.
7. If it were one of the large advanced countries, before its full socialist economic transformation, which in doctrine is not impossible, general civil and state war would take place.
8. If it were, as in the case of Russia, a country just emerging from feudalism, it would, with proletarian political victory, be able to take no other steps than the realisation of the «foundations» of socialism, i.e. a gradual strong industrialisation; and it would define its programme as waiting and working for foreign political revolution, and as an economic construction of state capitalism on a mercantile basis.
Without world revolution, socialism in Russia was then, and is, impossible. 

We have deliberately summarised the position in a raw way. The most remarkable thing in that 1926 was the proof that no one had been of any other opinion until 1924; the false interpretation of one or two passages of Lenin’s (see our series on Russia and the Revolution, Part One) was foiled, and it was shown that Stalin and Bucharin themselves had always spoken and written along those lines. 

For the purposes of the development we now follow, we won’t return to the economic part. Today it is much easier than then to prove that Russian society is capitalist. It will only be a little longer to hear it confessed.

While today Khrushchev speaks of a «Leninist» theory of peaceful coexistence, not only do we establish that the theory of building socialism in Russia alone was never a Leninist theory, but that the theory of pacifism between the two systems, as of 1926, was not even a Stalinist, or Bucharinian, theory. 

In the weak speeches of the cold Stalin and the warm Bucharin, this can be seen beyond doubt. Just one passage from Bucharin: «The perpetual existence of proletarian organisations and capitalist states is a utopia. Such simultaneous existence is a temporary phenomenon. Therefore, forcibly, in our perspective we envisage an armed struggle between the capitalists and us. I categorically declare that the final victory of socialism is the victory of the world revolution, at least the victory of the proletariat in all the decisive centres of capitalism» This was in 1926; today we are frolicking with the «non-decisive», the negligible capitalist Uncle Sam!

These words of Bucharin’s were Marxist. He was only too ardent, when he did not want to wait any longer to see socialism implemented in immense Russia, and by such total power. He then redeemed with his very life the right to be called a great, true revolutionary communist.

Even Stalin has something to thank for, if it is true that they let him die. We shall soon see.

Eve Flames 

On 10 May 1939, Stalin delivered his report in Moscow to the 18th Russian Party Congress. In the struggle between 1926 and 1939 in Russia the proponents of socialism had bloodily won. Not only Zinoviev and Kamenev but Bucharin himself had been killed, Trotsky a refugee had little left to live. In his style of rhetorical repetition, their enemy, not a dull-witted man but a stubborn one, who missed a great opportunity to prove that stubbornness is a revolutionary quality, is sure that they will never again speak from their closed or still open graves: «the purge of the handful of spies, murderers and saboteurs of the kind of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Jakir, Tucacewsky, Rosengolz, Bucharin and other monsters, who crawled before the enemy… ». But what does Stalin think, then, about coexistence and war? Well, in Stalin’s speech, war is certain, close, inevitable. 

It is insisted by the handful of cowardly flatterers of the time, intent today on the demolition of Stalin’s character, that he would not have seen the German offensive of 1942 within hours. Was then that of 1939 a confident Russian-German embrace, and was the low blow to his friend really only German? These hirelings reduce the historical dialectic to a stinking rag. Such immense forces are not mobilized by moves plotted in the shadows one night before! We must make reference to the document in which Stalin demonstrates, six months before Hitler’s invasion of Poland, a confident vision. It is very strange the impudent levity with which today, precisely those who have built their political conduct of the entire war and post-war period on such a perspective, disqualify him! 

Stalin describes the game of world imperialism as surely directed towards the outbreak of war. His words are explicit: «The new imperialist war has become a fact». The capitalist states, however, fear it because «it can lead to the victory of the revolution in one or more countries». Stalin still refers to Lenin’s doctrine of imperialism. 

What is strange, however, and deserving of criticism from us Marxists, not from the unprincipled who then surrounded him, is that Stalin implants in full the distinction between «aggressor states» and «democratic states» on which the defeatist policy of Antifascism and Liberation would later be built. 

For him, «the aggressor states, Germany, Italy and Japan» disguise their intention to attack the «democratic states, England, France, America» with their famous «Anti-Comintern pact». He even whips the (Munich) compliancy before Hitler’s bullying! He then stigmatises, after vaguely saying that Russia is for peace, the pilatesque policy of «non-intervention» in war. As for Russia, it prepares its weapons: «No one believes any more the mellifluous talk that the Munich concessions to the aggressors would usher in a new era of appeasement»; in any case: «we do not fear the threats of aggressors and are ready to respond with a double blow to those war-mongers who try to violate our borders».

We are Marxistically far removed from the «theory of aggression» and the distinction between warrior countries and demo-peaceful countries, which completely obscures Marx and Lenin’s true doctrine of war, the child of bourgeois relations of production, which has no need to be «wanted» by criminals. 

But we cannot remain silent that today’s language on peaceful coexistence and the avoidance of war is far more degenerate and nauseating than that held on the eve of the Second World War.

If the alternative of alliance first with the aggressors and then with the peaceful is one more masterpiece of the abolition of principles, this does not detract from the fact that today’s way of recounting the drama from Danzig to Stalingrad is even more smoky and suspicious, it being definite for us that it was treason to shake the armed hand of Hitler as well as Churchill and Roosevelt, the same genuflection of a power that had already become capitalist to the imperatives of imperialism, the same obedience to the superior forces of determinism, to which international politics is subject, entrusted, according to the gullible and charlatans, to the fragile, shaky hands of the «Big Few».

Stalin’s Will 

The biography of this character does not move us any more than that of any other far or near, friend or foe. We use it as a historical road map because it clears the field of the new lie, in no way less unworthy than the one that turned our great Brothers exterminated in the Russian purges into “monsters”: the lie that in all this more than vain shaking off of responsibility linked to the name of Stalin, we can draw a healthy return to the grandiose times when the Marx-Lenin line was raised up indefectibly, to the boundless terror of the capitalist world.

In Stalin’s writing on “Economic Problems” we noted how the thesis of imperialist war, which can only be ended by the destruction of capitalism, although enunciated with visible contradictory concessions to coexistence and pacifism, which had been already affirmed at the time, still seemed to be held up. 

Today we see that writ condemned, but why in essence? Not because the character of the already achieved socialism of the Soviet economy is questioned in the slightest, or the thesis of the validity of market laws in the midst of socialism is denounced as insane and false. We have seen that only Stalin’s claim that an increase in western capitalist production was already ruled out is condemned. Today we see that another point is condemned: the outcome of imperialism and the crisis in the third war.

Waiting for an economic and political catastrophe in the bourgeois world, and then not seeing it coming, is a felix culpa for revolutionaries.

So many times crisis and catastrophe have failed Marx and Engels. And so many times did the outcome of the predicted international wars. 

In 1926 the first concert of insults to future monsters tended to suffocate them under the infamy of pessimism, and as theorists of the stabilisation of capitalism. For this is a Trotsky laughably mocked even by a Togliatti.

In the speech before mentioned Stalin deduces the war of September 1939 from a visible crisis in world production, which, after the 1929-1932 crisis, which had been followed by a robust recovery, became clear in 1937; a year in which production in Russia alone did not decline. 

Stalin’s last mistake in 1952, of waiting for a western depression, while it was followed by the unpredictable ‘boom’ to which the K.B.s are unctuously genuflecting around the world, is perhaps the least of all his shames. Unfortunately, this shows that the pupils have far outstripped the master.

So if the accumulation curve had bent downwards, would the transition have been from cold war to open conflict? But this would perhaps have given rise to the hope that history would finally have seen the defeat of either England or America, or both of these powers, which have always been winning for two centuries and crippling the future of humanity. 

The curve has now turned upwards; and it has not only done so in Russia, as Stalin’s figures showed at the time in the transition between the 1937 and 1938 indices. Hence the filthy pacifist and tearful idyll, to which, with ten times more horrific blasphemies of Marxism-Leninism, the General Staff of the 20th Congress devoted itself.

We again quote Stalin’s phrases that we quoted in the «Dialogue» with him. «To eliminate the inevitability of wars, it is necessary to destroy imperialism». This drastic conclusion of Stalin’s closes a resolute refutation of «some comrades who claim that due to the development of new international conditions after the Second World War, wars between capitalist countries have ceased to be inevitable». Stalin not only opposes this Khrushchev-like thesis, but also the other, that «the contrasts between the camp of socialism and the camp of capitalism are stronger than the contrasts between capitalist countries».

And here is the position for which the 20th congress detaches Josif’s embalmed head from the cold corpse, and brings it on a golden platter today to London and tomorrow, no doubt, when the presidential election is foregone, to New York.

«Hence the inevitability of wars between capitalist countries continues to exist. It is said that Lenin’s thesis that imperialism inevitably generates wars must be considered outdated, because at present powerful popular forces, acting in defence of peace, have developed against a new world war. This is not true».

This was not true, and is not true. This: what Khrushchev says: «Wars are no longer fatally inevitable because today… partisans of peace exist». And these, and similar things, did not yet exist when «a» Marxist Leninist thesis was developed that wars are inevitable as long as imperialism exists.

One, you scoundrels? The thesis; removed from which Marxism and Leninism would fall into nothingness.

Viva Stalin, then? 

In the Dialogue with Stalin we showed the serious weaknesses in Stalin’s presentation. He still did not believe it possible to throw overboard what is, as we said, THE thesis of Lenin, not A thesis of Lenin. He did, however, want to explain why «coexistence», which had already been invented, had been made possible for several years. Meanwhile he wanted to throw out Bucharin’s thesis, and his own, about the inevitable war between the two systems. He therefore set out to declare war BETWEEN the capitalist states more probable. He recalls not without consistency his position of 1939: why, he says, did the capitalist states attack each other before they attacked us? He shows that he still possesses some light of that dialectic, for which the 20th congress was lined with absolute blindness: it is an unceasing descent into darkness, it is the evening, the night that looms over the great historic days of October. It is Stalin’s tired eye that records the last rays. For him, the states of the West helped the reorganisation of Germanic capitalism after the catastrophe of 1918, in order to launch it against the Russian revolution, he says. And yet, even falling into the rhetorical classification of 1939 between peacemongers and aggressors, in 1952 he explains the irresistible motive of the German uprising with the economic motive of the lack of markets and outlets, à la Lenin, and not with the historical criminology of imbeciles.

The softness in theory of this iron-acting man was already marked by Trotsky’s not surmountable pen. 

In fact, Stalin’s unsteady construction already contained all the data of the further descent down the counter-revolutionary ladder, which at the 20th Congress consummated in pretended disgrace to him; and we could clearly indicate four years ago how. He must rid himself of any remnants of the naive Bucharinian tendency towards a revolutionary holy war. He maintains the inevitable derivation of war from imperialism, and points to this as the enemy. But he prepares for the total misrepresentation of the Leninist «theory of defeatism» by saying, after minimising the effects of the «peace movement» to a kind of hesitation and postponement, that «this differs from the movement which took place during the First World War to transform imperialist war into civil war, because that went further and pursued socialist aims». 

The thesis remained in half shadow and half light. Marx’s thesis against the bourgeois democrats of «peace and freedom» in 1848 was the same as Lenin’s against the warmongering socialists in 1914. We deny that there is a PEACE objective distinct from SOCIALISM, from the emancipation of the working class. We better expect Revolution from War, than Peace from Capitalism. We know no other way to «bury the war» than the killing of the bourgeois system.

Stalin already decouples a movement for peace from action for socialism, and says that possible, but not irrevocably, before this. Khrushchev and his people have plunged to the bottom of the abyss, they want Peace without Socialism. An idiotic demand, and at the same time impossible! 

All entanglement and imbroglio are immediately, yesterday and today, disveiled by our position. Russia is as capitalist as the other states of the West, and war will also come between it and other states. Stalin saw it coming and preferred not to be the first to shoot, he hoped to wait, with the people’s movement, for it to go the same way as in 1939. He therefore assured the bourgeois states that the clashes between them were more pressing than between the systems: he wished them internal crisis and external war. Last illusion. Those of today no longer believe in crisis within capitalism and between capitalisms: they have lost the last glimmers to which Stalin found it useful to refer. They offer desistance from any disturbance, they elevate as an eternal rule the avoidability of war catastrophe by popular will and conscience, by world persuasion, they cynically liquidate the last blush to which the very hard grit of a Joseph Stalin was still sensitive.

Greatness and smallness of men, hardness and sensitivity of souls, have nothing to do with it. Stalin was in fact wrong, and he did not see that the third war was still a long way off; he manoeuvred as if it were closer. In equal measure he and his followers and successors do not believe in the Revolution, that it can stop it anywhere, and live by the day in the infamous and cocksure long bourgeois peace, which lies ahead for perhaps twenty years.

Competition and Emulation 

Trotsky’s powerful prophetic speech in 1926 was on such a high plane that he was cut off. Perhaps later he did not adequately complete, however wonderfully he wrote, that construction. He insisted on other aspects of the Russian drama: the greed of the state and party bureaucracy, the ferocity of Stalin: compared to the themes he had touched on, small things.

Today, the wretched Khrushchev, in order to disengage himself from the conditions to which «one» Lenin’s thesis is bound, gives up the last lights of Marxism that ever reached him, and asserts that in 1914 economic factors were at play, in 1956 other factors, moral and of will, would also be at play. «War is not an exclusively economic phenomenon». «In the question of whether there should or should not be a war (what kind of question is this?), class relations, political forces, the degree of organisation and the conscious will of men are of great importance».

Into what appalling mess have we fallen, to return from Stalin to Marx! Stalin advanced to the bookshop with a flamethrower, but in that light some page flap could still be read; the various Khrushchevs burst in like bulls whose eyes had been blindfolded after they had turned out all the lights to cover the risk that they had learned to read.

Are we Marxists, by any chance, and after that we have lined up «economic factors» on one side, on the other, in suggestive order, class relations, political and organisational forces, conscience, will?! And initiating between these adversaries an «emulative contest» we hear a «to you gentlemen» being launched, while Marshal Bulganin, with the most photogenic smile, holds the bar?!

Trotsky brought up the subject, as poor a fool as we were, on the «economic factors» of the moment. He was great. You can do nothing more, he said, than to develop the transition from our pre-capitalist society to mercantilism, than to move closer to the capitalist model. The more steps you take to reach it, the more irresistible will be its influences on you. It is not only by war that it can subjugate you. Either we will snuff it out in its western hideouts, or it will be here to deal with us. Neither militarily nor economically can the two developments run without intersecting. Casting a giant’s glance at the historical doctrine in the background of the future, Trotsky replied to some idiot’s interruption: most of all I believe in the world revolution, but if we look things in the face, we can wait even fifty years. The condition is that in all that time we will not have separated the realisation of the socialist economy in Russia from the overthrow of the capitalist social form in the West.

Internationalism, Trotsky taught at the time in the words of the intangible doctrine, is imposed on the internationality of trade which the capitalist form has everywhere introduced, and into the vortex of which we shall be led. Nothing will be worth the illusion of staying out of its influences. When they put the gag on him he could not defend himself. He came down from the tribune for the last time and said: the International will discuss again… Him dead, we are still given today to follow the «dialogue» with which his luminous mind refuted the Khrushchevs, ahead of his time.

Markets and Trade 

Coexistence means «non-war», but it cannot mean non-contact, non-exchange. Trotsky warned this well. History confirms this.

At the time of Stalin the formula was that of the double world market, which we, in proving it false, rectified in the alleged existence of two semi-world markets. Stalin’s perspective was as naive as it was audacious. Cut off half the world from the capitalism of the West, it drowns itself in its own overproduction, tears itself apart with wars of quadruple venom, and we remain, we pass. But who us? The other half-capitalism, only more vital than the first?

Today, the illusory theory of two watertight compartment-markets is resolutely thrown out: the socialist fatherland not only lowers its veil, it decisively unbuckles its belt. With Stalin it buries the last threats of drawing a deadly iron from under its skirts.

Here we need to hear from the economist on duty, Mikoyan. «We are firmly convinced that a stable coexistence is inconceivable without trade (italics of the text in «Rinascita», February 1956), which can be the basis of this coexistence even after the formation of two world markets. The existence of two world markets – the socialist and the capitalist – not only does not exclude, but on the contrary presupposes mutually beneficial trade between all countries. The exact interpretation of this problem has value in principle, from the aspect of coexistence between the two worlds, but it also has practical, economic importance».

Avoiding italics and exclamations of our own on the extremely abandoned, unconscious formulation, as of one who runs safe on very thin sheets of ice, we quote again: «we believe that our trade with capitalist countries is advantageous for both sides… This is imposed by the very necessity of the social division of labour… by the fact that it is not equally advantageous to produce all kinds of goods in all countries… ».

Has Mikoyan ever doubted, will he ever doubt one in a thousand of those who read «Rinascita», that in the socialist system, apart from the old fact that there is no trade, no market, there must be overcome, if not the technical division of labour in manufacturing, certainly the division, as much professional and corporate as regional and national, of labour in society? That all these formulae are nailed to the capitalist type of production relations, and supremely that «production must be advantageous»? Advantage and capital profit are terms, which say the same thing.

At the time we made this criticism of Stalin’s still cautious view of trade, of the comparison of the two systems, and we also reminded how the bourgeois economists of the liberal school adhered to this confluence of the two productions on the same outlets and accepted that the winner would be the one of the two who had made the most profit. But then who doubts that the argument that in Russia «the exploiters have been annihilated» and «there are no longer any bourgeoisie» loses any value, once it is admitted that, through international channels, profits from capital, anonymous and all the more greedy for it, freely cross every frontier?

Exchange of Capital 

This spate of frightening admissions about the ever-widening relations between the alleged two economies, the alleged two systems, show how the manoeuvre of «coexistence» and «emulation» can be read all in its economic content, and that the boastfulness of prevailing with the pressure of «popular» opinions, spread in the «consciousness» of the world’s masses, and similar homilies, do not change anything at all. In the end of all this colourful «interference fringe», which one wants to see established on the boundary between two opposing and heterogeneous systems, only one conclusion is possible, if one looks inside them. This embrace to which the persuasion of peoples would like to lead, as the usual alternative to violent conflict, is purely an embrace between homosexual natures, between identical systems. It is but a stage in the dumb claim of world trade liberalisation, cherished by all «economic operators». Even these days in America, business circles are calling for the lifting of import bans on foreign products; if we want, they say, the Japanese, for example, to buy raw cotton from us, we must allow them to «earn dollars» by selling their cheap cotton products here. Make profit in two, formula of the 20th Congress, and Mikoyan, formula in which those who barely understand Marx can read all of capitalism.

Having dropped these things into the mouths of the various Nenni, here they are firing blanks: the «capital market» must also be established with Russia. It must therefore be allowed to export «socialist» capital from Russia and then import … capitalist capital. This, too, is put on Mikoyan’s conscience, and it makes it seem true that K. and B. offer between cups of tea to Elizabeth two billion dollars in gold, albeit on account of the purchase of goods. 

Of course, when these gigantic exports of finance capital are implemented, people will continue to say that this is no longer the phenomenon characteristic of the most sadistic imperialism, the one described by Lenin: yes; yes; then it was the time of vulgar, crude economic factors: today it’s a different matter, there are moral values, the drive to emulate each other to mutual advantage; and the general consciousness of these gentle and graceful times no longer allows the manoeuvres of the past to screw each other across borders: war is avoidable.

A world that is a mere network of Stock Exchange and Capital Exchange is evidently as absurd to say socialist as it is semi-socialist. But it is even more illusory to envisage it as a world in which what Lenin ruled out is possible: preventing the outbreak of a third general war only in order to secure peace, and keeping capitalism alive.

In 1947, therefore, the US would have had a monopoly of the capital market, and today it would have lost it (along with that of nuclear weapons; and this is said by the American Lippman). So it is increasingly difficult for the US to demand both military and political agreements in return for economic aid.

Well then, we are in the midst of an idyll. In fact, it is so easy for Russia to demand, in return for as much as two billion dollars, barely a smile from Her Gracious Britannic Majesty!

Yes, War is Avoidable

We are, it is quite clear, for the full validity, even today, of Lenin’s doctrine on war, which is none other than Marx’s doctrine enunciated at its historical birth, after the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune, with which the revolutionary wars of liberal settlement had ended: all national armies are now confederated against the Proletariat!

Since 1848, Marx had annihilated any pacifist-humanist ideology that envisaged the end of wars through «general persuasion» of their futility. From 1848 to 1871 a series of wars were still useful, for the same bourgeois radicalism of the Mazzini, Blanc, Kossuth and the like, who did not understand this. The war between nations would not end with Universal Peace, but with supernational class revolution.

The Marxists of the Second International themselves, as Lenin challenged them for a decade, had sincerely believed that war could be prevented by the world proletariat. However, even in that idyllic and evolutionary period, when socialist votes were amassing in the world’s parliaments, not even the most outspoken reformists thought of stopping the war with «moral» and persuasive forces. For them, preventing the war meant preventing, with the general national strike to the bitter end, the general mobilisation on all sides of the borders, taking power into their own hands, in order to establish socialism in united Europe.

When Lenin established that the imperialist stage of capitalism leads to war, he did not yet believe in a successive series of world wars, but waited for the proletariat, at least in Europe, to rise up and stop the first one. His formula was «transform imperialist war into civil war». But the formula was alternating: either the war of the nations begins and develops, or civil war breaks out in each, the bourgeoisies are overthrown, and the war does not «click».

The great Leninist opportunity was lost in 1914 because all or most of the workers’ parties not only did not block the shipyards, the railways and the army corps, but marched with the national war. The Russian revolution arose from the combination of two singular conditions; the survival of a feudal regime and the series of military defeats. The cycle that should have developed into too few years was missing: i.e., condemnation and defeat of the social-traitor parties, recovery of the proletariat in the countries of Europe, overthrow of the imperial bourgeoisies, victorious or vanquished. And the Russian revolution was alone.

The start of the Second World War was met by no resistance of the working classes, and no revolution followed: on the road of the imperialist monsters the proletarian parties weren’t present: those communist parties born after 1914 in the twenty years between the two wars were totally denatured, and their greatest battle lost was that received by Stalin’s repressions.

Today those who still uphold Lenin’s thesis say that, once the imperialist-type conditions have been reconstituted even in the defeated countries, after a certain cycle the war will arise, with only one alternative (totally impractical if it occurred today): that the proletarian revolution can nip it in the bud.

The revolution would be born from the third war if before its outbreak, which everything suggests is still a long way off, the class movement had been resurrected.

The first condition for this arduous result is the questioning of the alleged socialist character of present-day Russia.

To the thesis of the 20th Congress on the present-day avoidability of war, we answer not that it is inevitable in an absolute sense, but that it cannot be avoided by a vaguely ideological movement of proletarians and poor and middle classes, over which it would pass like a whirlwind without finding resistance. General war is therefore historically avoidable, but only on the condition that it is opposed by a movement of the pure wage-earning class, and that this awaits it not to replace it with peace but to bring down, with it newly born, the old, infamous capitalism.

Squalid Utopianism 

The historical goal of stable peace in a capitalist world – and worse would be to say in a half-capitalist, half-socialist world! – together with the other of the 20th congress of «choice» between capitalism and socialism on the basis of an emulative confrontation, judged by the general conscience of men, is worth, in conclusion, having gone backwards from Lenin by a long way, beyond that by which Stalin had gone backwards, who when he died still gave hope to the bewildered, and more than ever defective in conscience and will, workers of the world, that in a coming conflagration the Red Army would attempt to spread beyond the capitalist frontiers, to persuade them with the language of cannon and bombs: a last remnant of Marxism, though already obscured by the degeneration of economic theories, remained in this vain hope of the workers, who murmured the vain phrase: yet Moustache/Baffone will come!

The degringolade from the 19th to the 20th congress ruins beyond Lenin and beyond Marx, to a conception of the historical struggle which, taking as its pretext the revelations of the new times, and the «creations» dictated by new situations, lies at the height of times more distant than the «Manifesto» itself, and is lost in the mists of Utopia.

The idea that the world is decided by comparing two models of economic societies, testing, with these artificial «scale models» of living humanity, where there is greater material well-being with all its ins and outs, and then opting for one of the two proposed forms, can only be likened to the first stirrings of utopian socialism, with the enormous difference to its advantage that in its time it boldly anticipated historical claims of tomorrow, whereas today it would be the result of a fabulous backtracking and recoil.

Marx and Engels indeed wrote about the utopians without any contempt, and for some of them like Saint Simon, Fourier, Owen, with true admiration.

But their entire theoretical construction, on which the European socialism of the late 19th century, and the Russian communism of Plekhanov and Lenin, was formed, had two cornerstones: the critique of socialist utopianism – and the critique of bourgeois democracy, of democracy, as Lenin puts it, in general.

They were two paths of the emulative and persuasive type. The old utopians like Cabet thought that everyone would become a socialist through visits to the Icarias, to the Phalansteries; the dreamers of the 18th century Enlightenment intoxication swore that egalitarian justice and social freedom would be adopted by the legal consultations of the sovereign people, deriving as a corollary of peaceful civilisation from the glorious revolution that the bourgeois class had conducted, in the name of those principles.

These are two great constructions of history, but the socialists of past generations have passed over their noble ruins to arrive at the scientific determinism of Marx, and claim, alongside Lenin, his theory of the new Revolution and Dictatorship.

Dictatorship – or persuasion. Aut-aut. One dictates to whom there is neither time nor way to reach by consensus. And the more capitalism incarnates itself in history, the more its end is only possible by force.

Reason, in its then truly vivid and seductive forms, led it by the hand. When the bourgeoisie was raising its altars to it, already the glorious precursors of the Conspiracy of the Equals dared to set Force against it.

This other scorn is there today in the proclamations of the Russian congress, under the latest lies of a return to Lenin and Marx. Not only the transition to communism through democracy, but even through utopia.

At the 20th congress they also shredded the «Manifesto» of 1848. In its pages on the socialist and communist «literature» of other doctrines, it forever marked the departure from the utopianism of the modern workers’ struggle. We cannot quote the theoretical texts of Marx and Engels on this point. A few sentences suffice, in which the naive fallacy of the utopians is depicted:

«It is enough, according to them, to understand their system in order to recognise that it is the best possible ordering of the best possible society».

«They therefore disapprove of all political, i.e. revolutionary, activity, they want to achieve the goal by peaceful means, and therefore seek by small and therefore inane experiments (let us grant that the Russian one is a large scale experiment … of building capitalism), by the power of example to open the way for the new social gospel».

Every now and then we catch these «forerunners» red-handed, who, in order to endorse betrayal and abjuration, claim that brand new events have creatively forged previously ignored forms of historical transitions, deducing from changes in situations the revision of formulas that they claim are outdated. They invariably end up with the same end, convinced of shameful passivism, of the most mouldy fogyism. With your results that have so excited the devotees of the latest novelties, go therefore, gentlemen of the 20th congress, at least one hundred and twenty years backwards, and let us hang on the infamous column of retrogressive, fallacious and hostile ideologies your present-day expedients; coexistence, emulation, competition; blocking, in homosexuality, of fertile and living history.

Birth of the Counter-October

Of all the anti-Stalinism presented to the world, only the points we have already discussed at the beginning of these days remain dubiously standing: the «cult of personality» and the «manipulation of history». On everything else, they have only gone in the direction in which Stalin sank, and further below him, but even on those two points the rectification is by no means in the direction of orthodoxy, and one must talk about them again before closing the epicedium on the buried in the same swamp.

It is stated that Stalin lied when he described the Trotskyist «monsters» as agents of foreign espionage. So they were not. And what were they then? Rehabilitation is remedy for personal, individual cases of moral, criminal judgement, but never correction of critical, historical judgement.

Stalin, according to today’s Soviet journals («Unità» of 15 April 1956) would have done wrong not by lying (indeed it is not theorisable that in certain contingencies the revolutionary is not led to have to lie), but by making, with those atrocious slanders, less clear the «battle of ideas» that was waged against «Trotskyism».

Here again Stalin is a more consequential Marxist than his correctors of today! What does ideological struggle mean? For the Marxist, there can be no ideological struggle without political struggle, and without this arising from the interplay of class forces. Thus the great extermination, not of a few monsters, but of a large stratum of the Bolshevik party’s strength, since it was not based on the influence of foreign states’ recruitment, must otherwise be explained as a clash of social forces. Stalin said the only thing he could say, so as not to admit that the partisan of the anti-revolutionary movement was, with all his followers, himself, since obviously he was not in the presence of uprisings against power: he had to speak of espionage, assassination attempt, sabotage in grand style. It is therefore fallacious to say: «Wrong was Stalin’s thesis that the class struggle became more acute every time the socialist country took a step forward. This thesis put forward in 1937, when class antagonisms had already disappeared, led to the unjust repressions».

For the umpteenth time, Stalin lied less anti-Marxistically than they did. It was precisely a phase of class struggle in which the bulk of the party and its leadership, with Stalin, won.

How else to explain that the Russian journal says, as quoted by «Unità»: «the Trotskyists, etc., expressed the interests of the exploiting classes who resisted, and the tendencies of the petty-bourgeois strata of the population»?

The 1934 and 1937 massacres expressed the interests of the international proletarian classes against the Russian state’s policy of detachment from the world proletarian struggle, masked by the lie of building socialism: in all that remains of their statements, carefully concealed after the suffocation, and in the 1926 speeches themselves, they vindicate Lenin’s line that it is a matter of moving to a long struggle of the proletarian dictatorship against the internal forces of petty-bourgeois classes, supported by the multiple influence of international capitalism. Here, for Marxists, lies the whole dispute to be resolved.

That was the great turning point, the reversal of the revolutionary struggle in Russia. The explanation of this massive episode that erupted in the historical underground cannot, without Marx collapsing, be drawn from a blunder, an error, or a distraction of mentioned Stalin. The struggle was what it was, and it is fair to call it a class struggle, in both its ideological and violent forms. Stalin’s corpse will not cry out if it has to choose a place. But that same place belongs to his 20th Congress sinkers, who are careful not to ideologically justify today the murdered of then.

The place shared by the one dead and the living is therefore only one: that of capitalist counterrevolution.

It is precisely counterrevolution that is «creative», and one discovers in living history the most new and unexpected forms and manifestations of it. In this sense, we have learned much from half a century of betrayals to the socialist proletariat.

It is the Revolution that is one; and it is always she, in the course of an immense historical arc that will close as it has opened and where it has promised, where it has a rendezvous perhaps with many of the living, but certainly with the unborn, as with the dead: these knew that it never fails, it never deceives. It, in the light of doctrine, is already taken for granted as a thing seen, a living thing.

The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Russia

Day Three: Evening

Poor and naked you go, Philosophy! 

In Khrushchev’s report for the Central Committee, the basic text of the 20th congress, after the corrosive criticism of decades of theoretical work by historians and economists, the state «philosophers» were hit in turn. That Marxism is to be regarded as one «philosophy» among many others, i.e., like so many others, is something we have once again made ample reservation about, and therefore this governmental philosophical service, which on the other hand is proclaimed to be totally bankrupt, does not seem to us to be very serious.

In any case, let Khrushchev speak: «The tasks inherent in the preparation and education of our cadres, in the institutes of higher education and in the Party study network, make it necessary to create a study manual on the principles of Marxism-Leninism, in which the most important theses of Marxist-Leninist doctrine are set out in a concise, simple and clear manner, and to prepare books that illustrate the principles of Marxist philosophy in a popular manner. Such books would be of great importance for the propaganda of the scientific materialist conception, for the struggle against reactionary idealist philosophy».

From this situation, it emerges that in order to prevent the super-professors of the philosophical academies from speaking gibberish, it is necessary to refine them on the basis of little manuals, needless to say «popular», of propaganda against, oops, reactionary philosophies.

The bourgeois themselves have long since abolished courses in theoretical philosophy to replace them with those in the history of philosophy, and if you like philosophies. In any scheme, reactionary philosophy is understood to be that which served as a superstructure for feudal forms of production: fideism. Idealism is the philosophy of the bourgeois revolution, and the purportedly scientific materialists of Moscow show themselves to be extremely steeped in it at every turn: other than branding it from above as reactionary and, horror! – anti-popular. It is itself, par excellence, the only popular philosophy.

Here, in Khrushchev’s country, don’t work, neither the popular school, nor the institute for school teachers, nor the supreme academy from which come out the pedagogues of pedagogues: better to say, in cosmopolitan fashionable style, the trainers, of activists assigned to propaganda among the masses.

In any case, the historic congress said that this apparatus has deviated: let us try to see in what sense.

It is not difficult to find the key to the quiz. These are faithful pupils of country schoolteacher Stalin, who at the same time disqualify him as the commissar of popular education, and (perhaps unconsciously) repeat the bits he had them memorise.

The Dogmatists, the Talmudics, Josif’s Refrain 

Anyone who understands anything knows that we are anything but «Trotskyists»; and we will also recall here that everyone admits that Leon was the strongest contemporary Russian-language writer – after all, for revolutionary writings the national language is of little importance, and Stalin’s «Linguistics», according to which the mother tongue «is not a superstructure» and remains sovereign even as the forms of production and class relations change, can also be believed to be taken out of the sacristy.

Stalin’s form of writing, without being weak or incapable, is, unsurpassedly, pedestrian. He has an elementary school style, in fact, and if you like, a «The $64,000 Question» style. Dry question and answer, with serial repetition worthy of microgroove records. 

Now, if we try, from such lengthy speeches by Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Suslov, Scepilov and other lesser ones, to draw out the new philosophical Word of the 20th Congress, we find nothing more in our hands than three or four words from Stalin: dogmatic, Talmudic, pedantry, scholasticism and the like, with which all in the most monotone tone strike, here not Stalin, but an innumerable flock of official philosophers and scientists – and political leaders – whom they accuse living off their wages undeservedly. Against this deplorable trend, everyone raises flags – of ancient knowledge – that we have seen in the hands of all the true «wrongdoers»; reality, life, constructiveness, concreteness, and if we really want to draw out the highest «new» theses, we will only find these, no less frustrating: creative Marxism, or what one might call «recreated» Marxism, and the enrichment of Marxism, phenomena that would be repeated at every step along the historical path.

Well, since we are ultimately enjoined to be clear, simple, and concise, like those polemicists serially supplied to the «cadres», let us be so.

Let us take the part of the dogmatists, of the Talmudics, even of the scholastics and even of the pedants; let us assume the defence of a Marxism that never creates anything new and constitutes a constellation of precise unshakable theses, and let us resolutely refuse, unguibus et rostro, to give it over to those who want to enrich it, claiming it rigid and poor as it was born not from Marx’s inflexible misery but from the womb of history, when and only when it should have been pregnant with him.

Coinciding instead with periods of counterrevolution, of class recoil, of historic long involution of social forms, is the empty discourse of the creativists, and alleged creators; of the vaunted discoverers of rich, unheard-of conquests, insofar as it rehashes old and miserable formulas, the last pusher of which was Josif, and which poorly disguise the well-known formulas with which Marxism leoninely struggled in the days – in waves – of Proudhon, Lassalle, Bakunin, Dühring, Bernstein, Sorel, and the fearful tide of mud of 1914, when, above all, an athlete, a gladiator of revolutionary orthodoxy, bit the dust of those, innumerable, who wanted to create its falsifications, to enrich it with the Jewish price of betrayals: Lenin.

To you, Schoolboys! 

Let us pause to show how the pupils have in their blood the style, the phrasing, the flabby manner of the wretched master.

Khrushchev, first of all: «Struggling against the manifestations of negligence in the further elaboration (!) of Marxist theory, we cannot look at theory dogmatically, as people detached from life… theory is not a collection of dead formulas and dogmas… but a combative guide for action… theory detached from practice is dead». Not one of the proletarian leaders who went on to serve the bourgeois governments, the national war, spoke differently from this tone, and from that of the passages we follow in gleaning. But also none of those phrased as trivially as these of today.

And afterwards: «Those who think communism can only be built with propaganda (but the beast is he who thinks of any recipe for building it on the construction site as a bourgeois artefact!) without a practical struggle to increase production (one card to the «flogger» of the classical galleys!) to raise welfare (ten cards to the Keynes school!) they slip down the path of Talmudism and dogmatism».

To you, Mikoyan, Josif’s debunker: «The party, the Central Committee, creatively apply the theory of Leninism in the current phase of society’s development and at the same time enrich Marxism-Leninism».

Of these «enrichments» we already know much: democratic transfer of power, imperialism without war, renunciation of violence, constitutional discipline, imitation of capitalism’s victories as a factory of prosperity, honest competition with it, a signed promissory note (today in London tomorrow in Washington) not to mock it any more. Enrich Marxism a tad more (do you have the relevant index in the Sixth Five-Year Plan?), and you will have it «broken into pieces!»

Mikoyan is too brilliant to quote him without interrupting. «Most of our theorists only repeat and disguise in different forms quotations, formulas and theses already known». Huge scandal! But what does theory ever mean? It means an orderly sequel of conclusions; literally a «procession» of people one row of which does not bypass the other. This criticism can go to poets, not to the spreaders of organised doctrine. But we know that artists suck most of all: he says so elsewhere himself, Mikoyan. Let him continue.

«Can there be science without creation? No, without creation there is only scholasticism, scholastic drill, not science, which is first and foremost creation, construction of the new, and not repetition of the old».

If we poor souls were to write the handbook of Marxist philosophy (from Moscow with these prodromes, it is certain that handbooks will be written… with feet) we would welcome this well-founded formula; Science is the repetition of the old. As for «scholasticism», we would write that it is that philosophy which hinges on «creation»; and without creation, scholasticism ends. We put the theory of creation in this order. We doubt that God created Mikoyan: he in turn created nothing; unless we read what he says backwards.

«The 20th congress will give a serious impetus to the militants of the ideological front (a front where even the corporal is invited to soldier on by improvising the moves!) so that they will undertake creative work… enrich the ideal heritage of Marxism-Leninism… (and finally, in a third line, created… ruminating) to ensure the creative enrichment of Marxism». Fever of originality!

Get up you, over there! 

Enough, let’s call those in the back benches. Suslov: «Our work takes place … in a mechanical repetition of well-known formulas and theses, with the result that we form pedants, dogmatists, detached from life. Our propaganda was first directed towards the past, towards history (!), at the expense of topicality». Here we go, by all the devils! Here is an authentic emulator of the disgusting fashions of the bourgeois parvenus, who don’t know a thing, but are able to beat us with their idiotic question: ah, don’t you know the latest? Keep up to date!

«The party has never tolerated dogmatism, but the fight against it has today taken on a particular acuity». And here a cry from the heart, in which is the whole fault of careerism, of the personal race to «make it»:

«There is no doubt that the cult of personality has greatly contributed to the spread of dogmatism and pedantry. The proponents of this cult attributed the development of Marxist theory to only a few people they blindly followed. The only task of the other mortals (who were they, then?) was to assimilate and popularise the creations of these individuals».

Magnificent! These gentlemen have decided to liquidate the «some people». But they can only recite the same lesson. If they have assimilated! If they have popularised! In the meantime they dishonour Stalin, for the worst that he dictated, they have him nailed in the testicules just as they are raving: make room, away we go, we want to create too. Jehovah, you are but a miserable demiurge! says the classic devil, exiled to earth, of Anatole France.

Scepilov «lines up»: when will these impatient «creators», kept on a leash so far, bring us a handful of their own work? They merely profit from the fact that the master has been embalmed, and cannot shout: zero in profit: homework copied word for word!

«We Marxist communists are not passive custodians of the Marxist-Leninist heritage, we are not archivists of ideology (bravo! You are heirs who, in order not to be vulgar custodians of your father’s axis, enrich it by eating it to the last penny!). Ideological work that is not linked to the vital tasks of economic and cultural edification turns either into a talmudic and dogmatic repetition of well-known truths and theses, or into raving and incensing». In the first «day» we gave the reader a modicum of «incensing» at Stalin carried out by all of his appointed «ad litteram» disciples of anti-Talmudism and anti-dogmatism.

Is thus closed, or is rather beginning a more fertile, season of nonsense?

Noises outside the Classroom 

If all these faithful pupils have with uniform move given hands to fire extinguishers of the same brand, and thrown jets of the same equivocal foam, there is certainly a reason. All is not dead in the Russia of the Revolution, and a flame still burns there! There are still old Marxists, comrades in the struggle of Lenin, and of all the others who today with a supremely pharisaical gesture are «rehabilitated», authentic thoroughbred Bolsheviks, believers in the dogma of the revolution that transcends all frontiers: the indelible tradition of this whole dynamic of the «past» is alive in the young generation, before which the stumbling present is sinister, pale and cowardly.

There are annoying, pedantic quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin, even though for years those of other theorists of the calibre of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bucharin have been «illegal». There are still comrades who have faith in an archive, and who do not believe that they are «detaching themselves from life» by feeding on the history of Bolshevism’s world struggle, when its goals were Berlin and Vienna, Paris and Rome, and its was Lenin’s alternative: in the world, either domination by the bourgeoisie, or by the proletariat! No middle ground!

There are still, fortunately, and by historical law, dogmatic believers in what Lenin wrote and promised; and even if those formulas were repeated with naivety, and even blindness, they would stand higher than the congressional kitchen of tailor-made attitudes, with its vomitous modern recipes.

The very strenuous defence by the «Creativists» of residual doctrinal fidelity, in sounding false and out of tune, confirms this situation.

Khrushchev: «Scrupulously safeguard the purity of Marxist theory, conduct a determined struggle against the survivals of bourgeois ideology in the consciousness of men». Suslov: «Marxism Leninism must develop … respecting its intangible principles, fighting intransigently against all attempts to revise them». And so do others from the benches.

Equally disingenuous is the half-hearted attempt to save themselves, after having so deplored considering the texts sacred, with quotations from Lenin, whom they pretend to make up as the author of so many inauspicious «creations», which came after him (and today it is confessed that a selection was made for this sole purpose; and a great mass of his writings was left out of the gigantic Organisation to give his Opera Omnia).

Here, too, the schoolboys show their mettle. The basic quotation, more than exploited, is copied from Stalin.

Shady use of Lenin 

This is the true system of the junkers of doctrine: pointing to a volume of the official series, and a page of the volume, being certain that purge and censorship have scrutinised the whole edition, as when the Catholic quotes the canonical text of the Gospels. And artfully concealing the date and theme of the writing, that is, its historical background, the direction of the battle in which it was written by someone who was not a builder of archives, but a fighter of revolutionary action; when did Lenin write these words (subject to scrutiny) (Our programme, 1899): «We do not regard Marx’s theory as something completed and inviolable; on the contrary, we are convinced that it has only laid the foundation stone of the science which socialists must develop in all directions if they wish to keep pace with life. We think that an independent elaboration of Marx’s theory is especially essential for Russian socialists; for this theory provides only general guiding principles, which, in particular, are applied in England differently than in France, in France differently than in Germany, and in Germany differently than in Russia»? 

Lenin was then in a fierce struggle with two wings of the Russian anti-Czarist movement: the populists, who refused to admit Marxism, claiming that in Russia it was the peasant-owners, and not the workers, who had the socialist task – the «legal Marxists», who, with the usual version of economic England, and political Europe, deduced from Marxism the conclusion that in Russia, in order to fight against capitalist enterprises, it was necessary to keep a neutral legality towards the autocratic government. Lenin needed from then on to construct the revolutionary method that united immediate action with arms with proletarian class aims, and he laid the foundations of his monumental historical edifice against these.

The young Lenin could not have known, as we, as adult Lenin did, that theory is from the very beginning «complete and intangible», and that whoever gives up an edge of it, loses it all. However, already in his youthful formulation, the cornerstones and general directives of Marx’s theory are placed at the centre. What are these? Lenin’s entire oeuvre and life answer, not two sentences.

What, we will ask the distant descendant Scepilov, are then the «intangible principles» even in creativity and enrichment? What is left standing, for the 20th Congress, of Lenin’s cornerstones?

To this unfair way of quoting Lenin we have countered the study in historical order of his writings in the course of the revolutionary struggle in Russia, and readers will find there, for example, enough about the Stalinist (in origin) fraud of Mikoyan and C. about Lenin’s position in 1917 for a peaceful seizure of power.

Here it suffices for us to say that, just as all the quotations handled at the 20th Congress are second-hand from Stalin the master (while precisely on based on them they claim to be leaving Stalin to return to Lenin!), so that first date we took from Stalin’s own speech at the 18th Congress, held as we have already said on 10 March 1939.

What is left intangible? 

Our right to keep Lenin within the gang of «dogmatists» lies in the fact that he himself, as long as he lived, held this term as a title of honour, and in contraposition with opportunist and «free critic».

The first chapter of the classic «WHAT IS TO BE DONE?», which dates from 1902, is precisely entitled: «Dogmatism and ‘Freedom of Criticism’». It is a total attack against Russian and international revisionism, and the footnote on the first page actually says: «At the present time the English Fabians, the French ministerialists, the German Bernsteinians and the Russian critics… together they take up arms against ‘dogmatic’ Marxism…. (it is the) first really international battle with socialist opportunism».

In the exposition of the agrarian question, and in showing Lenin’s Marxist orthodoxy in this, we have once again reproduced (from «The Agrarian Question and Marx’s Critics», 1901) the opening passage and invective to Cernov, who boasted of having dislodged «dogmatic Marxism» from the field of agrarian questions. This dogmatic Marxism, Lenin writes, has a strange property: scientists always give it up for dead, and then the bombardment against it starts again… 

Subsequently the old bombard passed into the hands of Stalin, who genially created the supplement: talmudic – then to those of the 20th Congress who, however hysterically itching to enrich, created nothing else.

All we want to establish is that in making this banner of dogmatism our own, we do not credit ourselves with any creation, or even enrichment of the theory and history of opportunism, an inexhaustible tabes. 

Yet a few of the «cornerstones» were still saved from Stalin’s grasp, and a few principles were still left intact; while it is clear that for the frozen gloves of the travelling messengers of the 20th Congress nothing intangible remains, if, as the title of the «Unità» states, Eden worthily has «donné la réplique» of peaceful coexistence to them, with the historic words: «the world can feel safer today»!

Indeed, in that same text Stalin cannot fail to quote Lenin again in the words (Works – Almost – Complete, XXV, 418): «Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. [here he emphasised, i.e. not we: Lenin, or Stalin himself!]. The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat [id. as above]».

Bad faith therefore when one says that something remains, that one does not want to touch, revise, recreate, enrich. And who had to be the most tacky, and say: «the path that you Russians, faithful to Lenin’s teachings, have followed, is not obligatory for other countries»?

Quite easy question; one lira for the correct answer: the Italian party delegate.

How they enriched Marx 

The French comrades procured, with rescue in extremis, a copy of the second edition of the «Handbook of Political Economy», «achevé d’imprimer le 17 mars 1956»… pour vivre l’espace d’un matin; edited by the USSR Academy of Sciences, Institute of Economics.

Totally Stalinist text, with half a volume devoted to the «political economy of the socialist mode of production». All this may well remain official, but not as much as we draw from it to close this issue of the evolution of theory.

Preface: given Marx and Engels their due, well or badly formulated, Lenin is credited with having enriched Marxist economic science with the theory of imperialism, providing «the first elements of the fundamental economic law of modern capitalism». What’s that? A law that Marx did not even dream of, and left the care of discovering in full… to Stalin. Lenin then is the author of a new, complete theory of the socialist revolution (of course, until we see a newer one from Stalin, and Khrushchev-Togliatti). He would then have given a scientific solution to the problems of building socialism and communism… and after so much, we are not surprised that among the top academics who drafted the text is our dear Scepilov.

In fact, avoiding any flattery, it is added later that «Stalin, the great comrade-in-arms and disciple of Lenin, formulated and developed a number of new theses»(!).

The further ones, however, we believe the Academy will put them up for competition with an international invitation to tender.

Of course there is the chapter on the law of unequal development. There is the formidable lie that «Marx and Engels, studying pre-monopolist capitalism in the middle of the 19th century (see above our quotation from Lenin on unique capitalism, of which imperialism is simply a political, military, dictatorial ‘superstructure’ foreseen throughout by Marx), were led to the conclusion that the socialist revolution could only win simultaneously in all or most civilised countries». Lenin would later come to the conclusion that the old formula of Marx and Engels no longer responded to historical conditions, and not only that the socialist revolution could triumph in one country alone, but even (hear!) that victory in all or most countries WAS IMPOSSIBLE (!!!) We have therefore heard a lot of bullshit from that scoundrel of Vladimir Lenin in the years after 1918, when he almost took us all by storm for not bringing the revolution to him in the whole of Europe! But, had he not scientifically discovered that it was IMPOSSIBLE? By the law of unequal development?!

Do you know the law of unequal development? Stalin was not supposed to know it: it is in a 19th century Italian comedy by the good Ferrari: academies are either made or they are not made!

We must offer you more academic prose. In the following mess, Lenin appears to have discovered that in the imperialist period the capitalist countries form a tighter chain, and that the revolution can grasp the weakest link. Fine, but to what end? To declare to others that it is impossible to break them? For this it takes Stalin and worse than Stalin, it takes Khrushchev, Scepilov, Togliatti or Thorez. A later palinody attributes to Lenin a vision of the path of world revolution, which is propounded as an advance on the method of detaching satellites for Russia from the «imperialist camp».

But today even those, under Tito’s auspices, seem to be dropped, to be used as ballast!

In any case, here one always plays on the misunderstanding between the triumph of political revolution and economic-social transformation, and advances, covered, the false card of building a socialist economy, of «prefabricated» socialism.

Stalin’s rejected Contributions 

At the end of the part on the capitalist economy, the Handbook takes up Stalin’s theses that got on Mikoyan’s nerves. For Stalin, the final historical crisis of capitalism reopened after the Second World War, and the formula of the chronic underproduction of capitalist enterprises and permanent unemployment is invoked; imprudent theses that at the 20th congress, hand extended to the economic science of the West, are – they alone – decisively taken back.

It follows that the Handbook will be withdrawn and redone, as was announced at the congress; and that the same fate must befall the Russian Party Programme.

We believe that the whole part of Stalin’s false economic doctrine will remain standing, worsened, namely the description of Russian society as a type of socialist economy. Lenin’s apocryphal new theory of the socialist revolution, and Stalin’s theory of the economy, in which the classes of the proletariat and the peasantry appear as definitively friendly classes, in the political struggle as in the economic «construction», will remain standing.

From step to step the Handbook quotes the well-known phrases from Lenin’s writings, to make the sad treatment we know. 

The most insidious side of the course outlined at the 20th congress consists in the alleged return to a closer link than in Stalin’s time with the doctrine of Marx and Lenin. But this is treated in the same way, common to Stalin and to the whole gang. It is predictable without any doubt that the step being taken today towards the declaration of an ideological identity and social programmes with the capitalist countries, towards what we have for years called the Great Confession, will be presented with theoretical arguments drawn from the Marxist school: and indeed a substantially authentic relationship will be declared. But historically and politically, the two transitions have gone in the same direction: from the declaration to capitalism of wanting to overthrow it everywhere on the class front, to that of wanting to coexist with it on the front of States, even believing that imperialism would lead it to war and collapse – and then from this position to that of peaceful emulation and confrontation, in the expectation of the definitive peace of States, and the internal democratic peace of the classes in each state.

The one and the other historical developments prove Marx and Lenin right. But it is inevitable, horrifying as it is, that in all this the great pages of Lenin, and also of Marx, will for a long time to come serve as a fig-leaf over the shameful parts of a new and more infamous opportunism, which, thanks to the charm of those names, will once again attempt to drag the world proletariat into the abyss. 

The Function of the Party 

When reading the Moscow speeches, it seems that at least one of Marx’s and Lenin’s cornerstones remains in place: the necessity and front-line function of the class political party.

The question of the party and its relationship to the state was at the heart of the ruthless struggle with the Russian opposition. While the latter reacted to the fact that with the state apparatus and its police the members of the communist party, which was to be considered in the state as the bearer of the class dictatorship and the true «subject of sovereignty», were being hit and knocked out, Trotsky and Zinoviev were being insulted as those who wanted to break the party in its unity and sabotage it. They responded proudly by vindicating Marx’s and Lenin’s doctrine on the nature the function of the class political party, to which they had always been faithful. 

Today, while nothing is being said (and even Stalin addressed the problem at previous congresses, however infrequently) on the question of the state and its massive permanence, while contradictorily they claim to have achieved a society without classes destined to disappear, and «the object of sovereignty», today it is still affirmed, however, and after having found among all the usual, even parrot-like, tone that the party must continue to be the supreme organ that handles, according to its programmatic directives and decisions, the state machine. 

But it is clear that even this position is breaking down. The symptom is easily found among the foreign bootlickers. In fact, how can one maintain this point, and launch across the border, with the others, the watchword of remedying the Leninist splits, reconstituting the unity of the «workers» parties, and drawing those of the middle classes into their front? The lability even in this of the utterances given in Moscow emerges from the demeanour of the more cynical followers. The worst comes from Italy, as usual. Nenni made harsh statements on what, for him and his short sightedness, forms the new course: in his triviality he spoke the truth. He is not in a position with his peers to have theoretical scruples, nor does he have and know how to simulate them. 

The concept of the relationship between party and state, which is all solidly contained in Marxist texts and in the history of the class struggle, from the «Manifesto» onwards, is shaken by pairs of kicks.

«Is the Leninist concept of the party’s leading function in the state still valid? Is the party still the proper instrument» to guide the vaunted creative action of the masses? «Should the party stand, as it does, above the state, even in the hierarchy that places (but look at that!) the party secretary before the Prime Minister?»

The answer is given without hesitation: the party must cease to be unique, it must to the same degree as any other come back under the parliamentary state, and worse, the latter must submit, rather than to the democratic succession of parties, to the superior leadership of a robed magistracy.

These robed cretinies are the height of the ridicule that the painful affair in Russia brings, together with the infamy, concerning the proletarian conquests of party, state and dictatorship, which shone a dazzling light thirty years ago, and which are now clouded by the sway of a braying quadruped’s tail.

Handbook of Principles 

It is not fair to say that the ideological mess only comes from beyond the curtain. The theoretical wretchedness is inherent in the transition that the 20th congress flaunted between Stalin’s personal leadership, sustained by the cult of personality, and the new collegial leadership, linked no one knows how to a new communist legality in the state and internal democracy in the party. Here not a single word is in its place, and this fight against the cult of personality would give us no cause for satisfaction, even if it were not, as we showed at the beginning, merely a nauseating comedy.

What on earth is the cult of personality, and who ever established and affirmed it, in Russia or elsewhere? Has this individual power really existed? It is nothing but a fictionalised hoax for the sole purpose of defaming the healthy and robust concept of dictatorship, which philistines want to reduce to that of autocratic imposition. The fideist reserves worship for figures beyond nature and beyond life, and does not deify the social leader. The Enlightenment follower and the critical idealist dismantle the authority that is transmitted by the otherworldly power to a man who, even if he is a King Log, personifies an outdated institution: they put everyone on the same footing, they deify if anything the popular will, the dubious character of Demos. Marxism, and here you would need the historical-philosophical treatise, does not pivot either on a Person to be exalted, or on a collective system of persons, as subjects of the historical decision, because it draws historical relations and the causes of events from relations of things with men, such that the results common to any individual are brought to light; without thinking any more of his personal, individual attributes. 

Since Marxism rejects as resolving the «social question» every «constitutional» and «legal» formulation premised on the concrete historical race, so it will have no preference and will give no answer to the misplaced questions: must all be decided by a man, a college of men, the whole body of the party, the whole body of the class? First of all, no one man decides, but a set of economic-productive relations common to large human groups. It is not a matter of piloting, but of deciphering history, of discovering its currents, and the only way to participate in the dynamics of these is to have a certain degree of knowledge of them, which is very differently possible in various historical phases. 

So who better deciphers it, who better explains the science of it, the need for it? It depends. It can also be one, better than the committee, the party, the class. And consulting «all the workers» does no more than consulting all the citizens with the senseless «counting of heads». Marxism fights Labourism, workerism, in the sense that it knows that in many cases, most of them, the resolution would be counter-revolutionary and opportunist. Today we do not know whether the vote would go to the frying pan or the fire: Stalin or the Anti-Stalinists. It is hard even to rule out that it would be the latter that would be the bigger swindle. As for the party, even after its election by those who deny the «cornerstones» of its programme on principle, its historical mechanics are not resolved with «the base is always right» either. The party is a real historical unit, not a colony of men-microbes. The communist left has always proposed replacing Lenin’s alleged formula of «democratic centralism» with that of organic centralism. As for the committees, there are a great many historical cases that make the case for collegial leadership: we need not repeat here the relationship between Lenin and the party, Lenin and the central committee, in April 1917 and October 1917.

The best detector of the revolutionary influences of the historical force field can, in given social and productive relations, be the mass, the crowd, a consultation of men, one man. The discriminating element is elsewhere.

Elementary little Scheme 

It is well known that we are schematic. One can see in this respect the theses of the Italian and world communist congresses, supported by the left at the time of the Communist International. We also saw very healthy revolts of parties to committees, as at the illegal 1924 conference in the Alps of the Communist Party of Italy, which had been led by the centrist current for over a year: not only did the vast majority of the members vote for the left-wing opposition, but even the central apparatus voted for it. No one was surprised and the committee did not «fall» because of this. It fell by quite other ways: it still rules, with Stalin and without.

So the question of action and what leads it (?) can be reduced to three main stages.

Appearance of a new mode of production, such as the industrial capitalist one. Political revolution by which the class that controls the means of production in it comes to power, and founds its State. Appearance of the class that in that new form gives its work without participating in social control: the proletariat. The concept of class for Marx is not in this descriptive observation, but in the manifestation of common actions (which are determined by common conditions) at first neither desired nor deliberated by anyone. Formation of a new theory-programme of society, which opposes the apologetic theory of the ruling class. Only from this point (of course with infinite complications, advances and recoils) do we have the «constitution of the proletariat into a political party», and only from this moment a historical class. Thus, historical conditions for a new class to act: theory – political class organisation.

Second stage. With these conditions the new class conducts the struggle to oust the other from power. In the case we examine, constitution of the proletariat into the ruling class. Destruction of the old state. New state. Class dictatorship, the subject of which is the party. Terror (the bourgeois revolution also had such stages, like any revolution). 

Third stage. Transient in a historical sense but long and complex. Under the dictatorship of the party, the relations of production defended by the old class, and which barred the way for new productive forces, are successively broken. Ideological influences of all kinds and customs to which the proletarian class was subject are gradually eradicated. The classes disappear after the revolution of the modern proletariat, but before they disappear they continue to struggle, in an inverted position. With them the apparatus of state force disappears.

All this seems pointless repetition. We put all the black and white pieces in place for a moment to ask the age-old question: where do we get the conscience, the will, the «guidance» of action? And, if you like, the authority? We left no piece unemployed, off the chessboard.

In quoting Lenin they failed to notice a magnificent construction of his, which reaches far beyond the… Central Committee. «The working class, which all over the world is waging a hard and persistent struggle … needs authorities … only in the way that young workers need the experience of veteran fighters against oppression and exploitation, of those who have organised many strikes, have taken part in a number of revolutions, who are wise in revolutionary traditions, and have a broad political outlook. The proletarians of every country need the authority of the world-wide struggle of the proletariat. … The collective spirit of the progressive class-conscious workers immediately engaged in the struggle in each country will always remain the highest authority on all such questions» (Lenin, XI: 412-413).

Central to this passage are the concepts of time and space taken to their maximum extension; the historical tradition of the struggle, and the international field of it. We add to tradition the future, the programme of tomorrow’s struggle. How will this Leninian corpus, to which we give supreme power in the party, be summoned from all continents and above all times? It is made up of the living, of the dead and the unborn: we have not therefore «created» this formula of ours: here it is in Marxism, here it is in Lenin. 

Who is now chattering about powers and authority entrusted to a leader, to a steering committee, to a consultation of contingent bodies in contingent territories? Every decision will be good for us if it is within the lines of that broad, worldwide vision. It can be grasped by one eye, or by millions of eyes.

This theory was erected by Marx and Engels, since they explained against the libertarians, in what sense the processes of class revolutions are authoritarian, in which the individual disappears, as quantité negligeable, with his whims of autonomy, but does not subordinate himself to a leader, a hero, or a hierarchy of past institutions.

So much for the phoney and petty history of Stalin’s fierce and sinister orders, and reverence for him, factors that would have built, to the belief of the gullible, decades of history!

Sense of Determinism 

For determinism, an individual’s conscience and will count for nothing: his action is determined by his needs and interests, and it matters little how he formulates the impulse that he believes, when all is said and done, to have awakened his will, of which he becomes aware late. This applies to those below and above, wretched and rich, humble and powerful. So we Marxists find nothing in the person, in people; nor in the «personality», poor puppet of history. The more he is reknown, the more strings pull him. For our grandiose game he is not a piece, not even a modest pawn. But is there a King in chess? Yes, with the sole function of getting screwed. 

In the class, the uniformity, the parallelism of situations creates a historical force, a cause for historical development. But action equally precedes will, and more so class-consciousness.

The class becomes the subject of consciousness (of programmatic goals) when the party has been formed, and doctrine has been formed. In the tightest circle that is the party, as a unitary organ, one begins to find a subject of interpretation of the historical path, its possibilities and paths. Not always, but only in certain rare situations due to the fullness of contrasts in the world of the productive base, in the «party» subject we admit, in addition to science, also the will, in the sense of a possibility of choice between different acts, influencing the motion of events. For the first time freedom, not dignity of persons, appears. The class has a guide in history insofar as the material factors that move it are crystallised in the party, insofar as the party possesses a complete and continuous theory, an organisation that is in turn universal and continuous, that does not break down and compose itself at every turn with aggregations and splits; these, however, are the fever, which constitutes the reaction of such an organism to its pathological crises. 

Where are the «Guarantees»? 

Where, then, to find the guarantees against the degeneration, the decay of the course of the movement, of its party? In one man is little; man is mortal, he is vulnerable to enemies. It is, if only one, a very bad and fragile guarantee, even if it were ever believed to be inherent in one.

Would we, however, take seriously the great boast of having found the collegial guarantee, after the disappearance of a leader, who led at his will? This is not serious. In Russia everything has been lost, and nothing remains to be saved. In any case, the disintegration under Stalin shows less deteriorated aspects than are now being shown, deviating from him, while of his defects nothing appears, and nothing could appear, to have been corrected.

Our guarantees are known and simple. 

1. Theory. As we have said, it is not born in just any historical phase, nor does it await the advent of the Great Man, of Genius. Only at certain turning points can it be born: of its «particulars» the date is known, not the paternity. Ours had to be born after 1830 on the basis of the English economy. It guarantees insofar as (even if one admits that integral truth and science are vain goals, and only one can advance in the fight against the greatness of error) one holds it firm in the backbone forming a complete system. During its historical course it has only two alternatives: fulfil itself or disappear. Party theory is a system of laws that govern history and its past, and future course. Guarantee therefore proposed: no permission to revise, or even enrich the theory. No creativity. 

2. Organisation. It must be continuous in history, as far as fidelity to the same theory and the continuity of the thread of struggle experiences. Only when this is realised over vast spaces of the world, and long stretches of time, do great victories come. The guarantee against the centre is that it has no right to create, but is only obeyed insofar as its provisions for action fall within the precise limits of the doctrine, of the historical perspective of the movement, established for long courses, for the world field. The guarantee is that the exploitation of the «special» local or national situation, the unexpected emergency, the particular contingency is repressed. Either in history it is possible to establish general concurrences between distant spaces and times, or it is pointless to speak of a revolutionary party, fighting for a future form of society. As we have always discussed, there are great historical and «geographical» subdivisions that give fundamental turning points to party action: in fields spanning half continents and half centuries: no party leadership can announce such events from one year to the next. We possess this theorem, tested by a thousand experimental verifications: announcer of «new course» equals traitor. 

A guarantee against the base and against the mass is that unitary and central action, the famous «discipline», is achieved when the leadership is firmly bound to those canons of theory and practice, and when local groups are forbidden to «create» autonomous programmes, perspectives, and movements on their own.

This dialectical relationship between the base and the summit of the pyramid (which in Moscow thirty years ago we called for renverser, to turn upside down) is the key that assures the party, as impersonal as it is unique, the exclusive faculty of reading history, the possibility of intervening in it, the signalling that such a possibility has arisen. From Stalin to a committee of sub-Stalinists nothing has been overturned. 

3. Tactics. Strategic «creativity» is forbidden by party mechanics. The plan of operations is public and notorious and describes its precise limits, i.e. historical and territorial ranges. An obvious example: in Europe, since 1871, the party does not support any war of states. In Europe, since 1919, the party does not participate (it should not have…) in elections. In Asia and the East, still today, the party supports democratic and national revolutionary uprisings and an alliance of struggle between the proletariat and other classes up to the local bourgeoisie. We give these crude examples in order to avoid the claim that the pattern is one and rigid always and everywhere, and to evade the famous accusation that this construction, historically materialist in its entirety, derives from immovable, ethical or aesthetic or even mystical postulates. Class and party dictatorship does not degenerate into forms vilified as oligarchies, provided it is overt and publicly declared in relation to a foreseen broad historical perspective, without hypocritically conditioning it to majoritarian controls, but only to the test of enemy strength. The Marxist party does not blush at the sharp conclusions of its materialist doctrine; it is not stopped, in drawing them, by sentimental and decorative positions.

The programme must contain in a clear line the skeleton of the future society as the negation of the entire present structure, the declared point of arrival for all times and places. Describing the present society is only part of the revolutionary task. Deprecating and defaming it is not our business. Building in its flanks the future society neither. But the ruthless rupture of the present relations of production must take place according to a clear programme, which scientifically predicts how the new forms of social organisation, precisely known from party doctrine, will arise out of these broken obstacles.

Wickedness of Man? 

That in the future resurgent proletarian revolutionary parties will suffer further involutions, crises and degeneration, is not denied, and there will never be recipes to rule it out.

But it is a foregone conclusion that after once again proposing, and after a future that is not close at hand has built, all the guarantees that we have so called only to accept current polemical invitations, most of those of the other stripe, and many of ours, who believe themselves to be such, will come out shaking their heads: «Useless! No measure will remedy man’s lust for power. The state, the party, the organisation, in every situation, time and place, end up consolidating privileges of the supreme hierarchy, which clings to wealth, well-being, satisfaction of inexhaustible vanity. Man is rogue. He seeks joy and dominion and passes over his fellow man, his body, and his hunger». 

This argument does not deserve a line of reply. If this is believed, if this is remotely true, if man is not virtually as good as the vilified mother «beast», and if rogue is not precisely the social organisation (which dialectically arises from a historical sequence of inevitable and therefore useful phases of roguery) then it is over, then we are done for; we with Marx, Engels, Lenin have all collapsed, and our illustrious or unknown literature can go to a single bonfire.

Those who fill the world with this new legend of criminologist history: «Stalin’s mistakes were avoidable; it was enough that he was not so harsh, bitter and vicious», will have an easy time of it. But the history of the tremendous path of the communist revolution will write that this is the most infamous spit they have so far hurled at the effigies of Marx and Lenin, which they foolishly, as well as lyingly, still affix to the walls of the crossroads, where they sold their ancient faith.

To the immense figure of Lenin these people want to bind the trick, with which they hope to turn their prostitute’s rewards for yet more years, that it is right to escape from the firm line of doctrine in order to realise creativity and enrichment, since he would have first affirmed it. But it is only by eliminating this original fallacy that the movement will truly move beyond the shoals of the cult of the individual, and of the even worse vile cult of the crowd, of the masses. 

The old Marxist who has been working and studying Lenin’s great work, his living word and his action, for long decades, shows that he has done so profoundly in that he strips the false myth of Lenin himself of the legend that he recreated and enriched the common doctrine, where as a lion he defended every verse of it, until his last breath. 

But when he then hears that such a task, which should be challenged to giants, and no less to the non-pygmy Josif Stalin, would pass with equal right of manipulation to today’s homunculi, children of a putrescent age in which theory, science and art decay; when they won’t find echoes similar to those that ranks of ringing voices arose to raise in the fertile epochs of history, last the renaissances and the bourgeois liberation struggles, over which we passed for a century, and last over them and beyond them the Russian and world epic of October 1917 … then the dialectical weapons fall from the hands of the simple soldier of an intangible doctrine; he not heroically lowers them to hold his belly, to avert the risk of pissing himself.

Breath of Oxygen 

The «provocateurs» could not fail to have a good game on the tantalizing terrain of «philosophy», and we believe we have met their match, throwing up high levees against the mania to untie today’s knot with the usual insipid trembling quest: who will be tomorrow’s master? And to give names to the drama played out on the Moscow stage. We found other, fundamental meaning in it. 

Let us finally return, to close our day, to our solid ground: the physics of economic facts, the hand-to-hand struggle of material class interests, at the apex of whose simmering our school has placed the keys to the present, the past and the future, in the unitary framework of which we have gained total vision, if total blindness does not afflict us. 

The colossal construction of the emulative «theory», according to which the rhythm of the Russian system’s productive progression beats the rhythm of the system of contemporary western capitalism and will surpass it in a certain time in an absolute sense – referring the decision on the fate of the world to the Platonic outcome of this confrontation – drapes itself with a crazy thesis: that this rhythm is seen for the first time in the world and in history, and that its numerical indices attest to the entry of a new principle, in place of the ancient ones. 

This gigantic mystification is all in the game of defending and preserving the capitalist system, which is purported to want to defeat. How else to explain that it is echoed by the most outspoken Western publications and broadcasts?

There exists in America a Research Institute, Inc., of New York, which has issued a special report to the «thirty thousand firms, most of them industrial corporations, for which the Institute is a consultant in the fields of economics, legislation, business leadership (management), industrial and human relations, sales techniques and market conquest (Sale and Marketing)». The title is evocative «The toughest challenge». 

A significant statement is prefaced to the work: this research is carried out on facts, outside the adherence to any economic school and government policy. 

The entire subject matter, which we have studied here from a quite different angle, is presented as extremely serious and well-founded, and the figures of Khrushchev and Bulganin are weighed with respect and extreme commitment. These experts on capitalism close by admitting that the prize may also be due to the Soviet system, they do not invoke repression or war, they only study in depth the resource for the firms of the waves of arms orders, and finally they advise open access to «marketing» with the dreaded Reds. They also calculate in how many years, with the known plans, the western indices of production, in terms of mass and per capita, could be overtaken by the USSR. While they do not deny the weaknesses of the eastern system, especially in agriculture, they also expose those of the west, assess the course of the economic rhythm, the possible crisis, and are determined to take a «relaxed» approach.

The counselling of high capitalism therefore says that the invitation to emulation is to be welcomed, because of the parallelism of the two systems; that for the two imperialisms there is a lot to do, before fighting.

We are caught in this not inconsiderable study by a coincidence of perspective with our own (twenty years of peace). From calculations on the volume of raw materials available in the two camps, and on the extent of industrialisation of the underdeveloped areas of the world, it is assumed that the dual capitalist accumulation will have a safe outlet throughout the next twenty years. At 1975 will war, or revolution, to decide? Between now and then, the theoretical struggle will decide between the economy of explosion, and that of growing welfare. Two progressive opponents line up in the «Challenge»: theoretically, they fight side by side.

Market Experts 

Economists and institutes offer themselves for remuneration to both sides. We don’t believe that those at Research also send their fees to Moscow, but certainly do it the authors of the opinions that, amidst the alignments of the same and now annoying tables of figures, are reported in the Unità  of 12 April. This French magazine La Nef has suspect publishing: but we don’t care. The colossal falsehood of economic science is the one written under the table that sets at 10 per cent per annum and more the pace of Russian industrial production and national income, given and accepted to be about three times as high as those of the US, as we have already played out. «Nothing like this has ever occurred in the history of capitalist economies». According to these pundits, the bourgeois economists lost the game, their only salvation was to prove that the Russian figures were false, and rates lower.

If the riff-raff who compile and host such material had ever just opened the first volume of Capital at random, they would know two things: First: Completely similar things have occurred in the history of all capitalist economies. Second: When these things first occurred, we deduced that the capitalist economy was destined to blow up, and proletarian Marxism declared war on it.

The First International 

Are there Marxist-Leninists who ignore the Inaugural Address of the International Workers’ Association, written by the hand of Karl Marx?

The historic rally at Martin’s Hall was held on 28 September 1864. Marx’s text begins thus:

« It is a great fact that the misery of the working masses has not diminished from 1848 to 1864, and yet this period is unrivaled for the development of its industry and the growth of its commerce. In 1850 a moderate organ of the British middle class, of more than average information, predicted that if the exports and imports of England were to rise 50 per cent, English pauperism would sink to zero. 

Alas! On April 7, 1864, the Chancellor of the Exchequer delighted his parliamentary audience by the statement that the total import and export of England had grown in 1863 “to 443,955,000 pounds! That astonishing sum about three times the trade of the comparatively recent epoch of 1843! “With all that, he was eloquent upon “poverty”».

Let us stop. The threefold increase in twenty years, with the usual little calculation, and without playing the game (which the courtly Varga sometimes does today) of dividing two hundred by twenty, obtaining ten per cent, is worth the annual average of 5.7 per cent.

This is not yet the highest index, but it is enough to establish how initial capitalism runs fast, like today’s Russian, then fatally slows down.

It is a useless game that of «Unità» consultants, who give the rhythms of capitalist countries from 1870 onwards. They themselves cannot hide the fact that in given periods, which they call «cyclical momentum», there has, even recently, been about 8 per cent annual progress. Great Britain 1946-50 (post-war). Japan 1907-1913 (after the war with Russia; but today Japan, no longer the victor but the vanquished, we see that it runs even faster, and surpasses Russia). United States 1880-85. And, lo and behold: Russia 1890-1900, under… tsarism!

What’s the point of establishing that in further «long-term» periods Western capitalism is on the rate of 3 to 5 % pace? Russia will do so too, if in twenty years its per capita production matches that of America, England and Germany, and … barring complications. Emulation can go no further.

Here we are debunking the lower part of the table which, referring to countries «at an early stage of industrial development», picks out 1855-1913 (!) as a bundle for Russia, Sweden, the United States and Germany and finds 5 per cent…

The English Industrial Revolution 

The parallel of early capitalism between today’s Russia and England takes us back to the admirable thirty years between 1830-1860 when Great Britain was almost first and alone in pouring on the rest of the world mechanical industry artefacts. Continental Europe was to it what the immense Asia is to the U.S.S.R. today. The anti-feudal political revolution had taken place in the previous century, periods of great wars had followed, and the subsequent international crisis of 1848 had been overcome. The similarities are remarkable: the revolutionary seeks the consistencies of historical functions, which confirm to him (and all the better if centuries pass in between) that history can be harnessed to general lines of uniformity, to uniform turns of the economic base. The opportunist looks for discordances, in order to endorse his misdirection: with him, the conservative rejoices, if he sees the foundation of the forecast weakening, a forecast according to which flourishing industrialism is followed by a powerful new social subversion.

Consideration of rhythms, of rates of increase, was well known to Marx. We remain in the indices of foreign trade, a sure parameter of the bursting industrialisation. Marx discusses this in the first volume of Capital, in section 5 of the 25th chapter: Illustration of the general law of capitalist accumulation: England from 1846 to 1866. Do you want anything more basic? 

The total of export and import is given, on pages 650-651 of the L&W edition, for 1854 in pounds sterling 268 million and for 1865 in pounds sterling 490 million. The usual simple calculation says that from ‘54 to ‘65 the average annual rate was 6.2 per cent. But the table of exports alone in that period brings us to the rhythms of the … Russian type. From 1849 to 1856 we advance from 66 to 116 million pounds: rhythm 9.1 per cent. From 1865 to 1866 a mad rush leap: 14 per cent in a single year (from 167 to 189 million pounds). Engels observes: this was the prelude to the crisis that broke out immediately. We know that the previous crisis had been in 1856: before that in 1846. The figures confirm this, and the rhythms fluctuate, but hold in the total period. 

Shall we ask what has happened from Marx’s table to the present day? In 1953 total British trade was £5 billion 925 million. Since Gladstone’s 1863 it has grown 13 and more times greater. The capitalist system had a lot to do! But the average rate, duly researched, as we know, is that of adult capitalism: three per cent. 

On the same page Marx studies the figures for coal and iron production, length of railways. He obtains figures between 1855 and 1864 that would be long to report, but which give rhythms around four and five per cent.

Marx himself then determines the total and annual rhythms, of course with the correct procedure, for the same period in the income of certain industries: housing 3.5 per cent; quarries 7.7; mines 6.3; ironworks 3.6; fish-works 5.2; gas 11.5; railways 7.6. Miracles, but not of the «socialist» system!

He goes on to point out that the increase in income, as shown by the recorded taxes, and thus as always below true values, grew between 1861 and 1864 annually by 9.30 per cent.

Here, however, Marx does not deal with the figures proper to the early period, from 1830 onwards, and perhaps earlier; which he nevertheless discusses at length in all his works, and Engels no less does. But the figures are in all the history books, e.g. (not to go far) Barbagallo (an ancient Marxist). We give a few.

Cotton 1796-1800, 11.2 per cent. Wool 1829-1830, 11.5 per cent. Machines exported 1855-1865, 8.5 per cent. And so on. 

The other Capitalisms 

The phenomenon, which would only be seen in Russia a century later, is general. 

Capital invested in the United States in the burgeoning wool industry rose at the rate of 31 per cent per year (those who copy the technique of others, international feature in bourgeois times, exceed the speed of the first example). Coal mined from 1835 to 1850: from half a million tons to 6,266 million, 12 and a half times in 15 years, pace 18 per cent. And if we went back to 1820 with the paltry 365 tonnes, we would calculate a staggering pace: 1,500 times in 15 years. Today? We know: 465 million tonnes: more than a million times as much. Average, over 140 years, only ten per cent. See the game, Moscow? Push the starting years to those of newborn production.

France: in the thirty-year period 1830-1860 cast iron increased 8 times: 7 per cent pace. The horsepower of steam engines 58 times: 15 per cent pace.

Germany: here the years are rightly later. From 1871 to 1913 coal is 7.5 times more: long-term pace 4.5 per cent. If we want more just go back in time: the sugar produced in Prussia was in 1831 about one thousand tons, in 1843 about 9 thousand. Nine times in twelve years gives the rate of 19 per cent.

The idiotic invention of emulation is taken from the «new phenomena» of the very last years, which should justify the trumpeted idea of creating a new Marxism, and enriching the old. But just treat it with the Marxist science of a hundred years ago, and here is emulation turned upside down and ridiculed!

Let us go back to Japan: even before the war with Russia, between 1863 and 1907, in 14 years it began to spill its magnificent silk over the world: from 38 to 450 million yen: about 12 times, and this gives the annual rate of 19 per cent. Other indices are even more spectacular. Has the Mikado been thinking about building a socialist society ever since? 

Law of Accumulation 

The fundamental Marxist law stands more intangible than ever. The more strangely different the countries and divergent the historical times, the more precise, uniform the relationship between causes and effects becomes.

At the appearance of capitalist industry, the annual rhythm of accumulation is maximum, then decreasing.

Since the rhythm is not uniform but very irregular, it tends to be lower in long periods, and becomes marked again after economic crises, after wars, and especially after wars lost and devastating the country in question.

The rate is higher with the same age of the capitalist form, in countries that descend later in the industrial and mechanical agon. This is due to the more evolved technique at their immediate disposal, and to the changed organic composition, in relation to so much, of capital; for the same amount of labour, more processed materials.

American news from the aforementioned source awaits South America at a super-Russian pace, in the time to come: always in the next twenty years, if peaceful.

The story of the miracle of rapid accumulation due to planning, i.e. to the monopolistic and imperial form of capitalism, and to state industrialism itself (there can only be in this a certain equalisation of rhythm in time, a certain compensation for shocks of crisis: but not only in Russia, but everywhere: a subject we leave to another occasion), is of Stalinist manufacture. The usual tables are also there in the 1939 speech-report.

In confirmation of our old well-known Marxist laws, we have formed a single table with Stalin’s and Bulganin’s – with a few of Varga’s – for the various countries, and we go through the following periods: 1880-1900, peace; 1900-1913, peace; 1913-1920, First World War; 1920-1929, first «reconstruction»; 1929-1932, general crisis; 1932-1937, recovery; 1937-1946, Second World War; 1946-1955, second reconstruction.

We follow the course of the various countries through these phases, always giving the annual rhythms.

Great Britain: 1880-1900, 3.5; 1900-1913, 3.0; first war: zero (production unchanged); first reconstruction: ditto. Crisis 1929-1932: fall to 11 per cent!; recovery 1932-1937: rise to 10 per cent! Second war: stagnation, zero rate, properly: minus 0.6. Current phase: 4.8 per cent increase.

France: pre-war 6.5 and 6 per cent; first war: fall, to 6.6 per cent; post-war, rise, to 9.5 per cent! Crisis 1929-1932: fall, to 11.6 per cent; recovery 1932-1937, slow ascent (one per cent); second war: another fall to 3 per cent; last phase: ascent, to 8 per cent

Germany: first pre-war 7.5 and 7; first war: drop, to 8.2 per cent; first reconstruction: recovery to 7.3 per cent; crisis 1929-1932: precipice to 13.8 per cent!; recovery: rise again to 13.4 per cent!; second war: fall to 12.2 per cent!; current phase: recovery at record pace: 22.2 per cent! Without any socialism, and with little dirigisme.

United States: first pre-war 8.5 and 7; first war: increase of 3.4 per cent (ah old and foul Europe!). Post-war: continued at 3.6 per cent; 1929 crisis: tumbled, at 18.5 per cent!; recovery: at 11 per cent; second war: further recovery (and Europe as above) at 4.8 per cent; present phase: impassive advance at the same pace!

Japan: violent advance until the first war; during the war, advance at about 7 % (Europe etc.); post-war: same pace. Pause in the crisis, pace at 12 per cent in the recovery; second war: down to 12.5 per cent; current phase: decisive rise to 18.8 per cent: Russian time.

Russia: 1880 to 1913: pace of initial high industrialisation; 1913 to 1920: war, industrial dissolution. From 1920 to 1929 intensive industrialisation, at the rate of 34 per cent! (starting effect from the bottom); from 1929 to 1937, unaffected by the foreign crisis, up to 20 per cent; second war: practically, stagnation. Current stage: 18 per cent, like Japan, much less than Germany.

Italy? Let’s limit ourselves to saying that from the 1929 crisis to the second war it was stationary (down and then up); in the war it fell to 3 per cent; today it rises to a fair 12 per cent. In 1955 vehicles produced increased 69 %; oil (start-up phase!) 83 %; FIAT’s capital increased today by 19 billion, 32 %.

The picture, in the form of a prospectus, is included at the end of this text.

Who can read anything into this picture about the advantage of the (Russian) socialist system over the others? No one: they are all data from Russian sources, and therefore well comparable. They deflate forever the exaggerated expedient of emulation, they confirm the coexistence of similar, capitalist forms of various ages and origins and histories.

The keys to deciphering the picture, eloquent in itself in its significance as a platform for the future course, are three: Crisis, War, Revolution.

Our work is at an end, and its thesis is the rout of emulation. The more the contenders bypass each other, the more possible the Revolution becomes, with its orders, the corollary of the original theory: blockade of production.

For the broader conclusions we dare not make a prophecy, only a wish.

The post-war decade of advancing world capitalist production will continue for a few more years. Then the inter-war crisis, similar to the one that broke out in America in 1929. Social slaughter of the bourgeois middle classes and workers aristocracies. Resurgence of a world-wide working class movement, rejecting all allies. New theoretical victory of its old theses. Single Communist Party for all states of the world.

Towards the end of the two decades, the alternative of the difficult century: third war of the imperial monsters – or international communist revolution. Only if the war does not pass will the emulators die!

Marx and Gladstone 

We have reduced all of Russia’s statistical vainglory to a phenomenon of vigorous capitalism, like that which England of a century ago offered Marx.

How did Marx look at it then?

From that time he knew very well that in the hell of capital one does not cry vade retro Satana, but awaits its conquest of the world. He waited for British industrialism to set fire to Europe as it grew out of all proportion. We have the right to wait for the Russian furnace of production to set fire to the entire East. It is not failure that we wish for the five-year plans. It is the declaration of socialism that we hope to wrest from that system.

The British progressive rhythms measured by Marx’s long-sighted eye made him recognise the direct enemy, and he declared the world class war, drawing his accents from reading those figures.

For the 1864 speech, the Dialogue with Gladstone, was not reduced to what we have said.

To the insane growth of the foreign trade figures Marx, in the address, contrasts the data of the infamous exploitation of that model of the modern proletariat. He writes the equation between the grandeur of Capitalism and the enslavement of the wage-earner. He raises the tribune’s excommunication against the cynical Chancellor of the Exchequer.

«Dazzled by the ‘progress of the nation’, deluded by the figures of statistics, the Chancellor exclaims with wild emotion: in the years 1842-1852 the taxable (income) of the country grew by six per cent: in the eight years from 1853 to 1861, it grew by twenty per cent over the figure of 1853. This fact is so astonishing as to be almost unbelievable».

Marx wrote the same in «Capital» in 1866, except that then in his table he could note the jump in income in the year 7 April 1864 – 7 April 1865 alone of over ten per cent! His quote in the address continues: «This intoxicating increase of strength and power – adds Mr Gladstone – is confined to the wealthy classes». The demonstration of the distress of the English proletariat and its unfortunate struggles concludes with the mighty thesis: «In all the countries of Europe it now stands as an irrefutable truth that … on the false basis of the present, every new development of the creative force of labour tends only to make the contrasts deeper, the social conflict more acute».

In the pages of «Capital» the quotation from Gladstone’s speech of 16 April 1863 extends further to his assertion: «the increase of wealth… brings an indirect advantage to the working people, because it decreases the price of objects of general consumption. While the rich have become richer, the poor have become less poor. But I do not wish to assert that the extremes of poverty are less». Marx’s harsh sarcasm fell on the hypocrisy of this strange statement. The chapter ended with a note calling for the continuation of Engels’ 1845 study on the conditions of the English working classes. Engels removed the note and wrote at the foot of his manuscript: this was done by Marx in the first volume of Capital.

Returners, to the scorn of Stalin, to «Marxism», have you ever known anything about this?

The Extremes of a Century

The minister of the world’s first bourgeoisie felt the powerful blows of the unknown Dr. Marx, the red terror Doctor of the English press, the poor and almost lonely émigré who had repeated the cry of 1848: Working Men of All Countries, Unite! at the close of his flaming address.

The controversy became famous, and stretched over years and years; after Marx died. The German anti-socialist Brentano, who corresponded with the British minister, insinuated in one of his publications that Karl Marx was guilty of «false quotation». Gladstone had said that the figures for taxable income (Italy’s mobile wealth) concerned only the landowning classes, since wage incomes were not taxed: the figures therefore did not concern what is now called «national income» but only income and profits from property and business. Nothing had Gladstone admitted, about the growing misery of the working classes, as Marx claimed. But Marx’s demonstration did not need Gladstone’s confessions: it stood and stands, and affects all forms of wage-earners. Misery does not mean low wages, it means the nullity of the only ones who generated the rampant wealth by «rowing» in the grim factory of industrial enterprise. Marx’s figures draw the pace of accumulation, of the concentration of capital in ever rarer hands and heads, up to its depersonalisation, which reigns everywhere today.

But the accusation of forgery was no small thing then! Eleanor, Marx’s daughter, retorted indignantly, Brentano made another publication: finally Engels summarised the whole thing in a special treatise of his own, with reports of all the opposing allegations, facsimiles of the German and English texts, of the pages invoked by the two sides in the «Times», the Proceedings of the House of Commons, and other press sheets. Today demagogically courted members of the Russian party who declared themselves annoyed by these revivals of old stories (what do we care about the Bund? the populists? These are the existentialist phrases with which the party leaders made the congress laugh with gusto): today such types, incited by the Stalinist stop the pedant: what a form of pedant, they would say, that Frederick Engels!

The newspapers carried photographs of Marx’s tomb in London’s Highgate Cemetery, to whose nudity the Russians have superimposed a heavy monument: not satisfied with that inflicted on Vladimir Lenin, another unforgettable model of limitless simplicity, shy of all pomp and splendour.

At the tomb, Messrs Bulganin and Khrushchev were certain to reaffirm their historic re-approach to Marx, of the 20th Congress. They did not show any doubt that they had from that assembly unveiled to the world the same glories, which Marx had shoved down the throat of the British minister of the time, at the height of the historic first industrial revolution, model to all others, and to that of Russia.

Marx then contrasted the mad orgy of mechanical hyper-production with the foundation of the First Revolutionary International: the two who greeted from his grave had, freshly, buried the last poor ruins of the Third, of that founded by Lenin.

And while we are writing the last pages of this hasty work as simple pupils of that giant school, which alone can recall the two names, the radios broadcast from Moscow the statements of the two travellers, who had just returned from London: Mr Eden, impeccable minister of his Gracious Britannic Majesty, a pupil (he indeed with his head held high) of his classical predecessor Gladstone, received them with the utmost cordiality and friendliness.

Quite unlike the living contemporary emulators, the Dead converse…

END OF THE «DIALOGUE WITH THE DEAD»

Statistical Overview

Total and average annual increases in industrial production in countries and periods typical of the historical development of capitalism (expressed as a percentage of the previous annual product)

This framework is elaborated only on data from Russian sources (Varga, Stalin, Khrushchev). The indices for the first two periods are taken from the figures for basic industries given by Varga.

From the verticals, the states being arranged from top to bottom according to the age of the industrial form, it emerges that younger capitalism has faster average growth.

From the horizontals it emerges that in the normal phase the rate of increase of each country decreases over time.

From the war and crisis phases it emerges that mature and victorious capitalisms resist wars (imperialism) well and even advance; but they yield more to crises.

From the post-war and post-crisis phases, it emerges that the stronger the recovery, the younger the capitalism, and the more violent the descent.

The Russian horizontal confirms all the trends of other forms of capitalism.