FIRST DAY

Writing an article fifty pages long after a good two years (the famous one on linguistics was from 1950, which we only briefly touched upon, though it deserved more attention; and quod differtur…) Stalin responds to points raised over two years, not only in the Thread of Time but also in work meetings on Marxist theory and program conducted by our movement and made public, either briefly or extensively.

We do not mean by this that Stalin (or his complex secretariat, whose networks span the globe) has reviewed all that material and turned to us. It is not a question, if we are truly Marxists, of believing that the great historical discussions require, for the guidance of the world, personified protagonists who announce themselves to a stunned humanity, like when the angel sounds the golden trumpet from the cloud and Barbariccia, Dante’s demon, responds (de profundis in the proper sense) with the sound you know. Or like the Christian Paladin and the Saracen Sultan, who, before drawing their gleaming Durandals, introduce themselves loudly, challenging each other with lists of their ancestors and tournament victories, proclaiming each other’s impending death.

As if it could be otherwise! On one side, we have the Supreme Leader of the greatest State on earth and of the global “communist” proletariat, on the other – who, for heaven’s sake? – a complete nobody!

The truth is that facts and physical forces, from the background of situations, deterministically begin to discuss among themselves; and those who dictate or type the article, or deliver the speech, are mere mechanisms, loudspeakers that passively transform the wave into voice, and it is not said that nonsense does not gush out from the one with two thousand kilowatts.

The same questions arise, therefore, about the meaning of today’s Russian social relations and the international economic, political, and military relations; they impose themselves both up there and down here and can only be illuminated by comparison with the theory of what has already happened and is known; and with the history of that theory, though from a very distant past – which remains indelible – was once common.

We are well aware, therefore, that Stalin’s response does not come from the heights of the Kremlin vi to address us, nor does it bear our address; nor for the limpid continuity of the debate is it necessary for him to know that yesterday the newspaper that hosted it was called Battaglia Comunista, today Programma Comunista, following fruitless events that took place at the level of the layer of sub-fools. Things and forces, immense or minuscule, past, present, or future, remain the same in spite of the vagaries of symbolism. If ancient philosophy wrote sunt nomina rerum (literally: names belong to things), it meant to say that things do not belong to names. In other words, in our language, the thing determines the name, not the name the thing. So go ahead, devote ninety-nine percent of your work on names, portraits, epithets, lives, and graves of Great Men: we follow in the shadows, certain that not too far off is the generation that will smile at you, most illustrious ones of first and sixteenth magnitude.

The matters underlying Stalin’s current article are too significant, however, for us to deny him dialogue. For this reason, and not out of a sense of à tout seigneur tout honneur, we respond and will wait, even two years, for the rejoinder. There’s no hurry (right, ex-Marxist?).

Tomorrow and Yesterday

The topics discussed are all crucial nodes of Marxism, and they are almost all the old nails, upon which we insisted needed to be deeply hammered again, before claiming to be the forgers of tomorrow.

Of course, the bulk of political “spectators” scattered across various fields were not struck by what Stalin suggestively returns to – what he must return to – but by what he anticipates about the uncertain tomorrow. Focusing on this, because this is what makes an audience, the friendly and hostile spectators didn’t understand a damn thing and gave brain-dead and exaggerated interpretations. Perspective, that’s what obsesses, and while the observers are a pack of donkeys, the operator, who turns the crank from those lofty prisons that are the supreme offices of government power, is precisely in the position that allows the least visibility around him and the least foresight. While we gather what has been dictated to him by looking backward, where no one obscures his view between bows and incense, everyone else is moved by the compelling forecasts.

Existentially, everyone obeys the idiotic imperative: we must entertain ourselves; and the political press entertains when, as it does compellingly today, it opens a glimpse into the future and sees a Supername deigning to prophesy. And the unexpected prophecy is this: no more world revolution, no more peace, but not the “holy” war between Russia and the rest of the world; instead, the inevitable war between capitalist States, in which, for the time being, Russia is not involved. Interesting, but certainly not new to Marxism, even for us, who do not have the frenzy for political cinema, where the spectator is not interested in “whether it is true” what they see (soon with Cinerama, they will be physically thrust into the midst of the action), and, once the illusion of the overseas landscape, the ultra-luxury locale, the white telephone, or the embrace with the modern impeccable celluloid super-Venuses is over, he returns content, poor clerk or enslaved proletarian, to their hovel, and rubs up against his woman deformed by toil, or replaces her with a Venus of the sidewalk.

Everyone, therefore, has thrown themselves onto the point of arrival rather than the point of departure. This, however, is the fundamental thing: there is a whole array of half-wits eager to rush forward into pondering the after, who must be powerfully held back and pushed to understand the before, a task that is certainly easier, and yet one they cannot manage, even in their dreams. Anyone who has not understood the page in front of them cannot resist the temptation to turn it over to find enlightenment in the next, and thus the beast becomes more of a beast than before.

In Russia, regardless of the silencing police that scandalize the West (where the imbecilising and standardizing resources for craniums are ten times greater, and more disgusting), the problem of defining the social stage being traversed and the economic mechanism that is in motion imposes itself and arrives at the dilemma: should we continue to say that ours is a socialist economy, a communist one of the lower stage, or should we recognize that it is an economy governed by the law of value, proper to capitalism, despite State industrialism? Stalin seems to be confronting this recognition and to be restraining the overly bold economists and business leaders who lean towards the second view; in reality, he is preparing the not-so-distant (and also useful in a revolutionary sense) confession. The organized imbecility of the free world reads that he has announced the transition to the full, higher stage of communism!

To bring such a question into focus, Stalin approaches the classical method. It would be easy to play the card of abandoning any obligation to the school tradition, to Marx and Lenin as theorists, but at this stage of the game, the very bank might collapse. And so, instead, we start again ab ovo. Good, that’s what we want, we who have no bets to place on the roulette of history, and who learned from our first stammer that ours was the proletarian cause; and it had nothing to lose.

Thus, in 1952, there is a need for “a textbook of Marxist political economy,” not only for Soviet youth but for comrades in other countries. So, heed, you young and forgetful ones!

To include in such a book chapters on Lenin and Stalin as creators of socialist political economy, by Stalin’s own declaration, would bring nothing new. Very well, if it means that it is well-known that they did not invent it but learned it, and the former always claimed to have done so.

As we enter the field of rigorous terminology and “school” formulas, it should be stated in advance that we are dealing with a summary which the Stalinist newspapers themselves derive from a non-Russian news agency, and it will be advisable, as soon as possible, to consult the full text.

Commodity and Socialism

The recall of the first elements of economic doctrine is to discuss the “system of commodity production under a socialist regime.” In various texts (which, of course, took great care not to say anything new), we have maintained that every system of commodity production is a non-socialist system, and we will reinforce this: but Stalin (Stalin, Stalin; we are dealing with an article that could also be due to a commission that – “a hundred years from now” – substitutes for a deceased or incapacitated Stalin: in any case, the symbolism with its notations, within the conventional limits of a practical convenience, serves us too) could have written: system of commodity production after the proletarian conquest of power, and then we would not be at blasphemy yet.

Evidently, some “comrades” in Russia have stated – referring to Engels – that maintaining, after the nationalization of the means of production, the system of commodity production, that is, the character of commodities for products, means having preserved the capitalist economic system. In theoretical terms, there’s no Stalin who can prove them wrong. When and if they say that, being able to abolish commodity-type production, it was neglected or forgotten to do so, then they may be wrong.

But Stalin wants to prove that in a “socialist country” – a term of dubious schooling – commodity production can exist, and he refers to Marx’s definitions and their limpid synthesis – perhaps not absolutely flawless – in a little propaganda pamphlet by Vladimir.

On this theme, that is, on the commodity type of production, on its emergence and domination, and on its strictly capitalist character and how it characterizes modern capitalism, we stopped on September 1, 1951, at a “Naples Meeting” reported in the Party’s Bulletin No. 1, and in another more recent Meeting, also in Naples, which consisted of a paraphrase and commentary on Marx’s paragraph on the “Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof.”

This was mentioned in No. 9 of May 1‑14, 1952, in this very newspaper, and in the contemporaneous “Thread of Time”: “In the Vortex of Mercantile Anarchy.”

According to Joseph Stalin, one can remain in a mercantile environment and dictate secure plans, without the terrible Maelström luring the unwary pilot to the center of the whirlpool and swallowing him into the capitalist abyss. But his article reveals, to those who read as Marxists, that the whirls are tightening and accelerating – as theory has established.

A commodity, as Lenin reminds us, is an object that has two characteristics: being useful to human needs – being exchangeable with another object. But the lines preceding the passage, quoted so much from on high, are simply these: “In capitalist society, commodity production dominates; and therefore Marx’s analysis begins with the analysis of the commodity.”

And so, the commodity has those two prerogatives and becomes a commodity only when the second is juxtaposed to the first. The first, use-value, is entirely understandable even to a flat materialist like us, even to a child, it is organoleptic; we lick sugar for the first time, and we will reach out for the sugar cube. Long is the path, and Marx flies through it in that extraordinary paragraph, for sugar to be invested with an exchange value, and to arrive at Stalin’s delicate problem, astonished that they had fixed for him a grain-cotton equivalence.

Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and we know very well what devilry happens when exchange value is born. So let Vladimir tell it. Where bourgeois economists saw relations between things, Marx discovered relations between men! And what do Marx’s three tomes and Lenin’s 77 pages prove? One simple thing. Where current economics sees the perfect equivalence of an exchange, we no longer see the two exchanged objects but see men in social motion, and we no longer see equivalence but the swindle. Karl Marx speaks of a little spirit that gives the commodity this miraculous and at first glance incomprehensible character. Lenin, like every other Marxist, would have been horrified at the idea that commodities can be produced and exchanged by expelling that little devil with exorcisms: does Stalin perhaps believe this? Or does he just want to tell us that the little devil is stronger than he is?

Just as the ghosts of medieval knights take revenge on Cromwell’s revolution by haunting English castles, bourgeoisly ceded to the landlords, so the imp-fetish of the commodity runs unrestrainable through the halls of the Kremlin and grins from the loudspeakers of the millions of words of the 19th Congress.

Wishing to establish that the identification between mercantilism and capitalism is not absolute, Stalin once again employs our method. He goes back through the centuries and, with Marx, recalls that “under certain regimes (slave-owning, feudal, etc.) commodity production existed without having led to capitalism.” This is indeed said in Marx’s powerful historical overview in that passage, but for quite another purpose and with quite another development. The bourgeois economist proclaims that to link production to consumption, there can never be any other mechanism than the mercantile one, as he knows very well that as long as that mechanism stands, capital remains master of the world. Marx retorts: we shall now go and see what the historical tendency of tomorrow is; for now, I force you to acknowledge the data of the past: mercantilism has not always provided to bring the result of labor to those who needed to consume it; and he cites the primitive economies of gathering food for immediate consumption, the ancient types of family and clan, the closed islands of the feudal system with internal direct consumption without products having to assume the form of commodities. With the unfolding and complicating of technique and need, sectors open up that are provided for first by barter and then by true commerce, but (by the same route that served us regarding private property) it remains proven that the mercantile system is not “natural,” that is, as the bourgeois claims, permanent and eternal. Now, this late appearance of mercantilism (or system of commodity production, as Stalin says), this coexisting on the margins of other systems, serves precisely to show how, having become a universal system as soon as the capitalist system of production spreads, it must die along with it.

It would be long to recount how many times we have cited Marx’s passages against Proudhon, Lassalle, Rodbertus, and a hundred others, which boil down to the accusation of wanting to reconcile mercantilism with the socialist emancipation of the proletariat.

It appears difficult to reconcile with all this, which Lenin calls the cornerstone of Marxism, the current thesis thus referred: “there is no reason why, in the course of a certain period, commodity production cannot also serve a socialist society,” or: “commodity production takes on a capitalist character only when the means of production are in the hands of private interests, and the worker, who does not own them, is forced to sell his labor power.” The hypothesis is evidently absurd since, in Marxist analysis, every time a mass of commodities appears, it is because proletarians deprived of any reserve have had to sell their labor power, and when in the past there were those (limited) sectors of commodity production, it was because labor power was not sold “spontaneously” as today, but extracted by force of arms from prisoner slaves or serfs bound by relations of personal dependence.

Must we reprint once again the first two lines of Capital? “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities.”

The Russian Economy

The text before us, after having more or less skillfully pretended to go back to doctrinal sources, moves to the terrain of the present Russian economy, to silence those who would say that the commodity production system must inevitably lead to the restoration of capitalism, or we who more clearly say: the system of production for commodities survives insofar as we are in the midst of capitalism.

On the Russian economy, there are in the notable text the following admissions. If the large industrial factories are nationalized, small and medium-sized industries are not expropriated; indeed, doing so “would have been a crime.” The orientation would be to develop them into production cooperatives.

There are two sectors of commodity production: on the one hand, State production, which is national. In State enterprises, the means of production and the production itself, that is, the products, are national property. Simple: in Italy, for example, tobacco factories are State-owned, and so are the cigarettes it sells. But is this enough to give the right to say that we are in a phase of “liquidation of wage labor” and that the worker “is not forced to sell his labor power”? No, certainly not.

Let’s move on to the other sector, agriculture: in the kolkhoz, the text says, although the land and machinery are State property, the product of labor does not belong to the State but to the kolkhoz itself. And this is not disposesd of except as a commodity, in exchange for the goods it needs. There exist no other ties between the kolkhozy of the countryside and the town than those given by this exchange: “Production, sale, and exchange of commodities constitute for us a necessity, no less than it did 30 years ago.”

Let us now set aside the argument about the very distant possibility of overcoming such a situation. It remains established that it’s not a matter here of saying, as Lenin did in 1922: we have political power in our hands and maintain the military situation, but in the economy, we must fall back on the mercantile, fully capitalist form. The corollary of such a statement was: let us for now set aside the construction of a socialist economy; we will return to it after the European revolution. Today’s corollaries are altogether different, and opposite.

It’s not even a matter of trying to establish the thesis: in the transition from capitalism to socialism, nevertheless, for a certain time, a certain section of production takes place in the form of commodities.

Here it is said: everything is a commodity; and there is no other economic framework than mercantile exchange, and as a direct consequence also the purchase of wage labor power in the very large State enterprises themselves. And indeed: where does the factory worker find subsistence goods? The kolkhoz sells them through a channel of private merchants, or perhaps sells them to the State from which it buys tools, fertilizers, and other things, and the worker goes to get the goods, paying in money, in State warehouses. Can the State distribute directly to its workers products of which it is the owner? Certainly not, given that the worker (especially the Russian one) does not consume tractors, automobiles, locomotives, and even less… cannons and machine guns. The same items of clothing and furniture are evidently produced by those intact small and medium private enterprises.

The State can therefore give nothing but the wage in money to its employees, with which they purchase what they want (bourgeois formula, which means what little they can). That the wage-dispensing master is the State that “ideally” or “legally” represents the workers themselves means nothing as long as such a State has not even been able to begin to distribute anything outside the mercantile mechanism, anything statistically appreciable.

Anarchy and Despotism

Stalin wanted to recall some Marxist goals that we have dusted off so many times: to diminish the distance and antithesis between town and country, to overcome the social division of labor, to drastically reduce (to five or six hours, immediately) the working day, the only means of eliminating the partition between manual and intellectual labor, and to eradicate the vestiges of bourgeois ideology.

At the meeting in Rome on July 7, 1952, our movement focused on the theme of Marx’s chapter: “Division of Labor in Society and Division of Labor in Manufacture,” and the reader rendered “enterprise” for manufacture. It was demonstrated that to exit from capitalism, it is necessary, along with the system of commodity production, to destroy the social division of labor – and Stalin recalls it – and likewise the enterprise or technical division, on which the brutalization of the worker and factory despotism hinge. These are the two pivots of the bourgeois system: social anarchy and enterprise despotism. We still see in Stalin an attempt to fight against the former; on the latter, he is silent.

Nothing in today’s Russia moves in the direction of these conquests, whether of those evoked today or of those left in the shadows.

If a barrier, insurmountable today and tomorrow, broken only for the purpose of making a mutual mercantile deal, one against the other, is placed between the State factory and the kolkhoz, what will bring town and country closer together, what will lessen the social division between worker and peasant, what will free the former from the need to sell too many hours for too little money and too little food, and thus enable him to contend with the capitalist tradition for the monopoly of science and culture?

Not only are we not in the phase of early socialism, but neither are we in complete State capitalism, that is, an economy in which, although all products are commodities and circulate for money, every product is at the disposal of the State, to the point that from the center the State can fix all equivalence relations, including that of labor power. Even such a State is not economically and politically controllable and conquerable by the working class and functions in the service of Capital rendered anonymous and underground. In any case, Russia is far from such a system, and there we have only a State Industrialism. Such a system, arising after the anti-feudal revolution, is valid to develop and spread industry and capitalism with ardent pace, with State investment in even colossal public works, and to accelerate a transformation of economy and agrarian law in a bourgeois sense. Nothing about the “collective” agrarian farms is State-owned, and nothing socialist, it is well understood; we are at the level of the cooperatives that arose in the Po Valley at the time of the Baldinis and Prampolinis, who managed agricultural production by leasing, if not buying, lands, including State-owned lands like those along riverbanks and others that date back to the old duchies. What in the Kremlin cannot reach Stalin is that in the kolkhozy, they undoubtedly steal a hundred times more than in those drab but honest cooperatives.

Thus, the industrial State, which must negotiate to buy food in the countryside on the “free market” terrain, maintains the remuneration of labor power and time at the same level as private capitalist industry. Indeed, it can be said that as an economic evolution, for example, America is closer than Russia to integral State capitalism, given that perhaps the Russian worker, for three-fifths of his labor, ultimately receives agricultural products, while the American laborer, for three-fifths, receives industrial products, and even those foodstuffs he gets are, for the most part (poor thing) industrially canned.

State and Retreat

And at this point comes another big question: the agriculture-industry relationship leaves us in Russia fully at the bourgeois level, no matter how remarkable the relentless advance of the latter may be, and on this relationship Stalin admits not even having in prospect innovations that come close, not to say to socialism, but to a greater statism.

Even this retreat is cleverly covered by a doctrinal screen. What can we do? Brutally expropriate the kolkhozy? State force is required for this; but here Stalin makes the future abolition of the State reappear, which he otherwise wanted to relegate to the scrap heap, speaking of it with the air of saying: are we kidding, guys?

Evidently, the thesis that the workers’ State disarms when still the entire countryside sector is organized in a private and mercantile form does not hold water, because if for a moment the previously discussed thesis is accepted: that in socialist times commodity production can subsist, it would nevertheless be inseparable from the other: until mercantilism is eliminated in the entire field, there can be no talk of suppression of the State.

And so there remains nothing but to conclude that the solution to the fundamental town-country relationship, though it may be dramatically evolving from its millennia-old Asiatic and feudal characteristics, is presented clearly in the very terms in which capitalism presents it and in the classical terms in which the bourgeois countries have always posed it: to see how to do well in the exchange between the products of industry and those of the land. “This system will therefore require a considerable increase in industrial production.” That is where we are. Even, with the State imagined absent for a moment, a “liberal” solution.

We were saying that, after that of the agriculture-industry relationship, resolved in terms of a full confession of impotence to do anything other than industrialize and increase production (thus to the detriment of the workers), there is another major issue: the relationship between State and the enterprise, and the relationship between enterprises.

The issue arose before Stalin in the form of the validity in Russia, even for the economy of the large State industry, of the law of value proper to capitalist production. This is the law according to which the exchange of commodities always takes place between equivalents: the false façade of “liberty, equality, and Bentham,” which Marx demolished, showing that capitalism does not produce for product but for profit. Between the jaws of this vice, between necessity and the domination of economic laws, Stalin’s Manifesto moves in such a way that confirms our thesis: in its most powerful form, Capital subjugates the State, even when the State appears to be the legal owner of all Enterprises.

On the second day, O Scheherazade, we will tell you about this, and on the third about international markets and the War.

SECOND DAY

The main theme of the first day’s discussion on the issues on which Stalin has responded to our Marxist treatises and clarifications, for the precise defininition of the current economy in Russia, was the dispute that there can be compatibility between commodity production and a socialist economy. For us, any system of commodity production in the modern world, in the world of associated labor, that is, the grouping of workers into production enterprises, defines a capitalist economy.

In what follows, we will come to the question of the stages of the economy, or rather of socialist organization, and the distinction between the lower and higher forms of communism. We now preface that at the heart of our doctrine (to come onto historical ground, moving away from definitions of “static” and thus abstract systems) is the assertion that the transition from a capitalist economy to socialism does not happen in a single stroke but through a long process. It must therefore be admitted that there can be coexistence of sectors with private economy alongside sectors with collective economy, of capitalist (and pre-capitalist) zones with socialist zones, and for a very long period. And we specify right away: every zone or sector in which commodities circulate, which receives or sells commodities (including human labor power), is a capitalist economy.

Now, Stalin declares in his text (now known in full and in the original) that the Russian agrarian sector is mercantile – and confirms that it is a private economy even in terms of ownership of certain means of production – and he attempts to argue that the industrial sector (large industry) does not produce commodities except when it manufactures consumer goods and not “instrumental” goods; nevertheless, he wants to assert that not only the large industrial sector but the entirety of the Russian economy can be defined as socialist, even though commodity production largely survives.

We have amply responded to all this, recalling our abundant research material on the foundational texts of Marxism and on the data from general economic history, including that of the past century, and today, we must move on to the question of “economic laws” and the “law of value.”

Light and Shadows

But first, it is necessary to note from the text under examination that, in the face of objections that referred to Engels to establish that then one exits capitalism when one exits mercantilism, there one overcomes the former where one overcomes the latter, Stalin limits himself to trying to interpret differently a single passage, where the thesis is developed by Engels (making magnificent, masterful use, for this purpose, of the… Stalinist Dühring) throughout the entire “Socialism” section and in the chapters where we have so often drawn quotations from: Theoretical, Production, Distribution.

The passage from Engels says: “With the seizing of the means of production by society, commodity production is eliminated, and with it the domination of the product over the producers.”

The distinction may perhaps (maybe) pass for artful, but doctrinally, it is wrong. Engels, Stalin notes, does not say whether it is about the possession of all the means of production or, of only a part. Now, only the social seizure of all the means of production (large and small industry, agriculture) makes it possible to abandon the system of commodity production. Caramba!

Together with Lenin (and Stalin) around 1919, we broke our backs trying to get it into the thick skulls of social democrats and libertarians that the means of production could not be conquered in one day with the wave of a magic wand, and that precisely for this reason, and for this reason alone, there was needed His Terror, the Dictatorship; now they would have us printing manuals of Political Economy to admit the absurdity that all products will lose the character of commodities in a single stroke, on the day in which some functionary ascending to the Kremlin submits for signature to the Stalin of that distant time the decree that expropriates the last hen of the last member of the last kolkhoz.

Elsewhere, Engels speaks of the possession of all the means of production, and so we are told that the aforementioned formula of Engels “cannot be considered entirely clear and precise.”

By the horns of the prophet Abraham, that’s a strong one! That Friedrich Engels, the reflective, serene, definitive, crystalline Friedrich, the world champion of patiently straightening out dogs’ legs and doctrinal distortions, the unsurpassed, both in modesty and in worth, second to the tempestuous Marx, who sometimes, due to the coruscation of his gaze and language, is found obscure, and in his overpowering brilliance is perhaps – perhaps – more falsifiable; Friedrich, whose prose flows clear without jolts like spring water, and who by natural gift, as well as by the trained rigor of science, omits no necessary word, nor adds any superfluous one, is now accused of lacking precision and clarity!

We are on solid ground: here we are not in the orgbureau or the agitation committee, where perhaps, O ex-comrade Joseph, you could have looked at Friedrich as an equal. Here we are in the school of principles. Where is it said about the seizure of all means? Where is it spoken of about commodities, perhaps? Never again. This, Engels recalls, this seizure of all means of production, “since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, has more or less obscurely presented itself as a future ideal before the eyes of individuals or sects.” Let’s not play between clarity and obscurity. Precisely for us, it is no longer a matter of an ideal but of science.

And if further on Engels speaks again of society as owner of all means of production, it is precisely in the passage that outlines the set of demands that we thoroughly treated during the aforementioned meeting in Rome, in that only with such a result will the emancipation of all individuals be achieved. Engels here shows how the requests: abolition of the division between town and country, between intellectual and manual labor, of the social and professional division of labor (Stalin admits the first two but claims, with another serious doctrinal mistake, that this problem was not posed by the classics of Marxism!!) were already proposed by the utopians and vigorously so by Fourier and Owen, with a limitation of three thousand souls for population centers, with absolute alternation of manual and intellectual occupations for the same individual. Engels demonstrates how such just and generous demands lacked the demonstration provided by Marxism: namely, their possibility based on the degree of development of the productive forces reached (and now surpassed) by capitalism. Here, it is a matter of anticipating the supreme victory of the revolution, it describes that “organization in which labor will no longer be a burden but a pleasure,” and recalls the exhaustive demonstration already illustrated by us – and classic, by God! – in Chapter 12 of Capital on the destruction of the division of labor in society and of the despotism in the enterprise, brutalizer of man; aspects in which Stalin or Malenkov cannot claim to have made any progress, since instead, as Stakhanovism and Shturmovshchina (a dialectical reaction to the former by poor souls crushed in the deified enterprise) prove, the march is in the direction of the heaviest capitalism.

Stalin actually minimizes those postulates, reducing them to the “elimination of conflicting interests” between industry and agriculture, between manual laborer and technical manager. It is about much more than that! About abolishing in social organization the fixed distribution of individuals among those spheres and functions.

Where on earth do those passages of Engels authorize one to say that, in order to build this immense edifice of the future society, every pickaxe blow should not destroy a position of mercantilism, sweeping away one after another its pestilential trenches?

We certainly cannot repeat those entire chapters to Stalin here, and as usual, we will quote the central passages, because they are very clear and indisputable, and not to accept them cum grano salis. We know how those grains have become mountains, from long experience.

Engels: “The exchange of products of equal value, expressed by social labor, for one another – thus the law of value – is precisely the fundamental law of commodity production, thus also of its highest form, capitalist production.” This is followed by the well-known remark that Dühring, with Proudhon, conceives of the future society as mercantile and does not realize that with this he describes a capitalist society. Imaginary, says Engels. Stalin describes, in a not contemptible text, a real one, we modestly say.

Marx: “Let us imagine an association of free men, working with means of production in common and using according to a predetermined plan their numerous individual forces as one and the same social labor force.” In Naples, we commented word by word, showing that this initial paragraph is an entire revolutionary program. We return, with the future arrival at this form of social organization, lapidarily defined – communism! – to Robinson, from whom we started. What does that mean? Robinson’s product was not a commodity but only an object of use, exchange not having been born – of course. Soaring over all human history with an eagle’s flight: “All this is reproduced here socially but not individually.” Here; in said communist association. The only manual we need is the manual to learn how to read! And one reads: again, the product of labor ceases to be a commodity when society is socialist. And Marx goes on to compare this state of affairs (socialism) with commodity production, showing that this is its dialectical, perfect, fierce, and irreconcilable opposite.

Society and Fatherland

Yet before addressing the point of economic laws, something still needs to be said about the Stalinist version of the presentation of the socialist program as carved by Engels in those chapters. It is all the more necessary since Stalin, in refuting opinions of various Russian economists, far from attempting further breaches and revisions of the classic text, quotes whole passages from it, expressing harsh party condemnation for any violation of complete orthodoxy in this matter.

In all the developments of his fundamental exposition, Engels speaks of the appropriation of the means of production (and, let us note it a thousand times, in relation to the research we have dedicated in this paper and in Prometeo, especially concerning the products, which today dominate the producer and even the buyer: such that we define capitalism, rather than as a system of the denied disposal of the means of production to the producer, but as a system of the denied disposal of the products) of appropriation, therefore, always by Society.

In the Moscow paraphrase, “society” disappears, and in its place, there is talk repeatedly of the transfer of the instruments of production to the State, the Nation, and when they really want to stir emotion, to the People – in the closing speeches, eliciting the ritual ovations, to the Socialist Fatherland!

Having assessed Stalin’s description, not without recognizing its merit of being brutally honest (the leopard loses its spots… with what follows), the seizure of the means of production appears purely juridical, inasmuch as every one of its effects is limited to the pages of the Statute of the State agricultural artel or of the latest (under revision) Constitutional Charter of the Union, as far as it concerns the land and the large machinery and equipment of agriculture, given that the declaration on legal ownership is not followed by the economic disposal of agricultural products, divided between collective kolkhozy and individual kolkhozians. Such seizure is effective only for large industry because only of its products does the State dispose, and even resells those that are consumer products. Public seizure does not exist, not only for products but not even for means of production, with respect to medium and small industry, to commercial enterprises, to the lesser equipment of the encouraged family and small-plot agrarian cultivation. Therefore little, despite the immense factories and the gigantic works of public construction, is truly in the hands and under the control of the Republic that calls itself socialist and Soviet, little has been statified, nationalized in full. The relative size of State property, compared to the whole economy, is perhaps greater in some bourgeois States.

But who, what entity and what force, holds in its hands what was snatched from private hands after the revolution? The people, the nation, the fatherland! Never did Engels and Marx use these words. “The transformation into State property does not suppress the capitalist appropriation of the productive forces,” affirms Engels in the aforementioned chapter.

When society claims for itself the disposal of products, it will be clear that this will be the classless society, which has overcome classes; and as long as classes exist, it will be society organized “of one single class” with a view to the abolition of all classes, and then even that one class by dialectical consequence. Here, the masterful clarification of the Marxist doctrine of the State, crystallized since 1847, is grafted. “The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property (words of Marx in Engels’s quotation). But by doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and antagonisms, and abolishes also the State.” And then, and in this way, and only on this main road, it is society that we see acting, finally disposing of the productive forces and of every product and resource.

But the people, what the hell is that? A hybridisation of classes, an amalgam of parasites and slaves, of professionals of business and power with masses of hungry and oppressed. We consigned the people, even before 1848, to the leagues for liberty and democracy, pacifism, and humanitarian progressivism. The people are not a subject of economic management but only an object of exploitation and deception, in its pitiably infamous “majorities.”

And the nation? Another necessity and foundational condition for the construction of capitalism, expressing the same mixture of social classes no longer in the insipid juridical and philosophical expression, but in the geographical, ethnographic, or linguistic one. Even the nation does not appropriate anything: Marx derided in famous passages the expressions of national wealth and national income (this is important in Stalin’s analysis of Russia) and demonstrated how the nation enriches itself precisely when the worker is swindled.

If the bourgeois revolutions and the spread of modern industry in place of feudal systems in Europe and any other system in the world had to be made not in the name of the bourgeoisie and capital but in the name of peoples and nations, if this was a necessary and revolutionary transition in the Marxist vision, one deduces from it the perfect coherence, in Moscow’s directives, between the defection from the front of Marxist economics and the retreat from the proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist “category” of society, as used in the classical texts, to the political categories proper to bourgeois ideology and agitation: popular democracy and national independence.

Nothing, therefore, to be surprised about that after 26 years, the boorish slogan is repeated before which we forever burned the bridge: to pick up the bourgeois flags that, once high in the time of Cromwell, Washington, Robespierre, or Garibaldi, have since fallen into the mud, and which the march of the revolution must instead sink into it mercilessly, opposing socialist society to the lies and myths of peoples, nations, and fatherlands.

Law and Theory

The discussion has also turned to the comparison of the laws of the Russian economy with those established by Marxism for the bourgeois economy. The text in question engages dialectically on two fronts. Some say this: were our economy already socialist, we would no longer be deterministically set upon the inexorable track of given economic processes, but we could modify the path: for example, by nationalizing the kolkhoz, suppressing mercantile exchange and money. If you prove to us that this is impossible, let us deduce that we live in a society with a completely capitalist economy. What is to be gained by pretending otherwise? Others, instead, would like us to decisively abandon the distinguishing criteria of socialism established by theoretical Marxism. Stalin tries to resist both groups. These naive researchers are evidently not active “political” elements, the proof is that, if they were, an easy purge would have put them in a position not to bother. They are only “technicians,” experts of the current productive mechanism, who are the only conduit through which the central government can figure out whether the big machine is running or stalling; and if they were right, silencing them would serve no purpose: in one form or another, the crisis would present itself. The difficulty that has arisen today, or rather, has come to light, is not of an academic, critical, or even “parliamentary” nature, because to laugh off these pinpricks you need only be, not to say a Hitler, but the last of the De Gasperis. The difficulty is real, material, lies in things and not in heads.

To be able to respond, two points must be argued from the center of government: the first is that even in a socialist economy, people must obey laws peculiar to economics that cannot be transgressed – the second is that these laws, even if in the future period of perfect communism they will all be entirely different from those of the capitalist era as established by Marx, in the socialist period are some different from those, some common to capitalist production and distribution. And then, having identified the laws that appear insurmountable, it is necessary, under penalty of ruin, not to ignore them and above all not to go against them.

Then the special, though essential problem has arisen: among these, does the law of value apply in the Russian economy or not? And if it does, isn’t any mechanism that acts according to the law of value straightforward capitalism? To the first question, Stalin answers: yes, with us the law is in force, although not over the entire horizon. To the second: no, there can be an economy that, while not being capitalist, respects the law of value.

Throughout the solemn theoretical “essay,” it seems to us that the arrangement is rather flawed, and above all convenient for the polemical opponents of Marxism, for those who use “philosophical” weapons and will have an easy time pointing out the simplistic assimilation between the effect of natural and economic laws on the human species, and for those economists who have anxiously yearned for revenge on Marx for a century, who wanted to trap us in the circle: “Useless, you will never be able to escape the laws of economic yield and the competition of interests as we see them.”

We must distinguish between theory, law, and program. At a certain point, Stalin lets himself say: Marx did not like (!) to abstract himself from the study of capitalist production.

At the last meeting of our movement, on September 6 and 7 in Milan, one of the main themes was to demonstrate that at every step, Marx shows the purpose, not of coldly describing the capitalist fact, but of advancing the intention and program of the destruction of capitalism. It was not only about dispelling that old filthy opportunist legend, but about showing that the entire Marxist work has the nature of polemic and combat, and therefore does not waste time describing capitalism and contingent capitalisms, but a typical capitalism, a capitalist system, yes, gentlemen, abstract, yes, gentlemen, which does not exist but that fully corresponds to the apologetic assumptions of bourgeois economists. What matters is, in fact, the collision – class collision, partisan collision, not banal diatribes of scientists – between the two positions: one that wants to prove the permanence, the eternity of the capitalist machine, and one that demonstrates its imminent death. From this perspective, it is convenient for revolutionary Marx to admit that indeed the gears are perfectly centered and lubricated by the freedom of competition, by the right for all to produce and consume according to the same rules. This, in the real history of capital, was not, is not, and will not be the case, and the starting data are enormously more favorable to our demonstration: all the better. If, to put it briefly, capitalism had managed to live another century remaining smooth and idyllic, Marx’s demonstration would collapse: it shines with power insofar as capitalism lives, yes, but as a monopolist, oppressor, dictator, mass murderer, and its economic development data are precisely those it had to have had starting from the initial pure type; in line with our doctrine, against that of its lackeys.

In this sense, by all the gods, Marx sacrificed a life to describe socialism, communism, and we feel like saying that if it had been only a matter of describing capitalism, he would have absolutely not given a damn.

Marx therefore, studies and develops, yes, the “economic laws” of capitalism, but in such a way that the system of characteristics of socialism is fully and dialectically opposedly developed. So, does this system have laws? Are they different? And which ones then?

One moment, please. At the center of the Marxist construction, we place the program, which is a further step beyond the cold research study. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, however, to change it.” (Theses on Feuerbach, and every cultured fool adds: youthful.) But before the program and even before indicating the discovered laws, it is necessary to establish the whole doctrine, the system of “theories”.

Some theories, Marx finds ready-made in his own contradictors, such as Ricardo’s theory of value, and even the theory of surplus value. These – we do not mean to say that Stalin never knew this – are different things from the “law of value” and “law of surplus value” that he discusses in depth, which, to avoid confusing the less experienced, would be to call: the “law of exchange between equivalents” and the “law of the relation between the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit.”

The distinction we wish to clarify for the reader also applies to the study of physical nature. Theory is a presentation of actual processes and their correspondences that aims to facilitate their general understanding in a certain field, moving only later to prediction and modification. Law is the precise expression of a certain relationship between two series of material facts in particular, which is seen to constantly occur, and as such allows calculating unknown relations (future, gentlemen philosophers, or present or past, it does not matter: for example, a certain law, if well studied, can allow me to establish what the sea level was at the Temple of Serapis a thousand years ago, the only difference is that you cannot verify it, as was the case with the many donkey tails between the Earth and the Moon). Theory is a general matter, law is a well-delimited and particular matter. Theory is generally qualitative and only establishes definitions of certain entities or quantities. Law is quantitative and aims to achieve measurement.

A physical example: in the history of optics, two “theories” of light have alternated with varying success. The emission theory says that light is the effect of the movement of minute corpuscular particles; the undulation theory says that it is the effect of the oscillation of a fixed medium in which it is transmitted. Now, the simplest law of optics, that of reflection, says that the ray incident on the mirror makes the same angle with it as the emitted ray. Verified a thousand times, this law allows the gallant young man to know where to stand to catch a glimpse of a beauty, absorbed in her toilette, across from him: the fact is that the law is compatible with both theories, and it was other phenomena and other laws that determined the choice.

Now, according to the text, this would happen: the “law of exchange between equivalent values” is compatible both with Stalin’s “theory” that says: there are mercantile forms in a socialist economy, and with our (modestly) theory that says: if there are mercantile forms and large-scale production, it is capitalism. Verifying the law: easy, if you go to Russia and see that exchanges occur in rubles at given prices, as in any banal bazaar: the law of equivalent exchange applies. Determining which is the true theory is a bit more complicated: we deduce: we are in full, straightforward, and authentic capitalism; Stalin fabricates a theory – precisely: theories are invented, laws are discovered – and says in defiance of Papa Marx: given economic phenomena of socialism occur normally according to the law of exchange (called the law of value).

Nature and History

Before coming to the point – what are in Marx the laws of capitalist economy, and which of them are “discriminating” between capitalism and socialism, which (if any) are common to both stages – it should be noted the all-too-common assimilation between physical laws and social laws.

As fighters and polemicists, as we must be in the school of Marx, we must not dissolve such a question in a scholastic tone and insist on theoretical analogy for the “political” aim of avoiding being told: if social laws are not as unbreakable as, for example, the law of gravity, then we can remove some of them.

How can one forget that between the colossus Marx and the pack of salaried curs in the universities of capital, the struggle revolves around the point that the laws of bourgeois economy “are not natural laws,” and therefore we can and will break their circle? It is true that Stalin’s writing recalls that in Marx, the laws of economics are not “eternal,” but there are those peculiar to each stage and social epoch: slavery, feudalism, capitalism, but he then wants to arrive at saying that “certain laws” are common to all epochs and will also apply in socialism, which will also have its own “political economy.” Stalin mocks Yaroshenko and Bukharin, who would have said that political economy is succeeded by a science of social organization, and Stalin, sharply, retorts that this new discipline, approached by Russian pseudo-Marxist economists fearful of the Tsarist police, is indeed an “economic policy,” whose necessity he admits as a different thing. Well, let’s think of this: if in socialism there will be an economic science, we will discuss it once the terms are in their proper place; but when there is still an economic policy (as there must be under the proletarian dictatorship, too), there rival classes are present, there socialism has not yet been reached. And we must, à la Lenin, ask ourselves again: who holds power? And therefore: the economic development – which is, we agree, gradual – in which direction is it going? Its laws will tell us.

As for the general problem of the laws of nature and history, it must find a place in the treatises of our theoretical journal, where we respond to attacks that Marxism receives – given that out of a thousand writers, nine hundred and ninety-nine consider Moscow as the official seat – with regard to the banality of the expression given to the theory (this is a theory and not a law) of historical materialism, and regarding problems of determination and will, causality and finality. The original position of Marx is always that (so little understood and so uncomfortable for those who play the politics of opportunistic success) always that of the direct battle between the opposing classes and their historical antagonism, which sometimes employs the typewriter and sometimes the machine gun – we no longer say the pen and the sword. For us, the bourgeoisie, when it won, advanced the critical scientific method and boldly applied it, after the natural field, to the social one. It discovered and revealed theories that are now ours: that of value (the value of a commodity is given by the amount and time of social labor necessary to reproduce it) and of surplus value (the value of each commodity contains advanced capital and surplus value: the first part is reimbursement, for the second profit). And it said triumphantly: if you admit (and the same science a century later admits it) that the same physical laws apply to the primitive nebula and to our Earth today, you must admit that all future human societies will obey the same social relations, since we jointly expel the intervention of God or pure Thought from both fields. Marxism consists in scientifically showing that, instead, in the social cosmos, a cycle unfolds that will break the capitalist forms and laws, and that the future social cosmos will be regulated differently. Since you, for domestic and foreign “political” effects, do not mind castrating and trivializing this powerful construction to the point of ridicule, finally do us the favor of abandoning the adjectives of Marxists, socialists, and communists, call yourselves economists, populists, progressives: it suits you perfectly.

Marx and the Laws

Engels recognizes Marx as the founder of the doctrine of historical materialism. Marx declares that his contribution in applying the doctrine to the present world does not consist in having discovered the struggle between classes but in having introduced the notion of the proletarian dictatorship.

The doctrine thus unfolds up to the class and party program, up to the organization of the working class for insurrection and seizure of power. On this gigantic path lies the investigation into the laws of capitalism. There are two true and principal laws established in Capital. In Volume I, the general law of capitalist accumulation is established, the one known as growing misery – so often treated by us – which establishes how, with the concentration of capital in large masses, the number of proletarians and of the “reserve-less” grows – and we have explained a thousand times that this does not mean that the level of consumption and of the real standard of living of the worker decreases. In Volumes II and III of Capital, which in our journal will be the subject of an organic exposition as it was for the first, the law of the reproduction of Capital is developed (connected to that, on which we will dwell further, of the fall in the rate of profit). According to this, a part of the product and thus of labor must be set aside by the capitalist to reproduce the capital goods of the economists, that is, worn-out machines, factories, etc. When capital allocates a higher share to such setting aside, it “invests”, that is, increases the endowment of plants and productive instruments. Marx’s laws on how the human product is divided between immediate consumption and instrumental investments tend to prove that so long as mercantile exchange and the wage system remain standing, the system will face crises and revolutions.

Now, the first law cannot certainly be applied to socialist society because this organizes itself precisely to ensure that the social reserve is an individual guarantee for all, while not belonging to anyone nor being divided (as in pre-capitalism) into many small shares. The second law, says Stalin, persists and claims that Marx predicted it. Marxism establishes only, and among other things in the famous passage of the critique of the Gotha Program, that there will also be a social levy on individual labor even under the communist regime, to provide for the maintenance of plants, general services, and so on. It will not have the character of exploitation precisely because it will not be done through the mercantile way; and precisely for this reason, the social provision will determine a stable equilibrium, and not a series of upheavals, in the relation between products to be consumed and products to be destined for “instruments” for further production.

The central point of all this lies in this. Stalin, with a precious admission, declares that, since the law of value applies even in State industry, those industries function on the basis of commercial yield, profitable management, cost of production, prices, etc. For the etcetera, we write: remunerative. Moreover, he declares that the future program is to increase the production of instruments of production. This means that the “plans” of the Soviet government to industrialize the country require, more than consumer goods for the population, that machines, plows, tractors, fertilizers, etc., are produced, and colossal public works are undertaken.

For the next meeting of our modest movement, we had already studied a suggestive topic: capitalist States make plans, and so will the proletarian dictatorship. But the first true socialist plan will present itself (we mean as to immediate despotic intervention: Manifesto) finally as a plan to: increase production costs, reduce the working day, disinvest capital, level both quantitatively and especially qualitatively consumption, which in capitalist anarchy is for nine-tenths useless destruction of product, only insofar as this responds to “profitable commercial management” and “remunerative price.” A plan, therefore, of underproduction, of a drastic reduction of the produced share of capital goods. We will easily break the law of reproduction if at last Marx’s Department II (which produces food) prevails over Department I (which produces machinery). The current orchestra has already broken our eardrums.

Food is for the workers, instruments for the masters. Easy to say that since the master is the workers’ State, the miserable workers have an interest in “investing” and working half a day for Department I! When Yaroshenko reduces the critique of this tendency toward the fantastic increase in the production of instruments to the formula: economy for consumption and not for production, he falls into banality. But equally banal is the appeal, to smuggle State industrialism under the socialist banner, to agitation formulas such as: “He who does not work does not eat”; “abolition of the exploitation of man by man”; as if the purpose of the exploited class were the elegant task of ensuring that it is exploted by itself.

In reality, and even sticking to the analyses of the economic world alone, the Russian economy applies all the laws of capitalism. How can the production of non-consumption goods be increased without proletarianizing people? Where do they get them? The path is the same as in primitive accumulation, and often the means are equally ferocious as those described in Capital. Either they will be kolkhozians who will be left without their cow, or wandering shepherds of Asia torn from the contemplation of the vague stars of the Ursa, or feudal serfs of Mongolia uprooted from the millenary glebe. Certainly, the directive is: more capital goods, more workers, more working time, more labor intensity: accumulation and expanded reproduction of capital at the pace of hell.

The homage that we render to the “great Stalin”, despite a host of little fools, is this. Precisely insofar as the process of initial capitalist accumulation unfolds, and if this really reaches the provinces of immense China, the mysterious Tibet, the fabled Central Asia from which the European lineage emerged, this will be revolutionary, it will turn the wheel of history forward. But it will not be socialist, but capitalist. What is needed in that great portion of the globe is the exaltation of the productive forces. But Stalin is right when he says that the merit is not Stalin’s but of the economic laws that impose this “policy” on him. His whole enterprise lies in a falsification of the label: this too, a classic expedient of primitive accumulators!

In the West, on the other hand, the productive forces are already too abundant, and their surging makes the States oppressors, devourers of markets and lands, preparers of carnage and war. There, plans to increase production are not needed but only the plan of the destruction of a gang of criminals. And above all, of plunging into the mud their stinking flag of freedom and parliamentarianism.

Socialism and Communism

We will close the economic topic with a synthesis of the stages of future society, on which Stalin’s “document” (there it is, the word buzzing on the keys!) brings a little disorder. France Press accused him of having plagiarized from Nikolai Bukharin’s writing on the economic laws of the transition period. But this writing Stalin quotes several times, indeed using a criticism that Lenin made of it. Bukharin had the great merit, when he was commissioned to prepare the Comintern Program, which remained a draft, of highlighting the anti-mercantile postulate of the socialist revolution as a matter of utmost importance. He then followed Lenin in an analysis of the transition “in Russia” and in the recognition that mercantile forms had to be endured under the proletarian dictatorship.

Everything becomes clear when it is noted that the stage of Lenin and Bukharin comes before the two stages of communist society of which Marx speaks and which Lenin illustrates in the magnificent chapter of “State and Revolution.”

This overview can thus recap the not-so-simple topic of today’s dialogue.

Stage of Transition. The proletariat has conquered political power and must place non-proletarian classes outside the law precisely because it cannot “abolish” them in a single stroke. This means that the proletarian State oversees an economy that, in part, always decreasing, not only has mercantile distribution but forms of private disposal both of products and means of production, whether scattered or concentrated. An economy not yet socialist, a transitional economy.

Lower Stage of Communism, or if you will, of Socialism. Society already has disposal over products in general and allocates them to its members through a “rationing” plan. This function is no longer provided by mercantile exchange and money – one cannot pass off to Stalin, as a prospect of a more communist form, simple exchange without money, but still with the law of value: that would be a kind of relapse into the barter system. Instead, it is allocation from the center without the return of an equivalent. Example: an epidemic of malaria breaks out, and quinine is distributed free in the area, but in the measure of only one tube per inhabitant.

In such a stage, there is needed not only the obligation to work, but also a record of the labor time performed and its certification, the famous voucher so much discussed over a century, which has the characteristic of not being able to be accumulated, so that every attempt at accumulation corresponds to the loss of a labor quota without equivalent. The law of value is buried. (Engels: society does not attribute any “value” to products.)

Stage of Higher Communism, which we have no difficulty in calling Full Socialism. The productivity of labor is such that, to avoid the squandering of product and human power, there is no need (except in pathological cases) to have either coercion or rationing. Free withdrawal for consumption by all. Example: pharmacies distribute free quinine without limit. And if someone takes ten tubes to poison himself? Evidently, he is as foolish as those who mistake a fetid bourgeois society for a socialist one.

In which stage of the three is Stalin? In none. He is in the transition not from, but to capitalism. Almost respectable, and not suicidal.

THIRD DAY (Morning)

On the first day, a debate was held on the point that every system of commodity production is a capitalist system, since mass production by masses of men results in masses of commodities. Capitalism and mercantilism will retreat together from their subsequent fields of action or spheres of influence in the modern world.

It was resumed on the second, moving from the general process to that of the present Russian economy and, holding the denounced laws of its structure as correct, it was affirmed that from them resulted the full diagnosis of capitalism, at the stage of “State grand-industrialism.”

According to our interlocutor, Stalin, this rather defined and concrete process, applied to an immense area and population, can lead to an accumulation and concentration of heavy production, second to none, without necessarily having to repeat the phases of fierce reduction to propertylessness of the poor classes enclosed in local economic circles and in the small-scale technique of labor – as in England, France, etc. – and based solely on the foregone (since 1917) liquidation of large landowners.

If this second point were reduced to the thesis that, centuries later, the in-depth introduction of the large-scale labor technique with the resources of applied science arises, in such a different universal framework, this could be a subject of separate study, in the “agrarian question” especially. The opponent may be allowed to prove that he will reach full capitalism not by carriage but by airplane; but in turn, let him confess the “direction of the motion.” We are passing to him from the ground, we poor pedestrians, the exact data of a series of bases – but even radar can go crazy.

And now a third step: the framework of world relations across the complex horizon of production, consumption, exchange; State and military power relations.

The three are aspects of one single and great problem. The first could be called the historical aspect, the second, the economic aspect, the third and concluding, the political aspect. The direction and endpoint of the research cannot but be unitary.

Products and Exchanges

It happens, self-evidently, to the head of the Russian State and party that he has to change the front of his doctrinal corrections, and of the corresponding dry reprimands to the objections of the “comrades,” whenever he passes from the economic circulation within his own circle to circulation through it. We have already noted, the reader may recall, that this point of arrival had made the vigilant ears of the West perk up. Far from singing once again the hymn to a millennial autarky, the man of the Kremlin had calmly braqué (aimed) the telescope – tomorrow, those with a studied air wondered, the rangefinder? – toward the spaces beyond the curtain; and old tales of partitioning spheres of influence, as an alternative to breakout sorties, resurfaced. A key, however, less shrill and foolish than than that of the crime of genocide or the delusion of aggression.

The manner of getting industrial goods within Russia – and connected countries – to the farmers, and rural goods to the city dwellers, crushing with passages from Marx and Engels the John Does, and when necessary, rectifying ex officio, terms, phrases, and formulas of the authors, was asserted in full accordance with Socialism. The kolkhozy sell their products “freely,” and there is no other means of obtaining them; thus, via the market, yes, but with special rules: State prices (a novelty! an exclusive specialty!), and even special “pacts” of decommodification, in that no money is given but is “carried on account” against supplies from national factories (supreme originality! downfall of the corner grocer, of the American marine who establishes the equivalence between sexual favors and packs of cigarettes, and the banal clearings of Western countries!). Actually, the Master says, I wouldn’t say de-commodification but exchange of products. We wouldn’t want it to be the translations’ fault; in short, every system of equivalents, more or less conventional, from the barter of savages to money as the universal equivalent for all, to the hundred thousand systems of bookeeping for balanced accounts, ranging from the maid’s little notebook to the complicated bank filing systems, where additions are made by atomic brains, and thousands of recruits daily swell the suffocating fleet of sellers of navel-scratching-labor-power – why were they born and why do they exist, if not for the exchange of products, and for that alone?

But Stalin wants to silence the worm that from the “balances” of equivalent exchanges comes private accumulation, and says that the guarantees are there.

Even for the most general of generals, it’s hard to stay in the saddle on such a thesis, and to parry alternately in two directions, a blow to doctrinal rigidity, a blow to revisionist concession. Elasticity of the true Leninist Bolshevik? No, eclecticism, was our answer; and then the Bolsheviks would fly into a rage.

Be that as it may, for domestic relations (whose examination does not end today nor here, as already stated), Stalin himself makes a wide reservation when he speaks of foreign relations. Comrade Notkin gets quite an earful for having maintained that the various machines and instruments built in State workshops are also commodities. They have value, their price is recorded, but they are not commodities: we see Notkin scratching his head. “This is necessary, secondly, to realize the sale of means of production to foreign States, in the interest of foreign trade. Here, in the field of foreign trade, but only in this field (italics in original), our products are indeed commodities and are actually sold (without quotation marks).”

In the text bearing the formal imprimatur, this last parenthesis appears: we think the incautious Notkin put the word “sold” in quotation marks, which to a Marxist and Bolshevik smells quite a bit. He must not have graduated from the youth classes, clearly.

In a couple of years, we will need this data: the quantum, please. The relative share of what is placed abroad and domestically. And another piece of information: is it considered desirable for this share to rise or fall? That the total product must rise to the point of vertigo, we already know from the law of “proportional” planned economy. Not knowing Russian, we suppose that the correct meaning is: production plans that increase production at a constant annual rate, in the form of the law of population growth or compound interest. The correct term we propose is this: planned development at a geometric rate. Having correctly traced the “curve,” with our little wisdom we would write this “law”: socialism begins where this curve breaks.

Today we note: that amount of even capital goods that go abroad are commodities, not only in the “form” of accounting but also in the “substance.”

There’s one. Argue for long enough, even across a thousand kilometers, and eventually you end up agreeing on something.

Profit and Surplus Value

A little more patience, and we will come to talk about high politics and high strategy: we will see furrowed brows relax, given that in those matters everyone understands instantly: is Caesar attacking? Is Pompey fleeing? Will we meet again at Philippi? Will we cross the Rubicon? Now that’s digestible stuff, because it’s “tasty.”

Another point of Marxist economics is necessary. The force of circumstances leads the marshal to the explosive problem of the world market. He says that the U.S.S.R. supports the associated countries with economic aid that enhances their industrialization. Does this apply to China and Czechoslovakia? Let’s go on. “Thanks to such rates of industrial development, we shall rapidly arrive at ensuring that these countries not only no longer need to import goods from capitalist countries but will themselves feel the necessity to export the surplus goods of their production.” The usual aside, or inclusion: if they produce and export to the West, then they are commodities. If in Russia, what are they?

The important fact, in this return with banners unfurled to mercantilism in form and substance identical to that of capitalism (if one were really to believe in the makeover of economic faces!), is that it is based on the imperative: export in order to produce more! And it is the same imperative that essentially prevails within the domestic sphere of the so-called “socialist country,” where instead it is a real import-export affair between town and country, between the famous allied classes, because even there we have seen that it arrives at the law of geometric rate, and at: Produce more! Produce more!

Here’s how much of Marxism remains standing! Because since “the workers are in power,” we must no longer – Stalin insists – use offensive formulas that distinguish between necessary and surplus labor; paid and unpaid labor! And because, as we will see, having made some concessions to the law of surplus value (which is then zoologically a theory, according to the Second Day’s terms, and not a law), from now on: “It is not true that the fundamental economic law of contemporary capitalism is the law of the fall in the average rate of profit.” “Monopoly capitalism (here we go: what did you know about this, poor Karl?) cannot content itself with average profit (which, moreover, as a result of the increase in the organic composition of capital, has a tendency to decrease) but seeks maximum profit.” While the parenthesis of the official text seems for a moment to revive the extinct law of Marx, the new one is then proclaimed: “The pursuit of maximum profit is the fundamental economic law of contemporary capitalism.”

If the flamethrower in the library goes a little further, not even the operator’s mustache will be left.

These counter-nails that are being hammered in, crooked as they are, from all sides, are intolerable. They claim that the economic laws of monopoly capitalism have proved vastly different from those of the capitalism of Marx. Then the same people claim that the economic laws of socialism can very well remain the same as those of capitalism.

The window, now!

Heroically, let’s start again ab ovo. We must remember the difference between mass of profit and mass of surplus value, rate of profit and rate of surplus value, and what the importance is of Marx’s law, meticulously exposed at the beginning of Volume III, concerning the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall. Understand, read! It is not the capitalist who tends to the fall of profit! It is not the profit (mass of profit) that falls, but the rate of profit! Not the rate of every profit, but the average rate of social profit. Not every week or with each issue of the Financial Times, but historically, in the development traced by Marx up to the “social monopoly of the means of production” in the claws of Capital, whose definition, birth, life, and death are written.

If this much is grasped, it will be possible to see how the effort, not of the individual corporate capitalist, a secondary figure in Marx, but of the historical machine of capital, of this corpus endowed with vis vitalis and soul, to struggle in vain against the law of the falling rate, is precisely what makes us conclude on the classical theses that Stalin, amid Western bewilderment, deigns once again to embrace. First: the inevitability of war between capitalist States. Second: the inevitability of the revolutionary fall of capitalism everywhere.

This gigantic effort, with which the capitalist system struggles not to sink, is expressed in the slogan: produce in crescendo! Not only not to pause but to mark every hour the increase of the increase. In mathematics: curve of geometric progression; in symphony: Rossinian crescendo. And to that end, when the entire fatherland is mechanized, export. And know well the lesson of five centuries: trade follows the flag.

But this, Dzhugashvili, is your slogan.

Engels and Marx

For the demonstration, once again, we must return to Marx and Engels. Not, however, to organic, complete texts, written in one go, which each of them carved in the fullest vigor and direct impetus of one who has no doubts or gaps and sweeps obstacles from their path without any collision being felt. It is a question of the Marx, whom the testamentary executor gives an account in the almost dramatic prefaces to the second volume of Capital (May 5, 1885) and the third (October 4, 1894). First, it is a matter of justifying the state of the immense mass of materials and manuscripts (ranging from chapters in their final form to scraps of notes, notebooks, sketches, illegible abbreviations, promises of future research, and even pages uncertain and faltering in style) with Marx’s declining health, with the inexorable effect of repeated relapses of illness that forced him into pauses in which anxiety devoured his liver and powerful brain far more than the rest could heal them. Between 1863 and 1867, the labor furnished by that human machine was incalculable, and among it, the casting in a single fusion of steel the first volume of the greatest work. Already in 1864‑65, the illness had given the first troubles, and of its devastations, the unerring eye of the great helper marks the traces in the unpublished fascicles. But then the same exhausting work: deciphering, rereading, re-dictating, reordering the dictated text, giving order to the material, with the stubborn decision not to compose anything of his own, even overcame the resistance of the robust Engels himself: his generous eyes had watched too long over the pages of his friend, and a worrying weakness of eyesight condemned him for several years to reduce his personal work, forbidding him to write by artificial light. Not defeated, not discouraged, he offers his humble and loyal apologies to the Cause. Nothing else had been given him to do. With modesty, he recalls all the other sectors in which he “alone” has borne on himself all the weight. And his death follows a year later.

This is not for embellishment or effect. It is meant to highlight that the demand for technical fidelity, which dominates the compiler, has almost entirely deprived the two books those chapters of periodic synthesis and overall vision, which blaze forth in the one written in Marx’s lifetime. To Engels’s pen are owed, such overviews, neither few nor of little worth: but under Marx’s name, he did not want to extend them, and limited himself to analysis. Had it not been so, certain dual readings (today and for half a century) would be a vain effort, and for example, the sad legend that in the last book Marx had retracted something; and some want this in philosophy, some in economic science, some in politics, according to their personally confused tastes. As many explicit references and connections exist between the first volume and the early works or the Manifesto, so too between it and the later writings; and a thousand passages from the letters reaffirm it.

Less than that of Engels is this a place for analysis. We only note that in one passage Marx says, with one such overview, why he works so much on that law of the falling rate. Well, Engels hesitates to reproduce the passage, he frames it in square brackets because, although it was drafted according to a note in the original manuscript, it surpasses, in some developments, the materials found in the original…

[“The law of the increase in the productive power of labor does not, therefore, hold in an absolute way for Capital. This productive power is increased by capital NOT BY MEANS OF A SIMPLE REDUCTION OF LIVING LABOR IN GENERAL, but only when it saves, on the paid part of living labor, more than has been added to it of past labor, as we have briefly hinted in Volume I, XII, 2 (value transmitted from the machine to the product: quite topical, isn’t it?). Here the capitalist mode of production falls into a new contradiction. Its historical mission is to develop in an absolute geometric progression (sic!) the productivity of human labor. Now, it fails in this mission when it places, as in the present case (resistance of the capitalist to introduce higher-yielding machines), obstacles to the flourishing of productivity. It thus provides fresh evidence of its senility and shows that it is truly no longer of our time”]

Indifferent to the Pharisaical objection that after another sixty years of (stinking yet strong) capitalism, instead of removing it, the square bracket should have been tripled for the usual imprudent Marx, we note the usual programmatic theses that Marx loved to regularly intersperse with acute and profound analyses. Capitalism will collapse. And post-capitalism? Here it is: given that the productive power of each unit of labor increases, let us not increase the mass produced, instead, let us decrease the labor time of the living. Why does the West not want this? Because the only way to escape the “law of the falling rate” is that one (to overproduce). And as for the East? Ditto. But justice demands it be said that over there, it is youthful capitalism.

Rate and Mass

It will be appropriate to resume, avoiding both numerical examples and algebraic symbolism, the deduction of the law, which, not yet having lost the light of our eyes, we are not inclined to retire; maintaining brevity and lightness, as much as possible, in the tone of an apologue. “If commodities could speak,” says the immense Karl in that jewel of a paragraph, “they would say: our use-value may certainly interest men; we, insofar as we are objects, laugh at it. What interests us is our value. This is proved by our mutual relation as things of sale and of purchase. We mutually regard each other only as exchange-values.”

We have therefore brought for you the microphone to the square where commodities meet, coming from Russia on one side, and from America on the other. From above, it has been admitted that they speak a common economic language. For both, it is sacrosanct – and if not, they would not have come so far – that the market price they aspire to must prevail over the cost of production. In both countries, they aspire to produce them at low cost and sell them at a high price.

The commodity that comes from the country with a capitalist theory speaks: I am made of two parts, and you can see only one joint. The cost of production, the living and burning advance of the one who produced me, and the profit, which added to the first gives exactly the figure below which, don’t delude yourselves, I will not betray my principles. I settle with a modest profit to encourage the buyer; you can verify the rate of it with a little division: product divided by cost of production. If I cost ten and for just eleven I let myself be possessed, will you be so stingy as to find the ten percent rate exaggerated? Come on, gentlemen, etc.

We pass the microphone to the other commodity. Thus it speaks: Among us, we follow Marxist economics. In me, you see (I have no reason to hide it) two joints; I am made of three and not two parts. In the other, the trick is there but not visible. To produce me, the expenses made are of two kinds: raw materials, consumption of instruments, and the like, which we call constant capital (invested in me) – wages of human labor, which we call variable capital. The sum forms the cost of production of the other young lady who spoke first. Also for me, add a balance, benefit, profit, which is my third and last piece, and which is called surplus value. For the constant part of the advance, we ask nothing in addition because we know that it is incapable of producing any additional value: this is all in labor, or the variable part of the advance: you will therefore want to verify then, the rate, not of profit, but of surplus value, with the simple division of that surplus value by only the second part of the capital spent on me, that on wages.

The common buyer responds: go tell it to the doorman: what matters here is the total cost to my purse of both of you, that is, your respective selling prices.

A squabble arises between the two commodities, each claiming to want to make a less lucrative deal, contenting itself with a derisory rate of profit. Since neither can reduce it to zero, the one that really has the lower cost of production wins, as even Stalin invokes at every turn. For the constant part, the raw materials must be present in the necessary quantity and quality. The dispute will, in the two exporting camps, revolve around the variable part. There is the obvious method of paying the worker less and making them work more, but above all, there is productivity of labor, linked to technological improvements, the use of more profitable machines, the more rational organization of the factories; and here both sides show off flashy photos of vast installations, boasting of having increasingly lowered, for the same mass produced, the number of workers employed. One thing that matters even less to the purchasing agent on the contested market, is knowing in which case the workers are better paid and treated.

We do not believe it will be painful for the reader to note the difference between the two methods of value analysis. The rate of surplus value is always much higher than the rate of profit, and this all the more as constant capital prevails over variable capital.

Now, Marx’s law on the fall of the average rate of profit considers all profit, that is, the overall benefit on the production in question, before establishing to whom such profit will go (banker, industrialist, landowner). Marx in Chapter 13 of Volume III reiterates having treated the law “by design” before moving on to the distribution of profit (or surplus value) among the various social types, because the law is true independently of such distribution. It is therefore true even when the State acts as landowner, banker, and entrepreneur.

The law is founded on the general historical process, denied by none, apologized for by all, that with the application of increasingly complex instruments, tools, machines, devices, technical and scientific resources to human labor, its productivity grows unceasingly. For a given mass of products, fewer and fewer workers are needed. The capital that had to be put out, invested, in order to have that given mass of products in hand, continuously changes what Marx calls its organic composition: it contains more and more material capital and less and less wage capital. Few workers suffice to give an enormous “added value” to the materials worked, as they can work much more of them than in the past. This is also agreed upon. And then? Even assuming that capital, as is often the case (though this is not a necessary Marxist law, as it is for the operetta revolutionary), increases exploitation, increases the rate of surplus value by paying workers less, the surplus value and profit obtained will rise, but given the much greater increase in the mass of materials purchased and worked through that employment of labor alone, the rate of profit will always fall, as the rate is given by the ratio of profit, grown somewhat, to the entire advance for wages and materials, grown, for the second part, enormously.

Does capital seek maximum profit? Certainly, it seeks and finds it, but it cannot prevent the rate of profit from falling in the meantime. The mass of profit increases, since the mass of the population is larger, the proletariat more still, the materials worked more and more, the mass of production greater and greater. Small capitals divided among many at the beginning and invested at a good rate, in the end, very large capitals, divided among very few (and here the effect of concentration parallel to accumulation), invested yes at a fallen rate, but with the result of the incessant rise of social capital, social profit, average enterprise capital and profit, up to dizzying heights.

Therefore, there is no contradiction to Marx’s law on the falling rate, which could only be stopped by decreased labor productivity or a degenerated organic composition of capital, things against which Stalin fires with the heaviest artillery, things upon whose ground he desperately aims to surpass the adversary.

Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

In the last issue of this paper, some sobering figures from a capitalist source on the American economy appeared. Let us take from them the confirmation of the law established by Marx and denied by Stalin. In 1848, says the statistics, at the birth of industrial capitalism in the United States, out of 1000 units of value that were added in production to the raw material, 510 went to workers as wages and salaries, 490 to the bosses as profits. Avoiding details on depreciation, general expenses, etc., the two figures precisely give variable capital and surplus value: their ratio, or rate of surplus value, is 96 percent.

What would have been, according to bourgeois reasoning, the rate of profit? We should know the value of the materials transformed. We can only surmise it, assuming that in an infant industry, each worker on average transforms a value about four times the wage. The material will represent 2000 against 510 of wages and 490 of profits. Total production cost 2510. High profit rate: 19.5%. Note, however, that it is always below the rate of surplus value.

After the great cycle of hallucinatory ascent, in 1929, out of 1000 units of value added to the product, workers receive no more than 362, and capitalists 638. (Do not start equivocating: up until Black Friday, wages had risen and the workers’ standard of living had also risen significantly, this does not contradict). Here then, the rate of surplus value or of exploitation has greatly increased: from 96% to 176%. (If after using the vocal cords for a lifetime, there is still someone who does not understand that one is more exploited even while having more money and eating better, let him go to bed: he does not understand the effect of the increased productivity of labor power that resides in the worker’s carcass and ends up in the purse of the cuckolded bourgeois).

Now let’s try to evaluate the entire production. I admit (with the certainty that comes to those with some familiarity in constructing syntheses, always being cautious against their own thesis, for the benefit of some hair-splitter in fifteen who amuses himself checking things over) that the ability to process materials has, thanks to machinery, increased tenfold, with equal employment of labor, from 1848 to 1929. So, if with 362 given to workers instead of 510, the two thousand units of materials would have dropped to 1440, here they rise instead to 14,400. With the total invested expenditure at 14,762 lire, the known profit of 638 is 4.2%. Here is the fall in the rate of profit! Don’t just tip your hat to Marx, avoid pulling out your handkerchief to dry Uncle Sam’s capitalist tears! You may have guessed that we were looking for the rates, not the masses. To get an idea of the overall production figures, albeit not with the actual value but with a figurative comparison between the two eras, we’ll note that the two blocks that for 1848 give a gross product 3000 and for 1929 a gross of 15,400 refer to groups not very dissimilar in the number of producers. But in the eighty-year period, the worker population has at least increased tenfold, always using round figures, and therefore the total product can well be valued at 154,000, about 50 times that of 1848. Although the average profit rate of capitalists has fallen to 4%, the mass of profit has increased from 490 to 6380: thirteen times as much. It is quite certain that our figures are too conservative; the essential point was to reiterate that American capitalism obeyed the law of the falling rate and ran the race for maximum profit. Stalin cannot discover new laws for it. Nor have we accounted for concentration; let’s give this an index of ten, and the average profit of American industry will have (as mass) multiplied by 130. Here is the rush towards crisis, here are the confirmations of Marx.

We will indulge in another, even more hypothetical calculation. The American working class takes power with a situation similar to that of 1929: we repeat: 14,400 materials in work, 362 labor, 638 profits, 15,400 total product.

And then the workers read Marx and use “the increased productive power of capital by the simple reduction of living labor.” A decree of the revolutionary committee crushes production to 10,000 (where to cut… we’ll see then, just think that we will no longer have any more presidential elections or the like…). On this lot, the worker will be content to add to his 362 wages not the whole profit (which is gross of taxes and general services) but only a little, for now, bringing it to 500. For the general maintenance of public facilities and State administration, we even deduct more than the 638 of the former capitalists, namely, 700. Doing the math, there are only 8800 materials worked instead of 14,400, and if the number of workers is the same, each one’s working day drops by 62%, roughly from 8 to 5 hours. A nice first step. If we calculated hourly remuneration, we would see we have raised it by 120%: from 45 to 100.

It still wouldn’t be socialism. But while Stalin, where he sees in socialism a new law, purports to identify it with the capitalist one, that with increased labor productivity, production increases, we oppose him with the inverse law: with increased labor productivity, effort decreases, and production either remains constant or, after having crushed its capitalist branches of poison and blood, begins to regrow along a gentle curve, with human harmony.

As long as the call for the frenzied effort to produce, echoes, it can have no other meaning than that of exasperated resistance to the Marxist law of the fall in the rate of profit. Because for the rate to fall, but the mass of surplus value and profit not to begin to fall as well, the progressive-hangman rhetoric intervenes and cries out to a lost humanity: work more, produce more, and if, given their remuneration, the domestic workers would not be predictable buyers of the surplus product, find ways to export by conquering foreign markets for our consumption! This is the circle of hell of imperialism, which has found its inevitable solution in war, and its provisional way out from the supreme crisis in the reconstruction of an entire centuries-old apparatus of human labor destroyed.

All these same paths are followed by Stalin: reconstruction of the devastated areas, construction first of capitalist equipment in vast countries, and today the march towards markets. Such a march, whoever undertakes it, is done in two ways: low cost of production – war.

We shall close this exposition of Marx’s basic law with a new statement on capitalism that he presents in the Appendix – and which, as always, serves as a communist social program (end of Chapter 15, Volume III).
“Three cardinal facts of capitalist production:
“1. Concentration of the means of production in the hands of a few individuals. These means of production thus cease to appear as the property of the immediate producer and are transformed into social powers of production. At first, these powers are, it is true, private property of the capitalists who pocket all the benefits.”

Then… Marx does not write this, but it means that such secondary personal figures can disappear, and Capital remains a Social Power.
“2. Organization of labor as social labor, by means of cooperation (associated labor), division of labor, and the link between labor and natural science.
“In these two senses, the capitalist mode of production suppresses, albeit in different forms, private property and private labor.
“3. Formation of the World Market.”

As usual, the Thread has led where it was meant to lead. Let the reader know that the day has not passed but only reached noon. A morning perhaps harsh, heavy, like a Wagnerian symphony.

Will the closing afternoon be an easier song along the rugged path? Perhaps. “L’après-midi d’un faune” (“The Afternoon of a Faun”)? The Faun could only bear the coarse features and menacing movements of the sanguine Mars.

THIRD DAY (Afternoon)

In the first two days and in the morning of the third, we have extracted from Stalin’s well-known writing all the elements useful for establishing by which laws the economy of Russia is governed.

In terms of doctrine, we have thoroughly contested that an economy characterized by those laws can nevertheless be defined as socialism, even of the lower stage, and equally contested that, for this purpose, one can invoke the fundamental texts of Marx and Engels, where one clearly reads – though not with the banal ease of a comic novel – the economic characteristics proper to capitalism and those proper to socialism are clearly delineated, along with the phenomena that allow us to verify the economic transition from the former to the latter.

As a matter of fact, a series of stable conclusions have been reached. In the Russian domestic market, the law of value prevails; therefore: a) Products have the character of commodities; b) The market exists; c) Exchange occurs between equivalents, as the law of value dictates, and these equivalents are expressed in money.

The great mass of rural enterprises work solely with a view to commodity production, and partly with a form of allocation of products to the individual parcel worker (who, at other times, functions as a collective producer associated in the kolkhoz), a form that is even further from socialism and, in a certain sense, pre-capitalist and pre-mercantile.

Small and medium-sized enterpises that produce manufactured goods also work for mercantile placement.

Finally, the large factories are State-owned but are required to keep monetary accounts and to demonstrate that, respecting the law of value in the prices of outputs or expenses (raw materials, wages paid) and inputs (products sold), profitability is achieved, that is, a positive profit, a premium.

The demonstration regarding the meaning of the Marxist law of the rate of profit and its decrease has served to expose as hollow Stalin’s antithesis: since power is held by the proletariat, the great machine of nationalized industry does not pursue, as in capitalist countries the maximum volume of profit but is guided toward the maximum well-being of the workers and the people.

Apart from the broader reservations about the absence of radical conflicts between even the immediate interests of the workers of State industry and those of the Soviet people, a mishmash of isolated or associated peasants, shopkeepers, managers of small and medium-sized industrial enterprises, etc. etc., our demonstration that the capitalist law of the falling rate of profit prevails has been drawn from the asserted “law of the increase of national planned production in geometric progression.” If a five-year plan has imposed elevating production by twenty percent, that is, from one hundred to one hundred twenty, the subsequent plan will impose another twenty percent, meaning that production should go not from 120 to 140 but from 120 to 144 (a twenty percent increase on the 120 at the beginning of the new five-year period). Those familiar with numbers know that the difference seems negligible at first but then becomes gigantic: remember the story of the inventor of the game of chess whom the Emperor of China offered a reward? He asked that a grain of wheat be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third… Not all the granaries of the Celestial Empire sufficed before the sixty-four squares were exhausted.

Now, this law of fact, is nothing but the categorical imperative: produce more! An imperative specific to capitalism, derived from successive causes: increase in labor productivity – increase of material capital relative to labor capital in the organic composition of capital – decline of the rate of profit – compensation for this decline with the frenzied increase in capital invested and commodity production.

If we had begun to construct even a few molecules of socialist economy, we would realize it from the fact that the economic imperative has changed, and it is ours; the power of human labor is increased by technical resources: produce the same, and work less. And under true conditions of revolutionary proletarian power, in countries already overly equipped mechanically: produce less and work even less!

The last factual verification, after this (crucial) one that the directive is the increase of the mass of products, is that a large part of the products of the great State industry tends to be offloaded onto foreign markets. In such cases, it is openly declared that the relationship is mercantile not only in the accounting record but in the substance of things.

At bottom, here lies the admission that, even if only for reasons of world competition (always ready to fight not just with low prices but with cannon and atomic bombs), “the construction of socialism in one country” is not possible. Only in the absurd hypothesis that this country could close itself behind a real iron curtain would it be possible to begin converting the technical achievements of labor productivity, associated with planning “made by society in the interest of society”, into a reduction of internal labor effort and worker exploitation. Only in such a hypothesis could the plan, abandoning the mad geometric curve of capitalist dementia, declare: having reached a certain consumption standard for all inhabitants, fixed by the plans, no more will be produced, and the criminal temptation to continue forcing production to look beyond the circle where it can be flung and imposed, will be avoided.

All the attention of the Kremlin, both doctrinal and practical, is instead directed towards the world market.

Competition and Monopolies

An inadequate consideration of Marxist theories on modern colonialism and imperialism is that one must juxtapose them as different things, or at least as complementary developments, to the Marxist description of free competition capitalism as it would have developed roughly up to 1880.

With various contributions, we have insisted on the fact that the supposed objective description of the never-existent “liberal” and “peaceful” capitalism is, in Marx, nothing but a gigantic “polemical demonstration of party and class,” with which, accepting for a moment that capitalism functions according to the unlimited dynamic of free exchange among bearers of equal values (which expresses nothing but the famous law of value), one arrives at unearthing the essence of capitalism, which is a social monopoly of class, incessantly aimed, from the first episodes of primitive accumulation up to today’s wars of brigandage, at preying upon the differences engendered under the guise of contracted, free, and equal exchange.

If, having assumed the platform of exchange between commodities of equal value, the formation of surplus value and its investment and accumulation into new, increasingly concentrated capital is demonstrated, if it is demonstrated that the only way (compatible with the survival of the capitalist mode of production) to escape the contradictions between accumulation at the two poles of wealth and misery, and to defend itself against the subsequently deduced law of the falling rate of profit, is to produce more and more, always beyond the needs of consumption, it is clear that from the very first steps, the clash between the various capitalist States is delineated, each of which is led to attempt to have its commodities consumed in the other’s area, to ward off its crisis by provoking it in its rival.

Since official economics vainly attempts to prove that it is possible, with the formulas and canons of commodity production, to arrive at a stable equilibrium on the international market, and even maintains that crises will cease precisely insofar as civilized capitalist organization has extended everywhere, Marx must descend to discuss in abstract the laws of a fictitious single country of fully developed capitalism, which has no foreign trade, and demonstrate that it “must collapse.” It is all too clear that where the aforementioned relations between two closed economies arise, they are an element not of pacification but of upheaval, and the thesis opposing us is, a fortiori, lost. Our theoretical embarrassments would have been serious only if, in the first 50 years of the current century, we had continued to swim in economic and political milk and honey, with treaties of trade liberalization and neutrality and disarmament: instead, the world being a hundred times more capitalist has become a hundred times more shaken in every sense.

As usual, to show who is not changing the facts: note to paragraph 1 of Chapter 22 of Capital, Volume I. “Here, we abstract from foreign trade, by means of which a nation can convert luxury articles into means of production or subsistence necessities and vice versa. To conceive the object of the research in its purity, one must consider the commercial world as a single nation and assume that capitalist production has been established everywhere and has taken over all branches of industry.”

From the very beginning, the entire cycle of Marx’s work, in which (as we always assert) theory and program are at every stroke inseparable, tends to conclude at the stages where the contradictions of the first capitalist centers spill over onto the international plane. The demonstration that a pact of economic peace between social classes in a country is impossible as a definitive solution, and regressive as a contingent solution, fully parallels the similar demonstration regarding the illusory pact of peace between States.

It was repeatedly mentioned that Marx, in the preface to “A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy” of 1859, sketches this order of topics: capital, landed property, wage labor, State, international trade, world market. Marx says that under the first headings, he examines the conditions of existence of the three great classes into which present bourgeois society is divided, and adds that the unifying feature among the subsequent three headings “is obvious to all.”

When Marx begins the drafting of Capital, the first part of which absorbs the material of the Critique, the plan deepens on one hand and seems to narrow on the other. In the preface to the first volume, on the Process of Production of Capital, Marx announces that the second will deal with the Process of Circulation of Capital (simple and expanded reproduction of capital invested in production), and the third with the “Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole.” Aside from the fourth, on the history of the theory of value, of which there are materials already from the Critique, the third volume indeed tackles the description of the process as a whole, studies the division of surplus value among the profits of industrial capitalists, landed proprietors, and bank capital, and closes with the “fragmented” chapter on “Classes.” The drafting evidently had to develop along the problem of the State and the international market, for which other decisive texts of Marxism, both prior and later, provide.

Markets and Empires

In both the Manifesto and the first volume of Capital, as is well known, of primary importance are references to the formation in the 15th century, after the geographical discoveries, of the transoceanic market, as a fundamental datum of capitalist accumulation, along with the commercial wars among Portugal, Spain, Holland, France, and England.

At the time of the polemical and “combative” description of typical capitalism, it is the British Empire that dominates the world scene. Engels and Marx dedicate to this and its domestic economy the utmost attention. But this economy is liberalism in theory, imperialism and world monopoly in reality; and as early as 1885, at least, Lenin, in Imperialism, refers in this regard to the preface that Engels appended in 1892 to a new edition of his study “The Condition of the Working Class in England” from 1844. Engels refuses to erase from that youthful work the prophecy of the proletarian revolution in England. He finds it more important to have foreseen that England would lose its industrial monopoly in the world; and he was a thousand times right. If monopolism, according to the passages that Lenin cites, served to lull the English proletariat, the first one formed in the world with sharp class contours, the end of the British monopoly has sown the seeds of class struggle and revolution throughout the entire world; clear that it will take more time than in the fictitious “entirely capitalist single country,” but for us, the revolutionary solution is already anticipated in doctrine, and the ways and reasons for its “postponement” confirm it. It will come.

We quote a passage different from the one Lenin cites, from that text: “The theory of free trade had at bottom an assumption: that England was to become the sole great industrial center of an agricultural world, and the facts have completely disproved this assumption. The conditions of modern industry can be reproduced wherever there is fuel, especially coal, and other countries possess it: France, Belgium, Germany, Russia, America… (the new physical forms of energy today only reinforce this deduction). They began to manufacture not only for themselves but for the rest of the world, and the consequence is that the industrial monopoly that England possessed for almost a century is today irremediably broken.”

A paradox perhaps? We have been able to refute the comedy of free capitalism through the analysis of a contingent case, only because it was the most scandalous case in history, of a world monopoly. Laissez-faire, laissez-passer, but keep the navy armed, greater than the sum of all the others, ready to prevent any Napoleons from escaping their Saint Helenas…

In the previous installment, we cited a passage from Marx’s third volume, which, in a new synthesis of the characteristics of capitalism, closes with the clause: Formation of the world market. It would not be amiss to give another powerful glimpse.

“The true limit of capitalist production is capital itself. The fact that capital, with its own valorization, appears as the beginning and end, as the cause and aim of production, that production is nothing but production for capital, and that, on the contrary (attention! now the program! the program of socialist society!), the means of production are not merely means for an ever more extended development of the life process for the society of producers. The limits within which alone the preservation and valorization of capital-value, based on the expropriation and impoverishment of the great mass of producers, are thus in perpetual conflict with the methods of production that capital must employ to achieve its aim and which pursue the unlimited increase of production (Moscow, are you listening?); they assign to production as its aim production itself (Kremlin, are you on the line?) and have in view the absolute development of the social productivity of labor. This means – the unreserved development of the social productive forces – enters into permanent conflict with the reduced aim, the valorization of existing capital. If the capitalist mode of production is thus a historical means of developing the material productive forces and of creating the corresponding world market, it is at the same time a permanent contradiction between this historical mission and the corresponding conditions of social production.”

Once again, it remains reaffirmed that Russian “economic policy” does indeed develop material productive forces, does indeed extend the world market, but it does so in the capitalist forms of production, constituting indeed a useful historical means, as was the invasion of industrial economy to the detriment of the starving Scots and Irish or among the Indians of the Far West, but remaining fully within the inexorable jaws of the contradictions that bind capitalism, which enhances social labor yes, but by starving and tyrannizing the society of workers.

From every side, then, the world market, which Stalin has discussed, is the point of arrival. It has never been “unique” except in the abstract and could only be so in that hypothetical country of total and chemically pure capitalism, against which we have erected the mathematical demonstration of unfeasibility, such that if it were to come into being, it would soon shatter like certain atoms and crystals that can live only a fraction of a second. Thus, with the dream of a single sterling market fallen, Lenin provides the masterful description of the colonial and semi-colonial partitioning of the world among five or six imperialist State monsters on the eve of the First World War. This did not lead to a system of equilibrium but to a new distorted partitioning, and even Stalin admits this, recognizing that in the second war, Germany, having escaped “slavery” and “taking the path of autonomous development,” rightly directed its forces against the Anglo-Franco-American bloc. How then this reconciles with all the blatant propaganda about the non-imperialist but “democratic” war of such a bloc for so many years, up to the current uproars in the latest municipal councils for the pardon of the criminal Kesselring, is something that woe betide if comrade Jonov Doevsky dared to ask!

A new partition then, and a new source of war. But before moving on to Stalin’s judgment on the partition that followed the Second World War, we can’t resist presenting another of Lenin’s statements from Imperialism, particularly dedicated to our recent dialogue on the economic aspect. Lenin mocks a German economist, Liefmann, who, to sing the praises of imperialism, wrote: Trade is the industrial activity directed towards collecting, storing, and making goods available. Lenin delivers a blow that strikes far beyond Liefmann himself: “It follows that trade already existed among primitive men, who did not yet even know exchange, and that it will continue to exist even in socialist society!”. The exclamation mark, of course, is Lenin’s. Moscow, what do you have to say for yourself?

Parallel or Meridian

According to Stalin’s writing, the economic effect of the Second World War, more than putting out of action two major industrial and producing countries in search of markets, like Germany and Japan, neglecting Italy, was to split the world market in two. Initially, the expression “disintegration of the world market” is used, then it is specified that the single world market has split into two “parallel world markets, opposed to each other.” Which are the two camps are clear: on one side, the United States, England, France, with all the countries that have entered into orbit first of the Marshall Plan for European reconstruction, then of the Atlantic Plan for European and Western defense, or rather, for rearmament; on the other side, Russia, which, “subjected to a bloc together with the people’s democracies and China,” has formed with them a new and separate market area. The fact is geographically defined, but the formula is not very felicitous (save for the usual faults of the translators). Granted for a moment that on the eve of the Second World War there was a true single world market, accessible in every marketplace to products from any country, this does not break into “two world markets”, rather, the world market ceases to exist, and in its place are two international markets, separated by a strict curtain through which (in theory, and according to official customs, which nowadays know little) no passage of goods and currencies occurs. These two markets are opposed but “parallel.” This amounts to admitting that the domestic economies of the two great areas into which the earth’s surface has split are “parallel,” that is, of the same historical type, and this coincides with our doctrinal presentation and contradicts what Stalin’s writing intends to establish. In both camps, there are markets, therefore, a mercantile economy, hence a capitalist economy. Thus, the expression “parallel markets” may be acceptable, but we must firmly reject the definition that states the West has a capitalist market and the East a socialist market, a contradiction in terms.

This point of arrival of the two “semi-world” markets, divided roughly, at least regarding the more advanced part of the inhabited human territory, but not according to a parallel but according to the meridian of defeated Berlin, leads to a remarkable consequence in Stalin’s writing, especially if compared to the failed hypothesis of a single world market entirely controlled by a federation of States that emerged victorious from the war or controlled by the Western bloc alone with its center of gravity in the United States. The consequence is that “the sphere of application of the forces of the main capitalist countries (United States, England, France) to world resources will not expand but shrink; that the conditions of the world (we would say: foreign) market for these countries will worsen, and the contraction of production for their enterprises will be accentuated. This constitutes precisely the deepening of the general crisis of the world capitalist system.”

This has stuck a chord: while various puppets like Ehremburg or Nenni are sent around to promote “peaceful coexistence” and “emulation” between two parallel economic spheres, from Moscow it is stated that they still expect the Western sphere to collapse due to a crisis of drowning in too many useless products that cannot be sold (nor even given away, chaining recipients with century-long debts), and against which frenzied rearmament or wars in Korea and other imperialist brigandage fields are insufficient reactions.

If this has shaken the bourgeois, it is not enough to excite us Marxists. We must ask what such a process will determine in the “parallel” camp mentioned above; and with the official text, we have demonstrated the identical necessity to produce more and to offload products abroad. And we must then, as usual, draw the decisive conclusions from the rise of the historical current and the contradiction between this posthumous attempt to put the revolutionary vision of Marx-Lenin back on its feet: accumulation, overproduction, crisis, war, revolution! And the indelible historical and political positions assumed over a long course, which are persistently assumed in that mined West, in ruthless contradiction to every development of class pressure and revolutionary preparation of the masses.

Classes and States

Before the First World War, the clash is between two perspectives. The inevitable struggle for markets, which will provoke the war and the resumption of imperialist tension after the war, whoever wins it, up until the class revolution or the new universal conflict, constitutes Lenin’s perspective. The opposing one, of the traitors to the working class and the International, says instead that if the aggressor State (Germany) is crushed, the world will return to being civilized and peaceful, open to “social conquests.” To different perspectives, different consequences: the traitors invoke national union of the classes; Lenin invokes class defeatism within each nation.

The conflict had been postponed until 1914 insofar as the world market was still in “formation” in the Marxist sense. The basic concept of the formation of the world market, as we showed regarding capitalist mercantilism, is based on the “dissolution” – into the unique economic magma of the production, transport, and sale of products – of the restricted “spheres of life” and “circles of influence” proper to pre-capitalism, within which production and consumption occur within a local, autarkic economy, like that of aristocratic jurisdictions and Asiatic lordships. As long as these “fusions” of oil spots in the general solvent occur, both internally and externally, capitalism maintains the rhythm of its “geometric” swelling without bursting. That is not to say that islands enter into a single universal market without barriers: protectionism is very ancient for national areas, and the foreign markets, discovered by navigators, each nation tends to monopolize, with concessions from sovereigns and local sultans, with trading companies like the Dutch, Portuguese, and English ones, with the protection of State fleets, and initially even of pirate ships, of “partisan” raiders of the sea.

However, in Lenin’s description, not only are we near the saturation of the world, but the last arrivals are cramped in their areas of outlet; hence the war.

Second World War. The resurgence of Germany as a large industrial country is attributed by Stalin to the desire of Western powers to arm an aggressor against Russia. In truth, the primary causes were the non-devastation militarily of German territory and its non-occupation after the armistice. Stalin’s own development ends up admitting that imperialist and economic causes prevailed over “political” or “ideological” ones in determining the second conflict, from the moment Germany threw itself against the Westerners and not Russia. Thus, it remains established that the 1939 war and subsequent years were imperialist. Hence, the two perspectives were renewed: either toward new wars, whoever won, or toward revolution if the war was met not with solidarity between classes but with class confrontation – and opposed to this was the bourgeois perspective identical to that of the first war: everything depends on defeating criminal Germany; once achieved, we will sail toward pacifism, general disarmament, and liberty and well-being for all peoples.

Today, Stalin shows that he is for the first perspective, the Leninist one, by bringing forward again the imperialist explanation of the war and the struggle for markets; but it is too late for those who yesterday threw all the potential of the international movement onto the other perspective: the struggle for freedom against fascism and Nazism. That the two perspectives are incompatible is today admitted, but then why continue to steer the (now ruined) movement onto the track of the liberal, progressive, and petty-bourgeois version, onto that of the “war for ideals”?

Perhaps in order to prepare for a good political play in the new war, to be presented as a struggle between the capitalist ideal of the West and the socialist one of the East, and in the blatant contest of the politicking gangs on both sides, each hoping to drown the other in the fierce accusation of “fascism”?

Well, the interesting thing in Joseph Stalin’s writing is that he says: no.

Unshaken by the historic responsibility of having, in the Second World War, broken Lenin’s theory on the inevitability of wars between capitalist countries and with the only way out of it being class revolution, and worse still, of having broken the sole political directive consequent to that theory, by ordering communists, first in Germany then in France, England, and America, to make social peace with their bourgeois State and government, the head of today’s Russia halts the comrades who believe in the necessity of an armed clash between the “socialist” world, or semi-world, and the “capitalist” one. But instead of deflecting such a prophecy with the overused doctrine of pacifism, emulation, and coexistence between the two worlds, he says that it is only “in theory” that the contrast between Russia and the West is deeper than what can or may arise between one capitalist State and another in the West.

One can well, on the part of true Marxists, admit all the predictions about conflicts within the Atlantic group and the resurgence of autonomous and strong capitalisms in defeated countries like Germany and Japan. But Stalin’s point of arrival must be well analyzed, in the formulation in which we see invoked by analogy the aforementioned situation of the outbreak of the Second World War: “the struggle of capitalist countries for markets and the desire to drown their competitors proved, in practice, stronger than the contrasts between the capitalist camp and the socialist camp.”

What socialist camp? If, as demonstrated in your own words, your camp (which you label socialist) produces commodities for export at a pace you aim to maximize, is this not the same “struggle for markets” and the same “struggle to drown (or not be drowned by, which is the same) your competitor”? And in war, won’t you also be able or be compelled to enter as producers of commodities, which in Marxist language, means as capitalists?

The only difference between you Russians and the others is that those fully developed industrial countries are already beyond the alternative of “internal colonization” of surviving pre-mercantile islands, while you are still deeply engaged in that field. But only one consequence follows: given that war inevitably comes, those in the West will have more weapons, and after pressing you more and more on the terrain of market competition (having accepted exchanges of products and currencies, as long as you remain on the terrain of emulation you will have no other way than that of low costs, low wages, and the insane labor efforts of the Russian proletariat), they will defeat you on the military front.

How to avoid this, to prevent an American victory (which is also for us the worst of all evils)? Stalin’s formula is clever but is the best suited to continue the revolutionary sedation of the proletariat and to render to Atlantic imperialism the highest service. One avoids declaring to it the famous “holy war”, which would mean putting oneself in an unfavorable light in the idiotic world discussion about the aggressor, and falls back on an adulterated “determinism.” But even so, one does not return – and it would be historically impossible! – to the plane of class struggle and class war.

Stalinist language is equivocal. War, Lenin said, will come between capitalist States. What will we do? Will we shout, as he did, to the workers of all countries in both camps: class war, reversal of the rifle? Never again! We will make the same elegant maneuver of the Second World War. We will side with one of the camps, say with France and England against the United States. Thus, we will break the front; the day will come when, throwing ourselves against the last one remaining, even if a former ally, we will take him out too.

In the dark corridors, so much is peddled to the last naive proletarians not yet brought into line, by even worse means.

War or Peace

But then, many have asked the supreme leader, if we believe once again in the inevitable war, what to do with the vast machine we assembled for the pacifist campaign?

The answer reduces the possibilities of pacifist agitation to quite meagre proportions. It may postpone or defer some particular war, it may change a warmongering government into a pacifist one (and then, will the appetite for markets change or not, ten times put forth as the primary fact?). But war will remain inevitable. If in a certain area the struggle for peace develops, from a democratic and not a class movement, into a struggle for socialism, then it will no longer be a matter of ensuring peace (an impossible thing) but of overthrowing capitalism. And what will Fatty Nitti say? What will the hundred thousand fools who believe in international peace and domestic social peace say?

To eliminate wars and their inevitability, such is the conclusion, it is necessary to destroy imperialism.

Good! And so, how do we destroy imperialism?

“The present movement to maintain peace differs from the movement we carried out during the First World War to transform the imperialist war into civil war, as the latter movement went further and pursued socialist ends.” Very clear: Lenin’s directive was for social civil war, that is, of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

But in the Second World War, you already discarded social war and developed either national “collaboration” or “partisan” war, that is, not social war but rather the war of the advocates of one bourgeois and capitalist camp against the other.

So, will we take imperialism by the horn of peace or war? If one day imperialism and capitalism fall, will it be in peace or in war? In peace, you say: do not mock the U.S.S.R., and we act in the full legalitarian way; thus, no fall of capitalism. In war, you say: it is no longer the case of civil war everywhere as in the First World War, but the proletarians will follow the directive of looking at which capitalist camp we will side with, using our State and military apparatus from Moscow. This is how, country by country, the class struggle is smothered in mud.

There is no doubt that high capitalism, whatever the parliamentary and journalistic claptrap, well understands that Stalin’s “card” is not a declaration of war but a life insurance policy.

Jus Primae Noctis

After describing the great work accomplished by the Russian government in the technical and economic field, Stalin said, at least in the first reports: we found ourselves facing a “virgin terrain” and had to create new forms of economy from the ground up. This task, unprecedented in history, has been honorably completed.

Well, it’s true: you found yourselves before a virgin terrain. It was your fortune and the misfortune of the proletarian revolution outside Russia. The force of a revolution, whatever it may be historically, proceeds with all its vigor when it has to deal only with obstacles of a wild and fierce but virgin terrain.

But in the years when, after the conquest of power in the immense empire of the Tsars, the delegates of the red proletariat from around the world came to the Throne Halls resplendent with baroque gold, and it was a matter of marking out the lines of the revolution that was to overthrow the bourgeois imperial fortresses of the West, something fundamental was said in vain; and not even Vladimir understood. To this is due the fact that, even if the balance sheet of the great dams, the great power plants, and the colonization of immense steppes closes with honor, that of the revolution in the capitalist world of the West has closed not only dishonorably, which would be little, but with a disaster irreparable for long decades.

What was said to you in vain is that in the bourgeois world, in the world of Christian parliamentary and mercantile civilization, the Revolution found itself facing a whorish terrain.

You have allowed it to defile and perish.

Even from this sinister experience, She will be reborn.