The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Russia

DAY THREE: Early afternoon

Agriculture: reduced pace 

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

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

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

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

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

Thus Khrushchev relates; and what meanwhile does Bulganin prophesy? 

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

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

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

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

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

The burning agrarian question 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russian rural society 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An American announcement 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a bitter pill for the Soviet peasants.

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

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

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

The price «spread» 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The insoluble antithesis 

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

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

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

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

Asinine Revolution 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did Stalin think?

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-Marxist ”emulation” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lenin and Bucharin 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s to you, ‘Leninists’! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From production to consumption 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mad and lost challenge 

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

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

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

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

Savings and enjoyment 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

«Popular» consumption 

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

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

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

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

The modern convict 

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

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

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

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

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

Lean dance of calories 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And to so much, quickly, it will lead.

Figures and pacifism!

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

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

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

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

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

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