The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Russia

THIRD DAY: Morning

Stage assessment

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

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

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

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

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

History and historiography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parliamentarism equals personalism 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Superstructure and economic base 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mikoyan’s criticism 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue marks to Stalin 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stalin’s Dunce Laws 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We extinguished the flamethrower 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another vain fetish: Technique 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mummy-abortion of mercantilism 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The race to accumulate 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The age of capitalism 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Per capita indices 

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

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

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

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

Run then, capitalist industrial Russia! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

With the vanquished or the vanquishers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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