The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Russia

Day Three: Evening

Poor and naked you go, Philosophy! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dogmatists, the Talmudics, Josif’s Refrain 

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

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

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

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

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

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

To you, Schoolboys! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get up you, over there! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Noises outside the Classroom 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shady use of Lenin 

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is left intangible? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How they enriched Marx 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stalin’s rejected Contributions 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Function of the Party 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Handbook of Principles 

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

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

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

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

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

Elementary little Scheme 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sense of Determinism 

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

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

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

Where are the «Guarantees»? 

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

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

Our guarantees are known and simple. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wickedness of Man? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breath of Oxygen 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Market Experts 

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

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

The First International 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The English Industrial Revolution 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other Capitalisms 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Law of Accumulation 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marx and Gladstone 

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

How did Marx look at it then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Extremes of a Century

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quite unlike the living contemporary emulators, the Dead converse…

END OF THE «DIALOGUE WITH THE DEAD»

Statistical Overview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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