Complements to “Dialogue with the Dead”

Complements to “Dialogue with the Dead”

The text that follows is part of the account of a party meeting held in Turin on May 27 and 28, 1956, published in Programma Comunista nos 11, 12 and 13 of June-July, 1956. The subject of the meeting was the work and studies devoted by the movement to the questions of the Revolution and the social structure in Russia. 

A) RETREAT AND DECLINE OF THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION 

1. The internal Struggle in the Russian Party 

History does not enter man by the head; not by that path does it lead him to act; so that the poor man deludes himself that it is he who manipulates it. That is why in savouring and digesting the lessons of history, every poor man among us cannot resist the itch to change what was the inexorable event, and only after repeated chewing and ruminating does he manage to draw the construct of what was, because that is how it had to be. 

The crushing events of the social drama are not like some of Pirandello’s productions and some commercially released films, which have double endings, so that, in the ranks of the audience, the hysteria, of the perhaps seasoned dandies, can choose the one that makes it vibrate best. 

There is little point, therefore, in asking ”what should have been done” to prevent Stalin, and Stalinism, from winning the day, and the party that won the October Revolution, the state that it founded, from coming to the miserable end that we have shown throughout. 

The impression is harsher today that even the damned apologists for that solution, which history has archived, were no longer able to say that everything had gone for the best in the best possible revolution, that a constellation of mistakes, nefariousness, useless (!?) hallucinating massacres had concatenated with the process of facts. 

The theme of the meeting was all the work and studies devoted by the movement to the questions of the Revolution and social structure in Russia.  

If we more reasonably ask ourselves the causes that influenced the different path that the movement took in that round, we can first of all recognise the main one to be the defeat of the proletariat in western countries which, repeatedly beaten, clearly showed that it was in no condition to win the struggle for power. Europe had already for several years entered a situation more unfavourable to all communist parties, and bourgeois power had consolidated everywhere after the difficult post-war period, having faced the alternative between workers’ dictatorship and capitalist dictatorship, having employed without hesitation the means of repression, to which clearly any country would have resorted in the emergency of avoiding communist power, and without exception.  

In the stagnation of the revolution abroad, the problem of the Russian revolution showed all the difficulties, to understand which it is not at all necessary to alter in the least the clear vision held by Lenin in the long stages we have described. It was straddling two forces, one of which, the proletarian, was still quantitatively crippled by the decomposition of industry after the national and civil war, the other, the peasant, quantitatively immense, qualitatively had revolutionary efficiency only in a passing phase, until non-socialist postulates, proper to an extreme bourgeois revolution, but still a bourgeois one, were to be fulfilled. It was always said (and we have verified when and how) that in the further phase the ally would necessarily become the enemy. The peasantry at home as an ally could not replace the natural ally of the Bolshevik revolution, i.e. the working class abroad: it was an inferior substitute, and only efficient in a term that would allow to catch the breath, to restore mass prevalence to the genuine proletarians. 

2. The great Clash of 1926  

It was clear that in order to sustain proletarian energy in the cities it was necessary to reconstitute industry and increase it: this had been clear since before Lenin’s death – which we do not at all line up among the ”causes” of what occurred. In this everyone agreed. But in the countryside one was forced, in essence, if one wanted to have the help of the peasants in the civil war and the general economy, not to proceed in the direction of rural proletarianisation. Lenin had harshly admitted that he had to linger on the programme of the revolutionary socialists, beaten by Bolshevism in doctrine and on the social battlefield. In fact, they had to act in such a way that the number of workers in the countryside with personal and family control of cultivated land, and of the produce, increased. From this arose the enormous revolutionary potential of the broken disposition of produce by the landowning, semi-feudal and semi-bourgeois lords, and without this shift of forces the civil war would not have been won: no place for repentance. As we have shown and are showing, little remedy is the theoretical declaration that the land was nationalised, the property of the workers’ state, because not legal ownership, but economic management with its sharp relations, provokes the social reflexes of political and combative activity.  

Nor had Lenin ever been silent about the fact that, once the capitalist incursions had been beaten militarily, in order to accelerate industrial reconstruction, the oxygen of revolutionary life, it was necessary to obtain from foreign industry machinery, experts, technicians, and in the end capital in various forms, which could not be obtained without the offer of compensations (concessions). These could consist of nothing other than domestic labour power and domestic raw materials.  

The healthy, proletarian component (here we must express ourselves briefly) of the Russian party, the left, faithful to class traditions, posed the question in the oft-quoted (and read in suggestive excerpts at the meeting we are referring to) speeches by Zinoviev, Trotsky, Kamenev (this one too particularly decisive, explicit and courageous, against the howls of rage of the gathering) before the December 1926 session of the enlarged Executive of the Communist International.  

With decisive quotations on the subject of international revolution, these great comrades proved that until the victory of workers’ dictatorship in at least some of the developed capitalist countries, the Russian revolution could not remain, more or less for long, other than in the phase of transitory tasks. And this was not only in the sense that Stalin’s formula of ’building socialism in one country’ had to be rejected; and worse, in a country like Russia. For not only could not a socialist society, a socialist form of production, appear in Russia in the backwardness of proletarian Europe, but also the class relations could not have been those of a pure proletarian dictatorship, i.e. directed against every surviving class, bourgeois and semi-bourgeois. The task of the proletarian and communist state would have been to build a state industrial capitalism, which was also indispensable for the armed defence of the territory, and to conduct a social policy in the countryside that would have ensured the basic necessities of life in the cities and to evolve, fighting against the danger of private rural capitalist accumulation, towards a state agrarian industry, which was still in its infancy. 

3. The fifty Years of Trotsky  

It is not for the first time that we insist on the high revolutionary vision of Trotsky’s crushed speech, which showed with magnificent clarity how the unfolding of the primordial Russian economy towards more modern forms would make the economic and political influences of world capitalism more and more tremendous, and this would constitute a threat always capable of threatening the very life of Red Russia, until Russia’s internal proletariat beat it on some fronts. 

Let us emphasise again here the fact that Bucharin’s and Stalin’s speeches (apart from the narrations of the various centrist henchmen), in boasting of the possible advent of integral socialism in a Russia encircled by the bourgeois world, did not exclude at all, indeed they considered certain, on the basis of Lenin’s doctrine, a deadly war between socialist Russia and the bourgeois West, and established the line to follow in such a war, aiming at world revolution: a war of classes and states, which Stalin (we showed) referred to later, both on the threshold of the Second Imperialist War of 1939, and in his 1953 ’testament’, which the 20th Congress threw out with all the rest.  

Trotsky and the others showed without hesitation (see especially Kamenev) that the boast of building socialism was nothing but a return to the worst opportunism, and that those who raised this flag (Stalin and today’s anti-Stalinists) would in fact end up in the arms of imperialist capitalism, as it was. When confronted with the insidious question of what they would ”do” in the event of a long stabilisation of capitalism, they replied that in that virile and non-hypocritical position the party could, even while admitting that it was running a still capitalist and mercantile economy with its political state, hold out in the trenches of the communist revolution for decades. 

It had seemed to some comrades that such an ultimate deadline had been formulated by Lenin in just twenty years, and this in connection with our acceptance of Trotsky’s fifty years leading up to 1976, a date which we roughly attribute to the possible advent of the next great general crisis of the capitalist system in the world, i.e. the third huge imperialist war. It was therefore necessary to give the relevant quotations at such a point. It is not a serious problem if the revolutionary sees the revolution closer than it is; our school has already anticipated it many times: 1848, 1870, 1919. Deformed visions have waited for it in 1945. It is serious is when the revolutionary puts a deadline to obtain historical proof: never has opportunism had any other origin, never has it otherwise conducted its campaigns of sophistication, of which that of socialism in Russia is the most poisonous. 

Trotsky had spoken at the 15th conference of the Bolshevik Communist Party, defending the thesis of the opposition. In the session of the Enlarged Stalin responded to his speech at the time. Trotsky had reached this point in his reply when he was ruthlessly taken off the floor. We are forced to find Trotsky’s thesis in the words of his opponent. 

4. Stalin’s Position  

Stalin in that speech, as we know, toned down the economic thesis (proof that this was a demagogic posturing to begin with) by saying that his formulation of the construction of socialism meant victory over the bourgeoisie and the subsequent building of the economic foundations of socialism. His opponents proved in abundance, thanks to the overwhelming evidence that his formula was not in Lenin, nor in Stalin, or anything else, before 1924, how he was devious, and masquerading (today we can say) as Molotovian.  

Stalin then preferred, as was his custom, to defame the contradictor with arguments as trivial as easy on the public: the opponents not only did not believe in socialism in Russia but not even in the revolution not far off in the capitalist countries: they wanted to admit a capitalist development in Russia, therefore they sympathised with foreign capitalism.  

A Trotsky could not answer him as a buffoon. As a great dialectician he told him that he would believe in and fight for the European revolution even in the near future, but that if it did not rise or prevail, Bolshevik Russia could resist without falsifying traditions, doctrine and revolutionary programme for even fifty more years.  

At the Genoa meeting we noted that, within the laughter of the audience, among the fierce stigmatisers of Trotsky’s ’pessimism’ towards the revolution was then, among other Pharisees, Ercoli, who was rooting for a very close revolution; where Ercoli is none other than Togliatti, and where already last year, but with more tawdry flatulence today, after spitting on Stalin as well, he made and makes historical constitutional and legalitarian plans, in the bosom of the present republic and in collaboration with the black democracy, with over fifty years’ deadlines starting from today; what do we say? assures, in unison with the Moscow gang, the bourgeois world an unlimited existence, in peaceful and emulative coexistence! 

Let us then quote Trotsky in Stalin’s mouth. ”The sixth question concerns the problem of the prospects of the proletarian revolution. Comrade Trotsky said in his address to the 15th conference: Lenin estimated that, given the backward state of our peasant country, we will not achieve socialism in twenty years, that we will not even build it in thirty years. Let’s accept thirty to fifty years as a minimum.  

I must say, comrades, that this perspective invented by Trotsky has nothing in common with Lenin’s perspectives on revolution in the Soviet Union. A few minutes later, in his speech, Trotsky himself sets out to combat this perspective of his. That’s his business’.  

It is clear that Trotsky had not contradicted himself, but had first of all called for a rapid foreign revolution. He had then added that the delay of this did not prohibit the party from holding its integral position, without Stalin’s foolish alternative: we implement the maximum socialist programme immediately, or we leave power by returning to the opposition, pursuing a new revolution. Trotsky had destroyed the insidious alternative with the authority of Lenin, who, although he had always and at all times declared that Russian social transformation could proceed rapidly after the European and even German workers’ revolution, had formulated the clear eventuality of Russia alone, and foresaw the time it would take, decades and decades, not to build socialism, but to something far less, and preliminary! 

We could not read at our meeting the speech of the 15th conference, and we confined ourselves to giving Lenin’s passage as proof, for it is Stalin himself who quotes it immediately afterwards. 

5. Lenin’s ”Twenty Years”  

Here are Lenin’s words, as they are in the shorthand of the Stalin speech on December 2, 1926, and which there is no need to find in the source text, so eloquent are they, and of colossal importance in dispelling doubts and hesitations of anyone. They are referred to in Vol. IV p. 374 of the Complete Works in Russian: ”Ten or twenty years of regular relations with the peasantry and victory is assured on a world scale (let us read: in front of or against the whole world) even if there is delay in the proletarian revolutions, which are maturing; otherwise 20-40 years of tormenting whiteguard terror. (Plan Of The Pamphlet The Tax In Kind, Works, 32: 323). 

Here we beg Stalin to step aside with the laughable gloss which he makes follow, even though we do not wish to be as boorish as those of the 20th Congress, as proved by the fact that we have not sent his texts out of the archives. 

Stalin in fact deduces that twenty years is a sufficient time to do all socialism. Oh, que nenni! 

Lenin says this. Good relations with the peasants are necessary, and for a very long time. This is not obstructed by the obvious fact that when there are peasants, relations with the peasants, and worse if they are good relations, there is neither socialism nor its complete basis. But in the meantime, it is the only way to resist, with the armed support of the peasantry, respected in their bourgeois interests, the swoops of the encircling and aggressor capitalist world, not yet overthrown by the western revolution.  

Nothing else can be done, and if one had doctrinal or sentimental scruples about amplexes with the peasantry, destined (we quoted a hundred passages from Lenin on the subject) to a future counter-revolutionary task, our armed forces would be beaten by the bourgeois and tsarist reaction, and we would get 40 years of white terror. 

Twenty years later, Lenin admits that then the external and internal armed enemy will no longer be Danger No. 1. So, says Stalin, there goes socialism! But no, you wretched idol now shattered: then we move on to another phase which not even – again on the assumption of Western revolutionary delay – can be called socialism. Every good relationship with the peasants is denounced, they are put, from comrades in the dictatorship, under the dictatorship, and on the basis of the powerful urban state industry a new phase of total state capitalism is begun, even in the countryside. In other words, even the farmer peasants are dispossessed and become genuine proletarians. What the Associated Press report ascribed to today’s intentions of the Soviet regime: in theory this is right, because the forty years have passed: but that power is now downgraded and bourgeois, and not even the bourgeois state control of the countryside is its own faculty any more!  

Lenin’s perspective is as always impressive in strength and courage. It ties in with the old prediction: democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. In other words, he declares: if the revolution does not come to Europe, we will not see socialism in Russia. That is not why we will leave power, that is not why we will say, with a formula as blatantly Menshevik in 1903 as Stalinist in 1926 (purely polemical! ): ”bourgeoisie, go ahead and govern, and we’ll pass over as opponents”; but we will follow our bright path: a few decades with the allied peasantry (which, if the foreign workers’ ally rises first, we’ll send to the pulp in fourth gear) and struggle, directed by the proletariat, against revolts to the new state, against attacks from abroad, and to lay the industrial foundations of future socialism. Then, after this first transitional phase but without other internal political revolutions, the phase of total state capitalism, urban and rural. From this classic Lenin’s last step to non-mercantile socialism, (beyond the rebus of the ’exchange’ between industry and agriculture, reduced to the obvious collaboration of two branches of industry, in the general social plan) one day we will ascend to the side of the victorious workers throughout Europe.  

And hence the glittering corollary of Leo Trotsky: even after fifty years, if necessary, because not even half a century will see us, if not overwhelmed with weapons in our fists, abdicate the power conquered by a generation of proletarian – and peasant – martyrs, or take the even more cowardly step of lowering the flag of dictatorship and communism! 

As Stalin himself does today, deep in shame, with his dishonoured offer of peace to universal capitalism. 

6. Revolutions that finish off the Backlog of Tasks  

In the course of his exposition, the speaker wanted to give a few historical examples to remove any remaining dialectical uncertainties about the logic of the solution embraced: proletarian, socialist, communist power, living and fighting with its party and in the revolutionary state, while all economic tasks are of inferior, capitalist, and even pre-capitalist content.  

Such a question must be distinguished from the other, quite natural in its emergence, which we have been answering for not a few years with examples of a historical nature: Since it is claimed that class power in Russia today no longer belongs to the proletariat, and not even to an alliance between the proletariat and the poor peasantry, but is bourgeois and capitalist power (despite the assumed physical destruction of the components of a bourgeois social class), how has there not been an open struggle for the possession and conquest of power, which evidently could only be accomplished in armed forms? To this second question (apart from noting that the destruction of the opposition within the ruling party was bloody and mass, even if there was no collective resistance to repression) we also answered then with the historical method, citing cases of classes that fell from power without losing it in a struggle, among them that of the Italian Communes, the first example of the domination of the bourgeoisie as a class, which disappeared without a general struggle, giving way to feudal-type Seignories and a landed nobility coming from the city countryside. By quite another route the bourgeois class was then to rise to power again after centuries, and this time after insurrections and wars.  

Now we do not only want to prove that the historical event under consideration, the degeneration of social power, is not contradictory to the general theory, but also the other historical hypothesis constructed in doctrine and not verified due to repeated conditions; that is, the persistence of a class power that for a long phase does not implement its characteristic social forms, and is forced by historical determination to implement different and historically earlier, more backward forms, and to carry out what we would like to call a wave of regurgitation of revolutions. For it is not in keeping with our defence of the validity of a doctrine of history born with materialist Marxism to admit an exceptional course for a single country, Russia; or for a single historical phase, such as the destruction of the tsarist system at the beginning of the current century. 

And let us assume that other classes, other than the proletariat, and in other countries than Russia, have had to attend to similar tasks, imposed on them by the progress of economic and social causes and the unfolding of the relations of production. We have therefore referred to the United States of America and the Civil War of 1866. 

7. American anti-Slavery Revolution 

In other respects, we have been talking about the American national revolution of the late 18th century. Marx drew a parallel between this war of independence, which he called a signal of the French-European revolution at the turn of the century, and the war of secession between the Northern and Southern states, from which he expected another signal to a proletarian social movement in Europe, which with the national wars of those years 1866-71 did not break out. 

The war of liberation from the English of the New England colonists was a war of independence, but it cannot even be properly called a national war-revolution like the European wars of Italy, Germany, etc. The element of race was missing since the colonists were of mixed nationality, and predominantly identical to that of the metropolitan state, and above all economic and commercial factors raised them to political emancipation. 

Still less could such a war be called a bourgeois revolution, for in America capitalism did not arise from local feudal or dynastic forms, there was no aristocracy and no true clergy, and on the other hand the England against which it rose had been fully bourgeois since the 16th-17th centuries and had radically overthrown feudalism since then. 

The theory of the struggle between classes, and that of the historical series of modes of production run analogously by all human societies, must never be understood as trivial and formal symmetries, and their application cannot be done without Engelsian training in the handling of dialectics. On the subject of North American independence, the Marxist school repeatedly noted how the still feudal France of pre-1789 sympathised in positive ways with the insurgents against capitalist England; which was then to repay itself in the anti-revolutionary coalitions, and finally winning at Waterloo with the feudal Holy Alliance. 

In the example of the Civil War of 1861-65, there were no factors of national freedom at stake, not even a racial factor after all. The Northern states fought to abolish the slavery of the Negroes widespread and defended in the South, but this was not a rebellion of the Negroes, who in principle fought in Southern formations alongside their masters. It was not a slave revolution to abolish the slave mode of production, to be succeeded by aristocratic rule and serfdom in the countryside, and free trade in the cities. Nothing comparable to the great historical transition between these two modes of production, which occurred at the fall of the Roman Empire and with the advent of Christianity and the barbarian invasions, all leading to the abolition, in law, of property over the human person. 

In America, the industrial bourgeoisie of the North waged a social and revolutionary war not to conquer power to the detriment of the feudal aristocracy, which had never existed in America, but to provide for a transition in the forms of production much later than that with which bourgeois society was historically born: the replacement of production by slave labour with that by wage earners, or free artisans and peasants, whereas the European bourgeoisies had only had to fight to eliminate the form of serfdom, which was much more modern and less backward than slavery. 

This proves that a class is not ’predestined’ for a single task of transition between social forms. The American bourgeoisie did not have to dedicate itself to abolishing feudal privileges and serfdom, but to going back and liberating society from slavery. 

8. Dialectical Parallel  

There is in this example an analogy with the task of the Russian proletarian class, which was not the transition from capitalist to socialist form, but the preceding historical regurgitation of the leap from feudal despotism to mercantile capitalism; without this in any way undermining the doctrine of the class struggle between wage-earners and capitalists, and the succession of the socialist form to the capitalist form, by the modern wage-earning class.  

The Southern landowners were beaten in the 1866 revolution by the industrial bourgeoisie, albeit further back in history than the feudal nobles in that they were slave-owners, and albeit further ahead than them in that a mercantile social network already existed. The northern bourgeoisie did not hesitate to take on a task regurgitated and performed elsewhere by quite different classes; by the feudal and Germanic knights, or by the apostles of Judea: to free the slaves.  

It may be objected that this work of historical cleansing left Northern capitalism with no other task of revolution. But if the South had won in the civil war, as there was some likelihood of it, on the one hand the task would have remained for the future, on the other hand the bursting forth of the capitalism of America launched into first place in the world would have been quite different. 

In Russia the task of destroying the last feudalism was no small one for a working class victorious amidst such terrible trials, while it was certainly too much what Stalin pretended to want from her, namely the overthrow of capitalism in all countries. This was to remain, remained, and remains the task of the working class in the world’s most advanced industrial states.  

9. Why was there no Recourse to Arms?  

This question had to pose to himself Trotsky, who had with other valiant Bolsheviks, until Lenin’s death and afterwards, the armed forces in his charge. Neither he nor any other member of the current in solidarity with him then and afterwards resorted to force, nor did they think of unleashing it with state formations, or organising new ones. The official police and the full control of the army enabled the current that had prevailed in the party to beat its opponents and to carry out their real extermination, for those who were sent to the firing squads were far from being limited to the notorious tried, but reached tens of thousands of workers and Bolsheviks, old and young.  

So the guns decided, but this time they had their mouths in one direction only. Stalin said, and he had to say, that it was a class direction: but today, 1956, his cronies of that time failed to prove that the beaten were militating for the foreign bourgeoisie. Today, the demonstration given by Kamenev, a powerful orator, that the opportunist right wing were the victors, and that the bloody battle was won by Stalinism, by the ”Onlyrussia” side, today more than ever attached to those origins, in the service of international capitalism.  

Stalin played a lot, with hapless Bucharin, in claiming that the opposition lacked a firm line and was a shapeless bloc of saboteurs. Bucharin paid for his mistake, not by repenting like an imbecile or a pusillanimous man, but by eventually joining what was not a bloc, but was the only party of the revolution, in order to add his proud head to those fallen; and it was he who did not bend it an inch in the fiercest inquisitions.  

But actually the line of Russian opposition was not continuous. At the time of Lenin, of Kollontai, of the peace of Brest Litowsk (Bucharin again!), of the resistance to Lenin’s NEP, portrayed as weakness towards the peasants, of the obscure Kronstadt uprising, the reasons for opposition to the Bolshevik party’s first acts of government were joined, amidst generous naiveties, grave errors, of the anarchist, trade unionist and labourist type; and aversions to the cardinal principles: dictatorship, centralism, the relationship between class and party.  

In Trotsky’s first opposition in 1924, in which Zinoviev and Kamenev led the struggle with Stalin that ousted him from military command, the position was not comprehensive. The danger of right-wing deviation in the party was not denounced and the radical insidiousness of the theory of building of Russian socialism, backs turned to the international revolution, was not yet identified as magnificently as in 1926. Stalinist oppression was denounced as a just reaction to state imposition against dissenting party members, whereas in revolutionary dictatorship the party is sovereign over the state. This lent itself to equivocation with banal claims of ’democracy’. 

10. Bureaucracy, wrong Aim  

But a wrong and dangerous theory was also enunciated at the time. Power in Russia was now removed from the bourgeoisie and fully proletarian, but fell into the hands of a new and third class, the state and even party bureaucracy. 

We have spent a lot of work proving that the bureaucracy is not a class and cannot become a subject of power, just as in Marxism the boss, the tyrant, the clique, or the oligarchy is not a subject of power! Bureaucracy is an instrument of power of all historical classes, and comes first to rot when these are decrepit, like the Pharisees and scribes of Judea, the praetorians and freedmen of Rome. Administering the transition from tsarism to industrial capitalism, mixed with free agriculture, nothing can be done without a vast bureaucratic apparatus, which contains weaknesses and dangers. A centralised party with strong traditions should not fear bureaucracy per se, and can cope with it with the measures of the Commune extolled by Marx and Lenin: inexpensive government, rotation and not careerism, workers’ grade wages. All the innumerable degenerations have been the effect and not the cause of the reversed relations of political forces. 

Not socialism will have to fear the weight of bureaucracy, yes the direct economy based on accounting-isolated companies under state control; state capitalism swimming in the mercantile pool.  

This mercantile statism-dirigisme does not escape all the useless anarchic operations of double-entry bookkeeping and the individual rights of natural and legal persons. In the mercantile environment, the cumbersome public apparatus moves only on individual and private initiative: everything is done on demands that come from the periphery to the centre, compete with each other, demand painful comparisons and counting even to be rejected. In socialist management everything is arranged from the centre without argument, as simple as the withdrawal of six hundred rations by the company quartermaster, if compared to six hundred purchases of different things of quality and quantity, to their deliberation, registration, collection, claim, acceptance or rejection and replacement, and so on for a thousand other reasons. 

A capitalist and monetary system may fear bureaucracy as a social evil, but not as a third classist force. Socialism even of the lower and non-communist stage, i.e. with rationed consumption still, being outside the monetary and market instrument, leaves the bureaucracy in the attic among the old rattletrap, as it will dispose, according to Engels, of the state.  

The Russian opposition saw its enemy too late, and therefore had to succumb without a proper fight. In 1926 it could only consign its doctrinal weapons to history, and heroically fall. But those were enough years later for us to witness the death of many of the executioners, and the liquidation of the leader Stalin who, having come out badly from this last clash of theories, had nevertheless triumphed over the corpses of his adversaries, in a manner that the world believed to be not only fierce, but also final. 

11. Why was there no Recourse to the Proletariat?  

This last naive question can refer to the world proletariat and the Russian proletariat. It was precisely the Trotsky group that was accused of appealing against the Russian party’s decision to the Communist International: whereas they had been warned by the party not to do so, and were accused of having promised and failed. Elsewhere we have reported how as far back as February 1926, in the previous Enlarged Executive of the Komintern, the struggle was open in the Russian party and it was taken to a committee, but not to the Plenum. Present for the last time, before the mass arrests, were delegates from the Italian Left.  

At the time, there was no talk of the ’bloc’ with Trotsky, and we were the only ones to foresee it, or rather to describe the position of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev as identical, mocked by those who knew the secrets of Bolshevik life.  

Well, the Italian left-wing delegates, having been the only ones to argue against Stalin that the problem of Russia’s direction was an international problem, were warned against raising it in the enlarged Plenum with the very ’political’ argument that they had a right to do so, but the discussion (which took place the following December) would result in harsher disciplinary measures against fellow opponents within the Russian party. Although paralysed by this heavy responsibility, the Italian leftists went to the congress tribune, but their intervention only provoked an uproar and the closure of the discussion, under the pretext that so much was demanded by the Russian party, unanimous between majority and opposition!  

In those same months the Germanic opponents – among whom, however, anarchist and syndicalist tendencies were not lacking – proposed to the Italians to leave the International, denouncing it as non-revolutionary and founding a new movement (later the Trotskyists were to found the Fourth). 

The Italian left, which had previously denounced the opportunist danger for years, foreseeing its spread, though then not as manifest as today, on the basis of its precise Marxist line, did not believe itself in a position to accept such an invitation. Nor, later, that of the Trotskyists.  

As for deferring judgement on the serious historical issue to a consultation not of the mass of the party but of the Russian proletariat, this seemingly obvious proposal has no well-founded content. Ever since then, and more and more, party and Soviet congresses have extolled Stalin and his methods, which were not personal rage but the direction of collective historical forces, capable, in the event, of prevailing. 

The victory of Stalinism, a modern and base form of betrayal of the communist revolution, was thus foregone after the struggle of 1926, and it was clear to the international communist opposition that the distant salvation could only come through the total cycle of the degeneration of the Russian state and party and of the leftovers of the International; not before being able to take stock, theoretically already set at that time, of the getting rid, one after the other, of all the cardinal principles of Marx’s and Lenin’s revolution. 

After the shames of the Second World War and of fornicating with the two bourgeois imperialisms, came the more serious one of truce, peace and tomorrow identification with them. This, after such bitter and long travail, makes the great redemption not immediate, but certainly less distant. 

B) THE FALSE OPPOSITION BETWEEN RUSSIAN AND WESTERN SOCIAL FORMS 

We will go beyond the need for a balance of proportions between the various parts of a well-conducted discourse. What follows repeats in another form the content of the ”Evening” of the Third Day of ”Dialogue with the Dead”, the text of which is on the previous pages. However, we do not remove or alter either of the two drafts, except in the rectification of a few arithmetically unsound figures. It does not matter, indeed it is an advantage, the repetition, the bis in idem. At the meeting in Turin, what was expounded in a slightly different form were the points, indicated by the convened readers of the periodical in which the Dialogue had appeared in installments, closely following what has been called by fools a crisis of communism, whereas it is a crisis of anti-communism, in its noisy unfolding. 

Since there is therefore no author figure here, but impersonal work, which we do not call ’collegial’ so as not to use the terminology of the Pharisees of the time, we can violate the norms of Rhetoric, which in worthy times was a scientific discipline, today is an unhealthy drug practice. The ruling class in agony devotes itself to it in temples, such as the one in Rome, to which it had raised as an epigraph the expressive inscription: ’The Sewer’. 

Forgive us the shadow of Cicero, whose solemn passage the Italian high school students were made to translate: 

”Hoc in omnibus item partibus orationes evenit, ut utilitatem et prope necessitatem suavitas quaedam et lepos consequatur”. Which would translate as: ”This (i.e. the link discussed in previous periods, and as a … historical materialist, between the decorative dignity of a work, and its better correspondence to practical purposes, what we now call functionality) also happens for the different parts of an oration, so that from the efficacy and almost from the compulsory construction of it a certain pleasant and tasty elegance follows”. 

We are here muscular workers pounding nails, not conceived and forged by us; we can violate the aesthetic ’modules’ that bind the parts of the oration together, but we do not give up hammering the ultimate nail, on the capitalist nature of Russian society: down comrades, more blows! 

12. The ’Step’ of Industrialisation  

The crux of the matter lies in the claim of the present-day Russians that the proof of the diversity of the Soviet system from the capitalist system, and moreover of the superiority of the former, lies in the fact that from year to year Russia’s industrial production increases more, and at a greater percentage rate than the total product of the previous year, than in any country in the world and in any epoch of history. 

It has been proved to those who, busy with quite different affairs (amplexes in the town councils in Italy, with the Titos in Moscow), will not answer, and who can answer nothing, the following: 

1) False that that high rate is only in Russia. 
2) False that that high rate is only in history today. 
3) False that even if Russia were at the highest rate, and at a higher rate than any historical case, proof would arise from this that it is not capitalist. 

Putting facts and figures in order, the conclusion is one and certain: the social economic structure in Russia is exquisite capitalism.  

And we have, in the final part of the Dialogue, based on the cold figures, an ardent deduction: precisely because the first English capitalism, a model in the world, presented those phenomena that today flourish in Russia and have been exalted with equal zeal at the time of Stalin the demigod and Stalin the demiman, Karl Marx in 1866 made an impetuous historic assault on the intoxicated with satanic bourgeois joy, forerunner of today’s masters of the Kremlin, Chancellor of H. M. Capital, Mr William Ewart Gladstone.  

Of this almost contemporary (1809-1898), old and capital enemy of his, Marx says of him in note 185/a to the first volume of Capital: ’The capitalists threatened with being subjected to factory legislation, and ”losing their freedom” to exploit women and children without restraint, have found in the English liberal minister Gladstone a servant of goodwill’. 

To boast of the pyrotechnic marvels of burgeoning industrial production is therefore not historical proof of being a socialist, but rather of being a devoted servant of capitalism, and nothing is changed by the place, London or Moscow, or by the date, 1856 or 1956. At the very least, those who still dare to speak in the name of Marx’s doctrine, which we have drawn on here in the greatest and most cardinal work, and in the founding address of the Workers’ International, must keep it as said on their faces. 

13. Dantesque Overview of Bourgeois Hell  

The figures that were published on that occasion, and which were reread and commented on at the Turin meeting, are gathered here in an overview, to which the organisation’s groups will certainly devote further work. 

We have indicated the sources, all of which are Russian, and wish to warn of one thing. As a rule we do not report the annual indices of the tables from which we start, but only the relative increases. For example, in the table at the beginning of the Khrushchev report the index of Russian industrial production is placed 100 at 1929. We find the figure 466 for 1946 production and the figure 2049 for 1955 production. Without repeating them, we give the increase over the nine years between them, which is 340 per cent (in other words in 1955 4.40 times the product of 1946 was produced) and deduct the average annual increase which is 18 per cent (whereupon, let it be said for the tenth time, nothing prevents nine times eighteen from giving 162 instead of 340). 

The method of drawing up our simple picture is not risibly protected by patents filed in the name of a given sucker. We have only separated the typical periods chronologically, first of all in order to note that if they prove the fact (not law) of unequal capitalist development, they also prove the Marxist discovery of the internationality of the process.  

We have with such an obvious system eliminated the games that are played by Moscow (and sub-services) all over the place, mixing up periods. For example, Russian production is twenty times greater than in 1929, while American production is only 2.34 times. Turning to 1913, the Russian ratio becomes 36 versus the American 3.5. The ratio is not too different. But it changes if we start from the major depressions: from the Russian 1920 the run is even more spectacular: 160 times (!) in 35 years.  

If we take the American maximum depression 1932, however, we also have a strong jump: 4.4 times in just 23 years (from 54 to 234). But we read in the Khrushchev table (suppressed Bulletin For a Stable Peace, no. 7, 1956) another peak in American production: 215 in 1943 (at the height of the war, when weapons were being produced for use by the Russian proletariat) which, compared to 1932, gives the ratio of 4 times in just 11 years. At the same time Russia goes from 185 (since 1932 production, according to the Varga tables, varies compared to 1929, the base year of the Khrushchev table, by 233 divided by 126, i.e. 185 divided by 100) to 573. Here the ratios are quite different, indeed the reverse: Russia 3.1; America 4.0. 

And if we finally take the Khrushchev freshly made table alone, from 1937 to 1943, in six years, we have for Russia from 428 to 573, a ratio of 1.33, while for the United States from 103 to 215, a ratio of 2.1, much greater. The ”à sensation” thesis has been turned upside down. 

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.

By sorting our picture, all done with Russian data, we have thus put the matter out of the dishonest games, typical of all official releases from the political centres, whether from the East or the West. Here everything. 

14. Laws of Accumulation  

We have set out in the captions at the bottom of the prospectus the harmonious and regular deductions that can be drawn by those who consult it with one eye on the world map and another on the 60-70 years of history that have been engraved on the strong or fragile carcasses of the generation that is about to send them into preservation. 

These concomitances repeat in other words the general law of capitalist accumulation established at the beginning of the whole cycle by Marxism.  

This simple law, distorted by most of those who invoke it, and fearfully so in Stalin’s senile economic writings (which the 20th congress did not rectify, but on the contrary further deviated from Marx’s line), can be expressed as follows: capitalist production increases ’wealth’ in the form of an ever-increasing ’stockpile of commodities’, with the continuous increase in production. But the measure of such an increase not only does not give the measure of a societal advantage (when we do not mean by this a minority class) but rather that of the risk of greater ruin and misery. The race for accumulation is made by the concentration of wealth in ’an ever decreasing number of hands’ and eventually (Marx) in one hand, which is no longer of man (Russia). The hands of the former holders of parts of wealth swell the army of labour, i.e. those who live, if and when they work, and (in time) a little better if and when they work, on the sale of labour power alone. Therein lies the sense of growing misery.  

With alternating vicissitudes the pace of accumulation reverses into a recoil, with immense destruction of products and instruments of labour, either through crises of overproduction or through bloody wars of mercantile competition (imperialism). 

The secret of the step of accumulation, for which the Gladstones and the Stalins-Khrushchevs get excited, is this. Let it be the positive step: capital concentrates, and as other masses of dispossessed (artisans, peasants, small businessmen) are formed, misery grows with wealth because the impoverished grow out of all proportion (in Marx: Die Masse des Elends; literally: the Mass of Misery). Let us now take the negative step: diminished production means unemployment, the mercantile crisis equally brings down the smaller companies and the lesser rentiers: everyone burns the last reserves. Wealth does not go up, but down. Thanks to capitalism, misery, in this case as in the other, grows, everywhere and always! 

So the euphoria for periods of ascent, in all times and places, is an appropriate euphoria only for the friends and servants of Capital.  

Regardless of the effects and cycles of general market crises and world wars, the ’geometric’ or progressive proportion law of production, as dear to Stalin as to Bulganin (but which in their hands, as in Bentham-Gladstone’s, twists like a viper when one goes from the manufacturing field to the agrarian field) would lead to such a fabulous mountain of inconsumable commodities that in the life of capitalism is only possible because of its internal law of the historical descent of its average rate of profit.  

For Marxist economics, the rate of profit is proportional to the rate of accumulation. We call profit the part that remains to the capitalist of the total product, whether it’s allocated it to the consumption of the ruling class or to new investment in capital. It is clear that throughout the course the second destination prevails. The rate of profit is the ratio of this owner’s share – in Marx’s terms – to the total product (for us capital, for the bourgeoisie, turnover) and not to the value, real or nominal, of the instruments of production (the producing company’s equipment), which the bourgeoisie sometimes confuse with the assets, sometimes with the company’s capital itself – in the joint-stock ones expressed by the total number of shares, which however give different figures according to the nominal value at which they were issued, or according to their market value quoted on the stock exchange. 

However, the profit a company makes, and that part it distributes, vary with the product each year obtained after deducting all expenses (in Marx deducted variable and constant capital).  

The general law of the historical slowing down of the increase in production thus expresses in principle the other basic law of the downward tendency of the average profit rate, which with gigantic error is believed by Stalin and Sons to have been replaced by a law of maximum profit. And with even greater bestiality they pretend to read this nonsense into Lenin’s history of imperialism, of overprofit, of monopoly profit, a theory in which all the theorems of Marx’s economics remain firm and immutable, for those who have not been drinking. These drunken economists did not read in Marx how Capitalism, far from being saved for eternity by the Angel of Free Competition, is damned to fall under the Nemesis of Monopoly. This process can be read – in economic science – not with the law of profit alone, but with the same, combined with the Theory of Rent. 

15. Running the Picture  

These indications need no further comment: the picture, as usual, is an instrument: everyone can handle it. In it, it is clear, the first steps of the older capitalisms, and especially of the English capitalism, do not appear. This one already enters the scene at a slow rate of accumulation: about three per cent, lower than all competitors. Wars will not reverse the pace: here our old despair over the military unbeatability of that island comes to the surface. If we believed in the if in history, we would say that Bonaparte’s badly turned card cost us a century of socialism. 

In the first war they ruined all the European combatants, even the victorious France, but those overseas did more than England: not only don’t they stagnate, they advance with a slowed but positive increase! America, Japan.  

English capitalism satiated with wealth and power sleeps for 17 years on the laurels of Gladstone’s time. We showed that Marx calculates by 1860 increases of 7-8 per cent and even more, equal to those with which France and Germany begin, in our picture, at the end of the century. But we also showed how even earlier, in the 30-year period 1830-1860, there were higher rates also in Great Britain, equal to those of the United States, Japan and Russia at the end of the century.  

The United States also went through the second war with a resolute profit pace, and maintained it in the present phase of reconstruction: lower, however, than at the beginning of the 20th century. England had a small downturn in this, less grandiose for it, second war, and responded with a relative acceleration at the present time, at a pace equal to that of the United States, or almost. 

France, a second time winner but fiercely tried, had a decline in the war, and then resumed with an exceptional increase, as in the previous reconstruction of 1920.  

The mighty Germany, with its model equipment, fell wildly in the two wars, but just as boldly rose again. In the second recovery it beat everyone, even Russia itself, with an average annual rate of 22.2 against 18. But there is more: in the last year Russia is at 12, and for the next five years it plans 11.5. In contrast, 1955 in Germany gave the highest rate, more than 23 per cent. Today, Bonn Germany industrialises twice as fast as Russia. In agricultural production it quadruples it, to say the least. Well, where is socialism? Neither in the one nor the other: but it will come first in Germany!  

It is on Japan that the effect of the second war reverses that of the first. The descent is as precipitous as the German one. The current recovery is a little less than that, but equal to the Russian one. With the same difference, that in Japan the last years are better than the previous ones, and this will continue. Russia, on the other hand, is retreating, as to its incremental pace: it has been retreating, and the picture says so – that is, the Russian rulers say so – since 1920, when it began to climb again from the precipice into which it had fallen in the first war, followed by the terrible if victorious 1917-20 civil war. The worst negative rate we see in the two wars is 12: Russia in the first presented 20, which in ten years crushed production from index 100 to index 12.5: the eighth part. 

16. Crises worse than Wars  

The picture has a more impressive vertical series than those of wars. It relates to the American Black Friday of 1929, which from 1930 to 1932 caused production to fall back disastrously, with a rash of bankruptcies, company closures and general unemployment.  

The crisis had its greatest effect in the United States, and produced the only negative index in its historical course. But it is a tremendous negative: 18.5! What is the explanation? For us it is clear: the only country that in the war not only won but continued to develop the mechanics of industrial production, is damned by Dante-Marx’s law to descend into a worse circle of Hell. So be it.  

Germany, which had already collapsed in the war, fiercely feels the crisis, and falls, at the 13.8 high speed. France falls, at the lower speed 11.6. Great Britain, then closely linked to the American economy (more so than today) can hold out just a little better. However between the 1932 crisis and the new war there is a new general recovery. The United States rises with a mighty 11 per cent positive annual growth rate. Great Britain joins them with 10, emerging from its economic slumber of half a century, for too much fullness, and Gladstone from his grave seems to rise anxiously. France, on the other hand, reacts very little after so many hard trials. Germany performs another miracle, and rises again (we are at the time of Hitler and a state capitalism, reminiscent of the Russian structure) with 13.4.  

What is the effect of the American crisis outside Europe? Japan felt it by holding its positions in those three years, to make up for it, recovering quickly, in the good years: 12 per cent. Let us apply the total increase 75 to the 8-year period 1929-37: the average rate of advance is a little less than 7 per cent per year and fits in with the historical law of horizontal degression. In these same last 18 years Japan’s indices, first yielding then recovering, vary (Khrushchev) from 169 to 239, total increase 41 per cent. The average pace is lower: 2 per cent. Japan’s impressive rise does not disprove the law of slowdown. Neither does Germany’s: 18 years from 114 to 213 gives 87 per cent; annually only about 3.5 per cent. But Russia itself from 1937 to 1955, from 429 to 2049, with 370 per cent, has the annual rate of only 9 per cent, while in the periods backwards we read 20, 22.8, 34 per cent. The general law exists in full. 

17. Objections of the Counterthesis  

Having come across this robust 34.1 per cent, the contradictor might object that this Russian number is also the highest in the table. How can this be explained? 

First of all, we are dealing with the youngest of the competing capitalisms, and this is a contributory element with the general process. Finally, we are immediately following the most spectacular slide in the whole picture: 20 per cent per year, for the reasons already mentioned. And if, as we have done in other cases, we add up the two contiguous periods, forming a single one from 1913 to 1929 of 16 years, the extreme indices according to our data are 72 and 126 or 100 and 175. The 75 per cent increase in 16 years is not huge: it corresponds to the average annual rate of about 4 per cent; a rate that regularly slows down after the earlier ones of tsarist capitalism. The high figure 34 comes from the very low level of 1920. In fact, the new Russian capitalism is just a child. The old tsarist capitalism in 1920 was extinct: a descent of 87, reduced in seven years to an eighth, is nowhere to be found in the table: Germany and Japan, crushed in the second war, saved however 30 and 31 per cent of production after nine years, and had a platform to rise again.  

But there is another objection that, since no one pays us, we will certainly not keep silent. Russia went through the inter-war world crisis of 1929-32 like a salamander. It does not do like Japan, which merely stands three years at par with production, but continues its advance at a very fast pace: 22.8 per cent, equal to the best we know of even in exceptional cases; and only more rebounding than the record we have just discussed for the period 1920-29, which had been one of world recovery, except for England alone. 

Can this phenomenon of ’indifference to crisis’ suffice to speak of a non-capitalist economy? 

In 1929 the nascent and super-young Soviet capitalism had no channels of communication with capitalism and the international market. These began again to an appreciable extent ten years later, with the 1939 war. 

This explains why the crisis did not communicate to Russia, which was in a phase of serious underproduction (one-twentieth of the current, one-tenth, and less, of the per-capita output of capitalist countries at the time). An overproduction crisis therefore could neither appear in Russia internally nor enter from abroad. The crisis unfolded in all its tragedy outside its borders. To explain this, there is no need at all to admit the benefit of a hypothetical economic system, different in its internal structure. The credit for this original phenomenon in (modern) history goes back to… Joseph Stalin.  

Between 1926 and 1939 the key to Russian policy, which the force of history dictates to the ’dictator’, is the steel curtain. The old world of the West will rejoice, that the flames of revolution do not pass out of it: rejoice Russia, new-born to a capitalist revolution without historical precedents, that the flames of the anarchic fire of overripe capitalisms cannot pass through it. The old Leader died believing that if one day the curtain were lifted, the flames of war would pass, as they did in 1939, he believed, perhaps, that the other Black Friday would soon come, before German capitalism was again clothed in steel as well as dollars; then he would be up in arms again for the ”second blow”, which in a brilliant moment he had prophesied in 1939, and he would have stabbed an America in crisis at the throat, looked at in the whites of its eyes in the drama of Yalta. 

The cult of this myth, which we considered over the decades to be stained with the blood of revolutionaries and destined to collapse vilely, as is the case today, has given way to an even more cowardly position: the crisis of the West will never come again, just like the emulation and coexistence theories of the Mikoyans. If the crisis never comes, they, arm in arm with Keynes and Spengler and the screwball science of America, will have beaten us all, Marx, Lenin and us, distant chickens of the red Chanteclair. And we will lower the crest. 

But if crisis comes, as it will, Marxism will not only have won. Stalin’s fierce laughter will no longer be able to ring out behind the hissing of the first missiles, but it will be of no use for Khrushchev & C. to blaspheme themselves in their dirty fashion. For the curtain, which has become an emulative cobweb, the universal mercantile crisis will also bite young Russian industry to the heart. This will be the result of having unified the markets and made the vital circulation of the capitalist monster unique! But he who unifies its beastly heart, unifies the Revolution, which could after the crisis of the Second Interwar, and before a third war, find its world hour. 

C) THE SOCIALIST SYSTEM AT ”FIAT”? 

18. A Nod to Alma Italietta 

We have not included Italy in the picture, of which there are a few figures in the Dialogue. First of all, we do not have any Russian figures before 1929, and on the indigenous ones there is too much to distinguish and discern; something to be done at another time. And secondly, what age to give to Italian capitalism, and to which horizontal place it? It is (as in Russia) another case of capitalism born twice: we are not the first to compare capital and the phoenix: Father Marx must have done it. Our homeland would be entitled to the highest rung of the ladder, in homage to the great and proud maritime and commercial republics of the coast, and the bankers’ towns of the interior, not to mention the first centralized state monarchies in the south and north, with very ancient and centuries-old lineages, with high-sounding names, Frederick of Swabia, Berengar, Arduinus, Cesare Borgia…  

Then over all this passed, more than a return of feudalism in deep structure, the national and provincial political servitude; and the bourgeois system was reborn as the pale political import of France at the beginning of the 19th century, and of England in the middle of the same: a capitalism with passive colonial tones, late and badly risen to imperial ambitions, and today fallen into servitude to America, and into middle-class shopkeeper attitudes.  

Intriguing in no small measure, the historical outline of this country of shining titles, which even further back saw summits of early slave capitalism, from Magna Graecia to plutocratic Rome! 

We will not be accused of national boastfulness if we have not admitted it into the circles of bourgeois hell; we await the new Dante that his indulgent uncle Engels went so far as to vaticinise, in homage to his rusty glories. 

Yet we read of Italy in Khrushchev’s tables, which serve as gospel in this pass. 

Between 1929 and 1937, the bourgeois world made the experience of its cursed toboggan [slide, ed.]. It rolled down the slope of the 1929-32 crisis, and rose merrily between 1932 and 1937 towards war. According to Khrushchev between these extremes of eight years, while Russia took the plunge by quadrupling its output at the rate of about 21 per cent a year, Satan-Capital elsewhere slept. And as it slept in America, so it did in Italy: from 100 to 99. France even ceded from 100 to 82, while by the terms of the same plunge-rise Germany gave 100 to 114, Great Britain 100 to 124, and the quivering Japan 100 to 169.  

Benito, who dreamed of eclipsing Pirgopolinice, was the only serious pacifist we have ever known. In the din of the years 1937-46, Italy (whose subjection to the 1929 crisis of the then vilified ’demoplutocracies’ will be discussed on another occasion) only dropped from 99 to 72, a mere mince, an annual negative of just 3.5. A ’guerre en dentelles’.  

From 1946 to 1955 was a triumphal march. While the miserable seven or eight parties and the twenty little parties blame each other for the ruin of the fatherland, in the race to be the ones to ruin it, the figures of euphoria (bourgeois, and therefore of all of them) rise at a gallop. In the whole period, from 72 to 194, we have a premium of 170 per cent which is worth the annual average 12 per cent nice and round. The order of the race (to everyone’s future ruin) now stands as follows: Germany, Japan, Russia, Italy, France, the United States, England. 

The intermediate steps in Italy are interesting. From 1946 to 1949 the advance is 14.3 per cent! Then a little less: 1949-50 at 11.5; 1950-52 at 9.1; 1952-55 at 9.5 

Does it fall back perhaps? Italy, siren of the sea, smile but do not tremble. The governor of the Bank of Italy just told us (which means that Khrushchev’s figures do not proceed in vain: it did not occur to us in the Neapolitan way that ”si hanno ditte na fesseria a me, ve ne dico doie a vuie” [if they told me a nonsense, I’ll tell you two]) that industrial production in 1955 increased by the same degree as in 1954: 9.3 per cent. 

He added something remarkable: that in the same year, 1955, agricultural production rose by six per cent. In a five-year plan (but good with frosty 1956!) we would have 134 against 100, which any Bulganin would sign off on.  

Soon, however, Menichella started talking about the Vanoni plan, which speaks in terms of national income and labour employment rather than in terms of industrial production indices. The comparison between the two methods must be postponed to our future party work on the economy of the West. In any case, for Vanoni in ten years we must advance at 5 per cent per annum (163 against 100) in capitalist investments and the employment of workers. Having seen the total national income rise by 7.2 per cent in 1955 (first in Europe after Germany, which is at 10), 78.8 per cent of the 1955 income was consumed, investing 21.2 per cent of it in new plants, if construction is included, and 15.8 if it is excluded. With these margins, fixed installations in industry proper could be increased in the year by 6.9 per cent (1.9 per cent more than the Vanoni plan) and if construction is included by as much as 9.7 per cent.  

Construction is a key issue in the modern Italian economy. Is housing fixed capital, or is it a consumer good? That is an elegant question for another forum. Suffice it now to add that, returning to the Stalin-Khrushchevian industrial product indices (turnover), we are reminded of another character, Fascetti [president of IRI from 1956 to 1960, Editor’s note], with the progress of the indices of the companies managed by I.R.I. Spectacular: average in 1950-55 6 per cent, in the final year, 19 per cent. 

The analogy of the Italian I.R.I. with the Soviet ”system”, due to its disdain for profits, is for another discussion; for the first year, it broke even today. 

19. Highest Turin  

The industrial capital of Italy, which hosted our last meeting, deserved special treatment. 

The rapporteur referred to the report at the meeting in Asti, held on 26 and 27 June 1954. FIAT had recently held its annual shareholders’ meeting, and Prof. Valletta had presented the results and balance sheet for the year 1953. This year we were a short distance from the 1955 shareholders’ meeting and balance sheet. 

The passage from Asti’s report illustrating the significance of Turin and FIAT in the history of the workers’ movement and Italian communism was read out to the meeting. The general title was ’Volcano of production or swamp of the market?’; the paragraph, in No. 15 (7-8-1954) of Il Programma Comunista’, was ’The monstrous FIAT’.  

It was a criticism of the matrix of current Italian communist opportunism: ordinovism, Gramscism. One more self-quotation: ”These groups, as soon as they stuck their noses out of the tidy, shiny warehouses of the Turin car factory, and made contact with the less industrially concentrated part of Italy, with the agrarian and backward plagues, with the regional and peasant problem, they suddenly fell into a defence of the same positions as the most discoloured petty-bourgeois parties of half a century earlier, and were no longer concerned with revolutionising Turin, but with bourgeoisising Italy, so that it would all be worthy of bearing the mark of the Turin factory, of being administered and governed in the impeccable style of the Turin factory’.  

Let us return today to said style, which is the style of myths, of cults. The myth of Stalin has been dealt a bad blow; the myth of super-companies and motorised hysteria is about to be dealt a bad blow too: the miraculous FIAT assembly ’chains’ of across the Atlantic, of General Motors, have already had to be stopped in their sleepless, perpetual rolling. 

For now, new factories are being erected here, and a growing stream of cars spills out onto the already congested roads, and more and more makes its way over the pedestrian flesh. But the dead consecrate themselves to the myth of the modern jaggernaut with tyres. One blasphemes the old gods, not Progress!  

20. Valletta-Bulganin 

We are immediately able to give the figures for ’turnover’, i.e. the value of a year’s production, and the two reports provide us with them for four years. In 1952, 200 billion; in 1953, 240 billion: annual increase of 20 per cent. In 1954, 275: annual increment 14.6 per cent. In 1955, 310 billion: annual increment 12.7 per cent. In the three years, 155 against 100: average annual increment 15.7 per cent, much higher than the Russian 11.5 per cent. Valletta [FIAT CEO and president, Ed] surpasses Khrushchev. 

FIAT beats Dynamo 15 to 11!  

In the Asti report, the FIAT data did not serve us for the discussion of the purported socialist definition of any industrial system with a high rate of incremental product progression, but for the contrast of terminology and economic calculation in Marx and the bourgeoisie. 

For us, FIAT’s turnover is its ’capital’: 310 billion today. We must, as in Asti, break it down into variable capital, constant capital, and surplus-value. Then we determined, using the Valletta data on personnel and investment in new plants, this partition: Variable capital or personnel expenditure, 70 billion. Constant capital, i.e. raw materials and wear and tear, 110 billion; surplus value 60 billion. Total capital or product at the end of the annual cycle: 240 billion. 

Of the surplus value only 10 billion went to the shareholders, the other 50, as Valletta announced at the time, to new plants.  

The new year’s figures give similar results; but first let us remember how different the bourgeois language is from ours. FIAT’s nominal capital, about which we gave the long story at the time, has now increased to 152 million 500 lira shares and is 76 billion against 57 in 1953 and 36 in 1952. It gained 58 per cent in the first of the three years, in the second it stood still, in the third it gained 33.3. The average rate was 28 per cent per year. But the actual capital depends on the stock market price of the shares. This, which was 660 in 1953, is today as much as 1354 lire, still against the nominal 500. The real capital, even in current parlance, has thus gone from 75.5 billion to 205 billion. Two-year increase 272 per cent, annual increase 65 per cent.  

If this figure indicates the actual ’credit’ of the shareholders ’against’ the company, of which they are the ’masters’, their annual dividend, or profit in the official economist’s sense, should have increased by the same amount. Never again! The Vallettas and C. only gave the shareholders 7.3 billion in 1953 and 10.6 billion in 1955. That is, shareholder profit fell from 9.7 per cent to 5.1. Frenzy of productive investment, law of the descent of the profit rate! 

The whole of FIAT today, however, is worth neither the nominal 76 billion nor the real 205 billion. At Asti, we ’estimated’ it at no less than one thousand billion, as assets of property and machinery, which we Marxists would call: value of the means of production; not to be confused with constant capital, mentioned earlier. 

Valletta said today that between 1946 and 1955 they invested 300 billion in new plants, and announced the prestigious ’Mirafiori Sud’ for 1956. The figure of 50 billion is still valid today as an annual rate. Today’s FIAT would be worth 1100 billion, at a stroke, more and not less. Get rid of the shareholders, who cover with their pieces of paper less than a fifth of the real, and you will pass from socialism-FIAT to the highest socialism-IRI.  

21. The Threatened Labour Force  

To date, one thing is remarkable: the workforce has only grown from 71,000 to 74,000, i.e. by 5 per cent, just two and a half per year! And then the variable capital will have risen from 70 to 80, even exaggerating on the vaunted handouts to the staff, highly praised for not having gone on strike for one hour in one year (ah, Turin the super red!). Even if we put 12 to the shareholders, and 50 to investments in new plants, the 1955 account “the Marx way” becomes: Variable capital 80 billion. Constant capital 168 billion. Surplus value 62 billion. Total 310 billion, as known. The surplus-value is divided into 12 of profit to the shareholders, and 50 of new plants; the total rate of it is 62 versus 80, i.e. 78 per cent, in Marx’s sense.  

The organic composition of capital would have gone from 110/70 (i.e. 1.57) in 1953, to 168/80 (i.e. 2.10) in 1955. We showed that it is low because FIAT is a vertical set-up that buys the original raw materials and transforms them over and over again. However, is there not a trick in Valletta’s figures if constant capital, which was 46% of the product in 1953, is 64% in 1955? Are we beginning to see the benefits of automation? Even if a large slice of surplus value to be taken to new plants was hidden (in fact the 1956 figure was not said this time), the fact remains that the product rises by 30 per cent, in the two years in which the labour force rises by only 5 per cent.  

And here the donkey falls (there’s the rub)- we would say the Vanoni donkey, if the poor man had not died. We have certainly exceeded 5 per cent in new investment, but with employment we are not there, we remain at 2.50 per cent, only!  

Stay, bad Italy of the South, at zero, and behold the proletarian aristocracy of Turin, huddled around its Valletta! Who shortly afterwards performed the Soviet miracle of the weekly hours and, outclassing the Bulganins once again, reduced them from 48 to 46, from 45 to 44, and from 42 to 40. Without reducing wages in the slightest, it is proclaimed; but also without increasing the number of workers in the slightest.  

22. Five-Year Plan for Big Fiat  

From the clandestine little room in Turin came the homage, to the socialist merits of the top administrators, of a Five-Year Plan, Russia style, nice and done.  

If the rate kept in the past three years was 15.7 per cent, this corresponds to a 106 per cent increase in production over a five-year period. From the 100 per cent index, one must move on to the 206 per cent index. The 200 billion-turnover of 1952 will have to be 412 in 1957, and, if you will, in 1960 the 310 of 1955 will have to be as much as 640. 

The 250,000 motorised vehicles of today will become 515,000, even if we disregard the fact that in one year they have gone from 190,142 to 250,299, a rise of 30.5 per cent (and how is it that sales only go up by 14 per cent? Would the warehouses be as engorged as General Motors?) 

Where there are nine hundred thousand unsold cars from 1955 production. G. M. had five makes: ’Chevrolet’, ’Pontiac’, ’Oldsmobile’, ’Buick’ and ’Cadillac’. Four years of Fiat work! 

What was the 1955 G. M. turnover? 9 billion 924 million dollars, over 6000 billion lire. 

Twenty FIATs! 

Personnel? 577,000. Eight FIATs. 

Organic composition, mechanisation, automatism, they are only two and a half times the FIAT. 

How do they count stopping this demented march?  

1) Two hundred thousand redundancies in Detroit. 
2) Five million tonnes of steel demanded less (and the steel workers’ strike in the hands of traitors!) 
3) One third of the advertising on television is paid for by car factories. 
4) ”You only have to be employed for a fortnight to be able to walk into a shop and walk out a few minutes later at the wheel of a blazing car, without having paid a single dollar in advance”. 
5) “The G. M. Technical Centre cost $10 million; it is a monument to Progress”. 

Out of it comes, while planning to throw a million new cars in the rubbish, the turbine car – secret designs – known as the ’Firebird’. 

Can the historical-economic equation of this Progress not show when the knot comes, the catastrophe, the Revolution, the social ’Firebird’? 

It is of no interest to us now – returning to Fiat – to establish how much, according to the plan, will be the 1960 dividends, the nominal capital updates, and its weight at stock exchange values. And the mystery of advancing automation only allows us to ask the questions: how many workers? how much their remuneration? how many hours per week? 

Bourgeois economics knows only one thing: that they will all have the utility car, the refrigerator, the television, and perhaps a FIAT stock certificate. 

And we will do such accounts another time; our grandchildren will do them better. 

Because of such perspectives, the Soviet-style economy knows (it is well understood) one more thing; that in Turin one lives in a … socialist system, at FIAT they produce under the… socialist system! 

Indeed, it is the first place in the Soviet world that the young and giant automobile industry in Italy is entitled to. Automotive capitalism, whatever the mysterious year of birth of Italian capitalism, is very young; the motorised road vehicle is little more than half a century old: we said in Asti that FIAT’s date of birth was 1899 (the founding capital was 800,000 lire! which today would be 300 million at most, i.e. one thousandth of today. A thousand times in 56 years is achieved with 13 per cent per year, which in such a long period is another defeat for Russian rhythms; since 1899 Russian production has only increased about 400, not 1000 times). 

The decisive comparison is this. 

Russian five-year plan 1955-1960: 100 to 170, 12 per cent; 
The same, realisation; 100 to 185, 13.1 per cent; 
Russian five-year plan 1960-1965: 100 to 165, 11.5 per cent. 
FIAT Five-Year Plan 1960-65: 100 to 206, 15.7 per cent. 

And glory to the great… socialist homeland of the motor industry! And glory to the no less great homeland of degenerate Italian communism.