Summary of Our General Meetings in 2017
General Party Meeting – Firenze, January 27-29 [RG127]
– Saturday Session
History of India: The national movement
Course of capitalism: Production and trade
The missed revolution in Germany
The Military Question: the First World War, on the Italian front
The PCd’I and the Arditi del Popolo
– Sunday Session
The Hungarian revolution of 1919
Report of Venezuelan comrades
The meeting took place in an optimal way, according to our praxis, in an orderly and attentive way, both in the organizational part, of evaluation of work done and of planning of future work, and in the presentation of the many reports. A brief synthesis is given below to our readers, as customary.
What we claim to be the embryo of what will be the great party of the international communist revolution destructive of capitalism lives today in the determination of our team of militants, disciplined to the historical program and informed of our class science and tradition of social war.
In the useful overlapping and sound succession of generations of communists it is for the party to pass on modules of interpretation both of the world and of itself, which are the dialectic and drastic denial of the bourgeois ones.
Capitalism in its becoming enormous and corrupting tends inexorably to impose ever more extensive and pressing the conditions for its destruction and its capsizing into communism, and the party represents, already in the present society, such total overcoming, anti-individualist and anti-mercantile.
If the working class still lives in the society of the commodification of man and of war, its revolutionary party is in a position to evaluate it and fight it also from its outside. The trade union is immersed in the competition environment, and the bargaining on the price of the labor force is its constitutive purpose; but the party is not the union, only it aims at directing it from the outside. Even the soviet, the state of proletarian dictatorship, the red army are indispensable instruments, organs of the working class, in which the influence, even if minoritarian, of non-communist directions is inevitable. But the party is not the soviet, it is not the state, it is not the army, and it contrasts with its nature and with its aims the adoption within it of the methods of the union, the soviet, the state, the army.
Not in the sense that in the party a space of polycentric freedom and of loose discipline opens up: on the contrary, only in the communist party, unlike in the other intermediate bodies between the party and the class, is a superior historical form of convergence of aims and work, a discipline (which means “learning”) that rejects democracy, the historical bourgeois flag.
In this spirit we also organize the work at our meetings, at the general ones in particular, a method, moreover, sought and applied in all previous historical forms of the party, from the League of Communists to the First International, to the Third in its early years.
At meetings we work for this result, to welcome the wealth of contributions from the periphery, in different languages and in their partiality, to make them converge and insert them into the large and complex building of the unitary body of doctrine of our Left Communist current, in the common interpretative key and in the word that the party addresses to the unending social war of the working class.
General Work Meeting – Torino, May 26-28 [RG128]
– Saturday Session
The Military Question: the First World War
Course of capitalism: towards a huge crisis
Marxism and mathematical models
India: The national movement
Rearming of States
The succession of modes of production
Report of the venezuelan section
– Sunday Session
The missed revolution in Germany
Party trade union activity
The concept of dictatorship before Marx
The Hungarian revolution
We held the May meeting in Turin, in the ample and comfortable environment which a rank and file union has allowed us to use, in a neighborhood of what, despite the crisis, remains a city with a strong proletarian and workers component.
Consistent presence of our delegations, from Italy, the United Kingdom, France and Germany.
The work began on Friday mid-afternoon, already in the presence of numerous comrades, with the usual report of the center on the results of the work in the past few months, which was followed by all comrades with different commitments, who reported amply, anticipating the conclusions that would have been presented in the reports, during the full sessions of Saturday and Sunday, and which, subsequently, would find definitive formulation, arrangement and sometimes integration in the party press.
On Saturday morning we completed the planning of the future work of the party, then began the presentation of reports, all of which very much demanding from our small but determined forces.
Saturday evening, a common dinner, organized by the local section, was an opportunity to get to know each other and exchange opinions among us.
The very good results of our studies and the effectiveness of our propaganda derive from the scientific-communist-revolutionary method that distinguishes us: no personalism, no forms of competition, no need to amaze the audience with inventions or glaring discoveries, but the objective research of historical facts and their interpretation in the light of the invariant class doctrine, tested by centuries of class struggle.
A very well attended General Meeting in Genua – September 29 ‑ October 1, 2017 [RG129]
– Saturday Session
Course of the economic crisis
The Military Question: the First World War
The war in Syria
The missed revolution in Germany
The Hungarian revolution of 1919
Economy and strikes in XIX century England
Party’s union activity
Report of the Venezuelan section
– Sunday Session
The Military Question, continues: The Caporetto Rout
The concept of the Party in Lenin
Winds of war in Korea
The concept of dictatorship before Marx: Babeuf
In accordance with an hyperstested method and rhythm of work, which allowed the present party to pass unscathed these long decades of counterrevolution, we held the general meeting that according to our detailed and always updated indexes boasts the number 129 since 1974, in complete continuity as method and contents with the earlier 62 occurred since 1951.
All militants are invited to general meetings, individually, although, due to organizational convenience, reports are made for whole sections or work groups.
Representatives were present from England and France and, from Italy, of Torino, Genova, Friuli, Cortona, Bari, Roma, Firenze, Parma. Others, unable to be present, have sent their salutations and a written report of their and their section’s work.
The subjects reported by the numerous work groups and on our external activity, all very demanding, are faced with an impersonal approach, that is, with disdain of any originality or creativity, with the sole aim of tracing in the past of our class and of our party the interpretative keys of today’s events.
History of India: the National Movement
The comrade continued the reports on the history of India describing the Hindu and Muslim organizations that opposed the colonial regime until the first decade of the XX century.
During the first session of the Indian National Congress, held in Bombay in 1885, the Muslim component was little represented, in addition to the Bengali, both little present in the new professions from which came the majority of delegates, lawyers, doctors, journalists and teachers. But some large vassal princes, a number of members of the Maratha aristocracy, and some industrialists made a valuable financial contribution.
Starting with the Congress of 1887, held in Madras, also a number of large landowners, merchants and bankers and even small and medium-sized landowners, village leaders and Muslim religious leaders participated, a change resulting from the growing pressure to which these classes were subjected following the centralization process initiated by the colonial state.
A modern nationalist ideology was developed, disapproving India’s colonial economic dependence on Britain with an uninterrupted drainage of wealth, for the creation of a modern conception of an Indian nation, with political claims not as citizens of the Empire but as part of a nation.
Even if in such a vast territory as India, the objective elements that, according to the ideology of the time, should have characterized a national identity seemed to be missing. India, in fact, as the British bourgeoisie was not tired of repeating, was not uniform as race, religion, culture, and language.
The answer given by the first Indian theorists was not evidently materialistic but subjective: for Surendranath Baneijea, influenced by the writings of Giuseppe Mazzini, a nation came into being when the members of a community claimed their belonging to a given territory.
The benevolent neutrality towards the Congress by the colonial leadership turned into explicit hostility within a few years.
However, to the consensus that the Congress had obtained among the notable Indians it was necessary to give an answer: during the last decade of the nineteenth century there was a series of administrative reforms. These measures were judged totally inadequate by the Congress, but they reached the goal of opening new connections between the colonial leaders and the notables. The latter realized that they could deal on an almost equal level with the colonial class. As a consequence, in the second half of the nineties, most of the notables abandoned the Congress.
For Congress, the only possible remedy was a strategy that would mobilize broader sectors of the Indian masses behind the ideals of nationalism. Objective class opposition made it difficult. The Indian masses were predominantly rural and generally very poor. Certainly this was also the result of colonial exploitation, but there were privileged classes, especially landowners and great merchants, only exceptionally British, among the beneficiaries of the colonial system; and the Congress had counted on the support of many of those notables, taking charge of their political demands. For the Congress, interpreting the needs of the peasant masses meant opposing the privileged Indian classes.
Class struggle, however, was not at all in the program of this organization, unlike nationalist intellectuals, who knew well the existing misery and social discrimination; they believed however that mobilizing the masses would weaken the nationalist movement, countering a part of the people, the exploited, to the Indian ruling classes. In order not to take sides with the deprived, the Congress preferred to lose its political weight in the second half of the 1990s.
Some internal tensions intensified, the old moderate leadership was challenged by a new, more radical, “extremist” current, but socially just as conservative. Their political intransigence was accompanied by a timidity towards socio-economic reforms that was no different from that of the moderates. They only managed to succeed thanks to the political use of Hinduism, a language of metaphors and figurations of Hindu religious tradition. Although political Hinduism became increasingly popular in those years between the Hindu petty bourgeoisie and the students, it did not generate a mass following to nationalism. Hinduism turned to the peasants affected by the 1896 serious famine in Deccan, but also to the nascent proletariat of Bombay, showing that it wanted to protect the workers’ union rights, but only of those who did not depend on Indian owners, with whom Hinduism sought to establish good relationships.
Meanwhile, tension also grew in the context of the so-called Westernized Muslims, part of the surviving sectors of the Mughal aristocracy, whose political leadership was however closely linked to the British.
In this complex situation, the anti-British currents, both within the Congress and among young Westernized Muslims, were fueled by British politics that launched a series of measures with a view to reducing costs.
In the Congress the struggle focused on two demands put forward by the “extremists”: a form of self-government identical to that already enjoyed by the “white” dominions and to widen the boycott movement to the whole of India.
But in 1907, at the Congress of Surat, the works ended with a majority of moderates that formalized the expulsion of extremists. The splitting of the Congress gave the colonial authorities the opportunity to intervene with a heavy hand. The main leaders and the most active militants of the extremist current were arrested and, in general, condemned to heavy prison sentences. In the spring of 1908, the New Extremist Party was dispersed and reduced to impotence. A terrorist movement remained active, which was soon infiltrated by the Central Intelligence Department of the Indian police and, although possibly dangerous for the individual Briton, was far from being a real threat to the colonial state.
At the next meeting the comrade continued on the period from the early twentieth century until 1920, outlining the economic and political decline of England and the slow strengthening of Indian nationalism.
The nationalists had maintained an openness towards the Muslim League, which saw itself pushed towards the Congress by two events of 1911. The first was the attack of Italy to the Ottoman Empire, made possible by the benevolent English neutrality, which triggered the first Balkan war, as a result of which the Ottoman Empire lost all its residual possessions in Europe, except for Constantinople. These events, together with a series of massacres perpetrated in Persia by the Russians, then allies of the British, aroused the indignation of Indian Muslims, profoundly influenced by pan-Islamism, who saw England behind the final attack on the last great independent Islamic State.
The second important fact was the revocation of partition of Bengal, moving the capital from Calcutta to Delhi, a completely unexpected act and seen by Indian Muslims as the renounce to a series of commitments by the colonial authorities. The conviction therefore emerged that in order to protect the interests of the Muslim community in India, an agreement with the Congress was to be sought.
All the years from 1914 to 1947 were marked by the ineluctable crisis of the colonial power system, due to the overlappping of three processes. The first was the decline of England. The second was the growth of Indian nationalism, which immediately after the First World War changed from substantially elitist to a mass movement. The third was the progressive loss of economic importance of India for Great Britain.
India had been fundamental for England because it fulfilled a triple “imperial commitment”: the payment of home charges and other debts contracted with England; the role of buyer of British industrial products and of export of agricultural products and raw materials; the employment for the army of Indian troops, paid by Indian taxpayers. Only the first “imperial commitment” still existed (but only until the forties, when India turned from debtor to creditor of England), while the other two became increasingly inapplicable since the years of the First World War.
The British economy, like all those capitalistically advanced at the time, was going through a process of change that progressively made it less dependent on the colonies, both for the purchase of raw materials and for the sale of industrial products. The British industries were turning to produce goods that, although still having market in the western countries, were however scarcely marketable in the colonies because of the latter’s limited purchasing power.
During the First World War, the Indian army’s contribution to the victory of the Entente was considerable, but the costs for its deployment, especially when it was employed on a large scale, began to be intolerable.
In August 1914, India learned that it had entered the war alongside England against the Central Empires. Immediately there were declarations of loyalty and solidarity from different sectors of the Indian bourgeoisie, which counted on bringing the British to new and more generous political concessions. But the lack of English response to these expectations gave way to a process of radicalization.
In 1917 our revolution in Russia was followed with interest by many politicized Indians, who for a long time had denounced the analogies between the tsarist empire and the Anglo-Indian empire. Among these was Manabendra Nath Roy who, after having contributed to the establishment of the Mexican Communist Party in 1919, had participated in the second congress of the Communist International. But, having returned home with a task of the International, he did not find much success among other Indian Marxists, nor was he able to establish a consistent contact with the working class and peasant classes.
Moreover, the objective conditions described in this report offer little similarity with what happened in Russia. Even the subjective conditions greatly diverge, as will be described in the rest of the study.
On 11 November 1918 Germany signed the armistice that ended the war.
Already in February 1919 rumors of a campaign of “civil disobedience” began to circulate. The man who supported this initiative was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. After his death he will be recognized as “father of the nation” and the world bourgeoisie will sanctify him for the “non-violent” methods of struggle: “satyagraha”, “firmness in truth”. Ideal that did not prevent him from siding several times on the side of the British imperialist butchers. In 1899, at the beginning of the Second Boer War, he declared that the Indians had to support the war effort if they wanted to legitimize their citizenship request. In 1906 he created the Indian Health Corps to bring assistance in the war against the Zulus. During the First World War he supported Britain also by promoting a recruitment campaign for Indian soldiers.
In April 1917 there was a series of agitations in India: the first in Bihar, where the peasants were exploited by the English indigo planters, and others in Gujarat, by the peasants of the district of Kaira and the workers of Ahmedabad. Gandhi was among the organizers, and obtained moderate success that gave him a certain following. All this however through mediation between the sides. In the great strike between December 1918 and January 1919, the textile workers of Bombay, predominantly of ethnic Marathas, called Gandhi to direct the fight, but he refused so as not to be against the entrepreneurs, mainly Gujarati and Parsi, who had begun to support him politically and economically.
In those years the theses on nationalism and colonialism were clearly presented at the second Congress of the International and became a clear theoretical and practical orientation for all communists. Three types of countries in relation to the national movement were distinguished in them: the first was formed by the capitalistically advanced nations, in which the progressive bourgeois national movement had long since ended; the second included the countries of Eastern Europe, Austria, the Balkans and Russia, where national movements had partly developed in the 20th century; in the third were the semi-colonial countries. In Asia “the driving forces of the bourgeois democratic national revolution will be the workers and the peasants” and was hoped for “the closest alliance between the communist proletariat of Western Europe and the peasant revolutionary movement of the East of the colonies and of the backward countries in general». Socialists “must support the most revolutionary elements of the bourgeois democratic movements of national liberation, help them in their insurrection, and, if the case arises, in their revolutionary war against the imperialist powers that oppress them”. In fact, against the thesis that there could no longer be any national wars, Lenin wrote: “Every war is the continuation of politics by other means. Continuation of the policy of national liberation of the colonies will necessarily be the national wars of these against imperialism “.
Gandhi’s movement had certainly not been “the most revolutionary element of the bourgeois movement”, so much so that, under the pretext of non-violence, he repeatedly managed to disarm the Indian masses in the face of the ferocity of their oppressors. Although he was a defender of the pariahs, the last of the Indian castes, Gandhi considered the division of the society into castes as fundamental.
On February 24, 1919, during a period of very strong social tensions and strikes in several cities, Gandhi announced a campaign of “civil disobedience”. Due to the pression from below by the uprising struggles, a series of harlals, general strikes, was announced throughout India. The first ones, on March 30th and April 6th, depending on the area, were characterized by the participation and by scenes of fraternization between Hindus and Muslims. The situation soon escaped the control of both the British and the Gandhians, and in various parts of the subcontinent riots broke out with dead and wounded, particularly in Punjab but also in Bombay, Ahmedabad and Calcutta. Called to order by the cowardly Indian bourgeoisie Gandhi suspended the movement, and arranged to organize a body of volunteers trained in “non-violent fight techniques”, which would frame and direct the future mass movements.
In 1920 the Indian government established that a fixed and substantial share of tax revenues could no longer be used by the Empire, a norm presented as a concrete step forward towards the “responsible government” promised in 1917, namely self-government. To the richer 3% of the population, which corresponded to the active electorate, essentially landowners, merchants and moneylenders, industrialists and wealthy professionals, was devolved the management of over a third of the financial resources of the provinces, offering them the possibility to influence, far more than ever before, the destination of the remaining resources. But these reforms were wholly inadequate to the ideals and needs of nascent Indian nationalism.
Gandhi’s party was faced with two irreconcilable interests: on the one hand, the workers and peasants who, although lacking a rooted revolutionary party, driven by a serious economic crisis, put forward with determination the social question; on the other, part of the Indian bourgeoisie, well aware of the situation and happy to accept the partial concessions of the English Crown.
Gandhi’s party certainly did not aspire to take the leadership of the workers and peasants, and revived the anti-colonial struggle through a non-cooperation and non-violent movement: a progressive boycott of the colonial state through the renunciation of titles and honorary duties, resignation from civil state employment and tax evasion. Eventually, the resignation from the army and the police and the boycotting of elections foreseen by the reform law were added. Therefore a very moderate political action, preferred by the majority of the Congress and the Muslim League, fearful that the revolution against the British could be transformed into a social revolution against the privileged Indian layers of which they were representatives. The outcome of the movement against the partition of Bengal constituted a worrying warning, which had found a recent confirmation in the double revolution in Russia.
The Catastrophic Course of World Capitalism
A. The productions
The capitalist mode of production has disrupted the ancient mercantile economy relations of production based on the peasant family economy and small craft production of cities and villages. It ruined and expropriated the old producers, proletarianized them by forcing them to sell, in exchange for a salary, the only good left to them, their labor force. In so doing and replacing the independent and dispersed production of the peasant and the artisan with the collective and centralized production of the mechanized economy and of the great industry, capitalism has socialized the productive forces and ended up undermining the foundations of mercantile production.
The great mechanized capitalist agriculture and the big industry, by mobilizing immense armies of workers, that operate collectively and in a centralized way, employing the latest technical and scientific knowledge, have blunted the limitations of the ancient modes of production and freed the productive forces, and the frenzied accumulation of capital has exalted its development to an unprecedented scale.
However, at the end of the nineteenth century, after the appearance of the monopolies, today called “multinationals”, capitalism became in turn an obstacle to the development of the productive forces. On the one hand, the deadly accumulation of capital – in itself uncontrolled – leads to an ever-increasing socialization of production, on the other hand the appropriation remains private. This fundamental contradiction periodically leads capital to a crisis of overproduction.
The accumulation of capital rests on the appropriation, in the act of production, of labor unpaid to the worker: surplus-value. Capital gets to a gigantic accumulation of surplus value, that is of value, value being nothing but the crystallization of labor in the produced object, be it agricultural or industrial.
The more the productivity of social labor increases, the more the rate of profit falls, and therefore the return on invested capital decreases.
To illustrate this decline in the rate of profit, at the meeting we presented three tables on the progress of industrial production in the great imperialist countries, in the years 1900 to 2007. This long period was divided into 5 cycles.
The antagonism between the productive forces unleashed by the accumulation of capital and the capitalist production relations themselves lead to cyclical crises of overproduction. These are the ways in which capital lets off and temporarily solves its own contradictions. The accumulation of capital is first and foremost an immense accumulation of cmmodities, and the crisis appears in the circulation of goods when the drop in sales triggers insolvencies.
In the warehouses unsold commodities are piled up, protests are issued and the banks’ budgets are inflated with postponed or unpaid promissory notes. Financial and industrial failures are no longer avoidable. The economy is paralyzed: it is the crisis. Companies “restructure” and lay off massively, unemployment takes on gigantic proportions. The fictitious capital, the result of the frenetic speculations that preceded the crisis, sees its prices plummet. The constant capital of many industrial companies loses value. The financial institutions themselves fail and the bulk of their bad debts, previously kept hidden, is sold off. The goods in stock end up being liquidated, constant capital is partly devalued, wages are at the lowest level, unemployment at the top as well as precariousness.
At this point the rate of profit begins to rise again, the tension gives way and little by little the activity resumes. Later unemployment decreases and consumption resumes. For a certain period productions pass from trot to gallop. Speculation, which has resumed mounting, reaches its peak, the cost of raw materials, under the effect of strong demand and speculation, skyrockets, wages are in turn increased and, to force the market to absorb the gigantic amount of goods, credit is pushed to the maximum. Under the combined effect of speculation and credit, which result from the enormous accumulation of capital, interest rates, which with the recovery had begun to rise gently, are once again at their highest.
Them the crisis is back.
More tables represented growth in the nine major industrial countries, which are at the same time imperialist nations in the sense of Lenin. The growth of industry is determined by the rate of profit, because that is what determines investments. The growth of productions is a reflection of the rate of profit: when the rate of profit is high, growth is also robust, whereas when, on the contrary, the rate of profit is low, as in the case of the old imperialist countries, growth of production is equally low.
In order to follow the course of capital on a global scale, we presented a table with the average annual percentage increases in industrial production. The table can be read vertically and horizontally. Vertically, countries are listed for increasing growth rate, which corresponds to decreasing seniority, as the older capitalist countries have lower profit rates. Horizontally, from cycle to cycle, we can see the rate of growth declining over time, which corresponds to the historical slowdown in the rate of profit.
It is noted in the 1929-1937 cycle, which precedes the Second World War, the failure to resume growth in Germany, the USA and in particular France, despite the effort to rearm. Italy and England, on the other hand, remain at levels close to those of previous cycles.
The United States during the war years produced a gigantic military effort. The war allowed world capitalism to start a new long cycle of accumulation and it was a great deal for American capitalism, while on the battlefield “his” uniformed proletarians were being massacred.
Capitalism is rejuvenated by the imperialist war. The war produces gigantic destruction and terrifying massacres. These massive destructions entail an extensive destruction of capital and the general devaluation of constant capital, as in the crises of overproduction but on a much higher scale. There is a considerable drop in wages, linked to mass unemployment and great insecurity, which brings with it a sharp increase in the rate of surplus value. These two factors cause a remarkable rise in the rate of profit, as in the days of the first seasons of capitalism, especially during the period of “reconstruction”. Even after this, years 1946-1950 after World War II, and when the productions have regained their pre-war level, the new increased productivity, linked to the introduction of new technologies, lowers the cost of production of constant capital, momentarily reducing the organic composition of capital.
It is worth noting the reversal of the trend following the Second World War: the 1937-1973 cycle marked a recovery of increases. As early as 1950 the various countries regained the 1937 level, the highest reached before the war. England regains an almost youthful increase with an average of 3%. Germany, which had experienced appalling destruction, grew by 7.2%, close to the USSR, 8.2%, which was a younger capitalism. Russian capitalism, following the destruction of the civil war, had almost disappeared and almost had to be reborn.
But this post-war cycle, which saw a vigorous and almost prodigious accumulation of capital, and on the material level a formidable development of the productive forces, ended definitively in the two-year period 1973-1974 with the first serious world crisis following the second conflict. Later, from cycle to cycle, the increases have steadily decreased. While in the period 1950-1973 there were practically no recessions, or limited to national phenomena, the 1973-2007 cycle is divided by successive crises into five short cycles: 1973-1979, 1979-1989, 1989-2000, 2000-2007; the last one, begun in 2007, is not yet concluded. Each of these short cycles corresponds to a period of expansion followed by an international recession.
B. The strangulation of the market
The aim of production, in the capitalist mode of production, is not the satisfaction of human needs but the accumulation of capital: every capital invested must generate a profit.
Capital presents itself as a mass of commodities whose value must be converted, i.e. it must be sold on the market.
The fact is that there can be no balance between production and the market, because these two phases of the circulation of capital are governed by laws in contrast. Production is not determined by needs, by demand, but the opposite happens: production in capitalism, unlike previous production modes, precedes the demand, and then finds itself having to dispose of the production of commodities, a condition to be able to start over again a new cycle.
It is vital for capitalism to extend the market, whatever the cost, in order to dispose of the increasingly gigantic production of goods. The increase in wages increases the sale, but if wages increase, surplus-value decreases: this is the grip that tightens capitalism. As the domestic market soon becomes saturated, outlets are to be found abroad: hence the importance of international trade. The other means of circumventing the limited purchasing power of individuals and businesses is credit, which defer payments. However, sooner or later the accounts must balance.
We have shown a table concerning the percentage growth of world trade, adding exports and imports. In the world total obviously imports and exports balance.
It goes from 4.3% for the cycle 1836-1890, to 3.3% of 1890-1913, to 0.5% for the cycle covering the two world wars. Then a strong comeback after the Second World War with 8.3% in the “glorious thirty years”, and a sharp deceleration to 5.1% in the 1974-2008 cycle. However, the increase remains high.
We then divided the 1974-2008 cycle according to the short cycles corresponding to international trade crises. In the periods that follow 1980, there was first a spectacular collapse of the increase up to 1992, then a net, although discontinuous, going up again to 2008, followed by a sharp slowdown in the following cycle, from which we have not yet emerged.
The slowdown for the 1997-2000 cycle corresponds to the monetary and financial crisis that hit the countries of South-East Asia in 1997, starting from Hong Kong, then extending to South Korea and from there to Russia, whose State declared itself insolvent, and finally reaching the countries of Latin America, such as Mexico, Brazil and especially Argentina, which experienced a terrible recession and whose State was forced to declare itself bankrupt.
What explains the strong increase in the increase in world trade from 1992 to 2008? Two factors: first, the relocations and outsourcing that have increased the transfer of goods, secondly the formidable development of capitalism in China and Southeast Asia.
Today commodities are rarely produced entirely in the same country. To lower their cost of production, large companies have “outsourced” part of their production and made use of subcontractors. Taking advantage of the significant reduction in freight rates, especially maritime, they put small and medium-sized companies in competition all over the world. Thus, the same product before becoming salable can travel many times back and forth between different countries. Intermediate goods today represent between 40 and 60% of international trade. This is how Germany between 2003 and 2009 became the world’s leading exporter. Eventually, the United States were back first, but then China overtook both, becoming the world’s leading exporter.
– The growing weight of Asia
The dazzling development of capitalism in China and Southeast Asia has offered a new market, first of all for the goods of the manufacturing sector, then for the capitals of the big monopolies: industrial groups like General Motors, Honda, Siemens, Renault, etc., linked to investment banks that directly and indirectly control thousands of companies throughout the world. While the North American, Japanese and European markets are growing at a slowcoach pace, those of Southeast Asia and China gallop.
A second table showed the percentage growth in the volume of trade. That of the great imperialist countries has halved in the 1974-2008 cycle compared to the previous 1949-1974. That of Asia, excluding Japan, remains high and stable in both cycles. World trade has therefore been driven by Asian countries and in general by emerging countries that continue to attract monopolies. However, after 2015, some of these countries have entered a recession, such as Brazil, or their growth has slowed considerably.
China. Between 1959 and 2008, its international trade grew at an average rate of 9.1%, more than the contemporary 8.5% of Western countries. The short cycles begin with 1959-1966, which saw in China the terrible crisis of 1961-1962, in which industrial production fell by 48%. This crisis has been accompanied by a serious agricultural crisis that has caused millions of deaths. This explains the collapse of its international trade. This recession will be followed by another in 1967-1968, after the 1960 high was exceeded in 1966: 1043 against 924 in the index of industrial production. The crisis was less severe, but however the fall in production reached 22%. Which explains the political crisis in the apparatus of the party and the state and the enlistment of a part of youth in the so-called “cultural revolution”. However, this crisis does not appear in the average increase of the whole cycle, on the contrary its very high rate corresponds to a capitalism in a youthful phase of sustained growth.
China has taken full advantage of the “globalization”, as can be seen from the rise of its increases, from cycle to cycle, up to an average of 18% per annum in 1997-2008. Goods flowed everywhere, but also and above all capitals, and Chinese exports exploded.
Then came the end of the binge: the global recession of 2008-2009, with a 14% fall in world trade. Exports decreased by 28% in Asia, 21% in Europe, 18% in North America and 9.3% in China.
This fall in Chinese exports was followed by a strong recovery in 2010. But, by investigating China’s foreign trade, we see that it slowed sharply in 2014, 2015 and 2016, announcing a considerable recession.
In another table we reported the relative global weight of exports of the main industrial countries. France, the United Kingdom and Italy are in a remarkable and inexorable decline. The last two are at the same level of Belgium, whose retreat is much weaker, but is surpassed by South Korea. Germany also moves back, but more slowly, and Japan returns to its quota of 1973-1979. The United States marks a slow decline and is found in the cycles of 2000-2007 and 2007-2015 at a level slightly lower than that of the 1973-1979 cycle.
In the opposite direction we can observe the dazzling rise of China which goes from a negligible value in the 1973-1979 cycle, to 5.1% of 2007-2015, world maximum, having overtaken the United States. In exports, China has surpassed the United States since 2006 and in the volume of trade since 2013. South Korea continues its slow but no less noticeable rise.
The share of the great imperialist states goes from 55% to 38% while Asia passes from 8% to 30%.
It took two world wars for the United States to finally replace England. But in our days, productivity is such that the growth of capitalism is much faster, and it also ages much faster. This means that, in the event that the proletariat cannot stop the mad rush of world capitalism, a single world war will suffice. In the meantime there will be another overproduction crisis, which we expect for 2018-2019. Among these gigantic bumps in history will be the alternative: International Communist Revolution or World War III.
C. The ongoing crisis
In order to give an overview of the course of world capitalism after the 2008-2009 recession, two tables were presented. The first containeds the percentage increases of industrial production compared to the previous year, the second the same percentage increases but relative to the highest previous level of production. The year corresponding to this previous maximum volume of industrial production is in most cases 2007 or 2008.
The 2008-2009 overproduction crisis hit all the major imperialist countries hard, with the exception of China. Russia, Japan, Italy and Spain have seen their industrial production fall by over 20% compared to the previously reached peak, while the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Belgium saw drops between 10% and 16%. In some less old capitalisms, like Mexico and Brazil, production fell 6-7% while others simply marked time like India. Still others, such as China and South Korea, which are also large industrial and imperialist countries, but of younger capitalism, have simply undergone a sharp slowdown, with a fall in production in some industrial sectors.
Then, in 2010-2011, all of them recorded a recovery in industrial activity that was more or less sustained but overall quite lively: + 6.1% and + 3.2% for the United States, +11.3 and + 7% for Germany, +5.1 and + 2.6% for France, +11.3 and + 3.9% for Belgium, + 15.1% for Japan, +16.3 and + 6% for South Korea, etc. But this recovery was followed by a relapse in the years 2012-2014. Afterwards, after mid-2014 or 2015, depending on the country, we saw a weak recovery, which is slowing down. So we had a double recession, followed by weak growth.
The United States did not follow this general pattern, on the contrary, after the recovery of 2010-2011 they recorded a continuous growth, but that is slowing down, up to a negative increase in 2016.
Among the imperialist countries, a handful of them, but not the smallest ones, in 2016, after 8 years have recovered and surpassed the maximum reached in 2007-2008: the United States, with a production of over 1.4% to that achieved in 2007; Germany, with a +2.2% and Belgium, with a remarkable +7.8%. But as an annual average over eight years, the increases are reduced, respectively, to 0.2%, 0.3% and 0.9%.
All the others are in a much more difficult situation, if not even in the abyss: -25% for Spain, -20.9% for Italy, -18.8% for Portugal, -17.6% for Russia (reference year 1989), -14.8% for Japan (despite all the efforts of the Shinzo Abe government and the massive interventions of the Japanese Central Bank), -14.8% for the United Kingdom (the previous maximum dates back to 2000!), -11.6% for France. The unhappy Greece pays a terrible tribute to the crisis with a -25.8%! When will we have the same figures for the great Germany? Soon, and they will be even worse!
Developing countries either slow down, like India, or are in full recession, like Brazil, with a fall in production of -17.1% compared to 2012.
D. Finance capital
The sharp slowdown in capital accumulation during the 1973 through 2007 cycle was accompanied by an unprecedented increase in public and private indebtedness and speculation if compared to the 1950-1973 cycle. By now the indebtedness in all the big capitalist countries, including China, goes beyond that reached by the United States on the eve of the Great Depression of 1929-1932, at the bottom of which the index of industrial production touched the lowest point with a fall of 43%.
Speculation becomes all the more frantic as the accumulation of capital is slowed by the fall in the rate of profit. Banks, insurance companies, investment funds, pension funds, etc., they all flung themselves into speculation rather than invest in industry, which yields too little profit. Speculation does not create any wealth, it is a game in which there are those who lose and those who earn by exchanging large shares of surplus value already produced.
If the accumulation of capital slows down following the fall in the rate of profit, the mass of commodities produced is still gigantic and the demand for raw materials remains strong. Today, this demand is further increased by the accelerated accumulation of capital in China.
First, the high demand for raw materials encourages speculation, pushing prices upwards. Speculators, on cereals, metals or energy resources, relying on a strong demand, buy large quantities, often to term, i.e., with deferred payment, for example to 3 months, thus causing a temporary shortage, waiting for prices to rise before selling them, thus earning a profit. This is how the price of oil could surpass 150 dollars per barrel and cereals have seen their price skyrocketed in 2007-2008, exacerbating scarcity and famine.
The same speculation took place in the real estate sector, but also on securities of all kinds. You buy securities, bonds, shares, etc., that is, loans at interest, not so much in view of the interest, but simply in the prospect of seeing their prices grow, and therefore selling them at a higher price. Debts for this purpose are also contracted. Speculation is all the more frenetic today that money is not expensive, that the “price of money”, that is, interest, is low.
At the height of the euphoria the value of speculative securities had reached 7,424 billion dollars, that is half of the American GDP, while the Dow Jones, the index of the New York stock exchange, on October 11, 2007 reached the dizzying record of 14,198 points with an increase of 84% compared to September 2002.
But what had to happen inevitably happened. Lehman Brothers, the fourth American investment bank, was making substantial profits in the real estate sector. In 2006, its portfolio of mortgage securities reached $146 billion, with a turnover of $19.3 billion and a net profit of $4.2 billion. These transactions were carried out through a “leverage effect” of 31, i.e., these 146 billion represented 31 times the value of the bank’s own funds, all the rest had been borrowed on the banking market to be lent a second time.
In the first quarter of 2007, the first symptoms of the overproduction crisis were felt with some insolvency in the payment of mortgage loan installments. The bank had to borrow to face losses and repayments. The machine came to a halt because the number of missed payments increased exponentially. On March 17, 2008, Lehman Brothers saw its shares fall by 48%. The bank’s agony will continue until September 13, after its shares price fell by 93%, forcing it to declare bankruptcy.
A second leviathan, the AIG, the world’s leading insurer whose assets exceeded $1,000 billion (the GDP of Italy in 2007 was $ 2,203 billion), shortly after the failure of Lehman Brothers was rescued by the US state thanks to a contribution of public funds of 182 billion. Without this investment, the entire international financial system would have risked collapsing like a domino.
The stock market then sank and on March 9, 2009, the Dow Jones reached its lowest level at 6,457 points: a slide of 54% that exceeded that of 1931, which was 52.6%.
If the value of the securities rises or falls, the country is no richer or poorer than before. This game only allows a layer of skilled parasites to live in luxury at the expense of the bourgeois dopes, but it is always surplus value that has already been produced in the production process. At the Stock Exchange the bourgeois exchange money, just like in a poker game.
Central banks and the States intervene generously to avoid the collapse of the financial system because a recession would be far worse today than that of 1929-1931.
The States got themselves indebted to save the banks, to the point that some of them were forced to declare themselves insolvent, or in the situation of having to threaten it.
The energetic intervention of the central banks, the FED, the Bank of England, the ECB, the Bank of China, seek to delay the collapse of the financial system by buying back billions of securities, treasury bills or mortgages, and by lending to banks hundreds of billions at rates close to zero.
In China, banks open a lot to credit by applying the central bank directives. This conduct, coupled with the big public works that mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars, has avoided a clear recession.
The states and large enterprises of the developing countries, which, unlike the old imperialist countries, are not in recession, can contract cheap debts. These North American, European and Japanese capitals, which do not find employment in the continents of origin, expatriate to those countries where capital continues to accumulate at a sustained or at least discreet pace. But the party for these countries ended in 2014 when the FED put an end to its third “quantitative easing”, accelerating the coming of a recession that began to have its effects in a number of these countries: Brazil, South Africa, etc.
So where are we after ten years of recession? The indebtedness of the states has reached peaks never seen before and, apart from the German State that has slightly reduced the own indebtedness, all continue getting indebted. On average, their debt expressed as a percentage of GDP is twice that of the United States on the eve of the Great Depression of 1929, when it was close to 54%, and for Japan even the quadruple.
The private sector indebtment, both households and non-financial companies, after having reached the maximum in 2009, shows a slight decrease, except for Belgium and France, where it continues to grow. The most indebted households are the Anglo-Saxon ones: 87.6% of GDP in the United Kingdom and 79.5% in the United States in 2016, against a debt ratio of 62% to 41% for other countries. It should be noted that the indebtedness of Chinese households is 44% of GDP.
With regard to non-financial companies, the debt in China amounts to 166% of GDP, the highest value, followed by Belgium with 163.2%, then France with 128.5% and Spain with 101.7. Japan has an intermediate debt ratio of its non-financial companies with 95.5%. The other countries are below 80% of GDP, which is still a lot. The less indebted country, and this does not surprise us, is Germany with 53.2%.
Savers so far invested in safe securities such as treasury bills or large state enterprises. In France, household savings in 2016 amounted to € 4.841 billion and another 70 to 80 billion are saved each year; in Europe at least 200 billion each year. These are no little thing and the States would like to direct them to industry and in particular to SMEs.
It is interesting at this point to sketch a class analysis. Economists speak of “families”, in general and without class distinction. But we know that, for example, in France, 3/4 of savings are held by 20% of households. If 20% of households hold 3,631 billion out of 4,841, considering that there are 37.4 million households in total, this means that on average each of these wealthiest families has on average savings of 485,394 euros. So it has to do with the big and middle bourgeoisie, which holds most of the savings and wealth in general and above all the ownership of the means of production.
At the other end there are 20% of households that do not spare at all or have a negative saving situation. There lies the true proletariat, along with the poor peasants, the small artisans, the retired workers who survive with miserable pensions, and the underclass. There are 60% of families who can save 5 or 10% of their income and who hold one quarter of the national saving, that is 1,210 billion euro, that is an average figure of 53,922 euro for each family unit. In this case we are dealing with the infamous swamp of intermediate social strata, on which the great bourgeoisie rests to maintain its class rule. Fortunately, however, the crisis is working to proletarianize them by freeing them from their savings. It is certain that the great bourgeoisie will sacrifice them first. Some will join the ranks of fascism, a part will join us to overthrow the bourgeoisie.
The basic problem is that it is not enough to create bodies capable of financing European companies: the latter to invest need to see prospects of making profit on the market, and this is where the problem lies. Although there was a recovery after the end of 2014, it remains very moderate. The only thing that is booming is speculation, which has exceeded in intensity and volume that of the end of the first decade of the new century.
Conclusions
We have seen that after 2014 there was an industrial recovery in the great imperialist countries. However, this is more than moderate, proceeding at a rate of between 1 and 2% per year; for France it is less than 1% per year and for Japan it has remained decidedly negative. Really little to brag about: all these countries, apart from Germany, Belgium and the United States, have a lower industrial production than that achieved in 2007, with decreases ranging from 12% to 25%.
The United States stand out for a strong recovery in 2010 with a +6.1%, but then it slowed down to become negative in 2016. However, this growth in 2014 allowed the United States to surpass the previous maximum of industrial production. But if you go to see in detail you realize that it was the energy sector that drove the indices, while the level of manufacturing production is still lower than that achieved in 2007. It will take another 3 years, at the rate of current growth, to return to that level. In terms of construction, its index is 56% lower than that achieved in 2004!
Even China profits from the more favorable present situation: after a strong slowdown from 2012 to 2015, it has marked a certain recovery. In any case there are symptoms of severe overproduction: a strong slowdown with excess production in key sectors such as steel, cement, energy, etc. A strong public and private indebtedness is growing. Easy to explain: industrial growth in China has been maintained thanks to the great public works and the considerable investments in armaments, which require a lot of steel, and to a galloping indebtedness, just like in the other big industrial countries that have exploited “quantitative easing”, and thanks to considerable public and private indebtedness.
Everything is ready for a formidable crisis of overproduction. The current situation is comparable to that of the eve of 1929, but for the worse. Public and private indebtedness is much higher and states and central banks have exhausted all their munitions.
When the overproduction crisis will explode in China, coinciding with that of the United States, Europe and other Asian countries, such as Japan, Korea, India, nothing will stop it, no protection will hold, they will sink to each other. The central banks will be overwhelmed and many states will be forced to declare themselves insolvent. Fundamental banks of the global finance system, such as Deutsche Bank, will fall by the dozen.
The earth will then open under the feet of the aristocracy of the working class and of the petty bourgeoisie. The ignoble swamp of the half-classes will be ruined and with it a part of the great bourgeoisie. Proletariat and bourgeoisie will be pushed to a bloody clash, provoked by an irreversible fracture in a polarized society.
Then the revolutionary voice of the communist proletariat will once again be heard with the rebirth at the world scale of a great International Communist Party and a red union international.
After no few years of extreme crisis of capitalism, in the following recovery, the alternative: world communist revolution or imperialist Third War, will arise.
Lessons of the Lost Revolution in Germany
Having described the events up until the Spartacist week of the first days of 1919 at the last General Meeting in May 2016, passing through the years 1919, 1920 and 1921, we went on to summarize the process of degeneration of the Third International.
Formed on January 1, 1919, the German Communist Party showed theoretical and tactical deficiencies that would accompany it in all its future defeats. The councilist defect led to proposing exit from the trade unions, which were under the sway of opportunism, turning their tasks over to the workers’ councils. On January 5, 1919, the party agreed to participate in an insurrectionary plan alongside the left Independents and the Revolutionary Captains, but already on the day afterwards the Independents withdrew their support for the Berlin Revolutionary Committee, preparing the terrain for Noske’s cops. Rosa and Karl were murdered on January 15.
In February 1919 the so-called campaign for the “socialization” of the mines started in the Ruhr: once again this was directed jointly by Spartacists, Independents and the Majority SPD. After yet another social democratic betrayal, it would lead to a bloodbath. The campaign for “socialization from below” of companies in the Halle region suffered a similar fate a few days later. A new edition of the tripartite “revolutionary committee” in March in Berlin ended in another tragic defeat: between 1,500 and 3,000 murdered, among whom was one of the most important figures of the German left, Leo Jogiches.
In April 1919 the atrocious farce of the proclamation of the Bavarian Council Republic took place, commissioned by the Independents and Majority SPD, who also managed to involve the communists, in order to consign them soon afterwards to the forces of repression: at the head of a republic conjured up by others, they were brutally swept aside on the first of May.
With 1919 coming to an end, the KPD entered into closer contact with the Third International, which in this period managed to break the isolation imposed by the civil war in Russia. From this point on, the International would elaborate all political and tactical resolutions regarding the West according to the German revolution. A reciprocal influence started between KPD and CI, which would be one of the causes of the degeneration of the International itself.
Despite the birth of the Republic, the bourgeoisie did not sleep soundly because the German proletariat and its communist party had not yet been defeated. Moreover, the Versailles Treaty had been a hard blow for the nation. Against this background the Kapp putsch was decided upon. There were only two apparent principal architects: the commandant of troops in Berlin, and Wolfgang Kapp, a man drawn from the Junker class and the old state functionaries. On March 13, 1920 Lüttwitz occupied Berlin, deposing the Ebert government.
The response of the German proletariat was immediate, following which an action committee was installed, comprising the SPD, USPD and unions: a general strike was proclaimed and the whole of Germany came to a standstill.
At first the KPD declared that the clash between republic and monarchy did not directly concern the workers and that the party would have called the workers to a general strike only with a view to seizing power, certainly not to rescue Ebert and Noske. This position would have been correct if those standing behind Kapp had been nothing more than an echo of the Wilhelmine era. But, formal appearances aside, it was the bourgeoise that wanted to put an end to the insubordination of the proletariat. The workers had realized this, before the KPD, and went on strike, bringing all of Germany to a halt within a day. The KPD then proclaimed: “For the general strike! Down with the military dictatorship! Down with bourgeois democracy! All power to the workers’ councils!”
On March 17 Kapp and Lüttwitz fled but the strike did not end. SPD, USPD and trade unions decided to continue it, with the intention of controlling the situation. Social democracy, under pressure, now came up with the idea of the “workers’ government” comprised of “workers’ parties”. At this point the union organizations, given the “good intentions” of the new government under Müller, decided to end the strike. The proletariat gave in. But so too did the KPD. “Rote Fahne” wrote on March 26: “The KPD thinks that the constitution of a socialist government will create conditions that are extremely favorable to the energetic action of the masses”.
The episode evokes the slogan of Workers’ Government from long before the Third International and allowed the spirit of legalism to emerge in the KPD. The councilist wing was expelled from the party. On 5 April the KAPD, the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany, was founded.
The result of such a confusion in political orientation would be the invitation from the International’s Executive to the three “workers’” parties (the left USPD, KPD and KAPD) to merge into a single party based on the 21 conditions for admission. The basic problem for the International was to create a mass party in Germany that would have organizational weight and following among the workers. Zinoviev himself would intervene directly in October at the USPD congress in Halle, hoping for a split in the Independent Party. The USPD effectively split into two factions and more than half of its members followed the International. The Central Committee of the KPD hailed the split at Halle, advocating fusion at the earliest opportunity. Unification would happen in Berlin in December 1920, but only between the left USPD and the Spartacists. The KAPD would not join the new party, preferring to remain a sympathizer party of the Third International.
The United Communist Party of Germany (VKPD) was a mass party, with 400,000 members, and a joint leadership consisting of ex-Spartacists and ex-Independents.
In Munich, the communists took part in the bourgeoisie’s demonstrations against the Entente; in the Landtag, communist deputies presented joint motions with bourgeois deputies; the Bavarian organ of the VKPD advocated the “United Youth Front”, inviting students, who had distinguished themselves in suppressing the Council Republic of Bavaria, to unite with the workers in a new “national sentiment”.
The repercussions at the heart of the International were far from slight. The party debated itself into a serious crisis. Early in March 1921 the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) pushed the VKPD into action. On March 16 it presented the famous “theory of the offensive”.
But on March 19, 1921 Hörsing, the commander of the police in Prussian Saxony, occupied the garrison of Mansfeld-Eisleben with the clear intention of disarming the workers, who still held weapons after the Kapp putsch. The VKPD proclaimed the general strike and called on all German workers to take up arms. However, its appeal was only followed in central Germany. Clashes between demonstrators and police took place in Halle, Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig, but already by March 28 it was clear that the action had failed. On March 31 the party itself called off the action. Once again, the proletariat and the communist party suffered a hard repression.
The entire Third Congress of the CI focused on criticism of the March Action. Lenin’s arguments at the Third Congress are well known and can be summarized with the formula: before calling the proletariat to take decisive action it is necessary to be sure of having conquered the “majority” to the principles of communism.
The International was not in a position to understand the Italian Left’s critique of the formula “conquest of the majority”, which in the West, where the movement was in retreat, could not be interpreted other than as an invitation to struggle on a legal and parliamentary level. It is therefore not a good approach to try to correct an error by means of an error of an opposite nature. This weakens the party and sows confusion within the proletariat. It was not by chance that after the Third Congress the International found itself on a downward trend from which it was unable to recover.
The report, which continued in the subsequent meeting to summarize the past studies of the party, arrived at the events of 1922 and 1923. What characterized the history of the communist movement in Germany in these two years were: the formation of the United Front with social democracy; national bolshevism, following the French invasion of the Ruhr; and the workers’ governments in Thuringia and Saxony until the final defeat in 1923.
The Third Congress of the CI, in 1921, had concluded with the invitation to the world proletariat to form an ill-defined “common front of struggle”. In the following August the KPD congress decided to implement the tactic of the United Front, which was at once not only political-parliamentary but governmental, understanding that the former necessarily implied the latter. In October the KPD agreed to give external support to the SPD-USPD coalition government in Thuringia. As a national tactic the KPD proposed to the two social democratic parties the confiscation of the property of the ousted dynasties, workers’ control of production by means of factory committees, and the imposition of war debts on the capitalists.
The CI endorsed the legalitarian action of the KPD in the “theses on the United Front” of December 18, 1921, now understood as an action from the top between more parties, justified as a vehicle for conquering the majority of the working class.
By contrast the union activity of the KPD, especially in the early months of 1922, was notable: it led many strikes and had an active presence in the struggles. The attempts to extend them and the criticism of the opportunist directions of the social democratic parties and the trade unions enabled the party to strengthen its position greatly within the German proletariat, subsequently obtaining a majority in important trade unions: the railway workers in Berlin and Leipzig, the construction workers in Berlin and Düsseldorf, the metalworkers in Stuttgart and up to 30% to 40% of the general labor confederation, the Allgemeiner Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGB) in June 1922. It succeeded in passing class positions such as, for example, the reorganization of the trade union on an industrial basis and the dismantling of corporate trade unions. In November 1922 the KPD moreover controlled 80% of factory councils.
But this did not work when transferred from union action to political, sliding towards opportunism. They put forward objectives of a democratic nature, such as the defense of the bourgeois Weimar Republic, which was threatened, it was said, by militarist reaction.
Across Germany, fascist bands were going about organizing themselves under the cover of institutions and the army, drawing into their ranks petty bourgeois ruined by the war and lumpenproletarians.
On June 25, 1922 the KPD entered an agreement with the SPD, USPD, AFA and ADGB for a politics of reform to impose on the government, which was a coalition of “non-workers’” parties: laws in defense of the Republic, measures against nationalist and monarchist organizations, amnesty for all the “revolutionary workers”, formation of workers’ committees of defense, constitution of organs of workers’ control, the general strike for obtaining such a political platform. In short, the preparation of the proletarian revolution was delegated to the bourgeoisie. In fact, the “laws for the defense of the Republic”, the only ones accepted by the government, put a further juridical instrument in the hands of the police for arresting communists.
The result was that German proletarians, called to demonstrate by all their parties and organizations, poured into the streets in their millions waving red flags and the flags of the republic. Fifteen days later the government had “Rote Fahne”, the central daily newspaper of the KPD, closed down for three weeks.
1923 was for Germany the year of inflation, a phenomenon of proportions never since seen in the history of capitalism, with a huge devaluation of wages.
On January 11 France occupied the coalfields of the Ruhr under the pretext that Germany was not facing up to the payment of reparations. The Cuno government, the first Weimar government without social democrats, supported by President Ebert, called the population to “passive resistance”: the workers were invited to take part in a “patriotic strike” and blacklegs were called traitors to the fatherland.
At first, the KPD behaved correctly: it convened a conference with the PCF in Essen and called upon the working class to fight on the two fronts, inviting the proletariat to the international brotherhood. The executive of the CI was also clear in this sense: the only true enemy of the proletariat was the bourgeoisie, in whatever country.
But there were already novelties brewing within the KPD: the thesis that Germany, a nation oppressed by the Entente, was a kind of colony and that Communists should place themselves at the head of the anti-French liberation movement. The CI and the Russian state did not help to clarify things: revealing the real economic need of Soviet Russia to form an economic alliance with the German Menshevik bourgeoisie, it reinforced the idea that there was some continuity between the German bourgeois government and the future dictatorship of the proletariat. In April 1923 the CI showed the KPD the way towards national bolshevism. The KPD claimed to be putting itself at the head of the “national liberation struggle”.
The KPD was now a mass party: at the third enlarged executive two and a half million workers organized in the unions followed the KPD, which had the majority in fundamental unions such as metal and construction workers in major cities such as Jena, Stuttgart and Halle. The Communists had also held sway in the factory councils, in which they distinguished themselves by controlling food prices, rents and leading the fight against speculation and famine, and had also begun to form the “proletarian hundreds” for self-defense of workers against the militarist right and against the French in the Ruhr: the proletarian hundreds developed especially in Saxony and Thuringia where they were also legalized; however, they lacked weapons.
But the thesis of the CI, to which the KPD adapted, was that the conquest of the majority had to be achieved by means of the United Front and that this was the anti-chamber of workers’ government, considered to be the precondition for the seizure of power.
This program was to be tried out in Thuringia and Saxony. Social democracy was thus rehabilitated, considered a workers’ party, the right wing of the proletariat.
Already in January 1922 Inprecor was writing that in Germany the situation was now ripe for the formation of a workers’ government and, even if in the Reichstag the “workers’ parties” did not have a majority, it was always possible in local parliaments.
The opportunity presented itself after the elections to the Saxon Landtag in 1922, which gave 46 seats to bourgeois parties, 40 to the SPD (by now reunited with the USPD) and 10 to the KPD. The question of supporting this coalition government was widely debated at the IV Congress of the I.C. Lenin and Trotski stated that it was unthinkable for the Bolsheviks to renounce the Red Army and the Soviet State. Nothing was done, and the SPD formed a minority government with the support of some radical bourgeois deputies.
In August 1923, under the direction of the KPD, with the slogan of Workers’ Government, a strike against the high cost of living had paralyzed Berlin, forcing the Cuno government to take anti-inflationary measures and to put an end to the passive resistance in the Ruhr. All of Germany was now in chaos and President Ebert decided to entrust the government to Stresemann: the SPD, returning to government, once again ran to the bourgeoisie’s sick bed in its moment of peril.
Since the KPD had now won over the majority and the masses had shown clear signs of recovery, between July and August 1923 the ECCI reached the decision to prepare the “German October”. On 23 August the political bureau of the CPR decided to approve the action.
The fundamental question was that of arms: nobody could say how many men were organized into the proletarian hundreds and with how many rifles; it was estimated that around 100,000 men could be organized in Thuringia and Saxony but how to arm them was unknown. Optimistically, it was believed that it would have been the Workers’ Government to arm the proletariat.
Meanwhile after the August strike the German state was gaining strength, on the one hand involving the SPD in the government, and on the other constantly giving greater power to the Reichswehr, the army. The German bourgeoisie was expecting the insurrection and was getting ready to repress it. In September 1923 Stresemann was ready to reach a compromise on the Ruhr, already long hoped for by the USA and Great Britain.
At the start of October 1923 Moscow decided to allow the KPD to enter the Workers’ Governments of Thuringia and Saxony. At the same time the predictable reaction of the Reichswehr was unleashed: on October 13 Müller declared the dissolution of the workers’ hundreds and all other workers’ paramilitary organizations and, despite Brandler being the relevant minister, on October 16 the Saxon police were put under the command of the Reichswehr.
Clashes broke out all over Germany. The social democratic press moaned about General Müller. The unions did not lift a finger. On October 17, Müller sent the Saxon government an ultimatum, demanding the complete submission to the Reich. On October 19 it was Stresemann himself who gave the order to reestablish “public order and security in Saxony”.
Despite all this, on October 20 the KPD fixed the insurrection for the 23rd. Unnecessary to say that the social democrats refused either to arm the proletariat or to organize the Red Army, thus leaving it to the communists alone to attempt the action. The German communists had no choice but to back down. After severe repression, on November 23 the KPD was declared illegal, thanks specifically to the law for the defense of the Republic, which a year earlier it had strenuously endeavored to get approved.
The KPD had for more than a year shown itself to be the most democratic party in Germany; now, at the very moment that it called upon the proletariat to go outside the bourgeois state to install its own dictatorship, the proletariat refused to follow. We cannot maneuver the class by brusquely setting opposite objectives; we cannot ally with other parties, especially with those that have already demonstrated on many occasions that they are the executioner of the communist revolution, in the hope of being able one day to bend it to our will. This lesson was not drawn by the CI and it continued to accuse men and fractions without questioning the value of the method followed in tactical and organizational matters.
What would have been of value, on the contrary, was what the Italian Left would ask at the Fifth Congress: take the scalpel to deviations of principle that inevitably led to these errors in the first place.
Let us seek to draw from these events the confirmation of a thesis that has always guided the Left in its struggle against yielding to the fetish of the “unity” that would win greater numbers to cause of communism.
We must take note of the immaturity, the indecision, the confusion that was far from absent in the broad political forces that flowed into the KPD. This allowed the counter-revolution, led by social democracy, to prevail over the over the generous efforts of a working class ready to fight for a good three months. The revolution in Germany was squashed because the proletariat had not succeeded in giving itself an adequate political leadership.
The Military Question: The First World War
– On the Italian front
The report on the military question, which reached the First World War, before moving on to present the movements on the different fronts, needed to clarify the novelties compared to the previous wars: a real industrial system that destroys resources and human lives for the renewal of capitalism. A process that initially was not well understood by the military leaders, involved in a destructive vortex which they thought they could solve only with organization and desire to win, in a fatalistic consumption of the cheapest war material, the human one.
The peace and political aftermath of the war had solved nothing in Europe in terms of the imperialist dynamic of the states and had put the revolutionary solution in Europe on the practical agenda.
The Second World War, which broke out only 20 years after the First one, was almost a continuation of the latter for the definitive settlement of unresolved issues. The states, defeated and victorious, learning from the mistakes at the closure of the First War, prevented any revolutionary possibility, having destroyed the international class party from the foundations.
All this will then guarantee Europe, even if divided, a very long capitalist peace under the control of the victorious powers, confining wars and conflicts to the areas of the so-called Third World.
The First World War was marked by the failure and betrayal of the national Social Democracies, by the disgraceful collapse of the Second International whose parties took sides with the national war fronts. The Second was a total disaster for the international proletariat, betrayed by the false myth of “socialism in one country” and by the myth of the war “against Nazi-fascism”.
The two wars have in common the industrialized destruction of resources and human lives, even if in different ways: A “trench” war the first, at least for the European fronts in the west and the south, a “movement” one the second.
The slowness of the German advancement in France transformed the war into the terrifying static massacre of the trench war; also the sudden advances to break the fronts, for example the Italian one of Kobarid, became bogged down in static clashes, as bloody as sterile.
The Second World War, which was characterized as “dynamic consumption”, was won by the strongest industrial power, the United States, just like the First.
For the Austro-Hungarian Empire the war represented the extreme attempt to contain the breakdown of the double monarchy, undermined by the bourgeois nationalistic thrusts; only the army, in a peculiar Austro-Croatian-Bosniak-Czech-Hungarian composite form, remained firm on the front; at least until 1918, when the conditions of disproportionate consumption of arms, food, and industrial capacity were fatal for both the Austrian and German empires. This caused the imperial army to split apart due to the national fault lines, first in the Czech component, then in the Hungarian one. The victory was obtained by the industrially strongest part.
After one year since the start of the war, for the Italian bourgeoisie the pretext of the enlargement of the national borders led to a haggling between the alliances. Finally, the Pact of London, with its incredible territorial promises to Italy, opened another front against the Central Empires. In a rugged and complex mountain front the “Napoleon-style” manoeuvrers and the traditional organization of the army were totally inadequate; they ran aground in the trench war with a disproportionate tribute of human lives and material resources.
Finally, Emperor Charles of Adsburg asked for the help of Germany, which will intervene with a completely new strategic offensive concept.
The Route of Caporetto
In the spring of 1917 the operations of the Italian army on the Asiago plateau resumed, with the strategic idea of bypassing the Austro-Hungarian deployment on the plateau from the north, with 300,000 soldiers and an imposing array of artillery for a front of 14 km. But the offensives are put down, with a tragic budget of 25,000 dead for a few kilometres of territorial gain.
The activity then moves back on the front of the Isonzo, with the tenth offensive, from 12 to 28 May. The battle lasted until the 22May and led to the expansion of the Plava bridgehead at the price of 112,000 dead. With the failure of the attacks towards the last ridge, the continuation of the offensive on Monte Santo resulted in a failure and the advance stopped.
During these fights, probably the only rebellion with a minimum form of spontaneous organization took place: on the 15th and 16th of July at S. Maria la Longa the revolt of the brigade “Catanzaro” bursted, having this already suffered decimation on the Asiago plateau in May ’16. A rebellion that was suppressed atrociously.
After a pause for reorganisation, the 11th offensive developed from 17 August to 10 September 1917, but with a change of strategy. For the Italian army the basic problem on the Karst was the forcing of successive defence lines, one after the other. Now they try to realize a tactical surprise: maximum concentration of forces, with the objective of the fall of the Tolmino bridgehead, then raid on the Bainsizza plateau and circumvention of the positions on the Karst. The offensive lasts for a month.
The 2nd Army penetrates for several kilometers inside the Bainsizza Plateau. Monte Santo was also conquered on 24 August. But in the following days the advance stops abruptly: the ’Plateau proves to be a very difficult terrain to cross and to move on with heavy armaments. Estimating that the advance on Bainsizza was no longer possible, they resume the thrust towards Tolmino, but the last objective of this operation, the San Gabriele Mount, is not conquered despite 20 days of attacks and 25,000 fallen.
The only tactical success was the Bainsizza: for the Austrian army, counter-offensive containment, defence of the S.Gabriele and finally withdrawal to more defensible positions; but the breakthrough would have become a matter of resources and time. The strategy of attack and consumption of resources conducted by the Italian army is achieving its goal at terrible cost.
The Austro-German attack begins on 24 October at 2 am with a violent artillery preparation. Coming from Tolmino at dawn, the 12th Germanic division breaks through the Italian line, goes up the Isonzo valley, on the back of the advanced defense, reaches Kobarid at 3 p.m. Following this division and within a day, the German Alpine body conquers the entire eastern region of Mount Kolovrat, the stronghold of the Italian second line defense. The focused use of toxic gases allows the breakthrough even in the Plezzo basin.
The left wing of the 2nd Army is overwhelmed, positioned in a totally offensive deployment, surprised by the enemy offensive.
Badoglio, in command of the 27th Army Corps, invested by the main foray in Tolmino, disappeared in the crucial phases of the attack.
The entire Italian command body, fossilized in the offensive perspective, gives way under an assault that is not prepared to hold up. At 2 o’clock on October the 27th the Italian Supreme Command ordered the general folding. One and a half million soldiers leave the areas for which they fought for two years. The attempt of resistance on the Tagliamento line is not possible because nothing has been predisposed for this. The route sees 280,000 prisoners, 350,000 disbanded, 40,000 dead and wounded, 400,000 civilians fleeing.
The “forger” Andrea Graziani is appointed inspector general of the evacuation movement and immediately starts his job.
Finally, the Austro-German advance begins to slow down. Continuing is increasingly difficult for the German Austro-Hungarian army. Armando Diaz will replace Cadorna on the 9th of November. The conditions for the Arrest Battle are outlined.
– In the Middle East and Caucasian Sector
Here the conflict had territorial and political consequences that still persist today, as proved by the serious crises that never fade away in the countries of the area. The victorious powers completely upset the Middle East by dividing the collapsed Ottoman Empire with artificial borders and imposing power groups subservient to them in charge of the governments of the new states.
It was the largest war theatre of all the First World War, with an asymmetrical line-up of forces: Ottoman Empire and Central Empires against the Russian and British Empires. Also there was a significant role for irregular Arab troops, who created the Arab Revolt against Turkey, and for voluntary Armenian troops who organized themselves in the Armenian Resistance, also against Turkey.
Five main military campaigns took place: that of Sinai and Palestine, that of Mesopotamia, Caucasus, Persia and Gallipoli.
Local and colony troops were heavily involved in the sector: France mobilised 1.4 million soldiers from Africa and the Caribbean and England 4.5 million from its immense empire.
On the 1st of August 1914, day of the beginning of operations in Europe, a secret military alliance agreement was also signed between the German and Ottoman empires: the Berlin government intended to open a path towards Persia and India, to the detriment of London, which was also strongly interested in Caspian hydrocarbons.
Enver Pascià, minister of war and head of the Young Turks Revolution, was representing the interests of the Turkish bourgeoisie with the Panturanian project.
The opening of a Turkish-Russian front was of great strategic importance for the Central Empires, and more for Germany. This would have eased Russian pressure on the eastern front.
The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had obtained the rights to the major Persian oil fields with the exception of those of some of the provinces bordering the Caspian Sea, which it intended to acquire with the war: oil had become the fuel of the entire British military fleet and gradually also of the commercial one.
We commented on a map on the division of the Ottoman Empire set out by the secret Sykes-Picot agreement between England and France and on the definition of the relative areas of influence: Caucasian territories were conceded to Russia and an area around Jerusalem was created, entrusted to international administration.
The Armenian community, estimated at around 2 million, was widespread throughout much of the empire, with concentration in the Caucasian territories on the border with Russia and a strong presence in Constantinople. It was the most active and politically organised ethnic minority. They took part in the war and finally managed to obtain the recognition of new Armenian state entities, thanks to Russian support, which had used it in an anti-Turkish function. However these entities had a short life.
Fearing a crisis caused by the Armenians present in its army, the Government of the Young Turks started a vast campaign of raids, arrests, deportations and hangings that in a few months caused the extermination of about 1.5 million Armenians. In turn, the Armenians were attributed massacres of the Muslim populations in the territories under their control.
Militias from the Kurdish minority participated in the conflict, some with the Ottomans and a minority with the Russians, induced by promises of some state concession. They proved to be unmanageable and their use was limited. But, despite the Sèvres agreements of 1920, which recognised the Kurds as a state entity, the British, on the strength of the Sykes-Picot agreements with France, never granted the promised territories that were very rich in oil.
The multiple Arab tribal communities in the Hegiaz region, a long coastal strip on the east coast of the Red Sea, created the Arab Revolt in 1916 with the aim of freeing themselves from Ottoman rule and forming an Arab state entity. The Hascemite Kingdom of Hegiaz had a short and troubled life until it was annexed to the newborn Saudi Kingdom in 1932, thwarting the hopes of the Arabs to achieve their own unitary state.
Subsequently, the League of Nations, with the institution of the Mandate, gave legal status to the military occupation of all those territories. London put Faysal at the head of the kingdom of Iraq, invented in 1921, which included large territories claimed by the Kurdish community, which had also contributed to the war. His brother Ab Allah Husayn was appointed Emir of Transjordan, now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
From these brief historical notes one can see already the origins of the main causes of the present conflicts.
The Caucasian campaign was instead fought between the Ottoman and Tsarist empires. The Russian revolution will have a major influence on the outcome of the campaign and on territorial resolutions. The British Empire will take advantage of this to defend and extend its important oil concessions in the Caspian Sea.
The German command here applied the “strategy of distraction”, opening up a secondary front far from the main one in Europe to force the Tsar to move troops to the Caucasus.
On November 1, 1914, Tsarist Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire and the offensive penetrated Turkish territory with moderate success. The Turkish counteroffensive, with Kurdish militias, only partially blocked the Russian advance.
Enver decided to launch a winter offensive on the Caucasus mountains to overturn the situation and invade Russia: it resulted in a total disaster.
England then decided to start the campaign of Gallipoli with which it aimed to force the Dardanelles and occupy Constantinople, forcing the Ottoman Empire to re-establish communications through the Black Sea with the Russian Empire. Despite the enormous use of men and vehicles from England, France, Australia and New Zealand, it resulted from February 1915 to January 1916 in the loss of more than 252,000 men, several large ships and some submarines. Turkish wards strongly opposed, also suffering losses of 250,000 men. This first amphibious operation served as a reference for the preparation of the ones of the Second World War
On March 3, 1918, the Ottoman delegation signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with the new Russian Soviet Republic, by which the Bolshevik government ceded to the Ottomans all the territories annexed by Tsarism after the war of 1877-78. The Treaty recognised the Republic of Transcaucasia. But the Ottomans resumed fighting until the Armenian army was dispersed.
The Ottoman Empire came to the end of the war having lost important campaigns but with clear success in the Caucasus. All the agreements and borders established by the Sèvres Agreement of 1920 did not lead to any definitive peace and the following year the war broke out between Georgia and Armenia and then between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Not even now, a century later and after the dissolution of the USSR, there is a stable and definite peace in those regions.
– The Sinai and Palestine Campaign
This chapter concluded the exposition regarding the broader Middle East and Caucasian front begun in the previous meeting in Turin.
The German commands pushed the Ottomans to attack the English forces in Egypt, which were supported by the local ones. They had two important objectives: to occupy and close the Suez Canal to all the English traffics, above all military, that from their colonies had flowed enormous quantities of supplies to their war and productive apparatus; to engage the English forces on several fronts in order to reduce their pressure on the European front.
The Sinai and Palestine campaign took place from 28 January 1915 to 28 October 1918 conducted in several steps and subsequently extended to Syria, involving on the Ottoman side a total of 650,000 men led by German military advisers, against a mixed group of English and Anzac (Australian and New Zealand) troops, for a total of 550,000 units.
A first Ottoman offensive started on February 2, 1915 but failed after just two days because the British were fully aware of the enemy plans thanks to their spies.
In July 1916 a second Ottoman offensive was rejected by the British, who moved the front line further into the Sinai to protect the Channel.
In London, the new government of Lloyd George gives a further impulse to the war and, without providing adequate reinforcements, gives orders to the army in Egypt for a vigorous offensive in the sector, both to support the Arab Revolt by distracting Ottoman forces, and to obtain a predictable and easy success that would offset the unsuccessful offensives in the other sectors.
The Ottoman forces have meanwhile settled on a fortified line that from the Gaza fortress on the Mediterranean stretched as far as Beersheba, the terminus of the railway line to Damascus. The bypassing British attack of 26 March 1917 was a failure and the fortress of Gaza was not conquered. Nevertheless, London orders the conquest of Jerusalem and provides its troops with new tanks and asphyxiating gases. However, the following month, the second attack also ends in a defeat.
The new English commander Allenby is supplied with new bombers and fresh and well-trained troops with the order to take Jerusalem by Christmas 1917, taking advantage of the fact that a large part of the Ottoman troops were moved to Mesopotamia and Arabia. The last lines of Ottoman defence were lost and on 9 December the British entered Jerusalem, giving British imperialism great political success and one of the few military successes after 3 years of war.
France has prepared a plan for the conquest of Syria, which it must put to one side, because in the Western sector it has a powerful German offensive to hold out against; for this reason, the English troops are also transferred to the European front.
On September 19, 1918, a sudden English offensive started; the Ottoman retreat began, with their columns heavily bombed by the Air Force to the point that only after a week the Seventh Ottoman Army ceased to exist as an operative unit. The road to Damascus, whose garrison surrenders without fighting and which was taken on October 1, 1918, is freed.
The capitulation of Bulgaria, with the real danger of having enemy armies under the walls of Constantinople, convinced the Turks to ask for armistice. The 600-year Ottoman rule in the Near and Middle East, now under the control of British and French imperialism, came to an end.
The PCd’I and the Civil War in Italy: The Arditi del Popolo
In the previous meeting we had described the birth of arditism in wartime and its subsequent reorganization; we had highlighted its petty bourgeois ideology, oscillating between the open anti-proletarian reaction and an ultra-left nationalism.
As early as November 1920, fascist terror had struck down on proletarian political and trade union organizations and on socialist council administrations and had carried out countless murders of leaders and ordinary militants. But this dramatic scenario had not led the Arditi to take to the field, arms in hand, against fascism.
The following year, in January, the Communist Party split up, with a marked revolutionary and internationalist program. The party already in early March launched the watchword to the proletariat “to accept the struggle on the same ground on which the bourgeoisie descends, to respond with preparation to preparation, with organization to organization, with organization to organization, with discipline to discipline, with force to force, with arms to arms “. The proof that it was not just words came from the military organization prepared by the party, which on several occasions had responded with arms, defending itself and even attacking.
Therefore the Arditi del Popolo were born in July 1921 not because they felt the need to avert fascist violence, but to prevent the Communist leadership of the proletarian revolt. As long as Socialist Party preached and practiced resignation the Arditi had not posed the problem of proletarian defense.
The founder of the Arditi del Popolo himself confessed that “at first fascism appeared to us inspired by patriotism: to curb the so-called red violence”.
Above the struggles among bourgeois rival gangs, a single purpose united fascists, Arditi del Popolo, D’Annunzio and socialists of all shades, that of preventing the revolutionary movement of the masses of workers under the leadership of the Communist Party. That some, in the face of white terror, preached peace and resignation and others the violent response did not change their purpose: to bring back and maintain “inner peace”, the bourgeois order.
No revolutionary ambition resided in the Arditi del Popolo, indeed, in the event of a resolute working-class struggle they would not hesitate to support fascism, “inspired by patriotism”, to stem the “red violence”.
The Arditi del Popolo were born suddenly and organized with impressive rapidity throughout Italy. It is estimated that in the summer of 1921 they had 144 sections with about 20 thousand members.
Many who were not willing to passively suffer fascist violence, but to this violence intended to oppose by force, impulsively adhered to it and promoted the formation of local sections. There were communists and republicans, anarchists and Catholics, socialists and without party.
That proletarians have voluntarily joined this organization is a fact, but it is absolutely not possible that a military structure of such magnitude could arise in the span of days and spontaneously could be able to spread and affirm nationwide. To realize such an apparatus it was necessary that a well-structured body, with the help of the State structure, had taken the initiative. All that could only be very, very, suspicious; and equally suspicious was the fact that this armed militia, as it had suddenly arisen, just as suddenly dissolved.
The Central of the PCd’I gave the decisive instruction that the military organization body of the party should remain completely independent from the Arditi del Popolo, while fighting alongside them, as it happened many times, when they were faced with the forces of fascism and reaction. The reasons for this attitude were essentially practical, dictated by a careful examination of the situation.
Even according to confidential information, obtained with the means at its disposal, the party had learned that the organization was not moving from below, but from a well-defined political center: a substantial sector of the bourgeoisie, of which Nitti was a representative, considered it convenient to curb fascism, which, because of its enormous development, threatened to go beyond the limits that democracy had assigned to it.
Moreover, the aims on which the organization of the Arditi del Popolo had arisen were common to those of socialpacifism: to arrive at a government that respected the freedom of proletarian organizations on the basis of common law, avoiding the phase of the fight against the state, even taking a position against anyone who upset the so-called civil confrontation of ideas.
Therefore, in the event that a Nittish-colored ministry was formed, the Arditi del Popolo would become an illegal force at the service of the legal government, not to curb the fascist squads, but to intervene against the proletariat when it had undertaken a revolutionary action against the state governed by the leftist ministry, and perhaps in collaboration with the socialists.
Completely opposed to those of the Arditi del Popolo were the aims of the communists, who tended to lead the proletarian struggle to the revolutionary victory. The communists denied (and deny) that in the bourgeois regime there could be a normal and peaceful order of social life, and affirm the clear antithesis between the dictatorship of the bourgeois reaction and the dictatorship of the proletarian revolution.
During the report, among the other documents presented, an article was read, written by Umberto Terracini for “Correspondance Internationale” of December 31, 1921 entitled: “The Arditi del Popolo, a daring maneuver of the Italian bourgeoisie”.
The Party’s Center directive was that the communists could not and should not participate in initiatives outside the party itself, because military preparation and action demanded a discipline at least equal to that of the communist party. It would not have been possible to obey two distinct disciplines, political and military. The communists, therefore, could not accept to depend on other organizations of a military type.
The proletarian military classification was rightly considered as the extreme and most delicate form of organizing the class struggle, in which the maximum discipline had to be achieved. And this meant that it was party-based and depended strictly on the politics of the class party, which by definition aims at regimenting and directing the revolutionary action of the masses. Hence the evident incompatibility.
In those crucial years of the first post-war period there were many movements that presented themselves as revolutionaries, and as many were their “revolution” programs; but, as the party pointed out, it was precisely the existence of too many species of revolutionaries that made revolution difficult, since it requires a clear approach to the struggle. The conclusion reached by the Communist party was that all those “revolutionary” projects were nothing other than plans for the best defense and preservation of bourgeois institutions: to introduce external changes to let the essential content subsist, such is capitalism and the democratic mechanism of the state, such is parliamentarianism. Any attempt to make the proletarian attention and effort converge in those programs, for communists had to be considered counter-revolutionary.
The party warned its militants and the whole proletariat from revolutionary impatience, from the mania to break the record of extremism, and from the dangerous and simplistic thesis that, as long as action can start, one must accept all the alliances, without splitting hairs as to the differences with the temporary allies.
Excluding organizational arrangements did not prevent actions being carried out in which the communist forces and the Arditi del Popolo were on the same side of the fighting front. However, the party reiterated the need to maintain full control of its forces by the time the revolutionary problem would be imposed and the alliances of the previous period would be tragically broken.
The action for the defense of the proletariat against the reaction could only be conceived as an action by the proletariat to overthrow the regime. For this reason the communists categorically refused to participate in political agreements with a “defensive” nature against the crimes of fascism, but with the aim of restoring “order”. For the communists this was nothing but defeatism; the Fascists themselves aimed to “restore order”.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1919
We continued this exposition with the chapter: The “Rose Revolution” and the partition of Hungary.
From June 1918 several strikes broke out throughout Hungary; in October, at the same time as the Austro-Hungarian armies were being defeated on the ground the workers on strike openly refused to obey the orders of the militarized management. They threatened the commanders and officers with a similar fate to that of Colonel di Pécs, whom the soldiers had shot dead. Following a shoot-out in a railroad workshop, the workers looted the offices. One of their demands was the removal of the police from the workshops.
It was in this climate that the essentially pacific bourgeois democratic revolution took hold. A provisional government was formed. Initially Charles IV instructed Hadik to form the government, but only 24 hours later, following the growing agitation among the troops and workers in Budapest, Archduke Joseph called upon Károlyi to define the passage of powers from Hadik to the National Council. The government was formed by the Independence Party and the ‘48, in the liberal-democratic tradition, and the SDPH, to which two secondary ministries were given: Welfare and Trade.
But the protagonist of the revolution was the working class, which, even if not organized and still without its own party, still managed, with the masses of peasants in the army, to overturn the centuries-old power of the Habsburgs. The defeat in the war was for the whole nation, with the bourgeoisie left under the ruins of the old Hungary, together with all the semi-feudal strata.
With the defeat there was not only less of a possibility to oppress foreign peoples; it was entirely foreseeable that a considerable part of the Hungarian population would fall under foreign domination. Hungary suffered unconditional surrender at Villa Giusti, while 47 divisions of the French Eastern army marched on Budapest. The agreements that had only just been signed were violated and the victorious imperialisms of the Entente divide up historically Hungarian territories. Some maps shown to our comrades demonstrated how Hungary lost two thirds of its territories and some millions of Magyars lost their citizenship.
At the beginning of December, three ministers of the Károlyi government tried, with their resignations, to force a return to the National Council’s original platform: they were against the presence of the Social Democrats in the government and against the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, considered “Bolshevik” organizations influenced by the Communists, who were getting organized. The attempt failed without finding the hoped-for support of the military and political leaders of the old regime and, above all, of the military mission allied to Budapest.
A month later a government reshuffle strengthened the power of Károlyi, who would assume the position of temporary head of state pending the elections to the National Constituent Assembly. The social democrats doubled the number of ministries they held from two to four.
The report continued by setting out the events that led to the birth of the Hungarian communist party.
At the start of the first world slaughter Bela Kun had been sent to the front as an army officer, and in 1916 he was taken prisoner by the Russians. In a prisoner of war camp he very quickly got in touch with the party organization and became a member of the Bolshevik party. Among the prisoners, a group agitated against the monarchy and the war, which Kun gave a decidedly Marxist direction.
On March 24, 1918, still in Moscow, Kun and the Hungarian comrades formed the Hungarian Group of the Bolshevik Communist Party.
At the 8th Congress of the PC(b)R Lenin said regarding the Federation of foreign groups said: “Hundreds of thousands of prisoners (…) returning to Hungary, Germany and Austria have ensured that these countries are now completely contaminated by the Bolshevism virus. And if groups or parties that are in solidarity with us dominate in these countries, it is thanks to the work (…) of these foreign groups in Russia, work that has represented one of the most important pages of the activity of the Russian Communist Party as a cell of the World Communist Party”. Bela Kun, together with Lenin, Marchlewsky, Liebknecht and Luxemburg signed the preparatory manifesto of founding congress of the Third International.
“The internationalists – eighty, eighty five percent are Hungarians – fight well, tens of thousands have given their lives for Soviet power,” said Sergej Lazo, commandant of the partisans in the Far East. They participated in numerous battles in the Civil War on all fronts: in the cavalry of Budënnyj, in Turkestan, in Crimea, along the Volga and in Siberia.
The Hungarian Group was well organized and structured: its newspaper was published twice weekly with thirty to forty thousand copies, in addition to numerous revolutionary pamphlets, with the organization of the course for propagandists with books published by the Communist Library.
With an article in “Szocialis Forradalom” on October 23, 1918 Bela Kun decisively distanced himself from the Hungarian Social Democratic Party and attacked its opportunist and reformist policy at the service of the bourgeoisie, the great landowners and the Church. He announced the Hungarian working class’s need for a revolutionary communist party, which would see its foundation a few days later, to be precise on November 4, 1918 in Moscow.
At the party’s founding conference, Kun strongly emphasized the fact that he “cannot collaborate with the SDPH; such a collaboration would be impossible, even if the leaders of the SDPH had not occupied ministerial seats and had not made compromises with the bourgeois parties. Our demands could not be satisfied, not even by the most radical democracy and the most popular government. We do not want specific concessions from the bourgeoisie. What we want is power, because only its possession offers the means to liberate the proletariat. The existing dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia for more than a year does not leave any further doubt in this regard (…)
“Every member of the CPR who is originally from Hungary will leave the territory of the Soviet Republic of Russia at the earliest opportunity to put themselves at the service of the international revolution in Hungary.”
On November 6, 1918 Bela Kun, Kàroly Vàntus and another two comrades left Moscow for Budapest.
At our next meeting the comrade presented the chapter regarding “The preparation” from January 1918 to March 1919.
The proletarian masses, exhausted by years of war and poverty, started a series of struggles against their class enemies, bourgeoisie and monarchy, but their altruistic nature was repressed with the help of the social democrats.
In January 1918, to the cry, “Down with the war! Peace! Long live the Russian proletariat!”, the working class went on strike. The leadership of the SDPH tried to put itself at the head of the strike to steer it down the roundabout paths of democracy. This revolutionary impetus throughout the country was broken after three days, with the army intervening in the streets with cannons and machine guns.
In June 1918, thanks to the influence of nearly 500,000 prisoners of war sent back to their homeland by communist Russia, the strike at the MAV factory resulted in an insurrection. A violent repression followed, which went unopposed by the SDPH. Workers were recalled en masse and sent back to the front. The struggle, conducted heroically for eight days was defeated again and its leaders jailed or sent to the front.
A large demonstration was announced for October 28, 1918. The Soldiers’ Council was set up, which immediately got in touch with revolutionary workers. The working masses had intended to go up to Buda from Pest and demonstrate in the citadel in front of the residence of the Archduke Joseph. In front of the Chain Bridge, the crowd tried to break the police and military cordons; the soldiers drew aside but the police fired on the crowd leaving dead and wounded on the ground. The next day workers at the weapons factory broke open the deposits and armed themselves.
The first public activity of the National Council was to send a delegation, in which the leadership of the SDPH was also included, to persuade the workers to give up their weapons, but it was unsuccessful.
On November 1, when military collapse was obvious, the SDPH, promising universal suffrage, declared itself ready to offer the help of the workers even to save the Habsburg dynasty. Duke Mihály Károlyi succeeded the old government with the help of the radical bourgeois party and the social democrats. The bourgeoisie understood that the exploitation of the proletariat could only continue on a democratic foundation, and that social democracy was ready to come to its assistance to such a reorganization of the bourgeois social order, revealing another facet of the same capitalist mode of production. The ministers designated by the SDPH for the new democratic government swore their loyalty to the Archduke Joseph.
In Budapest’s factories and the rest of the country all production came to a virtual standstill; there were no raw materials. The immense war and other debts amounted to as much as 40 billion crowns. Meanwhile the working class was demanding decent living and working conditions more and more energetically.
Groceries were also in short supply. Hungary went unheard by the victorious Entente powers: whereas Austria received 288,000 tons of food and clothing, Hungary, where the situation had turned critical, received only 635.
The communists who had arrived illegally in Budapest in November 1918 organized themselves quickly to found the party and edit the party press. They went into the factories, the barracks, the unions, and the villages to carry out propaganda. They convened assemblies, sometimes entering into heated clashes with representatives of the SDPH. Posters were pasted to the walls and pamphlets distributed everywhere to the masses: “In the democratic republic the standing army, the police and the army of bureaucrats assure the dominion of the bourgeoise over the people. The bourgeoisie will never bring exploitation to an end (…) The bourgeois state is an instrument dedicated to maintaining this exploitation. The proletarian state, instrument of the dictatorship of the proletariat, oppresses the bourgeoisie, taking away its capital to give it back to society.”
Meanwhile the counter-revolution was being organized in the whole country. The large landowners, capitalist magnates, thousands of officials who had lost their incomes and power, as well as the clergy, worried about the loss of their parasitic life, started to get organized and arm themselves.
The unceasing action of the Communist Party on all fronts aimed to attract the soldiers onto the revolutionary path and to win all of the armed organizations of the state (with the exception of the police) to the cause of the revolution. The Party’s organizations seized every opportunity to procure weapons. Demobilized soldiers were told not to return their weapons to the barracks. The Party managed to procure no fewer than 35,000 weapons from demobilized German soldiers, who were returning from the Balkans via Hungary.
Kun wrote to Lenin in a letter dated January 5, 1919: “The situation is very good here, our party is getting larger from day to day (…) All the metalworkers are taking action and the majority is on our side. Others are still hesitant, but it is only the idea of preserving the unity of the party that is holding them back (…) All leads us to suppose that in a few days the government will no longer be composed of social democrats, which means that the counter-revolution will then realize a new momentum. We know very well that our fate is decided in Germany, however, regardless of this, we are doing everything possible to hasten the moment when the workers seize power (…) All of the armies are disintegrating, while we workers are armed”.
The CPH rejected without hesitation every proposal aimed at establishing any transitional power in place of Soviet power. From the foundation of the Party the leaders of the bourgeois-democratic revolution tried to swindle it into reaching an agreement that would lead to any temporary solution enabling it to face the external enemy. When Károlyi offered the CPH the war portfolio in the provisional bourgeois government the party rejected it in a way that was wholly unambiguous. The CPH took a clear stand against the attempt to establish a “workers’ government”, a purely social democratic government. The CPH unanimously opposed this proposal with a motion that demanded the immediate realization of power by the councils.
On December 12, 1918 the Budapest garrison broke out under arms and expelled the Minister of War from the provisional government. On December 25 the revolutionary hussars of Kecskemét occupied their barracks and disarmed the officers. A clash between workers and soldiers occurred on December 26 in Budapest, leaving many dead and wounded. On December 31 a conflict between soldiers supporting the CPH and those supporting the government in Budapest’s two largest barracks was followed by an armed demonstration against social democracy. January 1919 saw the start of mass demonstrations against the bourgeois press and the destruction of the editorial headquarters of bourgeois newspapers, under the Party’s leadership.
Other insurrections took place in Budapest and in the province in the second half of January. In the barracks, armed resistance was organized against the order of the social democratic minister to disarm the soldiers with a communist orientation, and in particular the young conscripts. There were also armed demonstrations by demobilized NCOs and the war-wounded.
Beyond the action taken for the occupation of the factories, the Party launched its slogan for the occupation of empty houses. In February laborers began to occupy the large landed estates and in many places were led by the communists.
The line of the CPH was directed without hesitation towards the armed insurrection, towards the overthrow of the bourgeoisie’s power and its annihilation, towards the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Since large numbers of poor workers and peasants supported the workers and soldiers in arms, the Hungarian bourgeoisie, which could count on social democracy, was between a rock and a hard place: the Entente and the workers’ struggle for power. But the true face of bourgeois democracy soon revealed itself when one morning a detachment of 160 policemen, armed with machine guns and grenades, assaulted the headquarters of the CPH and devastated everything. At the same time a motion was presented to exclude communists from the workers’ councils.
In January the miners of Salgótarján had joined the CPH; the government had the entire district occupied by the army, which carried out an enormous massacre. This did not slow the numbers flocking to the CPH, not even locally, even though the government terror continued. Also at Pozsony (Bratislava) the workers declared the dictatorship of the proletariat, but after just 36 hours in power they were beaten by Czech troops and the city was permanently occupied by Czechoslovakia.
Even the rural village proletariat was joining the struggle; in the Arad Committee, farm workers divided the land; the authorities intervened, seeking to suffocate the movement with arrests.
The government restored to the capitalists the right of command in the factories, taking them away from the workers, suppressed the factory councils and replaced them with factory committees and the old system of personal representatives. There were street clashes during which the headquarters of the social-democratic newspaper “Nèpszava” were devastated, guilty of a hateful campaign of anti-communist slanders. On February 20 the government had virtually the entire leadership of the Communist Party arrested; the party headquarters and the newspaper “Vörös Újság” were closed and their assets seized. The arrested communists were severely beaten by “police comrades”, members of the Social Democratic party.
The working masses now called energetically for the release of the communists. In the large industrial centers, the most important trade union federation, that of the metalworkers, stood side by side with the communists. Print workers went on strike. The bourgeois government was impotent before the organizations set up by the CPH among demobilized soldiers, who soon numbered several hundred thousand. The organization of the unemployed was also impressive.
During the first days of March leadership in the largest factories passed into the hands of company workers’ councils, formed not according to legal norms but solely following revolutionary order.
In the meantime, the new central committee of the Party, in which the leader was Tibor Szamuely, pursued its work clandestinely, together with the communists who were in prison. Kun managed to get books and newspapers as well as a typewriter, moreover he was able to stay in touch with Lenin thanks to the party’s underground network.
At the next general meeting we continued the exposition with the chapter concerning the CPH program as formulated in the letter that Bela Kun wrote from prison on March 11, 1919, the platform on which the Hungarian labor movement was to be unified.
Given that “as long as we are in a state of arrest we are not willing to deal”, he continues:
“As far as the question of the unity of the workers’ movement is concerned, my point of view is that only real unity, rather than apparent, can be of use to the emancipation of the proletariat. I believe that there is no need to prove that the proletarian unity which, as was written in “Nèpszava” of 9 March, led the proletariat as a whole onto the terrain of leaders in the mold of Scheidemann (SPD), would only be ruinous. Proletarian unity, a unitary organization of the proletarian movement, would only be advantageous if it proved to be based on an authentic ideological and principled unity and did not support class collaboration but rather class struggle.”
He also wrote:
“If the Russian Bolsheviks had not put an end to diplomatic niceties in the party in 1907, as Lenin put it; if Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Mehring – and even the most anemic independent socialists – had not broken with the external unity of the German labor movement during the war; if the Italian socialists had not done the same thing during the war in Tripolitania; if all of them had not secured a freedom of movement that would allow them to create their own organization and to secure the possibility of propaganda, I think that in this case the history of the workers’ movement would have been deprived of rousing revolutionary events and above all of results. It may be the case that the so-called fratricidal struggle, which opposes one side of the proletariat against the other, would not have been so open; but one wonders if this struggle has not spared the proletariat many useless sacrifices, considering that every new year of capitalism requires such sacrifices.
“And I ask you, is it not also a fratricidal struggle that opposes proletarians gathered in the unions to those who are outside? There are inevitable evils, the so-called necessary evils.
“The unification of the proletarian movement is inevitable. But in order for it to arrive, there must first be divisions. This is not a play on words, but a law of dialectics.”
Kun then proceeded in the letter to spell out the points of the platform.
1. Do not give any support to the so-called government of the people; refrain from any participation in a bourgeois state government. Reject any class collaboration; form councils of the workers, soldiers and poor peasants, which are the organisms of working class power.
2. Break with the so-called “territorial” politics or, as we say now, with the “politics of popular integration”. To energetically attack what is called “revolutionary national defense”, which is the consequence of class collaboration; to prevent a new war against the Czechs, Romanians or Serbs at all costs. A proletarian party can consent to a revolutionary war only in the case that:
a) All power has effectively and definitively passed into the hands of the industrial and agricultural proletariat;
b) All communities of interest with capitalism have ceased to exist;
c) We have every guarantee that the war will not create new national oppressions.
3. It can be seen that the Hungarian revolution is currently in a transitional state, between its so-called “general” and “national” phase and that of pure proletarian revolution, i.e. of social revolution. The Hungarian revolution is the manifestation of the revolutionary energies of the international proletariat, developed as a consequence of the general bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production. The consequences of this can also be drawn in Hungary, as regards the political action to be deployed in the interests of the proletariat. Here they are:
a) No parliamentary republic, but a centralized republic for a transitional period, councils of workers’ and poor peasants’ delegates;
b) Suppression of the permanent army and special armed forces (police, gendarmerie, frontier guards etc.) and their replacement by the class army of the armed proletariat; disarmament of the bourgeoisie;
c) Complete suppression of the bureaucracy. Self-government of the proletarian masses through the councils of the delegates of the workers and poor peasants, who are not only invested with legislative power, but also with executive and judicial powers. All offices must be elective, of short duration and revocable at any time. Economic treatment of elected officials should not exceed that of skilled workers. Higher remuneration is only for specialists, according to the experience gained in the Russian revolution.
“A political constitution conceived in this way would guarantee the implementation of the transitional measures necessary to move forward to socialism and to ensure the repression of counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie”.
Report of our Venezuelan Section
The work of the section focused mainly on reading and studying articles from the texts and organs of the party, as well as on following the local situation of labor conflicts, politics and the economy. A relevant effort was devoted to the translation of texts and the preparation of the next issue of “El Partido Comunista”.
All the comrades of the section are aware of the need to participate and support the work of spreading the principles of left-wing communism in Spanish, in contact with the struggles of workers in Latin America.
We managed to continue the trade union work and, despite some difficulties independent of our will and ability, we managed to maintain contacts with the workers, to provide them with party press and to invite them to our meetings.
The significant increase in printing costs, due to the high inflation that affects the local economy, has led us to reduce the circulation of our publications; distribution is however active via e-mail.
Regarding the situation in Venezuela, we have informed the Party that the political confrontation, predominantly electoral, continues between the supporters of the government and the opposition. This clash, which has great national and international importance on the media, reinforces the confusion and disorientation of workers, who do not have an organization of their own to fight and protest. Even when there have been initiatives of workers’ struggles, these were used by one of the two bourgeois fighting fronts, in view of the 2018 governmental and presidential elections.
There is still strong inflation of prices of food and basic products. The government has approved wage increases, but that does not compensate it. The pro-government wing, concentrated in the National Constituent Assembly, is uncertain between paying the political cost of a package of economic anti-crisis measures or a diversionary tactic to gain time until the elections, in order to maintain power in most governorates. The opposition instead tries to take advantage of the mass discontent to secure the vote.
There have been no large wage conflicts. Even if there is dissatisfaction, the regime’s unions are responsible for keeping calm. Workers let themselves be mobilized only to support one of the two bourgeois opposing sides. When at the base workers succeed in freeing themselves from the control of the unions, the state repression bodies and the Ministry of Labor immediately coordinate to repress them.
Due to the difficult material conditions of the working class, the bourgeoisie tries to divert its growing anger with democracy, with electoral propaganda between falsely opposed bourgeois fronts. But neither the current chavist bourgeois government nor one directed by the opposition political parties will solve today the crisis in favor of the workers. The ruling class relies on this only apparent alternative to continue exploiting the working class, divided and disorganized.
The vast majority of trade unions do not mobilize workers, are conciliatory towards the bosses and sacrifice workers’ claims to the interests of businesses and the national economy.
Our comrades intervene among workers. They collaborated in the drafting of a document: “The demands of workers in Venezuela and in the world unify the working class without distinction of race, religion, political creed, sex, productive sector. Today more than ever, we must join forces to fight against the bosses – be they public or private – as well as their governments that have only one goal: to guarantee them profits through the exploitation of the working class. Workers should not be distracted by the skirmishes between the bourgeois fronts, they must fight for their immediate economic interests. The counterrevolutionary chorus is joined by the false workers’ leaders who only aspire to take part in bourgeois negotiations by offering packages of votes for the enemies of our class. “
We also propose to the class, among the workers and in the trade unions, a series of claims: reduction of retirement age to 50 years for women and 55 for men; reduction of the working day to 6 hours at the same wage; stable employment of all precarious workers, objectives to be imposed with the return to full use of the strike weapon, without notice or legal limits.
Venezuela is going through a serious economic and social crisis, the repercussion of the more general global economic crisis gripping all the capitalist countries.
The two factions, both bourgeois, fighting each other with deaths on both sides, use the media in a bombastic way to accuse each other of anti-national conspiracies.
The working class, which every day undergoes boss and state/government exploitation, is pressed between these false alternatives. However, it is laboriously looking for its own path of emancipation from exploitation, which must necessarily go from the immediate defense of salary, of its purchasing power, to the defense of working conditions, to struggling against the hectic pace of work, against overtime.
Small groups and company unions go in the right direction to seek class integrity, which means fighting the bourgeoisie as a whole, whether it be government or opposition, waving the banner of democracy or that of national socialism.
In the bustle of the fight to share the power and the booty taken away from the workers’ toil, the bourgeoisie, with its repressive apparatus, doesn’t lose sight of these little sparks of real class struggle. It intervenes drastically, in an attempt to exclude, marginalize, whoever tries to lead the worker’s discontent for the just class demands.
These are the only instrument that can unite the class, presently divided into a thousand rivulets, and lead it to its classic claims, to be achieved with the only methods that can beat the capitalist class, the indefinite strike, with no time limits and with the total block of production.
Mathematical Theory and Models
For Marxism mathematics is, like the ordinary language, an instrument. As such it is very useful, indispensable, and must be known how to handle it. A tool that has been handed down to us by previous generations and that is continually improved.
However, in an idolatrous society like the present one, mathematics is no exception to the systematic inversion of the means with the end. The Party must always focus on the historical end of the organic activity that distinguishes it, so that the use of mathematical tools does not transform its indispensable research activity, aimed at understanding where the capitalist mode of production goes, in a speculative game, an end in itself.
Our economic theory is expressed by abstract models, whose quantitative laws are represented in the language of mathematics. Once the model has been formalized into economic categories, it is possible with mathematical functions to verify or predict the link between its magnitudes and their relative evolution, over time.
But in no way can the reality of the facts emerge from the model: the facts are only historical, the theory interprets them.
In this operation, simplifications are inevitably introduced, taking into consideration what, for a given social-historical structure, is essential and productive of the major effects, from what appears accidental and just perturbation. Hence a theory is not only a container of measurable quantities, it is also endowed with its own structure, of essentially qualitative properties.
The current use of the word “mathematical model” is different. For us and, we have the ambition to say, for science, the model derives from the abstract theory, it simply represents and verifies the quantitative laws that theory has already guessed. With this premise, in no way can the model deny the theory.
On the other hand, a “mathematical model” understood as “mathematical simulation” is a particular calculation through which, starting from a certain number of actual data, for example the price for which a given commodity has been exchanged at different times in the past, we get, with exclusively formal-mathematical methods, to a hypothetical function that “approaches”, as far as possible, the detected prices. And consequently we hope to be able to predict them for a near future. Although recognizing to historical empiricism its merit, even if compared with science.
Several professors have committed themselves to denying some of the laws of our doctrine through the use of these models. For example, an empirical and accurate history of prices opposes our scientific-deterministic law of value. It is a different, class point of view: to whom day after day speculates on the quotations the second is certainly more useful, the first is necessary for who wants to overthrow capitalism.
In accepting a theory there is inevitably an act of faith, unspeakable word in these times of bewilderment, a theory is embraced or rejected by instinct. The theory is not born of a demonstration, it is its prerequisite. Every social theory is a moral force, a guide for thought and action.
The report then exposed the similarities between the theory of continuum mechanics and the theoretical framework of our economic doctrine. It has been pointed out how the evolution of mechanics, that is the transition from the mere fact to its scientific interpretation, has occurred historically on the path well synthesized by Marx in his Introduction of 1857. The scientific maturation in mechanics envisaged, in principle, with the emergence of bourgeoisie as a class, the abstract conception of the tensor of internal efforts in materials; subsequently the theory of constitutive relations inserted into the solicitation of materials the principles, so dear to us, of determinism and invariance.
The report concluded by giving news on some bourgeois studies with which one intends to reason in mathematical terms about social issues. The NASA of 2012 “demonstrated” the necessity of the catastrophic transition from capitalism to communism; the conclusion of these bigcaps: the only possible recipe to contain the inexorable advance of communism is “to correct the distribution of wealth” and “to protect nature”. Trivialities in the form of differential equations!
The Succession of Modes of Production: Rome
The report dedicated to the ancient classical variant in Rome has been focused on its superstructures, which have passed through the centuries and have arrived to this day, in a modified form to adapt to the new capitalist conditions of production.
The small village community located in the center of the peninsula in its millenarian history became a multinational empire of a power never seen before in the West.
The merit of having given itself a superior form of state is attributed to Rome. For Marx, Engels and Lenin, the state is an instrument of the ruling class to crush the dominated class; from this it follows that the State, whichever the class it represents, including the working class, can in no case be a neutral body with the function of mediating relations between actors with equal rights.
It is not easy to reconstruct the evolution of the Roman state machine. Slowly but inexorably the class State consolidates. This process can be observed both in the mechanism of attribution of offices, which becomes the prerogative of the families of the Roman nobility, and in the great deal of public works, through which the patriciate buys, literally, the State and thanks to which the assets originally owned collectively become private property. The contrast between private plots and public land is the determining factor of the dynamic attitude of the ancient variant with respect to the Asian mode of production.
This dialectical opposition between the original organic community and the nascent class structure of social relations has its own superstructural correspondence in the changes that have occurred over the centuries in the juridical institutes, which, from norms regulating the relations among the gentes, progressively assume the character of institutions governing relations among private citizens.
Because of the extension of the Roman territory due to military conquests, the law accepts new formulas and procedures, borrowing them from the more advanced societies with which the original city-state comes into contact; the winners cannot but make their own social relations more evolved, which better reflect production relations increasingly based on the self-assessment of the exchange value. At the end of this path the original Ius Quiritium disappeared and gave way to a complex system summarized in the Corpus Iuris Civilis of Emperor Justinian I.
The speaker then mentioned a phenomenon that anticipates the transformation of the ancient mode of production into feudalism. The economic crisis of the III century AD caused the loss of the centrality of the Italic peninsula compared to the imperial periphery; to put a stop to the phenomenon the emperors adopted the system of binding the producers to the land, thus creating that system which in the successive mode of production will be the serfdom. On the one hand, the State allows powerful local lords to govern their territory in complete autonomy, on the other hand it makes a series of work constraints hereditary and compulsory, and above all links the farmer to the land in such a way that the local lordships when selling the land implicitly alienate the producers who live on it.
The report provided some theses characterizing the thought of Lucretius, whose profound and consequent materialism is weakened only by Epicurean legacies. Like every revolutionary Lucretius was the victim of attacks by the ruling class, who rightly saw in his De Rerum Natura a weapon in the hands of the oppressed. The foundations of materialism are expressed in unambiguous poetic formulas: expressions such as “nothing born of nothingness” and “nothing is reduced to nothingness” leave no room for religion, branded as superstition and as a cloak behind which to hide the crimes committed in its name. The accusations of impiety addressed to his doctrine are sent back to the sender: impious is a doctrine that would like the cosmos created for the use and consumption of the human species. Even language is defined as an instrument of production, a thesis that will be developed, after many centuries, by Marxist dialectical materialism.
The Concept and Practice of Dictatorship Before Marx
With the Revolution of July 1830 we find on the Parisian barricades, next to the plebian heirs of the sans-culottes, numerous proletarians. The liberal bourgeoisie, exploiting the fear that motivated the armed proletariat, replaces the reactionary King Charles X with his cousin, Louis Philippe of Orleans, and a constitutional monarchy as well.
On August 20th, Filippo Buonarroti returns to Paris, merging a legal and propagandistic activity, now possible, with a sectarian and conspiratorial movement. The legal side advocated for a minimum program, consisting primarily of a demand for universal suffrage and progressive taxation. In Paris, the “Friends of the People Society” is founded, where Buonarroti and his followers are present alongside liberals and bourgeois republicans. After an attempted insurrection by the workers of Lyon in 1831, the “Society of Friends of the People” comes to an end in 1832. The “Human and Citizen’s Rights Society” is born from its ashes, within which a Buonarrotist minority is formed in opposition to the François-Vincent Raspail’s Bourgeois Republicanism.
In 1833 the pamphlet “Boutade d’un riche” by Marc-René de Voyer d’Argenson appears, where it is said that all wealth comes from work, and the people are encouraged to not “demand a poor increase in salary” but to seize power.
The repression of 1832 restricts the possibilities of legal activities. “Order reigns in Warsaw”, as the French Foreign Minister Sebastiani says, and throughout Europe. In this order the bourgeoisie accepts a position that is sometimes equal but usually subordinate to the monarchies and the aristocratic classes, who are frightened by the spectre of communism that is beginning to haunt Europe.
With workers’ insurrections in 1834, first in Lyon and then in Paris, and the consequent repressive laws in 1835, the “Society of Human Rights” ends. By intervening in the Lyon section, Buonarroti tries to avoid a rebellion that is untimely and likely to be defeated. But these positions do not stop him, after the defeat, from defending the rebels and identifying with their action. Karl Marx did the same in regard to the Paris Commune of 1871.
These days Buonarroti is often accused of having a wait and see attitude, because of his prudence and opposition to insurrectional, reckless and badly organized actions. Then, like now, most of the advocates of “action” wound up gradually in the enemy camp, after the best rebel elements wound up in prison or dead.
The Buonarroti group invites workers to strike in order to obtain wage increases. It encourages ending the ridiculous jealousies and harmful rivalries between workers’ associations in the various sectors. They also advocate the creation of a central committee of delegates to represent the particular associations. In articles we read: “To tell them that they are free to discuss the price of their work is an insulting derision for those who are aware that, placed between the needs of today and those of tomorrow, they are forced to suffer the law of the strongest, the law of capital”. In 1834 Voyer D’Argenson agrees to the need for the Coalitions and the formation of a central committee representing all sectors of the working class.
The relationship between the Italian Republican Giuseppe Mazzini and Buonarroti clearly highlights their respective positions. Already in 1832 Mazzini turned to the St. Simonian principle of universal association, as opposed to that of Buonarroti of class struggle.
With the failure of Mazzini’s expedition to Savoy in 1834, which had been strongly discouraged by all Buonarroti’s organizations, the final break between the two occurred. For Buonarroti, Italian unification – the Risorgimento – was part of a European social revolution. But most importantly, a struggle against the privileged classes.
Buonarroti exerted an important influence on sections of the English Chartists. The Irish Chartist, James Bronterre O’Brien, who served as political editor for several English newspapers, translated Buonarroti’s “Conspiracy” into English in 1836. Buonarroti and O’Brien have in common the conception that it is necessary to seize power in order to carry out the desired reforms. As well as a criticism of the Utopian Robert Owen, whom they appreciate in many aspects, but not for Owen’s appeals to the goodness of the rich and the aristocrats.
Buonarroti’s communism certainly has little to do with science and nothing to do with dialectics and materialism. Communists and scientific materialists, try to make the best use of dialectics, without making this, or science, a fetish. But dialectics tells us that Buonarroti, Babeuf and their comrades, are our direct forerunners.
Louis-Auguste Blanqui joined the revolutionary Carbonari in 1824. In 1827 he took part in student demonstrations in Paris, which were harshly repressed by the police, during which he was wounded three times. He therefore took part in the revolution of 1830, the defeat of which was a great lesson for him: his class position was clear when he joined Buonarroti’s “Society of the Friends of the People”. In a report to that Society in 1832, he correctly stated that in the Restoration of the French monarchy the bourgeoisie shared power with the aristocracy. But when feeling strong enough the latter reopened hostilities, and the bourgeoisie was immobilized by fear, especially due to the intervention of the people; the bourgeoisie came out of its hiding places only to seize the fruits of the victory. But, Blanqui continues, “a fierce struggle will now be engaged between the people and the middle class, no longer between the aristocratic classes and the bourgeoisie: the latter will need to call even their old enemies for help in order to be able to resist; (…) the bourgeoisie would abdicate their part of power to the hands of the aristocracy, willingly trading tranquility for servitude.”
In 1833 he wrote in a note: “To say that there is a commonality of interests between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a strange reasoning: for our part, we see only the alliance of the lion with the sheep”. In an article never published in March 1834, we read: “They are not free who, deprived of work tools, remain at the mercy of the privileged who hold them. It is this grabbing, and not this or that political constitution, that keeps the masses in servitude”.
Blanqui was convinced that it was necessary to go beyond the tradition of the Buonarroti and overcome the mythology of Robespierre, which had been present in the great Filippo until the end. Blanqui has nothing to do with sharing with a faith in a gradual and infinite progress, without revolutionary breaks. Years later he wrote that Saint-Simonists, Fourierists and positivists were the new religions, enemies of the revolution as much as the old.
Between 1834 and 1835 the Society of Families was founded. This, and its successor, the Society of the Seasons, even more so, were different from previous secret societies. They were an attempt, with the inevitable limitations, to create the revolutionary party of the proletariat, drawing on the “Conspiracy of Equals” of Babeuf. In the Society of Families the structure of the organization is secret but, unlike the old secret societies, all the members know the methods, the final purposes and the political doctrine.
In the Society of the Seasons, unlike the Families, there are no minutes, lists or documents. In 1839 also the Seasons reached the number of about a thousand members, mostly workers. The Society’s documents mention the need for a provisional dictatorial government of unpredictable duration and a planned economy.
In Paris in 1839 there are 150,000 unemployed workers, and those who are lucky enough to have a job, which can be 15 hours a day, see their wages drop. The economic crisis is followed by a political crisis between the king and parliament. The Society of the Seasons believes it is time to move on to the insurrection, which it prepares with accuracy, but overestimates its own strength and influence on the proletariat. Provocateurs from the police push towards the insurgency to eventually crush it. Blanqui tries to postpone the insurrection, but ends up supporting it because of the impossibility of stopping the course of events.
“Blanqui, leader of the Seasons, is also the creator of the insurgency plan. It takes care of the smallest details, identifies the armouries, bridges, barracks, ministries with all their secondary entrances, military prisons, police stations … The insurrectionary plan can be summed up as follows: march on the prefecture and occupy it; place guards and barricades on the bridges; transform the seat of the prefecture into a sort of entrenched camp; make the Cité the centre of the organized resistance and from there send columns in all directions”. [Gustave Danvier]
On 12 May 1839 the insurrection began and by the 13th it was already over. Only 500 men responded to the call for insurrection and no more than 300 more joined it. The defeat was due not to the clashes with the troops, but to the behaviour of the proletarians, who were divided between indifference and collaboration with the repression.
In the 1950s, the Soviet historian V.P. Volgin criticized Blanqui because he had an insufficient faith in the “ineluctability of communism”. Ineluctability and necessity are not the same thing; the second term was not very clear even in Blanqui, but surely the first has a strong smell of positivism and magnificent and progressive fortunes. Blanqui writes: “We do not believe in the fatality of progress, this doctrine of bastardization and squatting.” “France full of workers in arms, here is the advent of socialism. In the presence of the armed workers, obstacles, resistance, impossibility, everything will disappear. But for the proletarians who play with ridiculous demonstrations in the streets, planting trees of liberty or with sound barristers’ phrases, there will be first the holy water, then the courtroom and finally the grapeshot, always misery.”
Trade Union Activity of the Party
The trade union activity of the party was presented in the four-month period preceding the general meeting, divided into three sectors: 1) intervention in the manifestations of the labor movement, with special leaflets bearing the party’s political-union orientation; 2) the drafting of texts for the party press; 3) work performed within the trade unions.
We intervened:
– At the national event of the SI Cobas of 4 February in Modena – with a text in Italian and its translation in English – organized in response to the unjustified arrest of its National Coordinator. The flyer in English, introduced by a short explanation, was published in n. 6 of “The Communist Party”;
– At the demonstrations for the March 8th strike, called for the international women’s day;
– Attendance at the FCA (Fiat) plant in Cassino, organized by SI Cobas against the conditions imposed on the workers transferred there from the Pomigliano plant;
– Some stakes for strikes organized by SI Cobas in Rome, at the TNT and at an hotel;
– At the three Milan events for May Day: the morning demonstrations of the confederal unions and the Usb; the afternoon session by SI Cobas, Cub and Sgb. The text of the flyer, of a more political nature, as a tradition for the International Workers’ Day, has been translated, by comrades and sympathizers, into six languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Russian).
On our Italian press, in addition to reporting the aforementioned flyers, we have:
– completed the publication of the detailed description and commentary on the maneuvers of the CGIL, and of Fiom in particular, from the signing of the unitary collective agreement of 2008 to that, after eight years of unity, of November 2016;
– described the struggle movement of Alitalia workers and given our direction in this regard, in particular by polemizing with the slogan of the nationalization of the company, taken over by basic syndicalism;
– translated: from English the articles on the railwaymen struggle in Southern Rail (which operates in the southern part of the United Kingdom) against the so-called “sole agent” and that of Irish tram drivers; from the Spanish a note on the general strike in Brazil on April 28; from the French an article on the movement in French Guyana that saw the workers struggle subordinated and confused in a generic popular movement;
– drafted a note on the international scene of the struggles of dock workers, a note on the issue of “vouchers” in Italy and a polemical article on the watchword “Against the slogan of exit from the Euro from Europe from NATO”, brandished by the political cartel called “Eurostop” of which the Usb, at the behest of the political group that directs it, is a fundamental constituent part;
– in our Spanish-language organ “El Partido Comunista”, in addition to the original versions of the above-mentioned articles, we reported on the development, in which we collaborate, of the mobilization of courthouse workers in Venezuela and wrote a note to support the correct use of the strike against the various methods of scabbing (“Impulsar la lucha reivindicativa sin rompehuelgas”).
Within the Usb we intervened at its second Congress and in the provincial congress of Genoa, exposing, at the political level, our criticism of the slogan of exit from the EU, the Euro and NATO, and, at the union level, denouncing the obstacles to the participation of members to union activity. With regard to that Congress, we have drawn up an extensive article of analysis and critique.
The article expresses the meaning and the perspective of the militia in the union by our party comrades, which we consider of correct and sound revolutionary communism in the relationship with the bodies of immediate, economic struggle of the proletariat. The correctness of this approach is confirmed, even in the still small current developments of the labor movement, both by the overall course of the Congress, and by the activity that followed, in view of the general strike promoted by the basic syndicalism.
At the next general meeting we reported on our activity from the end of May to the end of September. We intervened in three events with our flyers:
– that of steel workers of Genoa and Novi Ligure, threatened with mass layoffs on the occasion of the change of ownership of the plants, including the major one in Taranto;
– the national strike in the transport sector (airports, railways, tramways) and logistics on 16 June, proclaimed by almost all the major basic unions, except the Usb;
– in France, in Paris, at the demonstration on 12 September against the new labor reform.
These flyers have been published on our press, the French one provided with an explanation. The one on the 16 June strike, introduced by a note, explained the behavior of the various trade unions, especially the so-called basic ones, before, during and after it.
On the Italian press have also been published: an extensive commentary on the USB at its second national Congress; an evaluation of the general “double strike” of basic syndicalism; the full text of the contents of the conferences held by the party in Turin, Genoa, Bologna, Florence and Rome on the subject of the Class Trade Union United Front.
But the level that most involved us in recent months was that of the activity within the trade unions. We continued to follow the activity of the Usb and SI Cobas, participating in demonstrations and pickets.
After the national transport and logistics strike of June 16th, immediately commented on our newspaper, the same unions that had promoted it on July 8th proclaimed a general strike of all categories for the following October 27th. Following this call, our comrades collaborated to draw up a document on behalf of the “Registered Usb Coordination for the Class Union” entitled “Problems of the strike of 27 October”, published on 4 August, in which, after stressing the importance of the mobilization, some limits were highlighted in order to overcome them. A certain interest and appreciation of the document arose, which made it possible to establish contacts with some union activists of various organizations and to draw up with them an “Appeal for the formation of a Unified Trade Union Front, for a general action of struggle of the whole working class, in defense of the freedom to strike “.
Of the intense activity following the publication of this document we reported in the article “The bumpy but ineluctable path towards a single trade union front”.
The Organic Activity of the Communist Party in Lenin
The party claims total continuity with the purest revolutionary tradition of the working class, starting from the Communist Manifesto of 1848, the First International and through the theoretical expressions of orthodox Marxism of the Second, restored and confirmed in the Third; it proclaims itself heir of the Left Current which within the Italian Socialist Party led to the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy in 1921, with which it also has a physical continuity, of organization and militants, defenders over almost a century of the incorrupt tradition of left-wing revolutionary communism.
While not losing contact with the working class and with its daily struggles, we have recognized the need to devote much energy, especially in times when the conditions for the revolutionary attack are lacking, to the study of the theoretical foundations of our way of existing and operating, both to continually repossess it, and to continue in the work of sculpturing our positions in doctrine and tactics. This does not mean “enrichment”, “updating” or, worse, revision, but the highlighting of ever clearer and more detailed confirmation of the correctness of our way of understanding the revolutionary process.
The party is at the same time the guardian of the doctrine and the organ that on the basis of it will have to carry out an action to guide the revolutionary class. It is therefore important for us to pay particular attention to this instrument, an organ of the working class even when this, in the vast majority of its members, is not aware of it, as it is now.
The International Communist Party is not the heir of an invention or aesthetic preference of the Italian Left: it is our demonstrable belief that there are no differences in substance between the way we understand our party and that of Lenin, obviously considering the historical and environmental differences in which the two organizations found themselves operating. The report presented at the general meeting intended precisely to read the experience of Lenin and his party to identify its characteristics of general value, to be compared with those of the small movement of today.
To understand what the communist party meant for Lenin, and to correctly interpret its positions, it is essential to have a clear picture of the context in which it operated. The report in the first part presented at this meeting focused on the period in which the Bolshevik party took shape, before and after the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers Party (POSDR).
It is in the years around 1880 that Marxism penetrates Russia, where by then the populist movement had developed. Around the Marxist theory and right propositions on the tactics of the proletariat in the double revolution, the Emancipation of Labor group is formed abroad.
In the first period, 1880-1898, the Marxist struggle took place mainly against populism, which had become a reactionary petty-bourgeois doctrine that defended a false rural socialism based on the Russian rural community. To settle accounts with this doctrine intervene not only the authentic Marxists, but also a whole series of elements for which the criticism of populism means passage from tsarism to bourgeois democracy: “legal Marxism”. The struggle is therefore conducted on two fronts: against populism and against petty bourgeois democratism.
At this time the Russian Marxists are reduced to a small group. It is important what Lenin writes in “What is to be done?”: this nucleus of militants had already been able to learn “everything” from European Marxism: it did not have to wait for the movement of Russian masses.
The first considerable labor unrest occurred in 1896, and that group of intellectuals threw themselves into the struggle, indicating to the movement not only its immediate tasks, but also the prospect up to socialism. The effects of this movement and the following ones were the following: 1) the party was linked to the class; 2) the party clearly separated from “legal Marxism”; 3) the party organization was established (1898).
Lenin affirms in all his works, including “What is to be done?”, that since 1896 the Russian proletariat was never more static. The inadequacy was of the party organization in leading the lively movement of the working masses. Thus is posed the question iw “What is to be done?”, where the crucial problem is just this: how to make the party suited to guide the workers’ movement? It is in front of this exuberant workers movement that the economicist deviation manifests itself.
After an examination of the relations between the classes in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, the report described the path up to the Second Congress of the POSDR, the one in which the party bases were laid, derived from the intense theoretical and organizational activity of the group making reference to Iskra magazine, an activity of recovery of the right Marxist positions, mainly by Lenin.
An opportunist current in the party, which is also present within Iskra’s editorial staff, manages to break it up, on issues that are only apparently marginal. At the congress there was a confrontation: as the Bolsheviks put forward their postulates, oppositions were manifested. And where, obviously? In the organizational question! All those who had previously been opponents of Iskra on the theoretical, programmatic and tactical level, now shouted against centralism and discipline and for the autonomy and democracy of the organization. Except then to drive a split in spite of the results of the democratic mechanism.
The narration continued until 1906, when a temporary reunification took place. Lenin, throughout the course of those years, which were still years of party formation, was always ready to postpone the clarification on secondary divergences while waiting for the necessary growth in the experience and maturation of the formal party, up to reluctantly accept the democratic mechanisms.
But there were aspects on which he was not willing to compromise: on the theoretical level, the orthodox application of the doctrine of Marx and Engels, to be accepted en bloc, without distinctions, very valid even in the presence of a perspective of double revolution; on the organizational level, a clear characterization of the militant, distinct from the mists of kindreds, sympathizers, fellow-travelers, and the affirmation of the cornerstones: absolute centralization and strict discipline.