This edition contains the translations of a series of six articles that were written over the period 1951 to 1963 and concerning the question of disasters and the role the State and economy played in their resolution. This was the period leading from the post-war reconstruction in Italy to the years of the boom, a period of massive capitalist expansion. The disasters mentioned seem to be modest in relation to the ones of the present period – air crashes with hundreds of deaths, smaller, but more frequent losses on the roads, the new illnesses resulting from the proliferation of (leaky) nuclear power plants and chemical works, even when these do not actually blow up and pour their deadly contents into the atmosphere, as at Chernobyl (and we are regularly told by the newspapers, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Savannah River, etc), Seveso, Bhopal and Flixborough.
Then there has been the doubling or more of the world’s population over the 40 years since the last article was written, meaning that people are forced to move into those areas their ancestors considered too dangerous because of the natural risk from volcanic eruption (Columbia), floods (Bangla Desh) or tidal floods (the North Sea basin).
Excuses in the 1950s ran along the lines that capitalism was in a phase of rebuilding and that all the damage of the war still had to be made good. But capitalism has never been anything other than a system which builds and rebuilds. If 40% of the bridges that the Romans built in Italy are still in use, we know that little of the present motorway system will last out this century and will have to be replaced. The Romans could limit their turn over to the dinner table with the vomunt et edent, edunt et voment and every self-respecting villa had its vomitorium. Now the excess agricultural product does not even have to pass through the human body, but is immediately transformed or even thrown away. Thus too with the construction industry: we can recall many cases of the demolition of works carried out less than 30 years ago, undamaged by any war. Here too capitalism can call on disasters and their prevention to aid it in removing unwanted excess populations from town centres to the outskirts to allow for rebuilding. Whereas in the 18th century or even in the first part of the last one, such a removal was often linked to the building of works of public utility: the Paris boulevards, railways and roads in London and so forth, now the only pressure is to provide quick access to land that can be relet at a much higher rent.
A classic case of this transformation can be found in the city of Pozzuoli, near Naples, built on the site of previous cities dating back to 529-8 BC. This site, unlike the neighbouring cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii survived the eruptions of Vesuvius, but was equally subject to another volcanic form, apart from a sulphur spout that last erupted in 1198, called bradisism, the slow rising and falling of the surface as magma flows underground from one caldera to another. This cycle lasts about 25 years and has never led to the complete abandonment of the area.
The arrival of the modern period changed this. In 1970 a plan was prepared to evacuate the population in case of undersea eruptions and tidal waves. The world renowned volcanologist, Haroun Tazieff, doubted the seriousness of the plan when he discovered that “with the prediction of a submarine eruption in the Gulf of Pozzuoli, the area of Rione Terra was to be evacuated, that is the higher part of the city. How come that it was this zone and not the port, which was far more vulnerable to the threat of tidal waves, was evacuated?” and answers his own question: “The occasion was seized on to get hold of the old part of the city at a very low price in order to begin speculation.”
Nature was not so obliging, however, but the earthquake in Irpinia in November 1981, followed by the start of a fresh cycle of bradisism in 1983, gave the local capitalist class (local mafia – Camorra, businessmen, elements from the local judiciary) a second chance. The old city was evacuated in October 1983 and the inhabitants outhoused in various areas up to 50 km from Pozzuoli. The City Council immediately voted for the construction of a new city, Monteruscello, which, with progressive numerical inflation, rose to a planned 44,000. Here again the volcanologist discovered the tricks used. His registration devices did not detect the movements that were registered daily by the State. In the end he found that the latter had been placed alongside the local railway and picked up the slight movements produced by passing trains. Then the new city was to be sited in the ex-caldera of one of the volcanoes of the Campi Flegrei, where a possible eruption would cause «total loss and zero survival».
Even the new town soon began to fall to bits, not because of a natural disaster, but because the job had been rushed with poor quality materials – after all it was an emergency! Not so the work along the coast. All and sundry were asked to intervene: FIAT, the State holdings ENI and Italstat, even the communist party League of Co-operatives, the party being worried about the loss of the area’s “political, democratic and civil traditions”, i.e. its vote share1.
It would be tedious to consider many more cases of this refinement of disaster management. Let us look at the articles translated here instead.
The first two deal with the death and destruction caused by floods in the Po valley in late 1951. Here we need an overview of the long period of capitalist expansion in this zone, the criticisms of those who foresaw disaster and an updating of the question from 1951 to the present day.
Cf Panorama Mensile No.3, March 1985 and La Repubblica 17.10.85 and 22.1.87 ↩︎
The Po valley as late as the eleventh century still consisted largely of woods and marsh. “Moving towards the Po from the urban centres (of Bologna, Modena, etc), the landscape became steadily more and more wild in aspect… Adventuring into the marshy areas of the lower Po valley meant exposing oneself to every possible kind of danger”.1 Even in the upper valley the Lomellina was infested by “woods and wolves” despite long-term settlement.
However, this period of abundant land and forest soon began to draw to a close. By the twelfth century the landowners were already limiting or preventing the cutting of wood in the Mantovano and the Polesine, even to the extent of removing the inhabitants from the formerly wooded areas.2 These measures were vital to protect a still semi-natural economy based on hunting, hog herding and small scale arable farming. With the rise of commerce, particularly of the Venetian Republic, wood became an important commodity in boat construction. As early as 1470 the Venetians enacted the Provisio quercurum in consilio Rogatorum creating a reserve of all oak trees on both private and common land for later boat building. “The result was, however, that land owners did not plant oak trees, but tore them up as soon as they sprouted from acorns so as to avoid their registration and thus the requirement to maintain them until maturity, without any return”.3
Thus from the beginning the State could not enforce or maintain a type of production. If the return on oak trees was so little or too slow in forthcoming then oak trees would not be planted. The State itself could of course fill the gap. The ministry of Colbert in France planted huge oak forests to provide timber for the French fleet two hundred years later, by when the iron-clad steam ship had been invented and oak had lost its value.4
Girolamo Silvestri writing during the enlightenment spoke of the diminution of wood planting in the Polesine for “natural reasons”, that is “river flooding, stagnant waters and too much heat and aridity, excessive cold” but also “moral reasons” due to men who damage the woods or who avoid planting them because “the fruit has to be awaited too long“.5 The reasons for the “immorality” of man is of course another matter. The enlightenment authors could of course point to the political division of Italy, the Po basin alone being divided among no less than six States, and thus a lack of coherence in hydraulic and reforestation works.
“From the time of the Renaissance to that of the Counter-Reformation, research by great Italians that from Leonardo to Galileo to Torricelli established modern hydraulic science, enlightened and perfected the initiative of great river reorganization and general improvement works which not even war, economic and political decadence and foreign domination totally managed to impair (…) Already around the 1550’s these initiatives were insufficient to deal with the agencies of degradation of the mountain country and the consequent hydraulic disorganization: increasingly chronicles and archive records speak of the improved land reverting to marsh and of rivers overflowing banks and embankments, flooding over the surrounding fields and devastating them”.6 Thus the mind was willing (to improve the hydraulic system) but the flesh was weak (and politically divided)?
The enlightenment thus saw “the various eighteenth century authors mainly call for the energetic and better co-ordinated State intervention. Even if few of them went as far as advising the State management of wooded areas or mountains requiring reforestation, (e.g. the Venetian Griselini in 1768, the Casentine Tramontani in 1801, the Trentino Serafino in 1807 and finally the Napoleonic general superintendent of woods Gautieri in 1814) however the State, especially in countries where the enlightenment experience was more advanced, was always seen as the body best suited to handle environmental problems of the mountain areas“.7 And in 1866 there was the unitary State (at least for the Po basin), a unitary capitalist State at the service of an increasingly powerful capitalist class based on industry and modernized agriculture, the two of course requiring public works (railways, ports and hydraulic works).
Laws on hydraulic works were passed in 1877, 1888, 1893, 1911 and 1923 (to cite only the first few). “With the 1877 law (only slightly improved by another in 1888) and in an increasingly marked way in 1893, 1911, 1923, etc the State slackened, deteriorated and depreciated – to the benefit of pre-existing private interests (…) – the functions that rational enlightenment had indicated as its own”. Because “the legislation, which in the first twenty years after unity aimed mainly at hydrographic defence became, at the turn of the century and especially with the enactments of 1919 increasingly interested (leaving defence in second place)… concerns close to the needs of industry”.8 This despite the disastrous floods of 1879, 1882, and 1896. Even in Jacini’s Results of the Agrarian Inquiry we find such suggestions: “Regarding drainage works (bonifiche), perhaps it would be the case to introduce private interest (speculazione privata) with the State expropriating marshy areas and granting full concessions to these interests… The restoration of the mature forests however can only be assumed directly by the State“.9 To drain an area (not previously covered by the sea) requires little time in comparison to that for letting a forest grow: the rate of profit is higher in the first case and thus attracts investment of capital. The latter, however is essential too, but must be performed by the “public” body. If, however, the second is not performed, disasters continue and the capitalist investment has to be repaired. Newly planted forests destined to become mature woodland would provide nothing for the present generation, nor even for the succeeding one”.10
Thus the poverty stricken peasants of the Po valley found no outlet in the reorganization of the hydraulic pattern of the Po valley, afflicted as it was by floods (of water and capitalist development), but merely in migration and “public works”. The revolts of these years and the formation of the early socialist parties were diverted into hymns as to reform and the needs of the nation. Andrea Costa, an early socialist and anti-colonialist could, however, still say “Instead of wasting public money on colonial adventures, let’s [who?] use it to relieve the great misery we have at home.” Later “Why not drain the marshes which cause malaria, why not cultivate our lands, why not turn all our forces to the culture and the agricultural and industrial development of our country? (…) When I think of the Agro Romano, Sardinia and the Marca, I don’t know how to believe the waste of men and money we are making in Africa!”11. Of course fascism could both waste men and money in Africa (Ethiopia) and drain the Pontine marshes at the same time, forty years later. Few socialists spoke like Francesco Ciccotti who “maintained that opposition to the Libyan war should be based not on contingent motives such as the funds diverted from reform works to the war, but on internationalist principles”.12 National unity would not solve the problem of the rational organization of human life in the Po valley, only the international unity of the proletariat could ensure that.
This ideology of public works which poisoned the socialist movement also invaded the local agricultural proletariat. The organization of vast armies of carriolanti (navvies) employed to repair the breaches after every flood disrupted the normal capitalist exploitation of labour, and left the workers unemployed after the close of the breaches or the season suitable for repair work. Thus continued public works were also “in the interest of the workers“, so much so that it was suggested that many floods were not due to the hand of God but that of man, of navvies who sabotaged works so as to be able to redo them, of a lumpen Keynesianism.13
With the “rinascita nazionale” of 1945 we enter the latest period of capitalist development. The war (1941-45) ended, economic and political decadence over (the crash, crisis, fascism), foreign domination finished (the Salo Republic, the German invasion), public works could be initiated on an ever greater scale. Even the major disaster in point, the Polesine in 1951, was a prompt to State action. However it was merely business as usual.
The direct official response to the floods was the Operative Plan for the Systematic Regulation of Natural Water Courses, with a thirty year budget of 1,500 billion lire. However in 1966 there were fresh floods (the Arno) so a new committee was established. “The Interministerial Committee,” which stated that the funding was “so limited that they could not undertake even routine maintenance.” Thus more money, 3,000 to 3,500 billion lire and other works for another 1,800 billion, a budget tripled in twenty years, without the aid of inflation. But “even this plan did not go ahead. There had to be added to the by now accepted evanescence of a responsible political will an unforeseen event: the establishment of the regions and the consequent splitting up of the State’s technical body.”14
Thus the Po basin was split into five regions as compared with the six pre-unification States. The river in fact forms a boundary between regions, so what if the Red Emilians raise their embankments: do the white Venetians cop the lot at flood time? So while these funds are left unspent, an estimated 50,000 billion lire have been spent on damage repair works, ten times the figure for the necessary programme of maintenance.
Funds for research and defence do not exist. Studies of the Po tributaries Adda, Ticino and Oglio were suspended in 1972. “The State hydrographical service in Milan consists of an engineer who passes by the office between 10 and 11 am once a week.” The Piedmont region has one employee to control 350 measuring apparatuses for the Po. The research laboratory for the Hydrological Protection of the Po basin has 20 researchers and a budget of 148,000 million lire in 1977.15 Thus the Po continues to be used for other private purposes (extraction of building materials, transport, cooling for power stations) without any plan.
What, however, is happening in the Po valley now? Why have there been serious floods since 1957, in 1994 and 2000 and does this mean that the few measures taken were enough to deal with the problem once and for all?
Not at all. The post-war building boom, that started grosso modo shortly after the Polesine disaster, used millions of tonnes of sand and gravel from the rivers’ beds, lowering some of them substantially – the Po by six meters in Piedmont between 1971 and 1987 alone. Further, many sections were straightened and the meanders cut off. This new canalized river therefore occupied less space than its forerunner. Then millions of gallons of water are removed from the river, particularly in its upper reaches, to form the water supplies for industrial and civilian use and for the generation of hydroelectric supply. Though this water obviously re-enters the river at some lower point, the upper reaches, the ones that most actively erode the valley sides and produce the load that the river carries, have in many cases been cut – the upper Po in fact disappears for several kilometres except at flood time when water supply is greater than demand. The load therefore no longer reaches the lower valley, but is dumped against dams or simply lies in the half abandoned river bed (until it is extracted). The lower stretches at flood time therefore have an excess of energy both because there is a more rapid flow, due to canalization and the increase in gradient, and because less energy is required to carry and form forces of attrition in the diminished load. Add the man-made effort to extract the river’s bed and we have the following result: the river is eroding its own bed and the water level is sinking. Thus too there is a falling tendency for the river to flood low lying areas.
Thus man, nolens volens, has solved the problem and to talk of planning is a waste of time! Not quite. If the threat from the river has fallen, that from the sea has risen.
All estuaries and deltas tend to sink under the weight of the load deposited by the rivers as they slow, lose energy and then enter the sea. For the Quaternary period, the Po delta sank at 1.5 mm per century, something that could easily be covered by the sediments deposited at flood time.
When the dynamics of a river are messed about with, when the load is insufficient because it is blocked by dams (Po, Rhone, Nile, Rhine) or is funnelled out to sea by a tidal scour produced by over-dredging of the bed (Thames, Maas), the delta starts to sink and, if not protected by the hugely costly defence schemes like the Thames barrier or the Dutch Delta scheme – which lasted 30 years and cost 2.3 billion US Dollars – and the Po has no such scheme, the delta recedes.
The delta area at Ravenna is now (1972-77) sinking at 5-6 cm a year compared with only 1-3 cm over the previous 24 years. Adria, in the very centre of the delta, fell 110 cm in the decade 1958-67 and the delta itself has receded by 3 km since 1944.
At this point the capitalist class has thrown up its hands. No enterprise economy is going to make good this loss, just as no one is going to do anything about the soil loss in the equivalent Fenland areas of Britain. There is just one last trick left. The delta can be made into a State Park with the taxpayer footing the usual bill – after all the term “sinking fund” is a State invention.
The legend of the Piave deals with another flood, this time more directly the result of human intervention. Here the meddling in the delicate equilibrium of an avalanche zone caused the disaster. Nature knows many different types of avalanches, from slips to slides, from many periods, some being extinct, dormant or active. In a few cases human settlement has been poorly selected and avalanches cause disasters, but in most there is the help of human agencies. We can recall the case of Aberfan in Wales where mine spoil was dumped for decades over a natural spring, until one day in 1966 heavy rain-fall caused this spring to explode, pouring millions of tonnes of black slurry into the village school, killing hundreds of children. At Stava in 1986 a mud dam holding back the products of mineral washing collapsed and the dredgings covered the entire valley floor, killing further hundreds of people. In both cases the usual who is to blame was used to hide the real culprit: the desire to produce at the lowest cost.
The sinking of the Andrea Doria in 1956, commented on in Weird and wonderful tales of modern social decadence was neither the first nor the last loss of a ship at sea, even if this was particularly worrying. Here a navigational error and collision showed how the structure of the ship itself was inadequate. The lesson was learnt? Ship design, at least for passenger transport, has continued to reduce the dimensions of the hull and to increase that of the superstructure, so as to increase accommodation and to cut costs. The veering of the Herald of Free Enterprise still inside Zeebrugge harbour in 1987 was put down to a technical error – the failure to close the car entrance doors before departure, a measure designed to save time. But one well constructed craft this would have at most have caused a sinking as water entered the hold via the doors. Instead there was a tendency to capsize, evidently the hull being unable when the ship was full of passengers, cars and the usual stocks of duty free to re-establish a correct balance. The ship settled on its side on a sand bank and hundreds died within sight of land. Never mind, the ship can be recovered intact, repainted and renamed, and the captain told to shut the doors properly. A similar disaster took place on the languid Nile: the small cruise shipLuxor was literally bowled over by a gust of wind and a bit of current from the Aswan High Dam. Again the hull was small, the draught had to be reduced to allow the vessel to pass over sand banks, but there would be no cuts in the cabin decks. The survivors were dragged out of the river by fishermen using the boats originally “designed” millennia ago and which the explorer Thor Heyerdal showed could make it all the way across the Atlantic if required.
Poor design is only the tip of the iceberg. The very earliest capitalist enterprises knew that to make a profit they had to run a risk: nothing ventured, nothing gained. Thus the Hanseatic League had their motto of navigare necesse est, non necesse vivere (we have to trade, we don’t have to survive), while the Italian counterparts invented marine insurance, for ships and cargoes, but not for men. Who cares that crews can also go down with their ships. In 1982 alone 402 ships disappeared, in many cases as a nice mise en scene to get the insurance money.
If there is a real risk, the insurance companies soon have the support of the State. It is the State, or its delegates, that provide lifeboats and lighthouses as a rule, while in the exceptional cases of war, like in the case of the Iran-Iraq war, all the States that have ships to send (USA, USSR, UK, France, Italy, Belgium, etc) rush to be the first to guarantee “free navigation”, that of the various Free Enterprises.
In the last two sections, a close examination of Capital is used to demonstrate that all the current developments of the capitalist economy could be foreseen and that there is no need for establishing a new theory of State capitalism to explain the nationalization of economic enterprises. The basis of the society: the exploitation of labour power to set in motion past accumulated labour has remained unchanged and from this one could develop all the interpretations necessary to understand modern trends.
Vito Fumigali Terra e società nell’Italia padana: I secoli IX e X (Torino 1976) pp 8-9 ↩︎
Quoted in La Boje: moti contadini e società rurale padana nel secondo ottocento (Mantova, 1984) and in Renato Zangheri Agricoltura e contadini nell storia d’Italia (Torino, 1977) p 268 ↩︎
Storia della sinistra comunista I (Milano, 1972) p 52 ↩︎
The floods in the Po valley and the confused debate over their causes and over the responsibility of organizations and public bodies that did not know how to carry out protection work, with all the disgusting mutual accusation of “speculating” on misfortune, puts in question one of the most widespread false opinions shared by all the contenders: that contemporary capitalist society, with the correlating development of science, technology and production, places the human species in the best possible position to struggle against the difficulties of the natural environment. Hence the contingent fault of the government or of Party A and B, which lies in not knowing how to exploit this magnificent potential at hand, and in the erroneous and culpable administrative and political measures. Hence the no less classic: “Move over, I want to take over now!”
If it is true that the industrial and economic potential of the capitalist world is increasing and not diminishing, it is equally true that the more virulent it is, the worse the living conditions of the human mass are regarding natural and historical cataclysms. Unlike the periodic spates of rivers, the spate of frenetic capitalist accumulation knows no perspective of a “decrease”, of a falling curve from the hydrometer readings, but only the catastrophe of the river banks bursting.
Yesterday
The relationship between the thousands of years long development of man’s production technique and the relations with the natural environment is very close. Primitive man, like an animal, gathered and ate wild fruit using a simple grasping action and, like an animal, fled headlong from the disruption of natural phenomena that threatened his life. As the artificial production of products for consumption and the accumulation of reserves of these products and of tools forced him to settle, so too they forced him to defend himself from such menaces as meteorites and natural dangers. Such a defence, not unlike that against other groups competing for the best site, or predators on the accumulated reserve, could only be collective. From these collective needs arose, as we have seen many times, class division and exploitation by rulers.
In Marx “the capitalist mode of production… presupposes the domination of man over nature”.1 It also presupposes the war of nature on man. A too generous and lavish nature would not be the favourable environment from which capitalism could spring up.
“It is not the absolute fertility of the soil, but its degree of differentiation, the variety of its natural products, which form the natural basis for the social basis for the division of labour (…) It is the necessity of bringing a natural force under control of society, of economizing on its energy, of appropriating or subduing It on a large scale by the work of the human hand, that plays the most decisive role In the history of industry. Thus, for example, the regulation of the flow of water in Egypt, Lombardy and Holland. Or irrigation in India, Persia and so on, where artificial canals do not only supply the soil with the water indispensable to it, but also carry down mineral fertilizers from the hills, in the shape of sediment. The secret of the flourishing state of industry in Spain and Sicily under the rule of the Arabs lay in their irrigation works.” (Footnote) “One of the material foundations of the power of the State over the small and unconnected producing organisms of India was the regulation of the water supply. Its Mohammedan rulers understood this better than their English successors. It is sufficient to recall the famine of 1866, which cost the lives of more than a million Hindus In the district of Orissa, in the Bengal Presidency.”
It is well known that similar famines have raged recently, despite the tremendous potential of world capitalism… The struggle against nature generates industry; man lives on two sacred Dantesque elements, nature and art (the third is God). Capitalism generates the exploitation of man from industry. The bourgeoisie will not be revolted by violence against God, nature and art.
Very modern high capitalism shows serious cases of retreat in the struggle to defend against attacks by the forces of nature on the human species, and the reasons are strictly social and class ones, so much so as to invert the advantage derived from the progress of theoretical and applied science. Let us wait then to blame it for having increased the rainfall intensity with atomic explosions or, tomorrow, with having “messed about” with nature so much as to risk making the earth and its atmosphere uninhabitable and even to make the skeleton explode by priming “chain reactions” of all the elements in nuclear complexes. For now let us establish a social and economic law for the parallel between its greater efficiency in exploiting labour and the life of men and the ever decreasing efficiency in the rational defence against the natural environment, in the widest sense.
The earth’s crust is modified by geological processes which man increasingly learns to distinguish and decreasingly attributes to mysterious wishes of angry forces and which, within certain limits, he learns to correct and control. When, in prehistory, the Po valley was a huge lagoon through which the Adriatic Sea lapped the foothills of the Alps, the first inhabitants, who evidently were not lucky enough to beg “amphibious craft” from self-interested American charity, occupied pile-dwellings rising above the water. It was a “terramara” civilization of which Venice is a distant development: it was too simple for a “reconstruction business” to be based on it with contracts to supply timber! The pile-dwellings did not collapse during floods: modern brick houses do; however, what means exist today to build raised houses, roads and railways! They would suffice to protect the population. Utopia! The sums do not tally, while the account of 200 billion lire for repair works and reconstruction is quite in order.
In the past, the building of the first embankments dates back to the Etruscans. The natural process of mountainside degradation and the transport of material suspended in river waters from the mountains at flood time has formed a huge, fertile lowland region over the centuries, this convenience then assuring the settlement of agricultural peoples. The subsequent populations and regimes continued to raise high embankments along the banks of the large rivers, which were insufficient to stop huge cataclysms when the river shifted its course. The shift of the Po near Guastalla onto a new course, which was until then the lowest reach of the Oglio, dates from the fifth century.
In the thirteenth century, the great river abandoned the southern distributor of the huge delta, the present-day secondary “Po di Volano”, in the reach near its mouth and adopted the present course from Pontelagoscuro to the sea. The frightening “shifts” have always been from south to north. A general law assumes a tendency for all the world’s rivers to migrate northwards for geophysical reasons. However, in the case of the Po, this law is evident due to the great difference between its north and south bank tributaries. The former rise in the Alps and have clear water either because they pass through large lakes, or because they do not have a maximum regime during periods of heavy rainfall, but instead during the springtime melting of glaciers. Therefore these rivers do not carry mud and sand deposits into the course of the main river when in flood. However, from the south, from the Appennines, the short and torrential right bank tributaries with their huge variations between maximum and minimum flow pour down the debris of mountain erosion, filling in the right bank section of the Po’s channel, which every so often escapes this damming by turning north.
Chauvinism is not required to know that the science of river hydraulics arose from this problem: for centuries the problem has been posed of the utility and functioning of embankments, or the connection with the problem of the distribution of irrigation water via canals, and finally of fluvial navigation. After the Roman works, there is information about the first canals in the Po valley in 1037. After the victory of Legnano,2 the Milanese built the Naviglio Grande to Abbiategrasso, which was made navigable in 1271. With this arose capitalist agriculture, the first in Europe, and the great hydraulic works were undertaken by the State bodies: from the canals and basins of Leonardo, who also provided norms for the river regimes, to the Cavour Canal, begun in 1860.
The construction of embankments to contain rivers raised a major problem: that of raised rivers. While the Alpine rivers, such as the Ticino and Adda, run largely between natural banks, the right bank tributaries and the Po below Cremona are raised: this means that not only the water level, but also the bed of the water course is higher than the surrounding countryside. The embankments save it from being flooded and a collector canal runs parallel to the river to collect local water which it carries to the river downstream: these are the great reclamation works, and as they approach the sea, the transfer of water to the river is performed mechanically so as to keep dry the districts which are below not only the river, but also the sea. The entire Polesine is a huge low-lying area: Adria is 4 meters above sea level, Rovigo 5: there the Po’s bed is higher and the Adige’s even more so. Clearly a breach in the embankments would turn the whole of Rovigo province into a huge lake.
There is a major debate among hydrologists as to whether the rise in the beds of such rivers is progressive. French hydrologists said yes a century ago white the leaders of Italian hydrology opposed them, and the matter is still discussed in congresses today. Nevertheless, one cannot deny that the river load and its deposition extends the mouth out to sea, even if this does not collect in the final reaches of the river’s bed. Because of this incessant process, the gradient of the bed and the water surface can only decrease and, according to hydrological law, the speed of the current equally falls: hence the need to raise embankments seemed historically endless and unavoidable. The disastrous nature of the breaches occurring is also progressive.
The availability of modern mechanical means has contributed in this field to spreading the method of exploiting great extents of the most fertile land, keeping them dry by continuous pumping. The risk to the tenants and workers worries a profit economy, but the damage caused when the works fail can be balanced against the fertilization by the invading mud on the one hand and the economic factor on the other: carrying out works is always good capitalist business.
The classic reclamations by alluviation were widespread in the modern period along the entire Italian lowland coast: river water was alternately allowed to flood into and deposit in the great basins, the level of which rose slowly with the double advantage of not letting useful and fertile soil wash out to sea and of providing ever greater security from flooding and future danger. This rational system was found to be too slow for the requirements of capital investment. Another tendentious argument was and is drawn from the continuously rising population density which cannot permit a loss of fertile land. So almost all the old polders, carefully surveyed with precision by the hydrologists of the Austrian, Tuscan and Bourbon regimes, have been destroyed.
Clearly, if today one had to choose from the various radical solutions to these problems, not only would one clash with the incapacity of capitalism to look to the distant future as regards the handing down of installations from generation to generation, but one would also clash with the strong local interests of farmers and industrialists who have an interest in not having various zones eroded and who play on the attachment of poor people to their inhospitable homes. Since a while back, new solutions have been proposed to create “lateral channels” for the Po.
This type of study is always unpopular because the results forecast are uncertain, something which creates great annoyance in business circles. One solution, on the right, consists in a cut from Pontelagoscuro to the valleys or lagoons of Comacchio: the artificial canal would cut about one third off the length of the present river course to the sea. Such a solution clashes with the big investments in Ferrarese reclamation works and with fish farming, so it would be resisted. But the solutions with more foresight and which perhaps are more in conformity with the natural processes call for the reuniting of the Po and Adige courses between which lies the lower Polesana, creating in its Thalweg,3 presently criss-crossed by small water courses, a huge collector and, perhaps, in the final count, a side canal for one if not both rivers would encounter no less resistance.
In the bourgeois period, such a study does not lead to positive research, but to two “policies”, right and left, as regards the Po, with the related conflict between speculating groups.
Today
There is discussion as to if the present catastrophe, in which some have already seen the natural formation of a large stable swamp and a shifting of the Po’s course with the total destruction of the north bank, is due to exceptional rainfall and the complicity of natural causes, or to the inexperience and the error of men and directors. Indisputably the succession of wars and crises have caused decades of neglect in the difficult service of technical inspection and embankment maintenance, dredging of river beds where necessary and the systemization of high mountain basins, the deforestation of which caused greater and more rapid rain water run-off during high water and greater flows of suspended material to the river-courses on the plain.
With the bad trend that now prevails in science and official technical organization, it is even difficult to collect and to compare udometric data (amount of rainfall on various dates in the basin which feeds the river) and hydrometric data (water levels at the hydrometers, maximum flow) with those of the past. Offices and scientists with self-respect now offer replies in line with political requirements and reasons of State, that is, according to the effect that they will have, the figures having been massaged in every possible way. One can also well believe what is stated by the current of criticism that not even the observation stations destroyed during the war have been replaced, and it is also credible that our present technical bureaucracy works with old maps, passed along copy by copy, dragging along slowly over the drawing tables of the lazy technical personnel, and it does not update the surveys with new altitude surveys, which are difficult, and with operations of geodetic precision, which allow one to collate the various data of the phenomenon: it lives in masses of maps which are in line with approvals given in circulars in terms of format and colour, but do not give a tinker’s cuss for physical reality. The figures handed out here and there for the popular press cannot tally: but it is easy to blame the journalists who know all about nothing.
It therefore remains to be seen – and those movements with wide support and plentiful means could well try to do this – if the intensity of rainfall really was the highest in a century of observation: it is correct to doubt it. The same goes for the hydrometer readings for the maximum levels and flows: it is easy to say that the historical maximum was recorded at Pontelagoscuro at 11,000 cubic meters per second but now has presently risen to 13,000. In 1917 and 1926 there were very large maxima of much lesser consequence, always in spring, up to 13,800 cubic meters per second passing through Piacenza.
Let us say without dwelling further on the matter that the rainfall was certainly not of unheard of proportions and the chief responsibility for the disaster lies in the long lack of necessary services and in the omission of maintenance and improvement works, which is related to the smaller public budget for such works and the way money was spent in respect to the past.
It is a matter of providing a cause for these facts, which must be a social and historical cause, and it puerile to bring up again the “bad management” of those who were or are at the helm of the Italian ship of State. Besides, this is not a uniquely Italian phenomenon, but occurs in all countries: administrative chaos, thieving, the penetration of speculation into public decision making are now denounced by the conservatives themselves, and in America they have been related to public disasters: even there ultra-modern cities in Kansas and Missouri have fallen victim to badly regulated rivers.4
Two mistaken ideas underlie a critique like the one we have just mentioned: one is that the struggle to return from the fascist dictatorship within the bourgeoisie (the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie has existed since it won freedom) to the external multiparty democracy had as its aim a better administration, whereas it is clear that it had to lead, and has led, to a worse administration. This is the fault common to ALL shades in the great block of the CLN.5
The other incorrect idea is the belief that the totalitarian form of the capitalist regime (of which Italian fascism was the first great example) gave overwhelming power to the State bureaucracy against the autonomous initiatives of enterprises and private speculation. On the contrary, this form is vital for capitalism’s survival and that of the bourgeois class at a certain stage, as it concentrates counter-revolutionary powers in the State machine, but renders the administrative machine weaker and more open to manipulation by speculative interests.
Here we need a historical sketch of the Italian administrative machine from the epoch of the achievement of national unity. Initially it worked well and had strong powers. All the favourable conditions contributed to this. The young bourgeoisie had to pass through the heroic phase and to make sacrifices in order to seize power and to affirm its interests. Therefore the individual elements were still prepared to offer their all and were less attracted by immediate hidden gain. Further resolute enthusiasm was needed to liquidate the resistance of the old powers and of the rusted State machines of the various parts into which the country was originally divided politically.
There was no notable division into parties as the sole party of the liberal revolution governed (virgin in 1860, old slag in 1943) with the clear acquiescence of the few republicans and with the workers’ movement yet to appear. The swindles began with the bi-party trasformation of 1876.6 The skeleton of the bureaucracy coming from Piedmont following close on the heels of the military forces of occupation enjoyed a real dictatorship over the local elements and the aristocratic, and clerical, opponents. were repressed by emergency powers… as they were guilty of anti-liberalism. Under such conditions, a young, conscientious and honest administrative machine was constructed.
The bureaucracy suffered a twin attack on its uncorrupted dominance with the capitalist system’s development in depth and extension. The great entrepreneurs of public works and of productive sectors aided by the State emerged in the economic field, while in the political field, the spread of corruption to parliamentary business became such that every day “the people’s representatives” intervened to impinge on the decisions of the executive system and general administration, which previously had functioned with scrupulous impersonality and impartiality.
Public works, which previously had been projected by the most competent, who were naively pleased to have a regular salary as government functionaries, and who were wholly independent in their judgements and advice, began to be imposed by the executioners: we mean the classical Carrozzoni7 began to do the rounds. The machine of State expenditure became decreasingly useful for the community, but all the more financially burdensome.
This process accelerated during the Giolittian period,8 but nevertheless increasing economic prosperity made the damage less obvious. This system, as its political masterpiece, slowly entangled the emerging workers’ party. Precisely because Italy has an abundance of labour power and a lack of capital, all sides call on the State to provide work, and the MP who seeks votes in an industrial or agricultural constituency does the rounds of the ministries hunting for the panacea: public works.
After the First World War, the Italian bourgeoisie, even though they came out “winners”, saw the favourable wind of the heroic period change too drastically and there was fascism. The concentration of the policing strength of the State along with the concentration of the control of almost all the economic sectors simultaneously allowed it to avoid the explosion of radical revolts among the masses and to assure free speculative manoeuvring for the well-off class, on condition that the latter formed itself into a single class centre framed by government policy. Every medium or small employer was compelled to make reformist concessions, called for during the long struggle of the workers’ organizations which (as usual) they destroyed, stealing their programme: so that while a high degree of capitalist concentration was favoured, the internal situation was pacified. The totalitarian form allows capital to set in motion the reformist trick of the previous decades, latching onto the class collaboration proposed by the traitors of the revolutionary party.
The steering of the State machine and abounding special laws were clearly placed in the service of business initiatives. From technical legislation to return to our starting point, dealing with rivers – which around 1865 had produced several masterpieces, one arrived at a total hotchpotch open to all possible manoeuvres, the functionary being reduced to a puppet of the large firms. The hydrological services are just those clashing with the famous idea of private initiative. They require a single establishment and full powers: they had a very long tradition. Jacini wrote in 1854: the civil problem of the waters found in Giandomenico Romagnosi an immortal writer-of treatises.9 All in all, bourgeois administration and technology had event then class goals, but they were serious, while today they are mere bagatelle.
This lead to the bad trend which has caused the degradation and not the improvement of the hydraulic defences in the Paduan plain, starting from a process not concerning just one party or nation, but the centuries long ups and downs of a class regime.
In short, if once the bureaucracy, independent but not omnipotent, laid out its project on the drawing board and then called in bids from public works it enterprises, compelling them, refusing even the offer of a cup of coffee, to complete them rigorously, thus at most the selection of the funded works was made according to general principles, today the relationship is inverted. The weak and servile technical bureaucracy, lets the enterprises themselves draw up the plans and approves them almost unseen, and the enterprises obviously select the profitable works and drop the delicate operations which require more diligence and offer less chance of repetition in the future.
The basis of this is not the moral fact, nor even that in general the functionary gives way before competition and large bribes. It is that if a functionary resists, not only his workload increases ten-fold, but also the interests against whom he clashes mobilize against him with the decisive party influence in the higher echelons of the ministry that employs him. Once the most capable technician gained promotion, now the one most able to move in such a system.
When single party fascism gave way to the multi-party system unknown even in Giolittian Italy, even in the constitutional model of perfect England, and so on (where we have never had ten parties declaredly ready to govern according to the constitution, but at most two or three), we went from bad to worse. They were supposed to restore the experts and the honest men with the Allied armies. What a silly hope so many had: the new changing of the guard has produced the worst of all guards, as on the Po embankments.
It is symptomatic enough in diagnosing the present phase of the capitalist regime that a senior official in the Ministry of Works let slip that the flood surveillance services worked well right up to the fatal moment: the only moment for which they are paid a regular salary – this is the style of modern bureaucracy (for some the new ruling classy Ruling classes arrive mouths agape, but not with a failing heart.)
No less interesting is what Alberto de Stefani wrote, entitled The Management of the Po.10 After outlining the history of measures, he cited the judgement of authors in technical journals: “One can never insist too much on the need to react to the system of concentrating the activity of the offices exclusively, or nearly so, on the projection and execution of major works.”
De Stefani did not see the radical implication of such a critique. He deplored the neglect of conservation and maintenance of existing works, while new works were being planned. He cited other passages: “One spends tens of billions (and tomorrow hundreds) for extensions after systematically grudging and withholding those small amounts required for the maintenance and even to close breaches”.
That seems to have happened on the Reno. An economist of De Stefani’s calibre scrapes by with saying: “We have too little conservative spirit due to too much uncontrolled fantasy.”
Is it thus perhaps a factor of national psychology? Never: of capitalist production. Capital has become incapable of the social function of transmitting the labour of the present generation to the future ones, utilizing the labour of past generations in this. It does not want maintenance contracts, but huge building deals: to enable this, huge natural cataclysms are insufficient capital creates human ones with ineluctable necessity, and makes post-war reconstruction “the business deal of the century”.
These concepts have to be applied to the critique of the base, demagogic position of the Italian so-called workers’ parties. When speculation and capitalist enterprise are given the capital to invest in hydraulic works which is now committed to armaments, capitalist enterprise (except to cause a crisis among the pseudo-reds of the metallurgical centres, if the business were really to be under-taken) will use that capital in the same way: cheating and speculating at one thousand percent, raising their glasses high to the coming if not of the next war, then of the next flood.
The huge river of human history also has its irresistible and threatening swellings. When the wave rises, it washes against the two retaining embankments: on the right the conformist one, of conservation of existing and traditional forces; along it priests chant in procession, policemen and gendarmes patrol, the teachers and cantors of official lies and State-schooling prate.
The left bank is that of the reformists, hedged with “people’s” representatives, the dealers in opportunism, the parliamentarians and progressive organizers. Exchanging insults across the stream, both processions claim to have the recipe to maintain the fast-flowing river in its restrained and enforced channel.
But at great turning points, the current breaks free and leaves its course, “shifting” like the Po at Guastalla and Volano onto an unexpected course, sweeping the two sordid bands into the irresistible flood of the revolution which subverts all old forms of restraint, moulding a new face on society like on the land.
Capital Vol. I (Harmondsworth, 1976) p. 649. The following quotation is on pages 649-50. ↩︎
In 1176 the Lombard Communes defeated the Emperor Barbarossa at Legnano. ↩︎
Line where opposite slopes meet at the bottom of a valley. ↩︎
Floods in June and July in Kansas and Missouri caused dozens of deaths and left many homeless. ↩︎
Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale: the antifascist front towards the end of the second world war, going from the Communist Party to the monarchists. ↩︎
On March 18th 1876, the last “destra” government fell and the “sinistra”, based on regional interests, took over. There was, however, little political difference as the two parties transformed into two almost identical schools of thought. ↩︎
Platonic and wasteful body or enterprise, especially public. ↩︎
La proprieta fondaria e la populazione agricola in Lombardia (Milan, 1854 – not 1857 as in the original). Stefano Jacini (1826-91) agronomist, head of the Inchiesta Agraria e sulle condizioni delta classe agricola (1884). Minister of public works under Cavour (1860) and again in 1864-and 1867. Gian Domenico Romagnosi (1761-1835) jurist and philosopher. Considered to be the main inspiration behind the juridical and administrative system adopted by the Kingdom of Italy (1861-1946). ↩︎
Alberto De Stefani was the Minister of Finance and the Treasury from 1922 to 1925 when he was removed after pressure from financial and industrial groups. He remained a fascist and was tried after the war for this, being acquitted. The article quoted was published in Il Tempo (Rome) on 21.11.51. It reiterates what he had previously written when still a minister: “As one reads on, one will see the path taken since the Kingdom’s foundation to the present of the various legislative attempts, of citizens’ sacrifices and their real value, of the excellence of provision and execution, of the defectiveness and deviations which the interest of the State and nation sometimes had to suffer because of the upper hand gained by political or particular or special interests.” (L’azione dello Stato per le Opere Pubbliche 1862-1924, Rome 1925 p. vii) ↩︎
In Italy, we have long experience of “catastrophes that strike the country” and we also have a certain specialization in “staging” them. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, rainstorms, epidemics… The effects are indisputably felt especially by poorer people and those living at high densities, and if cataclysms that are frequently much more terrifying strike all corners of the world, not always do such unfavourable social conditions coincide with geographical and geological ones. But every people and every country holds its own delights: typhoons, drought, tidal waves, famine, heatwaves and frosts, all unknown to us in the “garden of Europe”: and when one opens the newspaper, one inevitably finds more than one item, from the Philippines to the Andes, from the Polar Ice Cap to the African Desert.
Our capitalism, as has been said a hundred times over, is quantitatively small fry, but it is in the vanguard today in a “qualitative” sense of bourgeois civilization, of which it offers the greatest precursors from amidst the Renaissance splendour,1 in masterfully developing the economy based on disasters.
We wouldn’t dream of shedding a single tear if the monsoon washed away entire cities on the coast of the Indian Ocean, or if they were submerged by the tidal waves caused by submarine earthquakes, but we have found out how to collect alms from the world over for the Polesine.
Our monarchy was great in knowing to rush not to where one danced (Pordenone), but to where one died of cholera (Naples), or to the ruins of Reggio and Messina, raised to the ground by the earthquakes of 1908. Now our puffed up President2 has been taken off to Sardinia and, if the stalinists haven’t been fibbing, they have shown him teams of “Potemkin workers” in action that then run to the other side of the stage, like the warriors in Aida.3 It was too late to pull the homeless out of the flooding Po, but good play was made of MPs (male and female) and ministers paddling about in their wellies after setting up cameras and microphones for a world-wide broadcast of their lamentations.
Here we have the bright idea: the State should intervene! And we have been applying it for a good ninety years. The professional Italian homeless has set State aid in the place of the mercy of God and the hand of Providence. He is convinced that the national budget has much wider bounds than the compassion of our Lord. A good Italian happily forks out ten thousand lire squeezed out of him so that months and months later he can “squander one thousand lire of the government’s money”. And as soon as on one of these periodic contingencies, now fashionably called emergencies, but which fall in all seasons, are applied the unfailing central government provisions and fundings, a band of no less specialized “homeless” rolls up its sleeves and plunges into the business of procuring concessions, and into the orgy of contracts.
The Minister of Finance of the day, today Vanoni, suspends by authority all other State functions and declares that he will not provide a brass farthing from the exchequer for all the other “special Acts” so that all means can be addressed to dealing with the current disaster.
There could be no better proof than this that the State serves for nothing and that if the hand of God really did exist, he would make a splendid present to the homeless of all kinds causing earthquakes and bankrupting this charlatan and dilettante State.
But if the foolishness of the small and middle bourgeoisie shines forth at its brightest when it seeks a remedy for the terror that freezes it in the warm hope of a subsidy and an indemnity liberally bestowed upon by the government, the reaction of the overseers of the working masses who, they scream, lost everything in the disaster, but unfortunately not their chains, appears no less senseless.
These leaders, who pretend to be “marxists”, have for these supreme situations, which interrupt the well-being of the proletariat deriving from normal capitalist exploitation, an economic formula even more foolish than that of State intervention. The formula is well-known: “make the rich pay”.
Vanoni is thus reviled because he was unable to identify and tax high incomes.4
But a mere crumb of marxism suffices to establish that high incomes thrive where high levels of destruction occur, big business deals being based on them. The bourgeoisie must pay for the war! stated those false shepherds in 1919 instead of inviting the proletariat to overthrow it. The Italian bourgeoisie is still here, and enthusiastically invests its income in paying for wars and other disasters for which it is then repaid four fold.
Yesterday
When the catastrophe destroys houses, fields and factories, throwing the active population out of work, it doubtlessly destroys wealth. But this cannot be remedied by a transfusion of wealth from elsewhere, as with the miserable operation of rummaging around for old jumble when the advertising, collection and transport cost far more than the value of the worn out clothes.
The wealth that disappeared was that of past, ages-old labour. To eliminate the effect of the catastrophe, a huge mass of present-day, living labour is required. So, if we use the concrete social, not abstract definition of wealth, we can see it as the right of certain individuals, who form the ruling class, to draw on living contemporary labour. New incomes and new privileged wealth are formed in the mobilization of new labour, and the capitalist economy offers no means of “shifting” wealth accumulated elsewhere to plug the gap in Sardinian or Venetian wealth, just as one could not take from the banks of the Tiber to rebuild the ones swallowed up by the Po.
This is why it is a stupid idea to tax the ownership of the fields, houses and factories left intact to rebuild those affected.
The centre of capitalism is not the ownership of such investments, but a type of economy which allows the drawing from and profiting on what man’s labour creates in endless cycles, subordinating the employment of this labour to that withdrawal.
Thus the idea of resolving the war-time housing crisis with an income freeze on landlords of undamaged houses led to the provision of homes in a worse condition than that caused by the bombing. But the demagogues shout easy arguments, saying things “accessible for the working masses”, so as not to touch the freeze.
The basis of marxist economic analysis is the distinction between dead and living labour. We do not define capitalism as the ownership of heaps of past, crystallized labour, but as the right to extract from living and active labour. That is why the present economy cannot lead to a good solution realizing with the minimum expenditure of present labour the rational conservation of what past labour has transmitted to us, and to better bases for the performance of future labour. What is of interest to the bourgeois economy is the frenzy of the contemporary work rhythm, and it favours the destruction of still useful masses of past labour, not giving a giving a damn for the prosperity.
Marx explains that the ancient economies, which were based more on use than exchange value, did not need as much as the present to extort surplus labour, recalling the only exception of the extraction of gold and silver (it is not without reason that capitalism arose from money) where the worker was forced to work himself to death, as in Diodorus Siculus.
The appetite for surplus labour (Capital Vol. I, Ch. 10, Section 2: “The voracious appetite for surplus labour”) not only leads to extortion from the living of so much labour power as to shorten their lives, but does good business in the destruction of dead labour so as to replace still useful products with other living labour. Like Maramaldo,5 capitalism, oppressor of the living, is the murderer also of the dead: “But as soon as peoples whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave labour, the corvée etc. are drawn into the world market dominated by the capitalist mode of production, whereby the sale of their products for export develops into their principal interest, the civilized horrors of over-work are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom etc.”6
The original title of the paragraph quoted is “Der Heisshunger nach Mehrarbeit”, literally; “The voracious appetite for surplus labour”.
Young capitalism’s hunger for surplus labour, defined by our powerful doctrine, already contains the entire analysis of the modern phase of the enormously grown capitalism: the ravenous hunger for catastrophe and ruin.
Far from being our discovery (to hell with the trouveurs especially when they sing even the scale out of tune, then believe themselves to be creators), the distinction between dead and living labour lies in the fundamental distinction between constant and variable capital. All objects produced by labour which are not for immediate consumption, but are employed in a further work process (now one calls them producer goods), form constant capital. “Therefore, whenever products enter as means of production into new labour processes, they lose their character of being products and function only as objective factors contributing to living labour.”7
This is true for main and subsidiary raw materials, machines and all other types of plant which progressively wear out: the loss due to wear which has to be compensated requires the capitalist to invest another quota, always of constant capital, which current economics calls amortization. Depreciate rapidly, that is the supreme ideal of this grave digging economy.
We recalled a propos the “possession by the devil”8 how, in Marx, capital has the demoniac function of incorporating living labour into dead labour which has become a thing. What joy that the Po’s embankments are not immortal, and today one can happily “incorporate living labour into them”.’ Projects and specifications are ready in a few days! Good boys, you are possessed by the devil!
“Sir, the drawing office of our firm has done its duty in predisposing technical and economic studies: here they are all nice and ready.” And price analysis values the stones of Monselice higher than Carrara marble.9
“Preserving value by adding value is a dowry of nature of the labour force in action, of living labour; a dowry of nature which costs the worker nothing, but yields much to the capitalist: it yields to him the preservation of the existing capital value.”
This simply “preserved” capital, thanks always to the action of living labour, is called by Marx the constant part of capital, or constant capital. But: “the part of capital converted [i.e, invested] into labour power [wages] changes [instead] its value in the process of production (…) And it produces a surplus, surplus value.”
We therefore call it variable part, and simply variable capital. The key is all here. Bourgeois economics puts profit in relation to constant capital, which is there and does not move: indeed, it would go to hell if the work of the worker did not “preserve” it. Marxist economics, on the other hand, places profit in relation to variable capital alone and shows how active proletarian labour: a) preserves constant capital (dead labour); b) exalts variable capital (living labour). This exaltation, surplus value, is the entrepreneur who gets it. This, Marx explains, of establishing the rate without taking account of constant capital, is equivalent to setting it equal to zero: a common operation in the mathematical analysis of all questions involving variable quantities.
If constant capital is set at zero, the gigantic capitalist profit stands up. To say this is the same as saying that the profit of enterprise remains, if the trouble of guarding constant capital is taken away from the capitalist. This hypothesis is merely the current reality of State capitalism.
Passing capital to the State means placing constant capital at zero. Nothing changes in the relation between entrepreneur and worker because this depends only on the quantities of variable capital and surplus value.
Analysis of State capitalism a new thing? Without prosopopoeia, we are able to serve it as we have known it since 1867 and before. It is very short: C=0.
We will not leave Marx without giving, after the cold formula, a fiery passage: “Capital is dead labour, which revives itself, like a vampire, only by sucking living labour, and the more it sucks the more it lives.”
Modern capital, in need of consumers because it needs to produce more and more, has every interest in using up the products of dead labour as soon as possible in order to impose its renewal with living labour, the only labour from which it “sucks” profits. That’s why it is so happy when war comes, and that’s why it is so well trained in the practice of catastrophe. In America the production of automobiles is formidable, but all or almost all families have cars. And so it makes sense for cars to be short-lived. In order to get that much, first of all they are built badly and with sloppy sets of parts. If users break their necks more often it matters little: you lose a customer, but there is one more car to replace. Then they turn to fashion, with the cretinous aid of advertising propaganda, so that everyone wants to have the latest model, like women who are ashamed to wear a dress, perhaps intact, “from last year.” The fools take the bait, and it doesn’t matter if a Ford built in 1920 has more life than a brand new car from 1951. And finally, disused cars are not even used as scrap metal and are thrown into the car cemeteries. Anyone who dares to take one and say, “you threw it away as something worthless, what’s wrong with me fixing it up and driving around?” will receive a slap on the wrist and a criminal conviction.
Capital, in order to exploit living labour, must destroy still useful dead labour. Loving to suck warm young blood, it kills corpses.
So while the maintenance of the Po embankments for ten kilometres requires human labour costing, let us say, one million a year, it suits capitalism better to rebuild them all spending one billion. Otherwise it would have to wait one thousand years. This perhaps means that the nasty fascist government sabotaged the Po embankments? Certainly not. It means that no one has pressed for an annual budget of a miserable million and this is not spent as it is swallowed up in the financing of other “large scale works” of “new construction” which have budget estimates of billions. Now, since the devil has swept away the embankments, one finds someone with the best motives of sacrosanct national interest who activates the project office and has them rebuilt.
Who is to blame for preferring the large scale projects? The fascists and the official communists. Both of them prattle that they want a productivist, full employment policy. Productivism, Mussolini’s favourite creature, consists in establishing “present day” cycles of living labour out of which big business and big speculation make billions. Let us then modernize the aged machines of the great industrialists and also let us modernize the river banks after letting them collapse, all at the people’s expense. The history of the recent years of administrative management of State works and of the protection of industry is full of these masterpieces, ranging from the provision of raw materials sold below cost to works “undertaken by a State monopoly” in the “struggle against unemployment” on the basis of “constant capital equals zero”. In other words, let us spend it all in wages, and since the enterprise has only shovels for equipment, the State official is convinced that it is useful to shift earth first from here to there then immediately back to here again.
If the senior official hesitates, the enterprise has the trade union organizer to hand: a demonstration of labourers shouldering shovels under the ministry’s windows and all’s well. The trouveur arrives arid supersedes Marx: shovels, the only constant capital, have given birth to surplus value.
Today
Undoubtedly, the size of the disaster along the Po has been massive, and the estimated cost of the damage is still rising. Let us admit that the cultivated area of Italy lost one hundred thousand hectares or one thousand square kilometres, about one threehundredth or three per mille of the total. One hundred thousand inhabitants have had to leave the area, which is not the most densely settled in Italy, or, in round figures, one fivehundredth or two per mille of total population.
If the bourgeois economy were not mad, one could do a simple little sum. The national assets have suffered a serious blow, however the zone was only partially destroyed. When the floodwaters recede, the agricultural soil will largely be left behind and the decomposition of vegetation along with the deposition of alluvium will partially compensate for the lost fertility. If the damage is one third of total capital, it costs one per mille of the national capital. But this has an average income of five per cent or fifty per mille. If for a year every Italian saved scarcely one fiftieth of his consumption, the damage would be made good.
But bourgeois society is anything but a co-operative, even if the great freebooters of native capital escape Vanoni by demonstrating that “par-ownership” of their enterprises has been distributed among all employees.
All the productivistic operations of Italian and international economy are more or less as destructive as the Padan disaster: the water entered from one side and left by another.
Such a problem is insuperable on capitalist grounds. If it were a question of making the arms to provide Eisenhower with his hundred divisions within a year, the solution would be found.10 These are all short-cycle operations and capitalism is as pleased as Punch if the order for the 10,000 guns is with a delivery date in 100 and not 1,000 days. The steel pool does not exist without reason!
But a pool of hydrological and seismological organizations cannot be formed, at least not until the great science of the bourgeois period is really able to provoke series of floods and earthquakes, like aerial bombardments.
Here it is a matter of a slow, non accelerable centuries long transmission from generation to generation of the results of “dead” labour, but under the guardianship of the living, of their lives and of their lesser sacrifice.
Let us admit, for example, that the water in the Polesine will recede in a few months and that the breach at Occhiobello is closed before the spring, only one annual harvest cycle would now be lost: no productive “investment” can replace them, but the loss is reduced.
If, instead, one believes that all the Po embankments and those of the other rivers could frequently come apart, due as much to the consequences of overlooked maintenance during thirty years of crisis as to the disastrous deforestation of the mountains, then the remedy will be even slower in coming. No capital will be invested for the good of our great-grandchildren.
Our fathers wrote in vain: only a few examples of virgin forest remain, growing without the intervention of human labour. The forestry system thus becomes almost man’s work despite the minimum of capital in the operation. Nevertheless, high growing trees, the most important in the public economy, always require a very long period before yielding a useful product. However, although forestry science has shown that the best year to fell timber is not that at the end of the maximum life span, but that in which current growth equals average growth, one must always calculate 80, 100 and even 150 years for an oak wood. Minimal capital; minimum wait for a profit 150 years! Di Vittorio and Pastore11 would fling the book, if they had ever opened it, out of the window.
As in the operetta: steal, steal capital (love) cannot wait…
There is still worse to it. Relatively little is said of the disaster in Sardinia, Calabria and Sicily. Here the geographical facts differ drastically.
The very slack gradient of the Po valley caused a build-up of water which then swamped over the clayey and impermeable soils below. The same reasons of high rainfall and deforestation of the mountains in the South and the Islands, along with the steep fall down to the sea caused the destruction. The mountain streams washed sand and gravel from the bedrock and destroyed fields and houses, all in a few hours, without, however, causing many victims.
Not only is the sacking of the magnificent forests of Aspromonte and the Sila by the allied liberators irreparable, but here also the renewal of the land swamped by the flood waters is practically impossible, not merely uneconomic for the “investors” and for the “helpers” (more self interested than the former, if that is possible).
Not only the narrow horizons of cultivable soil, but also the thin non-rocky strata that gave it weak support have been washed away, soil which was carried up many times over decades by the grindingly poor farmers. Every plantation, every tree, the basis of a rather profitable agriculture, and industry in some villages, came down with the soil and the orange and lemon trees floated out to sea.
Replanting a destroyed vineyard takes about two years, but citrus plantations only provide a full harvest after seven to ten years and a great amount of capital is needed to establish and run them. Naturally, the good treaties do not give the cost of the unthinkable operation of carrying up again, for hundreds of meters, the soil brought down and, in any case, the water would carry it away again before the plant roots could fix it to the soil.
Not even the houses can be rebuilt where they were before for technical, not economic reasons. Five or six unfortunate villages on the Ionian coast in the Province of Reggio Calabria will not be rebuilt on their own hill sites, but down by the sea.
In the Middle Ages, after devastation had caused the disappearance of every last trace of the magnificent coastal cities of Magna Graecia, at the apex of agriculture and art in the ancient world, the poor agricultural population saved itself from Saracen pirate raids by living in villages built on the mountain tops, which were less accessible and thus more defensible.
Roads and railways were built along the coast with the arrival of the “Piedmontese” government and, where malaria did not prohibit it, where the mountains ran down close to the sea, every village had its “on-the-sea” near the railway station. It became thus so convenient to carry timber away.
Tomorrow only the “on-the-seas” will remain and there they are laboriously rebuilding some villages. So why then should the peasant reclimbs the slope where nothing can ever take root and the very bare and friable rock strata itself does not permit the rebuilding of houses? And the workers by the sea, what will they do? Today they can no longer emigrate like the Calabrians of the unhealthy lowlands and the Lucanians of the “damned claylands” made sterile by the greedy felling of the woodlands which once covered the mountains and the trees that spread over the upland pastures.
Certainly, in such conditions, no capital and no government will intervene, a total disgrace of the obscene hypocrisy with which national and international solidarity was praised.
It is not a moral or sentimental fact that underlies all this, but the contradiction between the convulsive dynamic of contemporary super-capitalism and all the sound requirements for the organization of the life of human groups on the Earth, allowing them to transmit good life conditions through time.
Bertrand Russell, the Nobel Prize laureate, who quietly pontificates in the world press, accuses man of overly sacking natural resources, so much so that their exhaustion can already be calculated. Recognizing the fact that the great powers conduct absurd and mad policies, he denounces the aberrations of the individualist economy and tells the Irish joke: why should I care about my descendants, what have they ever done for me?
Russell counts among the aberrations, along with that of mystical fatalism, that of communism which states: if we have done with capitalism, the problem is solved. After such a display of physical, biological and social science, he is unable to see as an equally physical fact the huge level of loss of both natural and social resources, essentially linked to a given type of production, and thinks that all would be resolved by a moral sermon, or a Fabian appeal to the human wisdom of all classes.
The corollary is pitiful: science becomes impotent when it has to solve problems of the spirit!
Those who really stand in the way of human progress, of decisive steps forward in the organization of human life, are not really the conquerors and dominators who still dare to ostentate greed for power, but the swarms of insipid benefactors and proponents of the ERP12 and brotherhood among peoples, like so many pacifist dove-cots.
Passing from cosmology to economics, Russell criticizes the liberal illusions in the panacea of free competition and has to admit: “Marx predicted that free competition among capitalists would lead to monopoly, and was proved correct when Rockefeller established a virtually monopolistic system for oil.”
Starting from the solar explosion, which one day will instantaneously transform us into gas (which could prove the Irishman right), Russell finishes with maudlin sentiments: “Nations desiring prosperity must seek collaboration more than competition.”
Is it by chance, Mr. Nobel Prize laureate, who has written treatises on logic and scientific method, that Marx calculated advent of the monopoly fifty good years in advance? If that were good dialectics, the opposite of competition is monopoly, not collaboration.
Take good note that Marx also predicted the destruction of the capitalist economy, class monopoly, not with collaboration, which with which all the Trumans and Stalins of goodwill you are devoted to incensing, but with class warfare.
Just as Rockefeller came, “big moustache must come!”13 But not from the Kremlin. That one, despite Marx, is about to shave like an American.
“The first capitalist nation was Italy” (Engels, Preface to the Italian Edition of The Communist Manifesto) ↩︎
Potemkin had constructed prefabricated villages to show Catherine II on her tour of the Russian countryside. They gave the impression of rural prosperity, but after each visit they were hastily dismantled then reassembled elsewhere on the tour. ↩︎
In early 1951 Vanoni introduced personal income tax to Italy. This tax entered the Guinness Book of Records as the “least paid tax in the world.” Still today tax evasion is widespread. (cf. llth. ed., 1963, p 107) ↩︎
Maramaldo killed the dying General Ferrucci in 1530, the last act of Florentine independence. The British equivalent is Ivo of Ponthieu who hacked at the dying King Harold at Hastings. But he was “branded with ignominy by William and expelled from the army” (Cesta Regum Anglorum). The chivalry of nascent feudalism contrasts favourably with the squalid unscrupulousness of early capitalism. ↩︎
The patriotic saga of Italy raised the Piave to the position and designation of the national river in 1917. In the war which was to have been the Fourth War of Independence, leading the country in a leap beyond the already gained Venetian frontiers (won by no means by armed might) from the Third, after two years of an immobile front on the Isonzo, streaming blood from a dozen battles, the direction then changed with the famous defeat at and flight from Caporetto, the Austrains flooding onto the plain through this breach. After a few days of fearing for the worst when it was believed that they would have been stopped only on the Adige or Mincio, on the 1859-66 frontiers, the tide was stemmed on the Piave, something that was foreseen by the not altogether stupid titch of a King who organized the defence.1 We all then learnt that the Piave was to be declined as masculine, not as a feminine substantive, laying to rest our schoolboy doubts.2
The river’s name entered popular poetry and legend. The old Neapolitan versifier E.A. Mario, recently passed on, wrote verses and music which lost only by a short head to Mameli’s hymn in the competition for the national anthem. Can you recall the ingenuous phraseology? “Together with the infantry, battled the waves.” Once again a river was personified in literature, like in classical literature, as defending the motherland, carrying to the sea piles of enemy corpses. “The Piave whispered: the foreigner shall not pass.”
But now the Piave has carried out to sea thousands of Italian corpses struck down by the apocalyptic flood from the Vajont during the dark night of October 9-10th., and has lost its title to nobility. Its legend was and is one of death, and there is no more glory in carrying away the bodies of soldiers than of pacific citizens caught in their sleep. Then they were immolated to the never satiated with blood numina of war, now to those of modern bourgeois and patriotic capitalist civilization and above all to the adorers of its science and technology.
We did not suddenly desire just today to dishonour along with the killer deities of wars between peoples those no less infamous of a civilization which rusts and rots year by year.
In Prometeo 2nd. series No.4, July-September 1952 we dedicated the article Politics and Construction to this theme which, among the various examples of deadly disasters which constitute real bankruptcies of scientific technique, recalled several cases of floods and cited historical cases of mountain reservoir dams, recalling the history of this skill from the Moors in Spain and Leonardo to the organizational inadequacies of the modern hydraulic services in the period of great capital and monstruous construction enterprises.
In France in 1959 there was the terrible Frejus catastrophe which, nevertheless, despite the collapse of the dam, which did not happen in the case of the Vajont basin, caused less victims than the recent Italian catastrophe.
Then we found the person responsible, the accused to be stood in the dock, but not in the manner of the reckless pettifogging political prick, of demagogic opportunism: it was Progress, the lying myth which makes the poor in spirit and the starved wretches bend their backs to it, ready to swear fealty to this Moloch which every so often and a little bit each day crushes them under the wheels of its obscene carriage.
In the inhuman system of capital, every technical problem boils down to an economic one, one of the prize won by cutting costs and boosting returns. The old prebourgeois societies had some residual time to think about safety and general interests. As we recalled in the case of the Frejus dam, that too was a masterpiece of brand new technology, it was light, slim and agile and so with a very modest concrete and steel tonnage held back an enormous volume of water. But already past builders had realized that dams work by gravity, that is, they resist the incredible thrust of the liquid in that they were extremely heavy and did not collapse. We recalled that after several disasters in Spain and at Gleno in Italy (1923) the theory was modified to take account of the hydraulic thrust below, at the base of the dam and these were broadened and made more stable. But the recent dams have obeyed (a mercenary science has obeyed) the sacrosanct need for low costs, so they are built, as with the Frejus and Vajont, in an arch, that is, with a curve that points out into the water pressure and spreads the load onto the shoulders wedged into the valley sides. The dam thus becomes less voluminous, less heavy and less costly and is made of highly resistant materials. But then the pressure of the thrust on the two shoulders of the construction grows massively because this depends on the water pressure borne on its back, which is all the more massive the higher the dam is. Allowing for superlative materials permitting the slimming of the dam and therefore of its shoulders, the pressure on the natural rock is immense and the problem ceases to be the, controllable, one of adjusting the arch of reinforced concrete to take the thrust (this cannot be reduced), but of seeing if the rocky sides will crumble, ruining the arch shaped dam. This was the error made at Frejus, then too it was not the mechanical and hydraulic engineers who were wrong, but – it is said – the geologists called on to evaluate the strength of the rock.
The first problem can best be tackled by mathematical calculations, performed either by a good theoretician or by a computer, while the great theoretician sitting at it goes through a few packets of cigarettes. It can be tested on a suitable scale model in the laboratory.
The geological problem is not one for the smoking saloon or the test tank. It is one of lengthy human experience based on the proofs of historical building. Human and social experience. For all modern engineering, in so far as it makes things which are not pocket sized or cars, constructing things fixed to the Earth’s crust, the key problem is the land/building relationship (for a simple house, the foundations) and there are no perennially valid formulae but instead many skilful applications to choose from after gaining hard-learnt experience, but taking a big salary and smoking in front of the computer is insufficient.
This experience ripens over the centuries: whoever believes in progress and in the jest that last season’s latest discovery contains the wisdom of all time, may get a big salary, but causes disasters, statistics for which, and they alone, show progress.
The very folk traditions among the uneducated masses, the place names themselves can help the geological expert (if it really was his fault) or, rather, the good engineer. Why ever was the Frejus narrows called Mal Passet: mal pass indeed.3 The mountain overlooking the reservoir and which slid into it causing the terrible overflowing, why was it called Monte Toc? Toc in Venetian, means piece: it was a rock that split off in pieces and all the inhabitants of the valley expected the landslide. Vajont, the name of the reservoir, but previously of the pass, the gorge in which the dam was wedged, all 263 meters (world-beating historical record!) in Ladino Friulian dialect equals the Venetian va zo, goes down, which collapses into the valley. In fact past landslides have been mentioned, the poor inhabitants living on them.
Gortani, the geologist, in denying indignantly that he would ever have consented to the selection made for the dam site, stated that the choice fell to the engineers. Quite so. The philosophy of the two tragedies of Malpasset and Vajont (among the many others) is identical. At the bottom of these reckless projects, dictated and imposed by the hunger for profit, by an economic law to which all the navvies, the surveyor and chief engineer must all bow, for which reason it is a foolish remedy to uncover the guilty party at an inquest, lies in the most idiotic of modern cults, the cult of specialization. Not only is it inhuman to hunt down the scape goat, but also vain, since one has allowed this stupid productive society to arise, made of separate sections. No one is guilty because, if someone takes off the blindfold for a moment, he can say that he gave advice requested by the next section, that he was the expert, thespecialist, the competent person.
The science and skill of producing and especially of building will, in the future society which will kill the monster of economic return, of surplus-value production, be unitary and indivisible. Not a man’s head, but a social brain above ridiculous separated sections will see without those useful blindfolds the immensity of each problem.
We read the report of the engineer who for thirty years had dreamt of building the Vajont dam. The good man is dead and does not need our defence. He was interested by the purely morphological fact that with a little dam one could hold back a lot of water and no where else would the return be so great at so little cost. A victim of inexorable determinism.
Engineer Semenza, in his comment, is surprised by the fact that one could have foreseen taking thirty years to develop his basic idea now that the dam is complete. He did not think that the long time required could be due to doubts over The correctness of the choice made. He thought that the work had been well divided into sections protected by the right of not knowing nor wanting to check one another’s conclusions. In this illusion, which is not blameworthy nor even a crime of “commission” or of “omission”, lies the omnipotence, stronger than all and even the best engineer, of the modern capitalist superstition of the division of labour, which Marx first condemned and only the revolution will kill. The innocence of the designer is found in these words: “Hundreds, thousands of people, scientists, engineers, workers of all trades, worked to complete this dam which should have closed the deep and narrow ravine of the Vajont stream. Vajont gorge4 as some guides call it, since by nature it is so inaccessible and inhospitable.” No one today would think that the tour guide was right because he made money taking people up to see the narrow gorge, not by working on the dam. “Among the first the hydrologists” who take rainfall and stream regime measurements, allowing one “to find the volume of water that would be held in the dam’s reservoir.” “Higher up the geologist examines the rock characteristics in detail, helped by the most modern (oh come on now!) geophysical research.” “Meanwhile, the topographer measures with microscopic precision (fashionable jargon!) the valley’s configuration so as perfectly to draw in the contour lines.”
Let us leave out the details of the design work or works, the ninety hours of computer time that saved years of work by a team of mathematicians, the tales of the experiments on wood then concrete models… Only one passage interests us, the reference to the ineluctable economic determinism. “The design selected from among many others, dating from 1956, fully exploits the valley’s characterics which seems to have been made for this purpose of building an exceptionally large dam.”
The valley was made to be exploited, and if that had not been the case… one would have had to have invented it.
With science, technology and labour, does man exploit nature? No, not at all, and the intelligent relationship between man and nature will arise when one stops making cost and design calculations in money, but in physical and human quantities.
Exploiting one can say when a human group exploits the other. The exploited collaborated with the exploiting enterprise in the grandiose constructions of the mercantile period. Many people were employed at Longarone and money was thrown around. The engineer has to answer: did it rain gold? It is true that a skilled worker struck over the evident danger of landslides, but it is also a bitter lesson that of the worker who, kicked out by the surveyor cursed to death because he was lame and would not have been been able to escape in case of danger, reacted in a violent manner. When the pay is good, risks to human life are normal fare for the society of money and wages.
The whole valley ran the risk, and now it is dead. The solution to this problem will never be found by the “democratic” method used by the currently available communists.
They are silly solutions to these tragedies – which only show that bourgeois, money, private initiative, market society has lived out its historical span and has by now become an even more putrescent corpse than the ones it flung into the Piave – the ones banded about by newspapers fed on a gutless petty-bourgeois ideology, which perhaps a hundred years ago could get by, and which claims justice, honesty and sentences for those who get it wrong or cheat.
Socially and politically we stand apart from those who ask for, in the name of the dead who risked their lives so that the iniquitous society gives them the only civilization it could, three laughable enquiries: The Ministerial Enquiry, called for by the ministers who have their fingers in the pie and delegated to university professors loyal to the system of sectorial responsibility with which one has the right not to know “others’ subjects” in this bureaucratic, scholastic and career-ridden system which is drowning us. The Parliamentary Enquiry in which a group of people with no knowledge and of contrasting ideologies (save that of the greed for political success and ambition, which is the same from the extreme right to the extreme left) study what they do not understand and then have a vote on it in the assembly of “politicians”, that is, those who should be the first to be tipped into the dustbin so as to liberate human society. The judiciary, which knows that its job is to apply a code rooted in tradition and the latest constitution, useful for the petty thief and for the civil servant who in this case was the only one to be slammed up for making public a “stolen” document which showed that the technical doubt over the dam was founded and long standing.
Three degrees of tricking, not the dead, but the living that look to the horrible parties and newspapers of all persuasions and drown in the unconscious of their destinies.
What is to be done with the dam? Another problem that the bureaucratic, democratic administrative mechanism will be unable to solve.
The dam was not flattened so Engineer Semenza, if he were still alive, should be innocent, looking at it from his sector’s point of view.
But the problem was the stability of the valley sides after they suddenly received a hydraulic pressure of 26 atmospheres.
There was no alluvium at the bottom? What kind of excuse is that? The liquid flowed fast through the gap and thus did not deposit but eroded, creating over the centuries the conditions the topographers described to poor Semenza. Thus the side was friable, certainly permeable, and underneath the massive pressure on the strata that could yield caused Toc to slide.
The following reservoirs, which could have provided an empirical test result, took place without being tested and without the order of the omnipotent State.
The dam was too high. The law on this matter must be amended to state a legal maximum, let us say under 100 meters. But then the return on the operation would fall below the costs. Horror! The monopoly would not lose out, but only the consumption pattern of those who depend on it, the same being the case if the State were to act directly.
Reformism, not only in Italy, flies this flag: the law passed, find, the loophole.
An old engineer who could understand geology, topography and building mechanics since he had an old fashioned degree said that the dam could collapse now. Behind it there is no longer water, but a mixed deposit of water and earth (mud and slime) which, with its higher specific weight, could exercise a greater thrust. Here there are no models that hold good! The case is too indeterminate and even the computers come up with nothing.
The Vajont basin was cut in two by the huge landslide with a volume higher than that of the water that it contained, a hill standing 100 meters above the water level.
But the smaller lake remaining next to the dam can generate the pressure indicated by the aforementioned engineer. It all depends on the height, that is the total, and the density of the mud which will be decanted.
The basin must be emptied, but not by blasting the dam with cannonfire, but instead by installing syphons over it to replace the devices destroyed by the disaster and abandoning the potential energy which the turbine, if working, could have exploited.
We cannot believe that the Ministry of Public Works could have thought that the wall would stay to support (?) an Alpine lake.
That sewer of death is no Alpine lake. The lakes formed during the glaciation between very deep indestructible rock walls and with a modest dam of natural morainic hills. They have been tested by Mother Nature over millions of years, not by a Technical Commission!
Man certainly will win against nature. And will do so thanks to a science, a technology, an administration that will not be rented out to anyone.
Before bending nature to our ends, we will have had to have bent the sinister social forces which enslave us more than millions of cubic meters of grave stones and which condemn the replies of today’s experts to great rewards and grasping profits. We must dam the floods not of water and earth, but of filthy lucre.
In 1917, the Italian army was forced back to the Piave river after the front broke at Caporetto (now Kobarid) on the Isonzo (now Soca). In the Third War of Independence, the Italians having previously made an alliance with Prussia against Austria (8.4.1866), lost both on land (Custoza) and by sea (Lissa). Prussia, however, prevailed, and the good offices of Napoleon III assured Italy of Venetia all the same. The Adige and Mincio are two rivers on the Po plain. ↩︎
In fact “The names of rivers, lakes and mountains are generally masculine. (…) Exceptions are, however, frequent due to old reasons, thus la (fem.) Piave (and in modern and local use) il (masc.) Piave.” Alfredo Panzini Grammatica italiana (Palermo, 1982 (1933)) PP. 34-5. ↩︎
Tecnica rilasciata ed incurante gestione parassitaria e predona
Andrea Doria
Alla prima applicazione alle navi del motore meccanico, la sicurezza dei viaggi marini parve, con buona ragione, un risultato storicamente e scientificamente garantito per il futuro, e tanto più con la costruzione metallica degli scafi. Dopo un secolo e mezzo di «perfezionamenti» tecnici, la probabilità di salvezza del navigante è relativamente minore che con gli antichi velieri di legno, giocattoli in preda del vento e del mare. Naturalmente la «conquista» – la più imbecille – è la velocità , se pure velieri speciali verso il 1850 guadagnassero sui vapori dei «nastri azzurri» non disprezzabili nel giocare – già allora – alla borsa dei cotoni tra Boston e Liverpool. Un ladro più rapido è un ladro più ladro, ma un fesso molto veloce non diventa meno fesso.
Tuttavia l’epoca dei levrieri dei mare sta già dietro di noi; essa corrispose alla fase successiva alla prima guerra mondiale. Già pri-ma di essa si era arrivati ai tonnellaggi enormi: il Titanic colato a picco nel 1906 [ndr.: era nel 14.4.1912] aveva superate le 50 mila tonnellate di stazza. E vero che la sua velocità nel viaggio inaugurale, in cui cozzò contro l’iceberg, non passava i 18 nodi. Dopo un mezzo secolo si hanno due sole eccezioni di transatlantici, tra francesi, inglesi, tedeschi, italiani, superiori di molto alle 50 mila tonnellate: infatti dopo l’ultima guerra il massimo varo è stato quello dell’United States di 53 mila tonnellate. Le due eccezioni furono le inglesi Queen Mary, di 81 mila, e Queen Elisabeth di 84 mila tonnellate, impostate prima della guerra e ancora in navigazione. La nuovissima nave americana ha tolto al Queen Mary il primato della traversata, che la stessa aveva nel 1938 tolto alla francese Normandie, distrutta durante la guerra. Le velocità sono in questo moderno periodo salite oltre le trenta miglia orarie, o nodi: l’Andrea Doria, maggior nave italiana del dopoguerra con la gemella Colombo (il Rex antebellico era di 51 mila tonnellate), era di 29 mila sole tonnellate, ma di buona velocità.
Si è dunque arrestata la corsa al grosso tonnellaggio, che prelude alla grossa catastrofe, ma si è anche arrestata la corsa all’alta velocità, di cui ci inebriò qui in Italia il ventennio fascista. La ragione è che oggi chi ha molta fretta dispone dell’aereo, che col poco equipaggio più di una cinquantina alla volta non ne ammazza; e la traversata per mare (col sole e il tempo quasi sempre bello sulla rotta meridionale che si scelse dopo la catastrofe del Titanic) è più che altro uno svago e uno spasso: gli ultrapotenti apparati motori per far filare come torpediniere i mostruosi colossi, col costo enorme (si guadagna un miglio di velocità oraria e poche ore di traversata sciupando diecine di migliaia di cavalli in più e aumentando in proporzione il consumo del combustibile) che comportano, non sono più chiesti dal viaggiatore e non fanno comodo alla compagnia. Quindi oggi la logica consiglia navi di media stazza e di media velocità, per i passeggeri di non primissimo rango in affari (economici o politici!) non costretti a volare. Le cronache hanno detto come i poveri scampati dell’Andrea Doria non volevano tornare in aereo: troppi saggi, in una volta, della gran civiltà della tecnica…
Inoltre quando ci si vede poco, checché sia del gran discutere sul radar, è buona norma andare poco veloci, come da che mondo è mondo.
Non è questa la questione centrale: ma è l’altra della estrema fragilità dello scafo della Doria sotto l’urto del non pesantissimo né velocissimo Stockholm, checché sia dello sperone rompighiaccio, che meccanicamente parlando poteva fare una breccia più profonda, ma meno dilacerata e meno paurosamente ampia.
Evidentemente è la Doria che si è scassata, probabilmente risultata troppo fragile in tutta la sua ossatura, nelle costolature e nei dorsali. Solo supponendo che un lungo tratto longitudinale dello scafo si sia sconnesso, si spiega come abbiano ceduto molti scompartimenti stagni (che per la nebbia erano già chiusi) e molte parti vitali: macchine, casse della nafta e così via.
Non sono solo le navi in cui la mania della tecnica moderna è orientata nel fare economie sulle strutture, usando profili leggeri, sotto il pretesto di materiali sempre più moderni e di resistenza miracolosa, garantiti più da una pubblicità sfacciata e dalle lunghe mani, che dalle prove dei burocratizzati laboratori e istituti ufficiali di controllo. Come avviene per le costruzioni e le macchine terrestri, la nave che ci dà la tecnica recente ed evoluta è meno solida di quella di mezzo secolo fa. La superba unità ha quindi sbandato e si è affondata, in tempi contrari a tutte le norme e le attese degli esperti. Poteva essere l’ecatombe, col mare agitato o con meno frequenza di navi vicine.
Vi è un’altra ragione oltre quella della falsa economia dell’impresa costruttrice. È noto che per ragioni tanto nazionaliste quanto demagogiche, lo Stato italiano (chi non sa come, dopo la Santa Russia, la maggior dose di industria «socialista» si trovi nella vaticanesca Italia, sebbene Palmiro non sia ancor del tutto contento?) era, della nave, tanto il committente quanto l’impresa appaltatrice (sono infatti dell’Irimare tanto la compagnia di navigazione Italia che i cantieri Ansaldo). È noto che in Italia l’acciaio costa di più; ed anche la mano d’opera (il lavoratore vi mangia meno, ma l’assistenza sociale e di Stato vi sbafa a man salva). Ordinando la nave ai cantieri olandesi o tedeschi la nave sarebbe costata un quarto di meno, ma Palmiro avrebbe avuto meno voti. Gli ingegneri italiani ebbero interesse ed ordine di lesinare sull’acciaio.
Non si lesinò però sull’architettura decorativa e di lusso. Uno dei sintomi del decadere mondiale della tecnica è che l’architettura uccide l’ingegneria. Tutte le civiltà hanno passato tale stadio, da Ninive a Versailles.
Vecchi marittimi mugugnanti sulle calate di Genova lo hanno raccontato ai giornalisti. Troppi saloni, piscine, campi di vari giochi, troppi ponti sopra l’acqua – eh, l’inimitabile linea, la sagoma slanciata delle navi italiane! – troppo volume, peso, spesa nell’opera morta, ossia in quel mezzo «grattacielo» che sta al di sopra della linea di galleggiamento, sfinestrato e sfolgorante di luci, ove si bea la classe di lusso. Tutto a danno dell’opera viva, che è lo scafo a contatto dell’acqua, dalla cui vastità e saldezza dipende la stabilità, la facoltà di galleggiamento, di raddrizzamento dopo le sbandate, di resistenza ai colpi di mare, agli urti colle montagne di ghiaccio, e a quelli eventuali con navi di paesi ove l’acciaio costa di meno, non solo, ma forse la tecnica è meno venduta alla politica affaristica… finora.
Tutto ciò, brontolano i veterani del mare, è a danno della sicurezza. Lusso più o meno cafone, o sicurezza delle vite umane trasportate, ecco l’antitesi. Ma può una tale antitesi fermare la Civiltà, il Progresso!?
Quando tuttavia non è sicura la terza classe, né l’equipaggio, nemmeno la classe superiore, dai favolosi prezzi di passaggio, lo è. Vi supplisce la retorica sui ritrovati moderni, l’alta tecnica, la decantata inaffondabilità, a prova di ghiaccio, a prova di scoglio, a prova di Stockholm!
La stessa storia avvenne per il risanamento delle grandi metropoli, in cui, come stabilirono Marx ed Engels fino dai tempi dello sventratore di Parigi, Haussmann, le classi povere hanno avuto e avranno tutto da perdere e niente da guadagnare. Fu fatto da abili tecnici e speculatori notare all’alta borghesia come le epidemie non si fermano davanti alle differenze di classe, e si può anche nelle case dei ricchi morire di colera. Avanti dunque il Piccone! Ora, quando la nave affonda, affondano anche i passeggeri di lusso, seminudi come i poveri cristi anche loro, e magari affogano in abito da gran sera. La sicurezza è quindi indispensabile a tutti: non si può fregarsene come avviene per le miniere, dove scendono solo i cirenei della produzione, con qualche ingegnere, ma senza ruffiani della decorazione: tanto si sta al buio.
La classe dominante, a sua volta impotente a lottare anche per la sua stessa pelle col Demone dell’affarismo e della superproduzione e supercostruzione, dimostra così la fine del suo controllo sulla società, ed è folle attendere che, in nome del Progresso, che segna la sua via a tappe di sangue, possa fare più sicure navi di quelle di un tempo.
Ed infatti i gorghi sulla disonorata carcassa dell’Andrea Doria si erano appena chiusi, che l’economia statalista, vivaio optimum del moderno privato affarismo e succhionismo, annunziava che ne avrebbe rifatta un’altra tal quale, solo, per scaramanzia, cambiando… il nome! Si vanta anche che, dato che il costo salirà di circa un terzo rispetto alla vecchia, si economizzeranno le spese di progettazione, calcolazione, e sperimentazione! I decoratori faranno è sicuro, gli stessi affari, e la macchina per arraffare le commesse di Pantalone si è già scatenata. Come dopo la guerra mondiale si scatenò, nella Ricostruzione, ferrata di tutte le risorse della odierna grande Tecnica, «il più grande affare del secolo», così si è risolta la «crisi» cantieristica e di navigazione (per cui si stava varando un apposita legge) con la commessa della nuova nave. Dopo la speronata dello Stockholm, e forse per qualche litro di più di alcool che avevano ingerito i suoi ufficiali, si è reso inutile il saggio ed alto voto del nostro Democratico Parlamento.
Nessuno penserà, nessuno legifererà, nessuno voterà perché si straccino le tavole dei vecchi calcoli e si ridisegni lo scafo e il suo scheletro, il solo che in un natante è vivo, spendendo cinque milioni piÙ di acciaio e altrettanto meno di ruffianeschi lenocinii. Il che non si può fare finché la produzione «socialista» è produzione aziendale, anche se di Stato, serva di considerazioni ancora mercantili dì concorrenza tra le «bandiere», ossia tra le bande di criminali dell’affare, che vale lo stesso.
E colui che lo facesse «deprezzerebbe» il non affondato Colombo.
Marcinelle
Allorché su queste colonne pubblicammo la serie sulla Questione agraria e la Teoria della rendita fondiaria secondo Marx, avvenne in Italia la sciagura di Ribolla, che fece 42 vittime contro le ormai sicure 250 e più di Charleroi. La stessa dottrina economica della rendita assoluta e della rendita differenziale si applica, come al terreno agrario, alle estrazioni di materie utili dal sottosuolo, alle forze idrauliche, e simili. Non a caso si dice «coltivare» una miniera. Intitolammo un paragrafo dell’esposto: Ribolla, o la morte differenziale.
Nell’economia del mondo capitalista tutti i consumatori di beni che sono offerti dalla natura, li pagano a condizioni più severe di quelli che sono tratti da umano lavoro. Per questi pagano il lavoro, ed un margine di sopravalore che la concorrenza, fin che vige, tende a ridurre. E la società borghese li offre ai suoi membri più a buon mercato delle precedenti società, poco manifatturiere.
I prodotti della terra in senso lato sono pagati dal consumatore secondo il lavoro e il sopralavoro, adeguati al caso del «terreno peggiore». Anche in questo caso tuttavia si aggiunge un terzo termine: la rendita, ossia il premio al monopolista della terra, al proprietario fondiario, terza forza della società borghese «modello». Il terreno più sterile detta per tutti i consumatori di cibi il prezzo di mercato. Ne segue che i proprietari monopolisti dei terreni più ricchi aggiungono alla rendita assoluta, o minima, la rendita differenziale dovuta al minor costo delle loro derrate, che il mercato paga allo stesso prezzo.
Crescendo i popoli e il consumo, la società deve dissodare le terre vergini e utilizzare tutte le superfici libere, fertili o sterili. Il limite alla fisica estensione determina il monopolio, e le due forme della rendita.
Per ardua che a molti la teoria appaia, essa è cardine del marxismo, e solo chi non l’ha mai digerita crede che la dottrina dell’imperialismo sia sorta come un’aggiunta al marxismo, studio preteso del solo capitalismo concorrentista. La teoria della rendita contiene tutta quella del moderno imperialismo, del capitalismo monopolista, creatore di «rendite» in campi anche prevalentemente manifatturieri, e che quindi si può chiamare col termine di capitalismo a profitto più rendita, e con Lenin: parassitario.
Bene intesa la dottrina, viene chiaro che nulla cambia se questa rendita con radici in cespiti tradizionali e nuovissimi, passa allo Stato, ossia alla società medesima capitalista organizzata in macchina di potere: ciò avviene al fine di tenere in piedi il suo fondamento mercantile monetario ed aziendale. Prima di Marx, Ricardo lo aveva proposto e Marx ne svolge la critica, fin dalla sua formazione, completa ed integrale.
I giacimenti di lignite di Ribolla sono tra i meno fertili, come lo sono in massima quelli belgi di antracite, e mai converrà al capitalismo, dove non vi è premio di rendita differenziale, come nelle migliori miniere di francesi, olandesi, inglesi, tedeschi, americani, spendervi per installazioni più costose atte ad aumentare la resa e garantire la vita del minatore.
All’economia presente non è d’altra parte consentito di chiudere quelle miniere; e resteranno allo stato di quelle descritte da Zola nel Germinal, col cavallo bianco che non vedrà mai la luce del sole, e che comunica con uno strano linguaggio della tenebra con due minatori condannati con lui dalla «società civile». Può il Progresso fermarsi, per scarsità di carbone?!
Ora che esiste una Comunità superstatale del Carbone, come del Ferro, tra Stati che hanno nazionalizzato le ricchezze sotterranee al pari dell’Italia, e su scuola fascista, si hanno gli estremi di ultramonopolio, per saldare sulla scala delle rendite differenziali, basse a Ribolla o a Marcinelle, una rendita base assoluta. Ma questa non basterà certo a pagare nuovi impianti, forse appena alla macchinosa impalcatura affaristico-burocratica che lavora, lei sì! «alla luce del sole».
Quando le logore condutture elettriche dei pozzi fanno divampare l’incendio, non bruciano solo le attrezzature e le carcasse degli uomini, ma brucia il carbone del prezioso, se pur poco fertile, giacimento geologico. Brucia perché le gallerie scavate dall’uomo gli conducono l’ossigeno dell’aria atmosferica, ed ecco il perché dei muri di cemento che esistevano a tappare vecchie gallerie. Quindi l’alternativa tecnica: mandare giù ossigeno per i morenti e i temerari loro salvatori, o chiuderlo perché ogni tonnellata di ossigeno ne annienta circa mezza di carbone? I minatori hanno gridato, all’arrivo dei preparatissimi tecnici chiamati di Germania: li avete fatti venire per salvare non i nostri compagni, ma la vostra miniera! Il metodo, se le urla inferocite dei superstiti non si fossero levate troppo minacciose, sarebbe stato semplice: tappare tutti gli accessi!
Senza ossigeno tutto si calma, l’ossidazione del carbonio, e quella analoga che avviene dentro l’animale uomo, e chiamiamo vita.
Vi è dell’altro – e non sono periodici rivoluzionari che riferiscono queste cose! Per un’antichissima tradizione, che certamente è più vecchia del sistema sociale capitalistico, fino a che il minatore non è riuscito, vivo o morto che sia, dalla sinistra bocca della miniera, questa continua a pagare per lui l’intero salario, anzi il triplo di esso. Il minatore infatti ha solo otto ore da permanere là sotto, e se non esce si suppone che stia erogando altro turno. Quando il cadavere è estratto e riconosciuto, i turni sono chiusi, e la famiglia non avrà che una pensione, inferiore dunque all’importo di un turno solo. Interessa dunque la compagnia, privata o statale o comunitaria, che le salme escano comunque; sembra che per questo le donne urlavano che le bare chiuse, su cui posavano pochi oggetti riconoscibili per l’identificazione, non si sapeva se contenessero detriti degli uomini, o del giacimento.
Fate uscire tutti i vivi, e tappate per sempre queste discese! Non potrà mai dirlo la società mercantile, che si impantanerà in inchieste, messe funerarie, catene di fraternità, in quanto capisce solo la fraternità da catena, lacrime coccodrillesche, e promesse legislative ed amministrative tali da allettare altri «senza riserva» a chiedere di prendere posto ancora nelle lugubri gabbie degli ascensori: di cappello alla tecnica! Non è facile cambiare il sistema di coltivazione seguito per lunghissimi periodi. E la teoria della Rendita vieta che si lasci ferma l’ultima miniera, la più assassina: è dessa che detta ad una società negriera e strozzina il ritmo massimo della folle danza mondiale del business carbonifero; che appunto il limite geologico dei suoi orizzonti futuri, restringendosi, spinge sulla china dell’economia di monopolio, del massacro del produttore, del ladrocinio contro il consumatore.
Il racconto giallo di Marcinelle fa vibrare i nervi del mondo. Per quanti altri turni, di otto ore per otto, i «dispersi» del ventre della terra, come ieri quelli delle profondità dell’Adriatico, consumeranno ricchezza di questa civile economia borghese, che da tutte le cattedre vanta la sua spinta gloriosa verso un più alto benessere? Quando si potrà depennarli dai registri paga, e pregato Dio per loro l’ultima volta, passare a dimenticarsene?
Il canale di Suez
Sangue non è corso, ed era chiaro dal primo momento che corso non sarebbe, per il terzo atto della trilogia borghese di ferragosto, che ha tinto di giallo la più fessamente rosea delle manifestazioni borghesi, la feria, la vacation, il vuoto nel vuoto di questo mondo di costruttori da operetta, di faticatori della fregatura al prossimo.
Possiamo mai credere che vi sia un marxista che, per un solo momento, abbia visto in Nasser un nuovo protagonista della storia, e il mondo messo a rumore e a soqquadro per un semplice gesto, per una trovata audace dell’ultimo cesaretto, o faraoncino che sia? Che uomo! Ha messo alla frusta Francia, Inghilterra ed America con una tirata di genio: la nazionalizzazione del canale! Tutto effetto di un cambio della guardia: da re Faruk che frustava solo odalische da un milione di dollari, al semplice colonnello che ha saputo porre a gonne levate Marianna ed Albione.
Anche il problema Suez si legge permettendo al colonnello di rimanere, senza altri incomodi pseudo-sessuali, quel fesso che è; ed applicando la teoria della Rendita.
Suez fu un’operazione ancora onorevole, e se vogliamo gloriosa, della borghesia giovane, pari a quelle che il «Manifesto dei Comunisti» levò a luci da epopea. Forse una delle ultime: quando il bis fu tentato a Panama, si tombolò ben presto nel marcio e nel superscandalo, e la vecchia Europa depose le armi del grande Lesseps e dei suoi tecnici di prima forza.
Lesseps sarebbe stato un sansimoniano, e l’idea di Suez passò nel mondo di un secolo fa come un’idea socialista. Essa entusiasmò gli utopisti, ma è indubbio come anche nella concezione marxista le imprese del capitalismo dirette a legare lidi lontani del mondo fossero considerate come premesse della trasformazione socialista di esso. L’idea si era fatta risalire a Napoleone I, che fece eseguire studi tecnici, e si disse sostenuta dal filosofo Leibnitz, grande matematico. Non a caso Bonaparte aveva tentato di partire dall’Egitto nella distruzione della supremazia marittima ed imperiale inglese. Ma civiltà ancora più antiche avevano concepita l’opera: il Faraone Sesostri l’avrebbe addirittura intrapresa, e giusta Erodoto 120 mila lavoratori sarebbero periti nel tentativo di un altro Faraone. I Califfi arabi vi rinunziarono per tema di aprire le vie alle flotte di Bisanzio. Dopo la scoperta della rotta per l’India, nel XV secolo, ritentarono i Veneziani, precursori del moderno capitalismo, ma i Turchi si opposero.
I lavori durarono dal 1859 al 1868 con capitali francesi in gran parte, ed ottomani, tra l’ostilità inglese. Memorabili furono le ecatombi di lavoratori bianchi ed arabi: gli inglesi denunziarono come schiavismo l’arruolamento a migliaia dei miserrimi fellaghs, una controversia fu arbitrata da Napoleone III. Gli ingegneri francesi del tempo erano dei lottatori e non solo degli affaristi: liberati dalle armate di manovali, impiegarono macchine gigantesche e superarono il compito. La concessione data dal governo egiziano doveva durare 99 anni dall’inaugurazione del canale: per tale periodo l’Egitto doveva ricevere il 15 per cento dei guadagni della Compagnia. Non è il caso di ripetere la storia delle gesta dell’affarismo e dell’aggiotaggio internazionale con cui i viceré d’Egitto, soggetti al Sultano di Costantinopoli, furono defraudati dal loro diritto alla quota di azioni, che passò per diverse vie al capitale e al governo, anzi alla stessa corona, britannici.
Fermo restò che trattavasi di una concessione, e la proprietà di tutta l’opera, più volte ampliata e perfezionata, doveva nel 1968 passare senza riscatti al governo del Cairo.
Ci guardiamo bene dal trattare la questione di «diritto» nel merito di questa lotta tra filibustieri e pescecani di massimo tonnellaggio.
Interessano i concetti economici. Il capitale iniziale fu di 200 milioni di franchi oro. Portato questo capitale a franchi di oggi potrebbe essere di 60 miliardi; in lire italiane di circa 100 miliardi.
Il valore attuale delle azioni, a parte la loro discesa del 30 per cento dopo il decreto di Nasser, che ha tuttavia assicurato il loro rilievo al corso di borsa (ciò dovrebbe voler dire al giorno del decreto), il capitale della Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, si afferma in cifre inglesi di 70 milioni di sterline, in cifre francesi di 90 miliardi di franchi. Le valutazioni non sono secondo il cambio: in dollari danno, la prima 200 milioni, la seconda 250, e in lire italiane 120 miliardi e 150 miliardi, all’ingrosso.
Nell’ultimo anno gli introiti della Compagnia sono stati di 35 miliardi di franchi, coll’utile di ben 16 miliardi, il 45 per cento! In lire 53 e 25 circa. Ma Nasser li valuta 100 milioni di dollari! 60 miliardi netti di lire.
Un frutto così alto non può essere tutto profitto di capitale industriale, a parte il già scontato suo ammortamento, che sembra coperto da enormi riserve che i capi della compagnia si sono formate. Non si tratta di un’intrapresa di produzione: le navi che passano lasciano un pedaggio da trecento a seicento lire per tonnellata di stazza, ma non portano via nulla di alienabile sul mercato: pagamento di un servizio, non di merci. Evidentemente le spese di manutenzione, custodia, esercizio, amministrazione del canale, sono una minima parte degli introiti. La differenza è una rendita.
È assoluta in quanto discende da un monopolio: quello di chi può chiudere le porte di Suez o Port Said. È inoltre differenziale in quanto rappresenta il costo della navigazione per la via peggiore, il giro interminabile del Capo di Buona Speranza.
A chi spetta questa rendita? Al «proprietario fondiario» del terreno in cui il canale fu tracciato, senza il permesso del quale non si poteva aprire il primo cantiere di scavo nel 1859. Questa questione di proprietà diventa per Nasser una questione di sovranità . A noi questa terminologia non dice nulla. Per noi marxisti la rendita tocca a chi può far valere il monopolio. Questo non è nemmeno antigiuridico: nella teoria classica del diritto romano «fonte della proprietà è l’occupazione». La stessa, da che mondo è mondo, è la fonte della politica sovranità.
A questa stregua sono insulsi gli Inglesi, e altrettanto insulso è Nasser. I primi fino a qualche anno addietro avevano truppe di custodia nella zona del canale, per la difesa di esso. Infatti nelle due guerre mondiali navi tedesche, e alleate a loro, non se ne fecero passare. Nella guerra italo-etiopica Londra stette lì per chiudere la porta; Mussolini ebbe allora il suo momento felice: ricattò gli Inglesi mostrandosi pronto ad attaccare la flotta del Mediterraneo. Ma non si creda che fanno la storia quelli che sanno fare i pazzi: il candidato al manicomio Nasser sta ancora molti cubiti più sotto.
Potevano gli Inglesi sognare di ritirare i gendarmi e conservare la rendita? Potevano tanto sognare i Francesi?
Maggiore follia è quella degli Egiziani che puntano sulla carta sovranità , metafisicamente intesa, per cui la sovranità di un paese minuscolo sta nella bilancia a pari di quella dei paesi giganti.
Nasser avrebbe fatto conto sulla Russia, uno dei colossi. È per questo che lo consideriamo un fesso. I giornali hanno pubblicato alla vigilia della conferenza a Londra, e prima che Scepilov, evento grandioso, si esibisse con l’abito a code, che i russi, nel XX congresso, avrebbero abbandonata un’altra delle teorie errate di Stalin, ossia il predominio politico internazionale dei grandi Stati sui piccoli, e la liberazione di questi dalla funzione di soggetti di satelliti e di vassalli. O poveri piccoli Stati! Non è questa una teoria creata da Stalin, che Stalin possa farsi venire l’uzzolo di abbandonare, o che possano togliere di circolazione i suoi esecutori testamentari! E non è il colonneiluccio del Cairo che può collocare al suo posto una teoria nuova: la santa sovranità degli staterelli anche tascabili. O la (più risibile ancora) fiducia che una simile teoria sia tenuta a rispettarla l’America, che la avrebbe predicata, o la Russia, campione del principio opposto: quello del pesce grosso che mangia il pesce piccolo.
Il fatto e la legge storica che i grandi Stati affettano il mondo come vogliono, colla guerra generale o colla (dio ci scampi e liberi) pacifica coesistenza tra essi (pesci grossi), e che gli Stati minori sono nelle loro mani docile plastilina della carta terrestre a rilievo, dominano la storia da millenni, da due secoli di storia europea soprattutto, e in maniera clamorosa nelle due ultime grandi guerre, che solo cambiano di scanno alcuni dei Big: Giappone, Germania, e ve ne pongono nuovi, come la Cina.
Nasser non è andato alla conferenza. E sia. Ma Londra gli deve fare paura proprio perché vi siede la Russia. Questa difende lo stesso principio degli altri: chi se ne frega della sovranità sulle due rive di questi passaggi mondiali, nodi della rete internazionale dei traffici? Da che non vi è più un solo padrone imperiale, come al tempo in cui Albione si fece la strada (per noi è la vita, oltre che la strada, rispose un Benito di formato non deteriore) lungo il Mediterraneo, e tutti i Mediterranei, i padroni sono i tre o quattro big di turno, per i quali un Nasser conta meno di un caporale. Suez lo regoleranno loro. O chi tra loro vincesse la (lontana venti anni) guerra terza del mondo, senza che conti un centesimo se l’Egittino avrà militato tra i vincitori o tra i vinti.
Hitler, che era espresso da forze alquanto più serie, fu dal dettato di queste condotto ad una tremenda puntata fino a Creta. La mira e la posta era Suez; egli arrivava a intendere (o chi per lui) che la meta era più Suez che Dunkerque, da cui si ritrasse. Big non mangia Big. Nasseruccio, allegro. Non uscire dal rango dei commestibili.
A te, vecchia talpa!
Passeranno questi venti anni, e noi animaletti-uomo, noi consumatori beffati e intossicati, noi produttori di sforzi sempre più sgradevoli e inutili, li lasceremo passare pendendo dalle radio e dagli schermi a sentire frottole e ciance di tecnici, di esperti, di specialisti, di managers, di diplomatici, di politici, di filibustieri e di avventurieri, senza nulla imparare, o sempre più dimenticando quanto la classe operaia sapeva già bene al tempo in cui cominciavano a decorrere i cento anni di Suez?
Bene, arcibene, che gli istmi siano incisi da tagli formidabili (Suez resta il più lungo, se non il più complesso: 160 chilometri, il doppio di Panama) e che la rete degli allacciamenti internazionali cinga e ricinga il mondo mercantile del convivente capitalismo, come quella del reziario immobilizzava il barbaro gladiatore alla mercé del colpo di grazia. Un proletariato latitante straccia oggi le sue Internazionali, ma il capitale è dannato a ricostruirle sopra i mari e i continenti. Bene, arcibene, che i grossi poteri siano pochi e oscurino nell’impotenza i piccoli e numerosi, avvolgendoli nell’altra rete inestricabile e inallentabile di falsità, di menzogna, di frode, di oscurantismo filisteo e bigotto, sotto gli orpelli, divenuti intollerabili pel fetore, di tecnica, di scienza, di filantropia e di ascese verso il benessere. Bene, che i centri di questa scuola di superstizione e di corruzione siano sempre più pochi, e più evidenti da ogni angolo della terra.
Mentre essi ci propinano le false credenze di tutte le loro patrie e le loro religioni, e ci rileggono con falso puritanismo e blasfema oscenità le Bibbie di Cristo, di Mammone e di Demos, anche noi possiamo ripetere i nostri classici versetti, e dimostrare che sapevamo da allora, da prima che si tagliasse il canale, che bene sarebbero venute le concentrazioni vertiginose della ricchezza e del potere, il totalitarismo imperiale, l’oppressione monopolistica, lo Stato di partito, la Santa Alleanza dei grandi Mostri Capitalisti, più che mai rinsaldata dalle guerre terrestri. Bene, la Dittatura del Capitale, del Militarismo, dell’Affarismo, del Fascismo, benedetta a vuoto dai Preti di tutti i riti. Apriamo la nostra Bibbia!
«La rivoluzione va fino al fondo delle cose. Sta ancora attraversando il purgatorio. Lavora con metodo. (..) Non ha condotto a termine che la prima metà della sua preparazione: ora sta compiendo l’altra metà. Prima ha elaborato alla perfezione il potere parlamentare, per poterlo rovesciare. Ora che ha raggiunto questo risultato, essa spinge alla perfezione il potere esecutivo, lo riduce alla sua espressione più pura, lo isola, se lo pone di fronte come l’unico ostacolo, per concentrare contro di esso tutte le sue forze di distruzione. E quando la rivoluzione avrà condotto a termine questa seconda metà del suo lavoro preparatorio, l’Europa balzerà dal suo seggio e griderà: – Ben scavato, vecchia talpa!»
Col radar storico della dottrina di Marx, sui cui schermi non si legge menzogna, da osservatori che non abbiano ingozzato l’alcool della intossicante ideologia borghese, nella caligine dei fondali di Nantucket, nella tenebra delle murate tombe di vivi di Marcinelle, nel limo amaro degli stagni del deserto arabico, mentre le forze della Rivoluzione sembrano rintanate, e il Grande Capitale gavazza nel vivo sole, abbiamo ritrovata, intenta al suo lavoro inesausto, la Vecchia Talpa, che scava la maledizione di infami forme sociali, che ne prepara la non prossima ma certissima, distruttiva esplosione.
It is vital to be quite clear over the question of State capitalism in order to reset the compasses that have lost their bearings.1
We have managed to gather many contributions to this from the range of traditional concepts of the marxist school that show that State capitalism is not only the latest aspect of the bourgeois world, but that its forms, even complete, are very old and correspond with the very emergence of the capitalist type of production; they served as the main factors in primitive accumulation and long preceded the fictitious and conventional-environment, which is met far more in the field of apologia than in the real world, of the private enterprise of free initiativeand other fine things.
As we have already said, there are many groups in the camp of the left communist antistalinists who do not see things in this way. We say to them, on the basis of earlier texts, for example: “Wherever it may be, wherever there is the economic form of the market, capitalism is a social force. It is a class force. And it has the political State at its disposal.”2
And let us add the formula which, for us, well expresses the most recent aspects of the world economy: «State capitalism is not a subjection of capitalism to the State, but a firmer subjection of the State to capital».
These groups, however, find the terms of the first thesis were: “correct until 1900, the epoch of the opening of imperialist expansion and, as such, remain up to date, but are incomplete when the evolution of capitalism attributed to the State the function of taking over the final moments of such an evolution from private initiative.”
And they continue by saying that we will be latecomers in the world of economic “culture” if we fail to understand that where this thesis fails to fit in with history, it ceases to be marxist, and if we do not request the addition of the study of the State economy to Marx’s analysis, taking this addition from texts written by the powerful personality of the economist Kaiser.3 Bad old habit! A text which seeks to establish given relations between things and facts is checked against things and facts and not against the signature to the book, so basing oneself on the powerful or powerless personality of the authors.
Personalities? stick them up your Kaiser as far as we are concerned, and if in 1950 they corrode the idol of private enterprise, we well know that Sir Karl reduced this to minute fragments a good century ago: you see we know this because we are stubborn latecomers, lazy in reading the latest books…
In Marxism, the concept of private initiative does not exist: look down at the compass dial, not up to heaven like the person who hears paradoxes (paradox – something which common sense says is incorrect when it very much correct).
We have said in thousands of speeches of propaganda that the socialist programme is for the abolition of private property of the means of production, which is borne out by Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme and Lenin on Marx. We said property and not private economy. The precapitalist economy was private, or individual. Property is a term which does not indicate a purely economic relationship, but also a legal one and brings into discussion not just the productive forces, but also the relations of production. Private property means private right sanctified by bourgeois legal codes: it brings us to the State and to power, facts of force and of violence in the hands of a class. Our old and valid formula means nothing if it does not already contain the concept that in order to overcome the capitalist economy, the juridical and State structure corresponding to it must also be overcome.
These basic concepts should suffice to reject the insidious content of the thesis: the social programme is enacted when individual property becomes State property, when the factory is nationalized.
Let us be quite clear, the groups with which we are in dispute do not state that State capitalism is already socialism, but fall into saying that it is a third and new form between private capitalism and socialism. They say in fact that there are two distinct periods in which “the State has more the older policing function than that of involvement in the economy” and that in which “it gives the maximum power to the exercise of force particularly to protect the economy centralized in it.” We say that in those two formulae, which are more or less faithfully reproduced, and even more so in the two historical periods, that capitalism is the same, the ruling class is the same, and the historical State is the same. The economy is the entire social field in which production and distribution occur and includes the men participating in this: the State is a precise organization acting in the social field, and the State in the capitalist period has always had the function of policeman and protector of the interests of a class and a type of production corresponding historically with this class. The State concentrating the economy within itself is an incongruous formula. For marxism, the State is always present in the economy; its power and legal violence are economic factors from first to last. One can at best explain it this way: in certain cases, the State, with its administration, assumes the management of industrial concerns; and if it assumes the management of all of them, then it will have centralized the management of the concerns, but not of the economy. Especially so long as distribution takes place with money prices (that these are fixed officially does not matter) and so the State is a firm among firms, a contractor among contractors; all the worse in that it considers as firms each of its national enterprises, as with the labourites, Churchillians and Stalinists. Getting out of this is not a question of administrative measures, but a problem of revolutionary force, of class war.4
The problem is posed better in an interesting bulletin published by the comrades of the “Groupe français de la gauche communiste internationale”5 of which – with great pleasure – we do not know the names and personalities. Sensible questions are asked on the problem which deserve further development, and the problem is posed in contrast to the vision of the noted Chaulieu group, which is influenced by the theory of “decadence” and of the transition from capitalism to barbarity which inspires in them, however, the same horror as that of the “bureaucratic” regimes. A theory in which one does not know what on earth the compasses are indicating until they prattle about marxism. There are elements in the internal bulletin of our movement6 on the decadence of capitalism where we deal with the false theory of the descending curve. Without any haughtiness scientifically speaking, it is only foolishness to tell a story which reads: oh capitalism grab us, swindle us, reduce us to a worn out old dog not worth a kick in the ribs, we will quickly recover – all this means is that you are decaying. Just imagine that it is decaying…
As to barbarity: it is the opposite of civilization and so of bureaucracy. Our barbarian ancestors, lucky them, did not have organization apparatuses based (old Engels) on two elements – a defined ruling class and a defined territory. There was the clan, the tribe, but still not the civitas. Civitas means city and also State. Civilization is the opposite of barbarity and means State organization, therefore necessarily bureaucracy. More State means more civilization means more bureaucracy, while class civilizations follow one upon the other. This is what marxism says. It is not the return to barbarity, but the start of supercivilization which is duping us everywhere that the monsters of contemporary State super-organizations dominate. But let us leave the members of Socialisme ou barbarie to their existential crisis, whom the bulletin we quoted refutes in an article with the correct title: Deux ans de bavardage: Two years of chattering – No chattering here please note!
Let us come to the balanced formula with which the French comrades formulated the question: definition of the ruling class of the State capitalist countries, exactitude or insufficiency of the definition: capitalism heir to the liberal revolutions.
The conclusion presented by this group is correct: stop presenting the bureaucracy as an autonomous class, perfidiously warmed-up within the proletariat, and instead consider it as a huge apparatus linked to a given historical situation in the worldwide evolution of capitalism. We are on the right track: the bureaucracy, which all class societies have known, is not a class, it is not a productive force, it is one of the “forms” of production appropriate to a given cycle of class rule. In certain historical phases it appears to be the protagonist on the stage – we too were about to say in the phase of decadence – they are in fact pre-revolutionary phases and those of maximum expansion. Why call the society ready for the midwife of the revolution, the obstetrician who will give birth to the new society, decadent? The pregnant woman is not decadent, but the sterile one is. Chaulieu sees the inflated belly of capitalist society and mistakes the inadequate skill of the obstetrician confronted with the swollen uterus with the imaginary infertility of the pregnant woman. They accuse the Kremlin bureaucracy of giving us a still-born socialism due to their abuse of power while the fault lies in not having taken up the forceps of the revolution to open up the belly of Europe-America, driven by flourishing capital accumulation; and having made a useless effort on an infertile womb. And perhaps only on an infertile womb, inverting the battle for grain with the battle for seed.7
Let us go on to the purely marxist-economic point after this brief clarification. The statement “capitalism heir to the liberal revolutions”, which correctly made the central point, contains the precise historical thesis: capitalism has a cycle, a single class course, from the bourgeois to the proletarian revolution, and it cannot be split into several cycles without renouncing revolutionary marxism. But, it must be said, as it is a little further on, capitalism appearing from the bourgeois (not liberal) revolutions or, better still, “antifeudal” revolutions. In fact liberalism became the goal and motive of these revolutions, their general idea, only through bourgeois apologetics. Marx rejected this and for him the historical goal of these revolutions is the destruction of the obstacles to the domination of the capitalist class.
Only in that sense is the abbreviated formulation correct. It is quite clear: capital can easily get rid of liberalism without changing its nature. And it is also clear: the direction of the degeneration, the degeneration of the revolution in Russia does not pass from the revolution for communism to the revolution for a developed kind of capitalism, but to a pure capitalist revolution: it runs in parallel with worldwide capitalist domination which, by successive steps, eliminates old feudal and Asiatic forms in various zones. While the historical situation in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused the capitalist revolution to take liberal forms, in the twentieth century it must have totalitarian and bureaucratic ones.
The difference is not due to basic qualitative variations of capitalism, but to the huge diversity in quantitative development, as with the intensity in each metropole, and the diffusion over the planet’s surface.
And that capitalism decreasingly adopts for its conservation, just as for its development and enlargement, the liberal chit-chat and ever increasingly police methods and bureaucratic suffocation, when the historical line is clearly seen, this does not cause the slightest hesitation over the certainty that the same means must serve in the proletarian revolution. It will handle this violence, power, State and bureaucracy, despotism as the Manifesto called it with a yet more dreadful term 103 years ago. Then it will know how to get rid of all of them.
The surgeon does not put down the blood stained lancet before the new life has emerged and has drawn its first breath, the hymn to life.
Yesterday
Does not the basic form of capitalism disappear with the disappearance of the private persons who, as owners of factories, organize production? This is the objection in the economic field which attracts many people’s attention.
“The capitalist” is named a hundred times by Marx. Besides, the word “capital” comes from the word caput, meaning head, and so traditionally capital is any wealth linked, intestate, to any singular titular person. However, the thesis to which we have long dedicated expositions doesn’t contain anything new, but only explains, remaining true, that the marxist analysis of capitalism does not consider to be vital the element of the person of the factory owner.
Quotations from Marx would be innumerable: let us then conclude with just one.
Let us take the so-called “classic” capitalism of the “free” factory. Marx always put these in quotation marks, they in fact characterize the bourgeois school he fought and destroyed with his economic concepts – this is the point that is always forgotten.
One naturally supposes that Mr. X, the first capitalist to appear, had a sum of money to hand. Good. Entire sections of Marx’s work reply with the question how come? The replies vary: theft, robbery, usury, black marketeering or, as we have seen more than a few times, royal charter or law of the land.
So X, instead of stashing his gold coins in a sack, so as to run his fingers through them every night, acts as a citizen imbued with liberal and humanitarian social ideals. He nobily faces the risks and circulates his capital.
So, first element accumulated money.
Second element, acquisition of raw materials, the classic raw cotton bales, of so many little chapters and paragraphs.
Third element, acquisition of the works where he sets up plant and looms to spin and weave.
Fourth element, technical organization and management. The classic capitalist looks after this himself; he has studied, gone on trips and journeys and has thought out new systems to work the bales and, by producing thread in quantity, cuts costs; he will dress cheaply yesterday’s urchins and even the blacks of Central Africa who were used to going about naked.
Fifth element, the workers at the looms. They do not have to bring an ounce of raw cotton or a single spare spool; that happened in the semi-barbaric times of individual production. But at the same time there will be trouble If they remove a single thread of cotton to patch their trousers. They are rewarded with a just equivalent for their labour time.
Through the combination of these elements one achieves the one that is the motive and the reason for the whole process: the mass of yarn or textiles. The essential fact is that only the capitalist can take this to market and the financial return is his and his alone.
Always the same old story. Yes, you know the little sum; the cost of the raw cotton, something for the wear and tear on plant and machinery, the workers’ wages. Receipts: the price of the product sold. This is greater than the sum of the costs and the difference constitutes the profit margin of the factory.
It matters little that the capitalist does what he likes with the money he gets back – he could do that with his original cash already without manufacturing anything. The important fact is that after restocking in everything to the level of his original investment, he still has a mass of money on hand. He could consume it himself, certainly. But socially he cannot and something forces him to invest it in large part, to translate it into capital again.
Marx says that the life cycle of capital consists only in its movement as value perpetually set in motion so as to multiply itself. The desire of the person of the capitalist is not required in this, nor would he be able to impede it. Economic determinism not only obliges the worker to sell his labour time, but similarly the capital to invest and accumulate. Our criticism of liberalism does not consist in saying there is a free class and a slave class: there is an exploited one and a profiteering one, but that they are both tied to the laws of the historical capitalist mode of production.
The process is therefore not within the factory, but is social and can only be understood as such. Already in Marx there is the hypothesis of the separation of the various elements from the person of the capitalist entrepreneur which is substituted with a share participation in the profit margin of the productive enterprise. Firstly, the money can be got from a lender, a bank, who receives periodic interest. Secondly, in such a case the materials acquired with that money are not really the property of the entrepreneur, but of the financier. Thirdly, in England the owner of a building, house or factory may not be the owner of the land on which it stands: thus houses and factories can be rented. Nothing prohibits the same for looms and other machinery and tools. Fourth element, the entrepreneur may lack technical and administrative managerial capabilities, he hires engineers and accountants. Fifth element, workers’ wages – evidently their payment too is made from loans from the financier.
The strict function of the entrepreneur is reduced to that of having seen that there is a market demand for a certain mass of products which have a sale price above the total cost of the preceding elements. Here the capitalist class is restricted to the entrepreneurial class, which is a social and political force, and the principal basis of the bourgeois State. But the strata of entrepreneurs does not coincide with that of money, land, housing and factory owners and commodity suppliers.
There are two basic forms and points required to recognize capitalism. One is that the right of the productive enterprise to dispose of the products and the sales proceeds (controlled prices or requisitions of commodities do not impair the right to such proceeds) is unimpaired and unimpairable. What guards this central right in contemporary society is from the outset a class monopoly, it is a structure of power, and the State, the judiciary and police punish whoever breaks this norm. Such is the condition for enterprise production. The other point is that the social classes are not isolated one from another. There are no longer, historically speaking, castes or orders. Belonging to the landed aristocracy was something that lasted more than one lifespan, as the title was handed down through the generations. Ownership of buildings or large finances lasts on average at least a lifespan. The “average period of personal membership of a given individual to the ruling class” tends to become even shorter. For this reason we are concerned about the extremely developed form of capital, not the capitalist. This director does not need fixed people. It finds and recruits them wherever it wants and changes them in ever more mind bending shifts.
Today
Here we cannot demonstrate that Lenin’s “parasitic capitalism” does not mean that power lies more in the hands of the financial capitalists than in those of the industrial capitalists. Capitalism could not spread and expand without growing more complicated and progressively separating into the various elements which enter into the competition for speculative gain: finance, technology, equipment, administration. The tendency is for the largest margin and social control to slip from the grasp of positive and active elements to become concentrated in the hands of speculators and business banditry.
We shall therefore fly from marx to… Don Sturzo.
This latter, with his habitual prudence, took in hand the INA scandal.8 What he said is interesting: I cannot say what happened during fascism because I was in America, but there these things are the order of the day, many others may come to light! We were sure of it. The capitalist parasitism of contemporary Italy beats that of Mussolini, and both remain child’s play in comparison with the wheeler-dealer US business.
INA had huge finances because it collected all the workers’ social security contributions, like other similar quangos with their well known initials. It pays slowly so its safes are stuffed with ready cash. It therefore has the right (since it has no head no body and no soul – it is for good reason that we are in the civilization of habeus corpus) not to let such wealth lie idle, so it employs and invests it. What good luck for the modern entrepreneur! He is the capitalist without capital, just as dialectically modern capital is capital without the boss, acephalous.
The bad business, the clever Sicilian priest says (those in the gallery yearn soon to make an exaggerated oration at his funeral) was the formation of too many front companies under the INA.
What the hell are front companies? Some types versed in business who have luxurious offices and have crept into the economic and political outer offices, do not have a penny or registered stock or buildings to their names (they do not even rent houses, but live in big hotels, they know Vanoni backwards, but Vanoni does not know them)9 “plan” a given deal and register a company with the plan as its sole asset, and INA, or some similar body, will give it the money and if some “special law” is required, let us say for raising cocks in old army bases, a problem hastily brought to the attention of national leaders, especially by a forceful speech on government ineptitude by one, of the opposition M.P.s, which solves all.
In fact, once the common impresario went to the bank to borrow money to use in the business planned. The bank replied: good, here it is, where are your securities? Out with your property and other titles… But a quango does not have these trifling needs: the national good is enough for it to pull out the cash. The rest of the tale tells itself. If the old impresario with his plan and production project created not cocks but cock ups, he was finished: he did not get his money back and he left the boss class humiliated.
Our front company with it brilliant general staff does not live in this fear: if it produces cocks, they are sold to poultry farmers for a good price, money is earned. If supposing it does not produce cocks or no one wants cocks, no matter: hand-outs, indemnities and profit shares have all been cashed in and INA pays for the mistaken cock farm plan.
We have explained what State capitalism (or the economy centralized in the State) means by this small and banal example. It should be said that INA’s loss is shared by all the poor unfortunates who pay into its coffers another cut of their daily wages.
State capitalism is finance concentrated in the State at the disposal of passing wheeler-dealers of enterprise initiative. Never has free enterprise been so free as since when the profit remained but the loss risk has been removed and transferred to the community.
The State alone can print as much money as it wants and can deal with the forger. The progressive expropriation of small owners and capitalist concentration in successive historical forms is based on this initial principal of force. We have with reason repeatedly stated that no economy in which firms present accounts and exchange is carried out in money can avoid such laws.
The power of the State is therefore based on the convergent interests of these benefiting profiteers of speculative plans of firms and of their web of deep-seated international relations.
How can these States not lend capital to those gangs which never settle their debts with the State except by forcing the exploited classes to pay up? There is proof that these “capitalizing” States are in chronic debt to the bourgeois class, or if you want fresh proof, lies in the fact that they are obliged to borrow, taking back their money and paying interest on it.
The socialist administration of a “centralized economy” would not provide outside takings to any “plan” just as it would not pay interest. Besides, it would not deal in money.
Capital is only concentrated in the State for the convenience of surplus-value and profit manoeuvring. It remains “available to all” or available to the components of the entrepreneurial class: no longer simply production entrepreneurs, but openly business entrepreneurs: they no longer produce commodities, but, Marx has already said, they produce surplus value.
The capitalist as person no longer serves in this: capital lives without him but with its same function multiplied 100 fold. The human subject has become useless. A class without members to compose it? The State not at the service of a social group, but an impalpable force, the work of the Holy Ghost or of the Devil? Here is Sir Charles’s irony. We offer the promised quotation: “By turning his money into commodities which serve as the building materials for a new product, and as factors in the labour process, by incorporating living labour into their lifeless objectivity, the capitalist simultaneously transforms value, i.e. past labour in its objectified and lifeless form, into capital, value which can perform its own valorization process, an animated monster which begins to “work”, “as if possessed by the devil’.”10
Capital must be seized by these horns.
Cf. Bussole impazzite (compasses struck with madness). ↩︎
Proprietà e capitale (Iskra, Milan, 1980) p. 130 ↩︎
Henry Kaiser proposed “social capitalism” with workers sharing the profits ↩︎
Reference to the Stalin-Kruschev attempt to increase corn yields. ↩︎
A bulletin issued in September 1951 by the group that later became the French section of the International Communist Party. Chaulieu = Castoriadis, a founder of the group Socialisme ou barbarie. ↩︎
“Il rovesciamento della prassi” now in Partito e classe (Milan, 1972) pp. 120-1, 130. “This theory (of the descending curve) comes from gradualist reformism: there are no drops, shaking or leaps” (Point 4). ↩︎
Reference to the Stalin-Khruschev attempt to increase corn yields. ↩︎
Don Sturzo: former priest, leader of the catholic right in the Christian Democrats, opposed to the corruption in the party and the State. INA (Istituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni) launched in 1912 to become the State monopoly, liberal opposition led to it being made into a quango but maintaining “greater autonomy and more strikingly a private type of internal structure than State bodies” (Candeloro Storia dell’Italia moderna, Milan, 1974, Vol. VII, p. 307). It could therefore operate in the way described in the text below. ↩︎
Scopo principale delle nostre trattazioni – nelle quali è indispensabile il continuo ripetere dati richiami ai «teoremi» fondamentali, e meglio se con le stesse parole e frasi – è la critica del farneticamento sulle forme «imprevedute» e difformi del capitalismo modernissimo, che costringerebbero a rivedere la basi della «prospettiva» e quindi del metodo marxista.
Tale falsa posizione è facilmente messa in rapporto col disconoscimento, e meglio colla mai avvenuta conoscenza, delle linee essenziali della nostra dottrina, dei suoi principii cardinali.
Tutta la discussione in corso sulle forme rivoluzionarie in Russia, ed in Cina, si riduce al giudizio sul fenomeno storico dell’«entrata» dell’industrialismo e del macchinismo in aree immense del mondo, finora rette da forme terriere e precapitaliste della produzione.
Costruire industrialismo e meccanizzare è uguale a costruire socialismo, ogni volta che si fa con piani centrali e «nazionali». Ecco la tesi errata.
La classica identità storica marxista è tra macchinismo e capitalismo. La differenza tra impiego delle forze meccaniche in una società capitalista e in una società socialista non è quantitativa, non sta nella direzione tecnica ed economica portata da cerchie ristrette ad una cerchia totale. Essa è qualitativa e consiste nel capovolgimento completo dei caratteri capitalisti dello impiego delle macchine da parte della società umana, cosa ben più profonda, e che consiste in «rapporto tra uomini» opposto a quello del maledetto «sistema di fabbrica» e della divisione sociale del lavoro.
Tre forme storiche: industrialismo per aziende autonome; industrialismo per aziende sempre più concentrate e infine unificate nella direzione; socialismo; tutte e tre prevedute e descritte «dal primo momento» in Marx. Nulla di sopravvenuto, che inatteso fosse, o spezzasse i limiti dell’analisi, allora delineata per sempre. E chi parla di dogmi si freghi. Non conosciamo rinnegato, nella cui bocca non abbia fornicato tale parola. Mao-Tsetung la paragona a «sterco di vacca». Ebbene, buon appetito.
IERI
L’uomo e la macchina
John Stuart Mill, uno dei profeti del Capitale, nei suoi classici Principles of Political Economy (Londra 1821) dice che resta ancora a sapersi se le invenzioni meccaniche abbiano reso meno pesante il lavoro di un qualsiasi genere umano. Marx parte da questa citazione nello studio del macchinismo. Per la prima volta, nel campo delle scienze sociali, la discussione comincia con lo spostare radicalmente il modo di impostazione dei quesiti. Se la macchina sia un bene o un male, tutt’al più sarà un bel tema per saggio di letteratura. Marx centra ed orienta subito la questione sull’impiego capitalistico delle macchine. Questo, di diminuire il lavoro del genere umano, non ne era affatto lo scopo. Esso impiego, «come ogni altro sviluppo della forza produttiva del lavoro, non mira cha a diminuire il prezzo delle merci, a raccorciare la parte della giornata in cui l’operaio lavora per sé stesso, ad allungare l’altra parte in cui lavora per il capitalista». Tale rigorosa definizione (inizio del cap. XIII, primo Tomo) al solito contiene in sé, e lo vedremo facilmente, il programma comunista. Faremo noi a meno di macchine, per punirle di avere commesso tale porcherie ? All’opposto, le impiegheremo in quanto, ed in modo che si possa, in un primo periodo, alzare i costi di produzione e abbassare la parte del tempo in cui l’operaio lavora per il capitalista, in periodo ulteriore «sviluppare la forza produttiva del lavoro» non per avere prodotti in quantità folli, ma per erogare meno lavoro.
Sempre per saggiare il metodo antimetafisico, riesce gustosa la noterella a piè di pagina, alle parole sul render meno grave il lavoro di un qualsiasi genere umano. «Mill avrebbe dovuto aggiungere: che non viva del lavoro altrui, perché è cosa certa che le macchine hanno grandemente aumentato il numero degli oziosi, cioè di quelli che si sogliono chiamare persone ammodo».
Dunque, se è marxista la tesi «le macchine erano indispensabili per arrivare alla rivoluzione comunista» effetto di lettura banale ed impotente è il luogo comune sulla marxista apologia del macchinismo moderno.
Dice Marx che i punti di partenza della «rivoluzione industriale» nel modo di produzione sono la forza lavoro nella manifattura, e lo strumento di lavoro nella grande industria. La forza lavoro sono gli operai, che anche nella manifattura impugnano utensili, ed hanno quindi strumenti di lavoro. Seguiamo il testo con una certa pazienza, nell’«analisi» dei caratteri del nuovo strumento di lavoro che chiamiamo macchina. Arriveremo a capire che le rivoluzioni sociali e politiche capitalistiche avvenute prima del secolo decimottavo, ossia quando lo strumento di lavoro era prevalentemente utensile manuale, e non macchina, hanno determinato rapporti sociali della forza lavoro (dei lavoratori) e rapporti politici, necessariamente prevedibilmente diversi da quelli di rivoluzioni industriali capitaliste (Russia, Cina) del secolo XX in cui lo strumento del lavoro è meccanico a vastissima scala. Restano tuttavia rivoluzioni storiche capitaliste, e borghesi. Una cosa è l’orgia di macchinismo, un’altra è la «costruzione del socialismo». Anche in esse – anticipiamo un poco – inevitabilmente l’ingresso della divinità-macchina porta con sé il sistema borghese della «autocrazia di fabbrica» e della esaltazione della produzione di merci. Marcia storica in controsenso di quella che mostrerà la rivoluzione socialista, e che per questo attendiamo nelle stesse forme in cui Marx l’attese, e che troviamo descritta leggendo la nostra Bibbia: Il Capitale. A marcia rabbia di ogni borghese «spirito libero»!
Che i progressi dello strumento del lavoro siano a disposizione di tutti al di là di confini, e di serie di generazioni, non è nostra peregrina trovata. La scienza è di tutti. Solo che oggi è di tutti i poteri capitalistici: solo domani sarà di tutto il genere umano, tipo anti-Mill.
Una noterellina: «Generalmente la scienza non costa nulla al capitalista; però questo non gli impedisce di valersene. La scienza degli altri è incorporata al capitale, precisamente come vi è incorporato il lavoro degli altri. Ma appropriazione “capitalistica” (virgolato nel testo) ed appropriazione personale sia della scienza che della ricchezza SONO COSE AFFATTO DIVERSE L’UNA DALL’ALTRA». Ometti, riflettete quaranta minuti. Marx comprova le tesi col fatto che il capitalista singolo, appropriatore e sfruttatore, in molti casi è un grosso asino in materia tecnica. Noi vi invitiamo a non più stupirvi del fatto che, se anche in Russia non vi è più nulla (?) appropriazione personale di lavoro altrui (ricchezza) ciò non toglie che vi sia in pieno appropriazione capitalistica di esso, avendo lo Stato capitalista russo potuto, ovviamente, appropriarsi senza spendere niente della scienza occidentale. Ha avuto dunque a disposizione tutte le invenzioni meccaniche e tecniche, e ha potuto saltare il lungo sviluppo che parte dalla bottega artigianale e passa per l’industriucola autonoma; ma non ha con ciò compiuto il chimerico salto della forma storica e sociale capitalista di produzione. Ma Marx aveva immaginato questo possibile ? Si, limitatamente ad una condizione data da forze rivoluzionarie unitarie «anazionali» che avessero a disposizioni territori comparabili di industrialismo completamente sviluppato (esempio: Germania) e di industrialismo da sviluppare (esempio: Russia). Mancando tale peculiare rapporto deve interporsi la fase di crescita del capitalismo, che si presenterà come un’avanzata più nello spazio geografico, che nella successione del tempo, come una conquista più in quantità, che in qualità o per stadi evolutivi concatenati.
Lavoro ed energia
Torniamo alla dottrinetta. In un organismo che ha raggiunto duemila anni (ormai non speriamo più farlo fuori prima) come la chiesa romana, l’infallibile papa non insegna nulla, ogni parroco insegna tutto. Se ridete, riderete fesso.
Marx per definire la macchina parte dai concetti della fisica, e passa poi a quelli storici, che interessano per sciogliere l’immenso enigma del rapporto macchina-uomo.
La teoria meccanica della macchina semplice si occupa di quegli strumenti o dispositivi che modificano in forma più conveniente la energia loro applicata da un agente, che sia anche la mano dell’uomo: non producono nuova energia, restituiscono solo quella ricevuta. Sono la leva, il cuneo, la carrucola, e così via. L’uomo non può spostare dal suo luogo un sasso di dieci quintali con i suoi arti, ma se impugna appropriatamente una lunga leva riesce a farlo. Non saprebbe dividerlo in parti minori che possa poi sollevare, ma se conosce l’uso del cuneo infisso a colpi di mazza, vi perviene.
Socialmente si può dire: macchina semplice è quella con cui non si fanno affari. L’economia classica sa che lavoro è valore. Lavoro (quantità di lavoro) è la stessa cosa che energia meccanica. Il fisico dice: forza moltiplicato spazio (spostamento del sasso) ci dà energia. L’economista dice: numero di operai moltiplicato tempo di impiego ci dà valore. Ora, fino a che noi nella produzione non usiamo che la forza muscolare dei lavoratori, le macchine semplici, alle quali è giusto sia meccanicamente che socialmente assimilare gli utensili che l’artigiano isolato maneggia, non cambierebbe nulla. Colla leva quell’uomo sposta il sasso di dieci metri in otto ore: otto operai senza leva lo avrebbero rotolato dello stesso spazio in un’ora.
Meccanicamente si potrebbe dire che la macchina composta, intesa con un più o meno complesso di macchine semplici (ruote, leve, ingranaggi, ecc.) non apporti nuova energia, mentre lo fanno le macchine motrici, che trasformano in energia meccanica il calore dei combustibili ed altre forme di energia. Allora sarebbe del valore regalato, che permetterebbe di eliminare tanto lavoro da farsi fare fisicamente dagli uomini. Ma sarebbe così solo in un macchinismo comunista. In un macchinismo capitalista la relazione energetica, fisicamente vera, socialmente è falsa.
Finché vedremo che l’energia meccanica è introdotta per produrre più merci, e non per adoperare minor tempo umano di lavoro, dovremo dire che il trapasso, quali che siano le presentazioni ideologiche e giuridiche, è processo capitalistico.
Quindi Marx definisce il divario tra l’utensile del periodo sociale artigiano e la macchina del tempo capitalista non in base all’uso di forza muscolare sostituito da altre energie, ma chiamando macchina nel senso sociale non solo le macchine motrici delle diverse industrie e fabbriche attuali, ma anche le trasmissioni di energia (serie di macchine semplici che nulla aggiungono di energia) e le macchine operatrici che si applicano alla materia da lavorare, che la tecnologia volgare chiama macchine utensili (tornio, stampatrice, foratrice, e così via). Di più: siamo già nella fase del macchinismo anche quando la nuova macchina operatrice non è ancora mossa da energia meccanica ma dalla energia muscolare umana: macchine a manovella, a pedale, ecc.
Se così non fosse, Marx dice, dovremmo dire che la macchina, come fonte di energia non umana, esiste da molto tempo prima della fabbrica capitalista.
L’uomo infatti ha molto presto appreso ad adoperare altre energie naturali. Un semplice aratro tirato da due buoi sarebbe già, non un utensile, ma una macchina vera e propria, che del resto fa sì che un uomo ari superficie maggiore di quella che nello stesso tempo può dissodare colla zappa.
Ma allora, dice Marx, il telaio circolare di Claussen con cui un solo operaio fa 96 mila maglie al minuto, sebbene usato non da un primitivo ma da un moderno, sarebbe utensile, in quanto era mosso a mano, così come la macchina di Wyatt per filare. Diverrebbero macchine solo dal momento che il primo sia mosso da un motore, la seconda, come fin dal 1735, da…un asino.
L’animale fu una delle prime energie naturali usate dall’uomo in sussidio della produzione fin dai tempi antichissimi. Ma ve ne furono altre: il vento, i corsi d’acqua.
Non dunque questi casi sporadici o diffusi, di impiego di energia meccanica che non sia quella muscolare umana, possono definire il meccanismo capitalistico, ma l’introduzione della macchina utensile che precede di molto quella del motore meccanico (macchina a vapore). «È la macchina utensile che inaugura nel secolo decimottavo la rivoluzione industriale; essa inoltre serve di punto di partenza ogni qualvolta si tratta di trasformare il mestiere o la manifattura in una operazione meccanica».
Facciamo un passo indietro: col mestiere, ossia col lavoratore artigiano autonomo, isolato, siamo nel precapitalismo, nel regime corporativo-feudale. Con la manifattura siamo già entrati in pieno capitalismo. Si sono realizzate infatti le condizione note: riunione dei lavoratori in massa, capitale nelle mani di un padrone che è in grado di procurarsi i locali, di acquistare le materie prime, di anticipare salari. Prima ancora del meccanismo, la manifattura semplice è già passata a manifattura organica con la divisione tecnica del lavoro tra diverse operazioni che, sia pure col semplice utensilaggio a mano, sono compiute da artefici diversi, sull’ordine insindacabile del “padrone”. È rinato questo termine del tempo schiavista, sostituendo ignobilmente quello meno odioso di “signore”. Il signore era un vivente e combattente cavaliere, un essere umano, il padrone diverrà alla fine un mostruoso automa.
L’autocrate di fabbrica
Leggiamo in Marx, non l’apologia, ma la implacabile requisitoria contro il sistema capitalista di fabbrica. Lo strumento di lavoro, fin che era tale da essere adoperato dalla sola mano dell’artefice, lo era anche, o signori idealisti moderni, dalla sua mente, e un poco dal suo cuore.
Oggi all’utensile artigiano è sostituita la macchina utensile. Marx dice: «Lo strumento, come si è visto, non viene affatto soppresso dalla macchina: strumento nano nelle mani dell’uomo, esso cresce e si moltiplica diventando lo strumento di un meccanismo creato dall’uomo. Da quel momento il capitale fa lavorare l’operaio non più con un proprio utensile, ma come una macchina che maneggia i propri utensili».
L’immensa crescita della potenza dell’umano lavoro si accompagna alla degradazione, non all’elevamento, dell’uomo lavoratore. La mule Jenny era il nome dato ad una macchina per filare, con innumerevoli fusi. Col progresso tecnologico del 1863, grazie a un motore di appena un cavallo, bastavano due operai e mezzo per 450 fusi rotanti, e in una settimana producevano 366 libbre di cotone filato. Col filatoio a mano la stessa quantità di cotone avrebbe richiesto ben 27 mila ore invece di 150: la produttività è divenuta 180 volte più grande! Non è qui possibile seguire e sviluppare questi confronti di Marx, applicarli ad esempio a calcolare quanti paleggiatori sostituisce una delle macchine escavatrici e profilatrici di terra per opere stradali portate dagli americani qui dopo la guerra.
Della fabbrica il dott. Ure dà due definizioni. Da una parte la dipinge «come una cooperazione di varie classi di lavoratori adulti e non adulti, che sorvegliano con abilità ed assiduità un sistema di meccanismi operatori, posti continuamente in azione da un motore centrale» dall’altra come «un grande automa composto di numerosi organi meccanici ed intellettuali che operano d’accordo e senza interruzione per produrre lo stesso oggetto, essendo tutti questi organi subordinati ad una potenza motrice che si muove di per sé»
Marx mostra che «la seconda definizione caratterizza l’impiego che dei lavoratori fa il capitale nella fabbrica moderna». La prima invece può corrispondere al nostro programma: «il lavoratore collettivo, il corpo del lavoro sociale, appare come il soggetto dominante, e l’automa meccanico come l’oggetto».
Ma oggi invece «l’automa stesso è il soggetto, ed i lavoratori sono semplicemente aggiunti come organi coscienti ai suoi organi incoscienti». Avete udito, o liberali, liberatori di corpi e di spiriti e di coscienze, che ci incolpate di automatizzare la vita! ? «Ure si compiace a rappresentare il motore centrale della fabbrica non solo come automa, ma anche come autocrate: in quei grandi collaboratori, egli dice, il benefico potere del vapore chiama intorno a sé miriadi di soggetti ed assegna a ciascuno di essi il suo determinato compito».
La centralità del concetto mostra che non si tratta, per la centesima volta, di descrivere il capitalismo, come perfino Stalin pretende, ma di scoprire i tratti sociali che la rivoluzione deve disperdere! Ecco altri passi.
«Nella manifattura e nel mestiere artigianesco l’operaio si vale del suo strumento, nella fabbrica esso serve la macchina». «Nella manifattura gli operai sono altrettante membra di un meccanismo vivente. Nella fabbrica sono incorporati ad un meccanismo morto che esiste indipendentemente da essi».
L’ulteriore comparazione di Fourier della fabbrica all’ergastolo, con cui il capitolo finisce, ricorda che nella galera i rematori erano incorporati alla nave, incatenati a vita ai suoi banchi, dovevano sospingerla, o con essa affondare.
«In ogni produzione capitalistica (ossia anche nella manifattura) in quanto essa non è soltanto processo di lavoro, ma accrescimento di capitale, è sottinteso che le condizioni di lavoro dominano l’operaio invece di essere da lui dominate (programma: il lavoratore collettivo socialista dominerà egli le condizioni del suo lavoro!); però è il macchinismo che dà a tale capovolgimento una realtà tecnica. Il mezzo di lavoro trasformato in automa, si presenta dinanzi allo stesso operaio durante il processo dello stesso lavoro, in forma di capitale, di lavoro morto che domina e succhia la sua forza vivente».
Fredda descrizione, non è vero, massa di volgari falsari ?
Dunque non occorre la persona fisica del padrone individuale, che mano mano è sparita nelle pieghe del capitale azionario, dei collegi amministrativi, degli Enti parastatali, dello Stato politico divenuto (cosa vecchia) imprenditore e fabbricante, e nella ultimissima turpe forma dello Stato che pretende di essere «gli operai stessi» e poterli per questo legare ai piedi dei sinistri automi di acciaio.
Il dispotismo aziendale, che solo la rivoluzione comunista raderà dalle fondamenta, quando non avrà più inframmettenze intossicanti colle «lotte per la libertà politica» e simili miraggi popolari, è denunziato nell’industrialismo borghese fin dal suo sorgere, accompagnato da vere rivoluzioni di classe, ma truccato dal puzzolente belletto democratico. Non una sillaba è da togliere alla sentenza, che da 90 anni possediamo già formulata, e che purtroppo non si è ancora preso ad eseguire.
«Gettando alle ortiche la divisione dei poteri, tanto vantata dalla borghesia, ed il sistema rappresentativo, di cui essa si mostra anche più tenera, il capitale, come privato legislatore e secondo il suo talento, foggia nel suo codice di fabbrica il suo potere autocratico sui dipendenti. Questo codice non è che una parodia della regolamentazione sociale del lavoro, quale la esigono la cooperazione in grandi proporzioni e l’uso dei mezzi di lavoro comuni, specialmente delle macchine. Qui la frusta del conduttore di schiavi viene sostituita dal libro di punizioni dell’ispettore».
Ultimi fantasmi dei liberali: la autocrazia e la dittatura «nella vita», e non nella pallida menzogna legale non sono ricominciate con Mussolini, Hitler, Franco… neppure con Stalin e proconsoli… neppure con Truman, Eisenhower e servi sciocchi dell’Europa unita: sono un fatto tecnico legato al fragore dei grandi motori centrali, girino essi sulle sponde dell’Hudson, del Tamigi, della Moscova o del fiume delle Perle.
Macchina e rivoluzione
Ma «la macchina è innocente delle miserie che porta seco». Qui una pagina formidabile mostra la stoltezza degli economisti ufficiali, che non potendo spiegare i tremendi antagonismi uscenti dall’uso delle macchine, fingono di ignorarli e chiudono gli occhi davanti al fatto che «la macchina, trionfo dell’uomo sopra le forze naturali, diventa tra le mani dei capitalisti lo strumento per assoggettare l’uomo a quelle forze – che essa, mezzo infallibile per abbreviare il lavoro quotidiano, fra le loro mani lo prolunga – che essa, mentre è la bacchetta magica per accrescere i benessere del produttore fra le loro mani lo immiserisce». Quindi «per essi, chi svela quale sia la applicazione capitalista del macchinismo, si oppone alla sua applicazione in genere, ed è avversario del progresso sociale!».
La macchina, che nelle mani della collettività lavoratrice sarà fonte di benessere e riposo, diviene assassina nelle mani del capitale. Non perciò condanneremo la macchina.
Qui Marx cita un personaggio di Charles Dickens, nel suo famoso romanzo «Oliver Twist». È la difesa del gran malandrino Bill Sykes: «Signori giurati, senza dubbio la gola di un commesso viaggiatore è stata tagliata, il fatto esiste, ma la colpa non è mia, è del coltello. E volete voi sopprimere il coltello a causa di tali temporanei inconvenienti ? Rifletteteci. Il coltello è uno degli strumenti più utili nei mestieri e nell’agricoltura, salutare in chirurgia, sapiente nell’anatomia, e allegro compagno nei banchetti. Condannando il coltello, voi vi ricaccereste in piena barbarie!».
No. Non vi ricacceremo in piena barbarie, e tale rischio non ci spaventa. Vi toglieremo solo dalle mani il manico del coltello-macchina.
La macchina sarà domani preziosa in un modo di produzione non mercantile, e la sua apparizione è stata altresì preziosa appunto per i rivoluzionari antagonismi che ha sollevato tra capitale e proletariato.
«È fuori dubbio che tali fermenti di trasformazione, il termine finale dei quali (il programma! o sordi) è la soppressione dell’antica divisione del lavoro, si trovano in aperta contraddizione colla forma capitalista di produzione e con l’ambiente economico in cui essa pone l’operaio. Ma la sola strada regia per cui un modo di produzione e l’organizzazione sociale che gli corrisponde procedono verso la loro dissoluzione e la loro metamorfosi, é lo sviluppo storico dei loro immanenti antagonismi».
Ancora una invettiva alla «divisione del lavoro», che il comunismo seppellirà. Dialetticamente era saggia nel tempo corporativo: nec sutor ultra crepidam: ciabattino, tieniti alla suola! Ma da quando «l’orologiaio Watt inventa la macchina a vapore, e il barbiere Arkwrigt il telaio continuo, un tale saggezza diventa demenza e maledizione»
Ed è anche con un grido di battaglia che si chiude questa parte dell’opera di Marx, dopo la dettagliata disamina della legislazione sociale sul lavoro e la limitazione della giornata di lavoro: «essa moltiplica l’anarchia e la crisi della produzione sociale, aumenta l’intensità del lavoro (Stachanov! Stachanov!) ed inasprisce la concorrenza tra l’uomo e la macchina. Distruggendo la piccola industria ed il lavoro a domicilio, essa sopprime l’ultimo rifugio di una massa di lavoratori, ogni giorno resi soprannumerari, e con ciò distrugge la valvola di sicurezza di tutta la caldaia sociale».
«Colle condizioni materiali e colle combinazioni sociali della produzione, essa porta a maturazione le condizioni e gli antagonismi della sua forma capitalistica, gli elementi di formazione di una nuova società, e le forze disgregatrici dell’antico».
OGGI
Dal cavallo al kilowatt
Già sulla base degli elementi tecnologici del suo tempo, Marx stabilisce appieno che l’introduzione della forza motrice meccanica (meglio, energia) accelera la concentrazione delle attività produttive in grandissime aziende, e la stessa legislazione sul lavoro nelle fabbriche agisce in tal senso: «eccitando così lo sviluppo degli elementi materiali, necessari alla trasformazione del sistema manifatturiero in sistema di fabbrica, le leggi, la cui applicazione comporta notevoli maggiori investimenti, accelera simultaneamente la rovina delle piccole aziende industriali e la concentrazione dei capitali». Più volte del resto abbiamo citato dai capitoli sull’accumulazione il passaggio famoso, illustrato colle modificazioni tecniche intervenute ad esempio nella siderurgia: «In uno speciale ramo della produzione la centralizzazione raggiungerà il suo limite quando tutti i capitali che si troveranno impegnati si fonderanno in un unico capitale individuale. In una data forma sociale tali limiti saranno raggiunti soltanto nel momento in cui l’intero capitale sociale si troverà riunito in una sola mano, sia di un unico capitalista, che di una società di capitalisti». Non meno notoriamente Engels traspose tale prospettiva ai trust, ai monopoli, e alle gestioni statali.
Se le stesse leggi mercantili che confluiscono nella produzione del plusvalore fornirono a Marx la base della dimostrazione, immensamente confermata dalla storia, sulla gigantesca accumulazione capitalistica in masse colossali, non meno vi influirono le nuove forme tecniche di produrre energia motrice.
Fino a che noi ci riferiamo alla macchina a vapore prima attuazione in grande dell’impiego di forza meccanica nella produzione, noi vediamo che la soluzione più appropriata è l’autonomia, in ciascuna fabbrica, della produzione del quanto di energia che le occorre. La centrale termica risolve tutto: specie dopo l’estrazione in grande del combustibile fossile, resa a sua volta grandiosa e dalle macchine e dalla forma capitalista della gestione mineraria (un volta largamente statale). Fino da allora è chiaro che il costo del cavallo-vapore diventa tanto minore quanto più grande è la caldaia, e quindi vi è altro motivo per soggiacere della piccola azienda alla grande: non si impone tuttavia un legame organizzativo fra fabbrica e fabbrica, potendo tutte trovare carbone sul «libero mercato».
Tutto ciò è mutato enormemente coi progressi della elettromeccanica. La convenienza di fare dell’energia una merce è divenuta decisiva con la creazione delle distribuzioni elettriche a mezzo di conduttori. Ogni fabbrica oggi tende non a produrre, ma a comprare la sua energia.
Il motore centrale di Ure poteva comandare le macchine operatrici, e gli uomini ad esse resi servi, in piccolo raggio: quello consentito dalle trasmissioni a mezzo di «meccanismi semplici»: alberi a puleggia, cingoli, ingranaggi conici… Nessuno aveva nemmeno trovato utile distribuire vapore sotto pressione ad altri con lunghe tubazioni: le enormi dispersioni di calore rendevano il sistema antieconomico.
Facciamo un’ipotesi gratuita: che prima di scoprire l’elettricità dinamica e la corrente elettrica si fosse scoperto il gas metano naturale. Anche questo è un combustibile fossile, di origine organica come quello solido e liquido. Ma a differenza di quelli (quello liquido è incanalabile come merce, non come combustibile, per motivi tecnici ed economici) si può distribuire con reti. Lo stesso sarebbe sorta la necessità di uno stretto legame di organizzazione tra tutte le fabbriche, alimentate da una stessa distribuzione.
Infatti il consumo di energia di ognuna non può più variare ad arbitrio della locale direzione, poiché potrebbe accadere alla centrale unica di restare a corto di energia, o di doverla «buttar via». Invece il capitalista dell’azienda a motrice autonoma poteva a suo piacere escludere forni e caldaie, ovvero impiantarne altre per aumenti di produzione.
Dipendendo tutto il piano di impiego degli operai, servi delle macchine utensili, da quello dell’energia assegnata, tutto il meccanismo industriale sociale si adegua a queste nuove norme, si collega, si centralizza, si subordina ad una infinità di discipline.
Pianificazione non è socialismo!
Un tale adeguamento e disciplina di reti generali non è mutamento di tipo storico di produzione: l’azienda resta azienda, il lavoratore resta un salariato, più e non meno astretto nella autocrazia degli automi di fabbrica. La normativa generale da cui sono uscite le mille e mille odierne leggi speciali, non è una rivoluzione sociale: inutile per il lettore immerso nella vita moderna estendere il confronto dall’energia motrice per le officine e stabilimenti che fabbricano manufatti, alle mille altre reti di comunicazioni, trasporti, servizi di ogni specie.
Anche l’antichità amministrava motori non autonomi. Autonomo era indubbiamente l’animale domestico, e tanto più potente l’azienda o il podere quanti più cavalli o buoi possedeva. Autonomo era il motore a vento, ma invece dipendente dal capriccio della natura.
Non autonomo, almeno sul lungo percorso di uno stesso corso d’acqua-fiume o «canale industriale» era il motore ad acqua. Ed ecco leggi di antichissimi Stati dare una precisa disciplina affinché nessuno modificasse il dispositivo dei «salti» per consumare più energia idraulica della macina, poniamo sita a monte o a valle. Una sentenza 1810 di una commissione liquidatrice dei privilegi sociali in Calabria dice tra l’altro: «Sia libero ad ognuno il costruir delle macchine idrauliche, pur che non si rechi con ciò danno alcuno alle macchine già esistenti».
Regime liberalissimo: quello di Gioacchino Murat. Immaginate un moderno regime che sia tanto liberale da dire: sia libero ad ognuno il costruir delle macchine elettriche, e attaccarle al primo filo che trova!
In tutti i tempi dunque il pubblico potere ha dovuto regolare e coordinare le attività produttive e le energie, tanto più in quanto era tecnicamente inevitabile la loro dipendenza da una stessa rete, da uno stesso flusso materiale di fonti di energia: e vi è parallelo completo tra il flusso di acqua in carica e quello degli elettroni dal conduttore a dato potenziale.
Ed allora, dimenticando per un momento lo svolgimento degli episodi storici peculiari e i nomi dei condottieri, domandiamoci come farebbe un organismo sociale e di potere che dovesse industrializzare un paese finora arretrato. Naturalmente esso non si aspetterebbe di ripercorrere una lenta via dalla corporazione senza lavoro in comune, alla manifattura senza macchine utensili, alla fabbrica con macchine utensili ma senza motori a vapore, alla grande industria colla sua centrale termica, ma passerebbe in modo immediato allo impianto di centrali elettriche, e fin che possibile idroelettriche, usando i mezzi moderni della scienza applicata per captare acque e creare salti, per distribuire poi date quote, stabilmente fissate in un piano di progetto, alle singole officine che dovrebbero produrre manufatti per il consumo.
La stessa ragione mercantile della concorrenza sul mercato mondiale nello acquisto di quanto è indispensabile a simili impianti, istraderebbe in quel modo i supposti poteri, da poi che ogni altra via sarebbe più costosa e implicherebbe maggiori erogazioni ad economie «estere».
Le pretese differenze tra il capitalismo russo e quello che si sviluppò, poniamo in Inghilterra, Francia, Germania, America, non consistono dunque e non significano un passo verso una diversa forma sociale che sfugga al sistema dispotico di fabbrica e alla divisione sociale del lavoro ed alla frenetica intensità del lavoro, ma nel più rapido e diretto arrivare a questo stesso sistema.
La storia sta a ricordarci che il 22-29 dicembre 1921 all’ottavo congresso dei Soviet si pongono le basi della industrializzazione pianificata, adottando il programma della elettrificazione di cui è noto come Lenin fosse un formidabile propugnatore.
Pensiero e storia
Nonostante la disposizione da parte dell’uomo dei nuovi possenti mezzi forniti dal dominio della energia elettrica, la legge sociale del trapasso da uno all’altro dei tipi di produzione non è stata spezzata. Autonomo o pianificato dal centro, a vapore o elettrificato, l’ingranaggio produttivo in costruzione in U.R.S.S è capitalistico.
Possono i trovati di scienza pura ed applicata usciti dalla mente umana cambiare e formare il corso storico ? Ci potremmo chiedere se la forma interatomica dell’energia, dato che in un pugno di materia oggi inerte è racchiusa più energia a milioni di cavalli e di kilowatt che nel corso di un fiume solenne, consenta di tornare alle aziende locali autonome, ad un’economia «liberale», ad un’analoga ideologia umana. Così non può essere, e del resto i mezzi per scatenare una simile eruzione di energia, spezzando i primi nuclei, consistono in energia di fonte meccanico-elettrica a tali potenziali, mille volte superiori a quelli del motore industriale che schiavizza braccia ed anime umane, che nessuna società di capitalisti, ma solo lo Stato politico, si è posto al controllo della impresa.
Dal modesto cavallo, prima bestia e poi HP, che azionava la filatrice rotante, ai milioni di volts del «ciclotrone», enorme è il cammino. Ma già Marx, nella trattazione che abbiamo studiata, ricorda che Cartesio e Bacone, per i quali gli animali da lavoro erano «macchine», e che erano ideologici precursori del capitalismo ritenevano che «un cambiamento nel modo di pensare porterebbe ad un cambiamento nel modo di produrre e alla dominazione pratica dell’uomo sulla natura». Cartesio, nei «Discours sur la méthode», fa il vaticinio che «invece di una filosofia speculativa quale si insegna nelle scuole se ne possa trovare una pratica, colla quale conoscendo la forza e le azioni del fuoco, dell’aria, dell’acqua, degli astri… sia dato valersene chiaramente quanto negli attuali mestieri… contribuendo al perfezionamento della vita umana».
Da Marx, noi poniamo una simile realizzazione al termine della difficile corsa storica, ma non riteniamo che la forza creatrice del pensiero generi forze di produzione nuove, bensì lo svolgimento e il contrasto dei processi sociali si rifletta nelle conquiste del pensiero.
Inutile dunque, con la volontà il sogno o l’illusione, o le cento risorse di deformazioni del pensiero e dell’opinione, cambiare nome al fatto ed al processo inesorabile e pretendere che sfruttando la sola «intelligenza meccanica» del moderno capitalismo, allievo cartesiano obbediente e superante il maestro, si riesca a identificare un sistema di compressione capitalista del lavoro e dell’uomo, con il perfezionamento della vita: al quale – nell’attuale svolto storico – non basta il lavoro dello spirito, ma occorre un’altra guerra sociale, condotta dalla forza materiale di uomini contro uomini, classi contro classi.
