The Party meeting in Genoa

14th-16th, May 1999.

The latest Party general reunion was held in the pleasant surroundings of the Genoa section’s office between the 14th to 16th May. Representatives from all sections were present, whilst those absent informed us what had prevented them from attending, some for reasons of health.

The necessary time was set aside to check the ongoing events of the war in Kosovo against our predictions; which everyone agreed reject the optimism of the old pacifist, opportunist, and bourgeois hypotheses. We discussed the studies which need to be prioritised, and also publications and propaganda in the various countries where we maintain a presence. In particular we discussed our intervention in various anti-war demonstrations called by workers and trade-union oppositions; where only the perspective of the party can bring a correct vision of the situation, and inculcate a knowledge of the one and only correct class response. We decided on a series of public meetings and publications to address this subject.

We went on to review the results of various study groups within the party concerned respectively with: economic themes; the recent and past history of our communist movement; the question of workers’ struggles and organisations, past and present; the theory of knowledge and modern progress in physics; the agrarian question; the class struggles in Mexico and Algeria and China, and the marxist interpretation of the history of the Balkan peoples. A plan of publications, translations and reprintings was decided upon and jobs were assigned drafting texts for publication.

A report on the organisation’s financial situation was presented and discussed.

On Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, with most comrades having arrived, we moved on to listening to the reports. We will give just a brief account of them here, although they can be read in their entirety in our theoretical publication Comunismo.
 

Course of the economic crisis

The task of ordering and commenting on economic statistics was the subject of this 1st report.
 Growth in capital production continues to gradually decline. There have been no significant indications that there will be one of those temporary reversals which have put a break on this tendency over the last 25 years; destined one day to bring about the profound crisis of low prices and violent deflation which will precede war.

This overall depressed state of the global economy is not altered by the fact that there are signs of resistance to the crisis in some countries:

1. in the United states, a slowing up of the previously very steep decline in industrial production, after long expansion and growth
2. signs of recovery in Russia after a long crisis of capital
3. the halting of contraction, or even expansion, in some of the Asiatic countries hit by the crisis in 1997,
4. A gradualness in the slowing up of the strong growth in China.

Interpreted by the bourgeoisie as a sign of recovery, the recent growth, after a long drop in the prices of oil, metals, and agricultural and mineral production, is for now only the immediate and temporary effect of agreed cuts in production and suspensions or cessations of mining and agricultural activity – including the abandonment of the use of marginal land prompted by falling consumption – that may lead to lower market regulated prices of production.

Other economic data, apart from the key figures for industrial production, indicate that the movement towards deflation is continuing; a drastic slackening of growth in world trade generalised to all areas, and a large drop in its physical volume, with an even larger drop in its current monetary value (difficulties converting commodities into cash) and the new wave of protectionist struggles is connected to this drop in trade. The following observations were made:

1. prices in decline (lower costs of production, lower wholesale and export prices)
2. a large worldwide drop in prices of raw materials, and particularly a drop in the prices of foodstuffs (overproduction and still millions starve)
3. a much reduced – even negative – inflation on prices of consumer goods in the big industrialisms and, surprisingly, this has also occurred just as rapidly in countries where currencies have been heavily devalued in the recent crises.

This data also highlights a phase of chronic over-production, saturation of the world market, and the senseless over accumulation of fixed capital in installations condemned to overproduce in order to continue to expand in an infernal merry-go-round powered by workers’ suffering.

The main feature of the present crises has been an acceleration of the process of decline which followed the 30 years of growth following the 2nd World War. This first became apparent at the end of the eighties in Japan and Russia, followed by the American and European recessions at the beginning of the nineties which came and went. But the underlying crisis has persisted, and bit by bit it has drawn in other areas of the world without releasing its grip on the zones already affected; now Europe is being drawn in and the crisis is knocking at the door of the world centre of capital, the United States.

For more than 40 years the party, guided by statistical data, has used historical facts to confirm its theses on the development and eventual collapse of capitalist society. The more overproduction – leading to a deflation crisis – there is, the more capital finds it necessary to destroy in order to accumulate further profit; and the more capital needs to destroy, the more the dominant class resorts to pulling the wool over the eyes of the proletariat with patriotic tub-thumping, and forms the imperialist fronts on which to line up a divided proletariat and resolve the crisis with the butchery of another imperialist war.

The 2nd part of the report considered some of the elements usually considered as factors in the recent relatively vigorous growth in the U.S.A.
 

The International Workers Association

The report on the 1st International, a continuation from previous reports, considered the 1870-72 period, i.e. the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune. Avoiding a historicist approach, the emphasis was on drawing out the lessons to be learned by the proletariat from these events.

For us marxists, the 1870-71 war is the last war in Western Europe which can be considered progressive, involving as it did the bourgeoisie’s last push against the remnants of feudal and aristocratic power.

In the First Address on the War, Marx was emphatic that the German proletariat should fight only for as long as the war for Prussia remained defensive, and should oppose Bismarck from the moment he embarked on an invasion of France. It was a war in which Germany completed the unification it had begun in 1859. This particular outcome of the bourgeois revolution however was not carried out by the historically backward German bourgeoisie itself, but from above by Bismarck, who even if personally a representative of the aristocracy had been constrained by great historical forces to undertake the bourgeoisification of Germany.

The proletariat however could not remain indifferent to the outcome of the conflict considering that if France had won there would have been an entrenchment of Bonapartism and Germany wouldn’t have recovered for a long time. A German victory, on the other hand would have destroyed Bonapartism in France allowing greater freedom of movement to the French Workers and, moreover, it would have united the German proletariat, which was on the point of becoming one of the largest in Europe.

At the time of the battle of Sedan at the beginning of September, and Bismarck’s counter-offensive against Paris, the International called for opposition to the bourgeois war.

At Sedan, Louis Napoleon was taken prisoner and Paris surrounded by the Prussians. Meanwhile in Paris and other cities insurrections broke out. The French bourgeoisie however managed to confuse the proletariat by invoking the notion of national defence, and convincing the revolutionaries that they should support the newly formed republic.

The Prussians would lay siege to Paris for 131 days without daring to enter Red Paris. As for the Thiers government, no sorties were attempted against the Prussians: they inspired considerably less fear than the armed proletariat.

The Paris Commune of 1871 saw the proletariat finally take power, force the Republican government to take to flight and finally, propelled by events, to heroically attempt to consolidate its own communist power.

Marx’s analysis in The Civil War in France, and past party studies, were used to assess the limitations of that power and define the reasons for its defeat.

Above all the Commune was clearly too lenient on the defeated bourgeois class. Once the bourgeoisie had realised this, it would move onto the counter-offensive with the aim of taking back power – with the help of the Prussian “enemy”. From a military point of view, the proletarian government didn’t move beyond a purely defensive position.

We saw however that the merits of this proletarian experiment were enormous despite the fact the revolutionary government was divided between Blanquists and Proudhonists, or rather non-marxist revolutionaries: what the Commune achieved in those three short months was a move towards the Dictatorship of the Proletariat predicted by Marx.

Members of the government received a salary equivalent to a worker’s wage and moreover their position was revocable at any moment. Conscription was abolished and replaced with the armed people. The Church, separated from the State, had its property expropriated. Factories had to reopen as centres of associated production without employers. The middle classes had their debts written off and were let off the previous three months rent. These are some examples of the Commune’s initiatives.

As is well known, the Commune was cut short by extremely harsh Franco-Prussian repression, with mass bombardments and bloody battles fought to the bitter end against those who refused to surrender. All the bourgeoisie’s pretensions of civilisation were laid bare as a sham. To paraphrase a comment Marx made at the time: What a glorious civilisation it is whose main problem is arranging how to get rid of the piles of dead bodies it leaves on the battlefield.

In conclusion, it was pointed out that even if the International, from abroad, hadn’t managed to bring its influence to bear directly, in fact the Commune was the fruit of seven years of its presence amongst the Parisian proletariat, both in terms of practical struggles and the propagandising of its programme of emancipation. The bourgeoisie of the time knew this; to the extent that, in the months which followed the Commune, the governments of Europe made a concerted effort to repress the International and destroy every genuinely proletarian organisation. Karl Marx, the dreaded Red Terror Doctor, was even accused of having organised the Commune himself, personally plotting the insurrection behind the scenes. Though the fact remains that his stirring speeches, printed in several languages, were distributed amongst the European proletariat.
 

Origins of the trade-unions in Italy

The birth of the General Confederation of Labour (CGdL) was the subject examined in this ongoing study.

The general Secretariat of the revolutionary syndicalist organisation Resistenza, formed in 1902 with the aim of unifying the activity of the Federation of the Chambers of Labour (autonomous) and the craft federations (led by reformists) operated in a co-ordinating rather than a leadership role. In 1906, the craft federations therefore decided to form a national confederation. 500 delegates, representing 700 craft unions with an overall membership of 200,000 members, would attend the inaugural conference. The vote on the agenda saw the revolutionary syndicalists heavily outnumbered by the reformists, and the former responded by abandoning the conference without however creating their own organisation.

The CGdL, its leadership practising blatant class collaborationism, wanted to strengthen the Federations rather than the territorially based Chambers of Labour.

Their concept of the unions, rubber-stamped by the 7th Congress of the 2nd International, saw the leadership of the proletariat split into a union/party diarchy, with the former coordinating economic strikes and the latter the political movement. The union was supposed to approve strike initiatives promoted by the party. This symmetrical approach stands in stark contrast to our “transmission belt ” view of the relationship between party and unions.

The CGdL would remain firmly under the influence of reformists of an evolutionist and class coalitionist stamp.
 

The War in the Balkans

With the fall of the Berlin Wall the period of post-war reconstruction came to an end, and preparation for the 3rd world war began. In this perspective, the bourgeoisie must start lining up the proletariat on opposed fronts. The counter-revolutionary interest favours getting the proletariat lined up on a war front before the crisis prompts it to line itself up on a class front.

In a recessionary crisis, capitalism needs a third world war: a war which will have as its goals the destruction of capital and commodities, including labour power. It is only a secondary aim of the respective war fronts to emerge victor from the war with the largest share of the booty – mainly in the form of post-war reconstruction contracts.

Since the main aim of the war isn’t victory of one or other of the fronts, but the destruction of productive forces, the opposed fronts must be of comparable strength. That is one of the reasons the Balkan War represented a step towards the 3rd World War: it served to put different alliances to the test, to create new ones and, in short, to establish the broad outlines of the coalitions likely to emerge in the next war.

The conduct of the military operations in the Balkans have demonstrated an anti-proletarian understanding amongst the bourgeoisie: the bombardments have hit the workers’ quarters and factories, and driven the Serbian workers to rally around the nationalist banners and the Kosovan workers to seek refuge in camps held under tight police control; today as objects of barter, tomorrow as cannon fodder.

Without going into premature geopolitical analyses of the situation, it is certain that whilst the USA would tend, by means of a land attack extended to the whole of Serbia, to increase the level of attacks, a fragile accord with Serbia would leave open the prospect of a partition of Kosovo, and leave military and social tensions high in a situation of encroaching war. The latter would indicate that the United States intends to hinder the process of European unification, postponing the war whilst preparing the second front.

In the Balkan region, “reconstruction” and the revival of “civil” production will not be possible until after the 3rd World War.
 

Work and Knowledge

The “core” of Das Kapital, and of historical materialism in general, lies in the analysis and overall consideration of Value/labour. What would it have served to proclaim Liberty, Equality, Fraternity – the battle cry of liberalism – without having understood the function and condition of workers’ labour? Absolutely nothing!

But why have so many bourgeois theoreticians conceded to Marx the merit of having provided the social sciences with a precious analytical method, but rejected the natural consequences of this method? It is simple: because they cannot accept that Marx went beyond restricting himself to the study, and became instead a prophet of the proletarian revolution. These gentlemen forget, incidentally, that the literal meaning of the word “prophet” signifies not somebody “who makes predictions” or worse, “horoscopes”, but “one who keeps his feet on the edge of the abyss”, and proclaims the truth!

According to them Marx, in his scientific work par excellence, Das Kapital, strayed off into polemical broadsides not appropriate in a scientific work: this is because “science” to them means just abstract study, with no practical consequences.

On the other hand, Dialectical materialism’s view is that there have never been any painless and purely cognitive theories: even knowledge about sexual reproduction can only be practical and carnal, under pain of the impossibility of being productive without it, determining a permanent cognitive outcome for individuals and the human species. But “Platonism”, understood as a dualism between ideas and the material world, is very persistent, even though in fact such a view was never really supported by Plato himself.

What we want to emphasise then is that the essence of real wealth is proletarian labour which, as capital, creates a dualistic social system: a system which nevertheless postulates its own surpassing and transformation into communist society.