The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Russia 

Viaticum for readers

A clear understanding of the present work entails (almost necessarily) knowledge of the «Dialogue with Stalin», printed in 1953 by the same movement, from which the present publication derives.

In the pages with which this paper opens, enough is said about the chronological connection and the very special nature of the «debate» that follows here.

With the 1953 preface to the «Dialogue with Stalin» we gave clear reasons for three stages of that ancient and profound contrast.

In the first period, which lasted from 1918 to 1926, it can be said that it was a divergence of tactics within a movement that tended towards the same common end, the Third Communist International, founded on the ruins of the Second that had fallen into social-patriotic opportunism, and in the wake of the Russian Revolution of October 1917. The left wing of Italian socialism, from which we derive, struggled in the war and post-war period from 1914 to break with every democratic and pacifist version of socialism, and crowned its struggle with the foundation in Livorno in January 1921 of the Communist Party of Italy. Within the international movement, this current argued theses that differed from those of the Communist International and Lenin himself, with regard to parliamentary tactics and the tactics aimed at eradicating opportunist workers’ parties, denying that the methods then known as the united front, and worse, workers’ government, were valid for this.

This baggage of contributions, which contained an explicit denunciation of the dangers of degeneration, had as stages the Moscow congresses from 1920 to 1926 and Italian party congresses in Rome in 1922 and Lyon in 1926.

In the second period, after 1926, the disagreement unfolded to the point of organisational and political separation, in which the left-wing position was everywhere fiercely beaten, while its predictions of involution of the ruling majority in Russia Europe and Italy were severely confirmed. In Russia the false theory of the construction of Russian socialist society without and outside the international proletarian revolution won the day, and the opposition that remained faithful to the Bolshevik and Lenin traditions on this and other points succumbed, vilified and exterminated. In Europe, the postponement of the revolutionary wave and the insolent consolidation of capitalism had as its defeatist and cowardly response the communists’ move into the ranks of blocs with non-proletarian parties and classes, with the aim not of overthrowing the bourgeoisie but of saving bourgeois liberal democracy.

In the third period, with the Second World War, it became clear that the dissension had widened to an unbridgeable gulf of doctrines and principles, with the total disavowal by the Kremlin and its foreign aggregations of revolutionary Marxism, in the cornerstones defended and claimed after the First War by those who fought like Lenin and with Lenin. Foreign parties were thrown into social-national collaboration, in the first phase in Germany, in the second phase in France, England and America. Lenin’s directions to develop defeatism within each belligerent imperialist country and the overthrow of the military and civil power of the capitalists resulted in a league with the states that were belligerently allied with Moscow, while against the states that were enemies of Moscow they fought not to destroy the bourgeoisie, but to restore its liberal forms, killed in theory by Marx and Lenin, crushed forever materially within Russia, both revolutionary and imperial.

This period marked the organisational and theoretical liquidation of the October and of Lenin’s International: the corollaries of the total transition to counter-revolution were seen. In small numbers, but with a mighty baggage of historical and doctrinal continuity, we proclaimed, out of the clamour that surrounded in a false intoxication of crowds the followers of what was then called on all sides Stalinism, that we had for many years been facing no longer a lost dissident from himself of yesterday and from us Marxists of all time, but an openly sworn mortal enemy of the working class and its historic path to communism. And at the same time the proof of the capitalist nature of the economic society established in Russia and the central infamy of boasting of it in the world as a socialist society was becoming clear; in which, of so many and such clamorous betrayals we recognise the supreme summit, the masterpiece of counter-revolutionary infamy.

• • •

In «Dialogue with Stalin» we set out to chart the future «times» of this historical debate – which we call such, however much one of the contending parties lacks illustrious credentials – and foresaw the future confession in which two links will be declared broken: between the Russian production structure and socialism; between the politics of the Russian state and that of the class struggle of workers in all states against the world capitalist form.

After three years, the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, if it did not give us the end of this historic future stage, nevertheless represented a huge leap, and perhaps closer than we expected. Since, however, the scandalous admissions, which make a world-wide clamour for detachment from the dead Stalin, are still embedded in the pretence of speaking the language of Marx and Lenin, the Dialogue with the contradictor-phantom must continue: the total Confession, which will come one day, we do not know if in another three years only, from the Kremlin, will reduce it to their monologue. In vain they had hoped so much with the Confessions they wrested from torturing revolutionaries. The Confessors will confess.

The stance we take today, in the face of the exaggerated to the point of obscenity of the idol of three years ago, and which is anything but one of applause for the iconoclasts, is consistent with what we established then, well foreseeing that on the course of the terrifying sinking the sneering cry of the bourgeois world would be raised against the grandiose conceptions of our revolutionary doctrine. We wrote the following:
«The methods of repression, of crushing, which Stalinism applies to those who resist it on all sides, finding ample explanation in all the criticism now recalled of its development, must not give any foothold to any kind of condemnation, which would even remotely arouse repentance with respect to our classical theses on Violence, Dictatorship and Terror as historical weapons of proclaimed use: repentance that remotely is the first step towards the hypocritical propaganda of the currents of the «free world» and their lying claims of tolerance and sacred respect for the human person. Marxists, unable to be protagonists in history today, can wish for nothing better than the political, social and wartime catastrophe of American lordship over the capitalist world. We therefore have nothing to do with the call for more liberal or democratic methods, flaunted by ultra-equivocal political groups, and proclaimed by states that in reality had the most ferocious origins, such as Tito’s».

Already from these clear words, as from our entire construction, which is all the more compact and cannot be confused with any other, the less it is recited in front of sound and television chambers by farcical figures, it became clear then what reception the pitiful contortions of the 20th congress and the comedy of the abjuration from Stalin, shown as a return to the classics of our great School, should have on our part; whereas it is a stage in the backward march towards the most fallacious superstitions of bourgeois ideology, a cowardly genuflection to the superpowers of the contemporary capitalist lupanare.

• • •

We have prefixed the short epigraph on the cover, which, together with this glimpse of our historical origin, saves our small group from undesirable confusion.

Let us add another discriminating factor. It is certain that each step of the aforementioned sinking of the Kremlin’s men into the quicksand of bourgeois counterrevolution brings closer the hard, bitter goal of the reconstitution of the revolutionary party, to which we devote everything of our possibilities, less than a bolder impatience.

When the hour will be marked by history, the formation of the class organ will not take place in a laughable constituency of little groups and cenacles that said and say they were anti-Stalinist or that today say they are «anti-20th Congress».

The Party, killed drop by drop by thirty years of adverse storm, does not recompose itself like the cocktails of bourgeois doping. Such a result, such a supreme event, can only be placed at the end of an unbroken single line, not marked by the thought of one man or a group of men, present «in the square», but by the coherent history of a series of generations.

Above all, it must not arise from nostalgic illusions of success, not founded on the unshakeable doctrinal certainty of the revolutionary course, which we have possessed for centuries, but on the low subjective exploitation of the fumbling, of the wavering of others; which is a miserable, stupid, illusory path to an immense, historical result. 

Day one

Recalling cornerstones

The recent discussions of the communist congress of the Soviet Union, which have been echoed in every field, have a profound historical significance. The relationship between all these words and the historical background is to be sought in a different way: we are much better prepared for this than the followers – who have been unsettled for not a short time, if at all – and the Western adversaries, who are ardent but armed with very poor polemical and critical means.

We say this today to the few who know the background of our non-noisy, but well-founded, coherent research and presentation. Other events, which will make noise in a much wider circle than ours, will find us welding, even amidst the silence, other links in this solid, if now barely visible, chain. 

With the dates of 1 February, 21 April, 22 May, 28 September 1952, Stalin published a series of not lengthy writings, with which he considered it necessary to intervene in the economic discussion that had arisen within the party in the year 1951, regarding the preparation of the new «Handbook of Political Economy», which had recently been published in the West, and which we hope to learn about before it is done away with¹. The purpose of the writing was to establish which economic laws should be applied to the structure of Russian society today, and to argue that these laws were those of a socialist economy. And, of course, the content was also to recall the laws that apply in the contemporary economy of international capitalism, comparing them with the way Marxist economics has formulated them for a century.

The «Dialogue with Stalin», published by our movement in a small volume in 1953, argued that this construction, while misrepresenting the reality of the progress of economic fact, both in Russia and in the West, contains a number of serious errors of doctrine; it is irreconcilable with the fundamentals of Marxist doctrine. There were collected «Threads of Time” given in this periodical in n. 1 of 10-24 October 1952 and in the following nos. 2, 3, 4, with supplementary extracts in nos. 2 and 3 of 1953.

It was at this very time, from 5-15 October 1952, that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held its 19th Congress, at which, as is well remembered, Stalin did not so much dominate as leader, as he was considered by all and sundry to be the originator of the party’s entire historical, economic, political and philosophical theory, officially referred to as the «doctrine of Lenin and Stalin».

This position remained unchallenged in the Russian party (and brethren) until 5 March 1953, on which day Stalin died. And from that day to the present (14 February 1956).

In the discussion on Russia in the pages of «Programma Comunista» from November 1954² we have put the materials of our critical view developed over years and decades in an organic order. According to this, the ‘Stalinist’ positions in historiography, economics, politics and even philosophy are false and anti-Marxist.

Of all this, may those who follow us today, friend or foe, consider above all the discussion of Marxist economics in that «Dialogue», and the recent exposition of the revolutionary history of Russia, of the great struggles of 1917 and the following glorious years, of the historical construction of the Bolsheviks and Lenin on the development of the Russian social structure, and of the Russian and world revolution; especially insofar as they counter the so-called theory of the construction of socialism in one country, the persecutory, infamous, and defeatist deeds of its wretched proponents from thirty years to the present.

From the 14th to the 25th of this February 1956, the 20th Stalin party congress took place: its language is a thousand miles away from ours, but it is no longer that of the 19th congress and the living Stalin: it is always about the immortal Lenin, no longer about an immortal Stalin. 

No one for Marxism is immortal – no one is dead. Life dialogues with all those it calls vulgar oratory. All will respond! With them the living, and those who will come after. 

From the East an ideological earthquake 

From various rumours it appears that the immense propaganda society constituted by the party and government in Moscow, which for thirty years has filled the earth’s surface with a formidable literature forged on a constant mould, even if it is careful from time to time to run an implacable Index that withdraws and burns straggling issues – and let it not be said to the detriment of the Roman Index behind which it stands, indelibly nailed on the plates on top of the auto-da-fé poles, a mighty consistency to bimillenary doctrine – it turns out, then, that this gigantic society suddenly puts everything under revision, and launches the announcement of new texts on all disciplines, to replace the ancients. Nothing is passed over in silence: history and economics, philosophy and politics, art and biology, technology and ethnology…

Has this congress of unbelievable abjuration highly founded the pedestal of a new faith, on whose cornerstones the new stelae of a different construction can be expected to be erected, and can anything be expected to arise tomorrow from that aggregate of historical forces? The materials of the congress, which came from all sources, presented in different lights by all the «churches», give us enough to answer resoundingly and irrevocably that no. 

Has this confession of dreadful and festering heresy in the slightest, kneeling under the ashes of an unbelievable Canossa, meant a return to the long-failed and prostituted orthodox positions, a washing away of bloody guilt, and a renewed baptism into salvation? Never. These figures of generous legends, themselves forged from subconsciousness of ancient historical addresses, hold no key for us today; only a new phase of the incurable disease is to be announced, a further step towards the bottom of the abyss of unredeemable damnation. The shouting from all angles, in reciting the most clumsy and inept mea culpa of Stalinist blindness, a return to the great sources of Marxism and Leninism, traditions of the purest historical blood boasted today by unrecognisable bastards, is but one more blasphemy in the unworthy series, a new – but by God a hundred times more impotent than the previous ones – insult to the height of the revolutionary faith of the world Proletariat. The blasphemy, the insult, worthily crowns a third of a century of obscene practices celebrating a secular black coven of priests of the phallus, smeared with lies and fraternal blood, with indelible stains for the history of the centuries. 

This ideological earthquake, which shows and prepares only ruins, leaving to other forces the raising of new structures, and with quite different materials, must be explained by the shaking of the social undercurrents, not only of Russia but of the entire world. It is vain to speak of it as a new fabrication of other propaganda scenes, for the same purposes of the same monstrous but still very strong power, as bourgeois imbecility does on all sides; Even more vain will it be, after drawing breath (in the ranks of the henchmen to whom the crumbs of the orgy banquets of the Bonzean sanhedrin incredibly surviving his exploits have been falling for years) to dare to still waffle on as a prelude to a better adjusted firing of ranks defending the classes sacrificed by the accursed present society. The sense of class of what is unfolding is quite another; in the not too distant future it will be evident, and we will premise it on further examination. 

The «new» formula of the alliance in the capitalist world between the class of wage-labour and the classes of minimal and petty wealth does not historically «exit», as a third way, from the antithesis – which we gave at the end of our first part of the Russian treatise and which our editors placed in front of the first announcement of the Moscow logorrhoea – between dictatorship of capital and dictatorship of the proletariat. It «enters» the counter-revolutionary horn of the insoluble antithesis, and passes into the service of the forces of big world capital. Stalinism dies, but is reborn under the unmasked appearance of what for us is not idiotic cause for scandal and horror, but a happy herald of revolutionary dissolution: world totalitarianism, the philistically deprecated «fascism».

The disgraced middle classes of this modern pestilential society, as we have seen so many times, only open up to the right, and those who grope and entice them are but a maintainer of the counter-revolution. 

This is what they said in Moscow, without knowing it or wanting it; and not by wielding with diabolical resources the rudder that their Western compatriots attribute to the Russians to hold firmly in their hands.

«Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past».

«The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language».

An extreme leftist of the congress, Anastas Mikoyan; you said that one must now search not in the current edition of newspapers, but in the archives. The words quoted above opened a «little work» – according to the author, a poor emigrant to London – that reached the German magazine «Die Revolution» published in New York in February 1852 by a loyal member of our school: Joseph Weydemeyer: a study written in one go in the same days as the events. This is the debut of «Eighteenth Brumaire», by Karl Marx. 

Lacerated historiography

A few times in our study we have highlighted historical falsifications, the reading of which, and after so many years of bitter experience, makes one’s eyes glaze over, and not only for those who lived through those events at close quarters. We have not done this with much effort: our naivety has not wavered enough in so many decades under the incredible series of desecrating jabs vibrated at the sacred history of the Revolution and its Party, and we have never been able to come to terms with the fact that masses of working-class children now swear by that Himalayan size shit.

Such confidence from so few was just. The materials of that mountain ruin at the hands of those who raised the heap: but what a foul stench!

The «Short Course» of the History of the Bolshevik Communist Party, on which an entire Russian generation was educated, as on the basic text, is in Khrushchev’s report disqualified.

The moderate secretary, although not one of the authors of the text, merely said (according to Unità) that the current C.C. wanted to improve the ideological work by disseminating the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin (black silence on those of Stalin!), and then that «for the last seventeen years our propaganda has been based mainly on the «Short Course», but that «it is necessary to publish a popular Marxist textbook (again!) of the Party’s history», another on the «principles of Marxist-Leninist doctrine», and a «popular exposition (don’t rely so much on the choice between popular and Marxist) of the fundamentals of Marxist philosophy». 

More resolute was Mikoyan, the full text of whose speech will not be given by Unità. In the version of this, the speaker only accused the Short Course of ignoring the last twenty years of history. And how will these twenty years be written with a materialist method? How will the supreme disgrace of 1939 be recounted, the imperial agreement first with Nazi Germany, then with the plutocratic democracies execrated today, the «sale bisogne» of the foreign parties that first became Hitler’s servants and defeatists (for Lenin’s theory!) only of the imperialisms of Paris, London, etc.; and, at a stroke, blatant partisans of the anti-German war for democracy, to the point of making one regret the chauvinists of 1914, bloodily flayed by Vladimir’s inexorable blade? And will one hypocritically charge the only surprising scapegoat, Djugasvili, with the attempted (and not even successful) coup of cutting off the hocks of the Allies of America in 1945, the «double blow» boldly announced in the report to the 18th Congress in 1939, now that idiotic diplomatic passerelles are being thrown at them? Is that head being offered for it? Not enough, gentlemen, is a skull.

Mikoyan said much more about the shame of that «history’. In the «Associated Press text is said: «Mikoyan criticised Stalin in several respects: 1) He (Mikoyan) declared that the writings of the former Premier ignored the last two decades; and therefore demanded new teaching texts on communism. 2) He attacked the accusations of treason that Stalin brought many years too late against the erstwhile heroes of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. 3) He declared that Russia’s foreign policy had become active, flexible and calm after Stalin’s death in March 1953». 

As for this point, it certainly does not smack of a return to the Marxist historical method! Our few readers can acknowledge that neither in 1953 nor in the years after 1945 did we ever believe the Russia-America war was close. But the historical reasons for this have not a damn thing to do with Stalin’s death! One does not fight against the personal myth by saying, in reverse, the same nonsense. And we will not stop here on the part, also known to Unità, that demolishes (rightly, but without deducing the clear consequence that annihilates the other conclusions of all these brazen neo-anti-Stalinists) the «Economic Writings».

Bari, the truth passes 

However, let us lift the cover of that Short Course, of limitless falsehood, as if it were a serious thing. «The History was compiled by a commission appointed by the Central Committee of the C.P. (b) of the C.C.C.P. of which Kalinin, Molotov, Voroscilov, Kaganovic, Mikoyan, Zdanov, Beria were members, under the direction of STALIN». All either well dead, or badly dead, or badly alive. And today there is talk of having «rehabilitated» the 32 of the great October Committee, of which, after a few natural deaths, only the great Dead, now debeatified, of 1953 had survived for many years!

It is better to read what the eminent historiographer Pankratova said, who (see, among others, Tempo of 24 February) «highlighted the profound crisis from which Soviet historiography suffered for some thirty years, due to the large number of topics made “taboo” under Stalin». 

She made a long list of events that it was obligatory to keep silent or turn upside down. To rewrite the history of the Civil War (1918-1920) as if Trotsky had ever been war commissioner. Keeping silent in the commemorative book of the Hungarian Commune of 1919, which bloody fell after desperate defence, the name of its great leader Bela Kun. Today an official communiqué rehabilitates this name of an incomparable comrade, a complete Marxist, a true revolutionary hero, who simply and modestly wandered the corridors of the Moscow congresses, among so many pompous schemers of manoeuvres with the social-traitors of Europe, as if the bitter defeat of the magnificent Hungarian party, as superb for theoretical doctrine as for valour on the barricades, were a fault; and only because, when the capitalist beasts were clawing at the throat, at the crucial moment, of the Moscow revolution, he had waited for nothing else to throw everything into the battle, in the great red Danube citadel, raised against the fierce wind of all the bourgeois fuzz of Europe, against the poisonous rage of all the renegades and social-traitors, German and of the Entente, fascists and democrats. He would never have returned to Europe to negotiate, perhaps on the orders of Lenin who loved him so much, with the executioners of renegade socialism: declared an enemy of the people in 1937, we do not know where he was sent to die in Siberia a few years ago; while only because the crime was committed outside Russia do we know the day and place where the axe raised by a still-living scoundrel, who had approached him as a disciple, sank into the skull of the red leader of Victory, Leon Trotsky. He can now leave jail more peacefully: he has no more mysteries to reveal. 

Let us follow some of Professor Pankratova’s references. Order not to make known in Russia Lenin’s historical correspondence with Trotsky, owned by Harvard University. Order to remove from libraries and museums all documents relating to the prominent role in the Revolution of those executed in the great «purges». Order to the historiographers Chliapnikov, Jaroslawsky and Popokov in 1931 to make Trotsky appear as a secret imperialist agent in the history of the civil war. She was ordered to play down the Allied Normandy landings in the Second European War, editing a 1946 work of hers. It was with good reason that in 1949 Stalin had himself described in treatises as «the founder of Soviet historiography». 

And finally the most astounding and astonishing thing – there are things that fall below the limit of any possible indignation! In the history texts relating to the October revolution, the fable was put in that an attempt to assassinate Lenin was made by Bucharin! The straightforward, simple, smiling, virginal Bucharin, whose moistened blue eyes we saw so many times flashing with enthusiasm and joy, when the master, whom he idolised as a child, dealt with the issues of the revolution at the Moscow congresses, and the most splendid mutual trust overcame the most ardent contradictors! How far from the despicable unanimity of a servant collegiate! 

Pankratova stated that the reaction of historiographers has largely contributed to the dropping of these vile «taboos». 

On rare occasions, science and courage go hand in hand.

Communists, it is written in the «Manifesto», «disdain to conceal their views and aims». It is not an ethical imperative for Marxists to defend the truth. But it is physically the only oxygen of the Revolution. 

Myth and the cult the person

One cannot help but rejoice at the blows delivered against what is the true counter-revolutionary plague of the contemporary world, deadly both insofar as it is a matter of bringing up the role (pass the ugly word for the silly thing) of the Person of Exception, the following and the gratitude one should owe it – and when one is ideologically raving and debauched about the generic human person, never so much hailed and bowed down as in an age of history that crushes it in masses like dust in a mortar. 

But what value is to be placed on the proclamations of Khrushchev, and Mikoyan, and Molotov, and Bulganin, and almost everyone! Falling cold, said as new and extraordinary things, are the obvious admissions that the cult of personality is contrary to the spirit of Marx and Lenin. So much for the spirit! – Whoever had manifested such a disgusting superstition to such men, and worse still if directed to themselves, would not have escaped from their clutches without leaving burning shreds of his reptilian skin.

For decades this filthy genie has been stuffing the skulls with the story of the exploits of the Great, the High, the Big, be they geniuses of good or evil. The kaleidoscopic modern capitalist society would occasionally let itself be set up by a clique of three or four more or less disabled illustrious men; the rakish Franklin Delano, the paranoid Winston, the now drained maniac of greatness and blood Josif. And, in reverse, until yesterday millions of men were thrown and immolated to the success of burning the carcass of the sadistic Adolf; of hanging the good miles gloriosus Benito by his feet. Is this Marxism, o fools sick of the cult of fools?

And is it so easy for these little idols hurtle down such bulky, suffumigated altars? Wretches, hear. 

After thirty-three years Karl Marx reprinted that little work we have already mentioned – after the Paris Commune, which had ordered the column in the Place Vendôme on which the bronze statue of the First Napoleon stood to be pulled down; and after the Third and Small had fallen. And he was able to write: «The prediction, with which I concluded, has already come true: if the imperial mantle falls on Louis Bonaparte’s humerus, this means that the bronze statue of Napoleon is about to be precipitated from the top of the Vendôme column». 

We shall therefore see the great statue of Djugasvili fall from the so fiercely contested Stalingrad stands. Perhaps it will be a slight advantage – if it is true that the great mass gathering at the close of the congress was cancelled so as not to give the elected leaders a taste of flattery – not to hear and read any more of the trivial scenes in which servile delegations of workers bear gifts of homage to a few fools entwined under a silly row of heads on a red background. 

But much higher still lies Marxism, than this stinking game about big names, which dulls, blinds and alcoholises the avant-garde class. 

In that same preface, Marx wrote these words about the fashion, which he indignantly saw coming, of Caesarism. 

«Lastly, I hope that my work will contribute toward eliminating the school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany, of so-called Caesarism (of you, Jerusalem, the parabola speaks!). In this superficial historical analogy the main point is forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants. People forget Sismondi’s significant saying: the Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society (we are tempted to dare to add: above all in its middle classes) lives at the expense of the proletariat». 

Are these ridiculous gentlemen who waffle, even after Stalin has been liquidated, about a new Marxism that they create every morning, so much as to attribute to this language a meaning, which they would not fail to say is trivially popular? We shall see, quoting them, that never! 

This is not the historical epoch, Marx teaches, of individual leadership of society, of the great civil struggles within it. And in other equivalent words: the revolution of the working class cannot be directed by Eminent figures. 

Many times we have used the term romanticism to designate the condemnation, which weighed on the Russian revolution for its anti-feudal, and in so much bourgeois «face», to follow the lines of the Great Western Revolutions. Just as these took from classical antiquity the legal doctrine (forgetting the difference, that the Latin jus played among the free only and left the mass of slaves, who all supported, outside its guarantees, i.e. the basic difference, as above, of Marx and Sismondi), so they took from it politically as much as literally (qui nous delivrera des Grecs et des Romains?) the rigid scheme of the Republic yielding to imperial Caesarism. 

On the tremendous problems of the Moscow Revolution, which had to be reduced to the truly mighty plot of Lenin’s Marxist construction, the shadows of the Paris Revolution were projected with force of terrible suggestion. It was agitated against the ardent and impetuous, but by no means stained with personalism, Trotsky, the outrage of Bonapartism and the vile historiographic invention of the preparation of a Thermidor, to him, the magnificent theoriser and captain of the most splendid proletarian Terror, and only proletarian. 

But just as the liberal bourgeoisie had foolishly and out of time, and after the sole example of the Great Bonaparte (who may perhaps stand to Robespierre as Julius Caesar stood to Brutus, and Alexander the Great to Leonidas) extinguished its collective revolutionary force in the Caesarism and puppets in which it crystallised in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, stunted abortions of history, so the magnificent Revolution of Russia, which had a formidable phalanx of captains and masters, played out with drunkenness in the name of Stalin, and bloody sacrifices to his greatness, which no one, perhaps not even we, believed to be so transient, its obligatory farce, starred by the Personality. 

Everywhere the bourgeois Revolution has devoured its own children, and nevertheless we never shouted at it to stop, whatever its nation and race was – or will be -. But the Revolution that will finally be proletarian, and only proletarian, if it will certainly cut the dross from itself with iron and fire, will not follow such a path. 

We said that the bourgeoisie of France gave the exception with the great Corsican. But how much even of that individual greatness was not a determination of historical forces? Marx in that text recalls that «Colonel Charras opened the attack against the Napoleonic cult in his book on the war of 1815, and since that time, particularly in recent years, French literature has with the weapons of history, and criticism, and satire, debunked the Napoleonic legend», and other times we quoted the wise Engels on the subject. Today, a young, forty-year-old historiographer of France, Jean Savant, has erected in his no less than fifteen works a theory that debunks the person of Bonaparte and reads in his famous deeds the work of three leading men: the political agitator Barras, the policeman Fouché, the great capitalist Ouvrard. Official science gnaws at its liver, but in frequent stages bows to the power of Marxism.

Let’s close the gap and ask ourselves whether we were in front of a congress of Marxist wreckers of the cult of Personality, or not rather of professional bootlickers, reacting to unemployment by setting up a cooperative of second-rate geniuses.

Incurable scoliosis

The courtly phrases of the 19th Congress have not been forgotten, and it is too recent for friends and foes alike to have done so. The most vehement, most burning of the iconoclasts, the oft-named Mikoyan, has in his personal file notes of this sort: Stalin, the Great Architect of Communism! Here is another explanation for the ongoing magnetic storm: from the Sun they have heard him thundering for Marxism-Leninism that does not want to worship Man!

Silly romanticism, here, mimicking the Great Architect of the Universe: the bourgeois were too philistine to put God to rest, and gave him a salaried post. Communism has no architects! and if were so, that place would have been occupied centuries ago, since the time of Cabet, Campanella, More and even Plato.

The «Associated Press» could not fail to pay the price for the head of our abjuring thurifer: it is worth telling it, although the argument of the authorship of coaxing statements is of little weight to us, precisely because we do without the steadfastness of the person on all sides, and we believe that light can come from the blasphemous as darkness from the orthodox, if only a morsel goes straight through or down the wrong way. 

«At the 19th congress in 1952 Mikoyan declared that Stalin’s work ‘illuminates with his genius both the great, historic road we have travelled and that which leads to an ever more tangible communist future’. At the end of his 1952 speech Mikoyan raised the cry of ‘Glory to the great Stalin!’. That time he also referred to Stalin’s works as a ‘treasure trove of ideas’ and said that in his books ‘Comrade Stalin illuminates our lives with the dazzling light of science’! ». 

Today, for people with such stomachs, as Tito went from being a knife-in-the-teeth bandit to a revolutionary hero, Stalin is reduced to a ragamuffin. But Stalin was a fighter, a conspirator and an organiser of the highest order: his negative sides are frighteningly well known, now that Trotsky’s book on his biography remains peacefully acquired as not due to a «secret agent»: theorist and scientist, that is what no one had to believe, not today, not yesterday, not the day before! Who, then, will believe a doctrinal and scientific reconstruction, committed to that people, who had the highest light held by him? Put out the lamp under his icon, people, and go to bed in the dark. Do not praise Lenin and Marx: they might jump out of their graves.

Let’s quote the bourgeois press, eh, tovarisch Tecoppa? According to instructions the grand secretary gave us, get to the archives, let us leaf through the collection of the Unità. 

The 19th congress announced the printing of one and a half million copies of Stalin’s «Problems of Socialism» (we shall discuss the actual demolition of this work at the 20th congress later). It was, in the Unità of the time, quoted by Pravda that «this is the greatest phase of development of Marxist-Leninist political economy…, which will exert an enormous influence on the development of advanced Soviet science», which «for the first time formulates the fundamental economic law of socialism» (it was the law of value and the law of increasing production in geometric reason!), and all of this by «creatively developing (we may as well get rid of this creativity, which is also nowadays traced back to Lenin) the teachings of Marx, Engels and Lenin».

Malenkov closed like this: «Under the banner of the immortal Lenin (he was already dead, good for him), under the wise leadership of the great Stalin, forward, etc.».

Molotov was more sonorous: «Long live the party of Lenin and Stalin! May our great Stalin live in good health for many years! Glory to comrade Stalin, great leader of the party and the people! Long live dear Stalin!»

Kaganovitch (issue of 15 October 1952) spoke at length of the genial leader Stalin, who enriched the theory of Marx, Engels and Lenin with new discoveries; of leader and master Stalin, of theoretical genius work, and so on. As for Mikoyan’s speech, you can read it on page 3 of the 16 October issue, with the effusive expressions already mentioned. 

Such use of rhetoric and repulsive courtesanship is also pernicious to the success of the defeatist work of the revolutionary preparation of the working class: will it not open its eyes, in Italy and elsewhere, even to this scandalous turn of events today?

We will still await the effects of those, Marxistically investigable, events which will occur tomorrow, and which will mark the long, hard path of the historical rise of the red tidal wave.

And we shall see the connection between today’s congressional earthquake and the proclamations that historical reality will inevitably impose tomorrow on those who today with unparalleled audacity throw away the sworn teachings of the master Stalin, the one and a half million copies of the new Economy that replaced Marx and Lenin, the volumes of Stalin’s «Complete Works» that were in advertising in Italy until today, and who as of today are being taken out of the shop. 

As we have already said, we are moving towards the Congress of Confession. The force of facts is a physical force, and it also imposes itself on men by presenting itself as the force of a theory, to which one can for whole cycles lie, but to which one is ultimately forced to bow.

A great turning point will come when it will have to be declared that the structure of Russia’s social economy is a capitalist structure.

Stalin’s pseudo-scientific economics would then be inconvenient to manoeuvre. It would also be convenient to draw this evidence from authentic Marxism, arguing the historical necessity of this situation, in order to save the stability – of which we will speak later – of state power.

It will be convenient then to mention that Trotsky, Zinoviev and so many of us had said this until the shutter came down in 1926. Then it will not be convenient to have spread that they said it because they were secret agents of capital.

Here is the plot for an objective Marxist explanation of the 20th Congress, and the frightening ideological lability of what had to be formulated in it.

Lead in the backsides 

Our readers will recall our recent abjuration of Molotov – whom his «dear Stalin» had graced with the epithet of leaden ass – to the statement, which escaped him in too much of a hurry, for perhaps one moment the diplomatic leads had loosened, that in Russia nothing but «the foundations» of socialism, and not «socialism», had been built.

Molotov would apparently repeat this abjuration, and with it others, such as that of having underestimated the uprising of the peoples of Asia and Africa against the white colonial yoke.

But we had the right to make this evidently exact thesis collimate with those that had been developed in the contradictory discussion at the Enlarged Executive in August 1926 between Stalin, Trotsky and Zinoviev, which was on that occasion particularly happy and complete, well redeeming the tactical swayings of earlier years. Stalin then resisted very weakly the overwhelming historical and theoretical proof that Lenin had never admitted that socialist transformation was possible (he never spoke of construction, nor can Marxism speak of it) without the advent of the workers’ revolution in the West. Stalin himself then fell back on military victory over the domestic bourgeoisie and the building of the basis of socialism. The basis of socialism, as Lenin always explained, is monopolist and statist capitalism in industry, and a step towards it is the most modest step of capitalism, whatever it may be, in place of small-scale rural production and small-scale trade. This a centralised state can build, where it is lacking, and thus build capitalist economic forms.

The transition to socialist forms is not a construction, but a demolition of production relations, which is possible beyond a certain quantitative level of the forces of production,  which Bulganin would later confess he could not reach even in 1960.

We tied the right Marxist formula, which did not escape a diplomat of Molotov’s calibre by chance, to his strength as a militant and scholar of Marxist science, which goes back to Lenin’s early days and which he badly postponed to Stalin’s dubious teachings in 1952.

This issue could not fail to resonate at this congress. But it is not ripe today: we will hear as much about it in a few years’ time as we do about those of distorted historiography, collegial and non-personal leadership, and the others that await us and you on the next day: the economic laws that explain the current Russian economy in heavy and light industry, agriculture and trade – and the great central question on which the defectors will break their own teeth and kidneys: the international transfer of power to the proletariat, and the alleged new ways of it. We have seen two generations of Marxists pass by: we had barely begun to repeat the doctrine on the road to socialism, that we already had to go toe to toe with those who foresaw new ways (back in 1910, the popularfrontist Bonomi).

The indication at this congress is to hold fast to the construction of socialism in Russia affirmed since 1936, even if in other countries the «will of the people» regulates their «internal affairs» in the sense of remaining capitalist. 

In a further stage the thesis on «coexistence», another anti-Leninist blasphemy, will be desperately held up, indeed «become Marxistically true» because it will be thrown off the edge, onto the pile of Josif’s unsold works, that of «construction». Then, a Molotov will tell the West, we coexist because we build the same thing: quantitatively growing capitalism.

But Lenin’s voice will then be raised, from everything except the congresses of that party: this is precisely why you will not co-exist, because the various imperialisms can only move towards confrontation and war.

On the shaky ground Khrushchev’s speech also had, amidst the shadows, a few twists and turns. For example when he described a Washington-Bonn business axis, which he contrasted with a London-Paris axis. Perhaps the incurable frontist saw the play of a crusade, comfortable still, against the Reichswehr of the hated Germany, which more formidably than after the first post-war period is now rising to its feet. But we have recalled that since 1919, the cannon shooting of the First World War not yet silenced, Lenin pointed to the imperial conflict between the United States and Japan, as if he felt the tremendous, if not atomic, bombs of Pearl Harbour crashing on stone and steel. 

The revolution will return with the not so near general war. But Lenin, in outlining this shining doctrine, did not so much link the military defeat, the delayed bourgeois revolution, and the proletariat’s descent into the struggle over this drama, as he did the return of the situation ruined by the traitors of 1914, and were still to ruin those, his own flesh and blood, of 1939. He saw the revolution that stops mobilisation and war and overthrows the powers of the belligerent, bloodthirsty imperial monsters. 

Difficult is the prospect of the next war if the first missiles are set off. But perhaps, in some non-next eventualities of history, they will not be set off. One of these might involve the Bonn-Washington axis, and especially if there is the feared, by the two atomic war ministries of the Kremlin and the Pentagon, German unification. If that party of a few men other than Marx and Engels, from the long-distant memory of 1852, who cast their eyes, anxious and full of the great visions of the 1848, on the appearance of the new glimmers of war on the horizon of an idiotic peace, will be resurrected, then the revolutionary drama, which in the first half of the twentieth century revolved around Russia, will be able to revolve in the second half around Germany.

Cautious glances at the new route

The measured words of Khrushchev’s report directed against Molotov’s thesis were counterbalanced by a statement that presented itself to trade observers as directed against Malenkov, before Molotov, and more seriously, censured by the party for having glimpsed a shift from the production economy to the consumer economy, a brake on heavy industry in favour of light industry, a phase that evidently in doctrine lies in time far beyond the total building of industrial bases.

Even Malenkov has not failed to formally rectify and retract this: neither Molotov nor Malenkov have been or will be guillotined, not even in effigy, as the journalists expected and will expect, and Bulganin even less so. Beria’s case is not about economic programmes: it is about the liquidation of the Stalinist period, of infamy and gallows on the healthy revolutionary wing of the Russian party. This would never have tolerated, aiming not at constructive plans but at the revolutionary destruction of western capitalism, the disgrace of military alliance pacts, of coexistence pacts, of international support – which by visibly yielding dismantled the laughable game – on the social scum of the middle classes, where the revolution against feudalism, the only one in which they could serve as cannon fodder, was made and forgotten. And today Beria is historiographed as an imperialist agent. 

But among Khrushchev’s own formulas one can read, if one looks closely, the other revirement of tomorrow, which will restore to the Trotskys, the Zinovievs, the Bucharins not only the honour of militant forerunners of communism, but the recognition of the powerful theoretical and scientific clarity of Marxists, while their murderers and alleged critics will go to the fate that awaits them, in the embrace with the toothed steel arms of the other imperial monsters.

We will use the text of the Unità, in the summary and excerpts from the report that Tass released.

In comparison with the potential of western countries, the figures will confirm that Khrushchev was right to say that Russia is still far behind – he said «the industrial base of the socialist system becomes more and more powerful». To the letter, the formula is as Marxist as the Molotovian one! 

Khrushchev decisively alluded several times to a «failure» in the agricultural plan and the low yields of Kholcosian production, hinting at the extent to which this delayed an increase in the production of consumer goods. But this has to be reserved for the economic side. In this too he leaned towards Molotov.

Even the formula: consolidating the economic power of our socialist country is toned down in comparison to that of the achieved socialist construction: in the former, Russia is socialist politically, in the latter economically. Two fakes, but theoretically different.

«Economic progress, raising the material and cultural level of workers» are no longer formulas that fit a socialist society!

Molotov’s cold condemnation is a contrast: «To claim that we have only laid the foundations of socialism is to mislead the party and the people». Is there therefore still people when socialism with its «relations of production» is already «built up», i.e. when not even the proletariat should exist anymore?

But the blow from the other side is much more thoroughly given: «We encounter another extreme in the way we deal with the question of socialist development. For we have some leading officials who interpret the gradual transition from socialism to communism as a signal for the implementation of the principles of communist society already at the present stage. Some hotheads have decided that the construction of socialism is already completed (in other words, has the construction begun or is completed? Does it only have the foundations or also the roof?) and have begun to compile a meticulous timetable for the transition to communism».

This second formula is extraordinarily timidist. In capitalism itself, certain economic functions are performed, in sectors closed in time and space albeit, with communist economic principles, i.e. without monetary remuneration: putting out fires, fighting epidemics, floods, (geological!) earthquakes, even the cold. In a socialist country, one would not even sneeze without compensation in give and take, of money and labour-time?

A few more nudges and we’re there, Secretary to whom – honi soit qui mal y pense – no worship will be paid, neither today nor ever.

1. See further, ‘Dialogue with the Dead’, ‘Day Three, Evening’: ‘How they enriched Marx’. ↩︎
2. See, in no. 4 of 1956 of the Communist Programme, the recapitulation of all this development in the caption to part II of the report of our meetings in Naples and Genoa: the treatment was then regularly continued in subsequent issues. ↩︎