FIRST DAY

Writing an article fifty pages long after a good two years (the famous one on linguistics was from 1950, which we only briefly touched upon, though it deserved more attention; and quod differtur…) Stalin responds to points raised over two years, not only in the Thread of Time but also in work meetings on Marxist theory and program conducted by our movement and made public, either briefly or extensively.

We do not mean by this that Stalin (or his complex secretariat, whose networks span the globe) has reviewed all that material and turned to us. It is not a question, if we are truly Marxists, of believing that the great historical discussions require, for the guidance of the world, personified protagonists who announce themselves to a stunned humanity, like when the angel sounds the golden trumpet from the cloud and Barbariccia, Dante’s demon, responds (de profundis in the proper sense) with the sound you know. Or like the Christian Paladin and the Saracen Sultan, who, before drawing their gleaming Durandals, introduce themselves loudly, challenging each other with lists of their ancestors and tournament victories, proclaiming each other’s impending death.

As if it could be otherwise! On one side, we have the Supreme Leader of the greatest State on earth and of the global “communist” proletariat, on the other – who, for heaven’s sake? – a complete nobody!

The truth is that facts and physical forces, from the background of situations, deterministically begin to discuss among themselves; and those who dictate or type the article, or deliver the speech, are mere mechanisms, loudspeakers that passively transform the wave into voice, and it is not said that nonsense does not gush out from the one with two thousand kilowatts.

The same questions arise, therefore, about the meaning of today’s Russian social relations and the international economic, political, and military relations; they impose themselves both up there and down here and can only be illuminated by comparison with the theory of what has already happened and is known; and with the history of that theory, though from a very distant past – which remains indelible – was once common.

We are well aware, therefore, that Stalin’s response does not come from the heights of the Kremlin vi to address us, nor does it bear our address; nor for the limpid continuity of the debate is it necessary for him to know that yesterday the newspaper that hosted it was called Battaglia Comunista, today Programma Comunista, following fruitless events that took place at the level of the layer of sub-fools. Things and forces, immense or minuscule, past, present, or future, remain the same in spite of the vagaries of symbolism. If ancient philosophy wrote sunt nomina rerum (literally: names belong to things), it meant to say that things do not belong to names. In other words, in our language, the thing determines the name, not the name the thing. So go ahead, devote ninety-nine percent of your work on names, portraits, epithets, lives, and graves of Great Men: we follow in the shadows, certain that not too far off is the generation that will smile at you, most illustrious ones of first and sixteenth magnitude.

The matters underlying Stalin’s current article are too significant, however, for us to deny him dialogue. For this reason, and not out of a sense of à tout seigneur tout honneur, we respond and will wait, even two years, for the rejoinder. There’s no hurry (right, ex-Marxist?).

Tomorrow and Yesterday

The topics discussed are all crucial nodes of Marxism, and they are almost all the old nails, upon which we insisted needed to be deeply hammered again, before claiming to be the forgers of tomorrow.

Of course, the bulk of political “spectators” scattered across various fields were not struck by what Stalin suggestively returns to – what he must return to – but by what he anticipates about the uncertain tomorrow. Focusing on this, because this is what makes an audience, the friendly and hostile spectators didn’t understand a damn thing and gave brain-dead and exaggerated interpretations. Perspective, that’s what obsesses, and while the observers are a pack of donkeys, the operator, who turns the crank from those lofty prisons that are the supreme offices of government power, is precisely in the position that allows the least visibility around him and the least foresight. While we gather what has been dictated to him by looking backward, where no one obscures his view between bows and incense, everyone else is moved by the compelling forecasts.

Existentially, everyone obeys the idiotic imperative: we must entertain ourselves; and the political press entertains when, as it does compellingly today, it opens a glimpse into the future and sees a Supername deigning to prophesy. And the unexpected prophecy is this: no more world revolution, no more peace, but not the “holy” war between Russia and the rest of the world; instead, the inevitable war between capitalist States, in which, for the time being, Russia is not involved. Interesting, but certainly not new to Marxism, even for us, who do not have the frenzy for political cinema, where the spectator is not interested in “whether it is true” what they see (soon with Cinerama, they will be physically thrust into the midst of the action), and, once the illusion of the overseas landscape, the ultra-luxury locale, the white telephone, or the embrace with the modern impeccable celluloid super-Venuses is over, he returns content, poor clerk or enslaved proletarian, to their hovel, and rubs up against his woman deformed by toil, or replaces her with a Venus of the sidewalk.

Everyone, therefore, has thrown themselves onto the point of arrival rather than the point of departure. This, however, is the fundamental thing: there is a whole array of half-wits eager to rush forward into pondering the after, who must be powerfully held back and pushed to understand the before, a task that is certainly easier, and yet one they cannot manage, even in their dreams. Anyone who has not understood the page in front of them cannot resist the temptation to turn it over to find enlightenment in the next, and thus the beast becomes more of a beast than before.

In Russia, regardless of the silencing police that scandalize the West (where the imbecilising and standardizing resources for craniums are ten times greater, and more disgusting), the problem of defining the social stage being traversed and the economic mechanism that is in motion imposes itself and arrives at the dilemma: should we continue to say that ours is a socialist economy, a communist one of the lower stage, or should we recognize that it is an economy governed by the law of value, proper to capitalism, despite State industrialism? Stalin seems to be confronting this recognition and to be restraining the overly bold economists and business leaders who lean towards the second view; in reality, he is preparing the not-so-distant (and also useful in a revolutionary sense) confession. The organized imbecility of the free world reads that he has announced the transition to the full, higher stage of communism!

To bring such a question into focus, Stalin approaches the classical method. It would be easy to play the card of abandoning any obligation to the school tradition, to Marx and Lenin as theorists, but at this stage of the game, the very bank might collapse. And so, instead, we start again ab ovo. Good, that’s what we want, we who have no bets to place on the roulette of history, and who learned from our first stammer that ours was the proletarian cause; and it had nothing to lose.

Thus, in 1952, there is a need for “a textbook of Marxist political economy,” not only for Soviet youth but for comrades in other countries. So, heed, you young and forgetful ones!

To include in such a book chapters on Lenin and Stalin as creators of socialist political economy, by Stalin’s own declaration, would bring nothing new. Very well, if it means that it is well-known that they did not invent it but learned it, and the former always claimed to have done so.

As we enter the field of rigorous terminology and “school” formulas, it should be stated in advance that we are dealing with a summary which the Stalinist newspapers themselves derive from a non-Russian news agency, and it will be advisable, as soon as possible, to consult the full text.

Commodity and Socialism

The recall of the first elements of economic doctrine is to discuss the “system of commodity production under a socialist regime.” In various texts (which, of course, took great care not to say anything new), we have maintained that every system of commodity production is a non-socialist system, and we will reinforce this: but Stalin (Stalin, Stalin; we are dealing with an article that could also be due to a commission that – “a hundred years from now” – substitutes for a deceased or incapacitated Stalin: in any case, the symbolism with its notations, within the conventional limits of a practical convenience, serves us too) could have written: system of commodity production after the proletarian conquest of power, and then we would not be at blasphemy yet.

Evidently, some “comrades” in Russia have stated – referring to Engels – that maintaining, after the nationalization of the means of production, the system of commodity production, that is, the character of commodities for products, means having preserved the capitalist economic system. In theoretical terms, there’s no Stalin who can prove them wrong. When and if they say that, being able to abolish commodity-type production, it was neglected or forgotten to do so, then they may be wrong.

But Stalin wants to prove that in a “socialist country” – a term of dubious schooling – commodity production can exist, and he refers to Marx’s definitions and their limpid synthesis – perhaps not absolutely flawless – in a little propaganda pamphlet by Vladimir.

On this theme, that is, on the commodity type of production, on its emergence and domination, and on its strictly capitalist character and how it characterizes modern capitalism, we stopped on September 1, 1951, at a “Naples Meeting” reported in the Party’s Bulletin No. 1, and in another more recent Meeting, also in Naples, which consisted of a paraphrase and commentary on Marx’s paragraph on the “Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof.”

This was mentioned in No. 9 of May 1‑14, 1952, in this very newspaper, and in the contemporaneous “Thread of Time”: “In the Vortex of Mercantile Anarchy.”

According to Joseph Stalin, one can remain in a mercantile environment and dictate secure plans, without the terrible Maelström luring the unwary pilot to the center of the whirlpool and swallowing him into the capitalist abyss. But his article reveals, to those who read as Marxists, that the whirls are tightening and accelerating – as theory has established.

A commodity, as Lenin reminds us, is an object that has two characteristics: being useful to human needs – being exchangeable with another object. But the lines preceding the passage, quoted so much from on high, are simply these: “In capitalist society, commodity production dominates; and therefore Marx’s analysis begins with the analysis of the commodity.”

And so, the commodity has those two prerogatives and becomes a commodity only when the second is juxtaposed to the first. The first, use-value, is entirely understandable even to a flat materialist like us, even to a child, it is organoleptic; we lick sugar for the first time, and we will reach out for the sugar cube. Long is the path, and Marx flies through it in that extraordinary paragraph, for sugar to be invested with an exchange value, and to arrive at Stalin’s delicate problem, astonished that they had fixed for him a grain-cotton equivalence.

Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and we know very well what devilry happens when exchange value is born. So let Vladimir tell it. Where bourgeois economists saw relations between things, Marx discovered relations between men! And what do Marx’s three tomes and Lenin’s 77 pages prove? One simple thing. Where current economics sees the perfect equivalence of an exchange, we no longer see the two exchanged objects but see men in social motion, and we no longer see equivalence but the swindle. Karl Marx speaks of a little spirit that gives the commodity this miraculous and at first glance incomprehensible character. Lenin, like every other Marxist, would have been horrified at the idea that commodities can be produced and exchanged by expelling that little devil with exorcisms: does Stalin perhaps believe this? Or does he just want to tell us that the little devil is stronger than he is?

Just as the ghosts of medieval knights take revenge on Cromwell’s revolution by haunting English castles, bourgeoisly ceded to the landlords, so the imp-fetish of the commodity runs unrestrainable through the halls of the Kremlin and grins from the loudspeakers of the millions of words of the 19th Congress.

Wishing to establish that the identification between mercantilism and capitalism is not absolute, Stalin once again employs our method. He goes back through the centuries and, with Marx, recalls that “under certain regimes (slave-owning, feudal, etc.) commodity production existed without having led to capitalism.” This is indeed said in Marx’s powerful historical overview in that passage, but for quite another purpose and with quite another development. The bourgeois economist proclaims that to link production to consumption, there can never be any other mechanism than the mercantile one, as he knows very well that as long as that mechanism stands, capital remains master of the world. Marx retorts: we shall now go and see what the historical tendency of tomorrow is; for now, I force you to acknowledge the data of the past: mercantilism has not always provided to bring the result of labor to those who needed to consume it; and he cites the primitive economies of gathering food for immediate consumption, the ancient types of family and clan, the closed islands of the feudal system with internal direct consumption without products having to assume the form of commodities. With the unfolding and complicating of technique and need, sectors open up that are provided for first by barter and then by true commerce, but (by the same route that served us regarding private property) it remains proven that the mercantile system is not “natural,” that is, as the bourgeois claims, permanent and eternal. Now, this late appearance of mercantilism (or system of commodity production, as Stalin says), this coexisting on the margins of other systems, serves precisely to show how, having become a universal system as soon as the capitalist system of production spreads, it must die along with it.

It would be long to recount how many times we have cited Marx’s passages against Proudhon, Lassalle, Rodbertus, and a hundred others, which boil down to the accusation of wanting to reconcile mercantilism with the socialist emancipation of the proletariat.

It appears difficult to reconcile with all this, which Lenin calls the cornerstone of Marxism, the current thesis thus referred: “there is no reason why, in the course of a certain period, commodity production cannot also serve a socialist society,” or: “commodity production takes on a capitalist character only when the means of production are in the hands of private interests, and the worker, who does not own them, is forced to sell his labor power.” The hypothesis is evidently absurd since, in Marxist analysis, every time a mass of commodities appears, it is because proletarians deprived of any reserve have had to sell their labor power, and when in the past there were those (limited) sectors of commodity production, it was because labor power was not sold “spontaneously” as today, but extracted by force of arms from prisoner slaves or serfs bound by relations of personal dependence.

Must we reprint once again the first two lines of Capital? “The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an immense collection of commodities.”

The Russian Economy

The text before us, after having more or less skillfully pretended to go back to doctrinal sources, moves to the terrain of the present Russian economy, to silence those who would say that the commodity production system must inevitably lead to the restoration of capitalism, or we who more clearly say: the system of production for commodities survives insofar as we are in the midst of capitalism.

On the Russian economy, there are in the notable text the following admissions. If the large industrial factories are nationalized, small and medium-sized industries are not expropriated; indeed, doing so “would have been a crime.” The orientation would be to develop them into production cooperatives.

There are two sectors of commodity production: on the one hand, State production, which is national. In State enterprises, the means of production and the production itself, that is, the products, are national property. Simple: in Italy, for example, tobacco factories are State-owned, and so are the cigarettes it sells. But is this enough to give the right to say that we are in a phase of “liquidation of wage labor” and that the worker “is not forced to sell his labor power”? No, certainly not.

Let’s move on to the other sector, agriculture: in the kolkhoz, the text says, although the land and machinery are State property, the product of labor does not belong to the State but to the kolkhoz itself. And this is not disposesd of except as a commodity, in exchange for the goods it needs. There exist no other ties between the kolkhozy of the countryside and the town than those given by this exchange: “Production, sale, and exchange of commodities constitute for us a necessity, no less than it did 30 years ago.”

Let us now set aside the argument about the very distant possibility of overcoming such a situation. It remains established that it’s not a matter here of saying, as Lenin did in 1922: we have political power in our hands and maintain the military situation, but in the economy, we must fall back on the mercantile, fully capitalist form. The corollary of such a statement was: let us for now set aside the construction of a socialist economy; we will return to it after the European revolution. Today’s corollaries are altogether different, and opposite.

It’s not even a matter of trying to establish the thesis: in the transition from capitalism to socialism, nevertheless, for a certain time, a certain section of production takes place in the form of commodities.

Here it is said: everything is a commodity; and there is no other economic framework than mercantile exchange, and as a direct consequence also the purchase of wage labor power in the very large State enterprises themselves. And indeed: where does the factory worker find subsistence goods? The kolkhoz sells them through a channel of private merchants, or perhaps sells them to the State from which it buys tools, fertilizers, and other things, and the worker goes to get the goods, paying in money, in State warehouses. Can the State distribute directly to its workers products of which it is the owner? Certainly not, given that the worker (especially the Russian one) does not consume tractors, automobiles, locomotives, and even less… cannons and machine guns. The same items of clothing and furniture are evidently produced by those intact small and medium private enterprises.

The State can therefore give nothing but the wage in money to its employees, with which they purchase what they want (bourgeois formula, which means what little they can). That the wage-dispensing master is the State that “ideally” or “legally” represents the workers themselves means nothing as long as such a State has not even been able to begin to distribute anything outside the mercantile mechanism, anything statistically appreciable.

Anarchy and Despotism

Stalin wanted to recall some Marxist goals that we have dusted off so many times: to diminish the distance and antithesis between town and country, to overcome the social division of labor, to drastically reduce (to five or six hours, immediately) the working day, the only means of eliminating the partition between manual and intellectual labor, and to eradicate the vestiges of bourgeois ideology.

At the meeting in Rome on July 7, 1952, our movement focused on the theme of Marx’s chapter: “Division of Labor in Society and Division of Labor in Manufacture,” and the reader rendered “enterprise” for manufacture. It was demonstrated that to exit from capitalism, it is necessary, along with the system of commodity production, to destroy the social division of labor – and Stalin recalls it – and likewise the enterprise or technical division, on which the brutalization of the worker and factory despotism hinge. These are the two pivots of the bourgeois system: social anarchy and enterprise despotism. We still see in Stalin an attempt to fight against the former; on the latter, he is silent.

Nothing in today’s Russia moves in the direction of these conquests, whether of those evoked today or of those left in the shadows.

If a barrier, insurmountable today and tomorrow, broken only for the purpose of making a mutual mercantile deal, one against the other, is placed between the State factory and the kolkhoz, what will bring town and country closer together, what will lessen the social division between worker and peasant, what will free the former from the need to sell too many hours for too little money and too little food, and thus enable him to contend with the capitalist tradition for the monopoly of science and culture?

Not only are we not in the phase of early socialism, but neither are we in complete State capitalism, that is, an economy in which, although all products are commodities and circulate for money, every product is at the disposal of the State, to the point that from the center the State can fix all equivalence relations, including that of labor power. Even such a State is not economically and politically controllable and conquerable by the working class and functions in the service of Capital rendered anonymous and underground. In any case, Russia is far from such a system, and there we have only a State Industrialism. Such a system, arising after the anti-feudal revolution, is valid to develop and spread industry and capitalism with ardent pace, with State investment in even colossal public works, and to accelerate a transformation of economy and agrarian law in a bourgeois sense. Nothing about the “collective” agrarian farms is State-owned, and nothing socialist, it is well understood; we are at the level of the cooperatives that arose in the Po Valley at the time of the Baldinis and Prampolinis, who managed agricultural production by leasing, if not buying, lands, including State-owned lands like those along riverbanks and others that date back to the old duchies. What in the Kremlin cannot reach Stalin is that in the kolkhozy, they undoubtedly steal a hundred times more than in those drab but honest cooperatives.

Thus, the industrial State, which must negotiate to buy food in the countryside on the “free market” terrain, maintains the remuneration of labor power and time at the same level as private capitalist industry. Indeed, it can be said that as an economic evolution, for example, America is closer than Russia to integral State capitalism, given that perhaps the Russian worker, for three-fifths of his labor, ultimately receives agricultural products, while the American laborer, for three-fifths, receives industrial products, and even those foodstuffs he gets are, for the most part (poor thing) industrially canned.

State and Retreat

And at this point comes another big question: the agriculture-industry relationship leaves us in Russia fully at the bourgeois level, no matter how remarkable the relentless advance of the latter may be, and on this relationship Stalin admits not even having in prospect innovations that come close, not to say to socialism, but to a greater statism.

Even this retreat is cleverly covered by a doctrinal screen. What can we do? Brutally expropriate the kolkhozy? State force is required for this; but here Stalin makes the future abolition of the State reappear, which he otherwise wanted to relegate to the scrap heap, speaking of it with the air of saying: are we kidding, guys?

Evidently, the thesis that the workers’ State disarms when still the entire countryside sector is organized in a private and mercantile form does not hold water, because if for a moment the previously discussed thesis is accepted: that in socialist times commodity production can subsist, it would nevertheless be inseparable from the other: until mercantilism is eliminated in the entire field, there can be no talk of suppression of the State.

And so there remains nothing but to conclude that the solution to the fundamental town-country relationship, though it may be dramatically evolving from its millennia-old Asiatic and feudal characteristics, is presented clearly in the very terms in which capitalism presents it and in the classical terms in which the bourgeois countries have always posed it: to see how to do well in the exchange between the products of industry and those of the land. “This system will therefore require a considerable increase in industrial production.” That is where we are. Even, with the State imagined absent for a moment, a “liberal” solution.

We were saying that, after that of the agriculture-industry relationship, resolved in terms of a full confession of impotence to do anything other than industrialize and increase production (thus to the detriment of the workers), there is another major issue: the relationship between State and the enterprise, and the relationship between enterprises.

The issue arose before Stalin in the form of the validity in Russia, even for the economy of the large State industry, of the law of value proper to capitalist production. This is the law according to which the exchange of commodities always takes place between equivalents: the false façade of “liberty, equality, and Bentham,” which Marx demolished, showing that capitalism does not produce for product but for profit. Between the jaws of this vice, between necessity and the domination of economic laws, Stalin’s Manifesto moves in such a way that confirms our thesis: in its most powerful form, Capital subjugates the State, even when the State appears to be the legal owner of all Enterprises.

On the second day, O Scheherazade, we will tell you about this, and on the third about international markets and the War.