Communist Left 25-26

The 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party took place in Beijing with 2,200 delegates in attendance, 100 more than the one before. The new slogan, ‘Development in Social Harmony’, has been imparted, setting aside, therefore, all reference to the Maoist ‘class struggle’ of that great country’s period of national-bourgeois revolution. From the ideological and the external apparatus of Chinese society, the very last trappings of the ‘communism’ that it never hosted in the first place are being removed.

The Congress intends, ‘to scientifically integrate market economy with state control’, which is actually the function of every bourgeois State once the image in the mirror is readjusted: capital controls; the State carries obeys.

According to the model of the mass party invented by Stalinism, fascism and nazism, the party-State apparatus is limitless, as opposed to the communist party of Marx, Lenin and the Left which it never remotely resembled. The party has 73 million members, with more joining all the time, and they are drawn mostly from the universities and the governing class. Pierre Haski writes: the party is ‘the point of departure for every young careerist (…) for everyone from the company managing director to the secretary of the local party section’.

‘The party is the custodian of stability for all those with something to lose in a changeover of power, of which there are quite a few’.  Clear admission of the class matrix of the CCP, which, as well as being the party of Chinese national capital, although originally a peasant party, is now the party of the bourgeoisie; who fear ‘a change of power’, that is, communism, real communism.

The condition of the working class, at the other social extreme, is amongst the worst in the World: only the privileged few have access to pensions and healthcare and the entire peasantry is entirely excluded. Only 12% of GNP goes on education, health and pensions as opposed to 50% in the West: the majority of workers have to pay for healthcare and education.

The trade unions are State controlled, and yet the number of public protests, according to the Minister of Security, has gone up from 10,000 in 1994 to 87,000 in 2005, and in 2006, although the number of protests diminished, they were more violent.

In the countryside, as happened centuries ago in the old world, violent and pitiless capitalist expropriation, of the common land and the land attached to the villages, is gathering apace.

Banks, the insurance and energy sectors, transport and telecommunications all remain State property but are managed, it goes without saying, in an entirely capitalist way.

Thus we have the highly absurd situation where a country that is clearly one of the biggest of the industrial nations founded on capitalist economic relations, in fact a ‘turbo-capitalism’ as they like to call it, a country ruled by a party-State which not only doesn’t set itself the future objective of attaining communism but totally excludes it, and therefore doesn’t recognize the existence of the elementary class struggle, is universally and indisputably categorized as communist.

The magic of words. The counter-revolutionary pressure which has born down on the international workers’ movement unopposed for 80 years, and so completely distorted its indispensable references and keys to reading history and the world, has, de facto, erased from the vocabulary, and from people’s thoughts, the very notion of communism as the negation of capitalism. In exact proportion to the historical maturation of genuine communism, which corresponds to the crises and extreme fragility of every aspect of the capitalist mode of production; the more that genuine communism objectively imposes itself as an absolute and inevitable necessity, the less it becomes possible to even mention it.

Just as Christianity at a certain point started to hide anxiety about death behind the illusion of eternal life, so the general need of the bourgeoisie, with counter-revolutionary intent obviously, was to portray as imperishable and unchanging, as laws of nature, the prevailing economic relations based on accumulation of profit and the sale of labour power, and to reduce communism to being simply a variant of the unavoidable and eternal capitalism.

Ever since Marxism suddenly appeared in the middle of the 19th century, it has always predicted that the economic sub-structure of capitalism would be channeled, always and everywhere, within the bounds of univocal and necessary economic laws. History has provided the fullest confirmation of this dialectical determinism of ours which transcends race and language, and even millenary histories and cultures. Within the skyscrapers which now surround the Forbidden City the same lifeblood now courses through them, and the same words are spoken – those of capital and finance – as in London’s ‘City’. On the workers’ estates, meanwhile, there is the same subjugation of the working class, and the conditions under which capitalist surplus value is extracted also become ever more identical.

If the Capital that today vertiginously eddies and swirls above the continents retains an essential underlying unity, the ways that the various bourgeois classes have attained power in their respective nations has nevertheless proved to be many and various. This has meant that the relationships, and the clashes, between the dominant classes, and their succession to, and division of, State power have followed different evolutionary paths, which explains the various different forms of government obtained when the bourgeoisie and big landowners have shared power. The western bourgeoisies boast about their long tradition of multi-party parliamentary democracy and, in an arrogantly euro-centric spirit and with a view to sowing confusion in the workers’ ranks, they trumpet it as the perfect ideal; as the one which most responds to the requirements of modern society, in other words of capitalism, based on individualism and the market.

However, while the economic sub-structure continues to evolve, although remaining entirely capitalist, in the sense of ever increasing concentration of production, capital and banking and loss of social power on the part of the petty bourgeoisie, at the same time the government centered on parliament becomes redundant and emptied of any real power. Its continued survival in a few Western countries today is merely for decorative purposes. It is kept alive within a kind of ‘virtual’ reality, in a self-referential media orientated world, its sole aim being to get the proletariat to vote, to spread the illusion that through elections the latter can obtain their quota of power when in fact, whoever gets in, it is the big bourgeoisie which continues to exert control.

The ‘communist’ variant of capitalism, which may be characterized by the presence of a state apparatus openly governed by a one party State, and by a tighter regulation of the rights of oppositional elements than in the West, meets the requirements of modern capitalism just as well, if not better, that the liberal regimes. What is more, just because a single party heads the State doesn’t mean it will also necessarily be monolithic, or that, especially in Russia and China, there won’t be continual violence and bloody in-fighting between the party factions. The story of Maoism and its inglorious end demonstrate this well enough.

In Moscow and Beijing, over a modern capitalist economy and its corresponding class structure, and dominating over older class relationships in the countryside as well, we therefore find bourgeois regimes and forms of government which are adapted to their class function, and which are less hypocritical and insincere that those in Washington, in Europe and in New Delhi. If the ‘harmonious society’ of the national communists in Beijing is perceived by western ideologists of the Haski stamp as a “hybrid model”, that is, as an incomplete or failed liberal democracy, a type of enlightened despotism, as a celestial mandate derived from Confucianism, we Marxists consider that it should be numbered instead amongst the forms of fascist organicism, indeed as its most classic, modern, and… western, exponent.

In conclusion, we will say that all of this clearly has nothing to do with Communism; the communism that will eventually, in both East and West, rout both liberals and ‘illiberals’.
 
 

(Translated from Il Partito Comunista, no 326, November-December 2007)

2008 Introduction

The following two Reports on Fascism were presented by the Italian Communist Left’s representative, in Moscow on 16 November 1922 and 2 July 1924, to the 4th and 5th Congresses of the Communist International.

Today, eighty years later, the formidable dialectic is still as valid now as it was then, if not more so.

The international bourgeoisie had managed to isolate the Russian Revolution within the narrow confines of ex-tsarist and semi-feudal Russia; it had also recovered from a period of initial disorientation, in which it had almost become resigned to the fact that the proletariat would overthrow it and take power by force of arms; in those years it had moved on to the counter-attack, and on an international scale. In Italy, casting aside its uncomfortable democratic mask, it had installed a regime which was plainly a class dictatorship. Despite all this the proletariat hadn’t accepted defeat, but had soldiered on, in preparation for the counter-attack.

Within the communist parties and the International, however, the first signs of weakness, and first signs of opportunist penetration within the revolutionary body, were starting to appear. But even if the framework of the global revolutionary organ was being put seriously at risk, it was not yet inevitable that all was lost: a flaring up of the class struggle might still have carried the parties and the International back onto the right, and necessary, road to revolution.

But unfortunately it didn’t happen, and today communism, revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat appear to brainwashed public opinion as utopias of a past world, proved by history to be the unrealisable and foolish dreams of those incapable of facing up to the overwhelming power of the bourgeoisie,

We, on the other hand, assert that the main defeat suffered by the proletariat, then as well, wasn’t so much in the armed conflict with the bourgeoisie, with one class openly struggling to maintain power and the other determined to take it away: rather it was due to a betrayal of its general staff; because of the counter-revolutionary degeneration which had corrupted the parties and the International, first of all distorting its theoretical and programmatic foundations and then turning it on its head.

And still today, a return to the original doctrine and the uncorrupted communist program of Marx, Lenin and the Left is the indispensable basis for tomorrow’s reorganisation of the revolutionary proletariat on an international scale; a reorganisation which is the necessary condition for the next bold attack on the strongholds of capitalism in order to achieve the revolutionary conquest of power.

This necessary affirmation of the need for the party is what prompts us to republish these reports on fascism. Although written a long time ago, just after the First World War, they are nevertheless still imbued with the ardour of revolutionary class struggle: not just historical research but critical arm indispensable to our movement, to our comrades and to proletarians in search of their authentic party.

* * *

Since these initial two reports, our party, continuing on the left Marxist road, has dedicated numerous studies to the theme of fascism. When asked, what is Fascism, we do not answer with the platitude that describes it as “a dictatorship which denies liberty” and the antithesis of democracy, with the latter supposedly representing the safeguard of all liberties. Although useful insofar as it disguises the character of class power, Fascism is nevertheless just one of the many aspects that bourgeois domination has historically assumed. But it is the most modern, the most effective, the most perfected, the most responsive to the necessities of capitalism in its final phase: imperialism.

Our investigation into fascism, and in fact into all of the super-structural and political forms that society assumes, is based essentially on an analysis of the economic and productive forces and class relationships over successive historical periods.

About the bourgeoisie we can say, schematising to the maximum, that after its revolutionary conquest of power, it installs a liberalistic phase of capitalism, marked by an economy in which free competition between producers and traders predominates. Corresponding to the free trade which exists in the realm of economy, freedom in politics is preached: every citizen, they tell us, stands in the same relation to the State as everyone else; Parliament holds sway over the Executive and every law and decision derives from its preliminary approval.

Of course, if during this phase democracy represents a form of government that suits the bourgeoisie, insofar as it helps to achieve a compromise between all its components, it is still a permanent swindle and a mystification as far as the proletariat is concerned; if we evaluate social relations in real economic terms, all that being free under the law really means for the proletariat is being free to sell your own labour power, or else starve.

The best demonstration that the State, even in this liberal period, was nothing more than the guarantor of the interests of the bourgeois class is given by the extension and sharpening of the class struggle, which unmasked the real dictatorial nature of the State even when in a democratic and parliamentary guise.

With the extension of commodity production and the consequent concentration of capital into a few hands, capitalism moved, bit by bit, into its final phase: imperialism. Lenin would define the characteristics of imperialism as follows:

• Concentration of production and capital has reached a sufficiently high level of development to enable the creation of monopolies, which become the key players in economic life;
• Fusion of financial and industrial capital and the formation of a financial oligarchy on the basis of this capital;
• Greater importance attributed to the export of capital as against the export of commodities;
• The rise of international monopolistic associations of capitalists who divide up the world amongst themselves;
• The completion of the dividing up of the Earth amongst the great imperialist powers.

In the modern imperialist phase, the capitalist system subjects all the canons that inspired it in its liberal phase to a radical revision. In this new epoch the bourgeoisie plays down its original myths of unlimited freedom for the citizen and free economic competition between businesses: it resorts to structures that aim to curb political opposition, and turns to state intervention in the markets and in finance.

This different economic situation is necessarily also reflected in governmental forms; State policy evolves towards ever stricter forms of control and unitary direction within a highly centralised hierarchical framework. Big capital, the financial capital that dominates the economic scene, assumes direct control of the levers of State and proves to be intolerant of any indiscipline. In this phase, even the dominant class has to do without democracy, which is substituted by forms of government that are openly despotic not only towards the proletariat but also towards the petty-bourgeoisie, peasantry and small shop-keepers, etc. Still schematising, we can say that fascism is simply one – or if you prefer, the most – characteristic expression of the modern stage of development of bourgeois society, constrained as it is to adopt forms of political totalitarianism capable of tackling, in a united and disciplined way, the revolutionary pressure of a proletariat which acts out of urgent historical necessity.

Such a concept has always been a distinguishing feature of our revolutionary left current’s historical and political evaluations. Even on the occasion of the coming to power of Hitler in Germany, our fraction expressed the view (whilst engaged in polemics with Trotski) that the new political/social form of organisation, Nazism, had been imposed on capitalism by economic conditions, and, above all, by the class struggle.

In the age of imperialism, starting at the beginning of the 20th century and then irreversibly so, all capitalist States, even when they haven’t adopted the structure of an openly fascist regime, have assumed its characteristic features as a matter of necessity, even if still maintaining a formal democracy with a simulacrum of a parliament and an apparent multiplicity of parties. The transformation of State institutions and of civil life within every country throughout the world has clearly proved this: the multi-party system is now reduced to a trivial soap opera, with State maintained psychophants as the main actors, and State financial support given to the parties, newspapers and even the workers’ trade unions.

* * *

From the strictly historical point of view, analysis of the fascist phenomenon must necessarily start from that extraordinary historical event, the First World War.

Fascism’s first historical theorisation, and apparition, was in Italy. When the war first broke out in Europe, in Italy people of every social stratum, with the exception of nationalists, were virtually united in their neutrality. But the interests of big capital were not neutral, and therefore Italian diplomacy was quick to engage in talks with the governments of the opposing sides, with the aim of drawing the major possible advantage from the war. Unhappy with the offers made by the Austro-Hungarian government, it would end up agreeing to enter the war on the side of the opposing coalition, and sign the famous Treaty of London.

These events were preceded by a major interventionist campaign in which the role assumed by Benito Mussolini was of no small importance. Whilst the Socialist party maintained the same oppositional stance to the war it had taken up during the military campaign in Libya, Mussolini, who for two years had been the editor of Avanti!, the party newspaper, started making tentative moves in favour of participation against Austro-Hungary. But the socialists didn’t retreat from their theses of neutrality, and any concealed interventionism within the party was denounced by its left wing. Mussolini would then openly line up in favour of the war and establish formal links with an interventionist movement within whose ranks men of the most diverse tendencies had come together; a movement which would be utilised by the centres of national capital in order to make entering the war appear to Italy as the logical and natural solution.

The First World War – condemned as imperialist by Lenin, by the Left of the Italian Socialist Party and by a few others, and seen as something which must be sabotaged by the proletariat of every county – was presented by Mussolini as a revolutionary event which would open the way to the emancipation of the proletarian masses. Even after the armistice had been signed, Mussolini would exploit the suffering and disappointment of the combatants. He would write: “The war has brought the proletarian masses to the fore. It has broken their chains. It has considerably enhanced their value. A war of the masses concludes with the triumph of the masses (…) If the revolution of 1789, which was both a revolution and a war, opened the gateways and the roads of the world to the bourgeoisie which had completed its century long apprenticeship, the present revolution, which is also a war, must open the doors of the future to the masses who have completed their hard apprenticeship of blood and death in the trenches (…) The revolution has continued under the name of war for 40 months. It isn’t finished (…) As to the means, we aren’t prejudiced, we accept what will be necessary: legal means and so-called illegal means”.

Faced with the powerful class movements of the proletarian masses, Mussolini would soon show what the ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ means he intended to put at the service of the ‘revolution’ actually were.

From 1919 onwards, with his organisation at the disposal – and on the payroll – of capitalist interests, there would be a daily almost pedestrian increase in the levels of violence and brutality deployed against workers and proletarian organisations. These criminal undertakings, blessed by the church, tolerated by the State, supported by the police and the army, and unpunished by the legal system, were carried out on a territory by territory basis, leading to the gradual strategic conquest of the entire Italian peninsular. With its highly militarised organisation, fascism moved to assume control of essential services in Italy’s economic centres. From Bologna, the fascist advance advanced in two directions, on the one hand towards the industrial triangle of Turin, Milan and Genoa, and on the other towards Tuscany and central Italy in order to encircle Rome.

The revolutionary attack by the Italian proletariat in 1922 had already been defeated by the underhand dealings of social democracy, so it wasn’t in fact fascism which saved the bourgeoisie from communism. The exponents of Italian big capital were nevertheless now convinced that the one remedy which would both prevent a return of the revolutionary peril, and discipline the middle classes, was the coming to power of Mussolini and fascism: all the elderly statesmen and the political parties on the democratic side were ready to accept him into the government. The only thing that needed to be settled, through gritted teeth, was how many portfolios the fascists would be awarded; once that had been agreed, Mussolini’s triumphal entrance to Rome, who would arrive there from Milan in a sleeping-car, was just the logical conclusion.

Neither the State not the democratic parties would intervene to stop the so-called fascist ‘revolution’. At the time of the ‘March on Rome’, the king would refuse to sign the declaration of martial law, thus allowing the fascists to converge on the capital undisturbed.

The only resistance the fascists encountered was in Rome itself where the workers, led by communists, fought hard against Mussolini’s squads. On that occasion too, as was by now the custom, the Police occupied the workers’ quarter, and by depriving them of any means of defence allowed the incoming hordes of fascists to shoot the workers in cold blood. When the party now called for a general strike as a class response to the fascist takeover, the socialist leaders of the General Confederation of Labour kept their members in check and instructed them not to obey the ‘dangerous’ exhortations of revolutionary groups, whereas the leaders of the other unions didn’t respond at all.

At the end of October 1922, Mussolini submitted his first government for parliamentary approval. The Mussolini government was given a vote of confidence of 306 votes to 116. The fascists had a mere 35 parliamentary deputies, that is, less than ten per cent.

Speaking for the Communist Party of Italy, Rabezzana read a party declaration that stated: “The consolidation of all the bourgeois parties around fascism confirms the exactness of our critique. More than any number of conferences, fascism in government shows that a revolutionary period has begun. The death of democracy coincides with the death throes of the dominant class (…) You fascists are the continuers and legitimate inheritors of the entire tradition of the Italian bourgeoisie”.

The Italian communist left has always rejected the idea of fascism as a ‘historical digression’, abruptly begun and abruptly finished. It has always maintained, on the contrary, that there is a continuous historical, social, political and economic thread uniting pre-fascist democracy, fascism and post-fascist democracy. In 1945, in our review Prometeo, we wrote: “The current war has been lost by the fascists, but won by fascism (…) The capitalist world, having preserved the integrity and historical continuity of its powerful State units, will continue to try to dominate the forces which menace it, to implement a system of ever tighter control over economic processes, and to undermine the autonomy of any social or political movement which threatens the established order (…) This fundamental truth becomes every day more evident in its organisational workings, which tend towards economic, social and political control of the world”.

Consistent with our unequivocal evaluation of fascism is derived our evaluation of what would later be called ‘anti-fascist resistance’: a movement which is so entirely lacking in class connotations that it even expects the proletariat to subject itself to a section of the bourgeois parties, in order to pursue the anti-historical and reactionary aim of ‘restoring democracy’. And that is why we have always considered anti-fascism as the most pernicious of all the products of fascism. The guerrilla warfare conducted by the armed partisan bands – and this is the case in Italy as much as in Spain – even when it was composed of confused proletarian groups, couldn’t free itself of its patriotic and democratic premises; which were, and are, completely antithetical, both historically and politically, to the class movement for socialism, in spite of the thousand and one lies of democrats and Stalinists alike.

At the Fourth Congress it is well-known I made a report on fascism at a decisive turning point in the history of fascism in Italy. Our delegation left Italy to be here on the day before Mussolini took power.

Today I need to speak about the matter a second time, and again at a crucial turning point in the development of fascism, prompted, as you know, by the Matteotti affair. Fate has also decreed, same as before, that this event should occur immediately after the Italian delegation’s departure for the 5^th Congress. In both cases, therefore, the timing of the reports has been appropriate in terms of illustrating the extremely important social and political phenomenon of fascism.

Naturally, I am not going to repeat here everything I said in my first report about the historical development of fascism because there are too many other points I need to cover. I will therefore just briefly recall the main ideas in the critique of fascism I made at that time. I will do so in a schematic way such as to maintain the integrity of what I said at the 4^th Congress.

First of all: the origins of fascism.

In terms of its historical origins the fascist movement is linked to a number of groups which advocated Italian intervention in the world war. There were many groups that supported such a policy, including an extreme left composed of renegades from syndicalism, anarchism, and in some cases – especially in Mussolini’s group – renegades from socialism’s extreme left. This latter group completely identified itself with the politics of national harmony and military intervention against the Central Powers. And it is very characteristic that this was the group to provide post war fascism with its General Staff. Relations between this earlier political grouping and the great fascist movement we are faced with today can be followed in an unbroken succession.

The date of birth of classic fascist action is November 2, 1920, the day the events in Bologna (Palazzo D’Accursio) took place. I will nevertheless omit this point of a purely historical character and move on to other matters.

Somebody typified the governmental crisis in Italy as follows: fascism represents the political negation of the period in which bourgeois liberal and left democratic politics held sway; it is the harshest form of reaction against the policy of concessions which was put into practice by Giolitti and co in the post-war period. We, on the other hand, are of the opinion that the two periods are dialectically linked: that the former attitude of the Italian bourgeoisie during the State crisis brought about by the post-war period, was nothing but a natural preparation for Fascism.

In this period there a proletarian offensive threatened. The forces of the bourgeoisie weren’t sufficient to withstand a direct attack. They therefore had to resort to cunning manoeuvres to avoid the engagement; and while these manoeuvres were being put into effect by the politicians of the left, fascism was able to prepare its subsequent massive instruments of coercion and lay the groundwork for the second phase, when it would take the offensive itself to deal a death blow to the revolutionary forces. It isn’t possible here to go over every argument that supports this interpretation. Again, what I said at the 4^th Congress still holds true. Another fact. Fascism starts out from the agricultural districts. This is extremely typical. The attack on positions held by the revolutionary proletariat starts in the peasant zones. Bologna is a rural centre. It is the capital city of a large agricultural area in the Po valley, and it was here that fascism started its triumphal tour through the whole of Italy, spreading out in various directions. In our first report we gave a geographical description of this triumphal tour. Suffice here to recall that fascism only attacks the industrial centres and the large cities during a second phase.

But although it is true that fascist action began in the non-industrial areas, we should not draw the conclusion that the fascist movement was created to serve the interests of the landed bourgeoisie, the large landowners. Quite the contrary. Behind this movement there stands the interests of big industry, commerce, and high finance as well. It is an attempt at a unitary counter-revolutionary offensive of all of the bourgeois forces. This is another thesis which I will be hammering out and returning to it many times in the course of this report. One should add – third point – the fact of the mobilization of middle classes. At first sight, going by external appearances, fascism does not give the impression of being a movement of the above mentioned upper social strata, i.e., the great landowners and the big capitalist bourgeoisie, but rather a movement of the petty and middle bourgeoisie, of ex-servicemen, intellectuals and all those classes which the proletariat has not yet managed to draw into its orbit and rally around the watchword of revolutionary dictatorship. Within these classes a powerful ideological, political and organisational mobilization has been developed; their discontent and their restlessness have been organised. They were told: you are the third class to enter the battlefield, that is, a new force that not only rebels against the proletariat, but also against the old bourgeoisie and its traditional politicians. During the post-war crisis the proletariat didn’t manage to enforce its revolutionary policy, and seize the power which was slipping out of the hands of the old ruling class. Now a third class appears on the scene. Such is the external appearance which fascism likes to give itself. But in reality it is a mobilisation of the middle classes, driven by and under the leadership of the conservative forces of the big bourgeoisie, with the cooperation and help of the State apparatus. Hence the dual face of fascism: firstly, it defends the interests of the big bourgeoisie, that is, the interests of the upper class; secondly, it mobilises the middle classes, that is, the important social forces of the small and middle bourgeoisie, in defence of those interests. In my first report I made a critique of fascist ideology. I asked: what is the ideology on which this movement based? Nowadays it has become a commonplace to state that fascism has no theory, has done nothing to outline a new political theory. It claims to have accomplished a revolution, to have given a new face to social and political struggle. In actual fact, from a theoretical point of view, it has created absolutely nothing that could serve as the constructive basis for the programme of such a revolution; of this self styled top to toe renewal of Italian society which, according to Mussolini, may tomorrow be extended to societies in other countries. It is a fact that to begin with fascism possesses a program that borrows a number of points from the programs of the extreme left. But this program exclusively serves the needs of the mobilisation which we referred to earlier. It is quickly forgotten, in fact transformed into its exact opposite, as soon as fascism gets into power; and from that moment its program of renewal fizzles out.

Fascism is not a revolutionary movement. It is a purely conservative movement for the defence of the established bourgeois order. It does not produce a new programme. However, as soon as we move from the ideological to the organisational sphere, we can see that it is bringing in something new. We can immediately see that there is something here that the bourgeoisie in Italy, and in other countries, haven’t so far employed. Although the Italian bourgeoisie had great political leaders, professional politicians, parliamentarians who could be assured of a great popular following at elections, and although it had its great liberal party, its policy used to be characterised by the fact that it lacked any organisational force. The liberal party had a clear and concrete doctrine, a well-defined historical tradition, and an ideology which was entirely adequate from a bourgeois point of view. But it lacked organisation. Fascism completely turned this state of affairs on its head. It brings nothing new in ideological terms (we will see soon enough the worth of its critique of the ideology of old bourgeois parties). But it does deploy a new factor which the old parties completely lacked: a powerful campaigning apparatus, powerful both in terms of its political organisation and its military organisation.

This shows that in the present period of grave capitalist crisis the State apparatus is no longer sufficient to defend the bourgeoisie. It needs to be backed up by a well-organised party which is capable of operating on a countrywide level and which struggles to gain support from the middle classes, and maybe even to sidle up to certain strata of the working class. During this crisis the bourgeoisie can face out the impending revolution only thanks to the mobilisation of the non-bourgeois classes. What relations exist between fascism and the proletariat? Fascism is by its nature an anti-socialist, and therefore anti-proletarian, movement. Since its inception fascism has presented itself as the destroyer of even the most minor conquests of the working class. Nevertheless it is incorrect to identify fascism with the traditional reaction of the extreme right: with its states of siege, its terror, its emergency laws and its prohibition of the revolutionary organisations. Fascism goes farther. It is a more modern movement. And being more sophisticated, it also endeavours to gain influence amongst the proletarian masses, and to this end it unhesitatingly accepts the principles of trade union organisation. It tries to create workers’ economic organisations.

Clearly these trade unions bear no comparison with free trade unions. Nevertheless, in my opinion, we must establish that the very existence of fascist unions represents a very significant argument against revolutionary syndicalism, which sees the economic organisation as the decisive weapon of class struggle. The facts show that this weapon can just as well be exploited for counter-revolutionary ends.

Of course the fascist trade union movement is to be distinguished from the real trade union movement by one very characteristic feature, i.e., it recruits amongst the ranks of all classes and not just amongst the working class because it is actually a form of organisation based on the sectors of production. The intention is to create parallel organisations of workers and employers on the basis of class collaboration.

We have thus reached a point where fascism and democracy converge. In short, fascism is playing the old game of the left wing bourgeois parties and social-democracy, that is, calling on the proletariat to declare a civil truce. To achieve this end it tries to form trade unions of industrial workers and of agricultural workers which are then manoeuvred into a de facto collaboration with the bosses’ organisations. The sole intention of this action, of course, is to annihilate the revolutionary organisations and to allow the proletarian masses to be fully exploited by the capitalists. And yet the upper propertied strata does not portray fascism as a brutal method of oppressing the workers, on the contrary it is presented as a way of organising the entire productive forces of the country, with the recognition of this requirement taking the form of the collaboration of all economic groups in the «national interest».

Obviously what underlies all this is the exploitation of nationalistic and patriotic ideology. This isn’t something entirely new. During the war, the formula of the submission of all particular interests to the general interest of the whole country had already been widely utilised in the national interest. Fascism is therefore reverting to an old programme of bourgeois politics. However, this programme appears in a form which somehow echoes the programme of social democracy but on the other hand really does contain something new, that is a powerful political and military organisation at the service of the conservative forces.

The conclusion I drew in the report I made to the 4^th Congress was that the fascist programme is actually based on a fundamental historical and social contradiction. Fascism would like to reconcile and silence all economic and social conflicts within society. But this is just the outward appearance. In reality it endeavours to achieve unity within the bourgeoisie, a coalition between the upper layers of the propertied classes in which individual contrasts between the interests of the different groups of the bourgeoisie and of the different capitalist enterprises are smoothed out.

On the economic terrain, fascism is entirely stuck in the rut of old bourgeois liberalism: it rejects any State intervention in the economy; preaches unlimited freedom of action for business; and advocates the free interplay of the forces which stem from capitalism. However this causes it to get caught up in an insoluble contradiction: it is extremely difficult to put into practice a unitary politics of the bourgeois class so long as there is complete freedom among economic organisations to develop in whatever way they choose, and so long as individual groups of capitalists are completely free to compete among themselves. The conclusion we draw from this is that fascism is destined to fail due to the economic anarchy of capitalism despite it holding the reins of government firmly in its grasp, despite it commanding the powerful weapon of the state apparatus, and despite the fact it has an organisation extending throughout the entire peninsula which mobilises the middle classes, and to a certain extent the proletariat as well, in the interests of the united bourgeoisie. The mighty fascist apparatus may give the impression that fascist power will last, but at its very roots this power suffers from a fundamental contradiction, because fascism hasn’t shown that it possess any new way of overcoming the capitalist crisis.

Today, same as before, we believe that the capitalist crisis will not be overcome by «heroic» means. I have repeated here the fundamental concepts for the analysis of fascism which I expounded in my first report. The conclusions we have drawn are the same as before, and they are fully confirmed by almost two years of fascist dictatorship.

* * *

Let us return to the historical phase we were in at the time of the 4^th Congress, when the fascists took power: the conclusion of the general offensive against the revolutionary forces and against the old detainers of power in Italy, the March on Rome. In that report I hadn’t yet touched on the controversial question that arose in our ranks during the 4^th Congress, although comrade Zinoviev mentioned it in his speech. What happened during our absence from Italy? A coup or a comedy? I will briefly take up this issue although in my opinion there were three options: coup, comedy – or revolution?

Let us remind ourselves of the characteristic features of the fascist seizure of power. There was no armed struggle. There was merely a mobilisation of fascism which threatened a revolutionary conquest of power, and a sort of defensive mobilisation of the State, which at a certain point actually declared a state of emergency. But the State didn’t put up any real resistance. There was no armed struggle. Instead of fighting, a compromise was reached, and at a certain moment the struggle was, so to speak, put on hold, postponed. This was not because the King, at the right moment, refused to sign the decree of martial law, but because the compromise had evidently been prepared a long time before. The fascist government therefore established itself in the normal way: after the resignation of the Facta government, the King summoned Mussolini to form a new cabinet. The leader of this self-styled revolution reached Rome from Milan in a sleeping car, and at every stop along the way he was cheered by official representatives of the State. Why one cannot talk of a revolution is not merely because power was taken without an insurrectional attack, but because of all the other reasons we touched on earlier when considering the historical significance of fascism. From a social point of view fascism does not represent a major change; it does not represent the historical negation of the old bourgeois methods of government, it merely represents the completely logical and dialectical continuation of the preceding stage of so-called democratic and liberal bourgeois government.

We resolutely oppose the statement, repeated over and over again by the fascists, that their assumption of power can be equated with revolution. In his speeches Mussolini says, «we made a revolution». But when we retort, «there was no revolution, no struggle, no revolutionary terror, because an out and out ’seizure of power’ never took place, and nor was there a real annihilation of the enemy», then Mussolini answers with an argument which, from an historical point of view, is quite laughable: «we still have time for that», he says, «we will complete our revolution in due course». But a revolution cannot be ’put on ice’; not even the most daring and powerful of leaders has that kind of power. Such arguments aren’t enough to refute the critique which points out the revolution never took place. You cannot say, «it’s true, these events haven’t yet happened, but that can be remedied whenever we want». It is of course always possible that new battles will take place. But the March on Rome was certainly not a battle, not a revolution. It is also said, «there has, nevertheless, been an unusual kind of changeover of governmental power, a coup», but I won’t dwell on this point because in the end just boils down to a play on words. Also, when we use the term «coup d’Ètat» we understand it to mean not merely a change of government personnel, a mere change in the general staff of the party in power, but rather an action that eliminates, in a violent way, the underlying orientation of every government which had ruled up to that time. Fascism didn’t do that. Fascism talks a lot about how it is against parliamentarism, and about how antidemocratic and antiparliamentarian it is. But, taken as a whole, its social programme is the same old programme of democratic lies, just an ideological weapon for the conservation of bourgeois rule. Even before fascism took power it very rapidly became «parliamentarian»; indeed it ruled for a year and a half without dispersing the old lower house which was composed of a majority of non-fascists, and even of anti-fascists. Displaying the flexibility so characteristic of bourgeois politicians, this house then hastened to put itself at Mussolini’s disposal in order to legalize his position and to grant him as many votes of confidence as he deigned to ask of them. Even the first Mussolini cabinet – as he frequently recalls in his «left wing speeches» – was not built on purely fascist foundations. It included representatives of the most significant of the remaining bourgeois parties, ranging from Giolitti’s party and the Popolari, to the democratic left. It was therefore a coalition government. Here then is what the so-called coup has begotten! A party with only 35 MPs in the House took power and occupied the overwhelming majority of ministerial and vice ministerial posts.

There is another important historical event which occurred in Italy which is nothing to do with the March on Rome and which also needs to be highlighted. I refer to the occupation of Italy as a whole by the fascists; an occupation set in train by previous events and whose geographical spread can be clearly plotted. The seizure of power by Mussolini was merely the acknowledgement of a previously existing relationship of forces. Every government raised to power – above all Facta’s – had given fascism free rein. It was the latter which really governed the country; it was given a completely free hand and had the state apparatus at its disposal. The Facta cabinet was only in charge for two months, awaiting the moment when fascism would deem it proper to take power.

These are the reasons why we used the term «Comedy». At any rate, we completely stand by our statement that this is not a revolution. What has happened is rather a change in the bourgeois leadership; a change, moreover, which was prepared for in advance, and accomplished gradually. In the economic and social field, it does not represent, not even in the realm of domestic policy, any kind of transformation of the programme of Italian bourgeoisie. As a matter of fact the great shock wave of the so-called fascist revolution, both before and after the March on Rome, does not rest on the official utilisation of the state apparatus, but rather on illegal reaction flanked by the tacit support of the police, local administration, bureaucracy and army; tacit support – and we need to be emphatic about this – which was already there, in abundance, even before the fascists took power.

In Mussolini’s first speeches to the House, he said, «I could throw you out of this room with the support of my troops. I could do it, but I’m not going to. The house can continue to perform its duties, provided it is ready to collaborate with me». The overwhelming majority of the old House was quite willing to bow to the orders of the new chief.

As a matter of fact, no new legislation was introduced after the fascists took power. In the realm of domestic policy, no emergency laws were enacted. Certainly there have been political persecutions (which we will discuss later) but officially the laws have not been modified. There have been no exceptional decrees like those approved by bourgeois governments during revolutionary phases, such as for example the ones enacted by Crispi and Pelloux, who periodically sought protection against the revolutionary parties and their leaders by adopting a policy consisting of states of emergency, military jurisdiction and repressive measures.

Fascism, on the other hand, continues to use the same original and modern technique against the proletarian forces it used before taking power. They have even declared that they will disband their illegal assault troops as soon as the other parties have done the same. In reality, the fascist fighting corps have disappeared as organisations external to the State only to then be inserted into the state apparatus through the formation of the «National Militia». And now, as before, this armed force remains at the disposal of the fascist party, and of Mussolini in person. It represents a new organisation, officially absorbed within the state apparatus. It is the pillar on which fascism rests.

On the agenda the question remains: should we allow this organisation to disappear or not? Can fascism be required to rely on constitutional means in domestic politics rather than on these new organs? Of course fascism hasn’t so far acknowledged the old norms of constitutional law, and at present the Militia is the harshest enemy of all those who aspire to bring down fascist rule.

Legally speaking, there are no emergency laws in our country. When in February 1923 thousands of Italian communists were arrested, we expected fascism to start a legal campaign against us, to take drastic steps and to obtain the harshest sentences. But the situation developed in a very favourable way and we were judged according to the old democratic laws. The Italian penal code, the work of a representative of the extreme bourgeois left, minister Zanardelli, is extremely liberal and leaves much room for interpretation. With regard to crimes to do with politics and beliefs it is particularly mild and flexible. It was therefore easy for us to assume the following position: «fascism getting rid of its enemies and taking dictatorial measures against us is quite understandable. It is perfectly right to judge us and find us guilty because we are communists, and because we aim to overthrow the existing government by revolutionary means. However, from a legal point of view, what we do is not prohibited. Other things certainly are prohibited, but you have absolutely no evidence of the alleged conspiracy, of the criminal association on which the charge is based». Not only did we stick to this line, but thanks to it we were acquitted by the tribunals, because it was absolutely impossible to convict us on the basis of the existing laws.

We could therefore see that the judiciary and police apparatus, from fascism’s point of view, were not up to the task. Fascism had got hold of the state apparatus but was unable to transform it to suit its purposes. It did not know how to get rid of the communist leaders through court rulings. It had its cadres, it own terrorist organisations, but within the justice system it did not deem it necessary to employ new weapons. This is for me a further demonstration of the total inadequacy of bourgeois-liberal guarantees and of liberal justice in the struggle against the freedom of movement of the proletariat. It is true that in such circumstances our defence had to adopt legal means as well, but if the enemy possesses an illegal organisation, by means of which it can resolve the issue in quite a different way, these democratic guarantees lose any meaning.

Fascism sticks to the old policy of left democratic lies, of equality before the law for all, and so on and so forth. This does not stop it from continuing to seriously persecute the proletariat. I merely wish to say, with reference to the purely political trials by which the leaders of the revolutionary proletariat were supposed to be crushed, that the new situation created by fascism hasn’t changed the classic system of the democratic-bourgeois governments at all. A revolution, on the other hand, is always characterized by the transformation of the political laws.

I will now briefly deal with the events which occurred after fascism took power.

First of all a few words on the economic situation in Italy. Fascists are continually telling us that the economic crisis of 1920 and 1921 was followed, after they took power, by a period of economic growth. They maintain that in the past two years the situation has stabilized, economical equilibrium has returned, order has been re-established and the whole situation has undergone a marked improvement. These are supposed to be the advantages of fascism for all social classes, the blessing for which the Italian people is indebted to fascism. This official position is supported by a full scale mobilisation of the whole of the press, and by the employment of all the means a party firmly entrenched in power has at its disposal. But this is just an official lie. The current economic situation in Italy is bad. The rate of exchange of the lira has plummeted to the lowest level since the end of the war: it is worth just 4.3 U.S. cents, i.e., fluctuations in the exchange rate have seen it drop to the lowest value so far recorded. Fascism hasn’t been able to improve the situation. It is true that, according to Mussolini, without him the lira’s rate of exchange would have dropped even lower, but this argument cannot be taken seriously.

The fascists also claim to have re-established a balanced budget. This is true from a material point of view: after all, it is well known that with State Budgets you can demonstrate whatever you want. In any case, fascists did not contradict the statement made by the Opposition’s experts, according to whom if the price of coal had not dropped compared with the 1920-21 prices, and if war costs, which have to be discharged over a given period of time, had not been recorded in a different way, the budget deficit would be far higher today than in 1920-21, as can be proven by the figures alone.

The index of the economic situation certainly shows widespread decline. As regards the unemployment figures they were very high in 1920, and particularly in 1921, and it is true they are lower now, but the data over the last few months shows that unemployment is rising again, and that the industrial crisis has not been overcome once and for all. In the business world the situation is extremely tense; trade is encountering major difficulties. This is proven by the statistics on bankruptcies which show an enormous increase compared with recent years. Also the cost of living index in large cities is rising. It is quite clear that the whole economic situation in Italy is getting worse; it hasn’t stabilized at all. And what fascism has produced, by means of enormous pressure exerted by the bourgeoisie, is only an external stability. The official indices show that all that has been obtained is just the expression of this terrible pressure exerted on the proletariat; that all that has been accomplished has been at the expense of the proletarian class and solely in the interest of the ruling class. Nor should it be forgotten that the very existence of this pitiless pressure makes it very likely that there will be an eruption of those very classes which were sacrificed in the fascist attempt to stabilize the economic situation in the exclusive interest of the big bourgeoisie.

I will now move on to the fascist government’s attitude towards the workers. I pointed out earlier that the great political trials staged against us have provided evidence of the inadequacy of the fascist State’s legal apparatus. Nevertheless, whenever they have been able to accuse comrades of committing common-law offences, rather than those the law considers ’political’, they have come down very heavily indeed. Numerous clashes have occurred, and are still taking place, between fascists and proletarians (mainly communists); and in such skirmishes there are generally casualties on both sides. It is a notorious fact that, long after the fascists took power, fascists who had killed workers were still being granted complete immunity, even when the proof against them was conclusive. Workers, on the other hand, who wounded or killed fascists in self defence received extremely severe sentences. The amnesty which has been decreed is only to the advantage of those who committed common-law offences for national ends: in other words it is an amnesty for fascist assassins, while those common criminals who pursue anti-national ends, i.e., who fight against fascism, must expect the harshest punishments. It is an unalloyed class amnesty.

A later amnesty would reduce sentences to between 2 and 3 years; but it is important to know that our comrades are generally sentenced to 10, 15 or even 20 years of imprisonment. Hundreds and hundreds of workers, Italian comrades, are today in jail because they didn’t manage to get over the border quickly enough after armed confrontations with the fascists; confrontations they’d participated in but which were almost inevitably provoked by the fascists. Thus the present Italian government is carrying out the most ferocious oppression against the working class. Whenever the working class tries to defend itself against the fascist terror, legal action immediately follows, in a way that does not differ much from the old political trials for «treason». In strictly legal terms, the right of the communist party, anarchist movement, etc, to exist continues to be guaranteed by the law as before. What isn’t possible… in theory?

And it is pretty much the same as far as the press is concerned. Officially, there is still freedom of the press. All parties are allowed to publish their organs but, although there is no legal pretext for it, the police authorities can prohibit the distribution of a newspaper. Up to now only communists have been the target of this prohibition. Our daily paper, Il Lavoratore of Trieste, has been prohibited in accordance with an Austrian law still enforced in that town. Thus the old Austrian laws are used against the revolutionaries, that is, against those who during the war, due to their defeatism, were called accomplices of Austria!

To this we can add the suppression of newspapers by armed bands, the raids on editorial offices by which the publication of proletarian press is made impossible, the sabotage of journalists associations, and so on and so forth. Even now our newspapers, as well as those of the opposition, are still often destroyed or burnt when they reach their destination.

The fascist government exerts a terrible pressure on the trade unions. Workers are forced to join the fascist unions. The red trade union offices have been destroyed. But despite this, they haven’t managed to rally the masses in the fascist economical organizations. The figures published by the fascists are a bluff. In fact the proletariat is today unorganized from a trade union point of view. At times the masses go along with the movements led by fascists unions but only because it offers them their only opportunity to strike. Many workers, many categories, which in their overwhelming majority are not in favour of the fascist unions, and which in the elections for the internal commissions vote in their overwhelming majority against fascists and for the revolutionary candidates, have to join the fascist trade union just so they can at least try to fight the bourgeoisie. Thus a grave conflict ensues within the fascist trade union movement. It can’t avoid strikes and is drawn into the struggle against the fascist organisations of bosses. This conflict within the fascist and government organs is always resolved to the detriment of the workers. Hence the discontent, the grave crisis that the leaders of the fascist union movement have been unable to conceal at their recent meetings. Their attempts at organising the industrial proletariat have completely failed. Their action aims to create a pretext – a superfluous pretext – for putting a break on the activity of free unions and keeping the proletariat in a state of disorganisation.

Recently the Government has taken steps against the free trade unions as well: official State control of the internal organisational and administrative work of unions has been introduced. This is a very serious step, but it does not change the essence of the situation as the work of the free unions had already been almost completely paralysed by earlier measures.

Free unions continue to exist, as do the Chambers of Labour (Camere del Lavoro), the trade guilds, etc., but it is absolutely impossible to provide accurate figures regarding their membership, even when they have managed to remain in contact with the masses. This is because orderly and continuous collection of contributions, and recruitment drives, are almost completely forbidden. Up to now it hasn’t been possible in Italy to reconstruct the cadres of the trade union organisations. But the great advantage of fascism is supposedly that there will be no more strikes. This, for the bourgeoisie and the philistines of the petty bourgeoisie, is the real clincher.

Back in 1920, when there was no fascism, they say, masses of workers could be seen taking to the streets every day. Here a strike, there a procession, open confrontations breaking out. Nowadays there are no longer any strikes, there is no longer any unrest. In the factories the work is no longer interrupted, and peace and order reign. This is the employers’ point of view.

Nevertheless, strikes are still called, and during these strikes incidents worthy of mention have occurred arising out of the relations existing between fascist trade unions, revolutionary workers, government and employers. The situation is definitely unstable. The continued presence of class struggle is demonstrated by a number of significant events. Indeed there is no doubt, despite the obstacles, that it is on the rise. The action of the fascist government is also directed against workers in the State owned enterprises. For example, out and out terror is being used against the railway workers. A great number of them have been sacked. Of course the first ones to be gotten rid of have been active members of the revolutionary organizations (the railway workers’ organization used to be one of the trade unions whose leadership was much further to the left). The Government has acted in the same way towards several other State-linked enterprises.

The fascist riposte: but we have given proletarians the 8 hour day! The 8 hour day is now established by law! These are great conquests! Name another bourgeois government of a major country which has promulgated such a law!

But this law contains rider clauses which totally annul the principle of the 8 hour working day. In fact, even if the law were rigorously enforced it would be possible to introduce an average working day which was a lot longer than 8 hours. In any case, the law is not enforced. With the approval of the fascist trade unions the employers do whatever they want within the workplace. And finally, the proletariat in Italy had already conquered the 8 hour day with its own organisations in any case; indeed, several federations had obtained a working day which was even shorter. We aren’t, therefore, talking about a «gift» bestowed by fascism on the Italian proletariat. In fact we could say that unemployment is increasing because the bosses are forcing the workers in the factories to work a lot more than 8 hours a day.

The other «conquests» are not even worthy of mention. Workers who had previously secured certain rights, a certain freedom of movement and action in the factories, are now subjected to an iron discipline. The Italian worker works today under the knout.

As regards the economic situation, all available figures show that wages have dropped dramatically after having temporarily reached a level corresponding to the rise in prices of indispensable goods, the prices of which today are 4-5 times higher than before the war. The workers’ standard of living has worsened. Certainly «order» has been re-established in the workplace, but it is a reactionary order, an order in the general interest of exploitation by the bosses. There is plenty of tangible proof that all fascist action, including that of their trade unions, is in the service of the employers and of the Union of Industrialists.

As regards the dockers’ organisation, despite it being led by notorious opportunists of the likes of Giulietti (or maybe precisely because of this) it managed, up to a certain point, to resist the fascist power and to survive the March on Rome. Existing alongside this organisation there was a dockers’ cooperative, called the «Garibaldi». Just as the new contract was about to be signed between the Government and the ship-owners, the Garibaldi thought it would make a more competitive offer. This would have meant dangerous competition for the ship-owners. It would have forced them to make a more attractive, but less profitable, offer. So what did they do? The group representing the shipping magnates, the maritime kings, issued an order to the fascist government, and the fascist government hastened to carry it out. Using the pretext of a conflict provoked by the local authorities, police officers were sent to occupy the offices of the cooperative and it was forced it to suspend its activities.

The situation is very complicated, but we can sum it up as follows: it is clear that the fascist state apparatus is in the service of the capitalist groups fighting against the working class. Today the whole life of the proletariat, the whole industrial life of Italy, provides the most damning proof, and clearest demonstration, that the development of government into a steering organ and business committee of capitalists has been realised in its most extreme form in our country. We should also be aware that similar phenomena are affecting the farm labourers. I cite as an example the strike led by the fascist trade union which was fought by the so-called «rice weeders» in the fields of Lomellina. Launched with the approval of the fascist union, it was a strike which would eventually see the full might of reactionary terror hurled against it; the strikers, women all, were attacked by the police and the militia, that is, by the organs of the fascist government, and the strike was stifled in blood.

There are hundreds of similar examples giving a picture of the situation in which the Italian proletariat finds itself today. The fascist trade union policy allows workers to try and conduct struggles; but as soon as there is any actual conflict between workers and bosses, the government intervenes with brutal violence in the interests of capitalist exploitation.

What is the relationship between fascism and the middle classes? A whole series of events gives damning proof of the disappointment of the middle classes. At first they saw fascism as their movement, as the start of a new historical period. They believed that the rule of the big bourgeoisie and its political leaders had been brought to an end, and without the need for any proletarian dictatorship; without the Bolshevik revolution which had caused them to tremble in 1919 and 1920. They believed that the rule of the middle classes, of the ex-servicemen, of those who had fought a victorious war, was about to be realised; they thought they could create a powerful organisation which would enable them to take up the reins of the State. In order to defend their own interests they wanted to develop an autonomous policy which would fight against both capitalist and proletarian dictatorships. The bankruptcy of this program is shown by the measures adopted by the fascist government; measures which not only hit the proletariat extremely hard, but also the middle classes who were raving about having created their own power, their own dictatorship, and who had even been drawn into demonstrations against the old apparatus of bourgeois rule, which they thought to have brought down with the fascist revolution. All of fascism’s governmental measures show that it is in the service of the big bourgeoisie, of industrial, financial and commercial capital, and that its power is directed against the interests of every other class; not just the proletariat, but the middle classes as well.

For instance, measures introduced in the housing field have hit all classes indiscriminately. During the war a moratorium was introduced which imposed certain limitations on the rent increases landlords could impose. The fascists have abolished these, giving landlords the option of raising rents. True, after having re-established unlimited freedom in this field, they had to enact a new law which limited the rights of landlords. But this new law is of a purely demagogic nature. Its only purpose is to placate the anger the first law aroused. Yet there remains a huge shortage of lodgings. The same applies to the educational reform. This was defined by Mussolini as «the most fascist of all reforms», and was drafted by the famous philosopher Gentile. From a technical point of view it is a reform which has to be taken seriously. To resolve the issue according to the new criteria, truly remarkable work has been done. But the whole tendency of the reform is aristocratic: a good education for the sons of workers, the poor, the petty bourgeois is rendered impossible. It means that only the well-to-do, that is, those families which can afford the high school fees for their children, will enjoy the privilege of culture. And that is why this reform has been very badly received by the middle class and petty bourgeoisie, and even by teachers and professors, whose economic condition has further deteriorated, and who are now subjected to a stricter discipline.

Another example: to solve the problem of bureaucratic reform, fascism has carried out a review of the salaries of State white-collar workers according to the principle: decrease of the lowest salaries, increase of the salaries of senior functionaries. This reform has provoked a feeling of discontent towards the fascist government amongst the junior ranks of the State bureaucracy as well.

There is also the question of taxes, which I won’t deal with in depth here, but which clearly shows the class character of the fascist government. Basically, the latter wanted to rebalance the budget. However, it didn’t take any measures against the capitalists in pursuit of this aim. In order to raise more revenue it simply increased the burden weighing down on the proletariat, on consumers and on the middle and petty bourgeoisie.

One of the main reasons for discontent towards fascism resides in its treatment of the rural population, small tenants, etc.

Fascism is the enemy of the industrial proletariat but it has caused a no less marked worsening in the conditions of the peasant class. Previous governments had already taken measures to regulate land taxation but they were never applied. The fascist minister De Stefani has now tried to enforce them in such a draconian way that an unbearable fiscal burden now weighs heavily upon the whole of small land property, even affecting the incomes of small farmers, tenants and farm hands. This is aggravated by municipal and provincial taxes, which local socialist administrations in the past had managed to manoeuvre in an anti-capitalistic direction which was favourable to the workers. Nowadays taxes on cattle and other taxes are instead causing a severe decline in the condition of small farmers. Recently the tax on wine was slightly reduced, a reduction which aimed to blunt the sharpness of discontent in the countryside. But all these taxes represent, now as before, a terrible burden for the rural population.

I will just give the example of a comrade from the Italian delegation who is himself a small farmer. For his 12 hectare plot, which he part owns, part rents, he must pay £.1,500, that is 12,5% of an output of £.12,000. Just imagine how intensively he has to farm that plot to ensure the existence of his family and employees!

A noteworthy phenomenon has taken place in the South of Italy. Last year, the grape harvest was excellent. Prices fell dramatically, and this year wine is only fetching very low prices. In the South there are many tenant farmers who say they are not making any money. But they grow other crops as well as the grape, and they generally use the other crop to somehow cover production costs, whilst grape growing provides the income on which they live. But, given the current wine prices, taxes and wine production costs, etc., there is nothing left over for them. Production costs and retail prices are the same; the peasant farmer doesn’t have enough to provide for his family. He is then forced to get into debt, to ask for advances from the petty bourgeois of the rural centres or from the large landlords, and in the latter case he has to mortgage his land. In the immediate post-war period, raising rents was forbidden by law. This law was abolished by the fascists. Small tenants now have to pay a rent to landlords which has gone up by anything from 100 to 400%. Even the clauses concerning the division of the crop between tenant and landlord have been drastically modified to the advantage of the latter. In order to survive the small landowner is forced to sell part of his land, or give up the plot for which he paid half cash, half-loan. If one day he can’t pay, he immediately loses both the acquired land and the money already paid out. What is presently taking place is an out and out expropriation of small farmers. Those who paid high prices for their land in the post war period, and are now without cash, are being forced to sell for less than they paid. I repeat, this is a real expropriation of small landowning farmers by large landowners, a phenomenon that tends to become increasingly widespread. Every measure the fascist government has taken in this sphere has had but one consequence: the worsening of the condition of the rural proletariat.

Formerly the socialists conducted an agitation whose methods we couldn’t entirely endorse: they tried to get the government to undertake major land reclamation works to occupy the farm workers, to fight unemployment, and thus improve labour’s bargaining position in the countryside. The fascist government has now suspended these works in order to balance the budget. A huge number of rural workers have consequently been thrown onto the labour market, poverty in the countryside has increased and the proletariat’s standard of living has further declined.

Discontent has been directed at the government. The fascists have talked at length about the parasitism of the old red cooperatives, which by means of parliamentary pressure in favour of public works used to systematically exploit the State, but now they are doing exactly the same thing. They are trying, with their fascist cooperatives (almost the entire cooperative apparatus of the socialists has been forcibly transferred to them) to carry out a similar policy in the interests of the new fascist bureaucracy.

The dire conditions which has been foisted on the peasantry by fascism means this class now sees the fascist government as a power which is hostile to its interests and it is gradually taking up a more combative stance. There have already been instances of armed peasant revolts against taxes, and against the fascist municipal administrations, which have resulted in bloody clashes. The fact that this has happened is extremely important and it characterises the situation very well.

Having commented on fascism’s social policy, I’ll now move to consider its policy in other fields, starting with religion. The stance fascism takes on this issue is an example of its theoretical flexibility. To begin with, in order to exploit certain attitudes traditionally held by the middle classes and by intellectuals, fascism adopted an anticlerical programme; thus did it fight the catholic Popular Party in order to undermine its influence in the countryside. In a second period fascism started competing with the Popolari, and became the official party of religion and of Catholicism. Both from an historical and a theoretical point of view this is quite remarkable. The Vatican is conducting a pro-Fascist policy. It has been very happy with the concessions the fascist government has made by agreeing to improve conditions for the clergy and restoring the teaching of religion in schools. Mussolini, who when he was in Switzerland was the editor of a petty collection of anti-religious books (tuppenny ha’penny pamphlets in which the non-existence of God was demonstrated and you could read about papal misdeeds, the story of the woman elected to the papal throne, and all the other rubbish which for centuries has clouded the minds of workers) this same Mussolini nowadays, whenever he deems it useful, invokes ’the Lord’ and proclaims that he is governing ’in God’s name’.

The political opportunism of the Vatican hides a fundamental antagonism which is brought out in the clash between the fascists and popolari (the latter representing a kind of Christian democracy). The catholic idea, as such, is opposed to fascism, because fascism represents an exaltation of the fatherland, of the nation, and its deification. From a catholic point of view this is a heresy. Fascism would like to make of Catholicism an Italian national question, but the catholic church’s policy is inherently international and universal because it seeks to extend its political and moral influence across all borders. This extremely significant conflict has been resolved, for the time being, thanks to a compromise.

Let us now look briefly at fascist foreign policy. The fascists, as far as international politics is concerned, claim to have found Italy in an extremely dire situation; the country was a laughing stock but after fascism took power, and Italy acquired a strong government, it started to be treated very differently, and its position on the international stage is now very much changed.

Events have nevertheless shown that all fascist foreign policy can do is continue the old tradition of the Italian bourgeoisie. Indeed nothing has changed, nothing new has occurred. After playing his main card in the famous Corfu Incident, Mussolini immediately renounced coups of this sort, saw reason, and was welcomed into the ranks of orthodox diplomacy, taking great care not to repeat the earlier mistake elsewhere. The great French and English newspapers write that Mussolini is a very astute politician, and that following the Corfu expedition, which was really rather a childish action, he has become very wise and prudent. As a matter of fact Mussolini’s international policy is the only option Italy has; a second rate policy, because in the struggle between the great world powers Italy plays a subordinate role. In the matter of war reparations and in the Franco-German conflict Mussolini has always taken an intermediate stance, which has exerted absolutely no influence, one way or the other, on the existing power relations. Its erratic attitude has been welcomed with satisfaction, one minute by Germany, then by France, then by Great Britain.

It is true that fascism was able to modify, or rather overturn, power relations within the Italian border. But it wasn’t able to pull off the same stunt again on an international scale because it has absolutely no influence on inter-state relations. Since the necessary historical and social presuppositions for such influence are lacking, one cannot really talk seriously of an Italian imperialism.

A few facts will place the extremely modest foreign policy which Mussolini is constrained to follow in the correct light. The Fiume question was resolved by means of a compromise with Yugoslavia. Threats of war against Yugoslavia have given way to a policy of compromise and reconciliation with this country. Here, too, imperialist nationalism has had to bow before the real facts of foreign politics. The recognition of Soviet Russia also shows that although it is quite possible to conduct an extreme right-wing policy in Italy, the fact of the fascists taking power is not sufficient to extend such a policy onto the international level.

What effect did the recognition of Soviet Russia have on the Italian proletariat? The Italian proletariat has had a fairly good revolutionary education, and didn’t swallow the bait dangled by the fascist press; a press that until the day before had recorded every anti-Bolshevik slander, every fairy tale about Russia, and then all of a sudden, on command, had started to write exactly the opposite: that is, that the communist revolution is no more, that bolshevism is liquidated and that Russia is a bourgeois country like any other; that Italy and Russia share common interests, that Russia and Italy can collaborate, etc. A gross blunder was also made when they said: we stand before two revolutions, two dictatorships, two examples of the same political method of eliminating democracy, which by their very nature must arrive at a parallel action, and so on and so forth. This is an explanation that can only cause hilarity. In reality, what we are talking about here is unadorned capitalist interest. Having been unable to prevent industrial decline due to an unfavourable balance of trade, Italian capitalists became interested in establishing relations with Russia in the search for new markets for their commodities. The Italian proletariat has judged this event as proof of fascism’s weakness, not Soviet Russia’s. I must nevertheless remark that the correct political interpretation of this international event of primary importance for the Italian proletariat has been clouded by an unpleasant incident: some Russian comrades issued statements which in explaining this political event went rather too far, containing as they did declarations of friendship towards Italy that could be interpreted as declarations of friendship towards official Italy, towards Gran Duce Mussolini. This was bound to provoke a certain degree of uneasiness amongst a proletariat which is being persecuted and hunted down by the fascists. If this false step had been avoided, everything else would have met with the full comprehension of the Italian revolutionary proletariat.

We come now to the relations which exist between the fascist party apparatus and the State apparatus under the new government. These relations have raised quite thorny problems the effect of which has been severe crises and continuous conflict within the ranks of fascism. From the very start the internal life of the fascist organisations has been extremely turbulent, but with 700,000 members it is a very large organisation and conflicts are inevitable in an organisation of that size. Nevertheless, the harshness and violence of the internal conflicts within the fascist movement in Italy are exceptional. At the start, the problem of the relations between party and State was resolved in a very imperfect way by placing political commissioners drawn from the ranks of the party alongside the State authorities. These exerted a certain influence over State officials, and therefore had de facto power in their hands. The inevitable outcome, of course, was friction. This method of organisation was then reviewed and the old rights of the state apparatus had to be restored, eliminating the fascist commissaries. But the crisis, which was overcome only with the greatest of difficulty, has not been resolved in a definitive way because within the fascist movement two currents have formed. The first of them, which aims at a revision of extremist fascism, wants to return to legality, and declares: power is in our hands, we have our great leader Mussolini, we can restrict ourselves to governing through the normal and legal exercise of power; the whole state apparatus is at our disposal, we form the government, our Duce is trusted by all parties, therefore, the party does not need to get caught up in administrative matters anymore. This current would like to renounce violent struggle, and the use of illegal means, and get back to normal relations. It tries to influence Mussolini by isolating him from the more extreme fascist elements.

These extremist elements are recruited among the local hierarchs, and they are designated by the Abyssinian term, ’Ras’. ’Rassism’ is for local dictatorships of fascist occupation troops throughout Italy, and indeed it advocates a «second wave» of terror against its opponents. Farinacci, who recently proposed the death penalty for antifascists, is one of its typical representatives.

Between these two extremes, between the tendency which advocates a «second wave» offensive against the opposition, and which says: if Mussolini says that the revolution is not yet accomplished then we must complete it; then we must immediately order (their words) «five minutes of shooting to annihilate all the enemies of fascism, once and for all» – between this tendency, and the one which would prefer better relations between fascism and certain opposition elements, and even with reformists such as the leaders of the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro, Mussolini has, up to now, maintained a certain equilibrium by making shrewd concessions, now to the one side, now to the other. He has restored the old rights to the State apparatus officials but has no intention of renouncing the key support provided by the organisations operating independently from the State apparatus since it is these organisations which sustain the fascist power, and which allow it to defend itself against revolutionary attacks.

Fascism hasn’t dissolved parliament. The old parliament, as I pointed out earlier, was constantly passing votes of confidence in Mussolini and conceding him full powers which granted him everything he asked for. Nevertheless, fascism wanted to modify the electoral law. In Italy the system in place was proportional representation. Fascism wanted to be certain of retaining the majority. I believe this would still have been possible using the machinery of the old electoral system. Even under proportional representation, with polls, fascism would have obtained what it has now. On the basis of the new electoral law, the party list which wins the majority of the votes, and obtains at least 25% of all votes cast, has the right to two thirds of the seats in the new parliament. This means that a quarter of the overall vote is enough to occupy two thirds of the seats, on condition, of course, that another party list doesn’t gain 26% or 27% of the entire vote, in which case the latter list would be awarded the majority. On the majority party’s national list there were 375 names. So in actual fact these deputies have been elected by Mussolini himself since the fact that this list would obtain more than 25% of the vote was in no doubt. A real battle about who would be nominated has broken out inside the fascist party. Around 10 thousand fascist Rases had set their sights on being amongst the 375 elected. It wasn’t even possible to reserve all the posts on the list for fascist candidates.

In the elections a dual tactic was employed. In the North, where fascist organisation is very strong, there was no need for compromise and electoral lists composed exclusively of fascists were put forward. In the South, where fascist organisation is much weaker, they had to compromise and politicians of the old regime were allotted plenty of slots on the national list. Thus some of the candidates would be new men from the ranks of the fascist party, and some would be, for want of a better word, ’traditional’ politicians.

The elections have now taken place and we won’t talk about them in detail. We know that the fascist terror hasn’t yet reached the stage where it is absolutely impossible for the opposition to exercise their vote. The fascist government manoeuvred with a certain dexterity. It knew that by totally removing the opposition vote the elections would have immediately lost all political significance. The government therefore restricted itself to influencing the outcome. Mussolini could now say, «the elections are now over. The vast majority has voted for us; this consensus of the vast majority of the Italian people legitimises our power. One can no longer speak of the rule of a minority».

In order to assess the conduct and the outcome of the elections it is necessary to clearly distinguish between the North and South of Italy. In the North the fascist organisations are very powerful, mainly in the country but also in the industrial towns. Thus up there it can keep an eye on its electorate and check that party members vote they way they are supposed to; in other words, it can almost totally suppress the secret ballot. Certainly the fascists have fought ruthlessly against their adversaries but because they were counting on their own strength they had to let them exercise their right to vote. Therefore in the North fascism only obtained a very small majority (that is, a majority in the true sense of more than 50% rather than the artificial majority of over 25% which they introduced). In some cities, like Milan, it is well known that the fascist national list was in a minority compared to the opposition lists.

In the South on the other hand fascism’s list of candidates collected an overwhelming majority of the votes. The overall number of votes cast in Italy as a whole was 7.3 million, and the fascists obtained 4.7 million of them (3.65 million is half the votes cast; the fascists polled over a million more than that). That is the strangest aspect of the thing.

In the South, apart from a few districts where agrarian conflicts similar to the ones in the Po valley have taken place, a died in the wool fascism has never really existed. Fascism gained a foothold there in the following manner. After the fascists took power the local bourgeois cliques thought it as well to adhere to fascism, in a formal sense, in order to retain their hold over the local administrative machinery and to be able to continue to exploit it. In the South a significant level of fascist organisation doesn’t really exist and yet it is actually in the South, by employing very simple means, that fascism has obtained the overwhelming majority referred to above. Here the elections have been conducted at will; representatives on the rival lists have been chased off, the fascist squads have been organised, granted electoral certificates, and been put at the disposal of the local administration; with every member of these squads voting 30, 40 or even 50 times. Given this situation, Mussolini has been forced to make the extraordinary admission that it was the South of Italy which saved the country; that the most seasoned forces in the battle against revolutionary democracy were to be found in the South; that in 1919 and 1920 it was the South which hadn’t allowed itself be led astray. Thus his previous political interpretation of the Italian situation that the north was the most progressive and civilised part of the country – has been turned on its head. In recent speeches, true, he has gone back to his previous theory and seems to have given up trying to make his pronouncements agree with the official statistical results of the elections. Fascism is extremely weak in the South. In relation to the Matteotti affair one can say in fact that the South has been unanimous in its condemnation of the government. This important fact shows how artificial are the means by which fascism maintains itself in power.

A quick glance, then, at the other parties which participated in the elections. Firstly, before passing to the pro-fascists I want to recall the nationalist party, which is now officially wholly integrated into the fascist party. The nationalist party had been around for a long time before anyone had heard of fascism. It exerted a major influence on the latter’s development, and it was they who equipped fascism with its flimsy theoretical armoury. The right-wing of the Liberals, with Salandra at their head, have also completely merged with fascism and their members were candidates on the fascist list. In order to try and grab some of the seats reserved to the minority other ’liberal’ personalities and groups, not included on the fascist lists, would stand beside them on parallel lists which were also purely fascist.

Alongside the official lists and these parallel lists there were liberal lists of candidates which were unofficially supported by the government. There were also other, not declaredly anti-fascist, lists such as Giolitti’s towards which the government maintained a neutral stance, allowing them to win a few uncontested seats.

Regarding the opposition, we need to focus first of all on the defeat of the various parliamentary parties which composed the ’democracy’, parties which once had such a powerful majority. Bonomi (extreme right-wing social reformist) wasn’t re-elected. Di Cesare and Amendola only managed to salvage a small group of supporters after the Government’s bitter attack against them, and specifically against the latter.

The Popular Party has also suffered a serious defeat. During the old parliament it even took part in the fascist government. Its attitude has always been equivocal. It was only during the struggle against the new electoral law that it made a clean break with Mussolini, who responded by getting rid of the Popolari ministers. The resulting crisis forced the party chief, Don Sturzo, to officially resign (although in fact he still continues to guide party policy). Arising from this there has been a kind of split. A right-wing group, the popolari nazionali, have now left the party and support the fascist list. The main mass of the party follow Don Sturzo as before. The extreme left, headed by Migliori, has also left the party. The agitation he has been conducting in the countryside has been at times closely convergent with the actions of the revolutionary organisations. Inside the party, the influence of the big landowners still predominates in the form of Don Sturzo’s mediatory centrism. The popolari movement has undoubtedly suffered a severe blow.

The peasant party is another small party which is worthy of note. In a couple of districts it put forward its own list of candidates up for election. It is a party composed of discontented small farmers not prepared to entrust the representation of their interests to any of the existing parties, and preferring to form their own party. This movement might well have a future. It could achieve national prominence. The small republican party, which may be considered a semi-proletarian party, is rather confused in its attitude, but it has conducted a very vigourous campaign against the fascist government. It has won two parliamentary seats (in the old house it had five, now it has seven seats).

Then there are the three parties which emerged from the old socialist party: the Unitarian Socialist Party, the Maximalist Socialist Party, and the Communist Party. These parties famously had 150 seats between them when united in one party. Today the unitarians (reformists) have 24 seats, the maximalists, 22, and the communists 19. The communists presented a joint list with the third-internationalist fraction of the maximalist party under the banner of proletarian unity. We can say that the Communist Party was the only one of the opposition parties to return to parliament not only with its former strength intact, but having won new seats. In 1921 we had 15 seats, now we have 19. True, one of the seats is being contested and the final total may be 18 but that is a minor detail.

In addition to the small lists of the German and Slav irredentists, there is a Sardinian party, founded a few years ago in Sardinia, which doesn’t actually go so far as to call for total separation from Italy, but does want increased regional autonomy. We are talking about a movement which wants the State to be decentralised and to be less tied to the Italian State and the Italian nation, and it might prompt parallel movements in other regions which are in an even worse situation. Apparently in Basilicata a similar party is being formed. This movement also has certain links with the purely intellectual one in Turin which publishes Rivoluzione Liberale and advocates liberal and federalist theories. This group is putting up an energetic resistance to fascism, and it has attracted a certain number of sympathisers from amongst intellectuals and the professional classes. As you can see, the opposition is divided up into a lot of small groups. We shall also mention here some of the political currents which don’t take part in elections.

There is, for example, the movement led by D’Annunzio, i.e. a small elite gathered around D’Annunzio, ready to go into battle when its leader gives the signal. However, D’Annunzio’s attitude has been rather contradictory of late. He has been quiet for quite a while. His was a movement born out of the previous middle class and servicemen’s movement which opposed the official mobilisation of the big bourgeoisie and which – since fascism was reneging on its program and pursuing a purely conservative course – set itself apart. Then there is the Italia Libera movement, that is, the anti-fascist opposition within the servicemen’ organisation, who are also seeing their influence grow quite substantially at the moment. Another anti-fascist movement which is quite active is masonry. Fascism has caused a profound crisis in masonry. There has even been a split, although it is not a very significant one: a small group of pro-fascist masons who wanted to leave.

The fascists have carried out a campaign against the masons. Mussolini, as a fascist, got the same decision approved about the incompatibility of masonry and party membership as he did when he was fighting for the socialists back in 1914. Masonry has lost no time in replying vigorously to these attacks. In bourgeois circles abroad it has carried out energetic propaganda campaign against the fascist terror. In Italy too it is conducting educational work amongst the petty bourgeoisie and intellectuals, amongst whom masonry is very influential; and this has not been without a certain effect.

The anarchist movement doesn’t play a very significant role in Italian politics at present. As you can see, the various currents opposed to the powerful fascist majority present a very complicated picture.

But even if this opposition has quite a powerful press, what does it count for in terms of its military and political organisation, that is with regard to the practical possibility of mounting an attack on fascism in the near future? Practically nothing is the answer. It is true that certain groups such as the republicans and the masons would have us believe that they have illegal anti-fascist organisations, but such claims are not to be taken seriously. The only thing that can be taken seriously is the strong opposition current which exists in public opinion and the press. The bourgeois opposition controls a large section of the press. These include some newspapers distributed throughout Italy and which, whilst not declaredly of the opposition, take up a stance which is clearly against fascism. Thus do Milan’s Corriere della Sera and Turin’s La Stampa steer public opinion, above all amongst the average bourgeois, towards a tenacious, albeit mainly vocal, opposition. All this goes to show that dissatisfaction with fascism has grown since the latter took power.

Although accurately defining and classifying the different opposition groups is quite difficult, between the mood of the proletariat and that of the middle classes it is nevertheless possible to draw a very clear line of demarcation.

The proletariat is anti-fascist on the basis of its class consciousness; its sees the struggle against fascism as a mighty battle destined to make radical changes and substitute the revolutionary dictatorship to the fascist dictatorship. The proletariat is seeking revenge, but not in the banal and sentimental sense of the word; it is seeking revenge in a historical sense.

The revolutionary proletariat instinctively understands that the real growth and predomination of the forces of reaction must be opposed by a real counter-offensive of the forces of opposition; the proletariat senses that only after a new period of hard struggles and – if victorious – by means of the proletarian dictatorship, can current reality be radically changed. The proletariat awaits this moment; the moment when, with redoubled zeal born of hard-won experience, it can pay back its class enemy in spades for the pummelling it is having to put up with at the moment.

The anti-fascism of the middle classes is of a less active character. Certainly we have before us an opposition which is strong and sincere, but it is basically pacifist. What they want with all their hearts is to re-establish normal political life in Italy, and complete freedom of speech and debate… but without the use of the cudgel, without having to use violence. Everything should return to normal, both communists and fascists should have the right to profess their beliefs. Aspiring to a certain equilibrium of forces and democratic freedom, this is the illusion of the middle-classes.

These two attitudes, both arising from dissatisfaction with fascism, must be clearly distinguished from each other. The second attitude presents difficulties for our activity which mustn’t be underestimated.

Even amongst the bourgeoisie understood in the strict sense of the word there are doubts about the expediency of the fascist movement. These worries they can express, to a certain extent, in the two newspapers referred to earlier, which are effectively their mouthpiece. They ask themselves: is this the right method? Is it not too drastic? Whilst it is in our class interest to have a machinery in place which can respond to certain requirements, might it not going beyond the functions and aims originally intended? Might it not overstep the mark? The more intelligent strata of the Italian bourgeoisie are for a revision of fascism and its reactionary excesses because they fear these are bound to prompt a revolutionary explosion. Naturally it is in the express interest of the bourgeoisie that these strata of the dominant class are conducting a press campaign against fascism, with the aim of bringing it back onto legal terrain and turning it into a safer and more flexible weapon of class exploitation. They are in favour of the astute policy of making apparent concessions to the proletariat at the same time as they express their enthusiasm for what fascism has done, for the reestablishment of the bourgeois order and for saving its underlying basis, private property. These are views which are nevertheless very influential.

For example, Senator Agnelli, director of the biggest Italian car manufacturing firm and the most powerful of Italian capitalists, is a liberal. But when, as has happened to some of our comrades, too much is made of this fact, the FIAT workers have immediately set us straight, assuring us that reaction rules in the FIAT works exactly the same as in other factories run by capitalists who belong to the fascist party. Agnelli is, after all, a tycoon who is very clever businessman. He knows it would be dangerous to provoke the working masses; he remembers the difficult moments he went through when the workers occupied his factories and hoisted up the red flag; he therefore gives benevolent advice to fascism on how to conduct the battle against the proletariat in a more astute way. And fascism is evidently not deaf to such advice.

Before the Matteotti affair, fascism had taken a turn to the left. On the eve of Matteotti’s assassination, Mussolini gave a speech in which he addressed the opposition. He said: «You form the new parliament. We have never needed elections; we could have exercised dictatorial power, but we still preferred to address the people, and you should recognise that the people have responded today by fully supporting us with an overwhelming majority». And actually it was Matteotti who challenged this by declaring that from a democratic and constitutional point of view fascism had been defeated, the government had been placed in the minority, and that its majority was contrived and misleading. Fascism of course refused to recognise this. Mussolini argued: «Based on the official figures, we have the majority. I will now address the opposition. Opposition can be expressed in two ways. First; the communist way. To these gentlemen we have nothing to say. They are completely logical. Their objective is to overthrow us one day through the use of revolutionary violence and install the dictatorship of the proletariat. To them we respond: we will only succumb to a superior force. You want to risk taking us on? Go ahead! To the other opposition groups we say: the employment of revolutionary violence is not contemplated in your programme: you aren’t preparing an insurrection against us; what do you want then? How do you propose to take power? The law has given us five years as the legislature of this House. And new elections would produce the same result. Surely the best thing, then, is to come to an agreement. Maybe we have overdone it, maybe we have overstepped the mark. We have used illegal methods which I am trying to prevent happening again. I am inviting you to collaborate! Make your proposals! Expound your thoughts! We will find a middle way». It was a call for collaboration with all the non-revolutionary opposition groups. Only the communists were excluded from Mussolini’s offer. He has declared that an agreement with the CGIL might be possible because the latter isn’t on the terrain of the demagogic theory of revolution, because bolshevism would by now be liquidated, etc.

That’s how things stood, the attitude taken by Mussolini showing what a force the anti-fascist opposition had become. The government could see that it needed to take a left turn. Then came the bombshell. The Matteotti affair caused the situation in Italy to completely change. The facts are well-known: one day, Matteotti the parliamentary deputy disappears. For two days his family await his return in vain. Then they turn to the police. The latter allege they know nothing. After the newspapers publish reports about Matteotti’s disappearance, eye witnesses describe seeing him being attacked in the street by five individuals and bundled into a car, which then shoots off at great speed.

Public opinion was in an uproar. Maybe Matteotti was being kept prisoner, maybe it was the terrorist act of a lone individual. Just that, or something worse? Maybe an assassination?

The government was urged to respond. Mussolini declared immediately: we will track down the guilty. A few arrest were made; but before long it became common knowledge that Matteotti had been killed by members of a fascist squad linked to the party’s terroristic organisation. The fascists immediately took this line: it’s a case of a regrettable gesture on the part of the illegal current we are fighting against, and against which Mussolini has always fought. It is an individual act, a common crime. We will take action against the guilty. But public opinion wasn’t too happy about it. The entire press hastened to show that the motive for the crime couldn’t be purely personal, that the assassins were actually part of a secret league, a type of black band, that had already on other occasions committed similar crimes; crimes which had remained unpunished because they hadn’t had the same repercussions as the murder of Matteotti. More and more people were accused. Key figures in the regime started to be attacked. It has been proved that the car in question was provided by the extremist-fascist mouthpiece Corriere Italiano. A member of the ’Directory of Four’ Cesare Rossi, was accused; Aldo Finzi, the deputy minister of internal affairs was accused. Various well-known fascists were arrested. The anti-fascists conducted a violent press campaign.

So the question is: who is responsible for the murder? Because it is undoubtedly a murder we are talking about, even if the body still hasn’t been found. Is it a crime of political fanaticism, a political crime, the result of a vendetta against Matteotti because of his speeches against fascism in the Chamber of Deputies? Or is it just a case of an Executive organ’s mistake? The latter hypothesis, I would say, isn’t ruled out. It is possible that Matteotti had to be held prisoner for a few days, and then, when he put up resistance, he was killed by the bandits who kidnapped him. Or are we dealing with something even more suspicious? It is said that Matteotti had in his possession certain documents relating to the corruption of several members of the fascist government, and he wanted to publish them. Maybe that was the reason they wanted to eliminate him? The latter hypothesis isn’t very likely. Matteotti wouldn’t have been so imprudent as to carry such documents around with him, and even if he had, there certainly would have been copies. Nevertheless, in the course of the press campaign, it has been established that the Ministry of Internal Affairs has become a business centre in which Italian and foreign capitalists can purchase a range of concessions from the government. There has been talk of large sums of money being salted away by senior officials. One example is the Sinclair case, that is, the oil treaty which awarded a foreign company a monopoly of oil extraction in Italy. It is even said that the casino in Monte Carlo dispensed an enormous sum in order to push through the law restricting licenses for gaming houses in Italy. Following these allegations the fascists even forced Finzi to immediately hand in his resignation. The question remains open: are we dealing with a political crime in the strict sense or a crime prompted by the need to silence witnesses to the moral corruption of the fascist government? Whatever is the case, the approaches of the bourgeois opposition and the communist opposition to the two possibilities are very different.

What does the bourgeois opposition say? For them it is just a judicial case. It wants the government to punish the guilty. Its perspective is that the government shouldn’t just restrict itself to establishing who was directly involved in the murder; the judiciary must cast light on the entire affair, calling the highly placed persons implicated in the affair, and maybe even members of the government, to account. For example, General de Bono, supreme chief of police, has been accused of being involved in the murder, and has been forced to resign. This shows to what level of the fascist hierarchy the responsibility reaches. After all, De Bono is one of the main leaders of the ’National Militia’.

Thus the bourgeois opposition considers the entire question as a legal matter, as a question of political morality, of the reestablishment in the country of social peace and tranquillity, and it asserts that the terror and other similar acts of violence must stop. For us, on the other hand, it is a political and historical question, a question of class struggle, a crude but necessary consequence of the capitalist offensive to defend the Italian bourgeoisie. The responsibility for the fact that such horrors are possible lies with the entire fascist party. With the entire government, the entire Italian bourgeois class and its regime. It needs to be openly proclaimed that only the revolutionary activity of the proletariat can liquidate such a situation; a situation which shows that such symptoms cannot be cured by purely legal means, with the philistine reestablishment of law and order. In pursuance of such an aim the urgent matter becomes instead the destruction of the existing order, a complete overthrow which only the proletariat can see through to the end. Initially the communists would unite in protest with the parliamentary opposition in the Chamber of Deputies. However very soon it was necessary to draw a line of demarcation between our opposition and theirs, and communists haven’t participated in the latest declarations of the other parties.

Even the maximalists are represented in the committee of the parliamentary opposition; apropos which we need to point out a very characteristic event. The CP, as a protest action against the Matteotti murder, had immediately proposed a countrywide general strike in Italy. Spontaneous strikes had already broken out in a number of cities which show that the proposal was serious and practical.

The other parties, with the approval of the maximalists, instead proposed a ten minute strike as a protest action in honour of Matteotti. But the reformists, maximalists, CGIL and other opposition groups would suffer the great misfortune of having the industrial confederations and fascist trade unions immediately accepting the proposal, and officially joining with the opposition! Thus, of course, did the protest lose any trace of class significance. Today it is as clear as daylight that the communists were the only ones to make a proposal which would have allowed the proletariat to influence events in a decisive way.

What is the outlook for the Mussolini Government in the present situation? Before the latest events occurred, we had been forced to recognise, despite striking evidence of a growing discontent with fascism, that its military and State organisation was nevertheless powerful enough to prevent the appearance of a force capable of working practically for the overthrow of fascism in the near future. Discontent was growing, but we were still a long way from a crisis situation.

Recent events provide a striking example of how small causes determine great effects. The Matteotti murder sped up the developing situation to an extraordinary degree, even if, of course, social conditions already meant the premises of this development existed in latent form. The rhythm of the fascist crisis has been greatly accelerated. The fascist government has suffered a damaging defeat from the moral, psychological, and, in a certain sense, also from the political point of view. This defeat hasn’t yet had repercussions at the level of the political, military and administrative organisation, but it is clear that a moral and political defeat such as this is the first step towards a further unravelling of the crisis and the struggle for power. The government has had to make notable concessions, such as surrendering the internal affairs portfolio to the old nationalist chief, now a fascist, Federzoni. Other concessions have also been made too, but fascism still keeps power firmly in its hands. In his speeches to the Senate, Mussolini has openly declared that he will hold on to his post and deploy all the means of power at his disposal against anyone who attacks him.

According to the latest news the wave of public indignation has still not abated. However the situation has become objectively more stable. The National Militia which was mobilised two days after the Matteotti murder has already been demobilised, and its members have returned to their usual occupations. This indicates that the government perceives the immediate danger as having passed. But that major upheavals could happen in the very near future looks far more of a possibility than it did before the Matteotti crisis.

What is nevertheless clear is that in future fascism will be in much more difficult position and that the practical possibilities for future anti-fascist action, depending on what happens in the intervening period, are now different than before.

* * *

How should we respond to this new situation which has so unexpectedly arisen? I will give a systematic outline of my view.

The CP must emphasise the independent role which the situation in Italy has assigned to it, and issue watchwords with the following content: liquidation of the anti-fascist opposition groups and their substitution with the direct and open action of the communist movement. Today we are faced with events which are causing the spotlight of public interest to focus on the CP. For a while after the taking of power by the fascists there were mass arrests of our comrades. It was said then that the communist and Bolshevik forces had been annihilated, dispersed; that the revolutionary movement had been completely liquidated. But for quite a while after the elections and other events, the party has been giving signs of life which are far too strong to support these assertions. In all his speeches Mussolini is compelled to refer to the communists. In the controversy over the Matteotti case the fascist press has to defend itself every day and take up a position against the communists.

This causes attention to be focussed on our party, and on its particular duty of retaining its independence from all the other closely linked opposition groups. Our party, having taken up its particular standpoint, draws a clear line of demarcation between itself and these other groups. Besides, thanks to its experience of class struggle in Italy during and after the war and thanks also to the bitter disillusionment it has suffered, the Italian proletariat knows that there needs to be a complete liquidation of all the social-democratic currents, from the bourgeois left to the proleterian right, and this awareness is firmly entrenched. All these currents have had the practical possibility of taking action and proving themselves. Experience has shown that none of them are up to the task. The vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat, the communist party, is the only one which is has refused to give up.

But in order to be able to follow an independent political line, it is absolutely indispensable that defeatism be expunged from the party. We cannot tell Italian proletarians, who have faith in the party and in its strength, that the actions attempted by communists up to now add up to failure and lack of success!

If our practice shows that the party can organise the struggle and implement an autonomous tactic of its own; if our practice shows that the party lives on as the unique opposition party; if we can issue appropriate watchwords which indicate a practical way of going on the offensive, it is then that we will achieve our aim of liquidating the opposition groups, and primarily the socialists and the maximalists. That is the direction we should go in, in my opinion, in order to take advantage of the present situation.

In order to work toward that we shouldn’t however restrict ourselves to polemics; practical work needs to be done to conquer the masses. The purpose of this work is the unitary joining together of the masses for revolutionary action, the united front of the proletariat of city and country under the leadership of the communist party. Only with this unitary joining together will we have achieved the condition which allows us to engage in the direct struggle with fascism. This is a major task which can and must be carried out whilst retaining the party’s independence.

It is possible, following the Matteotti affair, that fascism will unleash a «second wave» of terror, a new offensive against the opposition. But this will just be another episode in the escalating situation. We might see the opposition retreating and a decline in the public expression of discontent as a result of this new terror. In time, however, discontent will start to build up again and so will the opposition. Fascism cannot hold on to power by means of continuous, incessant pressure. Another possibility however exists: the working masses being brought together on the initiative of the CP under the banner of the reconstitution of the red trade unions. Maybe it will soon be possible to begin this task.

The opportunists don’t dare undertake this task. There are cities in Italy where we could be assured of success if we invited the workers to rejoin the red unions. But since this return would at the same time be a sign of struggle, because we would have to be ready at the same time to fight the fascists, the opportunist parties have been in no hurry to reconstitute the proletariat’s mass organisations. If the CP were the first to take advantage of the favourable moment and issue this watchword, there would be the possibility of the Italian labour movement reorganising around the CP at its centre.

Even before the situation created by the Matteotti affair, our independent stance was the best manoeuvre we could have performed. For example, during the elections even non-communist elements voted for communist candidates because they saw in communism what they would refer to as the clearest and most radical form of anti-fascism, the clearest rejection of what they hated. Our independent position is therefore a means to exercise a political influence even on those strata which aren’t directly linked to us. It is precisely to the fact that we have presented ourselves with a univocal programme that we owe the CP’s major success in the elections, despite the government offensive unleashed primarily against our candidates and our electoral campaign. We officially campaigned under the slogan » Proletarian Unity», but the masses gave us their votes because we were communists, because we openly declared war on fascism, because the our adversaries defined us as irreconcilable. This stance has ensured us notable successes.

The same goes for the Matteotti incident. All eyes are turned on the Communist Party, which speaks a language which is completely different to any other opposition party. From which it follows that only an entirely independent and radical stance towards not only fascism but also the opposition will allow us to take advantage of current developments in order to overthrow the monstrous power of fascism.

A similar work must be carried out to win over the peasant masses. We need to elaborate a form of organisation of the peasantry which will allow us to work not only amongst waged farm labourers, who essentially take the same line as industrial wage earners, but also amongst tenant farmers, small-holders, etc., within the organisations which defend their interests. The economic situation is such that no amount of pressure will be able to prevent the formation of such organisations. We need to try and raise this issue with the small peasant proprietors, and put forward a clear programme which addresses their oppression and expropriation. We need to represent a clean break with the ambiguous stance taken by the Socialist party in this field. We need to utilise the existing currents in order to form peasant organisations, and direct them onto the road of the defence of the economic interests of the rural population. Indeed if these organisations are transformed into electoral machines, they will fall into the hands of bourgeois agitators, politicians and advocates of the small towns and villages. If we manage instead to breathe life into an organisation for the defence of the economic interests of the peasantry (not a trade union, because in theory the idea of a trade union of small proprietors encounters serious objections), we would have an association at our disposal within which we could carry out group work, which would be influenced by us, and within which we could find a point of support for the coalition of the rural and urban proletariat under the sole direction of the Communist Party.

This is not a terrorist programme which is being presented. Legends have been created around us. It has been said that we actually want to be a minority party, to be a small elite and so on and so forth. We have never supported such notions. If there is one movement, both through its critique and tactics, which has worked relentlessly to destroy any illusions about terrorist minorities spread about by ultra-anarchists and syndicalists, that movement is our party. We have always been opposed to that tendency, and it really is turning things on their head to portray us as terrorists and supporters of actions by armed, heroic minorities and all that goes with it!

We do however take the view that as regards the problem of the disarmament of the white guards and the arming of the proletariat, a topic of much concern to the party today, it is necessary to take a clear and principled stand.

Certainly a struggle is possible if the masses take part in it. The majority of the proletariat knows full well that an attack by a heroic vanguard will not resolve matters. The latter is an ingenuous solution, and should be rejected by all Marxist parties. However, if we go to the masses with the watchword of disarmament of the white guards and arming of the proletariat, these same working masses have to be presented in an active role. We must dispel the illusion that a «transitional government» would ever be so naïve as to allow the bourgeois positions to be outflanked by legal means, by parliamentary manoeuvring and by clever expedients, in other words, would allow a legal taking possession of the entire technical and military machinery of the bourgeoisie and the peaceful distribution of arms to the proletariat; and with that done, have us quietly give the signal to revolt. This really is a silly and childish idea! Launching a revolution isn’t that easy!

We are absolutely convinced of the impossibility of embarking on the struggle with a few hundred or so, or even a few thousand armed communists. The CP of Italy is the last one to succumb to such illusions. We are firmly convinced of the absolute necessity of drawing the great masses into the struggle; but getting armed is a problem that can only be resolved by revolutionary means. We can take advantage of the slowing down of fascism’s development by creating revolutionary proletarian formations. But we have to destroy the illusion that manoeuvres of any kind may one day put us in such a position that we could take over the bourgeoisie’s technical and military machinery, in other words, tie our enemies’ hands in order to later go on and attack them.

To fight an illusion which induces in the proletariat a sense of revolutionary apathy isn’t terrorism; on the contrary it is a stance which is genuinely Marxist and revolutionary. We are not saying that we are the communist «élite», and that we want to overturn the social equilibrium with the action of a small minority. Not at all, we want to conquer the leadership of proletarian masses, we want unity in proletarian action; but we also do want to utilise the experiences of the Italian proletariat, and these have taught us that struggles which are led by a non-consolidated party – even if it is a mass party, or one composed of an improvised coalition of parties – leads necessarily to defeat. We want a joint struggle of the working masses of the city and country, but we want this struggle to be led by a general staff with a clear political line, i.e., the communist party.

This is the problem we are confronting.

The situation will unfold in a way which is more or less complicated, but there already exists the premises for the issuing of watchwords and agitation around the CP initiating and guiding the revolution and declaring openly that it is necessary to march forward over the ruins of the existing anti-fascist opposition groups. The proletariat must be warned that when the taking of power by the working class in Italy presents itself as a real danger to the capitalist class, all the bourgeois and social-democratic forces will align around fascism. These are the prospects for the battle which we must prepare for in advance.

To conclude, I want to add a few words on fascism as an international phenomenon, based on the experiences we have had in Italy.

We believe that fascism wants to spread beyond Italy as well. Similar movements in other countries, such as Bulgaria, Hungary, and maybe also in Germany, have probably been supported by Italian fascism. But if it is certainly true that the proletariat of the entire world need to understand and utilise the lessons learnt about fascism in Italy, in case similar movements are formed in other countries as means of fighting the workers, one shouldn’t however forget that in Italy there existed some particular presuppositions which allowed the fascist movement to become such a gigantic force. First and foremost amongst these presuppositions I will recall national and religious unity.

To get the middle classes to mobilise around fascism I now believe that both presuppositions are indispensable. A sentimentalist mobilisation has to be based both on national and religious unity. Evidently the formation of a large fascist party in Germany would come up against the presence of two different religious confessions, and different nationalities with tendencies which are in part separatist. In Italy, Fascism found exceptionally favourable premises. Italy was among the victorious States, and whilst an overcharged state of chauvinism and patriotism existed there, at the same time the material advantages of victory were less in evidence. Strictly connected to this factor is the defeat of the proletariat. The middle classes bided their time for a while to see whether or not the proletariat would be powerful enough to win. When the revolutionary parties of the proletariat showed their impotence, the middle classes then believed they could act independently and take the government into their own hands. In the meantime, the big bourgeoisie took the opportunity to subjugate these forces and to yoke them to the cart of its own interests.

Based on these facts, I don’t believe we should yet expect to appear in other countries a fascism as open and blatant as the one in Italy; a fascism in the sense of a unitary movement of the upper strata of the exploiters and of a mobilisation of a large majority of the middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie in the interest of those strata. Fascism in other countries is different than in Italy. In these countries it is just a petty-bourgeois movement, with a reactionary ideology which is purely petty bourgeois and with some armed formations; a movement which however isn’t completely identified with big business and particularly the State machine. This State machine can rather enter into coalition with the parties of big business, the major banks and large landed property, but towards the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie, it more or less retains its independence. Clearly this kind of fascism is an enemy of the proletariat as well. But it is a much less dangerous enemy than Italian fascism.

The question of relations with such a movement is, as far as I’m concerned, fully resolved: it is madness to think of having any kind of link with it. Such a movement in fact offers the basis for a counter-revolutionary political mobilisation of the semi-proletarian masses. If the actual proletariat were to be brought to act on the same basis it would present grave dangers.

In general terms we can expect abroad a copy of Italian fascism which will hybridise with the various manifestations of the «democratic and pacifist wave». But fascism will take different forms to that in Italy. The reaction and capitalist offensive of the various strata in conflict with the proletariat will not submit to such a unitary direction.

Much has been said about the foreign organisations of Italian anti-fascism. These organisations have been created by bourgeois Italian émigrés. How Italian fascism is viewed by international public opinion, and the propaganda campaign conducted against it by civilised countries, is also on the order of the day. This moral indignation by the bourgeoisie of other countries is even seen as a means of liquidating the fascist movement.

Communists and revolutionaries mustn’t give in to this illusion of the democratic and moral sensitivity of the bourgeoisie of other countries. Even where pacifist and left-wing tendencies still exist today, tomorrow there will have no scruples about using fascism as a weapon in the class struggle. We know that the exploits of fascism in Italy and the campaign of terror it has conducted there against the workers can only give cause for rejoicing to international capital.

In the fight against fascism it is only the revolutionary proletarian International which can be depended upon. It is a question of class struggle. We don’t turn for help to the democratic parties of other countries, or to associations of idiots and hypocrites like the League of the Rights of Man, because we don’t want to give succour to the illusion that they differ in some substantial way from fascism, or that the bourgeoisie in other countries isn’t just as capable of preparing for its own working class the same persecutions, and carrying out the same atrocities, as fascism in Italy.

If there is to be an uprising against Italian fascism and a campaign against the terror in our country, there is only one force to be counted on: the revolutionary forces in Italy and abroad. It needs the workers of every land to boycott the Italian fascists. Those of our comrades who have been persecuted and exiled abroad in the course of the struggle will not be indifferent to this battle, nor to the creation amongst the proletariat of an international anti-fascist state of mind. The reaction and terror in Italy should arouse a class hatred, a proletarian counter-offensive which will give rise to an international convergence of the revolutionary forces on a world scale against international fascism, and against all the other forms of bourgeois oppression.

Our view that “the most damaging thing produced by fascism was having provided the justification for antifascism” is well-known.

Marxism interprets the word ‘Fascism’ as denoting a form of government which capitalism adopts when it finds itself in particular difficulties. It is adopted when the proletariat becomes a real threat to the very existence of capital; when the bourgeoisie has to set aside and bury its differences, temporarily abandoning the mask of democracy; and indeed, the function of parliament has only ever been to represent the various factions of the dominant classes. When needs must, in order to protect their class as a whole, the cruel and ruthless executioners of the working class are unleashed to have their day.

The tendency of Capital is to become ever more concentrated, and a new form of government is adopted in conformity with the gigantic and destructive capitalist machine which results. The two things are connected: concentration is a response to the falling rate of profit, and is implemented through successive mergers although profits continue to decline. The inevitable result is an ever increasing pressure on the whole of society, and this is exerted both directly by organising an increased exploitation of the workers, and through the fact of the existence of the millions of unemployed expelled from the productive apparatus.

It is under these circumstances that the latest forms of nationalism and racism have developed. The emergency bourgeois government – the fascist government – demands unquestioning faith in the nation (with the latter having become a paltry substitute for the true global community) and at a terrible cost to those who don’t come up to the required standards of national and racial “purity”. As far back as the 18th century Dr Johnson would write that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. Today that is still undeniable, although we’d prefer to say it is the last refuge of the defenders of capitalism… and of its wars. More and more the nation is becoming an institution whose one aim is to imprison and oppress the proletariat within its borders. Meanwhile, the business dealings of capitalism know no frontiers. It is known, for instance, that many influential English capitalists had shares in Krupps during the 2nd World War, a fact which some say caused even more damage to the country than the actual German bombs themselves. Where-ever there is money to be had, and surplus value to extract, there will we find capitalism.

Indeed, what better way to make proletarians forget they belong to an international class than to disguise bourgeois States as ‘nations’? The workers are lined up on the war fronts, and then they slaughter each other in their millions. War is capitalism’s drastic solution to the problem of over-population, capitalism’s way of regulating population.

The workers in the trenches have often recognised the soldiers in the enemy trenches as being exploited just like themselves, and to such an extent that episodes of fraternisation have occurred despite rigidly enforced war censorship. But bourgeois propaganda continues to terrify us with the German, Arab, Jewish, and fascist menace, or indeed the “communist” or “bourgeois” menace, describing the violent atrocities of which the enemy is capable.

In opposition to this annihilation of international class power the Bolsheviks responded by offering immediate peace terms and withdrawing workers from the front during the 1st World War, even at the expense of territorial loss.

The anti-fascist movements played their part in this anti-revolutionary operation by providing the banner under which the 2nd World War would be fought, in the name of which millions of proletarians were massacred. Even the so-called left parties and trade-unions, which claimed to be representing the working class, declared themselves to be democratic and anti-fascist. But despite what they said, these movements were entirely directed towards dispersing the potential inherent in the class and getting it to directly support capitalism by supporting the principle and practice of democracy, since the latter is inseparable from capitalism.

It is an ignorance of dialectics which prevents them from understanding that both fascism and democracy are forms of bourgeois government, proper to different periods and places, and responding to diverse contingent necessities of capitalism. This is shown by historical evolution which sees the spread of the fascist model, even if it is dissimulated under a democratic veneer. Meanwhile democracy itself actually becomes the dictatorship of one party, or several parties with the same identical anti-proletarian, conservative programme. All that remains of democracy is just financial investments in the electoral circus

If we are asking the workers to desert the anti-fascist movements it isn’t because we deny the necessity of responding to the cowardly violence of fascism, but because we believe that the latter’s real power resides not in its thuggish ‘squads’ but in the real and continuous protection which democracy and the alliance of all the bourgeois fractions are prepared to give it. The proletariat doesn’t have the option of “choosing” between democracy and fascism because they are the same thing: fascism is the unscrupulous and extra-legal armed wing of democracy, and democracy is the “velvet glove” of fascism.

In any case, the living conditions workers have to endure are no better under the democratic regimes: they are no more secure on a day to day basis and their tomorrow is just as uncertain, they are just as worried about being evicted from their homes, just as liable to fall prey to spiralling debts and having to work longer and longer hours to pay them off. The proletariat in this society has one choice before it: either submission, or engaging in the struggle for its own class objectives, separate from and opposed to each and every bourgeois and petty-bourgeois faction.
 
 

(Originally appeared in Italian in Il Partito Comunista, No. 206, December 1992).

The Civil War as the key moment in the subjugation of the black and white proletariat to the requirements of a rapacious bourgeoisie.

A War of Long Duration

After the bombardment of Fort Sumter – which can be considered as having given the North an initial advantage, since the South appeared as aggressors, therefore silencing those in the North who were opposed to the war – the rush to arms was enthusiastic, with both sides convinced, for different reasons, that the war would not last long.

Recruitment was initially dependent on volunteers, who would flock to both camps in considerable numbers, but by the second year of the war conscription had already been introduced, particularly in the South. In the North the system didn’t take definite shape until 1863.

Since there could only be a quick resolution to the war in the East, with the fall of one of the two capitals, it was here that attention would therefore be focused in the summer of 1861. In the North public opinion was clamouring for a decisive victory, not least because most of the troops were only enrolled on three-month terms, giving an idea of how long Washington thought the war would last. “Forward to Richmond!” was the battle-cry of politicians and hack journalists alike; the battle-cry, that is, of those who thought they would be travelling there in carriages or trains, not marching, or languishing in trenches. But they would have to wait a few years: the battle which took place on July 12th 1861 at Bull Run in Virginia saw the North soundly defeated, even if it was little more than skirmish compared to the ones which followed.

The Northerners dug themselves in around fortified Washington to take stock of the situation. For Lincoln, at least, defeat be transformed into victory insofar as it confirmed Congress’s determination to press forward to victory. Lincoln was allowed to float a huge 400 million dollar loan, and enrol 500,000 volunteers for either a 3 year term or for the duration of the war. Apart from parties, frondes and interest groups, this was the way the bourgeoisie would express its unitary determination to achieve its economic and political objectives.

Even if there was contact between the rival armies in Missouri, in West Virginia and in the peninsular to the South-east of Richmond, as well in Virginia itself, the rest of the year would roll by without further major engagements. The North would also deploy its overwhelming naval superiority to impose a blockade and would conquer a certain number of coastal forts and islands.

What should be done? For the Southerners the decision was relatively simple: whilst defending themselves from attack, they needed to bide their time and allow defeats, attrition and pressure from the foreign powers to convince public opinion in the North that the war wasn’t worth continuing. But for the North, which had set itself the task of defeating an enemy occupying a limitless territory which could count on a massive population, there was nothing for it but to attack. But where?

Winfield Scott, the General-in-chief of the Northern forces, predicted it would take a war of three years at least, with heavy losses, to subdue the South. Along with the naval blockade, he considered driving down the Mississippi as a primary objective. In Northern hands it would effectively separate the South from the West, and the South would be slowly strangled due to its isolation, lack of supplies and the military pressure exerted on it from all sides. Due to these characteristics, Scott’s plan would become known as the «anaconda plan,» and although it had its weak points, it was better than many later ones. Lincoln, after Bull Run, didn’t want to modify it that much, but when McClellan was entrusted with the command later on this would force a change of direction. McClellan saw the East as the one spot where pressure needed to be applied to crush the rebellion, whereas the West he saw as a very secondary theatre of war. And on this basis he directed his next campaign. In fact Richmond had a psychological rather than a strategic value: if the city fell, the Southerners could retreat into their limitless hinterland and choose the time and the place from which to launch their counter-attack.

In any case, war was continuing. In the West the Southerners occupied Columbus, a city in Kentucky, leading the State to abandon its neutrality and definitely side with the North. The North would then counterattack in the same zone with a series of attacks on cities and fortified positions, with the consequence that the Southerners abandoned the State in February 1862. The commander in the west was actually Halleck, but later history would consider Grant as the military star of the age.

A good description of this campaign can be found in an article by Marx from March 27, 1862, which also gives his opinion on the general strategy of the war. A communist, sat in a library in London, would see more clearly than the generals strutting around the battlefields equipped with all the available information: “In densely populated and more or less centralised states there is always a centre, with the occupation of which by the enemy the national resistance would be broken. Paris is a brilliant example. The slave states, however, possess no such centre. They are sparsely populated, with few large towns and all these on the seacoast. The question therefore arises: Does a military centre of gravity nevertheless exist, with the capture of which the backbone of their resistance will be broken, or are they, just as Russia still was in 1812, not to be conquered without occupying every village and every plot of land, in short, the entire periphery?

“Cast a glance at the geographical shape of the secessionists’ territory, with its long stretch of coast on the Atlantic Ocean and its long stretch of coast on the Gulf of Mexico. So long as the Confederates held Kentucky and Tennessee, the whole formed a great compact mass. The loss of both these states drives an enormous wedge into their territory, separating the states on the North Atlantic Ocean from the States on the Gulf of Mexico. The direct route from Virginia and the two Carolinas to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and even, in part, to Alabama leads through Tennessee, which is now occupied by the Unionists. The sole route that, after the complete conquest of Tennessee by the Union, connects the two sections of the slave states goes through Georgia. This proves that Georgia is the key to the secessionists’ territory. With the loss of Georgia the Confederacy would be cut into two sections, which would have lost all connection with one another. A reconquest of Georgia by the secessionists, however, would be almost unthinkable, for the Unionist fighting forces would be concentrated in a central position, while their adversaries, divided into two camps, would have scarcely sufficient forces to put in the field for a joint attack.

Would the conquest of all Georgia, with the seacoast of Florida, be required for such an operation? By no means. In a land where communication, particularly between distant points, depends much more on railways than on highways, the seizure of the railways is sufficient. The southernmost railway line between the States on the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coast goes through Macon and Gordon near Milledgeville.

The occupation of these two points would accordingly cut the secessionists’ territory in two and enable the Unionists to beat one part after another. At the same time, one gathers from the above that no Southern republic is viable without the possession of Tennessee. Without Tennessee, Georgia’s vital spot lies only eight or ten days’ march from the frontier; the North would constantly have its hand at the throat of the South, and, at the slightest pressure, the South would have to yield or fight for its life anew, under circumstances in which a single defeat would cut off every prospect of success.

From the foregoing considerations it follows:

The Potomac is not the most important position in the war theatre. The seizure of Richmond and the advance of the Potomac army further south – difficult on account of the many rivers that cut across the line of march – could produce a tremendous moral effect. From a purely military standpoint, they would decide nothing.

The outcome of the campaign depends on the Kentucky army, now in Tennessee. On the one hand, this army is nearest to the decisive points; on the other hand, it occupies a territory without which secession cannot survive. This army would accordingly have to be strengthened at the expense of all the rest and the sacrifice of all minor operations (…) On the contrary, should the anaconda plan be followed, then, despite all the successes gained at particular points and even on the Potomac, the war may be prolonged indefinitely, while the financial difficulties together with diplomatic complications acquire fresh scope”.

We will see that the road to victory for the North was precisely that, even if it was a strategy applied only partially and two years late. But that is to run ahead of ourselves.

In the spring of 1862 the Confederates were in a tragic position. After winning a few battles they had spent the winter basking in past victories. The Northerners, on the other hand, had passed the winter of undeclared truce (the last of them) forming regiments, founding cannons, and organising the logistics required for armies of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of men.

The Offensive that had got underway in January in Kentucky had “liberated” the State. The northern march had continued southwards, and on February 25, Nashville, the capital of Tennessee, had fallen. Other victories were attained in trans-Mississippi, in Arkansas and in New Mexico: a minor theatre, inhospitable and sparsely populated, where armies of reduced dimensions operated, but important nonetheless as a supply centre for the South.

After other important coastal conquests by the North, their luck seemed to have run out when suddenly a new and deadly weapon appeared in the bay of Norfolk (in southern hands but blockaded by the North): a battleship. This was the Merrimac (re-christened the Virginia) a wholly new concept in ships, impenetrable to the cannon shot then available and therefore able to get alongside war ships and sink them at its leisure. It should have given them an advantage capable of breaking the Northern blockade, but the northerners were working on a similar, possibly better, ship, the Monitor; which just a day after the attack by the Virginia would reach the bay of Norfolk where a fierce, but indecisive, duel ensued.

But in the West success continued to elude the South. An attempted counter-attack in Tennessee would lead to a bloody battle at Pittsburgh Landing. Grant was attacked whilst awaiting the rest of his army, but partial defeat would be transformed into a clear victory, and the Southerners were forced to retreat to the south of the Mississippi State border.

Meanwhile, another offensive would aim to gain control over the great river, mostly by deploying the river fleet, supported on land by the infantry. Bit by bit the forts and cities on the river would succumb; and when to avoid being outflanked the Southerners were forced to abandon Memphis, the Northern navies would descend hundreds of miles South. Memphis fell on June 6th. But already on April 25th, thanks to an extremely audacious action by Admiral Farragut’s naval squad, an even more important city on the river delta had fallen: New Orleans. The Northerners had then headed upstream, taking up a position next to the apparently insuperable fortifications at Port Hudson. Meanwhile, the river fleet which in June would follow the course of the Mississippi downstream would be brought to a halt about two hundred miles due North at Vicksburg, where formidable defences had been set in place by the Southerners. They couldn’t do otherwise; the loss of the father of rivers would mean the detachment of the States on the other side of the river, with consequences we have already described. Thus, for the time being, a communicating door with the West remained open for the Southerners, a link they couldn’t afford to lose.

In the East, leadership of the northern troops, firstly of the Army of the Potomac then of the whole of the Northern army, had been entrusted to McClellan, a grizzled and conceited organiser who dedicated himself to constructing an army whose enormity, it was thought, would make it invincible. But the general seemed reluctant to use it, and only deployed it when given explicit orders to do so by Lincoln. Faithful to his vision of a concentrated attack on Richmond, McClellan conceived a plan of attack that foresaw disembarking troops to the southeast of Richmond, on a peninsular defined by the estuaries of the York and James Rivers. From there his intention was to move his huge army towards Richmond, which would be conquered by means of a textbook siege. Luckily for the Southerners, McClellan was in no hurry to fight and his army moved off very slowly. In fact, having once disembarked, the Northerners, instead of throwing themselves in forced stages on Richmond, chose instead to lay siege to Yorktown. Getting the batteries ready to invest the city took a month, and not surprisingly, the day before the bombardment started, the Southern garrison craftily slipped away, and abandoned the city.

The delay allows Lee, the new commander in chief of the Southern army, to gather an army that isn’t the equal of the Federal one but can nevertheless forcefully oppose it. Thus the fall of Yorktown and the port of Norfolk, in itself positive, is counterbalanced by the territory left to the Confederates, who led by Jackson attack in West Virginia and threaten Washington. Federal troops are sent north, weakening a still powerful army, which nevertheless still has 125,000 troops after the division. But they aren’t enough for McClellan, who has a curious propensity of always vastly overestimating the enemy’s strength. Therefore, when attacked by Lee in the Seven Days’ battles (25 May to 1 June) he retreats to the bridgehead; here McClellan decides to re-embark his army, which emerges relatively unscathed, in marked contrast to the Confederates whose victory costs them enormous losses.  But if Lee saved Richmond, McClellan expended enormous resources and achieved nothing. In fact the Southerners are given the opportunity to counter-attack, which passes into the second battle of Bull Run and carries Lee’s army up into Maryland. Here on September 17 the Battle of Antietam takes place, without winners or losers, but Lee is forced to fall back to the south.

For Marx this Federal success is extremely important and decides the outcome of the war, not least because of its effects on the battle of Perryville (Kentucky) in the following month. If the Southerners had won at Antietam, their push into Kentucky would have had far greater impact. From there, just by crossing the River Ohio and pushing forward into the eponymous State, they could have split the North in two. In a nutshell, it is almost the reverse of the tactics that Marx hoped the North would follow in his article of March 27. He is well aware of the limitless technical and economic power of the North, but knows too there is no certainty, at that point, about the attitude of the border States, nor of the European powers: the military collapse of the Union could have forced it into making a peace settlement favourable to the South.

McClellan is now replaced by Burnside, who attempts to launch an attack on Richmond from Fredericksburg, a city on the river Rappahannock. There Lee draws up his army, and from an impregnable position, on December 13, the Southerners massacre the soldiers of the Union, wave upon wave of whom are sent to die without prospect of success (12,000 dead). The Northerners fall back, Burnside is sacked (although his style of butchery would be imitated, on both sides, by every general after him), and in Virginia there is a transition to trench warfare. The Southerners, meanwhile, have started too think maybe they can win.

In the West, unlike in the East, the advance of the federal troops is constant, despite the occasional setback. Halleck is recalled to Washington and appointed general-in-chief, and the army of the West is divided in three; a factor which would weaken it, temporarily, until its command was entrusted to Grant.

The Northern advance is held up in Tennessee by a Southern counter-attack (Battle of Chattanooga) that is soon halted however and forced back to Perryville on October 8, after Grant in his turn had won at Corinth. There is a final bloody battle at Stone’s River, in Tennessee, and between 31 December and 3 January the Southerners once again have to abandon the State.
 

The Crucial Year

Vicksburg, the river fortress, necessarily becomes a primary target, but it requires repeated campaigns, three of which fail due to the stronghold’s particularly advantageous position, high above the water and in a predominantly marshy area. Finally, in a rapid outflanking manoeuvring, which daringly take the risk of getting trapped behind enemy lines, Grant manages to lay siege to the city, which capitulates on July 4 1863. Port Hudson suffers the same fate soon afterwards, and as well as bringing the entire course of the Mississippi under their control, the victory would yield the northerners an additional 36,000 prisoners.

In the East, command of the Northern army passes to Hooker, and he too ends up being defeated by Lee on the outskirts of Fredericksburg (Chancellorsville, 2-4 May). We need however to remember that the balance of dead and wounded in these battles wasn’t always in favour of the victor; on the contrary, sometimes the price of victory was an ample blood tribute. Therefore in every battle, barring few exceptions, the North was at a considerable advantage compared to the South due to its numerical superiority and populous hinterlands. Hence, when Lee decided to make another attempt to invade the North, he couldn’t have expected to face a weakened army. And at Gettysburg, in Pennsylvania between the 1st and 3rd of July, there was the umpteenth massacre of infantry by the artillery, after which Lee’s army, repelled with heavy losses, was forced to abandon the field and return to Virginia, from whence it would never emerge again.

After the resounding victory at Vicksburg, the year 1863 ended favourably for the North in the West as well. An impressive Northern offensive succeeded in occupying Chattanooga, an important city on the border with Georgia. But about twelve miles south of the city, on the banks of the Chickamauga Creek, the Southerners waited for Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland. There the latter was defeated, but, as so often was the case, not annihilated or dispersed. The battle was an extremely bloodthirsty one, one of the bloodiest of the war with the North’s casualty list running to 12,000 and the South’s to 19,000, amounting to 25% of the troops deployed. Rosecrans fell back to Chattanooga to hold out there.

Before achieving another Vicksburg, however, the federals were rescued by two armies under the direct leadership of General Grant, now commander in chief of the troops in the West, and after a battle before the gates of the city, on 23rd to 25th of November, the Southerners were forced to fall back to the South.

The war was now turning in the North’s favour, but that didn’t mean it would soon be over. In the expectation that war weariness would finally overcome the North, the Southerners can still expect to hold out in their unlimited fastness for some time to come. A strategy of conquest is therefore required and, above all, destruction of the enemy army – the one true condition of victory considering the vast dimensions of the confederate hinterland.

Lincoln now has Grant take command of all of the federal armies; the lieutenancy-general, a post that previously only Washington had ever assumed. Grant’s plan is simple, in fact the very one Marx had suggested a couple of years earlier: to attack with a strong army from Tennessee in the direction of Georgia, head for the sea and split the Confederation into two parts, head back north to rejoin the Army of the Potomac and force the Southerners to fight with the possibility of being destroyed in the process. But Grant hasn’t read Marx properly, and continues to favour the Virginian front, with the result that enormous forces, better employed elsewhere, are tied up there. The North however is so rich in all respects that it can allow waste. Especially of human life.

In the east, the attack is developed in three arenas: Shenandoah Valley; Central (River Rapidan); South (peninsular). Clearly the principal arena is the central one, and the first encounter is fought in a stretch of land known as the Wilderness on the 5-6 May 1864. It is an extremely bloody affair, as is by now the norm, and the Northerners are stopped. Grant prefers not to persevere and moves south. This forces Lee to move off quickly in order to head him off and to take up advantageous positions, which he does at Spotsylvania, where there is another huge massacre between the 9th and 19th of May. Another stalemate, another sideslip to the south by Grant; Lee once again forms up on unassailable positions and meets him in battle at North Anna on the 23rd; yet again Grant disengages himself to the south, this time moving menacingly close to Richmond. Lee lines up at Cold Harbour and Grant concentrates all his forces there. However Lee too has to deploy all of his forces and, unlike 1862, instead of sending detachments to menace the northern rear he has to recall all forces available to him, even from other theatres. It is at this point that Sherman in the west sets out on his march on Atlanta.

On June 3 Grant attacks, and his forces are beaten back (7,000 dead and wounded in one day) in a battle that would earn him the highly appropriate nickname of “butcher”. Meanwhile further north, in the Shenandoah Valley, the northerners led by Sheridan destroy the southern army facing them and threaten to encircle Richmond, forcing Lee to dispatch troops against them. Grant makes another skilful sidestep to the south and invests Petersburg, a city to the south of Richmond that forms part of its defensive system (13-8 June). Lee, taken by surprise, gets pinned down manning the city’s defences, and there he would stay for almost a year, defending the southern capital from the northern army that slowly but inexorably tightens its grip on the city. But worst of all, the possibility of carrying out those manoeuvres that had been his strength in the preceding years is precluded.

The only place with any room for manoeuvre is the Shenandoah Valley, despoiled by the northerners. In the month of July, General Early heads up the valley into Maryland and threatens Washington, but it is a threat that no longer inspires fear. He doesn’t achieve what Jackson achieved in ’62, which was forcing the North to send significant troop numbers back to defend the capital and thereby weakening the main front facing Richmond. Early thus re-enters Virginia having achieved virtually nothing; he however continues his harrying actions until Grant gives Sheridan the task of hunting him down.
 

The “March to the Sea”

On 4 May 1864 Sherman’s operations in Georgia begin, setting out from his base in Chattanooga. Facing him is the Army of Tennessee under the command of Joseph Johnston. The superiority of Sherman’s forces allow him to carry out continuous outflanking actions on the confederate positions, and in order to avoid being surrounded, the confederates have to continuously retreat, or accept battle under conditions which put them at a clear disadvantage. Once Sherman attacks one of these entrenched positions, he gets pushed back with losses; but then Johnston has to retreat, and then again and again, all the way to Atlanta. It is basically a repetition of Grant’s advance in the east: at last the federals have learned to exploit their superiority in men and equipment.

On 17 July, Hood replaces Johnston because of unhappiness in the South about the old general’s temporising tactics, but it is a serious mistake. Johnston, who had had no option but to retreat, had in fact significantly slowed up the progress of the Union’s army, which had only advanced 140km in two and half months: and he had achieved all that with little over half the number of combatants as the northerners, and with his forces incurring no major damage; a minor masterpiece. Hood on the other hand has no qualms about giving battle before Atlanta, and he suffers heavy losses. In the end Sherman tries another outflanking movement and Hood has to abandon Atlanta, which is occupied by the Federals on 2 September.

In 1864 victory smiles on the North at sea as well: in August, Farragut’s boats take Mobile, Alabama, last of the major ports left to the South. And as regards another thorn in the side of the Federals – the confederate commerce raiders – things also start to improve: on 19 June the famous Alabama is sunk in the English Channel; in October, in defiance of international conventions, the Florida is boarded when riding at anchor in the port of Bahia. Brazil wasn’t Great Britain, and conventions only get respected when there is someone around capable of punishing transgressors (and, those presently in charge in the “land of the free, home of the brave” are providing us with plenty of fresh examples of the validity of this axiom).

Meanwhile, in Virginia, the struggle between the armies of Grant and Lee continued. Holed up in Richmond and Petersburg, which he cannot afford to abandon, even if tactically it might have been the best option, Lee still has some room for manoeuvre, with Early’s troops, in the Shenandoah valley. But Sheridan gets put in charge of closing down this front as well, and in August he organises the Army of the Shenandoah. Grant’s orders are not just to destroy the enemy’s army, but also to devastate the valley and render it unserviceable to the Confederates. And not only to the regular army, but also to the bands of partisans, which although present in several States are particularly active in the valley, commanded by a southern officer by the name of Colonel Mosby. And partisan bands operating behind enemy lines, with the aim of keeping a substantial part of the enemy forces occupied, would prove to be another original feature of the Civil War seen in later wars. Thus Sheridan advances south, harrying the Confederates, who he regularly defeats along the course of the river thanks to his overwhelming numerical superiority.

Following his route isn’t difficult because everywhere it is marked with dense columns of smoke that fill the entire valley. That is how General Sherman puts into practice Grant’s order to «devastate the whole area so thoroughly that a crow flying across over the valley would have to carry its own rations.» With ruthless efficiency the unionists torch the farmhouses, the cattle sheds and mills; destroy the harvests, hay lofts and even stocks of wood laboriously accumulated for the winter; sequester and carry away livestock and slaves, and arrest and imprison all men below fifty years of age. Dwellings are supposed to be excluded from this fate but in fact, whether in reprisal against actions taken by the partisans or due to individual soldiers under the influence of drink or after war booty, they get burned down as well and the unfortunate occupants are left roofless, only to swell the lines of fugitive poor which the federal vanguards propel before them along the roads of the once fertile valley, now reduced to a desert.

With the approach of autumn, Sheridan retreats about half way up the valley. On 19 October the Southerners mount a surprise attack on the federal encampments at Cedar Creek, but eventually, thanks partly to the timely return of Sheridan from Washington, they are defeated and fall back. At this point, in the valley that in previous years the confederates had witnessed so many brilliant victories, it is all over for them as well.

Sheridan and Sherman’s successes allow Lincoln to be triumphantly re-elected in the second presidential ballot (8 November), defeating a recycled McClellan. But Lincoln’s main victory is over the radicals in his own party who, as we will see later on, are getting increasingly active.

If we now retrace out steps a bit, and return to the western front, we see Sherman ordering the evacuation of Atlanta on 7 September. Hood has decided to abandon a frontal assault on Sherman’s troops and decides to head north and invade Tennessee and Kentucky, hoping to be followed by Sherman. But times have changed; the numerical superiority of the northerners allows them to split their forces, and two armies of the West are formed: a smaller one, under Thomas’s orders, is sent to stop Hood in Tennessee, the other one, under the command of Sherman himself, is assigned to attack Georgia and the Atlantic States, with the aim of then heading back north towards Virginia.

Sherman’s main problem is his supply lines, which are far too long. The solution is to accumulate as much equipment and supplies as possible, and supplement that by living off the resources of the territories they cross. It is a bold decision having the army burn its bridges, forcing it to press on to victory or destruction; a repetition, on a grander scale, of Grant’s victorious manoeuvre at Vicksburg. And it is also a ruthless decision to have the full weight of the war descend on the civilian population, as Sheridan had already done in the North. The first of these measures is actually taken in Atlanta, which following the evacuation is razed to the ground to prevent it serving as a base for an improbable confederate counter-attack.

On 16 November the army sets out on the famous “March to the Sea”. But this isn’t so much an offensive, considering it wasn’t facing an actual army, but rather a triumphal descent towards the underbelly of the Confederation. For the advance the army was divided into four columns, which would devastate and destroy all before them over a broad 100-kilometre front. Once again, the troops’ good behaviour was not a high priority. On 21 December the port of Savannah is occupied. For the confederates, the loss of Georgia isn’t compensated by successes on other fronts: in Tennessee, at Franklin on 30 November and at Nashville on 15-16 December, the Southern army is defeated in battles which, after desertions had reached epidemic proportions, verge on the suicidal, and it is forced into retreat. But by now one can scarcely talk of an army: Hood resigns.

On 10 January in the New Year, Sherman marches out of Savannah and heads north. Columbia in South Carolina is taken on 17 February, and Charleston on the 18th. Meanwhile the one remaining important seaport, Wilmington in North Carolina, is taken by sea on 15 February, and reached by land on the 22 February. Whilst Sherman puts the hated South Carolina to fire and sword (in the northern collective imagination the State was considered the biggest warmonger of them all, and the one from which the secession had originated) the scattered southern forces are reunited in North Carolina, and their command restored to Johnston. Here Johnston makes a vain attempt to stop the Federals, but his temporising abilities are of little avail against such overwhelming forces. Meanwhile, in the valley of the Shenandoah, Sheridan disperses the remnants of the southern forces under Early’s command, and takes his cavalry before Petersburgh: Grant launches an enveloping attack (Battle of Five Forks, 29-30 March) and on April 2nd, an attack on the entire front. Lee, not wishing to be encircled, is forced on April 3rd to abandon the city, and Richmond along with it. Grant’s army pursues him and bars his line of march: at Appomattox Court House Lee renounces any last moment resistance, and on the 9th April, he signs the surrender. It is the end, for even if it is just one army surrendering, the South is nevertheless defeated. Soon the other generals surrender to the Federals as well.
 

The Emancipation of the Slaves

The question of the emancipation of the enslaved African masses, present in large numbers in the southern States, is one that affects events throughout the civil war. It constitutes a causative factor, a phenomenon relevant to the war itself, and a burning issue in the period afterwards.

For Marx and Engels the question of slavery is the central question and root cause of the disagreement between the capitalist and financial North and the agrarian and latifundist South. To their contemporaries, however, who appeared to give little thought to the matter of emancipation, that was not how it appeared. Apart from pro-abolitionist groups operating in the north very few northerners seemed to care much about the lot of the Negroes. Indeed, at the popular level, it seems there was actually more sympathy for Negroes and their emancipation in the South than in the North, at least before the war.

The fact is that the various actors who took part in the events which were unfolding didn’t have a clear understanding of what was happening, and, as is always the case, they acted like puppets, suspended as they were by historical and economic threads woven by the society in which they lived out their lives. About Lincoln we could quote Cromwell’s far-sighted quip: “No-one goes so far as he who doesn’t know where he is going”. In fact the good Abraham spent the last five years of his life contradicting in practice his earlier positions.

Marx, on the other hand, from the first year of the war could see that the question of emancipation was crucial to the outcome of what may be considered the completion of the bourgeois revolution in North America; a revolution which had started in the 17th century, and crossed the Atlantic on the ships of the colonizers; a capitalist development which, dispersed as it was throughout the boundless New World, would take a while to assume its characteristic forms. The so-called American Revolution, i.e. the War of Independence, marked the national emancipation of the American bourgeoisie from the colonial subjection of Great Britain: it is to this that we reduce its social and economic import, both as regards its aims and the way the struggle was conducted, which in fact involved only a very small minority of the American colonists. The Civil War, on the other hand, created the opportunity of completely liberating those productive forces that, according to our doctrine, pave the way to the proletarian revolution. The economic system in the South, and therefore slavery, stood in the way of this liberation. And this explains why Marx and Engels always gave their passionate support to the North.

As early as the beginning of November 1861, Marx wrote: “The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labour. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side by side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.

“If the border states, the disputed areas in which the two systems have hitherto contended for domination, are a thorn in the flesh of the South, there can, on the other hand, be no mistake that, in the course of the war up to now, they have constituted the chief weakness of the North (…) Anxiety to keep the “loyal” slaveholders of the border states in good humour, fear of throwing them into the arms of secession, in a word, tender regard for the interests, prejudices and sensibilities of these ambiguous allies, has smitten the Union government with incurable weakness since the beginning of the war, driven it to half measures, forced it to dissemble away the principle of the war and to spare the foe’s most vulnerable spot, the root of the evil – slavery itself.
When, only recently, Lincoln pusillanimously revoked Frémont’s Missouri proclamation on the emancipation of Negroes belonging to the rebels, this was done solely out of regard for the loud protest of the “loyal” slaveholders of Kentucky. However, a turning point has already been reached (…) Events themselves drive to the promulgation of the decisive slogan – emancipation of the slaves”.

The liberation of the slaves had therefore appeared as a military necessity as well. When later General Hunter made himself promoter of a similar initiative to Frémont’s, the president’s reply was the same. In 1862, however, the inadequacy of the military forces on the one hand, and the threat of a part of the Republican Party to form a third, more radical, party, forced Lincoln to act more decisively. The most determined section of the bourgeoisie had made its voice heard.

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union – announced Lincoln in 1862 – and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that” (Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862). But by the Autumn of 1862, the situation had ripened: the South was showing no signs of giving in, and only at Antietam had Lee’s counter-offensive been stopped by the Unionist army. On the wave of that victory (which some consider a turning point in the war, the beginning of the end for the South) Lincoln issued a first proclamation in which he announced his intention, from January 1st 1863, to liberate all slaves living in areas dominated by the rebels.

According to Lincoln it was a purely tactical measure: “Without the problem of slavery, the rebellion would never have happened – he said – and, deprived of slavery, it can’t continue”. We cannot but agree with this self-evident comment, but it should be remembered that the South wasn’t simply the North, plus slaves. In fact we have seen that slavery was an integral part of the economic social structure in the South, and it was illusory to think that if «the problem» was removed, everything else could go back to the way it was; how true this was would soon become only too evident.

The Proclamation invited the Southern States to re-enter the Union, subject to the emancipation of all slaves, in exchange for an end to the conflict. In some cases there was even compensation offered to cover any economic losses arising from emancipation. And yet the definitive Proclamation, which was issued on 1st January 1863, only included the territories in the hands of the Confederation and not the border States, nor the «liberated areas.» It was nevertheless an extraordinary turn of affairs (Marx considered it «clause-ridden,» but still «historic»).

If we consider Lincoln’s thinking at the time of his inauguration, when, among other things, he had declared his preparedness to accept a 13th amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing the permanency of slavery in the southern States, we can see how individuals count for very little: for the very same person was now calling for a 13th amendment to provide for the abolition of slavery in the Confederate States. But Congress, which was a lot more radical than the president, would go much further than this,  and push through a measure prohibiting slavery over the entire territory of the United States. This amendment, ratified eight months after Lincoln’s death in December 1865, represented a significant change to the Constitution.

The Emancipation Proclamation could not be postponed; chiefly because all it did was ratify something that was already happening on the farms and plantations throughout the South. The lack of control over the slaves due to the war emergency, with many whites in uniform, meant there was a general relaxation of discipline, with numerous cases of absenteeism, insubordination and successful escape attempts. And whenever the Federals arrived, the situation would become particularly explosive. Even back in 1862 a law had been passed prohibiting the army from returning runaway slaves to their owners (although the army would end up exploiting the former slaves as auxiliary workers; casually referring to them as «contrabands»). Later on slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia (The city of Washington) and in the Territories, although it was largely a symbolic measure.

The consequence of the Emancipation Proclamation was that Negroes could be enrolled in the Unionist army. But if, on the one hand, this allowed large numbers of highly motivated troops to be admitted, on the other hand it inspired fear. What would the armed Negro do after he had learned to kill whites with impunity? But right from the start all the calls to abstain from violence in areas where the slaves had been liberated would prove unnecessary; and the reality was that episodes of violence were comparatively rare as the process of introducing emancipation gathered pace. The idea of the Negro with a gun therefore slowly started to gain acceptance in the North. Besides, after much hesitation, and far too late, they had decided to arm the blacks in the South as well. Necessity had won out over fear: the Negroes, who in power represented a socially frightening prospect, had in fact rarely lived up to the fears of the whites; class of slaves though they were, they nevertheless found themselves in a myriad of different situations, lacking in mutual contact and leaderless; rarely did they rebel and in general their objective was to eke out a living on their own parcel of land. But it would take the whites many years to understand that fact.

In the South they understood it too late: in the end they realised that the enormous numerical inferiority of their armies was an insurmountable problem; whereas the enemy was using «their» Negroes against the South itself. For some time President Davis, and some of the most eminent military leaders on the southern side, including Lee, had been considering whether to emancipate at least some slaves in order to save the independence of the Confederates. Finally, despite opposition from the confederate Congress, Davis managed to pass a law stating that slaves who enrolled voluntarily in the Confederate army would not only be freed at the end of the war, but also (truly remarkable for the time) receive citizenship and a patch of land. All that whilst the North – Lincoln included – was still thinking of resolving the problem of the freed slaves by deporting them back to Africa.

History would however follow a different path and yet this enrolment of the blacks, apart from being a powerful confirmation of determinism in human history, shows that a revolutionary juncture had been reached: the supreme good for the South was independence, but to maintain it the South would have to gradually dismantle its economic system; gradually substitute it for a system which was remarkably similar to the one it was fighting against. History would thus have taken its course anyway, transcending lines on the map, different coloured uniforms, races, Generals; and also, transcending any ideas and consciousness that the participants may have had of the situation in which they were operating. In the end North America had to be transformed in order to allow the capitalist system to develop in line with the rhythms which world trade and the available resources allowed. And thus it was.
By the end of the war, in 1865, almost a million ex-slaves – a quarter of the Southern Negroes – had left the plantations and sought protection from the unionist troops, working afterwards for the army under often extremely harsh conditions, and without pay. Around two hundred thousand Afro-Americans, 80% of them from the confederate states, fought in the ranks of the unionist navy and army, in ‘black regiments’ commanded by white officers. Evidently there were those who were sceptical of the fighting capacity of the ex-slaves, but not for long. Initially they would receive lower pay than the whites, but eventually salaries would be levelled out; the first real and significant equalisation in the history of American blacks. In the army Negroes became literate and subject to the same rules as the whites. They fought with great courage, even if regularly destined for the worst missions; thirty per cent of them never came back, a much higher percentage than the whites.
 

The White Proletariat

In reality Negroes inspired more fear in the North than in the South. The Democratic Party in particular, in opposition in the North, would exploit the difficulties arising as result of the war to counter-pose the Negroes’ interest in having slavery abolished to that of the white workers, impoverished due to the length of the conflict and by inflation and menaced by the prospect of the appearance of millions of Afro-Americans on the labour market. Although an unlikely prospect, this was nevertheless believed.

As a class, white proletarians had more than enough reason to be fed up with the Republican Party and the government. Class-consciousness, which was starting to develop in the East, was repressed both in the North and the South by constant appeals to patriotic unity, which was preached by the politicians and put into effect with arms. In the course of this «war for liberty,» proletarians who dared to strike, especially in the factories which provided important materials for the war effort, would be faced with well-equipped army divisions; and those who criticised Lincoln would end up in jail without even a hint of a trial. Eventually the number of political prisoners incarcerated would reach 30,000, an eloquent testimony to how democratic the «revolutionary» bourgeoisie really are. Meanwhile the flower of the proletariat went off to die on the battlefields of Virginia and Tennessee.

In the North, the war caused the prices of essential goods to rise sharply, sometimes by as much as 100%. But there was no corresponding rise in wages, and for families in particular, who had found it difficult enough to buy enough food at the old prices, it was very hard indeed. It was one of the many ways in which the bourgeoisie took advantage of the war to enrich itself in a thoroughly shameless manner. Throughout the course of the war, strikes in all trades were relatively frequent everywhere, and this was a factor in the trade-union revival. In fact the shortage of labour gave proletarians a certain amount of leverage. Many women entered factories for the first time; a change frowned upon by their male workmates because they mainly perceived it, because women were paid less, as an attack on the average level of wages. By 1864, despite the war, the presence of the proletariat was making itself felt: there were 200,000 trade-union members, some in national rather than local trade unions which were equipped with their own press organs.

The extension of the strikes prompted the bosses to turn to Congress for help, and they were only too happy to oblige. The Contract Labour Law of 1864 made it possible to employ foreign workers who had undertaken to provide a year’s free labour in exchange for the cost of their emigration. This allowed the capitalists to access workers who were not only low cost but who couldn’t afford to strike. To break strikes the army was used, sometimes to drive workers back into their workplace at the point of bayonets.

Everything was conspiring to make proletarians see the war as one being fought on behalf of the Negro slave, or for the capitalist in his fancy spats; or at least being fought for everyone apart from themselves. In March 1863 a new law on conscription was passed. This allowed drafted men (the system functioned like a lottery, there was no general conscription) to obtain exemption by paying a commutation fee of 300 dollars to the government. For the overwhelming majority who couldn’t obtain exemption – 300 dollars was more than a year’s wages for many workers – it was case of a “war of the rich, fought by the poor”. Nothing new under the sun!

In July of the same year, immediately after the law had come into force, popular rage exploded into open revolt in the cities of the North. In New York an angry mob destroyed the recruitment office; then, for three days, groups of rowdy elements roamed the city destroying public buildings, factories, omnibuses and private houses. The so-called Draft Riots concentrated the blind and disorderly discontent of desperate elements, who unleashed their anger against the rich, and against Republicans, but above all, against Negroes. After sacking the houses of the rich, the mob moved on to torment the latter. An arson attack was launched on an orphanage for Negro children; many Negroes were hung, thrown into the flames, and generally hounded by the mob; many took refuge in Central Park. On the fourth day, troops who had just returned from Gettysburg suppressed the riots. It is thought that the number of deaths resulting from this event, which in the country’s interior history in terms of casualties comes next after the Civil War itself and the attack on the Twin Towers, is thought to be around four hundred. Other revolts, which were less bloodthirsty, took place in several other cities.

Writing about these events soon afterwards in Capital, Marx would declare that emancipation was also therefore a progressive factor as far as the advancement of the class struggle was concerned: “In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin”.

For the first time ever, in the annals of our small party, we were in a position to hold our meeting in Viareggio, a town with a strong working class presence in agriculture, in the maritime and shipbuilding industries and with entrenched proletarian traditions; the latter only slightly dampened by the town having become a ‘seaside resort’ in the last century. The meeting would take place within the spacious and tranquil surroundings of a circoscrizione di quartiere, a local ward centre.

 As usual the meetings on Saturday and Sunday were quite intense, and given over to the relation of numerous reports, some of them dealing with difficult subjects whose exposition was anything but obvious or straightforward. For now, we will only summarise the topics covered, whilst the full reports will be published in due course in Comunismo or Il Partito Comunista.

These different studies all draw on the collaboration of many comrades, and take place on a time-scale which can’t be reduced to the here and now. Without fear of contradiction we can say that they rely on the work of all current comrades, and of those who are no longer with us as well.

The party’s method does not involve indulging in gossipy ‘spot the mistake’ competitions, the typical “sport” of the bourgeoisie’s ghastly politicians and smarmy intellectuals; for whom, having no further truths or indeed anything worthwhile left to impart, there remains nothing but shouting louder than their fellow puffed up ignoramuses and con artists, or slagging them off with sour ripostes.

But having said that, we don’t mean to imply that the party is immune from making mistakes, that it never gets anything wrong, or, for that matter, won’t make mistakes in the future. Quite the opposite. What we do affirm, nevertheless, is that in order to look after its long-term objectives, the Communist Party must carry out its work in a way that transcends ‘personality worship’ and organisational sectarianism. In a party that has the stamina to attain the Communist historical consciousness of the path which lies ahead, even potential ‘mistakes’ may be useful insofar as they exercise our ‘collective dialectical musculature’ by prompting a deeper investigation of the relevant subjects, and bringing ever new, less investigated implications under the sway of doctrine.
 

THE CRISIS OF CAPITAL

As is customary at our meetings, there was a presentation to those assembled, about the Great Moribundity’s ‘hospital file’: the result of a lot of hard work, we will only attempt to give a brief overview here of the huge amount of data which was drawn together and elaborated in this report.

The lengthy period running from 1937 to 2005 was covered, concentrating on the big six imperialisms. We are also currently gathering information on China and India so that can be included as well. On the table, the first line for each country in clear type indicates the number of years of the relevant period, the second line, in bold type, indicates the average annual rate of growth of industrial production. (See table in the following Turin Meeting Report).

There is certainly plenty to reflect upon in this vast and evocative panorama of world capitalism, subsoil of all social determinations, great and small, when we look back over these counter-revolutionary centuries of ours, for although our historic enemy may be clearly triumphant on the political level, we see it economically going into inexorable decline.

The most recent periods, shown in italics, are incomplete and therefore only provisional insofar as they haven’t been concluded by peak of maximum growth. In fact some rhythms are even shown in the negative.

What stands out is the great cycle of capitalist aging, which has reduced growth, even in the very powerful capitalisms, to virtually nothing. To show that the glory days of capitalism are clearly over, we need only look at the average rates of accumulation in Italy and Japan in the post-war period (of truly ‘Chinese’ proportions) and compare them with the minimal growth today.
 

THE REARMING OF THE STATES

Every now and again the media gives us some meagre information on the amount the various States are spending on arms. Over the past year the raw figures (which still show ‘little Italy’ to be one of the world’s prodigal spenders on navy, air force, army and police, etc) are often accompanied by complaints from senior figures in the army about cuts to ‘defence’ spending, or by requests from the so-called “radical left” to limit this expenditure.

If the following statement from a Marxist of the calibre of Trotski is true, as it most certainly is, there is much to be alarmed about: “States do not fight because they are armed. On the contrary, they forge arms when they have to fight”.

Since 1998, following several years of reduction in global military spending due to the collapse of the immense Russian empire, and to the drastic reduction in military spending mainly in that region, but also in the United States, spending has started to rise dramatically. Between 1998 and 2004 the rise has been about 27%, reaching the enormous figure of 1,035 billion dollars, and by 2005 it had gone up to 1,100 billion dollars.

How is this spending divided between the various States?

In general, the data provided by SIPRI, (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), which are the ones circulated in the press, are calculated in dollars based on the official rates of exchange. On that basis, the division of military expenditure between the 15 States which spend the most, sees, for the year 2005, in first place the United States with an expenditure of 455.3 billion dollars (47% of total world spending), in second place, but lagging far behind, Great Britain spends 47.4 billion at 4.9%; France is third at 46.2 Billion (4.7%); Japan is fourth at 42.4 billion (4.3%); China is fifth at 35.4 Billion (3.6%); and sixth, reunified Germany at 33.9 billion (3.5%). In seventh place is ‘Little Italy’ which, at least from the point of view of military spending, finds a place amongst the ‘big boys’ with 27.8 billion dollars and a not insignificant 2.9% of the world total. Next comes “Putin’s” Russia, at 19.4 billion (2.0%), followed by Saudi Arabia 19.3 (2.0%); South Korea 15.5 (1.6%); India 15.1 (1.5%); Israel 10.7 (1.5%); Canada 10.6 (1.1%); Turkey and Australia with the same 10.1 (1.0%), adding up to a total of 975 billion dollars at 2003 prices.

But if military expenditure is analysed in terms of “purchasing power parity”, that is, taking account not of the official currency exchange rate but of the actual physical quantity of armaments, the situation changes completely and gives a picture which is far closer to the real relations of force between the imperialist powers (still based on SIPRI data).

The United States still remains, of course, in first place, but we see their percentage of world expenditure reduced slightly from 46.7% to 41.4%. In second place it is no longer Great Britain but China, with 14.6% of world expenditure, establishing itself as the upcoming super-imperialist. India is in third place, another Asiatic power in full ascent. Comes next in fourth place is Russia, a country recovering fast from the crisis which followed the break up of the old USSR.

And what is more, in just a very few years Russia has recovered its prior position amongst the world’s biggest sellers of arms. And it is no accident that its biggest customers are China and India.

On the basis of these more accurate criteria, France, the European country highest on the list, followed by Great Britain and Germany, all drop behind Russia.

Japan, whilst fourth in the previous table, now finds itself in eighth place. However, if you take into account that the ‘Land of the Rising Sun’ wasn’t even supposed to have an army and to be reliant on the allied occupying force of the United States, it is certainly no mean result.

Italy comes after Japan in ninth place, which is more reasonable than the seventh place it occupied in the previous table.

So here is the second table, also shown at the meeting, which gives information about the fifteen States which spent most on the military sector in 2005, calculating the rate of exchange on a parity with purchasing power:

              STATE EXPENDITURE   %
    1  USA              455,3    41,4
    2  China            161,1    14,6
    3  India            81,8     7,4
    4  Russia            66,1     6,0
    5  France            51,2     4,7
    6  United Kingdom    46,2     4,2
    7  Germany           36,9     3,4
    8  Japan             35,2     3,2
    9  Italy             34,5     3,1
   10  Saudi Arabia      29,1     2,6
   11  Turkey            24,3     2,2
   12  South Corea       23,1     2,1
   13  Brazil            20,7     1,9
   14  Iran              18,5     1,7
   15  Pakistan          16,1     1,5
             WORLD     1100,1   100,0

After taking into account the data set out in the table we resumed with Trotski’s slogan: “Calls for ‘disarmament’ have, and can only have, nothing in common with the prevention of war. The program of ‘disarmament’ only signifies an attempt – up to now only on paper – to reduce in peacetime the expense of this or that kind of armaments. It is above all a question of military technique and the imperialist coffers. The arsenals, the munitions factories, the laboratories, and, most important of all, capitalist industry as such, retain their power throughout every ‘disarmament program’. But States do not fight because they are armed. On the contrary, they forge arms when they have to fight. In case of war, all the peace limitations will fall aside like so much chaff. Back in 1914-1918, States didn’t fight with the armaments they had stocked up in time of peace, but with what they had forged during the war. It isn’t the arsenals but the productive capacity of a country that proves decisive (…)
      The question of disarmament is one of the levers used by imperialism to prepare for wars. It is pure charlatanism to attempt to distinguish between defensive and offensive machine guns, tanks, aeroplanes (…)
      War is not a game that is conducted according to conventional rules. War demands and creates all the weapons that can most successfully annihilate the enemy. Petty-bourgeois pacifism, which sees in a 10 percent, or 33 percent, or 50 percent disarmament proposal the «first step» towards prevention of war, is more dangerous than all the explosives and asphyxiating gases put together. Melinite and yperite can do their work only because the masses of people are poisoned in peacetime by the fumes of pacifism”.
     The issue is therefore clear: we mustn’t deceive anyone that a disarmed, or less armed, capitalism is possible. To gain access to, and protect, their markets and sources of raw materials, the imperialist powers use money but also armed force. The present oil wars make this very evident.
     Another factor not to be underestimated is that arms production constitutes in itself an extremely important sector of industry. Again on the basis of SIPRI figures (as reported in the June 14th issue of the Italian left-leaning newspaper Manifesto): “Since 2004, thanks to the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the world’s major arms firms have seen their takings go up by 34% and total profits now stand at 10.12 billion dollars. Not surprisingly 63% of the profits have ended up amongst the takings of the 40 top American companies involved in arms production”. In the present climate of quasi-stagnation in the economies of the major Western countries, these figures are not insignificant.
     The main arms firms are American, with their main customer the United States army: their profits therefore derive from squeezing the American tax-payer, who sees a quarter of federal spending invested in arms. And that is why the citizens of the ‘land of the free’ find themselves constantly menaced, today by “rogue States” yesterday by “soviet communism”, by international terrorism and other such nightmares, in order to convince them of the need for ‘social discipline’ and to get the proletariat to continue to slog its guts out!
     We finally concluded with excerpts from Anti-Dühring: “Militarism carries in itself the seed of its own destruction. Competition of the individual States with each other forces them to spend more money each year on the army and navy, artillery, etc., and thus more and more hastening financial catastrophe (…) Always and everywhere it is the economic conditions and instruments of force which help “force” to victory, and without these, force ceases to be force. And anyone who tried to reform war from the opposite standpoint (…) would certainly reap nothing but a beating”.
 

THE AMERICAN WORKERS’ MOVEMENT

The party work on the American workers’ movement paused to consider the period of the War of Independence, which the American bourgeoisie like to call a “Revolution” but Marxist analysis considers instead as a war between States, insofar as political power didn’t pass from one class to another and there was no overthrowing of one mode of production by another.

Even if traces of pre-bourgeois production remained in the large estates of the great landowners, direct assignees of huge properties by the Crown, the system of production was by now analogous to the one predominant in England for over a century; from when the English Revolution (and such it genuinely was) had deposed the absolute monarchy and reduced it to what it still remains today, a pale imitation of a faded power.

The war was of one part of the population against another, both sides roughly equivalent in numerical terms, and it was fought against the mother country; it could also, therefore, be described it as a civil war.

After having described the increasing fiscal pressure which England brought to bear on the colonies, and the limits which were placed on the latter’s territorial and economic expansion, the report went on to show how it was actually the proletariat of the big cities, along with artisans and other layers of the petty bourgeoisie, who organized resistance to the colonial power whilst the magnates were originally hesitant about backing it.

When later on the stage of all out confrontation between the English and colonial armies was reached, the big mercantile and financial bourgeoisie, and above all the big landed proprietors, would continue to equivocate and play a waiting game, fearing, as they did, the armed subordinate classes far more than any oppression from across the Atlantic.

So victory was not just due to an army, which suffered all the vicissitudes of the shifting, and not always cordial, relations between the colonies; it was also due to a historic conjuncture which saw Spain, and above all the France of Louis XVI, supporting the colonial armies and militias economically, and militarily with their own armies and navies.

The war couldn’t suppress class conflict for long however. Soon there was the inevitable general price rise, and the response was petitions menacing mass gatherings and general unrest. In 1781 there was even a mutiny by a sizeable army detachment, and in the years following victory, further disturbances broke out.

And yet there were certain consequences of the revolution that improved life for proletarians, including economic recovery. The declaration of the principles of individual liberty and equality, even if with objective limitations, had clear implications for the future condition of bonded laborers and slaves. Enslavement of whites was already in decline due to the difficulty of maintaining a constant supply of them; a difficulty that was accentuated every time there was a war in Europe.

In New England, slavery was abolished in the years after the war and prohibited in the territories north of the river Ohio. In the central colonies it disappeared more gradually, but by the beginning of the 19th century very few slaves remained there. In the South, of course, the ‘peculiar institution’ would remain firmly entrenched, and it was precisely here that the bulk of the millions of slaves were to be found. And yet there was a sense of dealing with an anomaly that would soon be swept away.

One had the impression that the American people were well on the way to achieving equality. Amongst proletarians, the great revolutionary formula – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – even if hypocritical in itself and of more relevance to the rich than to the subordinate classes, aroused hopes of a better future of decent wages, shorter hours, and working conditions fit for human beings. And yet what was really new about the American War of Independence was the general rhetoric about ‘Liberty’. Each class, every social strata, ranging from tenant farmers in the Hudson valley to the coopers of Philadelphia, from Boston sailors to merchants in debt to England, from land-hungry bonded servants to the skilled laborers of New York, all of them saw their respective problems resolved in the achievement of liberty, the opening up of a new world of wealth and well-being.

In the next century, it would nevertheless become abundantly clear that the American bourgeoisie had no intention of sharing the enormous riches within its grasp with the proletariat.
 

BALANCE SHEET OF THE ISLAMIC ‘REVOLUTION’

 Once the popular and proletarian uprising against the Pahlavi State had concluded with the victory of the priest’s party, the new politico-religious coalition, contrary to the wishes of the bourgeois strata that had supported it, would embark on a long and bloody battle against the other factions. A popular referendum declared Iran to be an ‘Islamic republic’ but from that time on there would be no more room for the democratic forces, even for those of populist inspiration which had contributed so much to the success of the insurrection.

The ‘revolution’ was dead before it had seen light of day. That wouldn’t stop this historical phase from eventually being dubbed the ‘Khomeinist Revolution’, however: false noun, usurped adjective.

Even within the Shiite community itself ‘spiritual’ differences would lead to vicious struggles amongst the priesthood, as often as not mediated by the Supreme Leader and sometimes leading to bloody attacks aimed at eliminating opponents. Ruthless repression would be the order of the day, whether against the groups and parties of the lay left, or those of the so-called ‘Islamic left’ (Bani Sadr).

Between 1980, and when the Iraqi armed forces invaded in 1983, the opposition was completely crushed. Almost six thousand people were condemned to death, exile for the more fortunate (including the second lay president, Bani Sadr) and ‘political death’ reserved for those factions amongst the clergy who wouldn’t adapt to the ‘Khomeinist’ dictatorship.

The country’s new constitutional order was organized in a special diarchical structure in which a ‘democratic’ form of the traditional type, represented by the president of the Republic and parliament, was accompanied by a parallel religious power presided over by a Supreme Leader and a Council which assisted him.

Effective control of the principal powers of the Islamic Republic was – and still is – referred to the latter, whilst a role involving little more than management and administration was attributed to the institutions of parliament and president.

The confessional nature of the state was sanctioned in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, which clearly identified that in Islam, and not in the state itself, the summit of power in Iran was located, thereby drawing a clear distinction between the roles of the President and the Supreme Leader; with effective power of government transferred to the latter and the organs specific to him.

During those three years of ferocious repression, the struggle to give a structure to the new state order, and the dynamic of the clash of imperialist interests in the Gulf area, would result in the Republic’s foreign policy becoming confused and contradictory. There would be traumatic stages like the seizure of the diplomats from the American embassy in Teheran and, later on, the military attack on Iran by Iraq. If the Islamic left, until its final elimination in the first year of the war with Iraq, insisted on the organic insertion of Iran in the non-aligned movement, another wing of the government sought a non-conflictual co-existence with the West and a measured policy towards the East. Finally, there was the political group around the Supreme Leader and the Council of the Revolution, which urged a break with the United States.

As the war with Iraq continued, and became ever more ruthless and bloody, these political contradictions would be swept aside.

The political weakness of the American president, Carter, and his failed attempt to free the captive American diplomats by military means, would cost him his re-election in 1981. Reagan, his successor, would instead purchase their freedom with clandestine deals involving arms and dollars, which could only be got into Iran with the complicity of the Israeli secret services and complicated international financial networks: this was the Iran-Contra scandal which was uncovered in 1987.

As the war continued, the United States allowed the two contenders to bleed each other dry, whilst it meanwhile provided support to the Iraqi dictator, who it would help to install and maintain in power as a counter-weight to the newly arisen Iranian republic.

After the assassinations of Behesti, leader of the Council of the revolution, and Rajai, who succeeded Bani Sadr as head of the republic, the Ayatollah Khomeini would himself step in to replace them. The circle was getting smaller, and the mullahs would now exert complete control over the ganglia of state and civil society. The weak Iranian bourgeoisie totally surrendered to the harsh discipline of the priests, who would lord it over the financial as well as the landowning and mining sectors and take over the oil business.

After eight years of war, and after a missile launched by an American ship had hit an Iranian civilian aircraft with 280 people on board – a ‘tragic error’ according to American diplomacy – the war would end, without the two contenders however signing a formal peace declaration.

The turbulent phase of the power of the priests draws to a close with the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, soon after the ending of hostilities in February 1989, and his replacement at the top of the regime by Rafsanjiani. A period of political stabilization is ushered in, and the new climate allows for a more pragmatic foreign policy, one which is more negotiated; one allowing the application of various approaches to the really knotty question: regional supremacy in the Gulf region.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is elected to the presidency of the republic, and he will remain in post until 1997, practicing a policy of economic liberalization aimed at attracting foreign investment to reconstruct an Iran devastated by the war.
 

ITALY: BIGOTTED AND MACHIAVELLIAN

If we have previously emphasized that the entire history of the Italic bourgeoisie is marked by its political intrigues and petty politicizing; if we have emphasized that Togliatti wasn’t the first to adopt its duplicitous standards, since these had already been adopted by the men of the Risorgimento, with Cavour chief amongst them, it isn’t out of moral bigotry.

If anything, bigotry is typical of the bourgeois ruling class (and not just the Italian one at that) inasmuch as it constantly finds itself objectively torn between wishful thinking and harsh material reality.

Thus the distorting mirror of national ideology means that promises are never kept, for the reason that it sees class divisions as ‘a Marxist invention’, rather than a blatantly obvious fact staring it in the face.

Thus do the Italics still claim to be followers of, or at least indebted to, Machiavelli, not knowing that the latter, accused in his day of being a ‘mannerino’, that is, a flunkey of the Medicis (and him a republican!), advocated the necessity of setting fancy speeches aside in order to learn from ‘actual reality’. He who at least had the merit of not shunning the lessons of history, of knowing how to conduct himself politically, and who loathed petty politicizing, which is the nauseating way of going about things these days

The really pathetic thing about Italic ideology is the rhetoric with which it tries to cover up its mistakes, which fails however to disguise the profound emptiness of a tradition that continually oscillates between velleity and reality. The events of the last fifteen years are no exception, even after the fall of the ‘ideologies’ which would force everyone to dissimulate…

Now that the reasons for this duplicity no longer exist, here it is being proclaimed to a country which although split in half has never been more united in squeezing the proletariat, excluded from the great blow-out and still in the grip of an irreversible crisis.

As the rate of profit continues its inexorable fall, whose fault is that? Answer that dear sirs, and you might not find it quite so easy to blame Marxism as an ideology, or to declare the latter unscientific and false…
 

THE ORIGIN OF THE TRADE UNIONS IN ITALY

The report dealt with the history of the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro in the period immediately after the 2nd World War when it was based in Naples. The comrade assigned to researching the subject had managed to track down several copies of the Confederation’s official organ, Battaglie Sindacali, the contents of which clearly evidenced the major influence which class positions had on this union.

But alongside these positions there were also non-communist tendencies present within it, which derived from the fact that members belonged to a whole range of parties, from the Partito d’Azione (Action Party) through to the Italian Communist Party and the PSIUP (Partito Socialista Italiano di Unità Proletaria).

Looking back at this union from where we are today, we are bound to confirm that it was indeed a ‘class’ union, because such were its actions; such it was considered by its members and because even the non-communist leaders, despite themselves, got swept up in the tide. In fact these leaders were compelled to hide their true opinions for fear of losing contact with the proletariat.

Wage demands for agricultural labourers, workers and office workers were unequivocal, and made regardless of their compatibility with the national economy.

Several passages from the pages of ‘Battaglie’ were quoted to show how it defended various class positions, such as calling for a single, inter-regional trade-union organisation to defend the interests of workers in all trades and sectors.

The organisation had to fight against the PCI, which attempted to sabotage it by trying to get workers to not join or not pay their dues. In Unità there were even accusations of ‘anti-communism’, which can be swiftly dealt with by pointing out that the CGL maintained it was only by international solidarity and the abolition of the capitalist system that it could alleviate the proletarian condition.

With other comrades having managed to track down additional issues as well, such that we have now acquired an almost complete set of Battaglie Sindacali, we have decided to duplicate it to make it available for further study.
 

ANTI-MILITARISM IN THE WORKERS’ MOVEMENT

This report was introduced with the observation that war is the inevitable consequence of capitalist society and its mode of production. At the same time, however, it represents capitalism’s greatest contradiction because in order to conserve its power, its class domination, the capitalist state is forced to arm the proletariat, its grave-diggers. As Marx wrote in the Manifesto: “Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians”.

Several passages from our classic texts (Marx, Lenin, the Italian Left) were then quoted to demonstrate that the proletarian party’s revolutionary stance towards imperialist war needs to be based on the following fundamental postulates; postulates which cannot be compromised or diluted in any way:

1. The party must never, under any circumstances, declare a suspension of the class struggle in time of war, much less call on the proletarian class to solidarize with its own bourgeois state. And this also holds true when a national territory is seriously threatened by the military aggression of enemy states;
2. The party must unilaterally reject any defense of the ‘homeland’;
3. At the same time it must encourage fraternization between proletarians in uniform in the opposing bourgeois armies
4. The party’s entire propaganda and tactical activity will aim to transform any war between states into a civil war between the classes.

These plain, but clear-cut, statements allow us to conclude that the policy and action of the 2nd International parties, both at the start of, and during, the conflict, represented a total abandonment of the doctrines and traditions of socialism (even the reformist version) and, in abruptly passing over to the side defending bourgeois national interests, they committed a conscious and deliberate betrayal of the working class and its historical cause.

Whilst the 2nd International parties, barring rare exceptions, forged a common front with their own national states, and therefore, although appearing at first sight contradictory, with international imperialism; whilst these parties were betraying the class, the proletariat, meanwhile, was everywhere acting on the basis of authentic class internationalism.
On all the war fronts without exception, there were, from Christmas 1914 onwards, innumerable episodes of military truces and fraternization. Faced with such a situation, and with the aim of preventing fraternization from being transformed into military strikes and thence into open civil war, the military commands would alternate toleration with brutal repression according to the circumstances.

Years of war would fail to dampen the proletariat’s spirit of rebellion, and in the fateful year of 1917 not one military front, not one army was unaffected by the phenomena of military strikes, mutinies, and revolts.

To give a full account of the full scale of these proletarian onslaughts, or even a bare summary, would be impossible. The report therefore restricted itself to covering three examples: the Christmas truce of 1914, which as everyone knows spread through the whole of the western Front; the rebellion in the French army of 1917 and the Italian Caporetto. It became very clear that these demonstrations, however significant might have been in themselves, also represented a generalized spirit of rebellion and a wish not only to have done with the war, but also to have done with the regime which had generated it and the class which wanted it in the first place. In 1917, in Russia, Italy, France, Austria and Germany, the armies all rebelled and declared their autonomous wish to declare war on war. All the conditions were in place for a successful revolutionary attack on the capitalist bourgeois power. What was lacking, except in Russia, was the party. The 2nd International, in spite of the declarations of the Basle congress and tens of others before that, passed over en bloc to the camp of defense of national capitalist interests and linked its destiny to the destiny of capitalism in general.

In 1914, social democracy consigned to the capitalist state an entirely defenseless proletariat destined to be slaughtered in the interests of the bourgeois fatherlands. In the years that followed they did nothing to prevent the ‘useless slaughter’. When in 1917 the proletariat in uniform expressed its firm will to impose peace, social democracy remained impassive as governments and army Chiefs of Staff used the most ferocious and bloody repression to force the proletariat in uniform back onto the battle fronts; to massacre its brothers in the opposing trenches and get massacred in its turn. When, furthermore, in 1919 the bourgeoisie risked collapsing under the violent impact of the revolutionary wave, yet again it was social democracy that came to its rescue and personally took charge of safeguarding the capitalist order, and drowning any revolutionary attempt in blood.
 

THE JEWISH QUESTION

The foundation of the State of Israel has been seen as an expression of the return of the Jewish people to the Promised Land, and therefore a religious rather than a political event. Needless to say, we don’t agree.

When we speak of anti-semitism today, the question is imbued with a myriad of meanings and symbols, which although unavoidable in a way can be avoided if we don’t go the way of rhetorical exaggeration.

Is it fortuitous that the State of Israel was formed after the 2nd World War, which had seen the crushing of the proletariat reach its climactic point under Nazism and Stalinism? Is it fortuitous that such a distinctive State was formed as though in compensation for the extermination of the Jews by the nazis?

Historical documentation has now proved that it wasn’t just the USA which turned a blind eye to the extermination camps, but also perfidious Albion and the Vatican, and the Red Cross also, which isn’t a State and never was…

If this event is interpreted in the light of the class struggle, we are therefore forced to admit that the entire history of anti-semitism, from the fake protocols of Zion to the campaign by the Nazis, is just a perverse manifestation of bad conscience by the global bourgeoisie, serving to muddy the waters and allow them to maintain that the final victory of democracy meant a country could be given to the persecuted: a smoke screen to conceal the far more complex truth and the real reasons for the struggle.

As far as we are concerned, all that the forming of the myriad of States after the ‘ending of colonialism’ has achieved is to carve out new highly articulated systems of oppression on a planetary scale. Israel, as a new State, is no exception; and its deadly enemy, the new Palestinian semi-state, is no exception either.

Even if thus they present themselves, in this fragile strategic area which, at the moment at least, is mainly the focus of contradictions between the imperialist powers,

Therefore, in order to avoid falling victim to bourgeois ideology, which utilizes all sorts of smoke screens and symbols to confuse the proletariat, the Marxist interpretation of how old and new States form needs to be adhered to.

23-24 September 2006

Comrades from the Italian sections and from France and Great Britain gathered in Turin on September 23rd and 24th 2006 to take part in the latest of our regular thrice-yearly meetings.

As usual, according to our tried and tested method, the sittings were divided into those dedicated to planning and organisational work, and those in which comrades presented the results of their research into subjects agreed at previous meetings.

At our meetings we are not in the habit of announcing opinions and ‘making interventions’. Our approach is rather to refer to progress made within our overall plan of impersonal research; what we might call scientific research in fact. Those listening to the reports attended not with the aim of sitting in judgement on the theme, or making immediate critiques, and certainly not in order to vote on them. The reports are considered instead as material for further reflection, as the basis for the party to attain a further deepening and greater understanding of the external social world, and about itself.

A taut but non-conflictual atmosphere distinguishes the way we work, where participation in the ongoing difficulties of the class struggle – today mainly on an emotional level and involving study – and an ongoing survey of all aspects of the capitalist crisis, isn’t disrupted by the knowledge that the principal task of our small but compact team today is the defence of the notion of one party in particular.

It was no accident that in 1974 our party organ in Italy called itself Il Partito Comunista, insofar as it rightly considered that an integral part of the programmatic baggage of Marxism, something that is indispensable to the social success of tomorrow’s revolutionary class, is the ensemble of dialectical milestones, the irreversible results of real historical experience, which have taught us what the communist party actually is, how it functions and works within history, and how history shapes it and makes it what it is.

The party is the most precious possession of the working class, it is its mind and its heart. Without class party there remains only the poverty that the dominant class sees, is able to see and wants to see. This party, real and alive, which although attacked from all sides will eventually become a great and visible force, we have found ourselves in the position of having to defend, and we are determined to carry on doing so, with all the forces at out disposal.
 

CHRONOLOGY OF LEBANESE HISTORY

The history of Lebanon, a country artificially formed by western imperialism, was briefly sketched out in this report. Practically non-existent as a State, Lebanon is just a testing ground for struggles and intrigues amongst its various internal components and various foreign infiltrations.

Once again the black clouds of war between bourgeois States are gathering over the region, and in particular, over Lebanon. And as usual, the proletariat will suffer the most, paying the usual heavy tribute of dead and wounded, above all amongst non-combatants. Once again it won’t be a case of a class war and proletarians will be set against each other on the opposing fronts.

The fragile truce in August 2006 which ended the Hezbollah rocket attacks on Galilee and the Israeli bombardments and invasion, has led to a multinational military corps being despatched, under the aegis of the UNO, whose nucleus is composed mainly of French and Italian troops. This hasn’t led to any agreement between the two opposed sides, merely the preservation of a fragile truce, during which both contenders are hoping to reinforce their positions whilst awaiting the next phase of the battle.

Meanwhile imperialism isn’t relaxing its grip on a region of fundamental strategic importance. For the time being it continues to act through its local ‘agents’, which consist of Israel and the pro-US forces on one side, and Hezbollah and its allies on the other. The working classes of Lebanon suffer oppression from both the country’s own propertied classes and from the capricious, sanguinary plans of actors on the international stage who are considerably more powerful.

Faced with this latest in a long succession of recent tragic events, with even worse ones no doubt in the offing, the party tackled this problem with a view to indicating to the proletariat of the entire region the right road to follow, which, as ever, is to fight for its own class interests. This means urging it to break that solidarity with the dominant classes which over the last seventy years has forced it, in Israel as in Lebanon, to live and die in a state of war, fighting for its own exploiters.

The report went on to provide an outline chronology of the Lebanese region, highlighting the historical reasons that have led to the development of the current ‘canker’. Future work on the subject will plot the inextricable links which exist between the events taking place in Lebanon and those in Iraq, with the latter, as we all know, having been hurled into a situation where daily bloody massacres are the norm. It has been labelled a ‘civil war’, but in fact this ruthless, savage war is an attack by the regime against the indigenous proletariat.

That the Middle East crisis is continually being stoked up and kept in a perpetual state of irresolution is all to the advantage of the war party, whose interests fully coincide with those of imperialism,.

Our prediction is that the middle-eastern proletariat will have no peace as long as capitalism endures, a view confirmed by these latest terrible events.
 

COURSE OF THE ECONOMY

This report continued the ongoing exposition of the statistics describing the senile crisis of world capitalism, a work requiring a lot of dedication and patience.  To this end, a number of updated graphs and tables were put on display to aid understanding.

For this meeting, along with the ongoing obligatory temporal updating of the serial data presented on previous occasions, a new table had been drawn up to provide figures on industrial production in India and China, who can now be ranked alongside and compared with the older capitalisms. We are working towards reinserting the figures for Russia, but for this we will need a device of some sort to make the delicate adjustments and calculations needed to bring the old ‘soviet’ series into line with the figures from after ‘the collapse’, which refer to a much changed territory, population and economic environment.

The tables under discussion represent only the indices of production. They do not therefore depict the full extent of production in the various countries but merely measure the growth in each of them. In the course of our ongoing study, we will aim to eventually update our quantitative comparison of the global industrial powers, but since capital’s vitality is based not so much on the dimension of capital but on the speed of its growth – which is profit, or rather the rate of profit, which instead is declining and sometimes very steeply at that – it is more useful to work on the basis of the variation than its overall size.

In the Chinese government statistics, from which we have drawn our data, there appear two series: one called “Index of gross output of industry” and the other “Index of gross domestic product of industry”. From reading the relevant literature it would seem the Gross Output is more relevant to our work, insofar as it corresponds, more or less, to the sum of variable capital and surplus value.
 

Comparison of this series with the one we published in Comunismo, no.46 in 1999, in an earlier study on the growth of Chinese industry also derived from the Chinese State’s yearbook, gives us almost matching growth rates, apart from the first three years: in the 1999 study, the series running from 1949 to 1953 was 100-137-189-245-319, which is now reduced to a more modest 100-123-147-185-241, which still gives nevertheless an average annual growth rate of 25%. This brings them into line with the data in the most recent Yearbook, which we assume to be more accurate. Another dissimilarity is in the upward revision of the figures for 1994 to 1997, which were still only provisional in the 1999 study, on the basis of more accurate data.

These adjustments don’t alter the overall sense of our Table 2 from 1999: between the peaks 1949-1960-1966-1993 the average percentage growth is altered from 26.4-0.4-12.0 to 23.2-0.4-12.4 and, for the whole period running from 1949 to 1993, from 13.7% to 13%.

The 1999 study went on to compare the size of Chinese capital with other countries and looked at its steel production, which are other aspects of the economic panorama we intend to integrate.

As in the old series we had 1949 = 100, the year in which Chinese capital first really made its mark.

From 2000 onwards, however, we only have the figures from the Gross Domestic Product series available, which we include here on a provisional basis. This second series gives lower growth rates. Divergences can be observed here which also differ significantly from the more up-to-date figures regularly published in The Economist.

The annual series from 1949 to 2005 (the latter isn’t a peak year, but just the latest for which we have figures) shows maximums in 1960 and 1966, marking out three periods showing respectively average rates of 23.2%, 0.4% and 12.4%. The intermediate period, however, was shaped more by ‘political’ rather than economic causes, covering as it does the so-called ‘Great Leap forward’ and the ‘Cultural Revolution’. If we add together the first two periods we have a period of 17 years with an average growth of 14.6%. We therefore find the tendency for a slowdown in growth, typical of all capitalisms, confirmed.

Over the whole of the 56-year period from 1949 onward we have an average rate of growth of 13.0%. This needs to be compared with the equivalent initial phase of other young capitalisms. For Russia and Japan, referring to old party studies, we have statistics available from 1913: counting forward 56 years we arrive at 1969, not far off the pre-world crisis peak of 1973. From 1913 to 1973 we have an average annual growth of 7.6% and for Russia 8.2%, a lot lower than China. But it should be observed that in 1913 capitalism in Japan and Russia was already sufficiently developed, for example, to enable it to provide enough weaponry to rearm for a world war. In Russia in fact, after the war and the revolution, capitalism was effectively ‘born again’. To sum up, we can say that Chinese industrialism in 1949 was far below the level of Russian and Japanese industrialism in 1913. The figures on steel production (from the 1999 report) confirm this: in 1913 Russia was already producing 4.47 million tons; Japan, in the same year, 0.41 million; China in 1949, only 0.16 million. The latter is indeed partly due to war-time destruction, but the previous peak from 1944 is still only 1.42 million, and needs to be put in the context of the far higher population of China, much larger than Japan’s and Russia’s.

Thus the menacing contortions of the Dragon – which instead of tongues of fire vomits outs endless heaps of low-cost merchandise of every shape and size, hypnotising and striking fear into a Western bourgeoisie now thoroughly decrepit and incapable of any defensive action – are due to factors which, in part, will go on to lose their exceptional character.

By making a more thorough analysis of the annual series on Chinese industry we can see it follows a very irregular course, with an alternation of years of immense growth, which should be viewed with caution, like those of 1992 and 1994 with +24% per annum, with those of drastic slowdown in growth. In the 52 years between 1949 and 2001 we can therefore identify the presence of 7 cycles, of between 6 and 10 years duration. We expected nothing less, Karl Marx had already detected it in the China, the ‘workshop of the world’, of his day: Great Britain. The beginning and the end of capitalism, conceived of as two dragons, which History needed once upon a time but which we’re heartily sick of now, and which we can, and must, free ourselves of.

We dealt with the series on Indian industry in a slightly different way as we have no previous party studies to rely on.

Our starting point here is 1948; this is simply because the figures before then are not currently available to us. There remains however the possibility, in India’s case, of recovering data from the nineteenth century; when the development of English imperialism, which was already well under way at that time, is bound to be well documented in colonial statistics.

The key years we have identified are 1953, and the peak years of 1966 and 2000 (both of global relevance). In the four periods which result we have the following series of average growth rates: 2.8%; 6.9%; 5.7%; and 5.3%. We see here, therefore, a much more mature progression than the Chinese one.

But maturity in capitalist terms doesn’t denote regularity: the Indian series, too, is marked by a continual alternation of accelerations and slowdowns.

In order to make a comparison between countries, it is better to refer to the Table on Long Cycles of Industrial Production. This is derived from the table covering the short cycles, defined by all of the rising successive peaks. Therefore the extreme years of the periods in the long cycles aren’t exactly the same in all countries. For example, for Russia we have had to take 1940-1973-1989, for France 1937-1974-2001, for Italy 1938-1974-2000, etc.
 

Here the capitalisms have been placed in order of ‘youthfulness’, from China to England. As we know the table can be read vertically or horizontally: from top to bottom and from left to right average increments steadily decrease, indicating how a country’s capitalism slows down in proportion to the time during which it has been reproducing itself. By its inherent nature, capital is driven to progressively ‘exhaust’ the human and natural resources existing in any given territory and historico-social environment. Inexorably the rate of profit declines to almost zero; there is no more ‘heat’ and the machines grind to a halt. The working class energy which the ruling class harness to churn out profit for its own ends, and which it has less and less use for, will have to be used by the working class for its own ends, to destroy capitalism.

In the table on the long cycles, we can clearly see China’s demonstration of youthful vigour, followed quite far behind by India, and then by Russia, Japan and the others. Over the last thirty years the only exceptions have been Germany and, most markedly, Italy, which one might describe as old before its time.

The last column covers the current cycle, calculated therefore on the basis of provisional figures but which still clearly indicates the gap between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, which seems irretrievable.

In the previous version of the table, Average annual rate of increase in industrial production between successive peaks of maximum growth, the table of short cycles, which we presented at Viareggio, since it only went back to 1937, a year which in no country was an industrial peak, the older cycles couldn’t be really considered as such, in other words they didn’t commence with a peak. In the present version, which goes back to 1929, this has been rectified (see previous report on the Viareggio meeting).
 

This table clearly shows that the imperialist war served as a kind of fountain of youth for capitalism. All the countries that suffered from severe war damage go on to show long uninterrupted cycles of accumulation. And cycles which follow wars are in general long.

Years of international capitalist crisis that particularly stand out, apart from 1929-33 which isn’t shown here, are those before the Second World War (indeed, they caused it), in 1966, and even greater, 1973-4; finally, in 2000-2001. But the real caesura is in 1974: the figures before and after show a general slowdown in accumulation. The penultimate cycle ends in 2000 (for France in 2001) and only now is there is an upturn from the recession that followed it.

India was affected by the 1966, 1974 and 2000 world recessions, although it wasn’t hit so severely.

As can be seen, if there is a succession of cycles lasting of roughly five years duration in France and Italy, the ten-year cycle is the norm in the United States, to the extent that the next recession can be forecast for around 2010-11.

China will also be due for a crisis around about that time, and, now that it depends more and more on the world market, a really serious crisis like that in 1929 cannot be totally ruled out.
 

THE JEWISH QUESTION

We listened finally to another part of the study dedicated to the controversial Jewish Question; a study which we are aiming to carry out by applying a materialist and dialectical approach to religious history.

In Jewish history, the formula/profession of faith “the Lord has freed us from slavery in Egypt” frequently recurs.

It is well-known how eventually the religions which were inspired by the Old Testament did everything they could to make the formula more palatable by reducing it to abstract spiritual and ideal values; but they who are more familiar with the heart and soul of Judaism know that the formula is a very concrete and material one. The Jews really were waiting for a Messiah, for God’s envoy to liberate them from the enemy. It is useless to pretend not to understand: the notion of a cyclical history, one that recurs, has always suited the dominant classes, which inoculate a vision of the social world and Nature itself as ruled by physical laws, and interpret movement and transformation as metaphor and appearance.

Therefore myth and ideology tend to falsify the model anchored in historical reality, as was, and still is, that of the Jewish world in general.

Of course we see every super-structure as ideological, and thus as an attempt to translate real historical movement into thoughts. What we want to do is to put ancient and modern Jewish history back on its feet, by identifying what interests determined the choices of the various relevant forces, classes and dominant groups; including tragic choices, like the one leading to the crucifixion of Christ.

Let us not forget that in the time of Christ it was rebel slaves who were crucified, and it is certainly not fortuitous that Christ arose in circumstances in which the liberation of slaves was a demand being made throughout the Roman world. Nothing that occurs in history is fortuitous, although nowadays that is what is believed, and they very much want us to believe.

So, we aren’t afraid to say that the message we can draw from those ancient events today can, and must, allude to the liberation of the proletariat subjected to the new Pharaohs, the Pharaohs of capital, with their pyramids, to the Babel of its Towers, which a certain type of Islamic fundamentalism has deluded itself it can topple without the need for class struggle; in fact, against, and as a surrogate for, class struggle. Here then is why our position is absolutely unique and doesn’t coincide with anyone else’s.

If, however, as has been sneakily suggested in an undermining kind of way, you wish to maintain that Marx thought the way he did simply because he was a ‘secularised Jew with a chip on his shoulder’, fed up with the new bosses, then we would say, yes, historical materialism does have its ideological component, but it can’t be reduced to that. We are its bearers, not just mawkish sentimentalists aiming to tug at the heartstrings.

Thus the history of Judaism interests us because it represents an influential interpretation not just of ancient history, but also of the present, which is dominated by the struggle between capital and labour, and which the ruling classes are doing everything they can to disguise as a religious struggle.
 

Our beloved Giandomenico has died. Suffering from an incurable illness, he passed away at his house in Cortona at the age of 66 years old. He leaves behind not only us, but also his partner, and party comrade, and his daughter and grandson, all of whom loved him dearly.

He was a man of exceptional intelligence whose brilliant mind ranged over a vast array of topics, and everything he studied he did so with extreme sensitivity. His work was nourished by his wish to connect with others, particularly his party comrades, and the inspiration he provided them clearly shows in their work.

As a militant of the international working-class revolution, he dedicated his gifts and his vast knowledge to the cause of communism. For almost forty years he devoted his life to the party and dedicated his skill and passion to the methodical study of history, of doctrine, and to those teachings that are indispensable for ensuring the proletariat’s emancipation from wage slavery.

As a young man he saw to it that the party gained a hearing in the organisation of worker comrades in schools.

Later, in his small house in Val di Chiana, unbeknown to today’s working class, reserved and shy of all publicity (particularly as regards himself and his by no means small personality) he dedicated himself to a continuous and systematic work of research and elaboration, often delving into less explored realms, from which he would emerge with remarkable and surprising results. These, without fail, he would bring to the party at each reunion, where he would present them to us in an ‘off the cuff’ way, but in clear and rigorous terms accessible to all, smilingly explaining the hard-hitting dialectic, or with controlled disdain, unravelling it to make it accessible for the party press. Even when his illness had advanced to the stage where he could no longer travel, he wanted to remain linked to the collective rhythm of our little-known, but nevertheless highly important, battle; and although unable to present the reports himself, he would always make sure they were ready, in good time, to be read out at the party meetings.

The next generation of young communists, risen to their feet with an energy and self-sacrifice that today may seem misplaced, will find in his finely honed words – each of them chosen like a weapon, although fused within the body of the party’s collective production – both a denunciation of the countless dirty tricks and mean betrayals of our enemies, and a perfect, scientific resource, which they will find indispensable in the fight to destroy the monstrous enemy which presently dominates all of our lives.

Self-disciplined before all else, as only revolutionary Marxists know how to be, Giandomenico battled for five years with his terrible illness, supported by the love and incomparable strength of his partner. And in doing so, whilst displaying all the necessary determination, he nevertheless managed, right to the end, to maintain that serenity and capacity to enjoy life which comes from feeling part of a class and of a movement that is much bigger than ourselves; one which moreover carries within it the future of humanity.

To us, his comrades, he left word that a mass of notes, which he had set in order as best he could, be consigned to us with a view to us giving continuity, as we can, and as we must, to his robust and intransigent, and yet fraternal and friendly, life as a party militant.