SECOND DAY

The main theme of the first day’s discussion on the issues on which Stalin has responded to our Marxist treatises and clarifications, for the precise defininition of the current economy in Russia, was the dispute that there can be compatibility between commodity production and a socialist economy. For us, any system of commodity production in the modern world, in the world of associated labor, that is, the grouping of workers into production enterprises, defines a capitalist economy.

In what follows, we will come to the question of the stages of the economy, or rather of socialist organization, and the distinction between the lower and higher forms of communism. We now preface that at the heart of our doctrine (to come onto historical ground, moving away from definitions of “static” and thus abstract systems) is the assertion that the transition from a capitalist economy to socialism does not happen in a single stroke but through a long process. It must therefore be admitted that there can be coexistence of sectors with private economy alongside sectors with collective economy, of capitalist (and pre-capitalist) zones with socialist zones, and for a very long period. And we specify right away: every zone or sector in which commodities circulate, which receives or sells commodities (including human labor power), is a capitalist economy.

Now, Stalin declares in his text (now known in full and in the original) that the Russian agrarian sector is mercantile – and confirms that it is a private economy even in terms of ownership of certain means of production – and he attempts to argue that the industrial sector (large industry) does not produce commodities except when it manufactures consumer goods and not “instrumental” goods; nevertheless, he wants to assert that not only the large industrial sector but the entirety of the Russian economy can be defined as socialist, even though commodity production largely survives.

We have amply responded to all this, recalling our abundant research material on the foundational texts of Marxism and on the data from general economic history, including that of the past century, and today, we must move on to the question of “economic laws” and the “law of value.”

Light and Shadows

But first, it is necessary to note from the text under examination that, in the face of objections that referred to Engels to establish that then one exits capitalism when one exits mercantilism, there one overcomes the former where one overcomes the latter, Stalin limits himself to trying to interpret differently a single passage, where the thesis is developed by Engels (making magnificent, masterful use, for this purpose, of the… Stalinist Dühring) throughout the entire “Socialism” section and in the chapters where we have so often drawn quotations from: Theoretical, Production, Distribution.

The passage from Engels says: “With the seizing of the means of production by society, commodity production is eliminated, and with it the domination of the product over the producers.”

The distinction may perhaps (maybe) pass for artful, but doctrinally, it is wrong. Engels, Stalin notes, does not say whether it is about the possession of all the means of production or, of only a part. Now, only the social seizure of all the means of production (large and small industry, agriculture) makes it possible to abandon the system of commodity production. Caramba!

Together with Lenin (and Stalin) around 1919, we broke our backs trying to get it into the thick skulls of social democrats and libertarians that the means of production could not be conquered in one day with the wave of a magic wand, and that precisely for this reason, and for this reason alone, there was needed His Terror, the Dictatorship; now they would have us printing manuals of Political Economy to admit the absurdity that all products will lose the character of commodities in a single stroke, on the day in which some functionary ascending to the Kremlin submits for signature to the Stalin of that distant time the decree that expropriates the last hen of the last member of the last kolkhoz.

Elsewhere, Engels speaks of the possession of all the means of production, and so we are told that the aforementioned formula of Engels “cannot be considered entirely clear and precise.”

By the horns of the prophet Abraham, that’s a strong one! That Friedrich Engels, the reflective, serene, definitive, crystalline Friedrich, the world champion of patiently straightening out dogs’ legs and doctrinal distortions, the unsurpassed, both in modesty and in worth, second to the tempestuous Marx, who sometimes, due to the coruscation of his gaze and language, is found obscure, and in his overpowering brilliance is perhaps – perhaps – more falsifiable; Friedrich, whose prose flows clear without jolts like spring water, and who by natural gift, as well as by the trained rigor of science, omits no necessary word, nor adds any superfluous one, is now accused of lacking precision and clarity!

We are on solid ground: here we are not in the orgbureau or the agitation committee, where perhaps, O ex-comrade Joseph, you could have looked at Friedrich as an equal. Here we are in the school of principles. Where is it said about the seizure of all means? Where is it spoken of about commodities, perhaps? Never again. This, Engels recalls, this seizure of all means of production, “since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, has more or less obscurely presented itself as a future ideal before the eyes of individuals or sects.” Let’s not play between clarity and obscurity. Precisely for us, it is no longer a matter of an ideal but of science.

And if further on Engels speaks again of society as owner of all means of production, it is precisely in the passage that outlines the set of demands that we thoroughly treated during the aforementioned meeting in Rome, in that only with such a result will the emancipation of all individuals be achieved. Engels here shows how the requests: abolition of the division between town and country, between intellectual and manual labor, of the social and professional division of labor (Stalin admits the first two but claims, with another serious doctrinal mistake, that this problem was not posed by the classics of Marxism!!) were already proposed by the utopians and vigorously so by Fourier and Owen, with a limitation of three thousand souls for population centers, with absolute alternation of manual and intellectual occupations for the same individual. Engels demonstrates how such just and generous demands lacked the demonstration provided by Marxism: namely, their possibility based on the degree of development of the productive forces reached (and now surpassed) by capitalism. Here, it is a matter of anticipating the supreme victory of the revolution, it describes that “organization in which labor will no longer be a burden but a pleasure,” and recalls the exhaustive demonstration already illustrated by us – and classic, by God! – in Chapter 12 of Capital on the destruction of the division of labor in society and of the despotism in the enterprise, brutalizer of man; aspects in which Stalin or Malenkov cannot claim to have made any progress, since instead, as Stakhanovism and Shturmovshchina (a dialectical reaction to the former by poor souls crushed in the deified enterprise) prove, the march is in the direction of the heaviest capitalism.

Stalin actually minimizes those postulates, reducing them to the “elimination of conflicting interests” between industry and agriculture, between manual laborer and technical manager. It is about much more than that! About abolishing in social organization the fixed distribution of individuals among those spheres and functions.

Where on earth do those passages of Engels authorize one to say that, in order to build this immense edifice of the future society, every pickaxe blow should not destroy a position of mercantilism, sweeping away one after another its pestilential trenches?

We certainly cannot repeat those entire chapters to Stalin here, and as usual, we will quote the central passages, because they are very clear and indisputable, and not to accept them cum grano salis. We know how those grains have become mountains, from long experience.

Engels: “The exchange of products of equal value, expressed by social labor, for one another – thus the law of value – is precisely the fundamental law of commodity production, thus also of its highest form, capitalist production.” This is followed by the well-known remark that Dühring, with Proudhon, conceives of the future society as mercantile and does not realize that with this he describes a capitalist society. Imaginary, says Engels. Stalin describes, in a not contemptible text, a real one, we modestly say.

Marx: “Let us imagine an association of free men, working with means of production in common and using according to a predetermined plan their numerous individual forces as one and the same social labor force.” In Naples, we commented word by word, showing that this initial paragraph is an entire revolutionary program. We return, with the future arrival at this form of social organization, lapidarily defined – communism! – to Robinson, from whom we started. What does that mean? Robinson’s product was not a commodity but only an object of use, exchange not having been born – of course. Soaring over all human history with an eagle’s flight: “All this is reproduced here socially but not individually.” Here; in said communist association. The only manual we need is the manual to learn how to read! And one reads: again, the product of labor ceases to be a commodity when society is socialist. And Marx goes on to compare this state of affairs (socialism) with commodity production, showing that this is its dialectical, perfect, fierce, and irreconcilable opposite.

Society and Fatherland

Yet before addressing the point of economic laws, something still needs to be said about the Stalinist version of the presentation of the socialist program as carved by Engels in those chapters. It is all the more necessary since Stalin, in refuting opinions of various Russian economists, far from attempting further breaches and revisions of the classic text, quotes whole passages from it, expressing harsh party condemnation for any violation of complete orthodoxy in this matter.

In all the developments of his fundamental exposition, Engels speaks of the appropriation of the means of production (and, let us note it a thousand times, in relation to the research we have dedicated in this paper and in Prometeo, especially concerning the products, which today dominate the producer and even the buyer: such that we define capitalism, rather than as a system of the denied disposal of the means of production to the producer, but as a system of the denied disposal of the products) of appropriation, therefore, always by Society.

In the Moscow paraphrase, “society” disappears, and in its place, there is talk repeatedly of the transfer of the instruments of production to the State, the Nation, and when they really want to stir emotion, to the People – in the closing speeches, eliciting the ritual ovations, to the Socialist Fatherland!

Having assessed Stalin’s description, not without recognizing its merit of being brutally honest (the leopard loses its spots… with what follows), the seizure of the means of production appears purely juridical, inasmuch as every one of its effects is limited to the pages of the Statute of the State agricultural artel or of the latest (under revision) Constitutional Charter of the Union, as far as it concerns the land and the large machinery and equipment of agriculture, given that the declaration on legal ownership is not followed by the economic disposal of agricultural products, divided between collective kolkhozy and individual kolkhozians. Such seizure is effective only for large industry because only of its products does the State dispose, and even resells those that are consumer products. Public seizure does not exist, not only for products but not even for means of production, with respect to medium and small industry, to commercial enterprises, to the lesser equipment of the encouraged family and small-plot agrarian cultivation. Therefore little, despite the immense factories and the gigantic works of public construction, is truly in the hands and under the control of the Republic that calls itself socialist and Soviet, little has been statified, nationalized in full. The relative size of State property, compared to the whole economy, is perhaps greater in some bourgeois States.

But who, what entity and what force, holds in its hands what was snatched from private hands after the revolution? The people, the nation, the fatherland! Never did Engels and Marx use these words. “The transformation into State property does not suppress the capitalist appropriation of the productive forces,” affirms Engels in the aforementioned chapter.

When society claims for itself the disposal of products, it will be clear that this will be the classless society, which has overcome classes; and as long as classes exist, it will be society organized “of one single class” with a view to the abolition of all classes, and then even that one class by dialectical consequence. Here, the masterful clarification of the Marxist doctrine of the State, crystallized since 1847, is grafted. “The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property (words of Marx in Engels’s quotation). But by doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and antagonisms, and abolishes also the State.” And then, and in this way, and only on this main road, it is society that we see acting, finally disposing of the productive forces and of every product and resource.

But the people, what the hell is that? A hybridisation of classes, an amalgam of parasites and slaves, of professionals of business and power with masses of hungry and oppressed. We consigned the people, even before 1848, to the leagues for liberty and democracy, pacifism, and humanitarian progressivism. The people are not a subject of economic management but only an object of exploitation and deception, in its pitiably infamous “majorities.”

And the nation? Another necessity and foundational condition for the construction of capitalism, expressing the same mixture of social classes no longer in the insipid juridical and philosophical expression, but in the geographical, ethnographic, or linguistic one. Even the nation does not appropriate anything: Marx derided in famous passages the expressions of national wealth and national income (this is important in Stalin’s analysis of Russia) and demonstrated how the nation enriches itself precisely when the worker is swindled.

If the bourgeois revolutions and the spread of modern industry in place of feudal systems in Europe and any other system in the world had to be made not in the name of the bourgeoisie and capital but in the name of peoples and nations, if this was a necessary and revolutionary transition in the Marxist vision, one deduces from it the perfect coherence, in Moscow’s directives, between the defection from the front of Marxist economics and the retreat from the proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist “category” of society, as used in the classical texts, to the political categories proper to bourgeois ideology and agitation: popular democracy and national independence.

Nothing, therefore, to be surprised about that after 26 years, the boorish slogan is repeated before which we forever burned the bridge: to pick up the bourgeois flags that, once high in the time of Cromwell, Washington, Robespierre, or Garibaldi, have since fallen into the mud, and which the march of the revolution must instead sink into it mercilessly, opposing socialist society to the lies and myths of peoples, nations, and fatherlands.

Law and Theory

The discussion has also turned to the comparison of the laws of the Russian economy with those established by Marxism for the bourgeois economy. The text in question engages dialectically on two fronts. Some say this: were our economy already socialist, we would no longer be deterministically set upon the inexorable track of given economic processes, but we could modify the path: for example, by nationalizing the kolkhoz, suppressing mercantile exchange and money. If you prove to us that this is impossible, let us deduce that we live in a society with a completely capitalist economy. What is to be gained by pretending otherwise? Others, instead, would like us to decisively abandon the distinguishing criteria of socialism established by theoretical Marxism. Stalin tries to resist both groups. These naive researchers are evidently not active “political” elements, the proof is that, if they were, an easy purge would have put them in a position not to bother. They are only “technicians,” experts of the current productive mechanism, who are the only conduit through which the central government can figure out whether the big machine is running or stalling; and if they were right, silencing them would serve no purpose: in one form or another, the crisis would present itself. The difficulty that has arisen today, or rather, has come to light, is not of an academic, critical, or even “parliamentary” nature, because to laugh off these pinpricks you need only be, not to say a Hitler, but the last of the De Gasperis. The difficulty is real, material, lies in things and not in heads.

To be able to respond, two points must be argued from the center of government: the first is that even in a socialist economy, people must obey laws peculiar to economics that cannot be transgressed – the second is that these laws, even if in the future period of perfect communism they will all be entirely different from those of the capitalist era as established by Marx, in the socialist period are some different from those, some common to capitalist production and distribution. And then, having identified the laws that appear insurmountable, it is necessary, under penalty of ruin, not to ignore them and above all not to go against them.

Then the special, though essential problem has arisen: among these, does the law of value apply in the Russian economy or not? And if it does, isn’t any mechanism that acts according to the law of value straightforward capitalism? To the first question, Stalin answers: yes, with us the law is in force, although not over the entire horizon. To the second: no, there can be an economy that, while not being capitalist, respects the law of value.

Throughout the solemn theoretical “essay,” it seems to us that the arrangement is rather flawed, and above all convenient for the polemical opponents of Marxism, for those who use “philosophical” weapons and will have an easy time pointing out the simplistic assimilation between the effect of natural and economic laws on the human species, and for those economists who have anxiously yearned for revenge on Marx for a century, who wanted to trap us in the circle: “Useless, you will never be able to escape the laws of economic yield and the competition of interests as we see them.”

We must distinguish between theory, law, and program. At a certain point, Stalin lets himself say: Marx did not like (!) to abstract himself from the study of capitalist production.

At the last meeting of our movement, on September 6 and 7 in Milan, one of the main themes was to demonstrate that at every step, Marx shows the purpose, not of coldly describing the capitalist fact, but of advancing the intention and program of the destruction of capitalism. It was not only about dispelling that old filthy opportunist legend, but about showing that the entire Marxist work has the nature of polemic and combat, and therefore does not waste time describing capitalism and contingent capitalisms, but a typical capitalism, a capitalist system, yes, gentlemen, abstract, yes, gentlemen, which does not exist but that fully corresponds to the apologetic assumptions of bourgeois economists. What matters is, in fact, the collision – class collision, partisan collision, not banal diatribes of scientists – between the two positions: one that wants to prove the permanence, the eternity of the capitalist machine, and one that demonstrates its imminent death. From this perspective, it is convenient for revolutionary Marx to admit that indeed the gears are perfectly centered and lubricated by the freedom of competition, by the right for all to produce and consume according to the same rules. This, in the real history of capital, was not, is not, and will not be the case, and the starting data are enormously more favorable to our demonstration: all the better. If, to put it briefly, capitalism had managed to live another century remaining smooth and idyllic, Marx’s demonstration would collapse: it shines with power insofar as capitalism lives, yes, but as a monopolist, oppressor, dictator, mass murderer, and its economic development data are precisely those it had to have had starting from the initial pure type; in line with our doctrine, against that of its lackeys.

In this sense, by all the gods, Marx sacrificed a life to describe socialism, communism, and we feel like saying that if it had been only a matter of describing capitalism, he would have absolutely not given a damn.

Marx therefore, studies and develops, yes, the “economic laws” of capitalism, but in such a way that the system of characteristics of socialism is fully and dialectically opposedly developed. So, does this system have laws? Are they different? And which ones then?

One moment, please. At the center of the Marxist construction, we place the program, which is a further step beyond the cold research study. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, however, to change it.” (Theses on Feuerbach, and every cultured fool adds: youthful.) But before the program and even before indicating the discovered laws, it is necessary to establish the whole doctrine, the system of “theories”.

Some theories, Marx finds ready-made in his own contradictors, such as Ricardo’s theory of value, and even the theory of surplus value. These – we do not mean to say that Stalin never knew this – are different things from the “law of value” and “law of surplus value” that he discusses in depth, which, to avoid confusing the less experienced, would be to call: the “law of exchange between equivalents” and the “law of the relation between the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit.”

The distinction we wish to clarify for the reader also applies to the study of physical nature. Theory is a presentation of actual processes and their correspondences that aims to facilitate their general understanding in a certain field, moving only later to prediction and modification. Law is the precise expression of a certain relationship between two series of material facts in particular, which is seen to constantly occur, and as such allows calculating unknown relations (future, gentlemen philosophers, or present or past, it does not matter: for example, a certain law, if well studied, can allow me to establish what the sea level was at the Temple of Serapis a thousand years ago, the only difference is that you cannot verify it, as was the case with the many donkey tails between the Earth and the Moon). Theory is a general matter, law is a well-delimited and particular matter. Theory is generally qualitative and only establishes definitions of certain entities or quantities. Law is quantitative and aims to achieve measurement.

A physical example: in the history of optics, two “theories” of light have alternated with varying success. The emission theory says that light is the effect of the movement of minute corpuscular particles; the undulation theory says that it is the effect of the oscillation of a fixed medium in which it is transmitted. Now, the simplest law of optics, that of reflection, says that the ray incident on the mirror makes the same angle with it as the emitted ray. Verified a thousand times, this law allows the gallant young man to know where to stand to catch a glimpse of a beauty, absorbed in her toilette, across from him: the fact is that the law is compatible with both theories, and it was other phenomena and other laws that determined the choice.

Now, according to the text, this would happen: the “law of exchange between equivalent values” is compatible both with Stalin’s “theory” that says: there are mercantile forms in a socialist economy, and with our (modestly) theory that says: if there are mercantile forms and large-scale production, it is capitalism. Verifying the law: easy, if you go to Russia and see that exchanges occur in rubles at given prices, as in any banal bazaar: the law of equivalent exchange applies. Determining which is the true theory is a bit more complicated: we deduce: we are in full, straightforward, and authentic capitalism; Stalin fabricates a theory – precisely: theories are invented, laws are discovered – and says in defiance of Papa Marx: given economic phenomena of socialism occur normally according to the law of exchange (called the law of value).

Nature and History

Before coming to the point – what are in Marx the laws of capitalist economy, and which of them are “discriminating” between capitalism and socialism, which (if any) are common to both stages – it should be noted the all-too-common assimilation between physical laws and social laws.

As fighters and polemicists, as we must be in the school of Marx, we must not dissolve such a question in a scholastic tone and insist on theoretical analogy for the “political” aim of avoiding being told: if social laws are not as unbreakable as, for example, the law of gravity, then we can remove some of them.

How can one forget that between the colossus Marx and the pack of salaried curs in the universities of capital, the struggle revolves around the point that the laws of bourgeois economy “are not natural laws,” and therefore we can and will break their circle? It is true that Stalin’s writing recalls that in Marx, the laws of economics are not “eternal,” but there are those peculiar to each stage and social epoch: slavery, feudalism, capitalism, but he then wants to arrive at saying that “certain laws” are common to all epochs and will also apply in socialism, which will also have its own “political economy.” Stalin mocks Yaroshenko and Bukharin, who would have said that political economy is succeeded by a science of social organization, and Stalin, sharply, retorts that this new discipline, approached by Russian pseudo-Marxist economists fearful of the Tsarist police, is indeed an “economic policy,” whose necessity he admits as a different thing. Well, let’s think of this: if in socialism there will be an economic science, we will discuss it once the terms are in their proper place; but when there is still an economic policy (as there must be under the proletarian dictatorship, too), there rival classes are present, there socialism has not yet been reached. And we must, à la Lenin, ask ourselves again: who holds power? And therefore: the economic development – which is, we agree, gradual – in which direction is it going? Its laws will tell us.

As for the general problem of the laws of nature and history, it must find a place in the treatises of our theoretical journal, where we respond to attacks that Marxism receives – given that out of a thousand writers, nine hundred and ninety-nine consider Moscow as the official seat – with regard to the banality of the expression given to the theory (this is a theory and not a law) of historical materialism, and regarding problems of determination and will, causality and finality. The original position of Marx is always that (so little understood and so uncomfortable for those who play the politics of opportunistic success) always that of the direct battle between the opposing classes and their historical antagonism, which sometimes employs the typewriter and sometimes the machine gun – we no longer say the pen and the sword. For us, the bourgeoisie, when it won, advanced the critical scientific method and boldly applied it, after the natural field, to the social one. It discovered and revealed theories that are now ours: that of value (the value of a commodity is given by the amount and time of social labor necessary to reproduce it) and of surplus value (the value of each commodity contains advanced capital and surplus value: the first part is reimbursement, for the second profit). And it said triumphantly: if you admit (and the same science a century later admits it) that the same physical laws apply to the primitive nebula and to our Earth today, you must admit that all future human societies will obey the same social relations, since we jointly expel the intervention of God or pure Thought from both fields. Marxism consists in scientifically showing that, instead, in the social cosmos, a cycle unfolds that will break the capitalist forms and laws, and that the future social cosmos will be regulated differently. Since you, for domestic and foreign “political” effects, do not mind castrating and trivializing this powerful construction to the point of ridicule, finally do us the favor of abandoning the adjectives of Marxists, socialists, and communists, call yourselves economists, populists, progressives: it suits you perfectly.

Marx and the Laws

Engels recognizes Marx as the founder of the doctrine of historical materialism. Marx declares that his contribution in applying the doctrine to the present world does not consist in having discovered the struggle between classes but in having introduced the notion of the proletarian dictatorship.

The doctrine thus unfolds up to the class and party program, up to the organization of the working class for insurrection and seizure of power. On this gigantic path lies the investigation into the laws of capitalism. There are two true and principal laws established in Capital. In Volume I, the general law of capitalist accumulation is established, the one known as growing misery – so often treated by us – which establishes how, with the concentration of capital in large masses, the number of proletarians and of the “reserve-less” grows – and we have explained a thousand times that this does not mean that the level of consumption and of the real standard of living of the worker decreases. In Volumes II and III of Capital, which in our journal will be the subject of an organic exposition as it was for the first, the law of the reproduction of Capital is developed (connected to that, on which we will dwell further, of the fall in the rate of profit). According to this, a part of the product and thus of labor must be set aside by the capitalist to reproduce the capital goods of the economists, that is, worn-out machines, factories, etc. When capital allocates a higher share to such setting aside, it “invests”, that is, increases the endowment of plants and productive instruments. Marx’s laws on how the human product is divided between immediate consumption and instrumental investments tend to prove that so long as mercantile exchange and the wage system remain standing, the system will face crises and revolutions.

Now, the first law cannot certainly be applied to socialist society because this organizes itself precisely to ensure that the social reserve is an individual guarantee for all, while not belonging to anyone nor being divided (as in pre-capitalism) into many small shares. The second law, says Stalin, persists and claims that Marx predicted it. Marxism establishes only, and among other things in the famous passage of the critique of the Gotha Program, that there will also be a social levy on individual labor even under the communist regime, to provide for the maintenance of plants, general services, and so on. It will not have the character of exploitation precisely because it will not be done through the mercantile way; and precisely for this reason, the social provision will determine a stable equilibrium, and not a series of upheavals, in the relation between products to be consumed and products to be destined for “instruments” for further production.

The central point of all this lies in this. Stalin, with a precious admission, declares that, since the law of value applies even in State industry, those industries function on the basis of commercial yield, profitable management, cost of production, prices, etc. For the etcetera, we write: remunerative. Moreover, he declares that the future program is to increase the production of instruments of production. This means that the “plans” of the Soviet government to industrialize the country require, more than consumer goods for the population, that machines, plows, tractors, fertilizers, etc., are produced, and colossal public works are undertaken.

For the next meeting of our modest movement, we had already studied a suggestive topic: capitalist States make plans, and so will the proletarian dictatorship. But the first true socialist plan will present itself (we mean as to immediate despotic intervention: Manifesto) finally as a plan to: increase production costs, reduce the working day, disinvest capital, level both quantitatively and especially qualitatively consumption, which in capitalist anarchy is for nine-tenths useless destruction of product, only insofar as this responds to “profitable commercial management” and “remunerative price.” A plan, therefore, of underproduction, of a drastic reduction of the produced share of capital goods. We will easily break the law of reproduction if at last Marx’s Department II (which produces food) prevails over Department I (which produces machinery). The current orchestra has already broken our eardrums.

Food is for the workers, instruments for the masters. Easy to say that since the master is the workers’ State, the miserable workers have an interest in “investing” and working half a day for Department I! When Yaroshenko reduces the critique of this tendency toward the fantastic increase in the production of instruments to the formula: economy for consumption and not for production, he falls into banality. But equally banal is the appeal, to smuggle State industrialism under the socialist banner, to agitation formulas such as: “He who does not work does not eat”; “abolition of the exploitation of man by man”; as if the purpose of the exploited class were the elegant task of ensuring that it is exploted by itself.

In reality, and even sticking to the analyses of the economic world alone, the Russian economy applies all the laws of capitalism. How can the production of non-consumption goods be increased without proletarianizing people? Where do they get them? The path is the same as in primitive accumulation, and often the means are equally ferocious as those described in Capital. Either they will be kolkhozians who will be left without their cow, or wandering shepherds of Asia torn from the contemplation of the vague stars of the Ursa, or feudal serfs of Mongolia uprooted from the millenary glebe. Certainly, the directive is: more capital goods, more workers, more working time, more labor intensity: accumulation and expanded reproduction of capital at the pace of hell.

The homage that we render to the “great Stalin”, despite a host of little fools, is this. Precisely insofar as the process of initial capitalist accumulation unfolds, and if this really reaches the provinces of immense China, the mysterious Tibet, the fabled Central Asia from which the European lineage emerged, this will be revolutionary, it will turn the wheel of history forward. But it will not be socialist, but capitalist. What is needed in that great portion of the globe is the exaltation of the productive forces. But Stalin is right when he says that the merit is not Stalin’s but of the economic laws that impose this “policy” on him. His whole enterprise lies in a falsification of the label: this too, a classic expedient of primitive accumulators!

In the West, on the other hand, the productive forces are already too abundant, and their surging makes the States oppressors, devourers of markets and lands, preparers of carnage and war. There, plans to increase production are not needed but only the plan of the destruction of a gang of criminals. And above all, of plunging into the mud their stinking flag of freedom and parliamentarianism.

Socialism and Communism

We will close the economic topic with a synthesis of the stages of future society, on which Stalin’s “document” (there it is, the word buzzing on the keys!) brings a little disorder. France Press accused him of having plagiarized from Nikolai Bukharin’s writing on the economic laws of the transition period. But this writing Stalin quotes several times, indeed using a criticism that Lenin made of it. Bukharin had the great merit, when he was commissioned to prepare the Comintern Program, which remained a draft, of highlighting the anti-mercantile postulate of the socialist revolution as a matter of utmost importance. He then followed Lenin in an analysis of the transition “in Russia” and in the recognition that mercantile forms had to be endured under the proletarian dictatorship.

Everything becomes clear when it is noted that the stage of Lenin and Bukharin comes before the two stages of communist society of which Marx speaks and which Lenin illustrates in the magnificent chapter of “State and Revolution.”

This overview can thus recap the not-so-simple topic of today’s dialogue.

Stage of Transition. The proletariat has conquered political power and must place non-proletarian classes outside the law precisely because it cannot “abolish” them in a single stroke. This means that the proletarian State oversees an economy that, in part, always decreasing, not only has mercantile distribution but forms of private disposal both of products and means of production, whether scattered or concentrated. An economy not yet socialist, a transitional economy.

Lower Stage of Communism, or if you will, of Socialism. Society already has disposal over products in general and allocates them to its members through a “rationing” plan. This function is no longer provided by mercantile exchange and money – one cannot pass off to Stalin, as a prospect of a more communist form, simple exchange without money, but still with the law of value: that would be a kind of relapse into the barter system. Instead, it is allocation from the center without the return of an equivalent. Example: an epidemic of malaria breaks out, and quinine is distributed free in the area, but in the measure of only one tube per inhabitant.

In such a stage, there is needed not only the obligation to work, but also a record of the labor time performed and its certification, the famous voucher so much discussed over a century, which has the characteristic of not being able to be accumulated, so that every attempt at accumulation corresponds to the loss of a labor quota without equivalent. The law of value is buried. (Engels: society does not attribute any “value” to products.)

Stage of Higher Communism, which we have no difficulty in calling Full Socialism. The productivity of labor is such that, to avoid the squandering of product and human power, there is no need (except in pathological cases) to have either coercion or rationing. Free withdrawal for consumption by all. Example: pharmacies distribute free quinine without limit. And if someone takes ten tubes to poison himself? Evidently, he is as foolish as those who mistake a fetid bourgeois society for a socialist one.

In which stage of the three is Stalin? In none. He is in the transition not from, but to capitalism. Almost respectable, and not suicidal.