L’atmosfera dell’Europa, greve e torbida ancora dei fumi della guerra, è piena della polemica sull’America, sugli aiuti dell’America, sulle intenzioni dell’America. Le stragi belliche non hanno disaffollato gli stomaci nella parte del pianeta di popolazione più addensata e più antica; la vecchia Europa ha fame, non ha abbastanza da mangiare, non produce più viveri a sufficienza, non ha più la forza di una volta per andarne a predare nelle altre quattro parti del mondo.

Ed ecco che la ricca America anticipa, e pianifica l’ulteriore anticipazione. Si tratta di oro, di valuta, di titoli di credito, di tutte le altre stregonerie geniali ed idiote del mercantilismo? Si tratta in sostanza di sussistenze, nel senso più lato, non essendo sussistenza solo ciò che entra per la bocca.

Queste sovvenzioni in viveri rappresenterebbero l’apice di generosità di cui è capace il capitalismo. Si partì dal regime del cash and carry, paga e porta via, o, se vuoi mangiare, paga il conto prima di essere servito. Poi si passò alla legge di affitto e prestito, ossia, con un senso di larga fiducia, si consegnarono le merci facendo credito al compratore.

L’oste di oltre Atlantico ci faceva un abbonamento ai pasti. In fine è venuta l’UNRRA, ossia si regala senza nemmeno annotare il debito, il ricco trattore fa pranzare l’affamato per amor di Dio.

Chi conosce appena gli elementi della visione marxista dell’economia sa da tempo che la graduazione di merito va fatta alla rovescia. I tre metodi presentano successivamente un grado maggiore di sopraffazione e di sfruttamento che il ricco esercita sul povero.

L’Europa nella devastazione dei suoi impianti produttivi conserva crescente una sola delle forze della produzione, la massa lavoratrice.

L’America non ha subìto distruzioni, le industrie ed ogni altro impianto sono intatti, tutto il suo capitale costante è integro.

Il capitale costante rappresenta l’eredità che le generazioni passate col cumulo secolare dei loro sforzi di lavoro tramandano alle successive. Sulla strada di questa successione si accampa il privilegio di classe, poiché i miliardi di giornate-lavoro lasciate dai morti non appartengono a tutti i vivi ma ad una piccola minoranza.

Tale rapporto giuridico servirebbe poco ai satrapi del capitale ove essi disponessero del solo capitale costante: ben potrebbero contemplare le foreste di macchine immote e di spente ciminiere, non sfuggirebbero essi stessi alla morte per fame.

Il capitale costante deve integrarsi, perché si generi il profitto e si continui l’accumulazione della ricchezza, di capitale variabile, ossia di lavoro umano, in quanto l’ingranaggio economico consente ai monopolizzatori degli impianti di anticipare le sussistenze dei lavoratori rimanendo beneficiari di tutto il prodotto della combinazione tra impianti e lavoro.

Fin quando nel classico capitalismo delle libere aziende tutto questo si svolge in tante isole economiche, il padrone del capitale costante non solo non ha bisogno di anticipare le sussistenze, ma sono gli operai che gli anticipano una settimana o una quindicina di lavoro. Se essi potessero senza crepare anticiparne un anno o quanto occorre per l’intiero ciclo di trasformazione delle materie prime, nei casi in cui è periodico, la legge e la morale borghese avrebbero sancito volentieri questo rapporto.

L’evolversi del capitalismo ha condotto le aziende a divenire sempre più interdipendenti, ed il problema della fecondazione del capitale fisso da parte del capitale salari viene pianificato dalla borghesia su scala mondiale.

La guerra attuale ha in certo modo allontanati tra loro i due generatori del profitto capitalistico e per riavvicinarli, sola condizione che permetterà di riportare al massimo di giri le ruote della macchina dello sfruttamento, occorrono imprecisabili intervalli di attesa.

Per superarli senza che la massa delle braccia produttrici si assottigli e si disperda il capitalismo costruisce un apparato che anticipa sussistenze alle popolazioni affamate.

Tale anticipo presentato come un dono, appunto perché la parte che veramente produce profitto è il capitale sussistenze, verrà ritirato a condizioni dieci volte più strozzinesche di quelle che corrispondevano al caso di pagamento per contanti, e a quello successivo dell’accensione di un regolare conto a debito del vacillante capitale europeo.

La letteratura del nascente tempo borghese inorridiva di Shylok che convertiva il suo effetto di credito contro il nullatenente nel diritto di tagliargli dalla persona un pezzo di carne, ma oggi l’intelligente capitalismo lo tiene invece in piedi con una scatoletta di meat and vegetable. Così l’afflato della cristiana e illuminata civiltà mercantile che, scorrendo i mari, mosse dai nostri lidi alla conquista del mondo, ci ritorna ingentilito dal Far West.

Dopo l’altra guerra perduta dalla Germania chi percorreva quel paese militarmente prostrato nelle battaglie combattute sui territori altrui restava stupito dalla integrità dei possenti impianti moderni che una acceleratissima industrializzazione aveva attuato in pochi decenni. La foresta di ferro e di cemento armato piantata nel suolo rappresenta il capitale costante in cui si cristallizza il lavoro delle generazioni, è una riserva come il carbone fossile delle foreste vegetali sepolte nei millenni geologici. Se lo Spartaco proletario, anziché cadere sgozzato ad opera di quelli che si erano dati a fare della Germania una perfetta democrazia, a simiglianza dei marxisti rinnegati di oggi, avesse potuto afferrarla nelle tenaglie della rossa dittatura, sorella a quella di Russia, forse l’imperialismo non avrebbe potuto trascinare il mondo in un altro bagno di sangue.

I conquistatori della Germania, che erano in realtà i conquistatori dell’Europa, si sono ben guardati dal proclamare il V day, il giorno della vittoria, prima di avere percorso tutto il territorio del vinto, già straziato dai bombardamenti, tanto per controllarne la residua consistenza di impianti produttivi che per impedire le convulsioni rivoluzionarie nelle masse sacrificate.

Ma non è solo capitale costante tedesco quello che è stato spiantato. Il rapporto di forze economiche e quindi di dominazione politica sorge nello stesso modo per i paesi che hanno bruciata la loro attrezzatura tecnica nel combattere contro la Germania, come l’Inghilterra e la Russia. Le masse di questi paesi dovranno lavorare follemente per ricolmare il vuoto prodotto in ciò che i borghesi chiamano ricchezza nazionale. In questo investimento grandioso di capitale variabile si genereranno per il capitale ricostruttore profitti giganteschi. Ma il ciclo non si può avviare senza anticipi e per ora non abbiamo uno spettacolo di intenso lavoro, ma di disoccupazione e di fame. Chi con la forza del proprio attrezzamento intatto può anticipare i dollari e le scatolette diventa il padrone e lo sfruttatore delle masse europee schiavizzate.

La campagna contro l’America, ossia contro il mostro statale plutocratico che tiene anche i nostri compagni proletari di America, vittime non ultime della tremenda crisi, sotto il suo classico tallone di ferro, non potrebbe essere condotta con speranza di successo contro la mobilitazione proteiforme di mezzi di ogni genere, che riempirà spettacolosamente di sé gli anni che stiamo per vivere, se non da un movimento e da un partito rivoluzionario coerente. Da un partito internazionale che non avesse spezzato la cordata della teoria della organizzazione e della tattica che doveva direttamente ascendere verso la rivoluzione totalitaria.

Male potranno i liquidatori di Internazionali riaccendere da comitati di provincia la fiamma della lotta operaia contro l’imperialismo, la cui centrale mondiale agisce oramai fuori di Europa.

Per poter contrapporre a questo strapotere mondiale una resistenza paragonabile con le sue spietate risorse, bisognava non aver pascolato per tutti gli anni di guerra col gregge della imbecillità borghese d’Europa invocante dalla forza industriale e militare di America la salvezza suprema.

Bisognava non aver avuto della lotta proletaria una concezione che ammettesse in un primo periodo l’alleanza con il nazismo al fine di fare alcuni passi nell’Europa orientale, e in un secondo la guerra contro quello e la non meno disonorante alleanza con le democrazie capitalistiche nella illusione di fare altri passi fino a Berlino.

Se si trattasse non di una conquista di marescialli ma dell’incendio della rivoluzione si saprebbe che questo deve attaccare nello stesso tempo tutte le strutture, in ogni paese, del potere della borghesia.

Quindi la campagna internazionale antiamerica che si inscena con accorti passi – inguaribilmente progressivi – dagli ex comunisti di Mosca parte battuta.

Essa nel suo cauto avviarsi lascia largo adito alla eventualità, non esclusa in principio, che si rifiuti il piano Marshall non perché esso è la suprema espressione della sopraffazione di classe, rispetto a cui le fanfaronate degli Hitler e dei Mussolini erano giochi da ragazzi, ma solo perché nei suoi capitoli di credito quello relativo alla Russia e paesi soggetti si cifra troppo basso.

E infatti vediamo in Italia dichiararsi, quando i delegati americani fanno presente che sarebbe la fine se si spezzasse il rosario di navicelle che cariche di grano si stendono tra i due lidi dell’Atlantico, che non si tratta di rifiutare i soccorsi.

Non vi sarebbe invece altra parola di battaglia proletaria, contro la ricostruzione di Europa secondo Marshall, che il rifiuto.

Quando nella contesa per la remunerazione del lavoro l’operaio fa ricorso allo sciopero, metodo che per qualche anno ancora i rinnegatori di tutto non hanno tuttavia liquidato, esso risponde alla elargizione di una scarsa quota di sussistenze proprio col rifiuto di quelle che gli restano.

Ma la consegna di Belgrado è di fare sabotaggio alla influenza di America anche con l’azione ”governativa”, ossia dal di dentro dello Stato. Non hanno abbastanza provato i cicloni storici di questa ultima guerra che lo Stato è una potenza unitaria e non divisibile in fette! E per fare azione governativa occorre successo elettorale.

Di qui le posizione anfibie e le tattiche di graduale conversione, le quali non potranno evitare che le adesioni al cosiddetto comunismo, venute da tutta la melma delle classi medie per la convinzione che quello fosse l’erede delle funzioni camorristiche e di protezione esercitate prima dal fascismo, svaniscano al solo odore di pochi cents di dollaro, quando saremo giunti al punto decisivo.

The exploitation of man by man in the domain of manufacturing industry arose in modern society with the emergence of capitalism, when the technical possibilities of associated labor began to be exploited. The worker is expropriated of the product of his labor and part of his labor power is taken from him to form the profit of his employer. A simple schema like this is not sufficient to represent the relation between worker and employer in the domain of agriculture, where the revolution so far occurred has not substantially modified productive techniques, but only the juridical relations between socially defined persons. At the basis of the agrarian economy is the occupation of land, at first established by the military power of strong tribes or groups or of military leaders who invaded the territories of other peoples or who settled in unpopulated regions. In reality, in order for the landlords to be able to avail themselves of human labor power, the seizure of land by means of brute force is a prerequisite for an economy based on the slave labor of conquered peoples. But in modern society, in which we are presently interested, slavery had already been abolished by the time the capitalist economy began to emerge. Feudal society was no longer a slave society.

The occupation of the land, which was not only preserved in the feudal regime but actually constituted the basis of that regime, is perfectly accepted and juridically sanctioned in the fully developed capitalist regime. In practical terms this means that the owner of a vast expanse of agricultural land, although he does not work on these lands, obtains from them the land rent, without thereby being obliged to modify the productive technique of the workers that he exploits by introducing the resource of an associative form of activity.

In this way, large landholdings can exist without necessarily constituting single large enterprises; the latter being an institutional form wherein each worker has specialized tasks. There are large agrarian businesses. They have the character of capitalist enterprises applied to agriculture; they involve an extensive incorporation of industrial capital in the land (such as machines, animals, various types of plants and equipments, etc.) and employ wage workers (agricultural laborers) who are pure proletarians. The owners of these big agricultural enterprises could be either the owners of the land itself, or large-scale rural leaseholders. Theoretically, a large industrial agrarian enterprise could also be superimposed on small-scale agrarian enterprise, if it is convenient for the capitalist to lease a large number of contiguous small private properties.

With regard to the ownership of very large tracts of land, this could prevail – and does prevail today – even in large capitalist countries, superimposed on small farm parcels, when the large landowner (the latifundist) has his land divided into small parcels, in each one of which a peasant family lives and works with primitive technology. In such a case, the worker is not totally expropriated of his product like the wage worker, but yields to the exploitation of the landlord a large part of his product, in kind (various types of crops) or in money (sharecropping or leaseholds). The sharecropper or the tenant farmer can therefore be considered a semi-proletarian. There are also, in the purely modern bourgeois regime, small landholdings connected to small agricultural businesses.

The small-scale peasant landowner is a manual worker and generally has a quite low standard of living. But he is not a proletarian, because the entire product of his labor belongs to him; nor is he exactly a semi-proletarian, since he does not have to surrender any part of his product to another person. However, in the interplay of economic forces, he feels the impact of the demands of the privileged classes by way of high taxes, indebtedness to finance capital, etc. His social position is paralleled by that of the artisan although his legal position is different, being theoretically in the same category as the large landowner. In reality, capitalism, in order to rid itself of medieval obstacles, did not need to infringe upon the juridical institutions that affected real property; to the contrary, it adopted, almost to the letter, the framework of Roman law according to which, in theory, the same article of the legal code applies to parcels of land of less than an acre as well as to vast plantations.

What capitalism needed to destroy were those aspects of the feudal system that were of Germanic provenance, a system that made the small peasant exploited on the large estate an intermediate figure between the slave and the free laborer.

The “glebe serf”, besides having to endure veritable extortionate demands in delivering his quotas to the landlord and the church, was bound to his place of work. Capitalism had to free him from this servitude just as it had to liberate the impoverished artisans from the shackles of the thousands of laws and rules governing the guilds, so that both, transformed into men free to sell their labor power anywhere, could constitute the reserve armies of production based on wage labor.

The shattering of these juridical bonds constituted the bourgeois revolution. It is of course true that the latter, which on the other hand, in theory, did not abolish the artisan class, left intact the principle of agricultural production based on landholdings, and did not consist, from the point of view of legislation, in a redistribution of private landed property.

There can be no doubt that, among the various forms of agricultural enterprises mentioned above, the one that is most compatible with capitalist industry is the large unified agricultural business, and the one that is least compatible with it is the small landholding; these can be juridically divided into two types: the “minifundio” and the “latifundio”.

It is not correct to define the latifundio as a survival of the feudal regime, since it survived intact after the violent and radical abolition of all feudal bonds. It may or may not have a tendency to fragmentation, just as small parcels may or may not have a tendency to be re-concentrated into large estates or modern large-scale agricultural enterprises. But such phenomena unfold, in the framework of the modern bourgeois regime, as a consequence of technical factors and economic trends.

What role does the cycle of transformation of agricultural production play in the clear condemnation of industrial capitalism set forth in the historical communist schema, according to which the exploitation of labor power will be abolished with the conquest of rule over society by the workers?

With regard to the modern large agricultural business, the latter will rapidly be subjected to the same fate as manufacturing industry due to the fact that it is based on the technique of associated labor.

The agricultural wage laborers of these large enterprises, although they are burdened by the social and political handicap of not being concentrated together in large modern urban conglomerations, will march alongside the industrial proletariat on the road to the formation of revolutionary class potential.

The semi-proletarians, that is, the sharecroppers and leaseholders, although they cannot have the same degree of class consciousness, can expect to reap great social advantages from the revolution of the industrial proletariat, since the latter, although it will support in every stage of development the predominance of associative forms of labor and the concentration of small enterprises into larger ones, will be the only class that can radically abolish for the first time in history the system of private ownership of the land, at the same time as it abolishes industrial exploitation.

This does not mean that the small sharecropper or leaseholder will become landowners, but that they will be freed from the obligation to pay the tribute extracted from their labor power, in the form of money or payments in kind, that the landowners previously received. In other words, the revolution of the industrial proletariat will be capable of immediately abolishing the principle of land rent; furthermore, thanks to one of many dialectical relations that intervene in the succession of social and historical forms, it will be capable of abolishing the principle of land rent much more rapidly and completely than that of the profit of industrial capital.

As for the small landowner, the question is theoretically quite different, insofar as the land rent of his parcel presently accrues to his benefit and is not distinguished legally from the fruit of his own labor power. There can be no doubt that a revolution in this domain will only take place during a later stage, since all the small landholdings previously administered by sharecroppers, lessees or the small landowners themselves, will be consolidated into large socialized agricultural operations much more rapidly than this could have been done within the framework of the bourgeois economy.

Thus, one can by no means present the agrarian reflection of the proletarian revolution as an episode of redistribution or repartition of the land, nor as the conquest of the land by the peasants. The slogan, “small property instead of big property” does not make any sense. The slogan, “small agrarian business instead of big agrarian business” is purely reactionary. With regard to this point, it is necessary to clarify which stages of this cycle can be completed prior to the downfall of bourgeois power. It is a classical opportunist error to tell the rural masses that an industrial capitalist regime, no matter how advanced it may be, can abolish land rent. Land rent and industrial profit are not distinctive aspects of two different and opposed historical eras. They coexist perfectly well not only in the classical understanding of bourgeois law, but also in the economic processes of the accumulation of finance capital.

Despite the substantial differences that we have demonstrated up to this point that distinguish the two fields of production, land rent and profit have a common origin in the principle of the extraction from the worker of a part of his labor power and in the commercial character of the distribution of the products of industry and agriculture. In this manner, the slogan of socialization of land rent without a revolution of the working class is pure idiocy worthy of that other idiocy reflected in the slogan of the socialization of monopoly capital within the framework of the private enterprise economy.

Another opportunist position is that it is necessary to await the concentration of the agrarian economy into large enterprises before we can speak of a revolution that would socialize both industry and agriculture. Such a conception is defeatist, since the commercial nature of the bourgeois economy and its evolution within the framework of ever more speculative and exchange-oriented forms allow us to foresee that private capital will not be moved on a large scale to land improvement business ventures, whose profits are small and will furthermore require a long term delay prior to realizing the payoff compared to the colossal industrial and banking capitalist business deals.

Now, the replacement of the small enterprise (whether it is unencumbered or enclosed by latifundia [the Roman term for large privately owned agrarian estates] by big business cannot take place without radical technological transformations. And these transformations will be all the more slowly introduced where, for natural reasons, they will prove to be too expensive (irregular topography, shortages of water, infertility of the soil, etc.). Only an economy of a social character will be capable of mobilizing the enormous masses of productive forces needed for such a transformation.

Finally, the slogan of the distribution of the latifundia to the peasants in the bourgeois regime also makes no sense, as it attempts to promise an expropriation without indemnification, which is contrary to the institutions of the bourgeois State, and is purely demagogic in times when neither the State nor the capitalist class have the availability of liquid capital and can mobilize the productive resources necessary for the elimination of some of the technical characteristics of the worst examples of the latifundia, such as the lack of housing, roads, canals, and drinkable water, as well as the presence of epidemic malaria, etc.

There can be no doubt that the agrarian program of the workers revolution will include, parallel to the suppression of all land rent, a temporary redistribution of the croplands at the level of management, insofar as this will enable a uniform application of the labor power of that part of the peasant class that cannot be socially established among the workers of the collective enterprises.

In any event, this new redistribution will affect not the ownership but the distribution of management of the surface of the land and will not be able to assume, in modern capitalist countries, the social or historical dimension it assumed in Russia in 1917, where the conquest of power by the industrial proletariat not only achieved the first suppression of the principle of land rent but also the suppression of the feudal agrarian regime, which had continued to be practically in full force in the Czarist empire after the abolition of glebe serfdom promulgated in 1861.

In the typical capitalist country, the revolutionary industrial working class will embrace without restrictions the agricultural worker of the large enterprises and in this way prevent the regression of the rural laborer to the condition of the small peasant. It could consider the semi-proletarian sharecroppers and leaseholders as allies; tolerating their aspiration to the free use of their land, something that only the revolution can achieve. Only with great caution and as a temporary measure could it expect any positive support from the small peasant landowners who have not yet been ruined and proletarianized by capitalism. It is even possible that, in periods of crisis of the industrial apparatus due to war and defeat, one could expect that the majority of the small rural landowners, exploiting the economic crisis thanks to the high prices of agricultural products and seeing their social position become more stable, and also in view of their incapacity as a class to weather long-term historical cycles, could support the policies of the conservative parties.

The Spanish War, Prologue to the Second World Imperialist War (1936–40)

The phase of the progressive degeneration of the Soviet State and of the communist parties was inevitably to end with a front-line participation in the imperialist massacre, first localized in Spain (1936-39), and later extended to the whole world (1939-45). This degenerative process began, as we have seen, in 1926 with the establishment of the Anglo-Russian Committee, and it was Bukharin who clearly expressed the substantial and radical change that had taken place in the programmatic terms of the policy of the Russian State and the International.

Between the United Front and the Anglo-Russian Committee the break in continuity is unequivocal, brutal. The first is framed in the classical terms of the capitalism-proletariat antagonism (the proletariat acting through the class party and the revolutionary State). The divergence between the French, Austrian, and German oppositions, and specially between the Italian left and the leadership of the International remains within the frameworks of the problem of the tactics to be followed to foster the development of class action and the Party. The second one, the Anglo-Russian Committee, is framed in Bukharin’s formula, who declares that its justification lies in the defense of the diplomatic interests of the Russian State. Diplomatic, since it is not a matter of a military battle limited to specific events, but of a whole political process. The programmatic approach is no longer within the framework of “capitalism-proletariat”, but within the framework of “capitalist State-Soviet State”. This new opposition is obviously not, nor could it be, a simple modification of formulations which nevertheless express a substance similar to the previous one. The very criteria of the definition of the capitalist State and the proletarian State are no longer of a Marxist character, but of a positivist and rationalist character, imposed by the evolution of the situation.

Previously, the notions of class and capitalist State were unitary, dialectical and descended from the analysis of the relations of production. Starting in 1926, the Comintern proceeded to a disassociate itself from the notion of class and the problem no longer consisted in an action aimed at the destruction of the State that embodies capitalist domination, but in an action aimed at supporting or undermining a specific capitalist force (deemed as capitalism par excellence). And which capitalist force? The one that comes into conflict with the “diplomatic” interests of the Soviet State at that particular moment in the evolution of international events.

At the time of the Anglo-Russian Committee the contours of this policy radically opposed to the previous one weren’t well defined yet, but the problem was already clear: we have a divergence between the defense of the interests of the English proletariat, engaged in a gigantic class battle, and the interests of the Russian State which is counting on England to strengthen its weak positions in the antagonistic evolution of States on the international field. If the endorsement given to the trade unionists, who were presented to the English proletarians as the leaders of their strike and the defenders of their interests, results in the opposite result to the one intended, since the English government moves on to the struggle against the Russian government, this does not alter in any way the fundamental alteration which has taken place in the policy of the Comintern and which is specified in the period of “social-fascism” when it moves on to the struggle against social-democracy specifically, separated from the rest of the capitalist apparatus. It no longer moves from the class objectives of the German proletariat to deduce from them a tactic of simultaneous struggle against social democracy and fascism, and since the former is elevated to the rank of enemy number one, it slips into a position of merely competing with Hitler’s maneuver for the legalitarian dismantling of the positions held in the German capitalist State by democrats and social-democrats. In this case the “diplomatic” benefits were not lacking for the Russian State, and the cruel defeat of the German proletariat was accompanied by a marked improvement in economic relations between Russia and Germany.

After social-fascism comes the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War first, and finally the World War. The process of reversal undergone by the communist parties and the Soviet State goes even further than the limits reached by the tactics of social-fascism, since now it’s a matter of welding the workers to the apparatus of the capitalist State, peacefully in France, by force of arms for the first time in Spain, then in all countries.

The new policy is not presented in the coherent aspect of a struggle against the capitalist political force, the expression of the bourgeois class as a whole, but along the contradictory line which raises, in turn, social democracy or fascism to the rank of enemy number one, according to the needs of the evolution of the Soviet State in the international situation of the moment.

First modification, and then falsification and inversion later on, are not limited to the characterization of the capitalist class, but they also affect the characterization of the proletarian State in the new binomial of capitalist State-proletarian State, which replaces that of capitalism-proletariat. The proletarian State is no longer the one that identifies its fate with that of the world proletariat, but the one in which the defense of the workers of all countries is personified. Until 1939 the proletarians of every country saw their interests united with the diplomatic successes of the Russian State; from 1939 to 1945 the proletarians gave their lives for the military successes of this State. The situation for the Russian proletariat is just as tragic: first the intensive exploitation in the name of socialism, then their massacre under the same banner. Ultimately, therefore, the assessment of the events we have been dealing with must rise to a much higher plane than that limited to the tactics of the communist parties, and must concern itself not with the formal and organizational aspect of the relations between the proletarian State and the class party, but with the concrete type of these relations that history has presented, for the first time, with the victory of October 1917 in Russia. The proletarian State and the class party are converging instruments of the struggle of the revolutionary proletariat, and the hypothesis of their separation must be rejected as reactionary. It is only necessary to draw from the formidable Russian experience the lessons to establish their organic convergence in view of the future revolution. This is the central problem which we think our study should devote itself to, starting from the policy followed by the Russian State already in the heroic period when Lenin was at its helm, because our enlightened admiration for the great revolutionary does not prevent us from categorically affirming that the source of the degeneration and reversal of the Russian revolution is to be found in the insufficient solution of the problem of organic relations between the revolutionary State and the class party, in other words, the problem of the policy of the proletarian State on a national and international scale, an insufficiency in turn ineluctably linked to the fact that this question arose for the first time in October 1917.
* * *

In order to understand the Spanish events it is necessary to refer first of all to the fundamental element of the Marxist understanding of things, to the essential point of what the French call the “démarche” of thought. To separate the essential from the accessory.

Is it because in the republican and anti-fascist camp there is talk of socialism, because hundreds of thousands of proletarians take up arms in the name of socialism, that we can affirm the existence of the real conditions for this struggle? In our premise we have indicated that the struggle between the fundamental classes, between capitalism and the proletariat, has been taking place, since October 1917, on a higher level than previously before, and it imposes on the proletariat the need to impose its revolutionary State: it must centralize on the proletarian front the social movements which take place even outside its geographical borders; but in the phase of its degeneration it can proceed to a similar centralization only through a radical modification which brings it back to its original position. Otherwise it becomes the main axis of the politics of counter-revolution, as happened first in anti-fascist Spain, then in the democratic countries when the partisan movement arose in the course of the second imperialist war.

The essential role in the anti-fascist sector of Spain was played by the Russian State, rather than the Spanish Communist Party, which was so small it barely existed.

Our analysis of the events will show that only because of the central fact imposed by the events – the war – was it possible to proceed to class-based and to determine the position of the revolutionary proletariat accordingly, while achieving such class-based objectives was impossible through merely accessory means, such as the elimination of the boss from the factories, the absence of the traditionally bourgeois parties from the government, and even, in the days of the most heated social tumult, of the elimination of the government itself.

If we succinctly show a film of the Spanish events, it’s not because we intend to put forth the thesis that a different tactic of the Communist Party or of any other political formation could have determined a different outcome of the situation, but we do it only to demonstrate, in the first place, that all the “workers’ initiatives” were ultimately just the only form through which the capitalist class could exist – in those specific circumstances – (and it existed politically and historically even if physically absent in the factories or cleverly concealed in the anti-fascist government, because it achieved its fundamental objective of preventing the affirmation of the proletarian class on the question of war and the State), and secondly to highlight the elements of an evolution that – albeit in less pronounced forms – spread to other countries after the world war and expressed itself in the liquidation of the bosses from nationalized industries, either temporarily or definitively.

The fact that the Italian left is the only current that survived after the cruel slaughter that, after the dress rehearsal in Spain in 1936-39, extended to the whole world in 1939-45, wasn’t due to coincidence. Socialist and communist parties could only exercise a fiercely counter-revolutionary role as situations reached the end point of their evolution. But Spain also represented the grave of trotskism and the colorful schools of anarchism and syndicalism.

Trotski, the giant of “maneuverism”, had even given a theoretical justification of the possibility for the proletariat to wedge itself into the democracy-fascism antagonism, stating that the historical inability of democracy to defend itself from fascism and the historical need to oppose it could create the condition for an intervention of the proletariat, the only class capable of bringing the anti-fascist struggle to its revolutionary conclusion. It was therefore inevitable that Trotski would take a place in the forefront in defending and increasing the “revolutionary achievements” obtained in the factories and fields or in the organization of the fighting army.

The anarchists, for their part, if in the early days they could avoid compromising their “anti-State purity”, were to find in these events the chosen land for their experiments in “free communes”, “free cooperatives”, “free army”. All these “freedoms” ended in the other “freedom”, the fundamental one: that of waging the anti-fascist war.

The foundation of the Party in Italy was accompanied by a clear stance not only on the fundamental problems of the time, but also on what arose as a reflection of the development of the fascist offensive: the democracy-fascism dilemma – said the Party – falls within the framework of the bourgeois class and the opposition of the proletariat can only fight for its own class-based objectives. The struggle for these objectives, even during the legalitarian or extra-legalitarian attack of fascism, imposes the simultaneity of the struggle against democracy and against fascism. The firm position of our current was confirmed by the whole development of the Spanish events, which, in a long and exhausting war of about three years, saw the opposition of two armies within their respective State apparatuses, both capitalist: Franco’s army relying on the classical structure of the bourgeois State, and the Madrilenian and Catalan army, whose bold peripheral initiatives in the economic and social field could only be part of a counter-revolutionary evolution, because at no time was the problem of the creation of a revolutionary dictatorship posed. There were many occasions presented by the Spanish events to refute the positions defended by Trotski: the same military battles won by the anti-fascist government did not show a situation favorable to the autonomous assertion of the proletariat, but a condition to strengthen its link with the anti-fascist capitalist State, since only through the efficiency of the latter could success against Franco be guaranteed; an irrefutable argument, since participation in the war was admitted in the first place.

The confirmation of the Marxist position against all anarchist and syndicalist schools could not be brighter. In fact, especially in the first period of the events following the establishment of the military fronts, from August 1936 to May 1937, the conditions were the most favorable to the realization of the anarchist postulates. Faced with the disintegration of the State apparatus, specially in Catalonia, the flight and elimination of the masters, all spontaneous initiatives had free rein. And the anarchists were in the vast majority at the head of the army, trade unions, agricultural and industrial cooperatives, the same embryonic State network of Barcelona. The failure can not thus be attributed to a lack of objective conditions, while the pretext always invoked to justify the failure, namely the support given to Franco by Mussolini and Hitler, can not be invoked by anarchists, since they asked, in response to the fascist intervention in Spain, not a struggle of the proletariat of other countries against their respective democratic governments, but rather that those proletarians pressure their capitalist governments so that they’d intervene militarily in favor of republican Spain or at least that they send weapons for the success of the anti-fascist war.

As we have said, class-based objectives clearly delineated from those of the bourgeoisie could only be carried out in function of the central problem: that of the war. This is what our current did, and when, in August 1936, at a meeting of the Central Committee of the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) – a party of the extreme left in Catalonia – our delegate, who was present as an observer, expressed his opinion that it was necessary to propagate not the idea that the workers and soldiers in the Franco regime must be massacred, but the opposite idea of fraternization, the leaders of this “Marxist” organization categorically affirmed that such propaganda deserved the death penalty.

How could the anti-fascist war in Spain be qualified as imperialist, when it was not only impossible, but inconceivable, to determine the imperialist interests in antagonism, since it involved two armies from the same country? It’s certain that the Spanish events posed, as far as the characterization of the war that developed there was concerned, a problem that Marxists had never seen before. But if fitting historical precedents could not be found, the Marxist method of analysis nevertheless made it possible to affirm that, although it was true that conflicting specific and imperialist interests could not be detected in the Franco-Popular Front duel, the imperialist character of both Franco’s war and that of the Popular Front was indisputably revealed by the fact that neither of them was based on the dictatorial and revolutionary organization of the proletarian State. The same thing was true for Catalonia in the autumn of 1936: the decay of the previous Catalan State, not being overcome by the institution of the proletarian State, could only know a (moreover transitory) phase during which the persistence of the bourgeois class in power asserted itself not physically and directly, but thanks to the inexistence of a proletarian struggle directed to the foundation of the proletarian State.

In the two cases, of the characterization of the war and of the Catalan State, the imperialist nature of the former, the capitalist nature of the latter, does not result from the external elements (the stakes of the war, the apparatus of coercion of the State), but from the substantial elements that are condensed in the lack of an affirmation of the proletarian class, which in Spain is not able – not even through its sparse minority – to pose the problem of power. It has already been said that the proletariat derives from the negation of the negation of capitalism, from a negation that implicitly contains the affirmation of the opposite.

The Popular Front remains in the state of simple negation of Franco and it was necessary to set up the negation of the Popular Front itself in order for the proletarian class to assert itself. This process of negation is not evidently imposed on the formal and formalist, rationalist level, but results dialectically from the theoretical and political clarification of the proletarian class. Only the establishment of the objectives of this class sets the course of the revolutionary struggle against Franco’s State, against the State of Barcelona and Madrid, and against world capitalism. It is also on this level that the general strike that broke out in response to Franco’s attack is situated.

Let us now turn to a brief exposition of the most important facts.
* * *

Unlike other countries Spain did not have a bourgeois revolution. The feudal organization of Spanish society annexed important territories across the sea, thus providing the opportunity for the clergy and the nobility to accumulate enormous wealth. The capitalist mode of production that was established in the mining and industrial centers of the country did not lead to the fall of the dominant feudal castes, but – contrary to Russia, where the czarist State and the bourgeoisie were not confused and remained distinct, even if rarely in opposition – in Spain these castes and the State adapted to the needs of the industrialized economy, located only in certain centers. When, at the end of the last century, the time came for the old Spanish colonies to begin industrializing, the ties were broken and the empire fell apart.

On the other hand, unlike England, Spain did not proceed to an intense industrialization of the country in connection with the possibilities offered by the possession of the colonies so that, when in Europe we have the formation of the powerful capitalist nation-States, the Spanish bourgeoisie is deprived of any possibility of affirmation in the field of international competition.

The nobility and clergy not only remained the holders of landed estates but also became owners of mining companies, banks and industrial and commercial enterprises, while the areas of highest industrial development, Catalonia and Asturias, came largely under the control of foreign capital, mainly English.

These historical precedents structured Spanish bourgeois society in a peculiar way in which the development of industrialization is arrested by the persistence of ties to the feudalism of old. The workers’ movement, in which both at the time of the First International and today is largely made up of anarchists, is so affected by this that until today the conditions for the establishment of a party based on Marxist concepts have not been met. The social upheavals that have occurred there find in these objective conditions the premise to draw a climate with a lot of struggle, but the impossibility of a radical modification of the archaic social structure of the bourgeoisie condemns the proletariat to remain on the sidelines with its own class goals. Marx noted as early as 1845 that a revolution that would take three days in another European country would take nine years in Spain. Trotski, for his part, explained the intervention of the army in the social field as resulting from the fact that it – like the clergy and the nobility – tended to conquer, without ever being able to achieve it, a position of social dominance alongside the other two existing castes. In a word, therefore, the non-existence of historical conditions for the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the nobility determines the historical non-existence of conditions for an autonomous and specific struggle of the proletarian class and excludes the hypothesis that Spain can play the role of epicenter of the international revolutionary upheavals.

In 1923, in relation to the disasters of the Moroccan campaign, Primo de Rivera took power and the regime he established was wrongly qualified as fascist. No revolutionary threat justified the establishment of a fascist-type dictatorship and, in fact, the corporatist framework entailed the participation of socialists in the consultative bodies, in the Equal Commissions established for the regulation of labor conflicts, and Largo Caballero, secretary of the General Union of Workers under socialist control, was even appointed as State Councilor. Under De Rivera the Spanish bourgeoisie tries in vain reorganize the State on a modern, centralized basis along the lines of other bourgeois States. This attempt failed and, in the midst of the great world economic crisis that broke out in 1929, capitalism found itself having to face a difficult and complex social situation. The De Rivera type of State is no longer appropriate because the situation does not allow the arbitration of labor conflicts, as powerful mass movements are inevitable. The conversion that was taking place at that time, and which responded to the interests of capitalist domination, was judged by all the political formations, with the exception of ours, as the advent of a new regime imposed by the revolutionary maturation of the masses.

In January 1930 De Rivera was liquidated. Another general, Bérenguer, takes his place to ensure the transition to the new government. In San Sebastian, in August 1930, the pact between the successors was concluded and, after the municipal elections that gave a majority to the Republicans in 46 out of 50 capitals, when the first threat of a workers’ movement (the railroaders’ strike) appeared, in February 1931, the monarchist Guerra took the initiative to organize the departure of King Alfonso XII.

A period of intense social conflicts opened up, as we said. These conflicts are inevitable due to the extreme weakness of the Spanish bourgeoisie at the outbreak of the world economic crisis. But the bourgeoisie, unable to avoid these conflicts, shows great sagacity in preventing their revolutionary developments. The proclamation of the republic is not enough to avoid the immediate outbreak of the telephone strike in Andalusia, Barcelona, and Valencia. The movement of the peasants of Seville takes violent forms: the left-wing government massacres thirty peasants and the reactionary Maura, Minister of the Interior, congratulates the socialists for their attitude in defense of order and the republic. Alongside the UGT (the union organization controlled by the socialists), the CNT (National Confederation of Workers controlled in a monopolistic form by the anarchists) also strictly remains within the limits of wage demands and states that these movements, unable to find an outlet, couldn’t have found a way to direct the fight against the republican State.

In June 1931 the elections give an overwhelming majority to the left-wing parties and Zamora gives way to Azaña, who excludes the right from the government. Parallel to a worsening of the social tension, on the one hand the government shifts more and more to the left, and on the other hand the repression of the movements intensifies. On October 20, 1931, the Azaña-Caballero Ministry declares that the young republic is in danger and passes the Defense Law which, in its chapter on compulsory arbitration, outlaws unions that fail to give two days’ notice before calling a strike. The UGT, which is in government, takes an open stance against “anti-republican” strikes, the CNT maintains its neutrality in the face of the violent and terrorist action of the leftist government, and the two days mentioned in the law are not enough for the union leaders to prevent the outbreak of revolts. The CNT, however, managed to keep all strikes under its control and limited itself to not taking the reigns of those that were outside the framework of republican legality.

At the beginning of 1932, after the government with socialist participation had obtained the unanimous approval of the Cortes for the way in which it fought the strikes, in August 1932 the right-wing forces began to reorganize. But the moment wasn’t yet right for it, the atmosphere was still too socially explosive and Sanjurjo’s coup to seize power failed.

In September 1932, agrarian reform is finally voted in. The concessions made to the peasants who become “owners” are such that they will have to wait 17 centuries before being released from the commitments contained in the act of purchase. In January 1933 the repressive action of the government reaches its peak: striking workers are massacred in Malaga, Bilbao, Zaragoza. After these adventures, and when a certain fatigue was manifested among the masses, the conditions for a new change of government personnel arose: on September 8, 1933 Azaña resigned, the new elections of November 19, 1933 gave a majority to the right-wing parties, and the Lerroux-Gil Roblès government was formed under the influence of the landowners. When, in October 1934, the Asturian insurrection broke out, the right-wing government did nothing but follow in the footsteps of its left-wing predecessors and the movement was bloodily repressed. The socialists had declined any responsibility for this “wild” form of struggle and the anarchists themselves had ordered the resumption of work.

During the pause of social tension (tragically interrupted by the insurrection of Asturias) that goes from September 1934 to February 1936 are the right-wing governments at the helm of the bourgeois State and repression is exercised mainly on a legalitarian level: at the time of the elections of February 16, 1936, there’s 30,000 political prisoners.

In connection with the international atmosphere which soon we’ll see the great movements in France and Belgium, a period of even greater social tension than that of 1931-33 opens up in Spain, and as a result the Spanish bourgeoisie calls its leftist servants to power. In this more heated social climate, the anarchists themselves are aligned with the needs of the new situation: the fierce abstentionists of yesterday, in a rally in Zaragoza, after solemnly reaffirmed the apolitical nature of the CNT, leave their members free to vote for whoever while the Regional Committee of Barcelona, two days before the elections, makes open propaganda in favor of the Popular Front under the pretext that it advocates amnesty.

The elections of February 16, 1936 mark an overwhelming success for the Popular Front that obtains the absolute majority in the Cortes. It is composed of the republican left of Azaña, of the dissident radicals of Martinez Barrios, of the Socialist Party, of the Communist Party, of the Syndicalist Party of Pestaña and of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (the POUM, a result of the unification of the Right Oppositionist Workers and Peasants’ Bloc of Barcelona directed by Maurin, and of the trotskist tendency directed at that time by Andrea Nin). The electoral program contains: general amnesty, repeal of regressive laws, decrease of taxes, policy of agrarian credits.

After the elections, the Azaña government is formed with only representatives of the left. But in the indicated situation of aggravation of the social tension, the bourgeoisie could not limit itself to the concentration in a single government; its other forces remained in waiting and already in April 1936, on the occasion of the commemoration of the foundation of the Republic, the right-wing parties organized a counter-manifestation that was qualified as a “revolt”. At the session of the Cortes, Azaña declares:

«The government took a series of measures and removed or transferred the fascists who were in the administration. The right-wingers are panicking, but they will not dare to raise their heads again».

We are less than three months from the “insurrection of the sectarian Franco”: the Communist Party, enthusiastic about Azaña’s declarations, votes for confidence in the Government.

In the first days of July 1936, Lieutenant Castillo, a member of the Popular Front, is assassinated and, in retaliation, the monarchist leader Sotelo is also killed. The Popular Front and all the parties that comprise it express sacred indignation at the accusation launched by the right wing of being responsible for the assassination, and Council President Quiroga has to resign because a phrase in his speech could have been interpreted as encouraging the authors of the assassination.

From Morocco Franco launched his offensive, whose initial targets were Seville and Burgos: two agrarian centers, the first of which, having experienced the most violent but inconclusive peasant uprisings, offered the best conditions for the success of the coup.

It was thus in the very bosom of the State apparatus under the complete control of the Popular Front that Franco’s enterprise could be meticulously organized, and its preparations could not escape the attention of the leftist and extreme leftist ministers. What is more, the first reaction of these parties is obviously conciliatory. The radical Barrios, who had already presided in 1933 over the conversion of the government from the left to the right, tried to repeat the operation in the opposite direction and if it did not succeed it was not because the compromise was excluded in principle, but because the social atmosphere did not allow it.

In response to Franco’s attack a general strike is unleashed on July 16 which is completely successful, especially in Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, in Asturias, while Franco’s two points of support, Seville and Burgos, are firmly held by the putschists.

One of our critics wasn’t wrong to ask us: but finally, for you all the events before and after the general strike count for nothing, the general strike itself being nothing more than a temporary outbreak of measles? In fact, as far as the proletarian movement is concerned, the general strike was nothing more than a lightning explosion of the class consciousness of the Spanish proletariat: only in those few days we witnessed not an armed struggle between two bourgeois armies but a fraternization of the strikers with the proletarians relegated to the army, who, making common cause with the insurrectionary proletarians, disarmed, immobilized or eliminated the ruling body of the army itself..

Immediately the democratic and anti-fascist State tries to remain in control of the situation: in Madrid the hierarchy is established through the “Enlistment Offices” controlled by the State, in Barcelona in a less immediate way: Companys (leader of the Catalan left) declares, in agreement with the leaders of the CNT, that «the State machine must not be touched because it can be of some use to the working class» and the two bodies destined to ensure the first State control were immediately created; in the military field the “Central Committee of the Militias”, in the economic field the “Central Council of the Economy”. The Central Committee of the Militias comprised 3 delegates from the CNT, 2 delegates from the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation), 1 delegate from the Republican Left, 2 Socialists, 1 delegate from the League of “Rabasseres” (small tenants under the control of the Catalan Left), 1 delegate from the Coalition of Republican Parties, 1 delegate from the POUM and 4 representatives of the Generalitat of Barcelona (the defense counselor, the general commissioner of public order and two delegates from the Generalitat without a fixed State post). All the above-mentioned political formations ensured the continuity of the capitalist State in Catalonia from July 1936 to May 1937, and it is superfluous to add that the overwhelming majority held by the workers’ organizations was presented as a guarantee of the subjection of the bourgeois class to the demands of the proletarian movement.

Meanwhile, from the beginning of the events, Zaragoza falls into the hands of Franco and the proximity of this military center allows Barcelona to present the necessity of military victory against “fascism” as the supreme “necessity of the moment”, to which everything must therefore be subordinated.

The Spanish Communist Party, which takes a front line position in the anti-fascist war, cannot tolerate misunderstandings, and it is in Moscow that its function as a counter-revolutionary spearhead is brutally revealed. Here is what the following infamous communiqué says: «The Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union rejected the appeal for pardon of those sentenced to capital punishment on August 24 by the Military College of the USSR, in the trial of the unified Trockist-Zinovievist center. The verdict has been carried out». L’Humanité, in its issue of 28-8-36, comments: «When the accused approved Vyshinsky’s indictment and asked to be shot, they only expressed their conviction that they could no longer expect any mercy. They reasoned coldly: we wanted to assassinate you, you are killing us: it is right. These sixteen murderers remained until the very end fierce enemies of the Communist Party, of the State and of the Soviet people, and their death purged the atmosphere of the socialist country that they plagued with their presence». For his part, Prosecutor Vyshinsky concluded his indictment thus: «I demand that every last one of these mad dogs be shot».

It is these same murderers of the Russian proletariat who put themselves in the vanguard of the anti-fascist war and unleashed the offensive to respond to the intervention of Hitler and Mussolini in favor of Franco with a similar intervention from the other countries in favor of the “legitimate republican” government.

In the midst of the Spanish events, when the general strike had not yet ceased, and on the other hand the strike in France was developing, the head of the government of the French Popular Front, Leon Blum, considering that the opening of the Pyrenean border could establish a dangerous contact between the strikers of the two countries, decided to close it. In August 1936, it is Blum himself who takes the initiative of the constitution of the “Committee of non-intervention in Spain”, with its headquarters in London and representatives of the governments of all countries, fascist and democratic, Russia included.

The role of this “Non-Intervention Committee” was to avoid international complications, while each “High Contracting Party” industrialized the corpses of the proletarians who had fallen in Spain to make them serve the success of the world counterrevolution: in Russia to massacre the real leaders of the October Revolution, in the fascist countries to prepare the climate for world war, in France to make the workers’ movement move away from their class objectives. In fact, it is well known that the main slogan launched by the Communist Parties and the Socialist Left was: “airplanes for Spain!”

Military events in Spain have had their ups and downs. Both the defeats and the military victories in the anti-fascist war are used in the progressive elimination of all extra-legal initiatives and in the reconstruction of the classic hierarchy of the anti-fascist State. The defeats because they were presented as resulting from the lack of a strict military discipline around the ruling center, the victories because they were presented as confirmation of the usefulness of a firm centralization around the military staff.

As for the anarchists, they abandoned, shred by shred, their program. At first, immediately after the conclusion of the general strike of July 1936, they responded to the first attempts to incorporate the workers in an organic form in the Militias controlled by the Generalidad with the words “militia yes, soldiers no”, but they soon abandoned this position, faced with the necessities of the military struggle, to dislodge the fascists from Zaragoza. They then renounced their opposition to the core program of the far left government presided over by Caballero: the establishment of the Single Command extended to the entire territory of the anti-fascist sector with the capitals of Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona. The needs of the military struggle fully justified on a strategic level the need for centralization in a single command, and the anarchists came to participate, through their representatives who became ministers, in the Caballero government, the Caballero who is presented as the Spanish Lenin (an expression that has historically tolerated every such insult): the same Caballero remained in 1936-37 perfectly consistent with the position that had earned him the appointment as Councilor of State under the regime of De Rivera!

As we have said, in the period from the liquidation of the general strike of July 1936 until May 1937, while the Madrid State could afford to maintain even the previous police apparatus of the “Civil Guards”, in Catalonia the classical State apparatus of the bourgeoisie went through a “vacation” during which control over the masses was established indirectly through the “Central Committee of Militias” and the “Council of Economy”. This transitional phase is followed by the elimination of any element, even peripheral, that disturbs the smooth functioning of the anti-fascist capitalist State. In October 1936, Caballero launched a decree for the militarization of the militia, and the CNT, in its resolution of October 14, decreed that it would not be possible to demand respect for working conditions, for working hours, for wages nor for overtime, in all industries directly or indirectly connected with the anti-fascist war, which practically means in all industrial enterprises.

Thus we are on the way to May of 1937. On the 4th of this month, under pressure from the Stalinist Comorera, head of the PSUC (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia), the Generalitat of Barcelona decided to take back direct control of the Telephone Company: this was the signal of a general action aimed at eliminating all management not directly framed by the antifascist State. A general strike broke out spontaneously: all the political formations proclaimed their innocence in this “crime”, and it was with bullets and machine guns that the movement was bloodily repressed. It is suggestive that Franco, even though important groups of proletarians had abandoned the front and gone down to Barcelona, did not take advantage of the occasion to unleash a military offensive: he left his anti-fascist comrades to it because their success depended on his own. The operation succeeds in full: all peripheral initiatives are eliminated after the violent repression of the strike movement of May 1937. The Negrin Government of the resistance “until the end” was then formed, in which the last hopes of all sectors of the anti-fascist movement were placed. It was this Government which, after abandoning Madrid, and after the intermediate step of Valencia, moved first to Barcelona and then to Paris, leaving to the socialist Besteiro the task of negotiating with Franco for the conclusion of the war during the spring of 1939.

It should be noted that, with its usual skill and cynicism, the Spanish bourgeoisie proceeded, after the strike of May 1937, to liquidate some of the elements that had been at its service at the critical moment of July 1936. This is the case of Andrea Nin, Minister of Justice in the first antifascist government in Barcelona. He was transferred to Madrid, and was then taken by “irregular” elements (the Stalinist International Brigades) to be assassinated in circumstances that have never been clarified. This is also the case of the anarchist Berneri, arrested by the Barcelona police, who, following the technique of fascist punitive expeditions, had previously made a home visit to ensure that the victim was unarmed. Instead of being taken to prison, Berneri is assassinated; the anarchists protest but do not even dream of breaking the solidarity that binds them to the antifascist government.

We have spoken of the International Non-Intervention Committee. It had fully succeeded in avoiding both the possible international complications arising from the Spanish war and the possibility of an autonomous intervention of the international and Spanish proletariat in the course of these events. We would like to point out that Russia, which left to the communist parties the task of protesting against the policy of the very committee in which it participated, did not take an initiative of open armed intervention in Spain until after the fall of Irún on September 1, 1936, and its consequences (the establishment of the centralized government headed by the “sinister” Caballero) had given it the necessary guarantees. The decree on the militarization of the militia and the “union handovers” of the CNT to complete, totalitarian discipline of the anti-fascist war were issued on October 14, 1936, and it was on the same date that the Soviet ship “Zanianine” landed in Barcelona. Needless to say that on the one hand all the measures that ensured the subsequent strike of May 1937 would be crushed were already in place, and on the other hand, the open intervention of Russia in the Spanish war was even more self-interested than that of Hitler and Mussolini, since all the weapons were being bought with gold by the anti-fascist government of Caballero first, then Negrin.

The Spanish tragedy ended in the spring of 1939 with a total victory for Franco. A few months later, on September 3, the second world imperialist war broke out. The events that preceded it were: the Munich Compromise of September 1938; the Russian-German pact of August 1939.

After the remilitarization of the western bank of the Rhine, which we discussed in chapter 5, and the absorption of Austria in the winter of 1938, it was the turn of the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Hitler defends and takes the reigns of the irredentist movement in the Sudetenland, which occupies the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia. England sends one of its delegates, Runciman, for the examination of the question and the report that this drafts is favorable to the claims of the Sudetenland. France, bound by a pact of mutual assistance with Czechoslovakia, takes at first a hostile position to the Sudeten movement, but then resigns itself to participate in the Conferences of Godesberg and Monaco, where the four Greats of the time (Germany, Italy, France, England) sanction a compromise that gives satisfaction to Hitler.

The controversy surrounding “Munich” has not yet died down. Russia, and with it the Communist Parties, claim that Munich represented the conclusion of the policy of the imperialist States of isolating the “country of socialism”. The French and British political personalities participating in the Munich Agreement, Daladier and Chamberlain, argued instead that this compromise allowed them to gain a year and thus prepare for war against Hitler. The latter, for his part, proclaimed that the agreement was part of his policy of “peaceful” and non-war reparation of the injustices enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles.

If one takes into account the what actually followed, it becomes indisputable that the thesis of using a year for the better preparation of a Franco-English war does not hold up, since in 1940, when, after the Polish campaign, Hitler launched the Blitzkrieg against the West, no obstacle stood in the way of his resounding victory. Similarly, the thesis of Russia and the Communist Parties is confirmed as false, since the Munich Compromise did not determine the isolation of Russia. Russia maintained diplomatic relations in view of a military alliance with France and England until August 1939; in this same August it was Russia that broke off these negotiations on its own initiative and, while the allied delegates were still in Moscow, established the economic and military agreement with Germany. In June 1941 the military alliance with France, England and America was formed and remained in force until the end of military operations in July 1945.

The Munich Compromise is explained by the different considerations from those supported by the imperialists who then had to move to the unleashing of the war. On the European level, it is certain that it responds to the needs of the inevitable German predominance in the framework of the intersection of the two industrial and agrarian basins (the Germanic one and the Balkan one) corresponding in turn to the connection of the two great waterways of the Rhine and the Danube. On the level of an eventual construction of the European economy, the Munich compromise represents a rational solution that capitalism tends to give to the natural needs of the structure of this continent. With regard to the antagonistic development of the bourgeois States of Europe and its repercussions on the international scene, the compromise had to come up against insurmountable obstacles, because neither Russia could adapt to being definitively eliminated from Europe, nor could the United States tolerate the establishment of a German hegemony, which could thus threaten its positions not only in Europe but also on other continents.

Having achieved a solution to the Danube problem in Munich, Germany moved towards a similar solution to the Polish problem. Meanwhile, France and England sent their military missions to Russia with a view to concluding a military alliance. As we have said, these missions are still in Moscow when the bomb of the Russian-German treaty drops.

Up until this moment, on August 23, 1939, Russia advocated in the diplomatic field punitive measures against “the aggressor” and it was Litvinov who defined the aggressor as those who, in violation of contractual commitments, invaded another country. The aggressor – Litvinov specifies – must benefit from the automatic economic and military support of the League of Nations. And it is evident that Hitler, with his attack against Poland, was in the specific conditions contemplated by Soviet diplomacy.

But, suddenly, the doctrine of being against the aggressor is completely abandoned, Russia pledges to give no support to Poland, which will be invaded a few days later, and receives in return not only a part of Poland, which it will hasten to occupy at the end of September, but also the Baltic countries and Bessarabia.

The Russian-German agreement has the same fate as the Munich Compromise. About two years later, on June 21, 1941, it’s torn apart by further events: Hitler invades Russia. Once again, to explain this event, the interpretations of the contenders are not enough. Not that of the Russians that they had thus gained two years to prepare for war, since the Blitzkrieg was just as violent and rapid in Russia as it had been in May-June 1940 in the campaign in the West, and on the other hand it would have been better to face Germany in 1939 when the Franco-English threat still existed and Poland had not yet been eliminated. Nor does the German argument hold water, since it was clear – and current events confirm this – that if a compromise was possible with France and England in order to prevent an overflow of German power towards the East, this compromise was absolutely impossible with Russia because of its age-old interests in Eastern Europe.

On another level, the Russian-German treaty had its full effects: in the Axis countries, in Germany and Italy, it strengthened the front of the fascist deception for the war against the international plutocracy; in the democratic countries, and especially in France, it determined the political fracture that was to facilitate first the German military victories, and then the establishment of the military occupation regime.

The French Communist Party, which until September 1938 had was in a bloc with the government for the defense of the fatherland in the name of the fight against Hitlerism and Fascism, and which had then passed to a violent opposition against the Munich Compromise presented as the “prize to the aggressor”, radically changed its tone, highlighted the imperialist objectives of France and England, but did not speak either of the equally imperialist objectives of Germany and Italy, or of the imperialist significance of the war that was developing in the meantime.

The leader of the French Communist Party, Maurice Thorez, defected and was able to reach Russia thanks to the support of the German authorities who facilitated his passage, and the French and Belgian Communist Parties asked the German occupation authorities for permission to publish their newspapers. Events precipitated, Hitler invaded Russia on June 21, 1941 and as a result there was a new radical change in the policy of the Communist Parties. They now move on to the organization of the Resistance and partisan movements.
* * *

The Italian bourgeoisie gave Fascism to the proletariat because it could not conclude its revolutionary struggle after the First World War. This same bourgeoisie, in compensation for the frenzied participation of the workers in the second imperialist conflict, has given the Italian proletariat a regime which aggravates the conditions of exploitation imposed by Fascism itself.

The open betrayal of the communist parties, which participated in the anti-fascist war, can today rely of the support of one of the most powerful imperialist States in the world to hinder the rebirth of the proletarian movement, but this betrayal can not eliminate the antagonisms on which capitalist society is based. These antagonisms not only persist but tend to worsen, and the Italian Left can serenely look back on its past struggle against capitalism and opportunism: it was the first to raise its voice against the deviations of the International, it has followed all the storm of events without ever deflecting, and it takes up the flag of internationalism and class struggle to continue its fight, whatever the difficulties to be overcome and the path that must be taken to reach the final victory.

Proletarian Struggle and Violence

The first three parts of this work have briefly outlined the historical development of the class struggles up to present‑day bourgeois society. They presented the perspective which Marxist socialism has long given on this subject but which nevertheless continues to be an object of deviation and confusion.

To clarify the question we made the fundamental distinction between energy in the potential state (energy which is capable of entering into action but is not yet acting) and energy in the actual or kinetic state (energy which has already been set into motion and is producing its various effects). We explained the nature of this distinction in the physical world and extended it in a very simple way to the field of organic life and human society.

The problem was then to identify violence and coercive force in the events of social life; we have emphasized that this is operating not only when there is a brutal physical act against the human body such as physical restraint, beating, and killing, but also in that much larger field where the actions of individuals are coerced through the simple threat and under the penalty of violence. This coercion arises inseparably with the first forms of collective productive activity and thus of what is considered to be civilized and political society. Coercion is an indispensable factor in the development of the whole course of history and in the succession of institutions and classes. The question is not to exalt or condemn it, but to recognize and consider it in the context of the different historical epochs and the various situations.

The second section compared feudal society with bourgeois capitalist society. Its aim was to illustrate the thesis, which of course is not new, that the passage from feudalism to capitalism – an event fundamental in the evolution of the technology of production as well as in the evolution of the economy – has not been accompanied by a decrease in the use of force, violence, and social oppression.

For Marx, the capitalist form of economy and society is the most antagonist that history has presented until now. In its birth, its development, and its resistance against its own destruction, capitalism reaches a level of exploitation, persecution, and human suffering unknown before. This level is so high in quality and quantity, in potential and mass, in severity and range and – if we translate it into the ethical-literary terms which are not ours – in ferocity and amplitude of application, that it has reached the masses, the peoples, and the races of all corners of the earth.

Finally the third section dealt with the comparison between the liberal-democratic and the fascist-totalitarian forms of bourgeois rule, showing that it is an illusion to consider the first to be less oppressive and more tolerant than the second. If we take into consideration not violence as it is openly manifested, but instead the actual potential of the modern State apparatuses, that is to say their ability and capacity to resist all antagonistic, revolutionary assaults, we can easily substitute the blind common-place present‑day attitude, one that rejoices because two world wars supposedly drove back the forces of reaction and tyranny, and replace it by the obvious and clear verification that the capitalist system has more than doubled its strength, a strength concentrated in the great State monsters and in the world Leviathan of class rule now being constructed. Our proof of this is not based on an examination of the juridical hypocrisy or of the written or oratorical demagogy of today, which anyway are more revolting than they were under the defeated regimes of the Axis powers. Instead it is based on the scientific calculation of the financial, military, and police forces, in the measurement of the frantic accumulation and concentration of private or public, but always bourgeois, capital.

In comparison to 1914, 1919, 1922, 1933, and 1943, the capitalist regime of 1947 weighs down more, always more, in its economic exploitation and in its political oppression of the working masses and of everyone and everything that crosses its path. This is true for the ”Great Powers” after their totalitarian suppression of the German and Japanese State machines. It is also and no less true even for the Italian State: although defeated, derided, forced into vassalage, saleable and sold in all direction, it is nevertheless more armed with police and more reactionary now than under Giolitti and Mussolini, and it will be even more reactionary if it passes from the hands of De Gasperi to those of the left groups.

Having summarized the first three parts, we must now deal with the question of the use of force and violence in the social struggle when these methods of action are taken up by the revolutionary class of the present epoch, the modern proletariat.

* * *

In the course of about a century, the method of class struggle has been accepted in words by so many and such various movements and schools that the most widely differing interpretations have clashed in violent polemics, reflecting the ups and downs and the turning points of the history of capitalism and of the antagonisms to which it gives rise.

The polemic has been clarified in a classic way in the period of World War I and of the Russian Revolution. Lenin, Trotski, and the left‑wing communist groups who gathered in Moscow’s International settled the questions of force, violence, the seizure of power, the State, and the dictatorship in a way we must consider as definitive on the theoretical and programmatic level.

Opposed to them were the countless deformations of social-democratic opportunism. It is not necessary to repeat our refutation of these positions but it is useful to simply recall some points which clarify the concepts which distinguish us. Moreover, many of these false positions, which were then trampled to the ground and which seemed to have been dispersed forever, have reappeared in almost identical forms in the working class movement today.

Revisionism pretended to show that the prediction of a revolutionary clash between the working class and the defensive network of bourgeois power was an obsolete part of the Marxist system. Falsifying and exploiting the Marxist texts (in this case a famous preface and letter of Engels) it maintained that the progress of military technology precluded any perspective of a victorious armed insurrection. It claimed instead that the working class would achieve power very shortly through legal and peaceful means due to the development and strengthening of working class unions and of parliamentary political parties.

Revisionism sought to spread throughout the ranks of the working class the firm conviction that IT WAS NOT POSSIBLE to overthrow the power of the capitalist class by force and, furthermore, that IT WAS POSSIBLE to realize socialism after conquering the executive organs of the State by means of a majority in the representative institutions.

Left Marxists were accused of a worship of violence, elevating it from a means to an end and invoking it almost sadistically even when it was possible to spare it and attain the same result in a peaceful way.

But in the face of the eloquence of the historical developments this polemic soon unveiled its content. It was a mystique not so much of non‑violence as it was an apology of the principles of the bourgeois order.

After the armed revolution triumphed in Leningrad over the resistance of both the Czarist regime and the Russian bourgeois class, the argument that IT WAS NOT POSSIBLE to conquer power with arms changed into the argument that IT MUST NOT BE DONE, even if it is possible. This was combined with the idiotic preaching of a general humanitarism and social pacifism which of course repudiates the violence utilized for the victory of the working class revolutions, but does not denounce the violence used by the bourgeoisie for its historical revolutions, not even the extreme terroristic manifestations of this violence. Moreover, in all the controversial decisions, in historical situations which were decisive for the socialist movement, when the right contested the propositions of direct action, it admitted that it would have agreed with the necessity of resorting to insurrection if it were for other objectives. For example, the Italian reformist socialists in May 1915 opposed the proposal for a general strike at the moment of war mobilization, using ideological and political arguments in addition to a tactical evaluation of the relation of forces; but they admitted that if Italy intervened in the war on the side of Austria and Germany they would call the people to insurrection….

In the same way, those who theorize the ”utilization” of legal and democratic ways are ready to admit that popular violence is legitimate and necessary when there is an attempt from above to abolish constitutional rights. But how can it be maintained then that the development of military technology in the hands of the State is no longer an insurmountable obstacle? How can it be guaranteed, in the event of a peaceful conquest of the majority, that the bourgeoisie will not use those military means in order to maintain power? How can the proletariat in these situations victoriously use the violence which is criticized and condemned as a class means? The social democrats cannot answer this because in doing so they would be obliged to confess that they are pure and simple accomplices in preserving bourgeois rule.

A system of tactical slogans such as theirs can in fact be reconciled only with a clearly anti‑Marxist apology of bourgeois civilization, which precisely is the essence of the politics of those parties which have risen from the deformed stump of anti‑fascism.

The social-democratic thesis contends that the last historical situation where the recourse to violence and to forms of civil war was necessary was precisely that situation which enabled the bourgeois order to rise from the ruins of the old feudal and despotic regimes. With the conquest of political liberties an era of civilized and peaceful struggles is supposedly opened in which all other conquests, such as economic and social equality, can be realized without further bloody conflicts.

According to this ignoble falsification, the historical movement of the modern proletariat and socialism are no longer the most radical battle of history. They are no longer the destruction of an entire world down to its foundations, from its economic framework and its legal and political system to its ideologies still impregnated with all the lies transmitted by previous forms of oppression and still poisoning even the very air we breathe.

Socialism is reduced to a stupid and irresolute combination of supposed legal and constitutional conquests, by which the capitalist form has allegedly enriched and enlightened society, with vague social postulates which should be graftable and transplantable onto the trunk of the bourgeois system.

Marx measured the irresistible and increasing pressures in the social depths which will cause the mantle of the bourgeois forms of production to explode, just as geological cataclysms break the crust of the planet. His formidable historical vision of social antagonisms is replaced by the contemptible deception of a Roosevelt who adds to the short list of bourgeois liberties those of freedom from fear and freedom from need, or of a Pius XII who, after blessing once again the eternal principle of property in its modern capitalist form, pretends to weep over the abyss which exists between the poverty of the multitude and the monstrous accumulations of wealth.

Lenin’s theoretical restoration of the revolutionary doctrine re‑established the definition of the State as a machine which one social class uses to oppress other classes. This definition is fully and particularly valid for the modern bourgeois, democratic, and parliamentary State. But as a crowning point of the historical polemic, it must be made clear that the proletarian class force cannot take over this machine and use it for its own purposes; instead of conquering it, it must smash it and break it to pieces.

The proletarian struggle is not a struggle that takes place within the State and its organs but a struggle outside the State, against it, and against all its manifestations and forms.

The proletarian struggle does not aim at seizing or conquering the State as if it were a fortress which the victorious army seeks to occupy. Its aim instead is to destroy it and to raze its defeated defences and fortifications to the ground.

Yet after the destruction of the bourgeois State a form of political State becomes necessary, i.e., the new organized class power of the proletariat. This is due to the necessity of directing the use of an organized class violence by means of which the privileges of capital are rooted out and the organization of the freed productive forces in the new, non‑private, non‑commodity communist forms is made possible.

Consequently it is correct to speak of the conquest of power, meaning a non‑legal, non‑peaceful, but violent, armed, revolutionary conquest. It is correct to speak of the passage of power from the hands of the bourgeoisie to those of the proletariat precisely because our doctrine considers power not only authority and law based on the weight of the tradition of the past but also the dynamics of force and violence thrust into the future, sweeping away the barriers and obstacles of institutions. It would not be exact to speak of the conquest of the State or the passage of the State from the administration of one class to that of another precisely because the State of a ruling class must perish and be shattered as a condition for the victory of the formerly subjected class. To violate this essential point of Marxism, or to make the slightest concession to it (for instance allowing the possibility that the passage of power can take place within the scope of a parliamentary action, even one accompanied by street fighting and battles, and by acts of war between States) leads to the utmost conservatism. This is because such a concession is tantamount to conceding that the State structure is a form which is opened to totally different and opposed contents and therefore stands above the opposing classes and their historical conflict. This can only lead to the reverential respect of legality and the vulgar apology for the existing order.

It is not only a question of a scientific error of evaluation, but also of a real degenerative historical process which took place before our eyes. It is this process which has led the ex‑communist parties down hill, turning their backs on Lenin’s theses and arriving at the coalition with the social-democratic traitors, at the ”worker’s government”, and then at the democratic government, that is to say a direct collaboration with the bourgeoisie and at its service.

With the unequivocally clear thesis of the destruction of the State, Lenin re‑established the thesis of the establishment of the proletarian State. The second thesis does not please the anarchists who, though they had the merit of advancing the first, had the illusion that immediately after bourgeois power was smashed society could dispense with all forms of organized power and therefore with the political State, that is to say with a system of social violence. Since the transformation of the economy from private to socialist cannot be instantaneous, it follows that the elimination of the non‑labouring class cannot be instantaneous and cannot be accomplished through the physical elimination of its members. Throughout the far from brief period during which the capitalist economic forms persist while constantly diminishing, the organized revolutionary State must function, which means – as Lenin unhypocritically said – maintaining soldiers, police forces, and prisons.

With the progressive reduction of the sector of the economy still organized in private forms, there is a corresponding reduction of the area in which it is necessary to use political coercion, and the State tends to progressively disappear.

The points which we have recalled here in a schematic way are enough to demonstrate how both a magnificent polemical campaign ridiculing and crushing its opponents and, above all, the greatest event up to now in the history of the class struggle have brought out in all their clarity the classical theses of Marx and Engels, the Communist Manifesto, and the conclusions which have been drawn from the defeat of the Paris Commune. These are the theses of the conquest of political power, the proletarian dictatorship, the despotic intervention in the bourgeois relationships of production, and the final withering away of the State. The right of speaking of historical confirmations parallel to the brilliant theoretical construction seems to cease when this last phase is attained since we have not yet witnessed – in Russia or anywhere else – the process of the withering away, the dying down of itself, the dissolving away (Auflösung in Engels) of the State. The question is important and difficult since a sound dialectic can demonstrate nothing with certainty on the basis of a more or less brilliant series of spoken or written words. Conclusions can only be based on facts.

The bourgeois States, in whatever atmospheres and ideological climates, inflate in a more and more terrible way before our eyes. The only State which is presented, through tremendous propaganda, as a working class State, expands its apparatus and its bureaucratic, legal, police, and military functions beyond all limits.

So it is not surprising that the prediction of the shrivelling up and elimination of the State, after it has fulfilled its decisive role in the class struggle, is greeted with a widespread scepticism.

Common opinion seems to say to us: ”You can wait forever, you who theorize and pretend to realize red dictatorships! The State organ, like a tumor in the body of society, will never regress and will instead invade all its tissues and all its innermost recesses until suffocating it”. It is this commonplace attitude which encourages all the individualist, liberal, and anarchist ideologies, and even the old and new deformed hybrids between the class method and the liberal one, all of which are served to us as types of socialism, based on a mere personality and on the plenitude of its manifestation.

It is quite remarkable that even the few groups in the communist camp which reacted to the opportunist degeneration of the parties of the now dissolved International of Moscow, tend to display a hesitation on this point. In their preoccupation with fighting against the suffocating centralization of the Stalinist bureaucracy, they have been led to cast doubts on the Marxist principles reestablished by Lenin, and they reveal they believe that Lenin – and along with him all the revolutionary communists in the glorious period of 1917‑20 – were guilty of an idolization of the State.

We must firmly and clearly state that the current of the Italian Marxist left, with which this review is linked, does not have the slightest hesitance or repentance on this point. It rejects any revision of Marx and Lenin’s fundamental principle that the revolution, as it is a violent process par excellence, is thus a highly authoritarian, totalitarian, and centralizing act.

Our condemnation of the Stalinist orientation is not based on the abstract, scholastic, and constitutionalist accusation that it committed the sinful acts of abusing bureaucratism, State intervention, and despotic authority. It is based instead on quite different evaluations of the economic, social, and political development of Russia and the world, of which the monstrous swelling of the State machine is not the sinful cause but the inevitable consequence.

The hesitation about accepting and defending the dictatorship is rooted not only in vague and stupid moralizing about the pretended right of the individual or the group not to be pressured by or forced to yield to a greater force, but also in the distinction – undoubtedly very important – made between the concept of a dictatorship of one class over another and the relationships of organization and power within the working class which constitutes the revolutionary State. With this point we have reached the aim of the present article. Having restated the basic facts in their correct terms, we of course do not pretend to have exhausted these questions, which is something that only history can do (as we consider it to have done with the question of the necessity of violence in the conquest of power). The task of the party’s theoretical work and militancy is something other: it is to avoid, in the search for a solution to these questions, the unconscious utilization of arguments which are dictated or influenced by enemy ideologies, and thus by the interests of the enemy class.

Dictatorship is the second and dialectical aspect of revolutionary force. This force, in the first phase of the conquest of power, acts from below and concentrates innumerable efforts in the attempts to smash the long‑established State form. After the success of such an attempt, this same class force continues to act but in an opposite direction, i.e., from above, in the exercise of power entrusted to a new State body fully constituted in its whole and its parts and even more robust, more resolute and, if necessary, more pitiless and terroristic than that which was defeated.

The outcries against the call for the proletarian dictatorship (a claim that even the politicians of the iron Moscow regime are hypocritically hiding today) as well as the cries of alarm against the pretended impossibility of curbing the lust for power and consequently for material privilege on the part of the bureaucratic personnel crystallized into a new ruling class of caste, all‑this corresponds to the vulgar and metaphysical position which treats society and the State as abstract entities. Such a position is incapable of finding the key to problems through an investigation into the facts of production and into the transformation of all relationships, which the collision between classes will give birth to.

Therefore to equate the concept of dictatorship that we Marxists call for, with the vulgar concept of tyranny, despotism, and autocracy, means to cause a banal confusion.

The proletarian dictatorship is thus confused with personal power, and on the basis of the same stupidities, Lenin is condemned just like Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin.

We must remember that the Marxist analysis completely disclaims the assertion that the State machines act under the impulse of the will of these contemporary ”Duces”. These ”Duces” are nothing but chessmen, having only symbolic importance, which are moved on the chessboard of history by forces from which they cannot escape.

Furthermore we have shown many times that the bourgeois ideologists do not have the right to be shocked by a Franco, a Tito, or the vigorous methods used by the States which present them as their leaders, since these ideologists do not hesitate to justify the dictatorship and terror to which the bourgeoisie resorted precisely in the period following its conquest of power. Thus no right-minded historian classifies the dictator of Naples in 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi, as a political criminal but on the contrary exalts him as a true champion of humanity.

The proletarian dictatorship, therefore, is not manifested in the power of a man, even if he has exceptional personal qualities.

Does this dictatorship then have as its acting agent a political party which acts in the name and in the interests of the working class? Our current answers this question, today as well as at the time of the Russian Revolution, with an unconditional ”yes”.

Since it is undeniable that the parties which pretend to represent the proletarian class have undergone profound crises and have repeatedly broken up or undergone splits, our decidedly affirmative answer raises the following question: is it possible to determine which party has in effect such a revolutionary prerogative, and what criterion is to be used to determine it? The question is thus transferred to the examination of the relationship between the broad class base and the more restricted and well defined organ which is the party.

In answering the questions on this point we must not lose sight of the distinctive characteristic of the dictatorship. As is always the case with our method, before concrete historical events reveal the positive aspects of this dictatorship, we shall define it by its negative aspect.

A regime in which the defeated class still exists physically and constitutes from a statistical viewpoint a significant part of the social agglomerate but is kept outside of the State by force, is a dictatorship. Moreover this defeated class is kept in conditions which make it impossible to attempt a reconquest of power because it is denied the rights of association, propaganda, and the press.

It is not necessary to determine from the start who maintains the defeated class in this strict state of subjugation: the very course of the historical struggle itself will tell us. For the class we fight to be reduced to this state of a social minority, undergoing this social death pending its statistical one, we will admit for a moment that the acting agent can be either the entire victorious social majority (an extreme hypothesis which is unrealizable), or a part of that majority, or a solid vanguard group (even if it is a statistical minority), or, finally, in a brief crisis, even a single man (another extreme hypothesis, which was close to being realized in only one historical example – that of Lenin, who in April 1917, alone against the entire Central Committee and the old Bolsheviks, was able to read in advance in the march of events and to determine in his theses the new course of the history of the party and of the revolution, just as in November he had the Constituent Assembly dissolved by the Red Guard).

As the Marxist method is not a revelation, a prophecy, or a scholasticism, it achieves first of all the understanding of the way in which the historical forces act and determine their relationships and their clashes. Then, with theoretical research and practical struggle continuing, it determines the characteristics of the manifestation of these forces and the nature of the means by which they act.

The Paris Commune confirmed that the proletarian forces must smash the old State instead of entering it and taking it over; and that its means must not be legality but insurrection.

The very defeat of the proletariat in that class battle and the October victory at Leningrad have shown that it is necessary to organize a new form of armed State whose ”secret” is in the following: it denies political survival to the members of the defeated class and to all its various parties.

Once this decisive secret has been drawn from history, we still have not clarified and studied all the physiology and the dynamics of the new organ that has been produced. Unfortunately an extremely difficult area, its pathology, remains open.

Above all else its basic negative characteristic is the exclusion of the defeated class from the State organ (regardless of whether or not it has multiple institutions: the representative, executive, judicial and bureaucratic). This radically distinguishes our State from the bourgeois State which pretends to host all social strata in its bodies.

Yet this change cannot seem absurd to the defeated bourgeoisie. Once it succeeded in bringing down the old State based on two orders – the nobility and the clergy – it understood that it had made a mistake by only demanding to enter as the Third Estate in the new State body. Under the Convention and under the Terror it chased the aristocrats out of the State. It was easy for it to historically close up the phase of open dictatorship since the privileges of the two orders which were based on legal prerogatives rather than on the productive organisation could rapidly be destroyed and thereby the priest and the noble could rapidly be reduced to simple indistinguishable citizens.

* * *

In this section we have defined what fundamentally distinguishes the historical form of the proletarian dictatorship. In the next section we will examine the relationship among the various organs and institutions through which the proletarian dictatorship is exercised: class party, workers councils, trade unions, and factory councils.

In other words we will conclude by discussing the problem of the so‑called proletarian democracy (an expression that can be found in some texts of the Third International, but which it would be better to get rid of) which is supposedly to be instituted after the dictatorship has historically buried bourgeois democracy.

L’intervallo fra la pubblicazione dei vari numeri della rivista rende meno agevole ai compagni seguire la linea della presente esposizione, la cui finalità era invece proprio quella di dare al procedimento del CAPITALE di Marx un andamento privo di disgressioni e con sviluppo continuo.
Il lavoro può essere utilizzato a condizione che lo si ricolleghi alle puntate precedenti apparese, il che è consigliabile fare con letture o esposizioni collettive.
Nel n.5 è stata pubblicata la prima puntata che riassume la materia della prima sezione: Merce e moneta.
Nel n.6 abbiamo dato la parte relativa alla II sezione: trasformazione del denaro in Capitale; ed iniziata la Sezione III: il Plusvalore.
I titoli dell’opera originale sono invece: La produzione del plusvalore assoluto, la produzione del plusvalore relativo.
Le nuove dizioni rispondono al tentativo di rendere più chiari i concetti. Ma la chiarificazione non può andare a scapito del rigore, e quindi facciamo più uso di formolette matematiche che non l’originale. Non si tratta infatti solo di fare afferrare le tesi di Marx con fatica minore, ma sopratutto di ristabilirne, in modo inoppugnabile dai falsificatori e dagli avversari, l’esatto significato. Nel testo solo con grande perizia si perviene a ben intendere quando si trattano scientificamente modelli necessariamente teoretici del fenomeno, e quando si viene ad ampie esposizioni storico-narrative.
Nell’ultima puntata sono occorsi alcuni errori che lasciamo al lettore di rettificare, anche nelle formoline e nelle note. Precisiamo solo che il par. 20 tratta il calcolo dell’azienda riunita di cui al n.18, mentre è stato stampato per sbaglio, «di cui al par. 19 ».

Durata della giornata di lavoro

La durata della giornata di lavoro è variabile. Essa ha un minimo che in regime capitalistico non raggiungerà mai il tempo di lavoro necessario, ed ha un massimo che dipende dai limiti fisici della resistenza del lavoratore. Ponendosi pienamente sul terreno della economia capitalistica, di considerare la forza lavoro come una merce ed il salario come il suo equo prezzo, il lavoratore come ogni altro venditore ha diritto di essere tutelato dalle legge nello stabilire la quantità della merce che vende, ossia il tempo che si impegna a lavorare nella giornata. Se così non fosse non solo sarebbe violato il canone di eguaglianza giuridica tra coloro che scendono sul mercato, ma menomandosi l’organismo dell’operaio diminuirebbe il numero degli anni nei quali avrà la forza di lavorare, sottraendogli così larga parte dell’unica sua proprietà privata: la forza lavoro. Menomando fisicamente la classe operaia ciò ritornerebbe inoltre a lunga scadenza a danno degli stessi capitalisti, sebbene ogni singolo imprenditore non scorga altro che la caccia al massimo di tempo di lavoro.

Di qui una lotta per la limitazione legale della giornata di lavoro, largamente descritta da Marx in capitoli che più che riassumere occorrerebbe aggiornare all’epoca attuale.

Piuttosto è interessante vedere a quali conclusioni teoriche perviene una tale esposizione. Lungi dal conchiudere nell’apologia della legge sociale Marx ironizza la riduzione del pomposo catalogo dei diritti dell’uomo al meschino risultato, per il lavoratore, di sapere per quanto tempo si è ”liberamente” venduto, e quanto tempo residuo gli appartiene.

Ma questo risultato, se impedisce l’annientamento fisico della classe operaia, non toglie che, come sappiamo, anche nel tempo legalmente venduto, una larga parte (il pluslavoro) sia tempo non pagato.

Ciò che occorre agli operai (Cap. VIII/7) non è di sapere un limite della giornata di lavoro ma «di innalzare come classe una potente barriera che impedisca loro di vendere se stessi a le loro progenie in morte e schiavitù mediante un volontario contratto col capitale». Queste parole non s’interpretano nel senso banale dell’introduzione della giornata legale di lavoro o del contratto collettivo e magari del salario fissato per legge, ma nel senso della abolizione storica del principio che fa del lavoro una merce, e della possibilità di vendere liberamente anche un’ora sola di lavoro, ossia della abolizione del capitalismo.

Sopralavoro e capitalismo

Abbiamo detto che la produzione di plusvalore appare col regime capitalistico nel senso preciso in cui plusvalore è differenza di un valore di merci che compare dopo una serie di scambi sul mercato.

Ma anche prima che la forza lavoro fosse trattata come merce sui mercati (liberi), il lavoratore era costretto in forme diverse a fornire larghe parti del suo tempo gratuitamente (sopralavoro). Così nel caso dell’economia schiavistica, terriera, ecc., ecc. Però osserva Marx che quando la forma di una società non mercantile o lo è scarsamente, ossia le merci interessano più per il valore di uso che per quello di scambio, l’ordinamento sociale non dà luogo ad eccessiva fame di sopralavoro. Il proprietario di schiavi non ha interesse a farli lavorare al di là di un certo limite, perché in generale consuma e non vende prodotti dello schiavo, mentre dovrebbe pagare in denaro un nuovo schiavo se il primo muore o diviene invalido. Il proprietario feudale fa lavorare gratuitamente sul proprio fondo il contadino nei giorni di comandata; per quanto questo sistema appaia inumano pure esso produce un saggio del sopralavoro inferiore a quello del moderno capitalismo (Cap. VIII, 2).

Capitale e plusvalore

Fino a questo punto l’analisi si fa immaginando che il capitalista paghi sempre allo stesso prezzo la forza lavoro (salario costante), e che questo prezzo ne esprima esattamente il valore.

A queste condizioni, ossia restando fermo il tempo di lavoro necessario, il capitale, per soddisfare al suo bisogno di ottenere il massimo plusvalore, poiché questa è data da: Capitale variabile x Saggio del plusvalore, non può che seguire una di queste vie:
    1. accrescere il saggio del plusvalore, ossia il pluslavoro, ossia la giornata di lavoro – ma abbiamo già visto che storicamente si tende alla diminuzione;
    2. aumentare il capitale variabile, e ciò si può fare aumentando il numero degli operai. In questo senso il capitale fa sempre nuovi passi innanzi trasformando in operai gli artigiani, i piccoli proprietari, ecc. sfruttando l’aumento della popolazione, l’urbanesimo, la colonizzazione. Tuttavia malgrado questa tendenza dell’aumento della massa del capitale variabile, solo mezzo per aumentare la massa del plusvalore, si vede che il capitale è sempre più costretto a prendere nella produzione moderna in larga parte la forma di capitale costante. Ma la ulteriore analisi mostrerà che la contraddizione con la legge della dipendenza tra capitale variabile e plusvalore non è che apparente¹.

Fermo restando che la formazione di plusvalore è la caratteristica del capitalismo, va fatta qualche altra osservazione sulle condizioni iniziali perché appaia il fenomeno capitalistico. Il neo-padrone deve avere mezzi finanziari bastevoli per occupare un numero minimo di operai, tali da garentirgli un plusvalore sufficiente non solo a migliorare il suo tenore personale di vita ma anche a porre da parte un margine di danaro da trasformare ulteriormente in capitale.

Tali minimi sono molto variabili a seconda delle condizioni sociali; abbiamo qui un esempio di distinzione puramente quantitativa che dà luogo ad una differenza qualitativa (tra artigiano o maestro di bottega, e capitalista).

Non è però condizione indispensabile allo stabilirsi di rapporti di tipo capitalistico la trasformazione tecnica dei procedimenti di produzione. Il capitalismo è sorto utilizzando agli inizi la tecnica tradizionale. Più oltre sono venute le rivoluzioni nel campo della tecnica, il macchinismo e l’impiego delle forze meccaniche. Tali innovazioni, per noi, da una parte risultano suscitate con ritmo sempre più accelerato dalle necessità del capitalismo, d’altra parte significano le condizioni che rendono tecnicamente ed economicamente possibile l’abolizione di esso.

Sezione IV

Capitalismo e potenziamento del lavoro

Il plusvalore relativo

In ogni scienza, a scopo d’analisi di un fenomeno, poiché questo presenta in genere più grandezza variabili, si semplifica dapprima il problema facendone variare solamente alcune, e considerando le altre costanti. Così per es. la legge della caduta dei gravi assume una forma più semplice quando si supponga costante l’accelerazione della gravità, ossia l’intensità dell’attrazione terrestre. Ma facendo un passo innanzi, che diverrebbe indispensabile per l’esattezza ove il grave anziché cadere da piccola altezza partisse, poniamo, dall’orbita lunare, si deve osservare che mutando nella caduta la distanza tra il grave e il centro della terra, la forza attrattiva e l’accelerazione vanno crescendo. Poiché si sa con quale legge, ossia inversamente ai quadrati delle distanze, si sa studiare anche la caduta ad accelerazione variabile come quella ad accelerazione costante, solo che i risultati saranno complicati. In modo perfettamente analogo, mentre noi abbiamo studiato finora la produzione di plusvalore nella ipotesi semplificatrice della costanza di tutti i valori, ossia delle merci, del denaro, della forza lavoro (e ciò significa che noi immaginavamo immutato il quantum di lavoro medio occorrente a produrre le singole merci, l’oro, e i mezzi di sussistenza) ora ci spingeremo più innanzi e supporremo che possa variare il valore di scambio dei mezzi di sussistenza necessari al lavoratore, dunque il valore della forza lavoro ed il salario.

Nell’analisi precedente erano variabili la quantità del capitale, il numero degli operai, la durata della giornata di lavoro, ed il tempo di pluslavoro, restando invariabile il lavoro necessario. Abbiamo visto che il saggio del plusvalore poteva crescere solo crescendo la giornata di lavoro, e la sua massa solo crescendo il saggio stesso o la massa del capitale salari, cosa possibile solo accrescendo il numero degli operai. Il plusvalore prodotto sotto tali ipotesi venne detto da Marx plusvalore assoluto.

Ora supporremo che possa variare, col valore di scambio dei mezzi di sussistenza, il salario quindi il tempo di lavoro necessario. Chiameremo plusvalore relativo quello che trae origine non più dal semplice prolungamento della giornata di lavoro, ma dalla diminuzione del salario e del tempo di lavoro necessario.

Non si fa ancora qui l’ipotesi della riduzione del salario imposta fermo restando il valore della forza lavoro, fatto non raro ma che presenta tuttavia carattere d’eccezione rispetto alla generalità della nostra indagine. Parliamo di una diminuzione di salario a parità di consumi del lavoratore, per diminuito costo (valore) di quanto egli consuma. Ciò può accadere soltanto se aumenta la produttività del lavoro per quelle aziende che producono i mezzi di sussistenza. Perché sorga plusvalore relativo è dunque necessario che venga accresciuta la produttività del lavoro non di merci qualsiasi, ma delle merci che entrano nella sussistenza.

Sebbene il valore della merce lavorata nell’azienda capitalistica per essere venduta sia tuttora trattato da noi come una costante, poniamoci l’obiezione: come si spiega che il capitalista che può introdurre una innovazione aumentante la produttività del lavoro, pur restando inalterato il salario e ogni tempo di lavoro, realizza un più alto profitto?

In tal caso per un certo tempo il capitalista potrà vendere al vecchio prezzo più alto, o a poco meno, in quanto riuscendo a produrre di più e dovendo accaparrarsi un mercato più esteso dovrà eliminarne altri produttori con una relativa diminuzione di prezzi. Ma tale beneficio sarà transitorio perché ben presto la concorrenza costringerà i suoi rivali ad introdurre il nuovo metodo di produzione e costringerà lui ad adottare un prezzo diminuito. Perché possa abbreviare il tempo di lavoro necessario, l’aumento di produttività dovrà investire quelle merci che fanno parte dei mezzi di sussistenza del lavoratore, avendosi allora un aumento definitivo del plusvalore. Ciò a meno che la classe operaia non pervenga ad elevare il suo tenore di vita, ossia la massa dei suoi consumi, altra variazione di grandezze ancora estranea al nostro esame.

In ogni modo, nel nostro caso del capitalista che ha trasformato la sua tecnica, anche nel periodo transitorio egli non ha fatto che elevare il valore ”di uso” della forza lavoro dei suoi operai rispetto alla media sociale; essi gli danno non lavoro semplice ma complesso, quindi valore maggiore per ogni ora di applicazione. Ecco come senza cambiare il salario si è diminuito il tempo di lavoro necessario, che sarebbe quello in cui il lavoratore riprodurrebbe il suo salario se potesse vendere lui i prodotti ricevendo il beneficio dell’avvenuto perfezionamento (dedotte s’intende le quote di capitale costante). Perciò anche in quel periodo transitorio il maggiore plusvalore discende da maggiore pluslavoro.

Collaborazione²

Le tappe attraverso le quali il capitalismo realizza sempre maggiore plusvalore relativo aumentando la produttività del lavoro oltre il limite che poteva raggiungere il lavoratore indipendente artigiano si possono ridurre alle seguenti: collaborazione degli operai, manifattura, macchinismo.

Prendendo i mestieri così come sono in regime di produzione artigiana, con la stessa ripartizione e con le stesse capacità lavorative e strumenti o utensili del lavoratore di ciascun mestiere, si può tuttavia realizzare un aumento di produttività con l’affiancare durante il tempo di lavoro gran numero di operai. Per tal modo non solo si compensano gli scarti individuali in più e in meno dalla media potenzialità lavorativa, ma si permette effettivamente di eseguire le stesse operazioni in una somma minore di tempi.

Abbiamo così la semplice collaborazione, la quale accetta senza ancora modificarla la stessa divisione tecnica del lavoro raggiunta in regime artigiano. Tuttavia per il fatto della collaborazione viene innalzato il rendimento medio del lavoro umano: questo è un beneficio sociale, il primo di cui bisogna attribuire il merito storico al capitalismo: esso però non realizza la collaborazione sotto questo impulso sociale, ma solo allo scopo di intensificare la produzione di plusvalore.

D’altra parte non bisogna credere che sia indispensabile l’ordinamento capitalistico alla società che intenda godere dei benefici della collaborazione. Esempi di collaborazione su vasta scala hanno dato antichi regimi in cui capi militari dinastici o sacerdoti potevano disporre di grandi masse di forze lavoro (Assiri, Egizi, ecc.). Analogamente devesi presumere che se non può prodursi plusvalore senza collaborazione, si potrà conservare la conquista sociale della collaborazione anche superando lo stadio della produzione di plusvalore.

Manifattura

Quando si passa alla manifattura, si constata un cambiamento radicale: la tecnica produttiva degli artigiani non è sostanzialmente cambiata, ma viene rivoluzionata, nel senso di una più grande produttività, la vecchia divisione del lavoro.

La manifattura realizza questo in due modi. 1) Per produrre oggetti a cui debbono lavorare operai di diversi mestieri (esempio della carrozza cui occorre il fabbro, il falegname, il sarto, il pittore ecc.) questi operai vengono tutti riuniti nello stesso laboratorio ove eserciteranno sempre non tutto il loro mestiere ma solo quella particolare attività che occorre per l’oggetto in questione. In questo primo caso la manifattura riunisce vari mestieri separati restringendo grandemente però la sfera di applicazione di ognuno. Ciascun operaio acquista così maggiore abilità e produttività nella speciale funzione su cui si concentra. 2) Per produrre un oggetto che prima abbisognava dell’opera di un solo mestiere, (es. dello spillo) la manifattura fraziona le singole operazioni successive di tale mestiere affidandole ad operai che in quella sola cosa si specializzano. Così un mestiere viene spezzettato in tanti altri.

Nell’uno e nell’altro caso, parallelamente alla specializzazione dell’operaio, si specializza l’utensile che dovendo servire ad una sola operazione assume la forma che permette di compierla più rapidamente.

Queste due forme si chiamano forma eterogenea e forma organica della manifattura.

Oltre a diminuire il tempo di lavoro necessario per ragioni già dette, la manifattura lo diminuisce anche perché crea una distinzione che il regime artigiano medioevale tentava di respingere: quella tra operai specializzati ed operai manovali, che compiono meccanicamente sempre gli stessi gesti. Per questa seconda categoria, eliminandosi o diminuendosi le spese per il periodo d’apprendistato, si ha una diminuzione del valore della forza lavoro e un aumento di plusvalore.

La manifattura rappresenta un passo innanzi nella divisione del lavoro. Ma questo è un processo cominciato assai prima e che si può esaminare in riguardo al complesso della società.

La base fondamentale di una divisione sociale del lavoro, accompagnata necessariamente dallo scambio delle merci, è il fatto fondamentale della separazione tra città e campagna. Tale fatto è già avanzato nell’economia feudale: mentre i contadini restano disseminati nel territorio in cui è arbitro il feudatario, gli artigiani si concentrano nelle città con ben altro sistema di vita materiale intellettuale e politica.

Mentre questa divisione del lavoro artigiano suppone una grande disseminazione dei mezzi produttivi tra moltissimi produttori-mercanti indipendenti, la divisione del lavoro di tipo manifatturiero esige la concentrazione di molti mezzi di produzione nelle mani di singoli capitalisti.

Non sarebbe possibile conciliare il gran vantaggio della divisione sociale del lavoro con una organizzazione sociale generale senza capitalismo? Non solo questo è possibile come programma per l’avvenire, ma vi sono esempi nel passato di comunità viventi sulla base di una divisione del lavoro organizzata tra i mestieri e del possesso comune della terra (India antica, ecc.).

Perciò dice Marx che, mentre la divisione sociale del lavoro trovasi nelle forme più differenti di società, quella manifatturiera è creazione del capitalismo, ma i suoi benefizi reali sopravvivranno al capitalismo stesso.

Gli antichi scrittori d’economia esaltano la divisione sociale del lavoro perché aumenta il rendimento dell’attività umana: essi hanno più in vista la qualità e il valore d’uso che la quantità e il valore di scambio.

Con l’epoca manifatturiera appare l’economia politica come scienza speciale.

I suoi scrittori vedono le questioni sotto l’angolo visuale capitalistico, ossia considerano la divisione del lavoro come un mezzo per produrre di più, aumentare il plusvalore e l’accumulazione del capitale, ciò che chiamano elevamento della ricchezza nazionale.

Macchinismo

La manifattura, sorta sulla ristretta base dei vecchi mestieri, riesce ben presto insufficiente e si ha il trapasso alla tappa del macchinismo la quale s’inizia col sorgere di opifici meccanici ove si impiegano gli utensili e i primi apparecchi più complessi già adottati in singole manifatture.

L’introduzione della macchina mentre a sua volta (come le altre due prime tappe: collaborazione e manifattura) rappresenta un decisivo passo innanzi per il rendimento del lavoro umano, sociale, si determina sotto la spinta della tendenza capitalistica a diminuire il prezzo delle merci e a produrre altro plusvalore relativo.

Per macchina nel senso economico non si può intendere ciò che è macchina in meccanica e in fisica, cioè ogni dispositivo che modifica la intensità, la direzione o il punto di applicazione della forza che vi agisce. Il cuneo, la leva, ecc. sono fisicamente macchine ma economicamente semplici utensili. Neppure si può definire macchina solo un apparecchio mosso dall’uomo ma da altri agenti: l’animale, l’acqua, il vapore, ecc. Parlando di macchine distingueremo tra macchine utensili e macchine motrici. Queste forniscono a mezzo di agenti meccanici e di energia calorifica, chimica, elettrica ecc. un dato movimento che trasmesso opportunamente fa agire la macchina utensile o operatrice in modo che questa esegua atti e movimenti affidati alla mano dell’uomo, munita di utensile relativamente semplice.

Ma anche macchine utensili che hanno come forza motrice quella umana meritano economicamente il nome di macchine in quanto l’uomo compie un movimento semplice e continuo.

Qui l’intervento umano diviene puramente accidentale potendo essere sostituito da un motore meccanico, come si può ad una macchina per cucire applicare un motorino elettrico.

S’intende bene che, a secondo dei casi, l’operaio interviene sempre o per guidare e rettificare il moto della macchina utensile o per dirigere quella motrice, come guidando la stoffa da cucire sotto l’ago della macchina o azionando l’interruttore del motorino.

Le prime macchine sono operatrici e l’operaio doveva fornire l’energia fisica per muoverle; si cominciò a sostituire all’uomo la bestia, si seguitò la antichissima pratica di attingere l’energia dai corsi d’acqua e dal vento, ma la vera rivoluzione meccanica si realizzò con l’invenzione della macchina a vapore, capace di azionare contemporaneamente gran numero di macchine utensili. È seguita poi l’applicazione industriale dell’elettricità che permette di utilizzare a distanza l’energia idrica.

Si pone la questione se la nostra teoria del valore, effetto di lavoro, e plusvalore, effetto di pluslavoro, si presenti a tradurre bene il fatto economico dell’impiego di macchine e se spieghi come esso sia una fonte di plusvalore relativo.

La macchina prende posto tra gli elementi del capitale costante. Ossia essa trasmette al prodotto una parte del valore suo proprio tanto più piccola quanto maggiore è la sua resistenza al logorio e durata, e tanto maggiore quanto più essa consuma combustibile, lubrificante, ecc., valore che però noi computeremo tra quelli delle materie prime (indirette) che pure come capitale costante vanno ad incorporarsi nel prodotto. Adunque la macchina sembrerebbe aggiungere qualche cosa al valore e al prezzo del prodotto.

Il valore della macchia dipende per noi dal lavoro sociale medio occorso nella sua produzione. Meno costosa è la macchina, meno consuma a parità d’energia, più essa risulta produttiva nel senso che meno si aggiunge per tale quota al valore del prodotto.

È indubitato che la macchina contiene più lavoro ed è assai più costosa dei semplici utensili dell’artigiano o anche della manifattura.

Quindi nel macchinismo il mezzo di lavoro sembrerebbe apportare maggior valore alla formazione del valore del prodotto. In compenso però di questo fatto si verifica che, la macchina sostituendo a parità di prodotto un numero elevato di lavoratori, diminuisce la spesa salari, cosicché nel complesso si può avere diminuzione del valore prodotto. Quindi, sebbene gli impianti produttivi del meccanismo importino una spesa maggiore di quelli della manifattura in rapporto allo stesso valore di prodotti, se il rendimento del macchinismo è tale che il valore (somma di lavoro occorrente) dei prodotti risulti diminuito, l’onere degli impianti meccanici calcolato in valore assoluto potrà divenire minore.

Sostituzione di macchine ad operai

Si tratta di domandarsi se la macchina faccia risparmiare spese-lavoro in proporzione maggiore di quanto aumenti la spesa per conservazione degli impianti. Questo benefizio può aversi anche se, come avviene sempre, la macchina costa assai più dell’utensile.

Riprendendo i simboli già noti (vedi paragrafo 20) ricordiamo il profitto dell’azienda:

P = F – (A + H + M + wgv)

ossia: le entrate (valore F del prodotto) meno le spese (ammortamento annuo degli impianti fissi A, più materie prime M, più materie ausiliarie H, più il capitale variabile V = wgv (numero w di operai per g giorni lavorativi annui per salario giornaliero v) eguale profitto totale.

Ricordiamo anche che il saggio del plusvalore da: s = P / V.

In quest’azienda si introduce una macchina con la quota annua d’ammortamento A’. Tale macchina consuma materie ausiliarie di valore H’. Essa permette di eliminare w’ operai. Il capitalista spende in più: A’ + H’. Spende però in meno: w’gv.

Egli troverà convenienza ad applicare la macchina non appena si avrà:

w’gv > A’ + H’

Anche quando vi sia pareggio tra le due partite ed il capitalista non è ancora spinto ad introdurre la macchina, vi sarebbe beneficio sociale ad adoperarla. Infatti, mentre la partita w’gv rappresenta salari pagati ossia valore di forze lavoro, la partita A’ + H’ rappresenta prezzo pagato sul mercato ossia valore corrispondente al lavoro totalmente pagato (lavoro necessario pagato ad operai e pluslavoro usufruito dall’altro capitalista produttore di macchine ecc.). Socialmente converrebbe la sostituzione perché nelle macchine e materie ausiliarie sono state investite assai meno giornate di lavoro delle w’g risparmiate, a parità di prodotto.

Vediamo ora che cosa accade del plusvalore. Ammesso anche che il capitalista introduca la macchina in puro pareggio di spese, il capitale variabile sarà disceso da wgv a (w – w’)gv.

Il saggio del plusvalore sarà dunque cresciuto da P/ wgv a P/( (w-w’)gv) per es.: se gli operai da 100 sono diventati 50, il saggio del plusvalore sarà raddoppiato.

Abbiamo quindi plusvalore relativo, ossia plusvalore aumentato (per ora solo nel saggio) senza prolungare la giornata di lavoro.

Può sembrare che ciò non interessi nulla al capitalista una volta che egli ha soltanto spostato parte dei suoi investimenti da capitale variabile a capitale costante senza che (per ora) crescesse il profitto. Ma ciò non è che apparenza, e a parte il completo confronto tra l’analisi marxista e il sistema di contabilità capitalistico riservato da Marx al Terzo Libro e che noi cercheremo più in là di ridurre a qualche formuletta, la somma di capitale costante A’ + H’ che il nostro capitalista, restando immutata la massa del plusvalore P, ha sostituito da una eguale spesa salario, è a sua volta prodotto di lavoro, che prima non veniva eseguito (prima cioè che occorressero le macchine ed il carbone). Su tale somma di prodotto altro capitale (altro come possessore, ma in realtà lo stesso che prima si investiva nel salario degli w’ operai) ha realizzato altro plusvalore, quindi il plusvalore totale è aumentato.

Consideriamo adesso che vi sia un largo beneficio nella sostituzione della spesa macchine e parte della spesa salari, come corrisponde in realtà al diffondersi del macchinismo. Il profitto P, se rimanesse lo stesso il prezzo dei prodotti venduti, salirebbe grandemente, e il saggio del plusvalore (profitto diviso spesa salari) crescerà per due motivi, per l’aumento del dividendo e per la diminuzione del divisore.

In realtà effetto del macchinismo, quando esso sia sufficientemente generalizzato, è di far produrre le merci a minor costo, ossia con minor somma di lavoro. Ed infatti, raggiunto l’equilibrio e ritornati nelle condizioni generali della nostra ipotesi l’indagine che sul mercato si paghi tutto al giusto valore generato da tempo di lavoro, i prodotti dell’azienda in esame scenderanno di prezzo in proporzione al minor lavoro che essi contengono. Dovranno scendere obbligatoriamente non certo perché tale fosse lo scopo del capitalista, ma perché la concorrenza ve lo obbligherà. Egli non avrà tuttavia a pentirsi dell’innovazione, ed ecco perché. Nel prodotto figurava del lavoro che ora è diminuito di w’g giornate lavorative. È vero che vi figurano le giornate lavorative contenute in A’ + H’, ma queste sono molto meno, a) per effetto del pluslavoro che figura in A’ + H’ ; b) perché abbiamo supposto questa inferiore a w’g. Adunque il prodotto si pagherà ad un prezzo inferiore; il diminuito costo di produzione farà ribassare il prezzo nel rapporto:

(A+H+M+A’ +H’+(w-w’)gv ) /(A+H+M+wgv) = nuovo costo di produzione / costo di produzione anteriore

Sembrerebbe dunque che il profitto anche nel secondo caso ridiscenda al valore P.

Ma se noi facciamo l’ipotesi di un equilibrio generale succeduto alla diffusione del macchinismo, abbiamo per conseguenza che gli stessi fenomeni considerati per il ramo d’azienda che ci occupa sono avvenuti in tutti gli altri con conseguente riduzione anche del prezzo non solo dei nuovi prodotti A’ (macchina) H’ (carbone) ma anche dei vecchi acquisti per A ed H e altresì nei mezzi di sussistenza e quindi nei salari v. Per effetto di tale compenso generale la discesa dei prezzi si farà senza diminuire il profitto e l’aumento ad esso apportato dal fatto dell’introduzione delle macchine. La massa di plusvalore resterà dunque accresciuta malgrado la diminuzione del prezzo dei prodotti, il saggio del plusvalore sarà anche aumentato e la produzione di plusvalore relativo avrà raggiunto il suo apice.

Tutto ciò senza ancora considerare gli effetti storico sociali del macchinismo, nell’aumento generale della massa dei consumi e in quello del numero dei lavoratori assorbiti dall’industria.

Effetti secondari della macchina, tutti concorrenti ad accrescere il plusvalore, sono: a) la possibilità di utilizzare il lavoro delle donne e dei ragazzi; b) la possibilità di prolungare la giornata di lavoro esigendo il lavoro stesso meno sforzi e meno attenzioni; c) la intensificazione del lavoro ossia l’aumentato suo rendimento a parità di forza di impegno dell’operaio, cosa che può anche compensare la forzata riduzione delle ore di lavoro giornaliere.

Note:

1. Poiché il plusvalore accumulato diviene nuovo capitale, ed il plusvalore sorge da capitale investito in lavoro, vi è un limite alla accumulazione dato dalla potenzialità di tutta la popolazione lavoratrice, che tende a salire col numero degli abitanti della terra, la parte di essa in cui è diffusa la ”civiltà” capitalistica, e la proporzione di proletari sui cittadini data dalla progressiva espropriazione delle classi medie.
   Ma non può sembrare che l’enorme massa dei capitali costanti, ossia capitali dati da impianti e da riserve di merci (prodotti), sia nel mondo moderno cresciuta in modo più imponente ancora della massa di giornate lavorative a disposizione? E ciò non contraddice alla costruzione marxista?
   Non vogliamo ora rispondere certo ad un tale quesito, dovendosi prima esporre ad intendere tutta la dottrina dell’accumulazione (sezione VII) e oltre ancora la dottrina della scuola marxista sull’imperialismo.
   Ma è interessante considerare come una soluzione ”conservatrice”, che cioè prolunghi i tempi del ciclo capitalistico, consiste nella ”distruzione” del capitale costante prodotto, ossia impianti e scorte, e nella riduzione di paesi già ricchi, e progrediti nel senso industriale a paesi disattrezzati, col devastarne gli impianti (fabbriche, ferrovie, navi, macchinari, costruzioni d’ogni genere, etc.).
   Così la ricostituzione di quell’enorme massa di capitale morto consente una ulteriore folle rincorsa all’investimento di capitale variabile ossia di vivente lavoro umano sfruttato.
   Le guerre attuano quell’eliminazione d’impianti e di scorte di merci mentre la distruzione di braccia lavorative non raggiunge la loro proporzione per l’incremento del prolifico animale uomo.
   Si campa poi nella civilissima ricostruzione (il più grande affare del secolo, per i borghesi: un aspetto ancora più criminale della barbarie capitalistica che non sia la stessa distruzione bellica, per noi allievi di Marx) sulla insaziata generazione di nuovo plusvalore. ↩︎
2. Abbiamo preferito alla parola italiana cooperazione, che poteva far equivocare con le organizzazioni cooperative di produzione – fenomeni più che secondari in mezzo alle innumerevoli aziende capitalistiche private – la parola collaborazione, sperando che non si equivochi ancora col significato della nota espressione di collaborazione di classe. ↩︎

La crisi economica inglese ha fatto pas­sare in secondo piano i dibattiti parla­mentari sulle nazionalizzazioni alle quali del resto gli oppositori del governo si son guardati  dall’attribuire la responsabilità del disordine economico abbattutosi  sul Paese, limitandosi perlopiù a consigliare di rallentarne il ritmo o di rinviare nuovi esperimenti in rapporto alla difficile situazione del bilancio dello Stato. Mette  tuttavia conto di completare l’analisi precedente­mente fatta (Prometeo n. 4) con alcune considerazioni sulle ultime misure nazio­nalizzatrici votate dal parlamento britan­nico, che riguardano l’industria dei tra­sporti e le imprese produttrici e distribu­trici di energia elettrica.

Le due leggi hanno di mira, più che il salvataggio di industrie pericolanti e la garanzia del profitto  capitalistico  degli azionisti “espropriati”, il coordinamento di due branche fondamentali dell’econo­mia britannica attraverso l’unificazione di servizi essenziali per il rendimento massi­mo della compagine industriale e commer­ciale. Non è perciò strano che la legge sulla nazionalizzazione delle imprese di trasporto per ferrovia, per strada e per vie d’acqua (navigazione interna e costiera), implicante l’assunzione da parte dello Sta­to di tutti i servizi relativi, si muova sulla linea di una tradizione inaugurata da un governo liberaI-conservatore che, già nel 1919, riconosceva il principio della statiz­zazione delle ferrovie e cominciava ad uni­ficare la frazionatissima rete in quattro grandi compagnie  a carattere nazionale. D’altro canto, fin dall’inizio della guerra, la rete era stata affittata dallo Stato al canone annuo fisso di 43,47 milioni di ster­line, cifra che, largamente coperta durante il conflitto dalle entrate, ha richiesto negli ultimi anni, nonostante il sensibile aumento delle tariffe, l’intervento del te­soro (le previsioni per il 1947 erano per un deficit di non meno 37 milioni di sterline corrispondenti allo scarto fra il canone di affitto e le entrate nette dell’esercizio, non calcolando tuttavia le forti somme richie­ste con carattere di urgenza dal necessa­rio rinnovamento di tutta l’attrezzatura delle linee ferroviarie di comunicazione). Lo scopo  a  cui  la  legge  tende  è  di risolvere l’intricato  problema  del coor­dinamento della rete dei trasporti in con­siderazione soprattutto del disordinato svi­luppo preso negli ultimi anni dalle impre­se ferroviarie e stradali, sviluppo che ha portato a continue interferenze e a dop­pioni antieconomici gonfiando i costi di esercizio di entrambi i rami. Nell’accanita lotta di concorrenza che ne è derivata, le ferrovie hanno avuto la peggio, e non sa­ranno certo gli azionisti delle compagnie private a dolersi di un’espropriazione che garantisce loro un utile fisso contro gli utili ormai aleatori delle rispettive imprese, mentre accolla allo Stato le spese di riatta­mento della rete: maggior resistenza han­no opposto al progetto gli interessi del ra­mo trasporti stradali; ma è comunque chia­ro che l’interesse “collettivo” del capita­lismo britannico consigliava una più or­ganica distribuzione del lavoro, un alleg­gerimento della macchinosa attrezzatura delle due branche con conseguente ridu­zione dei costi, una economia di personale e, per concludere, una razionale organiz­zazione di quel vitalissimo ramo dell’eco­nomia moderna, che sono i rapporti. Tale compito poteva essere assunto solo dallo Stato; e l’opposizione parlamentare si è li­mitata a chiedere a favore degli azionisti un trattamento più favorevole negli indennizzi o a patrocinare modificazioni tecniche del progetto. Quanto alla classe operaia, essa ne ricaverà al massimo il beneficio di una riduzione del personale dipendente delle aziende nazionalizzate.

Più generale, per non dire unanime, è stato l’accordo sulla nazionalizzazione del­le aziende produttrici e distributrici  di energia elettrica, tanto più che il principio della municipalizzazione era ormai entra­to nella pratica corrente, e alle autorità locali era già da tempo riconosciuto il di­ritto non soltanto di concedere ad impre­se private il rifornimento di energia elet­trica nelle rispettive zone, ma di riscattar­le. Questo sistema aveva tuttavia lo svan­taggio di frazionare all’estremo la distribu­zione dell’energia, con conseguenti difficoltà di coordinamento e sensibili diversità tariffarie da luogo a luogo. Già un governo conservatore aveva, nel ’26, provveduto a creare un  “Central Electric Board” ap­punto al fine di coordinare su scala na­zionale  l’approvvigionamento  dell’energia elettrica, di eliminare gradatamente le cen­trali non economiche e di concentrare le concessioni in poche grandi unità azien­dali ad attrezzatura tecnica moderna, mentre nel 1936 la commissione  MacGowan, pur mantenendo la gestione privata delle aziende,  non ne escludeva l’ulteriore statizzazione. L’attuale legge, che prevede l’indennizzo degli azionisti sulla base del corso medio delle azioni ed obbligazioni in un dato periodo d’anni (ed ’è stato su questo punto che le critiche dell’opposi­zione  si  sono particolarmente accanite), prevede l’organizzazione  regionale  della distribuzione sotto la responsabilità di 14 “Area Boards”  e il raggruppamento delle reti ad alta tensione e delle più importan­ti centrali elettriche sotto il controllo della governativa “British Electricity Authori­ty”. Particolare curioso, per un Paese che si vanta palladio delle libertà locali: men­tre per le aziende private è previsto l’in­dennizzo, per le imprese comunali lo Stato si assume soltanto gli obblighi inerenti a prestiti e l’ammortamento degli impianti. In altre parole, i capitalisti recupereranno in titoli di stato a reddito fisso il capitale investito: i comuni, le libere comunità po­polari, sorgente dell’autogoverno ecc., se lo vedranno soffiar via.

Un efficace commento alla legge sulla nazionalizzazione delle industrie elettriche e alla sua presentazione come esempio di “realizzazione socialista” è dato del resto proprio in questi giorni dall’approvazione nella  fascista  Argentina del progetto di legge che dispone, per cominciare nella provincia di Buenos Aires e in seguito su scala nazionale, la deprivatizzazione di tut­ti gli impianti, edifici, macchine ecc. delle compagnie elettriche e la limitazione delle concessioni, da parte dello Stato, ai soli comuni e alle cooperative agricole. Se l’applicazione di misure e dì controllo e coordi­nazione economica ci portassero fuori ed ol­tre il sistema capitalistico, perché non di­chiarare “socialista” anche il regime Pe­ron, che ha d’altronde dimostrato in tutti i campi la decisione d’intervenire radicalmen­te nell’economia (monopolio del commercio estero, pianificazione industriale ed agri­cola ecc.)? 

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Una curiosa “variante” è offerta dal progetto di riorganizzazione della marina mercantile francese. Esso prevede la sta­tizzazione delle compagnie di navigazione nelle quali lo Stato era già direttamente interessato o che sovvenzionava, i cui azio­nisti riceveranno un indennizzo sulla base del corso medio delle azioni fra il 1944 e il 1945, col diritto legalmente riconosciuto di investire gli attivi non statizzati o le in­dennità riscosse in società private di nuo­va fondazione. Altre compagnie non statiz­zate dovranno stipulare convenzioni con lo Stato per il trasferimento a questo di alcune navi da trasporto. mentre accordi fra armatori provvederanno a limitare o addirittura ad escludere la concorrenza e a facilitare un coordinamento dei servizi e del materiale.

 La legge, che sostanzialmente sottopone al controllo dello Stato la marina mercan­tile, apre tuttavia al settore libero ampie prospettive di sviluppo e salvaguardia l’i­niziativa degli armatori, che potranno svol­gere in questo campo una attività pre­ziosa Davvero lo Stato non poteva essere più fascisticamente paterno!

 Nel 1902, Karl Kautsky trovava fra il materiale inedito di Marx un abbozzo incompiuto di “introduzione”, datato 23 a­gosto 1857, ch’egli giudicò essere lo schema di “Einleitun” di cui Marx parla nella pre­messa alla “Critica dell’Economia Politica”. Il manoscritto, che tocca rapidamente i problemi trattati in quel libro e i rapporti fra forme economiche e sovrastrutture, si chiu­de bruscamente con la pagina sull’arte gre­ca che riproduciamo e che costituisce un documento curioso dello sforzo marxista di giustificare teoricamente il fenomeno arti­stico nel quadro dello sviluppo storico dei rapporti sociali.

Per quanto riguarda l’arte, è noto che alcuni suoi periodi d’oro mancano di qua­lunque rapporto con lo sviluppo generale della società e perciò anche con le basi materiali, l’ossatura, della sua organizzazio­ne. Per determinate forme d’arte (ed esem­pio l’epica) è altresì riconosciuto che non possono più essere prodotte nelle loro ma­nifestazioni classiche, non appena subentra la vera e propria produzione, che perciò, nell’ambito della stessa arte, certe realizza­zioni significative sono possibili soltanto in uno stadio non evoluto dello sviluppo sto­rico. Se questo è il caso per il rapporto tra diverse forme artistiche nell’ambito della stessa arte, non è certo strano che il mede­simo fatto si verifichi nei rapporti fra il regno dell’arte in generale e lo sviluppo complessivo della società. La difficoltà con­siste unicamente nella giustificazione razionale di questi contrasti, per chiarire i quali basta specificarli. 

Prendiamo ad esempio il rapporto fra l’arte greca e il mondo moderno, e fra questo e Shakespeare. E’ noto che la mitologia greca fu non soltanto l’arsenale ma l’humus dell’arte greca. Ora, la concezione della na­tura e dei rapporti sociali che sta alla ba­se della fantasia e perciò dell’arte ellenica, è conciliabile col selfacting e le ferrovie e le locomotive e il telegrafo? Dove va a finire Vulcano di fronte a Roberts e Co., Giove di fronte al parafulmine e Mercurio di fronte al Credit mobilier? Ogni mitolo­gia in quanto supera e padroneggia le for­ze naturali nell’immaginazione eattraverso l’immaginazione sparisce con l’effettivo do­minio su di esse. Che né è della Fama, accanto a Printinghousesquare? L’arte greca presuppone la mitologia greca, cioè la na­tura e le forme sociali già elaborate in for­ma inconsciamente artistica dalla fantasia popolare. E’ questa la sua materia, non una mitologia qualsiasi. né una qualsiasi rielabo­razione inconsciamente artistica della natura (includendo in questo tutto ciò che è obiet­tivo, e perciò anche la società). La mitologia egizia non poteva costituire l’humus, il grembo materno dell’arte greca. Ma, in ogni atteggiamento mitologizzante di fron­te ad essa, che esclude ogni rapporto mitico con la natura, esige perciò dall’artista una fantasia completamente aliena da residui mitologici.  

D’altra parte: E’ possibile Achille, con la polvere e il piombo? O l’Iliade con la stampa e la macchina tipografica? I canti e le saghe e la musa non sono forse destinati a sparire col torchio e, insieme ad esse, non scompaiono forse le condizioni necessarie dell’epica. 

Ma la difficoltà non è nel comprendere che l’arte e l’epica greca siano connesse a determinate forme dello sviluppo sociale. La difficoltà è (nel comprendere) come pos­sano conservare per noi gusto d’arte e, in un certo senso, valere come norma e inar­rivabile modello. 

Un uomo non può ritornare fanciullo se non rimbambendo. Ma ciò non toglie che l’ingenuità del fanciullo lo rallegri e ch’egli sia portato necessariamente a riprodurre la sua verità su un gradino più alto, giacché nella natura del fanciullo il suo carattere personale vive e continua a vivere nella sua verità naturale. Perché dunque l’infanzia sociale dell’umanità, nei momenti in cui è fiorita più splendida, non dovrebbe eserci­tare un fascino eterno, come qualcosa che non tornerà mai più? Ci sono fanciulli incolti e fanciulli saggi come vecchi. A que­ste due categorie appartengono molti popoli antichi. I greci erano fanciulli normali. Il fascino della loro arte su di noi non è in contrasto con lo stadio non evoluto del loro sviluppo sociale, ne è anzi l’effetto, di­pende cioè strettamente dal fatto che i rap­porti sociali immaturi, nei quali nacque e soltanto poteva nascere, non si riprodurran­no mai più…