The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of Russia

DAY THREE : Afternoon

Questions of Principle

We are about to broach the great questions of living history: the world politics of states, peace and war.

Khrushchev, echoed by all the others, said he had to settle, in the 20th Congress, «some questions of principle». It is already a lot that there are still questions of principle: for so many years now, the slogan entrenched in the entire monstrous apparatus with its summit in the Kremlin has been: «Enough of bringing questions of theory among the masses!» Among the masses one brings only passing situations, «concrete» problems, and one has the right, when it is useful to the success of the moment, to mobilise «principles», perhaps from Marx, Engels and Lenin, but equally from Robespierre or Christ, from… Cavour and Garibaldi or from the Pope; the only condition is that such expedients find quota and vogue in the trend of Opinions, in popular favour… 

Those questions of principle have been ostentatiously placed on a new plane compared to the previous period, to the 19th Congress, to Stalin; and this might even be admitted in part. What we are instead dismantling here is that the «new course» (a formula, by experimental law, that is suspect one hundred times out of a hundred) is in the direction of the principles that were historically followed by Marx, Lenin, Bolshevism, the Communist International. 

This new course merely tears up some last charters, of principles that «under Stalin» had not yet been decided to repudiate: here is our clear evaluation of the 20th congress.

We believe we have given this evidence about Khrushchev’s third question: The forms of transition of the various countries to socialism. Not a page of Marxism-Leninism has been saved here. Even if it was not dared to say (the 21st Congress will say so) that the violent and dictatorial form of transition is now «forbidden», it has certainly been established that that «through democracy» is the rule in all States today, with which Moscow has an open diplomatic debate. 

The corollary to this step was then given with the unbridled abjuration – declaration of the liquidation of the Cominform. When Lenin’s historic work against the shameful adherence to the «democratic» wars of 1914 was destroyed by embracing the social-patriotic policy for the 1942 war, the Communist International, which he founded, was liquidated. Today, the entire work of the «split» in the early post-war period between social democracy and world communism is likewise repudiated, and they miss and regret the unity which represented the worst of the Second International, that of class collaboration on a world scale. Indeed, it also points to «the task of overcoming the split in the workers’ movement and strengthening the unity of the working class in order to make the struggle for peace and socialism successful» as a consequence of «the changes that have taken place in the international situation». But this new goal is not – as it would appear on the surface – a party of the working class alone, but is the submergence of this into a much broader front of the pacifist middle classes, nationally and socially. Subjection of the communist movement to a front of the popular classes is, we repeat, a historical formula that can only have one content: subjection of the whole of society to high capitalism. 

Let it be understood: it may well be argued by some, by any one, that the «changes in the world historical situation» between 1919 and 1956 lead to conclusions and perspectives opposite to those that determined and directed the international communist struggle then.

We do not extend ourselves, now and here, to show that instead, as we firmly believe, only drastic confirmations can be drawn. 

But in the meantime let us demonstrate the absence of a right to existence – which in a given future will be demonstrated not with words but with acts of force – of those who wish to link the aforementioned changes in the situation to this new direction, and do not at the same time declare bankrupt and fallen, not for forty years but for ever, the historical construction to which Marx and Lenin are linked. 

Coexistence without War 

There remain, apart from that of the transition, two other great questions, which Khrushchev heads: «The peaceful coexistence of the two systems» and «The possibility of avoiding wars in the present epoch». It is necessary to see if there has been anything new on these points, and in what sense. What there was that was new, we will quickly say: in addition to repudiating Marx and Lenin, even Stalin was repudiated. 

We have reported the position of the congress regarding the «non-interference» of the Soviet state in the «internal political affairs» of other countries; and thus the non-interference of the party, sitting in congress in Moscow; and the strange pretence that state, party and congress continue to foresee that socialism will replace capitalism in all those countries, and to desire it, «with clean hands». Unfortunately, this insanely defeatist attitude continues to find credence among the working masses of the world, as all bourgeois opinion and propaganda accredits it, artfully continuing to confuse their real terror of communism with the campaign of agitation against Moscow policy. The end of this is still a long way off: what is needed for a clarification of relations is not more congresses like this one, but new, original and different alignments of imperialism’s interests and fronts of conflict; as, among many examples, emerges from the recent words of the semi-crippled president of America.

Here we must point to the historical unfolding of this question of coexistence, or even cohabitation (no one is so blind as to claim that the two groups of states can go on «ignoring each other»).

And in fact the coexistence designed today does not only mean: abstention from class and state war, international peace, revolutionary and even partisan disarmament, it clearly means: economic, social, political collaboration.

Historically, this question stems from another one that is hushed up today, that is pretended to be peaceful: whereas it is the only, true one that we place on the table, in a circle of silence, but waiting for it to be loudly, clamorously disputed on both sides in a few more three years periods. It is the question of socialism in one country.

Indeed, before taking a position on the curious question: must a country with a socialist system and one with a capitalist system necessarily wage war against each other? one must ask oneself whether such a historical situation can be determined, and whether it has already been determined today.

Of this great question we see three stages: 1926, at the December Enlarged Executive of the Moscow International (Seventh Session) – 1939, at the 18th congress of the Russian Communist Party, on the eve of the Second War – 1952, at the 19th congress, and before Stalin’s death.

The Turning Point of 1926 

That first discussion reflected a decisive moment. The great organisation that solidly held the state in Russia abandoned the effort to provoke the world proletarian revolution and set itself two tasks: its own internal and external defence with armed force – a direction of the social economy, which the proponents of the winning thesis called «building socialism».

Two theses were right then, and history has confirmed them: the revolution in the capitalist countries was «postponed» – the armed assault on Russia was possible, and likely.

Stalin’s thesis, and Bucharin’s too at the time, was that (even if this situation was prolonged for a long time: passive international proletariat, active capitalist states) it was possible in Russia, by retaining power, to implement the transformation of the economy into a «socialist system».

Particularly vigorous was the counter-demonstration of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, which we repeat is still worthy of careful study today. They incontrovertibly clarified Marx’s and Lenin’s doctrine on those points: we insist on recalling it. 

1. Capitalism appears and develops in the world at unequal times and in unequal rhythms.
2. The same applies to the formation of the proletarian class and its political and revolutionary strength.
3. The seizure of political power by the proletariat can take place not only in a single country but also in one that is less developed than others that remain in capitalist power.
4. The presence in the world of countries where proletarian political revolution has already taken place accelerates the revolutionary struggle in all others to the maximum.
5. In the ascendant phase of this revolutionary struggle it is possible for the armed forces of proletarian states to intervene in defence and offence.
6. Where civil and state wars stop, a single country can only take the steps permitted by the economic development that has been achieved in it «in the direction» of socialism.
7. If it were one of the large advanced countries, before its full socialist economic transformation, which in doctrine is not impossible, general civil and state war would take place.
8. If it were, as in the case of Russia, a country just emerging from feudalism, it would, with proletarian political victory, be able to take no other steps than the realisation of the «foundations» of socialism, i.e. a gradual strong industrialisation; and it would define its programme as waiting and working for foreign political revolution, and as an economic construction of state capitalism on a mercantile basis.
Without world revolution, socialism in Russia was then, and is, impossible. 

We have deliberately summarised the position in a raw way. The most remarkable thing in that 1926 was the proof that no one had been of any other opinion until 1924; the false interpretation of one or two passages of Lenin’s (see our series on Russia and the Revolution, Part One) was foiled, and it was shown that Stalin and Bucharin themselves had always spoken and written along those lines. 

For the purposes of the development we now follow, we won’t return to the economic part. Today it is much easier than then to prove that Russian society is capitalist. It will only be a little longer to hear it confessed.

While today Khrushchev speaks of a «Leninist» theory of peaceful coexistence, not only do we establish that the theory of building socialism in Russia alone was never a Leninist theory, but that the theory of pacifism between the two systems, as of 1926, was not even a Stalinist, or Bucharinian, theory. 

In the weak speeches of the cold Stalin and the warm Bucharin, this can be seen beyond doubt. Just one passage from Bucharin: «The perpetual existence of proletarian organisations and capitalist states is a utopia. Such simultaneous existence is a temporary phenomenon. Therefore, forcibly, in our perspective we envisage an armed struggle between the capitalists and us. I categorically declare that the final victory of socialism is the victory of the world revolution, at least the victory of the proletariat in all the decisive centres of capitalism» This was in 1926; today we are frolicking with the «non-decisive», the negligible capitalist Uncle Sam!

These words of Bucharin’s were Marxist. He was only too ardent, when he did not want to wait any longer to see socialism implemented in immense Russia, and by such total power. He then redeemed with his very life the right to be called a great, true revolutionary communist.

Even Stalin has something to thank for, if it is true that they let him die. We shall soon see.

Eve Flames 

On 10 May 1939, Stalin delivered his report in Moscow to the 18th Russian Party Congress. In the struggle between 1926 and 1939 in Russia the proponents of socialism had bloodily won. Not only Zinoviev and Kamenev but Bucharin himself had been killed, Trotsky a refugee had little left to live. In his style of rhetorical repetition, their enemy, not a dull-witted man but a stubborn one, who missed a great opportunity to prove that stubbornness is a revolutionary quality, is sure that they will never again speak from their closed or still open graves: «the purge of the handful of spies, murderers and saboteurs of the kind of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Jakir, Tucacewsky, Rosengolz, Bucharin and other monsters, who crawled before the enemy… ». But what does Stalin think, then, about coexistence and war? Well, in Stalin’s speech, war is certain, close, inevitable. 

It is insisted by the handful of cowardly flatterers of the time, intent today on the demolition of Stalin’s character, that he would not have seen the German offensive of 1942 within hours. Was then that of 1939 a confident Russian-German embrace, and was the low blow to his friend really only German? These hirelings reduce the historical dialectic to a stinking rag. Such immense forces are not mobilized by moves plotted in the shadows one night before! We must make reference to the document in which Stalin demonstrates, six months before Hitler’s invasion of Poland, a confident vision. It is very strange the impudent levity with which today, precisely those who have built their political conduct of the entire war and post-war period on such a perspective, disqualify him! 

Stalin describes the game of world imperialism as surely directed towards the outbreak of war. His words are explicit: «The new imperialist war has become a fact». The capitalist states, however, fear it because «it can lead to the victory of the revolution in one or more countries». Stalin still refers to Lenin’s doctrine of imperialism. 

What is strange, however, and deserving of criticism from us Marxists, not from the unprincipled who then surrounded him, is that Stalin implants in full the distinction between «aggressor states» and «democratic states» on which the defeatist policy of Antifascism and Liberation would later be built. 

For him, «the aggressor states, Germany, Italy and Japan» disguise their intention to attack the «democratic states, England, France, America» with their famous «Anti-Comintern pact». He even whips the (Munich) compliancy before Hitler’s bullying! He then stigmatises, after vaguely saying that Russia is for peace, the pilatesque policy of «non-intervention» in war. As for Russia, it prepares its weapons: «No one believes any more the mellifluous talk that the Munich concessions to the aggressors would usher in a new era of appeasement»; in any case: «we do not fear the threats of aggressors and are ready to respond with a double blow to those war-mongers who try to violate our borders».

We are Marxistically far removed from the «theory of aggression» and the distinction between warrior countries and demo-peaceful countries, which completely obscures Marx and Lenin’s true doctrine of war, the child of bourgeois relations of production, which has no need to be «wanted» by criminals. 

But we cannot remain silent that today’s language on peaceful coexistence and the avoidance of war is far more degenerate and nauseating than that held on the eve of the Second World War.

If the alternative of alliance first with the aggressors and then with the peaceful is one more masterpiece of the abolition of principles, this does not detract from the fact that today’s way of recounting the drama from Danzig to Stalingrad is even more smoky and suspicious, it being definite for us that it was treason to shake the armed hand of Hitler as well as Churchill and Roosevelt, the same genuflection of a power that had already become capitalist to the imperatives of imperialism, the same obedience to the superior forces of determinism, to which international politics is subject, entrusted, according to the gullible and charlatans, to the fragile, shaky hands of the «Big Few».

Stalin’s Will 

The biography of this character does not move us any more than that of any other far or near, friend or foe. We use it as a historical road map because it clears the field of the new lie, in no way less unworthy than the one that turned our great Brothers exterminated in the Russian purges into ”monsters”: the lie that in all this more than vain shaking off of responsibility linked to the name of Stalin, we can draw a healthy return to the grandiose times when the Marx-Lenin line was raised up indefectibly, to the boundless terror of the capitalist world.

In Stalin’s writing on ”Economic Problems” we noted how the thesis of imperialist war, which can only be ended by the destruction of capitalism, although enunciated with visible contradictory concessions to coexistence and pacifism, which had been already affirmed at the time, still seemed to be held up. 

Today we see that writ condemned, but why in essence? Not because the character of the already achieved socialism of the Soviet economy is questioned in the slightest, or the thesis of the validity of market laws in the midst of socialism is denounced as insane and false. We have seen that only Stalin’s claim that an increase in western capitalist production was already ruled out is condemned. Today we see that another point is condemned: the outcome of imperialism and the crisis in the third war.

Waiting for an economic and political catastrophe in the bourgeois world, and then not seeing it coming, is a felix culpa for revolutionaries.

So many times crisis and catastrophe have failed Marx and Engels. And so many times did the outcome of the predicted international wars. 

In 1926 the first concert of insults to future monsters tended to suffocate them under the infamy of pessimism, and as theorists of the stabilisation of capitalism. For this is a Trotsky laughably mocked even by a Togliatti.

In the speech before mentioned Stalin deduces the war of September 1939 from a visible crisis in world production, which, after the 1929-1932 crisis, which had been followed by a robust recovery, became clear in 1937; a year in which production in Russia alone did not decline. 

Stalin’s last mistake in 1952, of waiting for a western depression, while it was followed by the unpredictable ’boom’ to which the K.B.s are unctuously genuflecting around the world, is perhaps the least of all his shames. Unfortunately, this shows that the pupils have far outstripped the master.

So if the accumulation curve had bent downwards, would the transition have been from cold war to open conflict? But this would perhaps have given rise to the hope that history would finally have seen the defeat of either England or America, or both of these powers, which have always been winning for two centuries and crippling the future of humanity. 

The curve has now turned upwards; and it has not only done so in Russia, as Stalin’s figures showed at the time in the transition between the 1937 and 1938 indices. Hence the filthy pacifist and tearful idyll, to which, with ten times more horrific blasphemies of Marxism-Leninism, the General Staff of the 20th Congress devoted itself.

We again quote Stalin’s phrases that we quoted in the «Dialogue» with him. «To eliminate the inevitability of wars, it is necessary to destroy imperialism». This drastic conclusion of Stalin’s closes a resolute refutation of «some comrades who claim that due to the development of new international conditions after the Second World War, wars between capitalist countries have ceased to be inevitable». Stalin not only opposes this Khrushchev-like thesis, but also the other, that «the contrasts between the camp of socialism and the camp of capitalism are stronger than the contrasts between capitalist countries».

And here is the position for which the 20th congress detaches Josif’s embalmed head from the cold corpse, and brings it on a golden platter today to London and tomorrow, no doubt, when the presidential election is foregone, to New York.

«Hence the inevitability of wars between capitalist countries continues to exist. It is said that Lenin’s thesis that imperialism inevitably generates wars must be considered outdated, because at present powerful popular forces, acting in defence of peace, have developed against a new world war. This is not true».

This was not true, and is not true. This: what Khrushchev says: «Wars are no longer fatally inevitable because today… partisans of peace exist». And these, and similar things, did not yet exist when «a» Marxist Leninist thesis was developed that wars are inevitable as long as imperialism exists.

One, you scoundrels? The thesis; removed from which Marxism and Leninism would fall into nothingness.

Viva Stalin, then? 

In the Dialogue with Stalin we showed the serious weaknesses in Stalin’s presentation. He still did not believe it possible to throw overboard what is, as we said, THE thesis of Lenin, not A thesis of Lenin. He did, however, want to explain why «coexistence», which had already been invented, had been made possible for several years. Meanwhile he wanted to throw out Bucharin’s thesis, and his own, about the inevitable war between the two systems. He therefore set out to declare war BETWEEN the capitalist states more probable. He recalls not without consistency his position of 1939: why, he says, did the capitalist states attack each other before they attacked us? He shows that he still possesses some light of that dialectic, for which the 20th congress was lined with absolute blindness: it is an unceasing descent into darkness, it is the evening, the night that looms over the great historic days of October. It is Stalin’s tired eye that records the last rays. For him, the states of the West helped the reorganisation of Germanic capitalism after the catastrophe of 1918, in order to launch it against the Russian revolution, he says. And yet, even falling into the rhetorical classification of 1939 between peacemongers and aggressors, in 1952 he explains the irresistible motive of the German uprising with the economic motive of the lack of markets and outlets, à la Lenin, and not with the historical criminology of imbeciles.

The softness in theory of this iron-acting man was already marked by Trotsky’s not surmountable pen. 

In fact, Stalin’s unsteady construction already contained all the data of the further descent down the counter-revolutionary ladder, which at the 20th Congress consummated in pretended disgrace to him; and we could clearly indicate four years ago how. He must rid himself of any remnants of the naive Bucharinian tendency towards a revolutionary holy war. He maintains the inevitable derivation of war from imperialism, and points to this as the enemy. But he prepares for the total misrepresentation of the Leninist «theory of defeatism» by saying, after minimising the effects of the «peace movement» to a kind of hesitation and postponement, that «this differs from the movement which took place during the First World War to transform imperialist war into civil war, because that went further and pursued socialist aims». 

The thesis remained in half shadow and half light. Marx’s thesis against the bourgeois democrats of «peace and freedom» in 1848 was the same as Lenin’s against the warmongering socialists in 1914. We deny that there is a PEACE objective distinct from SOCIALISM, from the emancipation of the working class. We better expect Revolution from War, than Peace from Capitalism. We know no other way to «bury the war» than the killing of the bourgeois system.

Stalin already decouples a movement for peace from action for socialism, and says that possible, but not irrevocably, before this. Khrushchev and his people have plunged to the bottom of the abyss, they want Peace without Socialism. An idiotic demand, and at the same time impossible! 

All entanglement and imbroglio are immediately, yesterday and today, disveiled by our position. Russia is as capitalist as the other states of the West, and war will also come between it and other states. Stalin saw it coming and preferred not to be the first to shoot, he hoped to wait, with the people’s movement, for it to go the same way as in 1939. He therefore assured the bourgeois states that the clashes between them were more pressing than between the systems: he wished them internal crisis and external war. Last illusion. Those of today no longer believe in crisis within capitalism and between capitalisms: they have lost the last glimmers to which Stalin found it useful to refer. They offer desistance from any disturbance, they elevate as an eternal rule the avoidability of war catastrophe by popular will and conscience, by world persuasion, they cynically liquidate the last blush to which the very hard grit of a Joseph Stalin was still sensitive.

Greatness and smallness of men, hardness and sensitivity of souls, have nothing to do with it. Stalin was in fact wrong, and he did not see that the third war was still a long way off; he manoeuvred as if it were closer. In equal measure he and his followers and successors do not believe in the Revolution, that it can stop it anywhere, and live by the day in the infamous and cocksure long bourgeois peace, which lies ahead for perhaps twenty years.

Competition and Emulation 

Trotsky’s powerful prophetic speech in 1926 was on such a high plane that he was cut off. Perhaps later he did not adequately complete, however wonderfully he wrote, that construction. He insisted on other aspects of the Russian drama: the greed of the state and party bureaucracy, the ferocity of Stalin: compared to the themes he had touched on, small things.

Today, the wretched Khrushchev, in order to disengage himself from the conditions to which «one» Lenin’s thesis is bound, gives up the last lights of Marxism that ever reached him, and asserts that in 1914 economic factors were at play, in 1956 other factors, moral and of will, would also be at play. «War is not an exclusively economic phenomenon». «In the question of whether there should or should not be a war (what kind of question is this?), class relations, political forces, the degree of organisation and the conscious will of men are of great importance».

Into what appalling mess have we fallen, to return from Stalin to Marx! Stalin advanced to the bookshop with a flamethrower, but in that light some page flap could still be read; the various Khrushchevs burst in like bulls whose eyes had been blindfolded after they had turned out all the lights to cover the risk that they had learned to read.

Are we Marxists, by any chance, and after that we have lined up «economic factors» on one side, on the other, in suggestive order, class relations, political and organisational forces, conscience, will?! And initiating between these adversaries an «emulative contest» we hear a «to you gentlemen» being launched, while Marshal Bulganin, with the most photogenic smile, holds the bar?!

Trotsky brought up the subject, as poor a fool as we were, on the «economic factors» of the moment. He was great. You can do nothing more, he said, than to develop the transition from our pre-capitalist society to mercantilism, than to move closer to the capitalist model. The more steps you take to reach it, the more irresistible will be its influences on you. It is not only by war that it can subjugate you. Either we will snuff it out in its western hideouts, or it will be here to deal with us. Neither militarily nor economically can the two developments run without intersecting. Casting a giant’s glance at the historical doctrine in the background of the future, Trotsky replied to some idiot’s interruption: most of all I believe in the world revolution, but if we look things in the face, we can wait even fifty years. The condition is that in all that time we will not have separated the realisation of the socialist economy in Russia from the overthrow of the capitalist social form in the West.

Internationalism, Trotsky taught at the time in the words of the intangible doctrine, is imposed on the internationality of trade which the capitalist form has everywhere introduced, and into the vortex of which we shall be led. Nothing will be worth the illusion of staying out of its influences. When they put the gag on him he could not defend himself. He came down from the tribune for the last time and said: the International will discuss again… Him dead, we are still given today to follow the «dialogue» with which his luminous mind refuted the Khrushchevs, ahead of his time.

Markets and Trade 

Coexistence means «non-war», but it cannot mean non-contact, non-exchange. Trotsky warned this well. History confirms this.

At the time of Stalin the formula was that of the double world market, which we, in proving it false, rectified in the alleged existence of two semi-world markets. Stalin’s perspective was as naive as it was audacious. Cut off half the world from the capitalism of the West, it drowns itself in its own overproduction, tears itself apart with wars of quadruple venom, and we remain, we pass. But who us? The other half-capitalism, only more vital than the first?

Today, the illusory theory of two watertight compartment-markets is resolutely thrown out: the socialist fatherland not only lowers its veil, it decisively unbuckles its belt. With Stalin it buries the last threats of drawing a deadly iron from under its skirts.

Here we need to hear from the economist on duty, Mikoyan. «We are firmly convinced that a stable coexistence is inconceivable without trade (italics of the text in «Rinascita», February 1956), which can be the basis of this coexistence even after the formation of two world markets. The existence of two world markets – the socialist and the capitalist – not only does not exclude, but on the contrary presupposes mutually beneficial trade between all countries. The exact interpretation of this problem has value in principle, from the aspect of coexistence between the two worlds, but it also has practical, economic importance».

Avoiding italics and exclamations of our own on the extremely abandoned, unconscious formulation, as of one who runs safe on very thin sheets of ice, we quote again: «we believe that our trade with capitalist countries is advantageous for both sides… This is imposed by the very necessity of the social division of labour… by the fact that it is not equally advantageous to produce all kinds of goods in all countries… ».

Has Mikoyan ever doubted, will he ever doubt one in a thousand of those who read «Rinascita», that in the socialist system, apart from the old fact that there is no trade, no market, there must be overcome, if not the technical division of labour in manufacturing, certainly the division, as much professional and corporate as regional and national, of labour in society? That all these formulae are nailed to the capitalist type of production relations, and supremely that «production must be advantageous»? Advantage and capital profit are terms, which say the same thing.

At the time we made this criticism of Stalin’s still cautious view of trade, of the comparison of the two systems, and we also reminded how the bourgeois economists of the liberal school adhered to this confluence of the two productions on the same outlets and accepted that the winner would be the one of the two who had made the most profit. But then who doubts that the argument that in Russia «the exploiters have been annihilated» and «there are no longer any bourgeoisie» loses any value, once it is admitted that, through international channels, profits from capital, anonymous and all the more greedy for it, freely cross every frontier?

Exchange of Capital 

This spate of frightening admissions about the ever-widening relations between the alleged two economies, the alleged two systems, show how the manoeuvre of «coexistence» and «emulation» can be read all in its economic content, and that the boastfulness of prevailing with the pressure of «popular» opinions, spread in the «consciousness» of the world’s masses, and similar homilies, do not change anything at all. In the end of all this colourful «interference fringe», which one wants to see established on the boundary between two opposing and heterogeneous systems, only one conclusion is possible, if one looks inside them. This embrace to which the persuasion of peoples would like to lead, as the usual alternative to violent conflict, is purely an embrace between homosexual natures, between identical systems. It is but a stage in the dumb claim of world trade liberalisation, cherished by all «economic operators». Even these days in America, business circles are calling for the lifting of import bans on foreign products; if we want, they say, the Japanese, for example, to buy raw cotton from us, we must allow them to «earn dollars» by selling their cheap cotton products here. Make profit in two, formula of the 20th Congress, and Mikoyan, formula in which those who barely understand Marx can read all of capitalism.

Having dropped these things into the mouths of the various Nenni, here they are firing blanks: the «capital market» must also be established with Russia. It must therefore be allowed to export «socialist» capital from Russia and then import … capitalist capital. This, too, is put on Mikoyan’s conscience, and it makes it seem true that K. and B. offer between cups of tea to Elizabeth two billion dollars in gold, albeit on account of the purchase of goods. 

Of course, when these gigantic exports of finance capital are implemented, people will continue to say that this is no longer the phenomenon characteristic of the most sadistic imperialism, the one described by Lenin: yes; yes; then it was the time of vulgar, crude economic factors: today it’s a different matter, there are moral values, the drive to emulate each other to mutual advantage; and the general consciousness of these gentle and graceful times no longer allows the manoeuvres of the past to screw each other across borders: war is avoidable.

A world that is a mere network of Stock Exchange and Capital Exchange is evidently as absurd to say socialist as it is semi-socialist. But it is even more illusory to envisage it as a world in which what Lenin ruled out is possible: preventing the outbreak of a third general war only in order to secure peace, and keeping capitalism alive.

In 1947, therefore, the US would have had a monopoly of the capital market, and today it would have lost it (along with that of nuclear weapons; and this is said by the American Lippman). So it is increasingly difficult for the US to demand both military and political agreements in return for economic aid.

Well then, we are in the midst of an idyll. In fact, it is so easy for Russia to demand, in return for as much as two billion dollars, barely a smile from Her Gracious Britannic Majesty!

Yes, War is Avoidable

We are, it is quite clear, for the full validity, even today, of Lenin’s doctrine on war, which is none other than Marx’s doctrine enunciated at its historical birth, after the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune, with which the revolutionary wars of liberal settlement had ended: all national armies are now confederated against the Proletariat!

Since 1848, Marx had annihilated any pacifist-humanist ideology that envisaged the end of wars through «general persuasion» of their futility. From 1848 to 1871 a series of wars were still useful, for the same bourgeois radicalism of the Mazzini, Blanc, Kossuth and the like, who did not understand this. The war between nations would not end with Universal Peace, but with supernational class revolution.

The Marxists of the Second International themselves, as Lenin challenged them for a decade, had sincerely believed that war could be prevented by the world proletariat. However, even in that idyllic and evolutionary period, when socialist votes were amassing in the world’s parliaments, not even the most outspoken reformists thought of stopping the war with «moral» and persuasive forces. For them, preventing the war meant preventing, with the general national strike to the bitter end, the general mobilisation on all sides of the borders, taking power into their own hands, in order to establish socialism in united Europe.

When Lenin established that the imperialist stage of capitalism leads to war, he did not yet believe in a successive series of world wars, but waited for the proletariat, at least in Europe, to rise up and stop the first one. His formula was «transform imperialist war into civil war». But the formula was alternating: either the war of the nations begins and develops, or civil war breaks out in each, the bourgeoisies are overthrown, and the war does not «click».

The great Leninist opportunity was lost in 1914 because all or most of the workers’ parties not only did not block the shipyards, the railways and the army corps, but marched with the national war. The Russian revolution arose from the combination of two singular conditions; the survival of a feudal regime and the series of military defeats. The cycle that should have developed into too few years was missing: i.e., condemnation and defeat of the social-traitor parties, recovery of the proletariat in the countries of Europe, overthrow of the imperial bourgeoisies, victorious or vanquished. And the Russian revolution was alone.

The start of the Second World War was met by no resistance of the working classes, and no revolution followed: on the road of the imperialist monsters the proletarian parties weren’t present: those communist parties born after 1914 in the twenty years between the two wars were totally denatured, and their greatest battle lost was that received by Stalin’s repressions.

Today those who still uphold Lenin’s thesis say that, once the imperialist-type conditions have been reconstituted even in the defeated countries, after a certain cycle the war will arise, with only one alternative (totally impractical if it occurred today): that the proletarian revolution can nip it in the bud.

The revolution would be born from the third war if before its outbreak, which everything suggests is still a long way off, the class movement had been resurrected.

The first condition for this arduous result is the questioning of the alleged socialist character of present-day Russia.

To the thesis of the 20th Congress on the present-day avoidability of war, we answer not that it is inevitable in an absolute sense, but that it cannot be avoided by a vaguely ideological movement of proletarians and poor and middle classes, over which it would pass like a whirlwind without finding resistance. General war is therefore historically avoidable, but only on the condition that it is opposed by a movement of the pure wage-earning class, and that this awaits it not to replace it with peace but to bring down, with it newly born, the old, infamous capitalism.

Squalid Utopianism 

The historical goal of stable peace in a capitalist world – and worse would be to say in a half-capitalist, half-socialist world! – together with the other of the 20th congress of «choice» between capitalism and socialism on the basis of an emulative confrontation, judged by the general conscience of men, is worth, in conclusion, having gone backwards from Lenin by a long way, beyond that by which Stalin had gone backwards, who when he died still gave hope to the bewildered, and more than ever defective in conscience and will, workers of the world, that in a coming conflagration the Red Army would attempt to spread beyond the capitalist frontiers, to persuade them with the language of cannon and bombs: a last remnant of Marxism, though already obscured by the degeneration of economic theories, remained in this vain hope of the workers, who murmured the vain phrase: yet Moustache/Baffone will come!

The degringolade from the 19th to the 20th congress ruins beyond Lenin and beyond Marx, to a conception of the historical struggle which, taking as its pretext the revelations of the new times, and the «creations» dictated by new situations, lies at the height of times more distant than the «Manifesto» itself, and is lost in the mists of Utopia.

The idea that the world is decided by comparing two models of economic societies, testing, with these artificial «scale models» of living humanity, where there is greater material well-being with all its ins and outs, and then opting for one of the two proposed forms, can only be likened to the first stirrings of utopian socialism, with the enormous difference to its advantage that in its time it boldly anticipated historical claims of tomorrow, whereas today it would be the result of a fabulous backtracking and recoil.

Marx and Engels indeed wrote about the utopians without any contempt, and for some of them like Saint Simon, Fourier, Owen, with true admiration.

But their entire theoretical construction, on which the European socialism of the late 19th century, and the Russian communism of Plekhanov and Lenin, was formed, had two cornerstones: the critique of socialist utopianism – and the critique of bourgeois democracy, of democracy, as Lenin puts it, in general.

They were two paths of the emulative and persuasive type. The old utopians like Cabet thought that everyone would become a socialist through visits to the Icarias, to the Phalansteries; the dreamers of the 18th century Enlightenment intoxication swore that egalitarian justice and social freedom would be adopted by the legal consultations of the sovereign people, deriving as a corollary of peaceful civilisation from the glorious revolution that the bourgeois class had conducted, in the name of those principles.

These are two great constructions of history, but the socialists of past generations have passed over their noble ruins to arrive at the scientific determinism of Marx, and claim, alongside Lenin, his theory of the new Revolution and Dictatorship.

Dictatorship – or persuasion. Aut-aut. One dictates to whom there is neither time nor way to reach by consensus. And the more capitalism incarnates itself in history, the more its end is only possible by force.

Reason, in its then truly vivid and seductive forms, led it by the hand. When the bourgeoisie was raising its altars to it, already the glorious precursors of the Conspiracy of the Equals dared to set Force against it.

This other scorn is there today in the proclamations of the Russian congress, under the latest lies of a return to Lenin and Marx. Not only the transition to communism through democracy, but even through utopia.

At the 20th congress they also shredded the «Manifesto» of 1848. In its pages on the socialist and communist «literature» of other doctrines, it forever marked the departure from the utopianism of the modern workers’ struggle. We cannot quote the theoretical texts of Marx and Engels on this point. A few sentences suffice, in which the naive fallacy of the utopians is depicted:

«It is enough, according to them, to understand their system in order to recognise that it is the best possible ordering of the best possible society».

«They therefore disapprove of all political, i.e. revolutionary, activity, they want to achieve the goal by peaceful means, and therefore seek by small and therefore inane experiments (let us grant that the Russian one is a large scale experiment … of building capitalism), by the power of example to open the way for the new social gospel».

Every now and then we catch these «forerunners» red-handed, who, in order to endorse betrayal and abjuration, claim that brand new events have creatively forged previously ignored forms of historical transitions, deducing from changes in situations the revision of formulas that they claim are outdated. They invariably end up with the same end, convinced of shameful passivism, of the most mouldy fogyism. With your results that have so excited the devotees of the latest novelties, go therefore, gentlemen of the 20th congress, at least one hundred and twenty years backwards, and let us hang on the infamous column of retrogressive, fallacious and hostile ideologies your present-day expedients; coexistence, emulation, competition; blocking, in homosexuality, of fertile and living history.

Birth of the Counter-October

Of all the anti-Stalinism presented to the world, only the points we have already discussed at the beginning of these days remain dubiously standing: the «cult of personality» and the «manipulation of history». On everything else, they have only gone in the direction in which Stalin sank, and further below him, but even on those two points the rectification is by no means in the direction of orthodoxy, and one must talk about them again before closing the epicedium on the buried in the same swamp.

It is stated that Stalin lied when he described the Trotskyist «monsters» as agents of foreign espionage. So they were not. And what were they then? Rehabilitation is remedy for personal, individual cases of moral, criminal judgement, but never correction of critical, historical judgement.

Stalin, according to today’s Soviet journals («Unità» of 15 April 1956) would have done wrong not by lying (indeed it is not theorisable that in certain contingencies the revolutionary is not led to have to lie), but by making, with those atrocious slanders, less clear the «battle of ideas» that was waged against «Trotskyism».

Here again Stalin is a more consequential Marxist than his correctors of today! What does ideological struggle mean? For the Marxist, there can be no ideological struggle without political struggle, and without this arising from the interplay of class forces. Thus the great extermination, not of a few monsters, but of a large stratum of the Bolshevik party’s strength, since it was not based on the influence of foreign states’ recruitment, must otherwise be explained as a clash of social forces. Stalin said the only thing he could say, so as not to admit that the partisan of the anti-revolutionary movement was, with all his followers, himself, since obviously he was not in the presence of uprisings against power: he had to speak of espionage, assassination attempt, sabotage in grand style. It is therefore fallacious to say: «Wrong was Stalin’s thesis that the class struggle became more acute every time the socialist country took a step forward. This thesis put forward in 1937, when class antagonisms had already disappeared, led to the unjust repressions».

For the umpteenth time, Stalin lied less anti-Marxistically than they did. It was precisely a phase of class struggle in which the bulk of the party and its leadership, with Stalin, won.

How else to explain that the Russian journal says, as quoted by «Unità»: «the Trotskyists, etc., expressed the interests of the exploiting classes who resisted, and the tendencies of the petty-bourgeois strata of the population»?

The 1934 and 1937 massacres expressed the interests of the international proletarian classes against the Russian state’s policy of detachment from the world proletarian struggle, masked by the lie of building socialism: in all that remains of their statements, carefully concealed after the suffocation, and in the 1926 speeches themselves, they vindicate Lenin’s line that it is a matter of moving to a long struggle of the proletarian dictatorship against the internal forces of petty-bourgeois classes, supported by the multiple influence of international capitalism. Here, for Marxists, lies the whole dispute to be resolved.

That was the great turning point, the reversal of the revolutionary struggle in Russia. The explanation of this massive episode that erupted in the historical underground cannot, without Marx collapsing, be drawn from a blunder, an error, or a distraction of mentioned Stalin. The struggle was what it was, and it is fair to call it a class struggle, in both its ideological and violent forms. Stalin’s corpse will not cry out if it has to choose a place. But that same place belongs to his 20th Congress sinkers, who are careful not to ideologically justify today the murdered of then.

The place shared by the one dead and the living is therefore only one: that of capitalist counterrevolution.

It is precisely counterrevolution that is «creative», and one discovers in living history the most new and unexpected forms and manifestations of it. In this sense, we have learned much from half a century of betrayals to the socialist proletariat.

It is the Revolution that is one; and it is always she, in the course of an immense historical arc that will close as it has opened and where it has promised, where it has a rendezvous perhaps with many of the living, but certainly with the unborn, as with the dead: these knew that it never fails, it never deceives. It, in the light of doctrine, is already taken for granted as a thing seen, a living thing.