PDF-Version: Revue Internationale du Mouvement Communiste – The Dialectic of Productive Forces and Relations of Production according to Communist Theory

Critique of the so-called “Theory of Decadence”

“If one studies each of these developments for themselves and then compares them with each other, one will easily find the key to this phenomenon, but one will never get there with the universal key of a general historical-philosophical theory whose greatest advantage is to be suprahistorical.”

– Karl Marx, Letter to the Editor of the Otecestvenniye Zapisky, 1877

Introduction

This work was started in 1990, jointly by the now dissolved group ‘Communismo’, ‘Communism or Civilisation’ and ‘Union Prolétarienne’. The text published here is the fruit of joint reflection and discussion on the theory of decadence and deals with the historical and conceptual aspect of this notion, which refers to the authentic communist theory of productive forces. It is important to emphasise that this work could only be carried out because the various participants, through their joint participation in the RIMC (‘Revue Internationale du Mouvement Communiste’), were able to create contexts capable of overcoming sectarianism and the fragmentation of forces. Beyond the fundamental programmatic positions as stated on the cover page of the RIMC and which represent the essence of the communist programme, participation in the RIMC does not mean complete formal agreement of all the political positions of the groups. We have always insisted on the “technical” character of the instrument, which indeed may be a common magazine. The concrete political and theoretical differences can only be overcome by actual theoretical work and above all by the fighting movement of the class itself. The present work of the critique of the theory of decadence is a good example of such an effort, although it does not imply that the various participants have completely eliminated their theoretical and political differences.

The aim of this work is to provide a comprehensive and definitive critique of the concept of “decadence”, which poisons communist theory as one of its most important deviations that emerged in the post-World War I period and which, by its thoroughly ideological nature, prevents any scientific restoration of communist theory. Currents such as the ICC, the CWO, ‘Battaglia Comunista’, ‘Kamunist Kranti’ or the EFICC defend a uniform view of history. In the platforms and programmatic positions of these organisations, we find essentially the same hypothesis about an “irreversible retardation” of productive forces as the fundamental basis of their conception of history based on “decadence”. One must therefore ask oneself what the immediate roots of such a theory are, a theory that is completely deviant with regard to the communist programme. The hypothesis of an “irreversible retardation” of the productive forces is nothing other than the theoretical derivation of a general impression left by the period between the two wars, in which capital accumulation has difficulties in restarting due to the economic situation.

“It is in this time that Trotsky at the beginning of the transitional programme could explain that ‘Mankind’s productive forces stagnate. Already new inventions and improvements fail to raise the level of material wealth.’”[1]

Thus, certain tendencies of the Communist Left, such as ‘Bilan’[2], attempted to explain and theorise this situation on the basis of Luxemburg’s theory of accumulation. For ‘Bilan’, capitalist society could no longer fulfil its historical mission because of the essence of the internal contradictions of its mode of production: to continuously and progressively develop the productive forces and productivity of human labour. The rebellion of the productive forces against their private appropriation has become permanent. Capitalism has entered into its general crisis of decomposition (see ‘Bilan’, No.2 – 1934).

Here ‘Bilan’ forgets a basic rule of the communist dialectic, which we will explain in the following: in capitalism the historical conflict takes place between the productive forces and the relations of production. If the latter become too narrow for the development of the former, then crisis prevails. But in this contradiction, one must recognise the play of forces and not an absolute limit to the expansion of productive forces, which after all are constantly in motion.

‘Bilan’ develops its theory of the decadence of capitalism, the “general crisis of decomposition”, to try to explain particular phenomena of the time between the two world wars, which it will regard as irrevocable. More precisely, ‘Bilan’ estimates that this period of stagnation of capital is characterised by the incessant revolt of the productive forces. As one can see, Trotsky’s theoretical scheme, as well as the theory of the “general crisis of decomposition” of capital, originated in the particular historical period of capitalist development between the First and Second Imperialist World War, in which there was an obvious interruption in the development of the productive forces of labour. This particular and temporary episode in the history of the capitalist mode of production is explained by the fact that during this period capital was unable to restore its complete control over the proletariat.

“One cannot understand the reasons for the stagnation of capital in the period between the First and Second World War if one ignores the class struggle. Between 1917 and 1919 the proletariat was threatening and it was not possible to tame it in order to knock a quantum of surplus value out of it […] the tendency of the proletariat to form itself into a class and thus to approach the realisation of the actual human community has prevented and retarded the accumulation of capital […] the extensive upheaval of the proletariat – unfortunately not coordinated and unable to come to a clear view of the goals – of the capitalist countries, the colonial countries, supported by millions of peasants, attracted by the course of the revolution…” (‘Invariance’, No. 6, p.115).

In the same way that Trotsky and ‘Bilan’ attach overriding importance to a temporary interruption of capital accumulation, they also regard it as irrevocable.

“They have theorised this as an irrevocable fact. Their fundamental mistake was that they separated economic movement and class struggle in their analysis.” (ibid.)

In the two theories (Trotsky/’Bilan’) the same fundamental analytical error is found in the abstract study of economic conditions, without taking into account the particularity of the period and the class struggle. These errors lead them to ignore the particularity of the historical period and to generalise the economic appearances into a “new period of capital’s life”, thus developing the abstract theory of a so-called “decadent phase” of capitalism.

Aside from this, within the two theoretical presentations we will find true elements to the extent that they refer to a real temporary stagnation and paralysis of production, as was the case in the interwar period. There is also a certain logic and certain truths in the theory of the immediate predecessors of today’s theory of decadence, to the extent that in the course of this period the capitalist mode of production had to struggle with severe difficulties to turn its reproduction process to its advantage.

If we go a little further back in time, one can find, even at the time of the revolutionary onslaught, the same trace of illusions tied to a certain revolutionary optimism, in Rosa Luxemburg as in the Bolsheviks and in the Communist International, because at that time one was convinced that the crisis that capital was going through would completely bring it down. In fact, such errors of assessment made “in the heat” are not historically serious, provided that the movement is able, when the historical situation has changed, to acknowledge the defeat and reconsider its analyses. As ‘Invariance’ has already pointed out, the strength of the movement lies in its ability to integrate breaks and discontinuities.

This temporary paralysis of the reproduction and self-valorisation of capital can be explained by the fact that at that time the capitalist mode of production did not succeed in stabilising (in the fields of production, circulation, politics, etc.) after the “shock” caused by the First World War and by the violent clashes between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie that followed in the European capitalist countries and the other territories between 1914 and 1928. Therefore, twenty years later, there was a second ekpyrosis, even worse than the first, which allowed capital to all at once crush the proletariat in a lasting way in a counterrevolution from which it has not yet recovered, and to start a great period of accumulation unprecedented in the history of capital. Therefore, even if the theories of the 1930s, as wrong as they may be, can claim “mitigating circumstances”, their further use as a fundamental theory after the end of the Second World War is an unforgivable mistake.

The modern descendants of the theoretical tradition of ‘Bilan’, the ICC, the EFICC and the CWO, have uncritically adopted as their programmatic point of reference this “theory” of a “general crisis of deccomposition” (which, as we have seen, is linked to a very limited and particular section of the history of the capitalist mode of production), accepting “from the outset” its fundamental analytical error. By appropriating the theories of ‘Bilan’, these groups not only reproduce the fundamental theoretical error, but they draw ideological conclusions from it in a completely fantastic and ideological manner. Thus these “new theories” are the result of uncritical considerations which have distanced themselves so far from the theoretical elaborations of ‘Bilan’ that they have eroded their original content and meaning and, as a consequence, distorted them to the point of absurdity.

All the “new theories” on decadence are the result of a double process of distortion of the positions of ‘Bilan’ or Trotsky: firstly, the distortion of their original theoretical meaning; secondly, the disregard of their particular content, to which they corresponded to the extent that these theories were historically determined by the framework of a particular and temporally limited historical development of the capitalist mode of production.

In summary, the modern concept of decadence has, by transfer, generalised a number of particular features torn from their historical context into a new theory of decadence that presents itself as universally valid, not only for this historical period of capitalist production, but for the whole course of human history, in a fierce determination to justify the fundamental theoretical error “historically”. Thus the modern “decadence theorists”, in order to further develop their inventive conception, proceed from and generalise a particular theory and an individual and atypical situation of the capitalist mode of production, thereby erasing its historical particularity and creating an ideological concept that becomes the foundation of a mystical conception of history.

This conception of history, shaped by decadence in its modern vulgarised expression (ICC, EFICC, CWO), bases its analysis on a corresponding method which resembles a mechanistic and naturalistic materialist, a “social Darwinism” which bases itself on the conception of a quasi-biological cycle of rise and fall (decadence) of every society, conceived as a living being, and which fundamentally serves a gradualist and fatalist conception of history. Fundamentally, the method of abstraction through analogies leads “decadence theorists” to try to explain the course of human history and the capitalist mode of production from laws that are outside it and that are established a priori. By disregarding the historical particularities of each historical mode of production, they also disregard their particular laws and categories, for example, in the case of the capitalist mode of production, the division into the phase of formal and real subsumption of labour under capital, etc.

It goes without saying that such a method has nothing in common with communist theory. It even reproduces purely bourgeois theories of history influenced by certain philosophers of the 19th century. Like Schlegel, who in his ‘Philosophy of History’ of 1826 defends the notion of a naturalistic course of history, where, when human society weakens (which, according to him, occurs cyclically), the chaos of nature resurfaces. Similar ideas were also transported by German Romanticism and other authors such as Vollgraf and Van Lasaulx. These theories are characterised by two features:

a naturalistic interpretation of human civilisation. the use of a method of analogy to capture the course of human history.

The conception of decadence common to the heirs of Trotsky and ‘Bilan’, which to a certain degree – often unconsciously – derives from bourgeois sources that were heirs to these theories, is included in a similar ideological framework. Thus the theory of decadence proves to be incapable not only of understanding the laws of the capitalist mode of production, but also the laws of history that determine all societies and the entire history of mankind.

Several points are raised in the course of this critique. The topic of this chapter concerns the methodological and historical critique of the concept of decadence itself. If the state of “decadence” of the capitalist mode of production cannot be proven in a materialistic way as far as the economic foundations of the capitalist mode of production are concerned, then “decadence” can serve even less to be a conception of history that is “consistently” valid for all modes of production in history. From the logical-philosophical standpoint, or rather from that of historical materialism, the conception of decadence lacks any coherence. It is not a component of the theoretical arsenal of communist theory. And that is why it must be rejected. This rejection requires justification.

For the ICC, every mode of production inevitably has a phase of ascension and a phase of decline. This is the invariant cycle that the sequence of modes of production in the historical process is invariably subjected to. The conception of “decadence” thus attains a certain ahistorical transparency, which we here strive to criticise.

If we take a closer look at this proposition, we can break it down into two parts. Firstly: the ICC characterises decadence as a definitive and “irreversible” retardation of the development of the productive forces (see RI = ‘Révolution Internationale’, No. 4, 1972, p. 38). From this it must logically be concluded that every mode of production in history knows a phase of an “irreversible retardation” of the productive forces. Secondly: The ICC, which regards itself as Marxist, is forced to measure its theory against classical statements of communist theory, including the well-known statements of Marx in which it says: “No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed…” and “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. […] Then begins an era of social revolution.”[3]

The ICC takes the trouble to underline the phrase “then begins”, undoubtedly, gradualist as it is, in order to emphasise the progressive character of the movement that it believes it has determined. Well, one could just as well have underlined the word “social revolution”, which means exactly the opposite, if one understands revolution as the violent overthrow of the existing order or, in other words, a qualitatively brutal break in the arrangement of things and events. The ICC, in this sentence, has clearly shown that what makes one think of a gradual character is insufficient to transform these statements of Marx into a conception of decadence as an “irreversible retardation” of the productive forces. On the contrary, here Marx shows that the revolutionary upheavals which have highlighted the whole history of humanity since the primitive communist communities stem from the fact that, at a given moment, the productive forces are at odds with the existing relations of production.

So, to remain logical, if one insists on a determination of decadence as a retardation of productive forces, one can hardly see how they are constrained in the existing relations of production. If it is not the excessive development of productive forces that makes the relations of production too narrow and therefore condemns them to being overcome, then it is impossible to see why these relations would cease to be effective for the existing productive forces. It is therefore impossible to see why they should make room for new relations of production. Unless one falls, as the ICC actually does, into the flattest gradualism in which the social relations of production run out of breath for centuries before a revolutionary change intervenes.

On the other hand, if one thinks, like Marx, that it is the development of the productive forces which, at a given moment, render the existing relations of production obsolete, one enters into a dialectical view of history, in which the material basis of society demands the violent upheaval of the old relations of production and their replacement by new ones, which are better suited to embrace the material development of society. Thus, we are far away from the “long transitional phases” and “slow movements” of history that the ICC loves so much. (see RI No. 55, p.16)

It is clear from all this that the ICC practises an incredible confusion between ‘productive forces’, ‘relations of production’ and ‘modes of production’.

Before we take up in detail the historical sequence as viewed by the ICC again, these basic concepts of the communist programme must be reiterated in order to put an end once and for all to this confusion.

I. Basic Theoretical Definitions

With the concept of ‘productive forces’, communist theory covers the entirety of the faculties employed by the human race with regard to its activity of producing and reproducing material life.

Acquired by humankind, the natural productive forces thus assume the form of actual “productive organs” of the human race. These productive organs (which Marx calls acquired productive forces) are the product and result of the practical energy purposefully employed by mankind in its vital activity, its productive life as a species vis-à-vis nature.

Thus the productive forces take on the form of organs of the productive life of man, “[an organ] that he annexes to his own bodily organs, adding stature to himself in spite of the Bible”[4].

In other words, the productive forces constitute an extension of the natural senses and organs of human beings.

Man is a practical social being who objectively asserts himself against the external world only through his practical activity, social labour, and primarily vis-à-vis nature (non-organic body of man). That is why Marx categorises labour – regardless of its form – as a necessary and species-specific activity, i.e. one that produces and reproduces man as a species.

“The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”[5]

Human labour, the productive activity of the human race, which distinguishes it fundamentally from all animal races, is therefore the first productive force. This productive force is not individual, but social, and it takes on increasingly social traits as humanity progresses in its own development and mastery of nature external to it.

Even natural energy, such as the flow of rivers or the growth of plants, are productive forces, but they only actually acquire this characteristic when they are utilised by the labour of human beings and for their benefit.

The concept of ‘productive forces’ must be understood not only as the pure expenditure of physical labour, the pure immediate force, but also as any social labour. This becomes uniformly social by all that it must set in motion in order to become the labour of the human species: the different technologies, the development of science, the means of labour, machinery, etc. The more society develops, the more important this mediation becomes.

These things are called means of production, and they are nothing else than an extension, an expansion of human organs and senses.

“Thus the productive forces are the result of man’s practical energy, but that energy is in turn circumscribed by the conditions in which man is placed by the productive forces already acquired, by the form of society which exists before him, which he does not create, which is the product of the preceding generation.”[6]

In this way Marx underlines a fundamental concept of communist theory, that of the continuity of generations. A phase of “decadence” generalised for all mankind and for all history is therefore impossible because, as Marx points out in the ‘German Ideology’, halting production, even for 24 hours, would throw mankind back into a state of general barbarism.

Every productive force of social labour is a productive force acquired, that is, it is the result of the practical activity of a preceding stage of the development of mankind and the starting point for a new one. Thus all subsequent phases of human development are determined through the productive forces of social labour acquired in the preceding phase.

The means of production, by virtue of their social existence, comprise more than their simple physical form. A machine is a means of production, but it is more than its technical form and the weight of its iron. It is the product of a social development and therefore comprises a certain degree of development of the productive forces. The research it comprises is the result of an intellectual development, but this intellectual element takes on a physical/practical form in the existence of the machine. Against Stalin’s idealism, for example, who considered language a superstructure, Bordiga recalled that for communism language is a material element which ranks among the means of production[7].

As far as they embody the content of the activity of humanity at a given moment in its history, the productive forces need a form corresponding to them in order to unfold. These forms vary historically and under the influence of geographical and climatic factors.

When the productive labour of man takes place under the form of slavery, serfdom, craftsmanship or wage labour, it is said that it takes place under certain relations of production.

The relations of production initially form on a determinate state of material conditions. When a tribe seizes the defeated warriors to turn them into slaves, it turns them into its own means of production. In doing so, it commits itself to relations of production called slavery. Likewise, as for capitalism, it is the material relationship that exists between a class that monopolises the means of production and exchange (the capitalist class) and a class that possesses nothing but its labour (the working class) that forms the basis for wage slavery.

It is only at a second stage that these relations of production, as they consolidate, produce a legal form and a political organisation appropriate to them, allowing the development of their own consciousness and ideology, etc. The totality of the relations of production and the resulting superstructure form a determinate type of social organisation called ‘mode of production’.

Every productive force is embedded in a determinate mode of production which changes over the course of history. The relationship between productive forces and relations of production is a dialectical relationship by nature. This means that the development of the productive forces exerts an influence on the relations of production, but that in turn the latter forms the productive forces encompassed by it according to certain rules.

Neither the sequence of modes of production nor the development of productive forces follow a straight path of steady growth and progress. “It is only about striking and general characteristics here; for epochs in the history of society are no more separated from each other by hard and fast lines of demarcation, than are geological epochs.”[8]

In order to describe the great phases of development of humanity, communist theory speaks of the succession of modes of production. Thus it also arranges the different, great phases of human development according to a type scheme in order to find the common essential characteristics of the successive phases of human social development beyond the variants specific to the various geohistorical regions[9].

In fact, what matters for the common characterisation of the various modes of production studied is not exclusively the field of technology (development of productive forces) or social organisation (sequence of modes of production). The thread which links the different phases of human history is found fundamentally in the process of value and its forms acquiring independence. Since the dissolution of the primitive communist communities, i.e. from the point where in addition to the object of utility and its production for purposes of use, the object acquires a (exchange) value, there has been a development towards capital, i.e. towards value that has become completely independent[10]. Be that as it may, this development is neither straightforward nor automatic. In some branches of humanity and in certain epochs there is a regression of this phenomenon, and a retreat of value in favour of a return to natural economic forms. This was the case throughout the Middle Ages in the countryside, where it was up to the cities, and within them above all the merchants’ associations, the precursors of the bourgeoisie, to embody the development of value. Hence (among other things) the stupidity of one-sidedly applying the concept of “decadence” to such fundamentally and radically different epochs as the late Middle Ages and the capitalist post-1914 epoch.

II. Sequence of Modes of Production

a) The Primitive Communist Communities

Already in the middle of the 19th century, the works of bourgeois scholars proved that the first social form of mankind, as soon as it developed far enough to rise above its purely beast-like existence, is characterised by a communal mode of production. It is the group, the clan, the horde that contribute the organic mediation through which man forms himself as a species to defy nature. Communist theory, by taking up these works, especially that of Morgan, has expanded their meaning by showing that this communal production was characterised by the absence of the categories of the modern economy, which after all were praised by the bourgeois as natural and thus eternal categories of production. The stage of primitive communist communities (which we prefer to the term ‘primitive communism’ because there was not enough unity between the different tribes or societies to establish the existence of an actual communism, which is after all worldwide and uniform), the origin of all human societies, knew neither money, nor general exchange of commodities, nor political power, nor classes.

However, this social harmony, which includes the common disposal of the means of production and that of the “distribution” and consumption of the manufactured products, is at this time only possible on the basis of a very weak development of the productive forces and implies that humanity is completely imprisoned and dominated by nature. Humanity therefore has no means at its disposal to control its own development. In search of land, the wandering tribes fight each other and devote themselves to war to ensure their survival. When Marx talks about this time, he describes the war as one of the “great works” of the community. The population growth within these communities causes their frameworks to collapse for the simple reason that the community does not sufficiently master the natural and technical conditions to oppose the numerous factors of decomposition which it must encounter. These can be internal factors (population pressure, inability to meet needs) or external ones (war with other tribes, difficulties caused by nature and, at some stage of development, violent destruction by colonialism in Asia, Latin America, Africa).[11]

Marx emphasises that this form of collective appropriation of land and products of labour is a necessary one, through which the social being of man is confirmed. “…then the clan community, the natural community, appears not as a result of, but as a presupposition for the communal appropriation (temporary) and utilisation of the land. When they finally do settle down, the extent to which this original community is modified will depend on various external, climatic, geographic, physical etc. conditions as well as on their particular natural predisposition – their clan character. This naturally arisen clan community, or, if one will, pastoral society, is the first presupposition – the communality of blood, language, customs – for the appropriation of the objective conditions of their life, and of their life’s reproducing and objectifying activity (activity as herdsmen, hunters, tillers etc.).”[12]

On this unique basis, various forms of communities emerge, which communist theory calls ‘secondary modes of production’.

b) Secondary Modes of Production

Rosa Luxemburg, who influences the ICC in principle, has examined the sequence of modes of production very carefully and paid much attention to primitive societies. So precisely, in any case, that she does not fall into the clumsy trap of mechanically imposing on each of these societies a scheme which would automatically contain a phase of decadence. On the contrary. With an eye to historical reality, she writes the following: “Two facts spring to mind when one contemplates closely the fate of the mark community in various lands and parts of the earth. Far from being a rigid, unchangeable pattern, this highest and last form of the primitive communist economic system displays above all endless diversity, flexibility and adaptability, as seen in its various forms. In so doing, it undergoes a quiet transformation process in each context and under all circumstances, which, because of its slow pace, may hardly be apparent at first from the outside. Inside the society, however, new forms are replacing old ones and thus it survives under each political superstructure of native or foreign institutions, and within economic and social life, it is constantly developing and decaying, advancing and declining. At the same time, this social form shows an extraordinary tenacity and stability, precisely because of its elasticity and adaptability. It defies all the storms of political history; or rather it tolerates them passively, lets them pass and patiently endures for centuries the strains of every form of conquest, foreign rule, despotism, and exploitation. There is only one contact that it cannot tolerate or overcome; this is the contact with European civilisation, i.e. with capitalism. For the old society, this encounter is deadly, universally and without exception, and it accomplishes what centuries and the most savage Oriental conquerors could not: the dissolution of the whole social structure from the inside, tearing apart all traditional bonds and transforming the society in a short period of time into a shapeless pile of rubble.”[13]

In their diversity, the secondary modes of production know different forms of development. The ICC lets us hit the books again and declares that it is useless to dwell on this period because “everyone has heard of the decadence of Rome at least once in his life” (RI, No. 55, p. 16). Well, that is precisely why it is important to dwell here, for if the concept of decadence can be employed for the Roman Empire, it does not automatically follow from this that it also applies to the other modes of production[14]. At the same time that the large latifundia property was in danger due to its low productivity, much younger communal forms (Germanic form) continued to exist in the East. As Marx and Engels pointed out, the Germanic invaders in their surging to Europe brought with them a factor of renewal for the old latifund possessions, and this renewal, infused by a much younger form of barbaric community, marked the beginning of the transition to feudalism. To say, as the ICC does, that “feudality arises within the decadence of Rome” is to disregard the fact that feudalism arises from the fusion of two different forms of the same category of mode of production (the secondary one): the Roman and the Germanic one. Take, for example, the other great form of a secondary mode of production, the “Asiatic” form, which prevailed in India and China and was also found in Africa and Latin America – this form is characterised by its great stability over the centuries. Here, above the urban communities, a super-community, the state, is being established, entrusted with the task of carrying out the major works for the special facilities (irrigation) and territorial defence. This higher community thrives on the exploitation of numerous communities which work for their own needs and according to a very strict division of labour and which pay taxes to the central power. Sometimes, as for example in Peru, the two lines of communities correspond to two different peoples. Rosa Luxemburg explains how the Incas conquered the local tribes organised according to the communist system and how they imposed their own communal system on this system.

“To a certain extent, we have here two social strata, one over the other, and both internally communistic in their organisation, which stand together in a relationship of exploitation and subjugation.”[15]

There is no “decadence” here, but brutal destruction by the Spanish conquerors. As for China or India, Marx suggests that the deep stability of the productive sphere, based on communal organisation, at the state level is accompanied by situations of regular political upheaval leading to wars and the overthrow of dynasties, etc. The particularity of the “Asiatic” mode of production lies in its productive basis, in the myriads of village communities with a pronounced economic organisation (division of labour) that pay for their own needs, based on a determinate development of productive forces. The natural conditions of the areas where the Asiatic mode of production prevailed needed, beyond the communities that ensured the material functioning of society, an organism that would take care of the great public utility tasks, above all irrigation, which was necessary for the survival of the entire system. Therefore, all Asiatic societies knew a strong development of the state and the bureaucracy involved in ensuring the unity of the territory (general services: roads, mail, taxes, defence, etc.) and the great public utility works such as irrigation and defence, which the village communities were not able to carry out themselves.

For this reason, the central state had to resort to taxes and seize the surplus product of daily productive activity. This explains the obvious historical fixation of this mode of production. Every product that could have served for accumulation was supplied to and absorbed by the state, partly supplied to productive works by it, partly to unproductive expenditure (court costs, luxury expenditure).

This social organisation, which has survived for thousands of years, causes the following consequences for social development: As Pierre Souyri proves with regard to China in his work “Revolution and Counterrevolution in China,” there is an uninterrupted oscillation between the fragmentation and the disintegration of the whole of society and, in contrast, centralisation and bureaucracy. The whole history of China is one of the clash of centrifugal and centripetal forces: one regularly threw the realm or empire into the bloodiest anarchy, the other at regular intervals re-established the dynasties which set themselves the task of re-establishing the centralised despotic state able to unite the whole territory concerned.

The most important reasons for the revolts, which periodically bring the peasant communities into revolt against the central state and revive the local kingdoms, with the prospect of a “re-feudalisation” of the country, lie directly in the yoke of the state and the tax burden, which causes the peasants to break their ties with the state. At the same time, the state, deprived of its necessary means of survival, collapses and a period of general anarchy begins. But in this condition the great public utility works, traditionally a matter for the state, are no longer carried out. The irrigation system is no longer working, the roads are no longer being repaired, the communication links break down, etc. Once again, the necessity of support from a strong power is breaking new ground for the village communities, which is able to carry out the collective tasks that they can no longer guarantee due to their fragmentation.

Through extremely brutal political periods, through wars, etc., one comes to the same point again and again, and society is formed again and again, but on the same level and with the same organisation. Here, too, there is nothing of “decadence” until the violent intrusion of capitalism through the detour of colonialism introduces the deadly seeds that, as before in India, destroy the traditional foundations of Asiatic society. When the imperialists landed in China, they arrived in one of these turbulent phases with the Taiping rebellion against the Manchurian dynasty.

Another example that fully brings to light the truth about the thesis of a systematic “decadence” of secondary modes of production is that of the Russian communities. It is known that Marx and Engels, whose attention to this question was awakened by the Russian populists, above all Vera Zasulich, examined this question in order to know whether the still living remnants of the Russian “artel” would not allow a direct transition to socialism in this geographical area. A great example of “decadence”. But let us stick to this subject, because it reveals a lot about the working methods of the ICC.

In the 55th edition of ‘Revue Internationale’ Marx is quoted as follows: “The history of the decline of primitive communities […] has still to be written. All we have seen so far are some rather meagre outlines. […] (2) the causes of their decline stem from economic facts which prevented them from passing a certain stage of development. […] When reading the histories of primitive communities written by bourgeois writers it is necessary to be on one’s guard.”[16]

No doubt that the ICC uses this quote because it contains twice the word ‘decadence’ (= decline), which is rare in Marx, for whom this concept never had a scientific meaning. But the reader will at the same time have noticed an alarming number of omissions, represented by ‘[…]’ in the text. For every “sincere” writer, this typographic sign is generally used to indicate that one has omitted parts of the text that are irrelevant to the general understanding of the text and its presentation. But the ICC is not exactly sincere; it is even completely dishonest, and that is not due to morality, but to a deep simplicity and hardening of a thinking that is incapable of taking up parts that are capable of even slightly questioning it.

We now must dissect this text, which is never much fun, but the ICC forces us to do so. We here present the text of the letter from Marx to Vera Zasulich in its entirety. We will, by contrast, highlight the sections concealed by the ICC:

“The history of the decline of primitive communities […] has still to be written. All we have seen so far are some rather meagre outlines. But in any event the research has advanced far enough to establish that: (1) the vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, etc. societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist societies; (2) the causes of their decline stem from economic facts which prevented them from passing a certain stage of development, from historical surroundings not at all analogous with the historical surroundings of the Russian commune of today .”[17]

A little further back Marx adds, on the occasion of the communes inherited from the secondary modes of production: “Thanks to the characteristic features borrowed from the latter [prototype], the new commune introduced by the Germanic peoples in all the countries they invaded was the sole centre of popular liberty and life throughout the Middle Ages.”[18]

Marx’s words put differently: if the history of the decline of primitive communities is still to be made, it is because bourgeois historiography denies the phenomenon of survival of the developed forms of these communities. If the history of the decline of these communities is to be made, it is precisely for the reason that the Russian commune has not entered the stage of decline, up to a rather late stage and even beyond, under the deadly influence of the development of capitalism.

c) Feudalism

“The third form of ownership is feudal or estate property. If antiquity started out from the town and its little territory, the Middle Ages started out from the country. This different starting-point was determined by the sparseness of the population at that time, which was scattered over a large area and which received no large increase from the conquerors. In contrast to Greece and Rome, feudal development at the outset, therefore, extends over a much wider territory, prepared by the Roman conquests and the spread of agriculture at first associated with it.”[19]

What initially characterises the feudal mode of production is the form of landed property itself, the combination of elements of private property (manors inherited from the Roman villa) and elements of communal property (derived from the organisation of the Teutons); furthermore, the hierarchical estate organisation of the social classes (relationship of the vassal to the feudal lord) and the fragmentation of the population, the absence of communication channels and general infrastructure have left a regional stamp on feudalism. The ruling classes organise themselves from the countryside (the fiefdoms) and production does not escape the feudal mode of production at first. It reproduces it on the basis of crafts and trade (corporations and guilds). Throughout the Middle Ages, use-value still plays a predominant role in production. In order to understand the historical period that leads to this new mode of production, we prefer to resort to the classics, as opposed to the ICC, which relies on the most superficial bourgeois historiography to support its revision of history in a gradualist direction, in the best tradition with university “Marxism”. In No. 56 of RI on page 16, the ICC posits a transitional period of seven centuries between the ancient and feudal modes of production (from 300 CE to 1000 CE). According to Engels, however, it is only about four centuries (from 500 CE to 900 CE). “And, further, however unproductive these four centuries appear, one great product they did leave: the modern nationalities, the new forms and structures through which west European humanity was to make coming history. The Germans had, in fact, given Europe new life, and therefore the break-up of the states in the Germanic period ended, not in subjugation by the Norsemen and Saracens, but in the further development of the system of benefices and protection into feudalism […].”[20]

But the ICC completely ignores the Germanic mode of production and the role of the Teutons in the emergence of feudalism. It is true that it has to transform actual history in order to bring it into line with the idea that every new mode of production emerges from a long period of decadence of the previous one. In order to impose its scheme on the transition from antiquity to feudalism, the ICC has to strike out the entire history of the Germanic invasion and, equally, the works of Marx and Engels on this subject with one stroke of the pen. The transition of the decaying Roman Empire to a new, reborn form cannot be explained if one does not understand the role of the barbaric Teutons.

“All the vigorous and creative life which the Germans infused into the Roman world was barbarism. Only barbarians are able to rejuvenate a world in the throes of collapsing civilisation. And precisely the highest stage of barbarism, to which and in which the Germans worked their way upwards before the migrations, was the most favorable for this process. That explains everything.”[21]

If one follows the rummaging of the university manuals, as the ICC does, the decadent phase of feudalism begins in the 14th century until the 18th century. However, numerous historical facts prove that this is not the case.

According to the ICC, the bourgeoisie was born during the decadence of feudalism, in its logic since the 14th century. But, as distinct falsifiers, they practice tearing apart and piecing together mutilated quotations from the Manifesto to gloss over the inconsistencies of their apparent materialism (RI, No. 55, p. 17). Referring to the same Manifesto of 1847, we can read on page 31 that “from the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.”[22] The movement of the formation of cities began in the 10th century in Germany and since the eleventh century in France. Far from emerging from the “period of decadence” of the feudal mode of production, the bourgeoisie develops during a historical phase which the ICC presents to us as an ascending phase. The merchant, the first type of bourgeois, appeared in the form of guilds, i.e. in a class organisation typical of feudalism between the tenth and twelfth century. The merchants tried to assert their political power within the cities by electing judges. It is precisely this germ of a class that is the bearer of another political and social project, in accordance with the growing capitalist mode of production, that develops to the extent that trade and exchange also develop. With exchange value becoming increasingly independent, the bourgeoisie gains an ever-increasing weight within the feudal mode of production, and thus, at its time, does not provoke the decadence of feudalism, but its brutal death. Capitalist production does not develop on the basis of the decomposition of the craft corporations of the Middle Ages, following the logic of the ICC; on the contrary, it is the development of capitalist manufacturing since the 18th century which contributes to the decay of the corporations. In the English estates, for example (a classic model for the development of capital), the expropriation of the farmers was not due to the decline of agricultural production, but to the robbery of the communal and later church and crown estates by the landowners who, in order to meet the needs of the operators of the textile factories for raw materials, replaced people with sheep. The driving force behind this whole process is the need for money and its penetration into all the pores of feudal society. As far as the decline of productive forces in Germany is concerned, we leave the floor to Engels: “German industry had gone through a considerable process of growth in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.”[23] On the other hand, in most of Europe, in Germany and Central Europe, since the end of the century, one can observe a reintroduction of the foundations of even the feudal mode of production, serfdom: “Incidentally the general re-introduction of serfdom was one of the reasons why no industry could develop in Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the first place there was the reversed division of labour among the guilds–the opposite from that in manufacture: the work was divided among the guilds instead of inside the workshop.”[24] As for Eastern Europe and the whole Slavic world, feudalism did not emerge there until the sixteenth century, serfdom developed rapidly in Russia, especially since Peter the Great, and it was not abolished until 1861.

As good mechanists, the ICC imagines that a decadence of ideological forms corresponds to the given decadence of productive forces in feudalism. “A form of nihilism develops that denies to the understanding any possibility of influencing the course of things. Mysticism as a negation of the understanding develops. Here again a phenomenon that characterises the past periods of decay. So also during the decline of feudalism in the 14th century (…).” (RI, No. 58, p.19)

Let us remember that for the ICC, which draws on the reactionary and conciliatory historian Favier for its support, the heresies, the sermons, etc. are, as it were, manifestations of decadence, the scourge brothers the punks of decaying feudalism… In order to get an idea of the stage of “decadence” in which the ICC sect arrived under the shepherd’s staff of its “pulpit orators”, it is sufficient to remember how Engels rightly described the scourge brothers and other sects in ‘The Peasant War in Germany’: “This form of heresy was joined in by the dream visions of the mystic sects, such as the Scourging Friars, the Lollards, etc., which in times of suppression continued the revolutionary tradition.”[25]

But the ICC, like all “decadentists” by the way, does not understand a word of actual history. And what is particularly characteristic of its stupidity is that it is not able to connect ideological forms with class struggle (“The collapse seems bottomless” RI, p.19). We must remember, before the bottom, that as far as ideological decay is concerned, the period from the 14th to the 17th century includes the emergence of most of the national written languages and the creation of literary and artistic works which are among the most striking in the history of mankind; this period also extends to the Renaissance, the great inventions and discoveries which, to the displeasure of the ICC, also belong to the productive forces.

d) The Capitalist Mode of Production

We have seen during the previous pages that there can be different ways of disappearing for a given mode of production. It can go through a period of decay before finally leaving the stage, as was the case for the Roman Empire, one of the variants of the secondary mode of production. It can also survive for centuries without developing, as is the case with the Asiatic, another form of secondary mode of production. It can also be buried from within, through a mode of production that ascends up until the quantitative movement turns into a qualitative leap and the new one overthrows the old mode of production. This is the case of feudalism, which gives birth to the capitalist mode of production.

Now we must examine whether, from the standpoint of historical materialism, the notion of the capitalist mode of production as understood by the communist programme is consistent with the notion of decadence.

We have, at the beginning of the text, already quoted Marx, for whom the main historical contradiction of the capitalist mode of production is the fact that it develops its productive forces within a framework which very quickly becomes too narrow for them. From then on, what historically threatens capitalism is not some kind of weakening of the productive forces, but, conversely, their stormy development. The capitalist mode of production is exuberance of the productive forces, but these in turn threaten the social organisation of capital. This is the dialectical contradiction between productive forces and relations of production. The condensed version of this historical view can be found in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. “The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.”[26]

Thus the capitalist mode of production, from the very beginning, cannot take a step forward without at the same time strengthening at the other end the revolutionary potencies of the society which, dialectically, follow it: communism.

One sees in the course of this reappropriation of the classical definition of the capitalist mode of production that, on the conceptual level, there is no place in this view for the smallest notion of “decadence”. Capitalism is a historically prejudged mode of production precisely because, by developing, it breeds out its own contradictions and it cannot stop advancing for the slightest moment. Its essence itself forces it to develop and at the same time its own antagonisms. This can only lead to one thing: a catastrophic crisis of the capitalist mode of production, during which the possibility of a revolutionary overthrow on the part of the proletariat emerges. The latter is, according to Marx, the largest of all productive forces.

But unlike the bourgeoisie, which in feudalism had an independent space to assert its power and build citadels to deal with the bastions of feudalism, the proletariat as a class is only the negation of capital. It has nothing to establish in the present society, no gradual position to develop. Its mission is to seize the historical opportunity where the capitalist mode of production proves incapable of developing the productive forces without immediately falling into crisis. In seizing the opportunity of the brutal fall that follows the climax, the proletariat makes itself the ruling class and seizes political power to reorganise the productive forces in a sense contrary to the interests of the capitalist mode of production, for the benefit of humanity, whose representative is the proletariat within class society.

From all this it follows that even if the concept of decadence were valid for all other modes of production in history, it would be in complete contradiction with the essence of the capitalist mode of production, and as such would not be applicable to the latter at all.

It fell to the Communist Left of Italy, confronted with the Damenist deviation that revived the thesis of a progressive decline of the productive forces, to recall the fundamental thesis of Marxism, according to which history presents itself as a succession of catastrophes and not as a harmonious construction where aging societies slowly give way to the others, younger ones and bearers of a new development of humanity.

Dialectically against gradualism, this is, to sum it up, the position of Bordiga, which the ICC understands all the less, the more it uses the very particular version it is given… the GCI, great denier of actual history. In order not to make the question even more complicated, we leave aside this side polemic to simply reproduce the position of the Communist Left.

The ICC imputes to Bordiga, which is the ultimate insult, a repetitive view of history, according to which all modes of production must suffer the same fate and undergo the same brutal overthrow which results from a long process of uninterrupted development of productive forces. Here the ICC refers to a text, the result of the “Party Assembly of Rome” of 1951, which would contain these two famous opposing schemes of historical development.

If one reads the text in question, one sees that the Communist Left speaks in it only of the last two phases of the sequence of modes of production: that between feudalism and the capitalist mode of production and that between capitalism and communism. Nowhere is there talk of a general scheme that would be valid for all historical epochs. On the contrary, the text is a treasure in terms of presenting the dialectical view of revolutionary communism, for which the revolutionary conditions of the overthrow in a given society do not constantly exist within the course of a “long phase of decline” so sacred to the ICC, but which arise abruptly and in the course of short historical periods, and which must then be taken up by the conscious revolutionary minorities, if they fail to do so, the opportunity thus opened up is over.

So the economic catastrophe also corresponds to a phase of social revolution and not evolution. This scheme, which applied to the bourgeois revolution, will also apply to the proletarian revolution. As the text in question says: “Marx never pointed to an ascent and then a decline of capitalism, but to the simultaneous and dialectical growth of the mass of productive forces under the control of capitalism, their accumulation and unlimited concentration, and at the appropriate time, of the antagonistic reaction, that is, that of the dominated forces, the proletariat. The general productive and economic potential increases as long as the balance is not yet destroyed, but if this is the case, there is an explosive revolutionary phase in which in a short stormy period with the collapse of the old mode of production the productive forces fall back to rearrange themselves and take again a much more powerful upswing. […] The difference between the two views is expressed in the language of geometry as follows: the first curve, or the curve of opportunists (revisionists of Bernsteinian type, competing Stalinists, pseudo-Marxist revolutionary intellectuals), is a continuous curve that ‘allows a tangent’ in all points, that is to say, it runs practically in imperceptible changes of intensity and direction. The second curve, with which one wanted to give a simplified representation of the so disreputable ‘catastrophe theory’, shows points for each epoch, which are called ‘apex’ or ‘breakpoints’ in geometry. At such points the geometric continuity disappears and thus the historical graduality, this curve ‘has no tangent’, or, also, ‘allows all tangents’ – as in that week which Lenin did not want to let pass.

It is hardly necessary to note that the generally ascending direction is not committed to the idealistic notions of the infinity of human progress, but to the historical fact of the continued immense increase in the mass of productive forces following the great revolutionary historical crises.”[27]

April 1993

Communisme ou Civilisation

Comunismo

L’Union prolétarienne

Source: Revue Internationale du Mouvement Communiste, Issue 11, April 1993.

[1] ‘Communisme ou Civilisation’, Accumulation du capital et militarisme, No. 22, p.5; Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Programme, The Objective Prerequisites for a Socialist Revolution, 1938.

[2] See the introduction to the publication of a text of ‘Bilan’ in RIMC No. 10, May-October 1992.

[3] Karl Marx, Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, Preface, 1859.

[4] Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, Chapter 7: The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus Value, Section 1: The Labour-Process or the Production of Use-Values, 1867.

[5] Karl Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, Estranged Labour.

[6] Karl Marx, Letter to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov in Paris, 1846.

[7] International Communist Party, Factors of Race and Nation in Marxist Theory, 1953.

It is difficult to explain why the authors misrepresent the facts. Stalin was not of the opinion that language was part of the superstructure. For Stalin, language belonged neither to the superstructure nor to the base, because it “did not belong to a class” but to the “whole of the people” in a given country. Stalin says in his book “Marxism and Problems of Linguistics”: “It [language] was created not by some one class, but by the entire society, by all the classes of the society”.

Stalin does not include language in the superstructure because it would stand above the classes and thus above the superstructure of society determined by class: “Take, for example, Russian society and the Russian language. In the course of the past thirty years the old, capitalist base has been eliminated in Russia and a new, socialist base has been built. […] But in spite of this the Russian language has remained basically what it was before the October Revolution.”

Bordiga, in chapter 11 of ‘Factors of Race and Nation…’, deals with Stalin’s theses and explains, not without having pointed out beforehand that Stalin is already pursuing the intention with the question itself to take language (and thus national culture and the fatherland) out of the firing line of the social revolution:

“These gentlemen’s only merit (we don’t know if the text was written by Stalin himself, or in his name by secretary X or bureau Y) is that they have mastered the art of dressing up their lies in clear, accessible language, the way you would write after a century’s immersion in bourgeois culture. […] Everything seems easy to grasp, and yet it is all just a scam, relapsing entirely into the most rancid bourgeois mode of thought.

The entire transition took place “in parallel”. It’s that easy! To which we mustn’t simply reply that such a nice transition has not taken place, but also that if it had (or if it will) things would have happened quite differently. Stalin’s formula is that of a country snake-oil merchant. Nothing is left of dialectical materialism. Doesn’t the base influence the superstructure, doesn’t it act on the latter ? And in what sense does this derived superstructure, which is not simply malleable and passive, react in its turn ? According to which cycles, in what order, at what speed does this historic transformation take place ? Oh, all that is byzantine distinctions. Just roll up your shirtsleeves, first the right then the left! Destruction! Creation! For God’s sake! Out with the creator, out with the destroyer. Such materialism cannot function without a demiurge, an autonomous creative force: then everything becomes conscious and voluntary, nothing is necessary or determined.

Whatever. We can confront Stalin’s reasoning with reality. The economic base and the superstructure, which were feudal under the Tsar, have become, through the course of complex events, fully capitalist by the end of Stalin’s life. Since the Russian language has remained fundamentally the same, language is not part of the superstructure, nor of the base.

It appears that this whole controversy has been directed against a school of linguistics that has been suddenly disavowed in high places, and whose leader is the university professor, Nicolai Yakolevitch Marr, whose texts are unknown to us. Marr apparently said that the language is part of the superstructure. Given who is condemning him, we could consider Professor Marr to be a good Marxist. In fact, Stalin wrote, “Once N.Y. Marr noted that his formula ‘language is a superstructure with respect to the base’ encountered objections, he decided to ‘readjust’ his theory and announced that ‘language is an instrument of production. Was N.Y. Marr right to classify language as one of the instruments of production? No, he was certainly wrong”. Why? According to Stalin, there is a certain analogy between language and the means of production, which can also, to some extent, be independent of class relations. What Stalin means is that, for example, the plough or the hoe can be equally used in a feudal society as in a bourgeois or socialist society. But the reason why Marr is wrong (and Marx and Engels too, because for them, work and the production of the means of production occurs in combination with language) is that these means of production produce material goods, whereas language doesn’t. To which we reply: but the means of production also do not produce material goods! It is man who produces them, using these instruments! Tools are the means which humans use to produce. When a child first picks up the hoe by the blade, his father shouts at him: no, pick it up by the handle! This cry – which becomes a regular instruction – is, like the hoe, used for production.

Stalin’s smart-aleck conclusion proves that he’s the one who’s got it wrong. If language, he says, produced material goods, then windbags would be the richest men in the world! Well, isn’t that so? The labourer works with his hands, the engineer with his language. Which of them is the better paid? The landed gentleman smokes his pipe sitting in the shade and shouts ceaselessly at the day-labourer (who is working his fingers to the bone in silence): “Get on with it, dig!” fearing that the slightest pause will diminish his profit. […] Language is always a means of production, but taken individually, languages ​​are part of the superstructure. For example, Dante does not write his poem in the classical Latin of the Church but rather in the Italian vernacular; likewise the Reformation marks the final abandonment of the ancient Saxon in favour of modern German.” (ibid.)

[8] Karl Marx, Capital Volume I, Chapter 15: Machinery and Modern Industry, Section 1: The Development of Machinery, 1867.

[9] Nevertheless, the dialectic of the development of productive forces and relations of production is not a new historical-philosophical key to the opening of doors in order to skilfully avoid all questions. It is enough to refer to what Marx intended to develop in his 1857 plan:

“(2) Relation of previous ideal historiography to the real. Namely of the so-called cultural histories, which are only histories of religions and of states. (On that occasion something can also be said about the various kinds of previous historiography. The so-called objective. Subjective (moral among others). The philosophical.) […]

(5) Dialectic of the concepts productive force (means of production) and relation of production, a dialectic whose boundaries are to be determined, and which does not suspend the real difference.” (Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Introduction, 1857)

[10] But in no case do the forms of value (simple form, developed form, general form and form of money) historically correspond to the successive forms of production (primitive communist communities, secondary forms, Asiatic, ancient, Germanic, feudal and capitalist).

[11] Beyond these factors, the relations between tribes consist in the exchange of food surpluses, an exchange that constitutes the origin of the development of value and that initiates the dissolution of these communities.

[12] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Forms which precede capitalist production, 1857.

[13] Rosa Luxemburg, Introduction to Political Economy, 1925.

[14] “The last centuries of the declining Roman Empire and its conquest by the barbarians destroyed a number of productive forces; agriculture had declined, industry had decayed for want of a market, trade had died out or been violently suspended, the rural and urban population had decreased. From these conditions and the mode of organisation of the conquest determined by them, feudal property developed under the influence of the Germanic military constitution.” (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach, A. Idealism and Materialism, 1845)

[15] Ibid.

[16] Quoted from Marx’s first draft for a letter to Zasulich, 1881.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach, A. Idealism and Materialism, 1845.

[20] Friedrich Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, VIII. The Formation of the State among Germans, 1884.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter I: Bourgeois and Proletarians, 1847.

[23] Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, Chapter 1: The Economic Situation and Social Classes in Germany, 1850.

[24] Friedrich Engels, Letter to Marx in Ventnor, 15 December 1882.

[25] Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, Chapter 2: The Main Opposition Groups and their Programmes; Luther and Muenzer, 1850.

[26] Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Chapter I: Bourgeois and Proletarians, 1847.

[27] Rapporto alla Riunione di Roma del 4. Aprile 1951, Bollettino Interno del Partito Comunista Internazionalista, No. 1/1951.