PDF-Version: Il Programma Comunista – The Course of World Capitalism in the Historical Experience and in the Doctrine of Marx – Part I

Report to the meetings of Corsenza and Ravenna

FOREWORD

We begin the publication of the developed text of what has been exhibited in the meetings of our movement held in Cosenza in September 8 and 9, 1956, and in Ravenna in January 8 and 9, 1957, on the subject of the economy of contemporary Western capitalism, the subject of the next working meeting.

Short reports have already appeared, for the first one, in n. 19 of 1956, and for the second one in n. 3 and 4 of 1957.

In presenting these preliminary reports it was carried out as if it were known, in our work, that we had moved on to this fundamental study after a thorough development of that on the economic and social structure of Russia, which also occupied several interfederal meetings and which was published in these columns in a long and complete series that had not long ended – and after which there was the interlude of the account of the meeting of “Pentecost”, dedicated to the summary of the system of our principles in general social matters of the communist and Marxist doctrine.

As has been noted at other times, this topic is linked to many other studies and works of the last seven years of meetings and publications, and especially to the themes dealt with in Milan, Asti, Genoa, Forlì, to whose reports we refer the reader. The current study will also be linked, among other things, to the series on “Elements of the Marxist Economy” published in the magazine “Prometeo” from 1947 to 1950, which dealt with the subject of the first book of Capital.

The link between the Russian treatment and this one on capitalism in general is evident. Our fundamental thesis on the Russian question is that the historical problem must be solved by deciphering the economic and social characteristics of the present structure of that country. Our result is that it is a mechanism that has nothing to do with communism or socialism, even the first stage theorised by Marx in the “Critique of the Gotha Programme”, our classic text, before and after the use that Lenin made of it, for the characterisation of socialist society. In our long-standing Russian of today it is not at all socialist; it is completely capitalist (more rigorously also in the whole comes to be surrounded by limitations) and does not even constitute a stage of transition from capitalism to socialism; because the conditions of this short period, which have a political and class nature, have failed.

We will certainly not repeat all this here, but we must only remember how such an examination, largely referring to historical facts, economic data and classic doctrinal texts – threatened by new and incredibly bewildering interpretations and which had to be dealt with in the most violent way – has led to the most general question of the fate that recent historical facts have brought back to the verification of the doctrine of our school. It is too easy, when we show that the proletarian and communist revolution, led by Lenin’s Marxist party, was followed by a flourishing of the capitalist social form, to answer us that so much has happened because it cannot be otherwise, and the formulas of communism, Marxism and Leninism have proven to be false on the general historical scale with regard to going beyond the limits of the capitalist form.

This failed proof of the revolution would therefore be a general guarantee that the limits of the capitalist, mercantile and monetary forms are historically insurmountable, and they will close in their characteristics, which we claim to have all verified in today’s real Russian structure, every social economy of the future.

The verification went therefore in all our work – and our school never, in flourishing or difficult phases as it was, thought to desist from it – brought on all the countries of the world and especially on the most advanced of the West, conventionally opposed to Russia by all those who see in it socialism, whether they insanely recognise and apologise for it, or whether they curse it by exorcising it.

Did the Russian social form retreat?

We have always denied that there has been a “test” of socialism, and that then political forces prevailing by lotus perfidy or cowardice have withdrawn, reversing the course. It’s a lot more than that.

The key to our explanation of the fact that the Russian social structure has limited itself to evolving from feudal forms to those of a diffused capitalism, especially industrial capitalism – with a complex series of reservations on agrarian development that we have studied extensively – lies in the international situation. The basis of a transition of economic structure between the capitalist and the socialist modes cannot for us be the proletarian conquest of power in a single country, which has not only been seriously delayed in its exit from the social and state forms of the medieval regime, but which has an agriculture that is heavily backward and directed by delayed reforms to the proprietary and small-bourgeois types that have sunk into the religious-superstitious framework of the minimum company-family, the obstinate fortress of anti-revolutionary conservation, everywhere.

The premise had to be a political victory of the dictatorships of the proletariat – for us of the international communist party – at least in a group of countries including some of the most in which the Marxist revolution could enter the heart of the upheaval of the primordial forms of agriculture, which everywhere tends to large capital.

Evidence, attempt, model, are expressions that we have rejected and denounced as suspicious since before October 1917 – and to all this we will also devote a special study in the future – and since then our path has not been a foolish emulation of Russia but victory in the world of the revolution, whose red flag had been planted, tearing up the Pleiades of bourgeois and small bourgeois parties, on the sharp peaks of the Kremlin. After having thrown back the bourgeoisie of the world that had launched itself to knock down that symbol, not to save Tsarism, but to save itself, we waited and invoked for all the forces to be dedicated, not to knead a ridiculous sketch of the communist economy, to overturn the wave of the revolution on the flat idiotic capitals of Western civilisation that we so often defined, to measure our distance from it: Christian, mercantile and parliamentary, and we could add: familial, reconnecting ourselves to an essential point of arrival of all our research.

And we gave and will give much effort to prove that this criterion is in every page of Marx and Lenin with its truth tormented and dispersed later on, while all the return is only betrayal and lies.

Lower socialism and war communism

The work that we are doing involves a collaboration of the whole movement, and certain turns of the treatment arise very often to questions raised by fellow listeners and readers, or consulted to indicate what point they think that they fall more deeply to develop. For example, we find it appropriate to answer here a question from a group on the Pentecost meeting, precisely because at the same time it concerns the Russian and the present Western treatment. The topic is that of labour vouchers and the levelling of the average salary contained in the socialist programme of the lower stage, and the very appropriate question is this: after October in Russia, were attempts made in this direction, or was it rather applied as a purely bourgeois measure, even if by the government of the worker’s dictatorship, of compensating more for differentiated or qualified labour? Those who asked the question were aware of Lenin’s interventions on the absolute necessity of the labour of specialists and technicians who Lenin could not be shy about paying even very high wages to in the face of the danger of the paralysis of production, an argument that was incontrovertible, but which was explained in doctrine by the observation that they were in a full phase of state industrial capitalism, and of ordinary wage economy.

On the other hand, the question interests us because it is directly linked to what we were saying about the bourgeois objection that considers the passage from the phase of “war communism” to that of “NEP” mercantilism as a confession that the attempt to administer socialism had been made, and Lenin had to say: let’s stop; it’s impossible.

Let’s hope that the answer we are about to give will not surprise the comrades: no, a phase of socialism of equal labour by right has not been able to appear in time in Russia, as it does not exist today, clearly, since the scale of wages and salaries is worse than in Western countries. One could not even imagine arriving there before a revolution, which Lenin always expected, in Central Europe at least. The attempt, theoretically impossible, was not made with any act of Bolshevik power. We say theoretically impossible, because the endeavour already presupposes that the movement of products would occur without the market mechanism: Lenin in his 1921 speech remarked not only that it was absurd to think otherwise, but that he and the party had established this in 1918, and even before the seizure of power, on the basis of the actual Russian social relations; it is not something that has been discovered in 1921!

The set of measures that were called war communism (and not wrongly) are explained from the historical, political and military insurrectionary point of view; but, wanting to look at them from the economic point of view, they keep the stage of higher communism – they were an “air bridge” launched towards the wave, which then withdrew, of the revolution from the west, and towards a future that moved away.

Let us therefore explain the economic thing, considering that an economic way in history can appear before and after its time, in precarious phases, as today a slave regime by a band of outlaws, or a regime of mathematical rational socialism in a besieged medieval or bourgeois city: Arras or Paris.

Consider the bread distributed without money in return in Moscow, or the tram ticket abolished so that anyone that wants to, can get on and off the car. When giving bread rations in the districts, no one is asked to pick it up – even if they have a card, which in the hardest moments was not possible – if they have worked, and if they have proof of this. You can see that he is hungry and given a loaf of bread, like the soldier on duty, but then he is free to move away. The delivery of bread is an act that proceeds between society and the individual, not unlike the use of the driving energy of the tramway, not to mention even the races that each makes in the day or ask why, organisation too difficult for an acute situation to the extreme.

The single person transported and fed can generally decide, without any connection with what he has achieved, whether he will go to work, dig a trench on the outskirts of the city, or brandish the weapon of a fallen man to fight against the whites.

However, this system, which has surpassed every mercantile measure, both individual and of the masses, if it economically responds to the superior formula: to each according to his need, to each according to his ability, it is not possible, if not possible, through a mechanism of bloody coercion and oppression at the head of which is the dictatorship, the red terror, the permanent civil war, organised by the advanced workers of the communist party. The flour for the bread is there because the armed teams of the workers of the city have gone out to pick it up by force in the countryside from the farmers who have too much, in relation to the shortage of the army and the metropolis. It is possible to avoid a jackal inciting rations of bread or any other abuse of social services not paid or controlled, because the first patrol of armed workers can take him, summarily judge him, and execute him on the spot without any form of right. It is not a historical addiction (which is usually called conscience) formed in generations, which limits needs and enhances capabilities, but it is the revolutionary force in immediate explosion that has no time to calculate percentages of error, injury to the spirit of the human person.

Lower socialism and bourgeois right

The system of labour vouchers is much more complex in terms of the social organisation it requires, above all because, as Marx explained, it must take place, even in a society that has just emerged from the womb of the capitalist one, in a bloodless and peaceful manner. This means that a final application of restorative right is needed, that is, of bourgeois right (Gotha). However, it is far above the possibilities of a society like Russia, in which prevailing social forms are still lower than not only state capitalism, but also private capitalism itself, and even small mercantile production, as it was in 1921; and statistical control itself is a dream.

All products, in the “voucher” system, go directly to society and are not the object of exchange between producers, either individual or associated. But society calculates how much labour time they represent (this will not matter at the upper level, nor did it matter in the flames of the glorious Russian period of the besieged communes of Leningrad-Moscow, tightened at the throat) and makes it a total that reflects the total number of hours worked by each person in production. For each hour of labour, the individual will be able to withdraw an equivalent part of the social product, stripped of the known rates of surplus value (see the final Russian discussion and Pentecost report).

The voucher was therefore born when the accumulative currency died. But at the time of the tax in kind it was the market, the exchange of products owned by individuals and currency that appeared – and as progressive forms! – while the first forms of higher communism closed their shining appearance, because production would have died if the historical phase of the local civil war had not been closed, the requisitions, the masses of the speculators on the wall to the fury of the people; and with this, as Lenin sketched as an unsurpassed master, the scale of the economic forms had risen, and not fallen, in the only possible way of history, except for the fire that we did not set in Europe.

Let us suppose that we want to give bread to all without violating the principle of equal labour according to time. It can be established that in the day, say six hours, bread is one hour. If the voucher is six stamps you have the ration of bread of that day with that stamp. The organisation of such a service supposes that “society knows” how many people work, and what the relationship between the two quantities are, once the many provisions that come into play have been made. That is, it supposes that there is no longer a market for bread, bread that can be found as a commodity, money given against labour time, or wages.

This has never been seen in Russia, and even less is it about to be seen, since all labour is expressed as a currency, and all this currency is expressed as capital. But (here’s the answer to the question) not even in the years when the band betrayer of Stalin and the other thugs did not command, the problem of the lower stage, that is, equal consumption at the same time of labour, was not even put in the pipeline, because they were Marxists and not crazy drunk by the fire and flames of the trembling historical scene. How can we put the relationship of “so much right to bread for so much duty to work” – a relationship that will sanction a communist state, but for the bourgeois infliction of right and duty (and it was once Engels that insisted to put in the programmes in the place of the right to the full fruit of one’s labour, which is Lassallean nonsense, the equality of duty together with every equality of right) – when the majority of the population, to say nothing of all the rest, produces a weighed state? This is still the key to Russian agriculture in the kolkhoz family, and in the cooperative privatism of the kolkhoz company, where every day the belts are loosened more and more to the swollen belly, in the time that it turns to.

Levelling of consumption

We know that all our texts mock the egalitarian conception of socialism and the naive idea that it will go bankrupt every time a person consumes more than their share. But we know no less that, on a large scale, after the proletarian victory, the organisation of production will go through a phase in which, first with drastic means and then with administrative ones, the individual disproportions between consumption will be hit hard. And we know that first Marx and then on his guidance Lenin gave great importance to the decree of the Commune of Paris of 1871 that established for the officials of the Commune itself of any function a pay equal to the average wage of the factory worker.

It is indisputable that, even if as a statement that remained glorious in principle, this was a step towards the first form of socialism in which we tend to balance the average of social consumption and that of social labour time for all. The Commune, first dictatorial state of the working class, could not put it for all the French production and for an entire economy, because the federates ate more mice of the sewers of Paris than wheat of the fertile valleys of France, and the administration of the sections and districts of the city directed not so much workers of the factories, largely inactive, but workers who fought on the barricades and ramparts at that time, transformed into grenadiers and gunners of the revolution. But with the minimum of administrative management that the tragedy allowed, the Commune had to hire employees and pay them. It did not dare, and Marx seriously rebuked it, to take gold for the war from the full dungeons of the Bank of France, which would then go to Berlin; but it warned its epic “bureaucrats” that no more than one workshop worker would be paid. When it did not pay the others, the former stayed at their desks and the latter at their cannons, tightening their belts and teeth.

This principle was recalled by Lenin in connection with communist saturdays, in which communist party members, and they alone, gave hours and material work without compensation, that is, they offered society surplus labour and value, putting under their feet whole rags of their “right”.

The economic management, no longer mercantile, monetary or wage-based, of the lowest stage of socialism, is based on the planned calculation of physical quantities that are fundamental for society: labour time and the mass of consumer goods, the application of which is theoretically possible quickly for a society that is already conducted in a capitalist industrial form even for the agricultural sectors, and in which every molecular economy of production is decidedly overcome, and which can be started with simple and obvious provisions. Some of them will concern the members of the communist party; for whatever function they use until social consumption is calculated, they will be remunerated on the basis of the working average. As far as intellectual labour is concerned, a sure rule may be that for the latter it is possible that a different diet is prescribed, but it will also be prescribed the abolition of all drugs, such as alcohol and tobacco, and all forms of nocturnal recreation, designed to bounce off the brain before time runs out.

The reattachment to the Russian treatment

At the end of this passage, which is much less incidental than it can be considered, let us briefly recall which was the bridge of passage from the economy of the west.

In order to distract the world from the essential characteristics that prevent even a hippo from misunderstanding between capitalism and socialism – market, money, wages, business and family budgets, income, savings, tax, social security, credit law, property of the inhabited house, and so on – one is cheated on by a concept of Marxism that is exactly mentioned: one social form of production replaces another, through struggles and revolutions, only when it guarantees a lesser human effort against a greater production, a higher yield.

The proof of the socialist form has been sought in the greater production claim obtained in Russia, confusing the brute mass of the product with the relationship between the social quantity obtained and the social effort committed, and confusing with this concept – whose Marxist unit of measure is only one: time; that is, in capitalism the worker is left with a quarter of his day, in socialism a drastically greater proportion, at least double, and this at the same time as “technical productivity”, which is another pair of sleeves – the rate of increase in annual production. It was said that in this comparison Russia was beating the West. To this fundamental basic lie of all Stalin’s propaganda and of the various descendants, we also replied in the writings called “Dialogue with Stalin” and “Dialogue with the Dead” – which appeared here and in volume – that the fact, and its explanation, was false. That capitalism in general accelerates rapidly from year to year its brute production when it is “young”, when it comes out of a war especially if lost, when it comes out of a crisis, and in general when it is comfortable to mangle more the workers’ strength under the wage machine.

Having tried this looking eastwards, it is a matter of trying it looking westwards. The adversary is different, but says the same thing: the capitalist mode of production is able to increase social welfare unlimitedly by decreasing the average exertion, avoiding wars and crises, and what we expect, the revolution.

Prospectus I – Historical development of capital: yearly industrial production in England, France, German, USA from 1761 to 1955 (indices 1913 = 100)

The main source of the data collected in this graph, which covers most of the work of Kuczynski (Jürgen), an economist who claims to be of the Marxist school, and is a Soviet philosopher; the author, as in the past, was aware of extensive historical research on production, productivity, world trade, the history of industrial capitalism and the situation of the working classes. However, the present graph has only been able to use the data of the mentioned author until 1933, even subjecting them to certain computational elaborations that we indicate.

These are only four typical capitalist countries: England, France, Germany and the United States of America. The data year by year are given only from 1859, while for the previous periods (excluding France) were processed the extreme years of a series of cycles that the author gives in another work. The reference year is always 1913, so we assume the index 100 (except for the United States where 1900 is used in the cycles prior to 1859, which we also reported with transformation since 1913).

In order to integrate the picture from 1933 to 1955 (it starts from 1760 for England, from 1827 for the United States, from 1801 for Germany and only from 1859 for France, which is no small gap) we had to use index data of industrial production built on various sources: data from the UN yearbooks, data from the Italian statistical yearbook, data from the English magazine The Economist, and some other sources.

We have always ensured that there was no contrast between the various sources and the collimations wherever possible were acceptable, with differences that could be overlooked.

We repeat an important observation on the data of Kuczynski that affects especially the early historical periods of capitalism. While modern sources mostly refer to the complex of industrial production, almost always specifying that all manufacturing, mining, transport and public services industries are included (with rare exceptions), Kuczynski warns when he gives his pictures for years and cycles that it is only the production of “Industriewaren” or “industrial goods”, wanting for them to understand the products of those industries that work on raw materials of non-agricultural origin, but in turn industrial, or at least mineral. He indicates that the wood industry should therefore be excluded as it processes the forest product, and the textile industry. This criterion should exclude only spinning, but not weaving, the raw material of which is spinning, and certainly not the extractive industries.

This should be taken into account in the study of the graph, which, however, does not lose its meaning and its basic value in the light of the deductions to be drawn from it, as will be seen below.

Prospectus II – Recent progress of world capitalism

Annual industrial production in the main countries of the world from 1932 to 1955 (base index 1932 = 100) and annual increases in industrial production for the same countries from 1947 to 1955

The present picture refers to the most recent historical period, i.e. the period following the Second World War. In fact, only the ten from 1946 to 1955 are shown for the year, and now 1956 has been added. For simple reference are then reported the years 1932 and 1937.

In fact, the indices of total industrial production all refer to the base 1932 = 100. In addition to the four countries in the first table, the picture also includes Russia, Japan and Italy.

The figures in this picture, at least up to 1955, were all taken from Russian sources: speeches at the 20th Congress and previous reports at congresses on the five-year plans. The other non-Russian sources were used only for comparisons and confirmations, which are generally positive, to supplement the picture with the last vintage of 1956, for some index of intermediate years.

Country by country and year by year, the column on the right of the index indicates the annual percentage increase, positive or negative.

The relative increases of entire periods, such as 1932-1946 and 1946-1955, are then indicated in special horizontal indices.

Another horizontal shows the speed of recovery of production following the Second World War, in which all these countries were involved.

Elementary practical example

Effect of a constant annual increase and its deduction from the increase in the period

Yearly Increase of 20% for Five Years

Series of the indices: 100; 120; 144; 172.8; 207.4; 248.8 (Error series: 100; 120; 140; 160; 180; 200)

Exact deduction of the yearly increment – Final increment: 148.8%; not 100%

The present small graph, built according to a simple numerical example chosen at will, serves to dispel the doubt that is often raised by various comrades, who are wrong to be afraid of “mathematics”, and the consolation of learning that the same oversight is common in some cases to the great official Soviet economist Varga.

If in a five-year plan it was found that the production of the last year is about 150 percent increased compared to that of the year zero (i.e. not the first of the five-year period, but the last of the previous five-year period), to the question: how much was the annual increase, on average?, should not be answered hastily: 30 percent each year, as does who divides 150 final increase for five years.

Who does so exaggerates (by 50 percent) because the real annual increase is not about thirty, but only twenty per cent.

Hence a first tare is to be done to the propaganda done by hand.

In the calculation it is not the index that goes from 100 to 250 but from 100 to 248.8, as it happens exactly by adding for each year 20 percent to the figure of the previous year. The picture shows how to return correctly from the increase of the five-year period to the annual one. Twenty per cent per year does not mean 100 per cent in the five-year period, but 148.8 (which is worth 150) per cent. And the race from the index 100 to the index about 250 is not made at the rate of thirty percent per year, but only at that, less high than much, of 20 percent.

Source: Il Programma Comunista, 13-18 August, 1957.