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

Historical expansion of industrial production volume

1. Origin and controversy of the investigation

This treatment does not consist in presenting directly the development of modern capitalism according to the doctrine of Marxism, but takes its cue from the polemical need to refute the presentations made by the Stalinists in the first place, and the modern apologists of the capitalist system, who are “confessed”, in the second place. Russians and Americans.

To follow this polemical necessity we have taken as our starting point the study of the historical variation of the index of industrial production determined (and the modes of determination are in many cases, if not all, doubtful and contradictory) nation by nation.

The quantity of the global industrial product is not the essential quantity in a Marxist study, and for obvious reasons, of which we remember the main ones, which will be better examined in the following part of the study.

First of all, the industrial economy alone is insufficient for the study of a historical mode of production, in that it leaves aside the chronological events of the production of agricultural products, which, when considered, raises much less glorious chimes than those of global production, forming tables and index curves not for the entire product, but for the ratio of it to the population of the corresponding year. In this case, the curves of Russia and the USA would bend, while the humble curve of France, for example, would rise by no small amount.

In capitalist industrial production, the part of the agrarian economy conducted as a capitalist industry, that is by tenant entrepreneurs, and generally with mass employment of employees, is not even understood. In such a criterion it would be to the advantage of England and also of Italy, where considered. And it would give a greater idea of the development of the bourgeois form in many ultra-oceanic countries.

Moreover, the index of the industrial revenue of manufactured goods indistinctly brings together dead labour and living labour in the sense of Marx, i.e. capital that inertly crosses production and reappears unchanged, and more consumption capital added to it in production by the labour force, which for some decades now bourgeois economists have begun to call added value, usurping our terminology in order to falsify it.

This confusion, which remains intact in the subtle determination of the “per capita income”, as it would remain in the determination of indices of global industrial production reduced to the same population, serves to conceal the existence of classes and the monopoly of dead labour, whether it is exercised by a physical class, or by a capitalist state, and manager of the mercantile corporate fora, facilitator of foreign or indigenous classes.

2. The provocative image of Stalin-Khrushchev

The apology of the alleged Soviet socialism has been carried out for decades on the basis of the comparison between the indices of development of industrial production, spreading the false thesis that with the same thermometer we can measure the heat of life of the bourgeois form and of the socialist one, that is, increasingly sinking into the doctrine of the concurrent emulation between States and “systems”.

The same verification of the “speed in the race to production” is applied to the economies of the various countries, to demonstrate that this race is won by modern Russia, and that as a result in it we see socialism in the economic structure.

We start from the demonstration that such a verdict of the judge of arrival is contestable for obvious falsehoods; and we want to remind the proletariat that the crazy speed of the race to produce is only the maximum of the shame of the bourgeois system, and the maximum of the scientific evidence of its necessary historical end, that Marxism has elevated. This race will not be accelerated, but broken and held back by the victory of the socialist revolution.

Marxist theorems are used by those who speak from the Kremlin with ostentatious literal fidelity, to commit the maximum betrayal. But even this race to produce lies is about to end.

As it is true that Marx established that forms of production follow one another when the new one has a greater performance than the old one, it is also true that in social processes quantity is transformed into quality. But the fundamental quantity to which these rules must be applied is in both cases the time of the contribution of work that the individual must give to the form of production (class up to now) in force, and the time that remains free for the harmonious development not of himself (the formula would still smell of bourgeois philosophies and would project the individual towards the figure of the exploiter) but of the species, of society, no longer broken into classes that compete for the product of work. It is the madness to which this dispute has come that leads to the solution, not to abolish the classes, to glorify the heap around which the fight must take place, to find the unobtainable formula of a non-violent solution, that is, of a repulsive crush.

Undoubtedly it is right that for the social war that we have indicated as a historical solution to explode, the indexes of those gentlemen must have reached a certain level.

The latest edition of these images, conceived by Stalin, who was thinking of tearing them apart one day by sneaking up on them and letting the missiles go, is that of the 20th Congress. We run ten times stronger than the capitalist world, said Khrushchev, and this proves two things: that we are of a different substance, and that if they do not want to be bypassed soon they must, of free will, change into our own form!

3. Our first two tables

Our first controversial move was to show how the choice of the starting year of the indexes has a lot of effect in this game of comparisons. The year of grace Stalin-Khrushchev is 1929. The reason is simple, and we said so in the Dialogue with the Dead. In 1929 Western capitalism had reached a peak, followed by a frightening crisis. The height of 1929 (see our first prospectus) was only reached or exceeded: in 1926 in England, in 1952 (!) in France, in 1936, and after new ruin in 1951 itself, in Germany, in 1937 in the United States.

In Russia, on the contrary, there was a progressive increase that, begun in 1920, from a minimum fearful, according to data from Russian discourse, had no arrests until the year 1949, after which there is no news of 1941 and 1942 (German invasion), and only in 1944 and finally in 1948 the index returns to increase over 1940.

The fall that Western capitalism suffered between the two wars was determined by the great crisis that began at the end of 1929 and reached its worst in 1932. This was followed by a recovery until 1937, and for America another formidable one during the world war and after its intervention, having highly progressive indices precisely in the series of years 1941, 1942, 1943, in which Russian industrial production fell, while Russian soldiers fought until the end with the weapons of America’s industry.

So it was enough to change the reference year from 1929 to 1932 to see all mutated the picture of the same situation, and for this same show how the emulation in the race of in say industrialists is devoid of any scientific sense, and is completely reversed with appropriate choices, resulting in pure charlatanism to apply it to the diagnosis of the form of production, capitalist or socialist.

In Khrushchev’s picture, the Russian race between 1929 and 1955 was ten times faster than that of the capitalist world and almost nine times faster than that of America.

First of all, the criterion of our small graph in the Practical Example is enough to show that reaching tenfold in 26 years does not mean having an annual increase ten times higher, but only (indices 2000 and 200) an annual rate of about three times (12 per cent against 4 per cent).

Passing however with the same figures Khrushchev to the reference 1932 has had the result given in our second prospectus. In the 23 years Russia has had the index 1231 against the 445 of the United States, and the respective average annual rates are 11.5% for the first and 7% for the second, a difference that is not astonishing and that “does not turn into quality”.

With the second prospectus, however, we have gone further by choosing for comparison the post-war period, which has the same characteristics for all, and is for all of continuous increase in industrial production.

The results of this period have given the following ranking: Germany, Japan, Russia, Italy, France, England, United States. The doctrine of quality has run away in the air, unless you find more socialism than anywhere else in the world in West Germany and Japan!

For the other part of the period, that is, the part that for all was of war, with the exception of periods of economic crisis, the ranking is that of the year 1946 of the prospectus in question. Russia takes its beautiful revenge on Germany and Japan, but this time those who beat it in “socialism” are none other than the United States: just them. So these two dear allies are in the same qualitative band: and in fact, except in a false way, the result is right: two great capitalist powers.

Race 1932-1946: United States 283, Russia 252, England143, France 91, Germany 58, Japan 52. We observe that the annual rhythms would give the same order and are negative, as in the picture for Germany, Japan and France.

We have therefore reached the proof that the speed and its variation (acceleration of industrial production) are justified not by the emulation between different social forms but by the rules we gave in the Dialogue with the Dead: the effects of a production crisis, the effects of a recovery after the crisis, the effects of a lost war, the effects of a prolonged war invasion.

Since then we have added another element: the historical age of industrial capitalism, in the sense that the most recent capitalisms have much higher production growth rates than the ancient ones.

4. Law of decreasing increment

At the meeting in Cosenza and Ravenna it was stated that for the same national capitalism, beyond the abrupt changes in pace due to general crises and wars both distant and near, won and lost, and in keeping with the rules now mentioned, including that of the historical age of capitalism itself, the rate of annual growth decreases sharply with time.

The demonstration of this law, which is not how we will try to prove a discovery, but only a formulation in other words of the laws of Marx’s doctrine, is given in the third prospectus, published in these pages.

As we said at the meeting in Ravenna, it is a matter of neglecting the small vicissitudes of short periods, and drawing on the graphic diagram of the indices an “envelope curve” that touches above all the upper vertices of the base diagram. In other words, instead of considering the left column for each country, with the indices of industrial production given year by year, we consider only the middle column, which shows the indices forming the “vertex” of both the immediately preceding and the immediately following ones.

In this way the depressions are neglected, or if you want the valleys of the curve that stand between two vertices of the maximum, and no particular conclusions are drawn from the “baseness”, or if you want “minimum” or the minimums that are between the two maximums directly connected by our upper envelope curve.

All this is clearer in the oral expositions for the illustration of the large colour graphs, subsequently perfected in order to make them expressive and easy to read.

And in fact we have seen that the downhill runs of production, due to the very nature of capitalism and modern imperialism above all, are soon compensated by a subsequent robust rise, as we have seen impressive examples in France, Germany, Japan and Russia above all.

The present Russian situation, instead of being a matter of contradiction with the laws of capitalism, is only one great example of this true ascent and the other, starting from a minimum attained after a spectacular descent: the imperialist war of 1914-1918, disastrously lost, and the civil war between revolution and counter-revolution from 1917 to 1922.

For the time being, it is a question of explaining the mechanism of our third prospectus, inserted here, which concerns the four countries: England, France, Germany and the United States.

Prospectus III – Historically decreasing relative growth of capitalism

a) England

b) France

c) Germany

d) United States

5. Construction of the prospectus for England

On the basis of the construction of the framework only the maximum years with relative indices have been taken; indeed we will add that to make the prospectus less burdensome we have considered only those maximums that had a higher index than the maximum previously marked.

To give an example, in the first prospectus of the last issue it can be read that production in England had a maximum of 100 in 1913, but then had, for a series of oscillations, other relative maximums of 90, 91 and 94 in the years 1917, 1929 and 1924. Since in absolute value these maxima are below the one of 1913, we have not considered them but we have gone to the next maximum peak of 1927, because of 106, higher than 100 of 1913. In fact, if we had considered those intermediate years, we would have had negative variations between 1913 and 1917, and we would have seen a stronger increase, but only of “compensation”, between 1924 and 1927.

If we look now at table A) relative to England, we can see that from the years 1859 to 1956 we consider as real maximums those of the years (including the starting one) 1859, 1865, 1877, 1883, 1899, 1906, 1911, 193, 1927, 1929, 1937, 1951, 1956. The corresponding indices are in the second column and are a growing series. Under the heading “periods between maximums” are indicated the increments of each period and the corresponding annual average. With this series of all positive percentage increases there is a rational basis of comparison, because all the steps of indices so calculable, period by period or year by year, would give as their total sum the difference between the last and the first of all the indices of the years considered, in particular 193 minus 24. It would be enough for the verification to multiply for each period the increases of period (fourth vertical) by the index of the year of beginning (second vertical) divided by percent, finding the absolute differences of the indices.

The reader, scrolling through the fourth vertical, will find a series of annual increments that are not yet descending in a continuous and regular manner. This depends on the brevity of the events that characterised them. For example, in the years of tension that sparked the First World War, English production was boosted by 7.2% a year, but during the conflict and the subsequent phase of stabilisation it slowed down suddenly to just 0.4 for 14 years, and then rose again.

Under the title Short Cycles we have begun to group the periods, deduced with a purely formal method from the arithmetical data, into cycles that are chosen in such a way as to give them a certain historical meaning, without prejudice to the extreme terms chosen from among those of the previous columns. The norm of the descent of the rhythm begins to be almost completely verified and only one apparent denial remains: the increases of the period 1906-1913 and of that 1929-1937 with respect to those of the previous years. These two periods have the common character of being pre-war periods, and this is not only the case in England. An increase in production “against the rule” prepares the imperialist war, in the sense of Lenin.

Moving on to table A) even more to the right we will choose, always with the obligation to include them among the summits of departure, three great periods of 24, 30 and 43 years the first period is that of the European accommodation, in which England is neutral – 1859 to 1883. The second connects two years of peace 1883 and 1913, but of a peace that prepares the explosion of wars of industrial dominance in the world. The third period, 193 to 1955, also connects two years of peace and between them includes the two world wars.

In each of these periods the conditions are gathered for a course that we will say “normal” of the capitalist form. Either there are no precipices and subsequent ascents, or there are crises of war, and recovery, commercial crises, and recovery. The final three digits of the last column on the right are therefore valid for a period long enough to express the trend of capitalism, and it results in the decreasing or decreasing of the incremental rate, as in the final series: 3.6 per cent, 2.0 per cent, 1.5 per cent.

6. Tables from other countries

We can now leave to the readers a better study of the tableau of France. The same phenomena are found, including that of the over-productive tension that sparked off the war (1907 to 1913) with an obvious greater effect of stopping (short periods) the two world wars that led to no disastrous German invasions. It should be noted that the first, of vigorous capitalism, contains a great war won with Austria and a great war lost with Prussia, whose weight on French industry is long felt, until 1892, when the normal temperature of production is kindled, and beyond the fever of imperialist rivalries (see 1907-1913).

The final result is net: 4.1, 2.7, 0.9

The German table shows a more particular trend than the data common to the first two. The first period 1859-1872 was marked by the two wars over Austria and France over the settlement of Europe. The depression of the defeated France is matched by the further impetus of German capitalism, which secured its political revolution in 1871, and begins the struggle of fierce rivalry with England. In the years from 1906 to 1913 the strength of the great rivals entered into full recovery, and the scarcity of colonies and markets, crushes the German industrial development far below the general rule (see left 2.6 to compare with French 4.8, while in the last two years England had started with the cited 7.2). Then the disaster of the two lost wars, despite the power of the shooting (first prospectus) from the minimums of 1932 and 1946, of 51 (France 75) and 30 (France 27 in 1944, the year for which in Germany we were perhaps much lower) crush, but less than in France, the rhythm of the final war period. The series is net 4.6, 4.3, 1.6.

In table D) it is America, another continent, but different ways lead to the same point. Marxism opposes the doctrine of diverging roads to that of converging roads. The first International of History engraved that all roads led to Rome.

It is the debris of the social struggle that in the epochs of mud sets off for blind destinations along the thousands of alleys of the commodity.

The final periods (long cycles) in the American chart are different. The first of 33 years includes the war of secession and the phase of the doctrine of Monroe. The second of 21 years includes the descent into colonial agony from the Spanish war to the hunt for world markets, the third of 16 years includes the First World War in which America did not make sacrifices but only a great capitalist affair, with almost inappreciable setbacks (short crisis in 1921, index 105 against the European minimums 57, 45, 44 readable in the first prospectus, and without minimums in the years of war). It is the Second World War, our fourth long cycle of 27 years in which America really fights for the first time in history, but making a bigger deal. The blows to the course of its production rates give them two crises: 1929-1932, on Black Friday and 1937-1938, the crisis that deluded Stalin and made him an agent of the overwhelming Yankee of 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943; in three years from 236 to 445; the “supersocialist” step with which, even if he ignores him, we ridiculed Mr. Khrushchev! (always referenced for detail to the first prospectus).

The final decreasing series is very clear, although different from the European ones: 7.1, 6.1, 4.6, 3.5.

Diversity consists of the most sustained rhythms, but the law of decreasing returns is also confirmed, and nothing would have been different if even for America we had considered a single 43-year long cycle with two world imperialist wars, as in the other three panels.

In fact, from 1913 to 1953 the index rose from 100 to 517, the relative increase in period is 417 percent, and the average annual increase calculation, 3.9 percent. The ternary series is therefore 7.1, 6.1, 3.9; and it is like the other three in clear decline.

7. General criteria and international comparison

In all the tables of the third prospectus we started from the year 1859, and we did so for two reasons: it was the oldest year in which the first prospectus shows the four nations (in fact France begins); and for three others the previous data are not annual, but are those of the extremes of the cycles given by Kuczynski, who provides only the averages of the cycles, about ten years. The procedure of ascending to the indices of the extremes of cycles is only probabilistic and not of mathematical deduction, and only on other sources such a work can be carried out.

In the Ravenna report we indicated for 1761 in England (the oldest figure of all those shown) not 1.6 as we have printed now in the first prospectus, but 1.2 which corresponds better to the right approximate calculation. With this data English capitalism (and we also remember the low evaluation of the textile industry, which was then in first place) has risen from 1.2 to 24 in 92 years, or 20 times, with a total increase of 1900 percent. The annual rate of this period, so long that it can be called almost pre-capitalism, is 3.3%, which is lower than that of 2.6 of the following 24 years. But this conclusion should be reserved for other data that show a much faster start of British capitalism.

For France, this discussion of the available data cannot be set in motion. For Germany, we have deduced for 1800 the probable index 0.6, which, becoming 10 in 1859, led to an annual rate of 4.9 with which the present table begins; but we believe that even this rate, based on more detailed data, is higher.

Finally for the United States we have a 0.2 in the initial 1827, which becomes 3 in 1859, that is 15 times greater, and in 32 years leads to the relevant average rate of 8.2 percent, which exceeds the first of 7.1.

Therefore, except for a greater study on the ancient years of the first capitalisms, we can see that the general rule of diminution has occurred on a historical course of about two centuries.

If we now want to compare the rate of increase in the four historical countries, in addition to what we have already said about the individual frameworks, we can establish the prospectus:

England France Germany United States I cycle… 3.6 4.1 4.6 7.1 II cycle… 2.0 2.7 4.3 6.1 III cycle… 1.5 0.9 1.6 3.9

In general, from left to right, the indices are increasing; in fact, the four countries are in the order in which capitalism appears in them.

There may be some differences of opinion on the consideration of the American one, which some may consider older, for example, than the German one as at the beginning.

If, in order to establish the historical age of a bourgeois mode of production, we were to start from the political revolution, without prejudice to the primacy of the English revolution that took place in the 17th century, we could refer the American revolution to independence from England, which like the French revolution fell at the end of the 18th century, and consider the German revolution to be very delayed, since the feudal forms did not disappear until 1848; not even completely so by 1870, and to say that the Philistines would still be alive in 1914… and would resurface with the third Reich!

But North America did not need to make an anti-feudal class revolution, but only a civil war in 1866, according to even the sharpest judgments of Marx. As for Germany, despite the influence of the junker until recently, that of the dynasty (which still haunts today’s England!), and other tendencies, despite the defeat of the liberal bourgeoisie in 1848 and other developments, what marks the full birth of industrial capitalism even in the legal form of the State is 1859, in which the feudal Austria actually disappears, decaying from the place of one of the leading powers in the world. There is no need to wait for the triumphs of military Prussia in 1866 and 1870.

Let us therefore maintain the ranking of the mirror in terms of the age of capitalism, and deduce the rule that the youngest begin with a higher incremental rate of the previous career lotus, as shown by the first horizontal.

The net detachment of the United States is influenced by the low population density and the expansion of social forms from the Atlantic to the Pacific. For a dozen or so states in the Union, capitalism may be older than that of central continental Europe, but for everything else it is much younger.

Our rules will be confirmed by the entry on the scene of industrial production of Japan and then Russia. As for Italy, we have sometimes remembered the originality of its case and the hybridism of its state formation, conducted in the shadow of war of others. It follows Germany in the entry into the scene among the bourgeois powers at a certain distance, while for other economic and social forms has very ancient capitalist, not so much in industry as in finance, trade and agriculture.

But of all these passages we will go on to say more.

8. Capital’s centre of strength

While between our first and third cycles the countries of Europe fall below half (England 42 per cent, France 24 per cent, Germany 25 per cent), the United States complies with the law of incremental decrease, but to a much more moderate extent; they only fall to 55 per cent.

The general rule of the slowdown is proven, but the historical fact that the latest figures indicate is evident: the bankruptcy of European domination in the world, the passage of the capitalist industrial primacy from the East to the West of the Atlantic. And the key question for the years to come is whether this movement can be reversed, and whether Russian social development, and the upheaval of the powers of the East, will have this effect.

The significant fact is the different effect of the great world wars on the economic course of the different countries. In essence it can be said that wars are a resource with which capitalist states struggle against the inexorable law of diminishing rates of expansion. England, despite its victory in two great wars, has had to submit to it clearly and shows the irreparable senility of its structure. The younger France and Germany, which have been tried by highly destructive wars, are old before their time, and despite the signs of recovery given in the post-war period, it is only for the latter that a return of vitality can be expected in the productive structure and in the struggle for markets. By waging two wars against its European rivals, Germany has followed the only path determined by the tendency to avoid the loophole; its index of the third cycle, so tragic for it, is the best in Europe and will certainly still be the preferred one in the coming years.

The advantage of America has first of all its basis in the little vulnerability of the distant territory in the fires of war, and the proof of Soviet missiles are dubious and very far. It also intervened in the two wars after they had already torn Europe apart, which explains the phenomenon of accelerated production after intervention in the conflicts, which we have described above and on other occasions.

Imperial Russia applied the same tactic in the Second World War and, despite the hard evidence, it achieved a similar result. This is another element of the perspective of the future, to be taken into account.

For the moment, and before moving on to a nod to the course of the Russian indices, which we must limit to our third cycle, 1913-1956, we will stop to refute a doctrine built by Kuczynski. This author, not being able to deny the general fact of the slowdown of the rhythm, wanted to attribute it to the imperialist period, establishing the difference between the years of so-called pre-monopolist capitalism, and the years that followed. He places the developed around the twentieth century, and the figures easily prove his assumption.

His conclusion is that in Russia, where (who knows why) there would be a non-imperialist type of industry, one has reacted to this law of the capitalist form, and avoided the retreat of the productive rhythm, distancing the bourgeois world.

But the conclusion is false. Until the world wars explode, the phase of conquest of markets, colonies, trusts and monopolies described by Lenin as insuperable, achieves the aim of curbing the slowdown in the virulence of capitalism. We have shown this by the fact that the cycles that follow the opening of the imperialist phase exalt (for some years) the rhythm.

9. Sunset of the idyllic period

At the meeting in Ravenna we noticed how the part of the tableau that precedes 1914 flows calmly and serenely, while from that date the curves start to dance up and down, and it is clear that a general equilibrium will no longer be reached. There is another characteristic, that the great crises of production, for the most powerful capitalisms even more shocking than wars, tend to happen at the same time all over the world (which Stalin claimed to have denied in the speech of 1938). These crises of the imperialist period are of the same order of magnitude as the arrests of production following war defeats and devastating invasions.

The doctrine of crises is already in Marx and he saw in them a ten-year period (the years he studied are about 1845, 1856, 1866, and this will be explained below), but these crises of young capitalism are of much lesser incidence and have more of a crisis of international trade than of the industrial machine. They do not affect the potential of the industrial structure, which today is called production capacity, and which is the limit of global production if all existing plants functioned fully. Those were crises of “chomage”, i.e. the closure of industries; these were modern crises of disintegration of the entire system, which must then laboriously rebuild its damaged skeletons. This is the first response to the possible objection that in our first prospectus these crises are barely visible, also because there are no annual figures before the one of 1866.

Until 1913, if we go through the column of minimums, we find some coincidences only in 1886 (England and France), in 1894 (it was also affected in a certain way by Germany and America in 1901-1902, and more clearly for the four countries in 1908. But the losses are only a few percent, and the balance returns to the maximum in two years.

But after 1913 earthquakes hit the whole planet. We do not repeat ourselves on those (wars left aside): of 1920-21, which hit Germany with a delay of two years; of 1929-32 (particularly long since it did not emerge with the war), and of 1937-38 which already in 1939 was followed by a recovery (the year of the outbreak of the Second World War).

The two periods separated from 1913 are therefore clearly different. But the doctrine of Kuczynski falls for this consideration. In 1900, and even before, the imperial monopolistic forms appeared, and he says so himself, which as a first result did not provoke war, but in the meantime accelerated the rate of increase in production. In England this can be seen by comparing, in the second prospectus, the Short Cycles, from 1883 to 1906 with the following 1906 to 1913 (and to the left also 1883 to 1899, fully “idyllic” with those that followed). In France the same happens when comparing 1899-1907 with 1907-1913. In the United States, the struggle for empires was delayed, and so was the struggle of “navalism”, which was another incentive for state industrial orders. The pre-war 1903-1913 is still according to the general rule of diminution, and the 1913-20 still falls, but very little. It was the post-war period 1920-23 that, in parallel with the imperial positions of the United States in world peace, saw an abrupt rise in the pace, between 4.2 and 6.9 and this in spite of the rapid crisis of 1921, compensated with a shot, between 1922 and 1923, of 22 percent!

The nascent German imperialism, launched late in the rivalry of the fleets, and closed from the lack of colonies, even if defending itself with desperate weapons as the dumping (sale under cost) in order to produce, must suffer a net descent after 1891-1900, period in which the industry had naturally grown until the saturation of the too restricted internal market. The pressure to which the young German industrialism, of great technical capacity and productive power, was subsequently subjected between 1906 and 1913, and the decision of the first arrivals to suffocate it, led to war, the cause of which can be seen in the contradictory movement of the rhythms, at the turn of the 20th century.

This means that the imperialist phase tends to exalt the speed of growth of capitalism, to react to its ageing. But it can only do this by preparing the inevitable war of predominance of the States. The “neo-idyllic” doctrines of the Stalin-Khrushchev-Kuczynski type cannot replace Lenin’s fundamental doctrine.

The conclusion of this first rough summary that wants to translate the cold language of numbers into historical relations is in this sense: a third world war would come after a major interwar crisis of the magnitude of 1929-1932. During the resumption of production that will follow the force of the proletarian revolution will be called into question once again.

And such a crisis, with the resurgence of the Marxist revolutionary party, should also affect Russia.

A perfect correspondence links, in the modern super opportunist wave of Russians like Stalin and post-Stalin, the economic deformations of Marxism to the political and ideological ones that plunge them back into the dustbin of the small-bourgeois and revisionist myths.

The return of industrialism to the characteristics of the initial era, peaceful and idyllic, which provoked the evolutionist, gradualist, reformist theories, the Bernstein-style illusions of an economy that, progressively increasing in productivity, slipped without roar from capitalism into socialism, is the illusion sketched by Kuczynski of remedying the defects of the imperialist cycle, and is the pairing of the low propaganda of peace, emulation, shock-free persuasion that from Moscow replaces the perspectives of Lenin and even those fallen, but not to the last mud, of Stalin.

The Marxist school, on the other hand, is waiting for imperialism to break through the law that marks the road of capitalism; to try again the phases of the crazy exaltation of the rhythm of the production of goods, until the proletarian revolution will crush this demented illusion forever. Russia has not initiated socialism, but at the same time sacrificed itself to the blood orgies of national imperialism, of which it follows in the footsteps, and to the anachronistic betrayal of the illusion that with democratic opium the beast of Capital can be tamed.

Source: Il Programma Comunista, 11-25 September, 1957.