In the 1950s, the International Communist Party undertook a world-historic task: unravelling the Russian enigma. Through a series of articles they attempted to grapple with the nature of the Russian revolution – “Dialogue with Stalin”, a one way conversation with Stalin and his “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR“. Through a careful textual analysis, reference to Marx and Engels and the Marxist method, the ICP systematically reveals what is left unsaid but implied, by the admissions of the Stalinist bureaucracy: That capitalism had triumphed over the revolution.

PDF-Version: Thread of Time – Dialogue with Stalin

First Day

By submitting another article, a good two years after his last article, (that infamous text on linguistics[1] which we had to deal with only incidentally, but which would be worthy of detailed treatment; nevertheless, quod differtur[2]) about 50 pages long[3], Stalin responds to topics that have been presented in the last two years not only in the series “Thread of Time”, but also in the workshops on the theory and programme of Marxism conducted by our movement, and which have been published in summarised or detailed form.

By which we do not mean that Stalin (or his secretariat, whose networks span the globe) would have looked at this material and turned to us. We must not believe that, if we are real Marxists, the great historical disputes required personified protagonists presenting themselves to the astounded humanity – as if an angel on his cloud were blowing into the heavenly trumpet, and Dante’s demon Barbariccia responds with a sound that comes “de profundis”, that is, from the depths, in the realest, known to you, sense of the word[4]. Or like the Christian Paladin and the Saracen Sultan, who, before they draw their sparkling sabers, introduce themselves in a loud voice, challenge each other with the list of their ancestors and victorious tournaments and swear death to each other.

That’s just what was missing! On the one hand, the highest leader of the world’s largest state and the “communist” world proletariat, and on the other hand, a nobody, a nothing.

In reality, the facts and material forces acting in the substructure deterministically take up the discussion among themselves; and those who then dictate the text or hack into the keys are, like those who give the lecture, mere mechanisms, loudspeakers that passively convert the waves into voices; and it is not said that a loudspeaker with a power of 2000 watts doesn’t just produce the greatest nonsense.

It is therefore the same questions that emerge with regard to the importance of both social conditions in today’s Russia and international relations at the economic, political and military levels; they impose themselves just as much up there as they do down here, and they can only be clarified if they are juxtaposed with the theory that grasps what has already happened and is known, and if these questions are juxtaposed with the history of this theory, which a very long time ago – which remains indelible – was a common one.

So we know very well that Stalin’s answer from the upper Kremlin stories does not respond to our words and is not addressed to us. In order to continue the debate, it is not even necessary for him to know our theoretical organs[5]. The things and forces – whether large or small, past, present or future – remain the same, despite the whims of symbolism. When ancient philosophy wrote “sunt nomina rerum” (literally: the names belong to things), it wanted to say that things do not belong to the name. Translated into our language, this means: the thing determines the name, not the other way round. You can continue to dedicate 99% of your work to the name, portraits, epithets, lives and graves of Great Men: we will continue in the shadows, knowing that soon the generation will come who will only smile at you, you famous men of the great and very small calibre.

But the things between the lines in Stalin’s writing are too important for us to deny him the dialogue. For this reason, and not from a “á tout seigneur tout honneur”, we answer and expect the new appeal – even if it takes another two years, because we don’t have a hurry (isn’t it true, ex-Marxist?).

Tomorrow and Yesterday

The themes treated by Stalin in his text “The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR” are all key points of Marxism. But it is precisely these “nails” that must be hammered home before we can call ourselves the architects of the future.

Naturally, what struck the great mass of political onlookers on all sides was not the significant backtracking that Stalin engaged in, and had to engage in, but his anticipations of an uncertain future. It is on this pasture, which is always a recipe for success, that supporters and opponents alike threw themselves: they have not understood an accident, gave their own fanciful and aberrant interpretations.

Perspective is the obsession! But if the “observers” are just a bunch of asses, it is not much better for the operator: pulling the strings from the top of these prisons that are the organs of power, he is precisely in the position that allows him to see around him the least – and to foresee! So while everyone gets excited about suggestive predictions, we prefer to gather the conclusions that his backtracking dictated to Stalin.

Existentially everyone obeys the imbecilic imperative: “to distract oneself”! Yet, it is when it opens a window on the future and relates the prophecies that a great “name” has deigned to make that the political press distracts the public! This time the prediction was unexpected: no more world revolution, no more peace, but not the “holy war” between Russia and the rest of the world. Stalin said it: it will inevitably be war between capitalist states, a war that first of all will not include Russia! This is certainly nothing new, but it is interesting, even for us who don’t have a very keen taste for political cinema, because in cinema the spectator doesn’t care whether what he sees “is reality” (and to say that soon, with the Cinerama, he’ll be transported into full action!). Once the illusion of the exotic landscape, of the luxury apartments, of the embraces of the film’s super-Venus has been dispelled, the spectator, poor little employee or proletarian reduced to slavery, returns, all happy in his hovel and rubs himself against his wife whom fatigue has deformed, unless he replaces her with a beauty from the sidewalk…

So everyone threw themselves on the point of arrival, whereas it was the point of departure that was fundamental. There is a whole host of half-wits who want to rush to put the future, and who must be powerfully contained and thrown back to understand the first, certainly easier task, which they can’t even dream of. Everyone who has not understood the page in front of him or her cannot resist the temptation to turn it hoping to be enlightened by the next one, and this is how the beast becomes more of a beast than before.

In Russia, the existence of a police force that silences dissent, and that scandalises the West that concerns us (where the resources for imbecilising and standardising brains are ten times greater, and more disgusting), but rather the problem of defining the social stage that is being crossed, and the economic cog that is in motion, imposes itself, and arrives at the dilemma: should we continue to say that ours is a socialist, communist economy of the lower stage, or should we acknowledge that it is an economy governed by the law of value proper to capitalism, despite state industrialism? Stalin seems to confront such an acknowledgement, and he seems to want to hold back economists and business leaders who are too eager to adopt it. In reality he prepares the not far off (and useful also in a revolutionary sense) confession[6]. But the organised imbecility of the free world reads in it the announcement of the passage to the higher stage of full communism!

To focus on such a question, Stalin boards the classic method. It would be easy for him to lay down his cards and free himself from any obligation towards the school of Marx and Lenin theorists; but at this phase of the game the bank itself could jump! This is why he starts again ab ovo. Well, that’s what we want, we who have no stake to make the roulette game of history bear fruit and who have learned, from the very beginning, that our cause was that of the proletariat which has nothing to lose.

Stalin therefore declares that we need in the year of 1951 a “Marxist textbook on political economy”, and not only for the Soviet youth, but also for the comrades of other countries: prepubescents and senile beware!

He immediately points out that inserting in such a book chapters on Lenin and Stalin, as creators of socialist political economy, would not bring anything new. Very well, if he means what is already well known, i.e. that they did not invent it, but learned it – and the former has always maintained that.

Now that we are moving on to the field of strict terminology and “school” wording, we must say in advance that we have a preprint of Stalin’s text, which the Stalinist newspapers themselves have taken from a non-Russian press agency. We will look up in the full text as soon as possible[7].

Commodities and Socialism

He recalls the first elements of economic doctrine to discuss the “system of commodity production under the socialist regime”. We have in various texts (which, of course, in turn, were careful not to say anything new) argued that any system of production of commodities is a non-socialist system, and we are going to reiterate this: but Stalin (Stalin, Stalin; we are dealing with an article that could also be attributed to a committee that – “in a hundred years’ time” – surrogates a deceased or incapacitated Stalin: however, the symbolism with its notations, within the conventional limits of a practice of convenience, also serves us) could have written about a system of commodity production after the proletarian conquest of power. Such a statement wouldn’t be stepping into the realms of blasphemy.

Evidently some “comrades” in Russia have stated – referring to Engels – that preserving, after the nationalisation of the means of production, the system of commodity production, i.e. the character of commodities to products, means having preserved the capitalist economic system. In theory there is no Stalin who can prove them wrong. When, and if, they say that, being able to abolish commodity production, they have neglected or forgotten to do so, then they are certainly wrong!

But Stalin wants to prove that in a “socialist country” – a dubious term – the production of commodities can exist, and he refers to Marx’s definitions and their clear synthesis – perhaps not entirely beyond reproach – in a little propaganda booklet by Vladimir[8].

We have dealt several times with this subject, i.e. commodity production, its emergence and rule, its clearly capitalist character.[9]

According to Joseph Stalin, it is possible to stay in a mercantile environment and dictate safe plans, without the terrible maelstrom pulling the reckless pilot into the centre of the whirlpool and swallowing the abyss of capitalism. But his article reveals, to those who read as Marxists, that the turns tighten and accelerate – as the theory has established.

As Lenin reminds us, the commodity is an object with two characteristics: that of being useful to man – that of being able to be exchanged for another object. But the lines preceding the passage, quoted from above, are simply these:

“In capitalist society, the production of commodities is predominant, and Marx’s analysis therefore begin with an analysis of commodity.“

And so the commodity has those two prerogatives, and it only becomes a commodity when the second is juxtaposed with the first.

This, the use value, is completely comprehensible even to a materialistic dish like us, even to a child, is organoleptic; we lick sugar once, and then stretch out our hand for another little piece. Long is the way, and Marx flies down it in that extraordinary paragraph, before this sugar takes on an exchange value and is given a wheat-cotton equivalence that he did not expect! Only then can the delicate problem raised by Stalin arise.

We know very well, like Marx, Lenin and Stalin, what a devilry is released as soon as the exchange value is born. So says Vladimir. Where bourgeois economists saw relationships between things, Marx discovered relationships between men! And what do the three tomes of Marx and the 77 pages of Lenin prove? An easy thing. Where the current economy sees the perfect equivalence of an exchange, we no longer see exchange of the two objects, but men in social motion, and we no longer see equivalence, but swindle. Karl Marx speaks of a little demon who gives the commodity that miraculous and at first sight incomprehensible character. Lenin, like any other Marxist, would have been horrified to hear that it is possible to produce and exchange commodities while at the same time expelling that little demon with exorcisms: does Stalin believe it? Or does he just want to tell us that the little demon is stronger than him?

Just as the ghosts of the medieval knights took revenge for Cromwell’s revolution by infesting English castles, bourgeoisly surrendered to the landlords, so too the goblin-fetish of the commodity runs unstoppable through the halls of the Kremlin and sneers at the millions of words pouring from loudspeakers of the 19th Congress[10].

Wanting to establish that mercantilism and capitalism are not absolutely identical, Stalin once again employs our method. He goes back over the centuries, and with Marx recalls that “under certain regimes (slavery, feudalism, etc.), commodity production existed without leading to capitalism”. Indeed, this is what Marx said in a passage from his vigorous historical overview, but to a far different end and with far more development. The bourgeois economist asserts that there can never be any other mechanism than exchange to link production to consumption, for he knows well that as long as that mechanism is in force, capital will remain the master of the world. Marx replied: we shall now go and see the historical trend of tomorrow; for now I compel you to look at the data of the past: mercantilism has not always brought the result of labour to those who needed to consume it. He cites the example of primitive economies based on gathering and immediate consumption, the ancient types of families and clans, the closed islands of the feudal system with direct internal consumption without the products taking the form of commodities. With the development and complication of technology and needs, sectors are being created that are fuelled first by barter and then by trade itself, but (in the same way that has served us with regard to private property) it remains proven that the mercantile system is not “natural”, i.e. as the bourgeois claims to be permanent and eternal. Now this late appearance of mercantilism (or system of commodity production as Stalin says), its coexistence on the margins of other systems, serves precisely to show how, having become a universal system as soon as the capitalist system of production spreads, it must together die with it.

To cite passages from Marx against Proudhon, Lassalle, Rodbertus and a hundred others, which are solely devoted to denouncing the attempt to reconcile mercantilism and the socialist emancipation of the proletariat, would be too long.

For Lenin, this is the cornerstone of Marxism, with which it is difficult to square the current thesis of Stalin’s assertion:

“Why then, one asks, cannot commodity production similarly serve our socialist society for a certain period”, and “commodity production leads to capitalism only if there is private owner-ship of the means of production, if labour power appears in the market as a commodity which can be bought by the capitalist and exploited in the process of production “.

The hypothesis is obviously absurd, because in the Marxist analysis, each time a mass of commodities appears, it is precisely because the proletarians deprived of all reserves have had to sell their labour power. When in the past there were those (limited) sectors of commodity production, it was because labour power was not sold spontaneously as it is today, but was extorted by force from enslaved prisoners or serfs bound by relationships of personal dependence.

Do we have to reprint the first couple of lines of Capital again? “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’”.

The Russian Economy

After showing, with varying degrees of skill, an ostentatious respect for doctrinal sources, the text addresses the question of the current Russian economy. It is intended to silence people who have apparently claimed that a system of commodity production inevitably leads to the restoration of capitalism, or we who say more clearly: the system of commodity production survives because we are in full capitalism.

On the Russian economy there are the following admissions in the remarkable text. If the large industrial factories have been expropriated, however, small and medium-sized industries are not expropriated, indeed doing so would have been a “criminal” act. According to the author, they should be oriented towards production cooperatives.

There are two sectors of commodity production in Russia: the first is the state production which is national. In state enterprises the means of production and the production itself, i.e. the products, are national property. in Italy, for example, the tobacconists and thus the cigarettes, which it sells, are State-owned. But is this enough to give us the right to say that we are in the phase of “liquidation of wage labour” and that the worker “is not forced to sell his labour power”? No, certainly not.

Let’s move on to the other sector, that of agriculture: in the kolkhozes, says the brochure, even though the land and machinery are state property, the products of labour belong not to the state, but to the kolkhoz itself. The kolkhoz does not dispose of them other than as commodities and exchanges them for the goods it needs. There are no links between kolkhozes and cities other than this exchange. “Because of this,” Stalin says, “commodity production and trade are as much a necessity with us today as they were, say, thirty years ago”.

Let us leave aside, for the time being, the argument that the possibility exists, albeit a very distant one, of overcoming this situation, but let us note that it is no longer a question of saying, as Lenin did in 1922: we have political power in our hands: militarily we hold on, but in the economic field we must return to purely capitalist mercantile forms. The corollary of such an observation was: let us suspend for the time being the construction of the socialist economy, we will come back to it after the European revolution. What is being said today is quite different and even the opposite.

One no longer even tries to establish a thesis such as the following: in the transition from capitalism to socialism, however, for some time, a certain section of production takes place in the form of commodities.

Here it is said: everything is a commodity; and there is no other economic framework than mercantile exchange, and, consequently, the purchase of labour power, even in large state-owned enterprises. And, indeed, the means of subsistence, where does the factory worker find them? The kolkhoz sells them to him through the intermediary of private merchants or transfers them to the state, from which it buys tools, fertilisers and so on. The worker goes to the state shops to buy supplies and pays in cash. Can the state distribute the products it owns directly to its workers? Certainly not, since the (mostly Russian) worker does not consume tractors, cars, locomotives and even less… cannons and machine guns. Clothes and furniture are of course produced by these small and medium-sized enterprises, which have not been touched by the state.

The state cannot therefore do otherwise than to give a salary in money to those who depend on it and who, with this money, buy what they want (bourgeois formula which means: the little they can). The fact that the boss who distributes the wages is a state which, “ideally” or “legally”, represents the workers themselves, changes nothing until that state becomes able to start distributing in numerically appreciable numbers outside the mercantile mechanism.

Anarchy and Despotism

Stalin wanted to recall some Marxist objectives that we have so often exhumed from oblivion: to reduce the distance and antithesis between town and country, to overcome the social division of labour, to drastically reduce the working day (to five or six hours immediately), the only way to eliminate the division between manual and intellectual labour and to eradicate the remains of bourgeois ideology.

At the meeting in Rome on July 7, 1952 our movement ended on the theme of Marx’s chapter: “Division of Labour and Manufacture”, and by manufacturing the comrade leading the meeting conveyed this to mean enterprise/firm

It was demonstrated that to get out of capitalism, it is necessary to destroy, together with the mercantile production system, the social division of labour, and – Stalin reminds us – the very technical division by enterprises which leads to the brutalisation of the worker and on which rests the despotism of the factory. In Stalin, we still see an effort to fight against the former but he says nothing about the latter.

Nothing in today’s Russia moves in the direction of these conquests, both those evoked today and those left in the shadows.

State factory and kolkhoz are separated by a barrier that only comes up when they are doing business against each other: under these conditions, there is no chance that it will be shot down tomorrow rather than today! Who, then, will reduce the social division of labour between worker and peasant? What will free the former from the need to sell too many hours of labour for too little money and food, and will therefore allow him to contend with the capitalist tradition for the monopoly of science and culture?

Not only are we not in the first phase of socialism, but we have not even reached full state capitalism, an economy in which all production is composed of commodities circulating by means of money, in which each commodity is at the disposal of the state, so that the state can centrally fix all relations of equivalence, including that of labour power and wages. Such a state would function at the service of capital, which has become anonymous and subterranean, and the working class could neither control it economically and politically nor conquer it. However, Russia is a long way from this system, and we only have a state industrialism[11]. This system, which arose after the anti-feudal revolution, is valid for developing and spreading industry and capitalism at a blazing pace, with state investments in public works, including colossal ones, and for accelerating a bourgeois transformation of the economy and agrarian legal relations. The “collective” agricultural enterprises are neither state-owned nor, it is clear, socialist. We are at the level of the cooperatives that arose in the Po Valley at the time of Baldini and Prampolini, who managed agricultural production by renting, if not buying lands, and also state land such as floodplains and others, which date back to the old dukedoms. What cannot reach Stalin in the Kremlin is that in the kolkhoz they undoubtedly steal a hundred times more than in those dull but honest cooperatives.

So the industrial state, which has to bargain to buy food in the countryside on the terrain of the “free market”, maintains the remuneration of labour power and labour time at the same level as private capitalist industry. It can even be said that, from the point of view of economic development, America, for example, is closer than Russia to full state capitalism. After all, while the Russian worker spends perhaps three fifths of his wages on agricultural products, the American worker spends them on industrial products, and the food itself is often delivered to him by industry in the form of cans (the poor man!).

State and Retreat

Here another big question arises: Stalin admits that he does not foresee any intervention in the system of relations between agriculture and industry in order to bring them closer together – which would not be socialism, but more statism – even though, after the great industrial development in Russia, these relations are still completely of the bourgeois type.

Even this retreat is skilfully covered by a doctrinal screen. What can we do about it? Expropriate the kolkhoz brutally? And then Stalin starts to call for the future abolition of the state, which he wanted to do away with on another occasion, whereas he back then put a mask on, as if he wanted to say: “You’re only kidding, right guys?”.

Obviously, the thesis that the workers’ state must disarm at a time when the entire agricultural sector is still organised on the basis of mercantile forms of private property cannot be defended; for even if one were to accept, for a moment, the thesis discussed above that the production of commodities can survive in the age of socialism, it would still be inseparable from that other thesis: as long as mercantilism is not eliminated everywhere, we cannot speak of the disappearance of the state.

Having established this, there remains only one thing to conclude. In Russia the solution of the fundamental relationship between town and country (which, in the course of a dramatic evolution, has lost its thousand-year-old Asian and feudal characteristics) presents itself exactly as in the capitalist regime, and Stalin formulates it in the classical terms that the bourgeois countries have always given him: to try to regulate the exchange between the products of industry and those of the earth.

“This system will therefore require a significant increase in industrial production.” Here we are! If you leave the state out of it for a moment, it’s even a “liberal” solution!

They confess to a position of complete powerlessness, in regards to solution of the question of the relationship between agriculture and industry. Their only proposition is to industrialise and increase production: this solution is therefore to the detriment of the workers. This takes us to another great question: the relationship between state and firm, and the relationship between firms.

The question arose before Stalin in the form: does the law of value which applies in capitalist production also exist in Russia? Does it also apply for the state owned, large scale industry? This law determines that commodity exchange always follows equivalents: the appearance of “freedom, equality and Bentham”[12], a deceptive facade that Marx destroyed, when he showed that capitalism doesn’t produce for the product, but for profit. Between the jaws of this vice, between necessity and the domination of economic laws, Stalin’s manifesto moves in such a way, which confirms our thesis: in its most powerful form, capital subjects the state to itself, even when the state appears as the judicial sole owner of all businesses.

On the second day, oh Scheherazade[13], we shall tell you about this, and on the third of the international markets and war.

Second Day



To precisely define the economy of contemporary Russia, we on the first day of this dispute with Stalin’s “answers” to our Marxist inquiries and demonstrations mainly concerned ourselves emphasising the incommensurateness of commodity production and socialist economy. For us, every system of commodity production in the modern world, a world of associated labour, that is the aggregation of workers in production plants, is defined as capitalist economy.

Let’s now get to the question of the stages of socialist economy (better: of socialist organisation) and the distinction between lower and higher stage of communism. To get away from the definition of “immovable” and thus abstract systems and to put ourselves on the ground of history, let’s anticipate the central assertion of our doctrine: The transition from capitalist to socialist economy doesn’t happen in an instant, but in a long process. We must thus assume, that for a relatively long period there might be a coexistence of private and collective sectors, of capitalist (and precapitalist) and socialist realms. But we specify already that every realm, every sector, in which commodities (including human labour power) circulate, are bought and sold, is capitalist economy.

In the now distributed and in the meantime for us available scripture, Stalin explains, that in the Russian agricultural sector commodity production, respectively market economy exists (he further confirms the existence of private economy, insofar as some means of production are in private ownership as well), and he asserts that the industrial sector (large scale industry) only produces commodities when goods for consumption, but not when goods for production are produced. Nevertheless he acts convinced, to not only be able to call the sector of large scale industry, but the entire Russian economy socialist, even though commodity production continues to prevail on a big basis.

We addressed all this already in our texts, which dealt with the basic documents of Marxism and the data of general economic history; today we must move over to the question of the “economic laws”, particularly “the law of value”.

Certainties and uncertainties

Let’s first remark: To meet the objections of Russian economists, that invoke Engels to clarify that one can only leave capitalism if one leaves commodity production, that capitalism is only overcome where commodity production is overcome, Stalin only tries to read something different out of a single paragraph in “Anti-Dühring” than what is written there, whereas in the entire section “Socialism: Theoretical – Production – Distribution” Engels develops the addressed thesis – and very well-tailored for the Stalinist Dühring as well.

The paragraph reads: “With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer.”.

Engels, remarks Stalin, didn’t specify whether this concerns “all” or only “a part” of the means of production. The distinction might, or might not, seem very smart to one, from a theoretical point of view however, it is wrong. Only, so Stalin further, the social seizing of “all” means of production (Small and large scale industry, agriculture) allows to “get rid” of the system of commodity production. Caramba!

In 1919 we bestirred ourselves together with Lenin (and Stalin) until exhaustion, to force down the stubborn social democrats’ and anarchists’ throats, that the means of production cannot be conquered on a single day and by coup, and that precisely because of this – and only because of this – the terror, the dictatorship, is necessary. And today, new textbooks on political economy shall be published, that the absurdity, that all products lose their character as commodities on the day on which a functionary ascended to the Kremlin presents some Stalin with a decree for signature, which expropriates the last chicken of the last member of the last kolkhoz, is accepted.

In another paragraph, Engels talks about the seizing of all means of production, which is why we now need to hear that the above cited “formula of Engels cannot be described as entirely clear and exact” [Stalin, p. 11].

By the beard of the prophet Abraham, that’s strong stuff! Friedrich Engels, of all people, the contemplative, calm, sharply defining, crystal clear Friedrich, master of the patience to get a holed ship going again and to straighten the historical doctrine; whose modesty and prowess are unreachable (behind the impetuous Marx, who occasionally might seem difficult to understand because of his far sight and excellent language, and because of this strength maybe – maybe – might be easier to distort); Engels, whose language is so fluid, and who by talent and because of scientific discipline doesn’t omit a necessary word, nor adds an unnecessary one: of all people, one accuses him of a lack of precision and clarity!

One must put things into their place: We are not in the organisational office or in the agitation committee here, where you, ex-comrade Joseph, might be able to persuade yourself to be able to have something on Engels. We are in the school of principles here. Where is the talk of the seizure of all means of production? Maybe there, where the talk is of commodities? Never. “Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by sects, as the ideal of the future.”, reminds us Engels. Precisely because for us it is not a thing of an ideal, but of science, we cannot let a “more or less” clear, respectively unclear, pass.

And when Engels, a few pages on, talks about society as mistress of all means of production, then precisely in the passage, where he deals with the entirety of demands: because only through this upheaval will the emancipation of all individuals be achieved. Engels then shows, that the sublation of the divide between town and country, manual and mental labour, the social and professional division of labour was already demanded by the utopians, particularly the keen Fourier and Owen (Stalin indeed admits the first two divides, but claims, again theoretically being gravely in the wrong: “This problem wasn’t dealt with by the classics of Marxism” [Stalin, p.28]): In both, population should dispense across the country in groups of 1600 to 300, and mental and manual labour are in constant shift. Engels charges those justified and exalted demands only with one deficiency: the missing evidence (that only Marxism provided) of their realisation given the basis of the then achieved and now excessive development of the productive forces. Anticipating the highest revolutionary victory, Engels describes an “organisation of production”, in which regarding productive labour “burden becomes passion” and reminds us of the closed reasoning in the 12. Chapter of the first volume of “Capital” about the destruction of the social division of labour and the human crippling factory despotism. Neither Stalin nor Malenkov[14] can boast to have made a step in that direction. On the contrary: Stakhanovism and Shturmovshchina[15] (dialectical reactions of poor, crippled victims to the despotism in the haloed “sweatshops”) are the proof, that one is marching into the direction of the all stifling capitalism.

Stalin is trivialising those postulates, by reducing them to the “disappearance of the contradiction of interest” between industry and agriculture, between physically working people and the “leading personnel”. But something completely else is the point: The abolition of a social organisation, in which the allocation of people onto these sectors and functions adheres to a strict division of labour.

Where have these passages of Engels ever allowed to say, that it wouldn’t be necessary for the entire vast building of the future society, to destroy with every turn of the shovel the production of commodities, to shovel up post by post of its reeking trenches?

We of course here cannot recite for Stalin all the chapters, but as usual we cite the essential, because clear and unequivocal paragraphs, which we accept without restrictions and not say cum grano salis [with a grain of salt]. We know by old experience, how such grains of salt have turned into mountains.

Engels: “The ‘exchange of labour for labour on the principle of equal valuation’, in so far as it has any meaning, that is to say, the mutual exchangeability of products of equal social labour, hence the law of value, is the fundamental law of precisely commodity production, hence also of its highest form, capitalist production.”. It follows the famous passage in which Dühring is reproached for, just as Proudhon, imagining the future society as a market economy and not seeing, how he is thus describing a capitalist economy. An “imaginary society”, Engels says. At least Stalin in his not to be despised scripture describes an actually existing capitalist economy.

Marx: “Let us now picture to ourselves, by way of change, a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour power of the community.”. This sentence alone is a revolutionary programme. With the future achievement of this form of social organisation, succinctly labelled as communism, one returns to the Robinson with which one started. What does that mean? Robinson’s product was no commodity, but an object of use, because there was – of course – no exchange. With eagle wings we fly over the entire history of humanity: “All the characteristics of Robinson’s labour are here [“here” means: in the communist association] repeated, but with this difference, that they are social, instead of individual.”. The only necessary textbook to learn to read is the primer! And one reads: The product of labour ceases to be a commodity, when society is socialist. Then Marx arrives at the juxtaposition of this “state of things” (of socialism) with commodity production, and shows, that one is the dialectical, utter, relentless and irreconcilable opposite of the other.

Society and homeland

Before we however get to the question of economic laws, we must remark a great deal to the Stalinist version of the socialist programme put forward by Engels in the “Anti-Dühring”. This is even more important, as Stalin (in refutation of various Russian economists) refrains here from distortions and revisions of the classical texts and cites whole passages, while he in this subject utters a vehement “party condemnation” against any violation of orthodoxy.

Again and again Engels talks in his fundamental work about the seizure of the means of production by society, and first and foremost (we underline that a hundred times) about the seizure of the products – products, which today rule over the producer and even the consumer, so that from our point of view, capitalism can be described as a system, which not only negates the producers’ disposal of the means of production, but rather the disposal of the products.

In the Muscovite paraphrase the “society” disappears, instead the talk is about the transfer of the means of production to the state, the nation and (when in the terminal element of the events the point is to inflame passions and invoke the ritual ovations) to the people, the socialist homeland!

If one gives the summary of the Stalinist narrative, not without denying it the merit of brutal honesty, the seizure of the means of production regarding land and the large equipment goods of agriculture proves to be a mere legal question, because any of its practical consequences is already contained within the statutes of Artel[16] or the last Soviet constitution (which shall be revised). One must see, that those solemn statements about the rightful property have nothing to do with the economic disposal of agrarian products, which are divided between the kolkhozes and the single kolkohzniki. Factually true is the seizure through the state only in the large-scale industry, because the state only here disposes of products, and those it sells, as far as they are products of consumption, again. In the small and medium sized businesses and in the commercial enterprises however, there is no seizure of products, not even of the means of production, by the state. This also applies to the micro-equipment of the state-sponsored family and parcel economy. Despite the existence of huge factories and giant public construction projects, the self-proclaimed socialist and Soviet republic leads and controls not a lot; and not much was truly socialised and nationalised. The meaning of state property in relation to the entire economy is probably bigger in some bourgeois states.

Who then, which institution, which power, wields what was wrested from the private hand after the revolution? The people, the nation, the homeland? Never have Engels and Marx used those words. The transformation of private property into state property, “does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces”, Engels remarks.

Only when society disposes of the products, only then it is clear, that it has overcome the class antagonisms and has become a classless society. But as long as there are classes, society will be organised by that “class solely”, which must sublate all classes, and as a dialectical consequence itself. Here, it is tied on the masterful illustration of the theory of the state, which emerged already in 1847: “The proletariat seizes the state power and initially turns the means of production into state property.” (Engels is citing Marx here). “But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinction and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state.”. Only then, and only on this royal road it is society, which arises as the acting factor and finally disposes of the productive forces, all products, as well as resources.

But the people, what the heck is that? A mishmash of different classes, an “integral” of expropriators and slaves, of political or business professionals and the starving, respectively the oppressed. The “people” we already left to the associations for freedom and democracy, freedom and progress, before 1848. With its notorious “majorities”, the people is not the subject of economic planning, but merely an object of expropriation and fraud.

And the nation? As a necessity and perquisite for the emergence of capitalism it expresses the same mixture of social classes, not like “people” in the stale, legal and philosophic sense, but on a geographical, ethnographical and linguistic level. The “nation” as well doesn’t seize anything: In famous passages Marx ridiculed the expressions “national wealth” and “national income” (which plays an important role in Stalin’s analysis of Russia) and showed, that the nation enriches itself precisely when the worker is screwed.

If the bourgeois revolutions and the assertion of modern industry, which extruded feudalism in Europe and various other systems in the rest of the world, didn’t carry out in the name of the bourgeoisie and capital, but precisely in the name of the people and nations, if this was in the Marxist conception a revolutionary and necessary transition, then we can deduce, how consistently the Muscovite coincide with that: the jettison of Marxist political economy and the renunciation of the proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist “category” society (a category that is used in classic texts), as well as an orientation towards the political categories immanent in bourgeois ideology and propaganda: people’s democracy and national independence.

One does not need to be surprised then, when 26 years later the outrageous slogan is repeated, which we Marxists burned all bridges with: to “pick up”[17] the banner of the bourgeoisie. The banner, which in the days of a Cromwell, Washington, Robespierre or Garibaldi was upheld and then thrown overboard; the revolution in its march however, will leave it in the mud – because their lies and myths of peoples, nations and homelands it counterposes with the socialist society.

Law and theory

In the Muscovite debate, the comparison between the laws of the Russian economy and the established laws of bourgeois economy by Marxism also came up. The namely text fights dialectically on two fronts. Some say: “If our economy was already socialist, we would not need to follow deterministically the tracks of certain economic processes, but could set the course differently: e.g. by the nationalisation of the kolkhozes, the abolition of commodity exchange and monetary economy. If you show us, that this is impossible, then let’s deduce from that, that we live in a society, whose economy is entirely capitalist. What does it help to fool ourselves?” In contrast to that, others want to shelve criteria that distinguish socialism in Marxism; Stalin bestirs to answer both. Those naïve researchers are of course no active “political” elements: otherwise it would have been easy to take them out by a purge. We are only dealing with “technicians” and experts of the apparatus of production, through whose mediation the central government learns, whether the huge machinery runs smoothly or has stalled; and when they were right, it would not help to silence them: the crisis would show either way. The difficulties, which are surfacing today, or put more accurately, come to light, are not of academic, critical or even “parliamentary” nature – to move beyond such stitches, no “great man” needs to come, a small political parvenu could handle that. The difficulties on the other hand are real, material, they lie within the things, not in the heads.

For answering of the objections, the central government has to insist on two things: first, that in a socialist society, people also have to obey to economic laws which cannot be suspended. Second, that those laws – in whatever way they will differ in the future full communism all and sundry from the laws of capitalism – in the socialist phase partly correspond to the laws of capitalist production and distribution, partly differ from them. And if the apparently insurmountable laws are settled then, one must not ignore them by the punishment of demise and one particularly must not contravene them. So far Stalin.

Then a special, albeit essential question arises: is the law of value part of those laws which continue to persist in the Russian economy? And if yes, isn’t every mechanism that adheres to the law of value pure capitalism? Stalin replies to the first question: Yes, the law of value is in effect over here, though not everywhere. And to the second: No, not every economy in which the law of value operates is capitalist.

In the entire, solemnly presented theoretical “essay”, the structure seems to be very fragmented and most notably it suits the book of the enemies of Marxism. Those, who employ “philosophical” weapons, will have an easy job, because the effects of the laws of nature and the effects of the economic laws on the human species are equated; while those, who prefer the weapon of “economy” and who have been waiting for a century for a revanche against Marx, can believe to have made it: “The laws of economic profitability and competition of social interests, like we understand them, you will never be able to evade”.

One has to distinguish between theory, law and programme. In a certain passage the following sentence slips out of Stalin’s mouth: “Marx, he, as we know, did not like [!] to digress from his investigation of the laws of capitalist production” [Stalin, p. 82].

We already showed at the last assembly in September 1952 in Milan, that Marx’s aim didn’t lie in the sterile description of the capitalist “status quo”, but that from every row the demand and the programme of the destruction of capitalism stares one in the face. Our point wasn’t only to destroy the old and stale opportunist legend, but to show the entire polemical and militant nature intrinsic to Marx’s work. That’s why Marx doesn’t lose himself within the description of capitalism, or respective capitalisms, but instead he describes a capitalist system, an abstract, yes, non-existent, yes, typical capitalism, which nevertheless entirely corresponds to the glorifying theses of the bourgeois economists. Important is solely the clash of both positions (a clash of classes and parties, not a mundane dispute between intellectuals), of which one wants to prove the permanence, the eternity of capitalist machinery, while the other proves its coming death. In this light the revolutionary Marx cared to admit, that the clockwork, perfectly centered and by the freedom of competition, and the right of every individual, to produce and consume by the same rules, is well lubricated. In the actual history of capital it has never been like that, it is not like that, it never will be like that, meaning: the concrete reality would for our reasoning be much more convenient. Even better. If it, to make it short, would have worked out for capitalism, to persevere another century with idyllic ease, the Marxian reasoning would have suffered shipwreck. But it continues to shine with full force, as capitalism continues, but only by monopolisation, suppression, dictatorship and massacre; and its economic development precisely follows the results of the analysis of the pure type: confirmation of our doctrine, refutation of the lackeys of capital.

In this sense, Marx has dedicated his whole life to the description of socialism, of communism; had it concerned only the description of capitalism, he wouldn’t have given a damn about it.

Marx investigated and developed the “economic laws” of capitalism indeed, but the method, in which he did this, indicates the system of socialist characteristics entirely and in dialectical contradiction to them. So, does socialism adhere to those laws? Are they others? And if yes, which?

Just a moment! In the center of the Marxist work we put the programme, as a moment that follows a sober examination. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”, “Theses on Feuerbach”, and every educated dork adds: “youth” theses. But before the programme, and even before the depiction of the discovered laws, the doctrine as a whole, the system of “theories”, has to be determined.

Some of those theories Marx has found ready-made at his adversaries, e.g. Ricardo’s value theory, and the theory of surplus value as well. Those theories (we don’t want to claim Stalin never knew of them) are something different from the by Marx thoroughly treated “law of value”, respectively “law of surplus value”, which we here, to not confuse the less experienced among us, rather would like to call “law of the exchange of equivalents” and “law of the relation between the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit”.

It is important, to initially clarify the distinction between theory and law, a distinction, which also applies in science. Theory is the depiction of real processes and their relations, to ease the general understanding on a certain area – prediction and modification of those procedures only follow that. Law is the precise expression of a certain relation between multiple, particularly between two series of material circumstances: a relation, whose validity is verifiable at any point and which allows to calculate unknown proportions (no matter, you philosophers, if it is about future, part or present ones. For example I am, with a well discovered law, able to determine, how high the sea level was a thousand years ago; the only difference, that I cannot test, is, how much more you stink to high heaven today.). Theory is something universal, the law something strictly differentiated and particular. Theory is generally qualitative and serves the definition of certain magnitudes and essences. The law is quantitative and aims at their measurement.

An example from physics: in the history of optics, two theories of light have superseded each other with varying success. According to the particle theory, the transmission of light consists of the movement of miniscule “corpuscles”, while the wave theory explains this by the oscillation of a permanent medium. Now the easiest law of optics, the law of reflection, says that the ray that hits a mirror forms an angle of incidence that is equal to the angle of reflection. A thousand times this law is confirmed: the skirt chaser precisely knows where he must stand, when he wants to observe the beautiful neighbor that is grooming herself in front of the mirror: in fact, the law is compatible with both theories. It were different appearances and laws that decided the choice.

Now, according to Stalin’s text, the “law of the exchange of equivalents” is said to be compatible both with his “theory”: “In socialist economy there are forms of commodity production”, as well as with our theory that says: “If commodity production and mass production exist, then that’s capitalism”. The law is easily tested: One drives to Russia and one will see, that the exchange happens at determined prices with rubles, like on any arbitrary market: thus, the law of the exchange between equivalents prevails. To see now, which theory is the correct one, it’s a bit more difficult. We, for our part, deduce: In Russia one finds oneself within the pure and real capitalism. As for Stalin, he fabricates a theory – precisely: theories are invented, laws discovered – and in defiance of father Marx says: certain economic appearances of socialism obey usually to the law of exchange (law of value).

Nature and history

Before we get to the point – which laws of capitalism Marx puts forward, which distinguish capitalism from socialism, respectively which are (perhaps) common to both -, we must point at the common equation of laws of nature with laws of society.

As students of Marx we must be militants and polemics; we must not solve such a question scholastically and insists on the theoretical analogy of both areas, perhaps with the “political” goal, to dodge the following argument: “Now, if the laws of society aren’t as insurmountable as for example the law of gravity, then let’s go: let’s knock some over”.

How could we forget, that the fight between the giant Marx and the paid gang in the universities of capital flared up on the point, that the laws of bourgeois economy are “no laws of nature”, and we therefore not only want to bust this circle of hell, but can bust it. It is true, that Stalin’s scripture reminds, that with Marx the laws of economy aren’t “eternal”, but instead correspond to certain social phases and epochs: slavery, feudalism, capitalism. But Stalin wants to point out that “certain laws” are common to all epochs and thus also assert themselves in socialism, which allegedly has an own “political economy”. Stalin ridicules Yaroshenko and Bukharin, that said, that political economy is succeeded by a “technique of social organsiation” [Stalin, p.65]. Harshly he replies to that, that this new discipline, which pseudo-Marxist and trembling before the Tsarist police economists[18] would have attended to, is in reality an “economic policy” – and as such he allows it [Stalin, p.74].

Well, whether there will be an economic science in socialism, we will discuss once things have been put in their correct place again[19]; but where there is still an economic policy (like it is under the dictatorship of the proletariat), there are rivaling classes, and we are not yet in socialism. And we must ask like Lenin: Who has the power? And accordingly: Which direction does the economic development take, which – there we concur – takes place in stages? That will the laws of this development tell us.

As to the general question of laws in nature and history, it will be dealt with in our theoretical investigations there, where we reply to the expected attacks, which Marxism – which indeed has for 999 of 1000 writers established fixed abode in Moscow – will be subjected to: Attacks regarding Stalin’s banalisation of the theory of historical materialism (that’s a theory, not a law) and regarding the questions of determinism and will, causality and ambition. The original content of the Marxian position (barely understood and very inconvenient for people, that pursue a policy of opportunist success) is always that of the direct class struggle and the historical antagonism between the classes, a struggle, which alternately resorts to the typewriter and the machine gun – provided one isn’t able to talk of “feather and sword” anymore. We conceded to the bourgeoisie the achievement, in its war against the old classes, to have promoted the critical-scientific method and to have boldly applied it to the area of nature and then to that of society. It discovered and proclaimed theories, which today are ours: value theory (the value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour time required for its production) and the surplus value theory (the value of every commodity contains advanced capital and surplus value, therefore a refund and profit). And triumphantly the bourgeoisie then proclaimed: “If you admit” (and science will admit it one century later), “that the same physical laws apply for the primordial nebula as for our planet today, then you must also admit, that the current social conditions will apply for all future socities, because we consensually banish both the intervention of god as well as pure thought from nature and society”. Marxism by contrast delivers the scientific proof, that within the social cosmos, a cycle carries out, which will destroy the capitalist forms and laws, and that the future social cosmos will adhere to other laws. Since you don’t mind to remodel and banalise this mighty work beyond ridiculousness because of domestic and foreign political purposes, finally do us the favour to omit the adjectives “Marxist”, “socialist” and “communist”, and instead use “economist”, “populist”, “progressive”, and it fits like a glove.

Marx and the laws

Engels acknowledged Marx as the founder of historical materialism. Marx explained, his contribution in the application of this theory to the modern world consisted not of discovering class struggle, but to introduce the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Thus, theory leads to the class and party programme, to the organisation of the working class for the insurrection and the seizure of power. In this great perspective, the investigation of the laws of capitalism lines up. Two real and fundamental laws are put down in “Capital”. In the first volume, the general law of capitalist accumulation, also known as the law of increasing impoverishment (often dealt with by us): with the increasing concentration of capital the number of proletarians and the “reserve army” grows; we have explained multiple times already, that this not necessarily implies a fall in the level of consumption or real living standards of workers. In the second and third volume, the law of the reproduction of capital is developed (which is interrelated with the law of the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall, which we will get back to): a part of the product and thus of labour, must be put aside by the capitalist, to ensure the reproduction of depreciated machines, factories etc. (capital goods, for economists). If the capitalist increases the share destined as reserve asserts, he “invests”, meaning he expands the stock of production facilities and means of production. Marx’s laws on the allocation of the social product between immediate consumption- and investition goods prove, that as long as commodity exchange and wage system persist, the system faces crises and revolutions.

The first law certainly cannot be applied to the socialist society, because it organises precisely for the reason that the social reserve constitutes an individual security for everyone, although this reserve neither belongs to anybody, nor how in precapitalistic times, is divided into x little parts. The second law, Stalin tells us, persists in socialism; and he assures, Marx had foreseen that. Marxism merely established (among others in the known passage in the “Critique of the Gotha Programme”), that in communism there will be a social deduction of individual labour as well, to keep the production facilities in good condition, to ensure the public services etc. This deduction will not be of an exploitative character, precisely because it no longer needs to be mediated by the market economy, and it is precisely for this reason that the social reserve fund will establish a stable balance – instead of a series of shocks – between the products used for consumption and the products used as means of production in the subsequent production cycle.

The crucial point in all that is the following: Stalin makes the valuable concession, that – because in the state industry the law of value is in effect – its businesses function based on “cost accounting and profitableness, production costs, prices, etc.” [Stalin, p.20]. For “etc.” we pose: profitable. Additionally, he explains that the future programme consists of an increase of the production of the means of production, meaning, that the “plans” of the Soviet government for the industrialisation of the country not so much allow for goods of consumption for the population, but instead mainly consists of producing machines, agrarian tools, tractors, fertiliser etc. and to tackle giant public projects.

Plans aside: The capitalist states make plans, the proletarian dictatorship will make plans. But the first true socialist plan (which must be understood as an immediate despotic inroad, see the “Manifesto”) will eventually be a plan to the increase of the costs of production, shortening of the work day, divestment of capital, quantitative and especially qualitative levelling of consumption (which is under capitalist anarchy to nine tenths an absurd waste of product), because only in this way it will be possible to cope with “business profitability” and “profitable prices”. So, a plan of underproduction for the drastic reduction of the share of capital goods in production. The law of reproduction will run out of breath immediately, when the Marxian “department II” (production of means of consumption) eventually succeeds in knocking out “department I” (production of means of production). In any way, the capitalist “concert” has for too long punished our eardrums.

The means of consumption are for the workers, the means of production for the entrepreneurs. If the business master is the workers’ state, it shall of course immediately be accepted, that the workers are interested to “invest” and to sweat from four to eight hours for department I! If now Yaroshenko abridges the critique of the staggering increase of the means of production to the formula “primacy of consumption instead of primacy of production”, he becomes very mundane. No less shallow – to smuggle in state industrialism under socialist banner – are agitational formulas like: “He who doesn’t work shall not eat” or “Abolition of the expropriation of humans through humans”, as if it was the highest goal of the expropriated class to oversee its own expropriation.

Even if we only stick to the analysis of the domestic economy, the Russian economy in reality makes use of all laws of capitalism. How can it increase the production of goods not meant for consumption, without proletarianising humans? Where shall it take the humans from? The course is that of primitive accumulation, and mostly the means are as horrible as those, that are depicted in “Capital”: sometime it hits the kolkhozniki, who suddenly stand there without their cow; sometime the nomadic shepherds of Asia, which get snatched from their submersion into the view of the Ursa Major; or the feudal serfs in Mongolia, which are uprooted from their millenniums-old soil. The slogan is with certainity: more production goods, more workers, longer work time, higher work intensity – in other words: expanded accumulation and reproduction of capital in infernal pace.

Precisely that is the honor, that we, in defiance of a bunch of dorks, bestow upon the “great Stalin”. Just in the dimension in which the process of the beginning accumulation of capital takes place and embraces the provinces of the giant China, the mysterious Tibet, the legendary Central Asia (out of which the European tribe emerged), will it be revolutionary and spin the wheel of history forward. But this is not a socialist, but a capitalist process. In this big part of the globe, the glorification of the development of productive forces is necessary. Stalin correctly says, that this is not his credit, but that of the economic laws, which enforces these “policies” upon him. His entire undertaking is made up of fraudulent labeling: this is as well a classical mean of the bearers of primitive accumulation!

In the west, however, the exuberant productive forces for a long time trigger flood waves, one after another, which prompts the states to suppress, to devour markets and regions, to prepare blood baths and wars. Here no plans to increase production help, instead only the plan to smash a gang of criminals can help here. Especially the plan, to trash their reeking flag of freedom and parliamentarism.

Socialism and Communism

We will conclude the economic argument with a synthesis of the stages of the future society – a topic, in which the whole of Stalin’s “document” (we were looking for that word the entire time) is causing confusion. “France Press” accused Stalin of plagiarising the scripture of Nikolai Bukharin about the economic laws of the transition period. Stalin however mentions the texts several times and even draws upon a critique authored by Lenin[20]. Commissioned with the preparation of the programme of the Comintern (which stayed a draft), Bukharin deserves the great credit of emphasising the commodity-negating postulate of the socialist revolution as an issue of primary importance. He also followed Lenin in the analysis of the transformation period “in Russia” and the assessment, that during the dictatorship of the proletariat, forms of commodity production were to be tolerated.

Everything becomes clear, if one bears in mind, that these investigations of Lenin and Bukharin didn’t concern themselves with the two stages of communist society, of which Marx talks and which Lenin in a wonderful passage of “State and Revolution” outlines, but with a phase, which precedes both those stages.

The following scheme can serve as a summary of the certainly not easy topic of today’s “dialogue”.

Transition stage: The proletariat has conquered political power and renders all non-proletarian classes politically powerless, precisely because it cannot “get rid” of those classes in an instant. This means, the proletarian state controls an economy, in which partly, even if in decreasing amount, both a market-based distribution as well as forms of private disposal of products and means of production exist (these be fragmented or concentrated). The economy is not yet socialist, it’s a transition economy.

Lower stage of communism, or if you want, socialism: society disposes already generally of products, which are allocated to members of society by quotas. This function doesn’t require commodity exchange or money anymore – one cannot let Stalin’s statement pass, according to which the simple exchange without money, but still based on the law of value, should bring us closer to communism: rather it is about a kind of regression to bartering. The allocation of products on the contrary follows from the center, without return of an equivalent. Example: If a malaria epidemic breaks out, in the affected region quinine is distributed for free, but solely one tubule per person.

In this phase, not only compulsory work is necessary, but also the recording of the performed labour time and its certificate – the famous “labour voucher”, so much discussed in the last century. The peculiarity of this certificate is, that it cannot be kept in reserve, so that any try to accumulate it leads to the loss of the performed labour quantum without compensation. The law of value is buried.

Engels: “Hence, on the assumptions we made above, society will not assign values to products”.

Higher stage of communism, which can be unhesitatingly called integral socialism: the productivity of labour is in such a way, that, apart from pathological cases, neither coercion nor rationing are necessary, to exclude the squandering of products and human energy. Free consumption for all. Example: The pharmacies are distributing quinine free and without constraints. And if one would take ten tubules to poison himself? He would obviously be just as stupid as the people, which confuse a rotten bourgeois society with socialism.

In which stage does Stalin find himself? In none of the three. He is in a transition period, not away from capitalism, but towards capitalism. It’s almost honorable and certainly not self poisoning.

Third Day (Morning)

On day one we argued the fact, that any system of commodity production is a capitalist system, ever since through the labour of masses of humans enormous accumulations of commodities are produced. Capitalism and commodity production will together fade out of the spheres of influence that they gradually conquered in the modern world.

On the second day this got taken up again; and coming from the general process to today’s Russian economy, we thought of the laws stated by Stalin regarding the structure of the Russian economy as appropriate. The diagnosis of pure capitalism, in the stage of “great state industrialism” was confirmed.

According to the notion of our dialogue partner, this sufficiently defined and concrete process can, applied to giant areas and populations, lead to the accumulation and concentration of a heavy industry, which doesn’t rank behind others, and indeed solely on the basis of the since 1917 ensued elimination of big landowners, without inevitably repeating, as at that time in England, France etc., horrible expropriation of the lower population strata, who are caught in the subsistent, local economic circles and the fragmented labour technique.

Would one only say with this last point, that the extensive introduction of modern labour technique with the means of applied science plays out entirely differently because of the changed situation all over the world, then was the case centuries ago, then this could be subject of a separate investigation, namely with the treatment of the “agrarian question”. Could be, that Stalin will show, attaining complete capitalism not by horse and cart, but by plane – but he should at least state the “direction”. We, the rank and file, transmit to him from many ground stations a set of data – however even the radar can go haywire.

And now a third point: the international relations within the complex overall context of production, exchange and consumption; political and military balances of power.

The three points are only aspects of one and the same big question. The first could be called the historical, the second the economic and the third the political aspect. Direction and goal of the investigation must be set in one.

Products and exchange

In his theoretical corrections and the correspondingly harsh referrals against the objections of the “comrades”, the Russian state and party leader apparently needs to change fronts every time, when he gets on from the circulation within the country borders to the transcending circulation. We already alluded, the reader will recall, that the western “border guards” at this point have perked up their ears. Far from again striking up the song of a millenarian autarky, the man in the Kremlin calmly has set the binoculars on the areas beyond the Iron Curtain; and old stories about the division of spheres of influence as an alternative to the saber rattling and the abandonment of relations get a chance. At least one thing, that doesn’t sound as spectacular and impertinent, as the litany about genocide and craze of aggression.

Stalin claims, the manner, how within Russia (and the sister countries) industry items are assigned to the rural population and agrarian products to the urbanites, is perfectly in accordance with socialism – while slaying everyone and everything with quotes of Marx and Engels, and, when necessary, correcting their words, sentences and wordings ex officio. The kolkhozes “freely” sell their products – there is no other way of getting hold of their makings; so after all through the market, but there are special rules: state administered prices (Novelty! Specialty of the house!) and even special “contracts” about commodity deliveries with “non-commodity character”[21], because the state business don’t operate with money, but undertake offset agreements (Highly original! Role models are the huckster at the next corner, the American marine, which precisely knows about the equivalence of kissing and cigarettes, and the mundane “clearings” of the western countries!). However, the master doesn’t find the expression “commodity delivery” appropriate, one should talk about product exchange. (Adding this only, so the mistake isn’t searched for in the translation). In short, all more or less conventional equivalent systems, from the barter of the savages to money as universal equivalent for all products, the gazillion systems to issue performance and reward, which reach from the housekeeping book to the complicated banking business, where electronic brains add up endless queues of numbers, while daily the stifling flood of kicking their heels sellers of labour power swells – why did all this emerge, what is it good for, if not for the exchange of products, and solely for it?

But Stalin wants to crack the gnawing core of the problem, namely, that out of the “salaries” of exchange between equivalents a private accumulation emerges; and he says, there were guarantees against that.

Even for a generalissimo it is difficult to stay in the saddle with such a thesis and alternately fence in two directions – one blow against theoretical rigour, one blow against the revisionist concessions. Elasticity of the real Leninist Bolshevism? No, eclecticism, was our answer; back then that was the last straw for the Bolsheviks.

Now, no matter in what shape the domestic conditions might be (whose investigation is neither finished today, nor in the scope of this study), as soon as the talk is of the foreign relations, even Stalin raises concerns. The comrade Notkin had to get an earful, because he claimed that even the machines and tools produced in the state businesses are commodities. They have value, their price is determined and yet they aren’t commodities? One can literally see Notkin being aghast. Value and price are, according to Stalin, “needed in order, in the interests of our foreign trade, to conduct sales of means of production to foreign countries. Here, in the sphere of foreign trade, but only in this sphere” (underlined in the original), “our means of production really are commodities, and really are sold (in the direct meaning of the term).” [Stalin, p. 53].

The last parentheses originate in the officially released text. Presumably the improvident Notkin put the word “sold”, which a Marxist and Bolshevik is quite fed up with, in quotes. He must have missed the latest training courses.

In a few years, we would be interested in the following information: The volume of the balance of trade please, so the ratio of commodity import and export. And another thing: should this balance turn out positively or negatively? From the so called law of the well-planned “proportional” development of the national economy we know that the social product should grow at a furious speed. We don’t speak Russian, but assume that thereby it is to be understood: plans for the “uninterrupted growth of production”, that is analogous to the law of population growth or compound interest. We therefore propose the following, correct denotation: planning of growth in geometric progression. The “curve” drawn right, we would write up the following law with the little brains we have: socialism starts where this curve breaks down.

For today we record Stalin’s concession: the products destined for foreign trade, among them the means of production, are commodities, not only “formally”, in accounting, but also in “character”.

That is one thing. It is enough to discuss across a few thousand kilometers to finally come to understanding regarding anything.

Profit and surplus value

A little bit more patience, then we will talk of high politics and strategy, and then the frowning will end, because everyone understands the point: will Caesar attack? Pompeius flee? Do we meet at Philippi again? Will we cross the Rubicon? That is welcomed fodder for conversation that lifts the spirits.

We must point to another point of Marxist political economy. The power of things leads the marshal to the explosive problem of the world market. The USSR, he says, supports its sister countries through economic aid, which accelerates their industrialisation. Does that also apply for Czechoslovakia as well as China, that is, for an already capitalist country, as well as for a country, in which the capitalist mode of production is still in the early stages and only constitutes a fraction of aggregate production? Let’s see. “It may be confidently said that, with this pace of industrial development, it will soon come to pass that these countries will not only be in no need of imports from capitalist countries, but will themselves feel the necessity of finding an outside market for their surplus products.” [Stalin, p.32]. Which again brings up the question: if production (and export) is done for the west, then those are commodities; and if it is done for Russia, what are they then?

The point about this return to the system of commodity production, consummated with flying colours, which is identical with the capitalist system in form and character (if one does not fall for the economic make-up), is that it is founded on the imperative: export to produce more! Effectively it is the same imperative which also pertains within the supposed “socialist country”: the relations between town and country, between the famous “associated classes”, are about an import-export business, because here also, as already mentioned, the law of geometric progression applies, which says: more production! More production!

What remains of Marxism? Barely anything! Since “the working class, [is] now in power”, it is “necessary” to “abandon” the offensive formulas which distinguish between necessary labour and surplus labour, paid and unpaid labour [Stalin, p.18/19]. While the law of surplus value (which here according to Stalin’s criteria is a theory and not a law), first somewhat was spared, from today the following applies: “It is said that the law of the average rate of profit is the basic economic law of modern capitalism. That is not true. Modern capitalism, monopoly capitalism“ (there you go: what did you know, poor Marx?) “cannot content it-self with the average profit, which moreover has a tendency to decline, in view of the increasing organic composition of capital. It is not the average profit, but the maximum profit that modern monopoly capitalism demands”. While the subordinate clause (“which it needs…“) seems to bring the extinguished Marxian law into being for a moment, the new law is decreed after all: The demand for maximum profit “will be the basic economic law of modern capitalism” [Stalin, p.39].

If the flamethrower in the library isn’t halted, not even his moustache is going to be spared.

Those twisted counter-theses, which try to secure themselves against any objection, are unbearable. First, it is stated that the economic laws of monopoly capitalism would entirely differ from the capitalism “of Marx”. And then the same counter-theses assert that the economic laws of socialism could very well be the same as those of capitalism. Fresh air, quick!

Let’s heroically return to the ABC. One here has to remind of the distinction between the mass of profit and the mass of surplus value, between rate of profit and rate of surplus value, and of the meaning of the Marxian law of the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall, which is stated in detail at the beginning of the third “Capital” volume. Reading – understanding! It is not the capitalist that tends to decrease profit. It is not profit (the mass of profit) that decreases, but the rate of profit! Not the rate of any profit, but the average rate of social profit. Not any week or in any issue of the “Financial Times”, but historically, in the development predestined by Marx towards the “social monopoly of the means of production” in the grip of capital, whose definition, genesis, life and death are written.

He who understands this, can see that the effort, not of the single capitalist (a minor figure in Marx), but of the historical machine of capital (this “ensouled corpus” talented with “vis vitalis”), to escape the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is futile; and precisely this law let’s us conclude the following, classical theses (to which Stalin, confusing the west, again confesses):

First: Inevitability of war between the capitalist countries.

Second: Inevitability of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, wheresoever.

It is a giant effort that the capitalist system deploys in fight against its own collapse, and which expresses itself in the slogan: evermore production! Not only no stagnation, but achieving the maximisation of the maximisation at any time. In mathematics: geometrical progression; in music: “crescendo á la Rossini”. And for that purpose (once the entire motherland is mechanised): export. And to memorise the doctrine of the last five centuries well: “Trade follows the flag”.

But that, Jughashvili, is their doctrine!

Engels and Marx

For our line of argument, we once again have to return to Marx and Engels. This time not to the self-contained and complete texts, as if made from one piece by one or the other, written with full power and the groundbreaking eagerness of those who know neither doubt, nor are flustered and who remove obstacles in the way, without caring about their resistance. It is about the Marx, of which his “executor of testament” gives account in the almost dramatic prefaces to the II. (5.5.1885) and to the III. (4.10.1894) volume of “Capital”. First it is about explaining the state of the enormous mass of materials and manuscripts – they reach from chapters in elaborated form to loose pages, notices, summaries, illegible abbreviations, promises regarding later to be developed points, as well as uncertainly and cautiously composed pages provided with annotations – with the deteriorating health of Marx, with the inescapable ramifications of the progressing disease which forces interruptions upon him, which quail and attack the mighty brain more than rest lets him heal. The work accomplished by this human machine between the years 1863 and 1867, among it the flawlessly composed first volume of his main work, is immeasurable. Already in the years 1864 to 1865 the disease showed first signs of health disorders; the imperturbable sight of his great “colleague” Engels notices the traces of its devastating aftermaths in the unreleased notebooks. But after that the same bone-grinding work – deciphering, examining, dictating, reorganising of texts, classification of material: all that with the will not to compose anything distinct – exceeds also the power of the extremely robust Engels. For too long he spent nights awake over the scriptures of his friend; a worrying eye weakness “for years [restricts] [his] writing time to a minimum”, as he got disallowed from “taking the quill into the hand under artificial light”. Neither defeated nor discouraged he apologises sincerely and humbly to the task – more was not granted to him. Modestly he reminds of all the other areas, in which the brunt more and more fell to him “solely”. One year later, he died.

This is neither incidental nor conceited. It should only make clear that the aspiration of editorial diligence which determined Engels’ compilation work engendered that in the last two volumes of Capital the periodically returning sections of synthesis and summary almost fully are missing. Engels’ quill we also owe such parentheses, and not few or of little use of them; but he doesn’t want to manage something “which just wasn’t in Marx’ book”, and so he confines himself to analysis. Had it been different, certain shady interpretations (today as half a century ago) would have been futile, for example the sad legend, according to which Marx in the third and last volume revoked – according to the personal taste of the author: in the philosophy, the economic science or the politics – something. In truth in the first volume there are as many explicit references to the early scriptures or the “Manifesto” as connections between the last two scriptures and the first volume – thousands of passage of correspondence reinforce this.

Here it is even less than in Engels’ work about conducting “Capital research”. Let’s just remark that Marx in one of those short summaries says, why he is so thoroughly dealing with the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Engels hesitates to recite the fragment and puts it in parentheses, “because, though a rehash of the notes of the original manuscript, it goes in some points beyond the scope of the material found in the original.”

“[The law of increased productivity of labour is not, therefore, absolutely valid for capital. So far as capital is concerned, productiveness does not increase through a saving in living labour in general, but only through a saving in the paid portion of living labour, as compared to labour expended in the past, as we have already indicated in passing in Book I (Ch. XI II, 2, 5. 409/398). Here the capitalist mode of production is beset with another contradiction. Its historical mission is unconstrained development in geometrical progression of the productivity of human labour. It goes back on its mission whenever, as here, it checks the development of productivity. It thus demonstrates again that it is becoming senile and that it is more and more outlived.]”

Unaffected by the pharisaical objection that after another 60 years of capitalism (however with a strong dash of decay) one should with the as always “careless” Marx triple the parentheses instead of cancel them out, we emphasise the programmatic theses which Marx so “gladly” inserted in the discerning and profound analyses. So capitalism will collapse. And post-capitalism? It is like that: As the productivity of every work unit increases, we do not increase the mass of products, but decrease the working time of the living. Why does the West not want to know something about that? Because there is only one single way to flee from the law of the fall in the rate of profit: overproduction. And the East? Ditto. But for the sake of fairness let’s remark that capitalism there is still undergoing its adolescence.

Rate and Mass

It is time to again turn towards the deduction of the law: As long as we are not smitten with blindness, it is anyway not on the scrap heap. We will there circumvent both the language of numbers as well as algebraic symbolism and, as far as possible, preserve the brevity and the polish of the fable. “Could commodities themselves speak“, Marx says in one of those wonderful passages of “Capital”, “they would say: Our use value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange values.”

So we attached a microphone on the marketplace on which the commodities hailing from Russia and America meet. The ones from the “higher levels” have allowed them to speak a common economic language. For both commodities, the sacrosanct principle applies that the targeted market price must lie above the cost of production (otherwise they would not have travelled the long way). In both homelands one is concerned with producing them at low cost and to sell at high price.

The commodity hailing from the land of capitalist theory has the word: “I am made of two parts and therefore only one weld is visible on me: the cost of production (a living and used up advance of my producer) and the profit, that together add up to the precise sum below I, don’t delude yourselves, don’t meet my principles. To encourage the buyer, I content myself with a modest profit: through a simple calculation – profit divided by cost of production – you can check the rate of this profit. Suppose my cost is 10 and you can own me for 11, do you want to be stingy and claim that the ten percent rate is excessively high? Step right up, ladies and gentlemen…”

We now hand the microphone to the other commodity. It talks like this: “For us Marxist economics is critical. You see two welds on me. I have no reason to hide that: Because I consist of three and not of two parts. The trick with the other commodity is that it isn’t visible there. To produce me, there are two expenditures: raw materials, consumption of instruments of production and suchlike, which we call constant capital invested in me – and the compensation of human labour, which we call variable capital. The sum forms what the lady before me called cost of production. For me as well you have to add a yield, an earning or profit, which is my third and last part: called surplus value. For the advanced constant capital, we calculate nothing on top, as we know that it does not add value: only labour, meaning the variable part of the advance creates value. So, if you want to determine the percentage or the rate, not of profit but of surplus value, it is very easy as well: you just have to divide the surplus value by the second part of the capital advanced for me, that is, the wages.”

Whereupon the ordinary buyer replies: “Explain that to your hairdresser! The only thing my wallet is interested in is the end cost, that is, your respective sale price.”

There is spat between the two commodities, in which each claims to want to close the less profitable deal and to settle for the lowest profit rate. As neither of them can press it down to zero, the one that actually has the lowest cost of production wins, as Stalin also incessantly indicates. For the constant part, quantity and quality of raw materials are given. The competition in both export countries is staged on the variable part. And certainly, there is the solution to pay the workers less, to let them work longer, but predominantly labour productivity is backed, which is conditioned by technological progress, the use of more powerful machines and the ever more rational organisation of firms. Already both sides are displaying glossy prints of their large-scale plants, where each prides itself in having reduced the number of employees at constant or larger scale of production. But one thing that the buyers care even less about is knowing on which side of the contested market the workers are being paid and treated better.

The reader will, so we think, without effort determine the difference between both methods of value analysis. The rate of surplus value is always much higher than the rate of profit, and all the more as the constant capital outweighs the variable.

Now, the Marxian law of the fall of the average rate of profit deals with profit as a whole, that is, the total return of all spheres of production, regardless of the later to deal with distribution (between the banker, the industrialist and the landowner). In the 13. chapter of the third volume of “Capital”, Marx reminds: “We intentionally present this law before going on to the division of profit” (“Profit is for us, for the time being, only another name for or another category of surplus value”) “into different independent categories.” This “shows from the outset that this law is, in its entirety, independent of this division”. And so it also applies if the state behaves as owner, banker and entrepreneur.

The law is based on the general historical process – denied by no one, apologised for by everyone – of the incessant development of productivity due to the application of ever more complicated instruments, tools, machines, ever more diverse technical processes and of scientific achievements on manual labour. For a given mass of products, fewer and fewer workers are needed. The capital advanced that needed to be invested to get hands on this mass of products continuously changes what Marx calls the organic composition: ever more substance-based capital, ever less wage capital. Few workers suffice to bestow an enormous “increase in value” on the to be processed material, because they can process a lot more of it in comparison to the past. In this too one agrees. And further? Even assumed that capital exacerbates exploitation and increases the rate of surplus value by paying the workers less (even though this often happens, it only has the character of a law from the point of view of lounge revolutionaries), the squeezed out surplus value, respectively profit, will indeed increase, in face of the much stronger increase of the mass of purchased raw materials, with equal number of labour powers, the profit rate will continue to fall: Precisely because the rate expresses the relation of the slightly bigger profit (profit mass) to the enormously increased total advance in wages and material.

Capital demands the “maximum profit”? For sure, it demands it and it finds it as well, but it cannot prevent that meanwhile the profit rate falls. The mass of profit increases, because the population and still more the proletariat grows, the processed material becomes evermore impressive and the mass of products increases. In infancy: small capitals, divided between many and invested at a good rate; in old age: giant capitals, divided on few (consequence of concentration which develops in parallel to accumulation), admittedly invested at a low rate, however with the result of the exorbitant, vertigo-inducing increase of social capital, of social profit, of average business capital and profit.

There is no contradiction with the Marxian law of the fall in the rate of profit, which could only be detained by the reduction of labour productivity, by “degeneration” of the organic composition of capital; an issue against which Stalin at the moment hauls out the big guns, a terrain on which he desperately tries to subdue his enemies.

19th and 20th century

In no. 2 (1952) of “Il programma comunista” we published some plain numbers from capitalist sources about the American economy. They prove the law determined by Marx and negated by Stalin. According to statistics 1848, that is, at the appearance of industrial capitalism in the USA, of 1000 value units which were added to the processed material in the process of production, 510 units went as wages to the workers and 490 as profit to the entrepreneurs. If one disregards depreciation of machines, general expenses etc., those numbers on the one hand represent variable capital, on the other hand represent surplus value. Their ratio, or the rate of surplus value, is 96%.

How did the bourgeois calculate the rate of profit? To answer this, we have to know the value of the processed raw materials. We can only guess it, by assuming the hypothesis that in the crawling phase of industry every worker produces the quadruple of his wage on average. If the wages amount to 510, the constitute 2.040 units. The costs of production amount to 2.550 in total. High rate of profit: 19,2%. We notice anyway that it always lies beneath the rate of surplus value.

In the year 1929, after a long cycle of insane growth, the workers only received 362 of 1.000 newly added value units, the capitalists however 638. Don’t start to get confused now: Until “black Friday” the wages increased, and the living standard of the workers increased strongly – that doesn’t change a thing. As one sees, the rate of surplus value, respectively exploitation increased drastically: from 96% to 176%. If now, after one has written one’s fingers to the bone, there is still someone who doesn’t understand that one can be exploited even more despite higher wages and better food, then he should go home! He has not understood the consequences of the increased productivity of labour power, consisting of sweat and blood of hard workers and ending up in the pockets of the bourgeois.

Let’s now determine the value of total production. Let’s assume that between 1848 and 1929 thanks to improved machines and with same number of workers ten times more raw materials than before could be processed. We can quietly assume those low numbers: with the certainity of one, who is somewhat familiar with scientific syntheses and therefore without problems starts with preconditions which are inconvenient for the own thesis and which benefit the enemy, those hair-splitters, which take delight in checking everything fifteen times. Because the workers now receive 362 as opposed to the 510 before, one could think that the share in raw materials decreased from 2.040 to 1.448; the opposite is the case: the share rises to 14.480. With a total expense of 14.842 in investments and a profit of 638, one has a rate of profit of about 4,5%. The fall of the rate of profit: here we have it. It is enough to pull off one’s head before Marx; it is not necessary to hand a tissue to “Uncle Sam” to dry his crocodile tears! You have understood, we searched for the rate and not the mass of profit. To get an image of the total extent of production – even if not in real values, then still in form of a comparison between both epochs – one has to consider that a national product of 3040 in the year 1848 is faced with 15.480 in 1929: with non-noteworthy increase of worker hands. In reality however, the worker population has multiplied by ten in the course of the 80 years. One can thus estimate the total product at 154.800, about the fiftyfold of the year 1848. While the average rate of profit of the factory owners fell from 19,2% to 4,3%, the mass of profit increased from 490 to 6.390, meaning it is fourteen times as high. Surely our numbers are still far too modest. Important was only to prove, that American capitalism in the race to the maximum profit adheres to the law of the fall in the rate of profit. Stalin cannot educe any new laws from it. Additionally, we didn’t account for the concentration; if we apply a factor of 10 here, the average profit (in mass) of the American enterprises amounts to the 140-fold. There it is: the course for crisis, and the confirmation of Marxism.

We will allow ourselves an even bolder calculation now. Let’s assume the American working class assumes power in a situation as in that of 1929; let’s repeat the numbers: 14.480 raw materials, 362 labour powers, 638 profit, meaning 15.480 total product.

And then the workers read Marx and use “the increased productive power of capital for the saving of living labour as such”. A decree of the revolutionary committee pushes down production to 10.000 (where it is pushed down we will see; remind yourselves that there won’t be any presidential elections or similar events anymore). The workers will first settle for not adding the entire profit (which is burdened with dues and general expenses) to their wage of 362, but much less, so they arrive at, let’s say 500. For the functioning of public facilities and state-run administrative bodies we deduce even more than the 638 of the now removed capitalists, 