PDF-Version: Il Programma Comunista – Dialogue with the Dead – First Day

Preface

A clear understanding of the present work requires (almost necessarily) knowledge of the “Dialogue with Stalin“, printed in 1953 by this same movement, from which the current publication derives.

With regard to the chronological development and the very particular nature of the “contradictory debate” that began then and continues here, the first pages of this brochure say enough.

In the 1953 preface to the “Dialogue with Stalin”, we recalled the three successive phases of the deep contrast that has long opposed us to the Moscow movement.

In the first phase – from 1918 to 1926 – it can be said that it was, within a movement aiming at the same goal, i. e. the Third International, a divergence on tactics. But within this movement, founded on the ruins of the Second International, which became the prey of social-democratic opportunism, under the impetus of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the aim pursued was common. The left wing of Italian socialism – from which the current Internationalist Communist Party of Italy derives – had begun as early as 1914 and continued after the war to fight for a break with all democratic and pacifist versions of socialism. The crowning achievement of this struggle was the founding of the Communist Party of Italy in January 1921 in Livorno. Within the international movement, this same current supported divergent theses from those of the Communist International and Lenin himself on parliamentary tactics and on the so-called united front and – worse – workers government tactics, showing that these methods did not achieve their proposed goal: the defeat of opportunist workers parties.

The Moscow Congresses from 1920 to 1926, those of the Italian Party in Rome in 1922 and in Lyon in 1926 marked the stages of the Italian Left’s contribution to the international movement during this first period, a contribution that contained an explicit denunciation of the danger of opportunist degeneration.

In a second phase, after 1926, the divergence became more acute until it led to organisational and political separation. The left-wing opposition was then defeated in all countries, while its predictions regarding the reactionary evolution of the dominant majority in Russia, Europe and Italy were seriously confirmed. In Russia, the false theory of the construction of Russian socialist society without and outside international proletarian revolution prevailed, and the opposition, which, on this point as on others, remained faithful to Bolshevik and Leninist traditions, succumbed and was subjected to defamation and extermination. In Europe, the revolutionary wave was repelled and capitalism was consolidated in an insolent way: to this situation, the communist parties responded in a defeatist and cowardly way by entering into non-proletarian party and class blocs whose aim was not to overthrow the bourgeoisie, but to safeguard bourgeois liberal democracy.

In the third phase, during the Second World War, the disagreement widened to form an impassable gulf between the respective doctrines and principles of the Italian Left and the Moscow movement. From then on, the Kremlin and its external appendages totally renounced revolutionary Marxism and the cardinal positions defended and claimed after the First World War by those who fought like Lenin and by his side. Foreign parties were thrown by Moscow into national-social collaboration, first in Germany, then, in a second phase, in France, England and America. Lenin’s slogan of defeatism in all the warring imperialist countries and for the abatement of the military and political power of the capitalists was everywhere replaced by the shameful slogan of a workers’ league with the allied states in Moscow in the war, while the struggle against the enemy states aimed not at destroying the bourgeoisie, but at restoring its liberal forms. And yet, these forms, which Marx and Lenin had crushed in theory, history has eliminated forever in material reality, even within Russia, both revolutionary and Czarist.

In this phase, the organisational and theoretical liquidation of Lenin’s International and October was consecrated: the corollaries of the total transition to counter-revolution were drawn from it. Few in number, but with a powerful historical and doctrinal continuity, we worked outside the intoxication of the crowd that surrounded what was then called “Stalinism” from all sides. We have proclaimed that this adversary whom we have had before us for so many long years was not simply a dissident lost in the movement that yesterday was his and had always been ours, to us Marxists, but an open enemy, a sworn enemy, a mortal enemy of the working class and its historical march to communism.

At the same time, it became clear that the economy and society established in Russia were capitalist in nature and that extolling it in the world as a socialist society was the principal infamy of the Moscow movement, the summit, the counter-revolutionary masterpiece of so many resounding treacheries.

***

In the “Dialogue with Stalin”, we proposed to outline the future phases of this historical debate (historical in spite of the fact that one of the committed parties, us, totally lacks illustrious credentials) and we foresee the future confession that would eliminate the current identification between the economic structure of Russia with socialism; the policies of the Russian state and that of the working class struggle in all countries against the world capitalist form.

Three years later, the 20th Congress of the USSR CP, although not completing this historic step that we had planned, took a huge leap in this direction, which perhaps brought it closer to it than we thought at the time. But the Dialogue with our phantom opponent must continue, since he claims to speak the language of Marx and Lenin at the moment when he pronounces the scandalous confessions whose worldwide repercussions are due to the dramatic break-up with the late Stalin.

We do not know if it will only take another three years for the Kremlin to come to a full confession. But when the day comes, today’s “Dialogue” will turn into a monologue of these gentlemen. This is what those who extracted confessions from revolutionaries by torturing them had hoped for in vain. The “confessors” will in turn “confess”.

Faced with a denigration, which borders on obscenity so far away is Stalin, who, until three years ago, was the idol, our position is quite different from applauding the iconoclasts! It is perfectly consistent with the positions we established then. Now that, as might be expected, the bourgeois world salutes the terrifying decline of Stalin from a sneer directed against the grandiose conceptions of our revolutionary doctrine, we must remember what we wrote in 1953 in the preface to the Dialogue with Stalin:

“No doubt Stalinism applies repression to anyone who resists it, from whatever side, and crushes it mercilessly: the above-mentioned criticism of its development is more than enough to explain these methods. This criticism therefore in no way justifies a retraction of the classic revolutionary theses on violence, dictatorship and terror, historical weapons the Communist Left fully claims to use, and it must not serve as a basis for a type of’ condemnation involving their disavowal. Nor should it encourage any concession to the hypocritical propaganda of the currents of the “free world” and their false claim to respect for the sacrosanct human person.

Since they cannot currently be the protagonists of history, Marxists cannot wish for anything better than the collapse of the social, political and military domination that America imposes on the capitalist world. We therefore have nothing to do with the demands for greater liberalism and democracy made by extremely ambiguous political groups, which States such as Tito’s claim to satisfy, have imposed themselves in the most ferocious way.”

These unequivocal words, as well as our entire construction, all the more solid and less easy to confuse with any other, since it has never been butchered in front of the television cameras by buffoons, already foresaw what our welcome would be to the pathetic contortions of the 20th Congress and to the comedy of abjuration with regard to Stalin, presented as a return to the classics of our great school, when in reality it is only a step backwards towards the most fallacious superstitions of bourgeois ideology, a cowardly genuflection before the superpowers of the contemporary capitalist brothel.

***

On the cover of this booklet we have written the epigraph which, with this brief sketch of our historical origins, saves our small group from deplorable confusion.

Let’s add another discriminating one to it. It is certain that every step of the Kremlin’s men getting stuck in the sands of bourgeois counter-revolution brings us closer, on a hard and bitter road, to the reconstitution of the revolutionary party, a goal to which we devote all our strength, without stupid impatience.

When the time for this reconstitution has historically come, it is certainly not a Constituent of the ridiculous small groups and circles that have said and say they are anti-Stalinist and that today proclaim themselves “anti-twentieth Congress” that will carry it out.

The Party destroyed piece by piece in thirty years does not rebuild itself drop by drop like the cocktails of the bourgeois art of drug abuse. It must be placed at the end of a unique and unbroken line of continuity, which is not characterised by the thought of a man or a group of men present “on the market”, but by the coherent history of a succession of generations. Above all, it cannot emerge from this illusory nostalgia for success which, far from being based on the unshakeable doctrinal certainty (which we have had for more than a century) of the reality of the revolutionary course, relies heavily on the subjective exploitation of the trial and error of others: that would be a very mean, stupid and illusory way to achieve an immense historical result!

First Day

A brief reminder

The recent debates of the Communist Congress in the Soviet Union, which have been widely reported everywhere, have a profound historical significance. Of course, it is not the formulations of speeches that can lead us to it, but it cannot be discovered either by reducing them to mere verbal manoeuvres aimed at concealing calculations and mysterious acts.

It is in a completely different way that we must seek the relationship between the words spoken and the historical reality that underlies them, and we Marxists are much better prepared to do so than supporters and opponents of “communism”, the former more disoriented than ever, and for a long time, the latter very loud, but armed with very poor polemical and critical resources.

With the dates of 1 February, 21 April, 22 May, 28 September 1952, Stalin published a series of short writings, with which he considered it necessary to intervene in the economic discussion that arose within the party in the year 1951, regarding the preparation of the new “Manual of Political Economy”, which was recently published in the West, and which we hope to become familiar with before it is made to disappear[1]. The purpose of the paper was to establish which economic laws should be applied to the structure of Russian society today, and to argue that these laws were those of a socialist economy. And, of course, the content was also to recall the laws in force in the contemporary economy of international capitalism, comparing them with the way in which the Marxist economy has formulated them for a century.

The “Dialogue with Stalin”, published by our movement in a small volume of 1953, argued that this construction, while erroneously representing the reality of the progress of the economic fact, both in Russia and in the West, contains a series of serious errors of doctrine; it is irreconcilable with the foundations of Marxism. In this periodical there were collected the ” Fili del Tempo ” given in n. 1 of 10-24 October 1952 and in the following 2, 3, 4, with complementary extracts in n. 2 and 3 of 1953.

In 1952, from October 5 to 15, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union held its 19th Congress. Stalin, as will be remembered, not only presided over the proceedings, but was considered by all, as all the texts attest, as the supreme authorising officer of the whole historical, economic, political and philosophical theory of the Party, officially called “the Doctrine of Lenin and Stalin”.[2]

Until Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, and even until February 14, 1956, there was no one in the Russian or fraternal parties to question this.

In the treatise on Russia that has been going on in the pages of “Programma Comunista” since November 1954[3] we have returned in organic order the materials of our critical view developed over years and decades. According to this, the “Stalinist” positions in historiography, economy, politics, and even philosophy, are false and anti-Marxist.

Anyone who follows us today, friend or foe, should above all consider the Marxist economic discussion of that “Dialogue”, and the recent exposition of the revolutionary history of Russia, of the great struggles of 1917 and the following glorious years, of the historical construction of the Bolsheviks and of Lenin on the development of the Russian social structure, and of the Russian and world revolution; above all, because they contrast the so-called theory of the construction of socialism in one country, with the persecutory, infamous and defeatist deeds of its unfortunate supporters, for thirty years now.

However, from 14 to 25 February of this year 1956, the 20th Congress of the “Stalin’s” Party took place and if the language held there remains, certainly, a thousand miles from the revolutionary language, infinitely less snoring, it is no longer that of the 19th Congress and that of Stalin’s lifetime; because if one spoke, as always, of an “immortal Lenin”, there was no longer any question of an “immortal Stalin.”

Marxism knows neither “immortal” nor dead. With those whom the vulgar art of public speaking refers to as such, life is a dialogue. All will one day be held accountable for their actions, and with the living of today and those who follow them.

Ideological earthquake in the East

The news has come from various sources: the huge propaganda organisation set up by the Communist Party and the Moscow government is suddenly revising the enormous amount of literature that it has flooded the world with powerful means over the last thirty years. It also announces that, in all subjects, new “texts” will be substituted for the old ones: philosophy and politics; art and biology; history and economics; technology and ethnology, everything will be done…

Would this stupendous Congress of abjuration have laid the foundations for a new path? Could a brand new building be built on this basis? Should we finally expect the conglomerate of historical forces that expressed themselves at this Congress to do such a work?

The texts of the speeches that have come to us from various sources, and that the different chapels have presented in different ways, allow us to answer these three questions with an irrevocable no.

Has this confession of frightening and incessant heresy worthlessly minimal, kneeling under the ashes of an incredible Canossa, to mean a return to the orthodox positions in long failures trampled on and prostituted, a wash of bloody sins, and a renewed baptism in salvation? Never. These figures of generous legends, in turn forged by subconsciousness of ancient historians, do not offer us any key today; only a new phase of the incurable disease should be announced, a further step towards the bottom of the abyss of non-redeemable damnation.

At a time when, reciting the left-most of the mea culpa for their blindness towards Stalin, the communist parties, these unrecognisable bastards of a purebred historical tradition, cry out from all sides that they intend to return to the great sources of Marxism and Leninism, this is just another blasphemy in a vile series of blasphemies; a new but more than ever powerless insult to the high revolutionary faith of the global proletariat. And it is also the worthy crowning achievement of the obscene practices to which we have become accustomed, for a third of a century, the ignoble brotherhood, all stained with fraternal blood from which it will never wash itself, before the history of the centuries to come, of the indelible stains with which its lies and its crimes have marked it.

It is up to other forces to raise new political structures, and they will do so with completely different materials. The Moscow ideological earthquake, which does not reveal and prepare anything other than ruins, is explained by the tremors that shake the foundations of society, not only in Russia, but throughout the world.

It is therefore in vain that, on all sides, the bourgeois imbecility presents the event as a new staging, necessary for the propaganda of a power pursuing the same goals as under Stalin and still as monstrous, but still very firmly seated.

It is even more in vain that the great communist monks (who have always surprisingly “survived” similar exploits) now dare to gossip about this Congress as a prelude to a better adjustment of shooting for the defence of the sacrificial classes of the cursed present society. For this poor comment, they had to wait until the needy activists who, for years, have been picking up the crumbs of similar “orgies” of the ruling clique, find their breath taken away.

The class meaning of the event is quite different; in the near future, it will be obvious.

Let us take the “new” formula of alliance between the working classes and the petty-bourgeois classes: it does not historically offer a “way out” of the antithesis between the dictatorship of capital and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Far from opening a third way, it joins the first definition, the counter-revolutionary definition of this insoluble antithesis. It therefore serves the forces of global big capital. Stalinism is dead, but it is reborn under the unmasked aspect of what for us is not an idiotic reason for scandal and horror, but a happy announcement of revolutionary upheaval: world totalitarianism, the philistinely deprecated “fascism”.

In today’s rotten society, the middle classes have disgraced themselves and are only “opening up”, as we have seen many times, on the right, so that anyone who flatters them and attracts them to him is only an accomplice to the counter-revolution.

This is what, far from holding the leadership as firmly in hand as their Western comrades imagine when they believe in diabolical manoeuvres on their part, is what, without wanting to, or even knowing it, the Russian communists admitted in Moscow.

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language”.

Extreme Left of Congress, you said, Anastas Mikoyan, that we should now look in the archives and no longer in the newspapers for news! Well, the words we have just quoted are the beginning of a “little work” that its author, a poor émigré in London, sent in February 1852 to the German magazine “Die Revolution” published in New York by a faithful of our school, Joseph Weydemeyer: it is the exordium of the “Eighteenth Brumaire” by Karl Marx, written in one go during the events themselves.

A historiography in tatters

Despite a long and bitter experience, we have still on many occasions have to rub our eyes in disbelief at the historical falsifications encountered in “communist” publications. No matter how many and how serious the desecrations that Moscow has caused to the sacred history of revolution and the party, we have never managed, in our ingenuity, to realise that countless sons of the working class were now swear on these Himalayas of shit.

Although we belong to the very few who have experienced these great events up close, we are right not to lose confidence: this mountain of falsifications is collapsing today under the blows of the very people who built it: but what a foul fucking stench!

Indeed, Khrushchev’s report disqualifies the “Short Course of the History of the Communist Party (b)” which nevertheless served to “educate” (!) a whole generation of Russians.

Although not among the authors of this text, the secretary of the Russian Party showed himself to be full of restraint, giving as a reason for this disqualification that the current C.C. wished to improve the ideological work by diffusing the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin (dark silence on those of Stalin!). He simply added that “during the last seventeen years, the Party’s propaganda had been based mainly on the “Short Course”, but that it was “necessary to publish a popular Marxist manual (and therefore go!) on the history of the party”, another “on the principles of Marxist-Leninist doctrine” and a “popular exposition” (that we are spared the trouble of choosing between “Marxist” and “popular”) of the foundations of Marxist philosophy.

Mikoyan, on the other hand, was more decisive, who’s whole speech will not be placed in the pages of “Unità”: he blamed the “Short Course” for nothing less than ignoring the history of the last twenty years!

A question arises: how will Moscow manage to write this story in a materialistic way? How will it recount the supreme shame of 1939, the imperialist agreement, first with Nazi Germany, and then the plutocratic democracies, which are now hated today?

The dirty work of the fraternal parties, which, “defeatist” only towards the imperialists of Paris and London, first of all make themselves Hitler’s servants, to then transform themselves, as if by a magic wand, into partisans of the democratic war, so relentless to the point of making the 1914 chauvinists, that Lenin had so skilfully bloodied, pale in comparison? And will the hypocritical blame be placed on the only surprising scapegoat, Dzhugashvili, for the attempt (and the failure) to cut off the hocks from the allies of America in 1945, the “double blow” audaciously announced in the report to the 18th Congress in 1939, now that these idiotic diplomatic catwalks are being launched? Is that why you offer that head? A skull is not enough, gentlemen.

Mikoyan has said much more about the shame of the last twenty years! In the text of the “Associated Press” it is said:

“Mikoyan criticized Stalin in several ways: 1) He (Mikoyan) declared that the writings of the late Premier ignore the last two decades; and therefore called for new textbooks on communism. 2) He attacked the accusations of betrayal that Stalin brought many years late against the heroes of the former Bolshevik revolution of 1917. 3) He declared that Russia’s foreign policy had become active, flexible and calm after Stalin’s death in March 1953”.

This last point certainly has nothing to do with a return to the historical method of Marxism! If, in 1953, a war between Russia and America could not be predicted in the near future, the historical reasons for this fact don’t have a flying fuck to do with Stalin’s death! Our few readers will be able to testify that we did not see it any closer after 1945.

It is not by turning it upside down that we fight the “myth of the personality”.

You cheat, but the truth is coming through!

If one opens this “Short Course” of falsity without limits, as if it were a serious thing, one reads that it “was written under the direction of Stalin, by a Commission appointed by the Party’s Central Committee and in which Kalinin, Mololov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Jdanov and Beria participated”. All these people died a more or less natural death, or are still living to our misfortune. As for the Central Committee itself (the great October Committee), we are informed today that thirty-two of its members have been “rehabilitated”. However, for a long time the only survivor was, after a small number of natural deaths, Stalin, now de-sanctified.

One can breathe easier to read the statements of the eminent historiographer Pankratova, who “highlighted the deep crisis from which Soviet historiography suffered for almost thirty years, because of the large number of subjects that became “taboo” under Stalin”. It provides us with a long list of facts that historians were forced to keep quiet or distort. Thus it was necessary to rewrite the history of the Civil War (1918-1920) as if Trotsky had never been a war commissioner, and to commemorate the Hungarian Commune of 1919, crushed in blood after a desperate resistance, by keeping silent the name of Béla Kun who was its leader. Today, an official communiqué “rehabilitates” this incomparable comrade, a complete Marxist and a true revolutionary hero. We still see him wandering the corridors of the Kremlin, during the Congresses, where his simplicity and modesty contrasted so strongly with the smugness of so many scheming maneuvers with Europe’s social traitors. It seemed as if the bitter defeat of the Hungarian party, whose theoretical strength was as remarkable as their courage on the barricades, was to be blamed on itself. Yet all the “fault” had been not to wait for the beasts of capitalism to strangle the Russian revolution and to launch in the struggle, at the crucial moment, all the forces of Red Budapest, magnificently insurgent against the fierce offensive of the mercenaries of the European bourgeoisie and the poisonous rage of all the renegades of socialism, whether German or citizens of the Entente States, democrats or fascists. It is certainly not he who would have returned to Europe to negotiate with these traitors, even on Lenin’s order, who loved him very much! In 1937, he was declared “enemy of the people” and sent to some unknown place in Siberia to die.

As for Leon Trotsky, only the fact that the murder took place outside Russia allowed us to know the place and time when the ignoble bastard, still alive, who had slipped into his entourage as a supposed disciple, stuck his ice-axe into his skull. The assassin of the leader of the Red Victory can now get out of prison quietly: what he could reveal is no longer a mystery.

Professor Pankratova continues: order to conceal in Russia the existence of a correspondence, currently in the possession of Harvard University, between Lenin and Trotsky. Order to remove from libraries and museums all documents relating to the leading role played in the revolution by the victims of the “great purges”. In 1931, historians Shliapnikov, Jaroslavsky and Popokov were ordered to make Trotsky appear in the civil war as a secret agent of imperialism. The speaker herself had been ordered to modify a work written by her in 1946 to minimise the Allied landing in Normandy during the Second World War.

In short, Stalin was absolutely right to demand, in 1946, that textbooks present him as the “founder of Soviet historiography”!

The last fact cited by Pankratova is the most amazing: in the texts relating to the history of the October Revolution, Stalin had inserted that Bukharin had tried to assassinate Lenin. For anyone who remembers Bukharin, his righteousness and smiling simplicity; for anyone who still sees his blue eyes shining with enthusiasm when Lenin, to whom he bore almost childish adoration, dealt in the Moscow Congresses with the great revolutionary themes; for anyone who knows, finally, the magnificent mutual trust that united these two men, above the most ardently expressed disagreements, such a fable is below indignation itself! How far the relations of these two men were from the despicable unanimity that became the rule once the party was transformed into a brotherhood of flunkies!

Pankratova said that the reaction of historians had largely contributed to the removal of these vile “taboos”. It happens sometimes that science and courage go hand in hand…

“The communists”, says the “Manifesto”, “disdain to conceal their views and aims”. For Marxists, the defence of truth is not an ethical imperative, but a physical necessity since truth is the only oxygen of the Revolution.

Myth and cult of personality

We could not see, without rejoicing, the 20th Congress hitting the cult of personality. Indeed, whether it praises the “role” of an exceptional character, calling the crowds to follow Him or to express the gratitude due to Him, or whether it engages in an ideological delirium on the “human person” in general (who, moreover, has never been so highly praised as it is today when it is crushed, by whole masses, in the mortar of history), this cult is the true plague of the contemporary world, a deadly wound carried by the counter-revolution to the proletarian movement.

That being said, how much value should be placed on the proclamations of people like Khrushchev, Mikoyan, Molotov, Bulgan and almost all the speakers in Moscow who have attacked this myth of personality? When banalities such as “the cult of personality is contrary to the spirit of Marx and Lenin” are presented to us as extraordinary discoveries, the welcome can only be cold. Contrary to the “spirit”?! Those who had shown such a disgusting superstition to such men, and worse than ever turned to them, would not have come out of their clutches without leaving you burning scraps of their reptilian skin.

For decades now, this dirty mob has been stuffing heads with the exploits of the Greats, the Highests, the Bigs, be they evil or good geniuses. In this respect, the kaleidoscope of modern society would be settled from time to time by a clique of three or four illustrious men who are deficient: the rickety Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the paranoid Winston Churchill and that Joseph whose madness for grandeur and taste for blood are now being unmasked. Conversely, until recently, millions of men were sent to be sacrificed for victories consisting in burning the carcass of the sadist Adolph Hitler and hanging by the feet this good “miles gloriosus” of Mussolini!

That’s Marxism, or the cult of imbeciles of moronic maniacs?

And is it so easy that these idols fall apart from so cumbersome and fumigated altars? Wretches, hear me.

After thirty-three years Carlo Marx reprinted that small work, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, Marx was in a position to write:

“The concluding words of my work: “But when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendome Column,” have already been fulfilled”.

In 1869, the Napoleonic legend had already received the final blow. As for the Vendôme column, it was the Paris Commune that was to bring it down three years later.

We will therefore see the great statue of Dzhugashvili fall from the top of the ramparts, from which it stands so proudly, in Stalingrad! If it is true that the large mass meeting at the end of the 20th Congress was dispersed to avoid demonstrations of adulation of the newly elected representatives, it will perhaps have the slight advantage that we will no longer have the trivial scenes in which servile workers’ delegations come to pay tribute to a few fools sitting under a row of huge heads set against a red background.

But the distance between Marxism and this disgusting speculation on great names, which is used as a narcotic to dwarf and blind the working class, will be far from being bridged!

Let us read again Marx’s words in the same preface to the “Eighteenth Brumaire” on the subject of the Caesarism fad, which he saw with indignation taking root:

“Lastly, I hope that my work will contribute toward eliminating the school-taught phrase now current, particularly in Germany (it is you, Jerusalem, who is at stake; Editor’s note), of so-called Caesarism. In this superficial historical analogy the main point is forgotten, namely, that in ancient Rome the class struggle took place only within a privileged minority, between the free rich and the free poor, while the great productive mass of the population, the slaves, formed the purely passive pedestal for these combatants. People forget Sismondi’s significant saying: The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society (we are tempted to add: especially in the middle classes: Ed) lives at the expense of the proletariat.”

Are the ridiculous characters who, once Stalin is liquidated, talk about a new Marxism (they make one every day!) able to understand the meaning of these words, to which they would not fail to attribute the banal qualification of “popular”? We will see that this is not the case!

Marx teaches that the current historical period is no longer one of personal leadership in society, nor of the great civil struggles within the privileged minority. This means that workers revolution cannot be led by the Personality.

The anti-feudal and, in this respect, bourgeois aspect of the Russian Revolution condemned it to reproduce the general lines of the great Western revolutions: this is why we have often applied the term “romantic” to it.

The latter, forgetting the fundamental difference noted by Marx and Sismondi, i.e. the fact that Roman law concerned only free men and ignored slaves, had taken up its legal doctrine in antiquity. They also took from it, in politics and literature, (“who will deliver us from the Greeks and Romans?”) the fixed pattern of the substitution of imperial Caesarism for the Republic.

The same phenomenon occurred in the Russian revolution: the terrible problems it posed and for which Lenin had provided the powerful schema responding to the Marxist vision were obscured by the shadows that the great French revolution projected on them with an irresistible force of suggestion. Thus, the agitation against Trotsky, a passionate and violent character, but in no way tainted by personality, was based on the outrageous accusation of “Bonapartism” and a shameful fable attributed to him the theorist and the leader of the most magnificent proletarian and purely proletarian Terror, the intention of preparing a new Thermidor.

After the passage of the great Bonaparte, who was perhaps to Robespierre what Julius Caesar had been to Brutus, and Alexander the Great to Leonidas, the liberal bourgeoisie suffocated its collective revolutionary force, abandoning itself to a stupid and anachronistic Caesarism, then, by a laborious abortion of history, to those puppets who embodied it with dignity in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

By reciting litanies to Stalin, who nevertheless possessed a phalanx of magnificent captains and masters, by offering to his greatness (which no one, not even we Marxists, believed so fragile) bloody sacrifices, the Russian Revolution followed an identical path: it in its turn played the grotesque comedy of rigour, the one in which the Personality is the main actor.

It is certainly not because the bourgeois Revolution has always and everywhere devoured its children that we will never shout at it to stop, whatever the nation and race that are or will be its actors. Nevertheless, when its time has finally come, the proletarian and purely proletarian Revolution, while ridding itself, by iron and fire, of the slags that will inevitably cling to it, will not follow such a path.

We have admitted above that the French bourgeoisie provided the exception to the rule with the great Corsican. It remains to be seen how much of this individual greatness has not been determined by historical forces! Marx already recalled, in this Preface of 1869 which we have mentioned, that “Colonel Charras opened the attack on the Napoleon cult in his work on the campaign of 1815. Subsequently, and especially in the past few years, French literature has made an end of the Napoleon legend with the weapons of historical research, criticism, satire, and wit”. Engels could also be quoted on the same subject.

Today, a French historian, Jean Savant, has established in some fifteen books an interpretation that empties Bonaparte’s personality of the importance attributed to him and reveals in his famous gesture the work of three prominent men: the political agitator Barras, the policeman Fouché and the great capitalist Ouvrard. Whatever it may have, official science must often bow to the power of Marxism.

To conclude this digression, we will ask this question: did we witness, in Moscow, a Congress of Marxists committed to demolishing the cult of personality or rather that of professional bootlickers who defend themselves against unemployment by forming a cooperative of shitty geniuses?

Incurable Scoliosis

The courtesan phrases of the 19th Congress towards Stalin have not been forgotten, and the thing is too recent for friends and enemies to have done so. Mikoyan, for example, who is now the most vehement of all these iconoclasts, has in his personal file such classics as “Stalin, the great Architect of Communism!”. Here’s another explanation of the magnetic storm in progress: from the Sun they heard him thunder for Marxist-Leninism that doesn’t wish to worship Man!

The expression is of an indecent romanticism that apes the typically Masonic like term “Great Architect of the Universe”: the bourgeois, too philistine to retire God, have given him a stipendiary job! Communism has no “architects” and if it did, the position would have been occupied for centuries, from the time of Cabet, Campanella, Thomas Moore and even Plato.

The “Associated Press” could not allow the occasion to pass up the opportunity to indulge Mikoyan, who, until recently, had been handling the censer and who, today, is abjure; it recalls that

“At the XIX congress of 1952 Mikoyan declared that Stalin’s work ‘enlightens with his genius both the great, historical road that we have travelled, and the one that leads to an increasingly tangible communist future’. At the end of his 1952 speech Mikoyan raised the cry of ‘Glory to the great Stalin!’. That time he also referred to Stalin’s works as a ‘treasure of ideas’ and said that in his books ‘Comrade Stalin illuminates our lives with the dazzling light of science’!”

It is worth repeating that, even though it is not important for us to know who is responsible for the authorship of such shocking expressions, exactly because we do not need the coherence of individuals in all areas, for we believe that the light may come from the blasphemous as the darkness from the orthodox, only that a mouthful goeth to them straight or sideways.

Today, for people with similar stomachs, like Tito from a bandit with a knife between his teeth to a revolutionary hero, Stalin is reduced to a walking rag. But Stalin was a fighter, a conspirator and an organiser of the first order: his negative sides, Trotsky’s “Stalin” (which can be read quietly, now that he is no longer a “secret agent”) reveals them mercilessly: theorist and scientist, that’s what we should never have believed for a moment. But then, how can we trust, for a scientific restoration of the doctrine of the communist movement, those who were given light by it?

Good people, extinguish the candles under his icon, and go to bed in the dark! Keep praise to Marx and Lenin: they could jump out of their graves!

Let’s mention the bourgeois press, eh, tovarisch Tecoppa? Just the consignment of handing over the archives, given by the great secretary, we leaf through the collection of “Unità”. During the 19th Congress, it announced the printing of one and a half million copies of Stalin’s “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR”, which we will see how they were dealt with at the 20th Congress. Reproducing “Pravda”, it stated at the time that:

“This is the greatest phase of development of the Marxist-Leninist political economy…, which will exert an enormous influence on the development of advanced Soviet science”, which “for the first time formulated the fundamental economic law of socialism” (it was the law of value and the law of geometric expansion of production!), and all this “developing in a creative way (we will also deal with this creativity, which even today they wanted to trace back to Lenin) the teachings of Marx, Engels and Lenin”.

Malenkov closed this way:

“Under the banner of the immortal Lenin (he was already dead, good for him), under the wise guidance of the great Stalin, forward, etc..”.

Molotov was more sonorous:

“Long live the party of Lenin and Stalin! May our great Stalin live in good health for many years! Glory to comrade Stalin, great leader of the party and the people! Long live dear Stalin!”.

Kaganovich (issue of 15 October 1952) spoke at length about the brilliant leader Stalin, who enriched the theory of Marx, Engels and Lenin with new discoveries; of the leader and master Stalin, of brilliant theoretical work, and so on. As for Mikoyan’s speech, it can be read on page 3 of the issue of 16 October, containing all the sycophancy mentioned above.

Fortunately, such a disgusting excess of courtesan rhetoric undermines the very success of Moscow’s work of undermining the revolutionary preparation of the working class: hence today’s scandalous turn. Will it not open its eyes to the proletariat, in Italy and elsewhere? In any case, we will continue to wait for the effects of the new flip-flops which, Marxism gives us the certainty, will be confirmed tomorrow and will mark the long and hard road to revolutionary recovery.

And we will see the link between the earthquake of today’ s congress and the proclamations that the historical reality will impose tomorrow, inevitably, to those who today with unparalleled audacity, will throw away the holy teachings of their master Stalin, the million and a half copies of the new Economy that replaced that of Marx and Lenin, the volumes of the “Complete Works” of Stalin (that were until today being published in Italy, and that from today are removed from the shops).

As we have already said, we are heading towards the Congress of Confession. The force of facts is a physical force, and it imposes itself on men even presenting itself as the force of theory, to which one can for entire cycles, lie, but to which, in the end, one is forced to bow.

A great breakthrough will come when it has to be declared that the economic social structure of Russia is capitalist structure.

Stalin’s pseudo-scientific economy would then be inconvenient for the manoeuvre. It will also be useful to draw this proof from authentic Marxism, supporting the historical necessity of this situation, to preserve the stability – of which we will say more – of the power of the State.

It will then be worth mentioning that this Trotsky, Zinoviev and many of us had said so, until the 1926 shutter came down. And then it will not be convenient to have broadcast that they said so because they were secret agents of capital.

This is the framework for an objective Marxist explanation of the 20th Congress and the terrible ideological inconsistency of the speakers’ formulations.

Lead in the arse

We will remember (cf. “Dialogue with Stalin”), that Molotov (gratified by his dear Stalin with the epithet “Lead Arse”) had to recant during the 19th Congress the formula saying “that in Russia, not socialism, but only its foundations had been built”, which had escaped him at a time when, perhaps, its diplomatic padding had become disconnected. At the 20th Congress, he again denied this thesis (and several others, such as underestimating the uprising of the peoples of Asia and Africa against white colonialism). However, its formula was correct and we showed at the time how it echoed the thesis developed by Trotsky and Zinoviev during the contradictory discussion of the Enlarged Executive in August 1926, where Zinoviev, redeeming his tactical fluctuations of previous years, expressed himself in a particularly cheerful and complete manner.

Stalin then very weakly resisted the overwhelming historical and theoretical proof that Lenin had never admitted socialist transformation to be possible (he never spoke of construction, nor can Marxism speak of it) without the advent of the Workers’ Revolution in the West. Stalin himself then turned to military victory over the internal bourgeoisie and the building of the foundations of socialism. The basis of socialism, as Lenin has always explained, is monopolistic and state capitalism in industry, and a step towards it is the most modest step of capitalism, whatever it may be, instead of small rural production and small trade. This a centralised state can build, where it lacks, and thus build capitalist economic forms.

The transition to socialist forms is not a construction, but a demolition of productive relations, which is possible beyond a certain quantitative level of the forces of production, which Bulganin will confess to us later on that he will not be able to reach by 1960.

It is no coincidence that the formula of “building the foundations of socialism” escaped a diplomat of Molotov’s calibre, whose militant career and study of Marxism dates back to Lenin’s early days, and he was wrong to withdraw it in the face of Stalin’s questionable teachings in 1952. The question could not fail to resonate with the last Congress, but it was not yet mature. We will hear more about it in a few years’ time, as abundantly as we do today, about the historical distortions of collective and non-personal leadership; about the economic laws that explain the current Russian economy in heavy and light industry, agriculture and trade[4] and finally about the central issue: the international transfer of power to the proletariat, and the new ways it will be claimed. On this point, these renegades will go about their own business: we have seen two generations of Marxists pass by, and we were just beginning to know how to repeat the doctrine of the path to socialism that we were already at loggerheads with those who were fixing “new paths” for it in advance.

The delivery in this congress is to stand firm on the construction of socialism in Russia affirmed since 1936, although in other countries the “popular will” regulates their “internal affairs” in the sense of remaining capitalists.

At a later stage, the thesis on “coexistence”, another anti-Leninist blasphemy, will be desperately held up, indeed “it will become marxistically true” because the “construction” will be thrown overboard, on to the pile of unsold Joseph’s works. So, Molotov will tell the West, we coexist because we build the same thing: quantitatively increasing capitalism. But then also Lenin’s voice will rise (certainly not, however, in the Congresses of such a party!) to shout: that is precisely why you will not coexist, because the various imperialisms can only go towards confrontation and war.

On this shifting terrain, Khrushchev’s speech had, despite the shadows, some flights of fancy, as for example when he described the Washington-London trade route that he opposed to that of London-Paris. Perhaps this incorrigible partisan of the “fronts” saw the possibility of playing the always convenient card of the crusade against the Bundeswehr of this hated Germany which is in the process of achieving an even more formidable recovery than in the other post-war period.

As early as 1919, at a time when the sound of cannonades was not yet extinguished, Lenin predicted the conflict between the United States and Japan as if he had heard in advance the crash of the bombs at Pearl Harbour. The next general war (which is not yet about to break out) will bring the revolution back. But it must be remembered that in establishing his shinning doctrine, Lenin was not so much thinking about the return of the situation that had been determined at the end of the first conflict: military defeat, the outbreak of a delayed bourgeois revolution and the entry into the race of the proletariat as about the situation of 1914. Ruined, on that date, by the traitors of social democracy, it was only reintroduced in 1939 to be ruined in its turn by new traitors, who had previously been nourished by Lenin’s teachings. In short, what he envisioned was a revolution that would stop mobilisation and war and overthrow the power of the imperialist monsters.

The prospect of the next war is difficult if the first missiles arrive at the start. But perhaps, in some of the not so near eventualities of history, they will not be launched at the start. One of these could occur as part of a Washington-Bonn axis, especially in the case of German reunification, which the two atomic war ministries, of the Kremlin and the Pentagon, are so afraid of, If the small Party, which included Marx and Engels among its militants and which, full of the great visions of 1848, watched for the first glimmers of war in 1852 on the horizon of a stupid peace, resurfaced, Germany could become the pivot of the revolutionary drama which, during the first half of the 20th century, was focused on Russia.

A cautious look to the future

In Khrushchev’s speech, an allusion which, according to professional observers, is directed against Malenkov is counterbalanced by the measured words he devoted to Molotov’s thesis. Before Molotov, and more severely than him, Malenkov had been blamed by the Party for seeing the possibility of moving from a production economy to a consumer economy and curbing heavy industry in favour of light industry, a phase that evidently in the doctrine is placed much further in time, than that of the total construction of industrial bases.

Malenkov has also not failed to rectify and formally withdraw his positions: no more than Molotov, he will not be guillotined – not even in effigy – contrary to journalists’ expectations. And Bulganin even less. One could object to the case of Beria; but it has nothing to do with economic programmes: it was linked to the liquidation of the Stalinist period, which devoted the revolutionary wing of the Russian party, which remained healthy, to infamy and torture. The latter, stretched entirely, not towards constructive plans, but towards the revolutionary destruction of Western capitalism, would never have tolerated the shameful military pacts concluded by the Soviet Union, nor the embraces of coexistence, nor the policy that has relied upon the social fecundity of the middle classes in the West (a support that, by evading their feet, has ruined ridiculous speculation) when they, once the anti-feudal revolution is over and forgotten, can no longer serve even as a manoeuvring mass and are now only the dregs of society. And today it is the same men who have revealed the lies of Stalinist historiography against the opposition that make Beria go down in history as an imperialist agent!

We will use the text of “Unità”, in the summary and excerpts from the report that the “Tass” has reported.

In comparison with the potential of the Western countries the statistics will confirm that Khrushchev was right to say that Russia is still far behind – he said “the industrial base of the socialist system became increasingly powerful”. To the letter the formula is as Marxist as the Molotovian one!

On several occasions, he made strong references to “bankruptcy” in agriculture and the low yield of Kolkhozian production, suggesting how this was delaying the increase in consumer goods production. Even in that, he got closer to Molotov.

The formula “to consolidate the economic power of our socialist country”, is also a mitigation of the one that claimed of “socialist construction” in Russia; in the original, Russia appears to be politically socialist; in the new, economically. Two things as false as each other, but theoretically different.

As for “Economic progress and the rise in the material and cultural level of workers”, these are formulas that are no longer appropriate at all for a socialist society!

Molotov’s condemnation is contrasted by his coldness:

“To claim that we have only laid the foundations of socialism is to deceive the party and the people”.

So there is still the “people” while “socialism” – and the relations of production that characterise it – is already “built”, that is to say, the proletariat itself should no longer exist?

Against the other opponent, the attack goes much deeper: “We encounter another extreme in the way we deal with the issue of socialist development. Indeed, some senior officials interpret the gradual transition from socialism to communism as a signal for the application of the principles of communist society from the current phase. Some hotheads have decreed that the construction of socialism is already complete (in short, has the “construction” begun or is it completed? Is it on the foundation, or does it already have the roof? – Ed) and they have begun to carefully establish a schedule of the times necessary to move towards communism”.

This second formula is extraordinarily shy. Even under capitalism, some economic functions obey the principles of a communist economy, admittedly in areas limited in time and space, i.e. they are performed without remuneration in money: extinguishing fires; fighting epidemics, floods, earthquakes (geological and non-ideological!) and even the common cold. But in a “socialist” country, couldn’t we even sneeze without it being counted, without any counterpart in money or work?

A few more pushes and we are there, Secretary to whom – honny soit qui mal y pense – we will not pay, neither today nor ever, any cult.

Source: Il Programma Comunista, No. 5, March 1956.

[1] See: Dialogue with the Dead, “Third Day, Evening”: “How they enriched Marx”.

[2] On 1 February, 21 April, 22 May and 28 September 1952, Stalin, considering it necessary to intervene in the discussion that arose within the Party in 1951 about the new “Manual of Political Economy” (then in preparation and recently published in the West) published a series of short texts, gathered in a brochure entitled: “The economic problems of Socialism in the USSR”. He intended to establish the economic laws applicable to the current structure of Russian society and to argue that they were precisely those that characterised a socialist economy. He also recalled, or at least believed, the laws in force in the contemporary capitalist economy, comparing them with the formulations that the Marxist economy gave them a century ago. The “Dialogue with Stalin”, published by the Internationalist Communist Party of Italy in 1953 (French translation of 1956), argued that Stalin’s writings only gave an erroneous picture of the real economic process in both Russia and the West, and that they also contained a series of serious doctrinal errors, making them incompatible with the foundations of Marxism.

[3] See, in n. 4 of 1956 of the Programma Comunista, the recapitulation of all this development in the first part of the report of our meetings in Naples and Genoa: the discussion has then regularly continued in the following issues.

[4] We will examine this question on the Second Day.