International Communist Party Index

No. 2 - September 2025 - Year II Last update September 14, 2025 Paperback book

– Bourgeois Militarism Cannot Stop Proletarian Defeatism – Race Class & The Agrarian Question in the United States: 2. Slavery and the Rise of the Bourgeois World – The Kurdish Question in the Light of Marxism: Part 2 – The Communist Party of China: 1. The End of China's Isolation - 2. Chinese society – The Ideologies of the Bourgeoisie: 2. Feudalism - 3. Heresies and the Need for Communism – The Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today (1955)- Part 1. Struggle for Power in the Two Revolutions - Chapters 94‑104 From the Archive of the Left:    – Introduction    – Preface by Frederick Engels for the 1888 English edition    – Marx’s Speech on the Question of Free Trade

Bourgeois Militarism Cannot Stop Proletarian Defeatism

The present epoch parades before us a bourgeois class armed with automation, surveillance systems, drones, and mass prison systems. They imagine history has been frozen forever secured by their technological supremacy and state monopoly on violence. Yet the bourgeois state’s military force and state apparatus does not function autonomously. It is a dependent function of economic power and capitalist economy, far from being eternal, is riddled with internal contradictions and destined for cataclysmic crisis that will see its ultimate destruction at the hands of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Party asserts that military repression rests on capitalist foundations. When those economic foundations erode under the pressure of overproduction, falling profit rates, and mass proletarianization, even the most advanced state machinery becomes brittle and eventually grind to a halt.

The bourgeois state presents its armed force as neutral and omnipotent. But as we wrote in The Dagger and Friday in 1950, the army, like every institution of capitalism, is an organ of class rule, created, financed, and maintained through surplus value extracted from labor.

Military power is not abstract violence it is the final mechanism for preserving property relations.” Every drone strike and police baton are subsidized by the exploitation of labor. The army’s guns are paid for with unpaid hours worked by the proletariat. The source of bourgeois military power is the very economy whose contradictions will one day make it unsustainable.

Capitalism cannot overcome its law of value. Automation increases productivity but lowers the rate of profit. Commodities flood markets, labor is expelled, and wages stagnate. This creates a surplus population alienated, excluded, and forced into precarious life. And it is precisely from this proletarian class that revolutionary rupture emerges.

Capitalist crisis does not just strain government budgets; it fractures social cohesion. Bourgeois states attempt to buffer this with militarized policing and surveillance, but these are temporary patches over a decaying base. The more the economy falters, the more the state must rely on direct repression and the more transparent its class character becomes to the working masses.

Revolutionary victory has never required technical superiority. It requires the disintegration of bourgeois command from within. In every victorious revolution, it was fraternization, sabotage, and mutiny not military parity that ended bourgeois rule.

The path to power is not to "defend the fatherland," but to destroy it. Revolutionary defeatism and the refusal of proletarians to die for capital are the first cracks in the repressive state. Even in advanced armies, morale and class clarity remain decisive.

The Communist Party is not built in crisis; it is built for crisis. The Party must anticipate breakdowns, organize its militants, firmly adhere to it’s doctrine, and root itself across industries and society. It is not a mass party of opinion but a historical instrument of rupture, capable of guiding revolutionary force where contradictions are sharpest. Without the Party, revolt is reactive. With it, the proletariat becomes not a crowd but a class.

Military power without an economic engine is unsustainable. When capitalist crisis reaches its breaking point, even the mightiest militaries falter. World War I and II are not aberrations but as expressions of capitalism’s systemic failure. Every future major interimperialist war at the height of the overproduction crisis will reproduce this pattern imperial conflict followed by revolutionary opportunity.

The bourgeoisie cannot reform away crisis. They cannot repress their way to stability. The contradictions between capital and labor, production and profit, automation and value will erupt. And with them, the historical necessity of revolution will emerge as a practical and immediate necessity for the masses of proletariat guided by its communist party..

Military domination cannot escape the economic laws. The army, the police, the surveillance drone these are not gods, but machines of a decaying economy. When that labor refuses to reproduce the system when it organizes politically and breaks the chain those machines become mute.

1. - Slavery and Trade Networks in the Medieval Era

The first great slave-based empire in Europe was the Roman Empire. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, the disintegration of centralized imperial authority did not put an end to the economic structures and relationships on which the empire was based. The Roman Empire had functioned fundamentally as a commercial-tributary network, drawing wealth from the provinces in the form of taxes in kind sent to the heart of the country and profits from trade. Much of the empire's wealth was produced on vast latifundia estates cultivated by slaves, who mostly produced grain, wine, and olive oil for export. Slaves came mainly from the empire's constant wars of territorial expansion, which enslaved the defeated armies and the population of the newly conquered lands.

This would only diminish in the early Middle Ages in the West with the decline of military conquests leading to diminished access to slaves, depopulation and political fragmentation leading to reduced trade networks after the fall of the Western Empire; however, slavery mostly remained where slaves could be found and where the large latfundia estates were not broken up. Across Northern Italy and Gaul the latfundia’s were broken up into smaller holdings shifting to systems of independent peasant and communal farming by the Merovingian’s who confiscated much of the lands of the old Roman elite. In parts of Gaul and the Alps free peasant communities retained significant autonomy well into the early medieval era with manorialism gradually coming into existence in the 6th and 9th centuries. Under the Eastern Romans the Latfundias persisted in Greece and Anatolia under powerful landowners and the church, with dependent tenants only taking a more prominent role as access to slaves diminished and in Southern Italy and Sicily into the 6th and 11th centuries until the Norman conquests. North Africa maintained the system even after the Islamic conquests of the 6th and 7th centuries under new legal frameworks. In Iberia the Visigoths did not break up the old latfundia’s but created a hybrid version that utilised slaves and tenants as they integrated the old senatorial and aristocratic landholding class into its new state.

Early medieval societies, both Christian and Muslim, continued to make extensive use of slavery as a fundamental element of their economies, social structures, and warfare, even if it no longer played the central role it had previously at the height of the empire. In Christian Europe, in the Byzantine and Frankish empires, slaves were still employed in households, agriculture, mining, and the navy as oarsmen. Although Christian doctrine discouraged the enslavement of Christians, it permitted the enslavement of Muslims, or pagans captured in war or acquired through trade. In the Islamic world, including al-Andalus in the Iberian Peninsula, slavery was also deeply rooted in society. Islamic law allowed slavery under specific conditions, which usually applied to non-Muslim prisoners.

The slave trade linked different regions through complex networks that transcended religious and cultural boundaries. Christian and Muslim powers both participated in the capture and sale of slaves throughout the Mediterranean, along trans-Saharan routes, and across northern Europe. Viking raiders captured slaves in northern Europe and sold them to Muslim and Byzantine markets, while Muslim traders trafficked Slavic, African, and Christian prisoners throughout the Islamic world. Although religious teachings placed limits on who could be enslaved and how they should be treated, the demand for labor and the profits derived from the slave trade often prevailed over moral and theological restrictions, so that slavery in the early Middle Ages was a deeply rooted and widely accepted institution that shaped political power, economic systems, and intercultural interactions.

Like slavery, many of the commercial, maritime, and proto-industrial practices were also continued on from Roman times. Since the Romans' Mare Nostrum, the Mediterranean, remained the central artery for trade and the circulation of goods, control over shipbuilding and maritime logistics was crucial in the Middle Ages. After the fall of Rome in the West, the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantine Empire, inherited and expanded this maritime-commercial network and its shipbuilding traditions.

The Byzantines retained much of the Roman naval system, but innovated by developing advanced warships, such as the dromon, a fast lateen-rigged galley, and by experimenting with state-controlled shipyards and naval logistics. The Dromon remained the dominant warship of the Eastern Roman navy from around the 6th century until the early 13th century when it remained the most sophisticated warship in the Mediterranean a crucial tool in enabling the Byzantines to remain the dominant power in the region for centuries despite its continual territorial losses. Constantinople became not only a political center but also a center for shipbuilding, where the technical means of production, access to timber, skilled labor, and state finances were efficiently organized; however, with the progressive decline of Byzantine power under pressure from the Islamic caliphates and, later, the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks, a vacuum opened up in Mediterranean naval dominance.

2. - Early Seafaring

This vacuum allowed the rise of maritime city-states such as Amalfi, Pisa, Venice, and Genoa, which took up the shipbuilding legacy of Rome and Byzantium and revolutionized it into an early form of industrial production.

The maritime republics gained importance before their inland counterparts thanks to their direct access to trade routes and naval power. Genoa and Venice became dominant through the expansion of long-distance merchant capital, controlling sea routes, ports, and colonial enclaves in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Starting in the 11th century, Genoa began to build its naval power by supporting the early Crusades, later exploiting its alliance with the Crusader states and the Papal States to expand its commercial empire and build its financial power and banking systems.

Venice, in the 9th century, slowly built a powerful state merchant navy that protected Roman trade in the Adriatic from piracy. In the 11th century, it began to supplant the Byzantine fleet, to the point that the empire came to depend on Venetian navigation, a critical weakness that would ultimately allow the Latin conquest of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204 AD and the founding of colonies in Dalmatia, Crete, and Cyprus.

The Venice Arsenal was the first large-scale production facility in Europe to systematically apply division of labor, standardization of components, and centralized management. Venice led the way in the development of the Italian Galley, a faster ship superior to the Dromon with modular construction which could be more rapidly produced. At its peak, the Arsenal was capable of producing a fully equipped galley in a single day. The ship production methods where tightly controlled state secrets which allowed the Italians to maintain a near total monopoly on gally production for a century. Shipbuilding in Venice was the economic engine of the Republic, employing thousands of craftsmen in a structure of privileged guilds that restricted emigration and were strictly controlled by the state. The Arsenale had semi-industrial processes that allowed for rapid expansion of the military and commercial fleets.

The development of the means of production in shipbuilding was the basis of Venetian military power, its economic influence, and, ultimately, its role in shaping regional and global politics. Venetian economic power was deeply rooted in systems of forced labor, ranging from salt production to mining, agriculture, and war at sea.

Salt was necessary for food preservation at that time. It was also one of the Republic's most traded products and the basis of its income, produced under brutal conditions in Chioggia, Cervia, and the colonies of Crete and Cyprus, where workers, often slaves, prisoners, or local contract laborers, scraped salt from evaporation ponds. Venice also employed large numbers of slaves and prisoners in its mines, especially in Dalmatia and the Aegean islands, to extract resources essential for shipbuilding and military supplies. On its galleys, especially in wartime, Venice employed thousands of slave and criminal oarsmen: estimates suggest that a war galley had 100-150 oarsmen and that during major naval campaigns the Republic mobilized fleets of 100 or more ships, with over 10,000 men in brutal conditions, chained to the benches.

The ducato, first minted by the Republic in 1284, quickly became the main international currency in Europe thanks to the purity of its gold, its constant weight, and the rise of Venice's commercial and naval dominance. At a time when many European currencies were devalued and politically unstable, the ducato became a reliable standard in European and Mediterranean trade. Its circulation extended far beyond Venice's domains, reaching North Africa, the Levant, and Central Asia, and it became the default unit of account for merchants, bankers, and state treasuries. The stability of the ducat supported Venice's transformation into one of Europe's dominant commercial and financial powers, creating the first international banking systems.

3. - Italian Communes, Proto‑industrialism, Usurious Capital, and the First Proletarian Revolts

Other Italian city-states soon emerged, giving rise to the development of commercial and lending capital within the feudal world, creating the basis for the rise of the bourgeois class and the expansion of colonialism in Africa, Asia, and then the Americas, laying the foundations for the birth of modern capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The rise of the Italian communes between the 11th and 13th centuries marked a significant break in the European feudal order, when the cities of Italy began to assert their political and economic autonomy from the German feudal lords grouped under the Holy Roman Empire. The communes were city-states governed by elected councils and associations of guilds representing the growing power of the urban merchant and artisan classes, organized into sworn associations to protect trade, property, and local production. With the revival of trade along the Mediterranean and Alpine routes, cities such as Milan, Bologna, and Florence became centers of craft and commercial activity, supported by urban militia systems, guild regulations, and increasingly centralized government. The communes represented the embryonic form of bourgeois rule, in which production for the market and the accumulation of capital began to replace feudal extraction of rent in kind.

In the 13th and 14th centuries, inland communes such as Florence, Lucca, and Siena became centers of urban manufacturing, particularly in the textile sector. Florence in particular developed an industrial system of production of wool that employed thousands of wage workers with a highly organized division of labor, regulated by the powerful wool guilds. This early form of capitalist production based on the transformation of labor into surplus value through the production of commodities foreshadowed the industrial systems that would later dominate in the Netherlands and England.

Florence's early rise in textile production during the 12th and 13th centuries was significantly supported by Genoese and Venetian capital, which financed the import of raw materials, facilitated trade credit, and provided maritime transport to foreign markets. Genoese merchants often financed the importation of wool from England, the key raw material for Florentine textile production, while Venetian merchants supplied alum, essential for fixing dyes, from Asia Minor via their eastern colonies such as Phocaea. Between 1250 and 1350, Venetian and Genoese fleets transported thousands of bales of Florentine textiles to Mediterranean ports every year, with Venice alone accounting for almost 30% of Florence's foreign trade in textiles before the 14th century. The Florentine guilds of the Arte della Lana (wool merchants) and Calimala (merchants) relied on loans from Genoese bankers to buy English wool at the Calais Stock Exchange and on Venetian ships to reach markets in the Levant such as Alexandria and Constantinople.

But from the 12th to the 14th century, Florentine merchants and bankers forged extensive land links with northern Europe via communication routes connecting Rome to the fairs of Champagne, Flanders, and England via the Alpine passes. These routes bypassed the seaports dominated by Venice and Genoa, allowing Florence to engage in long-distance trade even without a fleet.

These safe corridors were essential for importing English wool, which passed through Calais and Flanders, and for exporting Florentine textiles, silk, and luxury goods to northern markets. To protect these corridors, Florence invested in diplomatic treaties, commercial partnerships, and financial networks with cities along the route, particularly Lyon, Geneva, and Bruges, where Florentine banks such as those of the Bardi and Peruzzi families established outposts to facilitate credit, bills of exchange, and the movement of goods. All municipalities, such as Florence, forged military alliances with neighboring cities, waged wars of expansion, and built road infrastructure to ensure the safe passage of merchants and caravans through the Apennines and towards the Po Valley.

The merchant elite of Florence, in its powerful guilds and banking consortia, made the city a key hub in the European textile production network and eventually developed its own financial capital, which was eventually concentrated in the most famous and powerful bank in Europe, that of the Medici.

Unlike the maritime republics, whose wealth was based on controlling trade through naval power, Florence grew by joining a network of inland cities and transalpine markets, relying on armed trade convoys, guild regulations, and financial instruments to dominate the flow of goods. These internal trade routes thus allowed the emergence of an industrial-financial bourgeoisie, whose power was not based on territorial domination but on control of labor, credit, and productive exchange.

In contrast to the feudal system still dominant in the rest of Europe, Italian city-states increasingly relied on agriculture for the market, led by landowners who were also urban bourgeoisie who rented land to peasants or employed wage laborers. These agricultural regions, particularly in the Po Valley and the Tuscan countryside, specialized in market-oriented crops such as oil, wine, flax, and cereals, often destined for urban consumption or export. The result was a partial commodification of land and labor in the countryside, with rents paid in cash rather than in kind and a growing reliance on contracts, debt servitude, and seasonal workers, marking a transition toward capitalist relations in agriculture. The transfer of the rural surplus to the urban circuits of production and trade further differentiated the Communes from the feudal courts, laying the foundations for a more advanced exchange of goods..

The first proletarian revolts in Italian city-states, particularly that of the Ciompi in Florence in 1378, were a direct expression of class antagonism within the flourishing urban manufacturing centers. The Ciompi, composed of wool carders and other unskilled workers excluded from guild representation, temporarily seized power and forced the dominant merchant class to grant political concessions and recognize their demands. A power that the Ciompi shared with some of the "minor arts", that is, with those lower on the social scale, whose members, although united in a guild, did not live in a very different way from wage earners such as the Ciompi and the dyers, without a guild. Although the revolt was suppressed within a year, it succeeded in securing temporary wage increases, broader access to guilds, and greater political awareness among the lower strata of workers. Similar unrest occurred in other manufacturing cities such as Siena, Bologna, and Milan, where artisans and textile workers periodically demanded better conditions and resisted oligarchic rule. As a result of these struggles, labor costs in Italian communes remained relatively higher, and the guild system, although oppressive in itself, imposed some wage and labor protections that limited the unchecked exploitation of workers.

In contrast, in the Dutch textile sector, especially in Leiden and Haarlem, conditions prevailed that allowed for greater exploitation of labor and lower production costs. Without the legacy of strong urban guild revolts and with the help of state-supported industrial organization, Dutch capitalists could hire immigrants, women, and unskilled workers at lower wages with minimal regulation. The Dutch were not hampered by the political compromises rooted in the legacy of guild struggles in Italy, which allowed for a more flexible and profit-oriented labor regime. Thanks to their privileged access to sea routes and connections to markets in the Baltic, Mediterranean, and eventually the Atlantic, Dutch merchants could produce cheaper textiles and transport them easily throughout Europe, gradually overtaking Italian cities, which remained tied to small-scale, high-cost production. With the rise of Spanish rule and its dependence on its artisans and banks, the Dutch would soon supplant Italy as a global financial power.

4. - Italian Banks and Atlantic Colonialism

The rise of the merchant bourgeoisie was not initially achieved through the establishment of capitalist production, but through the colonial plundering of the indigenous civilizations of Asia and Africa, the looting of temples and riches, and the enslavement of their peoples by the Portuguese and then the Spanish. Subsequently, the conquest of the Americas and the slave trade led to the rapid enrichment of the merchant classes of Western Europe. While much of this wealth ended up in the hands of the landed aristocracy and the monarchies that financed the fleets, it sowed the seeds of their downfall as a ruling class.

The mercantilist era of colonialism essentially meant ruthless piracy, organized banditry, and mass plunder promoted by an enterprising merchant bourgeoisie. But the bourgeoisie would only succeed in seizing state power and becoming the dominant social class at a later stage, after it had slowly taken control of manufacturing, overcoming the protectionism of the guilds and organizing it on a capitalist basis, as happened first in Flanders and England.

Merchant capital preceded banking capital, which in turn preceded industrial capital. Banking arose as a tool of merchant capital to facilitate transactions across time, space, and different jurisdictions. Banks sprang up in the ports of Genoa, Venice, Pisa, and finally Florence. The banking system could not have developed without naval supremacy. City-states used fleets to protect Mediterranean trade routes from rivals and pirates.

In the 15th century, the Medici rose to power not by fighting the Church, but by becoming its bankers. Merchant capital secured its place by financing feudal authority. As Marx wrote in the third volume of Capital, “merchant capital always depends on surplus value derived from capital in production.” Therefore, when merchants continued to be a secondary class compared to feudal lords on the world stage.

Despite its role as the financial capital of the Western world, unlike Spain and Portugal, Italy was politically fragmented, divided into rival city-states. There was no unified monarchy or national government capable of mobilizing long-term state investment, nor was there a large population available to establish colonial control over indigenous peoples and large tracts of land. Therefore, Italian city-states pursued regional domination and Mediterranean trade, not empires and the acquisition of overseas territories. Merchant capital in Italy remained enclosed within city walls, with no unified national state to defend it.

It was therefore the Spanish feudal crown that financed the Genoese adventurer and former merchant sailor Christopher Columbus, who arrived in the Americas in 1492. The Spanish monarchy wanted to break the Portuguese monopoly on the eastern trade routes to Asia, expand its territorial dominion, and enrich itself through colonial plunder. The Iberian kingdoms of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal were engaged in feudal rivalry, but Portugal had secured papal support for its conquests in Africa and Asia.

Columbus' voyage was an opportunity for Spain to claim new territories, undermine Portuguese commercial hegemony, and reaffirm Spanish prestige after centuries of fragmentation and war. Columbus' voyage was a move in the competition between absolutist states for global supremacy at the dawn of the capitalist world market. As Marx wrote in the first volume of Capital:

"The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extermination, enslavement, and burial in the mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a hunting ground for the slave trade marked the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the principal moments of primitive accumulation. Immediately following came the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe as its theater (...) Slavery is an economic category of the highest importance. Without slavery there is no cotton; without cotton there is no modern industry. It is slavery that gave value to the colonies; it is the colonies that created world trade, and world trade is the precondition for large-scale industry.

5. - From Roman Latifundia to the Reconquista and Slave Plantations in the Americas

After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, the Iberian Peninsula retained many of the agricultural and social structures inherited from Roman rule. Among these, the system of latifundia, vast estates owned by the elite and cultivated by slaves or peasants. While the classical Roman model of slavery declined during the Visigoth period (5th-8th centuries), the basic structure of land concentration survived. The large estates continued to function, now increasingly dependent on colonos or land-bound laborers in conditions of semi-servitude. These land relations and agricultural production methods were parallel to the enduring power of the Roman landowning elite who were integrated within the visigothic class society. In the south, the former province of Baetica continued to be a center of olive oil and cereal production, with large estates forming the core of the rural economy.

With the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula initiated 711, these land structures were neither abolished nor completely replaced. On the contrary, under the rule of the Umayyad Caliphate and subsequent local Muslim dynasties, many large estates continued to function, often expanding and improving thanks to the introduction of sophisticated irrigation systems (qanat, acequias) and the cultivation of new crops such as citrus fruits, cotton, and rice. Muslim rulers maintained hierarchical agrarian relations. While some lands were held directly by the state or distributed to the military elite according to the iqṭāʿ system, large areas of southern Iberia continued to function much like their Roman predecessors, with landowners supervising the work of Muslim peasants, slaves, and seasonal workers. The agricultural treatises of Al-Andalus, such as those of Ibn al-‘Awwām, testify to the advanced agronomic techniques developed under this system, but also reveal the continuing importance of latifundia-based production.

The Reconquista refers to the long process by which the Christian kingdoms from the 8th to the 15th centuries conquered the Muslim territories in the Iberian Peninsula. It accelerated the return of the latifundia model in explicitly Christian and feudal terms. As Muslim lands were confiscated, Christian monarchs redistributed them according to systems such as the repartimiento (Castile and Aragon) and the aforamento (Portugal). These policies granted large tracts of land to nobles, military orders (such as the Order of Santiago or Calatrava) and the Catholic Church. The beneficiaries of these properties were often granted jurisdictional control over the peasants and the right to demand taxes, labor, or rents. In many areas, particularly in Andalusia, Extremadura, and Alentejo, post-Reconquista properties closely resembled Roman latifundia, with huge estates worked by Muslim peasants (mudéjares),then forcibly Christianized (moriscos), slaves, or landless Christian peasants. Muslim prisoners from the War of Granada (which ended in 1492) and previous battles were enslaved on a large scale and forced into agricultural labor. In Portugal, especially in the south, large estates (morgado or latifúndio) became the dominant form of land ownership, mirroring what was happening throughout the peninsula.

By the 16th century, the latifundia system had essentially been completely reestablished and institutionalized in both Spain and Portugal. Estates were legally guaranteed through mayorazgos (hereditary fiefdoms) that prevented the division of land and reinforced aristocratic monopolies. Work on these estates became increasingly diversified with Muslim slaves, Christian serfs, and laborers all working the same plots of land, depending on the region and the crop. The dominance of large estates stifled agricultural innovation in many areas and created sharp class divisions in rural life.

Thus, the latifundia system in Iberia did not disappear with the Roman Empire, but evolved through the Visigothic, Islamic, and Christian feudal phases, reaching renewed strength in the wake of the Reconquista. This system became the structural pillar of the internal wealth of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns, providing grain, livestock, olive oil, and other basic products necessary to sustain the expanding military and administrative states.

The Reconquista was not only a territorial and religious campaign, but also a long practical school of military organization, labor exploitation, and agricultural administration. Christian lords learned to manage the large estates confiscated from Muslim landowners and to organize the workforce composed of various subjugated peoples: mudéjares, moriscos, and African slaves. These experiences provided the logistical and ideological model for subsequent overseas expansion. The institutions for managing property, forced labor, and land ownership created in Iberia would later be exported almost seamlessly to the colonies. It is no coincidence that the systems of the encomienda and hacienda in the Americas and the fazendas in Brazil mirrored the Iberian latifundia in both size and operation. The Iberian elites already knew how to profit from mass servitude and colonial-style agriculture, having done so for centuries in their homeland.

6. - Rise of Portuguese Naval Power

Parallel to this agrarian consolidation, there was the rise of Portuguese naval power. Following the Reconquista, Portugal emerged as a small, relatively resource-poor kingdom with limited land and few internal markets compared to its larger Iberian neighbor, Castile. Geographically confined to the Atlantic edge of Europe, Portugal lacked the necessary agricultural wealth or manpower to expand overland. These material limitations, rather than hindering the kingdom, pushed it toward maritime expansion as a national strategy. Recognizing the potential of the sea, the Portuguese crown, especially under Prince Henry the Navigator, invested heavily in a state-sponsored project of exploration, shipbuilding, and navigational training that aimed to bypass Muslim-controlled trade routes and access wealth directly from Africa and Asia.

Central to this project was the creation of a knowledge monopoly regarding Atlantic seafaring methods, whereby the Portuguese Crown centralized and safeguarded navigational information, maps, and ship design treating them as state secrets. All major discoveries such as coastlines, winds, ocean currents, port locations and landmarks were immediately reported to the crown and documented, maps were held in strictly controlled royal archies, ship captains and crews were often sworn to secrecy. While other powers printed and sold maps Portugal restricted this information. Jewish cartographers expelled elsewhere were welcomed to Portugal and they hired many foreign naval experts. By controlling the flow of maritime knowledge the state ensured that discoveries benefitted the crown and could not be easily replicated by rival powers. This monopoly allowed Portuguese mariners to push further along the African coast each year with increasing confidence.

The caravel, developed in this context during the 1430s, embodied this synthesis. A nimble, wind-resistant vessel designed specifically for Atlantic conditions. Designed to navigate the challenging winds and currents of the Atlantic, the caravel was light, fast, and maneuverable, with a shallow draft ideal for coastal exploration. Its use of lateen sails, adapted from Mediterranean and Arab vessels, allowed it to sail against the wind, a crucial advantage in returning from voyages along the West African coast. The caravel became the tool by which Portuguese navigators reached West Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, India, and eventually Brazil, securing vast trading networks. The Portuguese drew heavily from Italian maritime knowledge, particularly from the Genoese and Venetian traditions. Italian shipbuilding influenced hull design and rigging, while Italian navigators introduced crucial tools like portolan charts, the compass, and celestial instruments. Genoese explorers and mapmakers were often directly employed by Portugal, contributing their expertise to the growing Atlantic enterprise. This fusion of Mediterranean techniques with Atlantic experience allowed the Portuguese to outpace their European rivals in overseas expansion.

Portugal’s deliberate investment in maritime knowledge, infrastructure, and secrecy enabled it to dominate Atlantic exploration for nearly a century before other European powers caught up. What began as a response to geographic constraint became one of the most successful state-sponsored expansion projects in world history. Lisbon soon became a hub of trans-Mediterranean knowledge networks, combining Iberian feudal methods of conquest with Italian mercantile capitalism.

7. - The Portugese, African Early State Development and the East‑Sahara Slave Trade

Africa in this period was a continent of great political diversity, where large states coexisted alongside vast regions inhabited by stateless societies still in a state of primitive communism. Much of sub-Saharan Africa remained organized through kin-based, lineage, or clan systems with no centralized government. These stateless societies, common in forested regions, pastoralist zones, and less accessible highlands, governed themselves through communal consensus, oral traditions, and local chiefs. They practiced communal land ownership, collective non-stratiffied distribution of goods absent well defined class hierarchy, and generally lacked standing armies or formal bureaucracies.

Early African kingdoms and empires had emerged later than those in Europe, the Middle East or Asia, in several regions with varying levels of political centralization and economic development. In West Africa, empires like Ghana (700-1240 CE), Mali (1230-1600), and Songhai (1464-1591) developed complex states with royal courts, taxation systems, professional armies, and vast trade networks connected to the Islamic world through the trans-saharan trade routes. In the Nile Valley, Christian and Muslim states such as Nubia, Axum, and later Ethiopia had written languages, monumental architecture, and state religions. In Central and Southern Africa, states like Kongo, Great Zimbabwe, and Mapungubwe controlled trade routes and developed ruling elites, but often with more fluid political structures. These states were still surrounded by or bordered stateless or semi-centralized communities, which were often targets for expansion, tribute, and enslavement. In the 15th century approximately 60-70% of African landmass was occupied by stateless societies comprising 50-60% of the population. The map of Africa in the 15th century was a patchwork of powerful kingdoms surrounded by vast zones of decentralized societies, with interactions marked by trade, warfare, and shifting alliances.

The African kingdoms developed complex class hierarchies and expanded their influence by enslaving members of stateless or fragmented societies in the interior. These enslaved populations lacking political centralization or organized armies were frequently raided and sold in exchange for gold, horses, textiles, and later firearms first to the Islamic world then primarily to Europeans. Slavery became a central economic engine for many early African states, both as a source of labor and as a tradable commodity that helped consolidate and advance their power as they fought innumerable wars with the surrounding tribes and clans who resisted the expansion of their states.

It was first the expansion of Islam across North and East Africa beginning in the 7th century which created a vast, integrated trading system that significantly increased the demand for African slaves. Under the Umayyad (661-750) and Abbasid (750-1258) caliphates, and later under various Islamic sultanates, a flourishing trade in African captives stretched across the Sahara, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean. By some estimates, over 5 million Africans were trafficked via these eastern routes between 650 and 1600 CE, destined for markets in Egypt, Arabia, Persia, and India.

With the rise of the Ottoman Empire in 1299, and especially after the conquest of Egypt and the Hijaz in 1517, the Ottomans took control of major slave-trading hubs in North and East Africa. The Ottoman Empire dominated the Red Sea and controlled crucial port cities like Suakin and Massawa, as well as parts of Sudan and Somalia. The Ottomans institutionalized slavery, using African slaves in their imperial bureaucracy, harems, and army. Black eunuchs from East Africa played prominent roles in the Ottoman imperial court, while others were forced into plantation labor or military service. African slaves were taxed, traded, and conscripted as part of the broader Ottoman economic system. According to some estimates, over 1 million African slaves were transported to the Middle East during the 16th-18th centuries, many of them supplied through Ottoman-controlled or influenced territories in Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Swahili coast. Meanwhile the early African states used the proceeds from slave sales to purchase horses, swords, and eventually firearms, helping to strengthen their own standing armies and expand their regional systems of property relations and class domination.

During this time, European access to the African interior was limited by Muslim control of trade routes and the Islamic powers were more or less locked into a constant state of war with the Christian states. However, the Portuguese were the first to begin to circumvent this blockade through their maritime inovations. By the 1430’s the Portuguese established contact with Senegambia, then rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488. In East Africa, they seized Kilwa and Mombasa in 1505, asserting naval dominance in the Indian Ocean and breaking into the existing slave networks. By establishing forts and trading posts in places like Sofala (Mozambique) and Zanzibar, the Portuguese gained access to slave markets and natural resources previously monopolized by Muslim and Ottoman traders. They began redirecting slaves to Atlantic markets, especially to plantations in São Tomé, Cape Verde, and eventually Brazil, creating the early framework of the transatlantic slave trade.

This shift in control only intensified the enslavement of stateless Africans. African kingdoms in both West and East Africa continued to enslave weaker, non-centralized communities to supply foreign demand. The Songhai Empire (c. 1464-1591), for example, integrated slave labor into its economy, while East African kingdoms like the Yao and Makua later became major suppliers of slaves to both Arab and European traders. Stateless societies, lacking writing systems, military organization, and foreign alliances, were systematically targeted. Between 1500 and 1800, historians estimate that over 10 million Africans were trafficked via trans-Saharan, Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and transatlantic routes combined. The rise of class society in Africa, driven by trade and conquest, created an enduring structure of internal exploitation that colonial powers, both Islamic and Christian, would profit from for centuries.

Despite their naval power, the Portuguese did not attempt to fully conquer powerful African kingdoms. West and East African states were too populous, militarily organized, and politically complex to be easily subdued. Attempts at capturing slaves themselves also proved difficult. Instead, Portugal opted for a more pragmatic approach by establishing fortified coastal trading posts (like Elmina, São Jorge da Mina, and Mozambique Island) to secure access to African markets without expensive military campaigns inland.

Rather than colonizing Africa directly, Portugal directed its colonial energies toward building plantation colonies elsewhere, particularly on offshore islands like São Tomé, Cape Verde, and Madeira. These islands served as proving grounds for the full plantation-slavery model, where African slaves were used to cultivate sugar for export to Europe. By the early 1500s, these colonies were highly profitable, incentivizing the expansion of the slave trade. African kingdoms, now deeply tied into the Atlantic economy, began intensifying slaving expeditions using European weapons, thereby fueling a violent feedback loop whereby more slaves brought more weapons, which enabled more slave raids. In time, the Portuguese and other European powers would replicate this system in the Americas, especially in Brazil, where millions of enslaved Africans were sent over the next three centuries. Where early African states had only controlled 40-50% of the African landmass in the early 1500’s by the early 1800’s they now controlled an estimated 60-70% developing class and property relations across the continent as they enriched themselves through their own domestic exploitation of slave labor and leveraging it as a lucrative export commodity to finance their own states constant wars of expansion into the lands of the stateless peoples still living under a condition of primitive communism.

In 1441, Portuguese captains captured Africans in the Senegal River and took them to Lagos. By the middle of the 15th century, Portugal was already importing thousands of slaves to Lisbon, where in 1550 10% of the population consisted of enslaved Africans. From 1500, they began transporting African slaves to Brazil, which would become the largest slave colony in world history. Between 1441 and 1600, the Portuguese transported between 130,000 and 160,000 African slaves. In 1600, Portugal landed three quarters of all enslaved Africans in the Americas. The Portuguese began to lose their dominance over the transatlantic slave trade in the mid-17th century, as the Dutch, English, and French established their own slaving ports and colonial plantations. Although Portugal continued importing slaves into Brazil until the 1850s, the Atlantic slave trade was increasingly controlled by other European powers from the 1660s onward, especially the British by the 18th century.

Regardless, the Portuguese imported approximately 4.9 to 5.5 million enslaved Africans to Brazil between the early 1500s and the 1850s, by far the largest share of any single country in the transatlantic slave trade. These slaves were primarily used on sugar plantations along Brazil’s Atlantic coast, in regions like Bahia, Pernambuco, and later in coffee plantations in the southeast. Despite this massive slave-based system, Portugal’s colonial power was eventually surpassed by Spain, which controlled a much larger empire in terms of territory, silver wealth (especially from Potosí and Mexico), and population. Unlike Spain, Portugal lacked the manpower, bureaucracy, and military reach to conquer vast inland empires. Its empire, like the Italian city-states before it in the Mediterranean, remained coastal and trade-oriented, relying on fortified ports rather than deep territorial control. While Portuguese Brazil was economically important, especially for sugar and later gold, Portugal’s limited population, dependence on foreign capital, and frequent foreign occupation (such as during the Iberian Union, 1580-1640) meant it could never match the global reach and administrative depth of the Spanish Empire.

8. - Rise and Fall of the Spanish Colonial System

With the unification of Castile and Aragon and the final conquest of Granada in 1492, the Spanish monarchy immediately turned from the Reconquista to colonial expansion. The Spanish state, now rich in land and with a powerful nobility trained to exploit and repress, sought to deploy its military and Catholic ideological apparatus overseas. Thus, after the Reconquista, recognizing the importance of developing a naval power, the Spanish soon mimicked the Portuguese model and embarked on a centralized state sponsored program to develop it’s maritime capacities. As such it also increasingly linked itself to Italian city-states who offered financing, sold technical, scientific, geographical, and commercial resources for its colonial ambitions and to support its continual wars in Europe. Along side the Italian bankers, the Catholic Church would sanctify the conquest of the Americas just as it had done during the wars against Islam in the Iberian Peninsula and as it had previously done during the Crusades in the Lavant as a religious war, which in reality had crude economic motivations. The conquistadores were often former knights of the Reconquista or their descendants, and the social relations they imposed in the colonies mirrored those they had imposed at home.

The Spanish conquest of the Americas was made possible by a combination of military superiority, a surplus population from post-Reconquista Iberia, and the state’s ability to mobilize and project force across the Atlantic. Unlike the Portuguese, who focused on coastal trading posts and maritime routes, the Spanish used their disciplined infantry, gunpowder weapons, and cavalry, honed in centuries of warfare against Muslim states, to launch inland expeditions and occupy vast territories. The recently unified Spanish Crown had a surplus of soldiers, settlers, and adventurers, many of them unemployed veterans, ready to claim land and labor in the New World. This allowed Spain to militarily defeat and dismantle powerful empires like the Aztecs (1519) and Incas (1533), seizing their capitals and ruling through a combination of force, alliances with native rivals, and colonial bureaucracy.

Following this rapid conquest, Spain exported its latifundia model of landownership to the Americas, adapting it into the hacienda system. Like the large Iberian estates, haciendas were expansive rural properties granted by the Crown to conquistadors, settlers, and religious orders. These estates focused on extensive agriculture producing staples like wheat, maize, livestock, and wine for local and regional consumption. Haciendas relied on coerced labor, including indigenous workers under the encomienda, repartimiento, and later debt peonage systems. The hacienda were primarily organized around domestic consumptions not export-driven like the later plantations were.

The plantations followed in the tradition of the haciendas and the latfundia in that they were organized around large tracts of land granted to elites after conquest by the Spanish crown. The Spanish plantations and mines demanded more intensive and brutal forms of labor. In the Caribbean, coastal Central America, and parts of South America, the Spanish established sugar plantations initially worked by enslaved indigenous peoples. However, high mortality rates, demographic collapse, and later legal reforms (like the New Laws of 1542) limited the availability of native labor. As a result, the Spanish increasingly turned to the African slave trade, especially in plantation zones and urban centers. In mining regions such as Potosí (Bolivia) and Zacatecas (Mexico), the labor-intensive extraction of silver relied on a mix of forced indigenous labor (the mita system) and African slaves, particularly where native populations were depleted. From 1501, Spain imported African slaves to the Caribbean to provide labor for sugar plantations. Between 1501 and 1600, approximately 100,000 Africans were imported to Spanish colonies, mainly via Portuguese and Genoese ships. By the mid 1800’s the Spanish had imported between 1.5-2 million slaves from Africa for it’s colonies primarily in the Caribbean.

This shift to African slavery in certain regions marked a transformation of Spain’s colonial economy from one based on conquest and tribute organized around haciendas for domestic consumption to one increasingly tied to global capitalism and the Atlantic slave trade. While haciendas maintained a semi-feudal, land-based economy, plantations and mines became linked to international markets, producing sugar, silver, and other commodities in high demand. Thus the inheritance of the latifundia-style exploitation of land and labor was transferred almost entirely to the New World, where it was first applied to the indigenous populations and then, increasingly, to African slaves on plantations.

From within Spanish mines about 16,000-18,000 tons of silver and 185 tons of gold was brought to Spain, the equivalent of $200-400 billion today. From 1540 onwards, huge quantities of silver were extracted from the mines through the forced labor of indigenous peoples and Africans and shipped to Europe. By the end of the 16th century, 60-80% of the world's silver production passed through Spain.

While Spain enslaved indigenous peoples and Africans to work on sugar plantations and in silver mines in the Americas, the monarchy accumulated unprecedented wealth that would change the world economy forever. In fact, despite the enormous accumulation of wealth, the backward feudal order in Spain was highly inefficient and ultimately depended on foreign financial capital and artisanal production for its survival. It is estimated that between 30 and 50% of the silver and gold extracted by the Spanish ended up in the hands of Genoese and Italian bankers to pay the debts of imperialist wars and colonial adventures. Similarly, it is estimated that during this period, 10-15% of its gold and silver ended up in the hands of Dutch and English privateers.

Spain, with its colonial wealth, did not develop its productive forces. The monarchy used silver to finance wars against the Netherlands, France, and the Ottoman Empire. Silver quickly passed from Spain into the hands of Italian, Dutch, and French merchants and financiers. Spain declared bankruptcy several times: in 1557, 1575, 1596, and 1607. It remained an agricultural country, ruled by a landowning aristocracy hostile to bourgeois production. Industry stagnated, mainly because the aristocratic order, threatened by the rising bourgeoisie, conducted repressive campaigns that led to the expulsion of artisans. The influx of gold bullion increased the global money supply, causing inflation throughout Europe, a phenomenon known as the price revolution. Prices rose, particularly for grain and manufactured goods. The bourgeoisie, especially in non-Spanish regions, took advantage of the sale of its goods in a monetized and inflated market.

(continued to next issue)

Part 2
(Exposed at the January 2022 General Meeting)

Continued from the previous issue

– 1. – Introduction
– 2. – The Prehistory of the Kurdish Nationality
– 3. – Kurdish Rebellions from Sheikh Ubeydullah (1879) to Sheikh Said (1925)
– 4. – The New Secular Nationalism of the Republic of Agiri (1926 30) and the Dersim Massacre (1937 38)
– 5. – The Autonomous Republic of Mahabad (1941 45) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party
– 6. – Kurdish Nationalism in Iran after 1979
– 7. – Al Anfal Campaign (1988) and Proletarian Revolt in Southern Kurdistan (1991)
– 8. – The PKK: From its Foundation (1978) to its Capitulation (1999)
– 9. – KRG (2005), AANES (2013) and The Kurdish Question Today
– 10. – Conclusion
– A. – Appendix 1: Communism and the Kurds
– B. – Appendix 2: The Kurdish National Movement (Comintern, 1921)

[ It is here ]

With this first report, we resume our study of the Chinese question, which has undergone considerable developments in our Party's work over the years.

We wrote in 1970: “In Marxist doctrine and in the history of the class struggles of the world proletariat, China occupies a place that only our Party has been able to defend against the betrayal of Russian social-imperialism and the falsifications of Maoist national historiography” “Riprendendo la questione cinese”

Against traitors and counterfeiters who proclaimed the “construction of socialism” in China and elsewhere, the Party has always countered that such “construction of socialism” could only mean the accumulation of capital and the extension of a market economy, while emphasizing the great historical significance of those events. The Chinese revolution “was capitalist, but it was,” and from the outset it had to fulfill its historical task of developing capitalism, promoting trade and industrialization in an immense country dominated by a boundless and backward rural world.

In the 1980s, at the conclusion of an in-depth study, “L’epilogo borghese della rivoluzione cinese si legge nel suo passato” (Il Partito Comunista), in the chapter “Assessment of a bourgeois revolution,” we reiterated a fundamental point in our school's approach to the Chinese question: “Since the Russian October, as an international proletarian victory, was undermined by the counter-revolutionary wave of Great Russian nationalism, the most revolutionary event in contemporary history has been the breaking of the traditional economic and social immobility of Asia, an event to which the Chinese revolution, with its alternating advances and setbacks, has greatly contributed.”

The great stability of historical constructions is a constant in the social evolution of China, making extremely long and arduous the efforts that tend to create new social forms. Another quote, taken from “Class Struggles and States in the World of Non-White Peoples: A Vital Field for Marxist Revolutionary Criticism” (The Communist Program, 1958): "For the revolutionary forces germinating in the decrepit agrarian-bureaucratic society to finally overcome the resistance of the forces of conservation, a titanic effort spanning an entire century was required, between the first Opium War and the founding of the People's Republic, that is, between the first shocking blow struck from outside at the mummified edifice of the Manchu monarchy and the establishment of China in the form of the modern state."

The century of the Chinese revolution encompasses an uninterrupted sequence of events, changes, wars, revolutions, and counter-revolutions that is unparalleled in the history of other nations. But the Chinese revolution, while aiming at national goals, developed in close dialectical connection with the changing world events, so that China became the main theater where the penetration of imperialism, with its crises and wars, the national revolution, and the socialist revolution intertwined and clashed. In particular, the revolutionary victory of October had opened up to China the great perspective outlined by the Theses of the International, according to which, in the world struggle against capital, it was necessary to unite the struggles of the proletarians of the metropolises with those of the peoples of the East.

From 1920 to 1927, China provided the most important example of an independent proletarian action in the history of anti-colonial movements, and this is another fundamental reason why it occupies a place of prime importance in the work of the Party. In the 1920s, the Chinese proletariat, greatly outnumbered by the peasantry, managed to gain a prominent place in the class struggles that developed in China and placed itself at the head of the nascent revolution. Trade unions, almost non-existent in China before the 1920s, were formed during those years and led struggles and strikes that were real class wars, which left much workers' blood on the ground but also significant bridgeheads, such as the victory of the Shanghai uprising, which before being defeated by Chiang Kai-shek's arms was disarmed and led to massacre by Stalinist betrayal.

Although small in number at its inception, the Chinese Communist Party soon took the lead in the trade unions and became the reference point for the Chinese proletariat and, in some areas, even for the peasant masses. The CCP, which was founded in 1921 like the Communist Party of Italy but without a consolidated Marxist tradition behind it, developed in the midst of great social struggles and could have assumed the leadership of the Chinese revolution of opportunism, which had penetrated the Communist International, had not condemned it to renounce its political and organizational autonomy. By bringing the CCP into the Kuomintang and affirming the latter's leadership of the Chinese revolution, the International determined the inevitable defeat of communism in China.

The defeat of the communists in China, essentially attributable to the political leadership of the International, had the same significance for the revolutions in the East as the failure of the German revolution had in Europe.

Returning to the great struggles that shook China in the 1920s means for the Party to seek the causes of defeat and prepare for the next revolutionary assault. The Party has always maintained (Naples Theses, 1965) that “theory and action are dialectically inseparable fields, and lessons are not bookish or professorial but derive from dynamic assessments of clashes between real forces of considerable magnitude and extent, including cases where the final outcome was a defeat of the revolutionary forces,” a method we call “lessons of counter-revolutions.”

In 1927, the proletarian revolution in China was defeated. From then on, the revolutionary movement would only resume after World War II, but from the agricultural and most backward areas of China, with a totally different class character, nationalist and anti-imperialist, and not communist. From these regions, Mao's peasant armies would spread to conquer the cities, until the establishment of China as an independent nation-state in 1949.

The achievement of national unity and independence was the prerequisite for bourgeois development in China. Today's China, after troubled decades of capitalist development, has become one of the major imperialist countries, presenting itself on the world market as a brigand among brigands, ready to replace the United States as the world's leading power. The Chinese proletariat today knows well what it means to bear the chains of capitalist oppression, and tomorrow they will be called upon to shed their blood for the bourgeois homeland.

Chinese imperialism seeks, and will increasingly seek, to corrupt the younger generations of workers in order to divert them from the struggle for their own interests, to try to stop the growing struggles for their demands. The Chinese proletariat must not side with its own imperialism. On the contrary, it must continue to extend the struggle for higher wages and shorter working hours, giving impetus to class organization, the revival of class-based unions, and reconnecting with the program of revolutionary communism.

This is nothing new for the Chinese proletariat. That young proletariat has a glorious tradition to draw on: it will return to the methods of struggle and organization of its first generations of workers.

Part 1 - The End of China's Isolation

1.1 The Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion - 1.2 Marx Expected the Revolution to Come From China - 1.3 Imperialist Penetration and the Impotence of the Chinese Bourgeoisie - 1.4 Lenin: The Awakening of Asia

In order to fully describe the class struggle that developed in China in the 1920s, it is necessary to reconstruct the upheavals of the old economic forms and social organizations that succeeded one another in this immense country.

1.1 The Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion

Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto, in the chapter entitled “The Bourgeois and the Proletarians”: "The conquest of America and the circumnavigation of Africa created a new field for the bourgeoisie. The market in the East Indies and China, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and of commodities in general gave commerce, navigation, and industry an impetus hitherto unknown, and thereby gave a rapid development to the revolutionary element within the disintegrating feudal society."

Towards the sixteenth century, there were no political or military clashes between Europe and Asia, but an economic struggle was underway. The states that managed to accelerate the pace of primitive accumulation and form large mercantile and financial fortunes, the prerequisite and starting point of the capitalist mode of production, would prevail. “The great struggle between Asia and Europe will be decided on the seas, on the ocean routes that will open the way to world trade” (“Particularities of Chinese Historical Evolution,” The Communist Program, 1957).

In the end, the states that manage to monopolize world trade, that are able to deploy powerful commercial and military fleets to eliminate their competitors, are the states that will emerge victorious.

The great turning point around the sixteenth century was that trade took on an importance that transcended countries and continents, becoming global. It was therefore essential to connect the two continents directly. Asia did not participate in this endeavor; it would be carried out by the new states that emerged on the Atlantic. The new monarchies of Spain, Portugal, France, and England had the financial means necessary to equip fleets for ocean expeditions. The discovery of America allowed Spain and Portugal to conquer vast territories, but this did not have an immediate influence on world history. The circumnavigation of Africa by Vasco da Gama and, later, the heroic expedition of Magellan, who pushed on to the southern Atlantic and found the passage to the southwest leading to the Pacific, were fundamental. The circumnavigation of the globe confirmed the primacy of the West, regardless of whether it passed from the Iberians to the Dutch, English, and French. Europe's victory was complete: access to Asia was complete.

This naval superiority of the West was not accidental. Shipbuilding techniques and the art of navigation had received a great boost in the West because the civilization that arose on the shores of the Mediterranean had forced peoples aspiring to supremacy to equip themselves with modern fleets and become naval powers. In contrast, Asian states had not encountered the need to equip themselves with fleets comparable to those of the West. China, for example, was threatened by barbarian invasions from the north, while it did not face the danger of invasions from the sea. The ocean was an insurmountable barrier for them. When the ocean was violated, they found themselves defenseless. Asia, which for millennia had been the inexhaustible source of the conquering peoples who invaded Europe, would in turn become the object of invasion and brutal conquest. The new conquerors would not come on horseback like the old nomadic tribes, but with warships and cannons produced by modern industry.

In the first half of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese were the first to arrive in China, followed by the English, French, and Dutch. From this moment on, a slow but steady decline in Chinese power began.

In its initial phase, Western expansion was unable to make a dent in a well-organized state such as China. Freedom of trade was severely restricted. Towards the end of the 17th century, under the Qing dynasty, foreigners were only allowed to trade with China in the port of Canton. European merchants were considered dangerous by the Chinese court, which attempted to place them under bureaucratic control. A guild of Chinese merchants was created, called Co Hong (formalized by an imperial edict in 1760), which had a monopoly on trade with foreigners and was closely connected to the Chinese authorities.

Faced with emissaries of Western capitalism pushing for greater access to the rich Chinese market, China closed itself off. Even as late as 1793, when the British made demands at the Chinese court for greater openness to trade, these were firmly rejected.

But England, having become the factory of the world, could no longer do without such a vast market for its industrial production; it could not continue to import cotton and silk products produced by Chinese domestic craftsmen; imports of Chinese tea, which had replaced milk in the meager breakfast of the English worker, increased considerably. Large quantities of silver were used to cover this trade deficit.

England stopped this drain on precious metals with the opium trade. By selling this drug in China, the English solved their main problem: Chinese products, mainly tea and silk, which had previously been paid for in silver, could now be exchanged for opium. Silver, which had been imported in large quantities by the Chinese during the early period of trade, began to flow out of the country in 1826.

Marx reconstructs the history of the opium trade. Until the mid-18th century, the amount of opium exported to China was limited to a few hundred chests, and the product was mainly used as a medicine. The Portuguese had a virtual monopoly on this trade with China, obtaining the drug from Turkey. But in 1773, the directors of the East India Company came up with the idea of growing opium in India and exporting it to China. By the early 1800s, the number of chests of opium imported into China had risen to over two thousand, and in the following years the proportions became even greater: in 1820, the number of chests brought into China had risen to over five thousand, seven thousand in 1821, and over twelve thousand in 1824. In 1837, thirty-nine thousand cases of opium were smuggled into China.

Until then, foreign trade had allowed China to accumulate large quantities of silver. But in 1837, the Chinese government found itself at a point where radical intervention was the only option: the continuous drain of silver to pay for opium was beginning to disrupt the empire's finances and monetary circulation. The government decided “not to legalize the nefarious trade because of the harm it caused the people” (Marx, “Free swindling is the same as monopoly”). It also refused to impose a tax whose revenue would increase in proportion to the physical and moral decline of the people. The exceptional measures taken by the Chinese government from 1837 onwards culminated in the confiscation and destruction of smuggled opium. This provided the pretext for the first Anglo-Chinese war.

The military attack launched several times against China by the leading power of the time, England, followed by France, to break its isolationism was aimed exclusively at removing an obstacle to capitalist trade. Capitalist expansionism, due to the inflexible economic laws that govern it, tends to incessantly expand the boundaries of the world market, destroying any barrier that stands in its way, and could not stop at the closure of Chinese ports. The Chinese Empire, which had banned opium, was forced by arms to allow its use again; China, which did not produce this drug, was forced to import it from India in ever-increasing quantities and to allow its free trade within its own borders.

China thus became a captive market for Western capitalism. Through the breach opened by drugs, and gradually widened by British and French cannons during the two Opium Wars of 1839-42 and 1856, all other products also flooded in. From 1860, the year of the end of the Second Opium War, Westerners extended their penetration into northern China and the interior; by 1870, there were around 15 “open ports” in China. With the arrival of English cotton fabrics, the export of Chinese textiles began to decline. The import of cotton goods grew to represent about one-third of China's total imports in 1870; a few years later, it became the main import, surpassing opium. From 1870 to 1880, opium and cotton textiles continued to be among the main products exported to China, but the export of other products, mainly metals and metal products, also developed.

Starting in the second half of the 1880s, foreign penetration in China increased and took on new forms. The rapid pace of Western industrial development, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the development of steam navigation gave a strong boost to trade with China and, above all, to a sharp increase in exports to that country, whose value doubled in the decade between 1885 and 1894. These were the years when the balance of trade finally turned in favor of foreigners.

The last decades of the 19th century saw capitalism enter its imperialist phase. In China, too, the influx of goods was soon followed by capital investment and international loans. By the end of the century, the Chinese economy was in the hands of foreigners, who owned the main sectors.

But military defeat in the two Opium Wars also led to China's political subjugation, forcing it to submit to the dictates of the Western powers. The war resulted in the imposition of so-called “unequal treaties.” Under these treaties, China had to pay heavy indemnities that contributed to bleeding the imperial coffers dry; it was forced to open its sea and river ports to world trade; Chinese customs duties were limited to a 5% tariff; foreign goods in China were not subject to the “lijin” circulation tax; territorial concessions were established, giving rise to the different spheres of influence of the imperialist countries; the regime of extraterritoriality was introduced, under which foreign citizens were removed from Chinese jurisdiction and exempted from paying taxes. Finally, foreign warships could station in open ports and land in any Chinese port “when the interests of trade so required.” China did not fall directly under colonial control solely because of the fierce rivalry between the imperialist powers.

The imperial dynasty, in addition to being bent by the force of foreign powers, also had to face serious internal difficulties. The Opium Wars, having caused an upheaval in the old economic balance, led to profound social crises. The spread of opium, the outflow of silver, and the proliferation of foreign manufactured goods further aggravated an agrarian crisis that had its roots in rapid population growth and a shortage of arable land. These phenomena were compounded by the traditional poverty of the Chinese peasantry, which was exacerbated by the arrival of Westerners. The entire social structure weighed heavily on the shoulders of the peasants, who paid rent to landowners, interest to merchants and usurers, and taxes to the state. In addition, in the mid-19th century, there were famines, droughts, and floods, in the face of which the imperial power, whose coffers were empty, was powerless: without adequate financial means, the necessary water regulation works could not be carried out.

Historically in China, when the cumulative weight of rents, debts, and taxes became intolerable, and natural disasters were added to the mix, local revolts broke out against tax collectors and landlords, which could turn into large peasant wars. Repeated uprisings, triggered by this severe economic crisis, culminated in 1850 in a powerful peasant revolt, which spread from Kwangsi to the north and held the Yangtze valley under control for eleven years. This was the Taiping Rebellion.

This marked the beginning of the modern revolutionary era in China. It can be considered the last peasant war in Chinese history and the first failed attempt to create a modern, democratic state. The Taiping managed to establish a state that lasted for 15 years (1851-1865). Landlords and mandarins were killed by the rebels, the peasants occupied the land and imposed the destruction of property titles and collective management of the land. The physical struggle was accompanied by a scathing critique of the ideology of the ruling class. The Taiping's agrarian communism was expressed in formulas such as this: “All the land under heaven shall be cultivated by all the people under heaven; let them all cultivate it together, and when they reap the rice, let them eat it together.”

Inevitably, Taiping's agrarian radicalism clashed with all the forces of urban and rural privilege, undermining the authority and prestige of the old bureaucratic caste. The rebellious peasants clashed directly with all those sectors of Chinese society that, in one way or another, were linked to land ownership, which rallied around the Manchu dynasty. But the dynasty also found an ally in foreign powers. Among other measures, the Taiping attempted to suppress the opium trade, clashing with Western interests. After initial neutrality, French and British troops intervened directly in the conflict. A joint effort by the Emperor and the Europeans in 1864 crushed the heroic Taiping and entered Nanjing, spilling rivers of blood.

The great revolt failed because the traditional peasant war was incapable of dealing with a situation that had changed compared to previous centuries. Now it was not a question of overthrowing one dynasty and replacing it with another, which would attempt social and agrarian reform. A new factor had emerged in Chinese society that made this solution to the peasant question impossible: the Western powers, which defended their positions by relying on all those social strata that had privileges to protect. While they were willing to set aside a moribund dynasty, they could not renounce their alliance with the propertied and privileged classes: large landowners, merchants, and officials. This bloc has a common interest in keeping the Chinese peasantry subjugated and exploited. From this moment on, it is clear that the Chinese revolution could only win by fighting both the Chinese propertied classes and the imperialist powers at the same time.

1.2 Marx Expected the Revolution to Come from China

Already in the early 1950s, in one of his first articles on events in China, Marx had linked the expansion of capitalism in China and the Opium War with the social crisis of the millennial empire and the possibility of revolutionary developments. In an article dated June 14, 1853, significantly entitled “Revolution in China and Europe,” Marx directly raised the question of the effect that a revolution in China could have on Western capitalism. "It may seem a strange and even paradoxical assertion that the next uprising of the European people, and their next movement toward liberty and a republican system of government, are more likely to depend on what happens in the Celestial Empire (the extreme opposite of Europe) than on any other political cause, even more than on a threat from Russia and the consequent possibility of a European war. But this is not a paradox, as everyone can understand by examining the various aspects of the question”.

Marx argued that the Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion were closely linked. The social unrest that led to the Taiping Rebellion was triggered by British cannons seeking to impose the opium trade on China. The strength of the British army had broken China's centuries-old isolation. The reasons were purely economic: the trade balance in China's favor had to be overturned through opium smuggling. The imperial authorities tried to block trade, but were defeated militarily. After opium, other British products flooded the Chinese market, ruining local industry and crafts. The decline of imperial authority, the ruin of domestic crafts due to competition from Western industrial products, and the increased tax burden on peasants all contributed to the end of the Chinese Empire's millennial stability. This was the origin of the Taiping Rebellion.

Without delving into the “socialism” of the Taiping, Marx wondered whether the bourgeois revolution in China would have repercussions on white capitalism and give a revolutionary shake-up to old Europe. “Now that England has provoked revolution in China, the question arises as to how that revolution will react over time in England, and through England in Europe. This is not an easy problem to solve.” China's entry into the world market was the result of the expansion of capital, but also the historical possibility of new crises and new revolutions. According to Marx, a bourgeois revolution in China would have had disastrous consequences for capitalism in the West: market contraction, commercial crisis, and social revolution in Europe. The extraordinary development of English manufacturing would have been overwhelmed by a great commercial crisis of overproduction that would have caused unemployment and misery in England and had repercussions throughout Europe.

Marx writes on the relationship between crisis, war, and revolution: "Since the beginning of the 18th century, there has been no serious revolution in Europe that was not preceded by a commercial and financial crisis. This is true of the revolution of 1789 no less than of that of 1848. It is certain not only that every day we observe increasingly threatening symptoms of conflict between rulers and their subjects, between the state and society, between different classes, but also that the friction between powers is gradually reaching the point where the sword will have to be wielded (...) Dispatches heralding general war arrive daily in European capitals, only to disappear under the dispatches of the following day, which assure us that peace will last another week or so. We can be sure, however, that however acute the friction between the European powers may be, however threatening the diplomatic horizon may appear, whatever movement may be attempted by some fanatical group in this or that country, the anger of the princes and the rage of the people will be equally appeased by the breath of prosperity. Neither wars nor revolutions will be able to upset Europe, except as a consequence of a general commercial and industrial crisis, the signal for which, as usual, should be given by England, which represents European industry on the world market”.

This crisis could have been exacerbated by resistance to the expansion of trade in China, caused by the revolution in that country. “The Chinese revolution will be the spark that ignites the powder keg of the current industrial system, causing the explosion of a general crisis that has been brewing for some time, which will spread abroad and be followed shortly thereafter by political revolutions on the continent.”

Even if this predicted outcome did not come to pass, the link identified between the revolution in China and the uprising in Europe is of enormous importance, and the historical possibility that the European revolts could have been determined by a social revolution in distant China is highly significant. The idea that there could be a coincidence, in the action against capitalism, between the internal class struggle of the workers in the white metropolises and the rebellion of the peoples overseas against colonial rule, is therefore not a novelty that emerged at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when Lenin studied the phenomenon of imperialism, but is a historical possibility glimpsed by Marx and Engels.

1.3 Imperialist Penetration and the Impotence of the Chinese Bourgeoisie

The temporary success achieved by the imperial dynasty against the Taiping allowed it to cling to power for a few more decades, but its fate was sealed. The last years of the 19th century saw one power after another brutally wrest territorial, commercial, and railway concessions from China.

Imperialism progressively dismantled China, which lost numerous territories and all the provinces that were tributaries of the Chinese Empire: Vietnam, Nepal, Burma, Siam, Laos, and Korea fell under foreign control. All the imperialist powers participated in the banquet. Between 1860 and 1870, France occupied Cambodia and Annam, and with the Franco-Chinese War of 1884-1885, it forced China to renounce all rights over Vietnam, which became a French protectorate. England, which had already obtained Hong Kong, occupied Burma; to the north, Tsarist Russia built a railway along the border with China, allowing it to open up a zone of influence in northern Manchuria; Japan, which in the meantime had begun to modernize its productive apparatus by adopting Western modes of production and organization, ushered in an era of rapid expansion, and in 1894 inflicted a heavy defeat on its Chinese neighbor, obtaining the protectorate over Korea and opening up a sphere of influence in southern Manchuria. The imperial court, now powerless, signed treaty after treaty and granted concession after concession.

In the last years of the nineteenth century, imperialism made extraordinary progress in China. Between 1894 and 1899, China contracted all foreign loans for 370 million taels of silver, but the annual revenue of the central treasury did not exceed 80 million. The scope of foreign investment expanded considerably. Banks already established in China increased their branches, and new financial institutions with large amounts of capital were opened. The main function of the banks was simply to finance trade, but with the backing of the government, they became the main agents of Western economic invasion. Banks invested in railways, mines, and industry. International financial capital is now the absolute master of China's economic and political development.

Imperialism, in addition to dismantling China, caused a series of economic and social changes that profoundly disrupted the internal situation. The crisis into which the country fell caused widespread discontent. The foreign presence that crushed China created a feeling of anger and hostility towards foreigners, whether Japanese or Westerners. This situation and state of mind exploded in the established regions in yet another mass revolt, which went down in history as the “Boxer Rebellion.” Initially, the revolt aimed to drive out both the foreign powers and the Manchu dynasty, but soon the slogan “Down with the dynasty, drive out the foreigners” became “Long live the dynasty, drive out the foreigners.” The Manchu dynasty and the bureaucracy attempted to use the revolt to exploit it in an anti-Western sense, against the foreign powers. The result was a new disaster. The foreign powers united to crush the revolt.

The victors treated China with extreme harshness. This led to the “Protocol of 1901,” which placed China in a state of total dependence on the imperialist powers. It is forced to pay a heavy indemnity, burdened by high interest rates, and as a guarantee of payment, the foreign powers take control of Chinese customs and the collection of easily collectible taxes, such as the salt tax. The payment of the heavy indemnity and the continuous drain on the nation's financial resources deprive China of any possibility of real economic development.

But even more serious than the economic consequences are the political consequences of the “Protocol”: in addition to being able to interfere in internal politics, foreign powers impose unilateral disarmament on China, the destruction of certain forts, and ensure themselves the possibility of maintaining troops within the Legation Quarter and along certain railways. With the armed forces at its disposal and the right to inspect finances and administration, the diplomatic corps in Beijing became a kind of super-governor, deciding the fate of the Empire above the Court. China found itself dominated by a consortium of powers that constituted a veritable company for the exploitation of the country. To this end, the foreign powers made use of the traditional apparatus of bureaucrats and notables, culminating in the imperial court. This was the only thing keeping the dynasty alive, which by then held no real power. It had become so weakened that in various regions the rule of military leaders took hold, who would then become the so-called Warlords, holding power based on mercenary armies made up of landless peasants, uprooted from all sources of livelihood and wandering throughout the country.

From the beginning of the 20th century, starting with the Boxer Rebellion, the Chinese revolutionary movement fully assumed the dual task of internal social upheaval and national struggle against foreign subjugation. The Boxer Rebellion, with its siege of the legations in Beijing, had already launched a challenge, a declaration of war on all imperialism, a signal that China was indeed awakening and that it was time for new forces to take up and carry out the tasks that history had entrusted to them.

The first decade of the twentieth century saw the considerable rise of capitalism in China, with the consequent development of modern social classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. For the first time, political organizations modeled on Western parties emerged, such as Sun Yat Sen's Revolutionary League, which in 1905 formulated its political program, summarized in the “three principles of the people”: national independence, democracy, and the well-being of the people. The Chinese revolution was supposed to restore the nation state, entrusting its government solely to the Chinese people; it was supposed to create republican and parliamentary institutions that would guarantee equal political rights for all citizens; and finally, it was supposed to provide for a more equitable distribution of wealth in order to ensure a decent livelihood for the people. This was the typical bourgeois democratic program that would be inherited by Maoism.

After the failure of the reform attempts at the end of the 19th century (the “Hundred Days' Reform”), the militants gathered around Sun Yat Sen realized that such a program could only be achieved through revolutionary methods and means. Their program clearly stated that the transformation would be achieved through violent and armed action by the revolutionary vanguard and that, after seizing power, it would be necessary to establish an authoritarian dictatorship for a certain period of time.

Despite the deep commitment of revolutionary militants to overthrow the dynasty, their organization was often lacking, but above all, it had no following among the masses. Numerous coups were attempted in southern China, and there were attempts to stir up mutiny among the armed forces, but they proved unsuccessful, provoking ruthless repression by the dynasty.

The occasion of the revolution was a dispute between the center and the provinces over the railroad: at the beginning of the last century, foreign capital was increasingly invested in the construction of a railroad network, which was the material vehicle for opening up some internal areas and integrating them into the imperialist market as a whole. In this situation, foreign powers pressured the Beijing government to nationalize the railways, which did not mean that foreign control would be removed, but only that it would be transferred elsewhere. This led to the outbreak of a revolt against imperial officials in Sichuan in September 1911. A month later, the garrison in Wuchang mutinied, organized by military personnel linked to republican circles. The 1911 revolution unleashed the force necessary to bring down the dynasty. The empire collapsed, but there was no force capable of directing the transformation of China, resolving the agrarian crisis, resisting the demands of foreign powers, and regaining the nation's independence.

In 1911, the revolution overthrew the imperial dynasty and established a bourgeois republic under the presidency of Sun Yat-sen, but its inconsistency soon became apparent. The country remained prey to the intervention of Warlords, so much so that Sun Yat-sen soon voluntarily abandoned power to Yuan Shih-kai, one of the Warlords. Social renewal was stifled at birth. In essence, it was an unfinished revolution, which would be followed by others.

In China at that time, pregnant with bourgeois revolution, the bourgeoisie was incapable of accomplishing two essential tasks: securing national independence and implementing agrarian reform, a prerequisite for industrial development. The extreme weakness of the Chinese bourgeoisie, as in Russia, rendered it incapable of mobilizing the immense mass of peasants to expropriate the land from the landowners and redistribute it, thus putting an end to the oppression of the peasants. This was too great a task for it, born in historical and international conditions completely different from those of the French bourgeoisie of the Great Revolution of the 18th century. It would be even more difficult for it to fight against foreign powers, since its economic interests are often closely linked to them.

Sun Yat-sen's political program itself expresses all the illusions and indecisions typical of the Chinese bourgeoisie. On the one hand, there is hope of bringing about the national revolution with the support of foreign powers; on the other, there is a reluctance to involve in the movement either the peasant masses, starved by imperialism and the landowners, or the small but already dangerous indigenous proletariat, whose actions are already seen as a threat.

The impotence of the Chinese bourgeoisie allows effective power in China to pass into the hands of Warlords. Their rule strengthens foreign domination over the country's economy and politics. The Warlords are closely linked to foreign powers. The authority of a Warlord over a region roughly corresponds to the various zones of influence of the imperialist states. In Yunnan and southern Guanxi, the militarists are under the control and influence of France. The valleys of the great rivers, which economically dominate Hong Kong and Shanghai, have passed even more decisively under British control. The northern and southern provinces of Manchuria are divided between Russia and Japan. Because of this the civil wars that soon break out between the Warlords end up largely reflecting the conflicts between the main imperialist powers.

Furthermore, the power of the militarists makes the situation of the Chinese peasant class even more difficult. The armies of the Warlords are not only made up of desperate peasants who have become mercenaries, but their livelihood, based on money, is made possible by levies on rural income. This fundamental task is carried out by village notables and local landowners, who see the Warlords' troops as the only means of maintaining social order in the countryside, guaranteeing armed support for the repression of any peasant revolts.

The Warlords' regime is doubly disastrous for the peasant masses: on the one hand, because of the indiscriminate destruction wrought by the troops in numerous battles; on the other, because of the increased exploitation imposed by the landowners and notables. The ancient peasant misery is aggravated and agricultural production declines. Millions of peasants are left landless and, condemned to a life of poverty, swell the ranks of the Warlords' troops or turn to banditry. Masses of peasants pour into the cities in search of employment in industry.

It was precisely in this sector that the outbreak of World War I brought about profound changes. For Chinese business circles, the period of the Great War was definitely the “golden age of the Chinese bourgeoisie.” The war absorbed all the economic efforts and products of the great powers, and China benefited from increased exports to the wealthy countries at war. The pace of industrial expansion in those years was impressive. Numerous new industries were established and machines began to replace craftsmanship. At the same time, land, river, and sea transport and communication systems multiplied. The emergence of productive forces brought a new actor onto the scene who would be at the center of the profound upheavals of the 1920s: the proletariat.

1.4 Lenin: The Awakening of Asia

Lenin wrote in 1913: “Has it been so long since China was considered the model of countries in complete and centuries-old stagnation? Now political life is in turmoil in China, a social movement and a democratic upsurge are vigorously manifesting themselves. After the Russian movement of 1905, the democratic revolution spread throughout Asia: Turkey, Persia, China.”.

The “awakening of Asia” referred to by Lenin refers to the bourgeois-democratic and national revolution developing in the East. This raises an important question that needs to be clarified: the historical limits and criteria for the participation and support of the proletariat in a mass national movement. This is how Lenin explained it in 1914 in his article “On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”:

First of all, it is necessary to rigorously separate the two periods of capitalism, which are radically distinct from the point of view of national movements. On the one hand, there is the period of the failure of feudalism and absolutism, the period in which a bourgeois democratic society and state are formed, in which national movements become, for the first time, mass movements, drawing, in one way or another, all classes of the population into political life through the press, participation in representative institutions, etc.

"On the other hand, we are facing a period of fully established capitalist states, a period in which the constitutional regime has been consolidated for a long time, in which the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is highly developed, a period that can be defined as the eve of the collapse of capitalism.

The first period is characterized by the reawakening of national movements and the participation of peasants in these movements, the most numerous social class and the most difficult to mobilize, attracted to the struggle for political freedom in general and for national rights in particular. The second period is characterized by the absence of mass bourgeois democratic movements; it is the period in which developed capitalism, bringing together and mixing nations already completely drawn into the circulation of goods, brings to the fore the antagonism between capital, fused on an international scale, and the international workers' movement."

The national question can be the specific question of the proletarian movement only in the revolutionary phase of capitalism, when the bourgeoisie launches its assault on political power and sets out to destroy the old pre-capitalist institutions and carry out its work of economic and social transformation. In a phase of mature capitalism, on the other hand, any national program of a workers' party that calls for the improvement of the institutions of the bourgeois state or its economic base constitutes a program of class collaboration and defense of the homeland. Precisely for this reason, Marxism has always strictly delimited these two successive phases of capitalism by geographical areas. Again, Lenin:

"In continental Western Europe, the era of bourgeois democratic revolutions spans a fairly precise period of time, roughly from 1789 to 1871. This is the era of national uprisings and the creation of nation states. At the end of this period, Western Europe had been transformed into a system of bourgeois states, generally homogeneous nation states. To seek the right to self-determination in the programs of Western European socialists today is to be ignorant of the ABCs of Marxism." Instead: “In Eastern Europe and Asia, the era of bourgeois democratic revolutions only began in 1905. The revolutions in Russia, Persia, Turkey, China, the wars in the Balkans – this is the chain of world events of our era in our East.”

But already in 1913, Lenin drew lessons from the first wave of bourgeois national revolutions in the East: Russia (1905), Persia (1906), Turkey (1908), China (1911): “The revolutions in Asia have shown us the same lack of character and the same cowardice of liberalism, the same extraordinary importance of the autonomy of the democratic masses, and the same demarcation between the proletariat and the whole bourgeoisie” (“The Historical Destiny of the Doctrine of Karl Marx”).

The Russian Revolution of 1905 had been the testing ground for what Lenin had called the “two tactics of social democracy.” It was in its analysis of the events of 1905 that Bolshevism found confirmation of its tactics and definitively broke with the Menshevik current. In Russia, Lenin observed, “the bourgeois revolution is impossible as a revolution of the bourgeoisie.” The proletariat cannot therefore wait for the bourgeoisie to complete its political (the overthrow of tsarism) or social (the abolition of feudal property) task before entering the struggle. To take the head of the social movement without confining it to bourgeois legal forms, such as the Constituent Assembly, such is the meaning of the slogans: “Democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants!” and “All power to the Soviets!” The result of this tactic is not the establishment of a bourgeois democracy, but the open dictatorship of the proletariat.

The victory of the proletariat in Russia had opened up this great prospect for the whole of Asia, placing all countries before the alternative: communist revolution or bourgeois counterrevolution. From the moment Russia broke free from the chains of imperialism, and the question of proletarian revolution was on the agenda throughout the world, even in backward countries such as China, it was possible and necessary to engage directly in the struggle for a Soviet regime. Before it fell under the blows of the Stalinist counter-revolution, the Communist International had launched the great perspective of a union between the class struggle in the advanced capitalist metropolises and the national-popular insurrections in the colonies, with politically communist Russia at the center, a single world strategy aimed at the overthrow of bourgeois power throughout the world.

Part 2 - Chinese society

Report presented at the General Meeting in Genoa in May 2018

- 2.1 The Countryside - 2.2 Contradictory Development of Capitalism - 2.3 The Working Class - 2.4 The Role of the Classes in the Dual Revolution - 2.5. The Marxist perspective in the Theses of the International - 2.6. Nature and prospects of the revolution in China and the East - 2.7 Theses on national and colonial questions at the Second Congress of the International

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx writes about the capitalist mode of production: "With the rapid improvement of all the instruments of production, with the infinitely facilitated communications, the bourgeoisie drags all nations, even the most barbarous, into civilization. The low prices of its merchandise are the heavy artillery with which it levels all Chinese walls (...) It compels all nations to adopt the bourgeois system of production, if they do not wish to go to ruin; it forces them to introduce into their own homes the so-called civilization of the bourgeoisie, that is, to become bourgeois."

The expansive force of the capitalist mode of production succeeded in shaking and breaking down the social structure of the Celestial Empire, which had remained virtually unchanged for thousands of years.

Despite peasant revolts, Chinese society remained in a state of equilibrium for centuries, and even waves of invaders from nomadic and warrior peoples of Central Asia failed to alter its course. Although victorious on the battlefield, these invading peoples brought with them inferior modes of production, forcing them to adapt and quickly merge into the conquered country without changing anything.

Only the impact of capitalist production could put an end to that immobile type of society: in the clash between different forms of production, the most backward is swept away by the youngest and most dynamic.

Starting in the mid-19th century, the penetration of foreign powers into China disrupted the economy and ancient Chinese society. The old social hierarchy, divided into intellectuals, peasants, artisans, and merchants, which had been the foundation of the millennial empire, was overturned. New economic relationships emerged in the cities, while the countryside entered a deep crisis. Capitalism, with its technology, goods, and guns, destroyed the balance of Chinese society and gave rise to the formation of new classes that would be at the center of the struggles in 20th-century China.

2.1 - The Countryside

For centuries, China was dominated by a local economy that remained virtually unchanged, in which farming was accompanied by manufacturing, both centered on the family and conducted on a village scale. This static form was soon overlaid by central power.

At the dawn of the 1920s, China was still a country lagging behind the capitalist development of the West. Its population was almost exclusively employed in the countryside, with over 300 million men dependent on the land for their livelihood.

Maoism has always upheld the theory of the anti-feudal nature of the Chinese revolution, considering the division of land to be a necessary and sufficient measure for the upheaval of social relations in the countryside.

Some data shows us the importance of feudal property in China. From our 1964 study, “The Social Movement in China,” which we draw extensively from and to which we refer the reader, we have the following percentages:

It is clear that there was little to divide. This is because even in ancient China, the purchase and sale of land were freely practiced.

Subsequently, the impact of European imperialism led to a considerable weakening of central power, which resulted in the squandering of state assets for the benefit of the mandarins and the comprador bourgeoisie. Imperialism disrupted social relations in the countryside. The old class of government officials, mandarins, and military personnel, enriching themselves through trade with foreigners and forming a large merchant bourgeoisie, invested their profits in the countryside, seizing land from peasants and agricultural communes through usurious loans and indebtedness.

Hunger and poverty affected the majority of farmers, who were forced to live, work, and survive on small plots of land that were insufficient to support them. Not only did they not produce enough to have a surplus to sell on the market, but they were also forced to go into debt to buy seeds, fertilizers, and food to survive until the next harvest, as well as to pay rent and for the use of agricultural tools. They were therefore forced to mortgage their harvest and, if that was not enough, even their land, at interest rates never lower than 30% per annum, with peaks of up to 80%. Added to this was the crushing burden of taxes and extortion by Warlords, causing farmers' debts to increase year after year, leaving them at the mercy of loan sharks and tax collectors. Furthermore, unable to send their produce to distant markets, they were subject to merchants who manipulated prices at will. At the end of a season of hardship and toil, Chinese farmers inevitably found themselves in debt. Adding debt upon debt, they ended up losing their land and becoming tenant farmers; they then had to give the landowner 40 to 70% of their produce, plus a variety of gifts and personal services. Chinese farmers were thus reduced to the status of tenant farmers or semi-tenant farmers with lease agreements as the predominant form of social relations in the countryside.

There's not much data to show this, but what we do have comes from statistics published by the “left-wing” government in Wuhan after an investigation by its Agricultural Commission in central and southern China in 1927, which we talked about in our study “The Social Movement in China”:

“This picture confirms that 55% of the agricultural population (100-45) consists of landless peasants, forced to rent a miserable plot of land from owners of more than 30 mu, who own 80% of the cultivated land” (“Il movimento sociale in Cina”).

This situation was particularly difficult in the large river basins of central and southern China, because rice cultivation prevailed in these areas and there was a high degree of fragmentation of land ownership, while in the north, where wheat was produced, farms were more concentrated. This explains the forms of exploitation of the peasantry that were widespread in the central and southern regions: rent in kind, with very high rates of up to 70% of the harvest. It should be emphasized, however, that this rent was not levied by a class of feudal lords as in medieval Europe, but by the bourgeoisie, who found it more profitable to invest their capital in land than in industry and who, together with the notables, contributed to maintaining the old order in the countryside.

In China, the arrival of Westerners had created a close bond between landowners and the commercial bourgeoisie. Under pressure from imperialism, the leading members of the Chinese ruling class had become the main intermediaries of foreign capital. These famous “compradores,” allied with imperialism and vehicles for the commercialization of Western products, accumulated enormous profits, which they invested in land or used as usurious capital in the countryside. They were therefore an integral part of the system that oppressed and exploited the peasantry. It was difficult to draw a clear distinction between the various social figures to whom the peasant was subject: landowners, tax collectors, local officials, merchants, usurers, Warlords. The interests of these groups were fused together, becoming indistinguishable from those of the entire ruling class. The same person, for example, could collect rents, interest, and taxes; landowners could be rent collectors, merchants, usurers, often owned factories, and also provided officers for the army and state officials. All these figures, closely linked and often overlapping, formed the ruling class that oppressed and exploited the peasants, and even if they tried to ease the external pressure, their interests were linked to those of the imperialists, and the gap that separated them from the exploited masses was much greater than the antagonism that brought them into conflict with foreigners, hence their reactionary action in the face of the independence movements that were emerging in China.

2.2 - Contradictory Development of Capitalism

Since the Opium Wars, China has been an endless reserve for world imperialism to plunder, where the major powers have competed in their acts of banditry, dismantling the Empire and grabbing its enormous economic resources.

The impact of Western capitalism led some sectors of the Chinese ruling class to believe that Western techniques were necessary to better oppose the demands of foreign powers. The emphasis was mainly on the need to increase military and naval forces. Starting in the second half of the 19th century, modern arsenals and warships were built, but despite significant developments in local production, it remained largely dependent on foreign countries. Chinese capital was also used to build some railway lines, open mines with associated foundries, and develop the textile industry. However, until the late 19th century, Chinese capital was mainly used to modernize the armed forces, and the industrialization process depended essentially on foreign economic penetration.

The development of capitalism in China essentially began in areas occupied by foreign powers, where the first industrial structures were established, marking the first steps in a long process of transformation of the economy, which was mainly based on agriculture. In fact, the first regions where industrialization began were the eastern coast and the North of the country, i.e., those areas subject to the influence of foreign powers, where modern industries were established and railways were built.

In this way, China, subjugated by imperialism, had given rise, especially in the large ports, not only to an indigenous proletariat but also to a bourgeois class, which, however, given its subjugation to the oppressive imperialist presence, was characterized as almost exclusively commercial. The development of this class was closely linked to the interests of foreign capitalists, whom it represented on Chinese territory. Not only was this modern bourgeoisie closely linked economically to the great powers, but even when it aspired to greater independence, its actions were severely limited by the conditions imposed by foreigners.

Furthermore, young Chinese capitalism was unable to compete with foreign companies. First of all, starting with the unequal treaties of the 19th century, Chinese goods were subject to the payment of the li-jin, an internal circulation tax, from which foreign goods were exempt, and which multiplied due to the political fragmentation of China in the first two decades of the 20th century due to the appetites of various local civil and military authorities. Furthermore, after the Treaty of Nanking, Chinese companies could not defend themselves with the classic weapon of protectionism, because the maximum tariff could not exceed 5%.

Added to this was a chronic lack of capital for investment and a solid banking system, which forced Chinese companies to turn to foreign finance. China also depended almost exclusively on foreign manufacturers for the acquisition of machinery. Finally, the first Chinese industries also depended on foreigners to sell their products, as the Chinese merchant fleet was not as developed as that of the West. Not even the extraordinary development of Chinese industry during the First World War was enough to free young capitalism from its dependence on imperialism.

This situation of both connection and dependence on Western capitalism determined the contradictory nature of the Chinese bourgeoisie in the face of the problems posed by the nascent national revolution: on the one hand, it aspired to a struggle for liberation to break the chains imposed by foreigners, but on the other hand, its development and wealth came precisely from its intertwined relations with them. But more than anything else, the bourgeoisie feared the uncontrollable consequences of a revolutionary process that would set in motion the peasant masses who aspired to land and the nascent but already militant proletariat that was concentrating in the main industrial centers.

The contradictory position of the Chinese bourgeoisie was clearly expressed by its political leader, Sun Yat-sen, who, after overthrowing the thousand-year-old monarchy in 1911, spontaneously abandoned power to the Warlords. His “Economic Plan for the Development of China” reflects the illusions of the bourgeoisie, which claims to be able to achieve national independence with the “help of imperialism.” Sun Yat-sen wrote: "I propose a plan for the organization of a new market in China which, if sufficiently extensive, will develop the productive forces of China and absorb the industrial possibilities of the foreign powers (...) The nations which take part in the development of China will reap great benefits (...) For the success of this plan, I propose three essential points. First of all, an office should be set up for the powers that will provide the capital, so that they can act together and create an international organization, with its military organizers, administrators, and experts in various fields, so that plans can be prepared."

As early as 1912, Lenin clarified the true nature of the Chinese bourgeoisie and established the attitude of the future proletarian party in China. In an article on Sun Yat-sen, “Democracy and Populism in China,” Lenin argues that the proletariat must be wary of the bourgeoisie, because the more revolutionary it is and the more “socialism” it puts into its ideology, the more it has the chance to keep the proletariat under control. Lenin dwells on the correlation between democracy and populism in the bourgeois revolutions that were pressing in Asia, when the bourgeoisie of the colonial or backward countries, at a time when the proletariat was struggling to seize power, put the colors of socialism on its banners. Lenin finds the same traits of the Russian bourgeoisie in Sun Yat-sen's ideology: “This ideology of militant democratism is linked, in the Chinese populists, first of all to socialist dreams, to the hope of sparing China the path of capitalism; secondly, to the plan and propaganda of a radical agrarian reform.” This is not enough to make it the doctrine of the proletariat. "It is the theory of the reactionary petty-bourgeois ‘socialist’. For it is entirely reactionary to dream that it is possible in China to ‘prevent’ capitalism; that because of China's backwardness, the ‘social revolution’ will be easier there (...) Sun Yat-sen himself, with what can only be described as inimitable virginal naivety, destroys his reactionary populist theory when he acknowledges what life forces him to acknowledge, namely that “China is on the threshold of a gigantic industrial development” (i.e., capitalist), that in China “commerce” (i.e., capitalism) “will develop on an enormous scale,” that “in 50 years there will be many Shanghais among us,” i.e., centers of capitalist wealth and of the misery and dispossession of the proletariat.

In reality, the “economic revolution” Sun Yat-sen spoke of boiled down to transferring rent to the state, i.e., nationalizing land through a single tax. Lenin writes: "To make the increase in the value of land the property of the people means to transfer rent, i.e., the ownership of land, to the state, or, in other words, to nationalize land. Is this reform possible within the framework of capitalism? Not only is it possible, but it represents the purest, most consistent, and ideally perfect form of capitalism (...) The irony of history is that populism, in the name of the struggle against capitalism in agriculture, presents an agrarian program whose complete implementation would mean the most rapid development of capitalism in agriculture."

But Lenin believed that populists were incapable of implementing their program, in China as in Russia: it was not the Socialist Revolutionaries but the Bolsheviks who took the bourgeois step of nationalizing the land.

For Lenin, it is a question of grasping the dialectic of class relations in the Chinese revolution: “To the extent that the number of Shanghais increases in China, the Chinese proletariat will grow, probably forming a social democratic workers' party which, criticizing the petty-bourgeois utopias and reactionary ideas of Sun Yat-sen, will certainly be able to carefully sift out, preserve, and develop the democratic-revolutionary core of its political and agrarian program.”

Unlike populism, which dreamed of skipping over the capitalist phase, Marxism recognized the historical necessity of this phase. The emergence of “numerous Shanghais,” that is, the concentration of the proletariat in industrial centers, was seen as the result of the spread of capitalism within backward China.

2.3 - The Working Class

The development of capitalism led to the formation of the modern proletariat. A series of activities initially related to trade and the provision of services developed around ports open to trade, but soon the first industries and railways began to emerge, and coal and iron mines began to be exploited on an increasingly large scale.

It is not easy to obtain data on the number of proletarians in China in the early 1920s. The large number of employees in pre-capitalist production must be taken into account. These dominated not only in the countryside but also in the cities, for example in craft workshops and small shops.

Some estimates indicate that at the beginning of the 1920s, there were approximately 2 million proletarians in China. This was an extremely small number compared to the population, but highly concentrated, mainly in the major coastal cities. Industrial centers with a high concentration of workers had formed in these areas. For example, there were about 500,000 wage earners in Shanghai and its surroundings, and another 500,000 in the area comprising Canton and Hong Kong.

Not only was the low percentage of proletarians relative to the total population offset by a high geographical concentration, but another important feature was that the Chinese proletariat was concentrated in large factories that employed hundreds and thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, of workers.

The Chinese proletariat was young both as a class and in terms of age. Few of them were skilled workers; most of the Chinese working class was poorly qualified. These unskilled workers were mostly former peasants who had abandoned a life of hardship and toil in the countryside to end up in the hellish world of capitalist industry.

In general, the conditions of the Chinese working class were terrible, comparable to those of the first generations of workers in England, with very long working days and few days off. Work began at dawn and ended at sunset, with normal working hours exceeding 12 hours. There were no lunch breaks, and workers ate their meals quickly beside their machines. Factory discipline was harsh, with fines and even corporal punishment by foremen. The meager wages were barely enough to keep them alive. There were no safety or hygiene measures at work, and the mortality rate was very high. Female and child labor was widely used, and their working conditions were terrible. Some testimonies recall the reports of factory inspectors in England reported by Marx in “Capital.”

2.4 - The Role of the Classes in the Dual Revolution

Contact with Western capitalism had profound repercussions on Chinese society, changing its social stratification and giving rise, in an almost exclusively agricultural country, to the fundamental classes of modern society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Our current has always maintained that a social class cannot be reduced to statistical data, to “a purely objective, external observation of the similarity of economic and social conditions, of the position of a large number of individuals in relation to the production process”. As we state in Party and Class: "Our method does not stop at describing the social structure as it is at a given moment, at drawing an abstract line dividing the individuals who compose it into two parts, as in the school classifications of naturalists. Marxist criticism sees human society in motion, unfolding over time, with an essentially historical and dialectical criterion, that is, studying the connection between events in their relationships of mutual influence (...) The concept of class must not therefore evoke a static image in us, but a dynamic one. When we see a social trend, a movement toward certain goals, then we can recognize the existence of a class in the true sense of the word. But then the class party exists, in a substantial if not yet formal way.

From this point of view, we can say that in China, peasants, bourgeoisie, and proletariat entered the political arena with different goals, so it was a matter of identifying which class and which program would lead the future Chinese revolution. While history had shown with the bourgeois revolutions in Europe that the peasant class could not act autonomously on the political scene but had to entrust leadership to the urban classes, Marxism had already resolved the question of the role of classes in every revolution. And in particular, the nature and prospects of the revolutions in the East.

We wrote in the Theses on the Chinese Question in 1965: "The liberation of the peasant from the constraints of the natural economy, the development of a ‘modern’ industry using the labor and capital resources provided by ‘modern’ agriculture, the creation of a national market, and, crowning it all, the exaltation of ‘national unity’, of a ‘national culture’ and of all the ‘modern’ attributes of state power, have never been and cannot be anything other than the program of capital accumulation.

However, far from limiting itself, in a bourgeois revolutionary movement, to the formal demand for the national state and political democracy, Marxism determines in the most rigorous manner the role of social classes in every revolution. The emergence of an industrial proletariat in China, as in Tsarist Russia or in Europe in 1848, meant for communists the necessity of a class organization that would exploit the crisis of the pre-bourgeois regime for its own political ends. Such is the line of the Communist Manifesto and of the October Revolution, a line that Marx defined as ‘permanent revolution.’"

"From the point of view of the definitive victory of communism, the ‘permanent’ character of the revolutionary process, which was supposed to deliver power to the proletariat of the backward countries, only made sense if the proletarian revolution succeeded in spreading to the metropolises of capital. Russia, said Marx in his second preface to the Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto, would be able to avoid the painful phase of capitalist accumulation only “if the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two revolutions complete each other.” Lenin's International not only took up this perspective for Soviet Russia, but extended it to the whole of Asia. As the “Theses of the Congress of the Peoples of the East,” held in Baku in 1920, recalled, "only the complete triumph of the social revolution and the establishment of a world communist economy can free the peasants of the East from ruin, misery, and exploitation. Therefore, they have no other way to emancipate themselves than to ally themselves with the revolutionary workers of the West, with their Soviet republics, and to fight at the same time against the foreign capitalists and their own despots (the landowners and the bourgeoisie) until the complete victory over the world bourgeoisie and the definitive establishment of the communist regime."

The revolutionary perspective that had led to victory in Russia was thus extended to China.

2.5 - The Marxist perspective in the Theses of the International

Marxism is a doctrine that arose with the modern industrial proletariat and accompanies it throughout the course of a social revolution: it does not need to be developed, completed, or enriched; it only needs to be defended and revived from its repeated and nefarious degenerations. The approach that the Communist International took to national and colonial questions, which was the result of the needs of the moment, did not involve updating revolutionary doctrine. On the contrary, it reaffirmed the entire Marxist doctrine and projected it onto the world stage.

When the Communist Manifesto proclaimed that “the communists support everywhere every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political conditions,” it was not referring only to the conditions typical of bourgeois capitalism. In fact, when it reviews the countries of the time, it can speak of a proletarian revolutionary movement directed against the bourgeoisie and its state apparatus only in England and France. For the rest of Europe, communists must support every insurrection aimed at overthrowing the feudal system, even together with the bourgeoisie itself, as soon as it takes a revolutionary position.

From the outset, Marxist doctrine had established the role of the different social classes in the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the tasks of the proletariat in what we call double revolutions. The workers were supposed to support those insurrections against the enemies of their enemies, and then immediately launch a further revolt against the bourgeoisie. This was because Marxism had also established as a general historical law that, after their victory in alliance with the proletariat, the democratic bourgeoisie would attack and massacre the proletariat in order to prevent a new revolutionary wave from sweeping away their new power.

In fact, the bourgeoisie immediately behaved like the executioner of communists and workers: shortly after its first revolutionary victory in France, by massacring Babeuf and the Equals, then in 1831 with the bourgeois monarchy, and in 1848 with the Second Republic.

The revolutionary events in Germany in 1848-49 also confirmed Marx and Engels' predictions about the role of the German bourgeoisie in the bourgeois-democratic revolution. After the March 1848 movement, it was the bourgeoisie who immediately seized state power and used it to repress the workers, who had been their allies in the struggle. If the German liberal bourgeoisie had confirmed its role by betraying the workers, Marx and Engels saw a new and imminent danger for the working class emerging in the form of petty-bourgeois democracy. In the “Address of the Central Committee to the League” of March 1850, they argued that the role played by the German liberal bourgeoisie in 1848 against the people would be taken over by the petty bourgeois democrats in the next revolution. The petty bourgeois party, the democratic party, was much more dangerous to the workers than the previous liberal party.

The Address warns them: "While the petty-bourgeois democrats want to bring the revolution to a conclusion as quickly as possible (...) it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from power, until the proletariat has conquered state power, until the association of proletarians, not only in one country, but in all the dominant countries of the world, has developed to the point where competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases, and until at least the decisive productive forces are concentrated in the hands of the proletarians. For us, it cannot be a question of transforming private property, but of destroying it; not of mitigating class antagonisms, but of abolishing classes; not of improving the present society, but of founding a new society.".

The Address clearly states what the position of the proletariat and its party must be before, during, and after the revolutionary struggle.

Before the struggle against the common reactionary enemy, petty-bourgeois democracy will preach “unity and conciliation” to the proletariat, trying to involve the proletariat in a democratic party, a party “in which generic social-democratic phrases dominate, behind which the specific interests of the petty bourgeoisie are hidden, and in which the specific demands of the proletariat ‘should not be advanced.’” To avoid “becoming an appendage of bourgeois democracy,” workers must “strive to build an independent, secret, and public organization of the workers' party.”

Subsequently, “in the case of a battle against a common enemy,” the Address argues that “there is no need for any special union,” since “as soon as this enemy must be fought directly, the interests of the two parties momentarily coincide,” so that a connection between the different forces in struggle will spontaneously establish itself. But the Address warns that at the moment of bloody struggle, “it will be above all the workers who will win victory with their courage, their determination, and their self-sacrifice,” while “in these struggles, the petty bourgeois masses will be slow, irresolute, and inactive.”

“But once victory has been won, it will try to mortgage it for itself, to urge the workers to remain calm and return to their homes and work, it will try to prevent so-called excesses and exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory.” Faced with this inevitable attitude of petty-bourgeois democracy, the Address warns the workers that “from the first moment of victory, mistrust must no longer be directed against the defeated reactionary party, but against their allies of yesterday,” because “as soon as the new governments have consolidated themselves to a certain extent, they will immediately begin their struggle against the workers.” Marx and Engels clearly state that “the betrayal of the workers will begin in the first hour of victory.” The way to counter the betrayal of the democrats is to “be armed and organized”; therefore, “the immediate independent and armed organization of the workers” is necessary.

The Address concludes with the revolutionary vision of a national struggle set within a broader context of international working-class struggle, since, according to Marx and Engels, even if the revolution in Germany is destined to go through a long revolutionary process, it could coincide with the victory of the working class in France, an event that would have repercussions on the revolutionary struggle in Germany, shortening its course.

In any case, the message to German workers is clear: they must assume “as soon as possible an independent party position, not allowing the hypocritical phrases of the petty-bourgeois democrats to divert them even for a moment from the independent organization of the proletarian party. Their battle cry must be: revolution forever!”

So it was not necessary to wait until 1927 to predict that the Chinese bourgeoisie would betray and massacre the workers. Marxism had recognized that, in the course of bourgeois-democratic revolutions, and therefore in their variants, which are the national revolutions of colonial and semi-colonial countries, the proletariat fights against the enemies of its enemies together with those social classes that have an interest in destroying the remnants of the feudal regime, eliminating the obstacles to the development of the productive forces and thus promoting the unfolding of the objective material conditions necessary for the revolutionary transformation of bourgeois society. At the same time, he predicted and warned the working class that the big bourgeoisie, and then the radical petty bourgeoisie, would initially retreat from the task of pushing their revolution to its conclusion, for fear of losing their class privileges, and would betray and repress the workers in the name of defending the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois order.

The path indicated to the proletariat is that of “permanent revolution”: not stopping at victory against pre-capitalist forces and institutions, but going further, overthrowing the power of former allies in the struggle against the ancien regime, carrying through democratic demands and radical measures, especially in the agrarian sphere, and even skipping the bourgeois phase if the pure proletarian revolution comes to the rescue in the advanced capitalist countries.

The proletariat's party has known since Marx and Engels what awaits the working class, and Lenin confirms this for the revolution in Russia. Even though this revolution has a bourgeois-democratic character, Lenin does not draw the conclusion, like the Mensheviks, that the working class and its party should stand aside and leave the bourgeoisie to carry out its revolution, or follow in its wake, but he reiterates that it is necessary to maintain political autonomy and take the lead in the revolutionary struggle. Referring to the revolution in Russia, Lenin wrote in 1905 in “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution”:

"It is more useful for the bourgeoisie that the necessary transformations in the direction of bourgeois democracy be carried out more slowly, more gradually, more cautiously, less resolutely, through reforms rather than revolution; that these reforms be as cautious as possible with regard to the ‘respectable’ institutions of feudalism (the monarchy, for example); that these transformations contribute as little as possible to developing revolutionary action, initiative, and energy among the masses, that is, among the peasants and, above all, the workers. For otherwise it would be all the easier for the workers to “pass the rifle from one shoulder to the other,” as the French say, that is, to turn against the bourgeoisie itself the weapons which the bourgeois revolution would provide them with (...) For the working class, on the contrary, it is more advantageous that the necessary transformations in the sense of bourgeois democracy be achieved precisely through revolution and not through reforms (...)

Marxism teaches the proletariat not to stand aloof from the bourgeois revolution, to show indifference towards it, to abandon its leadership to the bourgeoisie, but, on the contrary, to participate in it most energetically, to fight most resolutely for consistent proletarian democracy, to carry the revolution through to the end. We cannot go beyond the bourgeois democratic framework of the Russian revolution, but we can enlarge it to immense proportions; we can and must fight within this framework in the interests of the proletariat, for its immediate needs and for the conditions that prepare its forces for future complete victory.

In backward Tsarist Russia, highly concentrated and ultra-modern islands of full capitalism had formed, and a proletarian stratum had emerged which, although a small minority compared to the vast peasant population, was, given the conditions of advanced capitalism in which it found itself, engaged in an anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist class struggle. The threatening presence of this proletariat was viewed with terror by the Russian bourgeoisie, hence its hesitant role in carrying out its own revolution and sweeping away the old pre-capitalist institutions. Only the proletariat could do this.

Lenin continues: "Theory teaches us Marxists (...) that the bourgeoisie is inconsistent, greedy, and cowardly in its support of the revolution. The bourgeoisie as a whole will inevitably side with the counterrevolution, with autocracy, against the revolution, against the people, as soon as its petty and selfish interests are satisfied (...) What remains is the ‘people’, that is, the proletariat and the peasants: the proletariat alone is capable of marching steadily to the end, since it goes far beyond the democratic revolution (...) Among the peasants there is a mass of semi-proletarian elements alongside the petty-bourgeois elements. This makes them unstable too, forcing the proletariat to group itself into a strictly class-based party. But the instability of the peasants differs radically from that of the bourgeoisie, because at the present moment the peasants are interested not so much in the absolute preservation of private property as in the confiscation of the land of the landowners, one of the main forms of this property. Without becoming socialists, without ceasing to be petty bourgeois, the peasants can become determined partisans, and among the most radical, of the democratic revolution.

Lenin therefore argues: "The proletariat must carry out the democratic revolution by winning over the peasant masses, in order to crush the resistance of the autocracy by force and paralyze the instability of the bourgeoisie (...) It must carry out the socialist revolution by winning over the semi-proletarian elements of the population, in order to break the resistance of the bourgeoisie by force and paralyze the instability of the peasants and the petty bourgeoisie."

Only the proletariat is capable of carrying out the democratic revolution, provided that, as the only consistently revolutionary class in today's society, it draws the peasant masses behind it and gives political direction to their spontaneous struggle against large landowners and the feudal state. For Lenin, there are three imperatives for proletarian tactics in the bourgeois-democratic revolution: "1) to recognize the leading role of the proletariat, its role as the leader of the revolution; 2) to recognize as the goal of the struggle the conquest of power by the proletariat, with the help of the other revolutionary classes; 3) to maintain that the first, and perhaps the only, place among these helpers belongs to the peasants“ (”The Goal of the Struggle of the Proletariat in Our Revolution," Works XV).

But these imperatives presuppose another, namely that the party of the proletariat must retain its programmatic, political, and organizational independence.

2.6 - Nature and prospects of the revolution in China and the East

The question arose in China as it had in Russia. The even greater backwardness of the Chinese countryside was offset by an enormous influx of foreign capital into cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Canton, which had allowed the emergence of a highly concentrated proletariat. As in Russia, the situation in China, and in colonial countries in general, further enhanced the vanguard role of the proletariat, since the national bourgeoisie of the colonial and semi-colonial countries, in the historical period in which the proletariat acts as an autonomous force, is no longer like the old European bourgeois class that fought against the feudal past. It is a class entirely different from the latter, closely linked to international capitalism in both the economic and political spheres, and even if it aspires to give itself a modern structure more in line with its class interests, and therefore with national independence and unification, it is always assailed by the fear of setting in motion social forces that are no longer controllable.

In the 18th century, the European bourgeoisie played a revolutionary role against feudalism because it managed to forge links with the peasant masses who aspired to land ownership. The bourgeoisie was able to mobilize the peasants because they would divide the land belonging to the feudal class among themselves. This paved the way for the victory of the French Revolution, in which it was the peasants themselves who swept away feudalism and subsequently provided troops for Napoleon's armies.

In China, on the other hand, it was the bourgeoisie itself, which had accumulated capital through trade with foreigners and invested it in land, crushing the peasants with heavy rents and usurious loans. In China, the bourgeoisie had not developed, as in Europe, in opposition to the other classes of the old society, but as a mere appendage of the latter, grafting itself onto the mandarin caste through the trade in land. Land was not owned by the feudal nobility, but mainly by a mercantile and usurious bourgeoisie. The oppression exercised over the peasants was not based on personal ties but on purely mercantile relations, since the disproportion between the enormous peasant population and the land monopolized by the bourgeoisie allowed the latter to demand exorbitant rents. Furthermore, the miserable condition of the tenant farmer forced him to borrow working capital, ending up in the hands of the usurer.

There was therefore no feudal property, so the serfdom of the peasants did not consist of the bondage of labor that the lord could freely dispose of, but was almost always a debt contracted for the rental of a plot of land. For this reason, in China there was no question of an agrarian revolution led by the bourgeoisie against the feudal lords. In general, the bourgeoisie could not free the peasants from serfdom, because in doing so, the bourgeoisie, which owned the land and had mercantile and usurious capital, would have gone against its own class interests. If in Russia, as Lenin noted, “the bourgeois revolution is impossible as a revolution of the bourgeoisie,” this was even more true in China. Nor did the oppression of imperialism make the anti-colonial Chinese bourgeoisie more revolutionary than the anti-tsarist Russian bourgeoisie. The Chinese bourgeoisie was bound to imperialism by ties stronger than any aspiration to independence.

But if the bourgeoisie could not be entrusted with the realization of its own political and national objectives, neither could the peasants. Despite the enormous importance of the peasant question, the Chinese revolution could not end up as an essentially peasant revolution. In the “Theses on the Chinese Revolution,” in response to the Stalinist and then Maoist conceptions, our party identified “the originality of bourgeois revolutions in the imperialist era”:

"In the past, all (revolutions) have mobilized the peasantry in various forms, including armed organization; all have brought about profound changes in agriculture to varying degrees. But Marxism has always emphasized the inability of the peasant class to have its own politics. It has shown that agrarian uprisings, an integral part of bourgeois revolutions, have only succeeded by moving under the direction of the cities and ceding power to them. The 1919 Manifesto of the Communist International already insisted on the dual character of the peasantry and the reasons why it cannot act as an independent class: the peasant is only the social representative of bourgeois relations; he always leaves the task of his political representation to others. To all the champions of “peasant socialism” who, in Russia as in China, reproached us for “underestimating” the peasantry, we countered with these teachings of Marxism, replying that the originality of the revolutions in the East did not lie in the armed intervention of the rural masses, but in the prospect of proletarian leadership toward goals that were not inevitably bourgeois.

2.7 - Theses on national and colonial questions at the Second Congress of the International

Before falling under the control of Stalinism, the Communist International had clearly outlined the tasks and prospects for revolution in China and other colonial and semi-colonial countries. Starting from the solid basis of the objective evolution of capitalism on a world scale, it entrusted to the communist movement and its centralized world organization the gigantic historical task of integrating the revolutionary movements of national liberation in the colonies with the world strategy of the proletarian revolution in the imperialist metropolises. The Theses of the International identified the close link, produced by world capitalism, between the Western proletarian movement and the masses of the subjugated countries outside Europe.

Colonies were one of the main sources of Western capitalism's strength. The large markets of the colonial countries and the immense territories to be exploited were the pillars that supported the economies of European countries, first and foremost England, the guardian of the bourgeois world order. Capitalism, undermined by inevitable crises of overproduction, poured its contradictions into the colonial territories, which became additional markets for the sale of surplus products and provided raw materials for the industries of the metropolises.

But colonial possessions also allowed the bourgeoisie of European countries to maintain class domination in their own countries. The exploitation of the colonies was useful for preserving the bourgeois order because the income it generated was a powerful tool for binding certain sectors of the working class to imperialism. With this income, the bourgeoisie could afford to make certain concessions to the so-called labor aristocracy, which became the agent of imperialism within the class. Hence the betrayal in Europe of the leaders of the Second International who, while embracing the slogan of defending the bourgeois homeland, denied any importance or function to the colonial question. These supposed leaders of the proletariat were so imbued with bourgeois ideas that they expressed no solidarity with the revolutionary movement in the colonies, having themselves become supporters of imperialism.

On the contrary, the Communist International, in order to overthrow bourgeois power worldwide, supported the need to unite the struggles of the Western proletariat with the revolutions in the colonies. From the Theses of the Second Congress:

"The suppression of European colonial power through the proletarian revolution will overthrow European capitalism. The proletarian revolution and the revolution in the colonies must converge to a certain extent for the struggle to be victorious. The CI must therefore extend the scope of its activity by establishing relations with the revolutionary forces working for the destruction of imperialism in the economically and politically dominated countries" (Thesis IV).

Against the chauvinism of the Second International, the Third International, in which “the will of the revolutionary proletariat of the world is concentrated,” declares in its Theses that "its task is to organize the working class of the whole world for the overthrow of the capitalist order and the establishment of communism. The CI is an instrument of struggle whose task is to unite all the revolutionary forces of the world" (Thesis V).

In the view of the International, the global attack on the domination of the great imperialist powers, first and foremost England, had to be carried out by integrating the single revolution, with purely proletarian aims, of the West with the incipient double revolutions of the East. It was a grand vision that extended the Marxist doctrine of dual revolutions beyond the traditional borders of Europe, projecting onto the immense world stage the struggle announced by Marx and Engels in 1850 for a “permanent revolution,” whose central political leadership was entrusted to the proletariat and its party, even if, in areas where capitalism was just emerging within a predominantly pre-capitalist economic framework, was at the head of non-proletarian forces.

In these areas, the small but often combative local proletariat found itself fighting alongside the urban and, above all, rural petty bourgeoisie, whose goals could only be bourgeois-democratic, in a situation that was explosive from a revolutionary point of view due to the presence of peasant masses hungry for land. In this context, the International based its revolutionary struggle not on generic popular and national blocs, but on the poor and semi-proletarian peasant masses of the colonies, taking the lead and directing their armed revolt not only against imperialism but also against the local propertied classes, the bourgeoisie, and the large landowners. These would have been ready to use the revolutionary impetus of the masses to wrest limited freedom from the ruling power, only to immediately turn against their own allies, the proletariat and the peasants, to crush them and safeguard their class rule, not hesitating to ally themselves with imperialism itself in the desperate defense of their common economic and social privileges.

To this end, the Communist International extended to the East, which was rising up in struggle, the lessons that had been learned in blood in Europe. Young communist parties were therefore required to preserve their strictest political, organizational, and military independence, maintaining a clear programmatic distinction from the bourgeois national parties, especially if these were demagogically “socialist.”

The Theses state: "It is necessary to vigorously combat attempts by emancipation movements that are neither communist nor revolutionary in reality to raise the communist banner; The Communist International must not support revolutionary movements in the colonies and backward countries unless the elements of the purest communist parties – and communists in fact – are grouped together and instructed in their particular tasks, that is, in their mission of fighting the bourgeois and democratic movement. The CI must enter into temporary relations and even form unions with revolutionary movements in the colonies and backward countries, without ever merging with them, and always preserving the independent character of the proletarian movement, even in its embryonic form” (Thesis XI).

Supplementary Theses were added to the national and colonial questions precisely to clarify the problems linked to the demarcation between the political camps within the national liberation movements of the colonies, to the support for their revolutionary popular and above all peasant wings, and to the indispensable safeguarding of the political, programmatic, and organizational independence of the communist parties, “even if still in their embryonic stage.” The meaning of these Theses was that, as already formulated by Lenin, the bourgeois democratic revolutionary movement should be supported without ever becoming confused with it.

The theses of the Second Congress reiterate this in no uncertain terms:

“There are two movements in the oppressed countries that are growing further apart every day. The first is the bourgeois-democratic nationalist movement, which has a program of political independence and bourgeois order; the second is that of the poor and backward peasants and workers who are fighting for their emancipation from all forms of exploitation. The first movement seeks, often successfully, to control the second. But the Communist International and its member parties must fight this control and develop independent class consciousness among the working masses of the colonies. One of the most important tasks to this end is the formation of communist parties that organize the workers and peasants and lead them to revolution and the establishment of the Soviet republic" (Thesis VII).

"The revolution in the colonies in its initial stage cannot be a communist revolution, but if from the outset the leadership is in the hands of a communist vanguard, the masses will not be deceived, and in the various stages of the movement their revolutionary experience will only grow.

"It would certainly be a mistake in the Eastern countries to try to apply communist principles to the agrarian question immediately. In its first stage, the revolution in the colonies must have a program involving petty-bourgeois reforms, such as the division of land. But it does not necessarily follow that the leadership of the revolution must be left to bourgeois democracy. The proletarian party must instead develop powerful and systematic propaganda in favor of the Soviets and organize Soviets of peasants and workers. These must work in close collaboration with the Soviet republics of the advanced capitalist countries to achieve the final victory over capitalism throughout the world. In this way, the masses of the backward countries, led by the conscious proletariat of the developed capitalist countries, will arrive at communism without passing through the various stages of capitalist evolution" (Thesis IX).

In the grand vision of the International, the proletariat of the colonies, led by the Communist Party, was to be at the forefront of the anti-imperialist struggle. The struggle for power in the colonies had to be conducted in close connection with the proletarian struggle in the metropolises, since only victory in the advanced capitalist countries could guarantee the survival of communist political power in a country with an economy that was still largely backward, and even enable it to skip the bourgeois stage.

Stalinism dismantled the communist perspective in the course of the Chinese revolution, granting the bourgeoisie the role of revolutionary leadership and subordinating the proletariat and the Communist Party to the leadership of the Kuomintang. This was not a mistake: it was the bourgeois counterrevolution that was overthrowing proletarian power in Russia and at the same time destroying the proletarian and communist vision of the world revolution, turning the International from the World Party of the proletariat into a tool to be used for the interests of the Russian state. The victory of the counterrevolution in Moscow also brought about the defeat of the revolution in China.

Unfortunately, in the 1920s, just when class antagonisms in China had become so acute as to raise the question of political power, opportunism penetrated the International and imposed directives on the Chinese communists, consisting essentially in renouncing the independent role of the Communist Party, which led to the disastrous defeat of the impetuous struggles of the proletariat and the peasant masses.

(To be continued in the next issue)

Part 2
Feudalism

Presented at the January 2023 meeting [GM145]

The bourgeoisie’s first attempts to provide itself with an ideology of its own date back to its emergence in around the 13th century.

The centuries before that and feudalism we covered in “Communism” No. 85 (“The succession of modes of production - The tertiary form of production”).

The Enlightenment and the bourgeoisie have given a negative assessment of the Middle Ages: both have in common the anti-historical and anti-materialist idea of an essentially homogeneous millennium. Feudalism was not a monolithic phenomenon, it did not develop at the same time everywhere, and it had different characteristics depending on time and place. Several historians have used the latter correct observation to deny, or underestimate, the existence of a consistent common denominator in the feudal system of production and in the consequent social relations.

Capitalism, which emerged first in England then more or less gradually in the rest of the world, also has different characteristics in different areas. The economy and capitalist society in Bangladesh is not the same as that in North America, but the laws that govern such different societies and worlds are the same, they are the laws of capitalism. No mode of production exists in a “pure” form; in each of them there remain larger or smaller remnants of previous forms of production, which cannot be annulled by decree.

And in each of them we witness the emergence of embryonic new forms of production, which initially might well fit in with the old world and not challenge it, yet are later destined to undermine it.

Embryonic feudalism is already visible in the Roman Empire of the third and fourth centuries, when, due to a combination of factors, the latifundium, a production system based on slavery, goes into crisis. Soil depletion, heavy tax burdens, and insecurity lead independent peasants to abandon their lands and take refuge with large landowners, who send them to cultivate the best land and graze herds on the worst. Slowly slaves and independent peasants see a blurring of the boundaries between them, the latter becoming cultivators on the land of a large landowner, from which they can no longer move away, even though they are not slaves.

In the last decade of the third century the Roman emperor Diocletian implemented major administrative, monetary (failed), and fiscal reforms. The basis of taxation would become the annona, the contribution in-kind introduced for the maintenance of the army. Landowners were taxed according to their ability to work (capita) and the amount of land sufficient to support a person (iuga). To this end, a census was introduced, affecting the entire empire and to be held every 5 years. Caput and iugum were not fixed entities: often a woman was worth half a caput, and the iugum varied according to the type of land.

With the administrative reform establishing the tetrarchy, dividing the empire into twelve dioceses, and doubling the number of provinces to 96 (due in part to the later Emperor Constantine), the power of the governors of the provinces led to a strengthening of the central power. The governors' power diminished however vis-à-vis the local landowners, especially those of the senatorial order.

Army personnel doubled to nearly 500,000. The fiscal, administrative and monetary reforms generated a large increase in the number of bureaucrats in the imperial administration. The Christian rhetorician and apologist Lactantius said there were more men living off tax money than there were paying it.

Within the provinces were the municipalities, whose officials, the curiales, were responsible for collecting taxes. These tended to abandon this activity since they were personally liable if the taxes were not collected; Diocletian therefore decided to make their function hereditary. Also bound to their activities were the artisans and above all the peasants, who often fled to avoid paying taxes. To prevent this they were now increasingly tied to the land they farmed, and together with the land they were bought and sold.

Diocletian's reform did not bring great results, and so in the year 313 Emperor Constantine, in addition to the famous edict of Milan, issued the indiction edict, concerning taxes: the principle of heredity was applied more broadly and fully, with obligatory subjection to the land. Hereditariness also applied to artisans and merchants. In the year 332 Constantine forbade settlers to leave their land, on pain of enslavement. Slaves continued to work the land along with the settlers, but their conditions were increasingly similar.

The Roman empire for its citizens was now synonymous with increasingly oppressive and unbearable taxation, as well as with the arrogance of the central power and the large landowners. Thus, the so-called barbarians were increasingly seen as liberators.

From Comunismo No. 84, ‘The Succession of Modes of Production in Marxist Theory - The Secondary Form of Production, Germanic Variant’: «During the Roman empire’s centuries of decline, the city, the residence of the great landowners, lost its dominance over the countryside and did not manage to regain it, which corresponded to the dissolution of the state as the central authority. Economically, the consequence of this decline was a lowering of labor productivity, especially of agricultural labor, in the large extensively cultivated latifundia (landed estates). The only possible solution was to break them up into plots and entrust them to peasant-laborers by way of private ownership, so that agriculture could be developed in an intensive way. Thus the breaking up of the great Roman villas marked the end of extensive agriculture, and the relationship of the immediate producer to the instruments of production would progressively change, passing from colonist status, to serfdom (...) The fundamental distinction between the ancient classical and Asiatic variants and the Germanic variants is that in the former, the relations of land ownership involve collective forms that ensure the predominance of the state; in the Germanic, on the other hand, private property prevails over collective land ownership, which serves the former».

Feudalism emerged slowly and laboriously from the encounter, from the collision and synthesis between a Roman world and latifundium slave economy now in decline, and a mostly Germanic world which asserted itself by right of conquest, but whose economic and social structure was more backward. «The more advanced social structures of the vanquished act on those of the victors. The land splitting operated by the Romans comes to an end, and the opposite process of concentration of land in the hands of the lords occurs, from which the relation of serfdom would develop».

A clarification on the Germans: it is true that such were the majority of the peoples who first settled within the borders of the empire and then conquered it, but along with them were peoples of Slavic and Turkic-Mongolian origin, such as the Huns, Hungarians, and Avars. Moreover, defeated tribes sometimes became part of the victorious ones, or merged with others: purity of race never existed.

The feudal structure is regulated by Charlemagne, king of the Franks, crowned by Pope Leo III as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire on Christmas Eve in the year 800, and yet one cannot talk of centralization in relation to feudalism, despite attempts to do so by those who held power. Revived here is the alliance between throne and altar, previously inaugurated by Constantine, from positions of strength, in the year 325 by his convening of the Council of Nicaea, and followed up by Theodosius in 380 with the Edict of Thessalonica, which prohibited all cults outside of Nicean Christianity.

The various Germanic peoples had gradually converted to Christianity but in the Arian version, the Franks being the exception.

The alliance was in the interest of both Charlemagne and the pope, as both wanted to escape the suffocating hegemony of Byzantium, despite it being, fortunately for them, geographically distant. Those appointed counts or marquises could have their titles revoked by Charlemagne, and the titles were not hereditary: this allowed central power to remain in the hands of the emperor, to the extent it was possible within a feudal structure.

With Charlemagne's death in the year 814 and the partitioning of the empire among his successors, there began the slow decline of the empire, now a Germanic one, which would endure for a millennium, until 1871. The central power, beset with difficulties from the start, was increasingly eroded by the feudal lords. A rebellion by the latter in the French kingdom of Charles the Bald, led to the placitum, or capitulary, of Quierzy, in the year 877, by which the hereditariness of the great fiefdoms was recognized.

In the 10th century the Saxon Ottonian dynasty, in the Romano-Germanic empire, attempted to restore the strength of imperial power by appointing bishops as feudal lords, who, as such, could not transmit their fiefdom hereditarily, which therefore returned to the emperor and were once more at his disposal. The emperor's authority over the pope, effectively appointed by the former, was also reaffirmed.

This attempt by the Ottonians was only successful in the short term. Emperors and feudal lords, despite numerous clashes, were aware that they could not do without each other. With the “Constitutio de feudis” issued in 1037 by Emperor Charles II the Salian, the hereditariness of minor fiefdoms was recognized: in the 11th century feudalism assumed its most typical characteristics of power fragmentation. This same century also saw the birth, or rebirth, of cities.

The Church of Rome

Two opposing accounts on ecclesiastics from the same church milieu. The bishops of the province of Narbonne in 1054 said, «Let no Christian kill another Christian, for there is no doubt that to kill a Christian is to shed the blood of Christ.” Bishop Burcard of Worms, around 1024 wrote, «Every day, murders worthy of wild beasts are committed among St. Peter's employees. They pounce on each other out of drunkenness, pride or for no reason at all. Over the course of a year, thirty-five absolutely innocent servants of St. Peter were killed by other servants of the Church; and the murderers, instead of repenting, glory in their crime». These testimonies help us better understand the world in those times, but we gladly leave moral judgments to others. We are as far from the apologists as we are from the detractors.

What is worthy of analysis is the role played by the Christianity of the Church of Rome, as regards ideology and its legitimization of feudalism as a social structure. The Church, in addition to its ideological function, was also an organic part of that society: the prince-bishops of Brixen, for example, exercised power over their territories from 1027 to 1803.

Christianity, before it became the ideology of the feudal world, was not the ideology of slavery. This is because when it became the religion of the Roman Empire, the slave mode of production was already at the start of a slow decline. Christianity identified with Roman imperial ideology, but not with a particular mode of production. A Christianity with an unambiguous identity does not exist: there are thousands of Christianities, all dependent on time and place, and, most importantly, on social class. Early Christianity was understood by slaves, and those who were “last”, as a movement aimed at their liberation, and in this it had a revolutionary significance. The owners and the powerful, however, understood it differently, and in a way that was closer to the truth.

When we speak of early Christianity we are not referring to the figure of Jesus, who, as far as we know, did not want to found any religion, but to restore Judaism. The same is true of the Essenes: they were forms of millenarianism and messianism which were very widespread at the time, taking their inspiration from the biblical prophets. The Essenes were heretics in relation to traditional Pharisaic Judaism. Jesus and John the Baptist, were heretics, in a different way, in relation to the Essenes, with whom probably they had had dealings: they were heretics squared.

The true founder of Christianity was Paul of Tarsus, called by Gramsci “the Lenin of Christianity,” by virtue of his undoubted qualities due to which he was recognized as a leader by his followers.

Paul said that masters were to treat slaves as brothers, and that slaves were not only to do the same but also to remain in the place to which God had assigned them. In the “Letter to the Romans” we read, “Let each one be subject to the constituted authorities. For there is no authority except from God: those that exist are established by God. Therefore whoever opposes authority, opposes the order established by God.” In the “Letter to the Ephesians,” “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, in the simplicity of your heart, as to Christ.” No abolition of slavery: liberation, though strongly desired as part of the sincere feeling of brotherhood among all men, was postponed to the future life, that of the kingdom of heaven.

Similarly, many centuries later, Hegel attempts to resolve the real contradictions of the material world by transporting them to the world of absolute spirit.

With Paul of Tarsus some contradictory aspects contained in the Gospels are retained, and other aspects of revolutionary significance are lost. In the Gospels Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is among men, here and now: the interpretation in an immanent sense, whereby the kingdom of heaven is to be realized in the real world, is legitimate. With Paul the kingdom of heaven acquires an abyssal, and by now unbridgeable, distance from the world.

Christianity was the ideology of the feudal world, though it existed before and continued to exist afterwards. It had great battles with the modern world, which challenged it, but it has also demonstrated a great capacity to adapt; a capacity shown even in the 1960s, with the Second Vatican Council.

At the end of feudal society, whose expression it was, Christianity itself survived: we are in the 16th century, when the bourgeoisie interpreted and used the Protestant Reformation to its own ends, and especially in the 17th century, when the bourgeoisie arrives at its doctrine of natural law.

This is visible in the Baroque too, an artistic mode that is both fascinating and inseparable from the Christianity of the Counter-Reformation. The exaltation that Baroque art makes of the faith, of the glory, the power and the wealth of the Church, as well as its redundancy, aims to conceal the fear of emptiness, of nothingness, of death. This is a dominant presence in the Baroque, accompanied by the biblical vanity of vanities. To this omnipresence of death we can give two explanations. The first is the usual one, which consists in the function of religions in general, to exorcise the fear of death. The second consists in the sense of death, of its own death, felt by a feudal or semi-feudal world and by its ideological and power apparatus. The Counter-Reformation Church can smell a corpse, but is unable to recognize that the stench emanates from herself.

With the disappearance of the feudal social structure whose ideological representation it was, Christianity, despite the power of the Church remaining strong and enduring, becomes a head without a body, a shadow without a reality, a ghost destined to lament itself for eternity, like the damned souls Dante encounters in his Inferno.

Feudalism and Feudalisms

Feudalism has had different characteristics according to the time and place. The feudalism of the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne and his successors is not identical to that seen elsewhere. There were regions such as Scandinavia, Ireland, and Friesland (the border region between present-day Holland and Germany) that remained essentially outside this social and productive system. A system that took on different aspects in the Byzantine Empire, given the permanence of a strong central power, unlike the territories of the former Western Empire.

Historian Marc Bloch, in his text “Feudal Society,” writes of the Byzantine Empire:

“There, after the anti-aristocratic reaction of the eighth century, a government which had preserved the great administrative traditions of the Roman period, and which was furthermore concerned to provide itself with a strong army, created tenements charged with military obligations to the state – true fiefs in one sense, but differing from those in the West in that they were peasant fiefs, each consisting of a small farm. Thenceforth it was a paramount concern of the imperial government to protect these ‘soldiers’ properties’, as well as small-holdings in general, against the encroachments of the rich and powerful.

“Nevertheless there came a time towards the end of the 11th century when the Empire, overwhelmed by economic conditions which made independence more and more difficult for a peasantry constantly in debt, and further weakened by internal discords, ceased to extend any useful protection to the free farmers. In this way it not only lost precious fiscal resources, but found itself at the mercy of the magnates, who alone were capable thereafter of raising the necessary troops from among their own dependents”.

A few lines earlier we read that in “the societies where an armed peasantry survived, some knew neither vassalage nor the manor, while others knew them only in very imperfect forms”.

England, on the other hand, shows us a Germanic-type society with an almost spontaneous evolution, at least until the 11th century and the Norman invasion. Alongside the feudal relations of vassalage there coexisted the older gentile relations. It is after the Norman invasion that we can speak of full feudalism. England also has another feature that distinguishes it from much of the feudal world: the absence of allodial land, at least in the period following the Norman conquest: the new lords had taken possession of all the available land. The allods, or allotments, usually small or very small in size, found almost everywhere in the centuries of the Middle Ages, were free of feudal encumbrances, and often cultivated by the same people who farmed the lord's land: they were definitely important for the survival of the peasants, who could dispose of the entire harvest of such land. In contemporary northern France as well allodial land was non-existent, or almost non-existent.

Different again is the situation in Spain, where feudalism was imposed mainly from the 11th century onward, as a consequence of the “reconquest” carried out by the Christian kingdoms in the north of the peninsula. Here the need to repopulate territories abandoned by the Muslims, and the consequent presence of settlers consisting of armed peasants, who were often in flight from heavier forms of seigniorial subjugation, led to less onerous conditions for the latter. This did not apply to Catalonia, a Marche of the Carolingian Empire, and Aragon, which was under the influence of the Franks.

There were imported or quasi-imported forms of feudalism: England after the Norman invasion of 1066 and the states founded by the Crusaders after 1099. French feudal institutions, which the Vikings had made their own after settling in the region later called Normandy, were introduced into England.

Let us again hear what Bloch has to say. «As for Southern Italy, it had been partitioned, before the arrival of the Normans, among three different powers. In the Lombard principalities of Benevento, Capua, and Salerno the practices of personal dependence were very widespread, though they had not been developed into a well-organized hierarchic system. In the Byzantine provinces, oligarchies of landowners, warriors, and often merchants also, dominated the mass of the humble folk who were sometimes bound to them by a sort of patron-client relationship. Finally, in the regions ruled by the Arab emirs there was nothing even remotely akin to vassalage».

Even within Charlemagne's Empire there are different situations. The territories east of the Elbe were Christianized, and partly repopulated, by Germanic peoples. Still farther east, Poles and Russians were subjected to raids and domination by Turko-Mongol peoples. In Russia serfdom did not fully take hold until the mid-16th century, with Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible and his victory at Kazan against the Tartars. In Sardinia feudalism arrived in the 15th century, along with Aragonese rule. Other forms of feudalism are those of the Ottoman Empire and the Japanese Empire.

Also when this system of production and social relations ended varied greatly: in Russia serfdom was abolished in 1861, in Romania corvées were abolished in 1864.

The bourgeoisie really likes to accuse Marxists of schematism, which supposedly prevents us from grasping the richness of history. In fact the only thing that is schematic is their fear, and consequent hatred, of our determinism which, applied to the analysis of the various successive societies and forms of production, sounds the death knell for their world. The schematism is entirely on the part of the bourgeoisie, as also are the myths, positive or negative, about the feudal world.

Scientific communism has always kept in mind the complexity of the phenomenon that was feudalism, and its extreme diversification in space and time. This is made very clear for example in a letter from Engels to Marx dated December 16, 1882. Engels understood that while corvées tended to decrease and even disappear in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this was not also happening east of the Elbe, in Prussia, Poland, and Russia, where a “second edition” of serfdom (Marx & Engels Selected Correspondence, L & W, 1934) was forming at the end of the Middle Ages, and which once established survived until the nineteenth century.

In this great variety there is a common denominator: feudalism consisted of a system of production and social relations with a low level of technology and consequent agricultural production that did not rise above subsistence level. In such a system the lordly class, whether secular or ecclesiastical, appropriated all, or almost all, of the surplus rural production provided by the peasantry. To the church went the tithe, or ‘tenth’.

The Ideology of Feudal Society

Feudal society was essentially composed of two classes: those who worked the land, largely serfs, and those, the unproductive class, who took possession of their labor. There are also artisans and merchants, also important but marginal, at least in the early Middle Ages, and installed in the pores of that society, in which it served a purpose.

The ideological representation of such a society is tripartite. As early as the 9th century, King Alfred the Great of England wrote that the king must have “men of prayer, men of horse, men of work.” Around 1020 Bishop Adalberon of Laon in one of his poems to the Capetian king Robert the Pious writes, «The society of the faithful forms one body; but the state comprises three», these are defined by him as oratores, those who pray, bellatores, those who fight, and laboratores. The latter are referred to as servants (servi), with a misleading definition, but it is very interesting to read, «Money, clothing, nourishment, servants provide everything to everybody; no free man could live without servants. Is there work to be done? One wants to spend lavishly? We see kings and prelates making themselves servants of their own servants; the master is fed by the servant, he who claims to be feeding him».

These words bring to mind Hegel's servant-master dialectic. In this conception there of course exists between the three parts, later called “orders,” and later still “states,” not antagonism but harmony. Again from the poem quoted: “These three coexisting parts do not suffer from the fact of being separated: the services rendered by one of them is the condition for the work of the other two; each in turn is in charge of assisting the whole. Thus, this threefold group is not less united, and this is how the law has been able to triumph and the world has been able to enjoy peace”

All class societies, yesterday as today, aspire to “social peace,” which is nothing other than the acceptance of the existing state of affairs by the subject classes; a state of affairs identified with God's will, then with Nature, and later still with Democracy and the Market.

Returning to the laboratores, they cannot be identified with serfs, or even with workers in general. They do not represent “everyone else” with respect to the first two orders, but the “upper” part of the third, consisting of artisans and merchants. The “lower” part, consisting of serfs bound to the land, servants and urban wage earners, was not even taken into consideration.

The same is true of the “third estate” in the French Revolution, theoretically consisting of all non-members of the clergy and nobility. In fact this third estate, of which Sieyès said it was nothing and wanted to be everything, consisted of the upper part of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie in the professions: peasants, artisans and wage earners continued to be disregarded. The plebs, especially urban, were then a kind of fourth estate which only with difficulty could distance itself from the third.

In 1901 the painter Pellizza da Volpedo completed his famous painting “The Fourth Estate,” depicting agricultural laborers. As communists, we can appreciate the painting but not the title. Defining the proletariat as a “fourth estate” implies a reformist vision, which might have been shared by De Amicis or Prampolini, but not by us. The fourth estate is the last estate in society and wants to be the first; it is the dominated part that aspires to dominate over the others. For communists the proletariat is a class, not an order or estate; its aim is not to dominate over the other classes, which in this conception would continue to exist, but to eliminate all classes including its own.

The medieval tripartite conception of society looks like a worse version of Plato's “Republic,” with priests instead of philosophers. One difference, in favor of the medievals, is that their ideology was an expression of real productive and social relations.

The Birth of the Towns

The birth, or rebirth, of the towns and cities becomes apparent in the 11th and 12th centuries, preceded, around the 10th century, by the phenomenon of “encastellation”, that is, by the appearance of castles almost everywhere; castles that functioned as the residence of the feudal lord and as a fortress to defend against raids. Sometimes they were old towns that were repopulated, even more often they were boroughs, that is, new towns that were formed around the old castles inhabited by the lords, or at key points on the trade routes. The inhabitants of the boroughs were actually called burghers or bourgeois.

The causes of this phenomenon were various and inter-related. First, there was a significant increase in population. The population of Europe roughly doubled between the 10th and 14th centuries.

Every city and town had been depopulated, a phenomenon that had begun as early as the 3rd and 4th centuries. The city of Rome, which had had more than a million inhabitants, only had about 30,000 after the Gothic wars of the 6th century. The reversal of this trend occurred slowly from the 10th century onward.

Between the 9th and 10th centuries the Saracen invasions ended, at least the main ones, along with those of the Hungarians. The former came to sack Rome in the year 846, not penetrating the Aurelian walls but sacking the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul outside the walls. The Leonine walls, protecting St. Peter's, date to this time, their construction ordered by Pope Leo VI. In the year 849 the Saracens are defeated at the naval battle of Ostia by an alliance between the papacy and the Christian duchies of Amalfi, Gaeta, Naples and Sorrento. In 916 the Saracens were driven from their settlement on the Liri River in Latium. Between 970 and 980 they were driven out of Fraxinetum, a settlement on what is now the French Riviera, from which they pushed into the Alpine valleys. After that date it was rarer for the raids to push far inland.

The Hungarians had settled in Pannonia between the 9th and 10th centuries: to this day “the conquest of the homeland” is still celebrated in Hungary, dated 896. The Hungarians were later defeated by imperial troops in 955.

The Vikings, then Normans, also began to settle as early as the 9th century around the mouth of the Seine. From here, in the 11th century, they set off to England and southern Italy. Their raids as well, therefore, also thinned out after the year 1000.

Between the 9th and 14th centuries there was also a rise in temperature, a factor favorable to agricultural production.

There was also technical progress, certainly limited but nonetheless important. Water mills, present since ancient times but of little use in the presence of slave labor, multiplied. In around the 11th century the three-year land rotation started to take the place of the two-year rotation, allowing two-thirds of the land to be used instead of half. At the same time the heavy plow appeared, which penetrated deeper into the soil and could be pulled by horses or oxen. Even the harrow, already present, was now being pulled by horses, at least by those farmers who were in a position to do so. The first evidence of a horse-drawn harrow appears in the Bayeux tapestry, which dates to the 1080s, a tapestry depicting the Battle of Hastings and the Norman conquest of England. Important was certainly the introduction of the treadle loom around the mid-13th century.

In the early Middle Ages, the bishop often exercised his power over the town, and the count over the surrounding countryside, hence the terms “contado” and “peasant.” Then, in order to curb the power of the great feudal lords, the emperor increasingly appointed bishops as counts, who were certainly more loyal to him, at least up until the Investiture Controversy. Behind the power of the bishops-counts there then took refuge, beginning in the 12th century, the rival power of the communes of the Lombard cities, who claimed them as their inheritance in order to achieve their independence and dominion over the surrounding countryside.

The increase in the urban population was by no means orderly. The towns and cities were the destination of important influxes of a different kind. There were the small nobles, the knights, who lacked fiefs and great resources and settled in the towns, where they hoped to take advantage of their title and carve out a social position. There were wandering merchants and traders from the countryside who sought greater profit in these new centers that were becoming populated. There were a few feudal lords from the surrounding areas who thought they could manage their own affairs from the city, taking advantage of its mercantile and craft skills which were superior to those in the countryside. And finally, there was a multitude of peasants, serfs fleeing from a life of hardship and anguish, where a year or two of bad harvests was enough to starve them to death. A medieval German saying went, “the air of the city makes one free,” a freedom from hunger, misery and very harsh living conditions.

Those who became apprentices of some craftsman, and later became artisans themselves, fulfilled their intent: blacksmiths in particular were important and already much sought after in the early Middle Ages. But for most of those who ended up working as servants, and especially as urban wage earners, bread was by no means assured.

Before the year 1,000 a set of favorable circumstances had enabled some cities to govern themselves. These kind of “pre-commune communes” were the Maritime Republics, located at pivotal points on the trade routes that stretched as far as Constantinople in the east and the Arab and Muslim lands to the south and west.

As early as the mid-9th century Amalfi depended only in a formal sense on the Byzantine Empire, and had made itself independent of the Lombard dukes of Benevento, thanks also to the characteristics of its territory, which was difficult to attack from the interior. Sometimes it was allied with the papacy, sometimes with the Byzantines, and sometimes with the Arabs. It lost its independence after three centuries, when it was absorbed by the Norman kingdom. The republic of Gaeta also dates back to the ninth century, perhaps to even before the Venetian republic. Other ones were Genoa, Noli, Pisa, Ancona and Ragusa, present-day Dubrovnik. The maritime republics, or rather their sailors and merchants, enriched themselves by supplying goods which were in high demand by nobles, courts, kingdoms and empires. They served a purpose in the feudal world and certainly did not call into question such good buyers, just as the various kings and feudal lords were well pleased with the services rendered by these merchants and sailors. Nonetheless, the fact remains that when the opportunity arose, kings and dukes did not attempt to take possession of these cities and their wealth.

With the arrival of the 11th and 12th centuries, towns and cities, new and otherwise, tended toward self-government while formally recognizing, in most cases, the authority of the emperor or of the various kings. This is especially true for north-central Italy and Flanders, and the neighboring territories. The new communal institutions are dominated by the small urban nobility, which struggles with the merchant classes to establish its predominance. Almost immediately a process of unification between these two classes begins: the nobles soon turn to trade and then to textile production, since they can no longer count on feudal rents, and the merchants continue their activities, mingling with a nobility that despises them but needs them. If the merchants are plebeians, they can still purchase a noble title for themselves.

From the symbiosis between merchant strata and petty nobility, the latter having also given itself over to commerce, the bourgeoisie was born. This new social class, while having no revolutionary intent, is immediately uncomfortable with the feudal system and its ideological superstructures.

Let us return to Bloch: “Essentially the bourgeois lives by commerce. He derives his subsistence from the difference between the price at which he buys and the price at which he sells; or between the capital lent and the amount of repayment. And since the legality of such intermediate profit – unless it is merely a question of the wages of a workman or a carrier – is denied by the theologians and its nature hard to understand by knightly society, his code of conduct is in conflict with prevailing moral notions. For his part, as a speculator in real estate he finds the feudal restrictions on his landed property intolerable. Because his business has to be handled rapidly and, as it grows, continues to set new legal problems, the delays, the complications, the archaism of the traditional judicial procedures exasperate him. The multiplicity of authorities governing the town itself offends him as obstacles to the proper control of business transactions and as an insult to the solidarity of his class. The diverse immunities enjoyed by his ecclesiastical or knightly neighbors seem to him so many hindrances to the free pursuit of profit.

On the roads which he ceaselessly traverses, he regards with equal abhorrence rapacious toll-collectors and the predatory nobles who swoop down from their castles on the merchant caravans. In short, he is harassed or annoyed by almost everything in the institutions created by a society in which he as yet has only a very small place. With franchises won by violence or purchased with hard cash, organized and equipped for economic expansion as well as for the necessary reprisals, the town which it is his ambition to build would be as it were a foreign body in feudal society».

The Rediscovery of Roman Law

In the early Middle Ages, within the Roman-Barbarian kingdoms, a customary law would come to predominate due to the need to bring order to a multiplicity of conflicting and territorial rights. The new rulers maintained their gentile rules, while those dominated often came under their own laws.

Roman law had not disappeared, but it was no longer meaningful since it expressed property relations that had now waned. Justice was administered for the most part by feudal lords large and small, often illiterate, and certainly with their own interests in view. Individuals had different jurisdictions, depending on where they came from, and on their social role. Land could have different jurisdictions too, depending on whether it was encumbered by the feudal rights of one or more lords; under the authority of monasteries or the Church in general; or was allodial. In the early 8th century Bishop Agobard of Lyon deplored the fact that «five men sit together and none of them has in common with the others the law of this world, whereas in things perennial they are all bound by the one law of Christ».

Roman-era codes were collections of ancient laws adapted to new needs. The first official collection of laws of the Empire, the Theodosian Code, is from 438, promulgated by Emperor Theodosius II. The Corpus Iuris Civilis dates back to 535 and the Roman-Byzantine emperor Justinian. The code was divided into four parts. The first, the Istitutiones, a didactic work for those studying law. The second is the Digest, a collection of edited fragments drawn from the works of leading Roman jurists. The third is the Codex, a collection of imperial constitutions from Hadrian to Justinian. The fourth is the Novellae Constitutiones, a collection of constitutions issued by Justinian after the publication of the Codex. In the West, this code arrived after the reconquest during the Gothic wars in the 6th century, and then fell into disuse after the arrival of the Lombards, except in the Italian regions directly controlled by the Byzantines. In a judgment, a placitum, made in the Marturi region near Poggibonsi in Tuscany in 1076, for the first time in many centuries there appears a quotation from the text of the Digest. The rediscovery of the Justinian code can be traced back to Irnerio's school of Bolognese glossators in the early 12th century.

Shortly afterwards, in around 1140, with the rediscovery of Roman law, we have the work of a monk named Gratian working in Bologna, the Decretum Gratiani, which would later become the basis of canon law. Irnerius taught law as an autonomous discipline, using the Justinian code, and by adding notes, called “glosses,” in the margin of the text, he interpreted it and resolved ambiguities. His Bologna school arose in the imperial orbit, in the period of the Investiture Conflict between the empire and the papacy, with the aim of upholding on legal grounds the supremacy of imperial power. Supremacy over the papacy, but also over kings and cities.

After an initial distrust even the kings found in Roman law an antidote to the fragmentation of their kingdoms and an instrument for achieving, even within the feudal structure, real and significant power for themselves by first of all reducing the power of the dukes, counts and barons, then that of the papacy, and at times that of the cities. Sometimes the dukes also used it against their vassals.

At first the towns and Cities saw this law as a threat to their own customs, which included having their own taxation system and being able to nominate their own magistrates; but soon however they realized it could be very useful. Trade relations which extended throughout Europe meant a universal law was necessary, something which the fledgling bourgeoisie in the 13th and 14th centuries understood very well. Dino Compagni, in his “Cronica” written between 1310 and 1312, took issue with “the accursed judges,” who interpreted the laws as they pleased, to the advantage of one faction against another. There was therefore a coexistence between proper law (ius proprium), the particular law of fiefs, communes and corporations, and common law (ius commune), consisting of Roman Justinian law and canon law.

In the mid-13th century, the Bolognese jurist Accursio drew up the “Magna Glossa,” which brought order to the accumulated glosses of over a century, due to various maestri who often wrote over each others comments to the point of rendering the texts incomprehensible. Common law now takes supremacy over ius proprium, which nevertheless remains.

There are exceptions to this revival of Roman law, the most important of which was established in England. Here Norman customary law merges with the customary law of the earlier Saxon kingdoms, giving rise to common law. In contrast, the other Norman kingdom, that of southern Italy, with a strong central power, is one of the centers of Roman-Justinian law, which together with canon law is the main source of inspiration for the Constitutions promulgated by Frederick II in the city of Melfi in 1231, one of the main instruments of the strengthening of the political unity of the kingdom against baronial and communal tendencies.

Alliance Between the Bourgeosis and Kings

The bourgeoisie, which arose in the 13th century, inherited the interests and attitudes of the classes of merchants and petty urban nobility that formed it. As early as the 11th and 12th centuries towns and cities, inspired by the Roman tradition, appointed Councils and Consuls, and sought as much autonomy as possible in fiscal matters and in every other field. To this end alliances could vary. When the Church became too intrusive even the Empire might be viewed favorably, for as long as he the emperor stayed in his lands and was content with formal acts of submission. On the other hand, when the emperor brought his army against the cities to assert his rights, as in the time of the Lombard League, the Church became an important ally. Nobody put the Church or the empire as such into question, only their excessive meddling.

The fledgling bourgeoisie, as well as the proto-bourgeois classes of the previous two centuries, discover very early on that they have interests in common with the kings, for whom the fight against the subdivision of feudal justice was part of their struggle against the feudal lords, as well as against the empire. In this struggle the kings made use of all the means at their disposal: those provided by the traditional feudal structure and those newer ones such as the Common Law, due to the rediscovery of Roman law and in particular the Digest.

In France the Capetian sovereigns, as from the 10th century, rule a narrow band of territory around Paris and the Loire. Elsewhere dukes and counts are not direct vassals of the king but of the emperor or the larger feudal lords, so behind a formal profession of allegiance they behave as allies at best, but in which not as vassals. In the 11th century the king acquires new counties in which he does not appoint counts, and which he himself performs the function of count: in order to curb feudal subdivision he makes use of the feudal system itself. Later on, in pursuit of the same end, Roman law would become an important instrument in France too.

In the Empire, Roman law has the function of affirming and reaffirming imperial power. Here it serves a positive function insofar as it limits, if only very partially, the power of the feudal lords and the resulting subdivisions, but it is always applied with a view to the preservation and maximum possible efficiency of the feudal system of which the empire is an expression. We communists advocate the importance of centralization, but not the existence of a center that exists only in a formal sense: and the Empire was precisely a center without centralization.

The same is not true of the kingdoms that were in the process of formation. To develop and expand they needed a process of centralization of power on the administrative, military and fiscal levels, and to ensure supplies. All of this at the expense of feudal lords large and small, and of the empire. Roman law lent itself well to the purpose. These kingdoms were certainly feudal, as were the royal ideologies feudal, but this need for centralization pushed the kingdoms to trigger processes that then contributed to the dissolution of the feudal world. On this road the kings found allies in the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie had the same need to combat feudal fragmentation in all fields, starting with legal ones, and Roman law was an important weapon in this fight. The King could keep the feudal lords, especially the minor ones, at bay, and these were the ones that presented the greatest problems for the towns and cities with their taxes and their claims. That is more the kings had an interest in the cities developing and becoming rich, since they could derive taxes and loans from them for their wars and everything else they needed: the burghers were regarded as chickens, first fattened, then plucked.

The English Exception

The trending alliance between bourgeoisie and king had exceptions, the most important of which was England. Here the bourgeoisie in its early days acceded not to the king but to the nobles, finding that the safeguards established by the “Magna Charta Libertatum” served their interests better. The latter was granted by King John Lackland in 1215, putting an end to the baronial rebellions by conceding what was requested. It was later confirmed by Henry III in 1225 and by Edward I in 1297.

The word “liberty” in the Middle Ages is meaningless in the singular: there are “liberties,” which should be translated as “privileges.” Liberties were the privileges granted by the king or emperor to nobles, clergy, merchants, and cities; privileges from which most subjects were excluded. The assessment of the Magna Carta as a victory of “modernity” over the Middle Ages is nonsense: it is the victory of the feudal nobility over an equally feudal kingdom, albeit one with a strong central power. This new kind of equilibrium, of feudal compromise accepted by the king, affected not only nobles and clerics, but also the nascent bourgeois forces.

In favor of the latter we read from two articles in the Magna Carta:
     «13. The City of London is to have all its ancient liberties and free customs, by both land and water. In addition, we wish and grant that all other cities and boroughs, and vills and ports, have all their liberties and free customs.
     «41. All merchants are to be safe and secure departing from England and entering England, and staying and going through England, both by land and by water, to buy and to sell, without any evil exactions, according to ancient and right customs, save in time of war, and if they are from a land at war with us».

The Bourgeoisie “che per viltade fece il gran rifiuto”

The communes of central and northern Italy in the 12th and 13th centuries represented a culmination of the power of the bourgeoisie, which has been able to endow itself with the laws and constitutions that most favored its interests. At the same time, two major difficulties become evident, which undermined the ability of this new class to develop. And there was a third difficulty too, less present in the Italian communes, which was the danger of being engulfed by a kingdom or the empire.

The first difficulty lay in the permanent war to gain preeminence over neighboring towns and their respective contadi, the rural territories surrounding the city. The second lay in internal civil war, open or encroaching. These wars were initially between “magnati” (wealthy nobles) and “popolani” (member of a corporation or city district) then between “Popolo grasso” (wealthy bourgeois) and “Popolo minuto” (artisans of the guilds, their apprentices and wage earners). Superimposed on these struggles were those between the richest and most prominent families for dominance in the city. The result of all this was that it was impossible for the bourgeoisie to find the tranquility and security it needed to prosper. Its class interest led it to renounce political power, in favor first of the podestas, then the seignories, then of the more or less territorially extended principalities.

From its inception, the bourgeoisie showed itself incapable of leading its own revolution and that it was ever ready to queue up behind whoever could lead it in that direction, paying for it in its stead. The power won and exercised in the Italian communes of the 13th century was therefore abandoned for a few centuries, then reconquered, and for the first time ideologically revindicated in the Netherlands at the end of the 16th century and in England in the 17th century.

We stated previously that cities were founded or reborn in the 11th and 12th centuries, in Italy and Flanders in particular, but also in northern France, Burgundy, Provence and in the Rhineland. In them would settle the pre-bourgeois merchant classes and minor nobility who would clash and then combine to give rise, around the 13th century, to the bourgeoisie. In central and northern Italy, still between the 11th and 12th centuries, the communes would establish themselves, aiming for real autonomy from the Empire and for self-government, and that much more markedly than in other regions of the former Carolingian Empire.

Along with the cities and the bourgeoisie there would also appear the ‘heresies’, and in a manner that was incomparably more evident than in the previous centuries of the Middle Ages. The homines novi, as the bourgeoisie were called, were often confused with the boni homines, as the Cathar heretics were known. The French cardinal Jacques de Vitry, travelling in Italy in 1216, wrote: ‘The Commune is like the lion spoken of in Scripture, which tears brutally, and also like the dragon that hides in the sea and spies on you to devour you (…) But what is most detestable in these modern Babylons is that there is no Commune in which heresy does not find its supporters, its protectors, its defenders, its believers’.

These religious ideas, heretical or not, were almost always based on millenarianism, with its expectation of the end of time, messianism, and the model of the early Christian communities, where all property was shared. These ideas weren’t useful to the bourgeoisie, but they were often adopted by merchants and bourgeois people. There are two reasons for this. The first and most obvious is the dominance of a religious ideology that saw a return to its origins as the only possible remedy for its ‘degenerate’ present, due to the ‘degeneration’ of the Church and the Empire, institutions that were supposed to follow the path of divine providence. This ideology was often shared by the bourgeoisie and nobility, as well as by peasants and the urban plebs. The second explanation, which is of greater interest to us, lies in the fact that the nascent bourgeoisie felt a vague need for a decisive critique of the entire feudal system, a critique present in all millenarian and pauperistic conceptions. In the absence of its own ideology, the bourgeoisie made use of such criticism, accepting along with it the ideas which were a part of it, whether heretical or not. As always, these ideologies were unconscious.

The Dream-need for Communism

Pataris, Cathars, Waldensians, Spirituals, Fraticelli, Micheliti, Apostolics: these were the main heresies between the 11th and 14th centuries. We have already discussed the ‘dream-need of communism’ in our press. Communism only became a real possibility with the rise of capitalism, when, from the mid-19th century onwards, communist sentiment was joined by communist reason, our scientific historical programme. Before then, communist sentiment, the dream-need for communism, present since ancient times in opposition to the class societies that succeeded one another throughout history, could only take the form of millenarianism, messianism and utopianism.

Almost none of the heresies started out as such and, as long as they remained just doctrinal divergences, they were often tolerated. But they were no longer tolerated when they did not submit to the authority of the pope and the bishops, and preached and created new religious orders without their permission. In the 11th and 12th centuries, the Church’s attitude towards heretics was not yet unanimous: in the Decretum Graziani of 1140, the basis of canon law, and in the subsequent Summa by Uguccione da Pisa, measures against heretics ranged from conversion, confiscation of all property (certainly the most widespread measure), and in the most stubborn cases, imprisonment and the death penalty. In the Decretal of 1199, whose first words are Vergentis in senium saecoli corruptelam, translatable as ‘the corruption of the century drawing to a close’, Pope Innocent III refers to Roman law, the codes of Theodosius and Justinian, and the penalties then reserved for Manicheans. In these codes, taken up by the aforementioned monk Gratian in his Decretum, heresy is equated with lese- majesty: the crime against the emperor now becomes a crime against God too and is punished as heresy.

Emperor Frederick II accentuated the repressive nature of the Vergentis for his own ends, and the rules he drew up were later accepted by the Church. Burning heretics at the stake became more frequent than in the past, even extending to exhumed corpses. Punishments became harsher for those who did not report heretics known to them and who did not participate in the struggles or crusades called by the pope or bishops against heretics, to the point they were considered heretics themselves, with all the consequences that entailed. It is true that sometimes the common people of the cities and the peasants killed and burned alleged heretics before the Church had pronounced its judgement, but it is also true that often the city institutions participated only very reluctantly in these episcopal and inquisitorial initiatives. This was sometimes out of sympathy for the heretics, but above all out of fear of seeing their autonomy limited in favour of the bishop, the Inquisition and the Church. As for the Inquisition, it was established in 1184 by the Council of Verona, presided over by Pope Lucius III and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, with the aim of combating the Patarines and Cathars.

The Patari

The heresies of these centuries were much more frequent and widespread than is generally thought. The oldest is the Pataria, which dates back to the 11th and 12th centuries. The Patari, or Patarini, originated in Milan, in opposition to simony (the buying and selling of ecclesiastical offices), the marriage of priests and the corruption of the high clergy, in particular the bishops of Milan. The Pataria then spread to northern Italy and beyond. The lower clergy was supported by the plebs, but also by artisans and merchants, and by the petty nobility opposed to the great feudal nobility, from which the bishops generally came.

Up until they gained the support of some bishops, and even popes, they were not considered heretics. Hildebrand of Soana, i.e. Pope Gregory VII, saw the movement as an ally in his reform of the Church and in the fight against corruption among the clergy. But the vision of a Church of the poor and equal, inspired by early Christianity, could not be accepted by a Church that was an expression of the feudal world and its ruling class.

It is clear to us communists that attempting to eliminate corruption in a class society without eliminating the class relations that determine it is like trying to empty the sea with a spoon. This does not mean that the people of that time, starting with that pope, did not believe in it. In this respect, things have not changed much: the superstition of legality still reigns supreme, as does the presumption that corruption, distortions and injustices can be eliminated through law and justice, ignoring the class relations that generate them and of which they are only a reflection. Law and rights are just new names that the ruling class gives to its own power.

As for the Patari, with the advent of successive popes and bishops opposed to the reform and moralisation of the Church, they were declared heretics and eventually disappeared. Most were reabsorbed by the Church, while some became Cathars.

Arnaldo of Brescia

The ideas of Arnaldo da Brescia, a former student of Abelard, were similar to those of the Patari. When he arrived in Rome in 1145, the power of the Commune, which had driven out the pope, had already been established. Arnaldo’s sermons were very well received by the common people. However, power was in the hands of the petty nobility rather than the artisans and merchants, who found Arnaldo’s anti-ecclesiastical and pro-imperial polemics useful, so his excommunication in 1148 had no consequences.

When the Pope imposed an interdict on the city of Rome in 1155, this caused problems for everyone, including the lower classes. When the minor nobility who ruled the municipality, along with the proto-bourgeoisie, decided on a reconciliation with the pope, Arnaldo was sacrificed to the agreement between the municipality and the pope, and between the emperor and the pope: he was handed over to the latter by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, burned at the stake and his ashes scattered in the Tiber.

Mariateresa Beonio-Brocchieri Fumagalli writes in her book La Chiesa invisibile (The Invisible Church): ‘In the plans of the austere reformer, who pursued the ideal of a poor and resacralised Church, the lines were drawn for its radical defeudalisation, for a suppression at the root of the links between the religious institution and the feudal institution: and these anti-feudal ideas were found in the struggles of the Roman commune, which had got to the stage of overthrowing, in its dreams, the power relations that bound it on one side to the emperor and on the other to the pope’.

The Cathars

The Cathars in the 11th and 13th century represented the most widespread and dangerous heresy for the Church, with a Church of its own along with its own bishops. They were also known as Albigensians, from the city of Albi in the south of France. They were widespread in southern France and northern Italy, but also farther afield. The Ghibelline Farinata degli Uberti, mentioned by Dante in Inferno, was a member of the Cathar Church in Florence, which had fewer members than those in northern Italy but was nevertheless of some importance. In the same city there were also the Franciscan spiritualists Pietro di Giovanni Olivi and Ubertino da Casale and their preaching encouraged the spread of the Fraticelli. The Apostolics, or Dolciniani, although more widespread in northern Italy were also numerous in Florence: it seems their main financiers were there as well. There were also Cathars in Viterbo, Rimini, Orvieto, and also in Flanders, England, Spain and Germany.

The Cathars’ beliefs differed notably from those of the Church’s, and also from other doctrines that were considered heretical. They had a dualistic view influenced by ancient Manichaeism and their connections with the similar Bogomils in the Balkans. Among the Cathars, some professed a moderate dualism, which could be accepted by the Church, while others professed a more radical dualism, with the principles of Good and Evil being of equal importance, as if to say that God and Satan were on the same level: a concept that could not be accepted. For them, everything that was body and matter was Evil, including property, wealth and power; only the soul and the spirit were good, which is why many of them practised fasting, abstinence from procreation, and some even suicide.

Yet similar ideas, according to which the body and matter was Evil, or Nothing, were also at certain times widespread within certain sectors of the official church. Pope Saint Gregory the Great had defined the body as ‘that abominable garment of the soul’. Saint Louis IX, King of France, had said that ‘when a man dies, he is healed of the leprosy of the body’. Augustine had said that matter is prope nihil, almost nothing, and it was to him that those who denied the value of matter referred.

But there were also supporters of the opposite view: if matter is almost nothing, it means that it is still something. If God took on a body, they said, it means that matter has its own dignity, that it is not Nothing: ‘Nothing’ cannot be attributed to God. This was the view of the Scottish Franciscan philosopher Duns Scotus, who lived between 1265, or 1266, and 1308: in him, this interpretation of Augustine was combined with Aristotelianism in recognising a positivity in matter. His work formed a bridge to Ockham’s nominalism and the dissolution of scholasticism.

If doctrinal differences with the heretics were significant, the creation of an ecclesiastical structure independent of the official Church appeared even more so. The vision of a Church of those who were the poor and equal, partly inherited from the Patari, certainly had a strong influence on the urban and rural plebs. The merchant and artisan classes, and even the minor nobility, found in it a way to free themselves from the power of the Church, and sometimes even from kings and the Empire. For the same reasons, at times, they even had the support of the great feudal lords, such as the Count of Toulouse, Raymond VI, who was also Duke of Narbonne and Marquis of Provence. Because of their hostility towards the Church, the Cathars were pro-imperial and Ghibelline, as were most of the Patarines. The Empire, too, initially looked upon them favourably.

Given the spread of the Cathars and the danger they posed to the Church, Pope Innocent III called a crusade against them in 1208, which ended with their extermination. It is said that soldiers in the south of France asked the papal legate how to distinguish heretics from others, and that the answer was: ‘Kill them all, then God will recognise his own’. The phrase was probably never uttered, but it fittingly expresses an extermination which, according to the most conservative estimates of the papal legates, amounted to 20,000 men, women and children. The real numbers were certainly higher, although lower than the million claimed by the crusader soldiers.

In addition to the Church, the kings of France also benefited from the crusade against the Albigensians. A few decades later, under Louis IX, they gained control of the south of France thanks to the defeat and subsequent weakening of the local feudal system.

The Waldensians

The Waldensians, who were present in southern France, would suffer the same fate as the Cathars, who they’d tried to convert.

Waldo, or Waldesius, was a wealthy merchant from Lyon who was born between 1130 and 1140 and died between 1206 and 1207. An anonymous Chronica, written a few years after his death, says that Waldo ‘had accumulated a great deal of money for himself through the iniquity of lending at interest’. But in 1173, aged around 40, he left his real estate to his wife and the necessary dowry for his daughters, and gave all his money to the poor and to the victims of his usury. The same source tells us that as early as 1177 ‘he began to have companions who, following his example, gave all their property to the poor and spontaneously professed poverty. Then, bit by bit, they began to confess, with public and private admonitions, their own sins and those of others’.

The ‘Poor of Lyon’, later called Waldensians, were appreciated by the Church for their preaching aimed at converting the Cathars, and in the Third Ecumenical Council of Lateran in Rome in 1179, their brotherhood was approved. Permission to preach, however, was more difficult to obtain, as it was reserved for the regular clergy. Poverty was appreciated as an individual practice, but it was dangerous if presented as a valid example for the entire Church. At the aforementioned Council of Verona in 1184, the constitution ‘ad abolendam’ was promulgated, in which we read: ‘We decree that the Cathars and Patarines and those who, under false names, lie and claim to be Humiliati or Poor of Lyon, Passagini, Giuseppini, Arnaldisti… shall be struck with perpetual anathema’.

The Poor of Lyon were not yet explicitly considered heretics, or at least not all of them; but Waldo’s insistence on preaching even without authorisation, and the consequent hostility of the bishop of Lyon, almost immediately led to their condemnation as heretics. The Welshman Walter Map, representing the English king Henry II Plantagenet at the Lateran Council of 1179, understood the situation well: ‘These people have no fixed abode, they go about in pairs, barefoot, clothed in wool, possessing nothing, but sharing everything in common like the apostles, following the naked Christ naked. They are starting now in a very humble way, because they find it difficult to move their feet; but if we admit them, we will be driven out.’

In the Liber contra Waldenses Haereticos by Anonymous of Passau, from the second half of the 13th century, we read: ‘It is not difficult to recognise heretics by their customs and their speech. They are in fact well-ordered and modest in their customs; they do not show themselves to be proud in their dress, because they do not wear precious clothes, nor are they slovenly; they do not engage in trade in order to avoid occasions for lying, swearing or defrauding, but live solely from the work of their hands as craftsmen; even their doctors are weavers or shoemakers. They do not enrich themselves but are content with what is necessary. They are also chaste, moderate in eating and drinking; they do not frequent taverns, nor do they give themselves over to dancing or other vanities; they refrain from anger; they are always working, teaching or learning, and thus they pray little. They feign going to church, giving their offerings, confessing, and attend the sermon, but only in order to criticise the preacher”.

Here too we find many artisans and merchants. Francis of Assisi, born about 50 years later, was in his turn the son of a wealthy merchant. Both practised and preached poverty. The main difference was that Francis remained obedient to the Pope and the Church, while Waldo, trying until the last moment to avoid it, broke away, arguing that obedience to God was more important.

We communists behaved in a similar way: we tried until the last moment to oppose the Stalinist degeneration of the formal party. When this was no longer possible, we preferred to remain loyal to the historical party, for which we were declared ‘heretics’ by Pope Stalin and his bishop Palmiro Togliatti. From there began a long and difficult reconstruction of the formal party, consisting first and foremost of clearing the ground of the rubble of a triumphant counter-revolution that has now lasted more than a century.

Returning to the Waldensians, they too, like the Cathars, suffered internal divisions. The few survivors of the persecutions joined the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. The persecutions continued, ending only with the French Revolution and, in Piedmont, with the subsequent ‘Letters Patent’ of Carlo Alberto in 1848.

Joachim of Fiore

The Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore was a contemporary of Waldo: born between 1130 and 1135, he died in 1202. He always remained obedient to the Church, so he was not declared a heretic, and his congregation in Fiore was recognised by the Pope in 1196. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 declared heretical certain phrases against Peter Lombard that had been erroneously attributed to him, as was recognised almost immediately by various popes. However, his ideas were far removed from those of the official Church and had a great influence on heretics and non-heretics alike, particularly on the Spiritual Franciscans.

Joachim spoke of three ages, or states: the age of the Father, the age of the Son, and the age of the Holy Spirit. The first age was roughly identified with that of the Old Testament, the second, until 1260, with the Gospel, and the third from that date onwards, until the end of time described in John’s Apocalypse. Messianism is combined here with millenarianism, generating a vision of time and history very different from that of Augustine of Tagaste. Augustine contrasted a City of God with an earthly city: in the latter there is the Church, which is a reflection of the former, but this dualism would only disappear at the end of time, with the triumph of the City of God. In this vision, history does not exist: with the coming of Christ, everything is accomplished, there is only an eternal present that will end with his second coming and the Apocalypse. Millenarianism therefore has no need for messianism, since the Messiah has already come: the future and history no longer have any meaning, since hope has become reality.

Even science has no meaning here. If truth is God, and God dwells within man, it is useless to know the external world: man need only look within himself. The concept of the soul owes much to Augustine, as does consciousness, and psychoanalysis as well. He too had his merits: by saying that there is no ‘before’ creation, since with creation God also created time, he intuited, in his own way, time’s relativity.

Augustine’s binary scheme is opposed by Joachim’s ternary scheme, inspired by the Trinity. Not ‘everything is accomplished’ with the appearance of Christ and the Church: the ‘carnal Church’, as he defines it, because of its defects (sins), does not have the capacity to lead men to the ‘kingdom of God’. This second age must be followed by a third, that of the ‘spiritual Church’, populated by monks and ‘holy’ lay people, where there are no ecclesiastical or imperial hierarchies, where there is no property, where everyone can satisfy their needs by cooperating according to their inclinations and abilities: not according to birth, wealth, or the role they hold in the ecclesiastical or temporal structure.

It is a perspective in which the feudal world has no place. Here is reflected the need for communism among the urban and rural plebeians, in a vision that also fascinated artisans and merchants, and sometimes even nobles and clergy. The ‘kingdom of God’ was therefore now to be realised in history, in that ‘sabbatical millennium’ in which together with other differences would also disappear those that existed between Christians and Jews, and after which there would come the tribulations described in the Apocalypse, followed by the triumph of Christ and the end of time.

Augustine’s vision is typical of the social classes of the late empire, of a society in decline that sees itself as an eternal present because it sees no future, which in fact it does not have. Joachim’s vision is the result of a feudal world already in crisis, in which the plebs, and even the proto-bourgeoisie, through religious messianism, project themselves confusedly towards a future that they cannot glimpse, but which they feel strongly.

It should also be noted that for Gioacchino, the three ages, or states, do not simply follow one another chronologically, but interpenetrate: the final stages of each age contain the seeds of the next. The present contains the future, the ‘kingdom of God’ is already present in those who work for it. Here we find an echo of our communist conception, according to which capitalism generates and contains communism, communism that is already present in the party that works towards it.

It would be ridiculous to talk about dialectics with regard to Joachim, but we can attribute to him a ‘spark’, in the sense that Augustine said that there is a divine spark in man, without this making him God. The Calabrian abbot’s Trinitarian conception, his theology, is the ideological form taken by a vision of history brought into the real world, in which there is room for human action; an action that can change reality and bring about the ‘kingdom of God’ in the world before the ‘end of time’. The doctrine of the three ages brings to mind Hegel’s triadic dialectic, where history is characterised by the progressive affirmation of the Spirit, which overcomes its previous form in an ascending movement of synthesis.

Judeo-Christian theology remains the basis of subsequent philosophies, such as those of Kant and Hegel. Faith in God is transformed into faith in Reason by the Enlightenment thinkers, and into faith in Progress by the positivists.

According to bourgeois intellectuals, Marxism, with its belief in communism, is also a kind of religion, a kind of Jewish-Christian heresy. Certainly, ours is also a belief, but it is combined with science: for the first time, with the rise of capitalism, and the reflections upon it, communist sentiment has been combined with science, with communist reason, our historical programme. The bourgeoisie can only deny our science, and caricature communism by portraying us as the millenarians we have spoken of: their very survival as a class is at stake.

Dominicans and Franciscans

The mendicant orders, namely the Dominicans and Franciscans, also known as Friars Preachers or Black Friars and Friars minor or Grey Friars, were recognised by the Pope in 1217 and 1209 respectively. The Spaniard Dominic of Guzman (1170-1221) and Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) practised and preached poverty and the absence of property for individuals and for their Orders. In this, they were no different from those who were considered heretics: ‘apostolic poverty’ actually derived from the reformist and heretical controversy.

The mendicant orders initially had no relations with the feudal classes and operated in the cities, in contact with the plebeians, artisans and merchants: all of whom resented the feudal wealth of the episcopate and the monks of the abbeys. Dominic and Francis were credible to their listeners in their preaching against heretics, as they themselves practised evangelical poverty. Pope Innocent III, who had established the two new orders, understood their importance for the renewal and very survival of the Church. At first, it was the Dominicans who preached against heresy and led the Inquisition, but they were soon followed by the Franciscans.

Cesare Vasoli, in his text ‘Medieval Philosophy,’ writes: ‘Thus, the Church, which for centuries had modelled its ruling classes on feudal institutions, endowing them with a culture that was essentially that developed by Alcuin for the dignitaries of the Imperium, was able to bring about a far-reaching intellectual and organic transformation. The mendicant orders were both the instrument and the ‘place’ in which a new political and cultural line was realized that was promptly adapted to the historical needs of the time’.

With the help of the Pope, they took control of the universities, despite fierce opposition from secular teachers. Initially, only the Dominicans attached importance to study, with the aim of countering heresy. Francis was not interested in books, but things soon changed with his successors. Loyalty to the Pope and the Church was the presupposition of the function exercised by the two new Orders.

Poverty was subsequently set aside, by saying that while property could not be owned by individuals, the Order could, in order to cater for everything that was needed in relation to its mission. In this way, it often happened that the friars lived comfortably, even though they could still claim to own nothing.

Spirituals, Michelites, Fraticelli

Already, by supporting evangelical poverty, Francis of Assisi and his most rigorous followers, known as the zeloti or zelanti, were setting themselves against others, called simply ‘The Community,’ who wanted to relax the rigour of the friars’ life. Among the latter was Elia da Cortona, actually born in Assisi, who was a collaborator of Francis and Minister General of the Order from 1232 to 1239.

Around the middle of the century many Franciscans embraced the ideas and prophecies of Joachim of Fiore, seeing in Francis the one who was ushering in the ‘age of the Holy Spirit’, in which the Church would no longer be guided by ecclesiastical hierarchies but by ‘spiritual men’. They were therefore called ‘spirituals’, as opposed to the others, who were called ‘conventuals’. Very close to the spirituals was Giovanni of Parma, Minister General of the Order from 1247 to 1257. Both the spirituals and the conventuals generally sought to mediate and avoid divisions.

A friar close to Giovanni of Parma, Gerardo of Borgo San Donnino (now Fidenza) wrote a text in 1254 inspired by Joachim and openly opposed to the position of the Church. Four years later, Bonaventura of Bagnoregio, who had taken his place as general of the Order, a position he would hold until his death in 1274, instituted a trial against Giovanni for heresy: who was acquitted but forced to remain silent. Bonaventura was also the author of the Legenda Major, a life of St. Francis considered the only true and official one. All the others were destroyed. In addition to being a predecessor of Andrei Vyshinsky, Bonaventura also anticipated Andrei Zhdanov and the MinCulPop (Ministero della Cultura Popolare).

In 1282, the theses of the Provençal ‘spiritual’ Pietro di Giovanni Olivi were condemned. His Joachimite ideas had a wide resonance, beginning with his disciples Ubertino da Casale and Angelo Clareno. Pope Celestine V, namely Pietro da Morrone, granted Angelo Clareno and Fra Liberato from the Marche region, who were also accompanied by Jacopone da Todi, permission to break away from the Friars Minor and form their own order, the ‘Poor Hermits of Pope Celestine’. However, the new Pope Boniface VIII abolished the new Order, and its promoters soon found themselves treated as heretics: they now called themselves the ‘Fraticelli della vita povera’ (Little Brothers of the Poor Life). Pope Clement V, at the Council of Vienne in 1312, while wishing to protect the unity of the Order, granted nothing to the spirituals, who were now openly persecuted by their local superiors. Pope John XXII, elected in 1316, closed the matter by entrusting the repression to the inquisitor Bernardo Gui. In 1318, the spirituals were declared heretics and often ended up being burnt at the stake: the first four in Marseille in the same year.

Very different was the story of Michele da Cesena, Minister General from 1316 to 1328, who persecuted the Spirituals to begin with. At the Chapter of Perugia in 1322, he defended the Franciscans’ thesis on the poverty of Christ and the apostles, both as individuals and collectively. The thesis was rejected, on fine points of law, by Pope John XXII. In 1276, Pope Nicholas III had accepted the Franciscans’ view of the poverty of individuals and of the Order, arguing that property belonged to the Church and that the friars only had the use of it. This view had already been supported by Bonaventura and contested by the Spirituals because it legitimised the wealth of the Church. Pope John XXII argued that the thesis that Christ and the apostles had no property was heretical, as they were owners of their poor possessions. The pope suspended Michele from his office, but he was reinstated by the Franciscans. In 1328, Michele declared the pope a heretic. The pope excommunicated him along with the other Franciscans Bonagrazia da Bergamo and William of Ockham. None of the three belonged to the Spirituals. All three found refuge with Emperor Louis of Bavaria.

After the excommunication, most of the Franciscans abandoned Michael. Those who remained loyal to him were called Michelites, or even ‘Fraticelli d’opinione’ (Little Brothers of Opinion), as they shared the idea of poverty of the Church of the other ‘fraticelli’, but did not practise it with the same rigour. However, the spirituals did not constitute a homogeneous group; they had differing conceptions among themselves, so their writings were sometimes used by the pope to support his own theses and to set them against each other.

The Romance of the Rose

The ‘Roman de la Rose’ consists of two distinctly different parts. The first, composed between 1229 and 1236 by Guillaume de Lorris, is an allegory of love in the tradition and spirit of courtly lyric poetry. After some additions by an anonymous author, between 1275 and 1280 we have a second part by Jean Chopinel de Meung-sur-Loire. The allegorical narrative now takes on the rationalist character typical of the author, who was trained in the scholastic tradition of Abelard, John of Salisbury and Alan of Lille: he was very close to those university circles of secular masters who were in fierce controversy with the mendicant orders. The story contains extensive quotations from Boethius’s ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’ and John of Salisbury’s ‘Policraticus’, among many others: its lack of originality does not diminish its importance. The comic-satirical vein and the obvious erotic allusions partly explain its popularity among the bourgeoisie, nobles and clergy. The author’s Neoplatonism leads to a celebration of Nature, and with it of sex, as it is stated that Nature is ‘God’s vicar’, who has given it the task of perpetuating the human species.

The bourgeois Jean de Meung refers to Joachimite millenarianism and the belief in a ‘golden age’, forging a vision that is certainly Christian, but more suited to the bourgeoisie and secular university teachers. This is due to its vehement criticism of the corruption of the clergy and the mendicant orders, which had by then become assimilated into the rest of the Church. It was a criticism which also attacked feudal relations, which the newly formed bourgeoisie felt were like cages whose bars they wanted to widen, without yet considering the possibility of destroying them. The Franciscan ‘Falsembiante’, one of the protagonists of the story, is described as a wolf hidden under the skin of a sheep, and as the shape-shifter Proteus. In the increasingly dominant mercantile society, money, which can buy and corrupt everything, increasingly becomes the equivalent of all things: it is as protean as Falsembiante.

‘Once, in the time of our first fathers and mothers, as the writings of the ancients testify, people loved each other with pure and loyal love, and not out of lust and desire for plunder, and goodness reigned in the world (…) The earth was not cultivated then, but was as God had adorned it, and spontaneously provided what each person needed for sustenance.

‘No king or prince had yet criminally seized the property of others. All were equal and had nothing of their own; they knew well the maxim that love and authority never go together and never dwell together; they are divided by the one who rules.

‘Jason had not yet built his ships and crossed the sea to conquer the Golden Fleece (…) However, Deception came, spear in hand, with Sin and Misfortune, who cared nothing for Sufficiency; Pride, who also disdained her, appeared with his entourage: Greed, Avarice, Envy and all the other vices. They brought Poverty out of hell, where she had remained for so long that no one knew anything about her. Cursed be the execrable day when Poverty came to Earth! (…) Soon those evil ones, mad with rage and envy at seeing men happy, invaded the whole Earth, sowing discord, strife, controversy and conflict, quarrels, disputes, wars, slander, hatred and resentment; and since they were mad for gold, they dug up the earth to extract from its bowels hidden treasures, metals and precious stones (…) As soon as the human race fell prey to this band, it changed its former way of life; men did not cease to do evil; they became false and deceitful, they became attached to their property, they even divided the land and marked out boundaries, they fought among themselves, taking whatever they could; the strongest took the largest shares (…)

‘Then they had to find someone to watch over the huts, arrest wrongdoers and bring justice to those who complained, and whom no one dared to challenge; so they gathered together to elect him. They chose from among themselves a great burly farmer, the biggest, stockiest and strongest they could find, and made him lord and prince. He swore to uphold justice and defend their huts if each of them personally gave him enough to live on from their own property, and they agreed (…) The people had to gather again and impose a levy on each person, to provide sergeants for the prince. They then accepted the levy in common, paid him rents and tributes, and granted him vast lands. This is the origin of kings, of land-owning princes (…) From that moment on, men amassed treasures. With gold and silver, precious and malleable metals, they made pottery, coins, buckles, rings and belts; with strong iron, they forged weapons, knives, swords, halberds, spears and chain mail to fight their neighbours. At the same time, they erected towers and palisades and walls with cut stones; they fortified cities and castles and built large carved palaces, for those who possessed riches feared that they would be stolen from them by stealth or by force. From then on, those unfortunate men were much more to be pitied, for they had no security from the day they appropriated for themselves out of greed what had previously been common to all, like the air and the sun.’

Millenarianism and the longed-for golden age are nothing more than the dream of a society without private property, without classes, without a state, and without kings.

The historian Jacques Le Goff writes in The Civilisation of the Medieval West: ‘This myth (…) although masked and fought against by the official Church, shook minds and hearts, revealing to us the true essence of the popular masses of the Middle Ages, their economic and physiological anxieties in the face of the permanent realities of their existence: subjection to the whims of nature, famine and epidemics; the revolts against a social order that crushed the weak and a Church that benefited from and guaranteed this order; their dreams: religious dreams, but dreams that brought Heaven down to Earth and glimpsed hope only at the end of unspeakable terrors. The piercing desire it reveals to go ‘into the unknown to find new things’ cannot imagine a truly new world. The golden age of medieval man is nothing more than a going back to the beginning. The future was behind them. They walked with their heads turned backwards.

Already the popular masses which Le Goff refers to were divided into rural and urban plebeians, and mercantile classes in part compsed of artisans on their way to forming the new bourgeoisie. Their vision was only partially and superficially shared. From there, the bourgeoisie began to take a different path from that of the subordinate classes, and consequently went off in search of its very own, new vision of the world.

The Dulcinians

The Dulcinians were thus defined, but they simply called themselves apostles.

The founder of the movement in 1260 was Gherardo Segarelli, born near Parma twenty years earlier. His ideas of radical pauperism, influenced by Joachim of Fiore, were no different from those of the Spiritual Franciscans or other groups, heretical or not. He asked to join the Franciscan order but was not accepted. The information we have about him comes from the Cronica di Salimbene de Adam di Parma, a spiritual Franciscan and Joachimite, who could not have had any sympathy for those who attempted to steal members from his order. He describes Gherardo as ‘idiotic and illiterate’, implying that his heresy was due more to ignorance than to malice. He accuses his followers of practising neither obedience, poverty nor chastity. Since they lived exclusively on alms, he criticises them using the words of Paul of Tarsus: ‘And when we were with you, we gave you this rule: if anyone does not want to work, he should not eat either’.

Salimbene also says that Gherardo refused to be the leader of his followers, arguing, in the words of Paul, that ‘each will give account of himself to God’. The chronicler also says that the Apostolic followers divided into two factions that even came to blows, factions of which nothing more was heard.

In 1286, Pope Honorius IV decreed the dissolution of the Apostolics, and Gherardo ended up in prison for the first time. The condemnation of the Apostolics was renewed by Pope Nicholas IV in 1290. With the election of Boniface VIII in 1294, four Apostolics were burned at the stake and Gherardo returned to prison. He too was burned at the stake in 1300, followed by other followers in subsequent years.

The ‘sect’ of the Apostolics spread widely, although it is often difficult to distinguish them from other heretics. They were widespread throughout Lombardy, a term that at the time referred to almost all of northern Italy, and in particular in Novara, Trento, Bergamo, Modena and Bologna. We also have reports of Dulcinians in Florence, Foligno and in Spain: here, the Galician Pietro di Lugo was tried for heresy but saved his life by recanting in 1322.

Dolcino da Novara was born around 1250, became a disciple of Gherardo in 1291, and leader of the Apostolics immediately after his death. In the area between Trento and Lake Garda, where he stopped to preach, he gained numerous followers. Moving then between Vercelli and Valsesia, he seems to have been welcomed with sympathy by the valley dwellers.

In 1304, he occupied Valsesia militarily, thanks to the armed support of Matteo Visconti, lord of Milan and Ghibelline, in an anti-Guelph role. In 1306, when this support failed, Dolcino and his followers, who are said to have numbered around 4,000, withdrew to Monte Rubello, in the Biella area. A crusade was launched against him by Pope Clement V and the bishop of Vercelli, Raniero degli Avogadro. The Dulcinians fortified themselves and raided the surrounding area to obtain supplies, which alienated them from the valley dwellers. In 1307, after about a year of battles, siege, cold and hunger, they were defeated and exterminated. First to be burned at the stake were Margherita di Trento, Dolcino’s companion, and Longino di Bergamo. Then it was Dolcino’s turn, after being tortured.

Almost all the information we have about Dolcino comes from the inquisitor Bernardo Gui and his writing entitled ‘The sect of those who say they are of the order of the Apostles and claim to observe the apostolic life and evangelical poverty: when and how it began, who its founders were, and what its errors were.’ From this we read: ‘Dolcino managed to gather into his sect, from distant places and in large numbers, many thousands of people of both sexes, especially in Italy, Tuscany and neighbouring regions (…) He also declares that his adversaries and ministers of the devil are secular clerics together with many of the people, powerful and tyrannical, and all religious, especially the Preachers and the Minors (…) ‘He then states that all those who persecute him, together with the prelates of the Church, will soon be killed and destroyed’.

Dolcino also made prophecies. In his Joachim-inspired vision, the Church would go through various stages: the penultimate one would be that of wealth and corruption. Dominic and Francis played a positive role in renouncing earthly goods and temporal power. Now that their orders have also degenerated, there is only one last stage, the one begun by Gherardo Segarelli in 1260 (the year that also marks the beginning of Joachim’s ‘age of the Holy Spirit’). Dolcino prophesied that Frederick of Aragon, King of Sicily, would become emperor and exterminate Pope Boniface VIII and all the clergy, and that his Apostles would then triumph, restoring the Church to the poverty and purity of its origins.

Bernardo Gui lists twenty of Gherardo and Dolcino’s errors:
     ‘… 2) That the Roman Church is that harlot who denied the faith of Christ, of whom John speaks in the Apocalypse.
     ‘… 5) That only those who are called apostles and belong to this congregation are the Church of God and are in the state of perfection of the first apostles of Christ and therefore are not bound to obey any man, pontiff or other, since their rule, which comes without mediation from Christ, is to lead a free and perfect life.
     ‘… 12) That all prelates of the Roman Church of every rank from the time of Saint Sylvester onwards, who deviated from the way of life of the early saints, are prevaricators and corrupters, except for the monk who was called Pope Celestine.’

Pope Sylvester is the one who, according to tradition, accepted Constantine’s donation and thus wealth and temporal power.
     ‘… 18) That a consecrated church is no more a place of prayer than a stable for horses or pigs.’

In Canto XXVIII of Inferno, Dante Alighieri prophesies Dolcino’s fate, even though the text was actually written after his death. Dante has Muhammad speak, who is waiting for Dolcino in the circle of schismatics. Schism was considered a sin more serious than heresy, as it divided the Church. The fact that Dolcino was considered even more of a schismatic than a heretic, and associated with Mohammed, shows that even after his death he was still considered a serious threat to the Church.

His end roughly coincided with that of his movement, at least as far as we know. The theorised and practised use of violence and weapons distinguishes the Dolciniani from other heretics. Although others, starting with the Patari and Cathars, had also sometimes taken up arms to help the Ghibelline and imperial factions. It is also true that for the Apostolics this stemmed from their need to defend themselves and survive when under siege. However, no one had theorised and practised it so openly: the Spirituals, for example, opposed being burnt at the stake only by fleeing. With a certain caution, and without exaggerating its significance, we can say that with Dolcino, the armed prophet took the place of the previous unarmed prophets.

From the text by Brocchieri-Fumagalli: ‘The sect had no rules or novitiate institutions, and the very thinness of its ideological structure and the purely emotional force of its denunciation allowed men of different backgrounds and cultures, and even of different ideals, to come together. The identification of the group or class that constituted the success of the apostolic sect is controversial and therefore does not allow for an in-depth discussion of the social physiognomy of the Dulcinians. Violante notes that Dulcinianism cannot be reduced to a peasant movement, because many of the sect’s members came from what we would now call the urban bourgeoisie, whereas in the final phase quite a few minor nobles joined.’

Dolcino’s evangelical communism was inevitably successful among peasants and the urban poor. As in other heresies, there were also many artisans and merchants, and even some nobles. For the bourgeoisie who followed Dolcino, the explanation already given applies: in addition to sharing a dominant religious ideology, there was the need to fight against the feudal world. Fighting against the Empire, and above all against the papacy, was felt to be essential to assert the existence and autonomy of this new social class.

All this was very confusing: social classes had little or no awareness of their own interests and actions. The bourgeoisie and the subordinate classes fought the same battle against the dominant feudal classes. It would take centuries for the subordinate classes, with the birth of the modern proletariat, to separate themselves clearly from the bourgeoisie, which now predominates, and from the middle classes.

Apocalyptic Bourgeoisie

The term ‘apocalypse’ derives from the Greek apocalipsis, meaning manifestation, revelation, appearance, discovery. The Apocalypse of John, written at the end of the first century, had mainly this meaning. But over the centuries that followed and during the Middle Ages, the term assumed shades of meaning that enormously accentuated the aspects of death, fear and terror.

Today, the apocalyptic vision is more prevalent among the atheist and rationalist bourgeoisie than among those who have religious beliefs. The bourgeoisie, whether atheist or religious, can smell the death of a class that has no future, because they cannot and will not believe in a future without capitalism, in which their own class will cease to exist. ‘The world has no future,’ they say, because they cannot think or say that it is their class that has no future. Hence their dark, gloomy, anguished visions of tomorrow, populated by nightmares of environmental and nuclear disaster, etc.

Of course, for them, none of this is due to the capitalist system of production, but to the imperfection or wickedness of human nature. Even science fiction creates worlds that, beyond appearances, are very similar to the real one: not even in fantasy can the bourgeoisie conceive of a world that is not shaped by capitalist relations of production.

The hope of traditional religions, already faltering from the outset, has turned to despair. The ‘kingdom of heaven’ has materialised as a nightmare. The future has disappeared. Hope, the ‘kingdom of heaven’, the future, of the religions and then of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, and more precisely of the classes that preceded the birth of the proletariat, have been inherited by the communists.

Communist Sentiment and its Encounter with Communist Reason

All these groups, heretical or not, steeped in millenarianism, messianism and Joachimism, may make us smile at their ideological visions, but they are on our side of history, in the name of a shared communist sentiment. The names mentioned are part of a very long list, which also includes many women, such as Chiara of Assisi and Margherita of Cortona.

The term ‘companions’ derives from the Latin ‘cum panis,’ and refers to those who eat the same bread at the same table. This term was commonly used by Franciscans.

It was only with the birth of capitalism, and the reflections on it that culminated in the Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848, that sentiment was united with reason and communist science and gave rise to our historical programme. In the name of a common communist sentiment, we sit at the same table with the various Waldos, Francis’s and Dolcinos, and share the same bread, the fruit of the earth and of human labour.

… The same bread that capitalism turns to stone. This is not just a metaphor: mixing marble dust with flour to increase its weight to sell it at a higher price has already happened. The reality of capitalism is worse than any fantasy, and worse than any conspiracy which the bourgeoisie comes up with to give an easy explanation for what they do not know, cannot know, and have no wish to understand.

(to be continued)

Part one
Struggle for Power in the Two Revolutions

X - 94. Dogma or a Guide to Action? - 95. The So-Called “Philosophy of Praxis” - 96. Lenin still on the Thread of Time - 97. The Famous “Anti-Right Front”: Kornilov - 98. Weakened Front, Advancing Bolshevism - 99. Preparliament and Boycott - 100. Insurrection Is an Art! - 101. Further Disagreements in the Party - 102. The Organs of struggle - 103. The Crucial Hour - 104. Power Conquered

 


[ It is here ] 

(continued to next issue)

Marx and Engels on the Question of Free Trade

Today the bourgeoisie world is once again lite alight around the global controversies surrounding the questions of protectionism or free trade. As the American post-cold war dream of the liberal laissez fair world order, dominated by U.S. finance capital and its industrial monopolies begins to evaporate due to the old mole of capitalist economic laws and competition, new industrial powerhouses have arrived on the scene who have developed around the block of the emerging finance center in China to threaten the U.S. bourgeois total dominance. Thus the “free trade” policies that the United States spent the last century crusading to spread across the world in the name of Democracy has suddenly turned into the context from which U.S. industry has been apparently been “taken advantage of” according to Republicans in the United States. In an appeal to working class to create “high paying jobs” by “reshoring” industry this wing of the bourgeois dumps the democratic veneer as it turns towards open dictatorship. Meanwhile the Democrats return to the role of the underdog agitator of the common man preaching democracy and a return to free trade, demonstrating that behind all the political hemming and hawing is pure economics, and the same old story of American bourgeois political theater and economic policy.

In the following speech by Marx given in 1847 and the subsequent essay introduction by Engels written almost 40 years later, the two pieces make clear that communists are for the free development of the means of production and opposed to any protectionist economic policy, not out of any naivety that one or the other trade policy of the capitalist in itself creates better living conditions for the working class, but due to free trade being “the plan which will soonest lead to the capitalist society to a deadloc”. Engels and Marx point towards the clear obtuseness of the opportunist socialists today and over the last century who claim protectionism as a defense of the working classes. The two masters unmask this song and dance of thinly veiled nationalist chauvinism parading as working class militancy for exactly what it is, only a defense of capital and it’s state. As we can see throughout history various national capitalist classes have at once demanded free trade and at other times insisted on protectionism, contingent on the levels of development of their industries in relation to other countries industrial competition as all industry must either “grow or die”.

American economic policy has long swung between free trade and protectionism, shaped by shifting industrial competition and strategic needs. In the early republic, the United States used tariffs and navigation acts to shield its young shipping and shipbuilding sectors from British dominance, ensuring American vessels could secure a place in transatlantic trade. But as the 19th century progressed, this heavy-handed protection gave way to a period of freer trade, particularly under mid-century Democratic leadership, which argued that reduced duties would lower costs for consumers and expand markets for farmers. After the Civil War, however, Republicans returned to high tariffs, prioritizing industrial development over maritime strength. These policies benefited emerging manufacturing hubs but devastated American shipbuilding, which could not compete with heavily subsidized British yards. By the early 20th century, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson attempted to swing the pendulum back again, advocating for lower tariffs as a way to broaden prosperity and promising that freer trade would directly benefit the working class by reducing prices and expanding job opportunities. Yet this experiment collapsed with the protectionist turn of the 1920s, culminating in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, passed during the Republican administration of Herbert Hoover, which dramatically raised duties on thousands of imports in an effort to shield American industries but instead deepened the global economic downturn during the Great Depression. Under Franklin Roosevelt, protectionism was revived not only to stabilize the economy but to build industrial capacity for wartime mobilization, as steel, machinery, and shipping were rapidly expanded under government support. After World War II, America’s industrial dominance enabled it to lead a return to free trade through institutions like GATT, liberalizing world commerce on U.S. terms while still protecting key sectors such as agriculture, steel, and textiles. This historical pattern of oscillating between defensive protectionism and expansive free trade traces back to the nation’s earliest struggles with Britain and reveals how domestic priorities and global power have continually reshaped American trade policy.

Today the situation of the United States is not dissimilar from that of the British Empire at the end of the 19th century. There too a country that was once the industrial powerhouse of the world and champion of free trade was suddenly facing a widespread movement to advocate for protectionism in the face of rising industrial competition. Engels comments extensively on this protectionist movement in Britain, which unlike in the case of the United States, never was able to make most of it’s economic policies a reality.

Such protectionist policies touted today as the key to staving off economic cataclysm, ultimately only worsen the situation, especially within today’s putrifying capitalism.Engles and Marx show that tariffs and manufactures are merely a method of “manufacturing manufactures”, used in the period when a semi-feudal country or an early capitalist country is developing itself; however, even in the latter context after the development of internal and world markets, protectionism, designed to advance the development of a certain industry, can inadvertently destroy others or even itself as Engels points to the example of the post-civil war American shipbuilding industry which was devastated by protectionism.

Engels and Marx point out that the further centralization of capital into bigger and bigger monopolies is a direct as a consequence of tariffs and protection. Monopolies develop and are explained as increasing national competitiveness in global markets; however, they never are truly able to get there and instead the trusts combined with the protectionism only allows for the more thorough and savage exploitation of industries granted to them against the domestic consumers and workers. An essential feature of imperialism further extrapolated by Lenin in his famous works on Imperialism. Protectionism emerges within the context of the global markets and free trade and thus is inevitably interlinked with it. While it is aimed at advancing industrialization, as capital has grown into its imperialistic phase, within developed industrial countries financial core, it is just as likely to devastate and wreck chaos within established branches of industry & their international supply chains which they are fundamentally connected to, giving room to rising international rivals, as opposed to promoting a general return to industrial growth and prosperity. Regardless, once such destructive tariffs are set about it is extremely hard to remove as Marx and Lenin explains.

Today we live in a world where rising industrial powers such as India, experience massive strikes of hundreds of millions while the stagnating industrial and financial powers in the West struggle to rebuild an industrial core; however, the general overproduction crisis of capitalism looms over the entire world and the progressive proletarianization of the masses of the middle classes in the west continues even if “good paying” jobs do not actually emerge as a result of “reshoring”. Instead, workers in the west find the same “new opportunities” with protectionism that came with free trade. Where once industrial jobs were replaced with an explosion in retail jobs in chains such as Walmart and fast food, now the new phenomena of lucrative tech industry jobs are replaced with precarious jobs in Amazon warehouses. For the working class who will be ruthlessly exploited by the capitalist class be it protectionism or free trade, the only difference is which policy works to gives them more leverage to organize themselves against the employer and which policy creates the conditions for the destruction of the bourgeois world faster. Given this criteria Marx and Engels layout who communists oppose protectionism and how free trade can bring about the more rapid destruction of the bourgeois world.

This critical lesson must not be lost on the working class of today. As the capitalist crisis deepens the same opportunist socialist snake oil salesmen return to croak about how protectionism helps the working class as they sit on their soap boxes preaching against so called “neo-liberalism”, we are told that the fate of the working class is tied ot the fate of the industrial monopolies and that reshoring industry will protect american jobs, nevermind that all of these jobs if they do return will be automated. In reality, the actual situation is one of being “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” both for the working class and for the capitalist economy itself. The only path forward is that of revolutionary assault on capitalism by the working class, all other dead ends promise only smoke, mirrors and more demagoguitous charlatans selling pie in the sky solutions to save this rotten sinking ship of fools, the capitalist economy and it’ states.

Preface by Frederick Engels for the 1888 English edition

TOWARDS the end of 1847, a Free Trade Congress was held at Brussels. It as a strategic move in the Free Trade campaign then carried on by the English manufacturers. Victorious at home, by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, they now invaded the continent in order to demand, in return for the free admission of continental corn into England, the free admission of English manufactured goods to the continental markets.

At this Congress, Marx inscribed himself on the list of speakers; but, as might have been expected, things were not so managed that before his turn came on, the Congress was closed. Thus, what Marx had to say on the Free Trade question he was compelled to say before the Democratic Association of Brussels, an international body of which he was one of the vice-presidents.

The question of Free Trade or Protection being at present on the order of the day in America, it has been thought useful to publish an English translation of Marx's speech, to which I have been asked to write an introductory preface.

"The system of protection," says Marx, "was an artificial means of manufacturing manufacturers, of expropriating independent laborers, of capitalizing the national means of production and subsistence, and of forcibly abbreviating the transition from the medieval to the modern mode of production."

Such was protection at its origin in the 17th century, such it remained well into the 19th century. It was then held to be the normal policy of every civilized state in western Europe. The only exceptions were the smaller states of Germany and Switzerland – not from dislike of the system, but from the impossibility of applying it to such small territories.

It was under the fostering wing of protection that the system of modern industry – production by steam-moved machinery – was hatched and developed in England during the last third of the 18th century. And, as if tariff protection was not sufficient, the wars against the French Revolution helped to secure to England the monopoly of the new industrial methods. For more than 20 years, English men-of-war [fighting ships] cut off the industrial rivals of England from their respective colonial markets, while they forcibly opened these markets to English commerce. The secession of the South American colonies from the rule of their European mother countries, the conquest by England of all French and Dutch colonies worth having, the progressive subjugation of India turned the people of all these immense territories into customers for English goods. England thus supplemented the protection she practiced at home by the Free Trade she forced upon her possible customers abroad; and, thanks to this happy mixture of both systems, at the end of the wars, in 1815, she found herself, with regard to all important branches of industry, in possession of the virtual monopoly of the trade of the world.

This monopoly was further extended and strengthened during the ensuing years of peace. The start, which England had obtained during the war, was increased from year to year; she seemed to distance more and more all her possible rivals. The exports of manufactured goods in ever growing quantities became indeed a question of life and death to that country. And there seemed but two obstacles in the way: the prohibitive or protective legislation of other countries, and the taxes upon the import of raw materials and articles of food in England.

Then the Free Trade doctrines of classical political economy – of the French physiocrats and their English successors, Adam Smith and Ricardo – became popular in the land of John Bull.

Protection at home was needless to manufacturers who beat all their foreign rivals, and whose very existence was staked on the expansion of their exports. Protection at home was of advantage to none but the producers of articles of food and other raw materials, to the agricultural interest, which, under then existing circumstances in England, meant the receivers of rent, the landed aristocracy. And this kind of protection was hurtful to the manufacturers. By taxing raw materials, it raised the price of the articles manufactured from them; by taxing food, it raised the price of labor; in both ways, it placed the British manufacturer at a disadvantage as compared with his foreign competitor. And, as all other countries sent to England chiefly agricultural products and drew from England chiefly manufactured goods, repeal of the English protective duties on corn and raw materials generally was at the same time an appeal to foreign countries to do away with – or at least to reduce in turn – the import duties levied by them on English manufactures.

After a long and violent struggle, the English industrial capitalists, already in reality the leading class of the nation, that class whose interests were then the chief national interests, were victorious. The landed aristocracy had to give in. The duties on corn and other raw materials were repealed. Free Trade became the watchword of the day. To convert all other countries to the gospel of Free Trade, and thus to create a world in which England was the great manufacturing centre, with all other countries for its independent agricultural districts, that was the next task before the English manufacturers and their mouthpieces, the political economists.

That was the time of the Brussels Congress, the time when Marx prepared the speech in question. While recognizing that protection may still, under certain circumstances, for instance in the Germany of 1847, be of advantage to the manufacturing capitalists; while proving that that Free Trade was not the panacea for all the evils under which the working class suffered, and might even aggravate them; he pronounces, ultimately and on principle, in favor of Free Trade.

To him, Free Trade is the normal condition of modern capitalist production. Only under Free Trade can the immense productive powers of steam, of electricity, of machinery, be full developed; and the quicker the pace of this development, the sooner and the more fully will be realized its inevitable results; society splits up into two classes, capitalists here, wage-laborers there; hereditary wealth on one side, hereditary poverty on the other; supply outstripping demand, the markets being unable to absorb the ever growing mass of the production of industry; an ever recurring cycle of prosperity, glut, crisis, panic, chronic depression, and gradual revival of trade, the harbinger not of permanent improvement but of renewed overproduction and crisis; in short, productive forces expanding to such a degree that they rebel, as against unbearable fetters, against the social institutions under which they are put in motion; the only possible solution: a social revolution, freeing the social productive forces from the fetters of an antiquated social order, and the actual producers, the great mass of the people, from wage slavery. And because Free Trade is the natural, the normal atmosphere for this historical evolution, the economic medium in which the conditions for the inevitable social revolution will be the soonest created – for this reason, and for this alone, did Marx declare in favor of Free Trade.

Anyhow, the years immediately following the victory of Free Trade in England seemed to verify the most extravagant expectations of prosperity founded upon that event. British commerce rose to a fabulous amount; the industrial monopoly of England on the market of the world seemed more firmly established that ever; new iron works, new textile factories arose by wholesale; new branches of industry grew up on ever side. There was, indeed, a severe crisis in 1857, but that was overcome, and the onward movement in trade and manufactures soon was in full swing again, until in 1866 a fresh panic occurred, a panic, this time, which seems to mark a new departure in the economic history of the world.

The unparalleled expansion of British manufactures and commerce between 1848 and 1866 was no doubt due, to a great extent, to the removal of the protective duties on food and raw materials. But not entirely. Other important changes took place simultaneously and helped it on. The above years comprise the discover and working of the Californian and Australian goldfields which increased so immensely the circulating medium of the world; they mark the final victory of steam over all other means of transports; on the ocean, steamers now superseded sailing vessels; on land, in all civilized countries, the railroad took the first place, the macadamized roads the second; transport now became four times quicker and four times cheaper. No wonder that under such favorable circumstances British manufactures worked by steam should extend their sway at the expense of foreign domestic industries based upon manual labor. But were the other countries to sit still and to submit to this change, which degraded them to be mere agricultural appendages of England, the "workshop of the world"?

The foreign countries did nothing of the kind. France, for nearly 200 years, had screened her manufactures behind a perfect Chinese wall of protection and prohibition, and had attained in all articles of luxury and of taste a supremacy which England did not even pretend to dispute. Switzerland, under perfect Free Trade, possessed relatively important manufactures, which English competition could not touch. Germany, with a tariff far more liberal than that of any other large continental country, was developing its manufactures at a rate relatively more rapid than even England. And America was, by the Civil War of 1861, all at once thrown upon her own resources, had to find means how to meet a sudden demand for manufactured goods of all sorts, and could only do so by creating manufactures of her own at home. The war demand ceased with the war; but the new manufactures were there, and had to meet British competition. And the war had ripened, in America, the insight that a nation of 35 million, doubling its numbers in 40 years at most, with such immense resources, and surrounded by neighbors that must be for years to come chiefly agriculturalists, that such a nation had the "manifest destiny" to be independent of foreign manufactures for its chief articles of consumption, and to be so in time of peace as well as in time of war. And then America turned protectionist.

It may now be 15 years ago, I traveled in a railway carriage with an intelligent Glasgow merchant, interested probably in the iron trade. Talking abut America, he treated me to the old Free Trade lubrications:
     "Was it not inconceivable that a nation of sharp businessmen like the Americans should pay tribute to indigenous ironmasters and manufacturers, when they could buy the same, if not a better article, ever so much cheaper in this country?"

And then he gave me examples as to how much the Americans taxed themselves in order to enrich a few greedy ironmasters.

"Well," I replied, "I think there is another side to the question. You know that in coal, waterpower, iron, and other ores, cheap food, homegrown cotton, and other raw materials, America has resources and advantages unequalled by any European country; and that these resources cannot be fully developed except by America becoming a manufacturing country. You will admit, too, that nowadays a, great nation like the Americans' cannot exist on agriculture alone; that would be tantamount to a condemnation to permanent barbarism and inferiority; no great nation can live, in our age, without manufactures of her own. Well, then, if America must become a manufacturing country, and if she has every chance of not only succeeding but even outstripping her rivals, there are two ways open to her: either to carry on for, let us say, 50 years under Free Trade an extremely expensive competitive war against English manufactures that have got nearly a hundred years start; or else to shut out, by protective duties, English manufactures for, say, 25 years, with the almost absolute certainty that at the end of the 25 years she will be able to hold her own in the open market of the world. Which of the two will be the cheapest and the shortest? That is the question. If you want to go from Glasgow to London, you take the parliamentary train at a penny a mile and travel at the rate of 12 miles an hour. But you do not; your time is too valuable, you take the express, pay twopence a mile and do 40 miles an hour. Very well, the Americans prefer to pay express fare and to go express speed."

My Scotch Free Trader had not a word in reply.

Protection being a means of artificially manufacturing manufacturers, may, therefore, appear useful not only to an incompletely developed capitalist class still struggling with feudalism; it may also give a life to the rising capitalist class of a country which, like America, has never known feudalism, but which has arrived at that stage of development where the passage from agriculture to manufactures becomes a necessity. America, placed in that situation, decided in favor of protection. Since that decision was carried out, the five and 20 years of which I spoke to my fellow traveller have about passed and, if I was not wrong, protection ought to have done its task for America, and ought to be now becoming a nuisance.

That has been my opinion for some time. Nearly two years ago, I said to a protectionist American: "I am convinced that if America goes in for Free Trade, she will in 10 years have beaten England in the market of the world."

Protection is at best an endless screw, and you never know when you have done with it. By protecting one industry, you directly or indirectly hurt all others, and have therefore to protect them too. By so doing you again damage the industry that you first protected, and have to compensate it; but this compensation reacts, as before, on all other trades, and entitles them to redress, and so on ad infinitum. America, in this respect, offers us a striking example of the best way to kill an important industry by protectionism. In 1856, the total imports and exports by sea of the United State amounted to $641,604,850. Of this amount, 75.2 per cent were carried in American, and only 24.8 per cent in foreign vessels. British ocean steamers were already then encroaching upon American sailing vessels; yet, in 1860, of a total seagoing trade of $762,288,550, American vessels still carried 66.5 per cent.

The Civil War came on, and protection to American shipbuilding; and the latter plan was so successful that it has nearly completely driven the American flag from the high seas. In 1887, the total seagoing trade of the United States amounted to $1,408,502,979, but of this total only 13.8 per cent were carried in American, and 86.2 per cent in foreign bottoms. The goods carried by American ships amounted, in 1856, to $482,268,274; in 1860 to $507,247,757. In 1887, they had sunk to $194,356,746. Forty years ago, the American flag was the most dangerous rival of the British flag, and bade fair to outstrip it on the ocean; now it is nowhere. Protection to shipbuilding has killed both shipping and shipbuilding.

Another point. Improvements in the methods of production nowadays follow each other so rapidly, and change the character of entire branches of industry so suddenly and so completely, that what may have been yesterday a fairly balanced protective tariff is no longer so today. Let us take another example from the Report of the Secretary of the Treasury for 1887: "Improvement in recent years in the machinery employed in combing wool has so changed the character of what are commercially known as worsted clothes that the latter have largely superseded woolen cloths for us as men's wearing apparel. This change... has operated to the serious injury of our domestic manufacturers of these (worsted) goods, because the duty on the wool which they must use is the same as that upon wool used in making woolen cloths, while the rate of duty imposed upon the latter when valued at not exceeding 80 cents per pound are 35 per cent ad valorem, whereas the duty on worsted cloths valued at not exceeding 80 cents ranges from 10 to 24 cents per pound and 35 per cent ad valorem. In some cases the duty on the wool used in making worsted cloths exceed the duty imposed on the finished article."

Thus what was protection to home industry yesterday turns out today to be a premium to the foreign importer, and well may the Secretary of the Treasury say: "There is much reason to believe that the manufacturer of worsted cloths must soon cease in this country unless the tariff law in this regard is amended."

But to amend it, you will have to fight the manufacturers of woolen clothes who profit by this state of things; you will have to open a regular campaign to bring the majority of both Houses of Congress, and eventually the public opinion of the country round to your views, and the question is, Will that pay?

But the worst of protection is that when you once have got it, you cannot easily get rid of it. Difficult as is the process of adjustment of an equitable tariff, the return to Free Trade is immensely more difficult. The circumstances that permitted England to accomplish the change in a few years will not occur again. And even there the struggle dated from 1823 (Huckisson), commenced to be successful in 1842 (Peel's tariff), and was continued for several years after the repeal of the Corn Laws. Thus protection to the silk manufacturer (the only one which had still to fear foreign competition) was prolonged for a series of years and then granted in another, positively infamous form; while the other textile industries were subjected to the Factory Act – which limited the hours of labor of women, young persons, and children – the silk trade was favored with considerable exceptions to the general rule enabling them to work younger children, and to work the children and young persons longer hours, than the other textile trades. The monopoly that the hypocritical Free Traders repealed with regard to the foreign competitors, that monopoly they created anew at the expense of the health and lives of English children.

But no country will again be able to pass from Protection to Free Trade at a time when all, or nearly all, branches of its manufactures can defy foreign competition in the open market. The necessity of the change will come long before such a happy state may even be hoped for. That necessity will make itself evident in different trades at different times; and from the conflicting interests of these trades, the most edifying squabbles, lobby intrigues, and parliamentary conspiracies will arise. The machinist, engineer, and shipbuilder may find that the protection granted to the iron master raises the price of his goods so much that his export trade is thereby, and thereby alone, prevented. The cotton cloth manufacturer might see his way to driving English cloth out of the Chinese and Indian markets, but for the high price he has to pay for the yarn, on account of protection to spinners, and so forth.

The moment a branch of national industry has completely conquered the home market, that moment exportation becomes a necessity to it. Under capitalistic conditions, an industry either expands or wanes. A trade cannot remain stationary; stoppage of expansion is incipient ruin; the progress of mechanical and chemical invention, by constantly superseding human labor and ever more rapidly increasing and concentrating capital, creates in every stagnant industry a glut both of workers and of capital, a glut which finds no vent everywhere, because the same process is taking place in all other industries.

Thus the passage from a home to an export trade becomes a question of life and death for the industries concerned. But they are met by the established rights, the vested interests of others who as yet find protection either safer or more profitable than Free Trade. Then ensues a long and obstinate fight between Free Traders and Protectionists; a fight where, on both sides, the leadership soon passes out of the hands of the people directly interested, into those of professional politicians, the wire-pullers of the traditional political parties, whose interest is not a settlement of the question, but its being kept open forever; and the result of an immense loss of time, energy, and money is a series of compromises favoring now one, then the other side, and drifting slowly though not majestically in the direction of Free Trade – unless Protection manages, in the meantime, to make itself utterly insupportable to the nation, which is just now likely to be the case in America.

There is, however, another kind of protection, the worst of all, and that is exhibited in Germany. Germany, too, began to feel, soon after 1815, the necessity of a quicker development of her manufactures. But the first condition of that was the creation of a home market by the removal of the innumerable customs lines and varieties of fiscal legislation formed by the small German states – in other words, the formation of a German Customs Union, or Zollverein. That could only be done on the basis of a liberal tariff, calculated rather to raise a common revenue than to protect home production. On no other condition could the small states have been introduced to join.

Thus the new German tariff, though slightly protective to some trades, was, at the time of its introduction, a model of Free Trade legislation; and it remained so, although, ever since 1830, the majority of German manufacturers kept clamoring for protection. Yet, under this extremely liberal tariff, and in spite of German domestic industries based on hand labor being mercilessly crushed out by the competition of English factories worked by steam, the transition from manual labor to machinery was gradually accomplished in Germany too, and is now nearly complete. The transformation of Germany from an agricultural to a manufacturing country went on at the same pace, and was, since 1866, assisted by favorable political events: the establishment of a strong central government, and federal legislation, ensuring uniformity in the laws regulating trade, as well as in currency, weights, and measures, and, finally, the flood of the French billions. Thus, about 1874, German trade on the market of the world ranked next to that of Great Britain, and Germany employed more steam power in manufactures and locomotion than any Continental European country. The proof has thus been furnished that even nowadays, in spite of the enormous start that English industry has got, a large country can work its way up to successful competition in the open market with England.

Then, all at once, a change of front was made: Germany turned protectionist at a moment when more than ever Free Trade seemed a necessity for her. The change was no doubt absurd; but it may be explained. While Germany had been a corn-exporting country, the whole agricultural interest, not less than the whole shipping trade, had been ardent Free Traders. But in 1874, instead of exporting, Germany required large supplies of corn from abroad. About that time, America began to flood Europe with enormous supplies of cheap corn; wherever they went, they brought down the money revenue yielded by the land, and consequently its rent; and from that moment, the agricultural interest all over Europe began to clamor for protection.

At the same time, manufacturers in Germany were suffering from the effect of the reckless overtrading brought on by the influx of the French billions, while England, whose trade ever since the crisis of 1866 had been in a state of chronic depression, inundated all accessible markets with goods unsalable at home and offered abroad at ruinously low prices. Thus it happened that German manufacturers, though depending above all upon export, began to see in protection a means of securing to themselves the exclusive supply of the home market. And the government, entirely in the hands of the landed aristocracy and squirearchy, was only too glad to profit by this circumstance in order to benefit the receivers of the rent of land by offering protective duties to both landlords and manufacturers. In 1878, a highly protective tariff was enacted both for agricultural products and for manufactured goods.

The consequence was that henceforth the exportation of German manufactures was carried on at the direct cost of the home consumers. Wherever possible, "rings" or "trusts" were formed to regulate the export trade and even production itself. The German iron trade is in the hands of a few large firms, mostly joint stock companies, who, betwixt them, can produce about four times as much iron as the average consumption of the country can absorb. To avoid unnecessary competition with one another, these firms have formed a trust which divides amongst them all foreign contracts and determines in each case the firm that is to make the real tender. This "trust", some years ago, had even come to an agreement with the English iron masters, but this no longer subsists. Similarly, the Westphalian coal mines (producing about 30 million tons annually) had formed a trust to regulate production, tenders for contracts, and prices. And, altogether, any German manufacturer will tell you that the only thing the protective duties do for him is to enable him to recoup himself in the home market for the ruinous prices he has to take abroad.

And this is not all. This absurd system of protection to manufacturers is nothing but the sop thrown to industrial capitalists to induce them to support a still more outrageous monopoly given to the landed interest. Not only is all agricultural produce subjected to heavy import duties which are increased from year to year, but certain rural industries, carried on large estates for account of the proprietor, are positively endowed out of the public purse. The beet-root sugar manufacture is not only protected, but receives enormous sums in the shape of export premiums. One who ought to know is of opinion that if the exported sugar was all thrown into the sea, the manufacturer would still clear a profit out of government premium. Similarly, the potato-spirit distilleries receive, in consequence of recent legislation, a present out of the pockets of the public of about $9 million a year. And as almost every large landowner in northeastern Germany is either a beet-root sugar manufacturer or a potato-spirit distiller, or both, no wonder the world is literally deluged with their production.

This policy, ruinous under any circumstances, is doubly so in a country whose manufactures keep up their standing in neutral markets chiefly through the cheapness of labor. Wages in Germany, kept near starvation point at the best of times, through redundancy of population (which increases rapidly, in spite of emigration), must rise in consequence of the rise in all necessaries caused by protection; the German manufacturer will then no longer be able, as he too often is ow, to make up for a ruinous price of his articles by a deduction from the normal wages of his hands and will be driven out of the market. Protection, in Germany, is killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

France, too, suffers from the consequences of protection. The system in that country has become, by its two centuries of undisputed sway, almost part and parcel of the life of the nation. Nevertheless, it is more and more becoming an obstacle. Constant changes in the methods of manufacture are the order of the day; but protection bars the road. Silk velvets have their backs nowadays made of fine cotton thread; the French manufacturer has either to pay protection price for that, or to submit to such interminable official chicanery as fully makes up for the difference between that price and the government drawback on exportation; and so the velvet trade goes from Lyons to Crefeld, where the protection price for fine cotton thread is considerably lower.

French exports, as said before, consist chiefly of articles of luxury where French taste cannot, as yet, be beaten; but the chief consumers all over the world of such articles are our modern upstart capitalists who have no education and no taste, and who are suited quite as well by cheap and clumsy German or English imitations, and often have these foisted upon them for the real French article at more than fancy prices. The market for those specialties which cannot be made out of France is constantly getting narrower, French export manufacturers are barely kept up, and must soon decline; by what new articles can France replace those whose export is dying out? If anything can help here, it is a bold measure of Free Trade, taking the French manufacturer out of his accustomed hothouse atmosphere and placing him once more in the open air of competition with foreign rivals. Indeed, French general trade would have long since begun shrinking were it not for the slight and vacillating step in the direction of Free Trade made by the [French-English] Cobden treaty of 1860, but that has well-nigh exhausted itself and a stronger dose of the same tonic is wanted.

It is hardly worthwhile to speak of Russia. There, the protective tariff – the duties having to be paid in gold, instead of in the depreciated paper currency of the country – serves above all things to supply the pauper government with the hard cash indispensable for transactions with foreign creditors. On the very day on which that tariff fulfills its protective mission by totally excluding foreign goods, on that day the Russian government is bankrupt. And yet that same government amuses its subjects by dangling before their eyes the prospect of making Russia, by means of this tariff, an entirely self-supplying country, requiring from the foreigner neither food, nor raw material, nor manufactured articles, nor works of art. The people who believe in this vision of a Russian Empire, secluded and isolated from the rest of the world, are on a level with the patriotic Prussian lieutenant who went into a shop and asked for a globe, not a terrestrial or a celestial one, but a globe of Prussia.

To return to America. There are plenty of symptoms that Protection has done all it could for the United States, and that the sooner it receives notice to quit, the better for all parties. One of these symptoms is the formation of "rings" and "trusts" within the protected industries for the more thorough exploitation of the monopoly granted to them. Now "rings" and "trusts" are truly American institutions, and, where they exploit natural advantages, they are generally though grumblingly submitted to. the transformation of the Pennsylvanian oil supply into a monopoly by the Standard Oil Company is a proceeding entirely in keeping with the rules of capitalist production. But if the sugar refiners attempt to transform the petition granted them, by the nation, against foreign competition, into a monopoly against the home consumer, that is to say against the same nation that granted the protection, that is quite a different thing. Yet the large sugar refiners have formed a "trust" which aims at nothing else. And the sugar trust is not the only one of its kind.

Now, the formation of such trusts in protected industries is the surest sign that protection has done its work and is changing its character; that it protects the manufacturer no longer against the foreign importer, but against the home consumer; that is has manufactured, at least in the special branch concerned, quite enough, if not too many manufacturers; that the money it puts into the purse of these manufacturers is money thrown away, exactly as in Germany.

In America, as elsewhere, Protection is bolstered up by the argument that Free Trade will only benefit England. The best proof to the contrary is that in England not only the agriculturists and landlords but even the manufacturers are turning protectionist. In the home of the "Manchester school" of Free Traders, on November 1, 1886, the Manchester chamber of commerce discussed a resolution "that, having waited in vain 40 years for other nations to follow the Free Trade example of England, the chamber thinks the time has arrived to reconsider that position."

The resolution was indeed rejected, but by 22 votes against 21! And that happened in the centre of the cotton manufacture – i.e., the only branch of English manufacture whose superiority in the open market seems still undisputed! But, then, even in that special branch inventive genius has passed from England to America. The latest improvements in machinery for spinning and weaving cotton have come, almost all, from America, and Manchester has to adopt them. In industrial inventions of all kinds, America has distinctly taken the lead, while Germany runs England very close for second place.

The consciousness is gaining ground in England that that country's industrial monopoly is irretrievably lost, that she is still relatively losing ground, while her rivals are making progress, and that she is drifting into a position where she will have to be content with being one manufacturing nation among many, instead of, as she once dreamt, "the workshop of the world". It is to stave off this impending fate that Protection, scarcely disguised under the veil of "fair trade" and retaliatory tariffs, is now invoked with such fervor by the sons of the very men who, 40 years ago, knew no salvation but in Free Trade. And when English manufacturers begin to find that Free Trade is ruining them, and ask the government to protect them against their foreign competitors, then, surely, the moment has come for these competitors to retaliate by throwing overboard a protective system henceforth useless, to fight the fading industrial monopoly of England with its own weapon: Free Trade.

But, as I said before, you may easily introduce Protection, but you cannot get rid of it again so easily. The legislature, by adopting the protective plan, has created vast interests, for which it is responsible. And not every one of these interests – the various branches of industry – is equally ready, at a given moment, to face open competition. Some will be lagging behind, while others have no longer need of protective nursing. This difference of position will give rise to the usual lobby-plotting, and is in itself a sure guarantee that the protected industries, if Free Trade is resolved upon, will be let down very easy indeed as was the silk manufacture in England after 1846. That is unavoidable under present circumstances, and will have to be submitted to by the Free Trade party so long as the change is resolved upon in principle.

The question of Free Trade or Protection moves entirely within the bounds of the present system of capitalist production, and has, therefore, no direct interest for us socialists who want to do away with that system.

Indirectly, however, it interests us inasmuch as we must desire as the present system of production to develop and expand as freely and as quickly as possible: because along with it will develop also those economic phenomena which are its necessary consequences, and which must destroy the whole system: misery of the great mass of the people, in consequence of overproduction. This overproduction engendering either periodical gluts and revulsions, accompanied by panic, or else a chronic stagnation of trade; division of society into a small class of large capitalist, and a large one of practically hereditary wage-slaves, proletarians, who, while their numbers increase constantly, are at the same time constantly being superseded by new labor-saving machinery; in short, society brought to a deadlock, out of which there is no escaping but by a complete remodeling of the economic structure which forms it basis.

From this point of view, 40 years ago Marx pronounced, in principle, in favor of Free Trade as the more progressive plan, and therefore the plan which would soonest bring capitalist society to that deadlock. But if Marx declared in favor of Free Trade on that ground, is that not a reason for every supporter of the present order of society to declare against Free Trade? If Free Trade is stated to be revolutionary, must not all good citizens vote for Protection as a conservative plan?

If a country nowadays accepts Free Trade, it will certainly not do so to please the socialists. It will do so because Free trade has become a necessity for the industrial capitalists. But if it should reject Free Trade and stick to Protection, in order to cheat the socialists out of the expected social catastrophe, that will not hurt the prospects of socialism in the least. Protection is a plan for artificially manufacturing manufacturers, and therefore also a plan for artificially manufacturing wage laborers. You cannot breed the one without breeding the other.

The wage laborer everywhere follows in the footsteps of the manufacturer; he is like the "gloomy care" of Horace, that sits behind the rider, and that he cannot shake off wherever he go. You cannot escape fate; in other words, you cannot escape the necessary consequences of your own actions. A system of production based upon the exploitation of wage labor, in which wealth increases in proportion to the number of laborers employed and exploited, such a system is bound to increase the class of wage laborers, that is to say, the class which is fated one day to destroy the system itself. In the meantime, there is no help for it: you must go on developing the capitalist system, you must accelerate the production, accumulation, and centralization of capitalist wealth, and, along with it, the production of a revolutionary class of laborers. Whether you try the Protectionist or the Free Trade will make no difference in the end, and hardly any in the length of the respite left to you until the day when that end will come. For long before that day will protection have become an unbearable shackle to any country aspiring, with a chance of success, to hold its own in the world market.

Marx
Speech, on the Question of Free Trade

Gentlemen,

The Repeal of the Corn Laws in England is the greatest triumph of free trade in the 19th century. In every country where manufacturers talk of free trade, they have in mind chiefly free trade in corn and raw materials in general. To impose protective duties on foreign corn is infamous, it is to speculate on the famine of peoples.

Cheap food, high wages, this is the sole aim for which English free-traders have spent millions, and their enthusiasm has already spread to their brethren on the Continent. Generally speaking, those who wish for free trade desire it in order to alleviate the condition of the working class.

But, strange to say, the people for whom cheap food is to be procured at all costs are very ungrateful. Cheap food is as ill-esteemed in England as cheap government is in France. The people see in these self-sacrificing gentlemen, in Bowring, Bright and Co., their worst enemies and the most shameless hypocrites.

Everyone knows that in England the struggle between Liberals and Democrats takes the name of the struggle between Free-Traders and Chartists.

Let us now see how the English free-traders have proved to the people the good intentions that animate them.

This is what they said to the factory workers:

"The duty levied on corn is a tax upon wages; this tax you pay to the landlords, those medieval aristocrats; if your position is wretched one, it is on account of the dearness of the immediate necessities of life."

The workers in turn asked the manufacturers:
     "How is it that in the course of the last 30 years, while our industry has undergone the greatest development, our wages have fallen far more rapidly, in proportion, than the price of corn has gone up?
     "The tax which you say we pay the landlords is about 3 pence a week per worker. And yet the wages of the hand-loom weaver fell, between 1815 and 1843, from 28s. per week to 5s., and the wages of the power-loom weavers, between 1823 and 1843, from 20s. per week to 8s.
     "And during the whole of this period that portion of the tax which we paid to the landlord has never exceeded 3 pence. And, then in the year 1834, when bread was very cheap and business going on very well, what did you tell us? You said, 'If you are unfortunate, it is because you have too many children, and your marriages are more productive than your labor!'
     "These are the very words you spoke to us, and you set about making new Poor Laws, and building work-houses, the Bastilles of the proletariat."

To this the manufacturer replied:
     "You are right, worthy laborers; it is not the price of corn alone, but competition of the hands among themselves as well, which determined wages.
     "But ponder well one thing, namely, that our soil consists only of rocks and sandbanks. You surely do not imagine that corn can be grown in flower-pots. So if, instead of lavishing our capital and our labor upon a thoroughly sterile soil, we were to give up agriculture, and devote ourselves exclusively to industry, all Europe would abandon its factories, and England would form one huge factory town, with the whole of the rest of Europe for its countryside."

While thus haranguing his own workingmen, the manufacturer is interrogated by the small trader, who says to him:
     "If we repeal the Corn Laws, we shall indeed ruin agriculture; but for all that, we shall not compel other nations to give up their own factories and buy from ours.
     "What will the consequence be? I shall lose the customers that I have at present in the country, and the home trade will lose its market."

The manufacturer, turning his back upon the workers, replies to the shopkeeper:
     "As to that, you leave it to us! Once rid of the duty on corn, we shall import cheaper corn from abroad. Then we shall reduce wages at the very time when they rise in the countries where we get out corn.
     "Thus in addition to the advantages which we already enjoy we shall also have that of lower wages and, with all these advantage, we shall easily force the Continent to buy from us."

But now the farmers and agricultural laborers join in the discussion.
     "And what, pray, is to become of us?
     "Are we going to pass a sentence of death upon agriculture, from which we get our living? Are we to allow the soil to be torn from beneath our feet?"

As its whole answer, the Anti-Corn Law League has contented itself with offering prizes for the three best essays upon the wholesome influence of the repeal of the Corn Laws on English agriculture.

These prizes were carried off by Messrs. Hope, Morse, and Greg, whose essays were distributed in thousands of copies throughout the countryside.

The first of the prize-winners devotes himself to proving that neither the tenant farmer nor the agricultural laborer will lose by the free importation of foreign corn, but only the landlord.
     "The English tenant farmer," he exclaims, "need not fear the repeal of the Corn Laws, because no other country can produce such good corn so cheaply as England.
     "Thus, even if the price of corn fell, it would not hurt you, because this fall would only affect rent, which would go down, and not at all industrial profit and wages, which would remain stationary."

The second prize-winner, Mr. Morse, maintains, on the contrary, that the price of corn will rise in consequence of repeal. He takes infinite pains to prove that protective duties nave never been able to secure a remunerative price for corn.

In support for his assertion, he cites the fact that, whenever foreign corn has been imported, the price of corn in England has gone up considerably, and then when little corn has been imported, the price has fallen extremely. This prize-winner forgets that the importation was not the cause of the high price, but that the high price was the cause of the importation.

And in direct contradiction to his co-prize-winner, he asserts that every rise in the price of corn is profitable to both the tenant farmer and the laborer, but not to the landlord.

The third prize-winner, Mr. Greg, who is a big manufacturer and whose work is addressed to the large tenant farmers, could not hold with such stupidities. His language is more scientific.

He admits that the Corn Laws can raise rent only by raising the price of corn, and that they can raise the price of corn only by compelling capital to apply itself to land of inferior quality, and this is explained quite simply.

In proportion as population increases, if foreign corn cannot be imported, less fertile soil has to be used, the cultivation of which involves more expense and the product of this soil is consequently dearer.

There being a forced sale for corn, the price will of necessity be determined by the price of the product of the most costly soil. The difference between this price and the cost of production upon soil of better quality constitutes the rent.

If, therefore, as a result of the repeal of the Corn Laws, the price of corn, and consequently the rent, falls, it is because inferior soil will no longer be cultivated. Thus, the reduction of rent must inevitably ruin a part of the tenant farmers.

These remarks were necessary in order to make Mr. Greg's language comprehensible.
     "The small farmers," he says, "who cannot support themselves by agriculture will find a resource in industry. As to the large tenant farmers, they cannot fail to profit. Either the landlords will be obliged to sell them land very cheap, or leases will be made out for very long periods. This will enable tenant farmers to apply large sums of capital to the land, to use agricultural machinery on a larger scale, and to save manual labor, which will, moreover, be cheaper, on account of the general fall in wages, the immediate consequences of the repeal of the Corn Laws."

Dr. Browning conferred upon all these arguments the consecration of religion, by exclaiming at a public meeting,
     "Jesus Christ is Free Trade, and Free Trade is Jesus Christ."

One can understand that all this hypocrisy was not calculated to make cheap bread attractive to the workers.

Besides, how could the workingman understand the sudden philanthropy of the manufacturers, the very men still busy fighting against the Ten Hours' Bill, which was to reduce the working day of the mill hands from 12 hours to 10?

To give you an idea of the philanthropy of these manufacturers I would remind you, gentlemen, of the factory regulations in force in all the mills.

Every manufacturer has for his own private use a regular penal code in which fines are laid down for every voluntary or involuntary offence. For instance, the worker pays so much if he has the misfortune to sit down on a chair; if he whispers, or speaks, or laughs; if he arrives a few moments too late; if any part of the machine breaks, or he does not turn out work of the quality desired, etc., etc. The fines are always greater than the damage really done by the worker. And to give the worker every opportunity for incurring fines, the factory clock is set forward, and he is given bad raw material to make into good pieces of stuff. An overseer not sufficiently skillful in multiplying cases of infractions or rules is discharged.

You see, gentlemen, this private legislation is enacted for the especial purpose of creating such infractions, and infractions are manufactured for the purpose of making money. Thus the manufacturer uses every means of reducing the nominal wage, and of profiting even by accidents over which the worker has no control.

These manufacturers are the same philanthropists who have tried to make the workers believe that they were capable of going to immense expense for the sole purpose of ameliorating their lot. Thus, on the one hand, they nibble at the wages of the worker in the pettiest way, by means of factory regulations, and, on the other, they are undertaking the greatest sacrifices to raise those wages again by means of the Anti-Corn Law League.

They build great palaces at immense expense, in which the League takes up, in some respects, its official residence; they send an army of missionaries to all corners of England to preach the gospel of free trade; they have printed and distributed gratis thousands of pamphlets to enlighten the worker upon his own interests, they spend enormous sums to make the press favorable to their cause; they organize a vast administrative system for the conduct of the free trade movement, and they display all their wealth of eloquence at public meetings. It was at one of these meetings that a worker cried out:
     "If the landlords were to sell our bones, you manufacturers would be the first to buy them in order to put them through a steam-mill and make flour of them."

The English workers have very well understood the significance of the struggle between the landlords and the industrial capitalists. They know very well that the price of bread was to be reduced in order to reduce wages, and that industrial profit would rise by as much as rent fell.

Ricardo, the apostle of the English free-traders, the most eminent economist of our century, entirely agrees with the workers upon this point. In his celebrated work on political economy, he says:
     "If instead of growing our own corn... we discover a new market from which we can supply ourselves... at a cheaper price, wages will fall and profits rise. The fall in the price of agricultural produce reduces the wages, not only of the laborer employed in cultivating the soil, but also of all those employed in commerce or manufacture."

And do not believe, gentlemen, that is is a matter of indifference to the worker whether he receives only four francs on account of corn being cheaper, when he had been receiving five francs before.

Have not his wages always fallen in comparison with profit, and is it not clear that his social position has grown worse as compared with that of the capitalist? Besides which he loses more as a matter of fact.

So long as the price of corn was higher and wages were also higher, a small saving in the consumption of bread sufficed to procure him other enjoyments. But as soon as bread is very cheap, and wages are therefore very cheap, he can save almost nothing on bread for the purchase of other articles.

The English workers have made the English free-traders realize that they are not the dupes of their illusions or of their lies; and if, in spite of this, the workers made common cause with them against the landlords, it was for the purpose of destroying the last remnants of feudalism and in order to have only one enemy left to deal with. The workers have not miscalculated, for the landlords, in order to revenge themselves upon the manufacturers, made common cause with the workers to carry the Ten Hours' Bill, which the latter had been vainly demanding for 30 years, and which was passed immediately after the repeal of the Corn Laws.

When Dr. Bowring, at the Congress of Economists [September 16-18, 1848; the following, among others, were present: Dr. Bowring, M.P., Colonel Thompson, Mr. Ewart, Mr. Brown, and James Wilson, editor of the Economist], drew from his pocket a long list to show how many head of cattle, how much ham, bacon, poultry, etc., was imported into England, to be consumed, as he asserted, by the workers, he unfortunately forgot to tell you that all the time the workers of Manchester and other factory towns were finding themselves thrown into the streets by the crisis which was beginning.

As a matter of principle in political economy, the figures of a single year must never be taken as the basis for formulating general laws. One must always take the average period of from six to seven years -- a period of time during which modern industry passes through the various phases of prosperity, overproduction, stagnation, crisis, and completes its inevitable cycle.

Doubtless, if the price of all commodities falls -- and this is the necessary consequence of free trade -- I can buy far more for a franc than before. And the worker's france is as good as any other man's. Therefore, free trade will be very advantageous to the worker. There is only little difficulty in this, namely, that the worker, before he exchanges his franc for other commodities, has first exchanged his labor with the capitalist. If in this exchange he always received the said franc for the same labor and the price of all other commodities fell, he would always be the gainer by such a bargain. The difficult point does not lie in proving that, if the price of all commodities falls, I will get more commodities for the same money.

Economists always take the price of labor at the moment of its exchange with other commodities. But they altogether ignore the moment at which labor accomplishes its own exchange with capital.

When less expense is required to set in motion the machine which produces commodities, the things necessary for the maintenance of this machine, called a worker, will also cost less. If all commodities are cheaper, labor, which is a commodity too, will also fall in price, and, as we shall see later, this commodity, labor, will fall far lower in proportion than the other commodities. If the worker still pins his faith to the arguments of the economists, he will find that the franc has melted away in his pocket, and that he has only 5 sous left.

Thereupon the economists will tell you: "Well, we admit that competition among the workers, which will certainly not have diminished under free trade, will very soon bring wages into harm,only with the low price of commodities. But, on the other hand, the low price of commodities will increase consumption, the larger consumption will require increased production, which will be followed by a larger demand for hands, and this larger demand for hands will be followed by a rise in wages."

The whole line of argument amounts to this: Free trade increases productive forces. If industry keeps growing, if wealth, if the productive power, if, in a word, productive capital increases, the demand for labor,the price of labor, and consequently the rate of wages, rise also.

The most favorable condition for the worker is the growth of capital. This must be admitted. If capital remains stationary, industry will not merely remain stationary but will decline, and in this case the worker will be the first victim. He goes to the wall before the capitalist. And in the case where capital keeps growing, in the circumstance which we have said are the best for the worker, what will be his lot? He will go to the wall just the same. The growth of productive capital implies the accumulation and the concentration of capital. The centralization of capital involves a greater division of labor and a greater use of machinery. The greater division of labor destroys the especial skill of the laborer; and by putting in the place of this skilled work labor which anybody can perform, it increase competition among the workers.

This competition becomes fiercer as the division of labor enables a single worker to do the work of three. Machinery accomplishes the same result on a much larger scale. The growth of productive capital, which forces the industrial capitalists to work with constantly increasing means, ruins the small industrialist and throws them into the proletariat. Then, the rate of interest falling in proportion as capital accumulates, the small rentiers, who can no longer live on their dividends, are forced to go into industry and thus swell the number of proletarians.

Finally, the more productive capital increases, the more it is compelled to produce for a market whose requirements it does not know, the more production precedes consumption, the more supply tries to force demand, and consumption crises increase in frequency and in intensity. But every crisis in turn hastens the centralization of capital and adds to the proletariat.

Thus, as productive capital grows, competition among the workers grows in a far greater proportion. The reward of labor diminishes for all, and the burden of labor increases for some.

In 1829, there were in Manchester 1,088 cotton spinners employed in 36 factories. In 1841, there were no more than 448, and they tended 53,353 more spindles than the 1,088 spinners did in 1829. In manual labor had increased in the same proportion as the productive power, the number of spinners ought to have reaches the figure of 1,848; improved machinery had, therefore, deprived 1,100 workers of employment.

We know beforehand the reply of the economists. The men thus deprived of work, they say, will find other kinds of employment. Dr. Bowring did not fail to reproduce this argument at the Congress of Economists, but neither did he fail to supply his own refutation.

In 1835, Dr. Bowring made a speech in the House of Commons upon the 50,000 hand-loom weavers of London who for a very long time had been starving without being able to find that new kind of employment which the free-traders hold out to them in the distance.

We will give the most striking passages of this speech of Dr. Bowring: "This distress of the weavers... is an incredible condition of a species of labor easily learned -- and constantly intruded on and superseded by cheaper means of production. A very short cessation of demand, where the competition for work is so great... produces a crisis. The hand-loom weavers are on the verge of that state beyond which human existence can hardly be sustained, and a very trifling check hurls them into the regions of starvation.... The improvements of machinery... by superseding manual labor more and more, infallibly bring with them in the transition much of temporary suffering.... The national good cannot be purchased but at the expense of some individual evil. No advance was ever made in manufactures but at some cost to those who are in the rear; and of all discoveries, the power-loom is that which most directly bears on the condition of the hand-loom weaver. He is already beaten out of the field in many articles; he will infallibly be compelled to surrender many more."

Further on he says: "I hold in my hand the correspondence which has taken place between the Governor-General of India and the East-India Company, on the subject of the Dacca hand-loom weavers.... Some years ago the East-India Company annually received of the produce of the looms of India to the amount of from 6,000,000 to 8,000,000 of pieces of cotton goods. The demand gradually fell to somewhat more than 1,000,000, and has now nearly ceased altogether. In 1800, the United States took from India nearly 800,000 pieces of cotton; in 1830, not 4,000. In 1800, 1,000,000 pieces were shipped to Portugal; in 1830, only 20,000. Terrible were the accounts of the wretchedness of the poor Indian weavers, reduced to absolute starvation. And what was the sole cause? The presence of the cheaper English manufacture.... Numbers of them dies of hunger, the remainder were, for the most part, transferred to other occupations, principally agricultural. Not to have changed their trade was inevitable starvation. And at this moment that Dacca district is supplied with yarn and cotton cloth from the power-looms of England.... The Dacca muslins, celebrated over the whole world for their beauty and fineness, are also annihilated from the same cause. And the present suffering, to numerous classes in India, is scarcely to be paralleled in the history of commerce."

Dr. Bowring's speech is the more remarkable because the facts quoted by him are exact, and the phrases with which he seeks to palliate them are wholly characterized by the hypocrisy common to all free trade sermons. He represents the workers as means of production which must be superseded by less expensive means of production. He pretends to see in the labor of which he speaks a wholly exceptional kind of labor, and in the machine which has crushed out the weavers an equally exceptional machine. He forgets that there is no kind of manual labor which may not any day be subjected to the fate of the hand-loom weavers. "It is, in fact, the constant aim and tendency of every improvement in machine to supersede human labor altogether, or to diminish its cost by substituting the industry of women and children for that of men; or that of ordinary laborers for trained artisans. In most of the water-twist, or throstle cotton-mills, the spinning is entirely managed by females of 16 years and upwards. The effect of substituting the self-acting mule for the common mule, is to discharge the greater part of the men spinners, and to retain adolescents and children."

These words of the most enthusiastic free-trader, Dr. Ure, serve to complement the confessions of Dr. Bowring. Dr. Bowring speaks of certain individual evils, and, at the same time, says that these individual evils destroy whole classes; he speaks of the temporary sufferings during the transition period, and at the very time of speaking of them, he does not deny that these temporary evils have implied for the majority the transition from life to death, and for the rest a transition from a better to a worse condition. If he asserts, farther on, that the sufferings of these workers are inseparable from the progress of industry, and are necessary to the prosperity of the nation, he simply says that the prosperity of the bourgeois class presupposed as necessary the suffering of the laboring class.

All the consolation which Dr. Bowring offers the workers who perish, and, indeed, the whole doctrine of compensation which the free-traders propound, amounts to this:

You thousands of workers who are perishing, do not despair! You can die with an easy conscience. Your class will not perish. It will always be numerous enough for the capitalist class to decimate it without fear of annihilating it. Besides, how could capital be usefully applied if it did not take care always to keep up its exploitable material, i.e., the workers, to exploit them over and over again?

But, besides, why propound as a problem still to be solved the question: What influence will the adoption of free trade have upon the condition of the working class? All the laws formulated by the political economists from Quesnay to Ricardo have been based upon the hypothesis that the trammels which still interfere with commercial freedom have disappeared. These laws are confirmed in proportion as free trade is adopted. The first of these laws is that competition reduces the price of every commodity to the minimum cost of production. Thus the minimum of wages is the natural price of labor. And what is the minimum of wages? Just so much as is required for production of the articles indispensable for the maintenance of the worker, for putting him in a position to sustain himself, however badly, and to propagate his race, however slightly.

But do not imagine that the worker receives only this minimum wage, and still less that he always receives it.

No, according to this law, the working class will sometimes be more fortunate. It will sometimes receive something above the minimum, but this surplus will merely make up for the deficit which it will have received below the minimum in times of industrial stagnation. That is to say that, within a given time which recurs periodically, in the cycle which industry passes through while undergoing the vicissitudes of prosperity, overproduction, stagnation and crisis, when reckoning all that the working class will have had above and below necessaries, we shall see that, in all, it will have received neither more nor less than the minimum; i.e., the working class will have maintained itself as a class after enduring any amount of misery and misfortune, and after leaving many corpses upon the industrial battlefield. But what of that? The class will still exist; nay, more, it will have increased.

But this is not all. The progress of industry creates less expensive means of subsistence. Thus spirits have taken the place of beer, cotton that of wool and linen, and potatoes that of bread.

Thus, as means are constantly being found for the maintenance of labor on cheaper and more wretched food, the minimum of wages is constantly sinking. If these wages began by making the man work to live, they end by making him live the life of a machine. His existence has not other value than that of a simple productive force, and the capitalist treats him accordingly.

This law of commodity labor, of the minimum of wages, will be confirmed in proportion as the supposition of the economists, free-trade, becomes an actual fact. Thus, of two things one: either we must reject all political economy based on the assumption of free trade, or we must admit that under this free trade the whole severity of the economic laws will fall upon the workers.

To sum up, what is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the progress of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action. So long as you let the relation of wage labor to capital exist, it does not matter how favorable the conditions under which the exchange of commodities takes place, there will always be a class which will exploit and a class which will be exploited. It is really difficult to understand the claim of the free-traders who imagine that the more advantageous application of capital will abolish the antagonism between industrial capitalists and wage workers. On the contrary, the only result will be that the antagonism of these two classes will stand out still more clearly.

Let us assume for a moment that there are no more Corn Laws or national or local custom duties; in fact that all the accidental circumstances which today the worker may take to be the cause of his miserable condition have entirely vanished, and you will have removed so many curtains that hide from his eyes his true enemy.

He will see that capital become free will make him no less a slave than capital trammeled by customs duties.

Gentlemen! Do not allow yourselves to be deluded by the abstract word freedom. Whose freedom? It is not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but the freedom of capital to crush the worker.

Why should you desire to go on sanctioning free competition with this idea of freedom, when this freedom is only the product of a state of things based upon free competition?

We have shown what sort of brotherhood free trade begets between the different classes of one and the same nation. The brotherhood which free trade would establish between the nations of the Earth would hardly be more fraternal. To call cosmopolitan exploitation universal brotherhood is an idea that could only be engendered in the brain of the bourgeoisie. All the destructive phenomena which unlimited competition gives rise to within one country are reproduced in more gigantic proportions on the world market. We need not dwell any longer upon free trade sophisms on this subject, which are worth just as much as the arguments of our prize-winners Messrs. Hope, Morse, and Greg.

For instance, we are told that free trade would create an international division of labor, and thereby give to each country the production which is most in harmony with its natural advantage.

You believe, perhaps, gentlemen, that the production of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the West Indies.

Two centuries ago, nature, which does not trouble herself about commerce, had planted neither sugar-cane nor coffee trees there.

And it may be that in less than half a century you will find there neither coffee nor sugar, for the East Indies, by means of cheaper production, have already successfully combatted his alleged natural destiny of the West Indies. And the West Indies, with their natural wealth, are already as heavy a burden for England as the weavers of Dacca, who also were destined from the beginning of time to weave by hand.

One other thing must never be forgotten, namely, that, just as everything has become a monopoly, there are also nowadays some branches of industry which dominate all others, and secure to the nations which most largely cultivate them the command of the world market. Thus in international commerce cotton alone has much greater commercial than all the other raw materials used in the manufacture of clothing put together. It is truly ridiculous to see the free-traders stress the few specialities in each branch of industry,throwing them into the balance against the products used in everyday consumption and produced most cheaply in those countries in which manufacture is most highly developed.

If the free-traders cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another, we need not wonder, since these same gentlemen also refuse to understand how within one country one class can enrich itself at the expense of another.

Do not imagine, gentlemen, that in criticizing freedom of trade we have the least intention of defending the system of protection.

One may declare oneself an enemy of the constitutional regime without declaring oneself a friend of the ancient regime.

Moreover, the protectionist system is nothing but a means of establishing large-scale industry in any given country, that is to say, of making it dependent upon the world market, and from the moment that dependence upon the world market is established, there is already more or less dependence upon free trade. Besides this, the protective system helps to develop free trade competition within a country. Hence we see that in countries where the bourgeoisie is beginning to make itself felt as a class, in Germany for example, it makes great efforts to obtain protective duties. They serve the bourgeoisie as weapons against feudalism and absolute government, as a means for the concentration of its own powers and for the realization of free trade within the same country.

But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.