Our working method aims at a general systematisation of historical Marxist doctrine, but for obvious reasons of limited means of the current movement, this cannot be done in an organic way and by carrying forward all the various parts on a uniform level, and even less do we want to do it by expounding chapter by chapter a defined ‘subject’ as in a course of scholastic or academic. There are so many serious gaps to fill in the communist movement’s baggage of struggle that we are working under the demands of the most serious manifestations of disorientation and opportunism, and in a certain sense of the current situation, which we despise, and every now and then we even have to devote ourselves to putting back on the right track theories concocted by groups that would like to call themselves extremists and ‘akin’ to us. As a result, some important areas of proletarian theory, method, and tactics have been dealt with alternately, sometimes in study and work meetings, sometimes in a series of writings in the column ‘On the Thread of Time’ in this fortnightly magazine. However, it has not been possible for some time to publish an issue of our journal, which, following the collection Dialogue with Stalin, had to take the name (in turn) of Thread of Time.

The material published in the fortnightly or collected in the journal format has been made available to comrades, who disseminated our programme in a wider circle, in the form of more or less extensive summaries, theses, and sometimes opposing counter-theses and theses. However, when the meetings, with their lengthy verbal presentations, sometimes on complex theoretical topics, were not followed by an adequate publication, the further development of the work became more difficult. There have been eight meetings prior to this one (not counting two regional meetings), beginning on 1 April 1951. The full reports of the first two were distributed in a mimeographed party bulletin, while the above-mentioned booklet-journal contained a summary of the material from the meetings held up to the Genoa meeting (April 1953). All such material is therefore available in a certain way, with some guidance on the topics of theory, programme, politics, and tactics; in the economic, historical, social, and philosophical fields, with the aid of preceding publications in the journal and newspaper.

While the central objective of the work was to defend the party programme against the degeneration of the wave of opportunism that swept through the Third International, placing such critique in its historical context of the vigorous tactical opposition of the Italian Left from 1919 to 1926, before the break with the Moscow centre, it proved necessary, due to repeated requests from comrades and groups, to clarify the Marxist scope of the great questions of proletarian historical strategy that are usually referred to as the national and colonial question and the agrarian question. The Trieste meeting on 30-31 August 1953 was devoted to a comprehensive approach to the Factors of Race and Nation in Marxism and served to replace a certain facile subordination of such relations to a simplistic class dualism – for which we have always been slandered – with a correct evaluation of the axis of historical materialism, which is based on reproduction even before production, in order to deduce the complex and innumerable superstructures of human society from material data. This material was published in full in a series of ‘Threads’ in the last part of last year in this newspaper and is available for the work of comrades. With Trieste, however, the Marxist views on the European national question up to the nineteenth century were presented, and the problem of the colonies and the coloured peoples and the East, connected with the period of capitalist imperialism and the world wars, remained to be dealt with. Of the subsequent exposition in Florence, which represented a bridge between the data of Marxism in the classical texts and those in Lenin’s works and the theses of the first two congresses of the Moscow International, there is so far nothing more than a summary report in the newspaper: since 6-7 December, the date of the meeting, no more detailed report has been drawn up or distributed than the documentation provided on that occasion. The lack of such a text has been felt because some positions have not been well understood and accepted, even if only by a few comrades. It is therefore necessary to remedy this situation.

Requests from other comrades on the agrarian question led to its treatment in a series of ‘threads of time’, which appeared from the beginning of 1954 to the present day and constitute an organic whole, with a series of concluding theses given in the most recent issue. However, as is well known, there is still a great deal of work to be done here. A complete overview of the agrarian question in Marx has been given, showing that it is not a separate chapter (this never happens in the Marxist system) but contains in itself not only the whole theory of capitalist economy but also all its inseparable connections with the revolutionary programme of the proletariat. It remains for another series, which will begin shortly, to trace the history of the agrarian question in the Russian Revolution, in order to show how the class theory of the party coincides with Lenin’s formulations in everything, and the correct explanation that must be given today of contemporary Russian social development.

The conclusions on the agrarian question lead directly to the theme proposed by the current report: the great conflict, which is not one of ideas and pens but of real class forces operating in society, between the economic construction of the Marxists and the many, but all similar and none new or original, that were opposed to it by the supporters and apologists of the capitalist order. The correct approach to this fundamental baggage of ours serves to ensure the formation of a renewed movement against a twofold danger that sometimes threatens even some of our less well-informed members, despite the rigid cordon sanitaire of organisational intransigence that is frequently the target of irony. One danger is that of allowing ourselves to be impressed by the sharp contrast with the doctrines of the official economists chronologically posterior to Marx, and by the supposed advantage they had in being able to work on later ‘richer’ materials, which plays well into their claim that events in the economic world have disproved, along with the predictions, Marx’s theory. The second danger is that, faced with the frightening collapse of the proletarian front, elements far more presumptuous than willing assert that the economic theory of capitalism and its end must be reworked with data that Marx could not have had, and by correcting many of his positions.

A contribution to this second point was made by a previous series of ‘Threads of Time’ dedicated to the ‘Batrachomyomachia’ of certain small groups, such as the French one of Socialisme ou barbarie, which some deviants from our movement have assimilated themselves to, who claim to be updating Marx and eliminating his ‘errors’; a series in which the defective theory of an insertion between capitalism and communism of a new productive mode with a new ruling class, the so-called bureaucracy, which in Russia, in place of capital and the bourgeoisie, would oppress and exploit the workers was particularly combated; reducing this divergence to an insuperable opposition with the first, more vital, more valid elements of Marxism.

Therefore, the theme of this meeting is linked to that which was discussed in Milan on the historical invariance of revolutionary theory. This does not form itself, much less reinforce itself, day by day, by successive additions or skilful ‘approximations’ and corrections, but arises as a monolithic block at a turning point in history astride two epochs: the one we follow had its origins in the middle of the nineteenth century, and in its powerful integrity we defend it without abandoning any shred to the enemy. The scientific proof of this theory of invariance lies in showing, in the light of counter-revolutionary grumbling over the course of more than a century, right up to the most recent, that the great polemical battle, fought at decisive turning points with weapons in hand by both sides, is always the same, and we take up the same arguments that constituted the revolutionary proclamation of the Marxist communists, which not only have not been surpassed or undermined by any discovery or finding of pretended science, but which tower with the same power and ever greater height over the insanities of conservative culture. And to crush this, they need the power of the class, but certainly not the help of intellectuals and clubs intent on spouting a new and better Marxism.

The recent study on the agrarian question in Marxism has provided the necessary elements to understand Marx’s ‘model’ of present-day society, which succeeded the great revolutions of the bourgeoisie in the advanced countries of Europe. According to our doctrine, a class that comes to power with the taking over of one of the great ‘modes of production’ to the previous one has an altogether approximate ideological knowledge and consciousness of the process that has taken place and of its further developments; however, it is generally accepted within the victorious and romantic young bourgeoisie that a social type with characteristics different and opposed to those of the feudal world has appeared, and it is recognised that the new economic relations are radically different from the old ones: the law and the State do not place any obstacles in the way of any category or order of individuals in the performance of all acts of purchase or sale, and deny that anyone can be compelled to give their labour without compensation and not be able to remove themselves from a sphere of employment.

Remnants of old feudal relations are still present, and the most ‘subversive’ laws cannot prevent their gradual disappearance: thus, in the early days, rent for the lease of land in kind took the form of the ancient prestation of tithes of the product to the lord, the clergy, the State. But everything tends to take on a unique form of relation: mercantile, and voluntary access to a market open to all. The liberal formula says: many citizens, equal molecules before a single State of all, thus saying: many free buyers-sellers, within the framework of a single open national market, and then international. However, we do not need to go as far as Marx to see models in which the swarm of isolated economic insects with their thousand relations is replaced by a scheme of a few social groups – classes – among which the movement and flow of ‘wealth’ actually takes place. For Marx, in the complex society of his time, which was still undergoing the conquests proper to capitalism in the large countries of central Europe, and therefore with real goals of individual and national scope, from electoral rights to racial and linguistic independence, the pure model of the new great form of production that triumphs is three-class: capitalist entrepreneurs; wage-earning proletarians; landowners.

None of these three classes reproduces the feudal legal position. In the agrarian field, the feudal lord, who had the right to levy labour and servile product from his territorial subjects and could not lose his power over the territory for economic reasons, has disappeared, and his place has been taken by the bourgeois landowner, since land is now a commodity alienable for money by anyone to anyone. In urban production, the mass cooperation of manual workers has replaced even the humblest craftsman, who owned his workshop and tools and had the manufactured objects at his disposal, with the modern proletarian; while the larger workshop owners have been replaced by the very different capitalist manufacturer, owner of the means of production and the capital for the advance of wages. It is well known that these strata have new and different resources. While the serf lived by consuming what was left of the physical product of his labour after fulfilling all his obligations, the modern proletarian lives only on his wage in money, converting it on the monetary market into articles of subsistence. While the feudal lord lived off the prestations owed to him, the bourgeois landowner lives off the rent paid to him by the tenant of his land, and with this, through money, he buys what he consumes. The capitalist industrialist derives a profit from the sale of his products above and beyond their cost, which he in turn converts into consumption – or into new productive instruments and human labour power – on the general market. Three new classes, three distinct and precise classes, three necessary and sufficient for us to say, seeing them present, that the capitalist epoch has arrived.

A model of a trinitarian society preceded Marx: that of the physiocrat Quesnay. The classes are distinguished in an incomplete manner, such as could be identified in a sparsely industrial production prior to the fall of feudal orders. It is important, however, that Quesnay precedes Marx in making the movements of value and wealth occur between class and class, thereby seeking to study the evolution of the ‘wealth of a country’, and he opposes the mercantilists, who neglect to provide a model of the productive machine, claiming to see goods arise from the world of exchange, whose impressive spread they extolled within and beyond borders. Quesnay’s three classes are well known: landowners, and these clearly no longer understood in the feudal sense, but who receive rent from tenant entrepreneurial farmers. Active class, which are the tenant-farmers themselves together with their agricultural workers, already understood as pure wage-earners. Sterile class, i.e. industrialists and wage-earners in manufacturing, who, according to Quesnay, transform and do not increase the value of what they handle. An insufficient model to explain the formation of new value, of surplus value, since the physiocrats believe that this is determined only when human labour unfolds in the field of the forces of nature, only in agriculture is the producer able to consume a part and not all of his physical product, thus feeding the whole of society in the non-productive strata.

For English classical economists, and in the greatest of them Ricardo, while the problem remains the same, incomprehensible to the pre-bourgeois world, of promoting greater national wealth, which the post-feudal Quesnay had posed to himself, the solution is scientifically more correct, inasmuch as it is established, after the experience of the first great manufacturing industry, that it is not nature but human labour that produces wealth, and that the social margins of this wealth are obtained from any worker paid by the hour, who adds to the product, be it foodstuff or manufacture, more value than is paid to him as his wage. But Ricardo’s model has this flaw: it is a corporate and individual model and fails to achieve the social construction that had been brilliantly addressed by Quesnay. The worker in the company produces so much wealth that one part is his wage, another is his employer’s profit, and, when this occurs on agricultural land, a third part is the rent paid to the owner of the land.

Marx was therefore not the first who, in order to explain the economic process and give its laws, constructs a schema of production mechanics, seeks the origin of value and its distribution among the factors of production, and expresses this by imagining a typical form with pure classes. So long as economists expressed the needs and interests of a revolutionary bourgeoisie on the threshold of political power and social leadership, they did not hesitate to work on discovering a model that represented the reality of the production process. Only later, for reasons of social preservation, did economics as an official science take a different turn, ostentatiously denying and mocking models and schemas, and immersed itself in the indefinite and indistinct chaos of mercantile exchange among free participants in the general traffic of commodities. More will be said later about the ‘right to models’ as a rigorously scientific method and not as an ideal goal or propaganda tool. For now, let us stick to the result of the schematic three-class society. Quesnay’s model wanted to show that it could live without disruptive fluctuations; Ricardo’s that it could develop itself indefinitely within the capitalist structure on condition that it accumulated ever greater capital invested in industry, and at most with the further step of confiscating the rents of the landed class, thus becoming binary and not ternary. Marx’s model has provided clear proof that such a society, whether ternary or binary, is headed towards the accumulation and concentration of wealth, and also towards revolution, which will knock it off its mercantile track.

Before proceeding with our task today, which is to defend the validity of the model and the quantitative relations to which its use has led us, which are confirmed by the facts in the most evident way, and to demonstrate the inanity of the efforts of bourgeois culture to escape the stranglehold that grips it, we must nevertheless pause for a moment to consider the other classes, left aside, outside the spotlight in which the three protagonists move.

A frequent mistake made not only by Marx’s opponents but even by his followers consists in believing that these classes are rapidly disappearing, and that only after their total disappearance will the conditions for the final crisis and collapse of capitalism be in place. A similar mistake is to say that Marxism ignores or at least neglects their existence, to declare that the social movement of these classes cannot in any way influence the balance of forces and the prevalence of one class type over another. The question of these other classes, especially the less well-off ones, is of burning relevance in view of the degeneration of the proletarian movement into opportunism. Today, these impure and ill-defined strata are brought by the politics of the big parties to the same level as the real wage labourers, and vague and dull demands are put forward which are said to concern all the poor strata, all the popular strata. In this way, the tactics, organisation, and theory of the workers’ party have gone to ruin, and since the poor have taken the place of the proletarian, the people have taken the place of the class.

The Marxist thesis that the middle strata will disappear is not to be understood in the sense that in the near future there will only be capitalists, large landowners, and wage-earners in all developed countries, but rather that of the three classes, only the proletariat can and must struggle for the advent of a new social order, a new mode of production. Since this will entail the abolition of the right to land and capital and therefore the abolition of the classes themselves, when the resistance of the two current ruling classes has been overcome, there will be no place for the minor classes in a form of production that will no longer be private and mercantile. They can only join forces with the cause of preserving the exploiting classes or, in certain cases and as a subconscious effect, with that of the proletarian class, but what they are excluded from is to struggle for a type of society of ‘their own’. This does not mean that they do not exist now or will not exist in the future, nor does it mean that they are completely absent from economic, social, or political struggles; only the certainty that they have no task of their own and that they are of secondary importance and cannot be placed on the same level as the wage-earning class when it comes to an exchange of aid; whereas it is a clearly regressive phase of the anti-capitalist revolution when the proletariat substitutes the demands of these classes for its own and confuses itself among them in organisation or in the notorious alliances and fronts.

If we look around us today in Italian politics, the series of these strata and layers, to which the parties that boast of organising the working classes address their warmest and most nauseating invitations of fraternal friendship, is endless. In agriculture, we would be hard pressed to stop at three types: small sharecropper workers, small tenant-farmer worker, and small proprietor worker, because immediately other worthy associates would appear, namely the ‘middle’ types, that is, those who openly hire agricultural labourers. That is not all: the agrarian office of the Stalinist party, which fights only against the windmills of the feudal barons, occasionally proclaims that it also defends and protects the interests of the large agricultural tenant! The true pillar of the bourgeoisie and of the Italian state. Outside the countryside, we will see called friend and defended against the ‘greed of the monopolistic strata’ even the artisan, the clerical worker, shopkeeper, professional, small merchant and industrialist, and even, no doubt, medium-sized merchant and industrialists, not to mention state officials up to... Einaudi, not to mention the great artists and film stars, the poor priests, the policemen and so on. All these people are useful as voters, as readers, as card-holders.

We have given numerous quotations from Marx where he explains that he is dealing with a hypothetically pure capitalist society, but that in his time, i.e. in the second half of the last century, not even the advanced England had a population or even a majority of the population divided into only three modern classes. Much time has passed since then, and while we continue to deal with the model of the classic society (overcoming Luxemburg’s concern, who maintained that this ‘cannot function’ or Bukharin’s, according to whom it was quite possible for it to function in the technical-economic sense; both indeed agreeing that, whether pure or impure, revolution awaited it), we note that in all countries the middle or spurious classes form a very large part of the population.

We will not use recent statistics, but rather international comparisons contained in the official Italian Statistical Yearbook of 1939, as they refer to a general pre-war situation and are less uncertain, although they should always be taken with a certain degree of caution, given the differences in research methods and terminology from nation to nation. In Italy, for example, a distinction is made between the active population (individuals with their own income, and therefore excluding the elderly, children, the disabled, etc.) and the total population. Out of 42.5 million, approximately 18 million were active, or 43.4%. Of the active population, 29% were employed in industry. Sterile for Quesnay, for us they are workers or entrepreneurs, many ‘pure’. In agriculture, 47% of the active population were employed. Meanwhile, scattered in many figures, there remained 24%, about a quarter, who are impure. The difficult thing is to sort the agricultural workers into pure (landowners, tenant-farmers, capitalists, labourers) and everything else. For Italy, we can find some criteria in the table of the population over 10 years old engaged in a profession. In industry, 7/10 are actual workers; in agriculture, 4/10, while the owners of large companies and properties are lumped together under the ‘independents’. Therefore, the working class could be estimated at 12% in agriculture and 21% in industry: a total of 33% of the active population. [After checking the figures, we arrive at 39%]. The true capitalist and landowning bourgeoisie will be very few: in short, in Italy we have one third of ‘pure’ capitalist society, two thirds ‘impure’. However, zero feudal barons or serfs!

Moving on to other countries, we can certainly set aside those with a worse impurity index than ours, and therefore are ‘less capitalist’, even though many of them are considered more modern, advanced, and civilised due to their high levels of well-being and culture. These are undoubtedly: Bulgaria, Ireland, Finland, Greece, Norway, Portugal, and Hungary; and outside Europe (geographically incomplete data) India, Palestine, Egypt, South Africa, Canada, Chile, Mexico, and New Zealand. They are ‘less than one-third pure capitalists’. Let us take a very broad look at the countries more capitalist than us. We only have data for industry and agriculture, and we are unable to sort them as we have attempted to do for Italy. In Europe: Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, Holland, and Switzerland; and outside: United States of America. Remember that we are using pre-1939 borders, and note that we have not mentioned two primary cases: Great Britain and Russia. Take France, for example: agriculture 35%, industry 35%. France is not a country with a much higher concentration of companies than ours, and calculating with the ratios used for Italy of 4/10 and 7/10, we would have that the active wage-earning population, plus the big bourgeoisie (if it is true that there are a hundred families!), reaches about 40%: more than a third, not yet half as an index of capitalist purity.

Germany, Austria and the other countries mentioned do not even reach half that figure. The United States, as a percentage employed in industry, is on par with France (but with 1926 data and only the white population!) and has less in agriculture: 28%. Considering the whole territory, even today they cannot be much beyond 40-45% ‘purity’. Note that the proportion of those employed in trade and banking (including a few wage workers) is high, at around 19%, as in Great Britain in 1931 (estimated by the exploiters of the world).

For England and Scotland, the statistics at first glance are embarrassing. Industry 47-48%, agriculture 5.8%. Such a fact is explained by admitting that capitalist tenant farms are counted as industry, and only the small peasant population, which is relatively small, remains in agriculture. We must therefore consider only the estimated 48% of the population to be capitalist. Let us also take into account the high proportion employed in transport and communications (7.8%), the highest in the world, and, considering that this is an economy of large companies, let us take not 7, but 8, and if you like 9%: we will barely reach 50%. Therefore: the classic country for Marxist analysis does not constitute a capitalist society that is 50% in pure form: it is only semi-capitalist. Marx knew this well. And we have cited that bourgeois society is condemned to carry with it enormous and shapeless masses of middle classes, agrarian and non-agrarian, remnants of bygone times.

Soviet Union. Data from 1926: Industry, calculating all declared workers without specification, only 6.6% (transport only 2.6, commerce only 2.5). Agriculture: 85%. Since 1926, as is well known, much has changed. Precisely for this reason, it is a pre-capitalist economic society evolving towards capitalism with the spread of large industrial companies and the general market. We will not discuss here how the population living in the countryside is classified today. The part that was in the feudal relation, boyars and serfs, has certainly disappeared. The rest must be divided between small production and collective enterprises: is the current form perhaps a hybrid between the rural capitalist enterprise and agrarian communism? No, it is a hybrid between the agricultural enterprise and the ancient forms of fragmented cultivation. The capitalist purity index of Russia in 1926 was no more than 8%, and today it is still (meaning that the entire Asian territory is included) lower than any other European and white country, whether inside or outside the Curtain. A sneer at the equation: American imperialism = Russian imperialism.

But enough, gentlemen: we are going to discuss a capitalist society such that we cannot show it to you, in reality, anywhere in the world, or at least on this adventurous planet. Nor do we ever expect to be able to show it to you, wanting first to consign to the dustbin of history capitalism in all its forms, pure and impure, confessed and denied.

We have thus attempted to provide a summary glimpse of how the three-class classic form of capitalism is staggered in various ways within the social magma.

By way of a brief overview, we recall how, geographically speaking, the countries and continents already conquered by large proportions of capitalist forms mix with others where the social composition is so backward that there is no appreciable share of bourgeois economy. There are African and Australasian populations still in a savage and barbaric state, there are the very dense populations of Asia with social forms not only pre-capitalist but also pre-feudal, with military and sometimes theocratic lordships still superimposed on primitive communism and a miserable form of small-scale farming, a form often defined by Marx as one of tremendous inertia, reluctant to evolve towards new relations of production, still indifferent to mercantilism, to the initial and progressive accumulation of capital (which in Europe under the medieval regime laid the foundations for the cycle leading to capitalism and socialism). In these areas (India, China, and so on), capitalism appeared on the periphery as imported by the white race, causing conflicts and imbalances when it came into contact with the internal society, which was satrapic-despotic or feudalistic. But two factors are determined by the same laws of historical materialism and the contrast between new productive forces and traditional property relations: the struggle of small peasants and artisans and the first indigenous bourgeois against the old authoritarian powers, and the struggle for national independence from white colonisation. The emergence of capital and the national struggle are evocatively associated with the same phenomenon that occurred two centuries earlier in Europe; Marxism finds in this a vital confirmation that goes beyond racial, religious, philosophical, voluntarist, and great-man explanations of history.

The example of Japan (absent from the previous description) would suffice to provide enormous proof of all this. Then there is the problem of China. We mention it here only to point out that, after its first historic census, that government boasted of having 560 million citizens; 600 million if you count the Chinese abroad: a classic boast in national-capitalist style. Can a capitalist revolution arise and thrive in this field from endogenous forces? It is already underway! It has characteristics, for example, different from the Japanese model, just as the German model differed from the English one; partly for geographical reasons. The Korean or Indochinese models may also differ, as did the Piedmontese model, where there was no obvious autochthonous civil war, but rather a clash between foreign imperial armies and States.

The development of the comparison is exhaustive. The circumstance of the presence of Western colonies and imperialist bases is certainly important; it certainly has an influence, but in what sense? Certainly not, especially in the last twenty-five years, in the sense that the class struggle in the East is languishing and dormant, while the higher-level struggle between workers and industrialists in the Western metropolises is raging. The thesis that bourgeois capitalism has brought the market to the limits of the world and determined the no longer national but international character of the subsequent antagonism between classes and modes of production, between the capitalist bourgeoisie and the communist proletariat, would be translated in an exaggerated way into the following terms: in today’s historical situation, there can be no class struggles, whatever the composition of the various national societies, except within the world framework. The general world economic, political, and military situation does not allow us to say that in the realm of half a billion Chinese, an imposing civil struggle to decide between the feudal mode of production and the bourgeois mercantile mode is not permissible, which now better suits peasants, artisans, intellectuals, and bureaucrats, and in which foreign agents and internal governments can make parallel technical contributions, even while fighting politically among themselves.

With this digression on spurious societies, within a discussion on classic capitalist societies, we want to stem the threat of casting out a quarter of the human species out of obedience to historical materialism, and to counter that if we admit (like the yellow press meaning... white and red) that social dynamism feeds on ‘fifth columns’ and ‘imperial aggression’ aimed at exporting economic forms like calico and glass beads, Marx’s determinism has no place.

In fields of the most diverse sizes, the bourgeoisie has everywhere fought against the ancien régime, and according to these fields, in the most diverse – but definable and stable throughout – historical cycles, the proletariat first fought for the same end as the bourgeoisie, then came into inexorable conflict with it. This is the key to the Marxist reconstruction which links, even in the work of some years of our present movement, the historical and social doctrine to the strategy of position and manoeuvre of the international communist party, openly organised in 1848. The closed fields of class struggle have been, for example, in Italy and in Flanders and the Rhineland, for almost a thousand years, even if only municipal. The big urban bourgeoisie took power from the agrarian aristocracy by founding small, democratic and capitalist Commune-States. The common people, the Ciompi, the first proletarians, fought with the Commune against the nobles, sometimes against the Church and the Empire. When they attempted to rise up against economic misery, they were bloodily beaten by the big banking and governing bourgeoisie. Historical materialism lives and wins when we see the same process unfolding, after centuries, not just in one city but in a whole nation, for example in nineteenth-century France.

It has been said since the Manifesto that the movement is accelerating. If it took centuries and centuries to weld the communal forces of the bourgeois into an assault on power in the large States, half a century is needed to make the new social form spread throughout Europe. And in lengthy treatises we showed that this development was deep in the social magma and even ran counter to the invasions of victorious armies, as in the case of the barbarians themselves who had conquered the Roman world.

Large or very large expanses of Eastern, African, and Asian space cannot but offer the same ‘historical spectacle’ before on the scene there comes to be only two characters: capitalism and proletariat. The new forms that spread more quickly from London to Vienna than from Genoa to Pisa will not keep us waiting too long to complete this tour of the world and of the races, but they will do so according to the same laws and cycles, unless we have dreamed, told tall tales, and badly chewed rigid and lifeless formulas.

The Trieste report included an entire chapter aimed at restoring order to well-known and fundamental concepts concerning the forces of production, their contrast with traditional relations of production or forms of property, the alternation between two successive historical great modes or forms of production; in the political aspect of the transfer of power from one class to another, and in the economic aspect of the reorganisation of production and distribution on new, radically different bases. And it was done in relation to the Russian Revolution of October, which was a double revolution, of the bourgeoisie and of the other classes against feudalism, and of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and its petty-bourgeois and democratic appendages; with a double victory. Of the two victories, the first has gone down in history, the second without civil war (long demonstrations were given of this possibility, in the light of historical materialism with reference precisely to the medieval Communes) in the Russian field, but because of the battles lost through our own fault, we proletarians of the West, it has turned into defeat. Now, at this meeting in Asti, we have had to concern ourselves with the interpretation of the Chinese revolution. It has not yet been a double revolution and for now it is consolidating itself as a capitalist and bourgeois revolution, in which the peasantry, artisans, and a small proletariat have fought in a subordinate role, as exponents of the arrival of the capitalist social mode. Attempts of Ciompi and June uprisings have not been lacking, but bourgeois power and arms have drowned them in blood. One single continuous bourgeois revolution is in power in the governments of Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung, as with the Orléans and the Second Republic, with Bonaparte and with the Third Republic in France. A revolution, however, kids, is anything but a stroll of rough soldiers with a red star. And a revolution not yet cooled, not crystallised, not ossified. It is we, white revolutionaries, who are tied up like salamis, and we have few lessons to impart to the burning East.

We have therefore explicitly established that Marx’s doctrine on the capitalist mode of production is established by reducing it to a pure model, which not only does not correspond to the structures of bourgeois societies in even the most developed nations of the last hundred years, but which is not even intended to be a definition of a stage that they are expected to go through, not even a single one among them, with total adherence.

The model was indispensable for applying a ‘quantitative’ method to economic facts, and, if you like, a mathematical method (apart from the question of exposition, which we will not fail to discuss). We are not alone in treating economic facts and phenomena with quantitative methods, among ancient and modern schools: statistics too, a science with the most ancient origins, uses quantitative methods insofar as it records and retains successive figures for prices, quantities of commodities, numbers of people, and similar concrete quantities, all of which, according to common practice, can be expressed in numbers, such as land, treasures, slaves, for example, of a Roman patrician, or the census of a citizen. But the step from recording statistics to economic science lies, as in every other science that the human species has constructed in successive stages, in introducing, in addition to the measurement, in numbers, of magnitudes palpable and visible to all, also that of new magnitudes that are ‘discovered’ and in a certain sense (and with a ‘tentative’ value, turned in history in various directions before hitting the mark) ‘imagined’; magnitudes ‘imagined’ in order to set up more in-depth investigations, magnitudes that are therefore – yes, indeed, gentlemen – invisible and abstract, and not the direct object of sensory experience. One would not have arrived at measurements and magnitudes (main example is the magnitude value) without starting from the ‘model’ of the society studied, and without this path one would not have arrived at the peculiar laws of the development of that society (in this case, capitalist) and at predictions about its course and turning points.

Without resorting to speculative heights, it is enough to understand in practice that if the concrete phenomena observable and recordable in the hundred years since the method has been applied and in the – let us say – hundred years to come were to go in another direction, then it would be concluded that the construction of the model, the choice of magnitudes, the relations between them calculated, and everything else, would have to be discarded, as has historically happened with many doctrinal constructions that sought to reproduce the ways of being of ‘slices’ of the natural world, and of that special slice that is human society, and which – not without having had a historical effect – disappeared as theories. Therefore, we do not seek proof that our model is valid, and the laws faithful to the real process, in particular virtues of the spirit, in the alleged internal absolute properties of human thought, least of all in the cerebral power of a genius discoverer, appeared in the world; certainly not in the heroic will of a sect, or even of a revolutionary social class.

The point of this treatment isn’t so much to re-present the main points of Marx’s economic theory (even though this is an incessant necessity in the face of the innumerable counterfeits by his enemies and at times by his weak followers), but it is to establish that the criticisms, whether they’re direct or more insidiously ‘flanking’, even recent ones, do nothing more than repeat age-old objections, on the ruins of which the new doctrine was, from its first and explosive birth, victoriously constructed, and thus reconnect us, especially through an examination of the positions of anti-communist economic schools, to what was the theme of our meeting in Milan: the invariance of Marxism, and in general of all revolutionary doctrines and faiths in human history. These do not arise from successive approximations, juxtapositions, additions, from a cloying contradiction and collaboration at the same time of pleiades of so-called researchers, but explode at given times and acute turning points in the general cycle, and cannot but form precisely then, and cannot but construct themselves precisely, and organically, in that way, in a single block.

We have seen that the bourgeois class itself, which boasts of having been the first to erect an economic science, boldly began to handle models and establish magnitudes to be introduced into economic calculation and into the construction of laws which it applied to the development of organised and modern human society. But this was precisely because it was then a revolutionary class, and was carrying out perhaps the greatest revolution in history, for which arms wielding weapons were needed no less than heads filled with a theory (and whether this took the form of faith and fanaticism fits perfectly into our explanation of history). When we cry out from Marx’s youth that there is no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory, we do not mean that only the workers’ movement is revolutionary and that the only revolutionary theory is the communist one. We apply that statement to all revolutions, and we do not mean by this (neither for pre-communist ones nor for our own) that every intellectual circle can fabricate a theory and thereby cause a revolution! The deep forces that disrupt social organisation at a given (rare) turn in the cycles, just as they take the form of economic and productive contradictions and clashes between groups and classes of people, so they take the form of a battle of new faiths against the old ones, and even, it is not difficult to admit, of myths against myths.

No less well known is our position, founded on characteristics proper to the productive organisation and its modern developments, that the communist proletarian class does not forge for itself a theory with a religious or predominantly romantic-ideological background, but achieves that which is the true science of the economic fact; and this in accordance with its different behaviour with regard to the appropriation of the productive forces, with the breaking of the old forms of class appropriation, in relation to the classes and revolutions that historically preceded it. And since we must look in all corners for the usual misunderstandings that lie in wait, we further warn that in order to reach this conclusion we have no need to maintain that human society will thus arrive at an infallible, absolute, general formulation of the laws of the physical and social cosmos, just as we do not believe that it started out with a baggage of supreme truths entrusted to it by immaterial powers, or that it can discover them by digging into the mysterious and innate immanence of its speculative thought.

Therefore, as soon as the bourgeois class no longer had need of operative revolutionary doctrines, the economic science that followed it underwent a transformation, thoroughly dealt with by Marx, from the classical school to the vulgar school. The dangerous ‘flights’ of Ricardo and his followers on the definition of value, which the products of the capitalist economy have as an intrinsic property, and which is called exchange value, but is not defined according to a moment of exchange, but rather according to a moment of production, were set aside. For Ricardo it was declared that a commodity does not have a value measured by a given ‘number’ because, perhaps in the statistical average of market prices, it is exchanged for that amount. Instead, it is because the commodity has a given value determined and calculable according to the socially average labour time required to produce it, that it must be sold on the market, save for occasional fluctuations, at that amount. This central theorem of the classical school, retained but with quite another vital force in the Marxist school, is then attacked by vulgar economics, calling all this madness, illusion, and myth, and in essence frees itself from the useless burden of the magnitude value, its determination and measurement, and the laws in which it appears.

The essential objection since then, expressed in different words, has always been the same. We are not in the physical realm that obeys (as was believed and conceded at the time) strict laws of causality, which can be established using magnitudes treatable with mathematical processes. We are in the human realm, where the disposition, will, and ‘taste’ of single individuals has influence, and the average phenomenon is neither graspable nor predictable nor classifiable in fixed formulas. Away then with the magnitude value (not the idea, the notion of value, which, stripped of its material determination, triumphantly invades the so-called sciences of society: law, ethics, aesthetics...); away in general with magnitudes introducible into economic science that are not brute monetary quotations or quantities of contracted commodities; away (and this was the scathing point) with the possibility of establishing through economic research the road humanity travels, understood as a society organising its own activity for the purposes of its own needs: all we can do is stand by and watch, and write down the unpredictable, infinitely free, autonomous from any itinerary, and indifferent among all possible routes, concrete and a posteriori history of this swarm of disordered earthlings. Susceptible and capable of everything, and even of believing in scientists.

All of Marx’s critics, however diverse they may be in terms of epoch and political persuasion, essentially share a common ground: the claim that a generic economic ‘science’, which after Marx has made great strides in university chatter and library waste paper, has done justice to the theory of value and surplus value, and moreover to the theory of the falling rate of profit, to which Stalin wanted to deliver the coup de grâce. In doing so, they want to do away with the equally essential theory of the general levelling of the capitalist rate of profit, in the national and transnational economic society. In all this – and rightly so, in their opinion – they are more relentless than in their scandalised crusades against the preaching of class struggle, the use of insurrectionary violence, the mud on the face of democratic and liberal ideals, the proletarian dictatorship and terror, led by the usual shaggy scholar whom the British – who are not so foolish – in the last years of his life called the red terror doctor.

In his well-known pamphlet of 1908 (let us keep our distance), republished in 1926, entitled ‘Studio su Marx’, a broad patchwork of all the countless theses of Marx’s critics, whether accepted or rejected (in these cases, the worst is when Marx is defended and treated with respect), the well-known Arturo Labriola claims credit for an earlier work of his from 1899 in which – acknowledging the inadmissibility of the Marxist theory of value – he attempted, in his own words, to reconcile a theory of price with that of value. The book appeared at a time when two revisionist wings were attacking Marx, as we understand him: the reformist and legalist wing of Bernstein and the syndicalist and self-styled extremist wing of Georges Sorel, whose acerbic preface to Labriola is reproduced. Those who remember how historically and politically the two tendencies clashed to the death, can see how eloquent it is that the theorist frequently echoes Bernstein’s criticisms in his continuous derision of the Marxist laws of capitalist development, and in his replacement of the breaking points with a gentle progressive curve. No less could one find parallels to this skirmishing in very recent treatises by would-be remedies to the misfortunes of Marx the scientist-prophet, who would be instructed by the alleged experiences of new facts of this century, and by the no less alleged violation of the ‘schemas’ dear to Marx.

If it made sense in 1954 to discover where the Marxist ‘plan’ for the itinerary for the historical capitalist form had gone wrong, one could only laugh at such a long wait, given that the sharp-tongued Neapolitan professor had already discovered it, or rather had coined the little story, which Sorel had been revelling in for fifty years, that the one who discovered it had been... Karl Marx himself. According to this little story, Marx had suspended his work as an economist for a long time after the publication of the first volume of Capital in 1867, not because of the serious illness that struck him, but because he was enlightened, in 1871, by reading the works of Jevons and others, on ‘truly scientific’ mathematical economics. The recognition of his errors led Marx to leave his materials in disorder, and all the harsh words of types of this calibre go to Engels, and even Kautsky in his heyday, who arbitrarily cobbled them together, are directed at him. Could it, said Mr. Labriola, be thought that precisely Marx alone was right and that ‘all, it is said all of Science’ was wrong against him?! But this situation, which still exists today – without it being possible to avoid mentioning Marx’s name at least twelve times in every newspaper printed in the world – this is precisely what we needed and still need. If science had made way for Marx, we would be screwed.

We complete the quartet of professors (Sorel, Labriola, Bernstein) with our old friend Tonino Graziadei, another professor. Echoing, he, a reformist trade unionist before the war, having moved to the far left in 1919, Arturo Labriola’s 1908 thesis, with a series of books on Price and Surplus Value in the Capitalist Economy, while apologising for the historical, political, and philosophical part of Marx and Marxism, fought against every theory of value and surplus value, which led to his disavowal by the (then) Communist International. The point is therefore this, in a war of position in which we have been engaged since 1848: has modern capitalism refuted the attempt to assign it a curriculum vitae by means of a doctrine of a classic class society, and the calculation of its tendential laws based on a system of formulas, in which the fundamental quantity is not the mercantile measure of price, but the value generated in social production? If we are defeated on this point, the professors of ‘marginalist Marxism’ will be right, but with them will also be right, equally, the Jevons, the Sombarts, the Paretos, the Einaudis, the Fishers, the Kinleys; and also the Rothschilds, the Morgans, the Rockefellers, etc., with at their head – à tout seigneur tout honneur – Joseph Stalin.

According to Sorel, Marx

‘did not understand the use of quantities in economics as mathematicians dealing with problems of physics understand it. It seems (?) that quantitative relationships appeared (?) to him to be only suited for providing rough, distant, or perhaps symbolic indications (what therefore, Dr. Sorel, is mathematics if not the use of symbols?); their clarity being all the greater the more unreal they are. It would be important to study this difficult question if one wants to arrive at a perfect understanding of the texts of Capital’.

Good. It would not have hurt him to settle this difficult question over the past fifty years, rather than devoting himself to actively and voluntarily bastardising the proletarian struggle.

Here it is appropriate to make a few observations on this ‘use of quantities in physics and economics’.

First. Marx intended to arrive at using numerical quantities and the magnitudes measured by them in economics, just as physicists do. This is apart from the mode of exposition, which is always influenced by historical reasons: for example, Galileo, threatened with persecution, presented his theory of the motion of the Earth in the form of a dialogue, and prefacing that he only wanted the opposite conclusions to be shown to be equally acceptable to human reason, so that the revealed doctrine could decide. It took a revolution in between for Laplace, according to a well-known anecdote, to respond to Napoleon’s stern question: ‘I see no mention of God in your explanation of the formation of the solar system!’, with the simple phrase: ‘Your Majesty, I did not make use of such an hypothesis’. Today, a professor speaking like that would be burned at the stake. As for Marx, having to address the working class, which, with minimal control over the conditions of labour, had also lost control of culture, he followed a literary form, thus making extensive use of numerical examples (often not summary, but far too detailed for the reader’s effort), rarely using algebraic formulas, and, as we shall see, in his later years, he thought about higher mathematics.

Second. The recent history of physics, and especially mathematical physics, shows that the use of magnitudes and quantities in the study of the material world is not as straightforward as it seemed in 1900. The rule is that we work with ever new symbols and models that often change and are proposed, and that the very norm that Sorel sees as a weakness is verified: clarity is all the greater the more unreal the models are. Without going into difficult territory, if one wants to do science, it must be communicable and applicable, and so in order to make oneself understood and move forward, one must be, if not summarisers, simplifiers to a good degree. The model of matter as many atoms of different qualities attracted to each other by chemical valences was quite ‘clear’. Much less unreal and equally less clear is the model of the atom broken down into a central nucleus around which electrons revolve: but before, the (abstract but not very) quantities of weight and chemical valence sufficed; today, many others have been added, both mechanical and electromagnetic. We can continue when the nucleus is vivisected (and then fissured) into protons, neutrons, and other particles, including the newest and most mysterious one discovered today: the antiproton. Models are made of the system, and measurements and symbols are given for the particles: are they corpuscles? Waves? Strips of trajectories captured for a moment on the plate? For now, it seems that everyone can say what they like.

Third. It must be acknowledged that historically, quantitative methods were first applied to problems in the physical world rather than to those of the social aggregate. It must also be acknowledged that, if already in the former, simplified schemas are introduced, initially with arbitrary tests, then with greater accuracy, in order to arrive at discovering laws and giving formulas, the accessory, impure, and concomitant phenomena, sometimes obscuring it, with the pure relationship that one wishes to isolate, are, nevertheless, less of a diabolical hindrance than in the field of sociology and economics. Having said all this, necessarily in a summary manner and with some simplification, we affirm that the use of magnitudes and quantities in Marx, once the model to be studied is formed, is entirely strict and rigorous; it is central, not incidental, and used as the sole means of uncovering the developments that are of interest in their general tendencies. And furthermore, we affirm that such use is strictly consistent and decidedly uniform, from volume to volume, from work to work, from epoch to epoch of the immense work.

The topic deserves that the parallel, discussed on other occasions (see various issues of Prometeo, first series, some ‘Threads of Time’, and similar), be developed a little further for the sake of dissemination, even if one falls into repetitions, customary and usual in party work.

Price is an empirical datum, in that everyone knows how to indicate and report it, and even judge it, provided it is expressed in the currency currently in use. Even in 1954, we will see arguments in favour of using this single mathematical quantity in economics: the monetary share; but for a century Marx noted that, while the debate on value is long, examining the thousand theories on money leads to the height of complications and abstruseness. Therefore, the notion of the price of a commodity is immediate, while that of its value is mediated. Physics made a gigantic step forward with the concept of mass enunciated by Galileo, whereas until then the more ‘external’ and ‘practical’ one of weight had been considered. A leap, not a step, which could and had to be taken as a corollary to the development of a more organised productive society, urban and manufacturing rather than rural and peasant, as in the Renaissance. While mass is constant, the weight of an object varies depending on whether we are at sea level or on a mountain peak, at the pole or at the equator, or perhaps on another celestial body besides the Earth. On this theoretical basis – unreal, if you like! – Galileo demonstrates what was practically evident: two bodies of very different weights fall in the same time from the same height, something that had been denied since Aristotle, simply because people had not been able to free themselves from impure factors: air resistance, for example. Hence the famous shout: feather and lead ball! Just as it is shouted at us: the labourer and the great Genius! This step was taken to introduce a new quantity: one not discovered in the first notions of thought, in the elements of the spirit; and, if we want, one that is itself ‘provisional’. But the ‘revolutionary’ leap remains. Galileo’s expression that weight is force, which depends on the quantity of mass, and then on another factor, acceleration, allowed the reduction of the fall of a stone and the Moon’s orbit around the Earth to the same mathematical law, which was made evident by Newton through simple operations on symbols.

When, in a further stage of development of the social technical organisation, one sought to establish this link also in the other comparison between the falling stone and the running infra-atomic corpuscle, the expression had to be modified, and in this new field mass is no longer constant for a given body, but in turn variable according to its velocity, if very high, i.e. it can decrease if energy is released. Now, the distance of the Moon is a billion times greater than the fall of an object from a stool to the ground, but the ratio between the mass of that object, perhaps a pen nib, and that of an electron is written with twenty-seven zeros (billion billion billion), and Galileo is excused if he had not noticed this four centuries earlier. We, with Marx, lay claim to clearing a path through the jumble of weight-price measurements and introduce a constant quantity, as far as we are concerned, the mass-value of each commodity, in order to deduce from it the data of the orbits on which the world of capital revolves, and it is enough for us that the new quantity be valid and constant for as long as it takes to throw that world into the depths of the Abyss.

Having defined the model of the classical society, we must now recall the measurable quantities are that interest us. In this exposition, the recent series on the agrarian question, with its counter-theses and final theses, will be helpful. It is therefore easy to trace ‘Marx’s table’ of the movements of value between the major classes involved, and to indicate the simple expressions needed to calculate the capitalist economy and state its laws, in order to defend, in a second part, their validity and vitality against the attempts of the anti-revolutionary economic schools, both those that focus their investigation on the pure phenomena of the circulation of commodities and money, wallowing in the mire of the market-swamp, and those that, as has been happening in recent times, forced to attempt a theory of production, have wished to venture onto the flanks and into the crater of the volcano, where the precursors of the tremendous eruptive explosion are bubbling.

The first economists started from the vague concept of national wealth. This endowment, whether thought of as in the monetary expression with the units and rates of the period, or as a mass of things useful for organised life, such as venues, tools, reserve stocks for consumption, is in constant movement, undergoes an outflow that requires an uninterrupted renewal. Not only is there no concrete example, but it is not even possible to propose an abstract model of a society that only consumes and whose wealth consists of an immense reserve from which, every day or every year, it is possible to draw what is necessary for the survival of all members of the aggregate. Every model of economic movement must contemplate a cycle of shifts, at the end of which, as a minimum hypothesis, the general social endowment and stock have again become what they were at the beginning. We will soon come to the integral problem, not only of taking into account the possibility of a progressive increase in equipment and reserves, but also of an increase that begins by offsetting that due to the variation, almost always significantly increasing, in the number of the population.

Social organisation continues on its path because, from a given moment, it finds itself not only in the presence of the natural environment, arranging its capacity for labour (which is not only muscular strength but transmission, tradition of past generations of technical preparation, and of technological knowledge in all fields, to which all science, knowledge, and social and individual thought is directly reduced), but also a mass of things and installations of all kinds that past generations have transmitted, transforming the earth’s crust to which we cling, endowing it with all sorts of manufactures, and having at any given moment a portion of consumption goods already produced but not yet used. A social mass of wealth, a social mass of labour, a set of commodities and goods produced by labour, the calculation of which we will disregard for now, as it is ultimately irrelevant, since all distributions are made, for reasons of power and class, through operations on the masses of existing and living labour, of value ‘added in production’ in the cycle that opens and is studied.

In a capitalist, and therefore mercantile, economy, it is clear that part of this transmission is initially provided by money, by monetary circulation: which in itself, and especially since the advent of paper money, is nothing more than a social mechanism for directing the distribution of ‘unborn value’. If, for example, a cataclysm were to bring normal means of transport to a halt, human society would soon die, with full coffers and accounts in credit. Not all past crystallised labour is set in motion in the cycle of productive activity that is beginning. A workshop, a machine, may remain inactive for the whole year, and a stock of consumption goods not currently in demand may lie dormant in the warehouse for the entire time. But even that part of already produced wealth that is set in motion in the new period of production can be set into motion in two different ways; that is, through total employment or through fractional, partial employment, so that in the end it is not absorbed and disappears, but only needs to be replenished for a given amount that has been subtracted, thus becoming as efficient as it was at the beginning.

When the classical school established that the value of such accumulated endowments was measured by the labour invested in them, and considered them as capital, it was led to present them as factors in the new production cycle and to calculate their value, considered proportional to the labour that had been required to produce them, and better still to that which would be required to reproduce them, if they were lacking.

It made the distinction, in which economics still struggles, with the individual blinders that force it to measure the share of each individual (which is not even the famous Person, but the Firm), between fixed capital and circulating capital, considering the former to be that which is used in production but is not thereby exhausted, such as, for example, a plough, and the latter to be that which is entirely used up, such as, for example, seeds and fertiliser.

We will not dwell further on this distinction: in the Marxist expression of the quantitative relations of the process, fixed capital, insofar as it is actually used without impairing its quality or quantity in any way, does not concern us and we do not take it into account: rather, what concerns us is that which is incorporated into the production process and remains physically in the product, or vanishes in by-products and waste, such as, for example, the wax used to make candles. We will therefore not calculate the plough, but we will note its ‘wear and tear’. Even the most primitive ploughshare is not eternal and needs to be sharpened and eventually replaced: if it lasts for twenty cycles, we will consider one-twentieth of its value as constant capital to be included into the ‘production function’.

Therefore, the first quantity to be considered is constant capital: raw materials, ancillary materials consumed, such as fuels, lubricants, etc.; wear and tear on tools and installations, all according to periodic renewal requirements; the oft-mentioned ‘amortisation’ that also applies to buildings where manufacturing takes place and to any other fixed assets. This part of the elements, of the terms of production, is therefore called by Marx constant capital. The predecessors often confused these concepts: Ramsay went so far as to identify what we mean [...] the current notion of fixed capital; all or almost all the others confused company assets with constant capital, and some got lost between the terms capital invested and employed in production, a distinction that is not relevant to Marxism in terms of calculating values.

In fact, as we know, there are three quantities that we must introduce and add together: after constant capital comes variable capital and surplus value. Since their sum is the value of the product, which goes into the hands of the capitalist and is therefore capital, or at least can be capital, all three terms are all three qualitatively part of capital insofar as they are part of value, and historically today all value is capital. But the first, or constant capital, considered first, is past labour, which goes through the cycle and comes out the same, i.e. without bringing forth any value other than that which it already contains, the second and third are living, actual, present labour, from which value added emerges during the cycle, a term that the bourgeoisie did not want to know about, but which they now use in their statistics, as we shall see, calling it ‘national income’. Marx called the second term to be added variable capital, and it corresponds to the expenditure on wages relative to the cycle under consideration. Nominally, therefore, the first two quantities would be capital. This is because it is implied that they form the capital ‘advanced’ in production, i.e. spent on the purchase of commodities and the payment of wages. But the whole sum is capital gained, value gained, and is greater than the first two terms, the expenditure advanced. Obviously, to this must be added what the bourgeoisie call ‘cost of production’, i.e. the gain, the profit, the return, and therefore what we call surplus value. So, adding up: constant capital, plus wage capital, plus surplus value, we obtain the value of the product.

This has nothing to do with the ‘value of the company’, and therefore the basic distinction: for us, capital is the collection of commodities, the product, whereas for the bourgeois economist, capital is the assets of the company and its owner (whether or not a natural person), including credits, cash in hand, and the market value of real estate such as land and buildings. But the distinction lies in this: for the bourgeois, there are two factors (leaving aside for now ground rent and the like): capital and labour.

Wages, or variable capital, would be the value generated by labour and paid to those who performed it, the margin, or profit would be generated by constant capital (advanced for the entire period from the purchase of raw materials to the sale of the finished product) and wage capital (advanced for the entire period from paying the workers to the sale of the final product).

For the bourgeois, capital invested, whether in materials and commodities or in labour power, generates value. Labour generates wages and is compensated by them. For the Marxist, constant capital generates nothing because it passes through the cycle with its value unchanged; labour, on the other hand, produces all the added value, i.e. variable capital plus surplus value, while the worker receives in return only the first part, the wage. Where the capitalist entrepreneur has no cash, he will borrow money for commodities, materials, and wages and repay it after sales. The interest paid is deducted from his surplus value: therefore, interest is not the product of capital but of labour itself. Well-known facts, but which needed to be reorganised in the counter-thesis scheme.

The four quantities: constant capital, variable capital, surplus value, and value of the product are connected by a simple addition, like those in a butcher’s bill, and our very simple ‘production function’ is a linear function, as they say in mathematics. According to our enemies, it is a futile exercise to write production functions using the quantity value, because in economics only circulation functions expressed with the quantity price vary with the famous market conditions: supply, demand, utility, ophelimity, marginal benefit, and... a carefully cultivated urge to spend wisely. We will see later that they too set up a production function. But perhaps all applied economics, or estimation, is not based on a production function that is that of simple interest (returns proportional to capital and time: a rational function, i.e. one that allows division) and compound interest (accumulation of returns with capital: an exponential function)? With this formula – put to the test, as we wish to do for ours – during humanity’s two thousand year slumber, the famous penny became a ball of gold as big as the Earth.

We therefore only make additions, and our calculation does not include the yield of capital at the rate of interest, which appeared, with usury, before modern capitalist production. To what, then, should the margin, the profit, be related? We will have to adapt ourselves to doing some division. It is clear that, vulgarly, this margin (quantitatively the same for them and for us: it is the difference between the proceeds of sales and all production expenses; the name varies, for us it is surplus value) is related to the cost of the plant, to the company’s assets. Someone opens a workshop, spends a million on machinery and needs half a million in cash to get started: at the end of the year, he has the workshop, the machinery, half a million in the cash register and, in addition, he has earned three hundred thousand lire: he says he has invested a million and a half, gaining twenty per cent per annum. But classical economics had taken a step forward and called the rate of profit the ratio of profit not to the value of the plant, but to the cost of production of the entire block of commodities that that profit has allowed in the final sale: thus, the ratio of profit to constant and variable capital expenditure. If that workshop bought raw iron for two hundred thousand during the year, paid mechanics three hundred thousand, and sold for eight hundred thousand, it earned three hundred thousand on an advance of five hundred thousand, and the rate of profit is sixty per cent. The rate of surplus value, on the other hand, as is well known, is found by comparing the profit-surplus value, which was three hundred thousand, to the variable capital or wage expenditure alone, which was three hundred thousand: in the above case, it is one hundred per cent.

Therefore, constant capital passes through the cycle without yielding anything. Labour passes through it, adding a value (six hundred thousand) to the product, which is double the wages paid to workers.

This is not complete, as it has only served to clearly define the four quantities that represent the value of the product and its related quantities: the rate of surplus value and the rate of profit. But these simple relations can be applied to a single company, and this is usually where the bourgeois economist limits himself, or they can be applied to the entire field of social production. If one does not move on to this second aspect, it is not possible to give a complete account of the Marxist production function. Note that we are here once again merely setting out the Marxist scope of the magnitudes and relations introduced, and we do not claim that proof and confirmation come from the fact that the logical argument holds, or that in certain derivations a sense of innate justice should begin to stir, or that the operations square with the rules of algebra and arithmetic. The consistency of the system with itself and the rigorous connection of its parts (even denied by the usual superficial philanderers) are not sufficient for proof, which can only be given in the historical field and by the appearance of phenomena that our model-schema can contain, and those it cannot. Marx asserts that in complete capitalist production (given only in the state of a pure model), the rate of profit of the various branches of production tends to level out: this tendency is all the more evident the closer a society approximates the model and contains few spurious classes beyond the three general types: workers, capitalists, and landowners.

This general rate of profit corresponds to a general rate of surplus value. The two ratios are linked to a third ratio, namely the organic composition of capital, which is the ratio between constant capital and variable capital. If 20 in wages is used to work on raw materials worth 80, the technological or organic composition ratio is 4 (its inverse is 25%). If the value of the product is 120, the profit is 20, and likewise the surplus value. But while the rate of profit is 20% (20 profit on 100 advance), that of surplus value is 100% (20 profit on 20 wages). In the various sectors, the organic composition cannot be the same, and as we saw, it grows rapidly in industry, slowly in agriculture. Marx nevertheless introduces the average rate of profit. For now, we will affirm, without further discussion, the law of the fall.

They call it – à la Stalin – a tautology. Marx, in fact, says that if, at an equal rate of surplus value, the organic composition rises (as is historically accepted by all), the rate of profit must fall. But who says that the rate of surplus value remains unchanged? A vain objection. If the rate of surplus value were to fall, then nothing: the rate of profit would fall for two reasons (profit of 10 instead of 20 on 20 in wages: rate of surplus value 50%; materials worked not 80 but 100, rise in organic composition. Total expenditure 100 plus 20, revenue 130, rate of profit down to 10 out of 120, from 20% previously to only about 8%). And if the rate of surplus value rises? Kill them! This would mean that they have lowered wages and extended the working day: and this is against the general direction of the historical movement of capitalism. That this must collapse if it starves everyone and increases the exploitative pressure goes without saying. The economic law is that, even if things improve, it will fail all the same. This is the point, for the many who are sick of demagogy.

The fundamental argument of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in the historical life of the capitalist mode of production, as it has already been discussed in our work, must be addressed again and in greater depth, and is one of those in which it is most necessary to faithfully re-present Marx’s material and organise its mathematical apparatus. It is moreover one of the points of misunderstanding, since a contradiction is trivially seen between the law of decline and the boundless hunger for surplus value and profit characteristic of capital in its modern forms, which, as Marx formidably denounced, has had the most impressive confirmations from recent history. In the Dialogue with Stalin, it was recalled how, with the incessant increase in the mass of capital and the mass of annual commodity production, which for us measures it, the mass of profit also increases powerfully, although the relative ratio between the mass of profit and the mass of product tends to decline historically.

In discussing the agrarian question, we believe that the fundamental, original, monolithic theory of surplus profits has been developed, which includes all types of rent (not just ground rent). It is clear from the earliest theorems of Marxism that the amount of surplus profits is progressive, simultaneously with the decline in the average rate of social profit. Marx himself, among many other phenomena, explains the influence of capital concentration: even among the most superficial critics, no one ignores that the law of concentration is given in the very first texts, even before Capital. Now, the average rate is derived from the sum of all profits in relation to all capital, of small, medium and large companies, and the simple size of the company is a reason for greater profit: therefore, small companies operate at a loss, below the average rate, while large companies operate at a surplus, considering the whole picture of industrial society in the same era. As capital becomes concentrated in fewer companies, the increased mass of profit is divided amongst an ever smaller number of profitable companies: but the total capital of these few but vast companies grows even more, and with it the mass of products. Hence: increase in production, decrease in the number of companies, increase in the average capital of each company, increase in the total mass of profits, but the latter less rapidly than the increase in production – and social consumption in all fields – and therefore a fall in the average rate.

Therefore, apart from a treatment of a statistical-historical nature confirming that Marx’s law has been fully verified, it must be understood that our entire representative model of integral classical capitalism requires the criterion of the determination, at a given historical-economic moment, of the average profit, of the average rate of profit, of all ‘capitalist enterprises’, i.e. of all industrial companies, including those that with the employment of capital and exclusively the labour of wage-earners operate in agriculture (mining, hydraulics, construction, etc.). In fact, without this term, average profit, our entire doctrine of value would become untenable. For us, the value of the commodity produced in a given industrial branch cannot be deduced from a search for averages on the shares of transactions at the markets: it must be known beforehand. In this, Marx goes far beyond Ricardo, who identified the value deduced from the labour-value theory with the sale value and asserted, in an initial form that was only approximate and above all inspired by a model of society wholly industrial and without rents (i.e. without surplus profit: a society which remains the ideal of every liberal economy, but which is impossible, and historically increasingly distant): every commodity is exchanged for another or for money in proportion to the average social labour required to produce it.

Marx’s formula is instead that every commodity has a price of production, which constitutes its value in our sense. While continuing to call this value exchange value, preserving the classic distinction from use value (inherent to the specific physical qualities of the commodity and the particular human need which it is apt to satisfy), the concept is that the value of every commodity is calculated according to the economic elements given in its production. So we could well introduce the expression ‘value of production’ and say that we are in favour of an economic theory of the value of production, while our opponents are in favour of a theory of exchange price.

We are at the ‘linear function’ stage of capitalist production (and only this stage!): the value of the product is defined as the sum of three terms: first, constant capital: second, wage capital: third, surplus value or profit. To find out the third term, or profit, I do not ask how the commodity has been sold, nor even how much it sells for on average in a given space and time; instead, I look for the average rate of profit of my ‘model of society’ under consideration: I combine (add) the first two terms of constant and variable capital, multiply the whole by the average rate, and this is the third term. Common economics calls the sum of the first two terms the cost, or cost price. Now, for us, value is the cost price plus a certain percentage, which is always the same, because it is the average rate of profit obtained from all the companies in the society under study. We have not yet gone to the market to gather information or leaf through price lists and catalogues at all, and we have found the quantity that concerns us: value of the commodity, given by its social price of production. Constant capital plus variable capital plus profit at the average social rate equals value of the product.

If we now leave our hot forge where everyone is bustling about, the proletarian because such is his fate, the capitalist because he is capital personified, even if he were a Robot, he has, Marxistically speaking, ‘the devil in his body’, we go to the market where the traders sneer ‘in search of someone to fool’ and where one ‘makes differences’ without the expenditure of mechanical and in any case physical energy, more or less as they are made at the bourgeois gaming table, we will not bother at all to theorise about these varied ups and downs. Cheating occurs, it is certain, and from the very first pages Marx tells us how fraud is the very climate of bourgeois society, but we can state this law: the average social rate of commercial swindles is equal to zero; that is, all those ups and downs, those good and bad deals in the general cycle, balance each other out. The mercantilist school, whose principle was that wealth was formed through exchange, had long been proven vain; however, this school, proper to the epoch of the first European expeditions for overseas trade, referred mainly to international exchange, and we, with Marx, do not dispute that surplus value – and therefore value – can arise in the exchange between a capitalist economic society and non-capitalist societies and even, in the white world, between the capitalist sphere and that of backward types of production (see small-scale agriculture). Once the pure capitalist society is established in the model, we affirm that all the profit and value it socially generates originate in the production process, never in acts and rounds of exchange. Therefore, changing the theory of value into a theory of price, or attempting to hybridise the two (Arturo Labriola), or changing the theory of surplus value into a theory of surcharge (Graziadei) is not permissible except for those who trample on Marx and pass arms and baggage to the enemy camp.

We do not dispute that our terms: constant and variable capital, and consequently the profit margin that we add, are given with deductions derived from the exchange of commodities (raw materials, labour power), whose shares in their turn undergo those occasional fluctuations. Even before we get to the point of drawing up, in mathematical language, an ‘Economic Abacus of Karl Marx’, a goal perhaps of this group work, we assert the right to discover the value that ‘stands before the price’ through an elaboration of prices. Physical mass was found and measured only by firstly starting from weights, and even from weights roughly known, but this has not at all prevented the mechanics of masses from being constructed with complete rigour, determining them in their measures independently of the infinite weights that a mass can assume, just as the same ‘value’ can assume infinite prices.

Marx’s expression that a given commodity sells at above or below its price of production, and therefore precisely above or below its value, now seems natural and familiar. There can be many causes for discrepancies, in both directions, between value and market price. All those due to pure commercial mechanisms, and the laws of competition, supply and demand, the effect of modern, highly skilled propaganda, publicity, advertising, the French réclame, the refined art of American marketing, the whiteness of the teeth of shop assistants smiling at customers, or the eloquence of street hawkers, are resolved in a secondary fluctuation around the social value.

But the theory of the agrarian question and of ground rent has served to establish that there are systematic deviations of price from value; and it has erected the formidable condemnation of capitalist society, whereby all agricultural products are sold and paid for by those who consume them above their value, provided that they are the products of an agriculture proper to the pure model of capitalist society. In this case, only the product of the most barren field is sold at its value, and this price sets the market rate. If, therefore, we move on, as we have seen, to more fertile fields, we will find that for the same product, less advances of capital, less advances of wages, and therefore less profit for the agrarian entrepreneur at the standard rate. But the law of mercantile distribution is that ‘all the prices of transactions quickly level out’, and therefore that product will not have a lower selling price. It did, however, have a lower price of production than that of the worst land: there will be a greater gain. Having already calculated our third term, the normal profit, which went to the agrarian industrialist, this added margin is surplus profit: it goes as rent to the landowner; if you like, to the State. Therefore, when capital enters into agriculture and dominates it, the sale prices of foodstuffs are above their social value. Conversely, given that the small peasant expends enormous costs and labour for his meagre produce and is forced to sell it at the current market price, the products of minimal agriculture are sold below value: the small peasants form a layer of slaves of the entire capitalist society.

Although all this material repeats the expositions of the Threads of Time on the agrarian question and the theses/counter-theses that summarised them, it should be pointed out that surplus profit in agriculture is not the only type of surplus profit that appears in a classical capitalist society, and is transformed into rent enjoyed by the landowning class, one of the three basic classes in our model. Surplus profit and similar rents are enjoyed by those who, with the same title of ownership of agricultural land, have natural waterfalls, mines, deposits of all kinds, building lands, as well as various buildings and manufactures necessary for industrial entrepreneurs. In all these cases, the organisation of bourgeois society, founded on the security of private property, forms and guarantees a series of monopolies that are inherent in its nature. It is therefore not free competition that is the basic feature of the bourgeois economy, but the system of monopolies, which allows a whole range of products, including the most pre-eminent ones from agricultural land and mining, to be sold at prices higher than their value, i.e. the sum of the social effort they cost, after also paying the normal profit of ‘free’ industry. The quantitative theory of the agrarian question and of rent is therefore the complete and exhaustive theory of every monopoly and of every surplus profit from monopoly, for every phenomenon that establishes current prices above social value. And this happens when the State monopolises cigarettes, as when a powerful trust or syndicate monopolises, say, the oil wells of an entire region of the globe, as when an international capitalist pool is formed for coal or steel or, as will be the case tomorrow, for uranium.

Thus the general meaning of capitalism is this: historically, it begins by lowering what might be called the social labour index for a given quantity of manufactured product, which would lead society to consume the same products, and even more products, with a lesser employment of labour, and thus reducing the working hours of the solar day. From the outset, however, and despite the decrease in the average rate of profit, agricultural surplus profit is established and the average effort for foodstuffs increases. Thus, as a necessary consequence of the inseparable mechanism of the market and the current price, a whole series of other surplus profits arise, and despite technical progress and increased labour productivity, the possibility of greatly reducing the average individual labour time and the hours of work in the day, even while raising the general level of consumption, is paralysed. Such human slavery for a third of one’s time and for at least half of one’s organic activity (sleep deducted) cannot be overcome until one comes up against the limits of the current price and the mercantile system, which are the cause of the ever-increasing gap between the social value of the objects of use and the price at which they are obtained by those who consume them.

Given that everything insists on the calculation of a social value to be placed before prices, in which we have already computed the three terms: the labour ‘of the dead’, used and replaced without anyone taking or giving anything back – the labour ‘of the living’, in exchange for which wages have been paid – a class premium due to the entrepreneur in the form of a fixed levy on the first two items; and given that we need to know the social quantity of this levy, it is not possible to consider the issues without a social rather than a corporate vision. Marx, therefore, who in the first volume of Capital gave the general function of capitalist production, within the limits of the analysis of the value of a given commodity, and in its application to the total production cycle of a determinate capitalist enterprise (with a formidable integration of historical data on the development of society leading up to capitalism and on the revolutionary programme for escaping it, although not only the usual intellectuals but even Joseph Stalin said that this non-descriptive part did not please Marx!), goes on, further in the work, to deal with the circulation of capital in society as a whole. It is not, according to a usual stale refrain, a matter of studying the circulation (mercantile, monetary) that had previously been left aside: on the contrary (since the critique of the mercantile system is contained in every page; and from the very first volume in the famous paragraph on the fetish character of commodities), it is a question of presenting the circuit of capital in production, passing from the sphere of the capitalist enterprise to the social sphere: to prove that, as in the former, in the latter there is only one source of capital increase, and it consists in a transfer of wealth from class to class.

Marx then forms the schemas of this circulation of all capital in his and our model of society. It is true that he begins by considering a society without rentiers, a binary society, with capitalists and wage-earners, and at first he examines the case in which capital (as Quesnay did for national wealth) remains unchanged from cycle to cycle: simple reproduction.

Society is subdivided into two departments: one dedicated to the production of commodities that go directly to the consumption of its members, and this is the Second. The other instead, which we will call the First, produces objects that in turn serve as instruments for further production.

The figures in this first table are well known:

We did not want to say what the figures mean after so many repetitions: first figure: constant capital – second: wages – third: profit – fourth: product.

Suppose that the cycle is one year and has come to an end: society has produced 9,000 units and this is its capital. It stops, takes a breather, and takes stock: 3,000 units are consumption, to be ‘eaten’, 6,000 are tools and raw materials.

In the following cycle, it is clear that these 6,000 will be employed again, 4,000 as constant capital in the first department and 2,000 in the second.

The 3,000 in consumption goes as follows:
a) 1,000 to the workers in the first department, 500 to those in the second: therefore 1,500; b) 1,000 to the capitalists in the first department, 500 to those in the second: again 1,500. Total 3,000. That’s all.

There are numerous considerations to be made even on this simplified schema, and numerous discussions have arisen too. We will highlight only this. In such a society, in both departments, the rate of surplus value is 100% (in the first, 1,000 out of 1,000; in the second, 500 out of 500). For us, this means that the workers have added 2,000 and 1,000 in value to the inert constant capital, but have only received and consumed half of it: the other half has been received and consumed by the capitalists. The rate of profit is 20% (in the first section 1,000 out of 5,000, in the second 500 out of 2,500). The organic composition of capital is 4, i.e. 4,000 against 1,000 and 2,000 against 500 (constant capital against variable capital).

Let us allow ourselves to do what Marx has not done: let us bring in the third class, the landowners. Let us imagine, again for the sake of simplicity and clarity, that all goods consumed are foodstuffs or at least agricultural products, and let us call the first department industrial and the second agricultural. In the latter, 500 went to the wage-earners and 500 to capitalist entrepreneurs. Let us add 1,000 in rent going to landowners.

The table becomes:

All the product has risen to 10,000, but this is solely due to the fact that the same quantity of consumption goods has been paid for at 4,000 instead of 3,000, and by the workers, the capitalists, and the landowners. With the rate of profit remaining unchanged, in the second department there was a surplus profit of 1,000, added to the normal profit of 500, thus giving a total margin of 1,500 on the 2,500 advanced: 60%. The agrarian capitalists have received 20%, like industrial capitalists, and landowners received a rent equal to 40% of the pure cost of production of agricultural goods, equal to a quarter (25%) of the value of the products of the land. In such a society, these are sold at a quarter above their value, their actual ‘price of production’.

What movement is taking place in this society between classes? As movement on the market, everything is in balance: therefore, professors and the bourgeois want to settle accounts on prices. In fact:

Landlords: with 1,000 in rent, they buy 1,000 in products to consume.

Capitalists: with 1,500 in profit, they buy 1,500 products to consume. But from the sale of products worth 10,000 in total, 8,500 leaves their hands: 1,000 goes to landowners, 1,500 is paid in wages to workers, 4,000 replenishes the constant capital of department I, with 2,000 that of department II: the accounts are balanced. The law of market value, or Stalin’s great shadow, is saved.

Let us now define the movement – which, as transfers from buyers to sellers, is entirely balanced, in a marvellous most moral equilibrium – as a transfer of value from class to class. The constant capital manipulated by the workers amounted to 6,000. After manipulation, the product was worth 10,000. Therefore: value added by labour was 4,000. Of this 4,000, the workers have received only 1,500 as wages. Therefore they have expended 2,500. This 2,500 has remained in the hands of the capitalists, insofar as they are the ones who are the owners and sellers of all the products of both departments. However, the capitalists had to pass on 1,000 as rent to the landowners. Their net gain was therefore 2,500 – 1,000 = 1,500. Balance sheet: from the working class to the capitalist class, 2,500. From the capitalist class to the landed class, 1,000. To the capitalist class for its consumption, net of reinvestment in the subsequent production of all necessary constant and variable capital: 1,500. To the working class for its consumption, the total variable capital, i.e. 1,500. At a meeting in Naples on 1 May, an explanatory overview of this was drawn up in the form of ‘Marx’s Tableau’ in order to show the mercantile balance and the appropriation of class against class, which has not yet been able to be reproduced but may be useful in due course. This table can be reduced here to a rudimentary diagram (avoiding, as in the original, the separate columns for ‘instrumental enterprises’ and ‘subsistence enterprises’, which are pure points of passage for values insofar as they are identified with the capitalist class) of movement among three classes.

This is not the time to carry out a further examination of expanded reproduction with the more complicated schemas that have been discussed at length concerning the progressive accumulation of capital, in the famous polemics of Hilferding, Luxemburg, Bukharin, Lenin, and others. In the simple reproduction scheme given so far, the capital invested in successive cycles remains constant, always amounting to 4,000 + 1,000 + 2,000 + 500, i.e. 7,500 in the two departments, to which is added the profit and rent of 1,000 + 500 + 1,000, i.e. 2,500 in total, which is all consumed by capitalists and landowners.

But both may not consume everything (the famous ‘abstinence’), but save (according to bourgeois theory, even workers can save, on their wages of 1,000 + 500) a portion to invest in new production. Let us assume half, and then capitalists and rentiers consume only 1,250 and capital increases by 1,250.

The analysis becomes more complicated when we come to form the table of the following cycle, dividing the investment differential between the two departments. In fact, the 1,250 saved are practically, physically, unconsumed subsistence, and therefore, in order to reinvest, not only is less subsistence produced, but more capital goods (constant capital) are needed for the coming cycle. Therefore, the breakdown of the figures in the table of the first cycle must be recalculated too: it is very easy for the usual commentators to say that Marx would have got lost in such a quagmire.

These are calculations that will be settled elsewhere: here it is sufficient to re-establish and reaffirm the fundamental concepts. The capital of the society under consideration, which in simple reproduction remains the same size, is measured by the product of a cycle – of one year – by the ‘cost of production’ of the product of the cycle, and if we consider the income of the three classes to be consumed, we can generally say that the total value of the plants, manufactures, and machinery also remains constant, as does the amount of agricultural land under cultivation: but these quantities do not appear in our figures.

In order to address the issue of progressive reproduction, we must first ask ourselves – and this was the point that preoccupied Luxemburg – whether the fictitious society we are using as a model is closed or open. In the first calculation, both accounts in money and accounts in the quantity of commodities are balanced on the market. In the case of an open society, we can imagine that, since there remains a margin of money that is not invested internally or, possibly, not intended for the purchase of subsistence goods, it is possible to ‘buy’ tools and subsistence goods in foreign fields. According to the doctrine of the great Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, only under this condition of the existence of peripheral markets to the capitalist circle can Marx’s schemas of expanded reproduction be rendered conclusive; Bukharin denied the necessity of this condition for further accumulation.

This question is certainly not simple and cannot be addressed without establishing the limits of the problem that from time to time is under discussion. Here we are dealing with the classic capitalist society, which, however, cannot be reduced, as Bukharin would like, to a social world of only industrial capitalists and wage labourers, since it must also include rentiers, whether they be the monopolistic proprietors of land and other natural resources and forces, groups of supercapitalists controlling key sectors, or the supercapitalist State itself. This model is certainly introduced for the purpose of constructing science, the only true science of capitalism and its economy, but also for polemical, combative, and party purposes.

It is in fact the apologetic school of the capitalist system, and it is the party of bourgeois conservation, which assumes that by organising the whole of the real present world on the fundamental model of wage production, imbalances would disappear and the ‘inequalities’ of the problem would be resolved. And so they claim to explain all the phenomena of the model and even of the real society of today by presenting its quantities and laws differently: starting from price and not from value, from the market and not from production, considering the addition of value in each cycle as not given by labour but by three sources: labour, capital, and land. They, in conclusion, deny the need to discover a production function and study the functions of the market and exchange, but in reality they arrive at a distorted production function, in which the bourgeois privileges of enterprise and monopoly are justified by a corrupt science.

We – without ever neglecting that vast field of interpretation in which we follow, throughout the inhabited world, the succession of great modes of production and revolutionary struggles of every degree – demonstrate that the laws of the abstract model developed in such a way as not to conceal but to highlight the transfer of value from class to class – the extortion of class against class, the domination of class force over class – present tendencies and movements, recognisable in highly capitalist real societies, at the end of which there is no compensation but irreconcilability and rupture.

Since it is a matter of counterposing our classic approach with that of the self-styled official economic science and its various attempts, both ancient and recent, to divert attention from the coming revolution, it has been necessary to recall its outlines, to characterise the model on which one works, the nature of the magnitudes employed, and the expression of the relations deduced from them.

All this can be compared, in historical stages, with what is happening now, but after depriving ourselves of the convenient escape route which, after having ‘filmed’ unforeseen developments, one is ready to remodel the model, trade off magnitudes, patch up formulas, as we have seen for a century with representatives of groups who – in itself a verification of a highly experimental and materialist kind – quickly move on to defending the same dictates that the official scholars of the bourgeois world preach against us.

To conclude this first part and to balance the use of theoretical models and schemas, even for those who are following with some difficulty, we will look at a concrete case, one that is interesting for reasons of location and topicality. We are in Piedmont, and here one lives in the light or, if you prefer, in the shadow of FIAT, Italy’s largest industrial complex and one of the most highly valued in Europe and the world: just a few weeks have passed since the shareholders’ meeting and Prof. Valletta’s report on the 1953 financial statements.

The FIAT of Turin, with its history, is linked to the history of proletarian struggles in Italy and to the transition from traditional, courtly Piedmont to more modern forms of capitalist organisation. More can be said: it is closely linked to the history of the Communist Party and to the emergence of that tendency that let itself be influenced by the outlines of the structure and hierarchy of a large industrial production complex, to the point of making it, without really realising it, the model of the organisation of the proletariat into a class and of the proletarian State itself, of the future society. Perhaps the origin of the deviation that then reached its extreme limits lies precisely in the fact that urban Turin, with FIAT and now without Palazzo Carignano, can present itself as a true classic model of capitalist society, lending itself to rapidly developing the data of the proletarian class struggle and to being thought of on the eve of the ‘Stato Operaio’, even for groups which, in their immature political and ideological evolution, have not yet moved beyond a ‘constitutional’ and, in a certain sense, ‘utopian’ understanding of the proletarian State, which is not – it – our model, is not a system, is not a new city to be founded, but a simple historical expedient, more or less dirty, that we must remove from the hands of the bourgeoisie, just as one tries to remove a knife from the hands of a criminal without founding a party of knife-wielders.

The fact remains that these groups, as soon as they set foot outside the neat and shiny warehouses of the Turinese automobile factory and came into contact with the less industrialised part of Italy, with its agrarian and backward regions, with the peasant and regional problems, suddenly fell into defending the same positions as the most colourless petty-bourgeois parties of half a century earlier, they no longer concerned themselves with revolutionising Turin, but with bourgeoisifying Italy, in such a way that it might be wholly worthy of bearing the Turinese factory brand and being administered and governed in its impeccable style.

It is useful for us to compare FIAT’s figures with the model of presentation of classic capitalism precisely because it helps us identify what we want to destroy and replace with an economic organisation that is diametrically opposed to it.

If we ask the stock exchange what FIAT’s capital is, we will be given the total number of shares subscribed by shareholders. The history of this figure is moving: it rises with the fortunes, no less with the misfortunes, of Italy for two reasons: because the factory physically expands and its production increases, and because the lire in which the shares are denominated and their total amount are devalued in great leaps and bounds.

The Fabbrica Italiana di Automobili Torino was founded in 1899 with capital of 800,000 (eight hundred thousand) lire in shares of 25 lire each, for a total of 32,000 shares. Since then, a significant ladder is ascended. In those years of tremendous economic euphoria, which paved the way for Giolittism – another Piedmontese product no less, elevated to a social model by the current leaders of the so-called Communist Party, yesterday against Mussolini, today against Scelba, and against any future rear-end in the chair – shares with a nominal value of 25 lire were listed on the stock exchange at over 1,700! It was a time when government bonds were trading above par and the exchange rate was above parity with gold.

Very soon, the current joint-stock company was constituted with a capital of 9 million in shares of 100 lire. Capital increases before the First European War were: 1909, 12 million; 1910, 14 million; 1912, 17 million. With the war, an excellent business for industries of this kind, it continues: 1915, 25.5 million, shares of 150 lire; 1916, 30 million, and then 34 million, shares of 200; 1917, 50 million; 1918, 125 million. The war ends but the currency continues to be devalued: 1919, 200 million; 1924, 400 million. In 1926, a bond loan of 10 million gold dollars (worth 19 lire) was approved, which was repaid in full in 1938.

Let’s start again from 1938. Capital, as we know, for the entire period between the two wars, was 400 million. After a new war and a new inflation have passed, in 1947 the capital is brought to 4 billion, partly through bonus shares for existing shareholders and partly through new shares.

With further ‘revaluations’ and the absorption of other smaller companies, we arrive at 36 billion lire in 1952 and 57 billion lire in 1953. The ratio to 1938 is therefore 142.50, much higher than the currency devaluation. If this were between 50 and 60, we could say that the real value from 1938 to 1953 increased two and a half times: but this is the nominal value of those pieces of paper that are shares: in any case, an accumulation at a frightening rate.

Shareholder remuneration is not a major concern for us, it is merely one of the sectors of surplus value distribution among the shareholders, who are essentially the initial lenders of money, administrators, captains of industry, the State, and other similar shark-like gullets of every kind. In any case, in 1952, 10% of the 36 billion profit was distributed, while in 1953, 4.5 billion out of 57 billion was distributed, i.e. less than 8%.

But in the latest Valletta report, we find the figure of the quantity that we need, which we must then break down into the various terms of the production function. In 1953-54 (while the dividend per share was 63 lire out of 500, or 12.6%), production (turnover) was 240 billion.

A distributable profit of only 7.3 billion and a declared profit of only 9.574 billion, while high compared to the conventional figure for share capital, are very low compared to output. They would be 16.7% in the first case, but only 4% in the second: and this is the measure of the rate of profit, roughly speaking, as understood by Marx.

But let’s try to break down the 240 billion in market revenue, which represents a leap of 40 billion compared to the previous financial year’s 200 billion. First of all, the sensational statement must be noted that the new investments, drawn from profits and surplus profits, amounted to approximately 100 billion between 1946 and 1952, and that a programme of 200 billion is planned, with more than 50 billion to be allocated in 1954. This means that, after paying all expenses, 10 billion in profits could be taken from the 240 billion for shareholders and at least 50 reinvested (expanded reproduction), for a total of 60 billion. Expenses would therefore have been 180 billion. We must divide these between constant capital and variable capital.

Without going into the details of the balance sheet, which, moreover, are of highly questionable reliability, we have found that the personnel consists of 57,278 workers and 13,832 employees (decidedly too many, as FIAT is largely a protection racket for business and electoral clienteles, and a good part of these people, each of whom on average manages four real workers, are themselves devourers of others’ surplus labour, especially at higher ranks). Let us consider the average pay of these 71,000 employees to be around one million per year (this is Turin, after all!), then the variable capital is 70 billion. Our breakdown is complete, albeit very rough.

Constant capital 110 billion, variable capital 70 billion, profit 10 billion, surplus profit 50 billion. Product 240 billion: 110 + 70 + 10 + 50 = 240. With these figures, the actual rate of profit is 10 divided by 180, or 5.5%; but the rate of surplus value is 60 divided by 70, or 86%.

The order of our magnitudes appears to hold up well.

How much is FIAT worth? Suppose one wants to buy all the shares on the stock exchange, which are nominally worth 500 lire and number 114 million: thus the well-known nominal value of 57 billion lire. Since the shares have reached a price of 660, one must spend more: 75 billion lire.

A fairly comfortable investment: 60 billion in profits and extra profits (a veritable rent that FIAT has, because it is FIAT, and plays into the hands of the Christian Democrat state and the Communist opposition) account for 80%.

But Valletta will never be that foolish: his balance sheet assets alone list real estate and facilities at an estimated value of 225 billion, plus 68 billion in receivables, i.e. approximately 300 billion against the usual conventional liabilities. Let’s stick with the 225 billion and think of the entire factory-cities of FIAT Motori, Lingotto, and other departments, on whose roofs automobile test tracks run. The value will be at least quadrupled and no less than a thousand billion at a rough guess. Valletta will ask for that much, and it will be invested, in the sense of purchasers of landed property, at 6%, or even 5% if... everything were leased to the Joint-Stock FIAT, just to get rid of the hassle.

Does this correspond to the average rate of profit in Italy? Let us begin by saying that those ten billion which have been considered normal profit in the Marxist sense are the profit at the average rate on 180 of capital (constant and variable) with a rate of 5.5%. In this case, we would say that the price of production of the FIAT cars produced (160,000 according to Valletta) was 190 billion (an average of 1,200,000 each). But the selling price was 240, and therefore higher than the value (what average Italian would not be fooled by a Fiat?) at roughly one and a half million (think of small cars and big cars).

Our value calculation is based on: constant capital 110, labour 70, profit at the average rate 10: total 190.

A simple reference to the average rate of profit of non-privileged enterprises throughout Italy. We should know: how large the total annual industrial product is – how much is spent on raw materials and wear and tear – how much is spent on personnel.

Let us start from the fact that Italian national income is, officially, now 10,000 billion, to be divided into incomes from capital, property, and labour. The division is not easy. Those employed in industry are about 7 million and their compensation, at a rate somewhat lower than those at FIAT, amount to 5,000 billion. Let constant capital be at a higher composition rate, at least 3, and therefore 18,000 billion. These approximate 25,000 billion, at our rate of 5.50, would yield a mass of profit of 1,500 billion. Of the national income, another 2,500 billion would remain to be attributed to incomes of non-industrial agriculture, public services, and other sectors. A distribution made through a very rough survey, but which certainly is not unfavourable to the weight of the industrial economy in the country, and we have exaggerated in this sense precisely in order to prove that the average rate of profit is not high: and this should be the subject of further research on statistics, which should always be read cum grano salis.

This is enough for us to conclude that, with the magnitudes of the Marxist model and the relations of the production function, we can see with sufficient accuracy how things stand in class relations, in a colossal industrial enterprise that we have no nostalgia for inheriting, and in an industrial country, as we know, less than half of which is statistically industrialised, but whose pretensions to bourgeois modernity are sufficient to wish upon it promptly the drastic cure of the dictatorship of the proletariat, when it will be possible to sing the funeral dirges for the great electoral parties.

An old refrain is the one about Marx’s obscurity, about the difficulty of grasping the true meaning of his theses, about the alleged contradiction between the various parts of his work and the different expositions of the same question; and many of the critics – we return to making use of the aforementioned monograph by Arturo Labriola, not because of the special importance of the work, but because his positions, particularly at odds with what in our re-presentation is the scope of Marxism, prove particularly useful for clarifying essential points – are keen to insinuate that, almost out of principle, the most notable statements are given in passing, in digressions, or sometimes relegated to one of the famous, and indeed almost always formidable, footnotes. This would be an almost sadistic tormenting of the reader, demanding too much of his ‘generosity’, that is, not so much of his culture, preparation, and patience, as of his capacity for continuous and tenacious effort.

It is well known that we, without in the least equating Capital with a comic book, we maintain instead that, in addition to the absolute consistency of propositions throughout the work, even in the mathematical sense, and an absolute absence of hesitations, oscillations, wavering, or ambiguities, there is absolute evidence, beyond any doubt, as to the content of what was stated, by the powerful writer-worker Karl Marx in the historical phase in which alone it could and had to be stated, so that the same evident certainty concerns what the hand and pen of the person Karl Marx were unable to stop, the whole constituting the doctrinal heritage of the great, unitary, transcontinental and transgenerational party of the revolutionary proletarian class. As for Labriola, one cannot deny him the label of a generous reader, because he has certainly studied the text at length and compared and contrasted, with extensive knowledge, passages and passages of Marx’s works, and these in turn with a wide range of literature from all sources; and yet he never went to the bottom, even when he richly quotes from the very passages that ought to have resolved the point under investigation for him in a decisive and illuminating manner. So generous, Labriola and some of his peers, (most do not understand Marx because they do not understand... a damn thing), at their writing desks and in the political arena, where they were unable to deny themselves any flag or any colour, everywhere finding little tunes to sing again, emblems to wear in their buttonholes, flowers to pick casually in the meadow, thus on a path opposite to the one followed by us.

Many times we have said, but we must also reiterate this point, that it is not so much the totalitarian enemies of Marxism who cause damage as those who feign to hold it in high regard and then – in a hundred different ways – accept certain parts of it while rejecting others or distorting them in their own way. It is ultimately the former, not the latter, who have understood something: they have at least understood this, that setting one part of the Marxist corpus against another, one aspect against another, is the same as confirming the collapse of the whole, as demonstrating the failure of the entire construction. To claim to start with Marx and then leave him behind when one realises that one can chart a better course than he did, or not to want to follow in his footsteps, vainly claiming to find oneself at his point of arrival, whether theoretical and practical, historical or political, is far worse than rejecting the entire course of the great journey, declaring it fallen, from the premises upon which it was founded to the conclusions it reached.

Whereas the group of total deniers, a Father Lombardi for example, the more strength, preparation, and sagacity they deploy in their desire to tear our massive war machine to pieces, the more they are subject to our presentation of the historical struggle as a clash between incompatible blocs of forces, each made up of bodies, arms, weapons, and theory, it is instead its flabby and equivocal contradictors who dare to defend Marxism by dragging it into the retreats of shameful concessions, which have ruined and continue to ruin the strength of theory and the revolutionary movement.

This will only resume in the historical phase in which, through a supreme effort, it will resume what for decades and decades – first and foremost, gigantic on this path, Marx himself – has been done in order to expose and shame the ‘affines’, the famous ‘cousins’ of the political spectrum, to denounce not only the de facto alliances with them in the various historical periods of revolutionary strategy, but above all the doctrinal fornication, the ‘trade in principles’ that was reproached – for the umpteenth time, with prophetic accuracy – at Erfurt and at Gotha against German social democracy, the first sick patient to die of majority elephantiasis, of unitary cretinism.

Nothing indeed is more insidious, more poisonous, in its effects if not in its intentions, than a method such as that employed by the not unlearned in doctrine Labriola, Sorel, and Graziadei, who first turn the pillars of the system, of the Marxist edifice, upside down, vainly attempting to shake the columns of the temple, then, having cooked up their own theoretical soup, they exalt certain brilliant positions that Marx arrived at, which they claim were the result of gross oversights and scientific blunders, they subtly defend him from the underestimation of honest enemies, and they seek to win glory for themselves by attempting, once again falsely, to sing with his immense voice the final psalm. For a hundred others have set themselves on the same path, a dozen pimps and men of little worth, who, having no muscles even for papier-mâché columns, nevertheless had jaws – albeit those of donkeys – to consume the offal that is lavished on corrupters and renegades.

It suits us because we must set forth, to nonetheless make use of the writing of a ‘pro-Marxist’ of the type of Labriola, also because it, not being recent but now half a century old, serves to cut the wind from the sails of the ultra-modern ‘fixers’ who, with the same spirit, and believing they are doing so for the first time, have dared to propose to drag the vessel of Marxian construction into their dry docks, which are incapable of accommodating even a small boat. If, in fact, they have no other way of recovering from the pretension to see what a Marx did not see, they will be deflated to zero by the realisation of having discovered only old rubbish already cast in lead for fifty years, they, the fans of the latest printed issue, of the latest bookshop display.

Since it is difficult for one of these people, when it comes to, for example, digesting – where what is needed is not a generous stomach but a physiological one, not eroded by bourgeois ulcers – one of the laws of Marxism such as that on the rate of profit, to not veer, in chewing over the subject, toward the general philosophy of method, to the theory of human knowing, to the scope of historical materialism, and to not attribute the ‘discovered’ defects of Marx to his derivation from the idealist Hegel, to his unconscious mysticism or at least mythicism, denouncing (it is never quite clear) or admiring his alleged voluntarism and practicalism, downright pragmatism, as premises for scientific doctrine; it is good that all these muddleheads learn how these refrains have been whistling since ancient times in the ears of Marxists who have no hair of doubt on their brains and no mania for personal creation.

Since then, it has been a matter of reconciling these two theses: Marx was a historical genius and a political leader of the first order, and the movement that followed him cannot dispense with his work; Marx, when he set out to do economic science, lined up a series of assertions that were all wrong and all refuted by the study of the real economic facts of his own time and later. The way out of this frightening mess is obvious, worse, as was said, than the arguments of those who claim that Marx was an aberrant theorist and a senseless and criminal social agitator.

Since it cannot be denied that Marx dealt with economic science, expounded the preceding schools of political economy, and explicitly proposed a new scientific theory of economic facts that was to supplant the previous ones; and since it is desired that, while raising incense to the greatness of Marx’s thought, contemporary ‘generic’ economic research, i.e. that which makes its way through university chairs, examination texts, and scientific treatises, can continue to be considered valid, the old trick is resorted to: Marx spoke and wrote about economics, but he did not do economic science, rather... what exactly? Philosophy. Marx is not understood as an economist because economic science is sought in him, in the light of which he aligned – according to their professors – serious nonsense, allowing himself to be surpassed by dozens of modern scientists, but everything can be understood if one reads Marx as a philosopher and admits that, wanting to write as such, he deliberately did not hesitate to present economic facts and laws in a false manner. So Karl Marx at the economics exam does not reach the pass mark and is failed, but, having considered him a great philosopher, those who sit in the chair steal so much of that glittering philosophy that they set themselves up outside the faculty as leaders of the people and, above all, attain seats in parliament and the senate.

There is nothing more stupidly empty than such excursions on the backside.

It certainly cannot be denied that in order to deal with themes like that which we have before us, it is useful to have and use comprehensive data not only on the history of economic doctrines but also on the history of philosophical thought, and to establish what knowledge Marx brought with him from his education and what he acquired on his own under the influence of the events of his life.

The error lies in seeking in such investigation the decisive element for causing this or that ‘version’ or ‘reading’ of the Marxist work to prevail, and in going back to those sources in order to ask them for the deciphering of the supposed enigmas, the solution of the supposed doubts, which would be found in the text of the elaboration which Marx, even with those materials, and many times even in spite of and against those materials, came to attain. The research must be done, where it is necessary to explain passages and chapters that seem and at times are arduous, in the history of the epoch in which Marx lived, in the social relations peculiar to that period of transition, not because it chronologically coincided with Marx’s biographical curriculum, but because it was that in which, around the powerful limbs of a new force of history, the working class, there came – by necessity and even if Marx had not been born, or were our figure of legend – to crystallise the new, original, different from that of the preceding modes of production, theoretical superstructure.

Hegel, and before him the entire modern critical school, and Kant, to whom some would also attribute the ‘critical’ method used by Marx, is explained precisely by the transition from feudal to capitalist society. The critique of the German idealists or the reason of the French materialists, like the sense of the English empiricists, all express a superstructure of the struggle against the powers of divine right, and establish the freedom to subject revealed and theological truths, imposed from the top of the hierarchical ladder and by sacred texts, to the test of reason and experience.

Marx and the Marxists are explained by the calling into default, in turn, of the democratic and popular power of the bourgeois States, founded upon the ‘consciousness’ of the individual and free citizen. Just as undoubtedly between the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the old regimes, and the struggle of the working class against bourgeois power, there are historical links and derivations, so too are there between the two superstructures, relative to the two great transitions between modes of production. Therefore, the doctrine of the modern proletariat must be studied and clarified by taking due account of those prior developments in the way of thinking of the collectivities. Criticism, Enlightenment, experimentalism: Marx always shows the respective derivations, and from the French Encyclopaedia, from English political economy, and so on.

The wrong way is to ask who the philosophy professor of the law student Karl Marx was, what student circles he frequented, what books he kept on his bedside table, and how he may have expressed himself in his more youthful writings: apart from the fact that in reading them with a spirit of one who puts the whole process in order rather than throwing it into disarray, one discerns in them with sure clarity the new and independent position.

It is strange how, in order to prove that the whole of Capital, and at least the First Book (according to the usual legend that this says different things from the Third), is a critical-philosophical work and not an economic-scientific one, one starts precisely from the second preface of 1873, in which Marx settled his accounts with Hegel. The classic distinction between the process of inquiry and the process of presentation is quoted from it. They even quote a passage from the Russian review that Marx himself quotes, to make it expressly his own. And with this material, they try to endorse this absurd thesis: Marx did not want to give a scientific description of the real laws of capitalist economy and its development, but only wanted to present the data of the ‘economic consciousness’ proper to the people of the capitalist epoch. Marx himself knew (!) that ‘economic research does not require the intervention of this bizarre notion of value’, but he aimed ‘at something else: to reconstruct the process that unconsciously leads men to construct the (illusory) notion of value’. This method of Marx which studies not the facts but the illusions that man makes for himself about the facts, is elegantly defined as ‘social illusionism’. We will see later who ‘the men’ are, the same old and new story. And who is the subject of unconscious consciousness.

Let us begin by stating that, according to the correct position, the purpose of Capital in its every part and volume is to provide a theory of the facts of capitalist economy as they actually are, in such a way that the deductions are experimentally verifiable: not, therefore, as the contemporary economic consciousness of the bourgeoisie or of ‘men’ sees them, but as the theoretical knowledge of the class party sees them which, in the capitalist today, represents the communist and classless tomorrow.

But since the main ‘piece of support’ for the definition given by Marx of the character and purpose of the work of Marx is the cited preface, let us see in order what is drawn from it, and we will immediately see that the whole thing is flawless.

Marx passes in review the critics of the first edition. The Revue Positiviste in Paris reproached him, on one side, for treating economics metaphysically (so not even Labriola said anything new in 1906), and on the other, for limiting himself to a critical analysis of the given elements, instead of prescribing recipes for the cook-shops of the future. Attracted by the first accusation of metaphysics, Marx omits (perhaps also for publishing reasons) to respond to the second in any other way than with the ironic phrase about the cook-shops and with the (Comtist?) parenthesis. Auguste Comte was the leader of French positivism, which corresponded in politics to a vague social reformism: Marx does not deign here to point out that Comte introduces a revolutionary programme in every line... He responds to the blemish of metaphysics with the opinion of the Russian Sieber (already mentioned as a theoretical comrade), who says that ‘the method of Marx is the deductive method of the whole English school’, and of the German Block, who speaks of analytical method and places the author ‘among the most eminent analytical minds’.

The important passage is the one relating to the ‘European Messenger’ of St. Petersburg. This had said that the method of investigation is severely realistic, but that of presentation ‘unfortunately German-dialectical’. Marx first quotes this passage:

‘At first sight, if the judgment is based on the external form of the presentation of the subject, Marx is the most ideal of ideal philosophers, always in the German, i.e., the bad sense of the word. But in point of fact he is infinitely more realistic than all his forerunners in the work of economic criticism. He can in no sense be called an idealist’. Marx is not obscure. Marx is a fighter, and even as a writer he is one of those who do not give satisfaction, who never demagogically give in to the demand for a banal answer that can be swallowed without effort. He does not say: let it therefore be established that I am analytical and not metaphysical, realistic and not idealist: he says that he could not respond better than with a few more excerpts from the same review, which he then follows with another clear statement: ‘[w]hilst the writer pictures what he takes to be actually my method, in this striking and (...) generous way, what else is he picturing but the dialectic method?’.

And so we know from an authentic source what the method is; and what the dialectic method consists of, for Marx.

Let us quote the salient phrases: ‘The one thing which is of moment to Marx, is to find the law of the phenomena with whose investigation he is concerned (...) Of still greater moment to him is the law of their variation, of their development (...) For this it is quite enough, if he proves, at the same time, both the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass over; and this all the same, whether men believe or do not believe it, whether they are conscious or unconscious of it’.

Wait a moment: first of all, there is the response to the question about the ‘cook-shops of the future’, quoted from the Russian language and published under the most police-state regime of the time, which certainly escapes those who read ‘coppa-coppa’. Then there is the blow to the consciousness of humanity, which Marx officially endorses. And so it is strange that the posthumous Labriola quotes the following passage: ‘Marx treats the social movement as a process of natural history, governed by laws not only independent of human will, consciousness and intelligence, but rather, on the contrary, determining that will, consciousness and intelligence (...) If in the history of civilisation the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness’. And Labriola, nonchalantly: of course, one must understand individual, concrete consciousness.

How individual and concrete?! The text in which Marx recognises his own photograph has spoken of the consciousness of humanity and of ‘men’, of ‘any’ result of consciousness, not only of the individual.

But the text continues to do justice to the claim that Capital studies not the economic facts, but the ideological visions of them: ‘That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve (to criticism) as its starting-point. Such an inquiry will confine itself to the confrontation and the comparison of a fact, not with ideas, but with another fact (...)’. Unfortunately, we must skip ahead. ‘Whilst Marx sets himself the task of following and explaining from this point of view the economic system established by the sway of capital, he is only formulating, in a strictly scientific manner, the aim that every accurate investigation into economic life must have’. Ah, the art of quotation!

In writing, Marx does not give you satisfaction, and he does well. But you must know that he leaves ‘nothing by the roadside’. He remembered at the right moment to deal with the pupils of Comte 1871 (or rather of Stalin 1952?) on the little story of the cold description that leaves behind every proposal of social change. Now, after having dotted all the ‘i’s’ with the very words of the Russian, and having established what is the matter to investigate, and what is the method of investigating, he remembers well that they have charged him with a Hegelian tar-smearing as regards method of presentation.

What a Hegel of Egypt! Ten words strung together with the rigour of an algebraic formula, and even these, as we were saying, quoted by the twisters of straight backs: ‘Of course the method of presentation must differ in form (original italics) from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction’.

Hegel did not discover this, but all the first treatise-writers on the results of modern experimental research (and even some classical writers such as Lucretius). Kepler gives the various laws of planetary motion, deduced from analytical readings made in the sky with thousands of observations by Tycho Brache. Newton expounds the same thing (with a little more Hegelian... nationalism Marx and Engels take pleasure in Hegel’s demonstration that, with a few mathematical steps, the English Newton deduces from the German Kepler), but he starts from a hypothesis, which those laws and readings confirm, namely his law of universal gravitation. And it is science, purely experimental, empirical, as they like to say, and not speculative, as evidenced by both Tycho’s long list of angles and Newton’s first brief proposition and figure in which a moving point revolves around a fixed one (planet and sun).

What else? All secondary schools teach ‘experimental physics’, which is explained to young people in laboratories using deductive reasoning, i.e. starting from three principles which are then one alone, Galileo’s principle, from which everything else follows, ‘as if it were – but it is not! – an a priori construction’.

As for Hegel, and as for the vital part of the question, which does not concern the manner of presenting (a point on which we have not yet seen a single line contesting the excellence of Marx: if he really says false things in substance, what magical propagandistic power has made it so that after almost a century the world is steeped in them, in joy or in terror?!; and so, whether he flirted with Hegel or Mephistopheles, who cares!) but precisely the object of research and the ways to conduct it successfully, Marx in this and in all other points is decisive. The path taken by Hegel led nowhere. ‘My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite’.

And here is the series of formulas that have been repeated so many times. Hegel: Thought, the Idea, are creators of external reality. Marx: The ideal is nothing more than the material transported, translated into the brain of man. Hegel: The dialectic stands on its head. Marx: The dialectic must be turned upside down and made to stand on its feet.

When these two overused words celebrated a marriage, it fell to the Marxist Lenin to go into battle against the new (or rather rancid, as he proved) system of knowledge.

If we want to explain the two methods in simple terms, we could say that empiricism, better yet experimentalism, seeks truth by looking around and trying to organise the manifestations of the phenomena of the external, objective world in the best possible way. In this field would operate the general economic science of professors, whose prerogative would be to always be ready to record and accept every new datum and every result, without preconceptions or preferences of any kind (a brief analysis of modern official science would suffice to show that this is no longer the case, but that things are quite the opposite, since in all ‘scientific’ circles conscious falsification has become daily bread).

Criticism instead seeks the solutions not outside, but inside. Of what? The terms are at your disposal: of the subject, of the thinking I, of the spirit, of the brain, and, as Marx says to give his usual brushstroke, of the head, of the skull. This would be the ‘speculative science’ in which Hegel nevertheless believed, in which modern idealists believe, and in which Labriola also appears to believe in the pages in which he claims that this type of science was what Marx was working on.

Marx would therefore have proceeded like a Newton, who had merely imagined in his head, for his own subjective amusement, the law of gravitation, in one form or another, writing, for example, that two bodies attract each other with a force inversely proportional to their distance (and not to the square of it), deducing then the strange orbits of the planets according to this hypothesis, and dismissing the Tycho-economist from his post, who had knocked on his door to say: ‘one moment, teacher, the planet is not there tonight, at its appointed place, but elsewhere; its trajectory is not that, but another... the capitalist has not grown fat, but is desperately thin, while his workers have bought a villa... in Crimea.

Newton would have said: philosophically, and even mathematically, my system is coherent, and any effort of speculative criticism finds no logical flaw in it; what do I care about planets if they contravene the rules of circulation, and of the surplus-value extortioners reduced to starvation?

This and nothing else means that Marx carried out a critical and not a scientific work, even in the experimental sense, that he limited himself to weaving into an immense fabric relations that are not proper to facts but only to the illusions of consciousness. Of consciousness, therefore, found in its manifestations, that is, in the language of men, in their common meanings, in their general illusions, in their daily act of faith. Labour, therefore, is the only thing that can carry out criticism internally, the speculation of the subject within the subject, on words that are linked to other words, not on things, on facts, on measurements and observations of things and facts.

An investigation not into reality, but into the consciousness of reality, which would logically pre-exist it, as in Hegel’s system, as in the one Marx turns his back on. But, and here’s the point, consciousness of WHAT man, of WHICH men?

Marx, therefore, does not look at the object, but at its image on the spirit-retina, according to them. However, it is recognised that, even though he deals with impressions of facts and not with real facts, he has taken a step forward: the impression is not that on the individual. This first phantom has finally been dispelled.

Therefore, although it is a matter of constructing an illusionism, he deigns to discard individual consciousness as a source, because credit is given to Marx – the philosopher – that individual consciousness is illusory.

And so Marx would have sought the laws not of the ‘real’ or ‘physical’ economy, but of the projection of the economy into super-individual consciousness. The first to emerge is ‘class’ consciousness. But even this is immediately rejected. In a certain sense, a second concession is made to ‘serious’ Marxism. In fact, to Marx, Lenin, and all consistent and radical Marxists, the expression class consciousness has never been liked, even when applied to the proletariat. This notion, as we have said many times, implicitly contains the condition that revolutionary consciousness in all members of the exploited class must precede their revolutionary action. This notion, when viewed in depth, is the most conservative that can be conceived: and this was discussed at length in the meetings of our movement in Rome and Naples, and illustrated in explanatory diagrams that appeared in the Internal Bulletin, while others are being prepared to be published at the appropriate time and place, and which aim to show the various schematisations of workerists, syndicalists, ordinovists, Stalinists and libertarians, with these following abscissas: individual, class, party, society, State, and the ordinates: interest, action, will, consciousness.

But, staying with the theory of Marxist illusionism, which unfortunately could be gaining ground due to the deplorable fraudulent theoretical monopoly of today’s Stalinist communists, it is not clear whether Marx (declared powerless to place it in the world of real facts) sought the subject matter, for the purpose of kneading motor-myths, in the notions widespread among the working class, or the bourgeois class. It seems that reference is made rather to the bourgeoisie; and so Marx would have presented the economic system of the prevailing opinions in the bourgeoisie. But then Marx only had to write the fourth volume of Capital, that is, the history of economic doctrines. Even less: given that he so often asserts that Ricardo is the theoretical exponent of the class of large industrial capitalists, the work would have been fine and done by copying Ricardo. Why, then, point out so extensively where he went wrong, and replace his curves of development with those found by Marx, for its compensation, crisis, and revolution? Are these also the visions that the bourgeoisie dreams of?

We must go further. Given that Marx is condemned to write the poem of a consciousness, and since this consciousness does not belong to the individual, nor to the class, we must turn to ‘society’. According to the critic in question, Marx would have arrived at this notion, of the consciousness of the ‘society’ of a given epoch, in a form of his own, our own, and would have set out in his ‘system’ the main lines of this ‘social consciousness’ which strangely unites not only all individuals but the social classes, and is common to them despite their contrasting interests and economic conflict! Indeed, Marx would not have arrived at this datum, but would have even started from it as the foundation of all his construction. Meanwhile, he would have dealt with value, insofar as such a datum is in that consciousness. Only in this sense would he have spoken of surplus value, and of reducing the former and the latter to labour time, knowing that this was scientifically nonsense.

It would matter little to pursue such things from an old book by Labriola, if they were not hidden beneath many of the Marxist degenerations that have paraded and are parading in the history we are living, in the history of the difficult struggle of the proletariat, for communism; if they were not stated here in such a way that is not entirely contemptible, sometimes even suggestive, but such as to lend itself to clarify concepts that are not trivial and to give the arsenal an effective clean-out.

Labriola certainly does not ignore and does not contest the theory of the historical class struggle and of the antagonisms that break up capitalist society, this should be noted, and at least he did not contest these doctrines at the time he wrote this text. Indeed, he links the vehemence with which Marx felt social disunity to this discovery of a social consciousness, a connective tissue common to different groups and classes.

We do not need to devote ourselves to showing the irreconcilability of such a risky thesis with the notion of class struggle and with the doctrine, equally admired as powerful, of historical materialism, because the text itself will steer us to the conclusion.

Not forgetting that the professors worked on cold statistics of prices and on the vicissitudes of circulation, and must have done solid science, Marx gave sculptural laws of the production process, and must, for these gentlemen, have staged only illusion and stirred up incandescent myths, we will immediately see where this consciousness, in which the laws that Marx outlined in his giant work are written – in jest – has its foundation. In society, therefore, in ‘economic society’. You will never find such words in Marx: rather, you will find, in a critical context (in relation to Hegel, in fact), the term ‘civil society’, and this in relation to the doctrine of the State, which we will come to shortly.

What then would the ‘economic society’ be? The answer is simple: the economic society is exchange!

And so we arrive at an antithesis, which deep down and according to dialectical law could be our own, the one we are working towards in this report: production versus exchange! Struggle versus social pacification! A volcano promising an impending social eruption, versus a dead backwater that would bog down the revolutionary force in mercantile mud.

And indeed, listen: ‘Exchange posits agreement, whereas production posits antithesis’. ‘The proper environment for the idea of solidarity is exchange’. ‘Thus we see that the notions of struggle and solidarity each have their own environment’.

In this foolish version, which could have been borrowed word for word from Joseph Stalin, who died younger than Labriola, Marx’s critique would have led to the apology of full mercantilism, extinguishing the flames of the revolutionary fire in the fetid slime of the pecuniary exchange of product-commodities.

The thesis that a socialist society could have an economy governed (for heaven’s sake, in reality and not just in illusion!) by the law of equivalent value, i.e. of market exchange, is the same as what we find in the false syllogism of the text under consideration. After all, the syndicalists in the manner of Sorel dreamed (this, yes, is a true and insipid myth) of a society in which the intact law of equivalence prevailed in the exchange among ‘groups of producers’: it matters little that in Sorel’s society there was no State, but only a constellation of union-cooperatives; in Stalin’s, a monster-State acts as the head shopkeeper.

Here is the shaky syllogism: Marx said that value is not an individual creation, but social. But value is not a fact of reality, but rather of consciousness: therefore, social consciousness. There is no society or social consciousness except in exchange. Exchange will live forever.

Since for us it is not exchange but production that is already a social fact, and as a social fact it arises from the relation of different classes, we define value prior to and without exchange, as a real, scientifically known fact of the transient economy of capitalism. And now all that remains is to easily reduce the thesis of the ‘sanctity of exchange’ to a flat apologetic of bourgeois society, and of the counter-revolution. Capitalist production ends with a revolutionary order that has only one connotation: no more mercantile exchange. Here Marx arrived, and history will arrive.

It has therefore been beneficial to follow a drafting that is anything but recent, in order to gain a clear focus on old and new issues, especially those that the evolving of ‘contemporary thought’ will never resolve. Its increasingly complex tangle must be extinguished before we go any further.

The criticism we have followed (intellectual property: Prof. Arturo Labriola, Naples) starts from the intention of establishing that Marx’s work is not a science of economic processes, but is a task to classify in the field of philosophy, i.e. the search for data of ‘consciousness’ regarding economic facts. Why was Marx interested in presenting this data, rather than an objective theory of the present economy, and why did he prefer it even if it contradicted the results of positive observation, to the point of deliberately constructing a system of social illusions? Because – according to this criticism – Marx, an idealist, voluntarist, ‘activist’ (as they say today), beneath his materialist exterior, needed to arrive at a programme for the overthrow of the capitalist order to be implemented by masses ‘enlightened’ by their theoretical leader; and if an illusory notion serves this purpose better than a scientifically valid one, then the former is to be preferred.

In this kind of cerebral and literary construction, therefore, a will that changes the social (and economic) world is sought, it is believed that such a will can only arise by spreading the data of a kind of internal, speculative ‘consciousness’ of real economic life; it is imagined (claiming that Marx imagined it) that, once this task has been carried out by the theoretical genius, the explosive action of the masses will follow upon the will. After that, whatever will be will be, since it is not at all necessary for thinkers of this kind that a social structure should come into being, as Marx had shown he expected.

We were very interested in contrasting this ‘reading’ of Marx with our very different one. Marx conducts a sure and objective investigation of the laws of economic development and, in order to express them, he uses mathematical concepts and magnitudes that are not injected into reality from outside, but are discovered within it. However, Marx does indeed carry out this enormous task solely in order to arrive at the revolutionary programme and the theoretical and practical contrast between a new social order and the old one, but – the immense material with which Marx distinguishes himself from the utopians would suffice here to settle the question of interpretation – this programme is not felt, chosen, or willed by Marx the individual, but is itself discovered as the result of positive and scientific research. The error – among many others of Stalin – lies in saying that in the pages of Capital one reads only a description and critique of bourgeois economics, not the definition of the cardinal features of the communist economy. The programme therefore looms large, and so does the struggle for it, but its strength lies in its being based on a real analysis of the present economy; it is not a question of creating a presentation of it, distorted in order to serve the pre-established – where and how? – programme.

All the distortion would want to be supported by a misfitting reading of the famous last thesis on Feuerbach: the philosophers have busied themselves too much with explaining the world, now it is a question of changing it. The thesis means that if we want to align ourselves on the front of revolutionary change – when and which reality imposes it, and teaches it to those who know how to read it – it is the case to retire the philosophers, who by speculating in themselves seek the rules of the world’s becoming; laying quite another bridge, not speculative and idealist, between doctrine and battle. And instead, in the version we are following, it comes to this, which is exactly the opposite: Marx is not an economist because, as such, he would have explained, yes, but confirmed, the capitalist world: being instead devoted to subverting it, he made himself... a philosopher!

Patiently, we have followed the investigation into the location of that mysterious consciousness, where Marx would have drawn the basic notions, the typical figures for his exposition, of that which thus truly becomes – to the fragile consolation of all conservatives – a ‘sacra rappresentazione’ of legendary characters. It is a question of knowing what fertile ideal subsoil it is in which Marx dug up value, surplus value, profit, surplus profit, and the price of production, which would not be – alas for us – exact magnitudes commensurable with each other and susceptible to connections that form scientific laws, but illusions in which consciousness firmly believes, and nothing else.

Let’s recap: not the individual, who is too fragile a basis for a consciousness from which to draw even illusory figures – nor the class (which we endorsed from our opposite side. But then why? Probably because, for ideologues such as those in question, the class is above all an illusory character of Marx the puppeteer...) – and so, as we came to realise, the famous ‘economic society’, a mash-up of all individuals and all classes, whose potential to possess a common vision of social data is founded on the factor of ‘exchange’, the connective tissue that would hold together all the most diverse elements and groups of the social magma.

Here we are at the point. The society contemporary to Marx and to his fickle interpreters is the modern bourgeois society, shaped in general forms precisely with the predominance of the exchange economy, of the market. Before its advent, it would have been impossible to speak of a social consciousness, even one nourished by fallacious myths. Only where every object of use takes the form of a commodity and arrives on the market, and the figure of its price universalises its effect on every component of human society, only then, once the limits of the small, closed islands of production and consumption, and therefore of life, have been broken, can this butterfly-hunt for ‘illusions valid for all’ take place, inasmuch as customs, culture, and opinions begin to circulate widely, like commodities themselves. In pre-bourgeois societies, where we cannot yet speak of exchange and mercantilism (see here those who still have access to Marx’s precious passages, our almost daily food, quoted copiously and regularly read backwards) and where irregular oases mix different and heterogeneous ‘modes of production’, one certainly cannot speak of an ‘economic society’. Where would there ever be an economic society when there is still no ‘social’ economy, that is, when there is not even a national economy, but only a mosaic and, in any case, a conglomerate of ‘local economies’? Where a common political and state organisation begins to appear, a ‘civil society’ in Hegel’s sense may appear. Thus, in ancient Athens or Rome and in the empire, there was a civil society – except that the entire mass of slaves and semi-slaves were ‘outside’ social ‘civilisation’. The economic society (a term we reject in accordance with sound doctrine) means only this: bourgeois society, this given and peculiar product of history in which the same ‘economic right’ applies to all citizens.

Thus Hegel, like all other precursors of ‘modern critical thought’, and with them all these adulterated Marxists, are on the same ground: the establishment of bourgeois constitutionality, of the democratic State, is a turning point in human history that is as original as it is decisive, inasmuch as to render universal the environment of civil society is equivalent to having founded, thanks to the irrepressible virtue of Exchange, this authentic fetish: the Economic Society.

And if Marx had sought in the data of the general consciousness of such a society the types, figures, and structures of his presentation, he would have been left with nothing but the notions – which he powerfully demolished – of freedom, equality, and, as in the famous quotation, of Bentham, he would have been left with unlimited capitalist liberalism, where in essence the classical syndicalists, with Sorel at their head, drown.

Who does not remember the final page of Part II: Transformation of Money into Capital? ‘[t]his sphere of simple circulation (...) [is the one] which furnishes the “Free-trader Vulgaris” with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on Capital and Wages’. ‘This sphere [of commodity circulation], within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man [and citizen]. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’!

It is therefore not necessary to go to great lengths to show what this claim to the existence of a general consciousness in mercantile society amounts to, and how Marx extracted all the parts of his model of capitalist society from it. It reduces Marxism to a section of bourgeois ideologies, binds the proletarian class and its organisations to paying homage to the ideological cornerstones of the bourgeois order and the achievements of the bourgeois revolution, making all this an insurmountable limit to its own action. As, moreover, in the conception of almost all libertarians, one inherits and accepts with enthusiasm from the modern bourgeoisie its realisation of fundamental ‘civil’ rights – which is identified with the foundation of a mercantile economic society; and one only pleads that, after this bestowed civil liberty, and on its foundations, social liberty should at last come, that is, the utopia of free-trader equality between employer and worker.

This amounts to not having seen how it was precisely Marx who brought down just such a bulwark, denouncing – by constructing his model, establishing his production function – the deception according to which capitalist and worker are both free, equal, owners of their respective commodity, and operating for subjective individual Benthamite utility, ‘because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent’.

All this wandering around to find a subject to consciousness-mine, after having discarded the individual and discarding the class, and introducing this strange social support founded on the common mercantilist atmosphere that binds the components of modern societies, is all a turning up of the nose in order to reject the only logical holder that can be assigned to ‘consciousness’ and, better still, to the theoretical knowledge proper to communism, to anti-capitalism; after having in various guises tolerated, admitted, and applauded the entry of the intellectual genius into history as a decisive factor. The sole holder of revolutionary consciousness is the ‘class party’. But this word alone arouses horror in libertarians and syndicalists of the old school, as well as in the more recent opportunists and centrists of all kinds, and even in the aspirants of many wandering little groups who call themselves orthodox and opposed to the Stalinist corruption of the proletariat, and who doll themselves up with words such as vanguard, revolutionary leadership, study circle, and so on.

Marxist theory in its complete entirety, as scientific economics, as an interpretation of the human historical course, as a programme of revolutionary action and a definition of the claim of communist society, cannot be drawn as a datum from a collective consciousness of groups of people, not even of proletarians. It has for a bearer a well-limited collectivity, even when its precise boundaries in convulsive moments become not easily identifiable, namely, the party, in which, across space and time, borders and generations revolutionary militants gather and connect. In a certain sense, the party is the anticipated depository of the certain consciousness of a society yet to come and subsequent even to the political victory and dictatorship of the proletariat.

There is nothing magical about this, since the phenomenon is historically observable for all modes of production and for that same of the bourgeoisie, whose theoretical precursors and first political fighters carried out the critique of the forms and values of the time, putting forward theses that subsequently became generally accepted: while in the environment surrounding them, the same authentic bourgeois followed ancient and conformist confessions, failing to recognise even their own tangible material interests in the theoretical statements.

No less common in the correct exposition of Marxism is the assertion that such an ‘anticipation’ of future social forms is historically possible with particular clarity for the working class, arisen with the capitalist world and growing ever greater within its bosom, compared to the old revolutionary classes and to the bourgeoisie itself.

But precisely for this reason, the entire doctrinal baggage, proper to the communist workers’ class party must particularly be kept free from any constraints imposed by enemy ideologies, especially bourgeois ones. We would dare to say that this need for doctrinal incompatibility, sector by sector and line by line, would arise equally – nor do we fear being misunderstood here – if our avowedly distinctive party theses were for a moment to have the value of collective revolutionary illusion rather than the certainty of scientific result. The fruit of detailed scientific research cannot be passed on without generous simplification in the demanding body of theses, which the party must give itself with strong and decisive lines. And only in this sense – and in close relation to what was said in the preceding parts of this discussion about the impurity of capitalist societies and of the very class situations of the proletariat – could Labriola, not devoid of intuition or flashes of intuition, allow himself, whether it be Marx or his convinced followers, to use a one per cent ingredient of revolutionary illusionism, just as one does not deny a glass of cognac to the most heroic soldier before the battle.

However, this must be done in the direction of absolute originality and independence of the party’s theory from those of bourgeois society and of ‘current consciousness’. But if, instead, one draws the norms of action and theoretical models, as with the use of solidarity in exchange and similar distortions, from the canons and directives of today’s dominant class society, then one is practising the opportunist defeatism of a thousand well-known historical episodes of recent decades, and then one perpetuates not the revolutionary illusionism attributed to Marx as the sole source of doctrine, but a bourgeois illusionism one hundred per cent within the ranks of the working class. And so it happens that its own principles, its original programme, the goal of its historical action, are concealed from it in the most decisive and crucial phases, and it happens that, as even today, it forgets all this and is ready to fight for bourgeois positions: fatherland, democracy, constitution, the sanctity of existing state and social institutions.

We are about to leave one of the various texts from the opposite shore that have provided us with our justification for the use of models of capitalist society, with equal passport-regularity as scientific and theoretical work and as a party battle plan. The model has nothing to do with the illusion of consciousness: as we have shown, the latter is the passive effect of the formidable forces of the external physical and social environment on the fickle and reckless minds of men, in the succession of historical events that they act out but cannot understand; the former is instead the spontaneous and organic way in which the transmission of relationships between facts presents itself in that arsenal of real tools and technological methods forming a heritage of notations, records, writings, and algorithms, which the human species laboriously secures for itself in a long series of struggles; a result that is absolutely not personal or class-based, and we will deign to call it a social result only in the distant future when there will be society, and no longer classes. Which, among other things, is also conditioned by the formula: no more exchange, no more production for exchange. Social production for social need.

And only at the end of this not-brief discussion will we send packing the word that was used, and is still used in many cases, to relegate Marx and his corrosive material truths to the fringes of dreams, whether it be called criminal or generous: the word category.

Marx, indeed, would not have identified economic magnitudes and their material measurement and calculation, but introduced ‘categories’ into economics, just as philosophers have always worked to introduce them into logic, i.e. into the general science of the laws of thought.

The value, therefore, of a commodity, its price of production, would not be properties really determinable of the commodity in question, like its weight or its price at a given place and date. They would be categories, i.e. general notions of the thought or language of all people who concern themselves with or discuss commodities, nor would Marx have given to those and to the all other analogous notions any different or greater significance.

In the Marxist system, which lays the foundations for an original and different solution to the question of knowledge, categories of any sort have no place.

A conception such as, for example, that of Kant, of whom, as we said, one sometimes sees in Marx a follower (!), is entirely based in hunting for irreducible elements of thought contained within it prior to any of its relation with the external world; and even while overturning many ancient idols, and long centuries of philosophical illusionism, one ends up stopping at at least three cornerstones, not deducible from physical and empirical experience. These are the ‘a priori intuitions’ of space and time, premises of all natural science. And in the social sciences, they are the ‘categorical imperatives’ which, inherent in each individual, show them good and evil, enjoin them to follow the path of duty and morality.

This is not the place to discuss our remarks on the Marxist position concerning physical knowledge and the age-old subject-object debate: what is certain is that official science has at least shown that the two intuitions, space and time, can be reduced to one alone.

But what is certain is the estrangement and incompatibility of Marxism with any system, religious or idealist as it may be, founded on the regulation of individual behaviour, as the foundation for the progress of the social mechanism.

Marxism would be nothing if it were not the reduction of these categorical ‘values’ in matters of ethics – and also of aesthetics, that is, of the sense of the beautiful or the ugly – to the establishing of laws of external material facts which, according to the quantities of objects and forces at play, determine economic factors and make it possible to show how much variability the ethical and aesthetic outcomes oscillate, from century to century, from country to country.

Marx, if you don’t mind, did not devote himself to founding new categories of thought, but to attacking the few that remained standing and demolishing their irreducible absoluteness; and economics was not the field in which he indulged his philosophical whims, but the one on which he firmly based himself in order to dislodge the primacy of moral, aesthetic, and even legal and political values, anatomising their flimsy consistency and incessant mutability.

And if not by him, all the remaining categories of classical thought will be resolved and broken down, like nebulae with large telescopes, into complexes of various physical accidents, in the society whose laws of formation Marx outlined.

We believe that our listeners have not grown tired of the use made of texts that are anything but recent and of the traditional method of clarifying matters by combing through the theses (and counter-theses) put forward not by obvious enemies or declared opponents of Marxism, but by amphibious types who declare themselves to be socialists, pro-proletarian, and, if necessary, revolutionaries. Classic examples are Lassalle, Bakunin, Dühring (of whom, in the now closed book, there are no lack of praises and claims of seriousness against the denuding done by Engels), Proudhon, Rodbertus, and so on.

However, let us turn to some sources that are not only very recent and therefore appear to be ‘up to date’ with all modern positions and schools, but also belong unequivocally to the open and official defenders of the capitalist system: it will be interesting to see how, half a century later, and moving from vague social populists to declared capitalists, the same bells ring exactly, and the same blows strike us, we obstinate and immovable Marxists.

To this end, we use a series of articles published in 1953 and 1954 in ‘Organizzazione Industriale’, the weekly organ of the General Confederation of Italian Industry. The date is therefore recent and the authorship beyond reproach: nothing to say. The author, G. B. Corrado, is a professor of economics, but where, we do not know.

We make use, in particular, of the series: Concept of value and the money that expresses it – Money and mathematics – Money and time. We find ourselves immediately confronted with a firm presentation of modern and capitalist mercantilism as a system of ‘eternal’ and ‘natural’ laws, from which humanity will not and cannot escape, because to do so would mean suspending production, therefore consumption, therefore life, and committing a collective harakiri. Although all the encyclopaedias published to date in all languages are used here, not without occasionally inconveniencing even God himself, and all the latest findings in nuclear physics and the most modern concepts of mechano-geometry of the universe and matter are referred to, we note, as usual, that Karl Marx had read Corrado, since he responds to Corrado and watches from the stratosphere all the little steps of the Corrados.

A few quotations will suffice to demonstrate how the ‘demiurge’ of such an entire theory is ‘money’, which existed in the beginning, around which everything revolves, to which everything always returns, even while constantly defining it as an ‘unknown’. Not an unknown in the sense of algebraic analysis, i.e. a quantity ‘written’ with the symbol x and called an unknown, but solely for the purpose of determining its exact value, but an unknown in this other sense: that there may be inflation or deflation, low purchasing power or high purchasing power, valuable currency or debased currency, it does not matter: money still exercises its miraculous function; woe betide us if it were to disappear: everything would come to a sudden halt and the human species would perish.

A somewhat strange attempt at mathematical economics, in which money is at times defined as an unknown, defined as a number, defined as a constant. The author means that the number-money linked to a given sign, or banknote, can correspond over time, and from market to market, to a highly variable quantity of one good or another, of one commodity or another. It therefore varies as a medium of exchange and also as a ‘claim’ on goods. The word constant is then used not in a mathematical sense, but in a historical sense: mathematics and history do not fare well in all this. Listen: ‘Money in circulation presents itself as a constant of changing value and perpetual motion’. Now, for the mathematician, quantities are either constant, if the value is fixed, or variable, if the value is indeed changeable.

But here everything aims to culminate in the eternity of money, which would be as eternal as production and life, ignoring the fact that there was production without money (early communism, barter) and life without production (early communities of wandering and frugivorous humans). ‘Production – equivalent of money – existed and will always exist (...) There will therefore always be money because it is an indispensable tool for the services of production and therefore for the eternal needs of man, a creature of God’. Here we are with God, now back in fashion to endorse faltering doctrines. But aren’t animals, which consume and do not produce, creatures of God? And didn’t God create Adam to consume without working? In fact, things did not happen that way: according to the myths, the inventor of production (and therefore of money, according to Corrado) was Satan in the guise of a serpent; for the pagans, communism was led on earth by Saturn, symbol of all wisdom; money was invented by the grim Mammon, greedy for bloody holocausts. Furthermore: ‘The nature of economic goods, encompassing the properties of the infinitesimal and the infinite... [let us patch things up with our scant, half-learned schoolboy knowledge of theology and history, then we will come to the mathematics, which is handled quite differently] will always have an absolute and indispensable need for the money-number, which is the indispensable instrument of such exchanges’.

Thus, money is eternal, backwards and forwards, and therefore ‘money is a constant insofar as it responds to a constant need of humanity’. This ‘fetish’ character of money, analogous to that of the commodity, discussed in Marx’s famous paragraph, which revealed its secret forever in a relation of forced displacement of labour-value between men, is evident in that, instead of giving truly historical and experimental demonstrations, supernatural factors are invoked at every turn: ‘Papyrus becomes increasingly indispensable to production, which becomes increasingly synonymous with exchange (!), and becomes increasingly synonymous with exchange because the Creator has set as the technical condition for satisfying the interests of the individual the satisfaction of the needs and interests of others’.

It takes nothing less than the Almighty to assume that the interest of an individual in eating does not coincide with the interest in making another or many others fast, in regimes both historically prior to and posterior to exchange and money.

Is it therefore so important that this writer defends with such commitment the eternity of the mercantile mechanism, its natural immanence in the economy, in the life of social animals? Undoubtedly: one writes, one speaks from a newspaper devoted solely to the direct defence of industrial, capitalist interests, and here we have proof that capitalism cannot counter our thesis of its certain and not distant disappearance, replacement with other forms of production, which, by desperately linking production with mercantile exchange and with the mercantile law of value, of exchange between equivalents.

Because this, linking us with ‘Dialogue with Stalin’, allows us, by scientific means, to deduce that the Russian economy is mercantile insofar as it is capitalist, that the claim made in Stalin’s famous last theoretical work on socialism, which respects and applies the law of value, serves as rigorous proof of the effectively non-socialist character not only of the actual Russian economy, but also of that government’s economic policy.

These are the actual ‘a posteriori’ proofs of indisputable validity in the context of research, which hold even when the exposition is presented, for ease of dissemination, as an ‘a priori’ construction. Whereas the same research loses all credibility, and falls back into ‘a priori’ constructions by its very nature when, in order to prove a fact refuted by empirical observation (the eternity of exchange), one resorts to the decisions of a god.

No less striking is that the way of breaking through our Marxist deduction of value, and its laws ‘before exchange’, uses the same lines that we found in one of the many deserters of socialism, such as the one mentioned above. Here are a few more passages. ‘It is men who give value to things... therefore it is absurd to speak of the homogeneity and constancy of values... The philosophical concept that the value of a thing, and its very existence, is not what it is in itself and of itself (i.e. as it might be in the eyes of a most perfect being such as God), but what we believe it to be, is the expression of the most common and recurring realities... Here too, the immaterial dominates the material, the spirit transforms matter and our very reactions... God made man in such a way that the number of things that can please him is maximised... and this explains, even physiologically (!), the effectiveness, value, and usefulness of advertising…’.

We hear this argument made at every turn (another example of our down-to-earth, a posteriori approach): are you a most perfect being like a god? No, so tough luck, you can’t expect to know what the ‘thing in itself’ is and calculate its value; now I’ll give you something to think about, and build my science and my practice on statistics of how I fooled those who listened to me. The only possible science is mine! The science that was claimed – kill them! – to have been written by Marx, about how men allow themselves to be deceived.

We are at the usual point of the foundation of an economic science with quantitative methods and therefore with the use of mathematical calculation. There are many theories from the bourgeois camp, but all tend to establish that one can attempt to write the function of prices and the function of exchange, but one must not dare to introduce and try to deduce with mathematical laws the quantity: value.

Half a century ago, the business of the application of mathematics to science, in the physical field, was proceeding ‘comme sur des roulettes’, and it was merely a matter of putting similar little wheels under physiology, psychology, and sociology. But before this could be achieved, those who like to stray from the beaten track from time to time and bring to the fore – often more irreverently than us crass materialists – divinity, the immateriality of the spirit, and other ancient or modern narcotics, made quite a fuss: the question of the link between mathematics and physics has for some decades raised disagreements and difficulties of no slight weight, but above all such that the gossipy cultural press has been able to superimpose sensational campaigns like those in vogue about beach scandals.

Now, to say something on the matter as poor men [pover’uomini] (the citizens of Poveromo, an Apuan locality) do, let us begin by establishing that the matter becomes confused if one considers mathematics as a construction of pure thought, abstract and prior to any application to nature. For us, it is a tool of humanity like any other, therefore increasingly complex but never definitive or perfect, which is deformed in use and transformed by those who use it every time a new one is forged: and for us, it is not used by individuals, even excellent ones, but by the collective species.

And so, rather than indulging in speculative lucubrations on small and large numbers, on the infinite and the infinitesimal, we follow, in order to shed a little light as poor candle-holders (among so many dazzling beacons), the history of mathematics as used in successive epochs by human society, which also (league against blasphemy, stand firm) reflects the succession of modes of production.

Perhaps you remember how topography arose before geometry, and at its origin was the art of field surveyors after the fertilising floods of the Nile receded: yes, gentlemen, we are impartial, we owe the Pythagorean theorem and Euclid’s books to private property of the land, and we are not saying this (that would be characteristic of the PCI) in order to pull all the secondary school students towards communism.

We won’t go all that way! Let’s get to the end and to Corrado 1954. What he seems to outline would be called a ‘quantum economy’. Not only quantitative, but based, like the physics of Planck, on economic quanta.

The quantum is a tiny, fixed, very small portion of energy, of light, just as the corpuscle (atom, particles smaller than the atom that today are said to compose it) is of matter. All quanta are equal among themselves, and are ‘indivisible’. Therefore, light varies ‘in jumps’, always by a fixed amount. I suppose that the quantum of light has been identified, and that it is not the photon, but our wretched intellectual candle-stub. I want more light, I cannot add half a stub or two-thirds of a stub: either nothing or a second stub equal to the first: two stubs. Then not two and a third, not two and a half, but three, four, and so on. The distinguished light that emanates from a writer not fossilised like us, but constantly updating, acquiring the dictates of modern progress and keeping himself abreast of publications and academies, can be measured as a thousand, a million of our quanta-stubs: it is not allowed to blind us with nine hundred and ninety-nine and a half stubs.

If nature functions by quanta, then the mathematics to be applied reduces itself, it is clear, to the theory of integers. Between three and four, for example, a void is formed, decimals are no longer of use to us: fractions, and the infinite irrational numbers, which it was possible, with certain devilries, to insert between two fractional numbers differing by a thousandth, and less.

Students, don’t shout for joy: only arithmetic, not algebra, calculus, or analysis, but the other kind of arithmetic will make your veins and pulses tremble: thought and brain will move with far greater difficulty than before.

In economic mathematics, constructed in order to render concrete value an immeasurable and ungraspable thing, we see a large part given over to infinite and infinitesimal measures of money: billions of billions of dollars, and billionths, if you like, of Brazilian reis. But what use are these abstrusities if not to desperately defend the false secret of the money-fetish, its unknowability as value? There has been no small amount of confusion.

Let us take a look. For millennia, humans, when they have need of mathematics, have used two systems, called the discretum and the continuum. Asking ourselves whether nature is made (created...) according to the discrete or the continuous makes no sense, since it is only a question of seeing how best, at certain stages of its physical life, the human species has achieved advantages by using, for complex data of material relations of the surrounding environment, the two tools: the computation of the discretum, the computation of the continuum.

We do not find very convincing, therefore, this... buttonholing apropos of a jacket button, which to our senses appears to be made of a continuous material, but which according to modern physics consists of invisible molecules, these of atoms, the atoms of nuclei and electrons, the nuclei of protons, neutrons, etc. Don’t worry, not even those at Confindustria wear uranium buttons, but the usual inert tablets without any salt or pepper of radioactivity. So, do we also want to break down the paltry price of the button into impalpable economic molecules, even though kids on the pavement play with buttons, precisely because they are the only thing that for them has no price, and they find them everywhere without money?

First of all, if we use a quantum apparatus, or a discrete one, or one consisting only of integers, we will indeed have the law of large numbers in play (which in this case does not bother us, since if labour time, for example, does not allow us to establish the price of that single object, it allows reliable research for millions of similar objects on the market...) but it will no longer be appropriate to speak of finite magnitudes: neither infinite nor infinitesimal. Everything is measured by a number: this cannot be smaller than one, which is finite, and can be very large, but always expressible with a series of digits. Therefore, such infinitising is, in terms of mercantile value, nothing but a mess and a bugbear, whatever it may be of the universe, or of a button.

The use, in any case, of discrete mathematical tools is not only very ancient, but it precedes the other: Dedekind’s postulate of continuity characterises social production in the bourgeois epoch. But it had already appeared before, with the great Greek dialecticians, and this in analogy to the possibility of defining a capitalism (certainly a mercantilism) in the classical world.

Pythagoras still conceives the geometric line according to the discretum: it is a row of invisible tiny grains of extremely fine sand. Between two points (grains) on the line there must be a finite number (as large as desired) of intermediate points. Pythagoras applies his theorem to the famous mason’s triangle: three, four, five: three metres on one side, four on the other at right angles, five on the diagonal. One checks nine plus sixteen equals twenty-five (the most illiterate of masons does not check, but does it this way, tracing the outline of the house). But if the triangle were (without going too far) three and three... the ‘hypotenuse’ would no longer be given by an exact number: it would have infinite decimal places. The mental tool had to make a great leap. The Pythagoreans were still at a pre-critical stage of the thought of the Greek ruling class: they relied on theosophy, on the transmigration of the soul; they excelled in music, which makes supreme use of mathematics, but with the discretum tool: rigid finite numbers give the vibrations of strings in unison or in tune with each other.

In a theocratic society, mysticism and music may be enough to govern a people of farmers, but they are not enough in a society of advanced artisans and, in a certain sense, industrialists (even with slave-based production and not wage-based). Here it is necessary to measure, weigh, and define the quantities of commodities that are shipped to distant markets, even if they are still within the Mediterranean.

Zeno goes beyond Pythagoras. If the arrow, from the hunter’s bow to the target, travels along its trajectory through many tiny points, then when it is in one of them it is at rest and does not move, but yet it goes from one end to the other. And so: does this prove that motion does not exist? This was the trivial interpretation: the powerful dialectician Zeno of Elea demonstrated instead that, given that motion exists (because if you raise the usual doubts about experience, I’ll make you try sticking the arrow in your own backside), it must be concluded that on the – finite – trajectory the points are infinite, and that the arrow travels ‘evanescent’ spaces in ‘evanescent’ times, yet the ratio of these tiny spaces to these tiny times gives velocity, a concrete and finite concept.

Such is the birth act of the infinitesimal: with which (in the mind of man) the infinite was born. I can divide the thirty metres travelled by the arrow into exactly thirty, into three hundred decimetres, into three thousand centimetres, into thirty thousand millimetres, but I have also learned to divide them into such tiny little lines that their length is like nothing, and their number goes beyond three thousand, thirty thousand, and three followed by a thousand zeros. Delighted to meet you; most honoured, Mr. Infinite. And I, homo sapiens.

Now, if the economy were quantum, as Corrado seems to believe, there would be no reason to apply to it, in addition to probability and the law of large numbers, also algebra, the commensurability of parts of value, and calculus, an apparatus that sprouted in the bourgeois epoch (Leibnitz, Newton) from the Greek seed. And then there would be no reason for all the fuss about infinitesimals of value. But infinitesimal calculus is of interest to us only as a means of finding finite quantities in our formulas on constant capital, wages, profit, and rent, just as it interested Zeno for something well-defined and concrete: the velocity of an arrow.

Zeno is also famous for Achilles, which in the version of sophism (sophistry was not pettifoggery but a revolutionary and critical movement against the religious and autocratic traditionalism of the oligarchs) said: the swift-footed Achilles cannot catch up to the tortoise. The little tale is cute. Achilles starts handicapped, that is, a thousand metres behind the tortoise. He runs the thousand metres, but she in front of him has run a hundred. He runs the hundred, but she is ten ahead. He flies the ten, but the other is ahead by a metre. He crosses the metre, but she is ten centimetres ahead. The reasoning goes on to infinity, but the tortoise always stays a bit ahead: it has won the race. The solution is that by summing the infinite stretches run by Achilles, you get a finite and exact length (if you’re interested, it’s ten thousand divided by nine, that is, 1,111 metres, point one, one, one...) after which the tortoise is caught. That finite length is the sum ‘of infinite small lengths’.

The whole Confindustrial line of reasoning on the eternity of exchange amounts to Zeno’s sophism (in its phony bourgeois reading). Since money and exchange are eternal, the proletarian Achilles will never catch up with the capitalist tortoise. Mathematical economics has not integrated the question, we, with Don Carlo, have: shortly we will put it on the spit.

It was useful to show how, in an organ directly of industrial capitalist profit – with a tireless though confused use of theology, history, and mathematics – the attempt to prove that, in economic matters, the determination of the value of commodities and of money itself eludes human and scientific knowledge finds its rightful place. For it is indeed an immediate class interest to maintain that, in the field of economics, one cannot pose and solve problems of quantitative relation between efforts expended and results obtained, as applied science has known how to do ever since modern bourgeois society arose. Modern society develops decisively with the steam engine, and for it a decisive historical step is the calculation of the power of the heat engine and its measurement in horsepower is (see Engels on this in The Conditions of the Working Class in England, although, at least in the translations, there are some errors in theoretical terminology between force and energy, which, incidentally, still occurs today in practitioners’ language).

The horsepower is almost an expression of the leap between a humanity that has only been able to add animal strength to the muscular strength of man as a further means of production (apart from some natural energy such as river water and wind) and a new society that adds the power of heat, i.e. the transformation of thermal energy into mechanical energy.

From the outset, the new social organisation considered efficiency to be a problem of primary importance: to obtain as much driving mechanical energy as possible from a kilogram of fossil coal. Quantitative research established, at the great turning point when modern thermodynamics emerged, a perfect and complete theoretical apparatus, which showed not only that there was an insurmountable limit to the mechanical equivalent of heat (an aspect of the law of conservation of energy), but that an efficiency of ‘one’, i.e. the maximum, could never be reached because it is possible for a quantity of (mechanical) work to become entirely heat, but the reverse is impossible: with Clausius, theory and experiment have proved to applied technologists that, with any fluid and any cycle, only a part of the thermal energy can become mechanical energy: the rest goes to heat a small part of the surrounding universe (from which, generalising, the supposition that one day the universe will be a large ‘motionless pond’ at a constant temperature). Now, one must be cautious about such a conclusion, but the quantitative question between coal burned, or better, with true rigour, between steam produced in a boiler and work done by pistons or turbines, is indisputable.

All the doubts raised about the latest physico-mathematical meanings, in order to establish quantitative unknowability in economics, the impossibility of these ‘efficiency diagrams’ as the watchmaker Watt obtained them with his indicator (see again Engels), within the great social machine that consumes labour and produces consumer goods, and this flashing about of infinitely large and infinitely small quantities, is pure blague on the part of a class that shuts its eyes so as not to see and, above all, so as to keep others’ eyes from opening.

We have recalled the two conceptions of discretum and continuum, that is, of matter conceived, roughly speaking, as sand, or as glass, to say that it makes no sense to ask whether abstract quantities or pure space must be discrete or continuous in ‘rational thought’. These speculations are approachable only via the historical route. The two opposing suppositions have been tested from time to time, with useful results: it concerns not properties of thought, but transitory, contingent conventions among humans.

For example, in the same magnificent epoch of Hellenic culture, as seen in elegant ‘sophisms’ of Zeno, the concept of the continuum (and therefore of the computation of infinitesimals) is applied to the theory of sensible physical effects (speed of moving bodies), and it is affirmed with Democritus and Epicurus, belonging to the same school, which is indeed ‘rationalist’ but also undoubtedly ‘materialist’, the subdivision of matter into atoms in continuous motion: even glass, even water are like sand; and they did not have a microscope. Thus, the mathematical continuum and the physical discretum were good friends. With the great renaissance of bourgeois science, the continuum served to explain terrestrial and celestial mechanical motions and forces in a grandiose way, and the discretum served to found chemistry, the science of the quality of bodies existing in nature and their combinations.

Thus, infinitesimal calculus fully accounts for the link between temperature and vapour pressure and work obtainable through its expansion; the engineer and the machinist have relied on this ever since. Let us suppose that, for the purpose of deciphering other optical, electromagnetic, and corpuscular physics problems, it can be usefully written that temperature and energy vary not by continuous infinitesimals, but by very small finite jumps, or quanta, without this meaning that those technological relationships will lose their reliability and precision in use in their field, and Clausius will be made a fool.

The theory of large numbers or that of evanescent quantities is therefore completely useless in convincing us that the social mass of production and consumption cannot be subjected to quantitative and efficiency-based verification.

In order to ensure the preservation of the incessant reproduction of a mass of goods, wealth, values, of actual objects of consumption and services, which certain social classes extract from the social mass for their own benefit without having supplied contributions of labour, the twists and turns of these contemporary economists boil down to adding to labour, as a source of value, other sources.

They are fixed on positions already demolished by Marx through the powerful critique from which we have now and at other times already drawn broadly. They claim once again, retreating with respect to Ricardo, that capital is not only accumulated labour, but also ‘found’ labour, and that therefore land is also capital, that money is also capital, not as a ‘civil’ title to lay hands on capital, but as a source of fruit by its own virtue, analogous to that of land. Indeed, it must be said that these 1954 versions are less scientific than those of two centuries earlier, mercantilist and physiocratic.

Hear for the last time our weekly report from the manufacturers. ‘The application of a mathematical law to the economic value of things is as rational as the desire of that madman who wanted to catch the train to Genoa while remaining seated on the canopy of Milan’s central station. If it were possible to fix the value of goods, this would imply not only the halt of the evolution of the human race, but its crystallisation (!) and therefore, as a biological consequence, would lead to its extinction’. How long have we Marxists been saying that for the ideology of the ruling bourgeoisie, the end of its privilege (virtually contained in the theoretical discovery of the class relation that exploits class) can mean nothing other than the end of the world?

And so let us see how someone who knows how to be ‘rational’ reasons. This, after having allowed them to regale us with the little story of Rothschild, well known to our great-grandparents, but which today is applied to the American (of course) billionaire, with which they would like to explain the law of large numbers. The driver grumbles over the few cents tip: with the 5 million dollars you have! And he: I have ten, not five, but do you know how many people there are on Earth? No? I’ll tell you: two billion. Your share would be half a cent: I gave you 25! Do you want the answer? It’s even in the Lotte Civili of the good De Amicis, as Marxist as honey-milk cake.

But let us look at the pinnacle of science dated 1954, the supreme theorem of elusiveness, which should make us give up ‘grasping’ economic value, like Ferravilla in Mr. Panera’s duel: if it moves, how can I stab it? Here it is: ‘Like the physical world, the economic world also moves continuously; the goods produced by the labour of God and the labour of man (capital) indeed undergo an uninterrupted process of transformation from the moment in which they are born (production) to the moment they apparently die (consumption) and they cannot be produced or consumed except by continuously moving from one place to another’.

Here there is no other God respected except Mercantilism, whereby the essence of both consumption and production is exchange-transport: God therefore does not work when the primitive tribe, or the modern peasant, eats their grain.

Just as mathematics and history are therefore not used rationally, so the same theology could no less irrationally be used: in it we will never find the labour of God, but only the grace of God. God does not work, does not produce, and does not consume, at least until it turns out that he too has become an employee, and a dependent of Confindustria.

Everything is grist for the mill, and in the most varied fields they go fishing, anything to escape the tight corner of recognising that every value in circulation in the capitalist and mercantile world arose from the labour of men for men, and was not poured into circulation by divinity, nor by nature, nor by the magical capitalist formula, whereby Rothschild inherited his ancestor’s billions, who, in the year zero, picked up as a gift the 25 cents of the little story: compound interest.

After the meeting in Genoa, dedicated to a critique of the Western economy, and in particular the American economy, demonstrating its inexorable contradictions between increased labour productivity and the refusal to reduce working hours, substituting for it the exaltation of domestic and foreign consumption of the frighteningly growing volume of commodities produced, a young comrade wrote a letter to the speaker asking him to refute the theories he had heard expounded during the course, conscientiously attended, at the Academy of Genoa (homeland of Confindustria, as well as of higher education in the economic and commercial disciplines). He said he was firmly convinced of the Marxist positions but asked for a refutation of the formulas of various schools, of various authors, tending to give expression to the market value of commodities. He cited Kinley, Del Vecchio, Wieser and dwelt on Fisher’s equation, which is in fact called the ‘equation of exchange’ and which makes the price of a commodity depend solely on the factors of supply and demand: the quantity of commodities existing on the market, on the one hand, and the quantity of means of payment existing on the market, on the other, and the velocity of circulation of these means.

Now this is indeed a quantitative theory, given that it is expressed by a mathematical equation, but it stands at the antipodes of our own inquiry in that it does not seek to express the value of the commodity according to given results in production, but varies it purely according to market circumstances. It is one of the many versions of official economics ever since it historically recoiled from the ‘classical’ or Ricardian position of labour-value and dispersed itself into the rivulets of mercantile record-keeping.

To this young comrade we limited ourselves, for the time being, to sending in reply a quotation from Marx in which these salaried researchers receive the lashings they deserve, and which also dismisses those who, today holders of professorial chairs, had yet to be born when Marx was writing. We thereby wanted to highlight the different ground on which the question is framed and the impossibility of the naive request to ‘reconcile’ those latest results of academic science with our own, solidly bolted together for almost a hundred years.

The passage from Marx is taken from Theories of Surplus Value.

Thus Marx responds: ‘Classical political economy seeks to reduce the various fixed and mutually alien forms of wealth to their inner unity by means of analysis and to strip away the form in which they exist independently alongside one another’.

Here Marx mentions the reduction of rents and interest to parts of profit, surplus value.

‘The position is quite different as regards vulgar political economy, which only becomes widespread when political economy itself has, as a result of its analysis, undermined and impaired its own premises and consequently the opposition to political economy has come into being in more or less economic, utopian, critical and revolutionary forms. For the development of political economy and of the opposition to which it gives rise keeps pace with the real development of the social contradictions and class conflicts inherent in capitalist production. Only when political economy has reached a certain stage of development and has assumed well-established forms – that is, after Adam Smith – does the separation of the element whose notion of the phenomena consists of a mere reflection of them take place, i.e., its vulgar element becomes a special aspect of political economy’.

‘Moreover, vulgar economy in its early stages does not find the material fully elaborated and therefore assists to a certain extent in solving economic problems from the standpoint of political economy, as, for example, Say, whereas a Bastiat needs merely to busy himself with plagiarism and attempts to argue away the unpleasant side of classical political economy. But Bastiat does not represent the last stage. He is still marked by a lack of erudition and a quite superficial acquaintance with the branch of learning which he prettifies in the interests of the ruling class. His apologetics are still written with enthusiasm and constitute his real work, for he borrows the economic content from others just as it suits his purpose. The last form is the academic form, which proceeds “historically” and, with wise moderation, collects the “best” from all sources, and in doing this contradictions do not matter; on the contrary, what matters is comprehensiveness. All systems are thus made insipid, their edge is taken off and they are peacefully gathered together in a miscellany. The heat of apologetics is moderated here by erudition, which looks down benignly on the exaggerations of economic thinkers, and merely allows them to float as oddities in its mediocre pap. Since such works only appear when political economy has reached the end of its scope as a science, they are at the same time the graveyard of this science. (That they look down in an equally superior manner on the phantasies of the socialists need hardly be stressed.) Even the genuine thought of a Smith or a Ricardo, and others – not just their vulgar elements – is made to appear insipid in these works and becomes a vulgarism. Professor Roscher is a master of this sort of thing and has modestly proclaimed himself to be the Thucydides of political economy. His identification of himself with Thucydides may perhaps be based on his conception of Thucydides as a man who constantly confuses cause with effect’.

At this point in the Asti presentation, another young comrade present, from Messina, asked the speaker to kindly give him the relevant correspondence so that he could draft a response drawn from the studies that he too had done on university treatises by bourgeois economists. This comrade has prepared a note, in turn furnished with quotations from Marx, where the refutation of these various theories and the questions on the intrinsic and conventional value of money is highlighted. In the aforementioned note the triad of theories is examined, which it is useful to recall here for readers, pending further dedicated treatments on money.

1. ‘Objectivist’ theory of value, which reduces it to the cost of production, of the classical or scientific school. It is the theory of Ricardo, from which Marx began; but it considers only expenditure on constant capital and wage capital as the cost of production. Marx adds profit at the average rate and obtains the price of production, which we propose to call value of production, since in Marx it is equal to the exchange value of the classical economists.
2. ‘Subjectivist’ theory of the psychological or Austrian school. As the bourgeoisie ‘realises’ that its claims are those of a class and not of society as a whole, it abandons objectivism in every field and returns to subjectivism. It is the theory of marginal utility, which is related to the needs of the individual, i.e. it takes into account his personal satisfaction: a glass of water in the middle of the Sahara would be worth millions, while the most exquisite dessert would be worth nothing to someone who felt sick from a banquet already consumed.
3. Theory of ‘economic equilibrium’, of the so-called mathematical school. This school, as we said, does not use mathematics to find causal laws in the genesis of the value of production, but only to deduce the market price from quantitative market data. It seeks to explain why not only the price of individual commodities fluctuate, but also that of the general equivalent commodity, money. Inflation or deflation would depend on the scarcity or abundance of money, taking into account its velocity, or capacity to serve, within a given time, successive exchange transactions.

In Marx’s considerations, without his having read these small fry – contained in both Capital, Book One, and in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy – the demonstration is already definitive that these factors of subjective need or satiety, like those of the abundance or scarcity of signs of value and monetary species, can determine only variations secondary in nature and scope, and that they balance out, on average, around the value derived from the data of the social process of production; and all the more so, the more mercantile capitalism – a social type of production – extends itself.

Therefore, the way in which the value of commodities is expressed in relation to conventional and fiat paper currencies, even if the numbers representing it vary enormously, does not affect the scope of the law of the value of production.

All this research by various mercantilist economists thus follows a blind alley whose end we have long been aware of, and it no longer concerns us.

We will find the bourgeoisie, whether they like it or not, on the main road of the production function. Then we will discuss with them the ‘limit’ of this function. For them, it is continuous, with no sharp turns, but for us it presents a ‘singular point’, where the direction of the gentle curve breaks; all directions are simultaneously possible, like the rays of fragments flying out from a central explosion. The social revolution.

The word Welfare means well-being, prosperity, a high standard of living, and is fashionable in America, rallying around it all defenders of the current state of affairs: euphoria, ever increasing spending, ever more driven production, and the claim to demonstrate that average well-being is constantly improving.

This trend presents many interesting things, and we make use of a very recent writing by J. J. Spengler, of Duke University, entitled: Welfare Economics and the Problem of Overpopulation.

The doctrine in question is in stark contrast to the Marxist one, and yet its approach is of great interest to us because it demonstrates that our theoretical adversary must now accept open combat and can no longer successfully shut itself away witin the muddle of subjectivism or of a wavering and deliberately elusive mercantilism.

Mathematically and historically speaking, the defence of capitalism, with this very modern doctrine, moves into a more illuminated area.

First of all, by giving greater importance to the famous index of ‘individual income’ in relation to ‘national income’ – and the relationship binding them together is precisely the thorny problem of population growth – the economists of capitalism come onto the terrain of production and recognise that there are no mercantile tricks to escape the confrontation between productive force and the social number of consumers. We shall see that for these theorists, prices are no longer ‘natural’ facts, uncontrollable and superior to social will, but they argue that if the capitalist economy is to survive, it must shape the ‘price structure’ according to given plans. Let us say straight away that this refers to the level of prices in various sectors of consumption, and we shall immediately see them conclude in favour of high prices for food, low for manufactures! We knew that already.

They no longer seek Fisher’s equations of exchange, but establish – in their own way – a production function: Spengler adopts that of Cobb-Douglas, the meaning of which we shall try to clarify, though without being able to indulge in the mathematical apparatus; at the same time contrasting it with Marx’s production function. Naturally, in that of ‘Welfare’, classes are not prominent, as they are in the quantities we use, but the reasons for this are perfectly clear.

Historically, moreover, it is also interesting this author, without polemicising against Marx, whom he neither mentions nor cites, goes further back than him and explicitly links the very recent welfare school to none other than Malthus and his well-known works that appeared around 1830 on Political Economy and on the Principle of Population.

Malthus had, according to Spengler, glimpsed the solution that would allow food to be matched to population, or even to improve the first index relative to the second. He had outlined two models: the first corresponds to the phase in which a society manages to increase production in proportion to the number of its members, the second, to the phase in which it even manages to improve the ratio, thus overcoming in both cases his famous formula (considered more literary than scientific) that population grows in geometric proportion, food production in only arithmetic proportion.

So here we have the old rogue, he too raised up as a benefactor of human well-being! His real theory was not that births should be reduced through moral restraint, that is, through chastity dictated by reasoning and asceticism, nor even to suppress the population at an cost. For him, the population could even remain constant or grow slowly, and one could have enough products; his proposal was quite clear: make products that serve alimentary needs difficult to access and keep the class that works in hardship, making luxury goods cheaper and more accessible.

So true is this, that it is better to have it said by the unbridled admirer, a century removed. This parallel is precious to us: it confirms our thesis that, at a given turning point, class theories define themselves and oppose each other, and that social science advances in great century-spanning explosions and not through the tiresome drip-drip of academic half-learning and sloppy compilations which, as Marx said, usurp the name of scientific research.

Malthus, like Ricardo, and like Marx, writes at a decisive turning point in history: capitalism takes on a clear shape and outline against the old feudal economic systems; proletarian socialism already sketches the theoretical critique of the transition from the latter to the former and of the development of the new bourgeois society.

Here is how Spengler reports the doctrine of the rediscovered Teacher:

‘While Malthus seems to have been aware of the import of price-structure changes, he did not clearly specify their origin, probably because he sometimes had model (2) equilibrium in mind [average standard of living rising despite population growth], and because he did not attach much importance to the possible effect of such changes under model (1) conditions [average standard of living constant with population growth]. Apparently he was aware that a substitution effect would be set up against (in favor of) more children by a change in the price-structure embracing a relative increase (decrease) in the prices of elements entering into the cost of reproducing and rearing children and a relative decrease (increase) in other prices. For he [Malthus] described it as “desirable” that the “habitual food” of the common people “be dear” and that the prices of conveniences, decencies, and luxuries, be sufficiently low to extend their custom through the population. Presumably, having in mind model (2) conditions, he was supposing that the introduction of this kind of price structure would check natality, stimulate consumption, generate wants, cushion per capita income against population pressure, and retard the transformation of model (2) into model (1) conditions’.

Before any further development, and in order to demonstrate that Malthus is worthily represented and rightly followed by modern American super-capitalism, we only intend to report words already written by Marx, many generations before the Spenglers and their ‘cynical optimism’.

The passages, truly classic and decisive, are to be found in Theories of Surplus Value:

‘Malthus’s theory of value gives rise to the whole doctrine of the necessity for continually rising unproductive consumption which this exponent of over-population (because of shortage of food) preaches so energetically.

‘Malthus correctly draws the conclusions from his basic theory of value. But this theory, for its part, suits his purpose remarkably well – an apologia for the existing state of affairs in England, for landlordism, “State and Church”, pensioners, tax-gatherers, tenths, national debt, stock-jobbers, beadles, parsons and menial servants (“national expenditure”) assailed by the Ricardians as so many useless and superannuated drawbacks of bourgeois production and as nuisances. For all that, Ricardo championed bourgeois production insofar as it [signified] the most unrestricted development of the social productive forces, unconcerned for the fate of those who participate in production, be they capitalists or workers. He insisted upon the historical justification and necessity of this stage of development. His very lack of a historical sense of the past meant that he regarded everything from the historical standpoint of his time. Malthus also wishes to see the freest possible development of capitalist production, however only insofar as the condition of this development is the poverty of its main basis, the working classes, but at the same time he wants it to adapt itself to the “consumption needs” of the aristocracy and its branches in State and Church, to serve as the material basis for the antiquated claims of the representatives of interests inherited from feudalism and the absolute monarchy. Malthus wants bourgeois production as long as it is not revolutionary, constitutes no historical factor of development but merely creates a broader and more comfortable material basis for the “old” society.

‘On the one hand, therefore, [there is] the working class, which, according to the population principle, is always redundant in relation to the means of life available to it, over-population arising from under-production; then [there is] the capitalist class, which, as a result of this population principle, is always able to sell the workers’ own product back to them at such prices that they can only obtain enough to keep body and soul together; then [there is] an enormous section of society consisting of parasites and gluttonous drones, some of them masters and some servants, who appropriate, partly under the title of rent and partly under political titles, a considerable mass of wealth gratis from the capitalists, whose commodities they pay for above their value with money extracted from these same capitalists; the capitalist class, driven into production by the urge for accumulation, the economically unproductive sections representing prodigality, the mere urge for consumption. This is moreover [advanced as] the only way to avoid over-production, which exists alongside over-population in relation to production. The best remedy for both [is declared to be] over-consumption by the classes standing outside production. The disproportion between the labouring population and production is eliminated by part of the product being devoured by non-producers and idlers. The disproportion arising from over-production by the capitalists [is eliminated] by means of over-consumption by the owners of wealth’.

Spengler is not alone in following in Malthus’ footsteps. The nostalgic feudal English bishop and the modern ‘spokesmen’ of big capital have in common the historical law that, in order to have an increased product and a decreased consumers, it is necessary to keep the working mass at low consumption, above all of basic necessities, while at the same time keeping total product high. And so, for the consumption of the surplus product, Malthus’ solution is the parasites of the pre-bourgeois retinue; the solution of the ultra-moderns is the ‘price structure’, which amounts equivalent to a ‘consumption structure’. The structure advocated in these two so-distant eras is the same: few foodstuffs, many items for ‘differentiated’, luxury consumption.

The ultra-moderns replace the parasitic band of nobles and their retinue with the same indistinct mass of national consumers, forcing them to consume like imbeciles: little food, lots of equipment for fictitious needs.

They believe that a highly excited and drugged but poorly nourished mass will have fewer children and their famous per capita product will remain high. We have responded for over a hundred years, ever since we adopted the classic word proletariat, which comes from prole, meaning offspring [in Italian, ed.]. The exhausted and exploited masses produce too many children, and the law does not move towards balance, but towards imbalance and revolution. The two laws are in direct contradiction.

All modern thought of the ruling class agonises before the demographic problem. Spengler is not alone in seeing salvation in hunger. Dr. Darwin Jr. predicts five billion people within a century, and even more terrifying figures beyond that, heralding the crisis of the destruction of the species. A Prof. Hill sets out decisively in struggle against the application of scientific progress to saving human lives. India grows by five million every year. He proposes not using penicillin and DDT in India as a demographic brake, lamenting the historic terrible epidemics and famines of that country.

Demographic ‘optimists’ such as the Englishman Calver and the German Fuchs think instead that, with population growth, one moves towards an improvement in living conditions, and they cling to the hypocritical formula of ‘freedom from want’ and of the fight against poverty. Fuchs sees, within a hundred years, not five but eight billion, and argues that we will be able to feed up to ten billion.

But Mr. Cyril Burt, another Briton, gifts us a ‘theory of the stupid’. He notes that the wealthy classes have ever fewer children, the poor ever more, and the same ratio applies to advanced white peoples and savage peoples. He therefore predicts that the trend will be towards an increase, through heredity, of the uneducated (for him, worker equals stupid) and the increase of non-white peoples who will overwhelm us Europeans. He claims, through lengthy studies, to have observed the increase in social stupidity over the past forty years. Nothing more to say: he is right.

All these people shut themselves in a cul-de-sac because they want to discover the meaning of the course of events while admitting, a priori, that everything must remain as it is today: the division of society into classes, and mercantilism. We say that as soon as the class division is socially overcome, that is, once the mercantile link between production and consumption is abolished, the problem will resolve itself with reduced production, ultra-reduced social working time, reduced population growth and, in some cases, population decline.

A consumption structure not for the ‘stupid’. You are right, gentlemen, it is the stupid ones who breed, and today they make you sweat through your shirts so that the per capita figure does not slip through your hands.

The true defence of the species is also against the inflation of the species. But it has only one name: communism. Not the mad accumulation of capital.

Historically, the two opposing positions become quite clear. But we need to see them in the thorny ‘production function’.

It will be our last stop.

It is essential to explain the Cobb-Douglas production function adopted by the ‘modern Malthusian’ Spengler, about which we have discussed, doing everything to render the meaning of the mathematical formula that expresses it accessible. After having noted that, in the ‘theoretical class struggle’, between revolutionary doctrine and official science, the latter considers itself driven out from the tortuous alleys of mercantile price theory and forced to accept battle in the fiery field of production, we cannot but face the comparison between the radically opposed ‘Marx function’ and ‘Malthus function’.

We have had a formidable chance, in our hard task of upholding that Marx (to be clear) knew much more than those who studied and wrote after him, and until today, overcoming the idiotic, and unfortunately widespread, awe even within proletarian ranks, of ‘modernism’ and up-to-date-ism, inasmuch as our opponent had to make two moves which indicate his dangerous strategic situation: to move from the market to production; and to raise against our banner, unchanged for a century, the threadbare cassock of the Anglican bishop, one hundred and fifty years old.

This struggle of cold formulas is therefore, whether one likes it or not, strongly political, and only those for whom politics is a matter of chatter and flattery can turn up their noses at the bitter chalice of mathematical expressions, which at most we will try, with our great patience and little skill, to sugarcoat around the edges.

A real ‘sweetener’ would be to give Marx’s note on Malthus and Protestant priestcraft, which you can read (it is two pages long) Chapter XXV, note 6. The early work on the Principle of Population that caused such a stir is from 1798: ‘Although Malthus was a parson of the English State Church, he had taken the monastic vow of celibacy – one of the conditions of holding a Fellowship in Protestant Cambridge University’... ‘This circumstance favourably distinguishes Malthus from the other Protestant parsons, who have shuffled off the command enjoining celibacy of the priesthood and have taken, “Be fruitful and multiply”, as their special Biblical mission in such a degree that they generally contribute to the increase of population to a really unbecoming extent, whilst they preach at the same time to the labourers the “principle of population”. It is characteristic that the economic fall of man, the Adam’s apple, the urgent appetite, “the checks which tend to blunt the shafts of Cupid”, as Parson Townsend waggishly puts it, that this delicate question was and is monopolised by the Reverends of Protestant Theology, or rather of the Protestant Church...’.

There follows an amusing observation on the fact that political economy, initially studied by philosophers and statesmen, later became of great interest to priests. And here Marx quotes the vigorous Petty, who wrote: ‘that Religion best flourishes when the Priests are most mortified, as was before said of the Law, which best flourisheth when lawyers have least to do’. He advises Protestant parsons, since they do not want to mortify their flesh in celibacy, as St. Paul dictated, not to produce more priests than the 12,000 benefices included in the English budget at the time.

I leave it to you to then read how the Protestant bishops lashed out with phrases no less foolish against Adam Smith, who, as an admirer of the great philosopher David Hume, had praised his stoic atheism, with the detail that, on his deathbed, after a life exemplary in virtue, he read Lucian serenely and played whist. ‘You may smile over Babylon in ruins and congratulate the hardened Pharaoh’. You who, on the words of Hume, believe that ‘there is neither God nor miracles!’.

Ever since we were weaned, we have always said that there is something more detestable than a Roman Catholic priest: and that is a reformed priest.

We must come to the bitter part. The production function adopted by Spengler and the entire ‘Welfare’ school, the quantities of value contributed by fixed capital, wages, and surplus value do not appear, in any commodity, in a company’s product or in the entire social product. What does appear is the national product of a year, the labour force, and the wealth-capital of the nation, but only as ‘indices’, i.e. as numbers representing their variation relative to a base year, for which the three magnitudes under consideration are set equal to one or, as is more often done in statistics, to one hundred.

While the relation given by Marx is simple, constituting an addition, and therefore, in mathematical language, is a ‘linear function’ (as we know, in everyday language, we say that something is linear if it is immediately understood by everyone); the Cobb-Douglas relation is ‘exponential’, as it involves powers, and these are not integer exponents, such as the square or cube that everyone knows, but fractional exponents, which would cause some embarrassment to a mature high school student without a revolver. Let’s try to figure it out.

With the letter Y we denote ‘national income’, or rather the index of national income relative to a reference year. In Italy we are told that the national income in the immediate post-war period was approximately six thousand billion, and today it has reached ten thousand billion. If the 1946 base is 100, today’s index is 167.

By national income, we mean the sum of all the earnings of citizens, whether they are workers, employees, direct producers, merchants, owners, or industrialists. It is generally calculated from the taxed incomes from work, employment, capital, and property: let us accept it as it is given to us.

This quantity is now, on the part of the bourgeois, and is a concession oborto collo to Marxist truths, also defined as the value added by labour in production (see Dialogue with Stalin, Third Day).

Then there is the letter L, which represents the labour force index. This index refers to the number of persons. It ought to be the number of persons engaged in production, but it is taken, by the authors we refer to, as the population index. This amounts to assuming that the ratio of the productive population to the total is always the same(see the first part of this report), and also entails the assumption that, in the period under study, the level of employment and the complementary rate of unemployment of those fit for work do not vary.

The third letter K represents, again as an index, ‘income-producing wealth’. Here we must clarify. K is not just capital, but the whole complex of industrial, commercial, and financial capital, and of real estate assets. Furthermore, K is not (as in our linear function) commodity-capital, the product-capital that comes out of production in a year, the famous ‘turnover’ of the pure capitalist company, but the entire value of the production facilities, including that very large part which, at the end of the annual work cycle, remains reintegrated into its value. K would therefore be the index of ‘national wealth’ even more than of ‘national capital’: for now, let us not ask how the statistics provide such a measure.

Here is the formula reduced to its simplest form:

Y = L^m K^{(1 – m)}

The full formula is still a bit more complex. We have removed an initial coefficient A, which can serve to balance the monetary units of measure in their fluctuations, and which is assumed to be equal to one, and hence cancels out. Finally, there is another factor that influences the index, namely R, which should indicate the index of the variable ‘technical productivity of labour’ and is raised to a coefficient t indicating the number of years elapsed: it can be set aside, assuming that social technology is unchanged. We will say more about this later: it does not eat children.

However, we need to make things less tricky by using numbers in place of letters. The trick lies in that little exponent m. Let us say right away that, for the authors of the theory, it is equal to 0.75. Broadly speaking, the labour index affects the income index not with an exponent of one (that is, as its mother made it), but with an exponent reduced to three quarters. The other quarter? We find it displayed on the top right of K, attributed to wealth-capital: in fact, if m is 0.75, it is easy to see that 1 – m is 0.25.

The doctrine begins by saying: let us assume this formula. Then it is argued that empirical research on statistics has led numerous authors of the school to calculate m as ranging from 0.70 and 0.80 in various countries, and 0.75 is taken. Adopted.

Let us at once take a look at the practical implications.

In the base year, the Y, L, K indices are all 100. The formula, in that case, states:

100 = 100^0.75 × 100^0.25

Now, this is arithmetically exact, since the two exponents sum to one.

The little calculation is a bit tedious, and anyone who knows how to use logarithms can do it. They will find the innocent little figures: 31.623 × 3.1623 = 100. We are back where we started, and there is no need to worry.

We must ask you to take our word for it when we say that the conclusion does not change, despite minor variations in the indices, if, in place of the exponential form, we substitute an approximate and (thank god) linear form, which is this: Y = 0.75 L + 0.25 K.

Then verify, without logarithms, that at the start 100 = 0.75 × 100 + 0.25 × 100. Obvious.

The meaning of the opposing thesis is beginning to emerge: to make well-being increase, labour counts for three quarters, and wealth counts for the remaining quarter. We would have settled it quickly (but let’s leave the comparison for later): Y = L, and you, K, go ahead and get screwed.

Pay attention now, children. The year is beginning to pass and... Protestant priests are having children. If the population grows by one per cent each year (only Naples and Tokyo fail to do so), the L index will go from 100 to 101 after a year. What will have happened to Y if capital has remained at 100?

We will see with both little formulas (we recommend sticking to the second one during stormy weather):

Y = 101^0.75 × 100^0.25 = 0.75 × 101 + 0.25 × 100 = 100.75

We would have said: there was one per cent more labour force, and the value of income rose by one per cent, and it is 101: no sir; it is only 0.75 per cent more.

But before arriving at the higher concept of prosperity, our author concerns himself with another essential index, the index no longer of total national income, but of per capita income, of individual income; whether it is obtained by dividing by the number of inhabitants, those capable of work, or of employed workers, nothing changes here. These have, however, grown from the 100 they were to 101 (just as Malthus’s priests practice, and do not preach) and so Y:L, which was 100:100, and therefore 1, one, becomes, in our hands, 100.75:101 which, if you’ll allow, comes to 0.9975, with a decrease of 0.0025, or (don’t worry) a quarter of a percent. If population grows, well-being decreases. It is not us saying this, mind you, but the text: ‘[i]f (...) the ratio L/K of labor to capital increases 1 per cent, average output per worker will fall about one-fourth of one per cent’. Understood.

Is the remedy, then, to reduce the number of workers? Never: not only do we vehemently contest this (elsewhere, and outside the formula, lies our answer! What do you make of the index of daily working time, gentlemen?), but not even Malthus, a 19th-century parson, says it in earnest, nor do the little sheep – with wolf’s claws – of 1954 capitalism. The remedy – at-ten-tion! – is called, in words of fire: accumulation of capital.

And indeed, come here, poor little numbers, good little numbers, you must grow, so that Lucifer, Cupid, and the god of the parsons may be appeased, together with the population, the ‘national’ wealth too; and so K must rise in its turn. Good. Let it rise to 101. We will have:

Y = 101^0.75 × 101^0.25 = 0.75 × 101 + 0.25 × 101 = 101

A curiosity for graduating students: the calculations are sometimes rigorous, both cases.

And so the national income did not go alone, panting, to 100.75, but it too has frankly risen to 101. Hurray! But wait a minute, the text asks, what about individual income? Simple: 101 divided by 101: it is still ONE, as before. In a word: if population grows, capital must grow in the same measure if one really wants well-being to remain stable!

But these gentlemen are at best as progressive as a palm tree. Per capita income must, for all the devils, rise when population rises, it too by one per cent per year: otherwise, where would prosperity and Christian-bourgeois civilisation end up? Wow, numbers!

Let us see how to do it. Let us try making capital rise by two per cent. We’re not there yet, given that:

Y = 0.75 × 101 + 0.25 × 102 = 101.25

But this total of 101.25 must be divided, don’t forget, among 101 participants at the banquet: the individual income has become, from 1, only 1.0025, and has gained only a quarter of a per cent.

Let’s fast forward. Still holding that, in one year, the labour force has risen by one per cent, let capital rise by 5 per cent:

Y = 0.75 × 101 + 0.25 × 105 = 102
Y / L = 102:101 = approx. 1.01

Therefore if, in a country, in one year, the labour force (population) grows by one per cent, provided that accumulated capital grows by five per cent, it may happen that personal income grows by one per cent. More numerous, and happier.

A moment, please. Numbers, whether for the lottery or for the sublime calculation, all cost the same to write on paper. We have ordered Kto rise to 101 and then to 105. But in reality, how can this happen? In only one way: accumulation; with an equivalent term: investment; with an equivalent term: savings. Take note that we are not the ones deducing this, but we are faithfully following the statements of the opposing text.

The one per cent of national wealth K can be obtained and added only if less is consumed out of the previous year’s income! But let us note: for these gentlemen, capital is not only the value of the product, but that of the entire great social machine, nature included! Hence they do not demand an increase in wealth through miracles and through the ‘labour of God’ (as does the ineffable monetarist of our acquaintance from the Italian Confindustria), but through savings, i.e. through the labour... of the fool.

According to the authors in question, the value of the income generating wealth is from four to five times that of the national income. Thus all of Italy, with income at ten thousand billion, would today be worth barely fifty thousand billion. We do not deny that with U.N.R.R.A. formulas they had it even lower, nevertheless such a figure corresponds to about one million six hundred thousand per hectare: that might pass for the summit of Gran Sasso, but not for Milan’s Duomo or Fiat Motors.

We’ll accept, however, the ratio of 5, discovered by the prosperity-ists. They say, in fact, that in order to set aside one per cent of accumulation, one must save 4 or 5% of your income.

So, from the top again. If we are not good savers, rising from 100 to 101 means we lose well-being. We want to keep it stable: we need to save enough to bring K, too, from 100 to 101, i.e. one per cent of total wealth, thus 4% of each individual’s income. Or even 5.

Any more progressive than this, and you’re in the PCI. To avoid the trouble of my personal annual budget losing a quarter of a per cent, I have a foolproof recipe: I refrain from consuming 5%. I eat four and a half per cent less, but general prosperity is safe! And so is my own!

However, I want to be able to read in the newspapers that income has risen by one per cent: we saw that K must go to 105. Very well: all the individual producer-consumer has to do is set aside 20, if not 25, of his income, which was a hundred. The conclusion is truly brilliant: the worker who barely makes ends meet and in any case wants greater well-being aspires to increase their individual income, their share of the national income, by one per cent per year: they can easily achieve this if they and everyone else agree to consume 80 instead of 100! The advantage they will have the following year will be to go not from 100 to 101, but from 100 to 81!

It is said that mathematics is not a matter of opinion, however, even with simple mathematics, one can pull off little tricks: the reader may believe we are joking, that we have pulled a fast one on the professors in question. We must quote them: they themselves say it.

‘Scientia’ journal, April 1954 issue, p. 130: ‘[W]ith population and the labor force stationary, increasing output per worker one per cent per year would entail a saving rate of about 16-20 per cent per year’. The text calculates for L = 100 and K = 104; we did it for L = 101 and K = 105.

Before moving on to the critique of the law hypothesised by the Welfare economists, we do not want to ignore how they would respond faced with this strange prospect of improvement. There is the continuous increase, due to new technical-scientific resources, of the productive force of labour, which enables the same labour force to produce greater wealth. According to the texts of the school, in recent decades and in the more developed countries, this effect, which was denoted by the factor R^t, would be 1.01^t: this means that each year there would be a one per cent increase in income relative to the previous year, with the labour force and the previously accumulated wealth held equal.

Let us also grant this rate of progress, considered as the maximum. This means that the individual income 100, in order to rise, in one year, to 101, will not need anything if the population were stable. But if it grows by one per cent, the sole effect of technical progress will precisely be that individual income will not need savings, in order to remain fixed. If however, according to the dictates of prosperity, it must grow by one per cent, this must, as before, be obtained from savings: this will decrease by four, or by five, and will be 16 instead of 20, or 20 instead of 25%.

The whole result changes to this: the worker who wants to raise their income or earnings from 100 to 101 will have to – along with everyone else – consume not 80 but 84. In other words, they will break even not after 20 years, but after 16, granting, though not conceding, that nothing comes to interrupt the automatic progression of productivity.

Up to this point, we have considered pecuniary income in money, but here comes the true Malthusian subtlety of the Welfare doctrine. One thing, it establishes, is output, the individual yield, true well-being is another. What affects this is the way one distributes their own consumption. With equal income spent – it is clear that the number one use is always saving, i.e. not consuming, but investing, with a sweet offering to accumulating capital – well-being can increase or decrease. This depends on the ‘tastes’ of the individual, or on those prevailing in a population (advertising in all its forms helping) and also on the famous ‘price structure’, i.e. facilitating certain types of consumption through reduced prices and mitigating certain others through high prices.

It is certainly not possible for us here to carry out all the analyses and schemes that seek to represent them, for the purpose of resolving the famous question of the optimum population. We have already said that the conclusions of the majority of these economists lean towards the restoration of Malthus’s dictum: a structure of high price and low consumption of food; low prices and high consumption of all other goods and services, from clothing, to cinema, to motorcycles, etc.

The conclusions of this school are that even in densely populated areas, ‘well-being’ can develop even if the population continues to grow at the significant rates observed in recent times. They do not, however, hide the serious concerns for many modern countries that are racing towards overpopulation, i.e. tend to exceed the optimum so elaborately sought for the population, thereby ruining both the numerical optimum and the manipulated and heavily-drugged modern ‘welfare’.

We have already pointed out several times the differences between our presentation of modern capitalist society and that contained in the formulas now discussed. But we must insist on a few others. We especially seek the classes and the subdivision of the value produced among those classes: we provide the formula for a ‘model’ bourgeois society in which three classes are present: workers who receive wages, entrepreneurs who receive profit, and landlords who receive rent. Our formulas divide the social product, and social income, among the three groups.

In the peculiar society to which the formula of labour force L and wealth K is applied, one reasons as if all the members of society were workers and as if wealth K were social, that is, as if all inhabitants shared in it. For while it cannot be denied that the distribution of total income among individuals is certainly not uniform (indeed, Malthus is wholeheartedly applauded for his observation that transferring part of income to the relatively poorer constitutes a diversion from the formation of large capitals – indeed, those wretches would be capable of gobbling it all up, and ‘saving’ nothing), one reasons about the L index as if it contained all members of society, that is, as if everyone were workers – in the usual proportions of age, sex, etc.

And when one is asked to save a given rate – it is concluded by our writer that, for the happiest countries, (read: America) this must not be less than 10 or 12% – it is calculated by referring to the whole of number L without any exceptions, even minor ones. National income is therefore considered as the sum of homogeneous individual incomes, of a single type.

So then, these present-day Malthusians do not highlight, not only the rentiers and their courtiers and priests, but not even the entrepreneurs. Theirs is a society in which it is imagined that the ‘wealth’ of every company belongs to all citizens or at least to all its employees. Everyone indeed receives a share of the income arising from the labour force (at three quarters!) and from national, or corporate, social wealth. When, then, they save, it is clear that they receive in return shares of co-ownership in their own company, which have the character of a participation in the national income ‘from capital’.

This rigged supercapitalism, which emerges through all the indecent Digest-style apologias for felix America, is based on the gift, to workers, of a few shares in the factory and on foisting off on them, ‘in instalments’, a good portion of its products or those of similar companies in other sectors of the ‘consumption structure’.

A similar system, in its fundamental, inexorably mercantile mechanism, yokes precisely the producer-consumer, the productive worker, into subscribing instalments of their future labour – a new and more despicable slavery – forcing them to have one body and two souls, adding, to their existence as a worker who bears a living part of the social weight, the livery of a non-productive consumer. And towering over all this is the imbecilic equation between prosperity and freedom.

If I were a capitalist, and a defender of the historical utility of capital accumulation, a fact positively affirmed throughout an entire epoch which for the West now lies behind us, but for the East lives on with absolute right and unstoppable efficiency, I would likewise prefer to calculate accumulation using Marx’s formula rather than this one, cloaked in science but intimately unreal and imbecilic, of Welfare.

In Marx, accumulation is demanded from surplus value and not from wages: it therefore rests on profit and rent, never on workers’ remuneration. With society divided into three classes, it is neither meaningful nor reasonable to compute averages that emerge from the heap of low remunerations for millions of people and high earnings for company heads and large landowners.

The worker receives his wages and consumes it all. Originally, it barely suffices to keep him alive, with increased productivity it grows, albeit at a much slower rate than it: it raises their standard of living, but never comes close, even in their dreams, to the euphoric levels at which one could say to him: put something aside!

The capitalist and the landowner have the alternative between personally, or with their small retinue of parasites, profit and rent, or consuming less, and perhaps being frugal down to the level of the conventional average ‘per capita income’, which exceeds the best wages and salaries, devoting the rest to further investment, for the progressive accumulation of capital.

In other words, Marx’s capitalist, the character in our model of bourgeois society, is far less indecent as an exploiter and speculator than the one – or the anonymous company, or the anonymous capitalist State – that I encounter in the – false and non-existent – social model of Welfare.

Marx’s capitalist can readily admit that he is a machine for extracting value from the labour of his workers and allocating it toward the social function of increasing technical-productive equipment to an extent that non-capitalist economies could never have attained. He acts within a class society, but at the same time brings about the historic conquest of transferring production from the individual level to the social one.

Spengler’s society (an imaginary model) is nothing but a mercantile egalitarianism, something many confuse with socialism. It can dress itself up in this way, masking the extra profits of super-industrial countries, insofar as it does not separate out and highlight the pure model of the society of enterprises, but dilutes it in the mixture of today’s societies containing a mass at least half made up of petty bourgeois and middle classes. It can therefore play on the ambiguity of statistical averages. But the result is quite meagre. Imagining that income from labour and income from wealth rain down on everyone, and that everyone, through saving, contributes to accumulating for new investments, one arrives, after having imposed upon the lowest incomes the heavy savings rate of 12, 16, 20 and even 25%, at nothing more than an growth rate of social capital of one per cent per year, and, coupling it with the increase in productivity, of 2%. These are ridiculous rates: in a century, the annual increment of one per cent leads only to a capital between double and triple the initial one!

With two per cent, one would find that, over the hundred years of capitalism’s life, social wealth would have barely multiplied sevenfold! And the public of the homeland of billionaires swallows this stuff!

In the course of this study (No. 15 of Programma), we gave the figures for Marx’s famous table of simple reproduction, extended to the ternary society, which were summarised, on a product of 10,000, as follows: constant capital 6,000, wages 1,500, profits 1,500, rents 1,000. In such a society, what is called national income would be 4,000. Let us suppose that, at the starting year, this society numbers a hundred persons, and let us consider one landowner, two capitalists (one in each of the two departments), and 97 workers.

The average individual income is evidently 40. But it turns out as 1,000 for the landowner, 750 for the two capitalists, for the wage earners 1,500:97, i.e., 15.45.

The bourgeois gentlemen have admitted that it is possible to operate on social models, that one has the right to use a contingent monetary unit as a unit of value although this tends to fluctuate, and, with their mechanism that begins from a mathematical hypothesis on the laws governing the model, they have forfeited every right to define Marx’s construction as a tautology, that is, to accuse it of arbitrarily assuming what one wants to find and prove.

Well then, which of the two models do you think most closely resembles the society in which you live?

Let’s continue, and we promise not to give any more formulas, but only a few figures.

In Marx’s society, let Spengler’s problem be posed: the population grows, in one year, by one per cent, and yet it is desired that per capita income not decrease, but in turn gain one per cent. How much must be accumulated?

The landowner remains one, the entrepreneurs remain two, the proletarians rise to 98. Income per inhabitant falls from 40 to 39.65, if everything remains as before, and in that case nothing changes for landowners and capitalists; only wage-earners fall to 1,500:98, that is, 15.30.

But we demand that average income rise to 40.40, and over 101 inhabitants there are about 4,080 lire of ‘national’ income. If the ratios remain the same, it will be divided into 1,020 in rent, 1,530 in profits and 1,530 in wages. Workers will have 1,530:98, that is, 15.60, earning exactly one per cent.

However, while in the preceding year the capitalist advances had been 6,000 for constant capital and 1,500 for wages, i.e. 7,500, they will need to rise to 6,120 plus 1,530, i.e. 7,650. Thus, 150 will have to be saved and invested from the previous year’s yield.

Who puts up the 150? The workers? Never; Marx has not depicted the world of capital so gloomily. It will be the capitalist gentlemen to consume not all of the 1,500 profit, but only 1,410 (90 less, six per cent); and the landed gentleman to consume not 1,000, but 940 (60 less). They will not fall ill, however their consumption will drop by 6%, while that of the workers will rise by one per cent. However, the following year the capitalists will obtain 1,530 and will therefore have lost only 4%, the landowners, 1,020 with the same effect.

If this were Marx’s plan of progressive reproduction, things would move very slowly. It is evident that with our formula of accumulation the tempo is enormously accelerated. It will suffice to suppose that – devoting themselves to the ever so famous abstinence – the capitalists and proprietors consume no more than 85% of their fat incomes, in order to have a savings of 15% on 2,500 and therefore of 375 lire to bring into capital, to increment the starting 7,500. The annual rate thus rises to 5%. At such a rate, in a century, capital becomes 132 times greater.

But it is not at all difficult to save and invest twice as much, 30% of profits-rents, and to bring the rate to 10%. In this case, in a century, the capital becomes 4,140 times greater. Things begin to move.

Wait a minute, Spengler and his associates will say. You Marxists have a big fixation on calling the annual product capital, or rather the annual advance for wages and materials consumed. But in investing in order to obtain greater production, it is not only the additional workers and raw materials that you have to pay for, rather it is necessary, at least proportionally, to increase all the installations, buying more machinery, buildings, and so on. According to that ratio of ours, five times more must be set aside.

This is nothing but a play on words from which Marx easily dispels in his demonstration of progressive accumulation: it serves, as usual, to give the impression that capitalist and real estate assets beget value by their own virtue, beyond what human labour generates.

However, the objection says nothing. Let us grant even that social wealth is five times the total annual income of society as a whole, which, as we know, in our example, equals 4,000. We will then have to set savings in relation not to our figure (capital advance, i.e. 7,500) but to their figure of five times 4,000, hence 20,000.

Well then, if the capitalist and proprietor gentlemen bother to save 60% and not just 30 (they will still have a consumption fund of 300 and 400, compared to the 15 with which the worker lives on!), it will be possible to invest 1,500 per year and, calculating the rate against 20,000 and no longer against 7,500, the annual rate will be 7.50%. In a century, capital still becomes 1,380 times greater, a figure commensurate with the actual historical course of your magnificent bourgeois society.

But they will say another thing. How do you manage to increase, by 7.50% per year, the labour force necessary for greater investment when your population increases by barely one per cent?

Here their biggest trick comes to light: assuming that the labour force is proportional to the population! The secret of initial accumulation and of all subsequent capitalist accumulation has been precisely that of squeezing more labour force out of the same population.

At the beginning and at the exit from pre-capitalist societies (in which small production prevails, even for manufactures), wage-earners, despite being more numerous than the select and qualified artisans who require a long apprenticeship, are a small portion of the population. Their employers are naturally very few, but the average number of workers per capitalist firm (then personal) is still low. Since then, due to the progressive, ferocious expropriation of all the small independent work-tools of peasants, artisans, and petty bourgeois, the number of proletarians grows, even as a proportion of the population, while the number of capitalists decreases at a much faster rate than the increase in population. Let us be clearer: our 100 inhabitants of the model society were, a century ago, diluted over at least a thousand. Today we have, with the demographic rate, 2,700 ‘souls’, half of them of spurious classes, and there remain the 1,350 which we divide thus: the capitalists have gone from 2 not to 28 but let us say to 10, the landowner not to 14 but let us say to 5 (that’s already too many) and the wage-earners are 1,335, about 14 times more than at the start. These are symbolic numbers; in reality, it goes even further.

As for technical productivity, the one per cent annual increase is laughable. We refer it to the organic composition of capital. At the start, each worker perhaps transformed a value double his pay (in Marx’s time, that is, less than a century ago, it was on average quadruple). Today, in certain industries (for example mills), two workers suffice where a hundred were once needed: on average, the material transformed is worth at least twenty times the wage, and productivity has increased at least tenfold. We have already arrived at a labour force 140 times greater, even while limiting population growth to one per cent. This is achieved, over a hundred years, with an annual increase of barely 5%, and our considerations have certainly been too cautious.

The ‘Welfare’ model and formula have fallen flat.

Marx’s classic chapters on primitive accumulation show by what paths nascent capital satisfied its hunger for labour power. One of these was, at first, the increase of the working day up to its maximum physical limit. Then there was the attraction of women and children into the field of labour, almost unknown to the artisanal ages, made possible by the simplicity of the labour-acts in farms with collective labour and later in mechanical establishments. And finally, the emptying-out of the countryside, and urbanisation.

Attention must be paid to the enormous social differences between production in the countryside and in the city. For agriculture, since time immemorial, the active population tends to coincide with the total population, or to differ from it only very slightly. Not only do men and women work the land, but children too, and the elderly themselves, are systematically employed for suitable tasks, including semi-domestic ones. On the other hand, this total use of the labour-force is counterbalanced by the limitation of working hours for seasonal reasons and for the almost nonexistent use of artificial lighting. Working hours vary greatly from day to day, but the total annual working hours has a limit that cannot be exceeded.

However, corresponding to these conditions, the technical productivity of labour has been able to vary only slightly: the very surface over which this necessarily extends does not allow the number of workers and the successive operations to be concentrated into increasingly confined spaces.

The characteristic phenomena of capitalism, even granting that the capitalist enterprise with waged employees has been introduced into the countryside, have thus not been able to have the overwhelming pace that they have had in the city. Far less have collaborative labour and the technical division of labour had an effect, which, in a short span of time, have increased a hundredfold the possibilities of the production of manufactures.

The latter has therefore inevitably subtracted labour power away from agriculture, in such a way that all these unfavourable elements end up offsetting the little that the applied sciences have allowed in terms of the intensity of the production of agricultural produce, the cultivated area held equal.

Hence the classic concerns that, as the general population increases, the volume of food production may not be able to keep pace – whereas, on the contrary, nothing prevents the unlimited expansion of the quantum of the production of manufactures, of non-agricultural products and services. For such overproduction, the labour-force made available is sufficient: it would be desirable that, in order to absorb it, the population increase even more than is currently the case, from the standpoint of capital.

The meaning, therefore, of development is toward an ever-greater accumulation of capital, above all industrial capital. With it grows the number of proletarians, both in an absolute sense and relative to the total population, forming Marx’s great industrial reserve army, made up of the propertyless, of men now stripped of every individual reserve, separated from their conditions of labour, an army that suffers the consequences of the alternating waves of advance and crisis with which the general march of accumulation historically presents itself.

Because of the phenomenon of the concentration of companies, if capital grows, the number of capitalists diminishes, and, at an advanced stage of the process, it diminishes both relative to the population and in absolute terms. It is not, therefore, a sacrifice of the personal standard of living of the privileged that threatens to halt the tendency towards accumulation: the social plague, given their small number, does not lie in their personal consumption: nor was it, even when they were many, because then they were truly devoted to ‘turning the wheel of history forward’.

Today’s decrepit Western capitalism therefore has this possibility: to render the consumption of the generic producer himself parasitic, through the pandering ‘price structure’ and ‘consumption sectors’.

The accumulation of more capital, with the necessary mobilisation of an ever-increasing labour force, having become an end in itself, has meant that every increase in labour productivity, however much it may have exceeded all past and recent forecasts, is directed toward the incentive of producing more.

As long as the economy remains within corporate and mercantile limits, the solution does not render itself visible: instead of consuming more for artificial needs, which not only pass from necessity to utility, but from this to uselessness, and from this in turn to harmfulness, worse than deprivation, to cease saving, accumulating, and reduce the labour expended, in the only way possible, namely, by reducing the daily working time.

As has been said throughout our propaganda for over a century, this is the only concrete meaning that liberation can assume, not of the person, but of the human species, from the ruthless necessity determined by the forces of the natural environment in which it moves.

Unable to stop the infernal pace of accumulation, this humanity, parasitic upon itself, burns and destroys surplus profits and surplus values in a circle of madness, and renders its conditions of existence increasingly destitute and senseless.

The accumulation that made it wise and powerful now renders it tormented and stupefied, until the relation, the historical function that it has had, is dialectically overturned.

This transition from ‘progressivism’, if for a moment the word has any serious meaning, to parasitism, is not unique to the bourgeois mode of production alone. The feudal mode arose from a useful function of all its classes. The nomad could not have become a farmer, and those already settled since the classical age would have been overwhelmed and dispersed if the class of arms-wielders had not taken on the task of circumscribing a territory, where one worked and sowed, and of defending it from attack up to the harvest and beyond. But by the time of Malthus, such a function has historically changed its meaning, and the descendants of those ancient war-chiefs no longer defend but attack and oppress the poor worker of the land.

It is no coincidence that an analogous cycle of capitalism has led to the present situation of monstrous production volumes, nine-tenths of which are useless to the healthy life of the human species, and has determined a doctrinal superstructure that recalls Malthus’s position, invoking, even at the cost of asking the forces of Hell for it, consumers who swallow, without pause, whatever accumulation spews forth.

The welfare school, with its claim that individual absorption of consumption can rise beyond every limit, inflating the few hours that compulsory labour and rest leave each person for equally compulsory steps and rituals and morbid follies, in reality expresses the malaise of a society in ruin, and, in seeking to write the laws of its survival, merely confirms the, perhaps uneven, but inexorable, course of its horrible agony.

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