An ancient and modern crux of the battle around the theories of the proletarian revolutionary movement is the question of whether Marx had, in his works and in the monumental, though unfinished at his death, Capital, among them, only the objective of describing the laws governing the capitalist economy, or not also the presentation to the struggling masses of the clear programme of the social organisation that will emerge from the workers’ revolution: socialism, communism.

The position of the radical Marxist left, i.e. the only Marxists entitled to this adjective (whether or not it is appropriate to derive adjectives from people’s names) has always been that what stands at the forefront of Marx’s work – to put it bluntly, without equivocation – is the description of the characteristics of communist society.

The old objection that refers to the antithesis between utopian socialism and scientific socialism, in which it is one of the correct expressions of the original power of Marxism is used in this regard on a false level.

Utopianism is the ‘proposing’, starting from a construction made in the head of the author and dictated by a purported rationality, of a new form of society that should be implemented, either through the adherence of other thinking men to the propaganda of those wise proposals, or in the most deteriorated form, through a decision of the powers-that-be, of the current governments.

Scientific socialism is not – except for ex-socialists who have become bourgeoisified to the core – to be uninterested in the characteristics of the future society and to be silent about their ‘discriminations’ from those of the present social form, and to limit oneself to the descriptive study of the laws of this form, of the present capitalist economy. Scientific socialism is the foreseeing, not according to rational plans nor sentimental or moral preferences, both the unfolding of the phenomena of the bourgeois social form and the historical processes through which they will pass, and the new and different dynamics of economic forces that will follow them, not only, but will be opposed to them, in the dialectic of doctrinal research and revolutionary combat.

With the withering away of the conditioning of these transitions to the fact that their necessity has entered into the minds of all, or even of most, and with the exact notion of the problem of revolutionary class, revolutionary party – a notion whose name is: dictatorship – only then does utopianism die, and with it dies its deformed half-brother: social-democracy!

For decades and decades our historical school, and for several years now our small working organisation, has demonstrated this with assiduous work and with organic and dialectical citations, not bookish or worse overheard, of the classic Marxist texts, ancient and recent, and especially of Capital itself, which everyone, up to the fearsome ‘a-theoretical’ Joseph Stalin, degrades and treats as cold descriptive economics, whereas from the first to the last page the revolutionary cry and Michelangelesque sculpture of the purpose of the Revolution runs through it. It is a matter of reading it as it should be read, that is, living it and fighting at every step the real and ideal bourgeois forms against which it relentlessly respite.

To do descriptive science is to accept as static, eternal, and permanent the framework of the facts that are considered: to do dialectics and a revolutionary programme is to draw from the facts the science of their inexhaustible dynamics.

Driven by the fact that the Marxist description of capitalism is inseparable from the calculation of the orbit it describes in history, bourgeois economists have for a century set out to launch different and opposing descriptions, from whose ‘scientific’ laws the possibility of the long and eternal life of the capital-form – id est of the market-form – can emerge.

The inferiority of these multiple attempts lies in the fact that they often perform remarkable acrobatics to give this reading of the phenomena presented by contemporary capitalism, i.e. capitalism as it is; but nothing can or could answer that giant part of Marx’s construction that shows how capitalism – i.e. capital – was born and formed historically, and how it replaced previous forms of social organisation.

The usual trick concerning the ‘indices’ provided by current statistics – which the Russians so soon and so thoroughly fell for – assumes, in all its bogus calculations and formulae, one great fallacy: that the market and capital have always existed, since the creation of the world.

Marx, on the contrary, in every demonstration and in every chapter returns, in his own way, to the historical origin of the forms that he treats: from the first classical chapters of the complete First Book, to all those of the parts of the Second and Third that have been preserved for us. Every time he states how the characteristics of capitalist production are not original (‘natural’) but acquired, he demonstrates – dozens of times explicitly and hundreds of times implicitly – that those characteristics are transient and that history will see the disappearance of the capital-form.

The meeting made extensive use of the materials contained in Marx’s posthumous work, edited under the supervision of the Soviet Institute, which gathers together the first drafts of his texts, even before the edition of the Critique of Political Economy, completed by the author in 1859, and later incorporated into the first chapters of the First Book, published in 1867.

The Paris group provided translations of very important passages from the German text. This text, printed in Berlin in 1953 from the Moscow edition of 1939-41, under the title Fundamentals of the Critique of Political Economy faithfully reproduces a handwritten manuscript by Marx in notebooks from 1857-58 constituting the first rough draft of the work in preparation, of which only a part took the form of the legal publication of 1859. Throughout the remainder of the present book, the title of which was affixed by the editors and not by the author, there are initial drafts of the most diverse parts of Capital and even treatises that found no place in it, whose development can be found scattered all throughout Marxist literature.

To emphasise the overwhelming importance of this youthful text (but already well after both the Communist Manifesto and Anti-Proudhon, i.e. corresponding to a time when the socio-economic theory was already definitively formed in Marx’s mind – just as it is in that of the compilers of these little works of ours exactly another century later), a few organisational remarks were worth making. In the draft, Marx wrote without setting himself any limitations for editorial reasons, and thus had no reason to disguise (in the sense of referring to a particularly shrewd and sagacious reading) parts of his thought. When, on the other hand, he thought about the final draft for the press, he – who always aimed for publication in Germany and in the German language of the original – was forced, not least because of the serious economic difficulties that never gave him any respite, to come to terms with the censorship that was strict at the time. He therefore made the political and agitational passages less explicit, without ever scientifically sacrificing anything.

On the other hand, just as he had seriously worked on the orthodox economists, so he reckoned that his work of science would reach not only workers and fellow believers, but also scientific opponents, who undoubtedly a century ago were not the despicable careerists and sellouts of today. He therefore allowed it to be thought at first that it was a scientific study in the neutral – but decent – sense of the term; which did not prevent him from writing the innumerable pages of flame that can be read by those who have made the book material not for a locked-up library but for a life of struggle, and who know how to lay upon those pages the storms that followed for so many decades, and will still follow.

Therefore, the pages of the draft, full of unpolished passages, of words in all languages, of incomplete and broken notes, are precious, because they are useful to irrevocably confirm what in the ‘official’ texts we have for half a century read and what we have, we and comrades of our school and party, hundreds of times without a shadow of doubt affirmed, so that we have material for every hesitant, distant, and perhaps sometimes close enemy, to whom we can finally bring to heel with original statements – even those vetted by an organisation run by followers of every deformation – hammering, clear, obvious ‘à créver les yeux’!

We will not delay in drawing from the mine we have presented. And from it we will draw again that main thread, in which we can see how all the criticisms of the ‘later’ scientists had already been answered in advance, and we will draw confirmation of the assumption made at other meetings (see Asti, Milan, etc.) that the theories of the surpassers of Marx are rehashes of very old positions on which Marx himself had already passed triumphant.

We want to show that in the versions of economists and economic research institutes entirely devoted to the defence and apologia of capitalism, in the same terminology, in the same presentation of the economic phenomena of the present society, expressions are increasingly being adopted not only, but also methods of calculation that were originally established in Marx’s economics.

An interesting (for billionaires it is) booklet from the American capitalist magazine Fortune was shown at the meeting. It has the title in box letters: Fortune 500. What are the 500? They are the 500 largest capitalist enterprises in the United States, listed this year, as in previous years, in the order given by the size of their relative capital.

Time and again we have struggled to convince even professed old Marxists that for us capital is not measured by the size of the means of production, i.e. by the value of machines, tools, workshops, of stocks of semi-processed raw materials or of unsold products (stocks, inventories, stockpiled commodities). For us, capital is the sum of the commodities sold in a cycle, and even the calendar year, the sum of the products in the year of manufacture. And when we look for the rate of profit of this capital, we put it in relation to the profit of the enterprise, which in our terminology is surplus value. In relation, that is to say, not to the value of the plants the enterprise owns, but to the market value of the products, i.e. to the volume of sales, what in Italy, as we so often say, is called the ‘turnover’.

In fact, the table of the 500 monsters contains these data: name and headquarters of the company; ‘sales’, or turnover; ‘assets’, i.e. assets on the balance sheet, and thus the value of plants and machinery; ranking according to this figure, whereas the basic ranking is according to ‘sales’; net profits; equity capital (at stock market price); number of shareholders; number of employees; profit rate as a percentage of sales; profit rate as a percentage of equity capital.

The profit rate as a percentage of assets, i.e. of the asset value of the plants, is also not shown.

To set the record straight, we will say that the leader is General Motors of Detroit, the largest automobile industry, which we compared in the Dialogue with our FIAT. Sales in 1956 were 10,796 million dollars, i.e. almost 11 billion, or about 6,750 billion Italian lire. Again for 1956, twenty FIATs!

The workforce was 600,000 units as opposed to around 75,000 at FIAT i.e. eight FIATs. We repeat that productivity remains, in labour time if not in wage expenditure (we have no such data) at two and a half times that of our largest company.

The net profit was 847 million dollars, i.e. 7.9% relative to the amount of sales. As the equity capital was only 4,581 million dollars, the profit rate on this rises to 18.5%.

The value of the plants, or assets, is 7,400 million, which is more than the equity capital, but much less than the sales.

The lack of the wage and salary bill prevents us from calculating variable capital and the rate of surplus value as in the FIAT case. This is further impeded by the lack of figures for investments in new capital, withdrawn before distributing the indicated net profit, but certainly considerable even for 1957. Once again, we see how the rate of surplus value may well be high while the rate of profit tends to decrease.

What is remarkable is how the capitalist organs themselves do not take into account fixed capital, but only that which circulates and is transferred into the mass of the product; which is in strange contrast to the assumption of the various modern economic schools (Keynes, schools of welfare) which want to introduce as a factor in the production of surplus value (for them, of national income growth) alongside the human factor, Marx’s living labour, that of formed wealth or fixed capital, or Marx’s dead labour. And another ideological capitulation occurs when, in calculating the national income, the mendacious sum of capitalist earnings with the remuneration of labour-time, the expression ‘value added in the year by labour’ is used, deducting from the value of production (final capital for Marx) that of raw and auxiliary materials and the renewal of plants for annual wear and tear (Marx’s constant capital). What remains in this case is the sum of variable capital with the surplus value-profit; and to admit that all this was ‘added by labour’ is to admit, with Marx, that dead wealth, whether personal or national, generates no increase, increment, or differential in value, but at most preserves what was there in frozen form; while it is only human labour from whose cycle the increases in capital, value, wealth arise.

Let us make clear with a single quotation from Marx the fact that he and we do not take into account or include in the balance sheet plant capital, dead wealth, and in so doing we already establish that it must be at the disposal of active society and not of a privileged class monopoly, which uses it to enjoy the labour of others. In this passage of elementary arithmetic lies the entire critique of bourgeois society and the prediction of its demise.

First Book, Chapter Nine, Section 1. After establishing an example in which £410 of constant capital adds up to £90 of wages and £90 of surplus value, forming a total of £590 of product, Marx says:

‘The two things compared are, the value of the product and the value of its constituents consumed in the process of production. Now we have seen how that portion of the constant capital [employed] which consists of the instruments of labour, transfers to the production only a fraction of its value, while the remainder of that value continues to reside in those instruments. Since this remainder plays no part in the formation of value, we may at present leave it on one side. To introduce it into the calculation would make no difference. For instance, taking our former example, c [constant capital] = £410: suppose this sum to consist of £312 value of raw material, £44 value of auxiliary material, and £54 value of the machinery worn away in the process; and suppose that the total value of the machinery employed is £1,054. Out of this latter sum, then, we reckon as advanced for the purpose of turning out the product, the sum of £54 alone, which the machinery loses by wear and tear in the process; for this is all it parts with to the product. Now if we also reckon the remaining £1,000, which still continues in the machinery, as transferred to the product, we ought also to reckon it as part of the value advanced, and thus make it appear on both sides of our calculation. We should, in this way, get £1,500 on one side and £1,590 on the other. The difference of these two sums, or the surplus value, would still be £90. Throughout this Book therefore, by constant capital advanced for the production of value, we always mean, unless the context is repugnant thereto, the value of the means of production actually consumed in the process, and that value alone’.

And here Marx notes that even Malthus admits this, in the words of his work Principles of Political Economy in which he says:

‘If we reckon the value of the fixed capital employed as a part of the advances, we must reckon the remaining value of such capital at the end of the year as a part of the annual returns’.

It matters that such a point has entered the heads of the Fortune Directory and... of Marxist communists, given that Keynes, Spengler and Co. claim that even fixed property, and even money-capital ‘are entitled’ to fractions of the active income of social production. And for land ownership, Malthus also argued this. For 150 years or so, the whole issue has remained at a standstill.

In addition to the universally known and ‘official’ editions, let us add another, which clarifies another point that is often implicitly misunderstood without anyone realising it.

Since the conclusion of the anatomy Marx makes of bourgeois production is the theory of surplus value, many think that to fix everything it is enough to say: all social income is surplus value; if we now distribute it only among those who have worked, all communism is well and constructed.

A different formulation of the same oversight can be this: Marx has proven the law of value valid, that is, the fact that the value at which a commodity is exchanged on average depends on the social labour required to produce it. But he also showed that despite all these balanced contracts, the seller of labour-power, i.e. the proletarian, receives far less than he has provided. And so socialism comes when labour-power is paid at its true value, and thus the extortion of surplus value from the worker is ‘abolished’.

Marx has so many times shown that this is nothing but foolish immediatism, and most recently we have developed it in connection with the Critique of the Gotha Programme. That foolish thesis is equivalent to another formula, that of Stalin’s: in socialism, the law of value prevails.

The correct thesis is that in socialism, labour has no value, and is not paid for. Value is not deducted from labour, for any commodity, let alone human labour power. What remains, as an apparent paradox, is surplus value, that is, the gift of labour, and payment for labour, a millennia-old expression of servitude and abjection, dies.

Let us also make Marx’s official and notorious text say this.

Second Book, Chapter One, ‘The Circuit of Money-Capital’.

‘Generally M – L [Money – Labour] is regarded as characteristic of the capitalist mode of production. However not at all for the reason given above, that the purchase of labour-power represents a contract of purchase which stipulates for the delivery of a quantity of labour in excess of that needed to replace the price of the labour-power, the wages; hence delivery of surplus-labour, the fundamental condition for the capitalisation of the value advanced, or for the production of surplus-value, which is the same thing’.

No, the reason is not that at all, but...

‘because of [the contract’s] form, since money in the form of wages buys labour, and this is the characteristic mark of the money system (...) The characteristic thing is not that the commodity labour-power is purchasable but that labour-power appears as a commodity’.

Socialism does not consist in replacing the current unjust wage contract with a just contract. Socialism consists in abolishing the labour – money relationship. Wages are not to be raised, but abolished. And this is only possible when the monetary transaction has disappeared not merely between money and labour power, but above all – and even earlier (see Pentecost report on Marx’s critique at Gotha) – between commodity and commodity, whatever they may be.

When exchange between equivalents prevails and when value is calculated from labour, one is navigating in the full capitalist swamp. Marxism makes these laws its own insofar as it explains and describes bourgeois society; and at every step it advances the programme of the society that will follow its overthrow and in which mercantile and monetary exchange, the wage-form, and the law of labour-value will be, as Engels said of the State, placed in the museum of antiquities.

The power of the revolutionary dialectic leaps out entirely from the reading of Marx’s earliest text, because in it the ‘Social Man’, servant under Capital, rises by breaking the limits of the law of value; and dead wealth, today’s fixed capital, which in class society does not generate value, but gives the strength to steal it, pervaded with new life drawn from the roots of past generations and from the very curses of the slaves and serfs of the time, will rise up before the human species as an inexhaustible source of well-being and high joy.

The scientific laws of the new society stand in irreducible contrast to those of the present and negate them formula by formula and word by word: we defend the notion of the true and not false laws of capitalist production dynamics, not because such laws are to survive, but because that clear notion is the primary weapon for the extermination of the infamous bourgeois social machine. One must thoroughly study the structure and motion of a machine that one intends, at the given historical moment, to blow apart, clearing the way even of its sinister debris.