The comrade who reported on this subject recalled the work done so far and the topics whose results appear in the two mimeographed booklets ‘Abacus of Marxist Economics’. He explained once again why this fundamental publication, which aims to condense the entire original and integral economic doctrine of Marxism into precise formulas, has not yet been able to be completed, especially with regard to the final part of Volumes II and III of Capital, the materials for which were unable to be arranged by Marx himself for the purposes of their final editing. He stated that this serious work requires the participation of all comrades, because it is not a task for one person alone and summarises the activity of entire generations. Consequently, at the present meeting, again using a significant work prepared by a comrade in Paris, the aim was only to give a series of indications deserving full development on the questions which, in the subsequent treatment, will have to receive their proper arrangement.

These questions aim to give form to the Marxist theory of capitalist waste, and the solutions must be sought in the works of Marx, Engels, and other Marxists, especially if we keep in mind the method of reading Capital that we have defined as the ‘method of the three moments’. These moments could not be systematically arranged into a classification by the author, precisely because he was not an academic treatise-writer, but a Party leader, and they are to be recognised, one might say, in all the pages rather than in all the chapters of his magnum opus.

In the first moment, it is a matter of defining the economic dynamic within the capitalist enterprise, demonstrating that, while this socially represents a productive benefit, and therefore does not appear to be a stage of waste, it is nevertheless founded on a subtraction of value, labour, and time, carried out to the detriment of the proletarian class.

In the second moment, we move beyond the confines of the company and consider capitalist society as a whole, with particular regard to the effects of the mercantile and monetary mechanism, highlighting new aspects and new levels of social waste.

In the third moment, Marx already sees communist society here, of which history has not yet given an example, and, by making an open comparison with the insane irrationality of bourgeois society, he highlights the supreme degree of waste, as a result of which human production would require only a minimal contribution of labour and time, probably equal to a small fraction of what is currently required, with a far better effect in terms of consumption and enjoyment.

The speaker, inviting all his comrades to study certain areas of this research, gave some cues for the critique carried out, using quantitative criteria, of the dreadful deficiencies of present-day society, especially in its current process of final degeneration: thus, as regards the process of concentration of companies, which, while being positive and necessary, cannot be achieved without a continual destruction of living labour and of labour already crystallised in fixed capital. Another aspect of waste is precisely the cycle of renewal of fixed capital, studied thoroughly by Karl Marx, according to whom today we are witnessing the insane destruction of the effects of human labour, sending entire masses of goods that social production would have used far more rationally to the scrap heap for the speculative production of surplus value.

Another aspect of this kind is the plurality and instability of monetary means which, through waves of inflation, destroy what today is capital, but which translates into destroyed human labour. The monetary system then leads to the defeatist phenomenon of support provided by the State, increasingly capitalist and banking in nature, for a myriad of companies of all sizes that sustain themselves through that phenomenon of parasitism consisting in the demand by private individuals for state concessions and subsidies. The administration of this senseless mechanism of modern society and its recording in terms of money, debt, and credit, mobilises almost the entirety of today’s bureaucracy, which, as the real breadwinner of society, is totally unproductive, so that its consumption represents a very significant share of social waste.

This waste can be clearly shown to be clearly present even in the Russian economy, as demonstrated by the repressive measures being adopted there against the multiple intrigues and embezzlements of State money, and therefore of the labour of the producing proletariat. At the culmination of this investigation, there must be the comparison with a society that, finally, through the only historically admissible path, namely the destruction of the bourgeois State in all countries, will one day be able to overcome the necessity of military action and the fabulous expenditure on military preparations and on the stupid competitions for prestige between States, which are in reality competitions in terrorising humanity, and among which we must include the disastrous direction given to the use of all the resources of science towards nuclear explosions and even in the grandiose setting of what is foolishly called ‘the conquest of the cosmos and outer space’.

The speaker on the subject of the presentation of the economic doctrine of Marxism began by saying that, given the workload at this meeting, once again progress on this study would be slow, as its final results had been stuck for some time at the two booklets of the ‘Abacus of Marxist Economics’, which have expressed in quantitative formulae the fundamental doctrines of Capital for the entire First Book and only for the First Part of the Second.

In previous meetings, reference has been made several times (as also in the reports appearing on these pages) to the subsequent parts of the Second Book up to the theory of simple and expanded accumulation, but the not inconsiderable materials brought forward require a definitive coordination of formulae, schemas, and tables which have been shown several times at meetings but have not yet been published. Such a task is ponderous and requires the collective contribution of the efforts of the entire movement. The main difficulty lies in the fact that the subject matter of the Second Book, on the circulation of capital (the theme from which the historical-economic condemnation of the capitalist mode of production emerges), is only available to us in fragments, without the systematic structure conceived by Marx, and without Engels, by his own express declaration, wanting to construct a systematic presentation of his own, considering that he did not have the right to substitute his own work for the marvellous but only ‘semi-finished’ pages left by the pen of the giant Marx.

The task will be less arduous for the Third Book, which, by studying the process as a whole, has a more socio-political theme, leading directly to the programme of the Party when its drafting was broken off at the subject: classes, greatly exploited by all subsequent, and even very recent, carrion-like opportunism.

Since we categorically reject any claim to being updaters of the system, and do not wish to invent parts that have remained in the shadows as a result of the forces at work in the historical struggle, and we reaffirm that Marxism was formed as a monolithic and definitive whole precisely in the period 1840-1870 in which Marx worked (and that this would have been the case even if the person Karl Marx had never been born), the main way to tackle the problem we have set ourselves, and which the needs of the long-standing struggle against the distorters have posed to us, is to utilise the sources of Marxism in Marx and Engels above all, but also elsewhere; and therefore research into the historical texts is the fundamental task.

This path is not to be traversed by a single man, nor even by a single generation; it requires the participation of the entire Party, from all its sections and in all its groupings of the various languages, among which the most interesting is obviously the German one, even if today the German movement appears to be the most shaken by the general crisis.

In this sector too, our comrades in Paris have provided rich and most valuable material, which has been gradually accumulating without it yet being possible to make full use of it, and in this brief exhibition, we will draw upon it, albeit in a not entirely organic manner.

In the previous appeals to all comrades for their assistance in our joint research, we had outlined not a complete theory but the paths for arriving at giving form to the ‘theory of waste’ in the capitalist mode of production. This is a delicate issue, insofar as it traces back the entire foundation of Marxist analysis and programme. Such a theory is incomprehensible to those naïve people who wish to see in Marx’s work a pure description of the capitalist economy and, at most, the discovery of the laws that govern its economic dynamic. It may be regarded as an aspect of the programme for the revolutionary Party that we reclaim from the flaming pages of Capital. Indeed, the capitalist form can be defined as a squanderer of the efforts and energies of man and society only if we can measure its losses in comparison with the dynamics of a society no longer capitalist, a given in history even if it is not present anywhere in the world today. It must therefore be admitted that the data of such a society of tomorrow are derivable and deductible not from ideal schemes or abstract philosophical constructions, but from the data of past history and of all analysable social forms: pre-capitalist and capitalist.

The measurement of waste will therefore be possible even if it is admitted that the transition to capitalism marked (or rather was made inevitable precisely by it) a decisive improvement in the utilisation of human activity in relation to the social forms that preceded the present one.

It is clear that a critique based on an appeal to a future situation that no one has yet observed or recorded will always be met with fierce derision by those who are accustomed to mocking dogmatism or even the relapse into utopia of us revolutionary Marxists.

Throughout our lengthy research, we have cited countless passages in which it can be seen that Marx always explicitly makes the comparison between the characteristics of the capitalist process and those of future production and future society, a precise fact for which he regards ‘communism’ to be in effect, even while designating it under different names and periphrases. This occurs in all his works, in the three books of Capital, his magnum opus, and we can say in every chapter of it, even if, in order to demonstrate this fully, the critical work must be able to build secure bridges between pages that are even very distant from one another.

In this outline of the theory of waste, we asked and continue to ask our comrades to use a schema (science is always made by succeeding in constructing schemas, even if they are provisional) that we have deduced from the chapters of the Second Book, the subject of the current stage of our research.

The schema is that of the ‘three moments’ of revolutionary critique. The first moment is limited to the relations that are established within the confines of a single productive company, between capitalist and workers. Its analysis is already entirely contained in the formulae deduced from the First Book, but this should not be understood in the very mistaken sense that the First Book does not also concern itself with the other two subsequent ‘moments’: all three, on the contrary, burst forth from every chapter and, as we always like to say, from every page.

If the measure of social waste were as narrow a concept as that of measuring the exploitation of individual workers by the individual employer, we would be reduced to vulgar immediatists, who propose to abolish the employer while leaving aside mercantile system, money, the company with its debit and credit accounts, and even its profits, which would be trivially divided among the workers, untouched. Proudhon was the first to set foot on this slippery slope, and if years and centuries count for anything, it can only be in this: Proudhon in his time was a great man, whoever today proudhonises is a scoundrel.

In the first moment, the degree of waste would not even be the rate of profit, i.e. the ratio of surplus value to the total value of the product; it is well known that part of the surplus value in expanded reproduction does not go to the capitalist’s consumption but to new investment (and it would have to go there even in a society without capitalists, see Critique of the Gotha Programme). Thus, the consumption of parasitic capitalists alone would be a miserable thing. Marx already said it: you who stop at the first moment are only planning a generalisation of misery.

In a passage from the Grundrisse (German edition, p. 347: chapter of Marx’s ‘rough draft’ of 1858-59 corresponding to the Second Book on the circulation of Capital, our topic; a short chapter on the limits of capitalist production, crises, etc.), Marx sets these ratios: 2/5 raw materials, 1/5 machinery, 1/5 wages, 1/5 surplus product, of which 1/10 is for the capitalist’s consumption and 1/10 for new production. Using the notions from Capital, we have: 3/5 constant capital, 1/5 variable capital, 1/5 surplus value. The rate of surplus value is 100 per cent, the degree of the organic composition of capital is 3, as the ratio of constant capital to variable capital, which measures the productivity of labour. It is well known that in the schemas of simple reproduction in the Second Book, Marx always sets 100 per cent as the rate of surplus value, but 4 as the degree of composition of capital. More than 15 years had passed and productivity had increased: one section of today’s research that we point out to our comrades who have been called upon to assist is this; what is the degree today?

In any case, according to the Grundrisse, as regards the parasitic consumption of the capitalist, the profit is one tenth of the commodity-capital produced, one ninth of the advanced capital (C plus V). It follows that those who stop at the first intra-company moment merely raise the average standard of living by one tenth, a result that is certainly not worth a revolution!

Let us pick up on an interesting point: when Marx, in 1858, allocates one fifth to machinery, a high share of 20%, and one third of all constant capital, he includes not only the wear and tear but also the amortisation of fixed capital, as we have done recently in the meetings, in an unpublished framework where we include the full renewal of fixed capital in the C measure. The whole problem lies in evaluating this, as other eloquent quotations will show, because Marx’s thesis is that fixed capital, or dead labour, does not in itself generate value or surplus value, which comes entirely from variable capital, part of the circulating capital. We believe we have grasped the difference between Marx’s thought and that of the majority of his supposed disciples. Indeed, it would be absurd that a machine costing 100, including installation and maintenance over its useful life, would produce no more than 300 total in transformed materials!

Let us briefly recall that the second moment considers the ensemble of productive enterprises that form a pure capitalist society, with the interplay of the myriad effects of competition and the relationships between them, forming a social balance sheet of capitalism in which waste and its degree are at least double.

In the third moment, this dynamic is compared with that of a society without private capital, without a market, without money, and without companies, and we arrive at the final comparison with communist society, showing that waste is multiplied even further in the present society, at least by a factor of two, according to our rough schema: two – four – eight, which proves that labour in communist society can be reduced from eight hours to two a day – this, of course, in very broad terms.

At this point, we can turn to the French contribution.

Waste becomes ‘gaspillage’, for which another definition is given: losses on the ‘social price of production’. The definition is Marx’s and is already grounded on a consideration of the first and second moments. The price of production is the ‘value’ (we are therefore in capitalism) purged of the ups and downs of the competitive market. It is therefore: constant capital plus variable capital plus profit at the average social rate. The cost-price of bourgeois economists is something else (prix de revient) because it is given by constant capital plus variable capital (always per unit of commodity produced), taking into account, as is clear, the compensation for the renewal of fixed capital at the end of its cycle.

Before moving on to the critique of capitalist waste, we must point out the increase in productive forces that the capitalist mode of production has achieved compared to earlier modes. In this way, we will grasp, on the one hand, the roots of all the apologetic theories of capital and, on the other, the measure of squandering, of waste offered by the unprecedented development of productive forces brought about by capitalism.

This will enable us to show, on the one hand, that the ‘communists’ tied to Moscow are de facto defending capitalism when they claim that in capitalist... non-Soviet countries, workers receive fewer and fewer products, which they call absolute pauperisation, since reality belies these claims made by workerist revolutionaries.

On the other hand, that socialism has nothing in common with the American system of calculating production, according to which, as soon as a product requires less time to be manufactured than is required for its maintenance, it is thrown away rather than kept in operation (we will see later how capitalism, as a system of production, achieves this high level of productivity by appropriating a large mass of physical goods free of charge, which allows it to arrive at the absurd contradictions of the American type which we have just mentioned, whereas the truth is that it achieves this result through the squandering of physical materials that society could benefit from).

It is in this sense that Engels, in Anti-Dühring, characterises socialist production, writing: ‘The socialised appropriation of the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial restrictions upon production, but also with the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable concomitants of production, and that reach their paroxysm in the crises’.

Regarding the first point concerning the actual initial increase in productive forces due to the emergence of capitalism, Marx already in 1844 noted it, at a time when such a development could easily be read in the statistics, quoting in his Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts, an author whom he had always held in high regard (Wilhelm Schulz, in the ‘Movement of Production’) in the following passage: ‘Only by the exclusion of human power has it become possible to spin from a pound of cotton worth 3 shillings and 8 pence 350 hanks of a total length of 167 English miles (i.e., 36 German miles), and of a commercial value of 25 guineas’.

In the same text, Marx writes: ‘On the average the prices of cotton-goods have decreased in England during the past 45 years by eleven-twelfths, and according to Marshall’s calculations the same amount of manufactured goods for which 16 shillings was still paid in 1814 is now supplied at 1 shilling and 10 pence (i.e. the price has fallen to about one-ninth in thirty years). The greater cheapness of industrial products expands both consumption at home and the market abroad, and because of this the number of workers in cotton has not only not fallen in Great Britain after the introduction of machines but has risen from forty thousand to one and a half million. As to the earnings of industrial entrepreneurs and workers; the growing competition between the factory owners has resulted in their profits necessarily falling relative to the amount of products supplied by them. In the years 1820-33 the Manchester manufacturer’s gross profit on a piece of calico fell from four shillings 1 1/3 pence to one shilling 9 pence. But to make up for this loss, the volume of manufacture has been correspondingly increased’.

Even in his early writings, Marx shows that wealth has increased fabulously in countries conquered by the bourgeois regime; ‘Supposing that the daily labour of a worker brings him on the average 400 francs a year and that this sum suffices for every adult to live some sort of crude life, then any proprietor receiving 2,000 francs in interest or rent, from a farm, a house, etc., compels indirectly five men to work for him; an income of 100,000 francs represents the labour of 250 men, and that of 1,000,000 francs the labour of 2,500 individuals (hence, 300 million [Louis Philippe] therefore the labour of 750,000 workers)’. This may seem simplistic reasoning, but remember that Louis Philippe was the bourgeois and constitutional king, and note the basic concept that in a democracy the use of violence prevails just as in despotism: money ‘passes’ peacefully, but in reality the violence is the same, only more sordid than that of the highwayman. So much for a democratic and mercantile society, as Marx has been teaching us for 120 years!

In Capital, Marx will later show that this fabulous increase in wealth, which dwarfs the tradition of the feudal lords, comes from increased labour productivity due to mechanisation.

A passage from the Grundrisse will serve to show how Marx repeatedly makes an explicit comparison between a exchange-based society and communism. This defines our historical method and shows that with it we must tackle the problem of calculating losses. The laws of each form of production are originally different, and the historical development of society shows that each new form will boast a higher ‘yield’ than the old ones. Therefore, we take our frame of reference, our point of comparison, not in the past but in the future, since the solution to the social problem cannot be sought in the past, as in the false alternatives of the kind exemplified by the a-Marxist movement named ‘Socialisme et Barbarie’.

The passage is in the chapter dealing with false expenses in the circulation of capital, a topic dealt with in the Second Book, Second Part, already repeatedly examined by us.

Marx ridicules the ‘Robinsonades’ of John Stuart Mill: ‘If one imagines two workers who exchange with each other, a fisherman and a hunter; then the time which both lose in exchanging would create neither fish nor game, but would be rather a deduction from the time in which both of them can create values, the one fish, the other hunt, objectify their labour time in a use value. If the fisherman wanted to get compensation for this loss from the hunter: demand more game, or give him fewer fish, then the latter would have the same right to compensation. The loss would be common to both of them. These costs of circulation, costs of exchange, could appear only as a deduction from the total production and value-creation of both of them. If they commissioned a third, C, with these exchanges, and thus lost no labour time directly, then each of them would have to cede a proportional share of his product to C. What they could gain thereby would only be a greater or lesser loss. But if they worked as joint proprietors, then no exchange would take place, only communal consumption. The costs of exchange would therefore vanish (in communism, O gentlemen of Moscow!). Not the division of labour; but the division of labour founded on exchange. It is wrong, therefore, for J. St. Mill to regard the cost of circulation as the necessary price of the division of labour. It is the cost only of the [not-] spontaneous division of labour resting not on community of property, but on private property’.

The age-old debate is still alive and kicking; it is the very banal one about specialists, those super-parasites of the world of 1931! [sic] If I hunt or fish as I please, I will catch two fish or two birds a day, but if I hunt only or fish only, there will be at least three fish and three birds a day, and with this benefit of professional specialisation, there will be a 50% bonus that could pay for the commercial service (!!!).

As easy and banal as ‘common sense’! But we aim to provide an economic calculation formula that allows us to measure how modern specialisation costs society dearly and bitterly (it would suffice to count the infamous thirteenth month salaries for these holidays) against the ruins of a lazy and scheming trend of general human labour. The experts, unchecked in the mystery of their sector, mooch loudly and spin aimlessly, causing a series of destructive disasters to productive forces, both existing and potential.

The trading peoples, Marx says in another passage of the same work, such as the Phoenicians, Normans, Lombards, led other, more settled peoples to exalt production in times long before capitalism. This would be ‘the civilising influence of external trade’.

But the opposite occurs in the capitalist system.

Marx’s critique of the function of circulation in the present economy is extremely profound and involves questions of economics, history, and political programme in which our entire Party system and our original, dialectical, and grandiose solution to the ‘eternal enigmas’ of philosophy throughout the ages, which have been resolved through Marxism, are intertwined.

Our school has the task of expressing in a formulation the relations of economic magnitudes in which this brilliant achievement, reached in the history of humanity about a century ago, is summed up, but which is still far from entering the social consciousness, and even less so in ‘official’ science, which for that century has done nothing but decay and regress. While we repeat that even today we are not yet giving this systematic presentation, we recall that the relationship between the spheres of production and circulation (or distribution) is placed on very different planes in Marx’s economy and in that of the bourgeois: for them, the topic is the production, distribution, and consumption of commodities, and economics is the science of exchange, taken as an eternal economic category in the history of society; for us, it is a parallel study of the present transitory capitalist economy, one of the historical exchange economies – and so, with classical Marx, we speak of the production and circulation of capital, and even better of surplus value, or the dynamic valorisation of capital itself – and of its comparison with the communist economy – which, in a revolutionary way, places itself outside the categories of capital, surplus value, value, and exchange.

Faithful to the assertion that the system exists as a block given from the mid-19th century; and to provide further proof of this, we would like to refer to a masterful programmatic framework provided by Friedrich Engels in the three speeches he delivered at Elberfeld in February 1845, when his collaboration with Marx was already complete (he wrote to him on 22 February). At that time, the critical analysis of capitalist production had not yet been organically formulated, and along this path, Engels’ research (who had lived in industrial Manchester between 1842 and 1844) economically preceded Marx, with his youthful philosophical training, even though Engels as an adult later credited Marx entirely with the merit of discovering the scientific laws of capitalism. This only proves how these two great men anticipated the end of intellectual individualism, which, a century later, still plagues us today, but which will disappear in shame. And it proves, as Engels himself said, that the discovery was ripe, and the name of who was to make it did not matter, although Mehring, as a historian, says that he must record what had been, and not what could have been.

In the period that followed, an immense misunderstanding arose: that the open discussion of communism as a ‘proposal’ (as is explicitly presented in the three speeches at Elberfeld), that is, as an open Party programme, was more recently dismissed almost as a manifestation of ‘utopianism’ and replaced by a dry, descriptive, and passive science.

As a refutation of this ‘Second International’ type of view, against which the might of Lenin, master and leader, would later rise, but which unfortunately in more recent times has regained its vile predominance in today’s most poisonous opportunism, we are waging our struggle for a further ‘restoration’ of the one and indivisible revolutionary doctrine, and we affirm our thesis: it is not possible to describe, explain, and understand the dynamics of capitalism without resorting at every step of the investigation to its comparison with the well-defined path of communist society, which will emerge from its death.

‘Since (in present-day society) each man produces and consumes on his own without concerning himself much about what others are producing and consuming, a crying disproportion between production and consumption must, of necessity, quickly develop (...) He (the manufacturer) knows nothing about all this; like his competitors, he manufactures at haphazard and consoles himself with the thought that the others must do likewise (...) We have seen what the results of this fundamental mistake were (i.e. Marxist anarchy of production); if we want to eliminate these unpleasant consequences then we must correct this fundamental mistake, and that is precisely the aim of communism.

‘In communist society, where the interests of individuals are not opposed to one another but, on the contrary, are united, competition is eliminated. As is self-evident, there can no longer be any question of the ruin of particular classes, nor of the very existence of classes such as the rich and the poor nowadays. As soon as private gain, the aim of the individual to enrich himself on his own, disappears from the production and distribution of the goods necessary to life, trade crises will also disappear of themselves (it is clear that here Engels moves from a criticism of waste in the first instance, already contained in the naive moral condemnation of the enrichment of the employer on the labour of the workers, to a criticism in the second instance, namely of waste as a whole in a private-ownership-based mercantile society). In communist society it will be easy to be informed about both production and consumption. Since we know how much, on the average, a person needs, it is easy to calculate how much is needed by a given number of individuals, and since production is no longer in the hands of private producers but in those of the Community and its administrative bodies, it is a trifling matter to regulate production according to needs.

‘Thus we see how the main evils of the present social situation disappear under communist organisation. If, however, we go into a little more detail, we will find that the advantages of such a social organisation are not limited to this but also include the elimination of a host of other defects. I shall only touch today on a few of the economic drawbacks. From the economic point of view the present arrangement of society is surely the most irrational and unpractical we can possibly conceive. The opposition of interests results in a great amount of labour power being utilised in a way from which society gains nothing, and in a substantial amount of capital being unnecessarily lost without reproducing itself’.

In much later texts, Marx will describe this same social waste as a destruction of capital, meaning therefore that in the capitalist system the destruction of each capital amounts to a squandering of productive forces, and therefore of human labour, present or past, useful to society; but whoever infers from this that the capital-form of the productive forces should not disappear entirely in socialist society makes a grave error.

After criticising the blatant irrationality of transport expenditure in any economy where each company decides alone how much to produce and where to ship its products for consumption, with clear rules of profit (as is now admitted even in Russia in 1962), Engels continues as follows:

‘Such a complicated way of transport is out of the question in a rationally organised society. To keep to our example (the global cotton trade at the time), just as one can easily know how much cotton or manufactured cotton goods an individual colony needs, it will be equally easy for the central authority to determine how much all the villages and townships in the country need. Once such statistics have been worked out – which can easily be done in a year or two – average annual consumption will only change in proportion to the increasing population; it is therefore easy at the appropriate time to determine in advance what amount of each particular article the people will need – the entire great amount will be ordered direct from the source of supply; it will then be possible to procure it directly, without middlemen, without more delay and unloading than is really required by the nature of the journey (...)

‘Whereas [middlemen] now perform to the disadvantage of everyone else a kind of work which is, at best, superfluous but which, nevertheless, provides them with a living, indeed, in many cases even with great riches, whereas they are thus at present directly prejudicial to the general good, they will then become free to engage in useful labour and to take up an occupation in which they can prove themselves as actual members, not merely apparent, sham members, of human society, and as participants in its activity as a whole’.

The memorable text then develops the fundamental concept that, by overcoming the opposition of each individual interest against each other and against all others, the superstructure of conflict between members of society as a true ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’ (the war of all against all) falls away and the reason for the whole complicated and costly, as well as corrupting and perpetuating, apparatus of general criminalised psychosis, the police and judicial apparatus. Thus, almost all current administrative, judicial (and political) hierarchies and bureaucracies become superfluous. ‘Even now – this has been true for a century – crimes of passion are becoming fewer and fewer in comparison with calculated crimes, crimes of interest; crimes against persons are declining, crimes against property are on the increase’.

More than a century has passed since these lines, and we can add that crimes masked, tolerated, and unpunished against the social economy in its crude and state forms have then grown immeasurably, those which, for brevity’s sake, we refer to by the expressive name of intrigue, a pleasant and essential exercise for the notable members of the most modern society, even as it has developed in Russia...

Here Engels makes an evocative comparison between the enormous savings in productive forces that the end of militarism will bring. He is, as always, far removed from the petty-bourgeois style pacifist whining. ‘[I]n the event of a war, which anyway could only be waged against anti-communist nations, the member of such a society has a “real” Fatherland, a “real” hearth (...) Consider what wonders were worked by the enthusiasm of the revolutionary armies from 1792 to 1799, which only fought for an illusion, for the semblance of a Fatherland, and you will be bound to realise how powerful an army must be which fights, not for an illusion, but for a tangible reality’. Are these words outdated? Or are today’s words, which fall into the vilest national fetish under the capitalist regime, the foul ones?

The essential point here is that: ‘these immense masses of labour power of which the civilised nations are now deprived by the armies, would be returned to labour in a communist society’. The volume of products saved by putting idle soldiers to work, and that of war materials consumed, constitutes a quantifiable amount in relation to that of total production: it would suffice to compare, even historically, the figures of the military budgets of major countries with those of their total economic activity (gross national product). Here is an area of research for our speakers.

Engels then moves on to the contemporary ‘domestic economy’. He writes: ‘But, gentlemen, just go into the house, the inmost sanctuary, of a rich man (and now, we might add, of every middle-class philistine, duly kolkhozized by the press, radio and television), and tell me if it is not the most senseless waste of labour power when you have a number of people waiting on one single individual, spending their time in idleness or, at best, in work which results from the isolation of a single man inside his own four walls? This crowd of maids, cooks, lackeys, coachmen, domestic servants, gardeners and whatever they are called, what do they really do?’. Today, the trivial objection that bourgeois society would have freed itself from the exorbitant parasitism of this service staff is obvious, and indeed the average philistine would be reduced to lamenting this when, after lavish meals, he washes the dishes American-style together with his guests, as they pass through the kitchen. But in fact, the servile functions within the social magma, while they have in a certain sense changed their humiliating label, have certainly not improved their usefulness, and the forms they have taken are neither more useful nor less ignoble in substance.

At this point, our master Engels believes he has already demonstrated that ‘given this kind of organisation, the present customary labour time of the individual will be reduced by half simply by making use of the labour which is either not used at all or used disadvantageously’. We are in 1845, let us remember.

But Engels believes that we are not yet at the most important point, and moves on to the destruction of the domestic family hearth. It concerns the association replacing the individual not only in the life of production, but also in that of consumption, even if for now only in terms of material consumption.

The Elberfeld speech was not addressed to militants, nor even to workers alone. We must not forget this when considering the boldness of those predictions.

Engels refers here to the proposals of his contemporary, ‘Robert Owen, the English Socialist’. A utopian, we would say today, without detracting from the esteem Marx had for him. But if we do not dwell on the schematic ideas that Owen set out to implement in New Lanark in his communist factories, which Engels describes as intelligible at that distant time, such as the square building measuring 1,650 feet on each side (about 500 metres) and containing a large garden, capable of housing between two to three thousand people (which, properly interpreted, is perhaps a more valid project than much of the very latest hypocritical urban planning, especially the Italian Ina-Casa type, which would cram more than 10,000 people into almost 25 hectares!), the critical part of the passage is entirely decisive.

120 years ago, central heating was a futuristic vision. Just think that even in traditionalist England, in 1962, projects that forego a wood-burning fireplace in every bedroom of the fat bourgeois are reviled (and all the more hypocritical if less fat)! The brilliant Owen calculated all these immediately achievable savings. What Engels demonstrates with Owen’s detailed calculations is the enormous volume of the waste in labour power and labour time entailed by the fragmentation of humanity into molecular family cells, the economic effects of which are, however, less harmful than the social and political ones, since it is there that the real limit lies, clipping the wings of the emergence of the new social man, incapable of showing solidarity with his fellow man under the idiotic pretext that he loves only himself and his immediate family, a pretext that every day increasingly collapses into an exorbitant lie.

Underneath the rhetoric and praise for this type of family society, by now rotten for millennia, hides one of the vilest forms of slavery, that of housewives, or homemakers, from which emerge, through equally degenerative and unnatural paths, the rich nations of the American style and the poorer ones, where working-class women bear two burdens on their miserable sexed shoulders, deemed ‘weak’ by the hypocrisy of the self-righteous.

With Owen, Engels derides the waste of time spent doing the same shopping in two thousand different places, from the baker to the butcher. But modern man, cretinised by two centuries of capitalism, believes, convinced by faith in the television or cinema screen, that wandering from shop to shop is the supreme pleasure of human life! And the liberated Russian women freeze in bestial queues!

We want to reduce society to a barracks! An old objection of conventional anti-communism. But just now, wasn’t it precisely to the barracks that we had prophesied the same end as to the private household?

Utopianism is the act of contrasting today’s society with a model of a future society that has been coldly conceived and depicted. Good Marxism is to analyse the capitalist economy as emerging from history, that is, at its birth for the enhancement of human productive forces, and today in its corruption towards an increasingly insane squandering, up to the point of knowing with certainty the forms that the new society will take, destroying it.

The description that Karl Marx gives in the Grundrisse of the process of circulation, and which begins from the aforementioned Robinsonade about the hunter and the fisherman, leads to the conclusion that all the time spent by merchants and intermediaries forms part of the share of waste to be attributed to the capitalist form of production.

Today, production is based on exchange, and for this reason the work of merchants is indispensable to the manufacturing capitalists who are its beneficiaries. In a non-capitalist economy, this false expense is eliminated and, along with all the others, that division of labour which today runs between capitalists in production and commerce disappears, the truth being that neither perform any labour, even if it can be said that both groups devote their time, one to production and the other to distribution, to pumping up the labour of others for their own profit.

Marx says, among other things: ‘Circulation time – to the extent that it takes up the time of the capitalist as such – concerns us here exactly as much as the time he spends with his mistress. If time is money, then from the standpoint of capital it is only alien labour time, which is of course in the most literal sense the capitalist’s money (...) To regard the time the capitalist spends in circulation as value-creating time or even surplus-value-creating time is to fall into the greatest confusion. Capital as such has no labour time apart from its production time’.

And this is not what is at issue in the overall process that we have to consider. Otherwise, one could only imagine that the capitalist might compensate himself for the time during which he does not earn money (from the labour of others) by acting as a wage-earner for another capitalist, with whom he would lose that time. In this way, that time would also form part of the costs of production (of the other capitalist). From this point of view, the time that a capitalist loses or uses as a capitalist is in any case lost time, time sunk without return. The supposed labour time of the capitalist, unlike the labour time of the worker, which must constitute the basis of his income as a wage sui generis, will be analysed elsewhere.

At this point, treated almost in the same words in the Second Volume of Capital, Marx refers back to a theme from the Third Volume: namely, the response to the argument that the owner of a factory may perform in it the functions of a technician, of an engineer if he has such training. In this case, by using his time as a worker, even if an intellectual one (the example could also apply to manual labour), he avoids paying the salary of a manager, and in this case the value of his labour time passes into the product. As usual, Marx, referring to the programme of society and of the non-capitalist form, shows that the social function of the capitalist, as one entitled to the labour time of others and not his own, can be abolished and must be abolished to society’s advantage (a phenomenon already present in Marx’s time, the decline of the capitalist to a mere functionary, apart from the delicate question of what society ought to grant to its functionaries).

Let us return to the subject of true and false circulation costs. The passage continues as follows: ‘Nothing is more common than to bring transport etc., to the extent that they are connected with trade, into the pure circulation costs’. Insofar as trade brings a product to market, it gives it a new form (indispensable in a mercantile society). Transport certainly only changes the geographical location. But we are not interested here in the mode of change of form. Certainly, commercial transport today gives the product a different and new use value – and this applies even to the retail shopkeeper, who weighs, measures, wraps, and thus gives the product a new form for consumption – and this new use value costs labour time (that of the shopkeeper or shop assistant) and therefore generates a certain amount of additional exchange value. (We note that today much of this work is done at the outset in the sphere of production, by measuring and packaging portions of the product that go as they are into the hands of the buyer; all forms useful for capturing his freedom of choice). But Marx concludes here that ‘[b]ringing to market is part of the production process itself (and is therefore a production expense and not a false circulation expense). The product is a commodity (a vital requirement in the present capitalist economy), is in circulation only when it is on the market’.

This and other passages by Marx on circulation costs (we note again that in the Second Book he is referring to the circulation of capital and not the simple circulation of products and commodities) converge with Engels’ comparison at Elberfeld regarding the enormous waste of transport involved in the capitalist system compared to the communist one. The average geographical distance between the place of production and that of consumption of a use value is a real physical effort that will still have to be made; but in a rational plan, and outside the speculative race of competition and the hunt for the highest price, the total transport distances per unit of commodity will avoid being many, many times greater than necessary.

This is an essential element of waste, which comes immediately after the production of commodities in excess of consumption and then discarded (Brazilian coffee thrown into the sea or burned in locomotives).

They are all waste definable as ‘due to the absence of a production-consumption plan’.

According to Marx, as according to Engels, communist society abolishes all false circulation and retains only that which is due to the nature of things and not to exchange (i.e. to the private and not social appropriation of goods).

By abolishing this absurd circulation, communism abolishes the division of labour between manufacturers and merchants, and the autonomous function of the merchant, a phenomenon characteristic of capitalism.

‘[T]he government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production’ (Anti-Dühring). ‘The existence of classes originated in the division of labour, and the division of labour, as it has been known up to the present, will completely disappear’ (Engels, The Principles of Communism, first draft sent to Marx for the Manifesto). The same text also states: ‘Education will enable young people quickly to familiarise themselves with the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in response to the needs of society or their own inclinations’.

In this fundamental and classic sentence, the coincidence between individual inclinations (the famous vocations) and social interest is complete, and from then on we have the ‘production of man for man’, a brilliant concept from Marx’s youthful economic-philosophic manuscripts.

This ancient canon of original Marxism shows that we have added, discovered, or dreamed of nothing, when we presented as the highest goal of the communist programme the end of ‘specialisations’, of closed ‘professions’, and of the even more ignoble ‘careers’ of today’s nefarious world.

The ultimate goal of these closed and blind sectors is nothing more than the pursuit of a useless and passive consumption, defrauding society and humanity.

In the report we refer to, various points were indicated that provide topics for the calculation and assessment of the degree of waste.

We will conclude this presentation by reiterating them so that they can be more organically developed as contributions from multiple parties at subsequent meetings and discussions.

An essential aspect, neither contested nor condemned by anyone, of the development of modern industrialism, is the concentration of companies. The production unit is assuming ever larger dimensions, whether we consider them in terms of the number of workers employed, the quantity of materials processed and products delivered, the value of commodities launched onto the market or the capital of the enterprise. This phenomenon does not occur according to a rational plan but through the struggle of competition and the destruction of the structures of modest businesses, which become ‘passive’, go bankrupt, and close down. In all this there is the destruction of wealth, capital, and labour power, which remain unused. A measure of this loss, albeit partly offset by increased labour productivity in larger units, can be found in the statistics on ‘bankruptcies’, each of which corresponds to losses not only for the collapsed enterprise but also for others connected to it, in terms of commodities produced, installations left to decay, staff made redundant, and so on.

This phenomenon is exacerbated when it occurs in reverse waves, i.e. when large companies, for various reasons related to economic crisis or government policy measures, come to a standstill and break up into smaller companies. The chronic crisis in agricultural production can be explained by these fluctuations and misguided reforms, which intersect the useful process of concentration with a contradictory parcelisation of land and agricultural means of production, desired by bourgeois governments and, worse still, by parties that betray the proletariat. The low yield of agriculture in Russia and its discrepancy with the growth of industry can largely be explained by considerations of this kind (rich and poor kolkhozy, small family plots, etc.).

One cause of the destruction of real values, of labour power and their positive effects, lies in monetary fluctuations and the high inflation that follow wars. These lead to the ruin of countless small and medium-sized economic units and, overall, to heavy losses across the economies of the affected countries. The quantitative course of it can be traced in the phenomena that accompanied the two great world conflicts of this century.

The whole modern, insipid game of political power intervening in economic affairs, foolishly touted many times as a success of ‘socialism’, represents an enormous squandering of useful productive forces, with the salvation of productive, and worse, speculative units that would be better off collapsing, through resources that are made to fall back on to the social community, which means on the exploited classes. In this foolish game between so-called private initiative, always parasitic, and subsidies, grants, contributions paid for out of ‘public’ money, a phenomenon emerges that is characteristic of our era of senseless and irresponsible ‘gaspillage’: ‘demand’, with which ninety-nine per cent of watchful organisations of economic activity open their doors. Communism could originally be defined as the society in which none of its members will have to make demands for money or favours or concessions, or for positions of employment or careers, or for promotions, benefits, and similar equivocal things, and rewards for those who skilfully consume without producing.

Such research has the objective of establishing how socially passive the ‘middle classes’ are, composed of masses living off this deteriorated and destructive mirage of general well-being. The economic figures, wisely studied, will show that this amorphous mass is a heavier burden on society than the phantom ‘hundred families’ of the super-rich or the no less legendary managements of the ‘monopolies’, in which the most modern opportunism, foolishly or in bad faith, would have us see all the evil of the capitalist system appear, to the detriment of the society of producers, while even courting the average industrialist, filthier than Shylock! A few exploiters instead of countless, lice-ridden parasites (ferociously greedy towards the subordinate classes) have always been, by true revolutionary Marxism, considered a preferable condition, both in terms of the extent of social waste and in terms of the historical vision of the progress of the communist revolution.

This problem boils down to the bureaucratic plethora and the State, an extremely costly octopus composed of millions of unproductive workers, true social exploiters. Bureaucracy must be numerous when the functional economic units are small or very numerous and their countless monetary debits and credits and their rampant practices and requests for benefits or even taxation clutter thousands of square kilometres with useless paper. When communism goes beyond the forms of exchange and of money, the State will be extinguished, not only in the sense that justifies it, as an organ of class force, but above all as a hierarchy of paper pushers. Considering the whole economic society as it is today, by way of a crude comparison, as a single company, there will only be one figure to put down on paper, whereas today there are tens of millions. Then all activities will be directly productive; and even now it is easy to throw all the salaries of the paper pushers into the calculation of the immense abyss of social liabilities.

We have thus drawn up a list, albeit formless, of all the components of capitalist waste and the destruction of healthy human productive forces, placing our programme at the antipodes from the insane one that assigns the proletariat the task of competing with its enemies in the senseless direction of multiplying masses of products for false, accursed, and inhuman needs, a system whose only purpose is to exacerbate the production of surplus value, that is, of the slavery and alienation of man from himself, which will live as long as capital, market, and money live.