The following text (of which we had preannounced in no. 11) is a summary of a brief report presented during the last general meeting in Florence, and intended to resume and re-present the development of the Party’s work on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, placing it in the context of the important studies already carried out on the course and developments of the capitalist economy. It is a text necessarily incomplete because it is intended to be the start of a work to be completed and supplemented with statistical, theoretical, and historical data, which will take several meetings, while now it is important for us to recapitulate the essential points with a view to further developing our research.

Such research is particularly useful for young comrades or new adherents to the Party, not all of whom have been able to gain direct knowledge of the colossal work of theoretical restoration that has been underway for more than 15 years, work that carried out in constant adherence to invariant Marxism and the real struggles of the international proletariat, has allowed us to reaffirm, with resounding slaps in the face of the renegades, the full validity of Marxism in interpreting the entire historical course of the capitalist mode of production and in exposing the colossal counter-revolutionary mystification assembled around the revolutionary role of today’s Russia.

For the purposes of this summary, we will follow three lines. On one side, we will refer to Part III of Book III of Capital (‘The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall’) and to the studies on ‘The Course of World Capitalism in Historical Experience and in Marx’s Doctrine’ and ‘Trajectory and Catastrophe of the Capitalist Form in the Monolithic Classical Theoretical Construction of Marxism’, published in ‘Programma Comunista’ in 1957 (as well as the brief reports appearing in no. 19 of 1956 and nos. 3 and 4 of 1957). On the other side, we will finally present what was recalled in Florence about the reaction of capitalism, in its imperialist phase, to the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The reader may reconnect what we say to the report on the ‘Meaning and value of our studies on the course of the capitalist economy’, appearing in no. 10, of which the present text is in a certain sense an appendix.

As explained in issue 10 of Il Programma Comunista and at the meeting in Florence during the presentation of the topic and the illustration of the prospectus on Marxist economics drafted by the Naples section, the rate of profit is given by the ratio between surplus value, or profit, and total capital advanced (i.e. constant and variable capital) and is symbolically represented by the formula p = S/K where K is equal to C + V, unlike the rate of surplus value, which is given by referring the same quantity S to variable capital V alone, and in which therefore the symbolic ratio becomes s = S/V.

Marx now demonstrates that this rate (or ratio) decreases historically and tendentially (i.e., not in a simple and linear fashion, but through an irregular trend) in relation to the increased organic composition of capital; that is, to the relationship within the total capital advanced by the capitalist between the constant and variable parts. As we will see, the constant part tends to increase, thus increasing the organic composition and the quantity K, to which S is referred in the determination of the rate of profit; and this thus decreases. This occurs due to the increased productivity of labour, due to the relative decrease in V, in living labour, which sets in motion, or valorises, a greater quantity of C, dead capital, constant capital. We will now attempt to clarify and document what has been outlined in a very schematic way, through quotations from part 3 mentioned above.

Marx addresses the problem by highlighting, in particular, in the development of capitalist production the relative decrease in variable capital in relation to constant capital, and therefore to the total capital valorised by the proletarian class:

‘This is just another way of saying that owing to the distinctive methods of production developing in the capitalist system the same number of labourers, i.e., the same quantity of labour-power set in motion by a variable capital of a given value, operate, work up and productively consume in the same time span an ever-increasing quantity of means of labour, machinery and fixed capital of all sorts, raw and auxiliary materials – and consequently a constant capital of an ever-increasing value. This continual relative decrease of the variable capital vis-a-vis the constant, and consequently the total capital, is identical with the progressively higher organic composition of the social capital in its average. It is likewise just another expression for the progressive development of the social productivity of labour, which is demonstrated precisely by the fact that the same number of labourers, in the same time, i.e., with less labour, convert an ever-increasing quantity of raw and auxiliary materials into products, thanks to the growing application of machinery and fixed capital in general’ (Capital, III, I).

Further on, Marx explains how, even in the face of the expansion of total capital, this incorporates a relatively smaller part of surplus labour and living labour, although proletarian exploitation expressed by the rate of surplus value may increase:

‘The law of the falling rate of profit, which expresses the same, or even a higher, rate of surplus-value, states, in other words, that any quantity of the average social capital, say, a capital of 100, comprises an ever larger portion or means of labour, and an ever smaller portion of living labour. Therefore, since the aggregate mass of living labour operating the means of production decreases in relation to the value of these means of production, it follows that the unpaid labour and the portion of value in which it is expressed must decline as compared to the value of the advanced total capital. Or: An ever smaller aliquot part of invested total capital is converted into living labour, and this total capital, therefore, absorbs in proportion to its magnitude less and less surplus-labour, although the unpaid part of the labour applied may at the same time grow in relation to the paid part’.

A little further on, in a powerful page, Marx demonstrates that the tendency for the rate of profit to fall increasingly yokes the proletariat to the productive madness of capital, necessarily driven precisely by the fall in the rate of profit to the invasion of the world with its commodities, laden with proletarian sweat and profit for the capitalist, which the latter must realise on the ‘free market’:

‘The number of labourers employed by capital, hence the absolute mass of the labour set in motion by it, and therefore the absolute mass of surplus-labour absorbed by it, the mass of the surplus-value produced by it, and therefore the absolute mass of the profit produced by it, can, consequently, increase, and increase progressively, in spite of the progressive drop in the rate of profit. And this not only can be so. Aside from temporary fluctuations it must be so, on the basis of capitalist production’.

The law of the tendential fall, however, also derives from the whole complex phenomenon of the capitalist economy and from the production relations underlying it, which is why the capitalists and their ideologues, the economists, have a distorted view of it, limiting themselves to the surface or appearance and unwilling or unable, for class reasons, to examine the root causes:

‘The phenomenon, springing from the nature of the capitalist mode of production, that increasing productivity of labour implies a drop in the price of the individual commodity, or of a certain mass of commodities, an increase in the number of commodities, a reduction in the mass of profit on the individual commodity and in the rate of profit on the aggregate of commodities, and an increase in the mass of profit on the total quantity of commodities – this phenomenon appears on the surface only in a reduction of the mass of profit on the individual commodity, a fall in its price, an increase in the mass of profit on the augmented total number of commodities produced by the total social capital or an individual capitalist. It then appears as if the capitalist adds less profit to the price of the individual commodity of his own free will, and makes up for it through the greater number of commodities he produces. This conception rests upon the notion of profit upon alienation, which, in its turn, is deduced from the conception of merchant capital’.

Continuing his examination of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, Marx emphasises precisely the tendential character of this law, and in two chapters of Part III he demonstrates that antagonistic factors act against it (increase in the degree of labour exploitation, reduction of wages below their value, decrease in the price of elements of constant capital, relative overpopulation, foreign trade, growth of share capital) and that these slow down the fall, which would otherwise be much faster:

‘We have thus seen in a general way that the same influences which produce a tendency in the general rate of profit to fall, also call forth counter-effects, which hamper, retard, and partly paralyse this fall. The latter do not do away with the law, but impair its effect. Otherwise, it would not be the fall of the general rate of profit, but rather its relative slowness, that would be incomprehensible. Thus, the law acts only as a tendency. And it is only under certain circumstances and only after long periods that its effects become strikingly pronounced’.

We remind today’s theorists of productivity-linked wages, ‘income policy’, and ‘fair’ wages what Marx demonstrates in this essential passage:

‘The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is bound up with a tendency of the rate of surplus-value to rise, hence with a tendency for the rate of labour exploitation to rise. Nothing is more absurd, for this reason, than to explain the fall in the rate of profit by a rise in the rate of wages, although this may be the case by way of an exception [Mr Wilson is quite right, boasting of never having read Capital and of not seeking inspiration in Highgate Cemetery!]. Statistics is not able to make actual analyses of the rates of wages in different epochs and countries, until the conditions which shape the rate of profit are thoroughly understood. The rate of profit does not fall because labour becomes less productive, but because it becomes more productive. Both the rise in the rate of surplus-value and the fall in the rate of profit are but specific forms through which growing productivity of labour is expressed under capitalism’.

This is why the world of economics, despite the mountains of statistics compiled and made available to ‘scholars’ by mountains of research offices, appears increasingly incomprehensible and obscure to capitalists, and their theorists cannot and will not acknowledge Marx’s diagnosis, because acknowledging it would mean admitting that capitalism is only a historical mode of production, and as such transitory. The direct reaffirmation of the transience of capitalism, which is equivalent to a cry of struggle and revolt on the part of the increasingly exploited and oppressed masses (we rightly said that Capital is not a study book, but a battle programme), can be found in the passages we include at the end of this first part.

‘On the other hand, the rate of self-expansion of the total capital, or the rate of profit, being the goad of capitalist production (just as self-expansion of capital is its only purpose), its fall checks the formation of new independent capitals and thus appears as a threat to the development of the capitalist production process. It breeds over-production, speculation, crises, and surplus-capital alongside surplus-population. Those economists, therefore, who, like Ricardo, regard the capitalist mode of production as absolute, feel at this point that it creates a barrier itself, and for this reason attribute the barrier to Nature (in the theory of rent), not to production. But the main thing about their horror of the falling rate of profit is the feeling that capitalist production meets in the development of its productive forces a barrier which has nothing to do with the production of wealth as such; and this peculiar barrier testifies to the limitations and to the merely historical, transitory character of the capitalist mode of production; testifies that for the production of wealth, it is not an absolute mode, moreover, that at a certain stage it rather conflicts with its further development’.

And again.

‘The limitations of the capitalist mode of production come to the surface: 1) In that the development of the productivity of labour creates out of the falling rate of profit a law which at a certain point comes into antagonistic conflict with this development and must be overcome constantly through crises. 2) In that the expansion or contraction of production are determined by the appropriation of unpaid labour and the proportion of this unpaid labour to materialised labour in general, or, to speak the language of the capitalists, by profit and the proportion of this profit to the employed capital, thus by a definite rate of profit, rather than the relation of production to social requirements, i.e., to the requirements of socially developed human beings. It is for this reason that the capitalist mode of production meets with barriers at a certain expanded stage of production which, if viewed from the other premise, would reversely have been altogether inadequate. It comes to a standstill at a point fixed by the production and realisation of profit, and not the satisfaction of requirements (...)

‘The rate of profit is the motive power of capitalist production. Things are produced only so long as they can be produced with a profit. Hence the concern of the English economists over the decline of the rate of profit. The fact that the bare possibility of this happening should worry Ricardo, shows his profound understanding of the conditions of capitalist production. It is that which is held against him, it is his unconcern about “human beings”, and his having an eye solely for the development of the productive forces, whatever the cost in human beings and capital-values – it is precisely that which is the important thing about him. Development of the productive forces of social labour is the historical task and justification of capital. This is just the way in which it unconsciously creates the material requirements of a higher mode of production. What worries Ricardo is the fact that the rate of profit, the stimulating principle of capitalist production, the fundamental premise and driving force of accumulation, should be endangered by the development of production itself. And here the quantitative proportion means everything. There is, indeed, something deeper behind it, of which he is only vaguely aware. It comes to the surface here in a purely economic way – i.e., from the bourgeois point of view, within the limitations of capitalist understanding, from the standpoint of capitalist production itself – that it has its barrier, that it is relative, that it is not an absolute, but only a historical mode of production corresponding to a definite limited epoch in the development of the material requirements of production’.

This vibrant curse by Marx on the world of commodities, the market, competition, or ‘competitive emulation’, and the revolutionary affirmation of its transitory nature, we, bound by the same thread, claim them today as we did then, for the same objectives, and throw them back in the face of the ruling class.

In the Party’s work published from time to time in our press, we have amply demonstrated the subjection of the capitalist economy to the Marxist law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, verifying it on the basis of industrial production indices. The reason for this reference, which is not arbitrary, lies in the need to rely on universally accepted statistical data in order to avoid any accusation of using convenient data: our data, in fact, generally comes from statistics provided by either the UN or the statistical institutes of the different countries under examination. Now, the most apparent difference between our studies and what has been seen above lies in the fact that Marx, in his theoretical work, speaks of a fall in the rate of profit, whereas we verify the efficacy of the same law on industrial production data. In reality, this reference, in finding the tendency to decrease, is fully legitimate and responds to the exigency of availing oneself of constant reference points in the impossibility of obtaining reliable data on the organic composition and on its variations within the total social capital.

Let us denote by K₁ = C₁ + V₁ the total capital advanced in year 1 and by S₁ the surplus value. Assuming that all this surplus value is reinvested instead of being consumed by capitalists (which obviously is an extreme theoretical case), the total capital advanced in the following year becomes K₂ = C₁ + V₁+ S₁. The variable part of this capital, V₂ (represented by V₁ to which a fraction of S₁) has just been added), will produce a new surplus value, S₂. The rate of profit for this second year will therefore be:

p₂ =

S₂ K₂

Let us now consider things from a material perspective, rather than from the point of view of values. Physical production in year 1 can be represented by an index (the industrial production index furnished by different statistical offices) which represents the stock of commodities produced, whose value corresponds precisely to C₁ + V₁ + S₁. The same reasoning for the following year shows that the index of physical quantities corresponds to the value K₂+ S₂, that is C₁+ V₁+ S₁+ S₂. Now, what is meant by a relative increase in industrial production? The gross increase from one year to another relative to the starting year: that is, in our example:

(index year 2)-(index year 1) (index year 1)

Compared with what has been said above, we see that this corresponds (provided that all surplus value is capitalised and the organic composition of capital does not change from one year to the next) to:

(C₁+V₁+S₁+S₂)-(C₁+V₁+S₁) C₁+V₁+S₁

=

S₂ K₁+S₁

=

S₂ K₂

Although it cannot be said that there is a perfect identity between the historical evolution of the relative increase in industrial production and that of the rate of profit, given the simplifying assumptions that were necessary to us, it can therefore be said that these two quantities are linked, and that the evolution of one, which can be easily followed thanks to the abundant statistics from bourgeois sources, informs us about the evolution of the other, which bourgeois statistics instead shroud in mystery.

Here is how, in no. 17, 1957 of Il Programma Comunista, we clarified the limitations of referring solely to industrial production:

‘The quantity of the global industrial product is not an essential one in a Marxist study, and for obvious reasons, the main ones of which we will examine in more detail later in this study. First of all, the industrial economy alone is insufficient for the study of a historical mode of production, insofar as it leaves aside the chronological events of agricultural produce, which, when considered, raises far less glorious notes than those of the production of manufactures, and especially when related to population growth. These on the other side, even for industry, should be composed with those of global production, forming tables and index curves not for the entire product, but for its ratio to the population of the corresponding year (...) Capitalist industrial production does not even include that part of the agrarian economy conducted as capitalist industry, i.e. by tenant entrepreneurs and generally with the mass labour of wage-earners. Such a criterion would be to the advantage of England and also Italy, if taken into account. And it would give a better idea of the development of the bourgeois form in many transoceanic countries.

‘Furthermore, the index of the industrial yield of manufactures indiscriminately unites in itself dead labour and living labour in Marx’s sense, i.e. capital that passes inertly through production and reappears unchanged, and capital that labour power adds to it in production, and which bourgeois economists have, through clenched teeth, begun to call added value for some decades, falsely usurping our terminology. This confusion, which remains intact in the subtle determination of “per capita income”, as it would remain in the determination of global industrial production indices reduced to equal population, serves to conceal the existence of classes and the monopoly of dead labour, whether it be exercised by a physical class, or by a capitalist State and manager of the mercantile enterprise-form, favouring foreign or indigenous classes’.

That said, the objective that our research in this field has pursued and continues to pursue is clear: 1) To demonstrate, on the basis of the same statistical data furnished by the bourgeois, the full validity of the Marxist law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, in which the historical condemnation of capitalism is also implicit; 2) To refute the Stalinist thesis according to which the socialist character of the Soviet economic structure would be demonstrated by the high and ever-increasing rates of production growth compared to those recorded in the West, proving, with statistics in hand, that the same tendency towards a fall in annual rates of production growth also exists in the USSR. From the podium of the 20th Congress, Khrushchev proclaimed that in 1965, by virtue of its high production growth rates, Russia would have caught up with America. Even then, we predicted the baselessness of this assertion (and events proved us spectacularly right) and we accused the post-Stalinists of being worse than their spiritual father, because they were focusing entirely on the supposed economic competition with the capitalist West, while Stalin saw in his dreams, albeit distorted ones, the Red Army of the USSR, economically enlarged, spreading across the lands of a bourgeois world decadent and asphyxiated. Stalin and Khrushchev’s predictions have not come true, nor could they; and now both world blocs are subject to the Marxist law of decreasing growth operating in the East as in the West, since the economic root of the two production and state machines that, as gendarmes of the counter-revolution, divide control of the world between them is the same. The crisis that will engulf the world of commodities and wage labour, both in the East and in the West, will also be the same, again by virtue of the fundamental law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

In this regard, we report some quotes from studies that have appeared regularly in our newspaper on the course of capitalist economies in both the West and the East.

Il Programma Comunista no.16, 1957:

‘Proof of the socialist form has been sought in the alleged greater production achieved in Russia, confusing the relationship between the gross mass of the product, the social quantity obtained, and the social effort involved, and confusing this concept – whose Marxist unit of measurement is only one: time; that is, in capitalism the worker is left with a quarter of his day, in socialism a drastically greater proportion, at least double, and this with equal “technical productivity”, which is another matter altogether – with the rate of increase in annual production. It was claimed that Russia beat the West in this comparison. We responded to this colossal lie, the basis of all Stalinist propaganda and that of its various descendants, in the writings known as “Dialogue with Stalin” and “Dialogue with the Dead”, stating that both the fact and its explanation were false. That capitalism in general rapidly accelerates its gross production from year to year when it is “young”, when it emerges from a war, especially if lost, when it emerges from a crisis, and in general when it has the leisure to crush the labour force more under the wage machine. Having proven this by looking to the East, it is a matter of now proving it by looking to the West. The adversary is different but says the same thing: the capitalist mode of production is capable of increasing social welfare indefinitely, reducing the average effort, avoiding wars and crises, and what we expect from them, the Revolution’.

Again from Il Programma Comunista no. 17, 1957:

‘The apology for so-called Soviet socialism has been conducted for decades on the basis of a comparison between industrial production development indices, spreading the falsifying thesis that the same thermometer can be used to measure the vital heat of the bourgeois and socialist forms, that is, increasingly sinking into the doctrine of competitive emulation between states and “systems”.

‘The same verification of the “speed in the race for production” is applied by opportunists to the economies of different countries to demonstrate that this race is won by modern Russia and that, consequently, its economic structure is socialist. Starting from the demonstration that such a verdict by the judge at the finish line is contestable for obvious falsehood, we want to remind proletarians that the insane speed of the race to produce is nothing but the greatest of shames of the bourgeois system, and at the same time the greatest scientific proof of its necessary historical end, and that this race will not be accelerated, but broken and slowed down by the victory of the socialist revolution’.

In the univocality of the race to produce, we can recognise how unique the capitalist soul of the two supposedly opposing blocs is.

Over the years from 1957 onwards, we demonstrated the validity of the historically decreasing relative increase for the four major Western countries (England, France, Germany, USA), starting from 1859, and providing for Russia alone a table starting from 1913, with the repetition of the analogous law of decrease. We then provided another table grouping no longer 4 but 7 countries (in addition to the four aforementioned, Russia, Japan, and Italy), and we were able to demonstrate that in the post-war period the rate of Russian increase placed the industrialism of the USSR in only 8th place behind bourgeois Germany and Japan, refuting the Stalinist proof of the socialist character of production, unless one wanted to assign a socialist ‘content’ to the Japanese or German economies! These proofs allowed us to vigorously affirm before the world proletariat, both the capitalist character of the USSR and the subjection of world capitalism to the law of decreasing relative increase: a law which, in concluding our study, we verified for the capitalist world economy as a whole.

By dividing the period studied into four cycles, lasting 33, 21, 16, 27 years respectively, we obtained average indices of 4.9; 5.1; 2.4; 4.1 respectively. This index is still discontinuous and only tends to decrease, because within it acts, as a powerful brake on the fall, the tumultuous development of capitalism in Russia. The tendency to decrease asserts itself instead in an unequivocal way if we divide the period 1859-1956 into two long cycles of 54 and 43 years, which give indices of 5 and 3.5 for the whole world.

Thus we commented on these data: ‘No glorious industrialisation is harmed when we discover in its forward march the inexorable law of decreasing growth, proper to all physical and organic growth’. Such was and is our vehement affirmation of the ‘physiological’ character of the law that the Stalinists believed they had disproved and which they were instead forced to suffer. Il Programma Comunista, no. 23, 1957:

‘The decreasing relative increase is, after all, proper to every phenomenon of development in nature, and not only in organic beings. In oral presentations, the example was taken of a sphere that swells around its centre with a layer of equal thickness in equal units of time, as in galvanic metallisation or similar processes. From radius one to radius two to radius three, the surfaces of the sphere become one, four, nine, and the volumes one, eight, twenty-seven... The sphere therefore grows. And at each moment, its gross growth is always greater; it suffices to make the subtraction: seven, nineteen, thirty-seven... But the relative increase is another thing, namely the gross increase divided by the previous volume (or mass). If I calculate the ratios of the new series: seven divided by one; nineteen divided by eight; thirty-seven divided by twenty-seven, here is a nice descending series, which I write in decimal figures: 7.00; 2.38; 1.47; 0.95... Is the sphere getting bigger? Certainly. Is its weight increasing with each passing hour by a greater amount of metal? Of course. But the percentage increase steadily decreases from 700% in the first hour to 95% in the fourth...

‘Pretending that their industry would swell by violating this law, the Russians made their first mistake; pretending that this is the symptom of the transition from capitalism to socialism, they made a second, even more foolish mistake; and after all this, they assume that they are exponents of an enormous progress in mass culture! The increase in production explodes only once in history: when parcelled production gives way to mass corporate production. Then it inexorably recedes. When socialist production arises, the reduction in daily working hours will explode, and the volume of the product will halt in the modern madness of its increase’.

As can be seen from the quotation, the error of the Russians was double. Not only did they pretend to have disproved the law of diminishing increase, but they replaced it with a gradualist, reformist, anti-revolutionary vision of the transition from capitalism to socialism. They denied a firm point of Marxism: revolutionary catastrophism. They accepted ‘comparison’, the feeble theory of models; they reaccepted all the reformist rubbish that the 3rd International, violently breaking with social-democratic reformism, had fought against; thus providing further proof that they abandoned the trenches of revolution; that they dreamed of the social system that spoke through their mouths as eternal, progressive, unlimited; and that they shared the same horror as the English capitalists of Marx’s time in the face of falling profit rates.

They abandoned catastrophism and the theory of crisis that we have always claimed as cardinal in all of Marxism, and whose roots are not to be sought in our theoretical ‘hobby’, but in the very nature of capitalist production, as we see it outlined in the words of Marx (again in Part III of Book III):

‘The creation of this surplus-value makes up the direct process of production, which, as we have said, has no other limits but those mentioned above. As soon as all the surplus-labour it was possible to squeeze out has been embodied in commodities, surplus-value has been produced. But this production of surplus-value completes but the first act of the capitalist process of production – the direct production process. Capital has absorbed so and so much unpaid labour. With the development of the process, which expresses itself in a drop in the rate of profit, the mass of surplus-value thus produced swells to immense dimensions. Now comes the second act of the process. The entire mass of commodities, i.e., the total product, including the portion which replaces the constant and variable capital, and that representing surplus-value, must be sold. If this is not done, or done only in part, or only at prices below the prices of production, the labourer has been indeed exploited, but his exploitation is not realised as such for the capitalist, and this can be bound up with a total or partial failure to realise the surplus-value pressed out of him, indeed even with the partial or total loss of the capital’.

The productive damnation of capital clashes violently against the limits of the market. Surplus value must be realised on the market. At this juncture, we await capital swollen with commodities to the point of bursting, and we will wait to deliver the decisive blow. Faced with a capitalism having reached its extreme phase, the Party’s task is not to succumb to productivist ideology, but to violently cut into its material roots. We also claimed the complete Marxist programme for the ‘immediate’ part of its realisation by the victorious proletarian dictatorship in several countries, whose task today cannot be to accept productivism or to boast of high production increases, but to cut drastically into it, eliminating useless and harmful production branches, sources of social waste; increasing production costs; reducing working hours, disinvesting from industry; controlling consumption; exercising dictatorial control over mass media: in other words, acting in the opposite direction to what is done today in the USSR touted as socialist.

If, as we have seen, the tendential fall in the rate of profit and of the relative increase in industrial production is an inescapable law of the current production system, and a consequence of the increased organic composition of capital and the subjugation of science and technology to the imperatives of the production machine; if this tendency knocks at the door of capital, its reaction will be to try to increase the mass of profit by increasing the mass of commodities produced; it will be to flood the whole world with its commodities. Capital will try to react to the fall of its life-giving fire by increasing proletarian exploitation (increasing relative surplus value) and by further subjugating science and technology to itself in order to further increase labour productivity; but in doing so, it will only energise the natural tendency towards an increase in the \(C/V\) ratio and thus will find itself facing the same problems on a larger scale. This outcome is present in the consciousness of capitalists themselves, albeit in a distorted way; they write and say that for every new job created by them (!) the necessary capital investments are always greater, and the more modern and advanced the production branch or the nation to which they refer, the greater it is. They themselves therefore recognise the tendency towards the domination of dead capital, the increase in labour productivity, the necessary spread of capitalism throughout the world. It is from these roots that the vitality of capital originates, its grandiose drive, the categorical imperative that orders it to produce, and behind which lies the necessity to sell as the inevitable end of the cycle.

Thus the politics of power arises, menacing imperialism, state totalitarianism, the division of the world, crises, wars. The economic characteristics of imperialism are nothing new; they represent the paroxysmal extension of the characteristics of classical capitalism; they are inherent in the development of the capitalist mode of production; they are capitalism’s resources for prolonging its life at a time when its contradictions become increasingly more explosive, increasingly more uncontrollable, and every crisis, every disturbance calls into question the very existence of the system.

Here is how we described the phenomenon:

‘The doctrine of crises is already in Marx, and he identified in them a decennial period (the years studied by him are approximately 1846, 1856, 1866, and this will be presented later), but these crises of young capitalism are much less significant and are more in the nature of crises of international trade than of the industrial machine. They do not undermine the potential of the industrial structure, which today is called productive capacity, and which is the limit of global production if all existing plants were to operate at full capacity. Those were “chômage” crises, i.e. the closure, or shutdown, of industries; these modern ones, crises of disintegration of the entire system, which afterwards must laboriously reconstruct its damaged framework’.

Lenin entitled a concluding chapter of Imperialism precisely to this characteristic: ‘Parasitism and decay of capitalism’. Here we find the perfect link between today and yesterday, the identity of positions and programme, and therefore the identity of the Party’s action.

In the imperialist phase, all the contradictions of capitalism are interconnected, forming an inextricable Gordian knot. Hic Rhodus hic salta. Imperialism, in its economic and political reality, denies by its mere existence any spurious and reformist claim and reaffirms in all its vividness the vigour of Marxist theory and action living in the International Communist Party.

Today, capitalism, having concluded the business of the Second World War, sees its safety valves closing again. The need to ruthlessly dominate the division of the world is asserted with an iron fist against those who question it; peoples who struggle for national independence are martyred; while petty-bourgeois anti-imperialism, whether pro-Russian or pro-Chinese, which constitutes only the ‘good conscience’ of real imperialism, exhausts its pacifist, democratic, and humanitarian batteries. If there is a problem today, it is that of the communist revolution throughout the world. We do not close our eyes to Vietnam or the Middle East (and we note the ridiculous impotence of anti-imperialist pacifism in the face of these infamous tragedies), to the martyrdom of the former colonial peoples, to the economic and military oppression of the so-called Third World; but we repeat that the only real, immediate task is to struggle for the reconstruction of the revolutionary proletarian communist Party throughout the world.

The only way to solve the problems it has caused is to destroy imperialism. Only the red dictatorship in the developed countries will be able to resolve the national issues that fester under imperialist rule. There are no more intermediate goals, reforms to be achieved, fellow comrades to journey with, joint actions to be carried out; what must be placed on the historical agenda, as a collective necessity, is the advent of a higher social form across the entire planet: Communism.