This is not ‘Black Friday’, but its spasmodic, eagerly awaited eve. May the charlatan and his filthy serpent die: the rabble of bourgeois ideologues and the poisonous regime of Capital.

Is this perspective enough? That’s all, for the wage-earning class. The certainty that their chains will be broken forever is no longer a ‘dream’ of thinkers. The facts, the so often invoked facts, on which the opportunist plays his cards to beguile the worker, worn out by the factory at an inhuman pace, offer no alternatives. The science is impotent, the propaganda twisted. In the Corriere della Sera of 21 August, Cesare Zappulli, a candid soul, wrote: ‘But this matter of the balance of payments is another of the unfathomable mysteries of monetary economics, not being able to see how all countries can simultaneously claim to have them in surplus, that is, to be in credit vis-à-vis the outside world. Who then will be the debtor?’

The ‘mysteries’ of capitalist economics, it is true, are a puzzle. Everything under the regime of capital is a mystery and a puzzle. Even the so-called exact sciences. One lives under the banner of ‘utility’, of what is profitable, of mors tua, vita mea. For over a century since that certain Karl Marx, vilified, distorted, or mocked, identified the date of death of science in every field: that is, when the bourgeois class, still revolutionary, having conquered political power, had to trample the interests of the human species, the interests of the future, under the feet of its own class interests. Since then, there is no more science, no more search for objective truth, but only the subjugation of nature to the needs of an exploiting class based on the labour carried out by another class, the proletarian.

They are the jokes of mathematics and reason. Reason, with its philosophy, in order not to deny Capital and Wage Labour, has had to return to the already vilified God. But what does God Almighty have to do with the Law of Gravity! Infinitesimal calculus does not make Fisher’s ‘equation of exchange’ work out, and so, to put the old boat of bad conscience back on track, the brilliant ‘theory of extrapolation’ is invented. It is convenient, far too convenient, gentlemen ‘scientists’. Marx admonished you with the Poet: ‘Here must all distrust be left; All cowardice must here be dead’!

And the knots come to the comb. Every day, every moment. The regime crashes against the wall of its natural contradictions – that is, inherent in its nature – while attempting to involve the class that, unaware, sustains it with its precious, irreplaceable physical labour.

Not to be showy, but we could also write ‘a classical reading of economics’. Ricardo’s ‘heirs’ are ‘legitimate’ Marxists: that is to say, paraphrasing Marx, that ‘classical economics is the proletariat that had the courage to rebel’. Ricardo had the strong suspicion that his economics was selling capitalist commodities. He did not, however, have the courage to cross the supreme dividing line that separated him from revolutionary Marxism!

To discuss, therefore, the recent, past, and even future economic imbroglios in which the capitalist system ensnares itself, it has not been enough to resort to self-styled ‘Marxists’ or ‘interpretive’ doctrines. It is the modern ideologues, well aided by their opportunist tailists, who claim to forge ‘new’ so-called neo-capitalist theories, just as, in their time, neo-colonialist and imperialist ones were attempted.

Imperialism? Imperialism does not alter the structure of the modern economy. It is a superstructure. Finance capital is not a new category birthed by bourgeois imagination. Finance capital is the sublimation of capital tout court. The concept of capital is, in Marx, unitary, like the concept of exchange value itself; whereas for the bourgeois, both Capital and Value become capitals and values. Every commodity has value, a value determined by a single and univocal economic law (discovered by Marx), not by the thousand circumstances that, combining into a kaleidoscope of causes and into a kaleidoscope of causes and co-causes, make the bourgeois say: value, this unknown!

Lenin, citing Hilferding’s definition and endorsing it, adds, however, that it is incomplete with regard to monopolistic concentration. This is the quotation: ‘A steadily increasing proportion of capital in industry ceases to belong to the industrialists who employ it. They obtain the use of it only through the medium of the banks which, in relation to them, represent the owners of the capital. On the other hand, the bank is forced to sink an increasing share of its funds in industry. Thus, to an ever greater degree the banker is being transformed into an industrial capitalist. This bank capital, i.e., capital in money form, which is thus actually transformed into industrial capital, I call “finance capital” (...) Finance capital is capital controlled by banks and employed by industrialists’. (Lenin, Imperialism).

Didn’t Marx know this? We quote from the Third Book of Capital: ‘[W]ith the development of large-scale industry, money-capital, so far as it appears on the market, is not represented by some individual capitalist, not the owner of one or another fraction of the capital in the market, but assumes the nature of a concentrated, organised mass, which, quite different from actual production, is subject to the control of bankers, i.e., the representatives of social capital’. Industrial activity, that is, depends exclusively on banks, on money-capital.

The capitalist economy, therefore, does not cease to be founded on value and its valorisation, money being merely a ‘fantastic’ expression, in the same way as the convertibility into gold and silver of all securities, including monetary tokens.

Monetary crises reveal the ‘mystery’ of the capitalist economy, they uncover its transience, they lay bare the fallacy of all doctrinaire reverie.

Honest Trade and Welfare are two categories that pseudo-scientific propaganda likes to wield in order to ‘extrapolate’ from the laws of economics. These laws (the word might lead one to consider the economic mechanism eternal, like the cosmic one) condition this mode of production, not all modes of production. The bourgeois pretends that the economic system on which he lives and profiteers never croaks, because, as a bourgeois, he would croak with it. When things prove him wrong, he then drags in aesthetic or moral categories. In the style of Proudhon. Basically, the bourgeois is left with the mentality of the petty bourgeois. The developed capitalist economy tends to dispose of this antediluvian tool by replacing it with an army of hired servants: where it is confirmed that the human beast, in class society, becomes more and more of a beast.

On this fateful mid-August night, a loudspeaker announces to the astonished world that, from now on, the debts of the American state, contracted through the issuance of a deluge of paper money, supremely legal, blessed, and even coveted beyond the Curtain, will be paid off at 80% of their original value. Fierce news for dollar holders. In a single stroke, the hill drops by 20%. The non-American capitalists despair, but dare not invoke the sacred laws of economics: the exchange of equivalents. The theft is there. No one dares to complain.

The theft is far less filthy than that which is perpetrated daily against the wage-earning class. The wage-earner is told: Here is as much money as we have paid for so many hours of labour: not a penny more, but not a penny less either. The conscience of the boss, the manager, the president, or, if you like, the financial capitalist, who, however you turn it, has to keep the ship afloat starting from this ‘honest’ exchange, is calm. But the fistful of coins given to the worker at the end of the damned working day is only equal to the value of the commodities that he must consume in order to be useful to capital again; it is not equal to the value he has produced in the same time. A value three to four times greater. Marx, catching the economists of his time and of today and tomorrow red-handed, if they manage to survive, enlightens them: you have not bought the worker’s labour, but his capacity to work, his labour power! This force produces much more than it receives in the form of wages. Hence surplus value, the theft of profit, of ground rent, and of all the parasitic freeloaders.

Nixon’s ‘joke’ is part of the game. At the green table, the rules are ironclad: it does not matter whether you lose or win, but that the game continues. Theft between capitalists is normal. What is abnormal is that the proletarian class continues to be plundered by the capitalist class. The false law of equivalents has collapsed even among the bourgeois. What a flimsy law!

The inventors of the theory of Well-Being or Welfare are the Anglo-Saxons. In proletarian words, it is formulated as follows: produce more while saving.

Let’s not remind ourselves that this drivel came out when those American sorcerers immediately seized on Russian ‘peaceful coexistence’. Sure, the great Curtain had to be overcome with a ‘peace offensive’ blessed by priests of all political colours. In particular, this sounded like a blessing from the red priests, useful for keeping the worker giant prone.

Let’s see how. What does it mean to produce more while saving? It is in prosaic language a hoax, in scientific language a false theory. Saving ultimately means consuming less net product or surplus value. Consuming less surplus value and producing more means making the net product increase. How do we deal with this then? Who consumes the growing increase of the net product? It is one mystery among many, of which the monetary mechanism is a reflection. We would like to turn it over to that journalist from Corriere della Sera. He would not answer, he is entangled in the columns of the credit and debit account. Here, instead, one must get entangled in quite another account: that of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Alas, it is the fall of the Gods, which neither the journalist nor the capitalist likes to think about.

The unconsumed surplus goes to capital! The little scoundrels, in order to divert the proletarian’s irreconcilable hatred, tell him about the bourgeois’s shameless idleness in their villas, in defiance of the worker, in order to conceal from him the true destination of the profit of enterprise. An increasing part of the profit must go to value-‘producing’ investments, that is, to faster and more perfected machines in order to increase labour productivity. For a time, the mechanism works. Prices tend to fall relatively, because the same value is now confined in an increased mass of commodities. But in the end comes the crash: the market is saturated with unused capital. The rate of profit plummets. The production system also plummets.

Here is Welfare. Capitalist mythology.

The capitalist ideal would be C = M, that the value of the commodities produced would always be exchangeable with the mass of monetary tokens in circulation. This perpetual motion of exchange would prevent any monetary crisis. No periodic commercial collapse would afflict capitalist society. It is easy to recognise in this formula the utopia of the petty bourgeoisie, and of false workers’ parties: the ‘honest’ trade demanded by the weak and the dominated. Commodity producers go to the market where they find possessors of money, which they exchange with each other. The new possessor of money, with this, as an entrepreneur, repurchases means of production on the market; and the new possessor of commodities can always exchange them for money. The river of production flows between banks of milk and honey of mutual interests’ respect.

However, at a certain level of development of production, due to credit, the first disturbances are felt.

Credit, like a spring, has triggered the most latent energies of the production mechanism. More commodities and also more monetary tokens appear on the market, as is to be expected. But these monetary tokens take on a different function from traditional exchange currency. They have a life independent from the exchange of commodities. They are bought and sold as commodities. It would make no sense to exchange linen with linen, tables with tables. It means that the tokens being exchanged have different content and therefore also different form and function. So it is. At first, gold, the ‘autonomous embodiment of social wealth’, is exchanged for paper money, then the most disparate securities, such as bills of exchange, cheques, etc.

The exchange C = M could still function only if one could know not only the magnitude on the market of the mass of C, but also that of M. So long as one exchanged against gold and silver this was possible. But since anyone can produce bills of exchange and cheques, in complete freedom, the magnitude of the mass of these value-signs is completely unknown. It is unpredictable. Since then, i.e. since securities have supplanted gold and silver in commerce, the presence of crises is always latent. The more the market expands, the more the function of credit money supplants metal, the more unstable and precarious commerce becomes. At the slightest hitch, the mad rush to convert credit money (bills of exchange, cheques, etc.) into bank money and this into gold and silver begins. This is what happened on the ‘grey’ Ferragosto.

National currencies, they too being credit signs, have the same function as other paper instruments, with the difference that they should have a certain gold content, a given proportion between the number of coins issued and the actual stock of gold and silver deposited in the vaults of central banks.

The ‘drama’ of the dollar has consisted and consists precisely in this. It was claimed to be detached from the value of gold by continuing to print paper money at breakneck speed. If the additional paper money had been backed by an equal increase of gold in the bank’s reserves, nothing would have happened. However, this correspondence not having occurred, the increase in the mass of dollars has meant their depreciation relative to gold, further diminishing the gold content of the currency. Thus the pressure on gold has been twofold: on one side, that of dollars in circulation and, on the other, that of other credit instruments on dollars. The inconvertibility of dollars into gold has been matched by the inconvertibility of credit instruments into dollars. Production at this point threatened to grind to a halt.

Credit crunch, therefore, as an immediate measure. But then the utilisation of the productive forces would have fallen further from 80% and the monetary crisis would have triggered the production crisis. Indeed, the persistence of the monetary crisis and its international dimensions really threaten production. And the monetary crisis could turn into a production crisis not only American but worldwide.

Initially, the monetary crisis disrupts not the production of profit but its realisation. That is, capitalists see the conversion of profits into money on the market curtailed. Consequently, with the persistence of this state of precariousness, they cease to produce, because they would produce without profit. ‘The rate of profit’, comments Marx, Capital, III, ‘is the motive power of capitalist production. Things are produced only so long as they can be produced with a profit’.

Here is the reason for the current so-called neo-protectionist phase in the USA: to put production and with it profit back on the road, with the help of tax cuts in favour of companies and with wage freezes. If, despite tariff protection measures and production incentives, the monetary crisis were to persist, it would induce all other states to take the same measures as the USA, and it would be trade war between States, the antechamber to the general crisis, or to war.

Marx again: ‘The expansion or contraction of production (...) comes to a standstill at a point fixed by the production and realisation of profit, and not the satisfaction of requirements’. The crisis has this function, to recreate the conditions for producing and realising profit, without which the true purpose of capitalist production, which consists in the valorisation of capital and not in consumption, would cease.

When does the possibility of capital valorisation, a sine qua non for the existence of the capitalist mode of production, come to an end? It is Marx again who answers: ‘The stupendous productivity developing under the capitalist mode of production relative to population, and the increase, if not in the same proportion, of capital-values (not just of their material substance), which grow much more rapidly than the population, contradict the basis, which constantly narrows in relation to the expanding wealth, and for which all this immense productiveness works. They also contradict the conditions under which this swelling capital augments its value. Hence the crises’.

In turn, the social character of production and the private character of appropriation constitute the terrain in which this contradiction matures.

We have already seen how, with the development of the means of credit, the possibility of individual appropriation of wealth is extended, each one having the possibility of purchasing commodities against bills of exchange and cheques, certificates of payment with deferred maturity: real mortgages on future labour. And this is the aspect that we can define as superficial, as it manifests itself precisely at the moment of the realisation of values.

The same contradiction occurs in production. Production is social, that is, for masses of wage-earners, who, by virtue of the growing division of labour, use the means of production in common. The production of the net product, surplus value, profit, is therefore social production. What is private is the appropriation of this result of production. Variable capital and constant capital are allocated the net product in unequal parts before exchange. The availability for consumption of the proletarian class is predetermined at the moment of production, not exchange.

The mass of wages grows in absolute terms, due to the increase in the number of wage-earners, but decreases in relation to capital, which tends to increasingly appropriate the net product, depriving the wage-earning class of it.

What does it mean to transform net product into capital? It means transforming into means of production, into machines, tools, etc., conditions of production. The jamming of production, i.e. the crisis, occurs here in the sphere of the use of the means of production, when it would not produce profit, and they cease to be capital.

Thus, the historical mission of the capitalist mode of production, that of increasing the development of the productive forces, is lost. This has been true not since today but for over a century, when the first crises cracked the system and, in a still backward world, immense wealth began to be destroyed. The mission is over. Forever. One crisis follows another. One crisis is the premise of the next. The system remains standing, indeed.

But what force makes this monstrous machine survive itself? That an increasing share of net product is transformed into capital? Even the answer to this question is more than a century old. It is the military, state force of the capitalist regime, which enables the continuous plundering of labour power, the transformation of surplus product into profit and therefore into capital, into a social force, that is, which subjugates the class of proletarians, those without reserves, to wage labour.

The question of power is the current question of the working class. But no amount of violence could subdue the working class if the working class were not subjected to the deceptions, to the bonds that keep it bound to the rotting corpse of the regime. The totality of these deceptions and these bonds has only one name: opportunism.

The monetary crisis of capitalism dramatically re-proposes the crisis of the regime itself. But this crisis will not yet be the resolution of the social clash in favour of the proletariat if opportunism itself does not enter into crisis together with the regime.

Two powerful crises precede the one to come: the 1929-33 crisis and that of 1938 on the eve of World War II. It was then the crisis of the opportunist parties, who subjected the working class to the ups and downs of capitalist society, saving themselves and the system and proving to be their accomplices.

At the twilight of the bourgeois Gods there will follow a new proletarian dawn when the economic and social catastrophe will drag the false and deceitful idols of the defence of the economy, of the fatherland, of democracy, of ‘socialism in one country’, of peace between classes into the dust of irreversible historical defeat.

Our economists have found themselves, unexpectedly, with another tough nut to crack. They have called it ‘stagflation’, i.e. inflation-stagnation. Two simultaneous phenomena of economic disturbance, one in contradiction with the other. Mystery of mysteries. Unfathomable.

The phenomenon occurred for the first time in the USA last year, has crossed the ocean and landed in Europe. It is alive and well today also here in Italy and in mighty Germany.

If the product, instead of being sold at its value, is sold at a price even slightly higher than the price of production, the fall in the profit rate is contained. The expedient works as long as the market is able to absorb the commodities produced and as long as the upward fluctuations of prices relative to value stabilise. It is one of the ‘scientific’ axioms of the St. Louis School, which postulates, indeed, as an economic support, a certain inflation rate.

When, on the other hand, inflation enters into a spiral, such that the prices of all commodities, including that of labour power, chase one another, then it becomes uncontrollable and monetary devaluation abruptly brings prices back to their values and production tends to stagnate with an equally abrupt reduction in both the mass and the average rate of profit. In the meantime, competition, which in a phase of production euphoria is not pronounced, intensifies. Hence protective tariffs, support measures for the various national economies.

This phenomenon of ‘stagflation’ thus characterises the limit of the breakdown of the capitalist economy; it shows how the capitalist mode of production, in order to survive, must resort to artifices from which it is then thrown into a crisis. Which for economists is obviously indecipherable.

The countermeasures taken by the capitalist side to contain the fall in the rate of profit, once the expedients are exhausted, are the well-known and classic ones: containment or reduction of the cost of constant capital and depreciation of labour power, of wages. This is the method the USA is applying. As old as capitalism is old. Simply increase labour productivity to increase the constant capital set in motion by the same mass of wages, obtaining a greater product. Or reduce the mass of wages and increase surplus value. In any case, capitalism can only manoeuvre on the skin of the workers. So-called neo-capitalism can only apply recipes from the last century, from the ‘old capitalism’.

Wage freeze, therefore, and temporary reduction of production, are the bourgeois measures that affect only one of the social classes, the proletarian one. The working class has no other choice but ‘fight or die’.

But the ideologues of capitalism cannot foresee that, with the end of the system they serve, the human race would also not disappear. They no longer dare to claim that this is ‘the best possible world’. This is the case of one of the highest pontiffs of ‘economic science’, Schumpeter, who, in rightly predicting that ‘big business’ cannot last long, foretells the destruction of the world, the suicide of humanity because of this grave loss. Or it is the case of the less tragic Röpke who, also arguing the impossibility of such an unbridled race of large-scale capitalist production, dreams of a return to a petty-bourgeois economy, measured, wise, without shocks. These are visions, the first, of big capital, which, rather than die as a social force, launches its cry of death at socialism, death to the species; the second, of the petty bourgeoisie, fantasising about a production and a society in its own image and likeness. Connected to this second vision is the opportunist one which, by attributing economic, social, and political evils to the ill-will of capitalists and bourgeois rulers, inoculates into workers the tragic illusion that, by implementing changes and reforms to the capitalist system, by replacing the men in power with new men, old parties with new parties, while leaving the economic mechanism intact, capitalism is acceptable.

The historical solution to capitalism is only one: ours, that of revolutionary communism, sinker of the last class-based form of organisation of social labour.

The prospects, therefore, are compatible with the premises. For big capital, the recovery of the capitalist economy rests on a harsher crushing of the proletariat, and its salvation finally in the dissolution of the crisis in a third universal imperialist war. For petty-bourgeois opportunism, the prospect remains economic recovery in a welfare State in which the ‘healthy forces’ of all classes converge, from ‘honest capitalists’ to national bourgeoisies, to the disciplined and industrious working class, free from any revolutionary ambition. For all, salvation is envisaged, all avert collapse.

To the extent that the reserves – which capitalism has accumulated on the backs of wage labourers, in order to distribute them to them through political blackmail agreed with the official leaders of the proletariat in order to keep the working class away from revolutionary resurgence – are depleted, due to the expansion of social misery in the form of rising unemployment, destruction of wealth, and political oppression, the proletariat will be pushed, willingly or unwillingly, towards the only historical road open to it: that of communist revolution, of the violent overthrow of bourgeois state power.

This is our solution and our perspective.

We wrote in 1956: ‘It is not serious if the revolutionary sees the revolution closer than it is; our school has already anticipated it many times: 1848, 1870, 1919. Deformed visions expected it in 1945. It is serious when the revolutionary sets a deadline for obtaining historical proof’.

This wait, for us on the Communist Left, has lasted since 1919. Half a century has passed. Disasters have accumulated upon disasters. But we stand by the twenty-five years of Trotsky, and the fifty years of Lenin, and by our coinciding 1975. Revolution and communism for us are not hypotheses, they are certainty.