The world can be subjected to the rule of reason. This was the challenge thrown down by the revolutionary bourgeoisie during the 19th century. Both natural and social history could be studied according to reason; nature and human progress could be placed under the control of rational man. To build a State and a Society according to reason, ruthlessly destroying everything that opposed it, was the ambitious and mighty programme of a class in historic ascendancy.

The ruinous proceeding of the new mode of production, of which the theory of Reason represented the ideological superstructure, based on relations that increasingly ‘rested on themselves’ and depended less and less on men however powerful and high-ranking they might be; the absolute reification of the political organ of the state by society and of executive power by the state; the social equilibrium achieved not by the harmonious fusion of collaborating individuals, but by their anarchic movement of indifferent and estranged beings, was necessarily bound to lead, on the one hand, to the ignominious collapse of the new Goddess and, on the other, to the birth of Radical Critique, theoretical expression of a real subversive movement present in the bourgeois social body.

Reason abandoned the economic-historical-social sciences in horror. It had glimpsed in the infamous order of its present, the presuppositions of its overcoming and death, which Radical Critique had pronounced in theory and which the proletariat periodically attempted to execute in practice.

In its place came the vulgar sciences, mystification of the present, monument of deceit and blindness of the bourgeois class; deceit more towards itself than towards the opposing historical class: the proletariat. Theories of consolation and justification, their very appearance sounded like a death knell for the ruling class.

A rising class justifies itself with the facts. Historical-social reality is its best justification. It has interest in the truth, because the truth confirms the correctness and necessity of its new order.

Reason was then forced to limit its research only to the natural and exact sciences, and there it achieved important results, not hesitating to use the revolutionary methods of investigation of Radical Critique, rejected with scandal and abomination when it came to applying them to the social sciences.

The knowledge that the human species possesses has developed not through the autonomous work of thought, but through contact with matter and nature. Man is driven to knowledge not by the need for pure spirit and thought, but by the need for the reproduction of life in its most general sense.

This is all the more true in bourgeois society in which all productive forces are subordinated to the need for self-valorising value.

The bourgeoisie’s interest in the natural sciences is therefore not an end in itself. They are powerful productive forces and as such must be monopolised by the bourgeois class. Now, the more and more the natural sciences become the basis of real human life through industry, ‘the real historical relationship of nature to man’ (Marx, Manuscripts...), the more they are really subsumed by Capital.

It is not possible to proceed indefinitely with a rigorously scientific method in one field, and an ideological-mystifying method in another.

The mystification of real human life includes within itself the mystification of its basis, just as the reification of social consciousness proceeds in parallel with the real subsumption of the overall process of life by Capital. The progressive transformation of the natural sciences themselves into mystifying ideology is thus a natural and necessary consequence of their subjugation to the real domination of Capital.

This transformation, on the other hand, should not be understood as a fait accompli, but as a boundary process, as a tendency involving, in breadth and in depth, in different ways, the various sciences.

The scientific results achieved by the various sciences should not be understood as purely ideological inventions, but as the ‘scientifically true’, relatively ‘true’, representation of the real world, attainable within the framework of a historically determined and therefore transitory conception of the world and of history. In this sense, scientific truths are bourgeois and they are not. They are simultaneously true and not true.

Truth is both absolute and relative: absolute insofar as at the given moment it is the one that best defines the essence of reality; relative because such a definition is transitory and as such will be superseded by other, equally true, yet more true ‘truths’.

Human wisdom is in fact the sum of infinite truths-errors, all equally false-true, because they are all capable of explaining and representing the world.

On the basis of bourgeois production, of this historically determined mode of production, bourgeois science is the only ‘true’ one and its ‘truths’, scientific and ideological at the same time, are the only true and possible ones.

To propose, on the basis of the capitalist mode of production, a science alternative to the bourgeois one is a mystification and deception towards the proletarian class. The cultural and scientific emancipation of the proletariat is only possible after its complete economic and political emancipation. Only where the empirical individual has been freed from the burden of heavy and demeaning labour is a development of man’s spiritual faculties possible.

Furthermore, according to our materialist doctrine, the brain constitutes the last organ of man set in motion by the social revolution. On it, even after power has been seized, will weigh for a long time the inertia of the habits, customs, and ways of thinking of this infamous society. Consciousness is a powerful force of social conservation.

‘Human psychology is the most conservative force: not great events spring from consciousness, but events, their new correlations, their nexuses, the crossings of the great historical lines, force our passive and lazy psychology to adapt, painfully, awkwardly, to them’ (Trotsky: The Psychological Problems of War, 11 September 1915).

Consciousness constitutes, in the course of the revolutionary process and transitional period, a force of inertia that would freeze society in the status quo forever, if the powerful dynamic force of being and the action of the Communist Party, the only subject capable of implementing the overturning of praxis, did not intervene.

All formulations of alternative, or even worse, ‘working-class’ sciences and cultures reveal an idealist and gradualist conception of the Revolution: idealist, in that revolution and proletarian emancipation are conceived as a voluntary and conscious act of the social brain; gradualist, because if the worker can emancipate himself culturally without the violent destruction of the state, who is stopping him from emancipating himself politically and economically in the same way?

Revolutionary Marxism even looks at the expression class consciousness with suspicion as applied to the proletariat, which implicitly contains the condition that revolutionary consciousness must precede revolutionary action whereas the Marxist schema predicts the opposite.

The correct revolutionary answer to the dialectical problem is the reaffirmation of Radical Critique which, ‘in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, [includes] the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up’ (Capital, Vol. I).

Nothing withstands subversive critique. The critique of bourgeois science is recognition of its power and infamy. Critique recognises the objectivity of the premises and results of bourgeois science at the same time as it affirms that this objectivity has been subsumed by a historically transitory mode of production and thus of consciousness. It thereby condemns premises and results as mortal, while recognising that both the one and the other are historically and socially valid forms of thought. By recognising them as alive, it condemns them to death.

Radical Critique thus stands as the first human truth, the first chapter of the future human science of the social man, which will reunify tomorrow all the historical and social sciences, today divided by bourgeois schizophrenic madness. A science that will see the light when the proletariat executes, by a pure act of force, the dismantling of the capitalist order and of its immense scientific edifice, the summa of bourgeois Wisdom and Superstitions.

The theory of the proletariat arises spontaneously, illuminating human history with vivid clarifying light. It only arises when all the data of the problem are present and it poses itself as its definitive solution: ‘Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution’ (Marx, Manuscripts).

The very formulation of the problem contains within itself the solution because: ‘Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation’ (Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).

Or mathematically: ‘No equation can be solved unless the elements of its solution are involved in its terms’ (Marx to F. Domela Nieuwenhuis, 22 February 1881).

On the other hand, the very existence of the problem is confirmation that in the womb of the old society a new one is being formed: ‘When people speak of the ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created’ (Manifesto of the Communist Party).

The solution to the problem is in the problem itself and it takes the name of Communism. There exists no solution that can do without the problem and its material data. With this, Socialism passes from Utopia to Science. But once again the shift is not due to the power of the Spirit, but to practical movement, to material human praxis that finds its highest expression in the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

‘Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so the Socialists and Communists are the theoreticians of the proletarian class. So long as the proletariat is not yet sufficiently developed to constitute itself as a class, and consequently so long as the struggle itself of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie has not yet assumed a political character, and the productive forces are not yet sufficiently developed in the bosom of the bourgeoisie itself to enable us to catch a glimpse of the material conditions necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat and for the formation of a new society, these theoreticians are merely utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and go in search of a regenerating science. But in the measure that history moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece. So long as they look for science and merely make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society. From this moment, science, which is a product of the historical movement, has associated itself consciously with it, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary’ (Marx, Poverty of Philosophy).

Radical Critique is not a product of a particularly gifted mind, come to announce a new Truth to which all must submit. It is the theoretical expression of a real subversive movement operating in the social subsoil which deterministically subordinates to itself, as recorder and amplifier, the ‘given’ man, who lends language and voice to the movement itself: ‘The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes’ (Manifesto of the Communist Party).

The deep forces that disrupt the social organisation at a given turning of the cycles, just as they take the form of social clashes between classes of men, so they take that of a war of new faiths against the old.

The doctrine of the proletariat is ‘the wisdom of the movement of history, understood and made conscious’ (Marx, Manuscripts). It understands communism, unlike the utopians, ‘not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself’ (Marx, The German Ideology), but as ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’.

Revolutionary doctrine arises from the bosom of history in a single block as revolutionary doctrines have always arisen in the fertile phases of human history: ‘These do not arise from successive approximations, juxtapositions, or additions, nor from a cloying contradiction and collaboration at the same time of pleiads of so-called researchers, but explode at given times and sharp turns of the general cycle and can only ever form themselves precisely then, and organically, in that way, as a single block’ (Volcano of Production or Swamp of the Market?).

The titular subject of revolutionary theory is, in our conception, neither the individual nor a group of men, even if proletarians. It is a well-delimited collectivity of men, the Party, in which, above space and time, borders and generations, revolutionary militants are gathered and connected.

Born from the womb of history, expression of a social movement embodied by the proletariat, Radical Critique constitutes the oppressed class’s most powerful weapon of battle. Without it, the most noble proletariat is doomed to defeat. It, in fact, does not constitute an academic exercise of scholars, but is the collective brain held by the Party that unifies all the data of human development for the purpose of the best utilisation of proletarian energies in its work of extermination and destruction of the existing order: ‘criticism is no passion of the head, it is the head of passion. It is not a lancet, it is a weapon. Its object is its enemy, which it wants not to refute but to exterminate. For the spirit of that state of affairs is refuted’ (Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right).

The defence of the programme is therefore for communists not a theoretical luxury, but a practical necessity of the class struggle. It is with the weapons of criticism that we in fact diagnose the death of this infamous order, in the certainty of being able to execute its historical sentence with the sharpest criticism of weapons.

Anyone who debases and demeans doctrine places himself on the enemy’s ground and must be treated as such.

The Marxist Left does not set as the objective of its overall action the patching up of the existing order or its contestation for alleged injustices, infamous tasks that it has always left to the democratic and radical petty-bourgeois rabble.

The capitalist order is already refuted by living history, as 100 years of wars, revolutions, crises, and fierce counter-revolutions abundantly demonstrate. The chief task of subversive Marxists consists in the work of destroying bourgeois political power, which prevents the birth of the new society and forces immense social productive forces into petty and historically narrow relations of ownership and production.

The Left has always stated that: ‘To destroy is the only Marxist way to build. In the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois swamp, and indeed for all dying classes, knowledge is folly, revolutionary truth is treated with hemlock’ (Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today).

Only a radical and totalitarian work of destruction can allow the free and natural growth of communism, the beginning of its positive and creative phase, without state, parties, classes, alienated labour, and private property. In this work of destruction, criticism acts as the brain of revolutionary passion and is animated by class hatred. It has no illusions either about itself or about its enemy: ‘Criticism dealing with this content is criticism in a hand-to-hand fight, and in such a fight the point is not whether the opponent is a noble, equal, interesting opponent, the point is to strike him’ (Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy...).

It must ‘[teach the people] to be terrified at itself in order to give it courage’.

The sharp weapon of criticism strikes the enemy and reveals its aim as early as the afterword of Capital: ‘In its rational form [the dialectic] is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension an affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary’.

In perfect coherence with the methodological approach seen earlier, Marx places as the subtitle of Capital: ‘Critique of Political Economy’. With this he makes it clear that his aim is not doctrinaire but revolutionary. He does not want to elaborate a new economic science, a new economic model of society, but to study with a dialectical and materialist method a particular social organisation of life, the capitalist mode of production, identifying the laws that ‘regulate the origin, existence, development, death’ (Capital, Vol. I) and ‘its replacement by another and higher one’. ‘Marx, if you don’t mind, did not dedicate himself to founding new categories of thought, but to attacking the few that remained standing in order to demolish their irreducible absoluteness: and economics was not the field in which he let his philosophical flair wander, but the one on which he solidly founded himself to dislodge the primordiality of moral, aesthetic, and even legal and political values, anatomising their meagre consistency and incessant mutability’ (Volcano of Production or Swamp of the Market?).

His work consists in dismantling the bourgeois economists’ claim of the naturalness and eternity of their mode of production, demonstrating its historical and therefore transitory character, and the inevitability of its replacement by another social organism, whose essential characteristics Marx identifies, both negative and positive.

In this respect, Capital concludes the work begun with On the Jewish Question and the Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and the Manuscripts, in which Marx breaks with the radical-democratic tradition and moves from the Critique of Religion to the Critique of Political Economy, from the Critique of fantastical self-estrangement to the Critique of worldly self-estrangement.

The demonstration of the transience of Capitalism places the Party on the terrain of History, makes the Communist Party the only party resting on the future of man. This is also why Capital is not the economic work of a great man, but a battle weapon of the class political party: ‘[Capital] is without question the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie (landowners included)’ (Marx to J.B. Becker, 17 April 1867).

The demonstration that Capitalism is a product of History and not of nature constitutes a non-accessory part of Marx’s work. The numerous pages of Capital dedicated to this topic amply demonstrate this: ‘scientific analysis of the capitalist mode of production demonstrates the contrary, that it is a mode of production of a special kind, with specific historical features; that, like any other specific mode of production, it presupposes a given level of the social productive forces and their forms of development as its historical precondition: a precondition which is itself the historical result and product of a preceding process, and from which the new mode of production proceeds as its given basis; that the production relations corresponding to this specific, historically determined mode of production – relations which human beings enter into during the process of social life, in the creation of their social life – possess a specific, historical and transitory character; and, finally, that the distribution relations essentially coincident with these production relations are their opposite side, so that both share the same historically transitory character’ (Capital, Vol. III).

Marx arrives at the historical determination of the capitalist mode of production and its scientific knowledge through the unveiling of the mystery inherent in Capital’s process of reification. The analysis of this same process allows Marx to identify the revolutionary class of the modern era and to understand that the process of the immiseration and alienation of man is the mainspring of his redemption as a social man.

‘Where, then, is the positive possibility of a German emancipation? Answer: In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of German statehood; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat’. (Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction).

And again: ‘When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property. When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all, as Critical Criticism pretends to believe, because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need – the practical expression of necessity – is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself’. (Marx, The Holy Family).

And how little the free choice of the individual or of the entire proletarian class counts in its process of emancipation can be deduced from the following quotation: ‘It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today’.

The work of demystification begins with the first pages of Capital.

In this respect, the importance of the 4th section of the 1st chapter of Capital can never be overemphasised. Its reading and understanding allows us to grasp in their most intimate essence the fundamental determinations of Capital and by dialectical contrast the characteristics that define communism. Bourgeois and opportunist economists cannot understand it, not due to intellectual and cultural insufficiency but due to obvious class limitations.

‘It is one of the chief failings of classical economy that it has never succeeded, by means of its analysis of commodities, and, in particular, of their value, in discovering that form under which value becomes exchange value. Even Adam Smith and Ricardo, the best representatives of the school, treat the form of value as a thing of no importance, as having no connection with the inherent nature of commodities. The reason for this is not solely because their attention is entirely absorbed in the analysis of the magnitude of value. It lies deeper. The value-form of the product of labour is not only the most abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by the product in bourgeois production, and stamps that production as a particular species of social production, and thereby gives it its special historical character. If then we treat this mode of production as one eternally fixed by Nature for every state of society, we necessarily overlook that which is the differentia specifica of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity-form, and of its further developments, money-form, capital-form, etc’ (Capital, Vol. I 1.4-note).

Economic science is the theoretical consciousness of empirical capitalists. It systematises into formal theoretical systems the ideas of the actual agents of capitalist production, agents entangled in reified relations, which assume in their eyes the appearance of natural and eternal relations.

On the other hand, men question their conditions of life when these conditions have assumed the fixity of natural forms of social life. For political economy, the reified consciousness of the empirical capitalist, labour is therefore, as such, wage labour, just as gold and silver are money, the means of production capital, and land, monopolised land.

Social determinations are considered immanent in things, and things in themselves possess, as ‘social properties’, capitalist social determinations.

Political economy reifies social relations, identifies things with the relations between men hidden behind the things themselves. By this, it shows itself to be an expression of man’s worldly self-alienation, just as religion is an expression of his fantastic self-alienation. And indeed, its attitude towards the capitalist mode of production is similar to the attitude of every religion towards its God. Capitalism is the only True, it is the only way of producing in conformity with the laws of nature, it is the finally discovered natural form of social production.

‘Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and as such, eternal’. (Marx, Poverty of Philosophy).

The forms of thought of bourgeois economists are not, however, inventions of malicious doctrinaires whose goal is deception and mystification. This is immanent to the reified consciousness, that is, it is objective.

‘[I]n developing his productive faculties, i.e. in living, man develops certain inter-relations, and that the nature of these relations necessarily changes with the modification and the growth of the said productive faculties (...) economic categories are but abstractions of those real relations, that they are truths only in so far as those relations continue to exist’ (Marx to Annenkov, 28 December 1846).

The forms of bourgeois thought are thus ‘expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production’ (Capital, Vol. I). They are forms produced by history, historically determined and therefore transitory, inasmuch as they are the theoretical expression of transient social relations.

Bourgeois economic science cannot recognise this fundamental truth. It has been subsumed by reification and thus by its very essence led to legitimise and eternalise human alienation and estrangement: ‘Thus [Proudhon] falls into the error of bourgeois economists who regard those economic categories as eternal laws and not as historical laws which are laws only for a given historical development, a specific development of the productive forces. Thus, instead of regarding politico-economic categories as abstractions of actual social relations that are transitory and historical, Mr Proudhon, by a mystical inversion, sees in the real relations only the embodiment of those abstractions’ (Marx to Annenkov, 28 December 1846).

When bourgeois social relations collapse, the corresponding forms of thought will appear meaningless: ‘Hence all the mysticism of the commodity world, all the enchantment and witchcraft that shroud the products of human labour on the basis of commodity production in a halo of fog, suddenly vanish when we take refuge in other modes of production’ (Capital, Vol. I).

Bourgeois economic science, precisely because it is reified science, is incapable of recognising reification. Just as an observer standing on the Earth will deny its motion around the Sun, so alienated science will always confuse things with the social relations hidden behind them, will always allow itself to be deceived ‘by the Fetishism inherent in commodities, or by the objective appearance of the social characteristics of labour’.

For it, a certain socio-historical character of production will appear as a natural property of the products of labour: ‘These formulae, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him, such formulae appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident necessity imposed by Nature as productive labour itself’ (Capital, Vol. I).

Economic science is the first of the bourgeois sciences forced to deny itself as such, operating on principle in the world of the apparent and refusing to penetrate the essence of economic phenomena. Otherwise it would have to negate itself and transform itself into its opposite: Revolutionary Critique: ‘political economy (...) [has] abandoned (...) all vestiges of a scientific approach, in order to cling to the differences that strike the eye in this phenomenon – this confusion of the theorists best illustrates the utter incapacity of the practical capitalist, blinded by competition as he is, and incapable of penetrating its phenomena, to recognise the inner essence and inner structure of this process behind its outer appearance’ (Capital, Vol. III.9). Again: ‘Vulgar economy (...) deals with appearances only’ (Capital, Vol. I).

By dialectical contraposition, the Critique of Political Economy constitutes man’s first encounter with the truth. The riddle of the problem of knowledge finally finds its adequate solution here.

Reification in Marx consists in the fact that a social relation between men receives the character of a thing, presents itself and is understood as a thing; a character which mystifies and conceals every trace of the relation between men.

The mystification and concealment of human social relations is not a necessary product of the nature of man, but a product of his history. We do not find reification, in fact, either in primitive communities of the communist type, where labour is socialised and production is aimed at use values for the satisfaction of human needs, or in slave-owning and servile production where the relation of exploitation is visible to all. It is there accidentally present and even physically localised in money and usurer capital. The reification of the social activity of man begins to assert itself with the commodity production to which it is immanent. ‘In preceding forms of society this economic mystification arose principally with respect to Money and Interest-Bearing Capital. In the nature of things it is excluded, in the first place, where production for the use-value, for immediate personal requirements, predominates; and, secondly, where slavery or serfdom form the broad foundation of social production, as in antiquity and during the Middle Ages. Here, the domination of the producers by the conditions of production is concealed by the relations of dominion and servitude, which appear and are evident as the direct motive power of the process of production’ (Capital, Vol. III).

By disappearing commodity production, reification also disappears.

With the development of commodity production comes the subjugation of consciousness to reification. So whereas at the beginning of capitalist development it was possible for the theorists of Capital to glimpse the personal character of economic relations, today where the commodity-form is the effective form of domination of society as a whole, this is absolutely impossible.

Only radical critique can arrive at the unveiling of the commodity mystery and with it the unveiling of the mystery of Money, Wages, Profit, and the mystery among mysteries: Interest.

Subversive Criticism nails Capital to History and condemns it as mortal.

The commodity is a unit of use value and value. Neither the definition of the two terms, nor the qualitative determination of the former, nor the quantitative determination of the latter have anything mysterious about them. So where does the mystery of the commodity, of the mercantile character of the products of human labour, come from? From the very form of the commodity. For it is in this form that: ‘The equality of all sorts of human labour is expressed objectively by their products all being equally values; the measure of the expenditure of labour power by the duration of that expenditure, takes the form of the quantity of value of the products of labour; and finally the mutual relations of the producers, within which the social character of their labour affirms itself, take the form of a social relation between the products’ (Capital, Vol. I).

Now we know what value is and how it is determined qualitatively. But the question we must answer is: ‘Why is labour represented in value?’ (Ibid.)

Commodity production, and in this capitalist production does not differ, is production by private producers who are independent of each other. The totality of their private labours constitutes social labour.

Individual independent private labours confirm themselves as social labour, as articulations of overall social labour, only through their general alienation. In exchange they take on a dual social character. On the one hand, as concrete labours they must satisfy a social need; on the other hand, as useful labours they must be comparable with any other kind of useful labour. But the comparison of unequal concrete labours is only possible by prescinding from their actual inequality, only by reducing concrete labours to their common essence as expenditure of human labour power, as ‘abstractly human labour’.

Commodities, in order to be exchanged, in their concrete diversity, must be understood as formally equal, and this is only possible by reducing them to expenditures of abstract labour energy. This affirms ‘the social character that his particular labour has of being the equal of all other particular kinds of labour, takes the form that all the physically different articles that are the products of labour, have one common quality, viz., that of having value’. (Ibid.).

In doing so, ‘when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it (...) Value, therefore, (...) converts every product into a social hieroglyphic’ (Capital, Vol. I, 4).

Now value is immanent to the product of labour insofar as it is a commodity; it is the social form of expression of the labour embedded in an object when it is produced as commodity: it is the historical mode of expressing the social character of the private labour of commodity producers. The commodity, unity of use value and value, thus refers men back to their social relation as independent and estranged private producers as objective characteristics of the products of labour. It incorporates within itself as a thing the social relation, and as a thing it has in itself the character of commodity. ‘A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour (...) This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities’ (Ibid.).

We have seen that the commodity fetish consists in the fact that a specific historical-social character of production (private production) appears as a natural social property of the products (value).

If we have abolished that specific social character of production that makes the products commodities, ‘that natural social property’ would also disappear. Therefore, if we abolish private production and suppose an immediately social production, it is inevitable that the value-form and commodity-form of the products of social labour will disappear.

‘On the basis of exchange values, labour is posited as general only through exchange (...) [let] communal production, communality [be] presupposed as the basis of production. The labour of the individual is posited from the outset as social labour (...) His product is not an exchange value’ (Grundrisse, Notebook I). ‘Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labour employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labour no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labour’ (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme). ‘The communist method of production presupposes in addition that production is not for the market, but for use. Under communism, it is no longer the individual manufacturer or the individual peasant who produces; the work of production is effected by the gigantic co-operative as a whole. In consequence of this change, we no longer have commodities, but only products. These products are not exchanged one for another; they are neither bought nor sold. They are simply stored in the communal warehouses, and are subsequently delivered to those who need them’ (Bukharin-Preobrazhensky, The ABC of Communism).

Economic communism presupposes socialised production and distribution. To claim that under communism, products take on the character of commodities and need C-M metamorphosis to assert themselves as social labour is counter-revolutionary blasphemy that only renegades, academic prostitutes, and sellouts can utter without blushing.

We have seen in the previous section that in commodity production, the social nexus between producers is represented by exchange value, the phenomenal form of value. It is only through exchange value that private labours become an articulation of overall social labour. But ‘[t]he definition of a product as exchange value thus necessarily implies that exchange value obtains a separate existence, in isolation from the product’ (Grundrisse, Notebook I).

The duplication of the commodity into commodity and money is therefore the necessary consequence of the dual nature of commodities. Commodities are units of use value and value. They, as use value, are qualitatively different, as value, they are quantitatively different. Now, for the commodity producer it makes sense to exchange commodity for commodity only if the value of his commodity takes on, after exchange, a phenomenal form qualitatively different from its value-form. This is why Marx identifies the secret of the value-form in general, already in the simplest value-form, the single value-form, the analysis of which allows Marx to arrive at his theory of Money.

‘With regard to the development of the form of value, I have both followed and not followed your advice, thus striking a dialectical attitude in this matter, too. That is to say, 1. I have written an appendix in which I set out the same subject again as simply and as much in the manner of a school text-book as possible, and 2. I have divided each successive proposition into paras. etc., each with its own heading, as you advised. In the Preface I then tell the “non-dialectical” reader to skip page x-y and instead read the appendix [inserted in the body of the volume with the title The Value-Form from Edition II onwards, ed.]. It is not only the philistines that I have in mind here, but young people, etc., who are thirsting for knowledge. Anyway, the issue is crucial for the whole book. The economists have hitherto overlooked the very simple fact that the equation 20 yards of linen = 1 coat is but the primitive form of 20 yards of linen = £2, and thus that the simplest form of a commodity, in which its value is not yet expressed in its relation to all other commodities but only as something differentiated from its own natural form, embodies the whole secret of the money form and thereby, in nuce, of all bourgeois forms of the product of labour’ (Marx to Engels, 22 June 1867).

Again: ‘The secret of the entire value-form must be hidden in this simple value-form. Hence its analysis offers the real difficulty’ (Capital, Vol. I). ‘We have already seen, from the most elementary expression of value, x commodity A = y commodity B, that the object in which the magnitude of the value of another object is represented, appears to have the equivalent form independently of this relation, as a social property given to it by Nature. We followed up this false appearance to its final establishment, which is complete so soon as the universal equivalent form becomes identified with the bodily form of a particular commodity, and thus crystallised into the money-form’ (Ibid.).

In the simple value-form, the immanent contradiction between use value and value of the commodity is externalised: the use value of commodity B becomes the phenomenal form of the value of commodity A. With the development of trade, it is inevitable that from the mass of commodities, a particular commodity detaches itself, whose use value becomes the phenomenal form of the value of all other commodities.

‘The historical progress and extension of exchanges develops the contrast, latent in commodities, between use-value and value. The necessity for giving an external expression to this contrast for the purposes of commercial intercourse, urges on the establishment of an independent form of value, and finds no rest until it is once for all satisfied by the differentiation of commodities into commodities and money’ (Ibid.).

Money is then the exchange value separated from the commodity, externalised and existing as a commodity alongside it.

The reification of the social relation, immanent to commodity production, expressed by the value-form, which appears immanent to the products of labour as such, takes on in money, a thingified value-form, represented in the material body of a thing, the luminous body of gold. Gold as a thing represents the value-form of all commodities, a thing expressing the social relation of commodity production in which producers are set against each other as private producers. ‘The riddle of the money fetish is thus but the riddle made visible and dazzling to the eye of the commodity fetish’ (Ibid.).

It can therefore be deduced that money is an inevitable and necessary product of commodity production: ‘it [is] impossible to abolish money itself as long as exchange value remains the social form of products’ (Grundrisse, Notebook I).

Commodity production without money is an absolute absurdity. ‘[G]oods are to be produced as commodities but not exchanged as commodities’ (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).

Yet this was the solution proposed by petty-bourgeois socialism to solve the capitalist crises and the social question. The petty bourgeoisie is tied to commodity production. Its mode of production is simple commodity production, not capitalist production. Simple commodity production is historically premised on specifically capitalist production. While in the simple commodity mode of production the producer or distributor is autonomous and independent, with the transition to specifically capitalist production he falls under the domination of the capitalist. Even when he retains a semblance of autonomy it is purely external. He is bound hand and foot to the capitalist through credit and finance. Hence his romantic dream of returning to the past, to commodity production without the capitalist and in particular without the capitalist who directly dominates him: the usurious and financial capitalist. Reactionary petty-bourgeois socialism wants commodity production because it is its natural breeding ground, but it wants to abolish money and the one who owns it: the money capitalist.

‘From this we may form an estimate of the shrewdness of petty-bourgeois socialism, which, while perpetuating the production of commodities, aims at abolishing the “antagonism” between money and commodities, and consequently, since money exists only by virtue of this antagonism, at abolishing money itself’ (Capital, Vol. I).

The mistake of petty-bourgeois socialism is in failing to realise that money is not merely a sign of value, but the phenomenal form of social relations ‘hidden behind its back’.

Money in exchange does not give the commodity its value, but its ‘specific form of value’. In the first case we could consider the value of money to be imaginary, and thus consider it to be a pure sign expressing value in its immediacy and thus labour time. But this presupposes a condition irreconcilable with commodity production, socialised production in which the private labour of the individual is immediately social labour. In commodity production, private labour is realised as social labour in exchange, and the value of the commodity takes on the phenomenal form of exchange value, the autonomisation of which is constituted by money, by the material body of gold, which as a thing gives the commodity its ‘specific value-form’.

In commodity production, labour time takes the historical form of value. Money is the value-form made thing and ‘as a measure of value, is the phenomenal form that must of necessity be assumed by that measure of value which is immanent in commodities, labour-time’ (Ibid.).

As long as producers cannot refer to their labour as immediately social labour, as long as it is exchange that determines the social nature of private labour, labour time will take on the historical form of value, the products of labour will take on the character of commodities, and exchange value will autonomise in the form of money.

Money can be abolished when the relations of production concealed behind it are abolished. Once private production is abolished and immediately social production is assumed, workers will no longer need exchange to establish themselves as social labour, as articulations of overall social labour.

In economic communism, there will be no money, because there will be no commodity production, and no values because, since all labour activities are included in a centralised plan of production, they will be immediately social activities, activities of a kind, whereby labour time will not need to take on the historical form of value.

The quantity of labour crystallised in an object need not be expressed by the oscillating measure of money, but will be expressed by the natural mass of time. ‘From the moment when society enters into possession of the means of production and uses them in direct association for production, the labour of each individual, however varied its specifically useful character may be, becomes at the start and directly social labour. The quantity of social labour contained in a product need not then be established in a roundabout way; daily experience shows in a direct way how much of it is required on the average. Society can simply calculate how many hours of labour are contained in a steam-engine, a bushel of wheat of the last harvest, or a hundred square yards of cloth of a certain quality. It could therefore never occur to it still to express the quantities of labour put into the products, quantities which it will then know directly and in their absolute amounts, in a third product, in a measure which, besides, is only relative, fluctuating, inadequate, though formerly unavoidable for lack of a better one, rather than express them in their natural, adequate and absolute measure, time (...)

‘Hence, on the assumptions we made above, society will not assign values to products. It will not express the simple fact that the hundred square yards of cloth have required for their production, say, a thousand hours of labour in the oblique and meaningless way, stating that they have the value of a thousand hours of labour. It is true that even then it will still be necessary for society to know how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production. It will have to arrange its plan of production in accordance with its means of production, which include, in particular, its labour-powers. The useful effects of the various articles of consumption, compared with one another and with the quantities of labour required for their production, will in the end determine the plan. People will be able to manage everything very simply, without the intervention of much-vaunted “value”’ (Engels, Anti-Dühring).

Again, ‘Marx’s doctrine of the commoning of capital, i.e. its expanded reproduction like that of simple reproduction, deals only with capital appearing in alternating cycles as a commodity and as money. This is indisputable at the start and finish of the entire Marxist system on capitalist production: the socialist system remains dialectically defined and described by it, but few socialists have been able to take the bold step that from the negation of the characteristics of capitalism emerges, outside of any utopian plan, the positive definition of the characteristics of socialism. If there is to be accumulation in socialism, it will present itself as an accumulation of material objects useful for human needs, which will not need to appear alternatively as money, nor will they need to undergo the application of a “monetometer” that allows them to be measured and compared according to “general equivalents”. Thus such objects will no longer even be commodities and will not be defined by their (exchange) value but only by their physical quantitative measure and their qualitative nature, i.e. expressed by economists, and also by Marx for the purposes of exposition, as use value’ (Economic and Social Structure of Russia Today).

Finally, ‘In the case of socialised production the money-capital is eliminated. Society distributes labour-power and means of production to the different branches of production. The producers may, for all it matters, receive paper vouchers entitling them to withdraw from the social supplies of consumer goods a quantity corresponding to their labour-time. These vouchers are not money. They do not circulate’ (Capital, Vol. II).

It is the labour-good of which Marx speaks in his critique of the Gotha programme. It is Owen’s ‘labour money’, quite different from the petty-bourgeois utopia of a Gray or a Proudhon of the commodity-money guaranteed by the Central Bank. ‘Owen’s “labour-money”, for instance, is no more “money” than a ticket for the theatre. Owen pre-supposes directly associated labour, a form of production that is entirely inconsistent with the production of commodities. The certificate of labour is merely evidence of the part taken by the individual in the common labour, and of his right to a certain portion of the common produce destined for consumption. But it never enters into Owen’s head to pre-suppose the production of commodities, and at the same time, by juggling with money, to try to evade the necessary conditions of that production’ (Capital, Vol. I).

In economic communism there will be no money, because there will be no commodity production and value there.

On this point, not a few great Marxists have failed, including the great Trotsky who considered the use of money as an accounting medium in socialist society to be possible.

In his speech to the 4th Congress of the Communist International in 1922, Trotsky called the Russian economy a proletarian economy with capitalist accounting. The question is not one of mere reasoning as Trotsky thought but of the substance of the relationship. More correctly Lenin expresses this point as follows: ‘We must organise things in such a way as to make possible the customary operation of capitalist economy and capitalist exchange, because this is essential for the people. Without it, existence is impossible’ (Lenin, Political Report of the C.C. of the R.C.P.(b.) to the XI Congress).

Lenin envisaged for Russia, pending the International Revolution, the transformation of the social system towards forms of state capitalism. He aimed not at a transition to socialism, but at a transition to state capitalism. In contrast, Trotsky judged the Soviet social structure as a transitional structure to socialism. Trotsky’s unfortunate formulation in 1922 and his thesis of the socialist nature of Russian social relations have the same origin: the belief that economic relations are socialist because industry is nationalised and the communist party monopolises political power.

‘As Lenin described, the Russian economic landscape encompassed a blend of various economic forms: pre‑mercantile (primitive communism, Asiatic lordship and theocracy, land baronetcy); mercantile (industrial, commercial, and banking capitalism, free private land ownership); and post‑mercantile (early implementations of “war” communism, i.e., “social warfare”, such as free bread, housing, transportation in large cities, and similar provisions). Even within this transitional framework, the nationalisation of factories, companies, banks, and agrarian estates constituted revolutionary measures, albeit belonging to the realm of capitalist revolution (...) Lenin strongly asserted all of this during the N.E.P. period. Trotsky, who shared his directives, explained that it was socialism with capitalist accounting; indeed, it is precisely the type of accounting that defines the economic structure. The accurate Marxist expression was capitalism with capitalist accounting, but with records maintained by the proletarian State’ (Property and Capital, 1948).

Trotsky is clear that money, commodities, and the state will disappear in communist society, but he does not understand that these cannot even exist in socialist society and lower communism, nor that it is not enough for production to be nationalised and power held by the Communist Party for one to be able to speak of economic socialism.

Money and the State remain, with ever decreasing importance, still only in the transitional economy, which, as such, is not yet a socialist economy, but is only partly so or even, as in the Soviet Russia of Bolshevism, is entirely capitalist and pre-capitalist. In this case, it is the political aspect that qualifies the state, it is the direction in which it operates and strikes which make it socialist or capitalist.

On this question, here is what the Russian elementary party handbook, The ABC of Communism, asserted, following step by step Marx’s exegesis of the Gotha programme: In the communist system of production ‘money will no longer be required (...) Money will then have no value (...) in the first days of communist society, products will probably be distributed in accordance with the amount of work done by the applicant; at a later stage, however, they will simply be supplied according to the needs of the comrades’.

It is time for the programme of the communist revolution to be presented once again to the dazzled eyes of today’s proletarian flocks, so that, with their hope, and to the horror of the bourgeois, they may know what is truly at stake and what one must fight or die for.

Let us close paragraph and short chapter with a quotation that is more than a programmatic formulation: it is a prediction of the scientific work of excavating the future carried out by the historical Marxist party. Only when what is written below has begun to materialise will the proletariat be able to launch itself into a armed warfare against the entire pestilential world of capital and its gendarme: the United States of America.

‘We believe that the first socialist plan will be seen when the part of it expressed in monetary units is eliminated: naturally, such a plan must encompass all areas of productive activity and consumption, going directly from the many workdays to the amount of food and the like, and it must contain within its borders at least the central massif of Europe with the rivers that flow from it, from the Meuse and the Rhone to the Danube and the Vistula. This plan will not cry out that it has overindulged’ (Structure).

This chapter, presented at the last Party meeting in Bolzano, continues the study published in the previous issue of this journal, in the chapters Reason and Revolution and The Commodity Fetish and Its Death.

We have analysed in the previous chapter the economic categories Commodity and Money and have identified the social relations between men ‘hidden behind their backs’. We have seen that the circulation of commodities and money also exist in societies where production is, for the most part, production of use values, for oneself or for others (slavery, servile labour). The production of commodities and money are therefore not sufficient to characterise specifically capitalist production. Certainly, it is on the basis of commodity production and thus on the split between use value and exchange value, rendered external and autonomous in money, that the new mode of production is born. But it alone is insufficient to define it, even if capitalism is the universalisation of the commodity character of the products of labour.

‘Had we gone further, and inquired under what circumstances all, or even the majority of products take the form of commodities, we should have found that this can only happen with production of a very specific kind, capitalist production’ (Capital, Vol. I).

On the other hand, if it is true that money is not capital in itself, it is equally true that it is the first phenomenal form of capital, and that the first capitalists historically opposed landowners in the figure of money-holders, merchant and usurer capitalists. Money ‘this final product of the circulation of commodities is the first phenomenal form of capital. As a matter of history, capital, as opposed to landed property, invariably takes the form at first of money; it appears as moneyed wealth, as merchant capital and usurer capital’.

But commercial capital and usurer capital acted outside production, they did not even formally control it. For this to be possible, it was necessary, at one pole, for there to be an accumulation of money sufficient to set the process in motion and, at the other pole, the formation of a particular commodity: labour power, the free worker. Here is Marx’s definition: ‘The possessor of money or commodities actually turns into a capitalist in such cases only where the minimum sum advanced for production greatly exceeds the maximum of the Middle Ages. Here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his “Logic”), that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes’. So not every quantity of money is capital.

But, if labour power is lacking at the opposite pole, any amount of money remains what it is, money, and is powerless to transform itself into capital, as was historically the case in the ancient world. ‘The historical conditions of its existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It can spring into life, only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence meets in the market with the free labourer selling his labour-power. And this one historical condition comprises a world’s history. Capital, therefore, announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social production’. For money to transform itself into capital, it needs the free worker at the opposite pole: free of the means of production and subsistence, free to choose the capitalist to whom he sells his labour power. Free, finally, to choose with a ballot which fraction of brigands should handle the machinery of the state.

Wage labour announces a new historical epoch characterised by the eruption of a new mode of production: capitalism. Wage labour is in fact the specific social form assumed by labour in the capitalist mode of production: ‘The condition for capital is wage labour’ (Manifesto).

Capital and wage labour are two poles of the same social relation between men: the capitalist relation of production and exchange: ‘Capital therefore presupposes wage labour; wage labour presupposes capital. They condition each other; each brings the other into existence’ (Marx, Wage Labour and Capital). Capital produces labour as wage labour, wage labour produces products as capital. Both are premise and result of the overall production process.

Only in relation to labour as wage labour do certain things – means of production and subsistence – become capital, and only in relation to capital does labour become wage labour. Here too, a social relation of production, the relation of subordination of labour by capital, is reified and appears as a social, ‘natural’ property of things. Capital, as a thing, confronts labour as wage labour, and wage labour confronts the means of production and subsistence as Capital.

‘Hence although the sale and purchase of labour capacity, by which the conversion of a part of the capital into variable capital is conditioned, is a process which precedes the direct production process, and is separate from and independent of it, it forms the absolute foundation for the capitalist production process and it forms a moment of this production process itself, when we consider the latter as a whole and not only at the moment of the direct production of commodities. Objective wealth is converted into capital solely because the worker sells his labour capacity in order to live. The objects which are the objective conditions of labour, hence the means of production and the objects which are the objective conditions for the preservation of the worker himself, hence the means of subsistence, only become capital when faced with wage labour.

‘Capital is no more a thing than money is. In capital, as in money, definite social relations of production between persons are expressed as the relations of things to persons, or definite social connections appear as social characteristics belonging naturally to things.

‘As soon as the individuals confront each other as free persons, there is no production of surplus value without a wage system. Without the production of surplus value there is no capitalist production, hence no capital and no capitalist!

‘Capital and wage labour (...) merely express two factors in the same relation. Money cannot become capital without being exchanged for labour capacity as a commodity sold by the worker himself. Labour, on the other hand, can only appear as wage labour when its own objective conditions meet it as egoistical powers, as alien property, value existing for itself and holding fast to itself, in short as capital’ (Marx, Unpublished Chapter VI).

Therefore, to say wage labour is to say capital. The history of the one is the history of the other. Wage labour is the specific social form of labour of the capitalist mode of production, it cannot be the social form of labour of economic socialism.

‘Waged labour (...) is therefore a necessary social form of labour for capitalist production, just as capital, potentiated value, is a necessary social form which the objective conditions of labour must assume for the labour to be wage labour. Wage labour is therefore a necessary condition for the formation of capital, and it remains the constantly necessary presupposition for capitalist production. So although the first process, the exchange of money for labour capacity, (...) does not enter as such into the direct production process, it does in contrast enter into the production of the relation as a whole’.

Wage labour is therefore not the finally discovered natural form of labour. The wage is therefore not a thing, a pile of money understood as a thing, nor a mass of means of subsistence. The wage underlies and defines a historically determined, and therefore transitory, relation of production: capitalism.

The possessors of money and commodities on the one hand, and the free workers, holders only of their ability to work on the other, are in fact not a product of nature but of history. ‘Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power. This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production’ (Capital, Vol. I). Wage labour is a product of history, and the reified nature of the wage conceals and mystifies the exploitation of the proletariat.

Man is not born free. In the primitive communist community he did not exist separate from the community, he could only be in and with the community. Before capitalism he was tied to the land or to craft guilds. In both cases he was bound to the conditions of his labour, and he dominated them. Freedom had not yet arrived to make him a prisoner of things. When this appears, man’s bonds to the land and to his trade are severed by the sword, and man, finally free, can look around and seek out someone who, for a predetermined period, is willing to bind him to the conditions of labour.

‘Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent labouring individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labour of others’.

But the same force that has made the worker free by making him proletarian, makes many of the capitalists themselves free, centralises and socialises production until ‘[c]entralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated’.

Labour as wage labour is not in antithesis with private property, as the petty-bourgeois socialists à la Proudhon thought, and so think small-minded fools, the current vulgar pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese Marxists, and the workerist and ordinovist immediatists in general. Labour as wage labour is the completion of private property. Private property without wage labour is incomplete private property, not brought to its full development. To opt for labour as wage labour against private property is as much a nonsense as claiming to destroy private property while allowing labour as wage labour to subsist. Revolutionary Marxism has always judged the labour fetish to be another disgusting form of the capital fetish, and sets itself the revolutionary task of smashing the one and the other.

Romantic socialism made in Russia and China, like workerist immediatism, can never understand this truth, because it is incapable of understanding that wage labour and private property are the premise and result of each other. ‘Private property is thus the product, the result, the necessary consequence, of alienated labour’ (Marx, ‘44 Manuscripts). Private property is ‘the realisation of this alienation (of labour from itself)’. Now ‘[p]olitical economy starts from labour as the real soul of production; yet to labour it gives nothing, and to private property everything. Confronting this contradiction, Proudhon has decided in favour of labour against private property. We understand, however, that this apparent contradiction is the contradiction of estranged labour with itself, and that political economy has merely formulated the laws of estranged labour’.

Given this, we ‘Talmudic’ Marxists ‘also understand, therefore, that wages and private property are identical’ and, anticipating certain conclusions, we throw the following formidable programmatic conclusion down the throats of sellouts of all times and frontiers: ‘Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labour, and estranged labour is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other’.

The historical emergence of labour as wage labour constitutes the most infamous chapter in human history. Perhaps no epoch has seen so much violence, so much bloodshed, so much misery and brutalisation as this one. The dispossession of the direct producers and their subjugation to the first formal then real domination of capital is a ruthless process, annihilating man as a generic being and as an empirical individual.

The history of this infamy is delivered in the immortal and sculptural pages of the first book of Capital. ‘[T]he transformation of the individualised and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital. The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious’ (Capital, Vol. I).

The expropriation of the producers proceeds in extension and in depth. In extension, in that, capital always invades new areas previously on the fringes or outside its domain, and destroys the old communities settled there. In depth, in the sense that, in areas already subjugated to its dominion, capital proceeds to a further expropriation even more heinous and terrible than the one in the primitive accumulation phase. In this, the producer is separated from the means of production, from the objects on which and with which he exercises his very capacity to work and enjoy. It is the total expropriation of man’s senses.

‘Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital. In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world’ (Marx, Manuscripts).

This expropriation does not only concern the proletariat, in which ‘man [not only] has no human needs – even his animal needs cease to exist’, but also the capitalist in which ‘Pleasure is therefore subsumed under capital, and the pleasure-taking individual under the capital-accumulating individual’. Only that in the proletariat, such expropriation is accompanied by revolt, whereas in the capitalist by satisfaction, because in such expropriation it ‘feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence’ (Marx-Engels, The Holy Family). The abolition of the wage-earner by the revolutionary proletariat ‘is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities’ (Manuscripts).

Paid labour is the most disgusting side of the capital-labour relation because it is privatised. In the circulation process, the proletarian, owner of his labour power, is a commodity seller like any other. He is immersed in individual accounts that demean the power he expresses as a worker in the immediate production process. Such privatisation in the commodity sphere opposes the socialisation of labour power in the production process, where there is no distinction between paid and unpaid labour in producing commodities.

If the wage is the private side of the capital-labour relation, surplus value is its social side. When producing surplus labour, the worker does not produce for himself but for society, even if it is currently monopolised by capital; economically, he is therefore not a parcelled individual but a social one.

While individual incomes, including wages, express the luxury of the rich, the envy of the imitative petty bourgeois, and the hunger of the proletariat, the surplus value appropriated by capital subverts the current mode of production. Unpaid surplus labour is the active and corrosive element of the capitalist relation of production, the living source of communist society. On the political level, the negative and destructive fact of the proletariat – overthrowing the outdated form of the capitalist mode of production – is merely the revolutionary consequence of its fruitful productive activity of a higher form. In the sphere of modern production itself, the sure and complete guarantee of the universal revolution of communism is thus rooted.

Surplus labour has developed the social means of production, unceasingly inflated the productive apparatus and the mass of commodities churned out, made the immediate labour of millions of workers superfluous, made evident that the existence of capital stands as an obstacle to the development of the productive forces of socialised labour. With the development of machinery, large industry, and automation, the extension of relative surplus value and the contraction of necessary labour have undermined from the foundations the pillar on which the entire capitalist society stands: the law of value.

‘As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth’ (Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook VII).

Marx’s theory of surplus value has destroyed all the petty-bourgeois utopias of a Proudhon or a Lassalle for whom, if ‘all social income is surplus value (it is enough that) we distribute it among those alone who have worked (and) all communism is done and finished’ (Trajectory and Catastrophe). The Proudhonian and Lassallean position was foolishly immediatist and did not go beyond the privatist and mercantile worker-capitalist relation.

Quite another thing is Marx’s scientific conception of socialism. For Marx, in socialism, labour has no value and is not paid. Crystallised labour no longer needs to assume the historical-social form of value for any commodity, let alone human labour power. ‘The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down’.

In communism, necessary labour, paid labour, the age-old expression of servitude and abjection, will be abolished, but, in line with the Marxian critique of the Lassallean Gotha programme, surplus labour, that is, the gift of labour to society as a whole, will remain. ‘Here lies all the depth of the gap between Marx’s conception and the banal ones of Proudhon, Lassalle, and so many others, who call socialism the conquest by the worker of the fruit of his own labour, when, excuse the paradoxical formulation, socialism consists in the loss of it’ (Dialogue with Stalin). And again: ‘Socialism gives the allocation, and the disposal, of all the products of social labour not to individuals, not to enterprises and similar units (even co-operatives), but to society. No one will have, as an individual, the possibility of disposing the products of anyone’s labour, even their own. Should there be ownership of labour, there would be ownership of capital: hence capitalism. A strong proportion of avowed Marxists would remain speechless at the thesis: socialism will maintain surplus labour and will not pay for necessary labour’.

In communist society, producers will gift all their labour to society, so that even the variable part for the worker’s own subsistence will be eliminated. There will therefore no longer be any individual compensation or remuneration. Already today, the economic drive goes in this direction: with the socialisation of production relations, with the development of machinery and automation, necessary labour tends to a minimum while relative surplus value tends to cover the entire working day.

Communism is based on unpaid and selfless labour, on surplus labour for the benefit of the whole of society and no longer for the benefit of a privileged minority as occurs under capitalism. ‘[C]ommunism, if you take that word in its strict meaning, is voluntary unpaid work for the common good that does not depend on individual differences, that wipes out all memories of everyday prejudices’ (Lenin, 8th All-Russia Conference of the R.C.P. (b.), 1919).

In ‘A Great Beginning’, Lenin identifies the beginning of communism in the Communist Saturdays precisely because of their nature as unpaid and selfless labour: ‘Communism is the higher productivity of labour – compared with that existing under capitalism – of voluntary, class-conscious and united workers employing advanced techniques. Communist [Saturdays] are extraordinarily valuable as the actual beginning of communism; and this is a very rare thing, because we are in a stage when “only the first steps in the transition from capitalism to communism are being taken” (as our Party Programme quite rightly says). Communism begins when the rank-and-file workers display an enthusiastic concern that is undaunted by arduous toil to increase the productivity of labour, husband every pood of grain, coal, iron and other products, which do not accrue to the workers personally or to their “close” kith and kin, but to their “distant” kith and kin, i.e., to society as a whole, to tens and hundreds of millions of people united first in one socialist state, and then in a union of Soviet republics’.

Unpaid surplus labour, which in capitalism is indeed monopolised by a minority, but operates in the production process as a corrosive and destructive agent of the mode of production, in socialism will unfold for the benefit of society as a whole, and will have as a dialectical consequence the reduction of the working day of all active members of society.

‘In Capital, Karl Marx ridicules the pompous and grandiloquent bourgeois-democratic great charter of liberty and the rights of man, ridicules all this phrase-mongering about liberty equality and fraternity in general, which dazzles the petty bourgeois and philistines of all countries, including the present despicable heroes of the despicable Berne International. Marx contrasts these pompous declarations of rights to the plain, modest, practical, simple manner in which the question is presented by the proletariat – the legislative enactment of a shorter working day’.

The discovery that unpaid surplus labour is the alpha and omega, the cornerstone of communism is not our arbitrary interpretation of communist doctrine: it is contained in the texts of Marx and Lenin. ‘We are therefore quite sure that we did not discover it ourselves, the drastic formula that sums up both scientifically and dramatically the communist and revolutionary proletarian claim, death to accursed paid and necessary labour, make way for surplus labour freely given, without receiving or asking for anything, in the joy of fighting for the brothers of one’s own class, and tomorrow for the classless society, a good nurse even to the children at rest’ (Structure).

When man has killed off mercantile and individualistic selfishness in himself, when in the fullness of his being he has risen to the height of unpaid and selfless labour for the species, he will have at last have affirmed the human community, the true Gemeinwesen, in which the social man no longer exists in opposition to the community because he will simultaneously be the community: he will be both individual and universal. ‘Since human nature is the true community (Gemeinwesen) of men, by manifesting their nature men create, produce, the human community, the social entity, which is no abstract universal power opposed to the single individual, but is the essential nature of each individual, his own activity, his own life, his own spirit, his own wealth’ (Marx, Comments on J. Mill).

In communist society, the I ‘is also the other’; it is, in its concrete activity of labour and enjoyment, the other and all.

Marx in the following quotation preserves the dialogical form of I and thou proper to bourgeois economics and philosophy. In essence, it is social man dialoguing with himself. ‘Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential nature. 3) I would have been for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love. 4) In the individual expression of my life I would have directly created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature. Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature’.

Vulgar economics defines wages as the price of labour. Based on this formula, it remains a mystery where surplus value arises. Once the mercantilist theory that sees surplus value as arising from circulation proved untenable, vulgar economics has tried to reconcile accounts by reducing Capital to a thing – means of production and means of subsistence – and thus surplus value to profit, the product of Capital as a thing.

The formula wage = labour value is, by our critical criteria, an irrational, fantastic formula. It posits an absurd equality between value (wages) and potential value (labour-power), and confuses the use value of labour power with its exchange value.

Now the use value of a potato is being a potato, an object edible by humans and animals. The exchange value of the potato is not edible, nor is the weight of the potato. And just as it is absurd to compare the weight of the potato with the body of the potato, it is equally absurd to compare the use value of labour power with its exchange value. For Marx: ‘wages [understood as the] “price of labour” is just as irrational as a yellow logarithm’ (Capital, Vol. III) and again: ‘In the expression “value of labour”, the idea of value is not only completely obliterated, but actually reversed. It is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth’ (Capital, Vol. I).

We have seen: value is a historical form of expression of social labour time crystallised in a product. Labour has no value because it is itself, as a historically determined form of social labour, private labour, the source of value. The value of a commodity is equal to the average social labour time necessary for its reproduction. Now what is the labour time necessary to reproduce an hour of average social labour? One hour of average social labour itself. So to say value of labour is like talking about weight of weight, value of value. Labour value is a tautological formula that refers from one term to the other. In logical-mathematical terms it obeys the principle of the vicious circle. It is a proposition in which the predicate defines the subject by means of the subject itself and thus does not define it at all.

Labour is value, therefore it has no other value: it determines the magnitude of values through its temporal duration.

The formula, labour value, is therefore meaningless. But then how does this absurd formula present itself as rational in the eyes of all the actual agents of production? It is that: ‘These imaginary expressions, arise, however, from the relations of production themselves. They are categories for the phenomenal forms of essential relations’.

The essential relation of the capitalist mode of production is the relation between wage labour and capital. In this relation, the exploitation of labour power in the immediate process of production is not immediately visible. The phenomenal form of the relation does not coincide with its essence at all; on the contrary, it is its absolute mystification. The relation of capitalist exploitation is a mystery that must be unveiled.

The labour-wage formula, or the value of labour equivalent, are phenomenal forms of the relation of exploitation. In this, labour power is incorporated as use value having the specific property of being a producer of value, and is bought at its exchange value, with full respect for the law of value and exchange between equivalents. In the phenomenal form of the essential relation, it is the labour of labour power that is bought. Now, ‘[v]ulgar economy (...) deals with appearances only’, but as nature and history many times confirm, ‘in their appearance things often represent themselves in inverted form’.

On the other hand, it is ‘easy to understand (...) the necessity, the raisons d’être, of this phenomenon’ for the purposes of the defence and preservation of the capitalist mode of production. The mystery of the wage is the mystery of capitalist exploitation.

The labour-power–wage exchange defines the historical specificity of wage labour and distinguishes it from other historical forms of labour. In the wage, all labour power appears as paid labour and therefore unpaid labour also appears as paid labour.

In servile labour, the relation of exploitation was visible to all. The serf worked some days for himself and other days for his lord. Paid and unpaid labour were separated temporally and spatially. In time, in that, the peasant worked on different days for himself and for the lord; in space, in that, generally the provision of labour for the lord took place on his fields.

In slave labour, all the slave’s labour looks like unpaid labour. The slave is bought by the master, belongs to the master. Between them no contract is concluded, as the slave is neither an economic nor a legal subject, but an object of purchase and sale like any other living or dead commodity, from which they differ only because they are equipped with language. They were in fact defined instrumentum vocale to distinguish them from the animal, instrumentum semivocale, and from the dead tool, instrumentum mutum.

The sales contract is concluded not between slave and master, but between the buyer and seller of slaves. Now since the slave belongs to the master, it necessarily follows that all the slave’s labour belongs to the master. On the other hand, the slave eats and their master must continuously provide for his sustenance. So in reality the slave works in part for himself even if this part does not appear because the slave receives no recompense at all.

The wage-form is thus distinguished from the other forms because in it any distinction between paid and unpaid labour disappears. All labour appears as paid labour. Exploitation disappears, and the capitalist relation appears as a relation between equal, free men, co-operating for common goals. This ‘distinguishes wage labour from other historical forms of labour’ (Marx, Value, Price, Profit).

Summarising with Marx: ‘The wage-form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working-day into necessary labour and surplus-labour, into paid and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour. In the corvée, the labour of the worker for himself, and his compulsory labour for his lord, differ in space and time in the clearest possible way. In slave labour (...) [a]ll the slave’s labour appears as unpaid labour. In wage labour, on the contrary, even surplus-labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid (...) the money-relation conceals the unrequited labour of the wage labourer’. (Capital, Vol. I).

Because of this, wage labour is the historical form of labour most unfavourable to the subordinate worker, it constitutes the worst slavery, both on the side of the subject and the object. Objectively, because in slave society, the slave’s physical existence was not their problem but that of their master’s, it was guaranteed to them. In the wage relation, it is the free worker who is forced to secure it, time after time. In the event that the labour-capital exchange should break down, as during the crisis, the worker may well starve to death as he does not constitute capital for the capitalist. Moreover, the purpose of slave and servile production was the production of use-values, for oneself and for others. Production was static and the lords’ capacity for consumption limited. Instead, in capitalist production, the purpose of production is production itself, its expansion, the extortion and obsessive accumulation of value and surplus value. It has no limits; that is, it has natural and social limits (the land and the rate of valorisation) that all play against the wage-earner because they drive capital to a relentless attack on the living and working conditions of the proletarian.

The slave, after having been bought, has only to fear the wrath of the master, who is unlikely to seriously injure or kill them since the slave constitutes capital for him, even if little profitable. The wage labourer, on the other hand, must always prove himself if he does not want to be dismissed and thus condemned to death by hunger. ‘[T]he wage worker has permission to work for his own subsistence – that is, to live, only insofar as he works for a certain time gratis for the capitalist’.

Wage labour is therefore more productive than slave labour, and this explains why the social productive forces of labour have increased under capitalism, more than in any previous phase of the life of the species. This is the only merit we give to this infamous mode of production. ‘In comparison with that of the slave, this work is more productive, because more intensive, for the slave only works under the impulse of external fear, but not for his own existence, which does not belong to him, and yet it is guaranteed. The free worker, in contrast, is driven by his wants’ (Marx, Unpublished Chapter VI).

The free worker is therefore less free than the slave. His actual slavery is bound to increase the more the dominance and power of dead labour over living labour increases. ‘[T]he system of wage labour is a system of slavery, and indeed of a slavery which becomes more severe in proportion as the social productive forces of labour develop, whether the worker receives better or worse payment’ (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme).

The wage labourer, ‘like every seller of a commodity, he is responsible for the commodity he provides, and he must provide it at a certain quality, if he is not to be swept from the field by other sellers of commodities of the same species. The continuity of the relation between slave and slave holder is preserved by the direct compulsion exerted upon the slave. The free worker, on the other hand, must preserve it himself, since his existence and that of his family depend upon his constantly renewing the sale of his labour capacity to the capitalist’ (Marx, Unpublished Chapter VI).

Here at last is found the concrete, material, economic basis of the democratic mystification that conceals the worker’s actual relationship of subordination to capital. The conviction of the wage labourer that he is actually free and equal to the capitalist constitutes the subjective side of the worsening suffered by the worker in the transition from slave labour to wage labour. ‘This phenomenal form (wage, price of labour), which makes the actual relation invisible, and, indeed, shows the direct opposite of that relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalistic mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists’ (Capital, Vol. I).

Political democracy is the reflection of economic democracy. It was the best political shell of Capital in its anti-formist and reformist phase, and the proletariat fought for it as long as it carried out the destruction of feudal forces and forms. The communist proletariat supported the democratic struggle of the bourgeoisie, providing the best fighters for the armed struggle, not because it thought that democratic rule would improve its conditions of existence, but because it was conscious that the democratic phase in general could not be skipped, it had, unfortunately, to be gone through to the end. This does not imply in the slightest that the revolutionary proletariat had to hold a passive and subordinate attitude towards the democratic-revolutionary movement. The communist proletariat was to keep its party and its fighting organisation independent, ready to strangle the democratic bourgeoisie at the first opportunity history offered. Its watchword was: permanent revolution.

Today, since it is no longer a question of developing the productive forces, but rather of helping to give birth, with the forceps of violent revolution, to a new social order that subjects them to the rational control of social man, democracy is of no use to anyone, neither to proletarians nor to capitalists. That is to say, it serves the latter as an ornament, as an instrument to deceive the workers because ‘[t]he consciousness (or rather the notion) of free self-determination, of freedom, (...) as well as the feeling (consciousness) of responsibility bound up with this’ make the wage labourer the best worker and wage labour ‘a much better [labour]’ than the other historical forms of antagonistic labour (Chapter VI).

Today, in the phase of putrefaction and parasitism of the historical parabola described by the bourgeoisie, the struggle for democracy and for its defence binds the working class to capital more than the wedges of Hephaestus chained the rebellious Prometheus to the rock.

The scientific and critical discovery of the historical and social nature of wage labour and the reified nature of the wage animates Marx’s scathing polemic against Proudhon, John Gray, and the petty-bourgeois socialists, and Engels’ against Dühring and the Prussian state socialists, who conceived socialism as the universalisation of wage labour to the whole of society and equality as the equality of wages and not as the claim for the abolition of classes.

The reduction of all men to wage-earners with equal wages, while appearing extremely subversive – an appearance, especially today, comforted by the misery of present times in which even such a claim is a scandal – contains not an ounce of socialism in itself. On the contrary, it constitutes the universalisation of private property and Capital. It is the concretisation of the totalitarian domination of abstract Capital, of the social relation that no longer needs to personify itself in the private capitalist, of Capital that, in its madness of accumulation, is finally no longer limited by the possibility-freedom of consumption of surplus value as income by the capitalist class: ‘[T]he equality of wages, as demanded by Proudhon, only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labour into the relationship of all men to labour. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist’ (Marx, Manuscripts).

Marx’s thesis cannot be digested by those accustomed to the worn-out reasonings of formal logic; by those who are moved not by class hatred against a mode of production that ‘rests on itself’ (Grundrisse) and has less and less need of men – so much so that even their pure physical existence increasingly appears to them as ‘a pure luxury’ (Manuscripts) – but are animated only by the feeling of envy toward the capitalist, the historically transient personification of the social power of Capital.

Capital, says Marx, is a social power. It has had and partially still has need to personify itself in private figures, in capitalists. But its necessary and irreversible tendency is to assert itself for what it actually is: a social power that opposes itself as an alien and hostile power to all the actual agents of production, without any mediation of physical persons.

The romantic socialism of the anarchist Proudhon and the Prussian state socialists Lassalle and Dühring sought to reconcile mercantilism and the law of value with the socialist emancipation of the proletariat. Proudhon and Dühring, the ‘Stalinist’ Dühring (Dialogue with Stalin), claim the equal value of different types of labour and pose the equality of wages as a socialist claim. Hence the claim, judged socialist, for the equality of wages whatever the labour activity performed. Indeed, for Dühring, Marx’s position is anti-socialist and pro-bourgeois because he considers intellectual and skilled labour in general to be compound labour, and simple labour to be the labour of manual workers. For Dühring, it is typical bourgeois prejudice to consider intellectual labour as more important and therefore worthy of higher pay.

Proudhon and Stirner already wrote the same things 30 years before Dühring. ‘Now let us pass on to the conclusions M. Proudhon draws from value constituted (by labour time). A certain quantity of labour is equivalent to the product created by this same quantity of labour. Each day’s labour is worth as much as another day’s labour; that is to say, if the quantities are equal, one man’s labour is worth as much as another man’s labour: there is no qualitative difference. With the same quantity of work, one man’s product can be given in exchange for another man’s product. All men are wage workers getting equal pay for an equal time of work. Perfect equality rules the exchanges’ (Marx, Poverty of Philosophy).

For Proudhon, Lassalle, and Dühring, the exploitation of the proletariat comes to an end when, while mercantile and monetary production persists, the worker appropriates the ‘undiminished fruit of his labour’, i.e. the product of labour divided into equal parts among the members of society. ‘It is in order to find the proper proportion in which workers should share in the products, or, in other words, to determine the relative value of labour, that M. Proudhon seeks a measure for the relative value of commodities. To find out the measure for the relative value of commodities he can think of nothing better than to give as the equivalent of a certain quantity of labour the sum total of the products it has created, which is as good as supposing that the whole of society consists merely of workers who receive their own produce as wages. In the second place, he takes for granted the equivalence of the working days of different workers’.

Proudhon discovers nothing new. By identifying the value of the product with the newly added value he merely repeats Smith’s error, by equating the working days and proposing the integral fruit of labour he merely repeats Ricardian socialism: ‘Every man has an undoubted right to all that his honest labour can procure him. When he thus appropriates the fruits of his labour, he commits no injustice upon any other human being (...) Every man is a link, in the chain of effects – the beginning of which is but an idea, and the end, perhaps, the production of a piece of cloth. Thus, (...) it does not follow that one should be better paid for his labour than another’ (Bray, quoted by Marx in Poverty of Philosophy).

Note that the claims ‘undiminished proceeds of labour to the worker’ and ‘distribution of the proceeds of labour to all members of society’ are mutually contradictory. Whatever is meant by ‘undiminished proceeds of labour’ (labour added anew or total value of the product of labour) it is clear that if the worker appropriates it in its entirety, the non-workers (old, disabled, children) are condemned to penury and starvation. To the Lassallean claim contained in the Gotha Programme: ‘the proceeds of labour belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society’, Marx responds with a double question that highlights the contradiction of the Lassallean formula: ‘To all members of society? To those who do not work as well? What remains then of the “undiminished” proceeds of labour? Only to those members of society who work? What remains then of the “equal right” of all members of society?’.

The substance of the discourse of Proudhon, Stirner, Dühring, and Lassalle is as follows: 1) All labour time has the same value. 2) The value of the product of labour is equal to the value produced. 3) The value of the product is the wage: ‘for him (Proudhon) wages (...) form the integral price of all things’ (Poverty of Philosophy). 4) The exploitation of the proletarian consists in the fact that he only pockets part of the product of his labour while the rest is taken by the capitalist. Thus, between capitalist and worker, unequal exchange prevails. The abolition of exploitation consists in restoring the equivalence of exchange between capitalist and worker. With mercantile and monetary production in force, the emancipation of the proletariat is possible through the appropriation by the worker of the integral fruit of labour, i.e. a wage equal to the value of the product of his labour. 5) Since all labour time is of equal value, and since socialist society is based on the law of equivalence of exchanges, in it the law of value, mercantile and monetary production, and the equality of wages prevails.

For these immediatists, socialist society is that in which the law of value and exchange between equivalents is finally respected in all economic relations, including the worker-capitalist relation: ‘After all, the determination of value by labour time – the formula M. Proudhon gives us as the regenerating formula of the future – is therefore merely the scientific expression of the economic relations of present-day society, as was clearly and precisely demonstrated by Ricardo long before M. Proudhon. But does the “equalitarian” application of this formula at least belong to M. Proudhon? (...) Anyone who is in any way familiar with the trend of political economy in England cannot fail to know that almost all the Socialists in that country have, at different periods, proposed the equalitarian application of the Ricardian theory’. And again: ‘The “exchange of labour for labour on the principle of equal valuation”, in so far as it has any meaning, that is to say, the mutual exchangeability of products of equal social labour, hence the law of value, is the fundamental law of precisely commodity production, hence also of its highest form, capitalist production (...) By elevating this law to the basic law of his economic commune (...) Herr Dühring converts the basic law of existing society into the basic law of his imaginary society’ (Engels, Anti-Dühring).

For the romantic socialists, in the worker-capitalist exchange, the law of equivalent exchange is violated. The worker provides labour and in return receives part of the product of his labour. They confuse the use value of labour power with its exchange value. By identifying one with the other, they see in socialism the restoration of the exchange between equivalents in all economic relations and in particular in the worker-capitalist exchange. Romantic socialism thus reduces the question of the emancipation of the proletariat to a trivial question of unequal distribution. Socialism would establish equitable distribution, through the law of value and undiminished fruit, while leaving the relations of production untouched. ‘Here lies all the depth of the gap between Marx’s conception and the banal ones of Proudhon, Lassalle, and so many others, who call socialism the conquest by the worker of the fruit of his own labour, when, excuse the paradoxical formulation, socialism consists in the loss of it’ (Dialogue with Stalin).

Romantic socialists conceive distribution and production as independent of each other. The latter is acceptable to the worker, while the former must be reformed: ‘We have already seen that Dühringian economics comes down to the following proposition: the capitalist mode of production is quite good, and can remain in existence, but the capitalist mode of distribution is of evil, and must disappear’ (Anti-Dühring). In Dühringian and Proudhonian society, value, wage, commodity, and money, the law of value and exchange between equivalents remain; only wages are equalised and the condition of the wage-earner universalised.

But in real society the relations of distribution cannot be separated from the relations of production: ‘[t]he relations of distribution are in essence identical with these relations of production, they constitute the reverse of the latter, so that one and the other have the same historically transitory character’ (Capital, Vol. III), and again ‘[a]ny distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself (...) Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution’ (Critique of the Gotha Programme).

Along the historical line that runs from Proudhon to Lassalle and to Dühring is Stalin. In his 1952 text ‘Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR’ he states that commodity production and the law of value subsist in socialist society. For Stalin, commodity production loses its capitalist character when the means of production are held by the state, or, as he puts it, by the people: ‘our commodity production is not of the ordinary type, but is a special kind of commodity production, commodity production without capitalists, which is concerned mainly with the goods of associated socialist producers (the state, the [kolkhoz], the cooperatives)’.

On the question of whether or not the law of value applies to the Russian economy, Stalin answers that the law prevails, although not over the entire Soviet economy; and this ‘is not a bad thing. Under present conditions, it really is not a bad thing, since it trains our business executives to conduct production on rational lines and disciplines them. It is not a bad thing because it teaches our executives to count production magnitudes, to count them accurately, and also to calculate the real things in production precisely, and not to talk nonsense about “approximate figures”, spun out of thin air (...) The trouble is not that production in our country is influenced by the law of value. The trouble is that our business executives and planners, with few exceptions, are poorly acquainted with the operations of the law of value, do not study them, and are unable to take account of them in their computations’.

On the question of whether any mechanism that operates according to the law of value is not straightforward capitalism, Stalin answers that there can be an economy which, while not being capitalist, respects the law of value, and this is the specific case of the Russian economy. The existence of state ownership of the means of production would mean that in Russia the law of value would only exert positive and not destructive effects as is the case in capitalist countries: ‘Undoubtedly, the fact that private ownership of the means of production does not exist, and that the means of production both in town and country are socialised, cannot but restrict the sphere of operation of the law of value and the extent of its influence on production. In this same direction operates the law of balanced (proportionate) development of the national economy, which has superseded the law of competition and anarchy of production (...) The effect of all this, taken together, is that the sphere of operation of the law of value in our country is strictly limited, and that the law of value cannot under our system function as the regulator of production. This, indeed, explains the “striking” fact that whereas in our country the law of value, in spite of the steady and rapid expansion of our socialist production, does not lead to crises of overproduction, in the capitalist countries this same law, whose sphere of operation is very wide under capitalism, does lead, in spite of the low rate of expansion of production, to periodical crises of overproduction’.

For Stalin, the production of commodities loses its capitalist character when the means of production are held by the state, that is, by the people. According to Stalin, if power is in the hands of the proletariat, the machinery of nationalised industry, even if exchange of equivalents and double-entry accounting prevail, does not pursue, as in capitalist countries, the maximum profit but the maximum welfare of the workers and the people.

Terminological issues aside, people and workers do not belong to the Marxist lexicon, the fact remains that Stalinist socialism is strictly Proudhonian and Dühringian in that capitalist relations of production based on the law of value remain unaltered, and socialism is reduced to a trivial nationalisation of industry and to a distributive equalisation. ‘The issue arose before Stalin in the form of the validity in Russia, even for the economy of the large State industry, of the law of value proper to capitalist production. This is the law according to which the exchange of commodities always takes place between equivalents: the false façade of “liberty, equality, and Bentham,” which Marx demolished, showing that capitalism does not produce for product but for profit. Between the jaws of this vice, between necessity and the domination of economic laws, Stalin’s Manifesto moves in such a way that confirms our thesis: in its most powerful form, Capital subjugates the State, even when the State appears to be the legal owner of all Enterprises’ (Dialogue with Stalin).

Marx in his critique of the Gotha programme, destroys both the proposal of the undiminished fruit of labour and that of the division of the product of labour into equal parts among the members of society. Socialism for Marx is not the restitution to the worker of the entire product of his labour, on the contrary, it is the abolition of wage labour. If the law of value, this pillar on which the whole of existing society rests, remains in force, any distributive solution devised cannot solve any ills of the proletariat. It is precisely that ‘[b]asing themselves directly on this, the economists have been proving for 50 years and more that socialism cannot abolish poverty, which has its basis in nature, but can only make it general, distribute it simultaneously over the whole surface of society!’ (Critique of the Gotha Programme).

If the socialist solution actually lay in the egalitarian division of the social product of labour, while however maintaining mercantile, monetary, and enterprise production, it would be too easy for the adversary to demonstrate that the distribution of the surplus value consumed by capitalists to the whole of society would raise the living conditions of the proletariat by a negligible amount. Romantic, i.e., bourgeois socialism, ‘does not want to go backwards, but neither does it want to go forwards, it wants to stop history in its mercantile mode, obtaining justice for the wage-earners. Its prophet is Proudhon, its high priest, as we showed in the Dialogue, was Stalin (...) Like the progenitor Proudhon, it deceives the masses that it is possible to escape from the limits of capitalism without breaking its mercantile shell’ (Russia and Revolution in Marxist Theory).

The great novel of the Bear is coming to an end. The internal market has been built, and the great Russian economic power proclaims its intention to descend onto the world market.

From peaceful coexistence between two worlds, one moves to the interdependence between the two markets enunciated by Gorbachev:

‘On the whole, we have been living in peace for a long time. But the current international situation cannot be considered satisfactory (...) Making international relations more human is the only way out, however difficult. This is how we pose the question: ideological differences must be overcome. Let each person make his own choice, and let the others respect it. Therefore, new political thinking is needed, one that proceeds from the recognition of general interdependence and the idea that civilisation must survive’ (Gorbachev, Perestroika).

During the meeting with Italian industrialists which took place during his last visit to Italy (December 1989), Gorbachev explicitly announced the compatibility and interdependence between the socialist and capitalist economic systems.

‘We wish to participate in the international economic organisation. The market of the USSR is enormous and with the perestroika it will be even bigger. But we are building it now, with the restoration of finances, with new laws, up to the convertibility of the rouble’.

Gorbachev’s goal is a system where ‘markets in different areas are interdependent with each other (...) The difficulties must not discourage us, it is not true that the socialist and Western economic systems are incompatible’.

But the productivity of Russian labour is enormously inferior to that of the West. And what’s worse, during the 1980s, the delay in technical development compared to the advanced Western capitalist countries has increased, amid the desperate lamentations of the Russian leadership.

‘During a certain phase (and this appears particularly clear in the second half of the 1970s) something happened that was at first sight inexplicable. The country began to lose its momentum. Economic failures became more frequent. A kind of “braking mechanism” was formed that affected social and economic development. And this happened at a time when the scientific and technological revolution was opening up new prospects for social and economic progress (...) We analysed the situation and discovered first of all a slowdown in our economic growth. Over the past 15 years, national income growth rates had declined by more than half, and by the early 1980s, had fallen to a level very close to that of economic stagnation. A country that was once rapidly catching up to the most advanced nations of the world was beginning to lose position after position. And the gap in production efficiency, in product quality, in scientific and technological progress, in the production of advanced technologies and in the use of advanced techniques was beginning to widen, certainly not to our advantage’.

What is an indication of the senility of the Russian capitalist structure – the decline in the rate of economic growth – appears to Gorbachev as the result of a specific method of capital accumulation (which he moreover Stalinistically passed off as socialism): quantitative horizontal accumulation, also known as extensive accumulation.

As vulgar, reformist, and bourgeois, as he is, Gorbachev thinks that political will can overturn the historically decreasing tendency of capitalist accumulation.

The young Russian capitalist economy under Stalinist and post-Stalinist leadership has experienced all the stages envisaged by Marxist economic theory, in an accelerated form only because it was the last great capitalism to appear on the historical scene. Like all capitalisms, it has attempted to counteract, thereby confirming, the tendential law of the decline of the annual average increases in production – a phenomenal form of the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit – a law valid only for the typical periods of the historical development of capitalism and not for the quarterly conjunctures at which degenerate bourgeois economic science, including Russian, stops, by means of a horizontal extension of capitalism spreading from Europe toward barbarian Asia.

To speak of horizontal or extensive accumulation is not to deny, as Gorbachev seems to do, that intensive and ‘vertical’ accumulation of capital also took place in Russia. It simply means noting that in Stalinist and Brezhnevist Russia, quantitative production, especially in heavy industry, had become the top priority.

‘Accustomed to prioritising the quantitative growth of production, we tried to curb the decline in the growth rate, but we did so mainly by continuously increasing expenditure’.

Contrary to what Gorbachev thinks, Russian capitalism followed its own inexorable laws sweeping away all obstacles to its expansion. It was not the Soviet bourgeoisie that dictated to capital the modes and rhythms of its development, but the latter dictated to the Russian state and its leaders with its economic laws. Like any capitalism developing under the mantle of protectionism, it favoured horizontal and quantitative extension at the expense of quality and intensity. Only when it would have been ready to enter into the arena of the world market would Russian capitalism pose the problem of the economic competitiveness of its products and thus of its ‘restructuring’, its organic composition. In the meantime, the costs of quantitative accumulation would be paid by the Russian proletariat, including the future one, due to the squandering of natural wealth.

To Gorbachev the whole process appears reversed as if in a mirror. It was Stalinist political will that imposed on Russian capital one model of accumulation (recognised as valid until at least the 1940s) among many possible ones.

‘Dogmatism stimulated the evolution of a “spendthrift” economy that gained momentum and continued to exist until the mid-1980s. This is where the infamous mentality of “quantitative production”, which, until recently, has dominated our economy, has its roots’.

The ‘dogmatism’ of which Gorbachev complains are the last remnants of Marxist economic theory which, in a distorted and degenerate form, appear in the Stalinist economic scheme:

‘It was in this situation that a mentality full of prejudices about the role of goods-money relations and the law of value within the framework of socialism took hold; and it was often claimed that they were contrary to and alien to socialism. All this combined with an underestimation of profit-and-loss accounting and produced disorder in prices and disinterest in the problems of monetary circulation.

The Russian economy even now is a capitalist economy in which absolute surplus value plays a priority role over relative surplus value, unlike in the developed capitalist countries of the West. It is an economy more ‘extensive’ than ‘intensive’.

‘The analysis of the performance of industry has shown various mistakes in investment policy. For many years, our policy was to always create new enterprises. The construction of plants and administrative buildings absorbed enormous sums. Meanwhile, existing enterprises remained at the same technological level. Of course, if one makes good use of everything available in two or three shifts, one can achieve the objectives of the 12th Five-Year Plan using existing machinery’.

For Gorbachev, the Stalinist policy of extensive accumulation, besides dissipating the country’s natural resources, had the serious defect, creating a constant shortage of even unskilled labour, of making it difficult to increase the extraction of absolute surplus value itself and of preventing the formation of a true labour aristocracy due to the levelling of wages and living conditions.

‘As time went on, material resources became more difficult and costly to obtain. On the other hand, the extensive methods of fixed capital expansion led to an artificial shortage of labour. In an attempt to remedy the situation, large, unjustified and undeserved premiums began to be paid under the pressure of this scarcity (...) A parasitic mentality took hold, the prestige of conscientious and skilled labour began to diminish, and the tendency towards the levelling of wages spread. The imbalance between the measure of labour and the measure of consumption, which had become the pivot of the braking mechanism, not only hindered productivity growth, but led to the distortion of the principle of social justice. And thus, the inertia of extensive economic development was leading to the dead end of economic stagnation’.

The Gorbachevian solution to emerge from economic stagnation and face competition on the world market head-on, consists in a drastic restructuring of the Russian production apparatus and the working conditions of the proletariat. It is imperative for the Soviet economy to increase the extraction both of absolute surplus value through the reduction of labour time and relative surplus value through the extension of machinery and automation.

For this to happen, it is necessary to strengthen the order and discipline of labour.

‘At the Plenum in April 1985, we succeeded in proposing a systematic and well-considered programme and in outlining a concrete strategy for the further development of the country, as well as a plan of action (...) It was not possible to wait any longer; even so, too much time had been lost. The first problem that arose was to improve the economic situation, to halt and reverse the unfavourable trends in this sphere. The most immediate priorities, which of course we considered first, were to restore some sort of order to the economy, to strengthen discipline, to raise the level of organisation and responsibility, and to catch up in those sectors where we were lagging behind. During the year, vast and concrete programmes were drawn up in the main fields of science and technology: and these programmes aim to achieve decisive results and to reach world level by the end of this century (...) Priority shifted from new buildings to the technical modernisation of enterprises, to the economy of resources, to the improvement of quality.

And again:

‘We have drawn up and adopted a broad and comprehensive programme for scientific and technological progress, aiming to significantly increase production efficiency and double or triple productivity by the year 2000’.

At this point, Stalin’s romantic socialism becomes an obstacle. A policy that openly affirms the need to increase the pace of work, to reinforce the despotic discipline of capital over labour, to close factories that operate at a loss or operate inefficiently is obstructed by Stalin’s romantic ideology that identifies socialism with economic equality and all the welfare and economic guarantees offered by the state (even though the reality has always been very different from Stalinist propaganda).

The black beast of Gorbachevism is constituted, more than by the ideological declarations of the nostalgics, by the social acquisitions of the revolution from which the Russian proletariat still benefits. The difficulties encountered by the regime in introducing differentiation within the class through material incentives and the formation of a labour aristocracy; the organic refusal by the majority of workers, particularly the unskilled, of the restructuring of the production apparatus, which means for the class more work punishment and more discipline (a Soviet survey found that 61% of Soviet workers are against perestroika in the factory). The guarantees enjoyed by the class in terms of employment, medical care, schooling, etc. earned Gorbachev cries of hatred, contempt, and loathing against the proletariat.

Gorbachev expresses the current impotence of the Russian leadership, which cannot afford a frontal attack to deprive the proletariat of what remains on the social level 72 years after the October Revolution because he is, begrudgingly, bound by the professed ideology that makes the working class, in words, the ruling class of society and the state.

‘Perestroika snaps us out of our usual state of calm and satisfaction with the existing way of life. At this point I think it appropriate to draw your attention to a specific characteristic of socialism. I am thinking of the high degree of social protection in our society. On the one hand it is undoubtedly a benefit, our great achievement; but on the other, it turns certain people into parasites. Virtually unemployment does not exist. The state has assumed the burden of securing employment. Even a person dismissed for laziness or breach of labour discipline has to have another job. The levelling of wages has also become a regular feature of our daily life; even a bad worker receives just enough to live decently. The children of a parasite are not abandoned to their fate (...) Healthcare is free, and so is education (...) However, we realise that dishonest individuals try to exploit these advantages of socialism: they know only their rights but do not want to know about their duties; they do the bare minimum, avoid putting in effort, and drink a lot. There are many who have adapted existing laws and customs to their own selfish interests. They give very little to society; but they have managed to wrest from it as much as possible and even the impossible, and they live on incomes they have not earned’.

Like any self-respecting bourgeois, Gorbachev considers any worker who attempts to defend himself against capital a parasite:

‘Animated monster who starts working as if its body were by love possessed’ (Capital).

We cannot here reproduce the splendid Leninist analysis on the parasitic nature of imperialist capitalism. We can only remind Gorbachev and his ilk that the only true parasite is modern capitalism, whose parasitism is given by the fact that the ‘tendency is for the largest margin and social control to slip from the grasp of positive and active elements to become concentrated in the hands of speculators and business banditry’ (Doctrine of the Body Possessed by the Devil), which is exactly what Gorbachev and all his cohorts are.

The hard core of resistance to Gorbachev’s perestroika lies not so much in the so-called ‘conservatives’ à la Ligachev as in the large industrial concentrations. This is why one of Gorbachev’s first measures was the ban on workers’ strikes. On the other hand, it was in Chinese factories that Deng’s economic reform was aborted, long before the noisy urban petty bourgeoisie took to the streets to protest and demand a greater share in the division of workers’ surplus value (under the pompous buzzwords of democracy, freedom, and similar nonsense).

Gorbachev enumerates all the social strata in favour of perestroika, and in the front row we find certainly not the proletariat, but the scum of social parasitism, that Soviet intelligentsia that for 70 years has crawled at the feet of the Stalinist rabble and gathers the crumbs of extorted surplus value, while watching, covetous and envious, the well-fed, well-priced brethren of the West:

‘The intelligentsia has enthusiastically supported the restructuring (...) The congresses of the “creative unions” of directors, writers, artists, composers, architects, playwrights, and journalists were characterised by lively debates. All congresses have declared themselves in favour of perestroika’.

A deaf workers’ silence has so far greeted Gorbachevian propaganda, a silence that has on occasion made way for magnificent strikes like that of the miners, a good omen for a clear class response to the economic policy of the current leadership.

Reduced to its essentials, the problem boils down for Gorbachevism to creating a strong bridgehead within the industrial working class that makes the policy of restructuring its own, because, beyond the nonsense of modern degenerate bourgeois sociology, it is always the industrial working class that is the decisive class, it is its relative neutrality or indifference that allows the bourgeoisie to dominate the world. To divide the working class internally is the essential watchword of perestroika: to create a labour aristocracy that, in exchange for an improvement in its living conditions, will act as spokesman and defender of the most appalling attack on the conditions of the workers of Russia:

‘Perestroika is the elevation of the honest and skilled worker, the overcoming of levelling tendencies in wages’.

Here too Gorbachev must fight against the social achievements of the Revolution. Creating a labour aristocracy means pitting a minority class with higher incomes and greater labour and social guarantees against the majority with lower incomes, more precarious work, and fewer guarantees.

From its inception, capitalism has sought to export to the working class the ideology of competition and rivalry typical of the bourgeoisie, and from its first steps the workers’ movement, even before communist theory permeated it, opposed this ideology, according to which collective progress arises only from the competition of individuals, the solidarity among workers. The victory of competitive and rivalrous ideology is a tremendous misfortune for the proletarian movement and ideal for the bosses, who, by flattering a minority of the workers with a wage increase, would succeed in extracting a greater profit from the whole mass.

While the bourgeois and petty bourgeois, like Gorbachev, appeal to the basest and most primal, we can say animalistic, instincts of the individual beast, the socialist doctrine of the Party, condemning all competition proper to the bourgeois, does not reduce itself to the individual aim of improving oneself, but to that of improving all of society, the sole liberation of the dominated class.

We have already seen how Gorbachev raises lamentations to the heavens because of the excessive, according to him, guarantees enjoyed by the Soviet proletariat. It is now a question of mobilising all the social parasites and the most qualified stratum of the proletariat in the name of social and wage differentiations.

Now, although there are differences in living and working conditions within the proletariat, it is fairly homogeneous, the economic differences are not as marked as in the West. Russia is fundamentally a Ricardian society, not Malthusian; the expansion of subsection IIb luxury goods is still in its infancy, and has only touched some upper strata of the proletariat. Not only that, but official Soviet ideology has, before the advent of Gorbachev, exalted ‘collectivist’ attitudes (for the fatherland, for the people, for socialism, for proletarian internationalism) and not ‘individualist’ ones. Gorbachev himself in Perestroika polemicises against Western consumerism. Social consciousness, this Gorbachev knows very well, confirming Marxist doctrine, acts as a powerful brake on the changes postulated by the current Soviet leadership.

This explains the obsessive attack carried out by Gorbachev and his men against egalitarianism and egalitarian and collectivist ideologies and his uncritical and ultra-liberal exaltation of individualism.

‘The intensification of social production suggests a new attitude towards efficient employment and calls for a reorganisation of the workforce. As we work in this direction, we must carefully consider how the principle of social justice is applied. The widespread practice of egalitarianism has been one of the major distortions of recent decades (...)

‘This is how the 26th Congress of the CPSU formulated the problem of social justice: in socialism, the foundation of social justice is labour. Only labour determines a citizen’s true place in society, his position. And this precludes any manifestation of egalitarianism.

‘Egalitarian attitudes resurface from time to time even now. Certain citizens have understood the call for social justice as “equalise everyone”. But society insistently demands that the principle of socialism be firmly transposed into life. In other words, what we value most is the citizen’s contribution to the country.

‘We must encourage efficiency in production and the talent of a writer, a scientist, and any other honest, hard-working citizen. Let us be very clear on this point: socialism has nothing to do with levelling. Socialism cannot ensure living and consumption conditions according to the principle: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. This will be the case under communism. Socialism has a different criterion for the distribution of social benefits: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work”. There is no exploitation of man by man, no division between rich and poor, between millionaires and beggars (...) everyone has a guaranteed job; we have free secondary and higher education and free health services; citizens have an assured old age. This is the concretisation of social justice under socialism’.

We will return later to the question of the relationship between socialism and equality and demonstrate how the Gorbachevian solution, like the Stalinist one, is a thousand miles away from the Marxist one. However, the irrefutable fact remains, by Gorbachev’s own declaration, that egalitarianism is defended by the proletariat:

‘Egalitarianism must be rethought. Because too often it has been considered in a simplistic way; equal distribution for all, levelled for all, has often found favour with the masses’ (Igor Konf, member of the Academy of Sciences, staunch Gorbachevian, quoted in the Press).

The policy of social differentiation within the class through material incentives is accompanied by an ideological counteroffensive. It is explicitly theorised by the Gorbachevians:

‘In the Soviet Union, there is first of all a need for a psychological perestroika’ (Igor Konf) that re-evaluates individualism, because ‘the role of the individual has been undervalued for too long, in every sphere of our life, from culture to the economy’.

Ideological perestroika has the task of awakening man, accustoming him to not have fear of independence and freedom (freedom to get rich, to be a proprietor, but also to be fired, without social guarantees, etc.). Its point of departure is individualism, the exaltation of the person and his freedoms:

‘For us, these concepts have only had a negative meaning, they have become synonymous with selfishness. Whereas individualism also means something else, as the European tradition demonstrates: it means, for example, recognition of the values of the individual’.

In order to convince the proletarian to shoulder the social costs of the restructuring, Gorbachev resumes agitating the fetish of the human person, always derided by Marxists, who have shown how the apologists for this fetish are the same ones who crush it with obscene cynicism, as one might do a handful of slugs in the mortar.

For revolutionary Marxists, with each transition from simple to new, more complex modes of production, the network of social relations between the individual and all his peers increases, the conditions designated with pompous terms of autonomy and freedom decrease.

‘Individuals have always built on themselves, but naturally on themselves within their given historical conditions and relationships (...) But in the course of historical evolution, and precisely through the inevitable fact that within the division of labour social relationships take on an independent existence, there appears a division within the life of each individual, insofar as it is personal and insofar as it is determined by some branch of labour and the conditions pertaining to it (...) In the estate (and even more in the tribe) this is as yet concealed (...) The division between the personal and the class individual, the accidental nature of the conditions of life for the individual, appears only with the emergence of the class, which is itself a product of the bourgeoisie. This accidental character is only engendered and developed by competition and the struggle of individuals among themselves. Thus, in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are more subjected to the violence of things’ (Marx-Engels, The German Ideology).

Individualism weakens, the human person impoverishes. The richer and more articulate the objective world becomes, the poorer and more resigned the subjectivity of the individual man becomes. What happens for society as a whole is what happens for the working class in the immediate production process. The power of the worker estranges itself and objectifies itself to his external world, dominating him: the more he resets himself to zero, becoming a cog in the wheel of the automaton-machine, the more monstrously the latter inflates, the more human existence estranges itself and objectifies itself in the infinite web of social relations, leaving the individual man as a miserable empty shell, a puppet without life or will, moved by the strings of the automaton-capital, whether he is low or high in the social hierarchy.

The modern bourgeois who defends property sees the historical process upside down, as a succession of stages of the individual-man’s release from social bonds, as an enrichment and elevation of the human Person.

For revolutionary Marxism, this enrichment process consists in the reduction of all impulses of being to the sole impulse of having. The person cannot be separated from property:

‘Individual, person, and property all go well together. Given the false principle that we just examined (my body is mine, and so is my hand), the tool with which our powers are extended for the purposes of labour is also mine (...) The products of my hand and of its various extensions are also mine: Property is therefore an indestructible attribute of the Person’ (The Revolutionary Programme of Communist Society...).

When Gorbachev says that the ‘Soviet’ man must be freed from the inertia of the past, must be made autonomous and independent, must develop his spirituality, he means more prosaically that he must be made a proprietor:

‘The indispensable task, and the harbinger of success, consists in “waking up” those who have “fallen asleep”, activating and involving them so that everyone has the feeling of being the master of the country, of their own enterprise, of the office, or the institute’ (Perestroika).

And again:

‘It is evident from the example of the collectives of contract farms and family farms that our people felt the lack of the role of owner. Not only do many aspire to earn more, which is understandable, but they want to do it honestly. They precisely want to earn, not to milk the state. This desire is completely in keeping with the socialist spirit, and therefore there should be no restrictions’.

Acquiring a mentality and ‘a way of acting as owners’ is one of the central watchwords of perestroika. It is accompanied by constant appeals and the need for ‘a broad democratisation of all aspects of society’ and ‘workers’ self-management’. This call for democratisation and self-management does not contradict the measures of centralisation of power (Gorbachev today formally centralises more power than Stalin did) and the denial of the right to strike to the proletarians. It is the other side of the same coin of bourgeois rule. Democracy is always democracy of proprietors; freedom is always freedom of property (and this is all the more true the more private property is abolished as we shall later show on the basis of Marx).

‘Liberty, therefore, is the right to do everything that harms no one else (...) It is a question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad (...) But, the right of man to liberty is based not on the association of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the restricted individual, withdrawn into himself. The practical application of man’s right to liberty is man’s right to private property’ (Marx, On the Jewish Question).

The right of private property is the right of man alienated from himself, turned in on himself, separated from man and from the community:

‘The right of man to private property is, therefore (...) the right of self-interest. This individual liberty and its application form the basis of civil society. It makes every man see in other men not the realisation of his own freedom, but the barrier to it’.

Individual, person, property are the counter-revolutionary triad against which the Communist Party has fought since its inception.

‘And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also (...) You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend (...) You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible’ (Manifesto).

If individualism is the historical enemy of Marxists in the historical-philosophical field, electoralism is the enemy in the political field, and mercantilism in the economic field. ‘Any tactic that seeks to utilise these insidious methods in an attempt to achieve an apparent advantage, is equivalent to the sacrifice of the future of the party to the success of one day, or one year; it is equivalent to unconditional surrender to the Monster of the counter-revolution’ (The Revolutionary Programme of Communist Society...).

Psychological perestroika set itself the task of reconstructing the new Soviet man. The Stalinist hen has finally hatched its little monster: the homo sovieticus proprietarius.