Like modern Diogenes, the dynamic ‘masters of steam’ of this ramshackle peninsula are on a nagging search for the ways and means to pull the Italian economy out of the crisis. Armed with patience, they wander through the labyrinths of the structures of bourgeois economics, illuminating themselves with the dusted-off candle-ends handed down to them by Ricardo, Malthus, Keynes, Kaldor, Graziani, lights capable at most of giving them a glimpse of fearful and terrifying shadows, but certainly not the road that leads to an Eden in which there are no contradictions between production and market, between social production and individual appropriation of products.

An example of this hustle and bustle is the conference on ‘Enterprise in the Italian Economy’ held in Rome, organised by the Federation of the Knights of Labour, in the last days of October; a conference attended by the most brilliant representatives of Italian industry, politics, and intellectual life: everyone was there, from Agnelli to Petrilli, from Carli to La Malfa, from Prof. Spaventa to Prof. Andreatta, and ending with Hon. Peggio, the economic expert of the big party.

This episode, miserable in itself, provides an opportunity for Marxist critique to reiterate theses that are old, certainly, but still capable of easily disposing of the latest novelties of bourgeois intelligence and of revealing before the eyes of the proletariat the structures and mechanism of this bestial mode of production, capitalist.

We will not lose ourselves in the labyrinth of speeches and replies by such illustrious speakers: all their speeches were, aside from the obvious nuances necessary to deceive the astonished audience, perfectly identical in substance. In short, Agnelli is worth as much as Hon. Peggio, logically excluding from the latter’s speech the usual litany about ‘structural reforms’ and ‘democratic control’ over ‘choices’ and investments.

All agreed therefore against the proletariat and against Marxism, whose mocking shadow hovered like a spectre in the grand hall of the EUR whenever Ricardo, Malthus, and Keynes were mentioned.

Without fear of error, we can summarise the chatter of this conference in these few concise points:

1 – ‘The enterprise’, whether state-owned or private ‘constitutes the central element of the market economy’, it is, and remains, ‘an irreplaceable instrument for optimising the combination of production factors’.

2 – It is necessary to free the enterprise from the thousand constraints that hold it back and prevent it from disentangling itself with sufficient agility from the traps of today’s commodity-laden market. That is to say, once the enterprise fetish has been accepted by all, some representatives of capitalism are calling for a return to a certain laissez-faire understood as a competition for the best profit and as a measuring ground for the economic validity of the enterprise-prison. This is the recurring attack of these days by some fringes of the industrial bourgeoisie, Agnelli in the lead, on the parasitism of the so-called public administrations and local authorities which, by constantly falling into debt, destroy wealth and capital by diverting it from productive uses and ‘thus distort the financial market which overburdens companies with debt, making them incapable of attracting venture capital’.

3 – Once the enterprise and its productive function are settled, it is a matter of producing. And here comes the fateful question: what? Magic answer: planning, and the State and its governments are brought into play. It is necessary to plan, and who better than a government that, having freed itself ‘from a thousand particular pressures and from the pushes of too many corporations of interests’, finally gives ‘a rational direction to investments and the use of human and material resources, oriented towards the real needs of the country’s development’? None evidently.

The State must therefore support the dying enterprise, safeguard its autonomy and reason for existence by ‘proposing that general frame of reference that the market is less and less able to express spontaneously and from which, however, the investment decisions of enterprises; especially the largest of them, cannot be disregarded’.

These are the speeches, more or less convinced, of the Knights of Labour, of whom Marxism reveals the delusions and illusions.

Point 1: The enterprise is our beast. Socialism will know neither individualism, nor mercantilism, nor corporatism. They constitute the essential and necessary foundations of capitalism:
a – the existence of a market economy on which the worker is totally dependent, who buys his means of subsistence there; thus entailing the extinction of all those non-mercantile economies of autonomous parcellular producers associated in guilds, communes, etc;
b – impossibility for the workers to appropriate the product of their labour, ergo, remuneration in wages and private ownership over the products of labour;
c – extortion of surplus-value; that is, the workers are paid a value, in the form of wages, corresponding to a certain quantity of goods and services, less than the value added by them to the products;
d – investment of part of the surplus value in new facilities (capital accumulation).

Having broken, with iron and fire, the now dying feudal forms of production, the bourgeois raised to the sky their mighty workshops and factories, true galleys for millions of workers: it was the glorious time of capitalism and for its prophet, the captain of industry, sometimes owner not only of the products but also the plants and the land on which they were erected, he boasted of fulfilling the historic task of developing the productive forces.

When everything was identified with the captain of industry, property, capital and, finally, technical knowledge, the nascent socialist movement could not but inscribe on its banners the propaganda formula: abolition of private ownership of the means of production and exchange.

Propaganda formula that we have used, use, and will use, while keeping in mind that capitalism is a social and not an individual mode of production, and that capitalism can exist without a class of industrial bourgeois, and that individual ownership of the means of production and exchange is not enough to characterise it. All things well known since the time of Marx and Engels and which it is the Party’s task to re-present in the face of this disgusting actuality.

How else can one explain that declared defenders of the status quo, after having affirmed the irreplaceable role of the enterprise in the market economy, declare that ‘the problem of ownership structure appears abstract today’? Simple, because, and these gentlemen know it well, what characterises capitalism is not the ownership of real estate, tools, and cash, but the pursuit of maximum profit, the production of surplus value, in companies, whether state-owned or not, it matters little.

Having cleared the road of the ownership obstacle, there remain the anonymous enterprises which, in the design of those figures, once they have fulfilled the task of reconciling the productive forces, for them both capital and labour, would clash in the arena of that slice of the market programmed by the omnipotent State, where naturally the weakest perish and disappear; this is the version dear to the Agnellis and the Carlis. The second hypothesis goes further and audaciously would also like to programme the elimination of those dead branches that impede the normal development of the economy, and this is the thesis of the PCI. Both theses are reactionary: both have the company as their fulcrum, whether or not the classic captain of industry exists. We repeat:

‘The capitalist does indeed derive a profit from the unpaid surplus labor of his workers, whom he only pays enough to live on, but the fundamental feature of the new economy is not that he, in theory and according to the written law, can consume all the profit personally; instead, it is the general and social fact that capitalists must reserve an increasingly large part of the profit for new investments, for the reproduction of capital. This new and fundamental fact has more importance than that of profit consumed by those who do not work. While this relationship is more suggestive and has always lent itself more to counterpropaganda on legal or moral grounds against apologists for the bourgeois regime, the fundamental law of capitalism is for us the other, namely, the allocation of a large part of profit to the accumulation of capital’ (from Property and Capital).

That is why we have never bought into the socialist joke that it would consist in the physical elimination of the figure of the bourgeoisie and in the subsequent payment of the undiminished fruit of labour to the worker.

‘Naturally then the usual quid pro quo in economics, handed down from Proudhon to Lassalle to Dühring to Sorel to Gramsci: socialism is winning back for the workers the profit margin taken by the company. Socialism, as we keep on insisting, is the conquering by the workers associated together not in companies but in a completely international society, of the entire product, and therefore not just surplus value, which it is tritely stated goes to the bosses, whereas it is instead a social withdrawal which capitalism usefully introduced. So, a conquering of all of the value, after which value will be destroyed, just as by conquering all power, power will be destroyed’ (from The Croaking of Praxis).

For another reason, it should not surprise us that the bourgeoisie raises the enterprise to the seventh heaven: it is in fact the transposition of the bourgeois social conception into the economy. For the bourgeois, society is the ensemble of citizens all equally endowed with self-consciousness and a critical spirit. Once all the little men are put on an equal footing, the best one naturally and rightly asserts itself and from that moment on will lead a life of a great man while the wretched remainder will be nailed to a miserable life. Thus arranged, the system is perfect, and brotherhood and love must be established between the different individuals in the social fabric. The same conception in the economic field with a set of companies chivalrously fighting in a mercantile environment. Quite otherwise for Marxist critique, which, just as in the social field it rails against individualism and bourgeois conciliation, opposing to it its conception of history in which classes with opposing interests clash, imputes, in the economic field, the anarchy of production to the fact that it is conducted through companies, through enterprises that move and live in a mercantile environment.

Given these assumptions, company and market, the gross contradiction between consumption capacity and purchasing capacity, between exchange value and use value, will always exist.

The enterprise must therefore follow in socialism the fate of private ownership of products and the market: all three, terms of the same proposition, will be buried.

Point 2: The moralising diatribe against the waste and parasitism of local authorities and public administrations, which emptily consume ‘capital’ in order to poorly perform their organisational tasks.

A few words: the only parasite sucking the blood of humanity is capital, we know of no other. All the rest, elephantiasis of the State, disproportionate increase of its apparatus penetrating every pore of society, is nothing but the direct and inevitable consequence of this mode of production whose degree of such obsolescence, to use a fashionable term, is determined by the development of the productive forces.

These moralising campaigns are nothing more than a tragic bluff: on the one hand, the State is asked to plan and invest, the only way to defeat the competition in the world market, with a consequent growth of the state apparatus, which now also carries out the functions of the classic entrepreneur; on the other hand, there is a desire for cheap government that saves on the penny, a typical petty-bourgeois demand.

The State is rightly beating about the bush: ‘Gentlemen entrepreneurs, my tasks compared to the glorious time of free competition have grown: I collect taxes and levies, I accumulate, invest, produce and permanently conduct an economic war to the death with our fierce neighbours, I regulate the financial market and moreover perform my repressive task of maintaining the status quo. My whole apparatus, you understand, must swell: both the judiciary as well as the bureaucracy and equally the army’. The State, in short, presents the bill, a bill that cannot be evaded, that cannot be deferred, from which the bourgeoisie certainly cannot escape.

Is all this a sign of a greater freedom of action for the State vis-à-vis the economy, reduced to the status of a beast of burden that meekly follows the orders of the helmsman State? We have said it a thousand times: No! If this were the case, our entire materialist interpretation of history would fall, according to which politics arises from economics, and the old theses would come back into fashion, according to which the economy depends on politics, on the handling of Power by men of flesh and blood who would make history, with their head. We repeat: capital is a social force, which has at its disposal, and we emphasise this, the class political State. In short, the economy holds sway over politics.

An apparatus of State and a parasitic bureaucracy is nothing new either: a classic example was the reign of the Tsar who, in terms of bureaucratism, has much to teach everyone. A plethoric administration and a rapacious court to maintain constantly indebted the Empire to French and British bankers; capital subjugated a feudal State. The parasitic bureaucracy, therefore, is not a prerogative of this regime; all class regimes, more or less, have had it, precisely because it is not a force of production, but a form of class power. Its utility is not economic, but political: it contributes to shoring up the State. It is a necessary waste, organic to this class regime, and Agnelli and Co. know it well. They bluff in their sermons on local governments etc. that diverting them to the financial market prevents venture capital from being employed in enterprises, which would no longer be able to churn out competitive commodities.

In order to sell their commodities on the world market, our industrialists must lower their production costs; that such a manoeuvre must be done by not decreasing profits is for our entrepreneurs self-evident. There remain two terms on which to manoeuvre: the worker’s wage and the so-called false costs (taxes, maintenance of the bureaucratic apparatus of the enterprise, advertising expenses, etc.); the second term, to which the participants at the conference wink, cannot be touched, it is historically increasing.

This tendency can only be reversed by the Proletarian State running towards socialism, in which there will no longer be competing commodities and the State will increasingly lose its character of oppression to assume the technical function of rational administration of the products of human labour in struggle only with the forces of nature.

The worker’s wage can instead be diminished and compressed: that is the goal of the Knights of Labour. The rest is smoke in the eyes that serves to deceive the proletarian masses. It is the tactic of whining of which the supreme specialist is Hon. La Malfa; it always ends up, strangely enough, like this: we can’t take it any more, we can only grant minimal wage increases, you must tighten your belts, workers, otherwise it will be the ruin of the country!

Point 3: State planning. That this is nothing new for us Marxists is obvious; Engels himself, in Anti-Dühring, written in 1876, predicts that the development of the productive forces will lead to nothing else but their transformation into state property and, consequently, salaried employees will perform all the social functions of the capitalist, now relegated to the superfluous population. ‘The State is the ideal collective capitalist, it is the organisation that society gives itself to maintain the capitalist mode of production in the face of attacks from both workers and individual capitalists’. This is the so-called phase D, in which the capitalist class itself has to recognise the social character of the productive forces and then tries, while maintaining capitalist relations, to treat them as social.

Nothing different is being attempted by the Knights, demanding as much as possible for the State to plan and create frameworks for the economy that will resurrect the old days of prosperity in which, as the market was strong, enterprises proved their economic utility with facts (read: competitive prices).

Here is the great discovery: Capital plans; it will exit the crisis and never enter it again! Capital – we say – has only one will, that of its own unlimited growth. There exists only one table in which production is planned and it is two centuries old. It dates back to absolutist France and is the Tableau Economique of Quesnay, in which capital does not accumulate. The French Revolution broke up the absolutist State and the Table; who is so deluded as to want to resurrect it?

Instead, nothing will stop capitalism in its headlong rush towards its crises; trade, business, commerce, production: everything magnifies, it must magnify. Can capitalism plan its underproduction? If so, the entire Marxist theory would fall apart. Sick with historical blindness, the Knights of Labour, the sellout trade unions and the pseudo-worker parties demand nothing more from the State than productive choices and investments, passing off the dirty trick with the excuse that all citizens will benefit anyway.

After so much wandering, an inevitable outlet for our heroes: they began by quoting Malthus and Ricardo, fell back unconsciously into the arms of Quesnay, recovered to rattle off theses of Keynes and Kaldor, to end with... Mussolini. Or rather – because otherwise they would take us for those who see history as made by captains and leaders and after so much rebuttal it would be the last straw – with the politics of the former fascist regime. Was it not during the twenty-year period that this policy was glorified? The State made itself shareholder, banker, financier, investor for the convenience of big industry, for which there is no better client than the State: Finsider, Finmare, Imi, Iri, etc., are there, cyclopean entities now rotting to testify how fascism was ahead of its time.

That’s why we don’t give a damn about the extent of state intervention and the PCI-industrialist diatribe; it’s like making the condemned man ‘freely’ choose between the guillotine or the firing squad. ‘The State as protector of investments and the State as investor of Capital are two aspects in time of the same class enemy that the socialist revolution must overthrow’. This is what we said in 1950 in front of the Di Vittorios calling for reforms to rebuild this decadent civilisation. Today, 1975, different times but the same injunction.