Party of Committees to Support Resistance―for Communism (CARC Party, Italy)
Supplement to La Voce no. 72 of the (new)Italian Communist Party – December 2022
The author of the article that we, as CARC Party, are submitting to Platform for publication is the (new) Italian Communist Party. The (n)ICP is the party in Italy that has developed a strategy for socialist revolution and, consequently, is a party operating underground.
CARC Party is a party with public offices that avails of the political freedoms conquered by the anti-fascist Resistance in Italy (1943–1945) and of the struggles of the ‘70s.
The relationship that exists between the CARC Party and the (n)ICP is one of ideological unity and unity on the strategic objective: to make Italy a new socialist country. However, they are two distinct organizations. The discovery of the need for two parties to make revolution in an imperialist country like Italy is a novelty in the international communist movement, but it is the result of our experience in light of the conditions we find ourselves operating within.
Table of contents
PART ONE—WHAT IS IMPERIALISM
1. Introduction
2. Imperialism and the previous stages of bourgeois society
3. From bourgeois democracy to regime of preventive counter-revolution
4. From cyclical crises to general crises to crises due to absolute overproduction of capital
5. The international development of Antithetical Forms of Social Unity (AFSU)
6. The basic feature of imperialism
PART TWO—HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF IMPERIALISM SINCE 1916 ONWARDS
1. Introduction
2. The main stages of the history of imperialist epoch
3. The first socialist countries in the first, second and third stage
4. The role played by US imperialist groups
5. Types of current countries
6. Globalisation and its disruption (sanctions, pandemic, war in Ukraine)
7. Conclusions
The preceding sections of this article were featured in past issue
4. From cyclical crises to general crises due to absolute overproduction of capital
The society based on capitalist mercantile production of the material conditions for existence lasted until the 19th century, when it reached its limit in the most advanced countries: the manifestation of this limit were the ten-year cyclical crises, spanning from 1825 to 1865 (1825, 1836, 1847, 1857, 1865) and followed by the Great Depression of 1873-1895. For the first time in human history that, as Marx says (see The Capital, Book I Ch. 23―transcribed by www.marxists.org), we had to stop producing because we had produced too much and let the system of production of the material conditions of existence (companies, workers, etc.) go to pot and then start again.
Which were the characteristics of cyclical crises? They began to appear when capitalism had extended mercantile production to such an extent that it had become the main productive activity in entire regions and countries, i.e. as early as 18th century and up to the end of 19th century (in the pre-imperialist phase when capitalism was characterized by free individual competition). They were cyclical crises:
• of imbalance between supply and demand: a shortage of demand for goods can be due either to a fall in demand or to the fact that demand does not grow as much as production has grown; overproduction of goods, similarly, can be due either to an increase in production or to production remaining the same while demand is falling. It is the same phenomenon (imbalance between demand and supply of goods) seen from two different sides. A fall in the demand can be due to various factors: falling wages and pensions, loss of an outlet market, declining investments in a sector, removal of customs barriers and other political measures hindering the entry of goods or the introduction of customs barriers and other political measures hindering the exit of goods, the take-over of another commodity, etc. The increase in the production of goods may also be due to various factors: rapid swelling of production in a sector that was offering good profits, entry of a capitalist selling a certain commodity that supplants other commodities hitherto produced by other capitalists, arrival on the market of a capitalist who was not there before (fall of customs barriers), etc;
• due to the anarchic character of the capitalist mode of production: a system in which, on one side, all its actors depend on each other for the purchase and sale of goods, but, in antithesis to this, each one of them acts as if they were independent from the others and everyone acts without any understanding among them as to what should be produced, how, when and for whom;
• the solution to which came from the economic movement of bourgeois society itself: they were crises that “sooner or later ended on their own, just as they had come to be”.
The cyclical crises were a manifestation (a product) of the contradiction between the collective nature of bourgeois society (people and companies depending on each other for their productive activity) and the private nature of economic initiative and ownership of the means of production (people and companies considering themselves as independent of each other)*.
* The anarchic character continues to be there nowadays, indeed it is accentuated by privatizations, by the abolition of the red tape that limits the bosses’ freedom of initiative. The anarchic character of bourgeois society means that even in the current general crisis, business keeps zigzagging between ups and downs. So, every now and then, with some real argument, members of the imperialist bourgeoisie announce that the crisis is over because business is better than in the previous month, quarter or year. Moreover, the modern economic system is varied and fragmented enough, and the statistical surveys can be exposed to manipulation of various kinds. Without lying anyone can always find an index that “proves” things are going better: if employment and incomes fall, the discount stores (shops, markets, institutions that sell expiring, low-quality or unsold items at reduced prices) sell more, so the index of their sales is positive.
With bourgeois society entering the imperialist epoch, crises due to imbalance between supply and demand continue to exist but lose their importance (they become relatively small fluctuations between periods of development and periods of depression) and crises due to absolute overproduction of capital become the decisive phenomenon. These crises are due to the fact that the accumulated capital is so large that capitalists are no longer able to valorize it all through the production and sale of goods. In fact, the portion of capital employed in the production and circulation of goods decreases in relation to the total capital that capitalists have to valorize. These are crises that, while arising from the economy, become general―that is, also political, cultural, social and, as far as the current one is concerned, environmental―and find their provisional solution on the political terrain, i.e. in the upheaval of the social order within individual countries and in system of international relations (between countries).
5. The development of antithetical forms of the social unity (AFSUs) at the international level
The antithetical forms of the social unity (AFSUs) are practices, measures and institutions that express the economic unity of society within the framework of relations of production that keep society economically divided into as many opposing fractions as there are adult individuals. They are precarious and partial solutions to the contradiction between the increasingly collective character of the productive forces and their private ownership, a contradiction that capitalism has presented since its inception. The growth of the collective character of the productive forces already appears within the capitalist mode of production as development of various economic and political, ‘private’ and ‘public’ institutions which characterize modern bourgeois societies. These institutions express:
• attempts to overcome the antagonism inherent in the value relation and in the capital relation,
• attempts to direct the economic movement of societies by eliminating the most destructive effects of value relation and capital relation remaining within the framework of these relations.
Marx called these institutions ‘antithetical forms of the social unity’, i.e. expressions of the economic unity of society within relations that deny the unity of society and continue to divide it into as many opposing societies as there are adults living in that society. About AFSUs, Marx explains that “within bourgeois society, the society that rests on exchange value, there arise relations of circulation as well as of production which are so many mines to explode it. (A mass of antithetical forms of the social unity, whose antithetical character can never be abolished through quiet metamorphosis. On the other hand, if we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.)” (K. Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1973, transcribed by www.marxists.org).*
* Drafted by Marx in 1857-1858, the Grundrisse were first published in 1939 in the USSR and only made accessible to the western public through the German edition made in 1953 in the German Democratic Republic. In Italy the Grundrisse were first published in 1969-1970 by La Nuova Italia. In the Grundrisse, Marx made a profound examination of the social relationships of bourgeois society. Bourgeois society is in crisis not only economically, but also in terms of general human relations. It does not educate human beings (and as of today, we have reached a total of 8 billions) to live together and in accordance with the reproductive conditions of nature. Having destroyed or circumscribed the morals of previous societies (appendices to but actually matrices of religions, which not surprisingly are now revived in sects), bourgeois society sets individuals against each other, or makes them indifferent to one another (while they are indeed ‘in the same boat’) or exploitative of each other. Here, too, we see that humanity must make a leap: the transition to communist society, through what we call in the Manifesto-Program of the (new)ICP “universal training in specifically human activities” (note 2, p. 249: the online version of the Manifesto-Program can be found at https://nuovopci.it/eile/en/mp-npci-en/MP_ing__(n)PCI_WEB.pdf).
By social unity we mean the condition already achieved in modern capitalist society: individuals depending on each other for the production and reproduction of the material conditions of existence while each of them is powerless to produce them individually, but can contribute to their production and reproduction only by being part of a productive social organism that includes all individuals.
This condition was created by capitalism: it had never existed before except at the level of small “natural” communities. It exerts its effects in bourgeois society, even if this society does not recognize it and does not take it as the starting point of its activity, relations and institutions. Hence both the contradiction between this condition and current practices in bourgeois society and the resulting adjustments through traumas and crises. To bring the real social unity into existence means taking it as the starting point, as the premise for all the activity of groups and the whole of society, creating the institutions and relations necessary to this end.
It is impossible to understand the economic and political movement of modern societies without understanding AFSUs. The lack of interest shown by Marxist theorists in the AFSUs is a theoretical implication of the weakness of the proletarian revolutionary movement in imperialist societies.
Those who attempt to expose the economic and political movement of modern societies without understanding the AFSUs, inevitably oscillate between:
• attributing all power to subjective intervention (of the State and other associations of capitalists) in the economy,
• denying all power to subjective intervention (of the State and other associations of capitalists) in the economy.
In fact, they deprive themselves of the tool to understand the real dialectic between the attempts to govern the economy that are based on the social character of productive forces (i.e. the content of the production process) and the action of the objective laws of the capitalist relation of production based on the individual appropriation of the productive forces (i.e. the old form of the production process). Similarly, without an understanding of the AFSUs, it is impossible to understand the meaning of the thesis that the elements with which the new society will be built are formed within the dying society, and thus it is impossible to formulate the program of a communist party.
Those who attempt to outline a program of transformation from capitalism to communism without understanding AFSUs inevitably oscillate between resigning themselves to the present and fantasizing about the future because they deprive themselves of the means to discover the only possible material constituents of the future as provided by the present. In bourgeois society itself, on the ground of the mutual indifference and independence of producers, the practices and institutions that seek to remedy and prevent the consequences of universal alienation are formed as a necessary manifestation of social unity (of universal mutual dependence). The imperialist bourgeoisie retains the direction of society in its own hands. The bourgeoisie was forced to create institutions and organizations that took into account the new social conditions in which men and women live today, reconciling them in some way with the survival of capitalist ownership of the productive forces, with the imperialist bourgeoisie’s control over society as a whole, and with the antagonism of interests characteristic of bourgeois society. The bourgeoisie was forced to create these institutions by the struggles of the working class and the rest of the popular masses, by the increasingly collective nature of the productive forces and the overall economic activity, and by the increasingly organic nature of the society made up of the population of the entire planet.
1. These are the institutions and measures, with the associated institutional apparatus, that mitigate and to some extent regulate the contrasts between individual capitalists and between their “private associations” (between capitalist groups), that require capital accumulation activities to comply with certain rules, and seek to make capitalist activities congruent with public interests and objectives: with the survival of the natural and social conditions of the capital accumulation process itself. Examples are the international fiduciary currency and the international monetary system, national and international regulations of the monetary, financial, trade and production system (the quality standards and standardization systems), hygiene and health regulations on products and processes, limits placed on competition, patent protection, regulations aimed at protecting the environment from the plunder that is a tendency of unlimited capital accumulation, public incentives for research and to support certain productive sectors, countercyclical and developmental state policies, regulations for public services, land use and construction, licenses for the exercise of productive activities, the introduction of economic and industrial policies, the economic and social role of States and their associations, etc.
2. These are the institutions and measures, with the associated institutional apparatus, that mitigate the contrasts between the bourgeoisie as a whole and the popular masses (in particular the working class), to some extent protect the popular masses from the most extreme manifestations of the destructive tendencies of the capitalist mode of production on their lives and promote their cultural and moral development and the spread of experience necessary to organize and direct themselves. Examples are systems of collective bargaining over wages and working conditions, regulations on work benefits, protecting the health and to some extent the civil and political rights of workers, national systems that to some extent ensure a basic income for the income-deprived proletarians (the unemployed, the marginalized, the sick, the invalids, the old, the orphans), the more-or-less free and public school and health systems, the rules of hygiene and public order, measures to protect women, children, minorities, oppressed nations and peoples, measures to protect maternity and birth rates, demographic policies, social security and social protection policies, etc.
Characteristic of the imperialist epoch is the great development (one next to the other and one after the other) of AFSUs on an international scale. With the exception of the Latin Monetary Union (founded in 1865), international AFSUs began to develop in the first decades of the 20th century. Between 1914 and 1916, economic conferences between the Entente States organized the defense of their own citizens’ trades and the blockade of German citizens’ ones during the war. In 1919 the League of Nations was established (it went into operation in 1920), in 1921 the War Reparations Commission, in 1920 the Bank for International Settlements.
The highest expression of AFSUs on international scale is the creation of the international monetary system (Bretton Woods agreements, 1944) and of an international fiduciary currency (breakdown of the Bretton Woods agreements, 1971); the highest expression of AFSUs within a single state is State monopoly capitalism.
6. The basic characteristic of imperialism
The basic characteristic of the imperialist epoch is that the production as commodities of the material conditions of human existence becomes a secondary aspect of capital valorization and the activities of the bourgeoisie (although it remains an ineradicable aspect of them), subordinated to the capital valorization through financial and speculative transactions. The capital employed in the production of commodities is reduced to a small portion of the total capital that the imperialist bourgeoisie has to valorize with its activities. In 2013, with global gross domestic product estimated by the World Bank at 75 trillion dollars, the International Monetary Fund estimated that financial assets amounted to 993 trillion dollars, i.e. capital materialized in commodities amounted to less than 7% of the entire world capital: therefore it is reductive and misleading, even if considering only the economic activity, to reduce today’s world society to the production of goods.
The expansion of wars, of production and research activities aimed at war, the invention of new substances (many of which are put into use without being checked for safety) and the multiplication of goods and activities that enter as new commodities into the consumption of human beings, the devastation of the planet through air, water and soil pollution, the elimination of the achievements (in terms of security, equality, solidarity, education and healthcare) that the popular masses, especially in the imperialist countries, extorted from the bourgeoisie in the period 1917-1976 and the resulting undeclared war of extermination waged by the bourgeoisie against the popular masses, the recolonization of old colonial countries and former socialist countries (see Eastern European People’s Democracies), the inducement of emigration of populations to make way for plantations and mining, along with intellectual and moral brutalization, constitute one aspect of the imperialist epoch of bourgeois society.
The other is the development of the first and new socialist countries that gradually unfold in the three phases (transformations from capitalism towards communism, gradual and peaceful restoration of capitalism, “restoration at any cost” of capitalism) outlined in chapter 1.7.3 of the Manifesto-Program of the (n)PCI.
Today, in the face of the persistent crisis, both the bourgeois right and the bourgeois left devise, propagandize and implement cures that disregard the source and nature of the crisis, and the nature of the imperialist epoch. Both cures based on the supply theory (the government must take measures that increase profits to capitalists who employ proletarians in the production of goods) and those based on the demand theory (the government must give money to proletarians and other workers so that they increase their consumption and thus buy more goods) confirm the collective character assumed by the economy. But neither has nor will end the crisis.
Today, the production of commodities is an appendage of financial and speculative capital, the wealth of bourgeois society presents itself less and less as “a huge collection of commodities” (use-values, goods or assets, each of which satisfies a need but is produced as a bearer of exchange-value, in practice as a saleable product) and presents itself instead more and more as “a huge collection of money”. And, since by its nature money can increase in quantity beyond all limits, while the quantity of commodities cannot, this also alters the nature of commodities. They are, in fact, less and less intended to satisfy needs created by the general development of human society (the development of civilization made needs to be satisfied the production of tools, weapons, paper, construction, etc.) and more and more intended to create new needs in the population with purchasing power, in order to increase the mass of money that their sale accumulates in the hands of each individual capitalist. Costly and destructive megaprojects (such as the Strait of Messina Bridge in Italy), goods that quickly become obsolete or are otherwise perishable, packaging (with the enormous use of plastics) and advertising, the presentation of goods that prevails over their quality with all that this entails: these and the like are the laws that determine the quantity and quality of the goods produced. The bourgeoisie does not limit itself to satisfying the needs created by the general development of humanity, but, within the limits allowed by the division of society into classes of oppressed and oppressors, molds the system of social relations and individual conduct to the measure of the commodities whose use each capitalist manages to impose in order to enhance his capital, with the result that ‘everyone’ deplores. All this aggravates the moral and intellectual crisis of the popular masses in imperialist countries. To sell, in fact, the bourgeoisie not only satisfies needs, but creates new needs disconnected from the activities necessary to live and progress: it introduces 5G technology (enhanced data transmission to mobile phones) while even in imperialist countries the number of people who cannot access medical care increases. It is like a food producer who, to sell more, in a thousand ways induces people to spend the money they have to gorge themselves, heedless of their health and their lives.
The capitalist mode of production arose and supplanted the other modes of production (also based on the division of humanity into classes of exploited and exploiters, of oppressed and oppressors) as a mode of production designed to increase the productivity of labour, that is, to increase the quantity of goods that people produced in a given labour time, and thus designed to make people on the whole freer from nature and richer in terms of time and means to engage in superior human activities (from which, however, the mass of the population remained and remains excluded). The general crisis of capitalism eliminates these assumptions of capitalism’s success and makes its replacement a necessity for the survival of the human species.
The absolute overproduction of capital generates the ecological disaster, the exploitation of women reduced to a tool of advertising and a sexual object, the psychological, intellectual and moral deformation of the new generations and their mistreatment, gratuitous crime (i.e. without the motivation that the insufficiency of production once gave to war and crime), general insecurity and the widespread use of drugs that only demagogues perhaps really believe they are curing with more police and harsher penalties, the emigration that far exceeds that of the beginning of the last century. Suffice it to say that from Italy alone, with a population less than half of what it is today, more than 15 million workers emigrated in the 60 years following the Unification (1861), at an annual rate that exceeded the 350 thousand registered permanent emigrants in 1900.
What are the main repercussions of the transition to the imperialist epoch on the functioning of the bourgeois social system and what does it mean for the communists?
1. To produce the material conditions of human existence, a decreasing proportion of the working time of proletarians (people in general) is sufficient. Or, as long as we are in a regime of capitalist oppression of proletarians, the labor (which the capitalist pushes to the maximum in terms of intensity for each of his employees) of a decreasing proportion of the proletariat is sufficient. The other proletarians become superfluous for the purposes of producing the material conditions of human existence:
a) unemployed people who press at the doors of companies to be hired, thus competitors of the proletarians hired by capitalists (Industrial Reserve Army, as Marx put it);
b) proletarians to whom the capitalists give a wage (in a now completely fiat currency, which the proletarian needs to live on) in exchange for services (activities) other than the work necessary to produce the material conditions of existence.
2. Financial and speculative relations and “specifically human activities” become an increasing part of the activities of the bourgeoisie and to some extent the access of the oppressed classes to these activities is also extended. A note on “specifically human activities”: along the history of humankind, they arise and develop as activities of members of the ruling class. These are not forced to devote themselves to producing the material conditions of their existence (others do it for them) and develop other activities. Among “specifically human activities” there are beautiful, glorious and creative activities that constitute the civilization of the human species and there are also ignoble and harmful ones. Altogether they must:
a) either serve humanity in general (including those who produce the material conditions of existence) who, for this very reason, “recognize” the ruling class and agree to produce the material conditions for its members and what serves it as the ruling class as a whole,
b) or serve the ruling class to keep the oppressed classes subjugated,
c) or serve to satisfy the customs, habits and vices practiced by members of the ruling class.
We are no longer in a society that has at its own center the production of the material conditions of existence. Capital valorization is no longer primarily based on mercantile production but mainly on financial and speculative activities, and the production of commodities is no longer closely linked to the production of the material conditions of existence, but rather to the need for the capital valorization that leads to the production of whatever one can sell, even filth and poisons, whether it be physical, intellectual or moral.
Only the self-styled communists in imperialist countries still believe they are and (the active ones) remain the promoters of social struggles not consciously aimed at the establishment of socialism: 1. dictatorship of the proletariat, 2. planned management of the economy to meet the needs of the resident population and its relations of solidarity, collaboration and exchange with other countries, and 3. promotion of the population’s increasing access to specifically human activities.
We must insist (as a line to be proposed and practice to be implemented) on mobilizing and organizing the popular masses against the anti-popular effects of the course of things imposed by the imperialist bourgeoisie. At same time, with our propaganda (through open and frank discussion) and on an organizational level, we must struggle against the tendency among communists to limit themselves to mobilize the popular masses against the effects of the survival of the rule of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Instead, as communist we must promote the advancement of the socialist revolution and the gathering of our forces.