Party of Committees to Support Resistance―for Communism (CARC Party, Italy)
Supplement to The Voice of the (new)Italian Communist Party No. 72 – 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.
Foreword
This article is an excerpt from the pamphlet produced in December 2022 by the (new)Italian Communist Party in collaboration with CARC Party (Ideological) Training Center. It illustrates the main features that distinguish the imperialist epoch from the bourgeois society of previous centuries and the main events of the approximately 150 years of the imperialist epoch.
In order to pursue their immediate and historical aims, communists base their line of action on the objective conditions in which the class struggle takes place. Today they must base it on the features of the imperialist epoch, i.e. the epoch of the socialist revolution and the decay of bourgeois society. The analysis of the situation and the political line to follow comes, for communists, from the understanding of the nature of the imperialist epoch in the same way in which the treatment of a disease depends on the diagnosis we make of the disease.
We communists owe to Lenin and his work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) the name of the new epoch and the illustration of its main global economic features.
In The German Ideology (1846) Marx and Engels wrote: “we call communism the movement that society is making towards a new epoch, towards the new humanity…”, whose features are pointed out at the end of the second chapter of the Communist Manifesto (1848). In the early years of the 20th century, some representatives of the conscious and organized communist movement (Rosa Luxemburg, Rudolf Hilferding, Nikolai Bukharin and others) substantially united in the Second International dealt with imperialism at a theoretical level, to understand what was happening and the driving causes of the course of things. The research was accentuated when they found themselves in the World War I since 1914. In the spring of 1916 Lenin made a painstaking study (Notebooks on Imperialism) arriving at the conclusions set out in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, definitively published in 1917 after his return to Russia. Throughout the first world wave of the proletarian revolution (1917-1976), the representatives of the communist parties of the imperialist countries paid little or no attention to the nature of the imperialist epoch: this was one of the factors that determined the inability to promote the socialist revolution until the establishment of socialism, demonstrated in the last century by the communist parties of all the imperialist countries (with the exception of the weakest link in the imperialist chain, that is Russia).
The lag accumulated in the scientific knowledge of the reality of imperialism by the communists of the imperialist countries first gave rise to the theses of the modern revisionists on the “parliamentary road to socialism through structural reforms” and to other theories whose common conclusion is that it is not necessary to establish socialism and whose basis is the thesis that “the world is completely different”, imperialism and then globalization created a new mode of production, changed the nature of capitalism that Marx analysed and exposed in detail in Capital.
Even today, in the field of mass activity, this lag contributes to keeping the communists bogged down in economism and electoralism, while the transformations that occurred in the imperialist epoch both in the economic and political fields lead to the same conclusion, namely that the promotion of claim struggles and participation in the bourgeois political struggle must be consciously aimed at the establishment of socialism, which is based on three fundamental pillars:
1. dictatorship of the proletariat, 2. planned management of the economy aimed at satisfying the needs of the resident population and its relations of solidarity, cooperation and exchange with other countries and 3. promotion of the population’s growing access to specifically human activities.
The divergences and uncertainties existing in the international communist movement on the nature of the war underway in Ukraine and on the role of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China are also an expression of the need to recover this lag.
Generations of communists have “lived off the income” of Leninist analysis, either by re-proposing it in its entirety, almost as if imperialism were an immobile object and not an epoch in the historical movement of the capitalist mode of production, or by retouching it here and there the way in which an ancient fresco is restored, or by trying to update it by eclectically adding elements inferred from the empirical observation of contemporary phenomena. We adopt the conception of imperialism elaborated by Lenin in January-June 1916 and, in the light of it, we analyse the current world imperialist system. However, we must take into account:
(1) Lenin’s pamphlet is meant to be, and Lenin expressly stated this in the preface to the first publication in April 1917, a popular pamphlet because of the tsarist and war censorship, under which the pamphlet was to be published. It deals only with the main economic features and not with the political ones nor with the reason why the old capitalism described by Marx Capital (Book 1, Chapter 13 titled Machinery and large-scale industry)—centred on the production of goods, which (at least in Great Britain) becomes overwhelming from about 1750—in the last decades of the 19th century passes into imperialism. This reason is the absolute overproduction of capital;
(2) historical development between 1916 and today.
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 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
PART ONE—WHAT IS IMPERIALISM
1. Introduction
We call imperialism the type of society shaping out in Europe and North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and spreading from there to the whole world. By the same term we also denote the epoch of history that we are living through and that succeeded the epoch of bourgeois society that developed from Europe in the first centuries of the second millennium A.D. and gradually spread to the whole world.
Imperialism is also the epoch of the decay of bourgeois society and the establishment of socialism. The last stage of bourgeois society is that of Machinery and large-scale industry (1750–1900) described by Marx in Capital (Book I, Chapter 13). This stage ends in the ten-year cyclical crises described by Marx in Capital (Book 1, Chapter 23), in the formation of the five economic features of imperialism described by Lenin in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), and with the transition from the political regime of bourgeois democracy (in which the main opposing classes are on the one hand the nobility and clergy and on the other the bourgeoisie) to the regime of preventive counter-revolution (in which the main opposing classes are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat).
What distinguishes imperialism from all the stages of bourgeois society that preceded is:
(1) that the overall, progressive role played by the bourgeoisie in human history fails. The bourgeoisie has become a decaying class. The dominance of men over nature, together with the creation of productive forces that make men capable of producing the material conditions of their own existence without effort and by employing a small part of their time, constitutes the progress resulting from the centuries-old dominant role played by the bourgeoisie. In what sense the bourgeoisie now became decaying? In the sense that, due to the persistent domination of the bourgeoisie, the dominance men achieved over nature is turning into a catastrophe through several operations: imposition of the division of men between the hungry and the “obese”, between the unemployed and those chained to work; imposition of customs and habits (urbanisation, tourism, air transportation, production, use and dissemination of substances that did not exist in nature, multiplication of electromagnetic waves, etc.) destructive of nature and human health; production and imposition of the use of unnecessary or even harmful substances, objects and services; moral and intellectual brutalization and intoxication of the human species, etc.;
(2) the establishment of socialism (the socialist revolution)—the first stage of society with no more class division, the communist society—is underway. The intellectuals of the bourgeois left try to recreate the history of the 20th century without considering the main constituent element of the history of this century: the clash between revolutionary forces (the USSR and the protagonists of the first world wave of proletarian revolution) and the imperialist bourgeoisie, which tries at all costs to extend its existence. Therefore, their recreations are not scientific and we cannot take them as a guide for our conduct.
We communists owe to Lenin and his 1916 work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism the naming of the new epoch and the illustration of its main world economic features.
The transition of bourgeois society to imperialism took place in the period between 1875 and 1914 in Europe and the USA. In this period, which culminates in World War I (i.e. a war for a different partition of the world among the imperialist powers), bourgeois society takes on the five features described by Lenin in 1916 and before him to some extent by John Atkinson Hobson (Imperialism, 1902), Rudolf Hilferding (Financial Capital, 1910), Rosa Luxemburg (The Accumulation of Capital, 1913), Nikolai Bukharin (Imperialism and the World Economy, 1916) and other Marxists:
1. in the production of commodities (goods and services), monopolies made free individual competition between capitalists marginal;
2. finance capital took over capital employed in commodity production and made it its tool and minor part;
3. the export of capital took over the export of commodities;
4. the major capitalist powers divided the world among themselves and established the colonial system (the Berlin Conference for the partition of Africa took place between November 1884 and February 1885);
5. a few large monopolies divided the world production of the most important commodities (the partition of the world among capitalist monopolies) among themselves.
The basic feature of the new stage is that the production of the material conditions of human existence (food, clothing, footwear, housing, furniture, heating and cooling systems, protective instruments, tools and machines, means of transportation, etc.) as commodities becomes a secondary aspect of the valorization of capital and the activities of the bourgeoisie (although still an ineradicable aspect of them), subordinate to the valorization of capital through financial and speculative transactions.
The history of the imperialist epoch is the history of two kinds of contradictions intertwining:
• the contradictions between imperialist powers and groups over the partition of the world;
• the contradictions between imperialist powers and groups on the one hand and, on the other hand, the forces promoting and leading the socialist and the new democratic revolution (anti-imperialist and anti-feudal, linked to national liberation from foreign powers and the development of capitalist productive forces).
Concerning the imperialist epoch, the main backward or wrong conceptions to be fought in our ranks refer to two theses.
1. Imperialism is only a new trait of the old capitalism, that is, of the stage of bourgeois society that Marx discusses in Capital (Book 1, Chapter 13 titled Machinery and large-scale industry), that is of the epoch 1750–1900: thus, it would be a society still relevant to the capitalist mode of mercantile production of the material conditions of existence.
2. Imperialism is an entirely new mode of production compared to the old capitalism: the chief representative of this school of thought is Bukharin, whom Lenin refutes extensively in the Report on the Party Program.
Understanding the nature of the imperialist epoch is not an academic matter: the analysis of the situation and the political course to follow comes from this understanding, in the same way that the treatment of a disease depends on the diagnosis we make of the disease.
• Advocates of the thesis that imperialism is merely a new feature of the old capitalism consider, for example, the present one a cyclical crisis like those of the period 1825–1865, i.e., a crisis that is part of a “normal” (except for the size) alternation of conjuncture cycles and that, like all cyclical crises, sooner or later will cease of its own accord, because the disruption of the productive system, by reducing productive capacity, creates the conditions for the resumption of production. So, for the popular masses and their organizations it would be a matter of feeling the pinch while waiting for better times, at most persuading or inducing governments to adopt anti-cyclical, “damage control” policies (public spending plans and social safety net). This interpretation of the current crisis is also supported by parties and political figures who claim to be faithful to the principles of the communist movement, but in fact dogmatically transpose into the present Marx’s analysis concerning the crises of capitalist countries in the pre-imperialist epoch (when free competition among many independent capitalists still prevailed) and (this interpretation) finds an apparent basis in the fact that even in the stage of absolute overproduction of capital the real economy (production of commodities that entered or were brought into the material conditions of existence by the imperialist bourgeoisie) proceeds between ups and downs, in accordance with the anarchic nature of the capitalist system of production. Its actors depend on each other for the purchase and sale of commodities but, conversely, each acts as if independent from the others and all of them act without understanding among themselves about what each should produce, how, when, in what amount and for whom.
Repeaters of the thesis that imperialism created a new mode of production and changed the nature of capitalism that Marx analysed and expounded in detail in Capital, deny that a new mode of production needs to be established for which capitalism itself created the prerequisites (theory of the common good, etc.) and, thus, all the political substance of the communist conception. They deny the division of present society into social classes and the special mission of the working class (see the “disappearance of the working class”, the “theory of the multitudes,” etc.), they deny the class struggle as the engine of society’s development, they deny the dictatorship of the proletariat as the inevitable outcome of the class struggle through which the division of humanity into classes will be eliminated (failure or overcoming of “twentieth-century communism”, “post-Fordism”, “postmodernism”, “the class struggle is outdated”, etc.).
2. Imperialism and the previous stages of bourgeois society
Bourgeois society is a succession of stages that developed from one another: each stage as a superstructure of the stage that preceded it until the completion (at the end of the 19th century) of the Machines and large-scale industry stage. From there the epoch of imperialism begins. The history of bourgeois society consists of a succession of stages that developed as overlapped floors of the same building. The capitalist mode of production developed by the successive superstructures described in chapters 11, 12 and 13 of Capital:(*)
• the original or primitive accumulation (Capital, Book 1, Chapter 24): expropriation of the rural population and its expulsion from the land: for more read the index of the sub-chapters of chapter 24 of Capital, Book 1;
• capitalist mass production: capitalists who make some people work, on their own commission and in competition with each other, at home or united in small artisan companies;
• cooperation (Capital, Book 1, Chapter 11): from the 15th century to the mid-16th century. Multiple workers united in one large company under the orders of the same master who dictates characteristics and times (workers are like artisans each doing the same work, but all dependent on the same capitalist);
• manufacturing (Capital, Book 1, Chapter 12): from the mid-16th century to the last third of the 18th century. The main feature of this superstructure is that the production of a commodity is accomplished by workers who each make successive parts of it (the division of labour among workers each of whom works with his own tools and has his own specialization);
• large-scale industry (Capital, Book 1, Chapter 13): from the last third of the 18th century to the last quarter of the 19th century.
Between 1875 and 1914 there is the transition to the imperialist epoch of bourgeois society (but only in the Russian Empire socialist revolution took place).
(*) It is good to keep in mind that for details and dates Marx sticks generally and especially to Great Britain, the country where capitalism (born in Italy in the 3rd and 4th centuries of the second millennium, i.e. the age of the communes; the “Ciompi revolt” is from 1378) had its full development.
The capitalist mode of production has developed like a skyscraper with many floors built on a given ground: the simple mercantile economy, characterized by exchange among direct producers where, indeed, commodities are exchanged, on average, each one according to its value (the socially necessary labour time to produce it). It has a foundation and a ground floor, then has a first and second floor, etc. At each floor it transforms itself: the categories that were main on the first floor are no longer main on the second floor but live, if they live at all, in secondary aspects of the second floor. And so from one floor to the upper one. However, if the upper floor crumbles for some reason, the system downgrade to the lower floor and the secondary aspects become main once again, in order to run categories (aspects) that were secondary to the upper floor.
Let’s take for example the primitive accumulation, also called original accumulation because it constitutes the prehistory of capital and the mode of production corresponding to it, that is, the separation of the worker from the means of production (from ownership of the means of production), in particular the expropriation of rural producers (the peasants) and their expulsion from the land (see England in the late 15th century) which generates a mass of workers willing to work in manufacture at its inception. This primitive accumulation is a concluded or, anyway, now largely secondary process in imperialist countries, while it is the substance of the ongoing recolonization of backward countries by imperialist groups as part of globalization. This is what is currently called land grabbing, which has grown enormously since 2007–2008 and involves Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America. Land grabbing is the expropriation of entire communities from the land they live on and use to grow and produce their food. These lands are bought or leased by governments of other countries, private corporations and investment funds to open mines, install plantations, build luxury touristic complexes (so-called resorts), do unnecessary major public works, etc.
3. From bourgeois democracy to regime of preventive counter-revolution
This is the transition that occurs in political relations, in the early 1900s in the Anglo-Saxon imperialist countries and after 1945 in the others. In each country as the popular masses, mobilized by the conscious and organized communist movement (COCM),[1] in addition to demanding improvements (through strikes, demonstrations, protests, etc.) make use of the institutions of bourgeois democracy, the bourgeoisie must stifle their initiative and divert their education, replacing the clergy or combining with it. Then, the bourgeoisie develops a regime of preventive counter-revolution that replace bourgeois democracy, habitually disguising itself as bourgeois democracy, that is, cloaking itself in the institutions of democracy that the bourgeoisie had enforced to its advantage.
With preventive counter-revolution (PCR), the bourgeoisie seeks to avoid coming to a head-on confrontation with the mobilized and organized popular masses. An effective PCR regime prevents the bourgeoisie’s oppression of the proletariat and the rest of the popular masses and their opposition from escalating into civil war. In the PCR regime, the bourgeoisie combines five lines of action (five pillars that jointly hold up every PCR regime).
1. The first pillar consists of maintaining the political and generally cultural backwardness of the popular masses and divert them from the class struggle. To this end the bourgeoisie actively spreads among the masses a culture of evasion from reality, promotes theories, movements and occupations that divert the attention, interest and activity of the popular masses from class antagonisms and focuses them on triviality (diversion), makes confusion and intoxication with reactionary theories and fake news. In short, the bourgeoisie prevents the growth of political consciousness with a special articulated system of cultural operations. In this field, the bourgeoisie revalued and reclaimed the role of religions and churches, primarily that of the Catholic Church, but it could not limit itself to them, because a part of the masses inevitably escaped their grasp. It is the pillar of the PCR that the bourgeoisie developed on a large scale in the period of black and unrestrained reaction following the dissolution of the USSR, when on the other hand, given the development of the second general crisis due to absolute overproduction of capital, it had to limit the second, third and fourth pillar, avoiding large-scale use of repression.
2. The second pillar consists of satisfying the demands for improvement that the popular masses make with increasing force; of giving everyone the hope of being able to have a decent life and nurturing this hope with some practical results, of enveloping every worker in a web of financial constraints (mortgages, instalments, liens, bills, taxes, rents, etc.) that put him at every moment in danger of individually losing everything or, anyway, much of his social status if he fails to meet the deadlines set for him. If the popular masses won time and money in the claim struggles against the bourgeoisie, the latter had to direct them to use money for the satisfaction of their “animal needs”: therefore, it had to multiply and has multiplied the means and forms of satisfaction of such “needs” so that the popular masses running out of time and money they have.
3. The third pillar consists of developing channels for the participation of the popular masses in the political struggle of the bourgeoisie in a subordinate position, following its parties and representatives. The participation of the popular masses in the political struggle of the bourgeoisie is a fundamental ingredient of PCR. The division of powers, representative assemblies, political elections and the struggle between various parties (multi-party system) are essential aspects of PCR regimes. The bourgeoisie must make the masses perceive as theirs the state that actually belongs to the imperialist bourgeoisie itself. Everyone who wants to participate in political life must be allowed to participate. The bourgeoisie, however, places and must place the implicit condition that everyone plays along with the game and the rules of the ruling class: everyone doesn’t go beyond its social order. Despite this implicit condition, the bourgeoisie is nevertheless immediately forced to divide its political activity more sharply into two camps. One is a public (open) camp, to which the popular masses are admitted (this is the “theatre of bourgeois politics”). Another is a secret camp, reserved for insiders. Implicitly respecting this division and conforming to it becomes a prerequisite of every “responsible” politician. However, any implicit rule is obviously a weak point in the new power mechanism.
4. The fourth pillar consists of keeping the popular masses and particularly the workers in a state of powerlessness; preventing them from organizing (without organizing himself, a proletarian is devoid of any social force: he has no ability to influence the guidance and course of social life); providing the masses with organizations headed by men trusted by the bourgeoisie (organizations that the bourgeoisie built to divert the masses from class organizations, mobilizing and supporting priests, policemen, akin: “regime” organizations (“organizzazioni gialle” in Italian), such as, in Italy, the CISL,[2] ACLI,[3] UIL,[4] headed by venal, corruptible, ambitious, individualistic men; preventing workers from forming organizations autonomous from the bourgeoisie in their structure and guidance.
5. The fifth pillar consists of repressing communists as selectively as possible. It consists in preventing at all costs the communists from succeeding, from multiplying their strength by organizing themselves into a party, from elaborating and assimilating a correct conception of the world, method of knowledge and work, and strategy, from carrying out an effective activity, from recruiting and assert their hegemony in the working class. The pillars consists also of bribing and co-opting the communists, of breaking and eliminating those who do not let themselves be bribed and co-opted.
In a nutshell, with preventive counter-revolution the bourgeoisie seeks to prevent the creation of the subjective conditions for socialist revolution: a certain level of consciousness and a certain degree of organization of the working class and popular masses, both consciousness and organization autonomous from the bourgeoisie. Or at least it seeks to prevent the consciousness and organization of the working class, proletariat and popular masses from growing beyond a certain level. With preventive counter-revolution the bourgeoisie compete with the communists, contends with them for the ground of the consciousness and organization of the masses, and uses to this end all the power of the society it leads. As long as the bourgeoisie overtakes the communists, its domination is maintained and its political order safeguarded.
Which of the two contenders will win? It is up to the communists to exploit the superiority of their conception of the world and method of work, their identification with the strategic and overall interests of the masses, the weaknesses of the preventive counter-revolution and the bourgeoisie in general. So on this side, the success of the preventive counter-revolution is by no means a priori guaranteed. All the policies and measures that the bourgeoisie puts in place are double-edged weapons. Its fraudulent cultural policy strips all authority and “eternal truth” of credibility while simultaneously producing means of communication and aggregation. Its “regime” organizations can be turned against it, particularly when their results do not correspond to promises. Repression and the struggle against repression arouse solidarity and introduce to the political struggle. The more autonomous the participation of the masses in political struggle becomes, the more it forces the bourgeoisie to create political drama, in order to conceal real politics: in short, it makes it more difficult for the bourgeoisie to manage its state. The welfare the bourgeoisie can accord to the masses depends on the general performance of its affairs and the resignation of the oppressed people to exploitation. Ultimately, it is up to us communists to learn how to use the policies and measures of preventive counter-revolution for the benefit of the cause of the emancipation of the workers and popular masses from the bourgeoisie.
The next part of the article will be published in the upcoming issue of the magazine.
Notes
[1] The conscious and organized communist movement is the sum of parties and organizations that propose the march towards communism as their goal, with their respective heritage of conceptions, analyses, lines and methods to realize their goal, with a set of relations and corresponding division of tasks (mass organizations and communist party).
[2] Italian Confederation of Trades Unions.
[3] Christian Associations of Italian Workers.
[4] Italian Union of Labour.
