As was announced in the first summary report of the meeting, which appeared in issue no. 12 of the journal, the speakers were not able to present even relative conclusions of the theoretical research work on Marxist economics. However, due to the breadth, depth and difficulty of the research, these conclusions will not be immediate, nor should we expect the unravelling of who-knows-what mysteries or novelties.

The theory of ‘waste’ is a central thesis of Marxism not only from an economic point of view, but first and foremost from a revolutionary point of view. The discussion of the theory began at the meeting in Genoa on 4-5 November 1951, the written report of which appeared in issues 1 and 2 of this year’s journal. Waste is the squandering of productive forces, products and social wealth. Using the method of the ‘three moments’, the dialectical key to the reading of Capital and Marxism, waste at the enterprise level, i.e. in the first moment, would be reduced to the exploitation of wage labour by capitalists; but that would always be little. In fact, Marx struck down Lassalle’s notion of ‘undiminished fruit of labour’, making it clear that even in communist society, the surplus product would exist, but its form and social destination would be radically transformed.

It is in the second moment, within capitalist society taken as a whole, in the corporate whole, that most human labour is uselessly consumed. This social ‘waste’ is most evident and criminal when comparing capitalist society and the future, communist society. It is, in fact, the communist model of the organisation of production and the form of human labour that fully emphasises the nefarious features of the capitalist mode of production, once it is unanimously admitted that in history the forms of production succeed one another on the basis of the increase in productive forces. For capitalist society, according to its apologists, there is no waste, no unnecessary labour, no destruction of wealth, except in an entirely accidental manner, as in wars between states. Marx, on the other hand, constantly emphasises the destructive character of capitalism, based on the continuous juxtapositions between capitalist society and communist society.

The ‘faux frais’, the false expenses of capital circulation proper to an exchange-based society and exasperated by ‘free competition’ on the basis of a corporate, mercantile and monetary economy; militarism, the very notions of homeland and the family, constitute elements of effective destruction or irrational utilisation of labour and wealth: narrow forms of the atrophying of labour productivity. Crises are, therefore, the natural outcome of the multiple manifestations of ‘waste’, the periodic and recurring result of the accumulation of uselessly produced surplus labour, irrationally reproduced, on the basis of social production and private appropriation.

The dates we give in this text are taken from Marxist texts, and therefore signify crises that were the subject of reflection and study by our masters. The series opens with the crisis of 1800, which, according to Ricardo, was caused by the grain famine due to a poor harvest and occurred only in England. The next one occurred in 1815, for the same reasons – in Ricardo’s opinion – as the previous one.

The crisis of 1825, on the other hand, had its epicentre in the United States of America and India, and was a so-called commercial crisis. Marx (Capital, Vol. III Part V) characterises commercial crises as follows: ‘The most general and palpable phenomenon in commercial crises is the sudden general decline in prices following a prolonged overall rise’. The crises of these years all manifested themselves under the guise of commercial crises, i.e. due to foreign market restrictions, and the phenomena they generated were more or less the same, more or less accentuated. Marx also dedicates a lengthy piece of writing to the crisis of 1847-48 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, in addition to constant references in other texts, particularly in Capital. In this text Marx examines all the phenomena before and after the crises themselves. Prosperity, the prosperity of today, precedes critical travail. ‘The years 1843-5’, Marx writes, ‘were years of industrial and commercial prosperity, a necessary sequel to the almost uninterrupted industrial depression of 1837-42. As is always the case, prosperity very rapidly encouraged speculation. Speculation regularly occurs in periods when overproduction is already in full swing. It provides overproduction with temporary market outlets, while for this very reason precipitating the outbreak of the crisis and increasing its force. The crisis itself first breaks out in the area of speculation; only later does it hit production (...) we cannot at this moment give a complete history of the post-1845 crisis, we shall enumerate only the most significant of these symptoms of overproduction’.

Our opportunists would like prosperity without scheming, boom without speculation: our master teaches that in a capitalist regime, prosperity is the mother of speculation, into which the immediate effects of incipient overproduction are initially poured. Marx already traces the sinusoid of capitalist production, with its periodic ups and downs of productive exaltation and depression. The crisis is preceded by a period of intense productive upswing, which is in turn preceded by a period of crisis. The characteristic feature of affluent production then was the rush to invest in railways. Today, the productive content of wealth is the universal speculation of international lines of communication: motorways, tunnels, transatlantic liners, fighter jets, missiles, and the great Barnum of cosmonautics.

The classic prediction of the historical catastrophe of capitalism can still be found in this text: ‘[S]laves will be emancipated, because they will have become useless as slaves. Wage labour will be abolished in Europe in just the same way, as soon as it becomes not only unnecessary for production, but in fact a hindrance to it’. Whenever the crisis erupts in the midst of the blissful apparent eternity of capitalism, the futility of capitalist forms of the economy appears in meridian light: nothing has any value any more, money serves at most for physiological needs, the untouchable categories of capital’s economy blow up, it is chaos.

Marx also carries out a ‘bird's eye’ analysis of the most volcanic American productive machine, in which he sees a powerful hotbed of the contradictions of capitalism and the future centre of the unbridled development of the world bourgeoisie: ‘The prosperity in England and America soon made itself felt on the European continent. The world market links every corner of the earth and forces it to submit to capital’. The two centres, England and America, of world capitalism are ‘the demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos’ from which ‘the initial process’ of crises and prosperity originates. Thus, ‘while, therefore, the crises first produce revolutions on the Continent, the foundation for these is, nevertheless, always laid in England. Violent outbreaks must naturally occur rather in the extremities of the bourgeois body than its heart, since the possibility of adjustment is greater here than there. On the other hand, the degree to which Continental revolutions react on England is at the same time the barometer which indicates how far these revolutions really call in question the bourgeois conditions of life, or how far they only hit their political formations’. This valuable theoretical lesson, drawn from the economic entanglement that had already enveloped the two continents, but still predominantly Europe and Britain, and from which the crisis of 1847 exploded, anticipates and sanctions the validity of the revolutionary position defended by Lenin and the Italian Left, for whom the October Revolution would have resisted any reactionary comeback on condition that the European powerhouses, notably Germany, of capitalist imperialism collapsed.

The closure to this text constitutes a tremendous slap in the face to voluntarists and immediatists of all times: ‘With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in the periods where both these factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of production, come in collision with each other. The various quarrels in which the representatives of the individual factions of the Continental party of Order now indulge and mutually compromise themselves, far from providing the occasion for new revolutions are, on the contrary, possible only because the basis of the relationships is momentarily so secure and, what the reaction does not know, so bourgeois’. ‘All reactionary attempts to hold up bourgeois development will rebound off it just as certainly as all moral indignation and all enthusiastic proclamations of the democrats. A new revolution is possible only in consequence of a new crisis. It is, however, just as certain as this crisis...’

The new crisis of 1857 had its epicentre in the United States, but soon infected England and Germany. In Great Britain, agriculture itself was plunged into economic depression, as Marx had already felt in 1850. To the extent that capitalist forms of production seize every branch of productive activity, channels open up through which the crisis flows. The entire economy is thus subject to crises!

Theory of crises

From ‘73 to ‘78 the crisis became chronic in the US and in ‘75 it rebounded again in England. The last date to be found in Marx’s texts is 1879, of which he gives a cursory mention in his letter to Danielson, a Russian economist translating the 1st volume of Capital. In it, Marx again highlighted the desolation of the economy and especially the apparent tranquillity of the banks and railways, which accumulate debts and shares every day.

Marx notes that crises recur roughly every ten years, and while his concern to grasp the reasons for this near-constant periodicity is always alive in the search for the immediate phenomena that develop before and during the crises themselves, nevertheless, and above all, his interest in contingent facts serves to demonstrate the validity of the doctrine. How many times has it been necessary to mock the petty-bourgeois habit of correcting the nefariousness of capitalism with the proposal to a return to simple commodity production! Marx took Proudhon’s as a scapegoat and demonstrated that the diseases of mature capitalism had their origin in capital itself, in the simple categories of capitalist economy. It was not necessary to resort to expanded reproduction to explain the crisis, even if overproduction flooded the channels of the economy. Marx always speaks of relative overproduction: ‘To say that there is no general over-production, but rather a disproportion within the various branches of production, is no more than to say that under capitalist production the proportionality of the individual branches of production springs as a continual process from disproportionality, because the cohesion of the aggregate production imposes itself as a blind law upon the agents of production, and not as a law which, being understood and hence controlled by their common mind, brings the productive process under their joint control (...) but the entire capitalist mode of production is only a relative one, whose barriers are not absolute. They are absolute only for this mode, i.e., on its basis’ (Capital, Vol. III, Part III).

On the other hand, the entire capitalist economy is ready to provide the simplest and most complex forms of crisis. ‘The most abstract form of crisis (and therefore the formal possibility of crisis) is thus the metamorphosis of the commodity itself; the contradiction of exchange-value and use-value, and furthermore of money and commodity, comprised within the unity of the commodity, exists in metamorphosis only as an involved movement’ (Theories of Surplus Value, Ch. XVII). The primary form of the crisis is already in the commodity, that is, in the fact that it is both a product to satisfy a need and the bearer of value, of average social labour and surplus value. It is therefore in the social contradiction on which capitalist production rests that the content and cause of crises must be sought.

Lenin’s lesson on the causes of crises is perfect: ‘Crises are possible (…) because the collective character of production comes into conflict with the individual character of appropriation’ (A Characterisation of Economic Romanticism). Marx again in a succinct form: ‘Three cardinal facts of capitalist production: 1) Concentration of means of production in few hands, whereby they cease to appear as the property of the immediate labourers and turn into social production capacities. Even if initially they are the private property of capitalists. These are the trustees of bourgeois society, but they pocket all the proceeds of this trusteeship. 2) Organisation of labour itself into social labour: through co-operation, division of labour, and the uniting of labour with the natural sciences. In these two senses, the capitalist mode of production abolishes private property and private labour, even though in contradictory forms. 3) Creation of the world-market. The stupendous productivity developing under the capitalist mode of production relative to population, and the increase, if not in the same proportion, of capital-values (not just of their material substance), which grow much more rapidly than the population, contradict the basis, which constantly narrows in relation to the expanding wealth, and for which all this immense productiveness works. They also contradict the conditions under which this swelling capital augments its value. Hence the [origin of the] crises’. (Capital, Vol. 3 Part III). And another quotation among a thousand: ‘Capital comes more and more to the fore as a social power, whose agent is the capitalist. This social power no longer stands in any possible relation to that which the labour of a single individual can create. It becomes an alienated, independent, social power, which stands opposed to society as an object, and as an object that is the capitalist’s source of power. The contradiction between the general social power into which capital develops, on the one hand, and the private power of the individual capitalists over these social conditions of production, on the other, becomes ever more irreconcilable, and yet contains the solution of the problem, because it implies at the same time the transformation of the conditions of production into general, common, social, conditions. This transformation stems from the development of the productive forces under capitalist production, and from the ways and means by which this development takes place’ (Ibid.).

Unfortunately, the translations of Marxist texts, monopolised by the rich opportunist powerhouses, are always interestingly weak and fail to render the true sense of the original text. Indeed, by capitalist one must not only mean the capitalist-man, but above all the capitalist enterprise, the agent of capitalist production, the impersonal and anonymous capitalist productive organisation. Otherwise it would be a complete misunderstanding of state capitalism, in which there are no capitalists understood as individual masters of the means of production, whereas there are, as in Russia, the ‘trustees pocketing the proceeds of bourgeois society’ mentioned by Marx above. The trustees of the ‘prophet’ Karl are today called economic operators.

Marx’s analysis of the origin of crises then appears in meridian light: on the one hand, the socialisation of the productive forces, social production; on the other, the private control of the means of production and the productive forces themselves by individual production units. This is where social chaos lies: capitalist production units can no longer contain the growing social forces of production, companies are too cramped to organise labour power, control surplus labour and distribute it throughout society. Consequently, the anarchy of production, the relative overpopulation of producers, and the continuous destruction of wealth, constitute the stigmata of capitalism. And this is so even when the most advanced concentration of scattered capital induces bourgeois agents to rant about programming, control of production, planning. In reality, they feel the absolute and urgent need to plan production, but they clash in the insurmountable contradictions between associated production and corporate, private appropriation of surplus value. The crux of the matter is all here: it is not merely an economic phenomenon, but essentially a social one: the production of surplus value and profit is the beginning and end of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism could and should – this is its historical merit – socialise production, but not appropriation, which has remained at the private and pecuniary level, for everyone, bourgeois and proletarian.

Our revolutionary critique of the pretence of planning in the USSR, for example, starts from this general observation, where it is quite natural that centralised control of production and consumption, and of appropriation, should be dismantled, because the basis of the Russian economy is the enterprise, with its positive balance sheet aimed at realising surplus value and profit, and wages paid in money.