In the first 1968 issue of our then organ of the press, Il Programma Comunista, we headlined with obstinate scientific stubbornness: Monetary Crisis – World Capitalist Crisis, and in May of the same year: The Bourgeois Myths of Prosperity Collapse. The experience of the following decade confirmed that diagnosis. The usual cyclical alternation of capitalist accumulation, of phases of greater momentum with periods of stagnation in production and trade, has been repeated in these years in the various industrialised countries, marking, however, deeper crises, greater recessions in the volumes produced and shorter-lived recoveries with oscillations around an average tendency of slowing down to almost a standstill in the growth of the mass of capital in operation.

A period of overwhelming development of imperialism has definitively come to an end: from the end of the war, and precisely thanks to its immense destruction, until the crisis of 1975, the capitalist monster enjoyed three decades in which the machine of industry swelled, crushed formerly colonial nations and corrupted the western proletariat. The mass of products grew, by 4.6 times in Germany, even though halved, likewise in America, in Japan even by 11 times. There has been a repetition, on a magnified scale, of the capitalist expansive momentum, with robust and prolonged productive upturns and barely noticeable slowdowns, as Europe experienced from the Franco-German War of 1870 to the crisis of the early years of the century, also then three decades of accumulation, of bourgeois enrichment, without wars at home, of corruption of the working class and of opportunist influence on the proletarian party and organisation.

Today, this phase of ‘opulent’ capitalism, in which the enemy ideologies of social pacifism, reformism, inter-class collaboration, gradualism and revolutionary progressivism can penetrate the proletariat, is irreversibly closed. Neither the demagogy of the regime’s official ideologues nor the obscene patches of opportunist propaganda based on planning and participation will be able to resuscitate the exhausted capitalist momentum.

World imperialist capitalism enters the period of crises, in which the ineliminable fall in the profit rate and the accumulated disproportion between production and consumption is being meted out. Seventy years later, capital has once again reached its ‘critical mass’, it is too swollen to be profitably employed in its productive metamorphosis, the merchant-owner form of wealth is unable to satisfy social needs to the extent it previously did, indeed, for the future resumption of production, it requires the violent destruction, outside of the circuit and laws of the market and capital, of the unwieldy surplus of unsold goods, money capital and unused means of production.

Capital is misery and destruction

The impossibility for capitalism of a non-traumatic and continuous development, the absurdity, demonstrated in theory by our school and verified by historical experience, of the perpetuation of the accumulation process stems from the intimate contradiction inherent in the dual nature of commodities, a contradiction rendered pure and generalised to the point of the critical explosion of the capitalist mode of social production.

While the production of profit is by its very nature without measure and tends to increase independently of the quantity and quality of social needs, the scale of social consumption capable of compensating for the value of goods is shrinking ever more precisely as a result of and in parallel with the increased scale of commodity production. On the one hand, a huge industry grows according to its own laws and rhythms devoid of any possibility of control and planning, on the other hand, the proletarianisation of all social strata spreads, with the ratio of final consumption to the mass of capital in motion shrinking inexorably. Although the size of consumption has historically tended to increase, albeit slowly, enormous is the dead capital looming over society. And as capital grows and becomes more concentrated, and as it becomes increasingly detached in anonymous forms, its state apparatus of political management swells monstrously, flanked by the top representatives of big industry and big finance.

The apparent prosperity of the past decades was a fleeting manifestation, well exploited by the regime’s incense-burners, characteristic of only one phase of the cycle, paid for by the enormous increase in productivity and duration of work in the factories and by the systematic robbery and slow starvation of the populations of entire continents by the imperialist power stations.

But not even the ‘consumer society’ has been able, nor will it ever be able to realise the fantastically growing value of the commodities vomited onto the market. It is a reactionary utopia to expect capital to survive by extending consumption. Production and sales, proceeding at top speed, continue in all spheres of production and on all marketplaces when the retail market can no longer absorb new goods. At this point the commercial crisis is triggered, panic in the bourgeois class, prices collapse and reproduction comes to a standstill. Narrow individual consumption, further reduced by falling wages and employment and the lower incomes of the bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, professional and intellectual classes, could never absorb the exponential growth of production.

After all, large and growing shares of the capitalist production of the most industrialised countries do not find final consumption at home but on the world market, which is very sensitive to price and economic fluctuations. At the end of the period of prosperity, capital has filled all pores of ‘solvent consumption’ to the maximum.

By its own internal law, the organic composition of capital grows along with the increase in its total mass: the technical improvement of the production process implies the increase in the mass and value of machines and plants, like that of the raw material processed, and the mass of labour needed to set them in motion is reduced. The value of wages, on the other hand, is reduced by the reduction in the value of the proletariat’s means of subsistence due to the increase in productivity in the sectors that produce them. The mass of total wages paid, variable capital, becomes a decreasing fraction of total capital. The increase in the exploitation of the proletariat, necessarily limited to the natural duration of the working day, does not compensate capital for the enormous and potentially infinite increase in its organic composition, the gigantic apparatuses set in motion by the individual worker. The result is the reduction in the rate of profit, already denied by legions of well-paid university theorists, and which today imposes itself with the obvious drama of crises.

Competition between capitals is exacerbated, growing portions of capital cannot profitably invest in means of production and labour-power, they cannot continue their metamorphosis and in monetary form, they roam the financial markets of the entire world, driven here and there by even the smallest differentials in exchange rates, in interest rates, manoeuvred by speculation. There is overproduction of capital, before that of commodities.

But capital can only reproduce itself by keeping the mass of profit constant, by intensifying the exploitation of the proletariat through the application of science to material production, only if it can extend the scale of its reproduction to all branches and all continents. The contraction of production cannot therefore be planned and contained within the continuity of the economic regime, it cannot be subject to the same laws of general accumulation, it can only manifest itself in a catastrophic manner, inducing a general regression of society, a modern imposed artificial and temporary barbarism, where the myths that until yesterday had been smuggled in as eternal are suddenly overturned into their opposite.

In the current imperialistic phase of decrepit capitalism, when all regions of the globe have been subjected to the plunder of a few wealthy countries, all markets are saturated with goods, and each national capitalism seeks to export its overproduction of goods, unemployment, and inflation onto the others, the outcome can only be the violent resolution, through direct confrontation of military forces, of the otherwise unresolvable conflicts of interests. Only through war, as already at the height of the period of capitalist stagnation between the two world wars, after the crisis of 1929-33, with the destruction of a large part of the accumulated social capital, of the means of production, and with the new needs that destruction imposes, can the impetus towards a new division of spheres of influence, towards the general renewal of fixed capital, towards new accumulation, new employment and super-exploitation, new waves of migration, consumption, ‘prosperity’, be diabolically regenerated.

 
Premonitory tremors

The international concordance of production trends over the last decade is so obvious that it is possible to describe in a single alternation the different moments of capitalist stagnation around the world.

Broadly speaking, the oscillating curve of industrial production shows three marked and common downturns: in the winter of 1970-71, in the winter of 1974-75 and in the winter of 1977-78. There is international agreement in the convulsions of accumulation not only in terms of the temporal synchronism of the cycle, but also in the magnitude of the perturbations: the first of the three recessions, measured as a regression on the average calendar year basis, marks a recession in the USA but only a sharp and marked slowdown in European capitalisms and Japan. We find negative values of quarterly rates of increase on an annual basis, with lows ranging from -6% in the US to +3% in France.

Far more sudden and profound for all capitalisms was the crisis of 1975 that shattered the myths of indefinite growth and reminded economists and the bourgeoisie of the spectre of 1929. In the first quarter of 1975 Japan contracted its industrial production by 20%, which meant -10% on an annual average, which followed another -4% in 1974. The halt in production occurs with relative speed: it goes from an accumulation rate of 16% to the predicted low within 16 months. Stagnation on this low production scale lasted for about a year, only beginning to show signs of recovery from the bottom at the beginning of 1976. Almost the same productive trend was maintained by the United States, limiting the quarterly minimum of the recession to -11%, demonstrating that in the capitalist crisis, those who have accumulated and overproduced the most collapse the most: it is a crisis of too much capitalist industrialism, not of scarce ‘productive investments’ or ‘structural backwardness’, nor of ‘constraints’ on the freedom of enterprise. European capitalisms exhibit the same timing and similar dimensions in regressions.

The subsequent unfolding marked recovery everywhere. But, while US capitalism managed to stabilise its growth at an annual rate of around 5% (which makes us anticipate the next deeper crisis), recession returned to hold back accumulation in Europe and Japan where quarterly values fell to -1% in Japan in September 1977, to -8% in Italy in mid-winter and to values around zero for the other industrialisms in the following spring.

Thus, a reduction in the duration of the industrial cycle emerges. More than a century of American capitalism demonstrates the constant repetition of two series of overlapping cycles. In the United States from 1873 to 1970, the roughly ten-year cycle already recognised by Marx and Engels is well marked, with eight regular periods between 10 and 14 years. These are interspersed with other, more frequent periodic recessions, spaced about four years apart and usually occurring twice per ten-year cycle.

A similar tendency of alternating trends is demonstrable in the accumulation of other national capitalisms, although the temporal coherence of cycles only occurs at historical turning points of general crisis of the system. One of these was the immediate post-war period with the world crises of 1919 and 1921, another famous one from 1929 to 1933. In this post-war period, there was no shortage of stagnations and even productive recessions, but they were short-lived and always occurred out of phase in time from one country to another so that it was always possible for world capitalism as a whole to mitigate the impact of the recession by offsetting imbalances in the world market for goods, capital and labour. Today, cyclicality is in phase everywhere, precisely because capital flows have been settling for thirty years, and the interest of each national capital does not integrate but collides and contends for space with the other.

In the last few months, industrial production in all capitalistically mature countries has tended to increase, managing to exceed the highs of 1973-74: in four/five years, the self-surpassing amounts to only 4-5% for European capital, except for the UK, which is stagnating, and for Japan, while it is 13% for the US.

The most recent production indices would indicate that a new maximum in capitalist expansionary speed has already been reached with these values and would mean that 1979 could bring a new period of deceleration. In January, Japanese industrial production recorded the lowest growth rate since last August, in Italy the annual rates measured in December and January are half those of the previous months, while the Federal Republic of Germany announces zero growth in January compared to the previous year, and the contribution of the steelworkers’ strike is to be seen.

Inflation chastises dirigisme

The sharp rise in the inflation rate well above the average values maintained throughout this post-war period dates back to the early 1970s, thus preceding and not following the 120% increase in oil prices in the autumn of 1973 and a further tripling on 1 January 1974. The rise in consumer prices had already begun in March 1973 in France, as early as 1970 in the Federal Republic, and since April 1972 in Italy. The rise in crude oil prices is therefore rather to be seen as a reaction to the depreciation of the dollar on the world market, aimed at defending the payment of value in real terms to the producing countries. Since then, the price was kept constant in real terms until 1976 and then declined slightly due to declining demand from consumer countries.

Inflation galloped to more than 20% per year at retail level in Japan, Great Britain and Italy, to more than 10% in the USA and France. Strong inflation persisted until the 1975 crisis fully unfolded. Generally speaking, in all countries a production recession is followed by a retreat of inflation, but there is no direct correlation between production levels and inflation. In the year just gone, the world’s major currencies experienced a stabilisation in the pace of depreciation, but settled at very different inflation rates: from 12% per annum in Italy to the German minimum of 2%. This relative stationarity of inflation is, however, belied by the most recent price measurements, which would indicate a beginning of an upward recovery in changes: the February data for the United States, Great Britain and more markedly Italy, and the December and January data for the FRG indicate an upward trend.

The inflationary excess of the last decade can be explained by the issuance of paper money by governments committed to interventionist support of an economy that is tending toward decline: inflation is the economic system’s reaction to the forcing that one would like to impose on it, a reaction by which the laws of the market come back into play.

In Capital, Marx comprehensively frames the phenomenon of price variation, which under a monetary regime of forced circulation (i.e. fiat money Ed.), does not depend on variations in the value of commodities or accidental fluctuations in the relationship between supply and demand, resulting in an automatic adjustment of the socially conventional value of the mass of paper money circulating in a market according to the total value effectively demanded and accepted to compensate for transactions and payments and which is actually in operation as such: the mass of exchanged value defines the value of the mass of circulating paper money; its only measure is the actual recognition of value that is made for and in circulation. Unlike gold money, or money exchangeable for gold in a fixed proportion, a commodity before it is money, state paper is a commodity only and to the exact extent that it is recognised and functions as such. If a general contraction of trades or their slower progress, or an excessively loose operation of the presses alters the numerical ratio between paper bearers and commodity bearers, it is the market itself that re-establishes equilibrium with a general alteration of the price scale.

On the capitalist market, not only are commodities destined for consumption exchanged against income in money form, but, to a predominant extent, means of production against capital in money form. The crisis influences inflation in two opposing ways: on the one hand, the mass of money capital in paper form swells and cannot be hoarded without serious risk for the money capitalist, while the circulation of commodities and the velocity of money changing hands collapses; on the other hand, the oversupply of unsold commodities tends to produce a collapse in prices due to competition. In the crises of this decade, the markets have not yet become so flooded with unsaleable goods that a tendency towards deflation prevails. In this case the reference commodity can only be gold: if the price of commodities remains constant in relation to gold we are evidently, as is the recent case, in the presence of inflation due to an alteration of the price scale, due to changes in paper signs alone; when instead the price of gold rises alongside general deflation it will be the time for the more general crisis of mistrust, a traumatic precipitation of the crisis of overproduction.

Today, the mass of wandering capital in search of investment at remunerative rates is increasing at a very fast pace, with a marked acceleration in 1978: the size of capital borrowed on the Euromarket rose from 63 billion dollars in 1976 to 69 billion in 1977 to 51 billion in the first quarter of 1978 alone. These huge sums of money came largely from the US trade balance deficit, which from the winter of 1976 to the summer of 1978 went from an annual surplus of 10 billion to a deficit of 33 billion. It is the sign of the end of American dominance as a trading power, closely pursued by its more productive Japanese and German competitors. US imperialism compensates for the trade deficit with massive exports of its own green currency. Even if, compared to the American domestic product, this shortfall represents only a few percentage units, the inflationary effect on world markets is decisive.

New competitors are emerging for US capital: last month, for the first time in history, German exports surpassed American exports in quantity, an event long predicted by the party, signifying the great expansive capacities of the capital of halved Germany. On the other hand, as far as capital exports are concerned, it is Japan that is increasing its share of the whole, at the expense of the US share, while the share of European capital investing itself in the US is growing, and Japan already invests a third of its foreign capital in America, thus having those goods produced there that protectionist barriers would prevent from exporting.

The insecurity of money capitalists to invest because of the risk of zero profits or even loss of capital that the crisis entails is such that while everyone seeks to invest their capital, perhaps at low rates, but on a short-term basis, the supply of long-term loans is becoming scarce and the state-entrepreneurs themselves are finding it difficult to invest their ‘residual liabilities’ in projects with a ten-year turnover. The banking intermediation thus finds itself, as in all periods of crisis, including the classic 1929 crisis, collecting short-term capital while its own capital is already tied up for many years. A state of great rigidity is created which, if at first it is capitalism’s resource for ‘inventing’ a willingness to invest, in reality it is non-existent and not justified by the most reasonable forecasts and thus delaying the recession, then, when the reality of the capital surplus imposes itself, it is the trigger and amplification of the banking meltdown, of the financial crash. We await the phenomenon, not attenuated but generalised by the ever closer connection and centralisation of credit institutions with each other and with the issuing institutions and the government treasury.

Exchange rate fluctuations as bulletins in the trade war

The reflection of the heterogeneity of the development or regression of the various national capitalisms can be seen in the incoercible fluctuation of currency exchange rates. In part, this phenomenon is due to the linking of monetary systems with different inflation rates, so that the exchange rate variation merely reflects the real depreciation of one currency against the other, measured on the basis of a series of the same commodities. The fact remains, however, that the exchange rate is influenced not only by the movement of goods but also by capital flows, by the different rates of profit from one country to another, i.e. by the varying levels of development of the productive forces and by the different degrees of subjection of the proletariat to exploitation. The exchange rate can also be voluntarily altered by the massive movement of a money supply from one market to another and by the psychological amplification that results.

All epochs of capitalist crisis also mark the alteration of the old monetary parities. On the world market, the use of gold currency has continued far longer than within individual national markets, even to this day for the balance of trade with the Eastern countries. Gold was in fact for a long time the only authority superior to that of individual states and recognised by capitalists and merchants: gold is a commodity and as such has value in itself. It is the result of imperialistic maturation that the currency of dominant capitalism has also established itself in international trade. And with the military victory and American economic and political preponderance, the dollar can replace the once-dominant pound sterling on the markets: the basis of the dollar’s authority is the treasury’s gold reserves but also the power of its navy and army.

However, the process of corrosion of the dollar’s value is contemporaneous with its domination of the markets and is openly manifested with the end of the fixed exchange rate regime: it is a continuous process, accelerated over the last ten years. The speed of depreciation of the American currency exceeds the natural differential between domestic inflation and the average devaluation in competitor countries. The result is:
1) a continuous depreciation of US exported goods and an increase in imported goods;
2) a devaluation of America’s huge debts: in effect, the US obtains loans from all over the world at negative rates, returning devalued paper upon payment.

As a first reaction to these phenomena, the dollar has lost its authority where the permanence of the value it represented is indispensable, i.e. as a reserve currency. The gold reserves of central banks are still considerable (75% in France, 40% in the FRG). But as a means of payment the dollar remains the absolutely dominant currency: bad money drives out good money, with all holders of money trying to get rid of dollars, rather than marks, yen or gold.

The utopia of the ultra-currency

The capitalistic necessity of the continuous expansion of exchanges on the world market, in a regime of (now impossible) stable monetary circulation, led the lesser capitalisms to search for a monetary alternative to the declining dollar, a more ‘neutral’ unit, which would avoid the disruptions induced by the dollar’s fluctuating course and its speculative flows manoeuvred by American financiers. The other imperialisms, in their impotence and mutual disagreement over the imposition of a second currency on the world market, have on several occasions started multilateral, regional negotiations and initiated experiments for the common issue and control of conventional means of payment. Such common institutions should have been the monetary crowning glory of the ultra-imperialist philosophy of peaceful coexistence between competing capitalisms, a reactionary and utopian myth that will prove to be definitively so as the clash of capitals intensifies, markets close, and protectionism begins, but which the world bourgeoisie has failed to initiate even in its heyday.

The monetary crisis is only one aspect of the crisis of accumulation and the tensions that arise between the different partitions of world capital. Any monetary arrangement is destined to have a very short-lived life due to the continuous chaotic bubbling of production and trade, the overturning of interests and flows of goods and capital.

The first formulation of a monetary arrangement was that of the International Monetary Fund, which issued the ‘Special Drawing Rights’. Since the official abolition of the gold price, SDRs have a daily quotation resulting from a weighted average of the exchange rates of the 16 major currencies weighted according to their participation in world trade. Originally, the authority of the new ‘unit of account’ was derived from the Fund’s gold reserves contributed to it by the various participating countries. This collateral meant that the SDRs acted as a currency and also as a reserve, albeit in the modest proportion of 3% of the total and still a long way from replacing dollars as a means of payment or even as a unit of account for prices. The project’s failure can be traced back to sabotage by the United States, which frowns upon a competitor to its currency. The spread of dollars on the European and Japanese markets, a currency imposed on the debtors of the USA, has further reduced the space for SDRs.

More recently, under pressure from America, the IMF even proceeded to sell the gold in its possession, so that its price would be lowered against the dollar, but officially in the name of definitively surpassing the ancient yellow metal as a monetary instrument. It is unthinkable that the greatest imperialist power would consent to its currency being dethroned, let alone favouring the emergence of another artificial, consensual, mathematically averaged currency with ‘collegial’ management, thus renouncing such a lever for control over financial flows and for the blackmail of competitors. The USA gained its brigand-like dominance over the world by force of arms in a victorious world war, against precisely Japan and Germany, and by demonstrating the overtaking of allied Great Britain by the old colony. The imperialist system in crisis will not peacefully find a new monetary arrangement, just as it will not achieve a stable trade structure through diplomatic agreements. The exhaustion of the capitalist cycle requires, with the elimination of the surplus of wealth that engulfs it, a confrontation of the forces of competing imperialisms for survival, the outcome of which can redefine world power relations.

The most recent episode in the currency war is the attempted agreement for the ‘European Monetary System’ which, after difficult negotiations, formally came into effect among the countries of the economic community with the exclusion of Great Britain. Apart from the empty phraseology about the ‘ideal values’ of Europeanism, to which, as with Lenin, we attribute a bourgeois and reactionary character to, the agreement is, at least as far as it can be respected, a success of the diplomacy of German capitalism against American interests. Due to the continuing devaluation of the dollar, German trade has found itself progressively disadvantaged on the world market, and only due to the greater productivity of the German productive apparatus does the conspicuous trade surplus remain. If the FRG finds it cheaper to buy the raw materials it needs (oil) abroad, it suffers more from competition from foreign products, both on the domestic and third-party markets. The FRG, the largest capitalist power in Europe, the largest trader in the world, the country with the largest foreign exchange reserves and the strongest currency, and commercially in surplus even with the oil exporting countries, is also a country highly dependent on exports and very vulnerable to exchange rate fluctuations, currently orchestrated around the US currency. It is therefore an expression of the strength and maturity of German capital the necessity of imposing its own currency in international transactions.

The political weakness of the FRG, a destroyed and dismembered nation, was explicitly imposed by the victors who forbade it to rebuild its own army. Not unlike inter-war Germany, we are now faced with the same monstrous productive machine, the same (only formally different) subjugation of the proletariat and its organisations to national interests, housed in a limited territory, squeezed between old and competing capitalist nations, with no territories from which to extract raw materials and no commercial outlets for surplus production. The expansive offensive undertaken by Germany in the 1930s with the use of military and diplomatic force is now attempted with commercial penetration, low commodity prices and the authority of a strong currency.

A ‘mark zone’ already exists, after all, comprising the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway and Austria, countries whose currencies were already linked to fixed exchange rates before the EMS negotiations, in a single monetary and financial market. The mark also gained confidence as a reserve currency, which already surpassed the pound sterling in central bank treasuries in 1972 and accounted for 7-8% of the world’s reserves in 1978 at 40 billion. Even as a means of circulation the German currency has established itself by making up 10% of the circulating currency, where 80% is the dollar.

But for the marks to access the world market (as for the Japanese yen, in its ‘area’) means to clash with US capital. It is for the united European front around the FRG and as a counterweight to American financial dominance that Schmidt called the smaller capitalisms into the EMS, invited to choose between the protection of the dollar and that of the mark, with the immediate aim of slowing the revaluation of the German currency by providing European monetary policy with the strength of union. As is well known, this project, in itself modest in scope and with little binding force for the participants, found, nor could it have been otherwise, many difficulties in its elaboration due to the many and so deep-seated conflicts that divide even neighbouring European capitalisms. Monetary solidarity with the DM (Deutschmark Ed.) means for countries with weak currencies such as Italy and Great Britain to deprive themselves of the commercial advantages of continuous devaluations, as well as to alienate good relations with the giant across the ocean. Indeed, Great Britain has preferred to maintain privileged relations with the USA. Italy, after the traditional waltzing and the promise of regional fund loans, joined the System.

For all capitalisms, FRG first, there is also the ball and chain of a backward peasant world with the unresolved problem of feeding the cities at reasonable prices, an area of relative barbarism even in the most industrialised societies due to low productivity, and a source of irreconcilable contradictions not only between different nations but within individual societies where the preservation of the peasant structure requires high prices for agricultural products, prices artificially imposed by state authority, paid for by the increased exploitation of the urban and rural proletariat. The management of the reactionary structure of the Compensatory Amounts, which tend to prevent the formation of a single agricultural market, which would cause an unsustainable upheaval in the countryside of all countries, is therefore capitalistically ineradicable and a source of growing tensions.

The exchange rates of the countries adhering to the System have remained within the limits set by the agreement since 1 January. There was, however, a period of relative general exchange rate stability, so that it was no sacrifice for any country to comply with the agreement. Our prediction is that if there is an appreciable alteration in the rate of the dollar against the deutschmark, an irresistible centrifugal tendency will arise within the EMS, where all the smaller capitalisms exporting to the USA will once again prefer to place themselves in an intermediate position with their currency.

* * *

The convulsions of capitalist industry and finance throughout the world are a sign and anticipation of forthcoming crises far more serious in scope, depth and duration than those that have just passed. The wealthy classes will defend their privileges, their gilded idleness, their decadent luxury by all means, even more so when the crisis begins to erode their prerogatives and when millions of proletarians will see the false guarantees that this decrepit and rotten society had promised them dramatically collapse: work, wages, a roof over their heads. The working class, hitherto clouded, dispersed and brutalised by the double array of bourgeois jailers and ex-communists, is showing signs of revolt, still sporadic but with the unmistakable traits of the generous class tradition. Let us strengthen, colleagues, let the gigantic international army of labour, the bright promise of the future in today’s fetid stench of dying capitalism, join with the revolutionary direction.