We came together, comrades from different countries, to bring the contribution of our work to the great cause of communism.

For this goalwhich is not close to us in time, though certainly inscribed in the course of historywe know it will require a world communist party, capable of handling Marxist doctrine well and both leading the working class. Without the leadership of the Communist Party, revolution is impossible.

We do not gather to compare our personal or group opinions. Not to invent original theories. Not even to listen to brilliant new discoveries about the course of history. We gather to defend the continuity of the Communist Party, in its program and, today, in its small living organization.

It is first of all a continuity of doctrine. We have an impersonal theory, born in the midnineteenth century and then only strengthened and confirmed. In that theory is contained the answer to all our questions of today and tomorrow.

Every answer is already written. And it is within the reach not only of a few exceptional priests or men but also of the last of the comrades: just go and read, just study.

General custodian of our revolutionary science and revolution can only be the collective organ of the party. The Communist Party is not the sum of individuals, but a unitary organ that precedes and exceeds our individuals.

It lives outside in the harshness of social warfare, "in contact", and tomorrow at the head of the working class.

Internally it presents itself as an anticipation of communist society. In strident negation and overcoming of all the miseries of the petty bourgeoisie, among which the most deadly are individualism, envy, competition, and permanent intra species struggle.

Communism already lives in the Communist Party. We prove to the despicable bourgeois that it is possible for a human group to operate, disciplined and efficient, without an apparatus of coercion, spontaneously ordered because it already knows all its orders.

This is how the Communist Party wanted to be from its now distant origins in the League of Communists and in its even older generous pre scientific utopias.

These meetings of ours are further confirmation that communism is possible.

As usual, the meeting, attended by the entirety of our sections and held in the usual maximum order, was divided into a preparatory session of the proceedings, in which all groups are asked to report on their progress, and any difficulties, for which they can ask the remaining comrades for help, and a session for the presentation of reports.

Everything presented proved consistent with our program and confirmed the correspondence of the party’s tactical direction, receiving the unanimous approval of those present.

These are the exhibits we heard:

Report of the Study on the Women’s Issue

The group’s goal is to give continuity to the elaboration of the comrades before us, to reiterate that it is the party that anticipates the integral program of communism, which will come to remove the barriers that make one human being economically dependent on another.

The working group met three times. In the meetings, each comrade was assigned to read a party text and report on what he or she discovered there. Discussions focused on extracting insights and questions elicited from these texts.

The list includes Engels, Bebel, Kollontai, Zetkin and from our party since 1953.

We also have the collection of "Compagna, organ of the Communist Party of Italy for propaganda among women".

Today women’s dependence on both the capitalist and, because of their inveterate subordination, on men remains. The party must prefigure the appropriate tactics to combat the double exploitation of women, which has persisted since the beginning of human history and today has no reason to exist and only hinders the path to the economic equality of the sexes and liberation from the millennial social exploitation of men.

We aim to dissect the intricate layers of patriarchal oppression still emerging at the surface of modern capitalist societies and explore avenues for women’s emancipation as embodied in the invariant body of the party’s theses.

The working group identified several discussion points that will be explored with further readings and meetings: patriarchy in the past; women’s labor in the wageearner; domestic work; the issue of abortion; divorce; prostitution; the issues of homosexuality and transsexuality; and genderbased violence.

The comrades emphasized the need to contextualize these issues within a general critique of the mode of production, capitalist and previous.

In future studies (perhaps not of us but of comrades after us), just as our nineteenthcentury comrades analyzed the results of science from a dialectical materialistic point of view, we will examine some new studies in the field of anthropology (progressing slowly and with difficulty), especially on the development of technology, and based on the extension of knowledge, and relevant studies in the field of education, which in the last period have affected the whole world.

We do not find it of much use to draw on many of the theoretical works of feminists because they do not relate to the actual course of history.

It is necessary to fight patriarchy. It is necessary to open our eyes more clearly to the propaganda and psychological violence of the surviving overpowering within the capitalist system.

As a result of today’s classbased education system, women are made insecure, subjected to psychological stresses and strains and inequalities in their living conditions. Oppressed by domestic work, they find it difficult to return to the scientific and theoretical field, of which they have been deprived for thousands of years.

And this also as communists and in the party. Yes, women comrades need a working group, just as they may need their own newspaper, addressed specifically to women.

In particular, the situation of workingclass women is to be described. It is necessary to struggle against the oppression of women just as one struggles for wages. Although it will end only with the proletarian revolution. It is a struggle that our socialist comrades began in the 19th century, work that has continued into the 20th and will continue until the fall of bourgeois society.

There have been setbacks due to the defeats of the working class and the prevalence of antifeminist propaganda and intimidation by the state apparatuses. Communist militants we seek a light in the harsh conditions of defeat, which it is our responsibility to analyze and learn about.

Just as in order to end the exploitation of man by man we must break down its first cause, its commodification, so we cannot achieve communism without the liberation of all the oppressed. From the time of social harmony from primitive communism to the antagonism of exploitation, with the dualism of oppressors and oppressed, we seek the return of the human species to its organic unity where all contradictions are resolved. Here the centrality of this work as well.

Women’s advocacy must also affect unions is an area of application of this study. After the historical report this is the topic we will focus on.

In the past, communists have supported claims that were not just of the working class, such as women’s suffrage. But changing historical conditions led us to the rejection of parliamentary means to advance women’s conditions as well.

Working women must demand their protection from unions. These today do not even perform their most basic function of defending wages and hours. But it is their job to defend the condition of the entire proletariat, the unemployed, immigrant workers, women workers, homosexuals and all oppressed groups of workers. We must know the conditions that vary from country to country and from union to union. We need to articulate in unions all the demands of the working class.

We turn our gaze from primitive communism, free from exploitative relations and in harmony with nature and each other, to the egalitarian society to come, with a return to immediately human relations between the sexes. Only in the postcapitalist world will the seeds planted for millennia in men’s brains by classist modes of production wither. The study of patriarchy is generally concerned with the relationship of human beings to each other in class societies.

Deep in our minds, traces of what has been imprinted on them for generations survive in our behaviors. Primitive community groups existed as an organic structure that functioned together, while we are isolated and opposed to each other.

The party is the organic link that connects us to man’s historical responsibilities. With the party we return to an organically functioning community. But we are no longer in the purity of early man; we are today still under the domination of capital, in which most of our life takes place in areas dominated by exploitative relations. Only in the party does the light of doctrine allow us to unveil the traumas and miseries that external society spreads. Only then, as communists, can we explain in unions to workers, who cannot be free, the necessities we have learned from our history.

It is essential to communicate among comrades with affection and respect, even under the present bourgeois conditions, to create a party environment that welcomes in warm camaraderie the sentiments of the future society.

We will also be able to deal with the issue of ethics, starting with how Marx, Lenin and all our comrades understood it, which leads us to given behaviors, according to certain forms. And to think about how we revolutionaries embrace each other, even in a society around us based on antagonistic relations. This, too, is an issue we will have to address.

The Origins of Left‑Wing Socialism and Class Unionism in the Ottoman Empire:
Early Years and Founding of the Communist Party of Turkey

The antecedent of the founding of the Communist Party of Turkey can be traced more or less directly to the October Revolution. The first effect of the revolution on Turkey, which was at war with Russia at the time, was immediate. Russian soldiers returning from eastern Anatolia left power to a Soviet government representing Turks, Kurds and Armenians, based in Erzincan. In addition to Erzincan, the new Soviet government had influence in Erzurum, Dersim, Bayburt and Sivas. But it was soon suppressed by the Ottoman army before the Union and Progress Committee surrendered to the Entente and Constantinople and most of Anatolia were occupied by the victorious powers.

The first congress of Turkey’s leftist socialists was held in Moscow in 1918, with the participation of former prisoners of war, and led to the creation of the Communist Organization of Turkey, headed by Mustafa Suphi, Sharif Manatov and Süleyman Nuri.

In late 1918 and 1919 legal socialist organizations emerged in Constantinople, such as the Socialist Party of Turkey with 14,000 members and the Social Democratic Party with 2,000. To their left, Turkish students returning from studies abroad, mainly in Germany, formed the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party of Turkey, later renamed the Socialist Workers’ and Peasants’ Party of Turkey, a party that followed the ideological line of the USPD.

Some of the remnants of the left wing of Ottoman socialism reorganized in Constantinople as the Communist Group, under the influence of Bolshevism.

Meanwhile, the Nationalist Forces emerged as irregular militias in 1919, opposing the occupation. Soon some officers, led by Mustafa Kemal pasha, defected from the Ottoman army and, after a series of congresses, assumed leadership of the movement. Mustafa Kemal and his allies formed the Society for the Defense of Law, which soon became organized throughout Anatolia. By the end of the year, the Nationalist Forces had about 7,000 militants. In 1920, the Society for the Defense of Law established the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in Ankara, as an alternative to the Assembly of Deputies in Constantinople. Within a few months, the Nationalist Forces reached 15,000.

Its largest component was the Mobile Forces, which were 5,000 strong. These were based in Eskişehir, where a section of the Socialist Party of Turkey isolated from the center of Constantinople was organized. They often engaged in acts of dispossession of the rich to benefit their cause. The Mobile Forces included a 700man Bolshevik battalion, so named because it was commanded by a follower of Mustafa Suphi.

In those days Sharif Manatov arrived in Ankara and, together with dissident military vet Salih Hacıoğlu and some other comrades, declared the founding of the Communist Party of Turkey on July l4. The party opposed the government in Ankara as well as the government in Constantinople. It published the Comintern’s Appeal to the Peoples of the East. By the end of the year the party had 350400 militants, assisted by the Communist Organization of Turkey, now based on the Caucasus in the Black Sea region.

Yet it was neither the Communist Group of Constantinople nor the Communist Party of Turkey founded in Anatolia that established the first contact with the newly formed Communist International by sending representatives to Moscow, but the leftist Socialist Workers and Peasants Party of Turkey. İsmail Hakkı, one of this party’s delegates to the Second Congress of the Comintern, expressed a position completely contrary to that of the Anatolian Communists: "After the Russian Revolution and the partition of Turkey by the European imperialists, when the Janus face of the English and French capitalists was openly shown to the Turkish people, a new movement, a liberation movement, was born in Turkey. The Anatolian movement, now led by the Democratic Party, is the best response to the ruthless exploitation to which Turkey has been subjected by the Entente countries (...) Now the revolutionary state of Anatolia, which is gathering around it all the forces hostile to the Entente, driven by a centuriesold hatred of imperialism, is preparing for the struggle against European imperialism. The workers of Turkey will not allow themselves to be enslaved once again by the Entente and, thanks to the Russian revolution, which is the best friend of Turkey in struggle, the Turkish people will achieve complete freedom in a short time and, together with the workers of all countries, wage the struggle against imperialism throughout the world".

Shortly thereafter, between September 10 and 16, the First Congress of the Communist Organization of Turkey was held in Baku. Renamed the Communist Party of Turkey, it was the only Turkish organization represented at the congress was the Socialist Workers and Peasants Party of Constantinople. However, the Baku organization included rather radical militants, so the congress documents were considerably to the left of the positions of the Socialist Workers’ and Peasants’ Party: "We are convinced that the national revolutionary movement under way in Anatolia helps the proletarian movement of the whole world in its struggle against imperialism of the whole world, and it is certain that this national movement, with its development and deepening within the country, serves the emergence of class consciousness and thus prepares a suitable field for the social revolution of tomorrow. The Communist Party of Turkey will, on the one hand, contribute to the growth of the movement against imperialism in Turkey, and on the other hand, strive to prepare the principles for the real goal and ultimate aspiration of the workers, of the working people, to win power for the proletarians".

Moreover, thanks to the influence of Bolshevism, the congress recognized the Armenian genocide and adopted a proletarian internationalist approach to the question of nationalities: "They did not hesitate to create enmity between the Turkish and Armenian people. They have made enemies of these two nations that have lived together throughout history. It is the poor and helpless people who die everywhere and always, who are oppressed and deprived of the right to live. During the World War, which was a consequence of European imperialism, the poor Armenian peasants again fell prey to the lies of the British, the lies of the dashnaks and the instigation of the priests. They began to massacre the poor Muslims of Van and Bitlis, burning their houses and looting their property (...) In response, the government of the Union and Progress Committee acted without hesitation, the Armenians were deported, their property was confiscated, and most of them were killed by secret orders.

"Like any nation, Arabs, Kurds and Bulgarians will decide and determine how to live. As Russia accepts federation, so must we. Not only we, but all nations must accept this principle. Only through this principle can humanity become one big family. Just as the Communist Party of Turkey will try to save the Turkish workers and peasants from the influence of the Unionists and treacherous Socialists, it must separate the oppressed classes of the Greek, Armenian and Kurdish nations from the Dashnak or Badr Khan organizations, uniting them in the name of the same interests and purposes as one class".

Shortly after the congress, the International Workers Union (IWU), a coordination of combative workers hoping to form revolutionary class unions, was founded in Constantinople in October 1920. It was initially inspired by the American Industrial Workers of the World. It sent a warm letter to the Comintern announcing the founding of the union and asked to join the Profintern.

These developments alarmed Mustafa Kemal, who in late 1920 founded a progovernment Communist Party of Turkey. The fake party’s application to join the Comintern was rejected. However, he forced the Communist Party in Anatolia out of illegality to prevent the masses from being deceived: he founded a legal organization under the name People’s Communist Party of Turkey. The party line also changed, seeking to broaden its appeal to classes other than the proletariat and softening toward the Kemalists.

The party in Anatolia merged with leftist nationalists who critically supported Mustafa Kemal.

Despite the warnings, all the party leaders from the Baku Congress went without precautions to Anatolia. When they arrived in Erzurum, the local branch of the Society for the Defense of Law incited the population to attack them. The same scenario was repeated in Trebizond, where they later moved. Mustafa Suphi, Ethem Nejat, İsmail Hakkı and other comrades decided to return, but after leaving the city on a boat, they were approached by another boat and were all killed on the direct orders of Mustafa Kemal. Following this trauma for the communist movement in Turkey, the section stationed in Baku split into a left wing led by Süleyman Nuri and a pro Kemalist right wing led by Ahmet Cevat Emre.

Meanwhile, the Communist Group was struggling within the International Workers’ Union against the influence of anarchism. Ginzberg of the Communist Group expressed this struggle in his 1921 report to the Comintern’s Eastern Secretariat:

"The IWU (...) has given itself a bad policy in the last five months because of the acceptance of the principles and program of the American IWWs".

In a 1924 report entitled "A Brief Overview of the Turkish Labor Movement", Ginzberg describes these events as follows:

"There was also an Armenian Social Democratic Party (Hunchakist) in Constantinople with 2,000 members, mostly workers (...) In 1921, the communist group of the IWU (...) came into contact with the left wing of this party and the two groups merged to form the Communist Party of Constantinople in December 1921 (....) The Communist

Armenian faction of the Communist Party of Constantinople conducted a massive campaign in favor of Soviet Russia and Soviet Armenia through the press, conferences and agitations.

"Until the Franklin Bouillon agreement, the political line of the Communist Party of Constantinople was to support the Kemalist movement, but after this agreement, which was considered a betrayal of the independence movement, the party did not hesitate to unmask the Kemalists and lead the working class, while supporting every progressive step, to fight against the local bourgeoisie and imperialism through class struggle".

Origin of the Communist Party of China After the Third Congress

At the Third Congress of the Communist Party of China there was a bitter clash over the issue of relations with the Kuomintang, with many comrades opposing the tactics of entrism in that nationalist party. Immediately after the conclusion of the congress, in a letter dated June 20, 1923 and addressed to Zinoviev, Bucharin, Radek and Safarov, Maring made the leadership of the International aware of this, reconstructed the steps that had led to the adoption of the tactic of entry into the Kuomintang and defended the reasons for it.

Underlying his proposal was a negative assessment of the development of the revolutionary movement in China, characterized by the country’s economic and social backwardness and the weakness of the Communist Party, while, on the other hand, he showed admiration for the strength of the Kuomintang in southern China.

Hence the proposal to push Chinese communists into political activity in the Kuomintang and support for the national revolution as their main task. Maring wrote that since August 1922 the Party had been pushed to help the nationalist movement by participating in organizing the Kuomintang. Despite this, according to Maring, at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern Radek had proposed that the CPoC carry out independent political action under a communist banner, with the proposal for China to quickly develop a mass party. Maring immediately after the Fourth Congress went to Moscow to advocate the continuation of the tactics adopted in August, with the result that in January 1923 the ECCI adopted a resolution that the nationalist revolution was the main task of the Party and that its members should remain in the KMT.

The resolution, however, gave rise to discussions in the CPoC: about what was to be done in the KMT; how many communists were to be employed at this intervention and how many in propaganda among the workers; whether the Chinese bourgeoisie had a revolutionary role or everything would have to come from the workers and peasants.

While it was stipulated in the theses of the Third Congress of the CPoC that the party’s task was to develop the KMT throughout the country, at the same time criticism was leveled at the nationalist party for its tactics based mainly on the military aspect, thus leading it to bind itself to the feudal militarists of the North, and to seek relations with foreign imperialists, a tactic incompatible with a revolutionary nationalist party. Instead, the KMT should have been forced down the road of revolutionary propaganda and created a left wing in this party made up of peasants and workers.

Zhang Guotao, who opposed the view that wanted strong support for the KMT, summarized Maring’s position in his November 16, 1923 letter to Comintern officials Voitinsky and Musin as follows:

"The Comintern considers that the central task of the CPoC at this time is the nationalist movement and Soviet Russia should support the Kuomintang. So the Chinese Communists should concentrate their efforts in the reorganization of the Kuomintang and

work within the Kuomintang and develop the Kuomintang. All the political propaganda work of the CPoC should be done inside the Kuomintang (...) The labor movement should be brought inside the Kuomintang and workers throughout China be brought inside the Kuomintang. Only when the class consciousness of the workers within the Kuomintang has

developed, could a left wing of the Kuomintang develop. Only at that time could a real PCdC be formed. This would be the only process of the Chinese revolutionary movement".

It seems clear that since 1923 the perspective had been outlined that the revolution in China subordinated the social movement of proletarians and peasants to the demands of the national revolution and that only the party of the Chinese bourgeoisie, the Kuomintang, could lead the revolutionary movement. The Communist Party of China was to confine itself internally, bringing in workers and peasants. Although on paper the independent existence of the Communist Party was left standing, in fact it was reduced to the "left wing" of the Kuomintang, a directive endorsed by the leadership of the International and given to the Chinese Communists.

But the CPoC was still not convinced, and still in November 1923 resistance persisted. Zhang Guotao denied that the Kuomintang was the sole representative of the Chinese revolutionary movement. He then argued that the Chinese bourgeoisie was dependent on foreign capitalists, and although there were contradictions between the Chinese bourgeoisie and foreign imperialists, the local bourgeoisie was far from fighting against foreign oppression. On the other hand, the strength of the working class was yes young and weak but it had already shown its pugnacity. Zhang Guotao believed that workingclass

strength was already present and could be a major component of a future nationalist movement. He accepted the need to remain in the Kuomintang, organizing sections and trying to reorganize it, but he did not consider this work predominant. Communists were to continue to propagate their political positions independently, and it was necessary to prevent the labor movement from passing from the hands of the CPoC to those of the KMT. The main task remained to organize the workers.

Zhang Guotao believed that the Kuomintang was not only not a true nationalist party but that it was not even an organized party. He believed that the arrival of a Chinese nationalist party would take years. He proposed, therefore, that in workers’ centers where the Kuomintang had no influence it should not be allowed to organize sections, while only in Canton and Hong Kong was the work of the CPoC in the workers’ camp forced to be conducted within the Kuomintang.

Thus, there were comrades within the CPoC who were unwilling to cede the leading role of the revolutionary movement in China to the KMT and give up the political independence of the Communist Party. The CPoC leadership itself, at a meeting of the Executive on November 2425, 1923, was forced to acknowledge that the resolutions on the national movement and the Kuomintang question, laid down at the Third Party Congress, had not received substantial support from grassroots party members.

Despite the opposition to the tactics established at the Third Congress and the difficulties encountered in its implementation, the CPoC leadership confirmed that it was continuing on that path. The November 1923 meeting of the CPoC Executive resolutely condemned the "leftist distortion" of the single front policy and adopted a decision ordering communists to actively participate in the reorganization of the nationalist party.

The resolution left no doubt as to the path taken: all Communist Party work was to be conducted within the Kuomintang, now considered the central force of the revolution in China. The reorganization and development of the Kuomintang had become the main tasks

of the Communist Party, and to this end, the resolution issued precise directives: the Communists, while remaining members of the CPoC, were to join Kuomintang sections in centers where these were already present or to create Kuomintang sections themselves where there were not yet any; the program dictated by the KMT leadership was to be followed; and the correction of the KMT’s political tendencies was to be carried out "in accordance with the nationalist principle embodied in the Three Principles of the People".

It was the full adherence to Sun Yat sen’s bourgeois program and the submission of communists to the political leadership of the nationalist party. The nationalist movement had become the focus of all the work of the CPoC and the solution of the "national question" was placed above class interests and its own struggle.

On December 25, 1923, the CPoC Executive issued "Circular Number 13", which obliged, among other things, to ensure the election at the next KMT Congress, set for January 1924, not only of communists but also of "relatively progressive" figures. Special envoys were sent to Party sections to implement these decisions.

These decisions in the field of tactics were accompanied by new theoretical formulations to support them. The revolutionary character of the bourgeoisie and its function in directing the national revolution were exaggerated.

Mao Zedong himself, newly elected to the Central Committee, advocated this. In July 1923 he wrote that it would be the merchants, i.e., the bourgeoisie, who would feel "most acutely and most urgently" the sufferings of dual oppression to local militarists and foreign imperialists, and although the national revolution to overthrow militarists and imperialists "is the historic mission of the Chinese people" as a whole (merchants workers, peasants, students, and teachers in Mao’s formulation), because of the contradiction between the economic interests of merchants and those of foreigners and militarists, the role of merchants was considered by Mao to be "more urgent and more important than the rest of the "people".

Thus, by theorizing a preeminent role of the merchants, and thus of the bourgeoisie, we approach the classical position of Menshevism, which leaves the leadership of the revolution in the still backward countries to the national bourgeoisie. This interpretation of revolutionary development in backward countries, according to which the imperialist yoke made the national bourgeoisie of colonial and semicolonial countries more revolutionary than the Russian antifeudal bourgeoisie in later formulations, will be the same with which the degenerate International will justify all the directives imposed on the Chinese communists, which will lead to the tragic defeat of the proletarian revolution in China, while Lenin had already made it clear that "bourgeois revolution is impossible as a revolution of the bourgeoisie", definitively separating Bolshevism from the Menshevik current.

Disparities in World Steel Production

At the meeting, we returned to a theme our party has explored since the 1950s. Using old studies and new statistics, we restored annual steel production tables from 1860 to today for Great Britain, France, Germany, the U.S., Japan, Russia, Italy, China, and the world total.

Today, capitalism is shaking the entire world. After the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the rapid increase in production in Asia, especially in China, we have witnessed an exacerbation of the crisis. This crisis can only be resolved through a global war.

While Western economies decline, their contest for control of natural wealth across the planet continues. The Chinese state seeks domination of nearby seas. In Africa, nations like China and Russia compete with Western ones to influence local economies. Middle Eastern oligarchies defend income from their oil resources, trying to ensure their processing as well. Latin America is witnessing increased extraction of raw resources. Thus, preparation for war and the continuation of proxy conflicts persist, maiming and destroying the working class.

In the past, it was a matter of national pride to flaunt the successes of one’s country’s steel industry. Now, the bourgeoisie of the old capitalist nations are forced to admit that they must buy metallurgical products where they cost less. National economies in industrial decline are giving way on the international market to new emerging national economies.

But everywhere, this evergrowing productive capacity is marked by a constant slowdown in the relative pace of increase. This shows that not even the new emerging economies are immune to the same decline that Western countries have experienced.

In this post-war period, two dramatic changes have occurred in the steel industry. We have measured these changes with production data and their annual percentage variation. Both of these numerical series have indicated deep economic crises, with lasting effects on the rate of production expansion in general and on the industry’s rate of profit.

From the production graphs, it is clear that the main Western economies have experienced a decrease in steel production or at most a halt in growth. In contrast, China, Japan, and Russia were not initially affected as dramatically as other capitalist nations. This is because steel production has moved from the old economies to emerging ones, from China to Mexico. These data will be presented and analyzed in more detail later.

We have compared the production and increases of the last 50 years with the timeline of the previous 150 years. From 1860 to 1910, the main Western economies were in a development phase, and growth followed a more or less exponential trend. Until the First World War, steel production continued to grow.

In the period between the two wars, it was observed that production continued to follow this exponential curve in the United States. Meanwhile, European countries like England, France, Germany, and Italy recorded stagnation. In contrast, China, Japan, and the Soviet Union showed a constant increase in production, just like the Western economies from 1860 to 1910.

The preparation for the Second World War required an increase in steel production worldwide. After the First World War, the main European nations had recorded stagnation. A decline in production occurred after the devastation of the Second World War. This time, stagnation also occurred in the United States. It did not occur in the Soviet Union, China, and Japan.

The production of China and Japan did not immediately surpass that of the West during this period. However, in 1949, with the founding of the People’s Republic of China, there was an explosion in steel production that continued to grow exponentially, as with all production.

But already in the 1970s, the old capitalist economies suffered from a crisis caused by overproduction. While China continued to record exponential growth in steel production, in Japan it no longer increased. Comparing China’s growth with that of the United States, one can see the sudden decline in U.S. production in the mid1970s. Meanwhile, Chinese steel production continued to follow an exponential curve. In Japan, one can also see the halt in steel production growth. Relevant graphs were shown at the meeting.

Western steel companies will continue to see a slowdown in the rate of growth of production. Even Japan, after the 1980s, would soon see a dramatic decline in national production. All the gains made after World War II would vanish.

Since the early 2000s, all Western economies have seen their production either remain constant or even contract. Meanwhile, China has continued to grow, but even this at an increasingly slow pace.

The rate of increase in production is directly related to the rate of profit. It is not that capitalist steel production at a given moment stops growing. The accumulation of capital within the global economy always increases. But the amount of this accumulation, which increases from year to year, is always relatively smaller compared to the mass of production. This is true for each national economy. Graphs were shown at the meeting that demonstrate this.

Faced with the falling rate of profit, the European, Japanese, and North American bourgeoisies have reacted with restructuring and subcontracting. In the process, subcontractors are forced to give up part of their profits to get the order. They have also relocated part of the production to countries where costs are lower. Mexico, for example, has become a key center for the production of cars destined for the North American market.

Since the 2000s, the United States, Japan, and Germany have invested colossal sums in China, transforming it into the new "workshop of the world". Among other things, China has become the world’s leading steel producer. It supplies part of the steel needs of Europe and the United States.

Marxism does not foresee a growth of capitalism followed by a decline. Rather, it predicts the simultaneous dialectical strengthening of the mass of productive forces that capitalism controls and their unlimited accumulation and concentration. This occurs simultaneously with the antagonistic reaction of the dominated forces, that is, the working class. The general productive and economic potential increases until the equilibrium is upset and an explosive and revolutionary phase occurs. In the course of an extremely short and intense period, the old forms of production collapse and the productive forces diminish, opening the way to a new arrangement and a new, more powerful rise.

But while production always expands, the relative rate of this production is always decreasing. Thus, if in 1943 the United States produced almost 80 million tons of steel, to maintain the 3.9% increase of 1943 in 1944, the country would have had to produce 83.74 million tons. Of course, this was not the case. In 1943, production increased by only 3.3%, although it was 1.3 million tons more than in 1942.

Furthermore, within a given national economy and a given branch of production, one can observe not only a decreasing rate of growth in steel production but also a constant absolute slowdown in production.

As a historical trend in steel production, for example in the United States, the rate of growth not only decreases but goes into negative territory. This means that, regardless of the amount of annual production, the economy will not be able to produce at the same volume as in the past. This effect is found in all the countries analyzed. For the United States, this turning point occurred in 1980; for Japan, in 2009.

Therefore, on the one hand, we are witnessing an explosion in production. On the other hand, there is a slowdown in the pace of such production. We can say that the tendency of production increases exponentially since capitalism always tries to produce more. However, the tendency to slow down the rate of increase of production, which corresponds to the rate of profit, imposes itself. This tendency is difficult to distinguish through the noise created by the contingent oscillations of production. But as an inexorable trend, this rate of increase is decreasing. At a certain point, production stagnates and a crisis occurs.

It is a growth that, however, entails a decrease in the rate in the long run. This translates into periodic economic crises.

The loss of production of a particular commodity can, of course, be compensated by importing it from abroad. And this is only if that commodity is still socially necessary and has not become obsolete. This is obviously the case with steel, which is increasingly needed to produce machines, buildings, infrastructure, and always weapons of war.

Bourgeois Ideology
Medieval Aristotelianism, Averroism and Occamism

We are still in the prehistory of bourgeois ideology. The party is not an academy of historical or philosophical studies, nor even of Marxist studies. What interests us is how much of the concepts from the 13th and 14th centuries were considered useful and adopted by the nascent bourgeoisie. This is regardless of the actual fidelity to the doctrines in question, which were almost always distorted according to the needs of different societies in different eras.

Scholasticism

Scholasticism had the task of understanding the Revealed Truth through rational activity. Not trusting reason alone, it also appealed to religious tradition and authorities: the decision of a council, the writings of a Church Father, a biblical saying. If this was a limitation, it was also a virtue. It manifested the common and nonindividual character of the research, proven by the fact that the writings were often not signed. On this we are in complete agreement: intellectual property is the most despicable form of private property, which deprives the human species of the use of its best results. Even in this, we have not invented anything. We have recovered, dialectically, a part of our history – the history of the species—a history that, as we have already written, we claim in its entirety from the club to the missile.

With Augustine of Tagaste, Neoplatonism became the philosophical basis of Christianity. Neoplatonism, along with Stoicism, remained at the foundation of Christianity for about eight centuries, until the rediscovery of Aristotle in the 13th century.

The Rediscovery of Aristotle

In 1210, the Provincial Council of Paris banned the philosophical writings of Aristotle. Only with Albertus Magnus of Cologne and Thomas Aquinas was Aristotelianism incorporated into the Christian vision. Thomas purged Aristotle of everything that was in contrast with the Christian religion. It then became the supporting philosophical structure, the official doctrine of the Catholic Church.

The Church adapted to a world that saw the birth of a new class – the bourgeoisie – and the slow decline of feudalism and its ideological bases. "Thomism" was the ideology of a still feudal world, but to a lesser extent than the previous one.

What is obvious, but only for us Marxists, is that these conceptions did not transform their world but were a reflection of such transformations.

The interest in the investigation of nature, stimulated by Aristotelian texts, was a step towards the claim of greater autonomy by the nascent bourgeoisie. This movement fostered autonomy and selfconfidence against the Augustinian tradition, which considered knowledge of the world to be of minimal importance. Since God was within man, true knowledge was considered internal.

Furthermore, Aristotle’s reasoning in terms of cause and effect led to viewing the cosmos as governed by necessary laws. In some authors, these laws could be identified with God himself – a God different from that of the biblical tradition, because necessity denied him omnipotence and absolute freedom. To the point of making him a "useless hypothesis", as in the response attributed to Laplace towards Napoleon.

Knowledge of Aristotle’s "Politics" was important in the second half of the 13th century. Here, we find that human communities are governed by their own laws – laws of nature – without the need to introduce divine law. If in previous centuries the law of nature was part of divine law, now it gained its own, more or less broad, autonomy. Thomas Aquinas himself, for whom the important thing is the relationship between man and God and who considered the relationship between men among themselves to be of little importance, accepted Aristotle as he was with regard to politics.

There is therefore a sphere – politics – governed entirely by the law of nature, where it is not necessary to introduce divine law.

A few centuries later, the bourgeoisie took possession of a very limited and unimportant "right of nature". They expanded it enormously and made it their own revolutionary ideology. This is attributable to a class reality that overwhelms and distorts, along with the old world, also the old ideologies. In the ethics and politics of Aristotle, the bourgeoisie of the 14th and 15th centuries, while certainly remaining Christian, found a way to affirm partial autonomy with respect to the Church and the feudal world it represented.

Averroes and "Free Thought"

Ibn Rushd, called Averroes by the Latins, was born in Cordova in 1126. He was a doctor, philosopher, and jurist. The myth of an Averroes who was a rationalist if not an atheist has survived to this day. He supported a rigid distinction between the sphere of faith and the sphere of reason. The theory of the "double truth" was suited to the bourgeoisie. While as Christians they condemned lending at interest – always considered usury – bourgeois bankers or merchants, they practiced it.

We Marxists agree with Averroes: for us too, "right reason illuminates right faith and vice versa". Our science, without our communist faith, would be nothing. It is not even possible to separate them, except by making an abstraction. Faith and communist sentiment without science are blind and destined to fail. A Marxist science, separated from communist faith and sentiment, would resemble a Golem. Like the Golem of Central European Jewish tradition, it would be directionless – a sort of phantom pure science or pure technique destined to turn against its creator.

Averroism in the Christian world was a conception held by some philosophers, useful to the nascent bourgeoisie. For them, the rigid separation between the sphere of reason and the sphere of faith – between the investigation of nature and revealed truth – was an instrument to affirm autonomy between the "earthly city" and the "city of God". All this meant greater autonomy of the bourgeoisie from the power of the Church and from the feudal relationships it embodied. In Aristotle, Al Farabi, and Averroes, happiness consists in attaining knowledge and therefore contemplation. Now, contemplation becomes proper to the "city of God", while knowledge increasingly aims at the "earthly city" – politics and the production of wealth.

Occam and Nominalism

In his polemic against Aristotelian and Neoplatonic metaphysics, Occam goes so far as to deny the very principle of causality. While this aspect does not advance science, experimentalism does, as it takes the place of the apriorism of Platonic ideas and Aristotelian categories. What the bourgeoisie adopted was not the denial of the principle of causality, and only partly experimentalism, but the nominalism at its basis.

The "nominalists" deny reality to universal concepts, considering them mere concepts, verbal forms, signs. Science no longer has the universal as its object but the individual, whose knowledge can only be founded on experience. Nominalism is a step in the direction of materialism.

Averroism and Occamism led an attack, from two opposite sides, on Scholasticism, contributing to its dissolution. Occamism, with its nominalism and the importance attributed to experience, was the more disruptive of the two.

Individualism, which Occam also takes from Duns Scotus, was certainly the main aspect adopted by a bourgeoisie that was uninterested in other aspects of his thought. Connected to Occam’s nominalism are also his political conceptions, adopted by the bourgeoisie, according to which the Church must not have claims of temporal dominion. The rigid separation of the plane of faith from that of reason translates into a pro imperial position. It also leads to a position where truth no longer resides in the Church understood as hierarchy or in the pontiff, but in the Church understood as the totality of believers – a totality formed by the reality of individual Christians. Such conceptions were functional to all the classes that could not stand the feudal structure of society: to the bourgeoisie as well as to poor peasants, and sometimes even to kings and nobles in conflict with ecclesiastical power.


(Continued to next issue)