Murder of the Dead
("Murdering the dead": Amadeo Bordiga
on capitalism and other disasters)
by Amadeo Bordiga
In Italy, we have long experience of
“catastrophes that strike the country” and we also have a certain
specialisation in “staging” them.
Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, rainstorms, epidemics...
The effects are indisputably felt especially by poorer people and
those living at high densities, and if cataclysms that are
frequently much more terrifying strike all corners of the world, not
always do such unfavourable social conditions coincide with
geographical and geological ones.
But every people and every country holds
its own delights: typhoons, drought, tidal waves, famine, heatwaves
and frosts, all unknown to us in the “garden of Europe”; and when
one opens the newspaper, one inevitably finds more than one item,
from the Philippines to the Andes, from the Polar Ice Cap to the
African Desert.
Our capitalism, as has been said a hundred times over, is
quantitatively small fry, but today it is in the vanguard, in a
“qualitative” sense, of bourgeois civilisation, of which it offers
the greatest precursors from amidst Renaissance splendour[*], in the
masterful development of an economy based on disasters.
[*= “The first
capitalist nation was Italy.” (Engels, “Preface to the Italian
Edition of The Communist Manifesto”)
We wouldn’t dream of shedding a single
tear if a monsoon washed away entire cities on the coast of the
Indian Ocean, or if they were submerged by the tidal waves caused by
submarine earthquakes, but we have found out how to collect alms
from all over the world for the Polesine.
Our monarchy was great in knowing to rush not to the dance
(Pordenone), but to where people are dying of cholera (Naples), or
to the ruins of Reggio and Messina, raised to the ground by the
earthquakes of 1908. Now our puffed-up President[*] has been taken
off to Sardinia and, if the stalinists haven’t been fibbing, they
have shown him teams of “Potemkin workers” in action, that then run
to the other side of the stage like the warriors in Aida.[**]
[*= Luigi Einaudi,
President of Italy 1948-55.]
[**= Potemkin had
constructed prefabricated villages to show Catherine II on her tour
of the Russian countryside. They gave the impression of rural
prosperity, but after each visit they were hastily dismantled then
re-assembled elsewhere on the tour.]
It was too late to pull the homeless out
of the flooding Po, but good play was made of MPs and ministers
paddling about in their wellies after setting up cameras and
microphones for a world-wide broadcast of their lamentations.
Here we have the bright idea: the state should intervene! And we
have been applying it for a good ninety years.
The professedly homeless Italian has set
state aid in the place of the grace of God and the hand of
providence. He is convinced that the national budget has much
wider bounds than the compassion of our Lord.
A good Italian happily forks out ten thousand
lire squeezed out of him so that months and months later he can
“squander one thousand lire of the government’s money”. And during
one of these periodic contingencies, now fashionably called
emergencies but which fall in all seasons, when the central
government has scarcely initiated the unfailing provisions and
fundings, a band of no less specialised “homeless” will roll up its
sleeves and plunge into the business of procuring concessions and
the orgy of contracts.
The Minister of Finance of the day, Vanoni, suspends by his
authority all other state functions and declares that he will not
provide a single brass farthing from the exchequer for all the other
“Special Acts” so that all means can be addressed to dealing with
the present disaster.
There could be no better proof than this that the state serves for
nothing and that if the hand of God really did exist, he would make
a splendid present to the homeless of all kinds by causing
earthquakes and bankrupting this charlatan and dilettante state.
The foolishness of the small and middle bourgeoisie shines
forth at its brightest when it seeks a remedy for the terror that
freezes it in the warm hope of a subsidy and an indemnity liberally
bestowed upon it by the government. But the reaction of the
overseers of the working masses who, they scream, lost everything in
the disaster, but unfortunately not their chains, appears no less
senseless.
These leaders, who pretend to be “marxists”, have for
these supreme situations, which interrupt the well-being of the
proletariat derived from normal capitalist exploitation, an economic
formula even more foolish than that of state intervention. The
formula is well-known: “make the rich pay!”
Vanoni is thus reviled because he was unable to identify and tax
high incomes.*
[*= In early 1951 Vanoni introduced
personal income tax to Italy. This tax entered the Guiness Book of
Records as the ‘least paid tax in the world’. Still today tax
evasion is widespread. (Cf. 11th. ed., 1963, p. 10)]
But a mere crumb of
marxism suffices to establish that high incomes thrive where high
levels of destruction occur, big business deals being based on them.
“The bourgeoisie must pay for the war!” stated those false shepherds
in 1919 instead of inviting the proletariat to overthrow it. The
Italian bourgeoisie is still here, and enthusiastically invests its
income in paying for wars and other disasters for which it is then
repaid four fold.
Yesterday
When the catastrophe destroys houses, fields and factories,
throwing the active population out of work, it undoubtedly destroys
wealth. But this cannot be remedied by a transfusion of wealth from
elsewhere, as with the miserable operation of rummaging around for
old jumble, where the advertising, collection and transport cost far
more than the value of the worn out clothes.
The wealth that disappeared was that of past, ages-old labour.
To eliminate the effect of the catastrophe, a huge mass of present-
day, living labour is required. So, if we use the concrete social,
not abstract, definition of wealth, we can see it as the right of
certain individuals, who form the ruling class, to draw on living
contemporary labour.
New incomes and new
privileged wealth are formed in the mobilisation of new labour,
and the capitalist economy offers no means of “shifting” wealth
accumulated elsewhere to plug the gap in Sardinian or Venetian
wealth, just as one could not take from the banks of the Tiber to
rebuild the ones swallowed up by the Po.
This is why it is a stupid idea to tax the ownership of the
fields, houses and factories left intact to rebuild those
affected.
The centre of capitalism is not the ownership of such
investments, but a type of economy which allows the drawing from and
profiting from what man’s labour creates in endless cycles,
subordinating the employment of this labour to that withdrawal.
Thus the idea of resolving the war-time housing crisis with an
income freeze on landlords of undamaged houses led to the provision
of homes in a worse condition than that caused by the bombing. But
the demagogues shout easy arguments so as not to confuse the working
masses.
The basis of marxist economic analysis is the distinction
between dead and living labour. We do not define capitalism as the
ownership of heaps of past, crystallised labour, but as the right to
extract from living and active labour. That is why the present
economy cannot lead to a good solution, realising with the minimum
expenditure of present labour the rational conservation of what past
labour has transmitted to us, nor to better bases for the
performance of future labour. What is of interest to the bourgeois
economy is the frenzy of the contemporary work rhythm, and it
favours the destruction of still useful masses of past labour, not
giving a tupenny-ha’penny damn for its descendants.
Marx explains that the ancient economies, which were based
more on use than exchange value, did not need to extort surplus
labour as much as the present one, recalling the only exception:
that of the extraction of gold and silver (it is not without reason
that capitalism arose from money) where the worker was forced to
work himself to death, as in Diodorus Siculus.
The appetite for surplus labour (Capital Vol. I, Ch. 10,
Section 2: “The Greed for Surplus Labour”) not only leads to
extortion from the living of so much labour power as to shorten
their lives, but does good business in the destruction of dead
labour so as to replace still useful products with other living
labour. Like Maramaldo,[*] capitalism, oppressor of the
living, is the murderer also of the dead: “But as soon as
people, whose production still moves within the lower forms of
slave-labour, corvée-labour, etc., are drawn into the whirlpool of
an international market dominated by the capitalist mode of
production, the sale of their products for export becoming their
principal interest, the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted
on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, etc.” [**]
[*=
Maramaldo killed the dying General Ferrucci in 1530, the last act of
Florentine independence. The British equivalent is Ivo of Ponthieu
who hacked at the dying King Harold at Hastings. But he was “branded
with ignominy by William and expelled from the army” (Gesta Regun
Anglorum). The chivalry of nascent feudalism contrasts favourably
with the squalid unscrupulousness of early capitalism.]
[**= Capital Vol.
I, Chap. 10]
The original title of the paragraph quoted is “Der
Heisshunger nach Mehrarbeit”, literally; “The voracious appetite for
surplus labour”.
Small scale capitalism’s hunger for surplus
labour, as set out in our doctrine, already contains the entire
analysis of the modern phase of capitalism that has grown enormously:
the ravenous hunger for catastrophe and ruin.
Far from being our discovery (to hell with the “discoverers”,[*]
especially when they sing even the scale out of tune, then believe
themselves to be creators), the distinction between dead and living
labour lies in the fundamental distinction between constant and
variable capital.
All objects produced by labour which are
not for immediate consumption, but are employed in a further work
process (now one calls them producer goods), form constant capital.
“Therefore, whenever products enter as means of production into new
labour processes, they lose their character of being products and
function only as objective factors contributing to living labour.”
[**]
[*= Publisher’s
Note — The word used in the Italian original is “troviero”. This
literally means “finder” and, in the context, actually means
something like “someone who thinks they’ve found something important,
but they haven’t”, e.g. some bourgeois apologist who thinks they
have refuted Marx. There is no obvious English equivalent so “discoverer”,
with the inverted commas, will have to do.]
[**= Capital Vol.
I, Chap. 10]
This is true for main and subsidiary raw materials, machines and
all other types of plant which progressively wear out. The loss
due to wear which has to be compensated for requires the capitalist
to invest another quota, always of constant capital, which current
economics calls amortisation. Depreciate rapidly, that is the
supreme ideal of this grave-digging economy.
We recalled a propos “the body possessed by the devil”
[*] how, in Marx, capital has the demoniacal function of
incorporating living labour into dead labour which has become a
thing. What joy that the Po’s embankments are not immortal, and
today one can happily “incorporate living labour into them”!
Projects and specifications are ready in a few days. Good boys, you
are possessed by the devil!
“Sir, the drawing office of our firm has done its duty in
predisposing technical and economic studies: here they are all nice
and ready.” And price analysis values the stone of Monselice higher
than Carrara marble.[**]
[*= In this
collection.]
[**= Monselice:
the nearest stone quarries to the Po, Carrara: the main centre of
marble production in Italy.]
“The property therefore which labour-power in action, living
labour, possesses of preserving value, at the same time that it
adds it, is a gift of Nature which costs the labourer nothing, but
which is very advantageous to the capitalist inasmuch as it
preserves the existing value of his capital.” [*]
This value, which is simply “preserved”, thanks always
to the operation of living labour, is called the constant part of
capital or constant capital by Marx. But: “... that part of capital,
represented by [invested in] labour-power [wages], does, [instead]
in the process of production, undergo an alteration of value. (...)
and also produces an excess, a surplus-value...” [**]
[*= Capital Vol.
I, Chap. 8]
[**= ibid.]
We therefore call it the variable part, or simply variable capital.
The key lies here. Bourgeois economics
calculates profit in relation to the constant capital which lies
still and doesn’t move: in fact it would go to the devil if the
labour of the worker did not “preserve” it.
Marxist economics, on the contrary, places
profit in relation only to variable capital and demonstrates how the
active labour of the proletarian
a) preserves constant capital (dead labour),
and
b) increases variable capital (living labour).
This increase, surplus value, is gained by the entrepreneur.
This process, as Marx explains, of
establishing the rate without taking into account constant capital
is like making it equal to zero: an operation current in
mathematical analysis where variable quantities are concerned.
Once constant capital is set at zero, gigantic development of
profit occurs. This is the same as saying that the enterprise’s
profit remains if the disadvantage of maintaining constant capital
is removed from the capitalist’s shoulders.
This hypothesis is none other than state capitalism’s present
reality.
Transferring capital to the state means that constant capital equals
zero. Nothing of the relationship between entrepreneurs and workers
is changed, since this depends solely on the magnitude of variable
capital and surplus-value.
Are analyses of state capitalism something new? Without any
haughtiness we use what we have known since 1867 at the latest. It
is very short: Cc = 0.
Let us not leave Marx without this ardent passage after the cold
formula: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by
sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”
[*]
[*= Capital Vol. I, Chap. 10, Section
1]
Modern capital, which needs consumers as it needs to produce ever
more, has a great interest in letting the products of dead
labour fall into disuse as soon as possible so as to impose their
renewal with living labour, the only type from which it “sucks”
profit. That is why it is in seventh heaven when war breaks out and
that is why it is so well trained for the practice of disasters.
Car production in America is massive, but
all, or nearly all, families have a car, so demand might be
exhausted. So then it is better that the cars last only a short time.
So that this is indeed the case, firstly they are badly built with a
series of botched parts. If the users break their necks more often,
no matter: a client is lost, but there is another car to substitute.
Then they call on fashion with a large
cretinising subsidy of advertising propaganda, through which
everyone wants the latest model, like the women who are ashamed to
put on a dress, even if perfectly good, “from last year”.
The fools are taken in and it does not
matter that a Ford built in 1920 lasts longer than a brand new 1951
model. And finally the dumped cars are not used even for scrap, and
are thrown into car cemeteries. Who dares to take one saying: you
have thrown it away as if it were worthless, what harm is there in
me fixing and reusing it?
He would get a kick up the backside and a
gaol sentence.
To exploit living labour, capital must destroy dead labour which is
still useful. Loving to suck warm young blood, it kills corpses.
So while the maintenance of the Po embankments for ten kilometres
requires human labour costing, let us say, one million a year, it
suits capitalism better to rebuild them all spending one billion.
Otherwise it would have to wait one thousand years.
This perhaps means that the nasty fascist
government sabotaged the Po embankments? Certainly not.
It means that no one has pressed for an annual
budget of a miserable million. This is not spent as it is swallowed
up in the financing of other “large scale works” of “new
construction” which have budget estimates of billions. Now the devil
has swept away the embankments, one finds someone with the best
motives of sacrosanct national interest who activates the project
office and has them rebuilt.
Who is to blame for preferring the large scale projects?
The fascists and the official communists.
Both of them prattle that they want a productivist, full employment
policy.
Productivism, Mussolini’s favourite
creature, consists in establishing “present day” cycles of
living labour out of which big business and big speculation make
billions. Let us modernise the aged machines of the great
industrialists and also let us modernise the river banks after
letting them collapse, all at the people’s expense.
The history of the recent years of
administrative management of state works and of the protection of
industry is full of these masterpieces, ranging from the provision
of raw materials sold below cost, to works “undertaken by a state
monopoly” in the “struggle against unemployment” on the basis of
“constant capital equals zero”. In a few words, let us spend it all
in wages, and since the enterprise has only shovels for equipment,
the Lord is convinced that it is useful to shift earth first from
here to there then immediately back to here again.
If the Lord hesitates, the enterprise has the trade union organiser
to hand: a demonstration of labourers shouldering shovels under the
ministry’s windows and all’s well. The “discoverer” arrives and
supersedes Marx: shovels, the only constant capital, have given
birth to surplus value.
Today
Undoubtedly, the size of the disaster along the Po has been
massive, and the estimated cost of the damage is still rising. Let
us admit that the cultivated area of Italy lost one hundred thousand
hectares or one thousand square kilometres, about one three
hundredth or three per thousand of the total.
One hundred thousand inhabitants have had to
leave the area, which is not the most densely settled in Italy, or,
in round figures, one five hundredth or two per thousand.
If the bourgeois economy were not mad, one could do a simple
little sum. The national stock has suffered a serious blow.
However, the zone was only partially destroyed.
When the floodwaters recede, the agricultural soil will largely be
left behind and the decomposition of vegetation along with the
deposition of alluvium will partially compensate for the lost
fertility. If the damage is one third of total capital, it costs one
thousandth of the national capital. But this has an average income
of five per cent or fifty per thousand. If for a year every Italian
saved scarcely one fiftieth of his consumption, the damage would be
made good.
But bourgeois society is anything but a co-operative, even if the
great freebooters of native capital escape Vanoni by demonstrating
that “part-ownership” of their enterprises has been distributed
among the employees.
All the productivistic operations of Italian and international
economy are more or less as destructive as the Paduan disaster:
the water entered through one hole and left through another.
Such a problem is insuperable on
capitalist grounds. If it were a question of making the arms
to provide Eisenhower with his hundred divisions within a year, the
solution would be found[*]. These are all short-cycle operations and
capitalism is as pleased as Punch if the order for the 10,000 guns
is with a delivery date in 100 and not 1,000 days. The steel pool
does not exist without reasons.
But a pool of hydrological and seismological organisations cannot be
formed, at least not until the great science of the bourgeois period
is really able to provoke series of floods and earthquakes, like
aerial bombardments.
Here it is a matter of a slow, non accelerable centuries long
transmission from generation to generation of the results of “dead”
labour, but under the guardianship of the living, of their lives and
of their lesser sacrifice.
Let us admit, for example, that the water in the Polesine will
recede in a few months and that the breach at Occhiobello is closed
before the spring, only one annual harvest cycle would now be lost:
no productive “investment” can replace it, but the loss is reduced.
If, instead, one believes that all the Po embankments and those of
the other rivers will frequently come apart, due as much to the
consequences of overlooked maintenance during thirty years of crisis
as to the disastrous deforestation of the mountains, then the remedy
will be even slower in coming. No capital will be invested for the
good of our great-grandchildren.
Our father wrote in vain that only a few examples of virgin
forest remain, growing without the intervention of human labour.
The forestry system thus becomes almost man’s work despite the
minimum of capital in the operation. Nevertheless, high growing
trees, the most important in the public economy, always require a
very long period before yielding a useful product. However, forestry
science has shown that the best year to fell timber is not that at
the end of the maximum life span, but that in which current growth
equals average growth, one must always calculate 80, 100 and even
150 years for an oak wood. Di Vittorio and Pastore[**] would fling
the book, if they had ever opened it, out of the window.
[*= The article
refers to the start of the Korean War.]
[**= The
“communist” and “catholic” union leaders of the period respectively.]
As in the operetta: steal, steal capital
(love) cannot wait...
There is still worse to relate. Relatively little is said of
the disaster in Sardinia, Calabria and Sicily. Here the geographical
facts differ drastically.
The very slack gradient of the Po valley caused a build-up of water
which then swamped over the clay and impermeable soils below. The
same reasons in the South and the Islands, of high rainfall and
deforestation of the mountains, along with the steep fall down to
the sea caused the destruction. The mountain streams washed sand and
gravel from the bedrock and destroyed fields and houses, all in a
few hours, without, however, causing many victims.
Not only is the sacking of the magnificent forests of Aspromonte and
the Sila by the allied liberators irreparable, but here also the
renewal of the land swamped by the flood waters is practically
impossible, not merely uneconomic for the “investors” and for the
“helpers” (more self-interested than the former, if that is possible).
Not only the narrow horizons of cultivable soil, but also the
thin non-rocky strata that gave it weak support have been washed
away, soil which was carried up many times over decades by the
grindingly poor farmers. Every plantation, every tree, the basis of
a rather profitable agriculture, and industry in some villages, came
down with the soil and the orange and lemon trees floated out to sea.
Replanting a destroyed vineyard takes about two years, but
citrus plantations only provide a full harvest after seven to ten
years and a great amount of capital is needed to establish and run
them. Naturally, the good books do not give the cost of the
unthinkable operation of carrying up again, for hundreds of meters,
the soil brought down and, in any case, the water would carry it
away again before the plant roots could fix it to the subsoil.
Not even the houses can be rebuilt where they were before for
technical, not economic reasons. Five or six unfortunate villages on
the Ionian coast in the Province of Reggio Calabria will not be
rebuilt on their own hill sites, but down by the sea.
In the Middle Ages, after devastation had caused the
disappearance of every last trace of the magnificent coastal cities
of Magna Graecia, the apex of agriculture and art in the ancient
world, the poor agricultural population saved itself from Saracen
pirate raids by living in villages built on the mountain tops, which
were less accessible and thus more defensible.
Roads and railways were built along the coast with the arrival of
the “Piedmontese” government and, where malaria did not prohibit it,
where the mountains ran down close to the sea, every village had its
“on-sea” near the station. It became so convenient to carry
timber away.
Tomorrow only the “on-seas” will remain and there they are
laboriously rebuilding some houses.
So what then if the peasant reclimbs the slope
where nothing can ever take root and the very bare and friable rock
strata itself does not permit the rebuilding of houses?
And the workers by the sea, what will they do?
Today they can no longer emigrate like the Calabrians of the
unhealthy lowlands and the Lucanians of the “damned claylands” made
sterile by the greedy felling of the woodlands which once covered
the mountains and the trees that spread over the upland grazing.
Certainly, in such conditions, no capital and no government will
intervene, a total disgrace of the obscene hypocrisy with which
national and international solidarity was praised.
It is not a moral or sentimental fact that underlies this,
but the contradiction between the convulsive dynamic of contemporary
super- capitalism and all the sound requirements for the
organisation of the life of human groups on the Earth, allowing them
to transmit good living conditions through time.
Bertrand Russell, the Nobel Prize winner, who quietly
pontificates in the world press, accuses man of overly sacking
natural resources, so much so that their exhaustion can already be
calculated. Recognising the fact that the great powers conduct
absurd and mad policies, he denounces the aberrations of the
individualist economy and tells the Irish joke: why should I care
about my descendants, what have they ever done for me?
Russell counts among the aberrations, along with that of mystical
fatalism, that of communism which states: if we have done with
capitalism, the problem is solved. After such a display of physical,
biological and social science, he is unable to see that it is an
equally physical fact that the huge level of loss of both natural
and social resources is essentially linked to a given type of
production, and thinks that all would be resolved by a moral sermon,
or a Fabian appeal to the human wisdom of all classes.
The corollary is pitiful: science becomes impotent when it
has to solve problems of the spirit?
Those who really achieve human progress, taking decisive steps
forward in the organisation of human life, are not really the
conquerors and dominators who still dare to ostentate greed for
power, but the swarms of insipid benefactors and proponents of the
ERP[*] and brotherhood among peoples, like so many pacifist dovecots.
[*= The European
Recovery Programme, the “Marshall Plan”.]
Passing from cosmology to economics,
Russell criticises the liberal illusions in the panacea of free
competition and has to admit: “Marx predicted that free competition
among capitalists would lead to monopoly, and was proved correct
when Rockefeller established a virtually monopolistic system for
oil.”
Starting from the solar explosion, which one day will
instantaneously transform us into gas (which could prove the
Irishman right), Russell finishes with maudlin sentiments: “Nations
desiring prosperity must seek collaboration more than competition.”
Is it not the case, Mr. Nobel Prize winner, who has written
treatises on logic and scientific method, that Marx calculated the
development of monopoly fifty years earlier?
If that were good dialectics, the opposite of competition is
monopoly, not collaboration.
Take good note that Marx also predicted the destruction of the
capitalist economy, class monopoly, not with collaboration, with
which you are devoted to flattering all the Trumans and Stalins of
good will, but with class war.
Just as Rockefeller came, “big moustache[*] must come!” But not
from the Kremlin. That one, despite Marx, is about to shave like
an American.
[*= i.e. Stalin,
“Uncle Joe”.]
Source: "Battaglia
Comunista"
n. 24, 19-31 Dec. 1951
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