Mr. Giussani’s nightmares
Workers’ uprising ... Calculus of values

Paolo Giussani has to thank Operai Contro; his hysterical spite against the effort of some industrial workers to refer directly to Marx in order to achieve conscience of their own social condition, make him be a very appreciated item on anti-worker thinkers’ market and as such he will always be supported by the system and its masters. Both in his talk at the conference of the 23rd of January and in his last papers he has been, with strong determination, the spokesman of the social capital. His position can be summarized by quoting a sentence of his : "Workers’ conditions is becoming better and better, they have no reason for making a revolution against capital". A boot-licker, no offense meant. More and more people think the same, but the only difference is that the others have never given lectures of Marxist economy, they have never presented themselves as Marx’s interpreters. Mr. Giussani can not stand to have been criticized. He cries to have been attacked personally without any respect for his own honoured person. A scandal! Kautsky also raised hell. Lenin had dared to attack him publicly defining him a renegade, specifying name and surname. Lenin, a barbarian.
But Giussani is not Kautsky; he might have even given up with this matter. Operai Contro has eventually given him a little of publicity defining his Marxism as “algebraic Marxism" while it is actually not more but a collection of absurdities of a petty professor who does not understand anything about economy. But reckoning with these interpreters of Marx as a mere economist, had to be brought and it has already produced a result. Dr Giussani is only good to season the usual anti-workers slops, this is what comes out at Calusca on the 23rd of January. Our purpose was to make his role come out and this was achieved. Let the others come forwards : the "elite" workers, as Giussani likes to define us, has only to learn from this fight.
We re-confirm we will lead a theoretical fight against individuals as personification of determined interests, of determined social classes. History is the history of classes struggle, struggle among their theoretical conceptions, Giussani with his own positions is the direct interpreter of those petty bourgeois left to the margins of institutions who, in the insufficiency of Marx as a mere economist, try to find the justification for their return home to the large family of capital supporters. Marx versus Marx to deny the factory workers’ exploitation and, thus, to get safe from the nightmare of Christian remorse, aspects of which are well-known to doctor Giussani. He knows everything about Fatima Madonna, about mysteries of faith, who knows, maybe he was a seminarian too....
He had to be pushed to lay his cards on the table. He did that. He has played the role of the offended and eventually he has abandoned the conference. That is disappointing, we expected at least to face with a sharp enemy. He spoke a little and bad about economics, he just spewed out insults about the workers’ history and their submission to capital. For those workers sit in front of him at Calusca on January 23rd, his show was quite meaningless. When one faces with personnel managers or chief executives telling the same words, it is a completely different stuff. If you must have opponents, it is better for you them to be serious and educated so that they will force you to have the same strength in defeating them. Giussani has just taught us how to leave the stage like Wanda Osiris. Enraged and offended he took his writing pad and between two lines of spectators he reached the middle of the room, then he changed his mind and he come back to the stage because no one implored him to stay. The second time he was more determined, he took advantage of the opportunity and he went away: Wanda does not stand the debate.
Factory workers’ uprising is in the historical evolution. Whether doctor Giussani likes it or not and says again and again: "it is not true, it is not possible, I can not believe it", we regret for him, the modes of production succeeded until nowadays, founded on the class antagonism, has been transitory and overthrown. The dissolving elements mature in the real conditions of each economic age. Factory workers’ uprising is inside the contrast of antagonistic forces which mine capital in its own historical development. "Capitalism will never be transitory, never and never workers’ liberation can be assumed as a real datum of historical development", writes thickly the doctor. He always looks like one who, waked up from a nightmare of armed workers expropriating the expropriators, sweaty, repeats to himself: "it is not real, it will never happen, those madmen telling workers’ uprising is ineluctable, will make me get mad".
The rope tightened over a certain limit will break and since, such as it is put, it can be only tightened over that limit, it will break. Stop, writes Giussani, what is this ineluctability, this religious hope? Only Fatima Madonna, his protectress, can foresee future, we are not allowed to look into a real process and to single out its evolution laws. He, anti-religious first of all, together with his priests will hope that factory workers won’t find out in the negation of their condition of exploited the overthrowing of the present mode of production.
Giussani, in order to achieve human emancipation, relies on good-willed men "not Marxist at all". He prays and implores that this social system will not be overthrown by workers’ uprising, they could try to do it like in 1917 assaulting masters’ buildings and their power, frosting churches, trying to reorganize economic relations on new basis. But what barbarism, what obscurantism does the doctor denounce telling the efforts of workers in Russia? Let him get on preying to avoid that these efforts, even if they have been defeated, become the basis to start a new phase of workers’ revolution.
Giussani’s effort to banish such a way of thinking to a very small group of factory workers is really agreeable, and the smaller this group is, the more he can sleep peacefully.
We satisfy him soon. If he can write and support the same anti-workers pieces of foolery as any other firm-chief and he can do it publicly in a book-shop, politically sided with the left since long time, this is due to the fact that the workers’ movement is almost vanished, and with enormous efforts it is trying to re-establish itself on new basis; but even in such a situation he had not an easy life. The recording of Calusca January 23rd debate is available; in a few years we will laugh at "Marxist" economics theorists belonging to Milan reactionary petty bourgeoisie.
The workers’ exploitation is theft of non-paid work, appropriation of a surplus-value which is not paid by the master. If an average worker’s half an hour of labor produces the equivalent of the value of his own labour-power, the remaining seven hours and an half of an eight hours working day, produce a value of which the capitalist appropriates free.
An Appropriation without any equivalent, legally and systematically carried out every day in all factories. Giussani reminds us "but what theft, the commodity labour-power has been sold, the master has paid for it its value". "No constriction, no theft". Up to this point the version of Giussani and any master. The first one with his writing pad under his arm will go to the university to tell this discovery to some unwary students; the second one will take the worker to whom he has not stolen anything yet and make him work for himself. The commodity labour-power has an exchange-value paid by the wage and it has use-value which is still to be objectivated in a new exchange-value and which master will command of as his own property.
The workers is put in a factory to work and there he is exploited. He will produce a value which he will not get back from any equivalent. Appropriation of unpaid work, theft roughly speaking.
The master phones Giussani and thanks him because he has repeated that in the simple exchange of capital against labour-power, workers have got what was due to them, nothing more, nothing less. The master asks him: "Repeat it to your adversaries, Marxist philosophasters". "At the end,"- the master thinks - "who will go to the factory to see how labour-power has been used, and how the extortion of surplus-value has been performed?". No one. The worker, follower of Saint Marx, while he lets masters tan his skin, thinks "subtract the labour time necessary to reproduce the same value of my wage from my eight hours work and all the resting time you appropriate, you will use it to grow rich". Theft, says Mr Marx, theft, we say as workers after 130 years.
Doctor Giussani has understood, from his point of view, what exploitation is. He writes: "it is the difference between the value produced by the labour-power and the value paid to it as wage". A simple quantitative difference. Such a conception of exploitation implies the possibility of reducing the above quantitative difference: the wage increase as a way to reduce the gap between capital and labour. Giussani had better to go in a trade-unions center of studies to oppose to the working exploitation a right wage politics which fills the gap between how much one produces and how much one is paid. The simple quantitative difference so much liked by doctor Giussani is the result of a social relation qualitatively determined. The value paid to labour-power is determined by the value of subsistence means necessary for workers to reproduce themselves as a labour-power, the new value which he produces is determined by the conditions in which his labour-power is submitted to capital. The gap which Giussani talks about can not be filled until this mode of production is in force. "The idols acclaimed by Operai Contro", attacks Giussani, "have been everything but workers". From Engels, an industrial capitalist, to Marx, a doctor in philosophy, etc.. Giussani, we add, a doctor of algebraic Marxism. The difference: the first two, come to the theoretical conscience of the historical movement on its whole, sided with workers, gave them means of education; the second one, naturally come to the conscience of his mean bourgeois class interests, although petty, has found out in the relation between workers and Marxism the end of his false interpretation of Doctor Marx and he has publicly raged at workers and Marxism, a reactionary anti-workers rage.
"The international class of wage laborers and the world workers’ movement have always had an highly conservative or definitely reactionary character, and for their resolute choice and will." This is what Giussani writes.
An historical falsity and an immediate justification. The historical falsity. Giussani has to wash his mouth before expressing any judgement about workers’ history, their struggles and their defeats. The capital knows what irreducible enemy it has to face, how many changes in production, in the state organization it has been forced to introduce to submit workers and to be able to exploit them more and more intensively. In the rebellions, in the every day resistance, in the effective revolutionary attempts, workers have pushed on the historical development and even when they think to defend what they have today, the capital itself teaches them that it cannot be defended unless the capital is overthrown. Workers are condemned to fight for future. But Giussani does not invent anything new. The charge for workers to be retrograde comes from industrial capitalist themselves and their paid agents. "You are opposed to flexibility, to work by the day, to variable wage, you are reactionary, against industry progress". Chatters that trade unionists and parliamentarians repeat every day.
Are factory workers fighting against such a bull shit, conservative? It is true the contrary: the more they fight with strong determination the new level of exploitation, the more they are forced to face the problem of its overthrowing. The more they try to keep what they have, the more they are forced to overcome the present state of things. It is too difficult for our petty bourgeois doctor who, only being reactionary can well defend his privileges as doctor in algebraic Marxism.
Giussani’s attack against workers has also an immediate justification. Probably, he has to join a mass party with many followers in order to ensure himself the passage from intellectual for a few intimates to mass intellectual. Now everyone knows that wiping out the couple factory workers-communism, wiping it out definitely from history, is an indispensable test to be admitted in the governmental left area. Let Giussani send D’Alema his last writings as credentials, he will give him a post to bark against the little workers groups that still chat about exploitation, workers’ uprising and end of capitalism. Giussani attacks, in his writing, E.A.’s conception according to which the social wage does not exist. It is true, the social wage is not the wage, the wage is paid to workers in exchange for selling their labour-power. The conception according to which the wage consists of the wage directly paid for labour-power and the wage paid by social institutions is an old lie introduced in Italy by corporative work legislation. The Fascist state undertook the charge of the "the health service and the maintenance of the workers".
For the master, as also for Giussani, the social wage is always higher than the individual wage. The old story by which the wage is low but there is the unemployment compensation, and other social services for workers has to come to an end sooner or later. This has been the forte of the capital, of all corrupted representatives of trade unions and of all reformism. Actually, the amount of money, which a worker gets for his work during a determined time, is his nominal wage; it represents the exchange-value of the labour-power he has sold. The difference between the nominal wage and the real wage is not the same as the trivial difference between the gross and net wage, but that one between the exchange-value of labour-power and the mass of subsistence means which this value is converted into. What is the social wage ? It is the intervention of the so called social state done in order to cheapen maintenance costs of workers. Should this be considered a part of the amount of wages which capitalists pay to workers? Only an empirical observer can make this blunder.
The nominal wage is a starting datum and it is a part of the exchange between workers and capital, namely the payment of the labour-power value by masters. The mass of the subsistence means into which this value is converted can vary. That one million and half of monthly wage is converted into 60 average meals per month, two socks, 0.3% television and 2 aspirins paid at half price thanks to the state contribution or that it is converted into 60 average meals per month, two socks, 0.3% television and an aspirin paid at whole price does not change the nominal wage paid for the labor-power which is the starting point. If fortunately I succeed in appropriating a pair of new shoes at half price I can not add the saved amount of money to what it has been paid to me declaring my monthly wage has been increased by a social wage. I can only say that with the same wage I have had available a greater quantity of subsistence means. In consideration of the fact that subsistence means at my disposal tend to reduce as a consequence of a raise in the prices of the services organized by the state, I have two possibilities. Either the defense of the social state against the reduction of the state expenditure for health and education system, or the demand for wage increase to let my salary be converted in the same amount of subsistence means.
Giussani mistakes directly the wage for subsistence means. He considers among the contributions, trusting in Assolombarda, 13 monthly payments, holidays and he thinks that this is the social wage. Workers have paid holidays, a raise of the yearly salary, which is called "thirteenth check", even if doctor Giussani, who lives on a private income, does not know it. These are the only particular forms of the nominal wage of workers.
A last consideration. The idea attributed to us, namely that we would prefer to sacrify a part of the social wage in favor of a little of spendable private wage, is a lie because our opinion is instead that "if some social services are cut we can only ask masters directly for raise of wages". Giussani, on the other hand, argues "let the workers renounce to a little of spendable private wage in order to get an increased social wage". All corrupted unionists and their masters think in the same way. The last national contract of "metalmeccanici" workers has sacrificed the wage increase for the pension funds, the fresh wage has been sacrificed for the modern form of social wage to confirm Giussani thesis, maybe Assolombarda will call him as consultant to make a quantitatively exact calculus of how much social wage has been given to workers during this century. The "Social State" has been and is the social organization of workers’ misery, we can not define it in an other way even if we now that this will make the doctor get very angry.
The fatidical question if the amount of value is determinable before and independently from exchanges has been widely answered in writing on the review "Quaderni di Operai Contro". It has also been answered in person on 23rd January in Milan. This question is a bluff.
The question if values can be measured namely quantitatively determined before and independently from exchanges but with the specification added by Giussani "before and independently from every single exchange", reduced in its simplest terms, can be reformulated as follows: can one determine the length of an iron bar before and independently from the meter (the meter as product of many comparisons among lengths of concrete bodies) ? No. Moreover, if the length of a bar is twice the length of a pale, can one measure the length of one with respect to the other independently from their comparison-exchange ? No. Giussani shouts: " therefore, it is clear that for you it is the comparison-exchange to determine the length. This is what you assert when you say that it is not possible to measure the determined amount of value of a commodity before the exchange". Giussani, on the other hand, takes the iron bar which has a length twice the length of another bar, and while turning and tossing it, wonders if it is long or short and how long or how short it is. Then it takes the shorter bar and he wonders "if you are half of the other, there should be some way to discover, before I compare you with the other bar, your real and intrinsic quantitative measure of length, since you refers in a quantitatively defined way to the other bar A=2B". In a moment of rage he ask it to the bar itself, which obtusely answer: "I am iron bar, I can do many things but I do not know how long I am, even if I know that an element of my corporiety is a determined length". Giussani bursts out: "if the relation in which you reciprocally exchange with the other bar is 1 to 2, your length is a defined quantity". "It is clear"-the bar burst out-"the quantity of my length is defined but I do not know how much it is and I will never know unless you refer me with the other bar or any other thing which has length, namely thing having the characteristic to be long. Doing so, I finally start to measure that the defined quantity of length which is my characteristic is twice the defined quantity of length of the bar which is front of me". If the bar could explain, it would simply tell to its interlocutor: "refer me not just once but numberless of times with other bodies as things having length. At a certain point it will come out an official representative of length which will be used as measure of length of all bodies. Finally the physic characteristic which belong to me, the length, will be measured as a common thing. The defined quantity will be measured". Giussani has been trying for years to measure a determined length before and independently from the meter, he failed and without understanding what he has done. Then he turned the problem of measuring value upside down: If the length cannot be measured before and independently from the meter and it is the meter to measure it, it will be the meter itself to determine the length.
The fact that the form of general equivalent, namely the meter, allows us, by means of measurement, to assert that the bar is long 2 meters is nothing but the reflection of the length of the bar existing outside itself. On the other side, only the obtusity of the doctor can assert that it is the meter to determine the length of the bar. He founds his idea on the ambiguity of the quantitative determination, on the ambiguity of measuring. He confuses, in economic terms, value, relative forms of value and equivalent form of value. Money as measure of values.
Where does doctor Giussani want to arrive? He want to contest the statement that the content of the value of a commodity is the socially necessary labour time to produce it because he is not able to measure the value as it is. And he will never be able to do it because only its phenomenic form of exchange-value makes it measurable. Eventually, if he had measures values "before and independently" he would have given us the solution, throwing it on our faces. He did not because he is an alchemist and he has not found his philosopher’s stone. He will give us without feeling guilty the new thesis he is working on: if value can not be measured "before and independently", it is true what bourgeois economists say, namely that exchanges determines values. Giussani intended to use ourself in this mystification of doctor Marx’s ideas. We cannot satisfy him, according to us it is the socially necessary labour time what determines the value of commodities, exactly because the exchange allows its social measure. But it is matter of the future history, about which we will write in another place, how the confraternity of the algebraic marxists has come to the conclusion that the values of commodities is determinable at the level of the exchange.
We wait for another letter of doctor Giussani, answering it will be duty to which it will impossible for us to evade.

La redazione dei Quaderni di Operai Contro
Milano, February 1998

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