HOWARD MOSS

L'inedito di Bruno Rizzi «Inflazione e controrivoluzione»

N. 149

Summary — Inflation and Counter-Revolution. An unpublished essay by Bruno Rizzi, edited by Howard Moss.

Bruno Rizzi is best known for his work, Bureaucratic Collectivism. Written in 1939, it represents one of the first theories of 'convergence' between East. and West in modern political thought and may have been plagiarized by James Burnham for his famous best seller, The Managerial Revolution (1941).

In 1974 Howard Moss had a correspondence with Rizzi on the nature of socialism (published here in appendix together with other relevant letters) during which Rizzi, the ‘Marxist with a difference', sent him an article (the one here published) suggesting that he translate it into English and try to get it published in Britain. Moss did not do his at the time, but now, a dozen years after Rizzi’s death, that the writer is better known and more widley read, it seemed to him appropriate to publish it in its original form.

The value of the article lies in: (1) the small but not insignificant contribution it makes to Rizzi's own intellectual biography; (2) the foundation it lays for the major line of thought which arose from Rizzi’s theory of bureaucratic collectivism and which he developed and refined in his postwar writings - the idea of an economy based on small-scale enterprises each controlled by its own workers and competing with one another on a completely free market; (3) its highly innovative analysis of the phenomenon of inflation.

In the article, Rizzi argues that inflation is a method used with increasing intensity by governments to weaken market forces and to concentrate more and more power into the hands of a state bureaucracy, of the kind that already exists in Eastern Europe. This is capitalism’s attempt to spend more in monetary terms, than the wealth that is actually generated by productive activity and, if continually followed as a policy by governments, con lead only to inevitable social and economic collapse and a return to a feudal type of economy. This trend must be guarded against and reversed.