Theses on Feurbach
by Karl Marx

I

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism -- which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in "Das Wesen des Christenthums", he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of "revolutionary", of "practical-critical", activity.

II

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth -- i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

III

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.

IV

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-alienation, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice. Thus, for instance, after the earthly family is discovered to be the secret of the holy family, the former must then itself be destroyed in theory and in practice.

V

Feuerbach, not satisfied with abstract thinking, wants contemplation; but he does not conceive sensuousness as practical, human-sensuous activity.



Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations. Feuerbach, who does not enter upon a criticism of this real essence, is consequently compelled:

To abstract from the historical process and to fix the religious sentiment as something by itself and to presuppose an abstract -- isolated -- human individual.

Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as "genus", as an internal, dumb generality which naturally unites the many individuals.

VII

Feuerbach, consequently, does not see that the "religious sentiment" is itself a social product, and that the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs to a particular form of society.

VIII

All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.

IX

The highest point reached by contemplative materialism, that is, materialism which does not comprehend sensuousness as practical activity, is contemplation of single individuals and of civil society.

X

The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.

XI

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

What is Socialism?

by Gordon Schultz

http://www.socialistaction.org/revolution.htm

The German socialist Karl Marx was once asked what his favorite maxim was. He replied with a line by the Roman playwright Terence: "I am a man, and nothing that concerns a man, is a matter of indifference to me."If for the moment we ignore the use of sexist language in this ancient quotation, we get a feel for the profoundly humanitarian spirit of Marx and socialists since him.Indeed, socialists are very concerned about the injustice and social ills in the world today—hunger, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, disease, war, the exploitation of workers, the oppression of nations, races, women, and gays, the destruction of the environment, and the threat of nuclear annihilation.Socialists obviously don't have a monopoly on compassion, however. What distinguishes socialists from other socially concerned people is that we do not view these problems as normal, natural, eternal, or an inherent feature of the human condition. We believe that these problems are historically and socially created and that they can be solved by human beings through conscious, organized political struggle and change.Socialist Action argues that the wealth and other advances produced by industry, technology, and science have made it possible to eliminate these problems but that these problems continue because of the dominant economic and political interests and values of society. We assert that capitalism is ultimately the main source of these problems in the United States and the world today.Capitalism and the exploitation of workersUnder capitalism, the chief means of production—the factories, the railroads, the mines, the banks, the public utilities, the offices, and all of the related technology—are privately owned by a super-rich minority, the capitalist class. The capitalists then compete with each other in the marketplace and run production on the basis of what will bring them the biggest profit.This drive to successfully compete and to maximize profit leads big business to exploit workers, to pay their employees as little as possible, a mere fraction of the actual value that they produce. It also leads big business to resist the efforts of workers to unionize and to obtain increased pay, reduced working hours, and improved working conditions.This exploitation of workers results in a gross concentration of wealth, to the benefit of the capitalists and at the expense of working people. Even in the United States, the richest country in the world, where workers admittedly have one of the highest living standards, there is nonetheless a gross concentration of wealth. According to the Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, the top 1% of American families (834,000 households) own more than the bottom 90% (84 million households).This social inequality is aggravated by mass unemployment, which is endemic to capitalism. Because the means of production is divided up among the individual capitalists competing with each other, there is no overall coordination or planning of the economy and consequently no consideration to provide jobs to everybody who is able and willing to work.This anarchy of production for private profit also fuels the erratic boom-and-bust cycle of the capitalist economy. Periodically, the economy experiences crises of overproduction when the capitalists inadvertently glut the market with products that they cannot sell at a profit. The result is recessions and massive layoffs of workers, which ruin lives, idle factories, and deprive society of the benefits of production.The basic irrationality of capitalism is highlighted by the glaring gap between unmet human needs on one hand and the untapped potential of the existing human and material resources to fulfill these needs on the other. For example, when inventors or scientists or technicians develop new, advanced labor-saving technology, this should be a cause for celebration for workers because it means that the work week could be cut with no cut in weekly pay. Workers could enjoy greater leisure time without a drop in income. Instead, the capitalists use labor-saving technology to lay off workers because, of course, it only makes good sense from the business point of view to cut labor costs in order to increase profits.In the United States, there is a great need for a massive construction of more schools, hospitals, child-care centers, and recreation centers. There is also a great need to repair the nation's deteriorating infrastructure, including its roads, bridges, mass transit, and water systems. The capital, raw materials, and labor for such development exists, but the corporate rich do not invest in such projects because they correctly judge that it would not be profitable for them to do so. The potential, overwhelmingly working-class consumers of such services simply would not be able to afford the prices that big business would have to charge in order to make a profit.Nor does the capitalist government finance such a massive expansion as part of a public works program, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it would raise the public's expectation, which is basically at odds with capitalist ideology, that society should be responsible to provide for its members. And secondly, it would raise the possibility that the public would force the government to tax the rich to fund such an expensive program.The oppression of African-Americans and HispanicsIn addition to exploiting workers, capitalism contributes to the oppression of other groups in society. White racism and the oppression of African-Americans arose with the European slave trade, but they have been perpetuated under capitalism.After the slaves were freed during the Civil War, the capitalists used racism to justify paying less to Black employees. The capitalists also used racism to pit white workers against Black workers in order to divide the working class and weaken the organized labor movement. Despite the gains of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, white racist discrimination in employment and in other areas of life persists.Furthermore, the second-class status of African-Americans has been deepened by color-blind free market forces, specifically by the recent movement of industry out of the cities, where the Black community is concentrated. The resulting loss of decent-paying working-class jobs has increased Black poverty and devastated Black neighborhoods and families, fueling crime, drug addiction, and hopelessness.The oppression of Hispanics in the United states is similar to that of African-Americans in that it is based on widespread racist discrimination, combined with a decline in the number of available decent-paying jobs. The Anglo suppression of various aspects of Latin culture and identity worsens the plight of Hispanics in this country.The oppression of women and gaysWhile the oppression of women predated the establishment of capitalism, the private profit system has perpetuated their subordination to men. The main basis of women's oppression in capitalist society is the segregation of women in lower paying jobs in the labor market and the relegation of women to unequally shared child care and housework in the family.These two spheres of women's oppression—the labor market and the family—are mutually reinforcing. So long as women are unduly burdened by child care and housework, they will not be able to gain equality with men in employment. So long as women bring home a smaller paycheck, they will not be able to get their male partners to share domestic responsibilities equally.These unequal labor relations between men and women sustain the sexist ideology that justifies different and unequal gender roles and the rigid, polarized norms for males and females in all aspects of life.The oppression of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals is largely derived from this sexist ideology. Gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are stigmatized because they defy the norm of exclusive heterosexuality and because they do not conform to conventional standards of masculinity and femininity.Imperialism and U.S. foreign policyOn an international level, capitalism has led to the development of imperialism. Since the nineteenth century, the corporate rich of the advanced industrialized capitalist nations of Western Europe, the United States, and Japan have invested capital and exploited cheap labor and natural resources in the colonial world of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.The economic domination of the imperialist nations has distorted the development of the Third World nations, condemning the masses of their populations to poverty and misery. The rivalry between the imperialist nations has also led to military conflicts, including two world wars, as they competed for new world markets and carved up the world. Since the Second World War, the imperialist nations have been forced to grant most of their former colonies formal political independence, but their economic domination continues.Since its victory in World War II, the United States has been the leading imperialist power. At various points over the past fifty years, the U.S. government has defended American corporate interests abroad by supporting such repressive, undemocratic governments as the fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco in Spain, the apartheid regime in South Africa, the shah of Iran, the Marcos dictatorship of the Philippines, and the recently deposed Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia.The U.S. government has also gone to war or used other forms of military intervention to defend big business interests, such as in Korea in the '50s, Cuba in the '60s, Vietnam in the '60s and '70s, Nicaragua in the '80s, and Iraq in the '90s. The U.S. imperialists have also overthrown democratically elected reform governments that encroached on U.S. corporate privilege, such as in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican Republic in 1965, and Chile in 1973.Additionally, the United States dropped the atom bomb in World War II and launched the arms race with the Soviet Union—all to intimidate the Soviet Union and to deter the people of the colonial world from challenging imperialist domination and going the route of socialist revolution.The socialist solutionSocialist Action argues that the problems of exploitation and oppression in the world today can ultimately be solved by first replacing the capitalist system with a socialist system. The chief means of production should be socialized, that is, taken out of the private hands of the capitalists and put under public ownership, that is, government ownership.The economy should then be run by councils of democratically elected representatives of workers and consumers at all levels of the economy. Instead of being run on the basis of what will maximize profit for a super-rich minority, the economy should be planned to meet the needs of the people—in employment, education, nutrition, health care, housing, transportation, leisure, and cultural development.A socialist government could raise the minimum wage to union levels, cut the work week with no cut in weekly pay, and spread around the newly available work to the unemployed. A public works program, such as the one mentioned earlier, could be launched to provide yet more jobs and offer sorely needed social services. The government could provide free health care, from cradle to grave, and free education, from nursery school to graduate school.A socialist government could also address the special needs and interests of the oppressed. Existing anti-discrimination legislation in employment could be strongly enforced, and pay equity and affirmative action for women and racial minorities could be expanded. Blacks and Hispanics could be granted community control of their respective communities. The racist, class-biased death penalty could be abolished.The establishment of flexible working hours, paid parental leave, and child-care facilities, as well as the defense of safe, legal and accessible abortion, would provide women with alternatives to sacrificing work for the sake of their children and because of unwanted pregnancies, respectively. Same-sex marriage could be legalized, and a massive program, like the space program or the Manhattan Project, could be financed to find a vaccine and a cure for AIDS.Money currently spent on the military could be spent instead on cleaning up the country's air and waterways and developing environmentally safe technology. A socialist government of the United States would end this country's oppression of Third World nations because it would not be defending corporate profit there but would be encouraging the workers and peasants of those countries to follow suit and make their own socialist revolutions.The socialist system that Socialist Action advocates would be a multiparty system, with all of the democratic rights won and enjoyed in the most democratic capitalist nations, including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. A genuinely socialist system would be far more democratic than the most democratic capitalist system because in a socialist economy the common working people would democratically decide what should be produced and how it should be produced.Social democracy and StalinismMany people often ask Socialist Action if we support the model of socialism offered by the social democratic parties and government administrations in Western European nations. We say "no."In those countries, the Labor, Social Democratic, and Socialist parties have helped their working-class constituencies to win important progressive reforms, such as universal suffrage, the eight-hour day, old-age pensions, free health care and education, and social services more extensive than those here in the United States. However, these parties and the trade unions affiliated with them have secured these reforms within the capitalist framework, which they have never fundamentally challenged or sought to replace with socialism. Therefore, the capitalists' rule of the economy, their exploitation of the working class, and the resulting concentration of wealth continue.People also ask us if the so-called Communist countries of the former Soviet bloc represented the model of socialism that we support. Again, as with the Social Democrats, our answer is "no."In the former Soviet bloc, the capitalist class was expropriated, and the economies were socialized. These socialized economies made possible great progress in raising the living standards of the masses of workers and peasants in the areas of employment, health care, education, and nutrition, and in upgrading the status of women. However, these countries were ruled through the Communist parties by privileged bureaucratic elites that denied socialist democracy and imposed repressive, totalitarian political systems on the people. These dictatorial governments not only violated basic democratic and human rights but mismanaged the planned economies, being responsible for inefficiency, waste, corruption, and stagnation.The origins of these dictatorial bureaucratic regimes lie with the degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the 1920s and 1930s. One of the two leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution, Leon Trotsky, argued that the Bolshevik model of socialist democracy was never fully implemented and then was completely destroyed under the Stalin dictatorship because of a combination of factors. These factors included the failure of the socialist revolutions to triumph in Europe after the First World War, the resulting isolation of the Russian Revolution, the military attacks on the young Soviet republic by the imperialist nations, the devastation caused by the First World War and the Civil War that followed the revolution, the lack of democratic traditions in czarist Russia, and the general low educational and cultural levels of the masses of workers and peasants.Currently, in the former Soviet bloc nations, the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies, allied with the Western imperialists and native capitalist "wannabes," are trying to restore capitalism. So far, the introduction of the free market into the Soviet bloc has resulted in a gigantic drop in productivity and in the living standards of common working people, with increasing unemployment, poverty, and social inequality.This right-wing attempt to restore capitalism and the corresponding attacks on social services and entitlements, such as free health care and full employment, in the former Soviet bloc have also made it easier for the capitalist governments of Western Europe to attack the various reforms and social services that the labor movements and social democratic parties of those countries have won over the past decades.Socialist Action hailed the collapse of the repressive Communist Party regimes of the Soviet bloc, but we oppose the restoration of capitalism there. Instead, we call for a defense of the socialized economies and for the workers and their allies to overthrow the ruling Stalinist bureaucracies and establish socialist democracy in their place.Socialism and human natureMany critics say that socialism is a great idea in theory but that it is completely unrealistic and utopian because it goes against basic human nature. The critics claim that human beings are just too selfish, too greedy, too competitive, and too aggressive to create and sustain a cooperative and egalitarian society.Socialists recognize that individual self-interest has always existed and will always exist in human beings. We also acknowledge that there will never be a perfect harmony between the individual and society.But we argue that individual self-interest need not be the ruling principle of society. History and cross-cultural research suggest that basic human nature consists of many different, divergent, but co-existing capacities, and that human personality and behavior are largely shaped by the social institutions, practices, and ruling ideology of the given society.The critics of socialism correctly perceive the hyper-individualism of people in capitalist society, but then they incorrectly generalize this historically specific characteristic to human beings across time and place. They cannot imagine or understand that a reorganization of society along socialist lines would elicit, facilitate, and reinforce the basic human capacities for cooperation and solidarity.The revolutionary potential of workers & the oppressedStill, the point about self-interest as a motivating factor for human behavior is an important one. Socialists believe that many people of conscience from different classes and backgrounds can be won to a socialist perspective through appeals to reason, morality, and political idealism. However, we believe that the main impetus for a socialist movement to sustain itself and successfully transform society must be collective self-interest and power.We believe that the working class is the only social force that has both the necessary self-interest and power to lead the struggle for socialism. Socialism is in the interests of the working class because it will allow the workers to reclaim the wealth that they produced but which the capitalists appropriated from them through exploitation. The working class also has the power to overturn capitalism because of its strategic location at the point of production and its corresponding ability to shut down production by simply withdrawing its labor. Thus, a mass socialist movement can only grow out of a revitalized and radicalized labor movement, based on the trade unions and other organizations of the working class.Similarly, we believe that only the oppressed possess sufficient self-interest to lead the struggles for their own liberation. Therefore, we support the autonomous movements of the oppressed--the Black movement, the Hispanic movement, the women's movement, and the gay and lesbian movement--to insure that their respective needs and demands are met.However, we do not believe that the oppressed by themselves possess sufficient power to fully achieve their liberation since their oppression is at least partly rooted in the capitalist system. Because only the organized working class possesses sufficient power to abolish capitalism and its concomitant forms of oppression, the oppressed must win the organized working class to support their respective struggles, as well as ultimately ally themselves with the working class in the struggle for socialism.Independent mass actionSocialist Action does not believe that socialism can be voted into power through free elections. History has repeatedly shown that when workers and their allies try to use the existing democratic process to advance their interests and replace capitalism with a socialist system, the capitalist class and the armed forces of the capitalist state will smash democracy to save capitalism, as happened, for example, in Chile twenty-five years ago this month.Socialist Action points out that progressive social change has been made in this country through mass action, not by voting in certain politicians or by working within the system.American independence from England was gained through a revolution. The passage of the Bill of Rights was prompted by a rebellion of poor farmers. The abolition of slavery and the extension of suffrage to Black men was accomplished through a second revolution, the Civil War. Women won the vote through the women's suffrage movement.The labor movement won the twelve-hour day, then the eight-hour day, the right to strike, the right to form unions and bargain collectively, the minimum wage, unemployment compensation, worker's disability. Social Security, welfare, and increased wages and benefits for union members.The civil rights movement overthrew the segregationist "Jim Crow" laws of the South and forced the government to outlaw racist discrimination in employment and housing and to implement affirmative action.The anti-war movement helped force the U.S. to end its imperialist war against the Vietnamese in their just struggle for self-determination.The feminist movement won anti-discrimination legislation, affirmative action, pay equity in some public institutions, and the legalization of abortion.The gay and lesbian movement, too, has secured anti-discrimination legislation and greater funding of AIDS research and patient care.Additionally, the environmental and consumer protection movements have won important reforms that moderate big business's destruction of the planet and manufacture of unsafe commodities in its relentless pursuit of profits.Socialist Action advocates the independent political action of the workers and the oppressed to bring about further progressive change. We call for and build mass demonstrations, rallies, pickets, and strikes.We counter-pose such mass action to reliance on the American two-party system, electoral campaigns, and behind-the scenes lobbying of capitalist politicians. The logic of working within the two-party system of the capitalist political establishment is to subordinate the needs, demands, and priorities of the workers and the oppressed to what is acceptable to the rulers of this country. The inevitable result is the demobilization and cooptation of the struggle for change.We point out that the impetus for progressive social change has never come from the Democratic and Republican parties but that they can be forced by mass action to implement progressive policies and reforms, at least up to certain limits. However, we argue that socialism can only be achieved by a revolutionary culmination of mass action of the workers and their allies in opposition to the capitalist state and capitalist political parties.Socialist Action aspires to play a leading role in building a popular mass socialist movement in this country. Our members have participated in the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women's movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the environmental movement, the Central America solidarity movement, and the movement against the Gulf War, among others.If you want to fight for a society and a world free of all forms of exploitation, oppression, and social injustice, join us!

How to Make a Revolution
by Peter Camejo

*The essay below was first given as a speech by Young Socialist Alliance leader Peter Camejo in New York on May 3, 1969.Revolutionary socialists have been accused for many years of wanting to overthrow the U.S. government by force and violence. When they accuse us of this, what they are really trying to do is imply that we want to abolish capitalism with a minority, that we want to force the will of the minority on the majority. The opposite is the truth. We believe we can win a majority of the people in this country to support a change in the system. It will be necessary to make a revolution precisely because the ruling powers will not peacefully accept a majority rule which wants a basic change. How can a revolution involving a majority of the people actually take place in the United States? This is the question I want to discuss today. First of all, you have to have clear in your mind the meaning of the word “revolution.” Many people have a stereotyped picture of what a revolution is like. They say a revolution is when people come with guns, when they surround a fortress or take over a city. What they do is they confuse revolution with insurrection. Insurrection is just one stage of revolution. Revolution is a lot more. It’s a long process. In a certain way you can make a parallel between revolution and pregnancy. In the very early stages of pregnancy, if just on empirical evidence you ask whether or not someone is pregnant, the answer will be no. However, with the use of science you can determine whether the person is pregnant very early. Later on it becomes evident for everybody to see. The same thing is true of social revolution. In the early stages most people don’t see it. You always begin on the assumption that in every society that needs a revolution, the majority of the people don’t think it’s possible. This is most certainly true for the period of American history we are in right now. We’re in the early stages of the third American revolution. I say the third revolution because we’ve had two others - the revolution of 1776 and the Civil War. The ContradictionsWhy is it that we are in the early stages of a developing revolutionary situation? The reason is most basically because of the contradiction between the fantastic potential for solving human needs in this society and the existing reality. Let me explain: Everything you see, everything you ear or wear, your car, your housing – you didn’t make any of these things. We don’t produce these things as individuals. We produce socially. We have a division of work in the United States, and in the whole world for that matter. People in one part of the world make things which people in another part of the world use. But, even though we produce socially, through cooperation, we don’t own the means of production socially. And this affects all the basic decisions made in this society about what we produce. These decisions are not made on the basis of what people need, but on the basis of what makes a profit. Take the question of hunger. There are people going hungry all over the world, and the U.S. government recently reported that there are a lot of people going hungry right here in the United States. And yet, because of the profit system, the U.S. government is now paying farmers not to farm. Farmers don’t make their decisions by saying, “We need a lot of corn in the U.S., so I’m going to plant a lot of corn.” They never say that. They say, “How much money am I going to make if I plant corn?” Did you know that if decisions were not made on this basis, then the U.S. alone would have the potential to feed the whole world? The economic potential is there. Take the question of housing. If you took just the money that’s spent on the war in Vietnam, you could build beautiful free homes for every nonwhite family in the U.S. and for 30 million of the poorest whites. They could wipe out every slum in the next four years. The potential exists, not only in the factories and the materials for building, but in the potential to build new machines and factories. Yet, they are not going to solve the housing question because it’s not profitable to build low cost housing. Did you know that because of the way the system is structured a large percentage of the people do not do any productive work at all? You have the unemployed who are not hired because it’s not profitable to hire them. They you have the people in the Army, not to mention the police, and others who consume a great deal but don’t produce anything. Then you have things like the people in the advertising industry. They don’t do anything really useful or necessary. In addition, you have a mammoth, organized effort to create waste. For instance, if you designed a car for the Ford company that would last 50 years, they wouldn’t use it. Because that would destroy the purpose of making cars, which is to produce profits. I’ll give you another example of how the potential for meeting human needs is destroyed because of the profit system. Say you are a capitalist, and you’re about to build a factory. Do you say, “I’ll build it where it’s nice, where there are trees and fresh air, and where the workers will have nice homes and will be able to go mountain climbing or hunting or swimming”? No, that’s not the way you think. You say, “Well, where’s my market, where are my raw materials coming in, how can I make the most profit?” And this means you might build the factory where you will pump even more poison into the air. Smog is another example of a problem which stems directly from the system. Remember when they first discovered smog. They said, “Hey, look, there’s smog.” And they warned that if the smog increased to a certain point it would be dangerous. But, when they got past that point, they changed the danger level. And the smog is still getting worse. And now they tell us that all the rivers are polluted. In other words, it’s not that they just can’t meet the problem that exists. Things are getting worse. Third WorldBut, it is the underdeveloped world – in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Arab countries – where the contradictions of this system are the most clear. To really understand what this system means for Third World people, consider this one fact: When a worker finishes a full day in the colonial world, he produces as much as an average American worker does in 22 minutes. There is no way of solving the tremendous problems, the hunger and the poverty, that exist in the Third World unless that figure is raised. In order to raise this figure, you have to industrialize, you have to mechanize, you have to invest. Well, what happens is that instead of getting help from the industrialized sections of the world, instead of getting capital, Third World countries are drained of their wealth by the imperialist countries. More important, the Third World countries are blocked from industrializing simply because the advanced capitalist countries will not permit the competition which would result from it. In fact, in terms of the effect such exploitation is having on the world, in terms of people actually dying, starving and suffering, and their whole lives being destroyed by poverty, this is one of capitalism’s greatest crimes. Capitalism doesn’t just have general long-range problems like the ones I’ve just mentioned. It has other contradictions – big crises, like depressions and wars. And specifically in this period, when the colonial world is trying to break out of capitalism, the wars are directed against the colonial world. How do we go about changing this situation? How do we make it so that we can really fulfill our potential as human beings? First, it is necessary to realize that in the United States we have a ruling class. And it’s very important that everyone should get to know and recognize their ruling class. The ruling class in the United States is very small. In fact, I think, proportionately, it is the smallest ruling class in the history of any society. Even defined broadly, there are only about 30,000 of them. There are a lot of people who think they belong to the ruling class, but only about 30,000 who have the real power. Now, there are certain ways you can go about finding out just who these people are. One example is when you pick up your local paper and look at the society page. You see their children. The newspapers go to their parties and take pictures of the sons and daughters of the ruling class. In some cities, the people in the ruling class register themselves. Of course, some ruling class people don’t make the register, and there are some people who slip in who aren’t from the ruling class. But basically the social registers are a good indication of who these people are. In addition you can read many books put out on this question. Books like “The Rich and the Super-Rich.” They spell it out. How It’s DoneNow, how does the ruling class do it? Here, you’ve got some 30,000 people running a society of over 200 million and most of the people in the society don’t even know it. In the past, the ruling classes were proud of their role. They would walk around with feathers in their hats, or big robes and things, and when they went down the street, people would say, “Hey, there goes one of our ruling class.” Nowadays, they don’t do that. Now, they can slip on the campus where you are, and somebody in the ruling class could walk right by, and you wouldn’t even know it. They dress just like you. They’re incognito. Rockefeller would never come to your campus and say, “Hi, how’re you doing? Are you studying hard, getting your degrees so that you can come work for me and make me richer?” No, they don’t do that. They go around saying that there aren’t any classes in America, that everybody’s middle-class, only that some are a little more middle-class than others. In other words, they are ashamed of their existence. They have to hide it. And there are good reasons for that. One of their problems, of course, is that they’re so small. Why, there are more than 30,000 people on just one or two campuses. Now, how do they maintain their rule? To find this out you can try an experiment. Get all dressed up, put on a jacket and tie, and walk into some corporation and say, “Hello, I’m a sociologist, I’m here to do a study. Could I just walk around and talk to people?” And then you walk up to somebody and say, “Who’s your supervisor?” And he’ll point to someplace, and you find someone with a little name plate, and it’s a supervisor. And you ask him, “Who’s your supervisor?” And he’ll point to a different place, and you walk in and there’ll be a run. And you say to him, “Who’s your supervisor?” And he’ll point to a different floor, and you’ll find it get harder to get in the doors. There’s more and more secretaries, and phones, and the rugs get thicker and thicker. Eventually you have to make appointments. And then you hit the sound barrier. Here is where you switch from the people who carry our decisions to people who make the decisions. And that’s you local ruling class. The StructureBy the way, if you test out any institution in our society, you’ll find they are structured in the same way. A pyramid from the top going down. That’s the way all institutions are structured in this democratic country. This goes from government, for the political parties, the Army, the churches, the universities, for every basic institution. And when you get to the very top of these structures, to the most powerful people, you will invariably find people who own big property. Now, how do they keep the structure going? It’s a very subtle thing. In the United States, we have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and other democratic rights. So, say you go to your job on day and test it. Wear a big button that says, “Vote Socialist.” And watch how fast you get promoted. Watch how you are treated. Formally you have the right to have any political view you want. But, the truth is that in all these institutions there is a very worked out, institutionalized way of going up. And on the way up, you sell your individuality, you commit yourself to the values of the system. And you learn very fast that in return for full commitment of the system – for personal discipline, for showing up every morning wearing the right clothes, keeping your hair short, and the rest – in return, you get privileges. That is what holds the society together. When was the last time you heard someone say, “Capitalism’s a great society”? When did you hear anyone say, “Just think what our 30,000 ruling class has done for us. We should give them our full support.” They never say that. They don’t try to build up an ideological support for capitalism in the sense of telling you the full truth. All the institutions under capitalism are ideological institutions in the sense that all of them maintain and demand support for the system. So it should be no surprise to you that the higher you go in a corporation, the higher you go in the university structure, the higher you go in the Army, the people get more and more reactionary. They get more and more consciously pro the system; they are more and more for whatever crimes the system has to commit. They simply wouldn’t be there if they weren’t. This is why you can never capture the existing apparatus and use it for making a basic change. Workers’ PowerToday the smallness of the ruling class means that other classes have more power in comparison. We have a working-class army, for example, that has a great deal of actual and potential power. Take the basic production of goods and services. Have you ever thought what a general strike would be like in New York City? Workers can take over this city in a matter of hours. Because workers run everything – the subways, the trucks that bring food, gas, light, heat – everything. So you have to ask yourself, why is this power never realized politically? Why don’t they just kick the 30,000 out? The reason is simple. The mass of people are under illusions. Now let me repeat this because the whole strategy of the making a revolution in the U.S. is crucially dependent on understanding this. The 30,000 can rule only through maintaining illusions. You see, if tomorrow, President Nixon called a press conference and said, “Okay, I’m going to let you in on it; there’s 30,000 of us who are running this country. We’re canceling all elections. We’re canceling freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and so on. So go back to work, back to the campus – and if there is any disturbance we’ll throw you all into concentration camps.” How long do you think the ruling class would stay in power? They couldn’t do it. Their power is already limited by a certain consciousness that exists in the mass of people. Their power is limited by the fact that the mass of the people believe in free speech, in free assembly and in democracy. And this, by the way, is the thing that is least understood by the student movement. Many students believe that the ruling class has unlimited power. They think fascism and concentration camps are around the corner. Of course, we cannot be naïve about the ruling class. They will suppress opposition to them insofar as they can get away with it. And they will use the most brutal means available if it suits their needs. But they will try to keep the repression in the bounds of what they can get away with without waking up the mass of people, without destroying the illusions. Because, if the mass begins to wake up, that’s a big danger. Two-SidedThere are two sides to democracy in this country, and if you don’t understand both sides, you go wrong. One side is that it’s phony. There is no real democracy in the sense that we don’t run this country. The elections are totally phony. The ruling class simply gets up and picks two people, or three, and they say, “Okay, everybody, we’re having elections. Now you can vote for Humphrey, or for Wallace, or for Nixon.” Then they have their candidates have a debate. But the debate isn’t entirely phony. The debate often represents a real living struggle between different positions within the ruling class. The ruling class resolves many of the smaller tactical differences they have among themselves through means of elections. Obviously, such elections do not in any way mean that the people have a voice in ruling this country. At the same time, the masses of people believe in democracy. And this belief in democracy is something that actually weakens the rulers. And it is something that gives us real power. There is a power relationship between the masses and the ruling class based on the potential power of the working class. Because of this power relationship, you can do many things. It gives us what we call free speech. It gives us free assembly. It gives us the right to organize the YSA legally. Take for example the underground press. The underground press isn’t really underground. These papers are published legally even though they attack the system. They don’t suppress the newspapers because they know that the minute they start suppressing papers, it’s going to wake people up and bring a reaction. The only hope the ruling class has is if it can isolate the revolutionaries completely from the rest of the people. That is why the number-one task of all revolutionaries is to know how to reach the people. This is one of the biggest problems existing in the student movement at this point. The average student radical does not identify with the American people. In fact, he’s hostile to them. He says, “The American people, ugh, they’re against the Vietnamese, they’re racists, they’re this and that.” But you know something? That hate for the American people was taught to the student before he became a radical. Middle-class PrejudiceWhen you go to school, the whole concept you are taught is that anyone that works with his hands is below you. The average Joe Shmoe is a stupid fool. And they justify the fact that some people have more privileges by saying it’s because they’re more qualified. Everything you learn in the university is calculated to give you that superiority feeling. And when you become a radical, you just turn around and invert it in a way. You keep the same prejudice in your mind and you continue to say, “How stupid the average American worker is.” He’s no stupider than you were before you became a radical. Black people used to imitate white people, right? But, with the radicalization, one of the first things that started happening was that Black people stopped imitating the people who oppressed them. It’s the same thing with white workers. The thing that white workers do today is they imitate the people they regard as above them. They try to be like them. They vote for their parties. They support their ideas. But when they wake up this is one of the first things that will change. Now let me explain something about mass awakening. There’s no way that we radicals can by ourselves wake up the American people. Just forget about that. There is no special leaflet that we could write so articulately and carefully that when you hand it to a worker, he will pick it up and say, “That’s it – I’m with you.” If that were how we could do it, we’d have done it a long time ago. There is only one way it will happen. Capitalism does it for us. The system creates the situation in which people wake up. Let me give you a few examples. Think about why it is that Black people are moving today. Weren’t they Black in 1920? Weren’t they actually worse off, if you want to look at objective conditions, in 1910, 1920 and 1930? Role of AfricaYou know that at the beginning of the century, and after that, one of the biggest put-downs they had for Black people was to call them Africans. Then came the revolutions in Africa and other part of the Third World. And Black people started identifying with Africa, saying, “We’re all Africans.” And the ruling class began to say, “No, you’re Americans.” At the same time more and more Black people were moving to the cities because of the industrialization of the South. And this concentration of Black people living in the cities – this begins to give them a sense of power and is one of the reasons you have the rise of Black nationalism today. That is another example of how capitalism creates the basis for radicalization. I’ll give you one other example. For those people who were unemployed in the 1930s during the depression, their goal in life was to have a job, to have some stability. If you took a man who was unemployed or who had a lousy job and you gave him a job with fairly good pay, with the perspective of getting continuous increases – that to him was Nirvana. From what he had experienced in life, that was happiness. But then what happened? His kids grew up. And many of them didn’t have the constant image of the unemployed. There would always be food on the table. They could look forward to going to college. And all of a sudden the perspective of doing what their parents did, getting a job, working 40 hours a week, wasn’t so inviting. Consciousness is related to what you have lived. And what you expect. Anybody would have told you that the many years of prosperity would have completely conservatized the youth. But just the opposite has happened. They grew up totally dissatisfied, to the point that it’s becoming a mass rebellion of youth. The rebellion takes place on all levels. For instance, they start growing their hair long, just because it’s suppose to be short. They’re trying to do everything that they’re no suppose to do, because what they’re expressing, unconsciously, is that they’re totally aware that there’s potential to have an entirely different kind of life. They become aware of it by the very fact of how they live their first 21 years. They go to the university with other young people. And they want to do something creative. They want to be free. And they realize this is possible. They don’t want to just go to work for Standard Oil, which for their parents was a great thing. Radicalizing ProcessSo, all of a sudden, you have an increase in consciousness, an awareness about the problems of society, created by the capitalists. And this awareness can become much more intensified if you have a crisis – if you have a major war, or a downturn in the economic situation. Right now we have opposition, we have a radicalization, but even this is nothing compared to what can develop in the future. Now you can have all this spontaneous radicalization, you can even have uprisings of sorts, but that will never result in a change of the system, unless it’s organized, unless there is a concept of how to struggle. Because, the masses of people, when they first radicalize, they don’t understand the general problems. They don’t understand how to change society. Very few individuals come to this consciousness completely on their own. Think about the ideas – some of them very complex ideas – which have been a by-product of the accumulation of thought and experience over the long history of revolutionary struggle. It’s this thought, this experience which is embodied in what we call the vanguard – organizations like the Young Socialist Alliance and the Socialist Workers Party (today Youth for Socialist Action and Socialist Action). Now, the ruling class has also had experiences, from which they have gained knowledge. They’ve been running the United States without even any major political opposition for over 70 years now. They know how, when an opposition develops, to try to repress its vanguard, to knock it down, while at the same time how to maneuver and absorb it and buy it off. Eugene McCarthy’s campaign was an excellent example of this. Without a conscious vanguard with a revolutionary perspective it is hard to deal effectively with these ruling-class maneuvers. It is difficult to do the right thing. An example of this was the attitude of the early student antiwar movement toward the GIs. When the antiwar movement first began, the students’ immediate reaction was to hate GIs, to think of them as killers. I remember in Berkeley they even put up a picture of a GI portraying him as being the same thing as a cop. Saw AheadAt the same time, the YSA opposed this. We could predict, because of the mass opposition to the war and the fact that young people in general were radicalizing, that the GIs would radicalize. So way ahead, before signs of the GI radicalization could be seen concretely, we urged the antiwar movement to go out and leaflet GIs, and to begin to relate to them. And that’s what Marxism is all about. That’s what revolutionary politics is all about. It’s what has been learned from 100 years of struggle against the system. During this time there have been plenty of examples of how armies radicalize, and under what conditions they radicalize. There is something else the YSA sees, which we have learned from experiences in struggle. And that is that you mustn’t be sectarian. You should try to get everybody who is against the war to work together. The YSA understands that the best way to end this war, and to weaken the ruling class, is to get massive consciousness against the war – and to break the concept that the people against the war are a minority. And we know from experience that you have to use the most carefully though-out actions in order to produce that result. And in many cases, such actions are the so-called stupid, peaceful, mass antiwar demonstrations that some people are sick of – and of which we’ve now had eleven. And after each one of these mass demonstrations the YSA has said, “Okay, let’s do it again now.” And the SDS leaders say, “Are you guys crazy? What do you want to do that again for?” They look at it subjectively. They are tired of demonstrations themselves and they forget about the impact which the demonstrations have on the GIs, on the average person. They forget that the demonstrations are what helped the students to radicalize in the first place. Now, we’ve got a double problem in the antiwar movement and in the radical movement in general, and both sides of this double problem are closely interrelated. One is that some people think they are going to solve the problems of society by supporting some liberal. Let me explain what a liberal is. A liberal is someone who doesn’t like what capitalism does, but likes capitalism. They try to solve the problems created by the system by supporting the system. Now, many students do that too. When they supported McCarthy they did that. What they were looking for was a shortcut. They were trying to change the system from within. They hoped a McCarthy victory would be a substitute for building an independent political movement of the working people, the Black people and the students on a mass level, independently and against the ruling class. On the other side you have the ultraleftists who do the exact same thing – try to bypass building a mass movement. In California we have had a bad rash: people walking around saying, “Everybody get guns.” And there is a lot of applauding about guns at rallies. And then there are those who believe in confrontation as the only method of struggle. By this I mean that the success of an action for them is not measured by how many people are influenced and won over. Their criterion is “We’ve got to fight the police in the street. Otherwise we aren’t revolutionary.” What they are looking for is a shortcut. Some are naïve about what the cops can and will do to them. They think if the present vanguard arms itself and takes on the power structure, then they can change society. But they’re not going to change it by themselves. You can’t change it without the American people. And you certainly can’t change it against them. What is happening is that the ultraleftists are merely expressing frustration. Just like those who supported McCarthy, they don’t have the patience and the understanding of the need to mobilize the people, to win them over, to involve them in the struggle through mass movements. This is a working-class country. Black people in their great majority are working class. And there are the other oppressed nationalities – Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, etc. What you have is an overwhelming mass of people who have objectively no interest in this system. They have to be won over, and our whole strategy, everything we do, has got to be directed at winning them. French ExampleNow, how exactly can the American revolution come about? What kind of movements and strategy will allow us to take power? To make this clear, let me tell you what happened in France in May – June of 1968. I said that you need two things to make a revolution – a vanguard and an objective situation in which there is a crisis and a mass radicalization. Well, in France you had that objective situation – but you had no revolutionary vanguard. Let me show you how, if there had been a strong vanguard, revolutionaries in France would have led a struggle to take power from the ruling class: In France you had 10 million workers on strike. You had another two million farmers supporting them. Plus the 600,000 students. Now, since the total population of the country is 50 million, this means that an overwhelming majority of families had at least one if not two people involved in the strike. It was clear that the majority of the people in France were out on strike, making certain demands. You had a majority. There was no need to negotiate with anyone. What would a Marxist vanguard do in such a situation? First of all, we would fight for the formation of a strike council of the whole country which would simply say, “Well, it’s clear we have a majority, so we are going to have free elections to decide all the questions under demand here. And these elections are going to be run by the strike council because the government has shown itself to be undemocratic.” Remember, at the time of the crisis, de Gaulle (the president of France –YSA) had no real power, except in the sense that there was a vacuum which he filled. Do you know that when de Gaulle wanted to hold a referendum during the strike, it was so unpopular that he couldn’t get any workers in all of France to print the ballots? He had to go to Belgium, to ask the Belgian workers to print the ballots, and they refused too! He had no strength. One might ask, what about the army? But he had no army with him. Maybe the officers, but the soldiers – who were the soldiers of France? They were the sons and brothers of the strikers. The first thing a strike council would do would be to immediately hold elections in the army barracks for new officers, and any officers that didn’t accept this would be thrown out. And then you would go to the barracks and ask the soldiers to share their guns. The guns would be used to help form militias of the people. Then you would dissolve the police force and have the workers out on the streets patrolling. That could have been done in a number of days under the conditions that existed in France. Just to start with, you had hundreds of thousands of students who would have been immediately willing to participate in the militias and to arm themselves. Then elections would be held in the factories, and other institutions, and delegates representing the rank-and-file workers in the factories, the students, the soldiers in the army and people in all the various institutions would come together in a central council. And you would put on the floor of this body, which would be the most democratically chosen body in the history of the country, the motion that all industries are nationalized. We would simply pass that, along with other programs which would meet the people’s needs. When you think about it, every step I’ve outlined, every demand, is based on democratic ideas. The word “socialist” hasn’t even been used. Because what socialism means is not simply that socialists come to power, but that a class – the masses of the working people – come to power. That could have happened in France. The objective conditions were there, the radicalization among the masses. What was missing? There was no sufficiently strong Marxist vanguard. The working class in France was led by a party which supports capitalism, called the Communist Party. So the big problem in France, in order to make a revolution, is to depose the Communist Party from the leadership of the working class. In the United States, things are going to happen in a similar way to what happened in France. Not the same, but similar. Look what’s happening on campus – it’s spontaneous; on campus after campus you see radical actions. The same thing is going to take place in the working class. It is already happening with the masses of Black people. As these movements develop, the vanguard at first is small, and can play only a limited role. But, out of these actions come young people who begin to understand that you need to think out the whole question. They learn from experience. Maybe they get busted and they start thinking how to be effective. And someone sits down with them and explains how you make a revolution, how you form a vanguard and slowly build up and participate in mass struggles, how you get an interrelationship between the mass movements and the vanguard, and how you reach a situation where a crisis will develop and the vanguard will be able to lead the masses to take power. The key to victory is moving the masses. Any concept, any struggle that eliminates this will only end in disaster. Unfortunately, the ultraleft idea that you can go around the masses, or make the revolution without them, is one that is creeping into the thinking of many students and young people today. But there ill be a reaction to this. One of the troubles with ultraleftism is, of course, that when people react against it, they sometimes react against militancy in general, and flip over to become opportunists. In fact, you’re going to see people who were opportunists yesterday going over to being ultraleft today, and the ultralefts of today flipping over to become opportunists. Because all of them are looking for the same thing – a shortcut. And there is no shortcut to change the system. It takes a long time. You have to have a perspective of fighting for 10, 20 or even more years. Just like the Vietnamese say they will fight 10, 20, or 40 years – whatever is necessary. You can’t walk into the YSA and say, “I want a guarantee that the revolution will happen in five years because after that I have other plans.” The revolution doesn’t work that way. So, to end, I want to say this. The ruling class is never going to solve its problems through the capitalist system. Therefore, the objective conditions for revolution are going to rise up over and over again. We don’t create these conditions, but there is one thing we can do. That is, we can create the subjective factor – the vanguard. By entering the YSA, by building the revolutionary party, by understanding and participating in the revolutionary process, we can make victory possible. Are we going to be able to do it? Other generations have failed to do it. Are we going to be able to build a revolutionary socialist vanguard that can lead a mass movement to overthrow the system? That’s the challenge to this young generation. And the answer of the YSA is yes, we’re going to do it.

THE METHOD OF MARXISM
AN INTRODUCTION TO DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM
What is a philosophy?
At each stage in human history, men and women have worked out some sort of picture of the world and their place in it. They develop a Philosophy. The pieces they use to make up this picture have been obtained by observing nature and through generalising their day to day experiences.
Some people believe they have no need of such a philosophy or world outlook. Yet in practise everyone has a philosophy, even if it is not consciously worked out. People who live by rule of thumb or "common sense" and think they are doing without theory, in practice think in the traditional way. Marx once said that the dominant ideas of society are those of the ruling class. To maintain and justify its rule, the capitalist class makes use of every available means to distort the consciousness of the worker. The school, church, TV, and press are used to foster the ideology of the ruling class and indoctrinate the worker into accepting their system as the most natural permanent form of society. In the absence of a conscious socialist philosophy, they accept unconsciously the capitalist one.
At each point in class society, the rising revolutionary class, aiming to change society, have to fight for a new world outlook and have to attack the old philosophy, which, being based on the old order, justified and defended it.
Idealism and materialism
Throughout the history of philosophy we find two camps, the Idealist and the Materialist. The common idea of "Idealism" (i.e. honesty, uprightness in the pursuit of ideals) and "Materialism" (i.e. base, greedy, money-grabbing egoism) has nothing to do with philosophical idealism and philosophical materialism.
Many great thinkers of the past were Idealists, notably Plato and Hegel. This school of thought looks upon nature and history as a reflection of ideas or spirit. The theory that men and women and every material thing was created by a divine Spirit, is a basic concept of idealism. This outlook is expressed in a number of ways, yet its basis is that ideas govern the development of the material world. History is explained as a history of thought. People's actions are seen as resulting from abstract thoughts, and not from their material needs. Hegel went one step further, being a consistent idealist, and turned thoughts into an independent "Idea" existing outside of the brain and independent of the material world. The latter was merely a reflection of this Idea. Religion is part and parcel of philosophical idealism.
The Materialist thinkers on the other hand, have maintained that the material world is real and that nature or matter is primary. The mind or ideas are a product of the brain. The brain, and therefore ideas, arose at a certain stage in the development of living matter. The basic corner-stones of Materialism are as follows:
(a) The material world, known to us by our senses and explored by science, is real. The development of the world is due to its own natural laws, without any recourse to the supernatural.
(b) There is only one world, the material one. Thought is a product of matter (the brain) without which there can be no separate ideas. Therefore minds or ideas cannot exist in isolation apart from matter. General ideas are only reflections of the material world. "To me," wrote Marx, "the idea is nothing else than the material world reflected in the human mind, and translated into forms of thought." And further, "Social being determines consciousness".
The Idealists conceive of consciousness, of thought, as something external, and opposed to matter, to nature. This opposition is something entirely false and artificial. There is a close correlation between the laws of thought and the laws of nature, because the former follow and reflect the latter. Thought cannot derive its categories from itself, but only from the external world. Even the most seemingly abstract thoughts are in fact derived from the observation of the material world.
Even an apparently abstract science like pure mathematics has, in the last analysis, been derived from material reality, and is not spun from the brain. The school-child secretly counts his material fingers under a material desk before solving an abstract arithmetical problem. In so doing, he is re-creating the origins of mathematics itself. We base ourselves upon the decimal system because we have ten fingers. The Roman numerals were originally based on the representation of fingers.
According to Lenin, "this is materialism: matter acting on our sense organs produces sensation. Sensations depend upon the brain, nerves, retina, etc., i.e., matter is primary. Sensation, thought, consciousness are the supreme product of matter".
People are a part of nature, who develop their ideas in interaction with the rest of the world. Mental processes are real enough, but they are not something absolute, outside nature. They should be studied in their material and social circumstances in which they arise. "The phantoms formed in the human brain," stated Marx, "are É necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process." Later he concluded, "morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development, but men, developing their material production and their material intercourses, alter along with this their real existence their thinking and the product of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life."
The origins of materialism
"The original home of all modern materialism," wrote Engels, "from the seventeenth century onwards, is England." At this time, the old feudal aristocracy and monarchy were being challenged by the newly emerged middle classes. The bastion of feudalism was the Roman Catholic church, which provided the divine justification for the monarchy and feudal institutions. This, therefore, had to be undermined before feudalism could be overthrown. The rising bourgeoisie challenged the old ideas and divine concepts that the old order was based upon.
"Parallel with the rise of the middle classes went on the great revival of science; astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy, physiology, were again cultivated. And the bourgeoisie for the development of its industrial production, required a science which ascertained the physical properties of natural objects and the modes of action of the forces of Nature. Now up to then science had but been the humble handmaid of the church, had not been allowed to overstep the limits set by faith, and for that reason had been no science at all. [In the 17th century, Galileo demonstrated the truth of Copernicus' theory that the earth and planets revolved around the Sun. The professors of the day ridiculed these ideas and used the power of the Index and the Inquisition against Galileo to force him to recant his views. RS] (Science rebelled against the church; the bourgeoisie could not do without science, and therefore, had to join in the rebellion.)" (F. Engels.)
It was at this time that Francis Bacon (1561-1626) developed his revolutionary ideas of materialism. According to him the senses were infallible and the source of all knowledge. All science was based upon experience, and consisted in subjecting the data to a rational method of investigation; induction, analysis, comparison, observation and experiment. It was, however, left to Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) to continue and develop Bacon's materialism into a system. He realised that ideas and concepts were only a reflection of the material world, and that "it is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks". Later, the English thinker John Locke (1632-1704) provided proof of this materialism.
The materialist school of philosophy passed from England to France, to be taken up and developed further by Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and his followers. These French materialists did not limit themselves to criticisms of religion, but extended them to all institutions and ideas. They challenged these things in the name of Reason, and gave ammunition to the developing bourgeoisie in their struggle with the monarchy. The birth of the great French Bourgeois Revolution of 1789-93 took as its creed materialist philosophy. Unlike the English Revolution in the mid-17th century, its French counter-part completely destroyed the old feudal order. As Engels later pointed out: "We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealised kingdom of the bourgeoisie."
The defect, however, of this materialism from Bacon onwards was its rigid, mechanical interpretation of Nature. Not accidentally, the English school of materialist philosophy flourished in the 18th century, when the discoveries of Isaac Newton made "mechanics" the most advanced and important science. In the words of Engels: "The specific limitation of this materialism lay in its inability to comprehend the universe as a process, as matter undergoing uninterrupted historical development."
The French Revolution had a profound effect upon the civilised world, similar to the Russian Revolution of 1917. It revolutionised thinking in every field, politics, philosophy, science and art. The ferment of ideas emerging from this bourgeois democratic revolution ushered in advances in natural science, geology, botany, chemistry as well as political economy.
It was in this period that a criticism was made of the mechanical approach of the materialists. A German philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), made the first breakthrough in the old mechanistic ways with his discovery that the Earth and the solar system had come into being, and had not existed eternally. The same also applies to geography, geology, plants and animals.
This revolutionary idea of Kant was comprehensively developed by another brilliant German thinker, George Hegel (1770-1831). Hegel was a philosophical idealist, believing that the world could be explained as a manifestation or reflection of a "Universal Mind" or "Idea", i.e., some form of God.
Hegel looked upon the world not as an active participant in society and human history, but as a philosopher, contemplating events from afar. He set himself up as a measuring rod of the world, interpreting history according to his prejudices as the history of thought, the world as the world of ideas, an Ideal World. Thus for Hegel, problems and contradictions were posed not in real terms but in terms of thought, and could therefore find their solution only in terms of thought. Instead of contradictions in society being solved by the actions of men and women, by the class struggle, they instead find their solution in the philosopher's head, in the Absolute Idea!
Nevertheless, Hegel recognised the errors and shortcomings of the old mechanistic outlook. He also pointed out the inadequacies of formal logic and set about the creation of a new world outlook which could explain the contradictions of change and movement. (See below).
Although Hegel rediscovered and analysed the laws of motion and change, his idealism placed everything on its head. It was the struggle and criticism of the Young Hegelians, led by Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), which tried to correct and place philosophy back on its feet. Yet even Feuerbach--"the under half of him was materialist, the upper half idealist" (Engels)--was not able to fully purge Hegelianism of its idealist outlook. This work was left to Marx and Engels, who were able to rescue the dialectical method from its mystical shell. Hegelian dialectics were fused with modern materialism to produce the revolutionary understanding of dialectical materialism.
What are dialectics?
We have seen that modern materialism is the concept that matter is primary and the mind or ideas are the product of the brain. But what is dialectical thinking or dialectics?
"Dialectics is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought." (Engels, Anti-Dühring.)
The dialectical method of thinking already had a long existence before Marx and Engels developed it scientifically as a means of understanding the evolution of human society.
The ancient Greeks produced some great dialectical thinkers, including Plato, Zenon and Aristotle. As early as 500 B.C., Heraclitus advanced the idea that "everything is and is not, for everything is in flux, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away". And further, "all things flow, all change. It is impossible to enter twice into one and the same stream". This statement already contains the fundamental conception of dialectics that everything in nature is in a constant state of change, and that this change unfolds through a series of contradictions.
"...the great basic thought that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready made things, but as a complex of processes, in which things apparently stable, no less than their mental images in our heads, concepts go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away." (Engels, Anti-Dühring,)
"For dialectical philosophy nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything: nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain." (Ibid.)
Dialectics and metaphysics
The Greek Philosophers brilliantly anticipated the later development of dialectics as of other sciences. But they could not themselves carry this anticipation to its logical conclusion owing to the low development of the means of production, and the lack of adequate information about the detailed workings of the universe. Their ideas gave a more-or-less correct general picture, but they were often more in the nature of inspired guesses than scientifically worked out theories. In order to carry human thought further, it was necessary to abandon these old methods to arrive at a general understanding of the universe, and concentrate on the smaller, more mundane tasks of collecting, sorting out and labelling a host of individual facts, of testing particular theories by experiment, of defining, etc.
This empirical, experimental, factual approach provided an enormous boost to human thought and science. Investigations into the workings of nature could now be carried out scientifically, analysing each particular problem and testing each conclusion. But in the process, the old ability to deal with things in their connection, not separately, in their movement, not statically, in their life not in their death, was lost. The narrow, empirical mode of thought which consequently arose is termed the "Metaphysical" approach. It still dominates modern capitalist philosophy and science. In politics it is reflected in Harold Wilson's famous "pragmatism" ("if it works, it must be right") and the constant appeals to "the Facts".
But facts do not select themselves. They have to be chosen by individuals. The order and sequence in which they are arranged, and the conclusions drawn from them depend upon the preconceived notions of the individual. Thus such appeals for "the Facts", which are supposed to convey the impression of scientific impartiality, are usually just a smokescreen to conceal the prejudices of the speaker.
Dialectics deals not only with facts, but with facts in their connection, i.e. processes, not only with isolated ideas, but with laws, not only with the particular, but with the general.
Dialectical thinking stands in the same relationship to metaphysics as a motion picture to a still photograph. The one does not contradict the other, but compliments it. However, the truer, more complete approximation of reality is contained in the movie.
For everyday purposes and simple calculations, metaphysical thought, or "common sense", suffices. But it has its limitations, and beyond these the application of "common sense" turns truth into its opposite. The fundamental shortcoming of this type of thinking is its inability to conceive of motion and development, and its rejection of all contradiction. However, movement and change imply contradiction.
"To the metaphysician things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation, fixed, rigid, given once and for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antithesis É For him a thing either exists or does not exist: a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another: cause and effect stand in rigid antithesis one to the other." (Anti-Dühring, p. 34.)
For everyday purposes, for instance, it is possible to say with a degree of certainty whether an individual, plant or animal is alive or dead. But in reality the question is not so simple, as legal cases on abortion and the "rights of the foetus" indicate. At what point precisely does human life begin? At what point does it end? Death, also is not a simple event but a protracted process, as Heraclitus understood: "It is the same thing in us that is living and dead, asleep and awake, young and old; each changes place and becomes the other. We step and we do not step into the same stream: we are and are not."
Trotsky, in his ABC of Materialist Dialectics characterised the dialectic as "a science of the forms of our thinking insofar as it is not limited to the daily problems of life but attempts to arrive at an understanding of more complicated and drawn-out processes."
He compared dialectics and formal logic (metaphysics) to higher and lower mathematics. It was Aristotle who first developed the laws of formal logic, and his system of logic has been accepted ever since by the metaphysicians as the only possible method of scientific thinking.
"The Aristotelian logic of the simple syllogism is accepted as an axiom for a multitude of practical human activities and elementary generalisations. The postulate starts from the proposition that 'A' = 'A'. But in reality 'A' is not equal to 'A'. This is quite easy to prove if we observe these two letters under a lens--they are quite different from each other. But, one can object, the question is not of the size or form of the letters, since they are only symbols for equal quantities, for instance, a pound of sugar. The objection is beside the point--in reality a pound of sugar is never equal to a pound of sugar--a more delicate scale will always disclose a difference. Again one can object; but a pound of sugar is equal to itself. Neither is this true--all bodies change uninterruptedly in size, weight, colour, etc. They are never equal to themselves. A sophist will respond that a pound of sugar is equal to itself 'at any given moment'. Aside from the extremely dubious practical value of the 'axiom' it does not withstand theoretical criticism, either. How should we really conceive the word 'moment' a purely mathematical abstraction, that is a zero of time? But everything exists in time: and existence itself is an uninterrupted process of transformation: time is subsequently a fundamental element of existence. Thus the axiom 'A' is equal to itself if it does not change, that is, if it does not exist.
"At first glance it could seem that these 'subtleties' are useless. In reality they are of decisive significance. The axiom 'A equals A' appears on the one hand to be the point of departure for all knowledge on the other hand the point of departure for all errors in our knowledge. To make use of the axiom 'A equals A' with impunity is possible only within certain limits. When quantitative changes in 'A' are negligible for the task at hand, then we can presume that 'A equals A'. This is, for example, the manner in which a buyer and a seller both consider a pound of sugar. We consider the Sun's temperature likewise. Until recently we considered the buying power of the dollar in the same way. But quantitative changes beyond certain limits become qualitative. A pound of sugar subjected to the action of water or Kerosene cease to be a pound of sugar. A dollar in the embraces of a president ceases to be a dollar. To determine the right moment, the critical point where quantity changes to quality is one of the most important and difficult tasks in all spheres of knowledge, including sociology." (Trotsky, ABC of Materialist Dialectic)
Hegel
The old dialectical method of reasoning, which had fallen into disuse from medieval times on, was revived in the early 19th century by the great German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, (1770-1831). Hegel, one of the most encyclopaedic minds of his time, subjected the forms of formal logic to a detailed criticism, and demonstrated their limitations and one-sidedness. Hegel produced the first really comprehensive analysis of the laws of dialectics, which served as a basis upon which Marx and Engels later developed their theory of dialectical materialism. Lenin characterised Hegelian dialectics as "the most comprehensive, the most right in content and the most profound doctrine of development". In comparison with this, every other formulation was "one-sided and poor in content, and distorting and mutilating the real course of development (which often proceeds in leaps, catastrophes and revolutions) in nature and society". (Lenin, Karl Marx.)
Hegel's View of things was that of "A development that seemingly repeats the stages already passed, but repeats them differently, on a higher basis (negation of the negation), a development, so to speak, in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, revolutions; breaks in continuity; the transformations of quantity into quality; the inner impulses of development, imparted by the contradictions and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given body, or within a given phenomenon, or within a given society: the interdependence and the closest, indissoluble connection of all sides of every phenomenon (while history constantly discloses ever new sides), a connection that provides a uniform, a law-governed, universal process of motion, such are some of the features of dialectics as a richer (than the ordinary) doctrine of developmentÉ" (Ibid.)
"This new German philosophy culminated in the Hegelian system. In this system--and herein is its great merit--for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process, i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development. From this point of view the history of mankind no longer appeared as a wild whirl of senseless deeds of violence, as equally condemnable at the judgement-seat of mature philosophic reason, and which are best forgotten as quickly as possible, but as the process of evolution of man himself. It was now the task of the intellect to follow the gradual march of this process through all its devious ways and to trace out the inner laws running through all its apparently accidental phenomena." (Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 37.)
Hegel brilliantly posed the problem, but was prevented from solving it by his idealist preconceptions. It was, in Engels' words "a colossal miscarriage". Despite its mystical side, Hegel's philosophy already explained the most important laws of dialectics: Quantity and quality, the interpenetration of opposites and negation of the negation.
Quantity and quality
"In spite of all gradualness, the transition from one form of motion to another always remains a leap, a decisive change". (Engels, Anti-Dühring.)
The idea of change and evolution is now generally accepted, but the forms by which changes occur in nature and society have only been explained by Marxian dialectics. The common view of evolution as a peaceful, smooth and uninterrupted development is both one-sided and false. In politics it is the "gradualist" theory of social change--the basic theoretical plank of reformism.
Hegel developed the idea of a "nodal line of measure relations"--in which at a definite nodal point, the purely quantitative increase or decrease gives rise to a qualitative leap: for example in the case of heated water, where boiling point and freezing point are the nodes at which under normal pressure the leap into a new state of aggregation takes place, and where consequently quantity is transformed into quality." (Engels, Anti-Dühring.)
Thus, in the example cited, the transformation of water from a liquid to vapour or solid ice do not occur by a gradual congealing or dissipation, but suddenly at a particular temperature (0°C, 100°C). The cumulative effect of numerous changes of the speed of the molecules eventually produces a change of state--quantity into quality.
Examples may be produced at will, from all the branches of science, from sociology and even from everyday life (e.g., the point at which the addition of salt changes the soup from something palatable to something undrinkable).
The Hegelian nodal line of measurement and the law of the transition of quantity into quality and vice-versa are of crucial importance not only to science (where, like other dialectical laws, they are used unconsciously by scientists who are not conscious dialecticians) but above all in an analysis of history, society and the movement of the working class.
The interpenetration of opposites
Just as "common sense" metaphysics seeks to eliminate contradiction from thought and revolution from evolution, it also tries to prove that all opposing ideas and forces are mutually exclusive. However, "we find upon closer examination that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that despite all their opposition they mutually interpenetrate. And we find, in like manner that cause and effect are conception to individual cases, but as soon as we consider the individual cases in their general connection with the universe as a whole, they run into each other, and they become confounded when we contemplate that universal action and interaction in which causes and effects are eternally changing places, so that what is effect here and now will be cause there and then and vice-versa". (Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 36.)
Dialectics is the science of inter-connections, in contrast to metaphysics which treats phenomena as separate and isolated. Dialectics seeks to uncover the countless threads, transition, cause and effect which bind together the universe. The first task of a dialectical analysis is therefore to trace the "Necessary connection, the objective connection of all the aspects, forces, tendencies etc., of the given sphere of phenomena". (Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, p. 97.)
Dialectics approaches a given phenomenon from the point of view of its development, its own movement and life; how it arises and how it passes away; it also considers the internal contradictory tendencies and sides of this thing.
Motion is the mode of existence of the entire material universe. Energy and matter are inseparable. Furthermore, motion is not imparted "from without", but the manifestation of the internal tensions that are inseparable not only from life, but from all forms of matter. Development and change takes place through internal contradictions. Thus dialectical analysis begins by laying bare by empirical investigation the inner contradictions which give rise to development and change.
From the dialectical standpoint all "polar opposites" are one-sided and inadequate, including the contradiction between "truth and error". Marxism does not accept the existence of any "Eternal Truths". All "truths" and "errors" are relative. What is true in one time and context becomes false in another: truth and error pass into each other.
Thus the progress of knowledge and science does not proceed from the mere negation of "incorrect theories". All theories are relative, grasping one side of reality. Initially they are assumed to have universal validity and application. They are "true". But at a certain point, deficiencies in the theory are noticed; they are not applicable to all circumstances, exceptions to the rule are found. These have to be explained, and at a certain point, new theories are developed which can account for the exceptions. But the new theories not only "negate" the old, but incorporate them in a new form.
We can exclude contradictions only by regarding objects as lifeless, at rest and individually juxtaposed, i.e. metaphysically. But as soon as we consider things in their motion and change, in their life, their mutual interdependence and interaction, we come up against a series of contradictions.
Motion itself is a contradiction between being in the same place and somewhere else at the same time.
Life, equally, is a contradiction that "a being is at each moment itself and yet something else". (Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 167.)
Living structures constantly absorb substances from the environment, assimilate them and simultaneously other parts of the body decay, disintegrate and are expelled. Constant transformations occur also in the world of organic nature; e.g., a rock which disintegrated under the pressure of the elements. Everything is therefore constantly itself and something else at one and the same time. Thus, the desire to eliminate contradictions is the desire to eliminate reality.
Negation of the negation
Engels characterises this as "an extremely general and for this reason extremely far-reaching and important law of development of nature, history and thought; a law which É holds good in the animal and plant kingdoms, in geology, in mathematics, in history and philosophy". (Ibid., p. 193.)
This law, the workings of which were observed in nature long before it was written down, was first clearly elaborated by Hegel, who gives a whole series of concrete examples which are reiterated in Anti-Dühring. (Ibid., pp. 186-190.)
The law of the negation of the negation deals with the nature of development through a series of contradictions, which appear to annul, or negate a previous fact, theory, or form of existence, only to be later negated in its turn. Motion, change and development thus moves through an uninterrupted series of negations.
However, negation in the dialectical sense does not signify a mere annulment or obliteration whereby the earlier stage is both overcome and preserved at the same time. Negation, in this sense, is both a positive and a negative act.
Hegel gives a simple example in his book, The Phenomenology of the Mind: "The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant's existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated, they supplement one another as being incomparable with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they do not merely contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole."
In this process of endless self-annulment, the disappearance of certain forms and the emergence of others, a pattern frequently emerges which seem to be a repetition of forms, events and theories already surpassed. Thus, it is a commonplace that "history repeats itself". Reactionary bourgeois historians have thus tried to prove that history itself is merely a meaningless repetition, proceeding in a never-ending circle.
Dialectics, on the contrary, discerns within these seeming repetitions an actual É development from lower to higher, an evolution in which the same forms may repeat themselves, but on a higher level, enriched by previous developments.
This can be seen most clearly from the process of development of human ideas. Hegel already showed how philosophy developed through a series of contradictions; one school of thought negating another, but simultaneously absorbing the older theories into its own system of thought.
Similarly with the development of science. The alchemists of the Middle Ages were motivated for the search for the "Philosophers' Stone" which could turn base metal into gold. Owing to the low level of the productive forces and the lack of scientific technique, these early attempts at the "transmutation" of the elements was in reality a utopian fantasy. However, in the process of these vain attempts, the alchemists actually discovered a whole series of valuable facts about chemicals and experimental apparatus which later provided the basis of modern chemistry.
With the rise of capitalism, industry and technique, chemistry becomes a science which rejected the early "crazy" notions of the transmutation of the elements which was thus negated. However, all that was valuable and scientific in the discoveries of alchemy were preserved in the new chemistry, which maintained that the elements were "immutable" and could not be transformed one into another.
The 20th century has seen the revolutionising of science and technique with the discovery of nuclear physics, by means of which one element can actually be transformed into another. In fact, it would be theoretically possible to turn lead into gold, in modern times, but the process would be too expensive to be justified economically. Thus this particular process seems to have turned full circle:
(a) transmutation of elements
(b) non transmutation of elements
(c) transmutation of elements
But the repetition is only apparent. In reality, modern science, which in one sense has returned to an idea of the ancient alchemists, includes within itself all the enormous discoveries of the 19th century and 18th century science. Thus, one generation stands on the shoulders of another. Ideas which have apparently been "disproved" or "negated" make their re-appearance, but on a higher level, enriched by the previous experiences and discoveries.
Dialectics bases itself upon determinism: the thought that nothing in nature, society or thought is accidental; that seeming "accidents" arise only as the result of a deeper necessity.
Superficial historians have written that the First World War was "caused" by the assassination of a Crown Prince at Sarajevo. To a Marxist this event was an historical accident, in the sense that this chance event served as the pretext, or catalyst, for the world conflict which had already been made inevitable by the economic, political and military contradictions of imperialism. If the assassin had missed, or if the Crown Prince had never been born, the war would still have taken place, on some other diplomatic pretext. Necessity would have expressed itself through a different "accident".
Everything which exists, exists of necessity. But, equally, everything which exists is doomed to perish, to be transformed into something else. Thus what is "necessary" in one time and place becomes "unnecessary" in another. Everything begets its opposite which is destined to overcome and negate it. This is true of individual living things as much as societies.
Every type of human society exists because it is necessary at the given time when it arises: "No special order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it, have been developed: and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society. Therefore mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve, since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or at least are in the process of formation". (Marx, Critique of Political Economy.)
Slavery, in its day, represented an enormous leap forward over barbarism. It was a necessary stage in the development of productive forces, culture and human society. As Hegel put it: "It is not so much from slavery as through slavery that man becomes free".
Similarly capitalism was originally a necessary and progressive stage in human society. However, like slavery, primitive communism and feudalism (see section 2), capitalism has long since ceased to represent a necessary and progressive social system. It has foundered upon the deep contradictions inherent in it, and is doomed to be overcome by the rising forces of socialism, represented by the modem proletariat. Private ownership of the means of production and the nation state, the basic features of capitalist society, which originally marked a great step forward, now serve only to fetter and undermine the productive forces and threaten all the gains made in centuries of human development.
Capitalism is now a thoroughly decrepit, degenerate social system, which must be overthrown and replaced by its opposite, Socialism, if human culture is to survive. Marxism is determinist, but not fatalist, because the working out of contradictions in society can only be achieved by men and women consciously striving for the transformation of society. This struggle of the classes is not pre-determined. Who succeeds depends on many factors, and a rising, progressive class has many advantages over the old, decrepit force of reaction. But ultimately, the result must depend upon which side has the stronger will, the greater organisation and the most skilful and resolute leadership.
The Marxist philosophy is therefore essentially a guide to action: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, however, to change it". (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach.)
The victory of socialism will mark a new and qualitatively different stage of human history. To be more accurate it will mark the end of the prehistory of the human race, and start a real history.
However on the other hand, socialism marks a return to the earliest form of human society--tribal communism--but on a much higher level, which stands upon all the enormous gains of thousands of years of class society. The economy of superabundance, will be made possible by the application of socialist planning to the industry, science and technique established by capitalism, on a world scale. This in turn will once and for all make redundant the division of labour, the difference between mental and manual labour, between town and countryside, and the wasteful and barbaric class struggle and enable the human race at least to set its resources to the conquest of nature: to use Engels' famous phrase, "Mankind's leap from the realms of necessity to the Realm of Freedom".
INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
When one looks at history, it appears to be a mass of contradictions. Events are lost in a maze of revolutions, wars, periods of progress and of decline. Conflicts of classes and nations swirl around in the chaos of social development. How is it possible to understand and explain these events, when it appears that they have no rational basis?
From the beginning, human beings have sought to discover the laws which govern their existence. Theories ranging from supernatural guidance to the leadership of "Great Men" have attempted in one way or another, at one time or another to provide such an explanation. Some believe that as people act independently of each other, theories of human development are utterly worthless!
For almost 2,000 years the ideas of Genesis dominated the outlook of Western Europe. Those who attempted to undermine this concept were branded as disciples of the Devil. It is only in very recent times that the "heretical" view of history, evolution, has been generally accepted although even then in a one-sided fashion.
For the capitalist class and their functionaries in the universities, schools and places of learning, history has to be taught in an academic and biased fashion with absolutely no relevance to the present day. They continue to peddle the myth that classes and private property have always existed in a bid to justify the "eternal" nature of capitalist exploitation and the economic anarchy inherent within it. Volumes and volumes have been written by leading academics and professors to disprove the writings of Marxism and above all its Materialist Conception of History.
Marxists attach enormous importance to the study of history; not for its own sake but so as to study the great lessons it contains. Without that understanding of the development of events, it is not possible to foresee future perspectives. Lenin, for example, prepared the Bolshevik Party for the October 1917 Revolution by a meticulous analysis of the experience of the Paris Commune and the events in Russia of 1905 and February 1917.
It is precisely in this sense that we study and learn from history. Marxism is the science of perspectives, using its method of Dialectical Materialism to unravel the complex processes of historical development.
Marxist philosophy examines things not as static entities but in their development, movement and life. Historical events are seen as processes. Evolution, however, is not simply the movement from the lower to the higher. Life and society develop in a contradictory way, through "spirals not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; breaks in continuity; the transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses towards development, imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the various forces and tendenciesÉ" (Lenin.)
Engels expressed dialectics as being "the great basic thought that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing awayÉ" (Anti-Duhring).
This method is also materialist in outlook. Ideas, theories, party programmes, etc., do not fall from the sky but always reflect the material world and material interests. As Marx explained, "the mode of production of material life conditioned the social, political and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary their social being that determines their consciousness".
Using this method, Marx was able to indicate "the way to an all embracing and comprehensive study of the processes of the rise, development, and decline of social-economic systems. People make their own history, but what determines the motives of people, of the mass of people, i.e. what gives rise to the clash of conflicting ideas and strivings? What is the sum total of all these clashes in the mass of human societies? What are the objective conditions of production of material life that form the basis of all of man's historical activity? What is the law of development of these conditions? To all these Marx drew attention and indicated the way to a scientific study of history as a single process which, with all its immense variety and contradictoriness, is governed by definite laws". (Lenin, Three Sources and Component Parts of Marxism.)
Primitive communism
Early humans evolved some three million years ago out of a highly evolved species of ape. Slowly primitive "humans" moved away from the forests and into the plains; a transition which was accompanied by an improvement in the flexibility and dexterity of the hand. The posture of the body became more erect. Whereas other animals had different organs for defence (cutting digging, shovelling and coats for warmth), humans had none of these. To survive they had to develop their only resources which were their hands and brain. Through trial and error, humans learned various skills, which had to be handed down from one generation to another. Communication through speech became a vital necessity. As Engels explained, "mastery over nature began with the development of the hand, with labour, and widened man's horizon at every new advance". Men and women were social animals forced to band together and co-operate in order to survive. Unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, they developed the ability to generalise and think abstractly. Labour begins with the making of tools. With these tools, humans change their surrounding to meet their needs. "The animal merely uses its environment," says Engels, "and brings about changes in it simply by his presence; Man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between Man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction."
The economic forms were very simple. Humans, were very rare animals, and they roamed around in groups in search of food. This nomadic life was completely dominated with food gathering. Archaeologists call this period the old stone age. Henry Morgan, an early anthropologist, termed the period savagery. Then and for many thousands of years to come, private property did not exist. Everything that was made, collected, or produced was considered common property.
Between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, a new higher period emerged known as the new stone age or Barbarism. Instead of roaming for food, advances were made in cultivating crops and domesticating animals. Men and women became free to settle in a particular place and as a result new tools were fashioned to assist the new work, and a food producing economy was created. Stable tribes and communities arose at this time. Even today, for a variety of reasons, many tribes in Africa, the South Pacific and South America exist at this stage of Barbarism.
Yet with the birth of the permanent settlement, private dwellings did not come into being; on the contrary, the large ones that were built were for common use. In this period, no private family existed. The children belonged to the entire tribe.
In the stage of primitive communism (savagery and barbarism, each being a lower and higher stage respectively), no private property, classes, privileged elites, police or special coercive apparatus (the state) existed. The tribes themselves were divided into social units called clans or gentes (singular gens). These, in fact, were very large family groups, which traced their descent from the female line alone. This is what is termed a matriarchal society. How else could it be when it was impossible to identify the real father of a child? It was forbidden for a man to cohabit with a woman from his own clan or gens, thus the tribes were made up from a coalition of clans. At certain times, a form of group marriage existed between the clans themselves.
This classless form of society was extremely democratic in its character. Everyone would participate in a general assembly to decide the important issues as they occurred, and their chiefs and officers would be elected for particular purposes. As Engels pointed out in his book, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State:
"How wonderful this gentle constitution is in all its natural simplicity! No soldiers, gendarmes and policemen, no nobility, kings, regents, prefects or judges, no prisons, no law-suits, and still affairs run smoothly. All quarrels and disputes are settled by the entire community involved in them, either the Gens or the tribe or the various Gentes amongst themselves. Only in very rare cases the blood revenge is threatened as an extreme measure. Our capital punishment is simply a civilised form of it, afflicted with all the advantages and drawbacks of civilisation É the communistic household is shared by a number of families, the land belongs to the tribe, only the gardens are temporarily assigned to the households É There cannot be any poor and destitute--the communistic households and the Gentes know their duties towards the aged, sick and disabled. All are free and equal--the women included. There is no room yet for slaves, nor for the subjection of foreign tribes".
To the narrow philistine, who sees private property as a sacred god, these societies are looked upon with contempt. To the tribespeople, private property is completely alien. "The Indians," explains the historian Heckewelder, "think that the great spirit has made the earth, and all that it contains, for the common good of mankind, when he stocked the country and gave them plenty of game, it was not for the good of the few, but of all. Everything is given in common to the sons of men. Whatever liveth on the land, whatever groweth out of the earth, and all that is in the rivers and waters was given jointly to all, and everyone is entitled to his share".
Common tribal property came under growing strain from the development with the private family, with private houses growing up alongside the communal dwellings. As time went on Common Land became later divided up to form the collective property of each family. The Matriarchal family gave way to the Patriarchal (male dominated) form, which became essential to the maintenance of the collective property.
This "family", however, must not be looked up on as similar to that of today. As Paul Lafargue says, "the family was not reduced to its last and simplest expression, as it is in our day, where it is composed of three indispensable elements: the father, the mother and the offspring; it consisted of the father, the recognised head of the family; of the legitimate wife, and his concubines, living under the same roof; of his children, his younger brothers, with their wives and children, and his unmarried sisters: such a family comprised many members".
The growth of private property in the later stages of primitive communism is regarded by Marxists as elements of the new society within the old. Eventually the qualitative accumulation of these new elements led to the qualitative break up of the old society.
With the growth of new means of production, particularly in agriculture, the question arose who should own them? The possession of tools, weapons, new metals, but above all the means to make them, enabled a family to rise above the terrible life and death struggle with the force of nature.
Then with the further development (trade developed at first between the different communities) of the productive forces, inequality began to appear within society. This had a profound effect upon the Old Order. For the first time, men and women were able to produce a surplus above and beyond his own needs, resulting in a revolutionary leap forward for humanity.
In the past, where war broke out between two tribes, it was uneconomic to take captives as slaves. After all, a captive would only have been able to produce sufficient food for himself. No surplus was produced. The only use for a captive, given the shortage of food, was as a source of meat. This was the economic foundation of cannibalism.
But once a surplus was produced, it became economically viable to keep a slave who was forced to work for his master. The surplus obtained from a growing number of slaves was then appropriated by the new class of slave owners. But how were the slaves to be controlled and forced to work? The old tribes had no police force or means of coercion. Every individual was free and was a warrior.
The production of a surplus product smashed the old forms of society, enabling classes to crystallise. The existence of these classes required an apparatus of force to subject one class by another. Rich and poor, landowner and tenant, creditor and debtor all made their appearance in society. The clans which were social units of originally blood relations, began to disintegrate. The rich of different clans had more in common with each other than they had with the poor of their own clan.
Slave society
Despite all the horrors which accompanied it, the emergence of class society was enormously progressive in further developing society. For the first time since humans evolved from the ape, a section of society was freed from the labour of eking out an existence. Those who were freed from work could now devote their time to science, philosophy and culture. Class society brought with it priests, clerks, officials and specialised craftsmen. The historical justification and function of the new ruling class was to develop the productive forces and take society forward. It was at this stage that civilisation first emerged.
Special institutions were now created to protect the interests of the ruling class. Special armed bodies of men, with their gaols, courts, executioners, etc., as well as new laws were all needed to protect private property of the slave owner. The state together with its appendages came into being and the freedom and equality of the old gentile system fell into ruins. New ideas and morals developed to justify the new social and economic order.
By the 7th century B.C. the tribal aristocracy of Greece had become a ruling class of well-endowed slave owning landlords. According to the Ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, the majority of the population of Attica had been enslaved by this time.
With the growth of the city-states, the increase in the division of labour greatly accelerated. Not only between town and country, but between branches of trade and finance, merchant and usurer; new crafts sprung up together with a growing band of artists catering for the tastes and culture of the upper class.
The drive of the city-states for more and more slaves, resulted in continuous war. In the war against Macedonia by the Romans in 169 B.C., 70 cities in Epirus alone were sacked and 150,000 of their inhabitants sold as slaves. The slave economy was extremely wasteful and needed for its survival a continuous supply of slaves to replace those who had been injured or died. However the natural reproduction amongst slaves was very slow owing to the harshness of their lot, thus the only real method of replenishment was by conquest.
Although the slave was much less productive than the free peasant on the land, the low cost of his maintenance made slavery far more profitable. The ruination of the free peasants led to large numbers fleeing to the town forming the de-classed lumpenproletariat of the slave societies. The latter relied upon the charity of the upper classes, who provided them with circuses for their amusement.
It was in this period that the revolutionary Christian movement emerged. Originally a group of primitive Communist sects with a deep hatred of the conquering Romans and their rich lackeys, they won much support from the poor and oppressed. These early Christian revolutionaries were prepared to use violent means to overthrow the upper classes and bring about "Heaven on Earth". They were therefore hounded by the authorities and were ruthlessly executed for treason against the Emperor. Later, Christianity was raised to the position of state religion after being purged of its class hatred. The ruling class used it as a weapon to dupe and pacify the lower classes into accepting their earthly lot and to encourage their illusions in a better life after death.
The greater the surpluses the slave-owners obtained from the exploitation of the slaves, the greater became their extravagance, brilliance, arrogance and idleness. As more and more wars had to be waged to increase the slave population by conquest, the Roman Empire overstretched itself. Wars cannot be fought without soldiers and the best soldiers were the peasants. They were rapidly disappearing and thus had to be replaced by highly paid foreign mercenaries. The age of the "cheap slave" came to a rapid end bringing with it the decline of the slave empires.
Despite the various slave rebellions--the most famous being led by Spartacus--the slave did not prove to be a revolutionary class that could take society forward. As Marx was to point out, the class struggle would end "either in a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes". Karl Kautsky, the German Marxist, explained that "the great migrations, the flooding of the Roman Empire by the swarms of savage Germans did not mean the premature destruction of a flourishing high culture, but merely the conclusion of a dying civilisation and the formation of the basis for a new upswing of civilisation".
The mighty slave civilisations had produced an enormous leap forward for society. One is amazed at the cultural achievements of Ancient Egypt and Babylon. The Greeks and Romans developed scientific knowledge to tremendous heights. Hero, the philosopher, had discovered the basic principles of the steam engine. The contributions of Archimedes, Pythagoras and Euclid advanced mathematics to the stage where the beginnings of mechanical engineering would have been possible. Nevertheless, slave society had reached its limits and internal decay and external factors were to bring it to destruction.
The rise of feudalism
"The last centuries of the declining Roman Empire and its conquest by the Barbarians destroyed a number of productive forces: agriculture had declined, industry had decayed for want of a market, trade had died out or had been violently suspended, the rural population and urban population had decreased." (Karl Marx, The German Ideology.)
Over the centuries, the barbarian masses overran Europe; in the East, the Goths, Germans and Huns; in the North and West, the Scandinavian; in the South, the Arabs. In their conquest of territories they proceeded to ransack the towns, and settle down in the countryside, where they lived by means of primitive agriculture.
In these communities, they elected their village chiefs, however, as time passed by, chiefs were always chosen from the same family. The head of the privileged family, through succession, became the natural chief. The villages were at constant war with their neighbours, resulting in conquered lands being divided up with the greater share accruing to the chief. He thus became the most powerful and propertied man in the community. In times of strife, he would guarantee the protection of those under him while in turn they were duty bound to grant military service to him. These peasants were later able to forgo their military service for a tribute in some form or another.
The authority of these village lords was extended into the surrounding countryside. The lord "owed justice, aid, and protection to his vassals, and these, in their turn, owed fidelity and homage to their lord". (Lafargue, The Evolution of Property.) Wars and conquests served to crystallise these feudal relationships. The lords and barons together with their men-at-arms formed a new social hierarchy, sustained by the labour provided by their vassals. As Lafargue expressed it: "So soon as the authority of the feudal nobility was constituted, it became in its turn, a source of trouble to the country whose defence it had been charged with. The barons, in order to enlarge their territories and thereby extend their power, carried on continual warfare among themselves, only interrupted now and again by a short truce necessitated by the tillage of the fields É The vanquished, when not killed outright or utterly despoiled, became the vassals of the conqueror, who seized upon a portion of their lands and vassals. The petty barons disappeared for the benefit of the great ones, who became potent feudatories, and established ducal courts at which the lords in vassalage were bound to attend".
As feudal relations matured, the majority of farm land in Europe became divided into areas known as manors, each manor possessing its own lord and officials whose task was to manage the estate. The arable land was divided into two parts, about a third of it belonged to the lord (called a Demesne), while the rest was divided amongst his vassals. Pastures, wood and meadows were used as Common Land--a survival in fact from the days of Primitive Communism. Agriculture was to make great strides forward with the introduction of the three field system. The vassals share of the land, however, was further divided up into separate strips scattered throughout the fields which meant a massive drain on productivity.
The social structure which developed under Feudalism, gave rise to new classes and groups. The social framework resembled a pyramid structure, headed by the king, aristocracy, the great churchmen and bishops. Under them were the privileged barons, dukes, counts and knights. On the bottom rungs of the social order were the freeman, serfs (Bordars, Cotters, Villeins), and slaves.
Unlike today, where the main body of wealth is created in the factories the land produced nearly all of social requirement. So land became the most important possession of the Feudal system. The more land one held, the more powerful one became. The ruling class ruled by their virtual monopoly of land to which the serfs were tied. Theoretically, the King owned all the land but in reality areas and domains were granted to dukes, who in turn granted tenancy to counts, who would have many vassals under him granted tenancy of much smaller parcels of land. All had to provide services to their superiors in guaranteeing men-at-arms, payment of rent, etc.
Unlike the slave who owned nothing, the serf was a tenant of the lord. Unlike the slave, the serf has a vested interest in his plot of land. He had more rights than the slave: he could not be sold (neither could his family), providing some security, although the degree of serfdom and obligations varied. In return for this land and "rights", the serf was forced to work for the lord of the manor for certain periods of the week, without pay. Other services were demanded of him (Boon Days) at harvest time, and whenever the lord needed assistance. The lords' needs came first. The serf could not leave the land, had to have the lords' permission if his children were to marry outside his demesne. Taxes were imposed on a serf's inheritance and female heirs to land had to get the permission of their overlord.
The new organisation of society based on landed property gave rise to a further development of the productive forces. This time the surplus value created by the serf's labour was appropriated by the aristocratic lay and ecclesiastical ruling class.
In the words of the historian Meilly: "It is an economic maxim that productiveness increases in proportion as the freer constitution of society insures the workers an absolutely larger and more secure portion of the product of their labour. In other words, freer social forms have the direct effect of stimulating production."
As the new classes crystallised, new forms of state apparatus also came into existence to preserve the feudal property forms. The new morality and ideology that arose from these forms cemented social relationships. The Church, which became more and more powerful, provided the spiritual foundations of the new order and with it the Popes became more powerful than King or Emperor, with churchlands extending to between a third and a half of the land in Christendom. The tithe that is collected amounted to a 10 per cent tax on all income, goods, etc.
In general the feudal state remained centrally weak until the rise of the absolute monarchies of the 16th century. As a result, continual baronial wars shook the outlying provinces where robber barons built up their power and prestige, threatening the position of the central monarch. The struggle of the central monarch to subdue the regions is a characteristic feature of the period. The eventual defeat of these provincial lords, with their constant strife and war, enabled trade to develop to a higher level.
Trade was at a low level. The land, in fact, produced practically everything. It was a "natural" economy geared towards self-sufficiency. However, with the launching of the crusades, the expeditions to the Holy Land, new needs arose, and the merchants who supplied these needs, began to establish huge fairs in France, Belgium, England, Germany and Italy. These periodic fairs played an essential part in the growth of European trade, and helped to establish a strong class of rich merchants. Money relations began to erode the straight jacket of feudal society.
Hand in hand with the development of trade, went the growth of the towns. The merchant class that arose in the town clashed with the traditional standards and restrictions of feudalism.
The Church, for instance, considered the practice of usury as a sin, using the threat of excommunication against those who promoted it.
In his very good book, Man's Worldly Goods, Leo Huberinan explains the nature of the conflict: "The whole atmosphere of feudalism was one of confinement, whereas the whole atmosphere of merchant activity in the town was one of freedom. Town land belonged to feudal lords, bishops, nobles, kings. These feudal lords at first looked upon their town land in no different light from that in which they looked on the other land É All these forms (feudal dues, taxes, services) were feudal, based on the ownership of the soil. And all these forms had changed as far the towns were concerned. Feudal regulations and feudal justice were fixed by custom and difficult to alter. But trade by its very nature is active, changing, and impatient of barriers. It could not fit into the rigid feudal frame."
Therefore old relationships had to be challenged and changed. The towns began to demand their freedom and independence, and gradually town charters were conceded, some by agreement, others by force.
Trade itself gave rise to new forms of wealth. No longer was land the sole source of power and privilege, as money acquired in trading assumed a much greater importance. In the towns was born the wealthy merchant oligarchy which controlled and regulated the small scale individual production, through the guild system. With the further division of labour, Craft Guilds were established comprising the guild master, apprentices and journeymen. As more and more wealth was created through production the guild masters (employers of labour) came into sharp conflict with their journeymen (workers). By the 15th century, actual journeymen's unions were formed to protect their interests.
The introduction of the money economy (which had only a very limited character in slave society) slowly undermined the basis of the feudal system. Its laws and customs were modified to correspond with the new development. As serfs ran away to the towns to make their fortunes, money values began to transcend the old relationships, Labour dues being replaced by rented property. The impact of the Black Death, in the mid-14th century, greatly accelerated the process. Historians have estimated between 30 and 50 per cent of the population of England, Germany, the Low Countries, and France were wiped out by the Great Plague. This in turn resulted in the chronic shortage of labour, which forced many landowners to introduce wage labour to overcome their difficulties.
The rise of the absolute monarch
The nation-state as we know it today did not always exist. Peoples' allegiances at this time belonged not to the nation but to the lord, the town, the locality, or the guild. People considered themselves not French, English, etc., but people of a town or city. Every Christian was a member of the Roman Catholic Church, which in turn ruled over Christendom, and thus was the greatest power of all.
With the growth of wealth in the towns, a capitalist class began to arise which demanded conditions suitable for the unhindered development of trade and commerce. They wanted order and security. The struggle for independence of the towns from their feudal overlords, the continuous battles between local barons, the pillaging that followed, all gave rise to the need for a central authority, a nation state.
The conflict between the central monarch and the great barons (a struggle between two sections of the ruling class) ended with a victory for the king. He was supported by the merchants and middle class, who provided the money to raise the armies he required. The emergence of the nation state together with the centralised monarchy ushered in a great economic advance. For their support, the monarch granted certain monopolies and privileges to sections of the middle class and the next stage was set for the clash between the national monarch and the interests of the international church.
The late 15th century saw the beginning of the voyages of discovery. Men such as Columbus and Vasco Da Gama were financed by rich merchants to seek new areas of exploitation and "spread the Word of God". Joint stock companies were established to promote the financing of greater exploitation, for plunder and profit.
With the massive profits from the voyages, many merchants and financiers became the real centres of power and wealth. Nobles, aristocrats and monarchs became debtors to the rich merchants. One banking family, the Fuggors, were even able to decide who was to be made Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire!
The new economic developments were giving rise to a capitalist formation. The basis of the feudal economy had begun to disintegrate with the growth in power and wealth of the rising bourgeoisie. New values, ideas, philosophies, and morals evolved out of the new relationships. The old ruling class stubbornly resisted the changes.
As Marx explained: "At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relation of production or--this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms--with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution". Later on, Marx adds: "No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society."
The old society has been undermined during the previous period. Probably one of the greatest challenges to the old order was the attack on Catholicism. In this period, the Church was not just a religious institution but the chief bulwark of the social order. Apart from being a powerful landowner, it collected a tithe from everyone, had its courts and special privileges, controlled education and shaped the political and moral outlook of the people. As Charles I once said: "People are governed by the pulpit more than the sword in times of peace." The Church censored books, and used the threat of excommunication against dissenters. It is said that this was a very religious period but this is wildly exaggerated by historians. Rather than people actually living according to the precepts of the Bible, religion was rather used to justify the Old Order. Everything, including political thought, was expressed in religious terms. Those who wished to undermine the system, had to first challenge the monopoly of Catholicism.
In the early 16th century, the absolute monarchies came into conflict with the Catholic Church themselves. The Protestant Reformation ushered in by Luther, supplied the weapons in the struggle against Papal power. In England, Henry VIII broke with Catholicism and raided the wealth of the monasteries, which was dissipated in expensive European and Irish wars.
The capitalist revolution
The Puritanism of the Calvin variety suited the outlook and morality of the rising middle class in town and country with its emphasis on self-reliance and personal success. The middle class was now set to rise quickly after adapting to the inflation rampant between 1540-1640, in which prices rose by more than fourfold and came increasingly into conflict with the old ruling class.
In England, the struggle between the new bourgeoisie and the old order took the form of the civil war. The New Model Army of Oliver Cromwell led the middle class into the armed struggle against the King and Old Order. In 1649, the King was beheaded and a capitalist republic declared. Cromwell, resting for support on the army, established himself as the head of a Bonapartist military dictatorship. The elements of left-wing democracy and its proponents (the levellers and diggers), who threatened capitalist property rights, had to be mercilessly quashed. From then on the regime rested on a narrow social basis--the armed forces. The capitalist regime under these critical crises circumstances reduced itself in the Bonapartist fashion to the rule of one man.
The feudal structures were dismantled together with the House of Lords and monarchy. The old ruling class had been defeated, and the lower classes kept in their place. The struggle of the Parliamentarians against the King has been seen by historians and even by some contemporaries as a struggle against tyranny and for religious liberty but as Marx commented: "Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradiction of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production".
Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution, once noted: "Revolutions have always in history been followed by counter-revolutions. Counter-revolutions have always thrown society back, but never as far back as the starting point of the revolution". So it was in 1660 and 1689, where the big bourgeoisie hurriedly made a compromise with the "bourgeois" elements of the aristocracy. The monarchy and House of Lords were restored although from then on they could never play the same role as their predecessors, on the contrary, they became part and parcel of the capitalist state. The bourgeois men of property concerned themselves with their future, and of keeping the lower orders in their place with their power carefully checked.
One hundred years later, the French Capitalist revolution was carried through to completion without any compromise being struck. The French Revolution, like its English counter-part, began with a split in the ruling class. The King and his ministers clashed over a scheme to avoid state bankruptcy, with the Parliament (which represented the nobility, higher clergy, the court clique, etc.). The latter's appeal against the government tyranny took on unforeseen flesh and rioting broke out in the streets of the towns and cities. It brought to a head all the simmering discontent of the middle class and lower orders against the regime. "The revolt of the nobility was," explains George Rude, "perhaps, a curtain-raiser rather than a revolution which, by associating the middle and lower classes in common action against King and aristocracy, was unique in contemporary Europe." Despite the attempts at reform from above, they were insufficient to prevent revolution from below.
As in all popular revolutions the masses burst onto the scene of history. The most self-sacrificing came to the fore, and pushed the revolution far to the left. Between 1789 and 1793 the old feudal regime and aristocracy had been completely swept away. The regime was headed by the revolutionary middle class, the Jacobins, who were supported and pushed by the plebeian masses made up of wage-earners and small craftsmen. A shift to the right occurred in 1794 with the government of the Directory coming to power. This in its turn gave way to a new political counter-revolution, which brought to power the law and order type regime of Napoleon Bonaparte. Nevertheless, the old order had been broken, and the new bourgeois property rights were to remain intact. The shift of political power was not accompanied by a social change backwards, i.e., it did not bring a return to the feudal order but was a political change brought about through the struggles of different sections of the capitalist class itself.
The triumph of capitalism
The great Bourgeois revolutions cleared the path for Capitalism. The agrarian changes ensured the growth of capitalist agriculture, where the old feudal estates had been broken up and distributed to the peasants. In England, the conversion of a section of the aristocracy before the revolution prepared the way for the ruination of the peasantry itself. Governments now, instead of acting as a brake on trade and industry, actually championed its cause.
Through robbery, enclosure and plunder and competition, the means of production became concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. The ruination of the peasantry provided a pool of labour-power in the towns and cities. The class structure became more simplified. On the one hand were the capitalists and on the other the propertyless proletarians. All that these workers possessed was their ability to work. The only way they could remain alive was to sell their labour-power to the capitalists in return for wages. In the process of production, the proletarian produces more value than he receives in wages, the surplus value being expropriated by the capitalists. In its search for profit, amidst competition from rivals, the capitalist class is forced to introduce new methods of production, in this way Capitalism has, historically, played a progressive role continually revolutionising the productive forces.
Its export of commodities and then Capital leads the capitalist class to create "a world after its own image". The productive forces, technique and science gradually outgrew the nation state which protected it.
Imperialism
The period from 1870 to 1900 saw the division of the world amongst the main powers. In 1870 one-tenth of Africa had been divided up; by 1900 some nine-tenths of the "Dark Continent" were in the hands of Britain, France or one of the other European Empires. By 1914 this process of world division had been completed, and capitalism entered its highest stage of Imperialism. Huge trusts and monopolies had grown out of the earlier period of competition. "The state had more and more fused with the monopolies and financial institutions and acted increasingly in their interest. Production in this epoch is accompanied by the export of capital itself." (Lenin)
The imperialist stage brings with it the threat of world war, in the struggle for new markets, etc. Due to the carving up of the world and the tremendous growth in production, markets can now only be obtained by a new re-division of the world which inevitably leads to conflict on a world scale. World war indicates the contradictions between the private ownership of the means of production on the one hand and the nation state on the other. But unlike previous societies Capitalism has furnished the material pre-requisites for the new socialist order that can guarantee plenty for all.
The proletariat is the only consistent revolutionary class capable of carrying through to a conclusion the Socialist Revolution. This stems from its particular place in social production. The working class is disciplined in the factories and forced to co-operate in the productive process. It organises itself into large trade unions and then into its own independent party. Marxism, as opposed to all other theories, provides it with a clear ideology and tasks in its mission to overthrow Capitalism. The Bolshevik Party, led by Lenin and Trotsky, provided a living model to the workers of the world.
The peasantry and the middle classes are incapable of playing a leading role, due to their social position. The peasantry is scattered in the countryside, and have no real conception of unity or internationalism. These middle layers of society follow either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.
The peasantry have been in fact, the classical tool of Bonapartism--a regime based on the armed forces, balancing between the classes. In the epoch of imperialism and the decay of monopoly capitalism, if the working class fails to win the middle layers to its Socialist banner, they will be driven into the arms of reaction.
The law of uneven and combined development
From a progressive social system, Capitalism has now become a fetter upon production and the further development of humanity. Marx believed that the proletariat would come to power first in the advanced capitalist countries of Britain, Germany, and France. However, with the emergence of Imperialism, Capitalism, in the words of Lenin, "broke at its weakest link" in backward Russia.
Society does not develop in a straight line, but according to its laws of uneven and combined development. The uneven growth of society on the world scale is constantly cut across by the introduction of new products and ideas from different social systems. The backwardness of semi-feudal Russia was supplemented by the most modern techniques of production in its cities, due to the enormous amount of foreign capital from France and Britain. The new industrial proletariat which had recently come into being accepted the most advanced ideas of the working class: Marxism.
In many of the under-developed countries the festering sores of much needed land reform, autocracy, national oppression, and economic stagnation, have resulted in enormous discontent. The tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution, which would have laid the basis for capitalist development, have either only been partially carried out or not at all.
In these countries the Capitalist class has come on the scene too late to play a similar role as its revolutionary counter-part of the 17th and 18th century. As in Russia before 1917, they are too weak and tied by a thousand strings--through marriage and mortgage--to the land owners and imperialists. They both now acquire a common hatred of the emerging proletariat. The nationalist capitalist class prefers to cling to the old order rather than appeal to the lower classes to carry through the anti-feudal revolution.
The only class capable of carrying out the revolution is the proletariat by uniting around itself the poorer sections of the peasantry. Once the working class comes to power as in October 1917, it is then able to give the land to the peasants, expel the imperialists and unify the country. However, the proletariat would not stop at these measures but would then proceed to the socialist tasks: nationalisation of the basic industries, land, and financial institutions.
The Russian Revolution was the greatest event in the whole of human history. For the first time the working class took power, swept out the Capitalists, landlords and gangsters and organised a "democratic workers' state". It was to be the beginning of the international socialist revolution and fully confirmed the theory of Permanent Revolution.
Unfortunately, the betrayal of the socialist revolution in Germany, and other countries, led to the isolation of the revolution in a backward, devastated country. The destruction of the War, mass illiteracy, civil war, exhaustion, placed terrible strains upon the weak working class, and contributed to the degeneration of the revolution. It was these objective conditions which encouraged the growth of bureaucratism in the state, trade unions and the Party. Stalin rose to power on the back of this new bureaucratic caste. The individual in history represents not himself, but the interests of a group, caste or class in society.
Stalinism and its monstrous dictatorship grew not from the Bolshevik Party or socialist revolution, but out of the isolation and material backwardness of Russia. It destroyed the workers' democracy in order to preserve its privileges and power.
The Stalinist regime nevertheless rested on the new property forms of nationalised industry and the plan of production. The Soviets (Workers' Councils) and workers democracy were crushed in the Stalinist political counter-revolution. Only by a new political revolution could the Russian working class have restored the workers' democracy which existed under Lenin and Trotsky. This would not mean a return to capitalism, but an end to the privileged bureaucratic elite, as the masses themselves become involved in the running of society and the state.
The socialist transformation
The socialist transformation ushers in a new and higher form of society by breaking the fetters on the development of the productive forces. The obstacle of private property and the nation state are swept away, allowing the socialised property to be planned in the interests of the majority.
The Socialist Revolution cannot be confined to one country, but puts the world revolution on the order of the day. The world economy and the world division of labour created by capitalism demands an international solution. A Socialist United States of Europe would prepare the ground for a World Federation of Socialist States, and the international planning of production. This in turn would provide the basis for the "planned and harmonious production of goods for the satisfaction of human wants".
One of the first tasks of the victorious working class would be the destruction of the old state machine. In all class societies the state came into existence as "an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another". This raises the question, does the working class need a state? The anarchists reply no. But they fail to understand that some form of force is required to keep the old landowners, bankers and capitalists in their place. The proletariat therefore has to construct a new type of state to represent its interests. In a workers' state, the majority are holding a tiny minority of ex-capitalists in check and therefore the massive bureaucratic state of the past is not needed. This "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" or Workers' Democracy, as Trotsky preferred to call it, vastly broadened and extended the highest forms of bourgeois democracy.
Bourgeois democracy was defined by Marx as the workers deciding every five years which section of the ruling class would misrepresent their interests in Parliament. Everyone could say what they liked, provided that the boards of the monopolies could actually decide what was to be done.
The new workers state would extend democracy from the political to the economic sphere with the nationalisation of the major monopolies. New organs of power, such as the Soviets in Russia, based on the armed people, constitute "working bodies, executive and legislative at the same time". Bureaucracy would be replaced by the involvement of the masses in the running of the state and society. In order to prevent the growth of officialdom, the proletariat of Paris in 1871 and of Russia in 1917 introduced the following measures:
(1) Election of all officials, with the right to recall.
(2) No standing army, but an armed people.
(3) No official to receive more than a skilled worker.
(4) Positions in the state to be rotated amongst the people.
With the reduction of the working week, the masses are given the opportunity to involve themselves in the state, and obtain the key to culture, science and art. For as Engels once said, if art, science and government remain the preserve of the minority, they will use and abuse this position in their own interest, as was the case in the Stalinist countries.
The state arose historically with the emergence of class society. Thus, from its very inception, the workers' state begins to wither away, as classes themselves dissolve within society. This is why Engels characterised the proletarian state as a "semi-state".
"Under socialism much of 'primitive' democracy will inevitably be revived, since, for the first time in the history of civilised society, the mass of the people will rise to taking an independent part, not only in voting and elections, but also in the everyday administration of the state. Under Socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing". (Lenin, State and Revolution.)
In this lower stage of Socialism as Marx called it, one sees society, "just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it comes". (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme.) Although the exploitation of man by man has been ended, production has not yet reached a high enough level to completely eradicate inequality or class differences. People still have to follow the principle: "He who does not work shall not eat". The state, despite its transitory character, remains the guardian of inequality.
Socialism, the classless society
Yet with huge strides forward in production, based on the most advanced science and conscious planning, humanity enters the higher realms of real society. Classes and the state will have completely withered away, as society now adopts the slogan "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". The antitheses of town and country, and mental and physical labour disappear with the further revolution in the productive forces. In the words of Lenin, "the narrow horizon of bourgeois law", which compels one to calculate with the heartlessness of a Shylock whether one has not worked half an hour more than somebody else, whether one is getting less pay than somebody else--this narrow horizon will then be left behind. There will then be no need for society, in distributing the products, to regulate the quantity to be received by each; each will take freely according to his needs.
The barbarous nature of class society would have ended once and for all. The prehistory of humankind would have been completed. The productive forces built up over thousands of years of class rule now laid the basis for classless society where the state and division of labour were rendered superfluous. Humanity sets itself the task of conquering nature, and opens up the tremendous wonders of science and technology. In the words of Engels, "the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things".
And Trotsky pointed out that, "Once he has done with the anarchic forces of his own society man will set to work on himself, in the pestle and retort of the chemist. For the first time mankind will regard itself as raw material, or at best as a physical and psychic semi-finished product. Socialism will mean a leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom in this sense also, that the man of today, with all his contradictions and lack of harmony, will open the road for a new and happier race". (Leon Trotsky, In Defence of October.)
INTRODUCTION TO MARXIST ECONOMICS
Introduction
Today, under the impact of the capitalist crisis, many workers have developed a thirst for economics. They are attempting to understand the forces which dominate their lives. This brief introduction to Marxist economics attempts to provide the class conscious worker not with a complete account of economics, but a guide to the basic laws of motion of capitalist society dominating his existence.
The shallowness of capitalist economics is demonstrated by their inability to understand the crisis affecting their system. Its role is to cover up the exploitation of the working class and to "prove" the superiority of capitalist society. Their quack "theories" and "solutions" are incapable of patching up the rotten and diseased nature of capitalism. Only the transformation of society on socialist lines and the introduction of a planned economy can end the nightmare of unemployment, slump and chaos.
The right wing labour leaders have rejected their old god Keynes, to be replaced by "orthodox" economic solutions: cuts, wage restraint and deflation. The left reformists still cling to the capitalist policies of yesterday (reflation, import controls, etc.), which have been recognised as totally ineffective under capitalism.
Only with a Marxist understanding of capitalist society can the conscious worker cut through the lies and distortion of the capitalist economists and combat their influence within the Labour Movement.
Conditions for capitalism
Today, modern production is concentrated in the hands of giant companies. Unilever, ICI, Fords, British Petroleum, are some examples of the firms which dominate our lives. Although it is true that small businesses do exist, they really represent the production of the past and not the present. Modern production is essentially a mass, large-scale business.
At present, 200 top companies together with 35 banks and finance houses control the British economy, and account for 85 per cent of output. This development has come about over the past few hundred years through ruthless competition, crisis and war. At the time when the classical economists predicted free trade in the future, Marx explained the development of monopoly from competition as the weaker firms went to the wall. Monopoly capitalism grew out of and abolished free competition.
At first sight, it looks as if goods and things are produced mainly for people's needs. Obviously every society has to do this. But under capitalism, goods are not merely produced to satisfy someone's want or need, but primarily for sale. That is the paramount function of capitalist industry.
In the famous words of the ex-chairman of British Leyland, Lord Stokes, "I'm in business to make money, not cars!" This is a perfect expression of the aspirations of the entire capitalist class.
The capitalist process of production requires the existence of certain conditions. Firstly, the existence of a large class of propertyless workers who are obliged to sell themselves piece-meal in order to live. Thus the Tory conception of a "property owning democracy" is an absurdity under capitalism, because if the mass of the population owned sufficient property to be self-sufficient, the capitalists would not find the workers to produce their profits. Secondly, the means of production must be concentrated in the hands of the capitalists. Over the centuries, the peasants and those who owned their own means of subsistence were ruthlessly crushed and their means of life appropriated by the capitalists and landlords. They in turn hire the workers to work these means of production and produce surplus value.
Value and commodities
How does capitalism work? How are workers exploited? Where does profit come from? How are slumps caused?
In order to answer these questions, we first need to learn the key to the mystery: what is value? Having solved this problem, the other answers fall into place. An understanding of value is essential, for an understanding of the economics of capitalist society.
To begin with, all the capitalist firms produce goods or services, or more correctly they produce commodities. That is a good or service produced for sale only. Of course, someone may make something for his or her own personal use. Before capitalism existed, many people had to. But this is not a commodity. Capitalist production is above all the creation and "immense accumulation of commodities". That is why Marx himself started his investigation of capitalism with an analysis of the character of the commodity itself.
Every commodity has a use-value for people. That means they are useful to someone otherwise they could not be sold. This use-value is limited to the physical properties of the commodity.
They also contain a value. What is it and how can it be shown?
If we leave the use of money out for the time being, commodities, when they are exchanged, fall into certain proportions.
For example:
1 pair of shoes )
1 watch ) = 10 yards of cloth
3 bottles of whisky )
1 car tyre )
Each of the items on the left can be exchanged for 10 yards of cloth. They also, in the same amounts, can be exchanged with one another.
This simple example shows that the exchange value of these different commodities expresses something contained in them. But what makes a pair of shoes = 10 yards of cloth? Or 1 watch = 3 bottles of whisky? And so onÉ
Well, obviously, there must be something common to all. Clearly it is neither weight, colour, nor hardness. Again, it is not because they are useful. Bread after all is worth less than a Roll Royce, yet one is a necessity and the other luxury. So what is the common quality? The only thing in common is they are all products of human labour.
The amount of human labour contained in a commodity is expressed in time: weeks, days, hours, minutes.
To go back to the example: all these commodities can be expressed in terms of their common factor, labour-time.
5 hours (labour) worth of shoes
5 hours (labour) worth of tyres
5 hours (labour) worth of watches
5 hours (labour) worth of whisky
5 hours (labour) worth of cloth
Average labour
If we look at commodities as use-values (their utility), we see them as a "shoe", "watch", etc., as products of a particular kind of labour É the labour of the cobbler, watchmaker, etc. But in exchange, commodities are looked at differently. The special character is lost sight of and they appear as so many units of average labour. In exchange we are now comparing the amounts of human labour in general contained in the commodities. All labour, in exchange, is reduced to average simple units of labour.
It is true that the commodity produced by skilled labour contains more value than that produced by unskilled. Therefore in exchange, the units of skilled labour are reduced to so many units of unskilled, simple labour. For example, the ratio of 1 skilled unit = 3 unskilled units, or simply skilled labour is worth three times as much as unskilled.
Explained simply, the value of commodity is determined by the amount of average labour used in its production. (Or how long it takes to produce). But left like this, it appears that the lazy worker produces more values than the most efficient worker!
Let us take the example of a shoemaker who decides to use the outdated methods of the Middle Ages to produce shoes. Using this method, it takes him a whole day to make a pair of shoes. When he tries to sell them on the market, he will find that they will only fetch the same as shoes produced by the better equipped more modern factories.
If these factories produce a pair of shoes in, say half an hour, they will contain less labour (and therefore less value) and will be sold cheaper. This will drive the shoemaker using medieval methods out of business. His labour producing a pair of shoes after half an hour is wasted labour, and unnecessary under modern conditions. On pain of extinction he will be forced to introduce modern techniques and produce shoes at least equal to the necessary time developed by society.
At any given time, using the average labour, machines, methods, etc., all commodities take a particular time to make. This is governed by the level of technique in society. In the words of Marx, all commodities must be produced in a socially necessary time. Any more labour-time spent over and above this will be useless labour, causing costs to rise and making the firm uncompetitive.
So to be more precise, the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of socially necessary labour in the article. Naturally, this labour time is continually changing as new techniques and methods of work are introduced. Competition drives the inefficient to the wall.
Thus we can also understand why precious gems have more value than everyday items. More socially necessary labour time is needed to find, and extract the gems, than the production of ordinary commodities. Their value therefore being considerably higher.
Again a thing can be a use value without having any value, i.e. a useful thing that has had no labour time spent on its production: air, rivers, virgin soil, natural meadows, etc. Therefore labour is not the only source of wealth, i.e. use values, but nature too is a source.
From the above we can see that an increase in productivity will increase the amount of things produced (material wealth), but can reduce the value of the things concerned, i.e. the amount of labour in each commodity is less. Increased productivity therefore results in an increase in wealth. With two coats two people can be clothed, with one coat only one person. Nevertheless, the increase in the quantity of material wealth may correspond with a fall in the magnitude of its value.
Money
As a result of the difficulties in exchange by using the methods of barter, more frequently a common article was used as "money". Over the centuries one commodity--gold--became singled out to play this role as the "universal equivalent".
Instead of saying a good is worth so much butter, meat, cloth, etc., it became expressed in terms of gold. The money expression of value is price. Gold was used because of its qualities. It concentrates much value in a small amount, can easily be divided into coins, and is also hard wearing.
As with all commodities, the value of gold itself is determined by the amount of labour-time spent on its production. For example, say it takes 40 hours labour to produce one ounce of gold. Then all the other goods that take the same time to produce are equal to that ounce of gold. Those that take half the time equal half the amount, etc.
One ounce of gold = 40 hours labour
1/2 ounce of gold = 20 hours labour
1/4 ounce of gold = 10 hours of labour
Therefore:
One car (40 hours labour) = 1 ounce of gold
One table (10 hours labour) = 1/4 ounce of gold
Due to the changes in productive technique and the increase in the productivity of labour, all the values of commodities are continually fluctuating, like so many trains in a station pulling in and out at differing times. If you take any train as a standard which is moving off to gauge the movement of others, it would lead to confusion. Only by standing on the firm platform can you judge accurately what is happening. In relation to the changes of all goods, gold acts as the measure. Although the most stable, even this is in constant motion, as no commodity has a totally fixed value.
Prices of commodities
The law of value governs the price of goods. As explained earlier, the value of commodities is equal to the amount of labour contained in it. In theory, the value is equal to its price. Yet, in reality, the price of a commodity tends to be either above or below its real value. This fluctuation is caused by different influences on market price, such as the growth of monopoly. The differences of supply and demand also have a great effect. For instance, there may be a surplus of a commodity in the market, and the price that day may be far below the real value, or if there was a shortage, the price would rise above it. The effects of supply and demand have led bourgeois economists to believe that this law is the sole factor in determining price. What they were unable to explain was that prices always fluctuate around a definite level. What that level is, is not determined by supply and demand, but by the labour time spent in the articles' production. A lorry will always be more expensive than a plastic bucket.
Profits
Some "clever" people have invented the theory that profits arise from buying cheap and selling dear. In Wage, Labour and Capital, Marx explains the nonsense of this argument:
"What a man would certainly win as a seller he would lose as a purchaser. It would not do to say that there are men who are buyers without being sellers or consumers without being producers. What these people pay to the producers, they must first get from them for nothing. If a man first takes your money and afterwards returns that money in buying your commodities you will never enrich yourself by selling your commodities too dear to that same man. This sort of transaction might diminish a loss, but would help in realising a profit".
Labour power
In obtaining the "factors of production", the capitalist looks on the "labour market" as just another branch of the general market for commodities. The abilities and energies of the worker are seen as just another commodity. He advertises for so many "hands".
What we have to be clear about is what the capitalist has bought. The worker has sold not his labour but his ability to work. This Marx calls his labour power.
Labour power is a commodity governed by the same laws as other commodities. Its value is determined by the labour-time necessary for its production. Labour power is the ability of the worker to work. It is "consumed" by the capitalist in the actual labour-process. But this presupposes the existence and health and strength of the worker. The production of labour power therefore means the worker's self-maintenance and the reproduction of his species, to provide new generations of "hands" for the capitalist.
The labour-time necessary for the worker's maintenance is the labour-time it takes to produce the means of subsistence for him and his family: food, clothing, fuel, etc. The amount of this varies in different countries, different climates, and different historical periods. What is adequate subsistence for a labourer in Calcutta would not be adequate for a Welsh miner. What was adequate for a Welsh miner fifty years ago would not be for a Midlands car worker today. Into this question, unlike the value of other commodities, there enters a historical and even moral element. Nevertheless, in any given country, at any particular stage of historical development, the "standard of living" is known. (Incidentally, it is precisely the creation of new needs which is the spur to all kinds of human progress).
Not cheated!
Apart from the daily reproduction of his labour power, and the reproduction of the species, at a certain stage in the development of capitalist technique, a certain amount has to be provided for the education of the workers in order to fit them for the conditions of modern industry and raise their productivity.
Unlike most commodities, labour power is paid for only after it has been consumed. The workers thus philanthropically extend credit to their employers! (weeks in hand, petty cheating and bankruptcy, leading to loss of wages).
Despite this, the worker has not been cheated. He has arrived at an agreement of his own free will. As with all other commodities, equivalent values are exchanged: the worker's commodity, labour power, is sold to the boss at the "going rate". Everybody is satisfied. And if the worker is not, then he is free to leave and find work elsewhere É if he canÉ
The sale of labour power poses a problem. If "nobody is cheated", if the worker receives the full value of his commodity, where does exploitation come from? Where does the capitalist make his profits? The answer is that the worker sells the capitalist not his labour (which is realised in the work process), but his labour power--his ability to work.
Having purchased this as a commodity, the capitalist is free to use it as he pleases. As Marx explained: "From the instant he steps into the work shop, the use-value of his labour power, and therefore also its use, which is labour, belongs to the capitalist".
Surplus value
We will see from the following example that the capitalist purchases labour power because it is the only commodity which can produce new values above and beyond its own value.
Let us take a worker who is employed to spin cotton into yarn. He gets paid £1 per hour and works an 8 hour day.
After 4 hours he had produced 100lbs of yarn at a total vale of £20. This value of £20 is made up from the following:
Raw materials £11 (cotton, spindle, power)
Depreciation £1 (wear and tear)
New value £8
The new value created is sufficient to pay the workers' wages for the full 8 hours. At this point the capitalist has covered all his costs (including his total wage bill). But as yet no surplus value (profit) has been produced.
During the next 4 hours another 100lbs of yarn is produced valued again at £20. And again £8 of new value is created, but this time the wages have already been covered. Therefore this new value (£8) is surplus value. From this comes rent (to the landlord), interest (to the moneylender) and profit (to the industrialist). Thus surplus value or profit, in the words of Marx, is the unpaid labour of the working class.
The working day
The secret of the production of surplus value is that the worker continues to work longer after he has produced the value necessary to reproduce the value of his labour power (his wages). "The fact that half a day's labour is necessary to keep the labourer alive does not in any way prevent him from working a full day." (Marx).
The worker has sold his commodity and cannot complain about the way he is used, any more than the tailor can sell a suit and then demand that his customer must not wear it as often as he likes. The working day is therefore so organised as to give the maximum benefits from the labour power he has bought. In this lay the secret of the transformation of money into capital.
Constant capital
In production itself, machines and raw materials lose their use value, they become burnt up and become absorbed into the new product. They transfer their value into the new commodity.
This is clear in relation to raw materials (wood, metal, dyes, fuel, etc.) which are wholly consumed in the process of production, only to reappear in the properties of the article produced.
Machines on the other hand, do not disappear in the same way. But they do deteriorate in the course of production, thus dying a protracted death. The exact moment when a machine is finally declared redundant is no more possible to fix with exactitude than the exact moment of a person's death. But just as the insurance company, on the basis of the theory of averages, makes very accurate (and profitable) calculations concerning the life-span of men and women, so the capitalist know by experience and calculation roughly how long a machine will last.
The depreciation of machinery, its daily loss of use value, is calculated on this basis and added on to the cost of the article produced. Thus, the means of production add to the commodity their own value in proportion as the deterioration of its use value unfolds. The means of production, therefore, cannot transfer to the commodity more than that value which they themselves lose in the process of production. It is thus called constant capital.
Variable capital
While the means of production add no new value to the commodities produced, but only deteriorate, the labour of the worker not only preserves, but adds new value to his product by merely working. If the process of work were to stop at that moment when the worker had produced articles to the value of his own labour power, e.g. in 4 hours (£8) this is the only bit of new value created.
But the work process does not stop there. This would only cover the expenses of the capitalist in hiring the workmen. The capitalist does not hire workers for charity but for profit. Having "freely" entered into a contract with the capitalist, the worker must labour on, producing extra value and beyond that sum agreed on as his wage.
The means of production on the one hand, and labour power on the other--the "factors of production" of bourgeois economics--represent the different forms assumed by the original capital in the second phase of the cycle:
MONEY COMMODITY MONEY
(purchase) (production) (sale)
Capitalist economists treat these factors as equal. Marxism distinguishes between that part of capital which does not undergo any change of value in the process of production (machines, tools, raw materials) and that part represented by labour power which creates new value. The first part of capital called constant capital, and the latter variable capital. The total value of a commodity is made up from constant capital, variable capital and surplus value, i.e. C + V + S.
Necessary and surplus labour
The labour performed by the working class can be divided up into two parts:
(1) Necessary Labour: This is the part of the labour process which is needed to cover the cost of wages.
(2) Surplus Labour: This is the extra labour performed in addition to labour, which produces the profits.
To increase his profits, the capitalist is constantly attempting to reduce his wages bill. He does this by attempting to (1) lengthen the working day, introduce new shift patterns, etc., (2) increase productivity to cover wages more quickly, (3) resist wage rises or attempt to cut them.
Rate of surplus value
Since the whole purpose of capitalist production is to extract surplus value from the labour of the working class, the proportion between variable capital (wages) and the surplus value (profits) is of the greatest importance. One is expanding or contracting at the expense of the other. This struggle over the surplus constitutes the class struggle. What concerns the capitalist is not so much the amount of surplus value produced but the rate of surplus value. For every pound he lays out in capital he expects a big return. The rate of surplus value is the rate of exploitation of labour by capital. It may be defined as V/S or necessary labour/surplus labour, (it is the same thing expressed in a different way), where V = Variable capital, S = Surplus value. For example in a small plant, total capital of £500 is divided between Constant (£410) and Variable (£90). Through the process of production the value of the commodities have increased by £90 surplus: (C+V) + S or (410 + £90) + £90 surplus. The total new value is £590.
It is the variable capital that is the living labour, i.e. it produces the new value of surplus value. So the relative increase in the value produced by variable capital gives us the rate of surplus value V/S = £90/£90 =100% rate of surplus value.
The rate of profit
Under the pressure of competition at home and abroad, the capitalist is compelled to constantly revolutionise the means of production and to increase productivity. The need to expand compels him to spend a larger and larger proportion of his capital on machinery and raw materials and less on labour power, thus diminishing the proportion of variable capital to constant capital. Side by side with automation goes the concentration of capital, the liquidation of the smaller concerns and the domination of the economy by giant monopolies. This constitutes a change in the technical composition of capital.
But since it is the variable capital (labour power) alone which is the source of surplus value (profit), the bigger amounts invested in constant capital results in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, although with new investments profits can increase enormously they do not rise proportionately to the much greater capital outlay.
For example, take a small capitalist with a total capital of £150 made up of Constant Capital (£50) and Variable (£100). He employs 10 men at £10 per day making tables and chairs. After one day work they produce £250 in total value:
Total Capital : The wages paid = £100
The constant capital = £50
Surplus value = £100
The rate of surplus value can be calculated: V/S =£100/£100 = 100%. The rate of profit is calculated as the ratio between total capital and surplus value: Surplus Value/Total capital or £100/£150 = 66.66 % rate of profit. As the amount of constant capital is increased, so the rate of profit falls. In the same example given the same rate of surplus value we increase the constant capital from £50 to £100. The rate of profit = Surplus value/Total capital = £100/£200 = 50%. Again if we increase the constant capital to £200, all other things being equal, Surplus Value/Total Capital = £100/£300 = 33.33 % rate of profit. And lastly constant capital is increased to £300, the rate of profit would be £100/£400 = 25%.
This increase in constant capital expresses in Marxist terms a higher organic composition of capital, and is a progressive development of the productive forces. The tendency is therefore built into the very nature of the capitalist mode of production, and has been one of the major problems facing the capitalist class in the post-war period. The mass of surplus value increases, but in proportion to the increased size of constant capital it results in a falling rate of profit. The capitalists have continually attempted to overcome this contradiction by the increased exploitation of the working class, to increase the mass of surplus value and therefore the rate of profit, by means other than investment. They do this in a number of ways by raising the intensity of exploitation, increasing the speed of the machinery and the lengthening of the working day. Another method to restore the rate of profit is to cut the real wages of the workers below their real value. The very laws of capitalism gives rise to enormous contradictions. The capitalists' constant striving for profits gives the impetus for investment, but new technology forces more workers on the scrap heap. Yet paradoxically the only source of profit is from the labour of the working class.
Export of capital
The highest stage of capitalism--imperialism--is marked by the enormous export of capital. In their search for increased rates of profit, the capitalists are forced to invest huge sums of money abroad in countries of low composition of capital. Eventually, the whole world, as Marx and Engels explain in the Communist Manifesto becomes dominated by the capitalist mode of production.
One of the major contradictions of capitalism is the obvious problem that the working class as consumers have to buy back what they have produced. But as they do not receive the full value of their labour, they have not the resources to do this. The capitalists solve this contradiction by taking the surplus and reinvesting it in developing the productive further. Also they seek to sell the remaining surplus on the world market in competition with the capitalists of all the other different countries. But there are also limits to this as all the capitalists of the world are playing the same game. In addition, the capitalists resort to credit, via the banking system, to provide the necessary cash for the mass of the population to buy the goods. But this also has its limits as the credit eventually has to be paid back, with interest.
That explains why periodically, the booms are followed in regular succession by periods of slump. The feverish struggle for markets end up in a crisis of overproduction for capitalism. The destructiveness of the crisis, which are met with the wholesale writing-off of accumulated capital, are a sufficient indication of the impasse of capitalist society.
All the factors that led to the world upswing after the war have prepared the way for downswing and crisis. The characteristic of this new epoch is the organic crisis that capitalism now faces. At some stage the working class will be faced with a 1929-type slump if capitalism is not eradicated. Only by overthrowing the anarchy of capitalist production can humanity prevent the chaos, wastage and barbarism of capitalism. Only by eliminating private property of the means of production, can society escape the laws of motion of capitalism and develop and blossom in a planned and rational way. The mighty forces of production, built by class society, can abolish once and for all the criminal scandal of so-called overproduction in a world of want and starvation. Eradicating the contradiction of the development of the productive forces and the nation state and private ownership, will provide the basis for an international plan of production.
Using the powers of science and technology, the whole of the planet could be transformed in the space of a decade. The socialist transformation of society remains the most urgent and burning task facing the world's working class. Marxism provides the weapon and understanding to weld together this mighty army for the establishment of a socialist Britain, a socialist Europe, and the basis for the World Federation of Socialist States.
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