By Caleb T. Maupin
Published Jun 5, 2011 9:19 AM
To more and more people in the world, it is abundantly clear that the capitalist system doesn’t work. At least not for the majority. The system that generates war after war, that allows millions in the U.S. to be unemployed, millions more to go without health care, while fomenting racism, sexism, and anti-lesbian/gay/bi/trans/queer bigotry, and offering no future to the next generation is a disaster for the workers and oppressed people inside the U.S. and worse yet for the rest of the world.
In this time of crisis, as capitalism shows its true face, many are thinking and talking about the alternative system — socialism.
It is important to point out that there are many political parties around the world, especially outside the United States, whose name is “Socialist Party,” although they may have no relationship at all to socialism as defined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels or as developed in the Soviet Union starting in 1917 or in the People’s Republic of China or in Cuba.
The rightist sections of the media have made a big deal out of the fact that Dominque Strauss-Kahn is part of the political party in France called the “Socialist Party” (PS) since its founding in 1969. DSK, as he is known, is facing charges in New York that he raped a housekeeper in a luxury hotel where he was staying. He was, until his recent resignation, the head of the capitalist International Monetary Fund — which brutalizes the working class, indeed entire countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America and now even those in Europe.
DSK is not a socialist, but a quintessential capitalist, who possessed personal wealth, the power that comes from being the director of a major imperialist financial institution, and the possibility of being elected president of France on the PS ticket. The PS’s only connection to real socialism is historical, as it stemmed from parties that were members of the part of the socialist movement known as social democracy.
These social democratic parties — the PS in France, the Social Democratic Party in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Labor Party in Britain, for example — sometimes ran administrations governing these countries after 1945. Sometimes they even delivered social benefits to the European workers. But they ran these administrations on behalf of the capitalist system and the capitalist rulers, never challenging their source of power.
Today these parties don’t even pretend to advocate socialism. They are little more than an alternative to center-right governments, much as the Democratic Party in the U.S. is an alternative to the Republican Party. Thus the governments of Portugal, Spain and Greece, although socialist in name, are all imposing austerity programs on the workers of their respective countries.
Example of social democracy Labor government
There are historical examples of social democratic parties in office offering concessions to the working class, but these too are not real socialism. For example, in 1945 after World War II, much of Britain had been destroyed by Nazi bombs. In order to rebuild the economy, the Labor Party government took control of important sections of the economy.
Soon the Labor government administered mining, trains, electricity, radio, television and numerous other important parts of the British economy. But the government that took control of these economic institutions and directed them had bought them from their capitalist owners. It compensated the owners, even though many of these firms were not producing profits.
A national health care service was created, but it was always subject to cuts and underfunding. Numerous protests and strikes were held by the workers in order to keep government-owned hospitals open and well funded.
Then in the 1980s an openly right-wing government reversed many of the “nationalizations.” The Margaret Thatcher administration sold the various industries rebuilt with workers’ tax money to private corporations — and sold them cheap. The wealth of the billionaire class had never lost power, and it was happy to buy back the now profitable industries from a government they, not the public, controlled all along.
Regarding foreign policy, Labor governments in 1950 joined the U.S. war against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, in 1999 in the bombing of Yugoslavia, in 2001 the invasion of Afghanistan and in 2003 the invasion of Iraq. The social democratic parties in France, Italy, Germany, Spain and other imperialist countries have also participated in imperialist wars. They are “socialist” in name alone.
Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Showing posts with label Karl Marx. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karl Marx. Show all posts
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Egyptian Communist Party: Continue the Revolution, Protect It From Conspiracies
From: Egytian Communist Party - Google Translation
From this rather poor translation via google, what I gather is a strong rejection of calls simply to amend the 1971. The Communist Party is rather calling for a new constitution. Secondly, they are stressing that the sectarian, religious based violence going on is possibly linked with the remnants of the Mubbarack regime and could be used as a pretext for counter-revolution.
The Communist Party of Egypt was re-founded in 1975, and from what I can gather, seems to be ideologically in line with the Communist Party of Greece, promoting Anti-Revisionism. From what I can gather, the only other party in Egypt currently advocating worker's power is the "Revolutionary Socialists", an organization linked with the International Socialist Tenency of "neo-Trotskyists" such as the British SWP and the US ISO.
However, many groups promoting "Arab Socialism" or "Islamic Socialism" are present in Egypt, preaching politics similar to the former Nationalist Pro-Soviet Egyptian President Abdul Nasser or Mummar Gaddafi in Libya.
- Caleb T. Maupin
At a critical moment passes in which the country bridge the transition from dictatorship and corruption to the state of democracy and the rule of law and social justice; and after the triumph of the revolution and its success in achieving some of its demands and continuity in this critical transitional phase of drafting a new constitution and to provide freedoms and the elimination of remnants of the institutions of the former regime.
We view the counter-revolution by spreading chaos and intimidate citizens and lawlessness
And the use of the ugliest and most dangerous weapons fanning the flames of sectarianism, which reflected in the crime of burning and destruction of the Church of Saints in the village of access Batfaih and the subsequent violence and bullying has killed a large number of dead and wounded was meant to stoke the fires of sedition in the country and abortion revolution, the Egyptian people, and this counter-revolution led by elements of state security and the remnants of the National Party and businessmen of the stakeholders in the return of the old system and who use bullying and some of the forces disguised religion who Qdo their lives in dealing with the state security service and those who Kano until recently denied exit to the Governor and even disbelieve who takes him or pretend to him as According to the fatwa against one of their leaders and national youth demonstrations, which stood against Mubarak, such as the Revolution also use some of the elements of those falsely claiming the defense of Egyptian Christians and were satisfied with their cases on the trading screen satellite TV.
It is known that whoever is behind all this are the counter-revolutionary forces and their allies of the reactionary regimes and third parties hostile to the revolution, the Egyptian people.
There is no doubt also that the viability of state institutions to use the same old ways of Tboois beards and customary meetings have proved unsuccessful in practice in the treatment of these serious issues.
We stress that the face of this sedition and inciting them not only at activating the principle of citizenship and non-discrimination and rule of law and trial deterrent to the perpetrators and instigators of and change the general climate in the areas of education, culture and information and the need for religious institutions and political forces and civil society organizations in turn spread the values of religious tolerance and freedom of thought, conscience and equality, rationality and scientific thinking. On the other hand, we warn against the misuse of the weapon sit, especially in the field of liberalization - the symbol of the revolution - the weapon which was the most important and spent Enas success and continuation of the revolution 25; so we reject the use of this weapon of some groups are individually, allowing the forces of counter-revolution in the revolution and tarnish the image of millions of peaceful demonstrations and Atsamtha heroic managed to impress and respect for the peoples of the world.
The insistence on the continuation of the sit-chaotic despite an agreement by all the forces and communities revolt against the suspension has led to the exploitation of other conspirators against the revolution in the provocation of Egyptian citizens and seek to involve the armed forces to use violence against citizens, we call upon all political forces and popular gatherings and youth need to respect Tools and means of revolution and use the form, which helps to ensure their success in achieving its objectives. I have met all the bats of darkness to form a single row of counter-revolution, which works on the demolition of the Egyptian revolution great and ignite the fire of sedition between the sons of one nation and bring us back to back and try to re-impose dictatorship and the corruption of the National Democratic Party of Egypt through the ignition chaos in order to keep the masses of the Egyptian people to discuss urgent issues of the revolution, especially the need to develop a new constitution and reject any amendments to the Constitution of 71, which was dropped by the revolution.
Continuation of the revolution start now requires a constitutional declaration for a transitional period and the formation of a presidential council of civilian and military (or the election of a civilian president for a transitional period selected)
And the election of Constituent Assembly representing the Egyptian people, all walks of life and trends in the political development of a new constitution and amend laws to ensure that the freedom to form parties and trade unions, associations, and the law on political rights and to hold parliamentary elections on the basis of existing comparative non-conditional with the need to define a clear timetable for this transition period ranging from one year to year and a half ago.
The home in a delicate stage you need to awareness and action, organized to educate the masses and to mobilize and organize new forms of democracy behind the demands of the revolution.
We therefore call upon all honest nation and people to uphold the demands of the revolution was great, and we call on the masses of the Egyptian people to participate in the march millions tomorrow Fri Constitution and national unity to thwart the conspiracies of the counter-revolution and the emphasis on the vitality and the continuing revolution of the Egyptian people to achieve the most important demands for a new constitution to achieve democracy and social justice.
Long live the revolution of January 25! Long Live Egyptian people's struggle for freedom and justice and human dignity!
March 10, 2011 the Egyptian Communist Party
Friday, January 21, 2011
Hungry and Jobless, Tunisian Masses Rebel
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
Published Jan 19, 2011 5:09 PM
Jan. 18 — A popular uprising in the North African state of Tunisia since mid-December has driven President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled the Western-allied government for 23 years, into exile. Ben Ali fled on Jan. 14 after tens of thousands of workers and youths attacked the Ministry of the Interior and other government buildings in the capital of Tunis and in the city of Carthage.
When a street vendor who was attacked by police committed suicide by self-immolation on Dec. 17, it unleashed this enormous struggle. Defying tear gas and even live fire from the security forces that killed between 50 and 100 people, thousands also demonstrated in dozens of Tunisia’s provincial cities until they brought down a repressive head of state.
The courage of the Tunisian people and their success in the first step of a continuing struggle has aroused solidarity and hope worldwide. It has sparked protest in neighboring countries like Algeria and Egypt, where high prices and unemployment have hit hard. It has also aroused interest in Europe, where a year of strikes and protests has not yet stopped “austerity” programs aimed at depriving the working class of its rights.
Initially Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi was appointed to succeed Ben Ali. By the next day, however, on Jan. 15, the speaker of the Parliament replaced the former head of state of this country of 10.4 million people. That same day the army seized the airport near Tunis and then moved into the capital in an attempt to restore state control of the streets.
Militias suspected of being tied to Ben Ali have opened fire on the population and have clashed with the regular army, according to some reports. Popular and neighborhood groups have formed self-defense forces to protect their communities.
New government shaky
Because Ben Ali’s ruling Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD) political party was still represented in the new leadership, it immediately drew criticism and protest from the masses. This new group announced on Jan. 16 that it would form a government of national unity to bring in representatives of opposition parties, professional groups and trade union officials.
The RCD officials invited moderate opposition parties into the coalition government. These are the Democratic Progressive Party and the Democratic Forum for Labor and Freedoms. Al-Jazeera journalist Ayman Mohyeldin reported Jan. 16, “We know the incoming national unity government will have three members of the opposition. It will include some technocrats, independents, and economists and some figures from Tunisian labor and trade unions. Some of those have still to be determined.”
As of Jan. 18, the political parties banned by the Ben Ali regime — those who were strongest in opposition — were excluded from the proposed government of national unity.
These parties include the Hizr ut-Tahrir, a Pan-Islamic organization formed in 1953 in Palestine that has affiliates throughout the region; another Islamic party, the Hizb al-Nahda or Renaissance Party, which has some electoral support inside the country; and a left organization, the Tunisian Workers’ Communist Party (PCOT), which grew out of the student movement and was formed in 1986.
In an interview with Al Jazeera on Jan. 17, PCOT leader Hamma Hammami, who had been freed from prison Jan. 14 during the mass uprising, said, “This is a national government which has nothing national about it. It’s intended to conserve the old regime in power with all of its authoritarian institutions in place. This is why people are taking to the street with a new slogan ‘we don’t want the RCD’.”
The General Labor Union of Tunisia (UGTT) has been repressed over the last two decades by the ruling RCD party. However, over the last three years there has been independent trade union activity, particularly in the Gafsa mining basin, where industrial actions have taken place since 2008.
By Jan. 18, three leaders of the UGTT opposition parties who had accepted cabinet posts resigned. Two cabinet members who were RCD leaders resigned from that party. The situation was still fluid.
Military and security forces split
Since the rebellion began throughout Tunisia, there seems to have been a split between leaders within the security forces presumed to be more loyal to ousted president Ben Ali and the military, headed by Gen. Rachid Ammar. The head of the security forces, Ali Seriati, was reportedly arrested on Jan. 15 while trying to flee over the border with Libya.
There were claims the following day of gun battles outside the presidential palace in Carthage between elements still loyal to Ben Ali, on one side, and the regular military on the other. Interior Minister Rafik Belhaj, who had been relieved of his duties by Ben Ali earlier in the week in an effort to calm protests, was also reported to have been detained.
With rising tensions between the military and the security forces, people are arming themselves for protection against state violence. Al-Jazeera correspondent James Bay reported, “In between the roadblocks, we were coming across large groups of people who had their own home-made weapons, axes and steel bars.”
Whither Tunisia and North Africa?
Protesters said all Jan. 17 that they wanted more than just Ben Ali’s departure. The demands of the youth and workers have been centered on the need for full employment and the control of inflation stemming from the impact of the global economic crisis. Ayesha Sabavala, deputy editor of the Economist Intelligence Unit based in London, told Al-Jazeera, “If the interim government doesn’t quickly implement measures to reduce the level of unemployment and increase standards of living, we are going to see more of these protests.”
Demonstrations on Jan. 14 and 15 focused on the hated Ministry of the Interior and other government buildings. The new interim administration, which is still controlled by the ruling RCD party, will not willingly give up control of the police and army — the state. Nor will leading officials within the political establishment give up their posts unless, like Ben Ali, they see no other alternative when faced with a concerted, organized mass force.
In neighboring Algeria, demonstrations have also been taking place since late December. Four young Algerians tried to burn themselves to death, as did one person in Egypt and one in Mauritania. These developments in North Africa impact U.S. and French imperialism, which have both escalated their military and economic involvement in the region over the last several years.
The outcome of these developments in Tunisia and throughout the region will depend upon the degree of organization and political determination of the workers and youth. Will the Tunisian masses rejuvenate a national democratic revolution inside the country that will be anti-imperialist in its orientation? The anti-colonial and neocolonial histories of both Tunisia and Algeria have encompassed left tendencies that have operated both within the trade union movement and among the youth.
Washington has targeted North Africa in its so-called “war on terrorism.” Revolutionary developments there can lead to new military interventions, and anti-imperialists and anti-war activists here will have to oppose imperialist intervention. The outcome of these developments in the region portends much for the international working-class struggle against the worsening economic crisis throughout the world.
Throughout the past year European workers have held massive demonstrations and general strikes protesting austerity programs connected with the worsening global economic crisis. In Portugal, Italy, France, Spain, Ireland and even Greece, where demonstrations and rebellions have been the most widespread and militant, the actions of the workers and youth have not yet stopped the austerity programs, let alone forced the governments out of office.
The developments in Tunisia over the last month have gone further than any other series of demonstrations and rebellions against the crisis of world capitalism in the countries of Europe. While the situation in North Africa is more extreme, workers and youth in all the capitalist states throughout the world also face high rates of unemployment and rising costs of living.
The potential for the seizure of power by the workers or a coalition of progressive forces with strong and decisive proletarian involvement would prove to be a monumental political development with international implications. Such a demonstration of revolutionary organization and political direction would set a precedent for a general response of the international working class to the current global economic crisis.
Historical lessons
As Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin wrote in a letter to the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in September of 1917, prior to the successful seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, “To be successful, insurrection must rely not upon conspiracy and not upon the party, but upon the advanced class. That is the first point.”
Lenin continues saying that “insurrection must rely upon a revolutionary upsurge of the people. That is the second point. Insurrection must rely upon that turning point in the history of the growing revolution when the activity of the advanced ranks of the people is at its height, and when the vacillations in the ranks of the enemy and in the ranks of the weak, half-hearted and irresolute friends of the revolution are strongest. That is the third point.”
He then notes that “these three conditions for raising the question of insurrection distinguish Marxism from Blanquism [referring to a French revolutionary who focused on insurrection by a small group]. Once these conditions exist, however, to refuse to treat insurrection as an art is a betrayal of Marxism and a betrayal of the revolution.” (Lenin, “Marxism and Insurrection”)
Articles copyright 1995-2011 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Millions of Homeless, Millions of Empty Homes
By Jaimeson Champion
Published Dec 12, 2010 11:37 PM
As the cold winter chill sets in across the U.S., homelessness is at an all-time high.
Over the past few years, millions of people have been forced from their homes by foreclosures and evictions and into overcrowded shelters and transitional housing. The number of homeless families rose by close to 30 percent between 2007 and 2009. (hud.gov)
With layoffs continuing in nearly all industries, tens of millions more families and individuals are living with oppressive anxiety caused by not knowing if they will be able to make next month’s rent or mortgage payment.
Recently, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which includes a multitude of government agencies, ranging from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Department of Defense, unveiled a plan called Opening Doors. It has been billed as the “first ever federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness” and claims to be “centered on the belief that no one should experience homelessness — no one should be without a safe, stable place to call home.”
Nice words. The federal strategic plan to end homelessness is more than 70 pages of charts, graphs and statistics. (usich.gov) But noticeably absent from all the analysis is the one economic statistic that shows there can be an immediate, common-sense solution: the housing vacancy rate.
According to the Census Department, there are more than 18.9 million vacant housing units in the U.S. (census.gov)
That’s enough perfectly usable housing units to put a roof over the head of every single homeless person in the U.S., with millions of homes to spare. If it is true that “it is simply unacceptable for individuals, children, families and our veterans to be faced with homelessness in this country,” as President Barack Obama writes in the preface to Opening Doors, then how can rising homelessness in the middle of 18.9 million vacant homes be explained?
The paradox of plenty
The barrier between the homeless and the millions of empty homes is capitalism and capitalist property relations. In capitalist society, property rights are protected by law while human rights — like the right to food, shelter and a job — are not. During a capitalist economic crisis, when millions can’t find jobs, are losing their homes and are going hungry, the absurdity and cruelty of this system become glaringly obvious.
Throughout most of human history the chief economic problems have been rooted in scarcity and the hoarding of scarce resources by one segment of society at the expense of another.
The rise of capitalism and the dawn of the industrial revolution, however, which enormously expanded productivity, brought about an absurd new type of economic problem. In the early 1800s the French philosopher Charles Fourier was perhaps the first to describe this new problem when he reported on commercial markets becoming glutted with more products than could be afforded by the populace. He termed this phenomenon a “crise plethorique,” or a crisis of abundance.
What Fourier was seeing was the inherent law of capitalist overproduction in action. Two generations later, Karl Marx laid bare the inner workings of this system in his monumental work “Capital.”
Under capitalism, each capitalist firm is compelled, by competition with rival firms, to produce the maximum amount of goods by exploiting the maximum amount of labor so as to gain the maximum amount of power and profit and thus avoid being overtaken by competitors. Because there is no coordination between rival firms regarding the limits of the market, there inevitably comes a point when the amount of goods produced exceeds the amount the workers can afford to buy.
When supply outpaces demand in this manner, markets become glutted and capitalists’ profits fall. Workers are laid off in large numbers as the glut lessens the capitalists’ need for their labor power. Unemployed workers are less able to consume, thus exacerbating the general crisis of overproduction
A look back at the U.S. housing market over the past decade reveals this process.
From 2000 to 2006, home construction surged to record highs as firms in all areas of the housing sector, from construction companies to appliance makers, upped production and profited handsomely. But there eventually came a point when the surge in home construction outpaced the ability of workers in general to afford the housing units being produced.
By late 2006 the housing market was glutted with more units than could be sold at a profit and layoffs began across all areas of the housing trades. Housing prices fell as the glut set in, exposing the big banks and institutional investors to massive losses on the projects they had bankrolled through a host of securities and loans.
The ensuing financial meltdown led to more layoffs, foreclosures and evictions, and the downward spiral intensified. As 2010 draws to a close, millions of workers and their families are unemployed and homeless — while millions of homes and apartments sit vacant and the bankers and bosses sit back and count their bailout money.
The socialist solution
Simply put, capitalism is the root cause of unemployment and rising homelessness in recent years. And capitalist property relations are the sole reason why millions of perfectly good homes sit vacant while working class families crowd into already packed shelters and tent cities or freeze out on the street or in their cars.
The solution to the growing homelessness epidemic will not be found in government-produced charts and graphs. The solution can only be achieved through the struggle of the workers themselves.
Workers can, through militant action, force some reforms to ease their plight, like a government jobs plan and a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. But ultimately, the struggle must be to abolish capitalism and replace it with socialism.
Under socialism, when the working class takes over the vast means of production it has created and liberates the factories, the mines, and so on to be used for the good of all, the anarchy of capitalist production for profit will be abolished. Production will be planned and the “bottom line” will be to satisfy human needs.
Through the development of socialism, the absurd calamity of rising homelessness amidst a sea of empty homes will be a thing of the past and the doors to human progress can truly be opened.
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Published Dec 12, 2010 11:37 PM
As the cold winter chill sets in across the U.S., homelessness is at an all-time high.
Over the past few years, millions of people have been forced from their homes by foreclosures and evictions and into overcrowded shelters and transitional housing. The number of homeless families rose by close to 30 percent between 2007 and 2009. (hud.gov)
With layoffs continuing in nearly all industries, tens of millions more families and individuals are living with oppressive anxiety caused by not knowing if they will be able to make next month’s rent or mortgage payment.
Recently, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which includes a multitude of government agencies, ranging from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to the Department of Defense, unveiled a plan called Opening Doors. It has been billed as the “first ever federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness” and claims to be “centered on the belief that no one should experience homelessness — no one should be without a safe, stable place to call home.”
Nice words. The federal strategic plan to end homelessness is more than 70 pages of charts, graphs and statistics. (usich.gov) But noticeably absent from all the analysis is the one economic statistic that shows there can be an immediate, common-sense solution: the housing vacancy rate.
According to the Census Department, there are more than 18.9 million vacant housing units in the U.S. (census.gov)
That’s enough perfectly usable housing units to put a roof over the head of every single homeless person in the U.S., with millions of homes to spare. If it is true that “it is simply unacceptable for individuals, children, families and our veterans to be faced with homelessness in this country,” as President Barack Obama writes in the preface to Opening Doors, then how can rising homelessness in the middle of 18.9 million vacant homes be explained?
The paradox of plenty
The barrier between the homeless and the millions of empty homes is capitalism and capitalist property relations. In capitalist society, property rights are protected by law while human rights — like the right to food, shelter and a job — are not. During a capitalist economic crisis, when millions can’t find jobs, are losing their homes and are going hungry, the absurdity and cruelty of this system become glaringly obvious.
Throughout most of human history the chief economic problems have been rooted in scarcity and the hoarding of scarce resources by one segment of society at the expense of another.
The rise of capitalism and the dawn of the industrial revolution, however, which enormously expanded productivity, brought about an absurd new type of economic problem. In the early 1800s the French philosopher Charles Fourier was perhaps the first to describe this new problem when he reported on commercial markets becoming glutted with more products than could be afforded by the populace. He termed this phenomenon a “crise plethorique,” or a crisis of abundance.
What Fourier was seeing was the inherent law of capitalist overproduction in action. Two generations later, Karl Marx laid bare the inner workings of this system in his monumental work “Capital.”
Under capitalism, each capitalist firm is compelled, by competition with rival firms, to produce the maximum amount of goods by exploiting the maximum amount of labor so as to gain the maximum amount of power and profit and thus avoid being overtaken by competitors. Because there is no coordination between rival firms regarding the limits of the market, there inevitably comes a point when the amount of goods produced exceeds the amount the workers can afford to buy.
When supply outpaces demand in this manner, markets become glutted and capitalists’ profits fall. Workers are laid off in large numbers as the glut lessens the capitalists’ need for their labor power. Unemployed workers are less able to consume, thus exacerbating the general crisis of overproduction
A look back at the U.S. housing market over the past decade reveals this process.
From 2000 to 2006, home construction surged to record highs as firms in all areas of the housing sector, from construction companies to appliance makers, upped production and profited handsomely. But there eventually came a point when the surge in home construction outpaced the ability of workers in general to afford the housing units being produced.
By late 2006 the housing market was glutted with more units than could be sold at a profit and layoffs began across all areas of the housing trades. Housing prices fell as the glut set in, exposing the big banks and institutional investors to massive losses on the projects they had bankrolled through a host of securities and loans.
The ensuing financial meltdown led to more layoffs, foreclosures and evictions, and the downward spiral intensified. As 2010 draws to a close, millions of workers and their families are unemployed and homeless — while millions of homes and apartments sit vacant and the bankers and bosses sit back and count their bailout money.
The socialist solution
Simply put, capitalism is the root cause of unemployment and rising homelessness in recent years. And capitalist property relations are the sole reason why millions of perfectly good homes sit vacant while working class families crowd into already packed shelters and tent cities or freeze out on the street or in their cars.
The solution to the growing homelessness epidemic will not be found in government-produced charts and graphs. The solution can only be achieved through the struggle of the workers themselves.
Workers can, through militant action, force some reforms to ease their plight, like a government jobs plan and a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. But ultimately, the struggle must be to abolish capitalism and replace it with socialism.
Under socialism, when the working class takes over the vast means of production it has created and liberates the factories, the mines, and so on to be used for the good of all, the anarchy of capitalist production for profit will be abolished. Production will be planned and the “bottom line” will be to satisfy human needs.
Through the development of socialism, the absurd calamity of rising homelessness amidst a sea of empty homes will be a thing of the past and the doors to human progress can truly be opened.
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Video: Karl Marx & His Influences
The first in a series of discussions and presentation at Mac's Backs bookstore in Cleveland Heights, OH.
It is entitled "200 Years of Revolution."
The first, recorded below (highly edited), tells of Karl Marx and his historical influences. The French Revolution, The U.S. Civil War, The Paris Commune, Chartism, and the 1848 Revolutions are discussed.
It is entitled "200 Years of Revolution."
The first, recorded below (highly edited), tells of Karl Marx and his historical influences. The French Revolution, The U.S. Civil War, The Paris Commune, Chartism, and the 1848 Revolutions are discussed.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
"The Malady" by Moissaye J. Olgin
Note: Below is the first chapter of Moissaye J. Olgin's book Why Communism? It is entitled "The Malady" and discusses, in very well constructed agitation, the evils of capitalism.
YOU are a worker. You have had a job for a number of years. Your pay was not high, but you managed to get along. You were a faithful worker. You never shirked. Perhaps you saved up a few dollars against a rainy day. Perhaps you married and raised a family. You were decent, law-abiding.
One nice morning you are told your services are no longer needed. In plain words: you are fired. You are thrown out. There is a depression, they say. The employer has no more work for you. He cuts operations or he shuts his plant altogether. While you remain without a livelihood, he goes to his country estate or abroad to have a good time. He does not care to think what will happen to you. You plainly do not exist for the “company” any longer. It has no obligations towards its unemployed.
And yet, come to think of it, you are not a stranger to this factory or mill or shop. You and the like of you have built it. You and the like of you have created all the machinery, all the raw material and all the fuel which is necessary to run an industry. You and the like of you are the live power that puts motion into the dead matter of every industrial undertaking. It is your blood, your sweat, your muscle and your brain that is sunk into every piece of goods produced.
You have much at stake in this establishment — your whole life. It is yours, more than the owner’s. It is part of your very self.
Suppose now, when you are told to go, you refuse to budge. Suppose many of you get together and say that you are going to stay where you belong and continue working because this is the only source of your livelihood. Suppose you say you are going to produce for the benefit of yourself and others. This thought may be strange to you. Yet consider what would happen.
The owner, who has never worked and who does not know how to work, would call the police. Most probably the riot squad would appear. Perhaps the militia would be called out. There would be clubs and riot guns and tear gas bombs galore. You would be clubbed and shot at and many of you imprisoned, tried and convicted — for the sole crime of wanting to continue working at the machines and with the materials you and the like of you have produced.
Has it ever occurred to you that such a state of affairs is wrong?
Take another example. You are a tenant. For ten or fifteen or twenty years you have been living in a house. You have paid your rent regularly. You have paid off your flat several times over. Your landlord smiled at you as long as you were a “good” tenant. But now you have lost your job. You have not paid your rent for several months. A sheriff comes. Your furniture is thrown out on the sidewalk. You are “evicted.” Yet you know perfectly well that it isn’t the landlord who built the house. It is you and others like you who have produced all the building material and who have actually constructed, the house. Besides, you made the landlord rich by our payment of rents.
Suppose now, you refuse to quit the house. Suppose you band together with your fellow tenants and declare you are not going to permit anybody to drive you out into the street. You are a proud American; you will not allow anybody to turn you into a beggar. Again, you would be confronted with police clubs, courts and jail.
It looks strange. But this madness is the every-day practice of our great and wealthy country.
Now there are some notions that have to be made clear before we proceed. We said that the owner “has never worked.” You may disagree with this statement. Doesn’t a factory owner spend days and days in his office? Doesn’t a banker keep office hours? Doesn’t he go to the country club and golf links to rest after his strenuous labors? The papers and the preachers and the professors tell you that the business man is “doing his share” in production. They even say that he is an indispensable part of the industrial organism. This is one of those incorrect notions that are being inculcated in the minds of our people from childhood on. In fact, the small business man may still do some work by himself: the grocer works behind the counter, the cobbler works together with his few men. But the bigger the business, the less work remains for the actual owner. What does Morgan know about the operation of railroads and mines and restaurants he controls? What does Rockefeller know about work in a coal mine or an oil refining plant? Remove Ford from the top of his pyramid and nobody will notice the loss. Ford may have been instrumental in working up his business long ago with the aid of numerous engineers and workers — but he no more “runs” his business than the roan in the moon.
Big business, large scale production of the modern type is conducted by all kinds of specialists with the aid and cooperation of workers. Engineers, technicians, draftsmen, machinists, chemists, all kinds of experts are managing the big industrial giants of today, and these are hired people, while the board of directors and the other “big cheeses” of the corporation only decide upon policies which reduce themselves mainly to manipulating stocks. These people never produce. They could be removed without any loss to actual operations.
And yet, it is they who decide to cut down production or to close the plant altogether, depriving both the staffs of specialists and the skilled and unskilled workers of their sole means of making a living. Those who do not produce decide for those who produce.
As to bankers and brokers, real estate operators and promoters — they do not produce anything essential to human life although they have the lion’s share of control over production. As a matter of fact, they produce nothing. They transfer “paper” from hand to hand. That paper — call it checks or deeds or drafts or shares — is a claim to the fruits of somebody else’s labor.
Another question is that of “bad luck.” You have been taught to think that when you are out of work it is just your misfortune. “Business is bad,” “there is a depression,” they say. “Nobody is to Maine.” you are given to understand that economic powers are beyond human control. You are told that a depression is something like an earthquake, like a thunderstorm, like an avalanche. And yet, human ingenuity has learned how to control some of the most formidable forces of nature. The human mind has harnessed electricity, which produces the lightning. Human knowledge is accomplishing things which look miraculous. The tropics and the poles, the air and the bowels of the earth are all coming under control of man. Why should he not be able to control the production and distribution of goods that are vital for his life. Isn’t the Soviet Union a living example that this can be achieved? Why should there be a situation like the one we suffer render in the U.S.A. at present where millions of able-bodied workers, capable and willing to work, are being consumed by idleness and hunger, while excellent machines and mountains of raw material are lying around unused? Is it so difficult after all for human genius to organize a constant flow of goods which would satisfy everybody’s needs with nobody compelled to go without food, clothing and shelter? Humanity has learned to master the forces of nature. The progress of science is tremendous. New and ever newer inventions are made to aid human labor. At the “Century of Progress Exhibition” at Chicago, they showed cotton-picking machines, each of which does the work of 16 to 48 men. There are excavators and ditch diggers that do the work of 20 or 30 men. Between 1922 and 1929 the productivity of American labor increased 100 per cent. Why should the terrible crash in 1929 have had to come? Why should we have had to suffer those long weary years of the most terrible crisis in the history of this country?
We cannot blame this plight of millions on “natural forces.” There is nothing natural in such a situation. It is not natural that men should go hungry while the means to produce food are close at hand. It is not natural that a government should order the destruction of three and a half million bales of cotton by plowing under the year’s harvest on ten million acres of land in the South the way it was done by the government of the U. S. A., while so many are badly dressed. It is not natural that there should be poverty in the midst of plenty. It is not natural that milk should be dumped into rivers while babies are starving. It is not natural that the most ingenious means of production and transportation should be rusting away while those who produce them and can operate them are being wasted away by starvation and disease. All this is most unnatural. It is insane.
One word about the law. You have been taught to respect the law which appears in the shape of the policeman or the judge. You were taught that this is “justice.” Yet where is the justice of your being thrown out into the street for nonpayment of rent? Where is the justice of your being dismissed from the mines after many years of work? When the owner ejects you forcibly from his premises, this is not called force; when you resist, they say you are using force and violence. When the sheriff puts your belongings on the sidewalks, that’s law. When you break the padlock and replace your furniture in its old place, that’s unlawful. Why is it that violence against the workers is law and resistance to violence is unlawful? Why is it that robbing you of your only source of life is justice and protesting against this bloody justice is injustice? Something is wrong here, too. Apparently, all these notions about law and order, about justice and injustice, about crime and punishment, are made in the interests, not of you and the like of you, but in the interests of those who use them against you.
One more instance. The workers declare a strike. They have been told many times by many fine gentlemen that there is a partnership between the owners and the workers, that they must cooperate for the benefit of the industry. When partners disagree on a certain issue they fight out their dispute. Suppose you decide to fight it out by refusing to work. You are entitled to do so under the law. You organize a picket line. You say you are partners to this plant and you want to fight it out with your own employers. The employers try to bring in scabs. You refuse to admit the scabs into the plant. Immediately police arrive. The law protects the scabs and attacks the strikers. If you insist on your right to keep the plant shut, you are fired at, and the history of strikes in America is one long trail of bloody murders perperated by the police, by the “law” protecting the scabs.
There must be something wrong in a “law” that professes equality of employer and employee but at the same time uses all its power to oppress the latter in favor of the former. There must be a monstrous lie in the statement that employer and employee are partners to the business and equal before the State. The capitalist State itself apparently is something vicious and cruel and not the nice and lovely “institution of freedom” it is reputed to be.
We think it is urgent for the workers to look more deeply into these matters. Moreover, it is our deep conviction that workers who do not concern themselves with these vital problems are doing grave harm to themselves and their class. Only when you understand the malady can you find the proper cure.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Marxist Theory of Exploitation, Explained...
Two Articles From Political Affairs.
The posting of these articles should not be interpreted an endorsement of the CPUSA, Political Affairs Magazine, or the author. These articles are being posted because of their simplistic analysis of Marxian economic theory, and nothing more.
You Might Be a Marxist If ... You Want to End the Exploitation of Workers
By David S. Pena
Capitalism exploits workers. Since the vast majority of people in our capitalist society have to work for a living, it’s no exaggeration to say that the majority of people in our country, and throughout the world, are exploited workers.
What does it mean to say that workers are exploited? In Marxist theory, exploitation means that workers are literally robbed by capitalists. Of course the capitalists never admit this. They claim that they pay their workers a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, that you’re paid for what you produce, no less and no more. But Marxists say that’s not what really happens.
The capitalists have set up a system in which they (the minority) own the machinery, factories, farms and other means of production needed to produce the necessities of life such as food, clothing, and shelter. The workers (the majority) usually have no other way to make a living than to sell but their ability to work. They have to sell this ability (their labor power) to the capitalists in order to earn wages. In other words, they have to get jobs. Wages are then used by workers to buy the products necessary to sustain their lives.
What is the value of your ability to labor? According to Marx, your labor power is worth whatever amount of money (or commodities) is necessary to keep you alive and working. That doesn’t sound like much of a life, but let’s go with that assumption and see what happens.
Imagine that you need to make $50 per day in order to feed, house, and clothe yourself. You find a job at an auto parts factory owned by a capitalist who agrees to pay you $50 per 8-hour day, or $6.25 an hour. Your day is spent making parts that the capitalist sells to one of the big automakers for $100 a piece, and you manage to produce 100 parts per day. Think about it—you are producing $1,250 worth of product per hour, $10,000 worth per day and $50,000 worth in a 40-hour week! Amazing isn’t it? You, the worker, have the ability to create a tremendous amount of value where there was none before. And it’s in the capitalist’s interest to get you to produce as much as humanly possible either by forcing you to work more hours in a day or making you work faster—preferably, for the capitalist, both.
But we need to get clear about something you might not have noticed. Remember that you are producing $1,250 worth of value every hour, which boils down to about $20.83 cents per minute. Is it really important to know that? Absolutely.
Here’s why it’s important. At $20.83 per minute, it takes about 2 minutes and 40 seconds for you to produce $50 worth of value. In other words, you have to work less than 3 minutes to produce the $50 that covers your salary. At this point, everything seems fair and square. You do $50 worth of work, and that’s exactly what you’re going to be paid. But don’t forget that you have to work 8 hours to get the $50 that it takes you less than 3 minutes to produce. That’s the catch, and that’s how you get robbed. In order for the privilege of working in that capitalist’s factory to get a measly $50, you have to agree to stay 8 hours and produce $10,000 worth of value, value that is stolen from you by the capitalist—literally stolen because the capitalist takes it without paying for it.
Capitalists constantly tell you that you’re getting paid for what you produce, that you’re compensated fairly for the time you put in, but in reality the capitalist can pay you for less than 3 minutes of work and force you to work over 7 hours of unpaid labor just to get that tiny paycheck. In our example, if you had been paid for what you produced, you would have made $10,000 that day. Think about your own situation at work and how it fits this example.
That 7-plus hours of unpaid labor time is called surplus labor, and it produced $10,000 in surplus value—surplus for the capitalist, not the worker! It’s as if you are paying the capitalist more than the capitalist is paying you. You are giving him unpaid labor time. The entire capitalist society is set up to make this look normal and fair, and the police, courts, and army are set up to enforce capitalists’ ability to exploit labor. Surplus labor, and the surplus value that it produces, is the source of capitalist profit. Thus the wealth of capitalist societies is based on the robbery of workers through forced, surplus labor.
Here’s a brief look at how exploitation was explained in some of the Marxist classics, which are still the best sources to read for a deeper understanding of this issue and other aspects of the conflict between capitalism and socialism. In Chapter II of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Frederick Engels wrote:
the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labour power of his labourer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis this surplus value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up the constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes.
Karl Marx’s Capital is the best source for an in-depth, technical explanation of labor exploitation under capitalism. In Capital, v. 1, chapter 9, Marx used the term “necessary labour-time” to designate the part of day during which workers labor to cover their own wages. He called the rest of the day, “the second period of the labour process,” in which the worker produces:
surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of something created out of nothing. This part of the working day I call surplus labour-time, and to the labour expended during that time I give the name of surplus labour. . . . What distinguishes the various economic formations of society—the distinction between for example a society based on slave-labour and a society based on wage-labour—is the form in which this surplus labour is in each case extorted from the immediate producer, the worker.
Outraged by this extortion and want to put an end to it? Sounds like you’re a Marxist. Are you unconvinced and thinking of all kind of questions and objections? Stay tuned. They’ll be dealt with next month.
You Might Be a Marxist If ... You Want to End the Exploitation of Workers (Part 2)
By David S. Pena
Last month’s article discussed the exploitation of workers under capitalism, so let’s briefly review the main points of that discussion, and then we’ll consider some objections to the view that capitalism exploits workers.
Capitalists want to maximize profits, and they do this by exploiting the working class. The basic method of capitalist exploitation is to pay workers the lowest wage they can get away with (as close to mere survival as possible) while forcing their employees to do the maximum amount of work. More specifically, capitalists try to maximize the value they get out of you, in the form of the product or service that you produce, by increasing the period of time that you have to work beyond the time it takes you to produce enough to cover your wage or salary.
For example, last month we looked at an auto parts worker who was paid $50 per 8-hour day. That worker was able to produce $50 worth of product in approximately 3 minutes. Thus it took the worker an insignificant amount of time to produce enough value to cover the day’s wage. If you consider only those 3 minutes, it looks like an even exchange between the worker and the capitalist. The worker produced $50 worth of product and will be paid $50 in return. But don’t forget, our factory worker has to stay on the production line for a much longer time—another 7 hours and 57 minutes— just to get the $50. If this had been an even exchange, in which the wage equals exactly what the worker produces, the workday would have ended after those 3 minutes. But if that happened the capitalist wouldn’t make any profit, and maximizing profit is the whole point of capitalist production. Nearly $10,000 worth of surplus value was produced during the additional 7-plus hours that the worker was forced to remain at work. The capitalist steals this value from the worker; the worker is never paid for producing it. This theft of surplus value is what is meant by the term “capitalist exploitation.”
In Marxist theory, the amount of time you must work to cover your wage or salary is called necessary labor time. The time beyond that, during which you are forced to continue working in order to receive your wage, is called surplus labor time, and the value produced during that time is called surplus value. During surplus labor time you are working for free because the capitalist steals the time and the resulting product from you without paying for it. In order to maximize profit, capitalists try to minimize the amount of necessary labor time and maximize the amount of surplus labor time, so they can profit from the surplus value that results. That is why capitalists are always trying to keep wages as low as possible, extend the length of the workday, and increase through speedup the amount of work that you have to do in any given period of time. This intensification of work is what capitalists really mean when they speak so benignly about “improving productivity.”
The idea that workers are exploited and are literally victims of theft on the job gives rise to many questions and possible objections. Let’s look at a few of the most common ones.
“Exploitation does not apply to me because I don’t work in a factory.”
If you are one of the many workers who don’t labor on a production line, you might think that you are not being exploited. Does the Marxist view of exploitation apply only to factory workers? Consider a cashier in a supermarket, a clerk or secretary in an office, or a waiter or waitress in a restaurant or bar. It might not seem like it at first, but when you think about it, stores, offices, and restaurants are just like factories in the sense that they are business enterprises that produce and sell a physical product or a service—often both—in order to maximize capitalist profit. The type of business doesn’t really matter. In order to maximize profit, all businesses must exploit the ability of their workers to produce surplus value.
For example, a supermarket provides access to a large number of food products at one location, and it produces some products on-site such as specific cuts of meat, baked goods, and prepared dishes. It also provides customer service and an overall “shopping experience.” The produce department, meat department, canned goods, bakery, deli, and checkout lines are all stations on the supermarket “assembly line” that produces the shopping experience for the customer and the cart full of merchandise that rolls out the door at the end of the process. The cashier’s job is to complete the final step in the production process, which is a quick and accurate exchange of the customer’s money for the purchased goods.
Now if you’ve ever worked as a cashier you’ve probably noticed that the manager constantly adjusts the work schedule so that at any given time there are as few cashiers on duty as possible and everyone has to work at maximum speed just to keep up with the number of customers. Have you noticed that your workplace always seems understaffed and too hectic even though increasing the number of staff and slowing down the pace a bit would actually improve service? Ever notice that your manager gets very nervous whenever things slow down a little and the cashiers have a few minutes at their stations with nothing to do? That’s because the manager has to keep you working constantly and quickly for your entire shift. Don’t forget, management’s job is to minimize necessary labor time, the amount of time it takes you to produce enough value to cover your wage, and maximize surplus labor time, which is the amount of time you spend working for free in order to produce the profit that goes straight into the pocket of the capitalist. The period of surplus labor time get longer the faster you work, and the amount of surplus value you produce grows larger.
It makes no difference whether you work in a factory, office, supermarket, or restaurant. Capitalist exploitation happens in the same way and it happens to you just as much as any other worker. Think about this when you are at work and how it applies to your particular job. And remember it the next time your boss starts giving out prizes for “most items scanned per hour,” “most customers served per shift,” or “fastest typist.” Once you understand what’s really going on at your job, you will never look at work the same way again.
“None of this applies to me because I’m a college-educated white-collar worker earning a salary, not an hourly wage.”
It makes no difference whether you’re hourly or salaried, educated or uneducated. Here’s an example of how exploitation works in the white-collar world. I have a relative who’s employed as a social worker in a dialysis clinic that is owned by a transnational for-profit corporation that has clinics all over the globe. She has a master’s degree; she’s required to work 40 hours per week, and she makes $40,000 per year (about $19 per hour). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, per capita personal income in this country is around $39,750 per year. So she is making an average income, not great, but not terrible either.
How does that big corporation extract maximum surplus value from their white-collar employees? It’s very simple, they turn that average salary into a below average wage by bullying their workers and imposing enormous workloads that result in brutal speedup.
When our social worker started the job she was given a 40-hour workweek, but if you’ve ever worked in a salaried position that’s exempt from overtime pay, you know that you’re expected to work as many hours as it takes to get the job done. She soon found out that it was physically impossible to do all of the assessments, surveys, counseling sessions, applications for medical treatments and financial assistance, record keeping, data entry, transportation arrangements, and so on, in 40 hours. She’s been on the job less than a year and she started with 92 patients; that number quickly rose to 110, leaving her with less than 22 minutes per week to spend on each patient—and they keep adding patients and job requirements. She and her co-workers, the dieticians, social workers, and even the lower level managers, all find themselves in the same situation, and all are subject to constant threats and bullying from the bosses to keep up with their impossible workloads.
And here are the results of that exploitation. My relative routinely puts in 55 hours or more per week for the $40,000 salary for which she was supposed to work 40 hours per week. This lowers her hourly pay from $19 to about $14.55 per hour. This is well below the average hourly wage in the U.S., which according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics just happens to be $19 per hour. So much for that cushy white-collar job.
“I’m not exploited because I work in the public sector.”
Consider the public schools. As non-profit public institutions they do not have to extract profits from their employees or distribute profits back to capitalist owners. In that sense, there is no capitalist exploitation going on in the public school system. But we live in a capitalist society with a capitalist culture. Like islands in a capitalist sea, non-capitalist institutions are subject to capitalism’s attitudes and methods, and they must fight to survive in capitalist society. The capitalists would like nothing better than to privatize all public institutions so they can begin extracting all that untapped surplus value. Imagine how much profit they could make if teachers could be treated just like factory workers and students like customers.
That is why our public institutions are under constant attack from the capitalists who run our society. They hollow out our schools by imposing austerity budgets, and then they smear the schools in the media for the inevitable failures, failures that the capitalists engineered in the first place. And yes, you guessed it, their solution to these manufactured crises in public education and other sectors is always the same—privatization.
The pressure to privatize and to behave like capitalist enterprises permeates our public institutions. If you’ve ever worked in the public sector you’ve probably wondered why your bosses are always ranting that “If this place was a business it would go under!” or “We need to start running this place like a business!” And if you’re a public school teacher you’re probably wondering why classes are always too big, salaries are frozen, programs are being eliminated, and staff members cut—not just during economic crises, but always. Part of it is the influence of capitalist propaganda on ignorant and spineless administrators who can think of no better way to do things, and the other part arises from the pressing need to stretch the austerity budgets imposed by the capitalist society. So even though public institutions are not capitalist enterprises, they are increasingly run as if they are. Technically that’s not capitalist exploitation, but it sure feels like it to the worker.
“None of this applies to me because I belong to a union.”
Unions do not eliminate exploitation, but they do lessen its intensity and severity. By fighting for higher wages, better benefits, and more humane working conditions, they put some limits on the amount the capitalists can steal and they mitigate some of the more brutal methods of exploitation. But again, they do not end exploitation. The key to abolishing exploitation is to eliminate entirely the capitalists’ ability to steal the wealth that is created by workers. This will not be accomplished until our productive enterprises are taken away from capitalists and placed under a form of public ownership and control that distributes wealth through a democratic process designed to maximize the well being of the entire society. This form of society is called socialism, and unions will play a major role in achieving it. Socialism will be discussed in a future article.
“Exploitation is prevented by minimum wage laws and the 8-hour day.”
Like unions, such laws and regulations throw up obstacles to capitalist exploitation, but they do not put an end to it. Capitalists continue to exploit workers by packing more and more work into the 8-hour day, sometimes through sheer bullying and slave driving and sometimes with the help of computers, automated production lines, and other types of machinery. They also skirt wage and hours laws to such an extent that there are currently many millions of workers in our country who work for less than the minimum wage and for more than 8 hours a day.
“How can you say that I’m exploited when my boss doesn’t know a thing about necessary labor time, surplus value, or any of this theoretical stuff?”
The bosses don’t need to know a thing about Marxist economics, or even capitalist economics, in order to extract surplus value. All they have to do is keep you working hard all the time and keep finding ways to make you work even harder. That’s just the ingrained way of doing things in our capitalist society. Most of the time they don’t even have to think about it. But I guarantee you that somewhere back at corporate headquarters there’s an army of economists and accountants who know exactly what’s going on. They may not think about it in Marxist terms, but they know that the whole point of work is to keep you working for as long and as fast as possible for the lowest wage they can get you to take. They have it all down to a science. They know down to the second how fast to work you and down to the penny how little to pay you in order to maximize the surplus value that is extracted from your labor.
“How can you say we are exploited when people in other countries are so much worse off than us?”
In advanced capitalist countries such as the U.S. one can find broad swaths of poverty, despair, violence, exploitation, and human degradation that are as bad as anything in the world, but at the same time it is true that on average workers in advanced countries have higher material standards of living than workers in the less developed countries. Workers in the advanced countries are the most productive in the world, so the intensity their exploitation (the amount of surplus value that they produce per hour worked) is actually far greater than in most countries. But wages are higher in the developed world and methods of exploitation are not as physically harsh. This is due in large part to decades of struggles by organized labor and other progressive forces to lessen the brutality of exploitation and improve the living conditions of the working class. But the game is not up. Capitalists in the advanced countries are trying harder than ever to push living standards down as low as they can go. They’ve been very successful at this over the past 30 to 40 years. In the U.S., for example, they’ve gutted the labor movement, devastated the public schools, virtually eliminated job security and retirement pensions, rolled back government regulations, and kept real wages stagnant for the past 30 years. They still haven’t gotten us down to second and third world levels on the whole, but they’re working at it.
The other, uglier side to the relative but fragile affluence of workers in the developed countries is that capitalism is a global system designed to extract wealth from the rest of the world and put it in the pockets of capitalists in the advanced countries. Whereas workers in the developed countries suffer from exploitation, workers in the rest of the world are subject to super-exploitation. Capitalists in the developed countries have stolen such staggering amounts of wealth from workers in the rest of the world—through naked aggression backed by military force and other forms of exploitation too barbaric to attempt in their native lands—that they can afford to throw a few more crumbs to workers at home while they pillage workers abroad.
This brings us to the subject of imperialism, which will be discussed in next month’s article.
The posting of these articles should not be interpreted an endorsement of the CPUSA, Political Affairs Magazine, or the author. These articles are being posted because of their simplistic analysis of Marxian economic theory, and nothing more.
You Might Be a Marxist If ... You Want to End the Exploitation of Workers
By David S. Pena
Capitalism exploits workers. Since the vast majority of people in our capitalist society have to work for a living, it’s no exaggeration to say that the majority of people in our country, and throughout the world, are exploited workers.
What does it mean to say that workers are exploited? In Marxist theory, exploitation means that workers are literally robbed by capitalists. Of course the capitalists never admit this. They claim that they pay their workers a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, that you’re paid for what you produce, no less and no more. But Marxists say that’s not what really happens.
The capitalists have set up a system in which they (the minority) own the machinery, factories, farms and other means of production needed to produce the necessities of life such as food, clothing, and shelter. The workers (the majority) usually have no other way to make a living than to sell but their ability to work. They have to sell this ability (their labor power) to the capitalists in order to earn wages. In other words, they have to get jobs. Wages are then used by workers to buy the products necessary to sustain their lives.
What is the value of your ability to labor? According to Marx, your labor power is worth whatever amount of money (or commodities) is necessary to keep you alive and working. That doesn’t sound like much of a life, but let’s go with that assumption and see what happens.
Imagine that you need to make $50 per day in order to feed, house, and clothe yourself. You find a job at an auto parts factory owned by a capitalist who agrees to pay you $50 per 8-hour day, or $6.25 an hour. Your day is spent making parts that the capitalist sells to one of the big automakers for $100 a piece, and you manage to produce 100 parts per day. Think about it—you are producing $1,250 worth of product per hour, $10,000 worth per day and $50,000 worth in a 40-hour week! Amazing isn’t it? You, the worker, have the ability to create a tremendous amount of value where there was none before. And it’s in the capitalist’s interest to get you to produce as much as humanly possible either by forcing you to work more hours in a day or making you work faster—preferably, for the capitalist, both.
But we need to get clear about something you might not have noticed. Remember that you are producing $1,250 worth of value every hour, which boils down to about $20.83 cents per minute. Is it really important to know that? Absolutely.
Here’s why it’s important. At $20.83 per minute, it takes about 2 minutes and 40 seconds for you to produce $50 worth of value. In other words, you have to work less than 3 minutes to produce the $50 that covers your salary. At this point, everything seems fair and square. You do $50 worth of work, and that’s exactly what you’re going to be paid. But don’t forget that you have to work 8 hours to get the $50 that it takes you less than 3 minutes to produce. That’s the catch, and that’s how you get robbed. In order for the privilege of working in that capitalist’s factory to get a measly $50, you have to agree to stay 8 hours and produce $10,000 worth of value, value that is stolen from you by the capitalist—literally stolen because the capitalist takes it without paying for it.
Capitalists constantly tell you that you’re getting paid for what you produce, that you’re compensated fairly for the time you put in, but in reality the capitalist can pay you for less than 3 minutes of work and force you to work over 7 hours of unpaid labor just to get that tiny paycheck. In our example, if you had been paid for what you produced, you would have made $10,000 that day. Think about your own situation at work and how it fits this example.
That 7-plus hours of unpaid labor time is called surplus labor, and it produced $10,000 in surplus value—surplus for the capitalist, not the worker! It’s as if you are paying the capitalist more than the capitalist is paying you. You are giving him unpaid labor time. The entire capitalist society is set up to make this look normal and fair, and the police, courts, and army are set up to enforce capitalists’ ability to exploit labor. Surplus labor, and the surplus value that it produces, is the source of capitalist profit. Thus the wealth of capitalist societies is based on the robbery of workers through forced, surplus labor.
Here’s a brief look at how exploitation was explained in some of the Marxist classics, which are still the best sources to read for a deeper understanding of this issue and other aspects of the conflict between capitalism and socialism. In Chapter II of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Frederick Engels wrote:
the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labour power of his labourer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis this surplus value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up the constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes.
Karl Marx’s Capital is the best source for an in-depth, technical explanation of labor exploitation under capitalism. In Capital, v. 1, chapter 9, Marx used the term “necessary labour-time” to designate the part of day during which workers labor to cover their own wages. He called the rest of the day, “the second period of the labour process,” in which the worker produces:
surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of something created out of nothing. This part of the working day I call surplus labour-time, and to the labour expended during that time I give the name of surplus labour. . . . What distinguishes the various economic formations of society—the distinction between for example a society based on slave-labour and a society based on wage-labour—is the form in which this surplus labour is in each case extorted from the immediate producer, the worker.
Outraged by this extortion and want to put an end to it? Sounds like you’re a Marxist. Are you unconvinced and thinking of all kind of questions and objections? Stay tuned. They’ll be dealt with next month.
You Might Be a Marxist If ... You Want to End the Exploitation of Workers (Part 2)
By David S. Pena
Last month’s article discussed the exploitation of workers under capitalism, so let’s briefly review the main points of that discussion, and then we’ll consider some objections to the view that capitalism exploits workers.
Capitalists want to maximize profits, and they do this by exploiting the working class. The basic method of capitalist exploitation is to pay workers the lowest wage they can get away with (as close to mere survival as possible) while forcing their employees to do the maximum amount of work. More specifically, capitalists try to maximize the value they get out of you, in the form of the product or service that you produce, by increasing the period of time that you have to work beyond the time it takes you to produce enough to cover your wage or salary.
For example, last month we looked at an auto parts worker who was paid $50 per 8-hour day. That worker was able to produce $50 worth of product in approximately 3 minutes. Thus it took the worker an insignificant amount of time to produce enough value to cover the day’s wage. If you consider only those 3 minutes, it looks like an even exchange between the worker and the capitalist. The worker produced $50 worth of product and will be paid $50 in return. But don’t forget, our factory worker has to stay on the production line for a much longer time—another 7 hours and 57 minutes— just to get the $50. If this had been an even exchange, in which the wage equals exactly what the worker produces, the workday would have ended after those 3 minutes. But if that happened the capitalist wouldn’t make any profit, and maximizing profit is the whole point of capitalist production. Nearly $10,000 worth of surplus value was produced during the additional 7-plus hours that the worker was forced to remain at work. The capitalist steals this value from the worker; the worker is never paid for producing it. This theft of surplus value is what is meant by the term “capitalist exploitation.”
In Marxist theory, the amount of time you must work to cover your wage or salary is called necessary labor time. The time beyond that, during which you are forced to continue working in order to receive your wage, is called surplus labor time, and the value produced during that time is called surplus value. During surplus labor time you are working for free because the capitalist steals the time and the resulting product from you without paying for it. In order to maximize profit, capitalists try to minimize the amount of necessary labor time and maximize the amount of surplus labor time, so they can profit from the surplus value that results. That is why capitalists are always trying to keep wages as low as possible, extend the length of the workday, and increase through speedup the amount of work that you have to do in any given period of time. This intensification of work is what capitalists really mean when they speak so benignly about “improving productivity.”
The idea that workers are exploited and are literally victims of theft on the job gives rise to many questions and possible objections. Let’s look at a few of the most common ones.
“Exploitation does not apply to me because I don’t work in a factory.”
If you are one of the many workers who don’t labor on a production line, you might think that you are not being exploited. Does the Marxist view of exploitation apply only to factory workers? Consider a cashier in a supermarket, a clerk or secretary in an office, or a waiter or waitress in a restaurant or bar. It might not seem like it at first, but when you think about it, stores, offices, and restaurants are just like factories in the sense that they are business enterprises that produce and sell a physical product or a service—often both—in order to maximize capitalist profit. The type of business doesn’t really matter. In order to maximize profit, all businesses must exploit the ability of their workers to produce surplus value.
For example, a supermarket provides access to a large number of food products at one location, and it produces some products on-site such as specific cuts of meat, baked goods, and prepared dishes. It also provides customer service and an overall “shopping experience.” The produce department, meat department, canned goods, bakery, deli, and checkout lines are all stations on the supermarket “assembly line” that produces the shopping experience for the customer and the cart full of merchandise that rolls out the door at the end of the process. The cashier’s job is to complete the final step in the production process, which is a quick and accurate exchange of the customer’s money for the purchased goods.
Now if you’ve ever worked as a cashier you’ve probably noticed that the manager constantly adjusts the work schedule so that at any given time there are as few cashiers on duty as possible and everyone has to work at maximum speed just to keep up with the number of customers. Have you noticed that your workplace always seems understaffed and too hectic even though increasing the number of staff and slowing down the pace a bit would actually improve service? Ever notice that your manager gets very nervous whenever things slow down a little and the cashiers have a few minutes at their stations with nothing to do? That’s because the manager has to keep you working constantly and quickly for your entire shift. Don’t forget, management’s job is to minimize necessary labor time, the amount of time it takes you to produce enough value to cover your wage, and maximize surplus labor time, which is the amount of time you spend working for free in order to produce the profit that goes straight into the pocket of the capitalist. The period of surplus labor time get longer the faster you work, and the amount of surplus value you produce grows larger.
It makes no difference whether you work in a factory, office, supermarket, or restaurant. Capitalist exploitation happens in the same way and it happens to you just as much as any other worker. Think about this when you are at work and how it applies to your particular job. And remember it the next time your boss starts giving out prizes for “most items scanned per hour,” “most customers served per shift,” or “fastest typist.” Once you understand what’s really going on at your job, you will never look at work the same way again.
“None of this applies to me because I’m a college-educated white-collar worker earning a salary, not an hourly wage.”
It makes no difference whether you’re hourly or salaried, educated or uneducated. Here’s an example of how exploitation works in the white-collar world. I have a relative who’s employed as a social worker in a dialysis clinic that is owned by a transnational for-profit corporation that has clinics all over the globe. She has a master’s degree; she’s required to work 40 hours per week, and she makes $40,000 per year (about $19 per hour). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, per capita personal income in this country is around $39,750 per year. So she is making an average income, not great, but not terrible either.
How does that big corporation extract maximum surplus value from their white-collar employees? It’s very simple, they turn that average salary into a below average wage by bullying their workers and imposing enormous workloads that result in brutal speedup.
When our social worker started the job she was given a 40-hour workweek, but if you’ve ever worked in a salaried position that’s exempt from overtime pay, you know that you’re expected to work as many hours as it takes to get the job done. She soon found out that it was physically impossible to do all of the assessments, surveys, counseling sessions, applications for medical treatments and financial assistance, record keeping, data entry, transportation arrangements, and so on, in 40 hours. She’s been on the job less than a year and she started with 92 patients; that number quickly rose to 110, leaving her with less than 22 minutes per week to spend on each patient—and they keep adding patients and job requirements. She and her co-workers, the dieticians, social workers, and even the lower level managers, all find themselves in the same situation, and all are subject to constant threats and bullying from the bosses to keep up with their impossible workloads.
And here are the results of that exploitation. My relative routinely puts in 55 hours or more per week for the $40,000 salary for which she was supposed to work 40 hours per week. This lowers her hourly pay from $19 to about $14.55 per hour. This is well below the average hourly wage in the U.S., which according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics just happens to be $19 per hour. So much for that cushy white-collar job.
“I’m not exploited because I work in the public sector.”
Consider the public schools. As non-profit public institutions they do not have to extract profits from their employees or distribute profits back to capitalist owners. In that sense, there is no capitalist exploitation going on in the public school system. But we live in a capitalist society with a capitalist culture. Like islands in a capitalist sea, non-capitalist institutions are subject to capitalism’s attitudes and methods, and they must fight to survive in capitalist society. The capitalists would like nothing better than to privatize all public institutions so they can begin extracting all that untapped surplus value. Imagine how much profit they could make if teachers could be treated just like factory workers and students like customers.
That is why our public institutions are under constant attack from the capitalists who run our society. They hollow out our schools by imposing austerity budgets, and then they smear the schools in the media for the inevitable failures, failures that the capitalists engineered in the first place. And yes, you guessed it, their solution to these manufactured crises in public education and other sectors is always the same—privatization.
The pressure to privatize and to behave like capitalist enterprises permeates our public institutions. If you’ve ever worked in the public sector you’ve probably wondered why your bosses are always ranting that “If this place was a business it would go under!” or “We need to start running this place like a business!” And if you’re a public school teacher you’re probably wondering why classes are always too big, salaries are frozen, programs are being eliminated, and staff members cut—not just during economic crises, but always. Part of it is the influence of capitalist propaganda on ignorant and spineless administrators who can think of no better way to do things, and the other part arises from the pressing need to stretch the austerity budgets imposed by the capitalist society. So even though public institutions are not capitalist enterprises, they are increasingly run as if they are. Technically that’s not capitalist exploitation, but it sure feels like it to the worker.
“None of this applies to me because I belong to a union.”
Unions do not eliminate exploitation, but they do lessen its intensity and severity. By fighting for higher wages, better benefits, and more humane working conditions, they put some limits on the amount the capitalists can steal and they mitigate some of the more brutal methods of exploitation. But again, they do not end exploitation. The key to abolishing exploitation is to eliminate entirely the capitalists’ ability to steal the wealth that is created by workers. This will not be accomplished until our productive enterprises are taken away from capitalists and placed under a form of public ownership and control that distributes wealth through a democratic process designed to maximize the well being of the entire society. This form of society is called socialism, and unions will play a major role in achieving it. Socialism will be discussed in a future article.
“Exploitation is prevented by minimum wage laws and the 8-hour day.”
Like unions, such laws and regulations throw up obstacles to capitalist exploitation, but they do not put an end to it. Capitalists continue to exploit workers by packing more and more work into the 8-hour day, sometimes through sheer bullying and slave driving and sometimes with the help of computers, automated production lines, and other types of machinery. They also skirt wage and hours laws to such an extent that there are currently many millions of workers in our country who work for less than the minimum wage and for more than 8 hours a day.
“How can you say that I’m exploited when my boss doesn’t know a thing about necessary labor time, surplus value, or any of this theoretical stuff?”
The bosses don’t need to know a thing about Marxist economics, or even capitalist economics, in order to extract surplus value. All they have to do is keep you working hard all the time and keep finding ways to make you work even harder. That’s just the ingrained way of doing things in our capitalist society. Most of the time they don’t even have to think about it. But I guarantee you that somewhere back at corporate headquarters there’s an army of economists and accountants who know exactly what’s going on. They may not think about it in Marxist terms, but they know that the whole point of work is to keep you working for as long and as fast as possible for the lowest wage they can get you to take. They have it all down to a science. They know down to the second how fast to work you and down to the penny how little to pay you in order to maximize the surplus value that is extracted from your labor.
“How can you say we are exploited when people in other countries are so much worse off than us?”
In advanced capitalist countries such as the U.S. one can find broad swaths of poverty, despair, violence, exploitation, and human degradation that are as bad as anything in the world, but at the same time it is true that on average workers in advanced countries have higher material standards of living than workers in the less developed countries. Workers in the advanced countries are the most productive in the world, so the intensity their exploitation (the amount of surplus value that they produce per hour worked) is actually far greater than in most countries. But wages are higher in the developed world and methods of exploitation are not as physically harsh. This is due in large part to decades of struggles by organized labor and other progressive forces to lessen the brutality of exploitation and improve the living conditions of the working class. But the game is not up. Capitalists in the advanced countries are trying harder than ever to push living standards down as low as they can go. They’ve been very successful at this over the past 30 to 40 years. In the U.S., for example, they’ve gutted the labor movement, devastated the public schools, virtually eliminated job security and retirement pensions, rolled back government regulations, and kept real wages stagnant for the past 30 years. They still haven’t gotten us down to second and third world levels on the whole, but they’re working at it.
The other, uglier side to the relative but fragile affluence of workers in the developed countries is that capitalism is a global system designed to extract wealth from the rest of the world and put it in the pockets of capitalists in the advanced countries. Whereas workers in the developed countries suffer from exploitation, workers in the rest of the world are subject to super-exploitation. Capitalists in the developed countries have stolen such staggering amounts of wealth from workers in the rest of the world—through naked aggression backed by military force and other forms of exploitation too barbaric to attempt in their native lands—that they can afford to throw a few more crumbs to workers at home while they pillage workers abroad.
This brings us to the subject of imperialism, which will be discussed in next month’s article.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Even CIA Statistics Show that Socialism Stands Triumphant in Cuba
By Caleb T. Maupin
Published Aug 6, 2010 10:17 AM
The Central Intelligence Agency, a ruthless enforcer of Wall Street’s drive for profits, publishes “The World Factbook.” It gives updated statistics for every country, some of which measure quality of life and societal health, such as life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, unemployment and industrial production. In this series, Workers World examines some surprising conclusions, all using the CIA’s own statistics. Even though these statistics often understate gains compared to United Nations figures, they can’t help but show that countries benefit by breaking with imperialism.
In Latin America, the CIA’s “World Factbook” confirms that socialism stands triumphant. The island nation of Cuba, having begun constructing socialism after the 1959 revolution, stands above all other countries in terms of quality of life.
The infant mortality rate is the count of children per 1,000 live births who die before reaching one year of age. Not a single country in Latin America has a lower infant mortality rate than socialist Cuba, which is lower even than that of the wealthy United States. This is a testament both to the Cuban health care system, which is publicly operated and controlled by working people and their organizations, and Cuba’s attention to public health.
The educational system in Cuba, like the vast majority of the economy, is prioritized by the government and subject to popular, democratic control. As a result, Cuba stands far above the rest of Latin America in literacy, with 99.8 percent considered literate, even slightly higher than the U.S.’s 99.0 percent.
Compare this to Honduras, where a repressive military dictatorship was recently installed in a coup d’état backed by Washington. Literacy in free-market, U.S.-dominated Honduras is 80 percent.
The life expectancy of Cubans is above every other country in South and Central America, and much higher than in the nearby Dominican Republic. In nearby Guatemala, where U.S.-backed paramilitaries have brutally put down all attempts to build a world free of capitalism, the life expectancy is only 70.59 years, compared to socialist Cuba’s 77.64 years.
Amidst the world economic crisis, Cuba’s rate of industrial production has dropped by only 1 percent, according to the Factbook. In the United States, production fell by 5.5 percent, and in the Britain, 9.8 percent.
This is probably due to the fact that the Cuban economy is not dominated by Western markets, but planned according to human need. As a result, an economic crisis in the West did not force the Cuban workers to suffer at the hands of Wall Street.
The statistics confirm what Karl Marx and countless others after him have said numerous times: that without the chaos of the capitalist market, which he dubbed the “anarchy of production,” a planned economy can better serve the people and provide for a good quality of life.
Next: Western domination vs. national liberation in Africa.
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Published Aug 6, 2010 10:17 AM
The Central Intelligence Agency, a ruthless enforcer of Wall Street’s drive for profits, publishes “The World Factbook.” It gives updated statistics for every country, some of which measure quality of life and societal health, such as life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, unemployment and industrial production. In this series, Workers World examines some surprising conclusions, all using the CIA’s own statistics. Even though these statistics often understate gains compared to United Nations figures, they can’t help but show that countries benefit by breaking with imperialism.
In Latin America, the CIA’s “World Factbook” confirms that socialism stands triumphant. The island nation of Cuba, having begun constructing socialism after the 1959 revolution, stands above all other countries in terms of quality of life.
The infant mortality rate is the count of children per 1,000 live births who die before reaching one year of age. Not a single country in Latin America has a lower infant mortality rate than socialist Cuba, which is lower even than that of the wealthy United States. This is a testament both to the Cuban health care system, which is publicly operated and controlled by working people and their organizations, and Cuba’s attention to public health.
The educational system in Cuba, like the vast majority of the economy, is prioritized by the government and subject to popular, democratic control. As a result, Cuba stands far above the rest of Latin America in literacy, with 99.8 percent considered literate, even slightly higher than the U.S.’s 99.0 percent.
Compare this to Honduras, where a repressive military dictatorship was recently installed in a coup d’état backed by Washington. Literacy in free-market, U.S.-dominated Honduras is 80 percent.
The life expectancy of Cubans is above every other country in South and Central America, and much higher than in the nearby Dominican Republic. In nearby Guatemala, where U.S.-backed paramilitaries have brutally put down all attempts to build a world free of capitalism, the life expectancy is only 70.59 years, compared to socialist Cuba’s 77.64 years.
Amidst the world economic crisis, Cuba’s rate of industrial production has dropped by only 1 percent, according to the Factbook. In the United States, production fell by 5.5 percent, and in the Britain, 9.8 percent.
This is probably due to the fact that the Cuban economy is not dominated by Western markets, but planned according to human need. As a result, an economic crisis in the West did not force the Cuban workers to suffer at the hands of Wall Street.
The statistics confirm what Karl Marx and countless others after him have said numerous times: that without the chaos of the capitalist market, which he dubbed the “anarchy of production,” a planned economy can better serve the people and provide for a good quality of life.
Next: Western domination vs. national liberation in Africa.
Articles copyright 1995-2010 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
David Sole: The Difference Between Fascism and Communism
A class given by David Sole, leader of Workers World Party in Detroit.
More on videos on youtube. 17 videos total from discussion.
More on videos on youtube. 17 videos total from discussion.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Widsom From Lenin: "The State and Revolution"
In September of 1917, just before seizing power and putting the very contents of the text more or less into practice, Vladimir Lenin composed a book entitled The State and Revolution. The book was the summing up, explanation, and defense of positions that the Bolsheviks had held for a long time, which differentiated them from the various “Social-Democratic” Parties of the world.
The Distortions of Marxism
Lenin opens the text, speaking of how so many revolutionaries are hated and attacked by the capitalists during their lives, but suddenly, after they are dead their image is altered to make them “safe” for the capitalists.
When Lenin makes this point, the modern reader can only think of Martin Luther King, who was hunted, demonized, and repressed by the FBI while alive. King was hated by the capitalist class, especially when he began to speak in support of a “the right to a job”, and denounced the war in Vietnam. At one point he proclaimed “there is something wrong with capitalism” and that “America must move toward a democratic socialism.”
However, King, after his death is rebranded in U.S. history classes to be a capitalist, religious fanatic, blind patriot, and self-help economic libertarian. The man who the establishment hated, repressed, and openly called its enemy now has his own national holiday and is considered a national icon, his radical beliefs left out of the popularized capitalist narrative about King as some kind of pacifistic defender of bourgeois law.
The same, Lenin notes, was done with Karl Marx.
While in his life, Karl Marx had been demonized as a dangerous radical, in the years following his death, Europe became dominated by various “Social-Democratic” parties, led by figures such as Bernstein and Kautsky who used Karl Marx’s image to promote their own brand of liberalism, populism, and reformism, very different from the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx, the man who composed the Communist Manifesto and laid out the first declaration of Scientific Socialist principles, applying them to the class struggle.
Whom does the Government Serve?
The biggest distortion of Marxism, trumpeted by the various Social-Democrats of the world was a delusional concept that governments, when “universal suffrage” exists, are “neutral entities.” Because both the capitalists and the workers can vote, the government is basically up for grabs between the two groups. This revisionist theory argues that the working class can be mobilized to vote in its own interests and make the state serve them.
“Revolution” in terms of the establishment of a “worker’s state” is essentially no longer necessary, according to the leaders of the “Socialist International”, the large group of these parties throughout the world.
Lenin vehemently disagreed with such claims.
Lenin maintained that even if the state did grant universal suffrage, and workers were able to vote, the government would remain a tool of the capitalists. He listed a number of reasons that universal suffrage, despite being a political advance in many cases, does not change the class nature of the state.
He spoke first of “direct corruption of public officials”, and that bribery would always be a tool the capitalists would use, as they control the vast amounts of wealth, and can use to out-vote workers in economic means.
Lenin also spoke of how in capitalism there is “an alliance of parliament and the stock exchange”, and that the government’s income and stability depends on the ability of the rich to make profits, even if they are not directly bought off.
Lenin also spoke of how the working classes, who labor long hours often to the point of exhaustion simply “do not have time for politics,” and politics by default becomes the hobby of the leisure classes who have the energy and ability to debate political issues.
Lenin also spoke of the capitalist control of press, which is able to dominate the information on which workers base their vote, as well as the educational system, which controls the very outlook workers are given toward world events.
If all of these economic situations exist, even if “universal suffrage” becomes reality, the capitalist class still maintains control of the government, and is able to exercise its own “dictatorship” over the other classes.
What is “The State?”
All of these ideas show, that Karl Marx was right in arguing that “the state is a machinery of repression of one class by another.” Lenin showed that “the state” is defined really by one thing, that being “bodies of armed men” who have “the monopoly of armed force.”
Government has the right to execute people, however vigilantism or homicide by others is a crime. The government has the right to maintain an army, stockpile weapons, and use such things to repress people in jails, prisons, etc. Other entities do not have such things.
Lenin argued that the existence of the “special bodies of armed men” came into being with the dawn of private property. The jobs of the state, not just according to Lenin, but according to Locke and countless others, is to defend the private property of those who own it, and make sure they keep it.
As a result, when control of resources and industry went from the hands of the monarchs and feudal lords to the hands of the mercantile capitalists, it required bloody revolutions, new constitutions, as the previously existing states, established to defend the feudal classes, needed to be removed, overthrown, smashed, or whatnot, in order to create a new state that served the interests of capitalists.
The state had was then re-forged in the interests of the capitalists. Note that the one of the first governmental bodies in the United States was the “House of Burgesses” in Virginia. “Burgess” is an English version of the French word “bourgeoisie” that specifically refers to owners of means of production.
The entities that eventually became the United States government, whether they be committees of correspondence or continental congresses, were nothing more than coalitions of plantation owners, industrialists, agrarians, and others who owned means of production, and sought to replace the colonial feudal order with themselves.
The Model of a Socialist State
So, Lenin argued, that the goal of Socialist revolutionaries should be the overthrow and “smashing” of the capitalist statement, and replacement of it with a new “worker’s state” designed to serve the working class.
Lenin argued that this new state would be truly “democratic” because it would be run by the majority of the people.
The new state would be a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, because just as in capitalism, the capitalist class controls and dictates the actions of the state, in socialism the state would be dictated to by the working class majority. Just as the capitalist defended the capitalists property from being taken from them, the new state would defend the workers new property, that being the major means of production and commanding heights of the economy, from being re-conquered by the old ruling class.
The new socialist state would be based in popular control of industries and other “commanding heights” of the economy. The industries, banking, transportation, communication, media, and other items formerly controlled by the capitalist class would be held in the hands of the working class through a method of “expropriation.”
This “expropriation” is no more “theft” than the breaking up feudal estates or medieval commons in the transition from feudalism to capitalism was.
Lenin laid out how popular militias of workers would become the new police force. Lenin writes of how a revolutionary party, trained in the theory of Marxism, would direct society, training the people to think scientifically and work as the leaders of this new society, while mobilizing popular campaigns to suppress counter-revolutionary violence against the new social order and governmental system.
Lenin also spoke of how eventually the socialist state itself would dissolve, as the era of “socialism” passed and “communism”, a society where material abundance and technological efficiency eliminated the need for classes at all, and no state would be needed to defend private property at all.
“Communism” would be achieved when no classes existed in the world any longer, and so it is no longer necessary for “bodies of armed men” to protect the property of one class from another.
Criticism of Fellow Revolutionists
Lenin criticized the Paris Commune of 1871, the popular revolt of French Workers which was brutally put down. He blamed some of the Commune’s failures on the fact instead attempting to build a new “workers state” the Paris Commune had simply taken over the Parisian state that already existed.
This previously existing Parisian government was designed to serve capitalism, not the rule of the working class, and as a result, was ineffective in its ability to repress the counter-revolutionary efforts of the capitalists.
Lenin also engages in a polemic with the various Anarchists who argue that no state is necessary for the repression of counter-revolutionary violence. Lenin makes it clear the ruling classes shall not simply vanish when the state is seized by workers, but it will continue to exist, seeking to restore its previously existing power.
Thus, the new state will be needed to put down and repress such activities. The Anarchist argument is that creating a new state will allow the bureaucrats within this state to become themselves a “ruling class.”
Contrarily, Lenin makes clear that the root of capitalist power is not “authority” but their control over their “private property” in the economy. Lenin maintains that if popular control of the economy remains in existence, the state will likewise remain a state of the people.
The Lasting Impact of “The State and Revolution”
Lenin’s work was ground-breaking, and remains one of the most important texts of political theory in world history. Governments based on Lenin’s teachings once controlled 2/3 of the planet. Still today, the governments of China, Cuba, Democratic Korea, Vietnam, and Laos all state explicitly in their constitutions that the ideas of Lenin are the basis for the government itself.
Furthermore, in Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Belarus, the heads of state openly proclaim themselves to be “Marxist-Leninists” who base their government policies on the ideas Lenin laid out in this 1917 text.
This begs that question as to why this book is not incorporated into the basic education of anyone studying “comparative politics” or “political science.” The book is one of the most influential books regarding public administration. The ideas about what a state is, the activities a state engages in, and the very nature of the state itself presented in this text have been widely embraced throughout the world.
The Recent Decline of “Social-Democracy”
Those who Lenin polemicized against, interestingly enough, seem to have largely abandoned their ideas. The various political parties of the “Socialist International” or “Second International” seem to have officially made clear that they no longer desire to achieve a traditionally defined socialism at all.
In 1995, Tony Blair’s “New Labour” faction seized control of the British Labour Party, and made it overwhelmingly clear that they no longer sought to establish worker’s control of the economy. Rather, they sought some kind of post-modern socialism defined as “working together” and “cooperation.”
Similar beliefs and policies have been adopted by the French Socialist Party, the Italian Democratic Party of the Left, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, German Social-Democratic Party, and nearly every other party descended from the “social-democrats” who believed in a classless state.
It seems the social-democrats who once only believed in a classless state, have embraced the concept of a classless society at large, by denying that within the capitalist system two classes contend with each other for power.
Now, as capitalism dies leaving a “high tech dark ages” of low-wages, unemployment, racism, war, and emptiness in its wake, it seems that those who maintain that a socialist world is in fact possible, are overwhelmingly going to be forced to recognize the concepts laid out by Lenin, seeing that the governments of the capitalist world are themselves “private property”, not of “we the people” but of the same ruthless class that holds control of the economy, and lets the world sink into oblivion and darkness while scouring the dust for the last few bits of profit.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Monday, March 8, 2010
"Class Character of the Hungarian Uprising" Key Workers World Party Text
Many have asked me about the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. Many people know that Workers World Party's departure from the Socialist Workers Party involved a different analysis of the events. The document linked below was written by Vince Copeland, founding Workers World Party member (he wrote under the alias V. Grey.) It explains our analysis of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, and basically lays out the "Global Class War Theory" that defines WWP to this day.
To read or print this historical internal document of the Socialist Workers Party that helped to lay the basis for the founding of Workers World Party Click Here.
Many thanks to the blog "Fuck Yeah, Marxism-Leninism" and "Redguard" for making this accessible online.
Wisdom From Lenin: "What Is To Be Done?"
One of the most important texts in the history of the socialist and communist movements is the book “What is To Be Done?: Burning Questions For Our Movement” by V.I. Lenin.
The book was written in 1902, and became one of the defining texts that distinguishes the difference between “revolutionary socialists”, now called “Communists” and “economists” now called “social-democrats.”
Bernstein v. Lenin
At the time of the books publication, Eduard Bernstein of the German Social-Democratic Party was leading the international Marxist movement. Bernstein and his followers championed a slogan called “Freedom of Criticism.” What the slogan meant was that the teachings of Marx needed to be "criticized" by the world socialist movement, and eventually revised to be more current and more applicable to the modern situation.
The followers of Bernstein developed several “criticisms” and “updates” to the ideas of Karl Marx. They included one particularly large “revision.” This revision was with regards to Marx's theory of government. Marx taught then in class societies, the governments reflect the views of the “ruling class.” In Feudalism, the government reflects the views of Nobles and Monarchs. In Capitalism, it reflects the views of those who own the means of production, the capitalists or the bourgeoisie.
Bernstein argued that in a democratic capitalist state, where the right to vote is granted to all, the government becomes a neutral entity that can serve either the capitalists or the workers. In modern Germany, France, and Britain, Bernstein argued that the state was neutral, and workers could vote in their interests and gradually elect a socialist society into being. Bernstein argued that no longer did the revolutionaries need to propagate anti-capitalism or preach the overthrow of capitalism, but that they should simply push to “build socialism one step at a time” by winning key reforms, and building alliances with liberals.
Lenin, however, argued that “without revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary movement.” He argued that the state was not a neutral entity, and furthermore, it was the duty of revolutionaries not simply to be involved in struggles reform, but enable these struggles to become struggles against capitalism itself.
Lenin argued that under capitalism, the state is dominated by capitalist "by direct corruption of public officials, and by an alliance between the government and the stock exchange." (The State and Revolution)
Under One Wing Or Other
Lenin agreed that workers naturally do rise up against the system that represses them, as Mao Zedong later said “where there is oppression, there is resistance.” Lenin argued that when workers do rise up against the capitalists, it is the duty of the revolutionaries to provide the leadership to this resistance so that it may transform itself from a reform movement to a revolutionary movement.
Lenin argued that without any leadership, the natural resistance movements would find themselves aligning "under the wing" of one group of capitalists or another, not fighting in their own interests as a class. Lenin maintained that because workers are raised in a capitalist society that they hold a capitalist consciousness. Though they have genuine resistance and contrary sentiments, their first instinct will be to think within the confines of capitalist ideology and the capitalist system. So, their resistance will lead them to voting for liberal candidates, trying to pass more progressive legislation, etc.
Lenin argued that a party was needed that would prevent the broad movements of the workers from being co-opted by the capitalists, and transform them into revolutionary anti-capitalist struggles. Lenin argued that a revolutionary party could lead workers into organizing in their own interests, as opposed to siding with one section of the capitalists. He famously stated that without the education provided by a revolutionary party, the workers movement would not go beyond "basic trade union consciousness."
Against Terrorism
Lenin also argued against the “terrorists.” This was a group of radical socialists in Russia, often associated with Anarchism. This element of the revolutionary movement felt that they need not include the people in revolutionary activity, but that their small isolated sects could smash capitalism with “adventurist” acts of bombing, assassination etc.
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Lenin argued that it was the duty of the revolutionaries not to fall into this trap. Lenin criticized the terrorists for their lack of understanding of what motivates people to radical activity, and their insensitivity to the conditions of workers. He argued that if daily life in Czarist Russia was not enough to motivate revolt, mere acts of terrorism would not do so, either.
In 2010, What is To Be Done?
This classic text essentially lays out the Marxist-Leninist strategy of revolution. It lays out how to lead the masses of people in their struggles for survival, power, and better conditions, and at the same time educate and mobilize the people to reach beyond day to day conditions and demands and transform basic resistance into struggles demanding “the whole pie” by smashing the entire system, and replacing it with socialism.
If one seeks to understand what it means to be a communist, and what communists do to build socialism, this book is a necessity. Much of the communist/socialist movement is dominated by elements that either have no involvement in the class struggle at all, and simply act as “debating societies” and “theoretical discussion groups”, or with groups that do intervene in movements, yet while doing so simply merely align themselves with the liberals and do not seek to break workers free from the leadership of capitalists and the capitalist mentality.
“What is To Be Done?” answers the basic question many are asking. Many in the U.S. are currently seeing that there are problems with the capitalist system, and that it is necessary to overthrow it. However, they do not know how to act toward such a goal. Some who are anti-capitalist are reduced to suicidal, deranged acts of terror. The unemployed worker who recently flew his airplane into the IRS building was the very kind of action Lenin criticized among the “Terrorists” of Russia.
The various anti-capitalists who find themselves buried in the dead end of the Democratic Party that betrays them at every opportunity are modern re-incarnations of the very "economists" Lenin criticized within the Socialist International, who forget that without a revolutionary solution and “revolutionary theory” a base to overthrow the system cannot be built.
With so much potential and public opinion in opposition to capitalism, many are asking themselves and others the basic question “What is to be Done?” If they need answers, Lenin’s text from 1902, is happy to provide the answers that worked in Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and everywhere else that had a sucessfull socialist revolution, and accomplished what currently is desperately needed in the United States, a socialist revolution.
Spain, where class collaboration led to the triumph of fascism can show the dangers of economist revisionism. The failed attempts of the Weather Underground of the U.S., the "Red Army Faction" of Germany, and the various other isolated radical sects that began ineffective bombing campaigns can attest to the failure of the "terrorists" that Lenin criticized as well.
As Lenin put it in the text:
We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire. We have combined, by a freely adopted decision, for the purpose of fighting the enemy, and not of retreating into the neighbouring marsh, the inhabitants of which, from the very outset, have reproached us with having separated ourselves into an exclusive group and with having chosen the path of struggle instead of the path of conciliation. And now some among us begin to cry out: Let us go into the marsh! And when we begin to shame them, they retort: What backward people you are! Are you not ashamed to deny us the liberty to invite you to take a better road! Oh, yes, gentlemen! You are free not only to invite us, but to go yourselves wherever you will, even into the marsh. In fact, we think that the marsh is your proper place, and we are prepared to render you every assistance to get there. Only let go of our hands, don’t clutch at us and don’t besmirch the grand word freedom, for we too are “free” to go where we please, free to fight not only against the marsh, but also against those who are turning towards the marsh!
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