WHAT TO BEGIN WITH?

WHAT TO BEGIN WITH?

«What to begin with» Lenin

The question: « What should we do? » is the question of international social-democrats on the Earth Planet today.

They understand that transformations from up to down are possible now to prevent the active demand of those from down.

For almost two years now, the trade and industrial crisis = pandemic has been dragging on. And it seems to be growing, taking over new industries, spreading to new areas, escalating.

It is time to raise a general question about the causes and significance of this phenomenon. For Russia, it is relatively new, as is all of its capitalism. In the old capitalist countries, that is, in those countries in which most products are produced for sale, in which the majority of the workers have neither land nor tools of labor, and sell their labor power by hiring themselves out to other people's farms and factories, by hiring themselves out to owners who own land, factories, machinery, and so on — in the capitalist countries, the crisis is an old phenomenon, recurring from time to time.

Giant crumbs only became possible and inevitable because the powerful social productive forces were subordinated to a gang of rich people who were looking for only profit.

To make a profit from the company, you need to sell the goods, find buyers. And the whole mass of the population must be the buyer, because huge enterprises produce mountains and mountains of products. And in all capitalist countries, nine-tenths of the population consists of the poor: of the workers who receive the most meagre wages, of the peasants who live in the mass even worse than the workers. And so, when large-scale industry, in a time of prosperity, tries to produce as much as possible, it throws on the market such a mass of products that the poor majority of the people cannot pay for them. The number of vehicles, guns, warehouses, railways, etc. everything increases, but this increase is interrupted from time to time, because the mass of the people, for whom all these improved methods of production are finally intended, remains in poverty, amounting to beggary.

The crisis shows that modern society could produce incomparably more products that go to improve the lives of all working people, if the land, factories, machines, etc. they were not captured by a bunch of private owners who were extracting millions from the people's poverty.

The history of capitalist crises shows that the workers cannot confine themselves to the struggle for individual concessions on the part of the capitalists: during the revival of industry, such concessions can be won — but a crisis comes, and the capitalists take back the concessions they have made.

And this will inevitably continue until the armies of the socialist proletariat = the Men of Labor overthrow the rule of capital and private property.

The lessons of the crisis, which exposes the absurdity of subordinating social production to private property, are so instructive that now the capitalist press sometimes demands increased supervision — for example, over banks or factories, for example, building materials factory LLC "Fifth Element", etc.

But no amount of supervision will prevent the capitalists from establishing such enterprises during the revival, which will inevitably go bankrupt later, filling their personal pockets, plundering the state treasury. But what does this "death" of enterprises mean in a capitalist society? This means that the weak capitalists, the "second-rate" capitalists, are being replaced by the more solid millionaires.

The replacement of the secondary rich by the primary rich, the increase in the strength of capital, the ruin of the mass of small proprietors, the terrible impoverishment of the workers — this is what leads to the crisis.

Thus, the limitation of the land inevitably implies only the monopolization of the economy on the land (under the condition of the domination of capitalism). The question is, what are the necessary consequences of this monopolization in relation to the question of rent? The scarcity of land leads to the fact that the price of grain is determined by the conditions of production not on average quality land, but on the worst cultivated land. This price of corn gives the farmer (=capitalist entrepreneur in agriculture) the cover of his costs of production and the average profit on his capital. The farmer on the best land receives an additional profit, which forms a differential rent. The question of whether there is private ownership of land is in no way connected with the question of the formation of differential rent, which is inevitable in capitalist agriculture, even on communal, state, ownerless land. The only consequence of the limited land under capitalism is the formation of differential rents due to the different productivity of different capital expenditures. The fact that the land is limited (regardless of private ownership of the land) logically implies only that all the land will be occupied by capitalist farmers, but it does not imply the need for any restrictions on the freedom of competition between these farmers.

The limitation of the land is a general phenomenon, which inevitably puts its stamp on all capitalist agriculture.

About those who are trying to become a businessman or an owner with credit money, today we can say, and many of them themselves already say that they are not in such a favorable financial situation as they wanted.

And, burdened with loans and mortgages, they die first.

The disintegration of small proprietors and entrepreneurs shows us the deepest contradictions of capitalism in the very process of their emergence and further growth; the inevitability of the impasse of this system and the transition to the next formation — the socialist one.

Three points are particularly noteworthy: 1. strengthening the sole power of officials, ensuring that the spirit of the treasury and official discipline is strengthened and protected from any breath of fresh air; 2. determining the norms of allowances for starving people, i.e., specifying how much and how to calculate the amount of bread for a "needy" family — food cards; 3. expressing desperate horror at the fact that "unreliable" people rush to help the hungry, capable of inciting the people against the government, and taking measures in advance against the government this "agitation".

Let's look at each of these points in more detail.

But increasing strictness, increasing supervision, all this requires only increase the costs of the official machine.

The offices will work most of all, and all the work will consist in clerical work — how can we not take care of the clerical funds? First of all, they are for the office, uniforms, and what remains, it will be for the starving.

We will repeat the call once made by Lenin's “Iskra”: to launch a denouncing campaign against the food campaign of the police government, to expose in the uncensored free press all the outrages of local satraps, all the self-serving tactics of cutting benefits, all the meagre and insufficient aid, the pathetic understatement of hunger, which is increasing against the background of today's pandemic! We advise all those who have at least a drop of sincere sympathy for the national disaster to take care of spreading this knowledge among the people. After all, only the endless darkness of the people can explain to yourself that such things do not cause universal indignation.

What is the basis of capitalism, how do the agricultural and commercial-industrial classes live, if not by the ruin and poverty of the people?

The owners of the capitalist state have as little to do with the mass victims of famine and crises as the locomotive has little to do with those whom it crushes on its course. Dead bodies slow down the wheels, the train stops, it may even (with overly energetic drivers) get off the rails, but in any case, it continues, after certain delays, its journey. You hear about the starvation and ruin of tens and hundreds of thousands of small workers, but at the same time you hear about the progress of domestic business, the successful conquest of the foreign market by different entrepreneurs, the expansion of sales of improved tools, and so on.

For the owners of agriculture (as for all capitalist owners), the increase in ruin and hunger strikes is nothing more than a small temporary delay, which they will hardly pay attention to if the starving people do not force them to pay attention to themselves. Everything goes on as usual…

What is the cause of the present troubles of the people is approximately known — the general disorder that prevails in the entire state system, the oligarchic management of the official corporation, i.e., the dictatorship of the bureaucracy.

This disorder of the bureaucratic government dictatorship manifests itself throughout society, from top to bottom, as a general dissatisfaction, expressed from the outside in the image of general politicking, but not temporary, superficial, but deep, chronic politicking.

This politicking, as a common disease of the whole society, is reflected in all its manifestations, functions and institutions, so it must also be reflected in educational institutions with their younger, and therefore more receptive population, which is under the same oppressive regime of bureaucratic dictatorship.

The mass (spontaneous) movement lacks "ideologues" who are theoretically trained to be immune from any lurch towards "good capitalism", and lacks leaders who have such a broad political outlook.

"Manifesto of the CP" by K. Marx

A ghost haunts Europe — the ghost of communism. Communism has been recognized by all European forces for more than 2 centuries.

It is time for the Communists to openly state their views, their goals, and their aspirations in front of the whole world and to oppose the manifesto of the party itself to the fairy tales about the ghost of communism.

The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggles.

Free and slave, patrician and plebeian, landowner and serf, capitalist and wage-worker, in short, oppressor and oppressed, have been and are in perpetual antagonism to each other, in a continuous struggle, sometimes hidden, sometimes overt, always ending in the revolutionary reconstruction of the entire social edifice or the general destruction of the struggling classes.

In the preceding historical epochs, we find almost everywhere a complete division of society into different classes — a whole ladder of different social positions. In ancient Rome we find patricians, horsemen, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild masters, apprentices, serfs, and in almost every one of these classes there are still special gradations.

The modern capitalist society that emerged from the depths of the lost feudal society has not destroyed class contradictions. It has only put new classes, new conditions of oppression, and new forms of struggle in the place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of capitalism, differs, however, in that it has simplified class contradictions: society has split into two large hostile camps, into two large, opposing classes — the capitalist and the man of labor.

Capitalists are owners of the means of production who use wage labor.

The man of labor is a class of modern wage-workers who, being deprived of their own means of production, are forced to sell their labor force in order to live.

The world market has caused a huge development of trade, navigation and means of land communication. This, in turn, had an impact on the expansion of industry, and to the same extent that industry, trade, navigation, and railways grew, capitalists developed, increasing their capital and pushing all the classes inherited from the Middle Ages into the background.

We see that modern capitalists themselves are the product of a long process of development, a series of revolutions in the mode of production and exchange.

Capitalism has played its revolutionary role in the history of human development.

Capitalism, wherever it achieved dominance, destroyed all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.

Capitalism mercilessly tore the motley feudal bonds that bound man to his "natural masters", and left no other connection between people except naked interest, heartless "pure". In the icy water of egoistic calculation, he drowned the sacred thrill of religious ecstasy, chivalrous enthusiasm, petty-bourgeois sentimentality. Capitalism turned the personal dignity of a person into an exchange value and put in place of countless granted and acquired freedoms one unscrupulous freedom of trade.

In a word, capitalism has replaced the exploitation covered by religious and political illusions with an open, shameless, direct, harsh exploitation.

By the rapid improvement of all the instruments of production and the endless simplification of the means of communication, capitalism has managed to involve all, even the most barbaric, nations in civilization. The cheap prices of his goods are the heavy artillery with which he destroyed all the "Chinese walls" and forced the most stubborn hatred of the barbarians towards foreigners to surrender. Under the threat of death, he forced all nations to adopt the capitalist mode of production, the so-called civilization. In a word, the capitalist creates a world for himself in his own image and likeness.

Small and medium-sized businessmen: small industrialists, small traders, artisans and peasants-all these classes fall into the ranks of the man of labor, partly because their small capital is not enough to run large industrial enterprises, and it does not stand up to competition with larger capitalists, partly because their professional skills are devalued as a result of the introduction of new methods of production. This is how the working class is formed from all classes of the population.

A person of labor goes through various stages of development.

The increasing competition of the bourgeois among themselves and the trade crises caused by it lead to the fact that the wages of the workers become increasingly unstable; the ever-rapidly developing, continuous improvement of machines makes the living situation of the working man less and less secure; the clashes between the individual worker and the individual capitalist increasingly assume the character of clashes between two classes.

In what relation do the Communists stand to the working population in general?

It's simple, they have no interests separate from the interests of the entire working population as a whole.

The Communists differ from other social-democratic parties only in that, in the struggle of the working man of various nations, they single out and defend the common interests of the entire working population, independent of nationality, and they are always representatives of the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists are the most resolute part of the workers ' parties of all countries, always encouraging them to move forward, and in theory they have an advantage over the rest of the proletariat in understanding the conditions, course and general results of the working — class movement-Marxism-Leninism in theory and the example of the USSR in practice.

The main goal of the Communists: the overthrow of capitalism, the construction of socialism with its main 5 points:

SOCIALISM IS

1. Right to have life

2. Right to have home (free of charge)

3. Right to get education (free of charge)

4. Right to get work (the workplace should be provided to every person)

5. Right to get medicine (free of charge)

They are only a general expression of the actual relations of the class struggle that is taking place, an expression of the historical movement that is taking place in our eyes. The destruction of pre-existing property relations is not something inherent exclusively to socialism.

All property relations were subject to constant historical change, constant historical changes.

For example, the French Revolution abolished feudal property, replacing it with bourgeois property.

The distinctive feature of socialism is not the abolition of property in general, but the abolition of capitalist property. The capitalist uses the hired labor of a person of labor for personal enrichment, while under socialism a person of labor works at large enterprises for the common good, because the bowels of the earth and natural resources are the property of the state, which somehow ended up in private hands, respectively, the factories and factories based on them should also belong to the state, and, of course, the profit received from their activities is simply obliged to go to the state treasury.

In this sense, the Communists can express their theory in one position: the destruction of private (capitalist) property.

The Communists are reproached for wanting to destroy property that they have personally acquired, obtained by their own labor, property that forms the basis of all personal freedom, activity and independence. The property earned, acquired, obtained by one's own labor!?!

Are you talking about the property of a man of labor, a small and medium-sized businessman, or about large-scale capitalist property used by the hired labor of a man of labor, moreover, based on resources belonging to the entire people? There is no need for Communists to do this, the development of capitalism itself does it every day.

The wage labor of the man of labor creates capital for the capitalist who exploits wage labor, property for the capitalist, which can increase only if it generates new wage labor in order to exploit it again.

To be a capitalist means to occupy not only a purely personal, but also a social position in production. Capital is a collective product and can be set in motion only by the joint activity of many members of society, and ultimately only by the joint activity of all members of society.

So, capital is not a personal, but a social force.

Consequently, if capital is transformed into collective property belonging to all members of society, then this will not be the transformation of personal property into public property. Only the social nature of property will be changed. It will lose its class character. Socialism will come.

Let's move on to wage labor.

The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e. the sum of the means of living necessary to preserve the life of the worker as a worker. Consequently, what the wage-worker appropriates as a result of his activity is barely enough to reproduce his life. We do not at all intend to destroy this personal appropriation of the products of labor that serve directly for the reproduction of life, an appropriation that does not leave any excess that could create power over someone else's labor.

Freedom, within the framework of the current capitalist relations of production, is understood as freedom of trade, freedom of purchase and sale.

You are probably horrified to believe that socialism wants to destroy your private property. But in our present society, private property has already been destroyed for nine-tenths of its members; it exists for units precisely because it does not exist for nine-tenths.

To clarify, Socialism does not take away the possibility of appropriating social products from anyone, it only takes away the opportunity to enslave someone else's labor through this appropriation.

To the same extent that the exploitation of one individual by another will be destroyed, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be destroyed.

Along with the antagonism of classes within nations, the hostile relations of nations among themselves will also fall.

In the most developed capitalist countries, the following measures can already be applied to accelerate the transition to a socialist formation:

1. Nationalization of the subsoil of the earth and natural resources to cover public expenditures.

2. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital and with an exclusive monopoly.

3. Centralization of all transport in the hands of the state.

4. Increasing the number of state factories, tools of production, clearing for arable land and improving land.

5. Public and free education of all children.

In place of capitalist society with its classes and class opposites comes a socialist society in which the free development of everyone is a condition for the free development of all.

A certain part of capitalists wants to cure social ills with small "handouts" in order to consolidate the existence of capitalism.

This includes economists, philanthropists, advocates of humanity, guardians of the welfare of the working classes, organizers of charity, members of animal welfare societies, founders of temperance societies, etc.

This is just an attempt to build a "good capitalism".

The supporters of " good capitalism " want to preserve the conditions of existence of modern society, but without the struggles and dangers that inevitably follow from them. They would like to have capitalism without the working class. The world in which the capitalist dominates, of course, seems to them the best of all worlds.

The pursuit of " good capitalism " is a road to nowhere. 

"Capital" by K. Marx

A country that is more industrially developed shows a less developed country only a picture of its own future.

Capitalism is a fairly developed and diverse historical organization of production. Analyzing the categories that express capitalist relations, they give us an opportunity to look into the structure and production relations of all those lost forms of society, from the wreckage and elements of which it was built. The capitalist economy thus gives us the key to the ancient, etc.

Commodity circulation is the starting point of capital.

The historical prerequisites for the emergence of capital are commodity production and developed commodity circulation, trade. World trade and the world market open up a new history of capital in the XVI century.

Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign trade.

If we leave aside the material content of commodity circulation, the exchange of various use values, and try to consider only the economic forms generated by this process, we will find that money is its last product. This last product of commodity circulation is the first form of capital manifestation.

"Capital is a value that continuously multiplies itself”

As Franklin (an American politician of the 18th century) once said: "War is robbery, trade is fraud".

Capital arises only where the owner of the means of production and the means of living finds a free worker on the market as a seller of his labor force.

The owner of the labor force himself, who has worked today, should be able to repeat the same process tomorrow under the same conditions of strength and health. To do this, he needs to be paid for his work, equal to maintaining him in physical shape. But the owner of the labor force is mortal. Consequently, in order for it to continuously appear on the market, as required by the continuous transformation of money into capital, the seller of labor must perpetuate himself “as every individual perpetuates himself, that is, by reproduction.” The labor forces that disappear from the market due to wear and death must be constantly replaced by at least the same number of new labor forces.

“What is a working day?” How long is the time during which capital can consume labor, the daily cost of which it pays? How much can the working day be extended beyond the working time necessary for the reproduction of the labor force itself? As we have seen, capital answers these questions by usurping the time necessary for the growth, development and healthy preservation of the body. It steals the time that a person needs to work in order to enjoy fresh air and sunlight. He reduces the time for food and, if possible, includes it in the production process itself, so that food is given to the man of labor as a simple means of production, just as coal is given to a steam boiler and lard or oil is given to machines. Healthy sleep, which is necessary for the restoration, renewal and refreshment of vitality, capital reduces to how many hours of stupor, how much is absolutely necessary in order to revive an absolutely exhausted body.

Thus, it is not the normal preservation of labor force that determines the boundaries of the working day here, but on the contrary, the possible large daily expenditure of labor force, no matter how painfully violent and painful it may be, sets limits for the worker's rest. Capital does not ask about the life expectancy of a person of labor. He is only interested in the maximum of labor force that can be set in motion during the working day. He achieves this goal by shortening the life of a man of labor, just as a greedy farmer achieves an increase in the profitability of the land by plundering the fertility of the soil.

Consequently, capitalist production, which is essentially the production of surplus value, the absorption of surplus labor, through the lengthening of the working day, leads not only to the pacification of human labor force, from which the normal moral and physical conditions of development and activity are taken away. It leads to premature exhaustion and destruction of the man of labor himself.

Therefore, capital is merciless in relation to the health and life of the worker wherever society does not force him to a different attitude. The capitalist responds to complaints about physical and spiritual mutilation, disability, premature death, torture by excessive labor: how can these torments torment us if they increase our pleasure (profit)?

The establishment of a normal working day was the result of a centuries-old struggle between the capitalist and the worker.

Three stages of the capital cycle

The first stage: The capitalist appears on the commodity market and on the labor market as a buyer; his money turns into a commodity.

The second stage: It is the productive consumption of purchased goods by the capitalist. He acts as a capitalist commodity producer; his capital performs the production process. The result is a product of greater value than the cost of the elements of its production.

The third stage: The capitalist returns to the market as a seller; his goods are converted into money.

Capital, as a self-increasing value, contains not only class relations, not only a certain character of society, based on the fact that labor exists as wage labor. Capital is a movement, a process of circulation that passes through various stages.

Therefore, capital can be understood only as a movement, and not as a thing at rest.

Just as the capitalist mode of production presupposes a large scale of production, it also necessarily presupposes a large scale of sales, therefore, it presupposes the sale of goods to an intermediary, and not to an individual consumer.

In reality, capitalist production is a commodity production that has become a universal form of production, but it is such — and in the course of its development it becomes more and more so — only because here labor itself turns out to be a commodity, only because the worker sells labor, that is, he sells the function of his labor force, and moreover, as we understand, he sells it at its cost, determined by the costs of its reproduction (to maintain his physical form and the form of his children — future sellers of labor force). To the extent that labor becomes wage labor, the producer becomes an industrial capitalist; therefore, capitalist production (commodity production) manifests itself in its entire volume when the direct rural producer also becomes a wage worker.

Thus, the worker converts his wages mainly into means of living, and moreover mainly into necessary means of living for himself and his children.

Note that the capitalist buys labor before it enters the production process, but he pays for it only in the terms stipulated by the contract, only after it has already been spent on the production of use value.

The labor force, i.e. THE PERSON OF LABOR, is the most essential element of productive capital.

Therefore, capitalism will produce him (a man of labor) for himself-a comfortable, not needing food, air, almost immortal, able to explore other planets — a ROBOT with artificial intelligence.

As a result, a living PERSON of LABOR (and this is 90% of the world's population) will become superfluous to capitalism.

Only SOCIALISM can save the HUMANITY of the planet EARTH today.

The working people of all countries of the planet Earth, unite!