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2025-06-24T11:56:32Z

ComradeTrash:

Francisco Martins Rodrigues; Portuguese Revolutionary

Library:How Marxism works

2025-06-24T11:28:44Z

ComradeTrash: forgot a 3 comma :p

{{Library work|title=How Marxism works|image=How Marxism Works Harman cover 2.jpg|author=Chris Harman|written in=1979|publisher=Bookmarks Publications|published_date=May, 1979|published_location=London, England|edition_date=July 1, 2000|type=Pamphlet|isbn=9781898876274|source=[https://annas-archive.org/md5/0c69ac3b6f8a4bb3c912f57d19b84416 Anna's Archive]|audiobook=[https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0-IkmzWbjob9lPqBGAyQAX6lhxm5fE_d Dessalines]|display_title=yes}}
{{Foreword|date=2023-10-07|foreword=Originally written in 1979, ''How Marxism works'' is an incredibly important tool for the communist movement. Chris Harman was able to accurately convey the principles of [[Marxism]] to first-time readers. His pamphlet is still relevant today, with the majority of its examples from a recent enough period to resonate with present-day readers.

The strength of How Marxism Works lies in its beginner-friendliness: this book could be given out to someone who has never heard the word 'communism' before, and they would come out with a working knowledge of Marxism in record time.

However, Chris Harman was also in the [[Socialist Workers Party (UK)|Socialist Workers' Party]], a [[Trotskyist]] party. As such, some of his examples are dyed in the colors of his bias against the [[Soviet Union]] -- opinions that have nothing to do with how Marxism works, and instead all to do with the author's own leaning towards Trotsykism.

This edition by ProleWiki is adapted from an earlier edition and contains our own chapter annotations as well as this foreword. We have also removed an annex that advertised books for sale as it was not part of the author's work. Links have also been provided to ProleWiki pages or library works when possible. Everything else has been left as in the source.}}
== Introduction ==
There is a widespread myth that Marxism is difficult. It is a myth propagated by the enemies of socialism – former [[Labour Party (UK)|Labour]] leader [[Harold Wilson]] boasted that he was never able to get beyond the first page of Marx’s [[Library:Capital, vol. I|Capital]]. It is a myth also encouraged by a peculiar breed of academics who declare themselves to be ‘Marxists’: they deliberately cultivate obscure phrases and mystical expressions in order to give the impression that they possess a special knowledge denied to others.

So it is hardly surprising that many socialists who work 40 hours a week in factories, mines or offices take it for granted that Marxism is something they will never have the time or the opportunity to understand.

In fact the basic ideas of Marxism are remarkably simple. They explain, as no other set of ideas can, the society in which we live. They make sense of a world wracked by crises, of its poverty in the midst of plenty, of its coups d’etat and military dictatorships, of the way in which marvellous inventions can consign millions to the dole queues, of ‘democracies’ that subsidise torturers and of ‘socialist’ states that threaten each other’s people with nuclear missiles.

Meanwhile, the establishment thinkers who so deride Marxist ideas chase each other round in a mad game of blind man’s buff, understanding nothing and explaining less.

But though Marxism is not difficult, there is a problem for the reader who comes across Marx’s writings for the first time. Marx wrote well over a century ago. He used the language of the time, complete with references to individuals and events then familiar to virtually everyone, now known only to specialist historians.

I remember my own bafflement when, while still at school, I tried to read his pamphlet [[Library:The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte|The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte]].

I didn’t know either what Brumaire was or who [[Louis Bonaparte]] was. How many socialists have abandoned attempts to come to grips with Marxism after such experiences!

This is the justification for this short book. It seeks to provide an introduction to Marxist ideas, which will make it easier for socialists to follow what Marx was on about and to understand the development of Marxism since then in the hands of [[Friedrich Engels|Frederick Engels]], [[Rosa Luxemburg]], [[Vladimir Lenin]], [[Leon Trotsky]], and a whole host of lesser thinkers.<ref group="ProleWiki 1.">No less important, we can note as well: [[Stalin]], [[Mao Zedong]], [[Kim Il Sung]] and [[Deng Xiaoping]]. Trotsky himself was important to Marxism only as far as he provided an example of what ''not'' to do.</ref>

Much of this pamphlet first appeared as a series of articles in Socialist Worker under the title ‘Marxism Made Easy’. But I have added substantial fresh material. A little of this I have lifted wholesale from two previous attempts to provide a simple exposition of Marxist ideas: Duncan Hallas’s ''The Meaning of Marxism'' and Norwich SWP’s ‘''Marxist Education Series''’.

One final point. Space has prevented me from dealing in this pamphlet with some important parts of the Marxist analysis of the modern world. I have included a substantial further reading section at the back.

=== ProleWiki annotations ===
<references group="ProleWiki 1." />

== Why we need Marxist theory ==
What do we need theory for? We know there is a crisis. We know we are being robbed by our employers. We know we’re all angry. We know we need socialism. All the rest is just for the intellectuals.

You often hear words such as these from militant socialists and trade unionists. Such views are strongly encouraged by anti-socialists, who try to give the impression that Marxism is an obscure, complicated and boring doctrine.

Socialist ideas, they say, are ‘abstract’. They may seem all right in theory, but in real life common sense tells us something else entirely.

The trouble with these arguments is that the people who put them forward usually have a ‘theory’ of their own, even if they refuse to recognise it. Ask them any question about society, and they will try to answer it with some generalisation or other. A few examples: ‘People are naturally selfish.’ ‘Anyone can get to the top if they try hard enough.’ ‘If it weren’t for the rich there wouldn’t be any money to provide work for the rest of us.’ ‘If only we could educate the workers, society would change.’ ‘Declining morals have brought the country to its present state.’ Listen to any argument in the street, on the bus, in the canteen – you’ll hear dozens of such sayings.

Each and every one contains a view of why society is like it is and of how people can improve their condition. Such views are all ‘theories’ of society.

When people say they do not have a theory, all they really mean is they have not clarified their views.

This is particularly dangerous for anyone who is trying to change society. For the newspapers, the radio, the television, are all continually filling our minds with attempted explanations for the mess society is in. They hope we will accept what they say without thinking more about the issues.

But you cannot fight effectively to change society unless you recognise what is false in all these different arguments.

This was first shown 150 years ago. In the 1830s and 1840s the development of industry in areas such as the north west of England drew hundreds of thousands of men, women and children into miserably paid jobs. They were forced to endure living conditions of unbelievable squalor.

They began to fight back against this with the first mass workers’ organisations – the first trade unions, and in Britain the first movement for political rights for workers: [[Chartism]]. Alongside these movements were the first small groups of people dedicated to winning socialism.

Immediately the problem arose as to how the workers’ movement could achieve its aim.

Some people said it was possible to persuade society’s rulers to change things through peaceful means. The ‘moral force’ of a mass, peaceful movement would ensure that benefits were given to the workers. Hundreds of thousands of people organised, demonstrated, worked to build a movement on the basis of such views – only to end defeated and demoralised.<ref group="ProleWiki 2.">Known as [[utopian socialism]]; see [[Robert Owen]], [[Saint-Simon]], [[Charles Fourier]]. They believed that by building factories nicer to the employees, all other capitalists would be convinced to do the same when they saw how much nicer and productive these factories were. It did not work out.</ref>

Others recognised the need to use ‘physical force’, but thought this could be achieved by fairly small, conspiratorial groups cut off from the rest of society. These too led tens of thousands of workers into struggles that ended in defeat and demoralisation.<ref group="ProleWiki 2.">See [[Auguste Blanqui]]</ref>

Still others believed the workers could achieve their goals by economic action, without confronting the army and the police. Again, their arguments led to mass actions. In England in 1842 the world’s first general strike took place in the industrial areas of the north, with tens of thousands of workers holding out for four weeks until forced back to work by hunger and privation.

It was towards the end of the first stage of defeated workers’ struggles, in 1848, that the German socialist Karl Marx spelt out his own ideas fully, in his pamphlet [[Library:Manifesto of the Communist Party|The Communist Manifesto]].

His ideas were not pulled out of thin air. They attempted to provide a basis for dealing with all the questions that had been brought up by the workers’ movement of the time.

The ideas Marx developed are still relevant today. It is stupid to say, as some people do, that they must be out of date because Marx first wrote them down more than 150 years ago. In fact, all the notions of society that Marx argued with are still very widespread. Just as the Chartists argued about ‘moral force’ or ‘physical force’, socialists today argue about the ‘parliamentary road’ or the ‘revolutionary road’. Among those who are revolutionaries the argument for and against ‘terrorism’ is as alive as it was in 1848.

=== The idealists ===
Marx was not the first person to try to describe what was wrong with society. At the time he was writing, new inventions in factories were turning out wealth on a scale undreamt of by previous generations. For the first time it seemed humanity had the means to defend itself against the natural calamities that had been the scourge of previous ages.

Yet this did not mean any improvement in the lives of the majority of the people. Quite the opposite. The men, women and children who manned the new factories led lives much worse that those led by their grandparents who had toiled the land. Their wages barely kept them above the bread line; periodic bouts of mass unemployment thrust them well below it. They were crammed into miserable, squalid slums, without proper sanitation, subjected to monstrous epidemics.

Instead of the development of civilisation bringing general happiness and well being, it was giving rise to greater misery.

This was noted, not just by Marx, but by some of the other great thinkers of the period – men such as the English poets Blake and Shelley, the Frenchmen Fourier and [[Proudhon]], the German philosophers [[Hegel]] and [[Ludwig Feuerbach|Feuerbach]].

Hegel and Feuerbach called the unhappy state in which humanity found itself ‘alienation’ – a term you still often hear. By alienation, Hegel and Feuerbach meant that men and women continually found that they were dominated and oppressed by what they themselves had done in the past. So, Feuerbach pointed out, people had developed the idea of God –and then had bowed down before it, feeling miserable because they could not live up to something they themselves had made. The more society advanced, the more miserable, ‘alienated’, people became.

In his own earliest writings Marx took this notion of ‘alienation’ and applied it to the life of those who created the wealth of society:<blockquote>The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range... With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men... The object which labour produces confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer...</blockquote>In Marx’s time the most popular explanations of what was wrong with society were still of a religious kind. The misery of society, it was said, was because of the failure of people to do what God wanted them to. If only we were all to ‘renounce sin’ everything would turn out all right.

A similar view is often heard today, although it usually purports to be non-religious. This is the claim that ‘to change society, you must first change yourself’. If only individual men and women would cure themselves of ‘selfishness’ or ‘materialism’ (or occasionally ‘hangups’) then society would automatically get better.

A related view spoke not of changing all individuals, but a few key ones – those who exercise power in society. The idea was to try to make the rich and powerful ‘see reason’.

One of the first British socialists, Robert Owen, began by trying to convince industrialists that they should be kinder to their workers. The same idea is still dominant today among the leaders of the Labour Party, including its left wing. Note how they always call the crimes of the employers ‘mistakes’, as if a bit of argument will persuade big business to relax its grip on society.

Marx referred to all such views as ‘[[Idealism|idealist]]’. Not because he was against people having ‘ideas’, but because such views see ideas as existing in isolation from the conditions in which people live.

People’s ideas are intimately linked to the sort of lives they are able to live. Take, for instance, ‘selfishness’. Present day capitalist society breeds selfishness – even in people who continually try to put other people first. A worker who wants to do their best for their children, or to give their parents something on top of their pension, finds the only way is to struggle continually against other people – to get a better job, more overtime, to be first in the queue for redundancy. In such a society you cannot get rid of ‘selfishness’ or ‘greediness’ merely by changing the minds of individuals.

It’s even more ridiculous to talk of changing society by changing the ideas of ‘top people’. Suppose you were successful in winning a big employer over to socialist ideas and he then stopped exploiting workers. He would just lose in competition with rival employers and be driven out of business.

Even for those who rule society what matters is not ideas but the structure of the society in which they hold those ideas.

The point can be put another way. If ideas are what change society, where do the ideas come from?

We live in a certain sort of society. The ideas put across by the press, the TV, the educational system and so on defend that sort of society. How has anyone ever been able to develop completely different ideas? Because their daily experiences contradict the official ideas of our society.

For example, you cannot explain why far fewer people are religious today than 100 years ago simply in terms of the success of atheistic propaganda. You have to explain why people listen to atheistic ideas in a way they did not 100 years ago.

Similarly, if you want to explain the impact of ‘great men’, you have to explain why other people agree to follow them. It is no good saying that, for example. Napoleon or Lenin changed history, without explaining why millions of people were willing to do what they suggested. After all, they were not mass hypnotists. Something in the life of society at a certain point led people to feel that what they suggested seemed correct.

You can only understand how ideas change history if you understand where those ideas come from and why people accept them. That means looking beyond the ideas to the material conditions of the society in which they occur. That is why Marx insisted, ‘It is not consciousness that determines being, but social being that determines consciousness.’

=== ProleWiki annotations ===
<references group="ProleWiki 2." />

== Understanding history ==
Ideas by themselves cannot change society. This was one of Marx’s first conclusions. Like a number of thinkers before him, he insisted that to understand society you had to see human beings as part of the material world.

Human behaviour was determined by material forces, just like the behaviour of any other natural object. The study of humanity was part of the scientific study of the natural world. Thinkers with such views were called [[Materialism|materialists]].

Marx regarded materialism as a great step forward over the various religious and idealist notions of history. It meant that you could argue scientifically about changing social conditions, you no longer depended on praying to God or on ‘spiritual change’ in people.

The replacement of idealism by materialism was the replacement of mysticism by science. But not all materialist explanations of human behaviour are correct. Just as there have been mistaken scientific theories in biology, chemistry or physics, so there have been mistaken attempts to develop scientific theories of society. Here are a few examples: One very widespread, non-Marxist, materialist view holds that human beings are animals, who behave ‘naturally’ in certain ways. Just as it is in the nature of wolves to kill or in the nature of sheep to be placid, so it is in the nature of men to be aggressive, domineering, competitive and greedy (and, it is implied, of women to be meek, submissive, deferential and passive).

One formulation of this view is to be found in the best selling book ''The Naked Ape''. The conclusions that are drawn from such arguments are almost invariably reactionary. If men are naturally aggressive, it is said, then there is no point in trying to improve society. Things will always turn out the same. Revolutions will ‘always fail’.

But ‘human nature’ does in fact vary from society to society. For instance, competitiveness, which is taken for granted in our society, hardly existed in many previous societies. When scientists first tried to give [[Lakota people|Sioux]] Indians IQ tests, they found that the Indians could not understand why they should not help each other do the answers. The society they lived in stressed cooperation, not competition.

The same with aggressiveness. When Eskimos first met Europeans, they could not make any sense whatsoever of the notion of ‘war’. The idea of one group of people trying to wipe out another group of people seemed crazy to them.

In our society it is regarded as ‘natural’ that parents should love and protect their children. Yet in the Ancient Greek city of Sparta it was regarded as ‘natural’ to leave infants out in the mountains to see if they could survive the cold.

‘Unchanging human nature’ theories provide no explanation for the great events of history. The pyramids of Egypt, the splendours of Ancient Greece, the empires of [[Roman Empire (27 BCE–395 CE)|Rome]] or the [[Realm of the Four Parts (1438–1533)|Incas]], the modern industrial city, are put on the same level as the illiterate [[Peasantry|peasants]] who lived in the mud hovels of the [[Feudalism|Dark Ages]]. All that matters is the ‘naked ape’ – not the magnificent civilisations the ape has built. It is irrelevant that some forms of society succeed in feeding the ‘apes’, while others leave millions to starve to death.

Many people accept a different materialist theory, which stresses the way it is possible to change human behaviour. Just as animals can be trained to behave differently in a circus to a jungle, so, say the supporters of this view, human behaviour can similarly be changed. If only the right people got control of society, it is said, then ‘human nature’ could be transformed.

This view is certainly a great step forward from the ‘naked ape’. But as an explanation of how society as a whole can be changed it fails. If everyone is completely conditioned in present-day society, how can anyone ever rise above society and see how to change the conditioning mechanisms? Is there some God-ordained minority that is magically immune to the pressures that dominate everyone else? If we are all animals in the circus, who can be the lion tamer?

Those who hold this theory either end up saying society cannot change (like the naked apers) or they believe change is produced by something outside society – by God, or a ‘great man’, or the power of individual ideas. Their ‘materialism’ lets a new version of idealism in through the back door.

As Marx pointed out, this doctrine necessarily ends up by dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. This ‘materialist’ view is often reactionary. One of the best known adherents of the view today is a right wing American psychologist called Skinner. He wants to condition people to behave in certain ways. But since he himself is a product of American capitalist society, his ‘conditioning’ merely means trying to make people conform to that society.

Another materialist view blames all the misery in the world on ‘population pressure’. (This is usually called Malthusian after Malthus, the English economist of the late 18th century who first developed it.) But it cannot explain why the United States, for instance, burns corn while people in India starve. Nor can it explain why 150 years ago there was not enough food produced in the US to feed 10 million people, while today enough is produced to feed 200 million.

It forgets that every extra mouth to feed is also an extra person capable of working and creating wealth.

Marx called all these mistaken explanations forms of ‘mechanical’ or ‘crude’ materialism. They all forget that as well as being part of the material world, human beings are also acting, living creatures whose actions change it.

=== The materialist interpretation of history ===
<blockquote>Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence – their food, shelter and clothing.</blockquote>With these words, Karl Marx first stressed what was distinct about his explanation of how society developed. Human beings are animals descended from ape-like creatures. Like other animals, their first concern is feeding themselves and protecting themselves from the climate.

The way other animals do this depends on their inherited biological make up. A wolf stays alive by chasing and killing its prey, in ways determined by its biologically inherited instincts. It keeps warm on cold nights because of its fur. It brings up its cubs according to inherited patterns of behaviour.

But human life is not fixed in this way. The humans who roamed the Earth 100,000 years ago or 30,000 years ago lived quite different lives from ourselves. They lived in caves and holes in the ground. They did not have any containers to keep food or water in, they depended for their food on collecting berries or throwing stones at wild animals. They could not write, or count beyond the fingers on their hands. They had no real knowledge of what went on beyond their immediate neighbourhood or what their forefathers had done.

Yet physically their make up 100,000 years ago was similar to that of modern man and 30,000 years ago it was identical. If you washed and shaved a caveman, put him in a suit and walked him down the high street, no one would think him out of place.

As the archaeologist C. Gordon Childe has noted:<blockquote>The earliest skeletons of our own species belong to the closing phases of the last Ice Age … Since the time when skeletons of Homo sapiens first appear in the geological record … man’s bodily evolution has come virtually to a standstill, although his cultural progress was just beginning.</blockquote>The same point is made by another archaeologist, Leakey:<blockquote>The physical differences between men of the Aurignacian and Magdalenian cultures (25,000 years ago) on the one hand, and present day men on the other is negligible, while the cultural difference is immeasurable.</blockquote>By ‘culture’ the archaeologist means the things which men and women learn and teach one another (how to make clothes from furs or wool, how to make pots out of clay, how to make fire, how to build homes, and so forth) as opposed to those things that animals know instinctively.

The lives of the earliest humans were already vastly different from those of other animals. For they were able to use the physical features peculiar to humans – large brains, forelimbs capable of manipulating objects – to begin to shape their surroundings to suit their needs. This meant humans could adapt themselves to a wide range of different conditions, without any change in their physical make up. Humans no longer simply reacted to conditions around them. They could act upon those conditions, beginning to change them to their own advantage.

At first they used sticks and stones to attack wild beasts, they lit torches from naturally occurring fires to provide themselves with heat and light, they covered themselves with vegetation and animal skins. Over many tens of thousands of years they learnt to make fire themselves, to shape stones using other stones, eventually to grow food from seeds they themselves had planted, to store it in pots made out of clay, and to domesticate certain animals.

Comparatively recently – a mere 5,000 years ago, out of half a million years of human history – they learnt the secret of turning ores into metals that could be shaped into reliable tools and effective weapons.

Each of these advances had an enormous impact, not merely in making it easier for humans to feed and clothe themselves, but also in transforming the very organisation of human life itself. From the beginning human life was social. Only the joint efforts of several humans could enable them to kill the beasts, to gather the food and keep the fires going. They had to cooperate.

This continual close cooperation also caused them to communicate, by uttering sounds and developing languages. At first the social groups were simple. There was not enough naturally growing produce anywhere to support groups of humans more than perhaps a couple of dozen strong. All effort had to be put into the basic tasks of getting the food, so everyone did the same job and lived the same sort of life.

With no means of storing any quantities of food, there could be no private property or class divisions, nor was there any booty to produce a motive for war.

There were, until a few years ago, still hundreds of societies in many different parts of the globe where this was still the pattern – among some of the Indians of North and South America, some of the peoples of Equatorial Africa and the Pacific Ocean, the Aborigines of Australia.

Not that these people were less clever than ourselves or had a more ‘primitive mentality’. The Australian Aborigines, for instance, had to learn to recognise literally thousands of plants and the habits of scores of different animals in order to survive. The anthropologist Professor Firth has described how: <blockquote>Australian tribes … know the habits, markings, breeding grounds and seasonal fluctuations of all the edible animals, fish and birds of their hunting grounds. They know the external and some of the less obvious properties of rocks, stones, waxes, gums, plants, fibres and barks; they know how to make fire; they know how to apply heat to relieve pain, stop bleeding and delay the putrefaction of fresh food; and they also use fire and heat to harden some woods and soften others … They know something at least of the phases of the moon, the movement of the tides, the planetary cycles, and the sequence and duration of the seasons; they have correlated together such climactic fluctuations as wind systems, annual patterns of humidity and temperature and fluxes in the growth and presence of natural species … In addition they make intelligent and economical use of the by-products of animals killed for food; the flesh of the kangaroo is eaten; the leg bones are used as fabricators for stone tools and as pins; the sinews become spear bindings; the claws are set into necklaces with wax and fibre; the fat is combined with red ochre as a cosmetic, and blood is mixed with charcoal as paint... They have some knowledge of simple mechanical principles and will trim a boomerang again and again to give it the correct curve...</blockquote>They were much more ‘clever’ than us in dealing with the problems of surviving in the Australian desert. What they had not learnt was to plant seeds and grow their own food – something our own ancestors learnt only about 5,000 years ago, after being on the Earth for 100 times that period.

The development of new techniques of producing wealth – the means of human life – has always given birth to new forms of cooperation between humans, to new social relations.

For example, when people first learnt to grow their own food (by planting seeds and domesticating animals) and to store it (in earthenware pots) there was a complete revolution in social life – called by archaeologists ‘the neolithic revolution’. Humans had to cooperate together now to clear the land and to harvest food, as well as to hunt animals. They could live together in much greater numbers than before, they could store food and they could begin to exchange goods with other settlements.

The first towns could develop. For the first time there was the possibility of some people leading lives that did not involve them just in providing food: some would specialise in making pots, some in mining flints and later metal for tools and weapons, some in carrying through elementary administrative tasks for the settlement as a whole. More ominously, the stored surplus of food provided a motive for war.

People had begun by discovering new ways of dealing with the world around them, or harnessing nature to their needs. But in the process, without intending it, they had transformed the society in which they lived and with it their own lives. Marx summed up this process: a development of the ‘forces of production’ changed the ‘relations of production’ and, through them, society.

There are many more recent examples. Some 300 years ago the vast majority of people in this country still lived on the land, producing food by techniques that had not changed for centuries. Their mental horizon was bounded by the local village and their ideas very much influenced by the local church. The vast majority did not need to read and write, and never learned to.

Then, 200 years ago, industry began to develop. Tens of thousands of people were drawn into the factories. Their lives underwent a complete transformation. Now they lived in great towns, not small villages. They needed to learn skills undreamt of by their ancestors, including eventually the ability to read and write. Railways and steamships made it possible to travel across half the Earth.

The old ideas hammered into their heads by the priests no longer fitted at all. The material revolution in production was also a revolution in the way they lived and in the ideas they had.

Similar changes are still affecting vast numbers of people. Look at the way people from villages in Bangladesh or Turkey have been drawn to the factories of England or Germany seeking work. Look at the way many find that their old customs and religious attitudes no longer fit.

Or look at the way in the past 50 years the majority of women have got used to working outside the home and how this has led them to challenge the old attitude that they were virtually the property of their husbands.

Changes in the way humans work together to produce the things that feed, clothe and shelter them cause changes in the way in which society is organised and the attitude of people in it. This is the secret of social change – of history – that the thinkers before Marx (and many since), the idealists and the mechanical materialists, could not understand.

The idealists saw there was change – but said it must come out of the skies. The mechanical materialists saw that humans were conditioned by the material world but could not understand how things could ever change. What Marx saw was that human beings are conditioned by the world around them, but that they react back upon the world, working on it so as to make it more habitable.

But in doing so they change the conditions under which they live and therefore themselves as well.

The key to understanding change in society lies in understanding how human beings cope with the problem of creating their food, shelter and clothing. That was Marx’s starting point. But that does not mean Marxists believe that improvements in technology automatically produce a better society, or even that inventions automatically lead to changes in society. Marx rejected this view (sometimes called technological determinism). Again and again in history, people have rejected ideas for advancing the production of food, shelter or clothing because these clash with the attitudes or the forms of society that already exist.

For example, under the Roman Empire there were many ideas about how to produce more crops from a given amount of ground, but people didn’t put them into effect because they required more devotion to work than you could get from slaves working under fear of the whip. When the British ruled Ireland in the 18th century they tried to stop the development of industry there because it clashed with the interests of businessmen in London.

If someone produced a method of solving the food problem of India by slaughtering the sacred cows or providing everyone in Britain with succulent steaks by processing rat meat, they would be ignored because of established prejudices.

Developments in production challenge old prejudices and old ways of organising society, but they do not automatically overthrow those old prejudices and social forms. Many human beings fight to prevent change – and those wanting to use new methods of production have to fight or change. If those who oppose change win, then the new forms of production cannot come into operation and production stagnates or even goes backwards.

In Marxist terminology: as the forces of production develop they clash with the pre-existing social relations and ideas that grew up on the basis of old forces of production. Either people identified with the new forces of production win this clash, or those identified with the old system do. In the one case, society moves forward, in the other it remains stuck in a rut, or even goes backwards.

== Class struggle ==
We live in a society that is divided into classes, in which a few people have vast amounts of private property, and most of us have virtually none. Naturally, we tend to take it for granted that things have always been like this. But in fact, for the greater part of human history, there were no classes, no private property, and no armies or police. This was the situation during the half a million years of human development up to 5,000 or 10,000 years ago.<ref group="ProleWiki 4.">See [[Primitive communism]]</ref>

Until more food could be produced by one person’s work than was needed to keep that person fit for work, there could be no division into classes. What was the point of keeping slaves if all that they produced was needed to keep them alive?

But beyond a certain point, the advance of production made class divisions not only possible but necessary. Enough food could be produced to leave a surplus after the immediate producers had taken enough to stay alive. And the means existed to store this food and to transport it from one place to another.

The people whose labour produced all this food could simply have eaten the extra ‘surplus’ food.

Since they lived fairly meagre, miserable lives, they were strongly tempted. But that left them unprotected against the ravages of nature, which might mean famine or a flood the next year, and against attacks from angry tribes from outside the area.

It was, at first, of great advantage to everyone if a special group of people took charge of this extra wealth, storing it against future disaster, using it to support craftsmen, building up means of defence, exchanging part of it with distant peoples for useful objects. These activities came to be carried out in the first towns, where administrators, merchants and craftsmen lived. Out of the markings on tablets used to keep a record of the different sorts of wealth, writing began to develop.

Such were the first, faltering steps of what we call ‘civilisation’. But – and it was a very big but – all this was based on control of the increased wealth by a small minority of the population. And the minority used the wealth for its own good as well as the good of society as a whole.

The more production developed, the more wealth came into the hands of this minority – and the more it became cut off from the rest of society. Rules, which began as a means of benefiting society, became ‘laws’, insisting that the wealth and the land that produced it was the ‘private property’ of the minority. A [[ruling class]] had come into existence – and laws defended its power.

You might perhaps ask whether it would have been possible for society to have developed otherwise, for those who laboured on the land to control its produce?

The answer has to be no. Not because of ‘human nature’, but because society was still very poor.

The majority of the Earth’s population were too busy scratching the soil for a meagre living to have time to develop systems of writing and reading, to create works of art, to build ships for trade, to plot the course of the stars, to discover the rudiments of mathematics, to work out when rivers would flood or how irrigation channels should be constructed. These things could only happen if some of the necessities of life were seized from the mass of the population and used to maintain a privileged minority which did not have to toil from sunrise to sunset.

However, that does not mean that the division into classes remains necessary today. The last century has seen a development of production undreamt of in the previous history of humanity.

Natural scarcity has been overcome – what now exists is artificial scarcity, created as governments destroy food stocks.

Class society today is holding humanity back, not leading it forward.

It was not just the first change from purely agricultural societies to societies of towns and cities that gave rise, necessarily, to new class divisions. The same process was repeated every time new ways of producing wealth began to develop.

So, in Britain 1,000 years ago, the ruling class was made up of feudal barons who controlled the land and lived off the backs of the serfs. But as trade began to develop on a big scale, there grew up alongside them in the cities a new privileged class of wealthy merchants. And when industry began to develop on a substantial scale, their power in turn was disputed by the owners of industrial enterprises.

At each stage in the development of society there was an oppressed class whose physical labour created the wealth, and a ruling class who controlled that wealth. But as society developed both the oppressed and the oppressors underwent changes.

In the slave society of Ancient Rome the slaves were the personal property of the ruling class. The slave owner owned the goods produced by the slave because he owned the slave, in exactly the same way as he owned the milk produced by a cow because he owned the cow.

In the feudal society of the Middle Ages the serfs had their own land, and owned what was produced from it; but in return for having this land they had to do a number of days work every year on the land owned by the feudal lord. Their time would be divided – perhaps half their time they would be working for the lord, half the time for themselves. If they refused to do work for the lord, he was entitled to punish them (through flogging, imprisonment or worse).

In modern capitalist society the boss does not physically own the worker nor is he entitled to physically punish a worker who refuses to do unpaid work for him. But the boss does own the factories where the worker has to get a job if he or she wants to keep alive. So it is fairly easy for him to force the worker to put up with a wage which is much less than the value of the goods the worker makes in the factory.

In each case the oppressing class gets control of all the wealth that is left over once the most elementary needs of the workers have been met. The slave owner wants to keep his property in a good condition, so he feeds his slave in exactly the same way as you might oil your car. But everything surplus to the physical needs of the slave, the owner uses for his own enjoyment. The feudal serf has to feed and clothe himself with the work he puts in on his own bit of land. All the extra labour he puts in on the lord’s fields goes to the lord.

The modern worker gets paid a wage. All the other wealth he creates goes to the employing class as profit, interest or rent.

=== The class struggle and the state ===
The workers have rarely accepted their lot without fighting back. There were slave revolts in Ancient Egypt and Rome, peasant revolts in Imperial China, civil wars between the rich and poor in the cities of Ancient Greece, in Rome and Renaissance Europe.

That is why Karl Marx began his pamphlet [[Library:Manifesto of the Communist Party|''The Communist Manifesto'']] by insisting, ‘The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggles.’ The growth of civilisation had depended on the exploitation of one class by another, and therefore on the struggle between them.

However powerful an Egyptian pharaoh, a Roman emperor or a medieval prince, however luxurious their lives, however magnificent their palaces, they could do nothing unless they guaranteed that the products grown by the most miserable peasant or slave passed into their possession. They could only do this if alongside the division into classes there also grew something else – control over the means of violence by themselves and their supporters.

In earlier societies there had been no army, police or governmental apparatus separate from the majority of the people. Even some 50 or 60 years ago, for instance, in parts of Africa, it was still possible to find societies in which this was still so. Many of the tasks done by the state in our society were simply done informally by the whole population, or by meetings of representatives.

Such meetings would judge the behaviour of any individual who was considered to have broken an important social rule. Punishment would be applied by the whole community – for instance by forcing miscreants to leave. Since everyone was agreed on the necessary punishment, separate police were not needed to put it into effect. If warfare occurred all the young men would take part, under leaders chosen for the occasion, again without any separate army structure.

But once you had a society in which a minority had control over most of the wealth, these simple ways of keeping ‘law and order’ and organising warfare could no longer work. Any meeting of representatives or any gathering of the armed young men would be likely to split along class lines.

The privileged group could only survive if it began to monopolise in its own hands the making and implementation of punishments, laws, the organisation of armies, the production of weapons. So the separation into classes was accompanied by the growth of groups of judges, policemen and secret policemen, generals, bureaucrats – all of whom were given part of the wealth in the hands of the privileged class in return for protecting its rule.

Those who served in the ranks of this ‘state’ were trained to obey without hesitation the orders of their ‘superiors’ and were cut off from all normal social ties with the exploited mass of people. The state developed as a killing machine in the hands of the privileged class. And a highly effective machine it could be.

Of course, the generals who ran this machine often fell out with a particular emperor or king, and tried to put themselves in his place. The ruling class, having armed a monster, could often not control it. But since the wealth needed to keep the killing machine running came from the exploitation of the working masses, every such revolt would be followed by continuation of society along the old lines.

Throughout history people who have really wanted to change society for the better have found themselves up against not just the privileged class, but also an armed machine, a state, that serves its interest.

Ruling classes, together with the priests, generals, policemen and legal systems that backed them up, all grew up in the first place because without them civilisation could not develop. But once they are established in power, they come to have an interest in hindering the further development of civilisation. Their power is dependent upon their ability to force those who produce wealth to hand it over to them. They become wary of new ways of producing wealth, even if more efficient than the old, lest control escape from their hands.

They fear anything that could lead to the exploited masses developing initiative and independence.

And they also fear the growth of new privileged groups with enough wealth to be able to pay for arms and armies of their own. Beyond a certain point, instead of aiding the development of production, they began to hinder it.

For example, in the Chinese Empire, the power of the ruling class rested upon its ownership of the land and its control over the canals and dams that were necessary for irrigation and to avoid floods.

This control laid the basis for a civilisation that lasted some 2,000 years. But at the end of this period production was not much more advanced than at the beginning – despite the flourishing of Chinese art, the discovery of printing and gunpowder, all at a time when Europe was stuck in the Dark Ages.

The reason was that when new forms of production did begin to develop, it was in towns, through the initiative of merchants and craftsmen. The ruling class feared this growth in power of a social grouping that was not completely under its control. So periodically the imperial authorities took harsh measures to crush the growing economies of the towns, to drive production down, and to destroy the power of the new social classes.

The growth of new forces of production – of new ways of producing wealth – clashed with the interests of the old ruling class. A struggle developed, the outcome of which determined the whole future of society.

Sometimes the outcome, as in China, was that new forms of production were prevented from emerging, and society remained more or less stagnant for very long periods of time.

Sometimes, as in the Roman Empire, the inability of new forms of production to develop meant that eventually there was no longer enough wealth being produced to maintain society on its old basis.

Civilisation collapsed, the cities were destroyed and people reverted to a crude, agricultural form of society.

Sometimes a new class, based upon a new form of production, was able to organise to weaken and finally overthrow the old ruling class, together with its legal system, its armies, its ideology, its religion. Then society could go forward.

In each case whether society went forwards or backwards<ref group="ProleWiki 4.">The author doesn't mean the general trend of how society progresses, but individual revolutions.</ref> depended on who won the war between the classes. And, as in any war, victory was not ordained in advance, but depended on the organisation, cohesion and leadership of the rival classes.

=== ProleWiki annotations ===
<references group="ProleWiki 4." />

== Capitalism – how the system began ==
One of the most ludicrous arguments you hear is that things could not be different to the way they are now. Yet things were different. And not on some distant part of the globe, but in this country, not so long ago. A mere 250 years ago people would have regarded you as a lunatic if you had described to them the world we live in now, with its huge cities, its great factories, its aeroplanes, its space expeditions – even its railway systems were beyond the bounds of their imagination.

For they lived in a society which was overwhelmingly rural, in which most people had never travelled ten miles outside their local village, in which the pattern of life was determined, as it had been for thousands of years, by the alternation of the seasons.

But already, 700 or 800 years ago, a development had begun which was eventually to challenge this whole system of society. Groups of craftsmen and traders began to establish themselves in towns, not giving their services for nothing to some lord as the rest of the population did, but exchanging products with various lords and serfs for foodstuffs. Increasingly they used precious metals as a measure of that exchange. It was not a big step to seeing in every act of exchange an opportunity to get a little extra of the precious metal, to make a profit.

At first the towns could only survive by playing one lord off against another. But as the skills of their craftsmen improved, they created more wealth, and they grew in influence. The ‘burghers’, the ‘bourgeois’ or the ‘middle classes’ began as a class within the [[Feudalism|feudal society]] of the Middle Ages.

But they obtained their riches in a quite different way to the feudal lords who dominated that society.

A feudal lord lived directly off the agricultural produce he was able to force his serfs to produce on his land. He used his personal power to make them do this, without having to pay them. By contrast the wealthier classes in the towns lived off the proceeds of selling non-agricultural goods. They paid workers wages to produce these for them, by the day or week.

These workers, often escaped serfs, were ‘free’ to come and go as they liked – once they had finished the work for which they had been paid. The ‘only’ compulsion on them to work was that they would starve if they did not find employment with someone. The rich could only grow richer because rather than starve, the ‘free’ worker would accept less money for his work than the goods he produced were worth.

We will return to this point later. For the present what matters is that the middle class burghers and the feudal lords got their wealth from quite different sources. This led them to want society organised in different ways.

The feudal lord’s ideal was a society in which he had absolute power in his own lands, unbound by written laws, with no intrusion from any outside body, with his serfs unable to flee. He wanted things to stay as in the days of his father and grandfather, with everyone accepting the social station into which they were born.

The newly rich bourgeoisie necessarily saw things differently. They wanted restraints on the power of individual lords or kings to interfere with their trade or steal their wealth.

They dreamed of achieving this through a fixed body of written laws, to be drawn up and enforced by their own chosen representatives. They wanted to free the poorer classes from serfdom, so that they could work (and increase the burghers’ profits) in the towns.

As for themselves, their fathers and grandfathers had often been under the thumb of feudal lords, and they certainly did not want that to continue.

In a word, they wanted to revolutionise society. Their clashes with the old order were not only economic, but also ideological and political. Ideological chiefly meant religious, in an illiterate society where the chief source of general ideas about society was church preaching.

Since the medieval church was run by bishops and abbots who were feudal lords in their own right, it propagated pro-feudal views, attacking as ‘sinful’ many of the practices of the urban bourgeoisie.

So in [[Holy Roman Empire (800–1806)|Germany]], [[Kingdom of the Netherlands|Holland]], [[Kingdom of England (927–1707)|Britain]] and [[Kingdom of France (987–1792)|France]] in the 16th and 17th centuries the middle classes rallied to a religion of their own: [[Protestantism]] – a religious ideology that preached thrift, sobriety, hard work (especially for the workers!) and the independence of the middle class congregation from the power of bishops and abbots.

The middle class created a God in their image, in opposition to the God of the Middle Ages.

Today we are told at school or on television about the great religious wars and civil wars of that period as if they were just about religious differences, as if people were daft enough to fight and die merely because they disagreed over the role of the blood and body of Christ in the Holy Communion. But much more was at stake – the clash between two completely different forms of society, based upon two different ways of organising the production of wealth.

In Britain the bourgeoisie won. Horrific as it must seem to our present ruling class, their ancestors consecrated their power by cutting off a king’s head, justifying the act with the rantings of Old Testament prophets.

But elsewhere the first round went to feudalism. In France and Germany the Protestant bourgeois revolutionaries were wiped out after bitter civil wars (although a feudal version of Protestantism survived as the religion of northern Germany). The bourgeoisie had to wait two centuries and more before enjoying success, in second round that began without religious clothing in [[French Revolution|1789 Paris]].

=== Exploitation and surplus value ===
In [[Slavery|slave]] and feudal societies the upper classes had to have legal controls over the mass of the working population. Otherwise those who worked for the feudal lord or the slave owner would have run away, leaving the privileged class with no one to labour for it.

But the capitalist does not, usually, need such legal controls over the person of the worker. He doesn’t need to own him or her, provided he ensures that the worker who refuses to work for the capitalist will starve. Instead of owning the worker, the capitalist can prosper providing he owns and controls the worker’s source of livelihood – the machines and factories.

The material necessities of life are produced by the labour of human beings. But that labour is next to useless without tools to cultivate the land and to process naturally occurring materials. The tools can vary enormously – from simple agricultural implements such as ploughs and hoes to the complicated machines you find in modern automated factories. But without the tools even the most highly skilled worker is unable to produce the things needed for physical survival.

It is the development of these tools – usually referred to as ‘the means of production’ – that separates modern human beings from our distant ancestors of the Stone Age. Capitalism is based on the ownership of these means of production by a few people. In Britain today, for instance, 1 percent of the population owns 84 percent of the stocks and shares in industry. In their hands is concentrated effective control over the vast majority of the means of production – the machines, the factories, the oil fields, the best agricultural land. The mass of the population can only get a liveli- hood if the capitalists allow them to work at and with those means of production. This gives the capitalists immense power to exploit the labour of other people – even though in the eyes of the law ‘all men are equal’.

It took some centuries for the capitalists to build up their monopoly control over the means of production. In this country, for instance, the parliaments of the 17th and 18th centuries had first to pass a succession of Enclosure Acts, which drove peasants away from their own means of production, the land which they had cultivated for centuries. The land became the property of a section of the capitalist class and the mass of the rural population were forced to sell their labour to capitalists or starve.

Once capitalism had achieved this monopoly of the means of production, it could afford to let the mass of the population enjoy apparent freedom and equality of political rights with the capitalists.

For however ‘free’ the workers were, they still had to work for a living.

Pro-capitalist economists have a simple explanation of what then happens. They say that by paying wages the capitalist buys the labour of the worker. He must pay a fair price for it. Otherwise the worker will go and work for someone else. The capitalist gives a ‘fair day’s wage’. In return the worker should give a ‘fair day’s work’.

How then do they explain profit? This, they claim, is a ‘reward’ to the capitalist for his ‘sacrifice’ in allowing the means of production (his capital) to be put to use. It is an argument that can hardly convince any worker who gives it a moment’s thought.

Take a company that announces a ‘net rate of profit’ of 10 percent. It is saying that if the cost of all the machinery, factories and so on that it owns is £100 million, then it is left with £10 million profit after paying the wages, raw material costs and the cost of replacing the machinery that wears out in a year.

You don’t have to be a genius to see that after ten years the company will have made a total profit of £100 million – the full cost of its original investment.

If it is ‘sacrifice’ that is being rewarded, then surely after the first ten years all profits should cease.

For by then the capitalists have been paid back completely for the money they put in in the first place. In fact, however, the capitalist is twice as wealthy as before. He owns his original investment and the accumulated profits.

The workers, in the meantime, have sacrificed most of their life’s energy to working eight hours a day, 48 weeks a year, in the factory. Are they twice as well off at the end of that time as at the beginning? You bet your boots they’re not. Even if a worker saves assiduously, he or she won’t be able to buy much more than a colour television set, a cheap central heating system or a second hand car. The worker will never raise the money to buy the factory he or she works in.

The ‘fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’ has multiplied the capital of the capitalist, while leaving the worker with no capital and no choice but to go on working for roughly the same wage. The ‘equal rights’ of the capitalist and the worker have increased inequality.

One of Karl Marx’s great discoveries was the explanation for this apparent anomaly. There is no mechanism that forces a capitalist to pay his workers the full value of the work they do. A worker employed, for example, in the engineering industry today might create £400 of new output a week.

But that does not mean he or she will be paid this sum. In 99 cases out of 100, they will get paid considerably less.

The alternative they have to working is to go hungry (or live on the miserable sums handed out by the social security). So they demand not the full value of what they produce, but rather just enough to give them a more or less acceptable living standard. The worker is paid only enough to get him to put all his efforts, all his capacity for work (what Marx called his labour power) at the disposal of the capitalist each day.

From the capitalist’s point of view, providing the workers are paid enough to keep them fit for work and to bring up their children as a new generation of workers, then they are being paid a fair amount for their labour power. But the amount of wealth needed to keep workers fit for work is considerably less than the amount of wealth they can produce once working – the value of their labour power is considerably less than the value created by their labour.

The difference goes into the pocket of the capitalist. Marx called it ‘surplus value’.

=== The self expansion of capital ===
If you read the writing of apologists for the present system, you will soon notice that they share a strange belief. Money, according to them, has a magical property. It can grow like a plant or animal.

When a capitalist puts his money in a bank he expects it to increase in amount. When he invests it in the shares of ICI or Unilever he expects to be rewarded by offshoots of fresh money every year, in the form of dividend payments. Karl Marx noted this phenomenon, which he called the ‘self expansion of capital’, and set out to explain it. As we saw previously, his explanation began not with money, but with labour and the means of production. In present society, those with enough wealth can buy control of the means of production. They can then force everyone else to sell to them the labour needed to work the means of production. The secret of the ‘self expansion of capital’, of the miraculous capacity of money to grow for those who have plenty of it, lies in the buying and selling of this labour.

Let’s take the example of a worker, who we’ll call Jack, who gets a job with an employer, Sir Browning Browne. The work Jack can do in eight hours will create an additional amount of wealth – worth perhaps £48. But Jack will be willing to work for much less than this, since the alternative is social security. The efforts of pro-capitalist MPs, such as the obnoxious Tory Peter Lilley, ensure that he will only get £12 a day on social security to keep himself and his family. They explain that to give more would be to ‘destroy the incentive to work’.

If Jack wants to get more than £12 a day he has to sell his ability to work, his labour power, even if he is offered much less than the £48 worth of wealth he can create in eight hours. He will be willing to work for, perhaps, the average wage, £28 a day. The difference, £20 a day, goes into the pocket of Sir Browning. It is Sir Browning’s surplus value.

Because he had enough wealth to buy control of the means of production in the first place, Sir Browning Browne can guarantee growing richer by £20 a day for every worker he employs. His money keeps growing, his capital expanding, not because of some law of nature, but because his control of the means of production allows him to get someone else’s labour on the cheap.

Of course, Sir Browning does not necessarily have all the £20 to himself – he may rent the factory or the land, he may have borrowed some of his initial wealth from other members of the ruling class. They demand in return a cut of the surplus value. So perhaps he forks out £10 to them as rent, interest and dividend payments, leaving himself with only £10 profit.

Those who live off dividends have probably never seen Jack in their lives. Nevertheless, it was not the mystical power of pound coins that gave them their income, but the all too physical sweat of Jack. The dividend, the interest payments and the profit all came out of the surplus value.

What decides how much Jack gets for his work? The employer will try to pay as little as possible.

But in practice there are limits below which he cannot go. Some of these limits are physical – it is no good giving workers such miserable wages that they suffer from malnutrition and are unable to put any effort into their work. They also have to be able to travel to and from work, to have somewhere they can rest at night, so that they do not fall asleep over the machines.

From this point of view it is worth even paying for what the workers think of as ‘little luxuries’ – like a few pints in the evening, the television, the occasional holiday. These all make the worker more refreshed and capable of doing more work. They all serve to replenish his labour power. It is an important fact that where wages are ‘held too low’ the productivity of labour falls.

The capitalist has to worry about something else as well. His firm will be in business for many years, long after the present set of workers have died out. The firm will require the labour of their children. So they have to pay the workers enough to bring up their children. They also have to ensure that the state provides these children with certain skills (such as reading and writing) through the educational system.

In practice, something else matters as well – what the worker thinks is a ‘decent wage’. A worker who gets paid considerably less than this may well neglect his work, not worrying about losing his job since he thinks it is ‘useless’.

All these elements that determine his wage have one thing in common. They all go towards making sure he has the life energy, the labour power, that the capitalist buys by the hour. The workers are paid the cost of keeping themselves and their families alive and fit for work.

In present capitalist society, one further point has to be noted. Huge amounts of wealth are spent on such things as police forces and weapons. These are used in the interests of the capitalist class by the state. In effect, they belong to the capitalist class, although they are run by the state. The value which is spent on them belongs to the capitalists, not the workers. It too is part of the surplus value.

Surplus value = profit + rent + interest + spending on the police, army and so on.

== The labour theory of value ==
But machinery, capital, produces goods as well as labour. If so, it’s only fair that capital as well as labour gets a share of the wealth produced. Every ‘factor of production’ has to get its reward.

That is how someone who has been taught a little pro-capitalist economics replies to the Marxist analysis of exploitation and surplus value. And at first sight the objection seems to make some sense. For, surely, you cannot produce goods without capital?

Marxists have never argued that you could. But our starting point is rather different. We begin by asking: where does capital come from? How did the means of production come into existence in the first place?

The answer is not difficult to find. Everything people have used historically to create wealth – whether a Neolithic stone axe or a modern computer – once had to be made by human labour. Even if the axe was shaped with tools, the tools in turn were the product of previous labour.

That is why Karl Marx used to refer to the means of production as ‘[[Dead labor|dead labour]]’. When businessmen boast of the capital they possess, in reality they are boasting that they have gained control of a vast pool of the labour of previous generations – and that does not mean the labour of their ancestors, who laboured no more than they do now.

The notion that labour was the source of wealth – usually referred to as the ‘[[labour theory of value]]’ – was not an original discovery of Marx. All the great pro-capitalist economists until his time accepted it.

Such men, like the Scottish economist [[Adam Smith]] or the English economist [[David Ricardo]], were writing when the system of industrial capitalism was still fairly young – in the years just before and just after the French Revolution. The capitalists did not yet dominate and needed to know the real source of their wealth if they were ever to do so. Smith and Ricardo served their interests by telling them that labour created wealth, and that to build up their wealth they had to ‘free’ labour from the control of the old pre-capitalist rulers.

But it was not long before thinkers close to the working class began to turn the argument against the friends of Smith and Ricardo: if labour creates wealth, then labour creates capital. And the ‘rights of capital’ are no more than the rights of usurped labour.

Soon the economists who supported capital were pronouncing the labour theory of value to be a load of nonsense. But if you kick truth out the front door, it has a habit of creeping in the back.

Turn on the radio. Listen to it long enough and you will hear some pundit or other claim that what is wrong with the British economy is that ‘people do not work hard enough’ or, another way of saying the same thing, ‘productivity is too low’. Forget for a minute whether the argument is correct or not.

Instead look closely at the way it is put. They never say ‘machines do not work hard enough’. No, it is always people, the workers.

They claim that if only the workers worked harder, more wealth would be created, and that this would make possible more investment in new machinery. The people who use this argument may not know it, but they are saying that more work will create more capital. Work, labour, is the source of wealth.

Say I have a £5 note in my pocket. Why is that of use to me? After all, it’s only a piece of printed paper. Its value to me lies in the fact that I can get, in exchange for it, something useful that has been made by someone else’s labour. The £5 note, in fact, is nothing more than an entitlement to the products of so much labour. Two £5 notes are an entitlement to the products of twice as much labour, and so on.

When we measure wealth we are really measuring the labour that has been expended in creating it.

Of course, not everyone produces as much with their labour in a given time as everyone else. If I set out, for instance, to make a table, I might take five or six times as long as a skilled carpenter. But no one in their right mind would regard what I had made as five or six times as valuable as a table made by a skilled carpenter. They would estimate its value according to how much of the carpenter’s labour would be needed to make it, not mine.

Say it would take a carpenter an hour to make a table, then they would say that the value of the table to them was the equivalent of one hour’s labour. That would be the labour time necessary to make it, given the usual level of technique and skill in present society.

For this reason, Marx insisted that the measure of the value of something was not simply the time it took an individual to make it, but the time it would take an individual working with the average level of technology and the average level of skill – he called this average level of labour needed ‘the socially necessary labour time’. The point is important because under capitalism advances in technology are always taking place, which means that it takes less and less labour to produce goods.

For example, when radios were made with thermionic valves they were very expensive items, because it took a great deal of labour to make the valves, to wire them together and so on. Then the transistor was invented, which could be made and wired together with much less labour. Suddenly, all the workers in the factories still making valve radios found that the value of what they were producing slumped, for the value of radios was no longer determined by the labour time needed to make them from valves, but instead by the time needed to make them with transistors.

One final point. Prices of some goods fluctuate wildly – on a day-to-day or a week-to-week basis.

These changes can be caused by many other things besides changes in the amount of labour needed to make them.

When the frost in Brazil killed all the coffee plants the price of coffee shot up, because there was a shortage throughout the world and people were prepared to pay more. If tomorrow some natural catastrophe was to destroy all the televisions in Britain, there is no doubt the price of televisions would shoot up in the same way. What economists call ‘supply and demand’ continually causes such fluctuations in price.

For this reason, many pro-capitalist economists say that the labour theory of value is nonsense.

They say that only supply and demand matter. But that is nonsense. For this argument forgets that when things fluctuate they usually fluctuate around an average level. The sea goes up and down because of tides, but that doesn’t mean we cannot talk of a fixed point around which it moves, which we call ‘sea level’.

Similarly, the fact that prices go up and down from day to day does not mean that there are not fixed values around which they fluctuate. For instance, if all the televisions were destroyed, the first new ones to be produced would be very much in demand and fetch a high price. But it would not be long before more and more were on the market, competing with each other until the price was forced down close to their value in terms of the labour time needed to make them.

=== Competition and accumulation ===
There was a time when capitalism did seem like a dynamic and progressive system. For most of human history, the lives of most men and women have been dominated by drudgery and exploitation. Industrial capitalism did not change this when it made its appearance in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But it did seem to put this drudgery and exploitation to some useful purpose. Instead of wasting vast amounts of wealth on luxury for a few parasitic aristocrats or in building luxury tombs for dead monarchs or in futile wars over which son of an emperor should rule some God-forsaken hole, it used wealth to build up the means of creating more wealth. The rise of capitalism was a period of growth in industry, cities, means of transportation – on a scale undreamt of in previous human history.

Strange as it may seem today, places such as Oldham, Halifax and Bingley were the home of miracles. Humanity had never before seen so much raw cotton and wool turned so quickly into cloth to clothe millions. This did not happen because of any special virtues possessed by the capitalists. They were always rather noxious people, obsessed only with getting wealth into their own hands by paying as little as possible for the labour they used.

Many previous ruling classes had been like them in this respect without building up industry. But the capitalists were different in two important respects.

The first we have dealt with – that they did not own workers, instead paying them by the hour for their ability to work, their labour power. They used wage slaves, not slaves. Secondly, they did not themselves consume the goods their workers produced. The feudal landlord lived directly from the meat, bread, cheese and wine produced by his serfs. But the capitalist lived by selling to other people the goods produced by workers.

This gave the individual capitalist less freedom to behave as he pleased than the individual slave owner or feudal lord had. To sell goods, the capitalist had to produce them as cheaply as possible.

The capitalist owned the factory and was all-powerful within it. But he could not use his power as he wished. He had to bow down before the demands of competition with other factories.

Let’s go back to our favourite capitalist. Sir Browning Browne. Assume that a certain quantity of the cotton cloth produced in his factory took ten hours of workers’ time to turn out, but that some other factory could produce the same amount in five hours of workers’ time. Sir Browning would not be able to charge the price for it equivalent to ten hours of labour. No one in their right mind would pay this price when there was cheaper cloth just down the road.

Any capitalist who wanted to survive in business had to ensure that his workers worked as fast as possible. But that was not all. He also had to make sure that his workers were working with the most up to date machinery, so that their labour produced as many goods in an hour as did the labour of those working for other capitalists. The capitalist who wanted to stay in business had to make sure he owned ever greater amounts of means of production – or, as Marx put it, to accumulate capital!

The competition between capitalists produced a power, the market system, that had each and every one of them in its grip. It compelled them to speed up the work process all the time and to invest as much as they could afford in new machinery. And they could only afford the new machinery (and, of course, have their own luxuries on the side) if they kept workers’ wages as low as they could.

Marx writes in his major work, [[Library:Capital, vol. I|Capital]], that the capitalist is like a miser, obsessed with getting more and more wealth. But:<blockquote>What in the miser is mere idiosyncracy is, in the capitalist, the effect of a social mechanism in which he is but one of the wheels … The development of capitalist production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist as external coercive laws. It compels him to keep constantly extending his capital in order to preserve it. But extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation. Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!</blockquote>Production does not take place to satisfy human need – even the human needs of the capitalist class – but in order to enable one capitalist to survive in competition with another capitalist. The workers employed by each capitalist find their lives dominated by the drive of their employers to accumulate faster than their rivals.

As Marx’s The Communist Manifesto put it:<blockquote>In bourgeois society living labour is but a means to accumulate dead labour … Capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.</blockquote>The compulsive drive for capitalists to accumulate in competition with one another explains the great rush forward of industry in the early years of the system. But something else resulted as well – repeated economic crisis. Crisis is not new. It is as old as the system itself.

== Economic crisis ==
<blockquote>''The accumulation of wealth on the one hand, of poverty on the other.''</blockquote>That was how Marx summed up the trend of capitalism. Every capitalist fears competition from every other, so he works his employees as hard as possible, paying wages as low as he can get away with.

The result is a disproportion between the massive growth of means of production on the one hand, and the limited growth in wages and the number of workers employed on the other. This, Marx insisted, was the basic cause of economic crisis.

The easiest way to look at this is to ask: who buys the greatly expanding quantity of goods? The low wages of the workers mean they cannot afford the goods produced by their own labour. And the capitalists cannot increase wages, because that would be to destroy profit, the driving force of the system.

But if firms cannot sell the goods they produce, they have to shutdown factories and sack workers.

The total amount of wages then falls still more, and yet more firms cannot sell their goods. A ‘crisis of overproduction’ sets in, with goods piling up throughout the economy that people cannot afford to buy.

This has been a recurrent feature of capitalist society for the past 160 years.

But any quick-witted apologist for the system will soon point out that there should be an easy way out of the crisis. All that’s needed is that capitalists invest their profit in new factories and machines. That will provide jobs for workers, who in turn will then be able to buy the unsold goods.

This means that as long as there’s new investment all the goods produced can be sold and the system can provide full employment.

Marx was no fool and recognised this. Indeed, as we’ve seen, he realised that the competitive pressure on capitalists to invest was central to the system. But, he asked, does this mean the capitalists will invest all their profits, all the time?

The capitalist will only invest if he thinks he is guaranteed a ‘reasonable’ profit.

If he doesn’t think there is such a profit to be made, he won’t risk his money in investment. He’ll put it in the bank and leave it there.

Whether the capitalist invests or not depends on how he assesses the economic situation. When it looks right, the capitalists all rush to invest at the same time, falling over each other searching for construction sites, buying up machines, scouring the earth for raw materials, paying over the odds for skilled labour.

This is usually called the ‘boom’.

But the frenzied competition for land, raw materials and skilled labour forces up the prices of these things. And suddenly a point is reached where some firms discover their costs have risen so much that all their profits have disappeared.

The investment boom all at once gives way to an investment ‘slump’. No one wants new factories – construction workers are sacked. No one wants new machines – the machine tool industry goes into crisis. No one wants all the iron and steel that is being produced – the steel industry is suddenly working ‘below capacity’ and becomes ‘unprofitable’. Closures and shutdowns spread from industry to industry, destroying jobs – and with them the ability of workers to buy the goods of other industries.

The history of capitalism is a history of such periodic lurches into crisis, into the insanity of unemployed workers going hungry outside empty factories, while stocks of ‘unwanted’ goods rot.

Capitalism creates these crises of overproduction periodically because there is no planning, so there’s no way to stop the stampede of capital into and out of investment all at once.

People used to think that the state could stop this. By intervening in the economy, increasing state investment when private investment was low, then reducing it when private investment caught up, the state would keep production on an even keel. But nowadays state investment too is part of the lunacy.

Look at British Steel. Some years ago, when the firm was still nationalised, steel workers were told their jobs were being scrapped to make way for vast modern automatic furnaces designed to produce more steel more cheaply. Now they are being told that yet more workers must lose their jobs – because Britain was not the only country to embark on these massive investment plans.

France, Germany, the United States, Brazil, Eastern Europe, even South Korea, all did the same.

Now there’s a world surplus of steel – a crisis of overproduction. State investment is being cut.

Steel workers, of course, suffer both ways. This is the price humanity is still paying for an economic system where the production of massive wealth is controlled by a small privileged group interested only in profit. It does not matter whether these small privileged groups own industry directly, or control it indirectly through their control of the state (as with British Steel). While they use this control to compete with each other for the largest share of the profits, whether nationally or internationally, it is the workers who suffer.

The final lunacy of the system is that the ‘crisis of overproduction’ is not overproduction at all. All that ‘surplus’ steel, for instance, could help solve world hunger. Peasants around the world have to plough the land with wooden ploughshares – steel ploughshares would increase food production.

But the peasants have no money anyway, so the capitalist system isn’t interested – there’s no profit to be made.

=== Why crises tend to get worse ===
Crises do not just take place with monotonous regularity. Marx also predicted they would get worse as time went on.

Even if investment took place at an even rate, without fits and starts, it could not stop the overall trend towards crisis. This is because the competition between capitalists (and capitalist nations) forces them to invest in labour saving equipment.

In Britain today almost all new investments are designed to cut the number of workers employed.

That is why there we fewer workers in British industry today than ten years ago, even though output has increased over that time.

Only by ‘rationalising production’, by ‘increasing productivity’ and by cutting the workforce can one capitalist get a bigger share of the cake than another. But the result for the system as a whole is devastating. For it means that the number of workers does not increase at anything like the same speed as investment.

Yet it is the labour of workers that is the source of the profits, the fuel that keeps the system going. If you make bigger and bigger investments, without a corresponding increase in the source of profits, you are heading for a breakdown – just as surely as if you expected to drive a Jaguar on the amount of petrol needed to keep a Mini going.

That is why Marx argued 100 years ago that the very success of capitalism in piling up huge investments in new equipment led to a ‘[[Tendency of the rate of profit to fall|tendency of the rate of profit to decline]]’ which means ever-worsening crises.

His argument can be applied very simply to capitalism today. Instead of the old picture of ‘bad times’ turning into ‘good times’, of slumps turning into booms, we seem to be in a never ending slump. Any spell of upturn, any drop in unemployment, is limited and short lived.

Apologists for the system say this is because investment is not high enough. Without new investment there are no new jobs, without new jobs there’s no money to buy new goods. So far, we can agree with them – but we don’t agree with their explanation of why this is happening.

They blame wages. Wages are too high, they say, which cuts profits to the bone. Capitalists are frightened to invest because they won’t get ‘sufficient reward’.

But the crisis has continued through long years in which government pay policies have cut workers’ living standards and pushed profits up. The years 1975-78 saw the biggest cut in workers’ living standards this century, while the rich grew richer – the top 10 percent pushed up their share of the national cake from 57.8 percent in 1974 to 60 percent in 1976.

There still isn’t enough investment to end the crisis – and that goes not just for Britain but for other countries where wages have been cut back, for France, for Japan, for Germany.

We would do better to listen to what Karl Marx said 100 years ago than to listen to those who apologise for capitalism today.

Marx predicted that as capitalism got older, its crises would get worse because the source of profit, labour, does not increase nearly as rapidly as the investment needed to put labour to work. Marx wrote when the value of the plant and machinery needed to employ each worker was fairly low. It has shot up since then, until today it can be £20,000 or even £30,000. Competition between capitalist firms has forced them to use ever bigger and evermore expensive machinery. The point has been reached where, in most industries, it is taken for granted that new machinery means fewer workers.

The international economic agency OECD has predicted that employment in the world’s major economies will fall, even if by some miracle investment soars.

Which it won’t. Because capitalists care about their profit, and if their investment increases fourfold but their profit only doubles, they get really upset. Yet this is what must happen if industry grows more quickly than the source of profit, labour.

As Marx put it, the rate of profit will tend to fall. He predicted that a point would eventually be reached at which any new investment would seem a perilous venture. The scale of expenditure needed for new plant and machinery would be colossal, but the rate of profit would be lower than ever before. When this point was reached, each capitalist (or capitalist state) would fantasise about huge new investment programmes – but be afraid to make them for fear of going bust.

The world economy today is very much like that. Rover plans new production lines – but fears it will lose money. British Steel dreams of those big plants it planned – but have to keep them on ice because it cannot sell its present output. The Japanese shipbuilders have given up investing in new yards – and some of the old ones are being shut down.

The very success of capitalism in building ever vaster and more productive machinery has brought the system to the point of seemingly permanent crisis.

A point was reached in the slave societies of the ancient world and the feudal societies of the Middle Ages where either a revolution would transform society or it would enter a permanent crisis that would drive it backwards. In the case of Rome, the lack of a revolution led precisely to the destruction of Roman civilisation and to the Dark Ages. In the case of some feudal societies – Britain and, later, France – revolution destroyed the old order and enabled new social advance to take place, under capitalism.

Now capitalism itself faces the choice between permanent crisis, which eventually will plunge humanity back into barbarism through poverty and war, or a socialist revolution.

== The working class ==
Marx began The Communist Manifesto with the statement, ‘The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggles.’ The question of how the ruling class was to force the oppressed class to keep producing wealth for it was crucial. Because of this, in every previous society, there had been enormous struggles between the classes which often culminated in civil war – the slave uprisings in Ancient Rome, the peasant uprisings in medieval Europe, the great civil wars and revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries.

In all of these great struggles, the mass of the insurgent forces were from the most oppressed section of society. But, as Marx hastened to add, at the end of the day all their efforts served only to replace one privileged ruling minority with another. So, for example, in [[History of China|Ancient China]] there were several successful peasant revolts – but they merely replaced one emperor with another. Similarly, those who made the greatest effort in the [[French Revolution of 1789|French Revolution]] were the ‘bras nus’ – the poorer classes of Paris, but at the end of the day society was ruled not by them but by bankers and industrialists instead of the king and courtiers.

There were two main reasons for this failure of the lower classes to keep control of the revolutions in which they fought.

Firstly, the general level of wealth in society was fairly low. It was only because the vast mass of people were kept in abysmal poverty that a small minority had time and leisure to develop the arts and sciences to maintain civilisation. In other words, class division was necessary if society was to progress.

Secondly, the life of the oppressed classes did not prepare them to run society. By and large they were illiterate, they had little idea of what things were like outside their own immediate locality, and, above all, their everyday life divided each of them against the other. Each peasant was concerned with cultivating his own plot of land. Each craftsman in the town ran his own small business and was to some extent in competition with other craftsmen, not united with them.

Peasant revolts would start with vast numbers of people rising up to divide the land of the local feudal lords, but once the lord was defeated they would fall to squabbling among themselves about how they would divide the land. As Marx put it, peasants were like ‘potatoes in a sack’; they could be forced together by some outside power but were not capable of linking permanently to represent their own interests.

The workers who create the wealth under modern capitalism differ from all the previous lower classes. Firstly, the division of classes is no longer necessary for human progress. So much wealth is created that capitalist society itself periodically destroys huge quantities through wars or economic crises. It could be divided up equally and society could still have a flowering of science, arts and so forth.

Secondly, life under capitalism prepares workers in many ways to take control of society. For example, capitalism needs workers who are skilled and educated. Also capitalism forces thousands of people into huge workplaces in huge conurbations where they are in close contact with one another, and where they can be a powerful force for changing society.

Capitalism makes workers cooperate in production within the factory, and those cooperative skills can easily be turned against the system, as when workers organise themselves into unions. Because they are massed together in huge concentrations it is much easier for workers to democratically control such bodies than it was for previously oppressed classes.

Furthermore, capitalism tends increasingly to turn groups of people who thought of themselves as a ‘cut above’ ordinary workers (such as clerks or technicians) into wage labourers who are forced to organise unions and so on as other workers do.

Lastly, the development of communications – railways, roads, air transport, postal systems, telephones, radio and television – allows workers to communicate outside their own locality or industry. They can organise as a class on a national and international scale – something beyond the wildest dreams of previous oppressed classes.

All these facts mean that the working class can not only be a force which rebels against existing society, but can organise itself, (electing and controlling its own representatives, so as to change society in its own interest, and not just to set up yet another emperor or group of bankers. As Karl Marx put it:<blockquote>All previous historical movements were movements of minorities in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious independent movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority.</blockquote>

== How can society be changed? ==
In Britain the overwhelming majority of socialists and trade unionists have generally argued that society can be transformed without violent revolution. All that is needed, they say, is for socialists to win enough popular support to gain control of the ‘traditional’ political institutions – parliament and the local councils. Then socialists will be in a position to change society by getting the existing state – the civil service, the judiciary, the police, the armed forces – to enforce laws to curtail the power of the employing class.

In this way, it has been claimed, socialism can be introduced gradually and without violence, by reforming the present set up.

This view is usually referred to as ‘reformism’, although occasionally you will hear it referred to as ‘revisionism’ (because it involves revising Marx’s ideas completely), ‘social democracy’ (although until 1914 that meant revolutionary socialism) or Fabianism (after the Fabian Society which has long propagated the reformist view in Britain). It is a view accepted by the left as well as the right of the Labour Party.

Reformism seems, at first sight, very plausible. It fits with what we are told at school, in the papers and on television – that ‘parliament runs the country’ and that ‘parliament is elected according to the democratic wishes of the people’. Yet despite that, every attempt to introduce socialism through parliament has ended in failure. Thus there were three majority Labour governments in Britain between 1945 and 1979 – with massive majorities in 1945 and 1966 – yet we are no nearer socialism than in 1945.

The experience abroad is the same. In Chile in 1970, the socialist Salvador Allende was elected president. People claimed that this was a ‘new way’ to move to socialism. Three years later the generals who had been asked to join the government overthrew Allende and the Chilean working class movement was destroyed.

There are three interconnected reasons why reformism must always fail.

Firstly, while socialist majorities in parliaments are ‘gradually’ introducing socialist measures, real economic power continues to lie in the hands of the old ruling class. They can use this economic power to shut down whole sections of industry, to create unemployment, to force up prices through speculation and hoarding, to send money abroad so creating a ‘balance of payments’ crisis, and to launch press campaigns blaming all this on the socialist government.

Thus Harold Wilson’s Labour government was forced in 1964 and again in 1966 to drop measures which would have benefited workers – by the wholesale movement of money abroad by wealthy individuals and companies. Wilson himself describes in his memoirs how:<blockquote>We had now reached the situation where a newly elected government was being told by international speculators that the policy on which we had fought the election could not be implemented... The queen’s first minister was being asked to bring down the curtain on parliamentary democracy by accepting the doctrine that an election in Britain was a farce, that the British people could not make a choice between policies.</blockquote>It only needs to be added that, despite Wilson’s alleged indignation, for the next six years he did indeed follow the sort of policies demanded by the speculators.

The same deliberate creation of balance of payments crises forced the Labour government elected in 1974 to introduce three consecutive sets of cuts in public spending in hospitals, schools and social services.

Allende’s government in Chile faced even greater disruption at the hands of big business. Twice, whole sections of industry were shut down by ‘bosses’ strikes’, as speculation increased prices to an enormous level and hoarding of goods by businessmen caused queuing for the necessities of life.

The second reason capitalism cannot be reformed is that the existing state machine is not ‘neutral’, but designed, from top to bottom, to preserve capitalist society.

The state controls nearly all the means of exercising physical force, the means of violence. If the organisations of the state were neutral, and did whatever any particular government told them, whether capitalist or socialist, then the state could be used to stop sabotage of the economy by big business. But look at the way the state machine operates and who really gives the orders, and you can see it is not neutral.

The state machine is not simply the government. It is a vast organisation with many different branches – the police, the army, the judiciary, the civil service, the people who run the nationalised industries and so on. Many of the people who work in these different branches of the state come from the working class – they live and get paid like workers.

But it is not these people who make the decisions. The rank and file soldiers don’t decide where wars are going to be fought or whether strikes are going to be broken; the counter clerk in the social security office does not decide how much dole will be paid out. The whole state machine is based on the principle that people on one rung of the ladder obey those on the rung above.

This is essentially the case in the sections of the state machine that exercise physical force – army, navy, air force, police. The first thing soldiers are taught when they enlist – long before they are allowed to touch weapons – is to obey orders, regardless of their personal opinions of those orders.

That is why they are taught to do absurd drills. If they will follow lunatic commands on the parade ground without thinking about it, it is reckoned they will shoot when ordered to without thinking about that either.

The most heinous crime in any army is a refusal to obey orders – mutiny. So seriously is the offence regarded, that mutiny during time of war is still punishable by execution in Britain. Who gives the orders?

If you look at the chain of command in the British army (and other armies are no different) it goes: general – brigadier – colonel – lieutenant – NCO – private. At no stage in that chain of command do elected representatives – MPs or local councillors – get a look in. It is just as much an act of mutiny for a group of privates to obey their local MP rather than the officer. The army is a massive killing machine. The people who run it – and have the power to promote other soldiers into commanding positions – are the generals.

Of course, in theory the generals are responsible to the elected government. But soldiers are trained to obey generals, not politicians. If generals choose to give orders to their soldiers which are at variance with the wishes of an elected government, the government cannot countermand those orders. It can only try to persuade the generals to change their minds. The government knows the sorts of orders that are being given – because military affairs are invariably secret, it is very easy for generals to hide what they are doing from governments they don’t like.

That doesn’t always mean that generals always, or even usually, ignore what governments say to them. Usually in Britain they have found it convenient to go along with most of what the government suggests. But, in a life and death situation, the generals are able to put their killing machine into operation without listening at all to the government, and there is little the government can do about it. This is what the generals eventually did in Chile when Allende was overthrown.

So the question, ‘Who runs the army?’ is really, ‘Who are the generals?’ In Britain about 80 percent of the senior officers went to fee-paying ‘public’ schools – the same proportion as 50 years ago (17 years of Labour government didn’t change that). They are related to the owners of big business, belong to the same posh clubs, mix at the same social functions, share the same ideas (if you doubt this, look at the letters column in virtually any copy of the Daily Telegraph). The same goes for the heads of the civil service, the judges, the chief constables.

Do you think these people are going to obey government orders to take economic power away from their friends and relatives in big business, just because 330 people walk into a lobby in the House of Commons? Would they not be much more likely to copy the example of the Chilean generals, judges and senior civil servants, who sabotaged the government’s orders for three years and then, when the time was ripe, overthrew it?

In practice the particular ‘constitution’ we have in Britain means that those who control the state machine would be able to thwart the will of an elected left wing government far short of physically overthrowing it. If such a government were elected, it would be faced with massive economic sabotage by the employing class (factory closures, flights of money abroad, hoarding of necessities, inflationary price rises). If the government attempted to deal with such sabotage using ‘constitutional means’ – by passing laws – it would find its hands tied behind its back.

The House of Lords would certainly refuse to ratify any such law – delaying it for nine months at a minimum. The judges would ‘interpret’ any law passed in such a way as to curtail its powers. The civil service chiefs, the generals and the police chiefs would use the decisions of the judges and the House of Lords to justify their own unwillingness to do what ministers told them. They would be backed by virtually the whole press, which would scream that the government was behaving ‘illegally’ and ‘unconstitutionally’. The generals would then use such language to justify preparations to overthrow an 'illegal’ government.

The government would be powerless to deal with the economic chaos – unless it really did act unconstitutionally and called upon rank and file civil servants, police and soldiers to turn against their superiors.

Lest anyone thinks this is all wild fantasy, it should be added that there have been at least two occasions in recent British history when generals have sabotaged government decisions they did not like.

In 1912 the House of Commons passed a bill providing for a ‘Home Rule’ parliament to run a united Ireland. The Tory leader, Bonar Law, immediately denounced the (Liberal!) government as an illegal ‘junta’ who had ‘sold the constitution’. The House of Lords naturally delayed the law as long as it could (two years then), while former Tory minister Edward Carson organised a paramilitary force in the north of Ireland to resist the law.

When the generals who commanded the British army in Ireland were told to move their troops northwards to deal with this force, they refused and threatened to resign their commissions. It was because of this action, usually called the ‘Curragh Mutiny’, that Ireland north and south didn’t get a single parliament in 1914, and remains a divided nation even today.

In 1974 there was a rerun of the events of 1912 in miniature. The right wing sectarian Loyalists of Northern Ireland organised a general stoppage of industry, using barricades to prevent people going to work, against being forced to accept a joint Protestant-Catholic government in Northern Ireland.

British ministers called on the British army and the Northern Ireland police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, to dismantle the barricades and end the strike. The senior army officers and the police commanders told the government that this would be inadvisable, and neither soldiers nor police moved against the Loyalists. The joint Protestant-Catholic government was forced to resign, the views of army officers proving more powerful than the views of the British government.

If that could happen in 1914 and 1974 with middle-of-the-road governments trying to push through mild measures, imagine what would happen if a militant socialist government was elected. Any serious reformist majority in parliament would soon be forced to make a choice: either abandon reforms in order to placate those who own industry and control the key positions in the state, or prepare for an all out conflict, which will inevitably mean the use of some kind of force, against those who control those positions.

The third reason why reformism is a dead end is that parliamentary ‘democracy’ contains inbuilt mechanisms for preventing any revolutionary movement finding expression through it.

Some reformists argue that the best way to take on the power of those who control the key positions in the state machine is for the left to obtain a majority in parliament first. This argument falls because parliaments always understate the level of revolutionary consciousness of the mass of the population.

The mass of the people will only believe that they themselves can run society when they begin in practice to change society through struggle. It is when millions of people are occupying their factories or taking part in a general strike that ideas of revolutionary socialism suddenly seem realistic.

But such a level of struggle cannot be maintained indefinitely unless the old ruling class is removed from power. If it hangs on, it will wait until the occupations or strikes decline, then use its control over the army and police to break the struggle.

And once the strikes or occupations begin to falter, the feeling of unity and confidence among the workers begins to wane. Demoralisation and bitterness set in. Even the best begin to feel that changing society was just a wild dream.

That is why employers always prefer strike votes to be taken when workers are at home by themselves, getting their ideas from the television and the newspapers, not when they are united at mass meetings, able to hear other workers’ arguments.

That is also why anti-union laws nearly always include a clause forcing workers to call off strikes while secret, postal ballots are taken. Such clauses are accurately called ‘cooling off’ periods – they are designed to pour cold water on the confidence and unity of workers.

The parliamentary electoral system contains built in secret ballots and cooling off periods. For instance, if a government is brought to its knees by a massive strike, it is likely to say, ‘OK, wait three weeks until a general election can resolve the question democratically.’ It hopes that in the interim the strike will be called off. The workers’ confidence and unity will then fade. Employers may well be able to blacklist militants. The capitalist press and the television can begin functioning normally again, hammering home pro-government ideas. The police can arrest ‘troublemakers’.

Then when the election finally takes place, the vote will not reflect the high point of the workers’ struggles, but the low point after the strike.

In France in 1968, the government of General de Gaulle used elections in precisely this way. The reformist workers’ parties and unions told workers to end their strikes, and de Gaulle won the election.

The British Prime Minister Edward Heath tried the same trick when faced with a massively successful miners’ strike in 1974. But this time the miners were not conned. They kept their strike up – and Heath lost the election.

If workers wait for elections to decide the key issues in the class struggle, they will never reach that high point.

=== The workers’ state ===
Marx, in his pamphlet The Civil War in France, and Lenin in The State and Revolution outlined a completely different view of how socialism can be won. Neither simply pulled these ideas out of thin air: both developed their views by seeing the working class in action – Marx saw the Paris Commune, Lenin the Russian ‘Soviets’ (workers’ councils) of 1905 and 1917.

But Marx and Lenin insisted that the working class could not begin to construct socialism until it had first destroyed the old state based on bureaucratic chains of command, and secondly created a new state based on entirely new principles. Lenin underlined how completely different this state had to be from the old by calling it ‘a commune state, a state which is not a state’.<ref group="ProleWiki 9.">We've been unable to find this quote outside of this work.</ref>

A new state, Marx and Lenin said, was necessary if the working class was to impose its dictates on the remnants of the old ruling and middle classes. That was why they called it the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ – the working class had to dictate how society was to be run. It also had to defend its revolution against attacks from ruling classes elsewhere in the world. To do these two jobs, it had to have armed forces of its own, some form of policing of society, courts, even prisons.

But if this new army, police and legal system was to be controlled by the workers, and never turn against their interests, it had to be based on completely different principles from the capitalist state.

It had to be the means by which the working class as a majority dictated to the rest of society, not a dictatorship directed against the majority of the working class.

The main differences are these.

The capitalist state serves the interests of a small minority of society. The workers’ state has to serve the interests of the overwhelming majority. Force in the capitalist state is exercised by a minority of hired killers, cut off from the rest of society and trained to obey upper class officers.

But in a workers’ state, force would be needed only so the majority could protect themselves against anti-social acts by the remnants of the old privileged classes.

Soldiering and policing in a workers’ state can be done by ordinary workers, who mix freely with their fellow workers, share the same ideas and lead the same lives. Indeed, to make sure that groups of soldiers and police never develop separated from the mass of workers, the ‘soldiers’ and ‘police’ should be ordinary factory and office workers who take it in turns, on a rota system, to carry out these functions.

Instead of the armed forces and police being run by a small group of officers, they would be run by directly elected representatives of the mass of workers.

Parliamentary representatives in a capitalist state pass laws but leave it to full time bureaucrats, police chiefs and judges to implement them. This means that MPs and councillors can always hide behind a million excuses when their promises are not implemented. The workers’ representatives in a workers’ state would have to see their laws put into action. They, not an elite of top bureaucrats, would have to explain to the workers of the civil service, the army and so on how things should be done.

Again elected workers’ representatives would have to interpret the laws in courts.

Parliamentary representatives in a capitalist state are cut off from those who elect them by high salaries. In a workers’ state the representatives would get no more than the average workers’ wage.

The same goes for those who work full time in key posts implementing the decisions of the workers’ representatives (the equivalent of present-day civil servants).

Workers’ representatives, and all those concerned with implementing workers’ decisions, would not be, as MPs, immune to removal from office for five years (or for life in the case of senior civil servants). They would be subject to at least annual elections, and to immediate recall by those who elected them if they did not implement their wishes.

Parliamentary representatives are elected by all the people living in a certain locality – upper class, middle class and working class, slum landlords as well as tenants, stockbrokers as well as labourers.

In a workers’ state election would be by those who work only, with voting only after open discussion on the issues concerned. So the core of the workers’ state would be workers’ councils based on the factories, mines, docks, big offices, with groups such as housewives, pensioners, school students and students having their own representatives.

In this way, each section of the working class would have its own representative and be able directly to judge whether he or she was following their interests. In these ways, the new state cannot become a force separate from and against the majority working class – as it was in Eastern Bloc countries which called themselves ‘Communist’.

At the same time, the workers’ council system provides a means by which workers can coordinate their efforts in running industry according to a democratically decided national plan, and not end up running their factories in competition with each other. It is easy to see how modem computer technology would enable all workers to be given information on the various economic options open to society, and to direct their representatives to choose what the majority of workers thought the best set of options – for example, whether to spend resources on Concorde or on a cheap and reliable public transport system, whether to build nuclear bombs or kidney machines, and so on.

=== The withering away of the state ===
Because state power would not be something separate from the mass of the workers, it would be much less a matter of coercion than under capitalism. As the remnants of the old society against which it was directed became resigned to the success of the revolution, and as revolutions removed foreign ruling classes, there would be less and less need for coercion, until eventually workers need never take time off from work to staff the ‘police’ and the ‘army’.

This is what Marx and Lenin meant when they said the state would wither away. Instead of coercion against people, the state would become merely a mechanism of workers’ councils to decide how to produce and allocate goods.

Workers’ councils have come into being in one form or another whenever the struggle between the classes within capitalism has reached a really high level. ‘Soviet’ is the word the Russians used for workers’ councils in 1905 and 1917.

In 1918 in Germany workers’ councils were, briefly, the only power in the country.<ref name=":0" group="ProleWiki 9.">This is in reference to the German November Revolution of 1918–1919, when the nascent and not yet fully-developed Communist Party of Germany, headed by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, led a failed attempt to overthrow the newly-formed Weimar Republic.</ref> In Spain in 1936 the various workers’ parties and unions were united by ‘militia committees’ which ran the localities and were very much like workers’ councils.<ref group="ProleWiki 9.">Part of the [[Spanish Civil War]]</ref> In Hungary in 1956 the workers elected councils to run the factories and the localities as they fought Russian troops.<ref group="ProleWiki 9.">It must be noted the [[Hungarian counterrevolution of 1956|events in Hungary in 1956]] were an attempted fascist uprising and [[colour revolution]]. The counterrevolutionaries also did not fight 'Russian' troops but the [[Soviet Army]], in which there were Hungarian soldiers.</ref> In Chile in 1972-73 the workers began to build ‘cordones’ – workers’ committees that linked the big factories.

The workers’ council begins life as a body workers use to coordinate their struggle against capitalism. It may start with modest functions, raising strike funds maybe, but because these bodies are based on direct election from the workers, with workers’ representatives subject to recall, they can at the highest points in the struggle coordinate the efforts of the whole working class. They can lay the basis for workers’ power.

=== ProleWiki annotations ===
<references group="ProleWiki 9." />

== How do workers become revolutionary? ==
In Britain most workers this century have looked to the Labour Party and parliament to change society. A large minority have backed the reactionary ideas of the Tory party. The supporters of revolutionary socialism have generally been few in number.

This indifference or even opposition of workers to revolutionary socialism is hardly surprising. We have all been brought up in a capitalist society where it is taken for granted that everyone is selfish, where people are continually told by the newspapers and television that only a privileged minority have the ability to take the key decisions in industry and the state, where the mass of workers are taught from the first day they enter school to obey orders given by ‘their elders and betters’.

As Marx put it, ‘The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class,’<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">[[Library:The German ideology|The German ideology]], 1846</ref> and vast numbers of workers accept them.

Yet despite this, repeatedly in the history of capitalism, revolutionary movements of the working class have shaken one country after another: France in 1871,<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The [[Paris Commune]]</ref> Russia in 1917,<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The [[Russian revolution of 1917|October Revolution]]</ref> Germany<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The [[Spartacist uprising]]</ref> and Hungary in 1919, Italy in 1920, Spain<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">See ProleWiki annotations in previous chapter</ref> and France in 1936, Hungary in 1956,<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">See ProleWiki annotations in previous chapter</ref> France in 1968,<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The [[May 68]] crisis. Protesting students received some concessions from the French state, but nothing lasting: wages grew a little bit, a referendum was held but did not pass, and a new Parliament was elected, but it was still a [[Bourgeoisie|bourgeois]] parliament</ref> Chile in 1972- 73,<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The author is positioning himself against [[Salvador Allende]], Chilean Marxist and president of Chile from 1970 to 1973, who died at the hands of a western-backed and fascist coup in 1973 that put [[Augusto Pinochet]] in power. Pinochet would go on to commit countless crimes against the people of Chile for the next few decades.</ref> Portugal in 1975,<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The author here could be referring to two distinct yet connected periods in Portuguese history. The Carnation Revolution which occured in the 25th of April 1974, a military coup set in motion by disgruntled captains of the Portuguese army that put an end to the fascist "Estado Novo" dictatorship begun by António de Oliveira Salazar and by then headed by Marcelo Caetano. The Carnation Revolution thus marked the transition to a bourgeois liberal democracy and the start of the decolonization process, headed mostly by social democratic parties and in part by the PCP.

However, the year presented by the author (1975) could be more specifically referring to a period known as the "PREC" (Ongoing Revolutionary Period), a period after, but, within the context of the Carnation Revolution, which was a period of spontaneous and daring social upheaval, mostly headed by the proletariat and rural proletariat, after a failed right-wing coup in the 11th of March 1975, until the 25th of November, an attempted coup by a more isolated left-wing portion of the military headed by Otelo de Carvalho, with no support or involvement from other left-wing parties at the time.

The PREC was marked by the spontaneous (to the dismay of other institutional left wing parties, including the PCP) worker expropriation of factories, large rural holdings, strikes, and far-right political violence, and in some cases nationalizations of companies. However, this period did not last long and nearly all of the conquests and expropriations achieved by the proletariat in this period were eventually rolled back, via closure of agricultural cooperatives, and, in many cases, governmental restitution of expropriated property back to large landowners.</ref> Iran in 1979,<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The [[1979 Iranian revolution]] which led to the creation of the [[Islamic Republic of Iran]], deposing the royal family.</ref> Poland in 1980.<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The author is likely referring to the strikes and social unrest in the [[Polish People's Republic (1947–1989)|Polish People's Republic]]. During the strikes, the [[Solidarność]] trade union was formed, funded by the [[National Endowment for Democracy|NED]] (a direct CIA program) to topple the Polish state divide the Union, i.e. a wholly counter-revolutionary and reactionary movement that did not represent the workers in any way, instead representing the interests of the U.S. bourgeoisie.</ref>

The explanation for these upheavals lies in the very nature of capitalism itself. Capitalism is a crisis-prone system.<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">This is correct, but in light of reactionary movements against the Soviet Union we noted above, a more complete explanation is that capitalism is prone to crises, and one way of postponing these crises or their effects is [[imperialism]], which was and is still levied against any state that doesn't fall in line, including [[Socialist state|socialist states]].</ref> In the long run it cannot provide full employment, it cannot provide prosperity for all, it cannot secure our living standards today against the crisis it will produce tomorrow. But during the capitalist ‘booms’ workers come to expect these things.

So, for instance, in the 1950s and early 1960s, workers in Britain came to expect permanent full employment, a ‘welfare state’ and gradual but real improvements in living standards. By contrast, over the last 25 years successive governments have allowed unemployment to increase to a real figure of more than 4 million, have cut the welfare state to shreds, and have attempted again and again to cut living standards.

Because we are brainwashed into accepting many capitalist ideas, we accept some of these attacks.

But inevitably a point is reached where workers find they can stand it no more. Suddenly, often when no one expects it, their anger suddenly flares and they take some action against employer or government. Perhaps they stage a strike, or organise a demonstration.

When this happens, whether they like it or not, workers begin doing things that contradict all the capitalist ideas they have previously accepted. They begin to act in solidarity with one another, as a class, in opposition to the representatives of the capitalist class.

The ideas of revolutionary socialism that they used to reject out of hand now begin to fit in with what they are doing. Some at least of the workers begin to take those ideas seriously – providing those ideas are accessible.

The scale on which this takes place depends on the scale of the struggle, not on the ideas in workers’ heads to begin with. Capitalism forces them into struggle even if they begin with pro- capitalist ideas. The struggle then makes them question these ideas.

Capitalist power rests on two planks – control of the means of production and control of the state. A real revolutionary movement begins among the vast mass of workers when struggles over their immediate economic interests lead them to clash with both planks of capitalist rule.

Take for example a group of workers who have been employed in the same factory for years. The whole normal humdrum pattern of their lives is dependent on their jobs there. One day the employer announces that he is going to close the factory down. Even the Tory voters in the workforce are horrified and want to do something. In desperation they decide that the only way to continue to lead the sort of lives capitalism has taught them to expect is to occupy the factory – to challenge the employer’s control over the means of production.

They may soon find themselves up against the state as well, as the employer calls in the police to return control of ‘his’ property back to him. If they are to have any chance of keeping their jobs, the workers now must also confront the police, the state machine, as well as the employer.

Thus capitalism itself creates the conditions of class conflict which open workers’ minds to ideas quite opposed to those which the system has taught them. This explains why the history of capitalism has been marked by periodic upsurges of revolutionary feeling among millions of workers, even if most of the time most workers accept the ideas the system feeds them.

One final point. One of the biggest things holding many workers back from support for revolutionary ideas is the feeling that it is not worth them personally doing anything because other workers will never support them. When they find that other workers are doing things, they suddenly lose their own apathy. In the same way people, who feel that they, as workers, are quite incapable of running society, suddenly learn otherwise when they find, in the course of massive struggles against existing society, that they’re taking over much of its running.

It is because of this that once revolutionary movements start, they can snowball at amazing speed.

=== ProleWiki annotations ===
<references group="ProleWiki 10." />

== The revolutionary socialist party ==
The basic premise of Marxism is that the development of capitalism itself drives workers into revolt against the system.

When such revolts break out – whether a mass demonstration, an armed insurrection or even a big strike – the transformation of working class consciousness is astonishing. All the mental energy that workers previously frittered away on a hundred and one diversions – from doing the horses to watching the telly – is suddenly directed towards trying to deal with the problem of how to change society. Millions of people working on such problems produce solutions of amazing ingenuity, which often leave established revolutionaries as bewildered as the ruling class by this turn of events.

So, for instance, in the first Russian revolution of 1905 a new form of workers’ organisation, the soviet – the workers’ council – grew out of the strike committee set up during a printing strike. At first the Bolshevik Party – the most militant of the revolutionary socialists – treated the Soviets with distrust: they did not believe it was possible for the mass of previously non-political workers to create a genuinely revolutionary instrument.

Such experiences are found in many strikes: the established militants are taken completely by surprise when workers who have ignored their advice for so long, suddenly begin to organise militant action themselves.

This spontaneity is fundamental. But it is wrong to draw the conclusion – as anarchists and near-anarchists do – that because of spontaneity, there is no need for a revolutionary party.

In a revolutionary situation, millions of workers change their ideas very, very quickly. But they do not all change all their ideas at once. Inside every strike, every demonstration, every armed uprising there are always continual arguments. A few workers will see the action they are taking as a prelude to the working class taking control of society. Others will be half against taking any action at all, because it is disturbing the ‘natural order of things’. In the middle will be the mass of workers, attracted first by one set of arguments, then by the other, Onto one side of the balance the present ruling class will throw all the weight of its newspaper propaganda machine, denouncing the workers’ actions. It will throw too its strikebreaking forces, whether police, army or right wing organisations.

And on the workers’ side of the argument there must be an organisation of socialists who can draw on the lessons of past class struggle, who can throw the arguments about socialism into the balance.

There must be an organisation that can draw together the growing understanding of workers in struggle, so they can act together to change society.

And this revolutionary socialist party needs to be there before the struggle starts, for organisation is not born spontaneously. The party is built through the continual interplay of socialist ideas and experience of the class struggle – for merely to understand society is not enough: only by applying these ideas in the day-to-day class struggle, in strikes, demonstrations, campaigns, will workers become aware of their power to change things, and gain the confidence to do it.

At certain points, the intervention of a socialist party can be decisive, can tip the balance towards change, towards a revolutionary transfer of power to the workers, towards a socialist society.

=== What sort of party? ===
The revolutionary socialist party needs to be democratic. To fulfil its role, the party must be continually in touch with the class struggle, and that means with its own members and supporters in the workplaces where that struggle takes place. It needs to be democratic because its leadership must always reflect the collective experience of the struggle.

At the same time, this democracy is not merely a system of election but a continual debate within the party – a continual interaction of the socialist ideas on which the party is based with the experience of class struggle.

But the revolutionary socialist party must also be centralised – for it is an active party, not a debating society. It needs to be able to intervene collectively in the class struggle, and to respond quickly, so it must have a leadership capable of taking day-to-day decisions in the name of the party.

If the government orders the jailing of pickets, for instance, the party needs to react at once, without the need to convene conferences to take democratic decisions first. So the decision is made centrally and acted upon. Democracy comes into play afterwards, when the party hammers out whether the decision was correct or not – and maybe changes the party leadership if it was out of touch with the needs of the struggle.

The revolutionary socialist party needs to maintain a fine and delicate balance between democracy and centralism. The key is that the party does not exist for its own sake, but as a means for bringing a revolutionary change to socialism – and that can only be through class struggle.

So the party must continually adapt itself to the struggle. When the struggle is low, and few workers believe in the possibility of revolutionary change, then the party will be small – and must be content to be so for to dilute its political ideas in order to increase its membership would be pointless. But when the struggle increases, large numbers of workers can change their ideas very fast, realising through struggle their power to change things – and then the party must be able to open its doors, otherwise it will be left on the sidelines.

The party cannot substitute for the working class. It must be part of the class struggle, continually trying to unite the most class-conscious workers to provide a leadership for the struggle. Nor can the party dictate to the class. It cannot simply proclaim itself the leadership, but must win that position, proving the correctness of socialist ideas in practice – which means anything from a small strike to the revolution itself.

Some people see the revolutionary socialist party as the precursor of socialism. This is completely wrong. Socialism can only come about when the working class itself takes control of the means of producing wealth and uses this to transform society.

You cannot build an island of socialism in a sea of capitalism. Attempts by small groups of socialists to cut themselves off and lead their lives according to socialist ideas always fail miserably in the long term – for a start, the economic and ideological pressures are always there. And in cutting themselves off from capitalism, such small groups also cut themselves off from the only force that can bring socialism: the working class.

Of course, socialists fight against the degrading effects of capitalism every day – against racism, against sexism, against exploitation, against brutality. But we can only do so by taking the strength of the working class as our base.

== Imperialism and national liberation ==
Throughout the history of capitalism the employing class has always looked to an additional source of wealth – the seizure of wealth produced in other countries.

The growth of the first forms of capitalism at the close of the Middle Ages was accompanied by the seizure by western states of vast colonial empires – the empires of Spain and Portugal, of Holland and France, and, of course, of Britain. Wealth was pumped into the hands of the ruling classes of western Europe, while whole societies in what has become known as the Third World (Africa, Asia and South America) were destroyed.

Thus, the ‘discovery’ of America by Europeans in the 16th century produced a vast flow of gold into Europe. The other side of that coin was the destruction of whole societies and the enslavement of others. For example, in Haiti, where Columbus first established a settlement, the native Harawak Indians (perhaps half a million in all) were exterminated in just two generations. In Mexico the Indian population was reduced from 20 million in 1520 to 2 million in 1607.

The Indian population of the West Indies and of parts of the mainland was replaced by slaves captured in Africa and transported across the Atlantic under abominable conditions. An estimated 15 million slaves survived the Atlantic crossing while about 9 million died in transit. About half the slaves were transported in British ships – which is one reason why British capitalism was the first to expand industry.

The wealth from the slave trade provided the means to finance industry. As an old saying put it, ‘The walls of Bristol are cemented with the blood of the negroes’ – and this applied just as much to other ports. As Karl Marx put it, ‘The veiled slavery of the wage worker in Europe required for its pedestal slavery pure and simple in the New World.’ The slave trade was complemented by pure looting – as when the British conquered India. Bengal was so advanced that the first British visitors were stunned by the magnificence of its civilisation.

But this wealth did not stay long in Bengal. As Lord Macaulay wrote in his biography of the conqueror, Clive:<blockquote>The immense population was given up as prey. Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while 30 million of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They had been used to living under tyranny, but never tyranny like this.</blockquote>From that point onwards Bengal became renowned not for its wealth, but for a grinding poverty that every few years saw millions starve to death in famines, a poverty that continues to this day.

Meanwhile, in the 1760s, at a time when total capital investment in England was no more than £6 million to £7 million, the annual tribute to England from India was £2 million.

The same processes were at work in relation to England’s oldest colony – Ireland. During the Great Famine of the late 1840s when Ireland’s population was halved by starvation and emigration, more than enough wheat to feed the starving population was sent from the country as rent to English landlords.

Today, it is usual to divide the world into ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ countries. The impression is given that the ‘underdeveloped’ countries have been moving in the same direction for hundreds of years as the ‘developed’ countries, but at a slower speed.

But, in fact, one reason for the ‘development’ of the Western countries was that the rest were robbed of wealth and pushed backwards. Many are poorer today than they were 300 years ago.

As Michael Barratt Brown has pointed out:<blockquote>The wealth per head of the present underdeveloped lands, not only in India, but in China, Latin America and Africa, was higher than in Europe in the 17th century, and fell as wealth grew in Western Europe.</blockquote>The possession of an empire enabled Britain to develop as the world’s first industrial power. It was in a position to stop other capitalist states getting their hands on the raw materials, markets and profitable areas of investment within its third of the world.

As new industrial powers such as Germany, Japan and the United States grew up, they wanted these advantages for themselves. They built up rival empires or ‘spheres of influence’. Faced with economic crisis, each of the major capitalist powers tried to solve its problems by encroaching on the spheres of influence of its rivals. Imperialism led to world war.

This in turn produced huge changes within the internal organisation of capitalism. The tool for waging war, the state, became much more important. It worked ever more closely with the giant firms to reorganise industry for foreign competition and war. Capitalism became state monopoly capitalism.

The development of imperialism meant that capitalists did not just exploit the working class of their own country; they also took physical control of other countries and exploited their populations. For the most oppressed classes in the colonial countries, this meant that they were exploited by foreign imperialists as well as by their own ruling class. They were doubly exploited.

But sections of the ruling classes in the colonial countries also suffered. They saw many of their own opportunities to exploit the local population stolen from them by imperialism. In the same way, the middle classes in the colonies, who would have liked to see a rapid expansion of locally run industry so as to provide them with good career opportunities, suffered as well.

The last 60 years have seen all these various classes in colonial and ex-colonial countries rise up against the effects of imperialism. Movements have developed that have attempted to unite the whole population against foreign imperialist rule. Their demands have included:

* Expulsion of foreign imperialist troops.
* Unification of the whole national territory under a single national government, as against its division between different imperialisms.
* The re-establishment of the original language in everyday life, as opposed to some language imposed by the foreign rulers.
* The use of the wealth produced by the country to expand local industry to bring about ‘development’ and ‘modernisation’ of the country.

Such were the demands of successive revolutionary upsurges in China (in 1912, 1923-27 and in 1945-48), in Iran (in 1905-12, 1917-21 and in 1941-53), in Turkey (after the First World War), in the West Indies (from the 1920s onwards), in India (in 1920-48), in Africa (after 1945) and in Vietnam (until the United States was defeated in 1975).

These movements were often led by sections of the local upper classes or middle classes, but they meant that the ruling classes of the advanced countries faced an additional opponent as well as their own working class. The national movement in the so-called Third World challenged the imperialist capitalist states at the same time as did their own working classes.

For the working class movement in the advanced countries this had great importance. It meant that in its fight against capitalism, it had an ally in the liberation movements of the Third World. So, for example, a Shell worker in Britain had an ally in the liberation forces in South Africa who were fighting to take over the property which Shell owned there. If Shell can thwart the aims of the liberation movements in the Third World, then it will be more powerful when it comes to resisting the demands of workers in Britain.

This is true, even if the liberation movement in the Third World country does not have a socialist leadership – indeed, even if its leadership merely wants to replace foreign rule by the rule of a local capitalist or state capitalist class.

The imperialist state which is trying to smash that liberation movement is the same imperialist state that is the greatest enemy of the Western worker. That is why Marx insisted that ‘a nation that oppresses others cannot itself be free’, and why Lenin argued for an alliance between the workers of the advanced countries and the oppressed people of the Third World, even when these had a non-socialist leadership.

This does not mean that socialists will agree with the way in which non-socialists in an oppressed country lead a national liberation struggle (any more than we necessarily agree with how a trade union leader leads a strike). But we have to make it clear before anything else that we support that struggle. Otherwise we an all too easily end up supporting our own ruling class against ieople it is oppressing.

We have to support a liberation struggle unconditionally, before we are entitled to criticise the way it is led.

However, revolutionary socialists in a country which is oppressed by imperialism cannot leave matters there. They have to argue, day in day out, with other people about how the struggle for national liberation should be waged.

Here, the most important points are contained in the theory of permanent revolution developed by Trotsky.<ref group="ProleWiki 11.">The [[Permanent Revolution|permanent revolution]] theory of Trotsky does not talk about national liberation against colonialism, rather it talks about how the revolution that started in a country would extend through the other, making it "permanent", theory which is incorrect</ref> Trotsky began by recognising that often movements against oppression are initiated by people from middle class or even upper class backgrounds.

Socialists support such movements because they aim to ‘move one of the burdens that weighs upon the most oppressed classes and groups in society. But we also have to recognise that those from the upper or middle classes cannot lead such struggles consistently. They will be afraid of unleashing a full-blooded class struggle, in case this challenges not merely oppression from outside, but also their own ability to live by exploiting the most oppressed classes.

At a certain point they will run away from the struggle they themselves initiated, and, if necessary, unite with the foreign oppressor to smash it. At this point, if socialist, working class does do not take the leadership of the national liberation struggle, it will be defeated.

Trotsky also made one final point. It is true that in most Third World countries the working class is only a minority, often a small minority, of the population. But it is nevertheless often quite big in absolute terms (for example in India and China it is tens of millions strong), it often creates a huge proportion of the national wealth in relation to its size, and it is concentrated in overwhelming numbers in the cities which are key when it comes ruling the country. So in a period of revolutionary turmoil, the working class can take the leadership of all other oppressed classes and seize control of whole countries. The revolution can be permanent, beginning with demands for national liberation and ending with socialist demands. But only if socialists in the oppressed country have from the beginning organised the workers on an independent, class basis – supporting the general movement for national liberation, but always warning that its middle class or upper class leaders cannot be trusted.

=== ProleWiki annotations ===
<references group="ProleWiki 11." />

== Marxism and feminism ==
There are two different approaches to women’s liberation – feminism and revolutionary socialism.

Feminism was the dominant influence on the women’s movements which sprung up in the advanced capitalist countries during the 1960s and 1970s. It started from the view that men always oppress women, that there was something in men’s biology or psychological make up which made them treat women as inferior. This led to the view that liberation was possible only by the separation of women from men – either the total separation of the feminists who sought ‘liberated lifestyles’ or the partial separation of women’s committees, women’s caucuses or women-only events.

Many of those who supported this partial separation called themselves socialist feminists. But later radical feminist ideas of total separation made the running inside the women’s movement.

Separatist ideas ended time and again as a slightly radical wing of the social services, as with women’s refuges.

This failing led many feminists in another direction – towards the Labour Party. They believed that getting the right women in the right places, as MPs, trade union officials, local councillors, would somehow help all women to find equality.

The tradition of revolutionary socialism starts from a very different set of ideas. Marx and Engels, writing as far back as 1848, argued, first, that women’s oppression did not arise from the ideas in men’s heads, but from the development of private property and with it the emergence of a society based on classes. For them, the fight for women’s liberation was inseparable from the fight to end all class society – the struggle for socialism.

Marx and Engels also pointed out that the development of capitalism, based on the factory system, brought profound changes in people’s lives, and especially in the lives of women. Women were brought back into social production, from which they had been progressively excluded with the development of class society.

This gave women a potential power which they had never had before. Organised collectively, women as workers had greater independence and ability to fight for their rights. This was in great contrast to their lives previously, when their main role in production, through the family, made them completely dependent on the family head – the husband or father.

From this Marx and Engels concluded that the material basis of the family, and so of women’s oppression, no longer existed. What stopped women from benefiting from this was the fact that property remained in the hands of the few. What keeps women oppressed today is the way capitalism is organised – in particular the way capitalism uses a particular form of the family in order to make sure that its workers bring their children up to be the next generation of workers. It is a great advantage that while it pays men – and increasingly women – to work, women will devote their lives, unpaid, to making sure their men are fit to work in the factories and their children will grow up to do the same.

Socialism, by contrast, would see society taking on many of the family functions which weigh so heavily on women.

This didn’t mean that Marx, Engels and their successors went about preaching the ‘abolition of the family’. The family’s supporters have always been able to mobilise many of the most oppressed women in its support – they see the ‘abolition of the family’ as giving their husbands licence to abandon them with the responsibility for the children. Revolutionary socialists have always tried instead to show how in a better, socialist society, women would not be forced into the miserable, cramped life provided by the present day family.

Feminists have always rejected this sort of analysis. Far from approaching women where they have the power to change the world and end their oppression – where they are collectively strong at work – they approach women as sufferers. Campaigns of the 1980s, for example, focused on such issues as prostitution, rape or the threat to women and families from nuclear weapons. These all start from positions where women are weak.

Feminism starts with the assumption that oppression overrides class division. This leads to conclusions which leave class society intact while improving the position of some women – a minority. The women’s movement has tended to be dominated by women from the ‘new middle class’ – journalists, writers, lecturers, higher grade white collar workers. The typists, filing clerks, machinists have got left out.

It is only during periods of radical change and revolutionary upsurge that the question of women’s liberation becomes reality, not just for a minority, but for all working class women as well. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 produced a much greater equality for women than ever known in the world before. Divorce, abortion and contraception were made freely available. Childcare and housework became the responsibility of society. There were the beginnings of communal restaurants, laundries and nurseries which gave women far more choice and control over their lives.

Of course, the fate of these advances couldn’t be separated from the fate of the revolution itself.

Famine, civil war, the decimation of the working class, and the failure of revolution internationally meant the eventual defeat of socialism in Russia itself. The moves towards equality were reversed.

But the early years of the soviet republic showed what socialist revolution could achieve, even in the most unfavourable conditions. Today, the prospects for women’s liberation are far better. In Britain – and much the same is true of other advanced capitalist countries – two workers in every five are women.

Women’s liberation can be achieved only through the collective power of the working class. This means rejecting the feminist idea of women’s separate organisations. Only women and men workers acting together as part of a united revolutionary movement can destroy class society, and with it the oppression of women.

== Socialism and war ==
The present century has been a century of wars. Some 10 million people were killed in the First World War, 55 million in the Second, 2 million in the wars in Indochina. And the two great nuclear powers, the United States and Russia, still possess the means to destroy the human race many times over.<ref group="ProleWiki 12.">The [[Soviet Union]] developed the nuclear bombs in response to the development of the nuclear bombs of the USA, since without them, the United States would have had the path paved to destroy the country of the Soviets.</ref>

Explaining this horror is difficult for those who take existing society for granted. They are driven to conclude that there is some innate, instinctive drive in human beings that leads them to enjoy mass slaughter. But human society has not always known war. Gordon Childe noted of Europe in the Stone Age:<blockquote>The earliest Danubians seem to have been a peaceful folk; weapons of war as against hunters' tools are absent from their graves. Their villages lacked military defences. [But] in the later phases of the Neolithic period armaments became the most conspicuous items...</blockquote>War is not caused by some innate human aggressiveness. It is a product of the division of society into classes. When, between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago, a class of property owners first emerged, it had to find the means to defend its wealth. It began to construct armed forces, a state, cut off from the rest of society. This then became a valuable means of further increasing its wealth, by plundering other societies.

The division of society into classes meant that war became a permanent feature of human life.

The slave owning ruling classes of Ancient Greece and Rome could not survive without continual wars which procured more slaves. The feudal lords of the Middle Ages had to be heavily armed in order to subdue the local serfs and to protect their loot from other feudal lords. When the first capitalist ruling classes began 300 or 400 years ago, they too repeatedly had to have recourse to war. They had to fight bitter wars in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries in order to establish their supremacy over the remnants of the old feudal rulers. The most successful capitalist countries, such as Britain, used warfare to expand their wealth—reaching overseas, looting India and Ireland, transporting millions of people as slaves from Africa to the Americas, turning the whole world into a source of plunder for themselves.

Capitalist society built itself through war. No wonder that those who lived within it came 'to believe that war was both 'inevitable' and 'just'.

Yet capitalism could never be based entirely on war. Most of its wealth came through exploiting workers in factories and mines. And that was something which could be disrupted by any fighting within the 'home country' itself.

Each national capitalist class wanted peace at home while waging war abroad. So while encouraging belief in 'military virtues' it also bitterly attacked 'violence'. The ideology of capitalism combines, in a completely contradictory way, exaltation of militarism and pacifist phrases.

In the present century war preparations have become more central to the system than ever before. In the 19th century capitalist production was based on many small firms competing with each other.

The state was a relatively small body that regulated their relations with each other and with their workers. But in the present century big firms have eaten up most of the small firms, so eliminating much of the competition within each country. Competition is more and more international, between the giant firms of different nations.

There is no international capitalist state to regulate this competition. Instead, each national state exerts all the pressure it can to help its capitalists get an advantage over their foreign rivals. The life and death struggle of different capitalists with each other can become the life and death struggle of different states, each with its huge array of destructive weaponry.

Twice this struggle has led to world war. The First and Second World Wars were imperialist wars, conflicts between alliances of capitalist states over the domination of the globe.<ref group="ProleWiki 12.">On the Eastern Front, the largest and deadliest theatre of the Second World War, the conflict was not inter-imperialist in character. Rather, it was fought primarily between a socialist state and a fascist-imperialist one. The Nazis' chief military aim was the deportation, enslavement, and/or extermination of Eastern Europe's indigenous population in order to make room for German colonial settlement. The Soviets by contrast were struggling for the preservation of their homeland and had spent the previous decade trying to contain fascist aggression in Europe, Africa, and Asia.</ref> The Cold War was a continuation of that struggle, with the most powerful capitalist states lined up against each other in NATO and the Warsaw Pact.<ref group="ProleWiki 12.">The Warsaw pact was a pact of socialist countries, which also fought with the colonized in their decolonization processes, supporting them militarely and economically</ref>

In addition to this global conflict, many hot wars have raged in different parts of the world. Usually they have been struggles between different capitalist states over who should control a particular region, such as the Iran-Iraq war which broke out in 1980 and the Gulf War in 1991. All the major powers stoke the fires of war by selling the most sophisticated military technology to Third World states.

Many people who accept the rest of the capitalist system do not like this grim reality. They want capitalism but not war. They try to find alternatives within the system. For example, there are those who believe the United Nations can prevent war.

But the UN is merely the arena where different states that embody the drive to war meet together.

There they compare their strengths with each other, like boxers measuring up before a bout. If one state or alliance is easily more powerful than another, then both will see the pointlessness of a war whose outcome is known in advance. But if there is any doubt about the outcome, they know of only one way of settling the issue, and that is to go to war.

This was true of the two great nuclear alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Even though the West had the military edge over the Eastern Bloc, the gap was not so great for the Russians to believe themselves at a hopeless disadvantage. So, despite the fact that a Third World War would wipe out most of the human race, both Washington and Moscow drew up plans for fighting and winning a nuclear war.<ref group="ProleWiki 12.">See PW annotation 12.1</ref>

The Cold War came to an end with the political upheaval in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR into its constituent republics in 1991. There was then much talk of a 'new world order' and a 'peace dividend'.

Instead, however, we have seen a succession of barbaric wars—the war of the West against its former ally Iraq, the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the former USSR, the horrific civil wars in Somalia and former Yugoslavia.

No sooner is one military rivalry between capitalist powers resolved than another takes its place.

Everywhere, ruling classes know that war is a way of increasing their influence and of blinding workers and peasants with nationalism.

You can loathe and fear war without opposing capitalist society. But you cannot end it. War is the inevitable product of the division of society into classes. The threat of it will never be ended by begging existing rulers to make peace. The armaments have to be wrested from their hands by a movement fighting to overturn class society once and for all.

The peace movements which emerged in Europe and North America at the end of the 1970s did not understand this. They fought to stop the introduction of Cruise and Pershing missiles, for unilateral disarmament, for a nuclear freeze. But they believed that the fight for peace could succeed in isolation from the struggle between capital and labour.

So they failed to mobilise the only power capable of stopping the drive towards war, the working class. Only socialist revolution can end the horror of war.

=== ProleWiki annotations ===
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[[Category:Library works by Chris Harman]]
[[Category:Library works about philosophy]]

Library:How Marxism works

2025-06-24T11:25:43Z

ComradeTrash: Changed annotation referring to the carnation revolution.

{{Library work|title=How Marxism works|image=How Marxism Works Harman cover 2.jpg|author=Chris Harman|written in=1979|publisher=Bookmarks Publications|published_date=May, 1979|published_location=London, England|edition_date=July 1, 2000|type=Pamphlet|isbn=9781898876274|source=[https://annas-archive.org/md5/0c69ac3b6f8a4bb3c912f57d19b84416 Anna's Archive]|audiobook=[https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0-IkmzWbjob9lPqBGAyQAX6lhxm5fE_d Dessalines]|display_title=yes}}
{{Foreword|date=2023-10-07|foreword=Originally written in 1979, ''How Marxism works'' is an incredibly important tool for the communist movement. Chris Harman was able to accurately convey the principles of [[Marxism]] to first-time readers. His pamphlet is still relevant today, with the majority of its examples from a recent enough period to resonate with present-day readers.

The strength of How Marxism Works lies in its beginner-friendliness: this book could be given out to someone who has never heard the word 'communism' before, and they would come out with a working knowledge of Marxism in record time.

However, Chris Harman was also in the [[Socialist Workers Party (UK)|Socialist Workers' Party]], a [[Trotskyist]] party. As such, some of his examples are dyed in the colors of his bias against the [[Soviet Union]] -- opinions that have nothing to do with how Marxism works, and instead all to do with the author's own leaning towards Trotsykism.

This edition by ProleWiki is adapted from an earlier edition and contains our own chapter annotations as well as this foreword. We have also removed an annex that advertised books for sale as it was not part of the author's work. Links have also been provided to ProleWiki pages or library works when possible. Everything else has been left as in the source.}}
== Introduction ==
There is a widespread myth that Marxism is difficult. It is a myth propagated by the enemies of socialism – former [[Labour Party (UK)|Labour]] leader [[Harold Wilson]] boasted that he was never able to get beyond the first page of Marx’s [[Library:Capital, vol. I|Capital]]. It is a myth also encouraged by a peculiar breed of academics who declare themselves to be ‘Marxists’: they deliberately cultivate obscure phrases and mystical expressions in order to give the impression that they possess a special knowledge denied to others.

So it is hardly surprising that many socialists who work 40 hours a week in factories, mines or offices take it for granted that Marxism is something they will never have the time or the opportunity to understand.

In fact the basic ideas of Marxism are remarkably simple. They explain, as no other set of ideas can, the society in which we live. They make sense of a world wracked by crises, of its poverty in the midst of plenty, of its coups d’etat and military dictatorships, of the way in which marvellous inventions can consign millions to the dole queues, of ‘democracies’ that subsidise torturers and of ‘socialist’ states that threaten each other’s people with nuclear missiles.

Meanwhile, the establishment thinkers who so deride Marxist ideas chase each other round in a mad game of blind man’s buff, understanding nothing and explaining less.

But though Marxism is not difficult, there is a problem for the reader who comes across Marx’s writings for the first time. Marx wrote well over a century ago. He used the language of the time, complete with references to individuals and events then familiar to virtually everyone, now known only to specialist historians.

I remember my own bafflement when, while still at school, I tried to read his pamphlet [[Library:The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte|The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte]].

I didn’t know either what Brumaire was or who [[Louis Bonaparte]] was. How many socialists have abandoned attempts to come to grips with Marxism after such experiences!

This is the justification for this short book. It seeks to provide an introduction to Marxist ideas, which will make it easier for socialists to follow what Marx was on about and to understand the development of Marxism since then in the hands of [[Friedrich Engels|Frederick Engels]], [[Rosa Luxemburg]], [[Vladimir Lenin]], [[Leon Trotsky]], and a whole host of lesser thinkers.<ref group="ProleWiki 1.">No less important, we can note as well: [[Stalin]], [[Mao Zedong]], [[Kim Il Sung]] and [[Deng Xiaoping]]. Trotsky himself was important to Marxism only as far as he provided an example of what ''not'' to do.</ref>

Much of this pamphlet first appeared as a series of articles in Socialist Worker under the title ‘Marxism Made Easy’. But I have added substantial fresh material. A little of this I have lifted wholesale from two previous attempts to provide a simple exposition of Marxist ideas: Duncan Hallas’s ''The Meaning of Marxism'' and Norwich SWP’s ‘''Marxist Education Series''’.

One final point. Space has prevented me from dealing in this pamphlet with some important parts of the Marxist analysis of the modern world. I have included a substantial further reading section at the back.

=== ProleWiki annotations ===
<references group="ProleWiki 1." />

== Why we need Marxist theory ==
What do we need theory for? We know there is a crisis. We know we are being robbed by our employers. We know we’re all angry. We know we need socialism. All the rest is just for the intellectuals.

You often hear words such as these from militant socialists and trade unionists. Such views are strongly encouraged by anti-socialists, who try to give the impression that Marxism is an obscure, complicated and boring doctrine.

Socialist ideas, they say, are ‘abstract’. They may seem all right in theory, but in real life common sense tells us something else entirely.

The trouble with these arguments is that the people who put them forward usually have a ‘theory’ of their own, even if they refuse to recognise it. Ask them any question about society, and they will try to answer it with some generalisation or other. A few examples: ‘People are naturally selfish.’ ‘Anyone can get to the top if they try hard enough.’ ‘If it weren’t for the rich there wouldn’t be any money to provide work for the rest of us.’ ‘If only we could educate the workers, society would change.’ ‘Declining morals have brought the country to its present state.’ Listen to any argument in the street, on the bus, in the canteen – you’ll hear dozens of such sayings.

Each and every one contains a view of why society is like it is and of how people can improve their condition. Such views are all ‘theories’ of society.

When people say they do not have a theory, all they really mean is they have not clarified their views.

This is particularly dangerous for anyone who is trying to change society. For the newspapers, the radio, the television, are all continually filling our minds with attempted explanations for the mess society is in. They hope we will accept what they say without thinking more about the issues.

But you cannot fight effectively to change society unless you recognise what is false in all these different arguments.

This was first shown 150 years ago. In the 1830s and 1840s the development of industry in areas such as the north west of England drew hundreds of thousands of men, women and children into miserably paid jobs. They were forced to endure living conditions of unbelievable squalor.

They began to fight back against this with the first mass workers’ organisations – the first trade unions, and in Britain the first movement for political rights for workers: [[Chartism]]. Alongside these movements were the first small groups of people dedicated to winning socialism.

Immediately the problem arose as to how the workers’ movement could achieve its aim.

Some people said it was possible to persuade society’s rulers to change things through peaceful means. The ‘moral force’ of a mass, peaceful movement would ensure that benefits were given to the workers. Hundreds of thousands of people organised, demonstrated, worked to build a movement on the basis of such views – only to end defeated and demoralised.<ref group="ProleWiki 2.">Known as [[utopian socialism]]; see [[Robert Owen]], [[Saint-Simon]], [[Charles Fourier]]. They believed that by building factories nicer to the employees, all other capitalists would be convinced to do the same when they saw how much nicer and productive these factories were. It did not work out.</ref>

Others recognised the need to use ‘physical force’, but thought this could be achieved by fairly small, conspiratorial groups cut off from the rest of society. These too led tens of thousands of workers into struggles that ended in defeat and demoralisation.<ref group="ProleWiki 2.">See [[Auguste Blanqui]]</ref>

Still others believed the workers could achieve their goals by economic action, without confronting the army and the police. Again, their arguments led to mass actions. In England in 1842 the world’s first general strike took place in the industrial areas of the north, with tens of thousands of workers holding out for four weeks until forced back to work by hunger and privation.

It was towards the end of the first stage of defeated workers’ struggles, in 1848, that the German socialist Karl Marx spelt out his own ideas fully, in his pamphlet [[Library:Manifesto of the Communist Party|The Communist Manifesto]].

His ideas were not pulled out of thin air. They attempted to provide a basis for dealing with all the questions that had been brought up by the workers’ movement of the time.

The ideas Marx developed are still relevant today. It is stupid to say, as some people do, that they must be out of date because Marx first wrote them down more than 150 years ago. In fact, all the notions of society that Marx argued with are still very widespread. Just as the Chartists argued about ‘moral force’ or ‘physical force’, socialists today argue about the ‘parliamentary road’ or the ‘revolutionary road’. Among those who are revolutionaries the argument for and against ‘terrorism’ is as alive as it was in 1848.

=== The idealists ===
Marx was not the first person to try to describe what was wrong with society. At the time he was writing, new inventions in factories were turning out wealth on a scale undreamt of by previous generations. For the first time it seemed humanity had the means to defend itself against the natural calamities that had been the scourge of previous ages.

Yet this did not mean any improvement in the lives of the majority of the people. Quite the opposite. The men, women and children who manned the new factories led lives much worse that those led by their grandparents who had toiled the land. Their wages barely kept them above the bread line; periodic bouts of mass unemployment thrust them well below it. They were crammed into miserable, squalid slums, without proper sanitation, subjected to monstrous epidemics.

Instead of the development of civilisation bringing general happiness and well being, it was giving rise to greater misery.

This was noted, not just by Marx, but by some of the other great thinkers of the period – men such as the English poets Blake and Shelley, the Frenchmen Fourier and [[Proudhon]], the German philosophers [[Hegel]] and [[Ludwig Feuerbach|Feuerbach]].

Hegel and Feuerbach called the unhappy state in which humanity found itself ‘alienation’ – a term you still often hear. By alienation, Hegel and Feuerbach meant that men and women continually found that they were dominated and oppressed by what they themselves had done in the past. So, Feuerbach pointed out, people had developed the idea of God –and then had bowed down before it, feeling miserable because they could not live up to something they themselves had made. The more society advanced, the more miserable, ‘alienated’, people became.

In his own earliest writings Marx took this notion of ‘alienation’ and applied it to the life of those who created the wealth of society:<blockquote>The worker becomes poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range... With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion the devaluation of the world of men... The object which labour produces confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer...</blockquote>In Marx’s time the most popular explanations of what was wrong with society were still of a religious kind. The misery of society, it was said, was because of the failure of people to do what God wanted them to. If only we were all to ‘renounce sin’ everything would turn out all right.

A similar view is often heard today, although it usually purports to be non-religious. This is the claim that ‘to change society, you must first change yourself’. If only individual men and women would cure themselves of ‘selfishness’ or ‘materialism’ (or occasionally ‘hangups’) then society would automatically get better.

A related view spoke not of changing all individuals, but a few key ones – those who exercise power in society. The idea was to try to make the rich and powerful ‘see reason’.

One of the first British socialists, Robert Owen, began by trying to convince industrialists that they should be kinder to their workers. The same idea is still dominant today among the leaders of the Labour Party, including its left wing. Note how they always call the crimes of the employers ‘mistakes’, as if a bit of argument will persuade big business to relax its grip on society.

Marx referred to all such views as ‘[[Idealism|idealist]]’. Not because he was against people having ‘ideas’, but because such views see ideas as existing in isolation from the conditions in which people live.

People’s ideas are intimately linked to the sort of lives they are able to live. Take, for instance, ‘selfishness’. Present day capitalist society breeds selfishness – even in people who continually try to put other people first. A worker who wants to do their best for their children, or to give their parents something on top of their pension, finds the only way is to struggle continually against other people – to get a better job, more overtime, to be first in the queue for redundancy. In such a society you cannot get rid of ‘selfishness’ or ‘greediness’ merely by changing the minds of individuals.

It’s even more ridiculous to talk of changing society by changing the ideas of ‘top people’. Suppose you were successful in winning a big employer over to socialist ideas and he then stopped exploiting workers. He would just lose in competition with rival employers and be driven out of business.

Even for those who rule society what matters is not ideas but the structure of the society in which they hold those ideas.

The point can be put another way. If ideas are what change society, where do the ideas come from?

We live in a certain sort of society. The ideas put across by the press, the TV, the educational system and so on defend that sort of society. How has anyone ever been able to develop completely different ideas? Because their daily experiences contradict the official ideas of our society.

For example, you cannot explain why far fewer people are religious today than 100 years ago simply in terms of the success of atheistic propaganda. You have to explain why people listen to atheistic ideas in a way they did not 100 years ago.

Similarly, if you want to explain the impact of ‘great men’, you have to explain why other people agree to follow them. It is no good saying that, for example. Napoleon or Lenin changed history, without explaining why millions of people were willing to do what they suggested. After all, they were not mass hypnotists. Something in the life of society at a certain point led people to feel that what they suggested seemed correct.

You can only understand how ideas change history if you understand where those ideas come from and why people accept them. That means looking beyond the ideas to the material conditions of the society in which they occur. That is why Marx insisted, ‘It is not consciousness that determines being, but social being that determines consciousness.’

=== ProleWiki annotations ===
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== Understanding history ==
Ideas by themselves cannot change society. This was one of Marx’s first conclusions. Like a number of thinkers before him, he insisted that to understand society you had to see human beings as part of the material world.

Human behaviour was determined by material forces, just like the behaviour of any other natural object. The study of humanity was part of the scientific study of the natural world. Thinkers with such views were called [[Materialism|materialists]].

Marx regarded materialism as a great step forward over the various religious and idealist notions of history. It meant that you could argue scientifically about changing social conditions, you no longer depended on praying to God or on ‘spiritual change’ in people.

The replacement of idealism by materialism was the replacement of mysticism by science. But not all materialist explanations of human behaviour are correct. Just as there have been mistaken scientific theories in biology, chemistry or physics, so there have been mistaken attempts to develop scientific theories of society. Here are a few examples: One very widespread, non-Marxist, materialist view holds that human beings are animals, who behave ‘naturally’ in certain ways. Just as it is in the nature of wolves to kill or in the nature of sheep to be placid, so it is in the nature of men to be aggressive, domineering, competitive and greedy (and, it is implied, of women to be meek, submissive, deferential and passive).

One formulation of this view is to be found in the best selling book ''The Naked Ape''. The conclusions that are drawn from such arguments are almost invariably reactionary. If men are naturally aggressive, it is said, then there is no point in trying to improve society. Things will always turn out the same. Revolutions will ‘always fail’.

But ‘human nature’ does in fact vary from society to society. For instance, competitiveness, which is taken for granted in our society, hardly existed in many previous societies. When scientists first tried to give [[Lakota people|Sioux]] Indians IQ tests, they found that the Indians could not understand why they should not help each other do the answers. The society they lived in stressed cooperation, not competition.

The same with aggressiveness. When Eskimos first met Europeans, they could not make any sense whatsoever of the notion of ‘war’. The idea of one group of people trying to wipe out another group of people seemed crazy to them.

In our society it is regarded as ‘natural’ that parents should love and protect their children. Yet in the Ancient Greek city of Sparta it was regarded as ‘natural’ to leave infants out in the mountains to see if they could survive the cold.

‘Unchanging human nature’ theories provide no explanation for the great events of history. The pyramids of Egypt, the splendours of Ancient Greece, the empires of [[Roman Empire (27 BCE–395 CE)|Rome]] or the [[Realm of the Four Parts (1438–1533)|Incas]], the modern industrial city, are put on the same level as the illiterate [[Peasantry|peasants]] who lived in the mud hovels of the [[Feudalism|Dark Ages]]. All that matters is the ‘naked ape’ – not the magnificent civilisations the ape has built. It is irrelevant that some forms of society succeed in feeding the ‘apes’, while others leave millions to starve to death.

Many people accept a different materialist theory, which stresses the way it is possible to change human behaviour. Just as animals can be trained to behave differently in a circus to a jungle, so, say the supporters of this view, human behaviour can similarly be changed. If only the right people got control of society, it is said, then ‘human nature’ could be transformed.

This view is certainly a great step forward from the ‘naked ape’. But as an explanation of how society as a whole can be changed it fails. If everyone is completely conditioned in present-day society, how can anyone ever rise above society and see how to change the conditioning mechanisms? Is there some God-ordained minority that is magically immune to the pressures that dominate everyone else? If we are all animals in the circus, who can be the lion tamer?

Those who hold this theory either end up saying society cannot change (like the naked apers) or they believe change is produced by something outside society – by God, or a ‘great man’, or the power of individual ideas. Their ‘materialism’ lets a new version of idealism in through the back door.

As Marx pointed out, this doctrine necessarily ends up by dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. This ‘materialist’ view is often reactionary. One of the best known adherents of the view today is a right wing American psychologist called Skinner. He wants to condition people to behave in certain ways. But since he himself is a product of American capitalist society, his ‘conditioning’ merely means trying to make people conform to that society.

Another materialist view blames all the misery in the world on ‘population pressure’. (This is usually called Malthusian after Malthus, the English economist of the late 18th century who first developed it.) But it cannot explain why the United States, for instance, burns corn while people in India starve. Nor can it explain why 150 years ago there was not enough food produced in the US to feed 10 million people, while today enough is produced to feed 200 million.

It forgets that every extra mouth to feed is also an extra person capable of working and creating wealth.

Marx called all these mistaken explanations forms of ‘mechanical’ or ‘crude’ materialism. They all forget that as well as being part of the material world, human beings are also acting, living creatures whose actions change it.

=== The materialist interpretation of history ===
<blockquote>Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence – their food, shelter and clothing.</blockquote>With these words, Karl Marx first stressed what was distinct about his explanation of how society developed. Human beings are animals descended from ape-like creatures. Like other animals, their first concern is feeding themselves and protecting themselves from the climate.

The way other animals do this depends on their inherited biological make up. A wolf stays alive by chasing and killing its prey, in ways determined by its biologically inherited instincts. It keeps warm on cold nights because of its fur. It brings up its cubs according to inherited patterns of behaviour.

But human life is not fixed in this way. The humans who roamed the Earth 100,000 years ago or 30,000 years ago lived quite different lives from ourselves. They lived in caves and holes in the ground. They did not have any containers to keep food or water in, they depended for their food on collecting berries or throwing stones at wild animals. They could not write, or count beyond the fingers on their hands. They had no real knowledge of what went on beyond their immediate neighbourhood or what their forefathers had done.

Yet physically their make up 100,000 years ago was similar to that of modern man and 30,000 years ago it was identical. If you washed and shaved a caveman, put him in a suit and walked him down the high street, no one would think him out of place.

As the archaeologist C. Gordon Childe has noted:<blockquote>The earliest skeletons of our own species belong to the closing phases of the last Ice Age … Since the time when skeletons of Homo sapiens first appear in the geological record … man’s bodily evolution has come virtually to a standstill, although his cultural progress was just beginning.</blockquote>The same point is made by another archaeologist, Leakey:<blockquote>The physical differences between men of the Aurignacian and Magdalenian cultures (25,000 years ago) on the one hand, and present day men on the other is negligible, while the cultural difference is immeasurable.</blockquote>By ‘culture’ the archaeologist means the things which men and women learn and teach one another (how to make clothes from furs or wool, how to make pots out of clay, how to make fire, how to build homes, and so forth) as opposed to those things that animals know instinctively.

The lives of the earliest humans were already vastly different from those of other animals. For they were able to use the physical features peculiar to humans – large brains, forelimbs capable of manipulating objects – to begin to shape their surroundings to suit their needs. This meant humans could adapt themselves to a wide range of different conditions, without any change in their physical make up. Humans no longer simply reacted to conditions around them. They could act upon those conditions, beginning to change them to their own advantage.

At first they used sticks and stones to attack wild beasts, they lit torches from naturally occurring fires to provide themselves with heat and light, they covered themselves with vegetation and animal skins. Over many tens of thousands of years they learnt to make fire themselves, to shape stones using other stones, eventually to grow food from seeds they themselves had planted, to store it in pots made out of clay, and to domesticate certain animals.

Comparatively recently – a mere 5,000 years ago, out of half a million years of human history – they learnt the secret of turning ores into metals that could be shaped into reliable tools and effective weapons.

Each of these advances had an enormous impact, not merely in making it easier for humans to feed and clothe themselves, but also in transforming the very organisation of human life itself. From the beginning human life was social. Only the joint efforts of several humans could enable them to kill the beasts, to gather the food and keep the fires going. They had to cooperate.

This continual close cooperation also caused them to communicate, by uttering sounds and developing languages. At first the social groups were simple. There was not enough naturally growing produce anywhere to support groups of humans more than perhaps a couple of dozen strong. All effort had to be put into the basic tasks of getting the food, so everyone did the same job and lived the same sort of life.

With no means of storing any quantities of food, there could be no private property or class divisions, nor was there any booty to produce a motive for war.

There were, until a few years ago, still hundreds of societies in many different parts of the globe where this was still the pattern – among some of the Indians of North and South America, some of the peoples of Equatorial Africa and the Pacific Ocean, the Aborigines of Australia.

Not that these people were less clever than ourselves or had a more ‘primitive mentality’. The Australian Aborigines, for instance, had to learn to recognise literally thousands of plants and the habits of scores of different animals in order to survive. The anthropologist Professor Firth has described how: <blockquote>Australian tribes … know the habits, markings, breeding grounds and seasonal fluctuations of all the edible animals, fish and birds of their hunting grounds. They know the external and some of the less obvious properties of rocks, stones, waxes, gums, plants, fibres and barks; they know how to make fire; they know how to apply heat to relieve pain, stop bleeding and delay the putrefaction of fresh food; and they also use fire and heat to harden some woods and soften others … They know something at least of the phases of the moon, the movement of the tides, the planetary cycles, and the sequence and duration of the seasons; they have correlated together such climactic fluctuations as wind systems, annual patterns of humidity and temperature and fluxes in the growth and presence of natural species … In addition they make intelligent and economical use of the by-products of animals killed for food; the flesh of the kangaroo is eaten; the leg bones are used as fabricators for stone tools and as pins; the sinews become spear bindings; the claws are set into necklaces with wax and fibre; the fat is combined with red ochre as a cosmetic, and blood is mixed with charcoal as paint... They have some knowledge of simple mechanical principles and will trim a boomerang again and again to give it the correct curve...</blockquote>They were much more ‘clever’ than us in dealing with the problems of surviving in the Australian desert. What they had not learnt was to plant seeds and grow their own food – something our own ancestors learnt only about 5,000 years ago, after being on the Earth for 100 times that period.

The development of new techniques of producing wealth – the means of human life – has always given birth to new forms of cooperation between humans, to new social relations.

For example, when people first learnt to grow their own food (by planting seeds and domesticating animals) and to store it (in earthenware pots) there was a complete revolution in social life – called by archaeologists ‘the neolithic revolution’. Humans had to cooperate together now to clear the land and to harvest food, as well as to hunt animals. They could live together in much greater numbers than before, they could store food and they could begin to exchange goods with other settlements.

The first towns could develop. For the first time there was the possibility of some people leading lives that did not involve them just in providing food: some would specialise in making pots, some in mining flints and later metal for tools and weapons, some in carrying through elementary administrative tasks for the settlement as a whole. More ominously, the stored surplus of food provided a motive for war.

People had begun by discovering new ways of dealing with the world around them, or harnessing nature to their needs. But in the process, without intending it, they had transformed the society in which they lived and with it their own lives. Marx summed up this process: a development of the ‘forces of production’ changed the ‘relations of production’ and, through them, society.

There are many more recent examples. Some 300 years ago the vast majority of people in this country still lived on the land, producing food by techniques that had not changed for centuries. Their mental horizon was bounded by the local village and their ideas very much influenced by the local church. The vast majority did not need to read and write, and never learned to.

Then, 200 years ago, industry began to develop. Tens of thousands of people were drawn into the factories. Their lives underwent a complete transformation. Now they lived in great towns, not small villages. They needed to learn skills undreamt of by their ancestors, including eventually the ability to read and write. Railways and steamships made it possible to travel across half the Earth.

The old ideas hammered into their heads by the priests no longer fitted at all. The material revolution in production was also a revolution in the way they lived and in the ideas they had.

Similar changes are still affecting vast numbers of people. Look at the way people from villages in Bangladesh or Turkey have been drawn to the factories of England or Germany seeking work. Look at the way many find that their old customs and religious attitudes no longer fit.

Or look at the way in the past 50 years the majority of women have got used to working outside the home and how this has led them to challenge the old attitude that they were virtually the property of their husbands.

Changes in the way humans work together to produce the things that feed, clothe and shelter them cause changes in the way in which society is organised and the attitude of people in it. This is the secret of social change – of history – that the thinkers before Marx (and many since), the idealists and the mechanical materialists, could not understand.

The idealists saw there was change – but said it must come out of the skies. The mechanical materialists saw that humans were conditioned by the material world but could not understand how things could ever change. What Marx saw was that human beings are conditioned by the world around them, but that they react back upon the world, working on it so as to make it more habitable.

But in doing so they change the conditions under which they live and therefore themselves as well.

The key to understanding change in society lies in understanding how human beings cope with the problem of creating their food, shelter and clothing. That was Marx’s starting point. But that does not mean Marxists believe that improvements in technology automatically produce a better society, or even that inventions automatically lead to changes in society. Marx rejected this view (sometimes called technological determinism). Again and again in history, people have rejected ideas for advancing the production of food, shelter or clothing because these clash with the attitudes or the forms of society that already exist.

For example, under the Roman Empire there were many ideas about how to produce more crops from a given amount of ground, but people didn’t put them into effect because they required more devotion to work than you could get from slaves working under fear of the whip. When the British ruled Ireland in the 18th century they tried to stop the development of industry there because it clashed with the interests of businessmen in London.

If someone produced a method of solving the food problem of India by slaughtering the sacred cows or providing everyone in Britain with succulent steaks by processing rat meat, they would be ignored because of established prejudices.

Developments in production challenge old prejudices and old ways of organising society, but they do not automatically overthrow those old prejudices and social forms. Many human beings fight to prevent change – and those wanting to use new methods of production have to fight or change. If those who oppose change win, then the new forms of production cannot come into operation and production stagnates or even goes backwards.

In Marxist terminology: as the forces of production develop they clash with the pre-existing social relations and ideas that grew up on the basis of old forces of production. Either people identified with the new forces of production win this clash, or those identified with the old system do. In the one case, society moves forward, in the other it remains stuck in a rut, or even goes backwards.

== Class struggle ==
We live in a society that is divided into classes, in which a few people have vast amounts of private property, and most of us have virtually none. Naturally, we tend to take it for granted that things have always been like this. But in fact, for the greater part of human history, there were no classes, no private property, and no armies or police. This was the situation during the half a million years of human development up to 5,000 or 10,000 years ago.<ref group="ProleWiki 4.">See [[Primitive communism]]</ref>

Until more food could be produced by one person’s work than was needed to keep that person fit for work, there could be no division into classes. What was the point of keeping slaves if all that they produced was needed to keep them alive?

But beyond a certain point, the advance of production made class divisions not only possible but necessary. Enough food could be produced to leave a surplus after the immediate producers had taken enough to stay alive. And the means existed to store this food and to transport it from one place to another.

The people whose labour produced all this food could simply have eaten the extra ‘surplus’ food.

Since they lived fairly meagre, miserable lives, they were strongly tempted. But that left them unprotected against the ravages of nature, which might mean famine or a flood the next year, and against attacks from angry tribes from outside the area.

It was, at first, of great advantage to everyone if a special group of people took charge of this extra wealth, storing it against future disaster, using it to support craftsmen, building up means of defence, exchanging part of it with distant peoples for useful objects. These activities came to be carried out in the first towns, where administrators, merchants and craftsmen lived. Out of the markings on tablets used to keep a record of the different sorts of wealth, writing began to develop.

Such were the first, faltering steps of what we call ‘civilisation’. But – and it was a very big but – all this was based on control of the increased wealth by a small minority of the population. And the minority used the wealth for its own good as well as the good of society as a whole.

The more production developed, the more wealth came into the hands of this minority – and the more it became cut off from the rest of society. Rules, which began as a means of benefiting society, became ‘laws’, insisting that the wealth and the land that produced it was the ‘private property’ of the minority. A [[ruling class]] had come into existence – and laws defended its power.

You might perhaps ask whether it would have been possible for society to have developed otherwise, for those who laboured on the land to control its produce?

The answer has to be no. Not because of ‘human nature’, but because society was still very poor.

The majority of the Earth’s population were too busy scratching the soil for a meagre living to have time to develop systems of writing and reading, to create works of art, to build ships for trade, to plot the course of the stars, to discover the rudiments of mathematics, to work out when rivers would flood or how irrigation channels should be constructed. These things could only happen if some of the necessities of life were seized from the mass of the population and used to maintain a privileged minority which did not have to toil from sunrise to sunset.

However, that does not mean that the division into classes remains necessary today. The last century has seen a development of production undreamt of in the previous history of humanity.

Natural scarcity has been overcome – what now exists is artificial scarcity, created as governments destroy food stocks.

Class society today is holding humanity back, not leading it forward.

It was not just the first change from purely agricultural societies to societies of towns and cities that gave rise, necessarily, to new class divisions. The same process was repeated every time new ways of producing wealth began to develop.

So, in Britain 1,000 years ago, the ruling class was made up of feudal barons who controlled the land and lived off the backs of the serfs. But as trade began to develop on a big scale, there grew up alongside them in the cities a new privileged class of wealthy merchants. And when industry began to develop on a substantial scale, their power in turn was disputed by the owners of industrial enterprises.

At each stage in the development of society there was an oppressed class whose physical labour created the wealth, and a ruling class who controlled that wealth. But as society developed both the oppressed and the oppressors underwent changes.

In the slave society of Ancient Rome the slaves were the personal property of the ruling class. The slave owner owned the goods produced by the slave because he owned the slave, in exactly the same way as he owned the milk produced by a cow because he owned the cow.

In the feudal society of the Middle Ages the serfs had their own land, and owned what was produced from it; but in return for having this land they had to do a number of days work every year on the land owned by the feudal lord. Their time would be divided – perhaps half their time they would be working for the lord, half the time for themselves. If they refused to do work for the lord, he was entitled to punish them (through flogging, imprisonment or worse).

In modern capitalist society the boss does not physically own the worker nor is he entitled to physically punish a worker who refuses to do unpaid work for him. But the boss does own the factories where the worker has to get a job if he or she wants to keep alive. So it is fairly easy for him to force the worker to put up with a wage which is much less than the value of the goods the worker makes in the factory.

In each case the oppressing class gets control of all the wealth that is left over once the most elementary needs of the workers have been met. The slave owner wants to keep his property in a good condition, so he feeds his slave in exactly the same way as you might oil your car. But everything surplus to the physical needs of the slave, the owner uses for his own enjoyment. The feudal serf has to feed and clothe himself with the work he puts in on his own bit of land. All the extra labour he puts in on the lord’s fields goes to the lord.

The modern worker gets paid a wage. All the other wealth he creates goes to the employing class as profit, interest or rent.

=== The class struggle and the state ===
The workers have rarely accepted their lot without fighting back. There were slave revolts in Ancient Egypt and Rome, peasant revolts in Imperial China, civil wars between the rich and poor in the cities of Ancient Greece, in Rome and Renaissance Europe.

That is why Karl Marx began his pamphlet [[Library:Manifesto of the Communist Party|''The Communist Manifesto'']] by insisting, ‘The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggles.’ The growth of civilisation had depended on the exploitation of one class by another, and therefore on the struggle between them.

However powerful an Egyptian pharaoh, a Roman emperor or a medieval prince, however luxurious their lives, however magnificent their palaces, they could do nothing unless they guaranteed that the products grown by the most miserable peasant or slave passed into their possession. They could only do this if alongside the division into classes there also grew something else – control over the means of violence by themselves and their supporters.

In earlier societies there had been no army, police or governmental apparatus separate from the majority of the people. Even some 50 or 60 years ago, for instance, in parts of Africa, it was still possible to find societies in which this was still so. Many of the tasks done by the state in our society were simply done informally by the whole population, or by meetings of representatives.

Such meetings would judge the behaviour of any individual who was considered to have broken an important social rule. Punishment would be applied by the whole community – for instance by forcing miscreants to leave. Since everyone was agreed on the necessary punishment, separate police were not needed to put it into effect. If warfare occurred all the young men would take part, under leaders chosen for the occasion, again without any separate army structure.

But once you had a society in which a minority had control over most of the wealth, these simple ways of keeping ‘law and order’ and organising warfare could no longer work. Any meeting of representatives or any gathering of the armed young men would be likely to split along class lines.

The privileged group could only survive if it began to monopolise in its own hands the making and implementation of punishments, laws, the organisation of armies, the production of weapons. So the separation into classes was accompanied by the growth of groups of judges, policemen and secret policemen, generals, bureaucrats – all of whom were given part of the wealth in the hands of the privileged class in return for protecting its rule.

Those who served in the ranks of this ‘state’ were trained to obey without hesitation the orders of their ‘superiors’ and were cut off from all normal social ties with the exploited mass of people. The state developed as a killing machine in the hands of the privileged class. And a highly effective machine it could be.

Of course, the generals who ran this machine often fell out with a particular emperor or king, and tried to put themselves in his place. The ruling class, having armed a monster, could often not control it. But since the wealth needed to keep the killing machine running came from the exploitation of the working masses, every such revolt would be followed by continuation of society along the old lines.

Throughout history people who have really wanted to change society for the better have found themselves up against not just the privileged class, but also an armed machine, a state, that serves its interest.

Ruling classes, together with the priests, generals, policemen and legal systems that backed them up, all grew up in the first place because without them civilisation could not develop. But once they are established in power, they come to have an interest in hindering the further development of civilisation. Their power is dependent upon their ability to force those who produce wealth to hand it over to them. They become wary of new ways of producing wealth, even if more efficient than the old, lest control escape from their hands.

They fear anything that could lead to the exploited masses developing initiative and independence.

And they also fear the growth of new privileged groups with enough wealth to be able to pay for arms and armies of their own. Beyond a certain point, instead of aiding the development of production, they began to hinder it.

For example, in the Chinese Empire, the power of the ruling class rested upon its ownership of the land and its control over the canals and dams that were necessary for irrigation and to avoid floods.

This control laid the basis for a civilisation that lasted some 2,000 years. But at the end of this period production was not much more advanced than at the beginning – despite the flourishing of Chinese art, the discovery of printing and gunpowder, all at a time when Europe was stuck in the Dark Ages.

The reason was that when new forms of production did begin to develop, it was in towns, through the initiative of merchants and craftsmen. The ruling class feared this growth in power of a social grouping that was not completely under its control. So periodically the imperial authorities took harsh measures to crush the growing economies of the towns, to drive production down, and to destroy the power of the new social classes.

The growth of new forces of production – of new ways of producing wealth – clashed with the interests of the old ruling class. A struggle developed, the outcome of which determined the whole future of society.

Sometimes the outcome, as in China, was that new forms of production were prevented from emerging, and society remained more or less stagnant for very long periods of time.

Sometimes, as in the Roman Empire, the inability of new forms of production to develop meant that eventually there was no longer enough wealth being produced to maintain society on its old basis.

Civilisation collapsed, the cities were destroyed and people reverted to a crude, agricultural form of society.

Sometimes a new class, based upon a new form of production, was able to organise to weaken and finally overthrow the old ruling class, together with its legal system, its armies, its ideology, its religion. Then society could go forward.

In each case whether society went forwards or backwards<ref group="ProleWiki 4.">The author doesn't mean the general trend of how society progresses, but individual revolutions.</ref> depended on who won the war between the classes. And, as in any war, victory was not ordained in advance, but depended on the organisation, cohesion and leadership of the rival classes.

=== ProleWiki annotations ===
<references group="ProleWiki 4." />

== Capitalism – how the system began ==
One of the most ludicrous arguments you hear is that things could not be different to the way they are now. Yet things were different. And not on some distant part of the globe, but in this country, not so long ago. A mere 250 years ago people would have regarded you as a lunatic if you had described to them the world we live in now, with its huge cities, its great factories, its aeroplanes, its space expeditions – even its railway systems were beyond the bounds of their imagination.

For they lived in a society which was overwhelmingly rural, in which most people had never travelled ten miles outside their local village, in which the pattern of life was determined, as it had been for thousands of years, by the alternation of the seasons.

But already, 700 or 800 years ago, a development had begun which was eventually to challenge this whole system of society. Groups of craftsmen and traders began to establish themselves in towns, not giving their services for nothing to some lord as the rest of the population did, but exchanging products with various lords and serfs for foodstuffs. Increasingly they used precious metals as a measure of that exchange. It was not a big step to seeing in every act of exchange an opportunity to get a little extra of the precious metal, to make a profit.

At first the towns could only survive by playing one lord off against another. But as the skills of their craftsmen improved, they created more wealth, and they grew in influence. The ‘burghers’, the ‘bourgeois’ or the ‘middle classes’ began as a class within the [[Feudalism|feudal society]] of the Middle Ages.

But they obtained their riches in a quite different way to the feudal lords who dominated that society.

A feudal lord lived directly off the agricultural produce he was able to force his serfs to produce on his land. He used his personal power to make them do this, without having to pay them. By contrast the wealthier classes in the towns lived off the proceeds of selling non-agricultural goods. They paid workers wages to produce these for them, by the day or week.

These workers, often escaped serfs, were ‘free’ to come and go as they liked – once they had finished the work for which they had been paid. The ‘only’ compulsion on them to work was that they would starve if they did not find employment with someone. The rich could only grow richer because rather than starve, the ‘free’ worker would accept less money for his work than the goods he produced were worth.

We will return to this point later. For the present what matters is that the middle class burghers and the feudal lords got their wealth from quite different sources. This led them to want society organised in different ways.

The feudal lord’s ideal was a society in which he had absolute power in his own lands, unbound by written laws, with no intrusion from any outside body, with his serfs unable to flee. He wanted things to stay as in the days of his father and grandfather, with everyone accepting the social station into which they were born.

The newly rich bourgeoisie necessarily saw things differently. They wanted restraints on the power of individual lords or kings to interfere with their trade or steal their wealth.

They dreamed of achieving this through a fixed body of written laws, to be drawn up and enforced by their own chosen representatives. They wanted to free the poorer classes from serfdom, so that they could work (and increase the burghers’ profits) in the towns.

As for themselves, their fathers and grandfathers had often been under the thumb of feudal lords, and they certainly did not want that to continue.

In a word, they wanted to revolutionise society. Their clashes with the old order were not only economic, but also ideological and political. Ideological chiefly meant religious, in an illiterate society where the chief source of general ideas about society was church preaching.

Since the medieval church was run by bishops and abbots who were feudal lords in their own right, it propagated pro-feudal views, attacking as ‘sinful’ many of the practices of the urban bourgeoisie.

So in [[Holy Roman Empire (800–1806)|Germany]], [[Kingdom of the Netherlands|Holland]], [[Kingdom of England (927–1707)|Britain]] and [[Kingdom of France (987–1792)|France]] in the 16th and 17th centuries the middle classes rallied to a religion of their own: [[Protestantism]] – a religious ideology that preached thrift, sobriety, hard work (especially for the workers!) and the independence of the middle class congregation from the power of bishops and abbots.

The middle class created a God in their image, in opposition to the God of the Middle Ages.

Today we are told at school or on television about the great religious wars and civil wars of that period as if they were just about religious differences, as if people were daft enough to fight and die merely because they disagreed over the role of the blood and body of Christ in the Holy Communion. But much more was at stake – the clash between two completely different forms of society, based upon two different ways of organising the production of wealth.

In Britain the bourgeoisie won. Horrific as it must seem to our present ruling class, their ancestors consecrated their power by cutting off a king’s head, justifying the act with the rantings of Old Testament prophets.

But elsewhere the first round went to feudalism. In France and Germany the Protestant bourgeois revolutionaries were wiped out after bitter civil wars (although a feudal version of Protestantism survived as the religion of northern Germany). The bourgeoisie had to wait two centuries and more before enjoying success, in second round that began without religious clothing in [[French Revolution|1789 Paris]].

=== Exploitation and surplus value ===
In [[Slavery|slave]] and feudal societies the upper classes had to have legal controls over the mass of the working population. Otherwise those who worked for the feudal lord or the slave owner would have run away, leaving the privileged class with no one to labour for it.

But the capitalist does not, usually, need such legal controls over the person of the worker. He doesn’t need to own him or her, provided he ensures that the worker who refuses to work for the capitalist will starve. Instead of owning the worker, the capitalist can prosper providing he owns and controls the worker’s source of livelihood – the machines and factories.

The material necessities of life are produced by the labour of human beings. But that labour is next to useless without tools to cultivate the land and to process naturally occurring materials. The tools can vary enormously – from simple agricultural implements such as ploughs and hoes to the complicated machines you find in modern automated factories. But without the tools even the most highly skilled worker is unable to produce the things needed for physical survival.

It is the development of these tools – usually referred to as ‘the means of production’ – that separates modern human beings from our distant ancestors of the Stone Age. Capitalism is based on the ownership of these means of production by a few people. In Britain today, for instance, 1 percent of the population owns 84 percent of the stocks and shares in industry. In their hands is concentrated effective control over the vast majority of the means of production – the machines, the factories, the oil fields, the best agricultural land. The mass of the population can only get a liveli- hood if the capitalists allow them to work at and with those means of production. This gives the capitalists immense power to exploit the labour of other people – even though in the eyes of the law ‘all men are equal’.

It took some centuries for the capitalists to build up their monopoly control over the means of production. In this country, for instance, the parliaments of the 17th and 18th centuries had first to pass a succession of Enclosure Acts, which drove peasants away from their own means of production, the land which they had cultivated for centuries. The land became the property of a section of the capitalist class and the mass of the rural population were forced to sell their labour to capitalists or starve.

Once capitalism had achieved this monopoly of the means of production, it could afford to let the mass of the population enjoy apparent freedom and equality of political rights with the capitalists.

For however ‘free’ the workers were, they still had to work for a living.

Pro-capitalist economists have a simple explanation of what then happens. They say that by paying wages the capitalist buys the labour of the worker. He must pay a fair price for it. Otherwise the worker will go and work for someone else. The capitalist gives a ‘fair day’s wage’. In return the worker should give a ‘fair day’s work’.

How then do they explain profit? This, they claim, is a ‘reward’ to the capitalist for his ‘sacrifice’ in allowing the means of production (his capital) to be put to use. It is an argument that can hardly convince any worker who gives it a moment’s thought.

Take a company that announces a ‘net rate of profit’ of 10 percent. It is saying that if the cost of all the machinery, factories and so on that it owns is £100 million, then it is left with £10 million profit after paying the wages, raw material costs and the cost of replacing the machinery that wears out in a year.

You don’t have to be a genius to see that after ten years the company will have made a total profit of £100 million – the full cost of its original investment.

If it is ‘sacrifice’ that is being rewarded, then surely after the first ten years all profits should cease.

For by then the capitalists have been paid back completely for the money they put in in the first place. In fact, however, the capitalist is twice as wealthy as before. He owns his original investment and the accumulated profits.

The workers, in the meantime, have sacrificed most of their life’s energy to working eight hours a day, 48 weeks a year, in the factory. Are they twice as well off at the end of that time as at the beginning? You bet your boots they’re not. Even if a worker saves assiduously, he or she won’t be able to buy much more than a colour television set, a cheap central heating system or a second hand car. The worker will never raise the money to buy the factory he or she works in.

The ‘fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’ has multiplied the capital of the capitalist, while leaving the worker with no capital and no choice but to go on working for roughly the same wage. The ‘equal rights’ of the capitalist and the worker have increased inequality.

One of Karl Marx’s great discoveries was the explanation for this apparent anomaly. There is no mechanism that forces a capitalist to pay his workers the full value of the work they do. A worker employed, for example, in the engineering industry today might create £400 of new output a week.

But that does not mean he or she will be paid this sum. In 99 cases out of 100, they will get paid considerably less.

The alternative they have to working is to go hungry (or live on the miserable sums handed out by the social security). So they demand not the full value of what they produce, but rather just enough to give them a more or less acceptable living standard. The worker is paid only enough to get him to put all his efforts, all his capacity for work (what Marx called his labour power) at the disposal of the capitalist each day.

From the capitalist’s point of view, providing the workers are paid enough to keep them fit for work and to bring up their children as a new generation of workers, then they are being paid a fair amount for their labour power. But the amount of wealth needed to keep workers fit for work is considerably less than the amount of wealth they can produce once working – the value of their labour power is considerably less than the value created by their labour.

The difference goes into the pocket of the capitalist. Marx called it ‘surplus value’.

=== The self expansion of capital ===
If you read the writing of apologists for the present system, you will soon notice that they share a strange belief. Money, according to them, has a magical property. It can grow like a plant or animal.

When a capitalist puts his money in a bank he expects it to increase in amount. When he invests it in the shares of ICI or Unilever he expects to be rewarded by offshoots of fresh money every year, in the form of dividend payments. Karl Marx noted this phenomenon, which he called the ‘self expansion of capital’, and set out to explain it. As we saw previously, his explanation began not with money, but with labour and the means of production. In present society, those with enough wealth can buy control of the means of production. They can then force everyone else to sell to them the labour needed to work the means of production. The secret of the ‘self expansion of capital’, of the miraculous capacity of money to grow for those who have plenty of it, lies in the buying and selling of this labour.

Let’s take the example of a worker, who we’ll call Jack, who gets a job with an employer, Sir Browning Browne. The work Jack can do in eight hours will create an additional amount of wealth – worth perhaps £48. But Jack will be willing to work for much less than this, since the alternative is social security. The efforts of pro-capitalist MPs, such as the obnoxious Tory Peter Lilley, ensure that he will only get £12 a day on social security to keep himself and his family. They explain that to give more would be to ‘destroy the incentive to work’.

If Jack wants to get more than £12 a day he has to sell his ability to work, his labour power, even if he is offered much less than the £48 worth of wealth he can create in eight hours. He will be willing to work for, perhaps, the average wage, £28 a day. The difference, £20 a day, goes into the pocket of Sir Browning. It is Sir Browning’s surplus value.

Because he had enough wealth to buy control of the means of production in the first place, Sir Browning Browne can guarantee growing richer by £20 a day for every worker he employs. His money keeps growing, his capital expanding, not because of some law of nature, but because his control of the means of production allows him to get someone else’s labour on the cheap.

Of course, Sir Browning does not necessarily have all the £20 to himself – he may rent the factory or the land, he may have borrowed some of his initial wealth from other members of the ruling class. They demand in return a cut of the surplus value. So perhaps he forks out £10 to them as rent, interest and dividend payments, leaving himself with only £10 profit.

Those who live off dividends have probably never seen Jack in their lives. Nevertheless, it was not the mystical power of pound coins that gave them their income, but the all too physical sweat of Jack. The dividend, the interest payments and the profit all came out of the surplus value.

What decides how much Jack gets for his work? The employer will try to pay as little as possible.

But in practice there are limits below which he cannot go. Some of these limits are physical – it is no good giving workers such miserable wages that they suffer from malnutrition and are unable to put any effort into their work. They also have to be able to travel to and from work, to have somewhere they can rest at night, so that they do not fall asleep over the machines.

From this point of view it is worth even paying for what the workers think of as ‘little luxuries’ – like a few pints in the evening, the television, the occasional holiday. These all make the worker more refreshed and capable of doing more work. They all serve to replenish his labour power. It is an important fact that where wages are ‘held too low’ the productivity of labour falls.

The capitalist has to worry about something else as well. His firm will be in business for many years, long after the present set of workers have died out. The firm will require the labour of their children. So they have to pay the workers enough to bring up their children. They also have to ensure that the state provides these children with certain skills (such as reading and writing) through the educational system.

In practice, something else matters as well – what the worker thinks is a ‘decent wage’. A worker who gets paid considerably less than this may well neglect his work, not worrying about losing his job since he thinks it is ‘useless’.

All these elements that determine his wage have one thing in common. They all go towards making sure he has the life energy, the labour power, that the capitalist buys by the hour. The workers are paid the cost of keeping themselves and their families alive and fit for work.

In present capitalist society, one further point has to be noted. Huge amounts of wealth are spent on such things as police forces and weapons. These are used in the interests of the capitalist class by the state. In effect, they belong to the capitalist class, although they are run by the state. The value which is spent on them belongs to the capitalists, not the workers. It too is part of the surplus value.

Surplus value = profit + rent + interest + spending on the police, army and so on.

== The labour theory of value ==
But machinery, capital, produces goods as well as labour. If so, it’s only fair that capital as well as labour gets a share of the wealth produced. Every ‘factor of production’ has to get its reward.

That is how someone who has been taught a little pro-capitalist economics replies to the Marxist analysis of exploitation and surplus value. And at first sight the objection seems to make some sense. For, surely, you cannot produce goods without capital?

Marxists have never argued that you could. But our starting point is rather different. We begin by asking: where does capital come from? How did the means of production come into existence in the first place?

The answer is not difficult to find. Everything people have used historically to create wealth – whether a Neolithic stone axe or a modern computer – once had to be made by human labour. Even if the axe was shaped with tools, the tools in turn were the product of previous labour.

That is why Karl Marx used to refer to the means of production as ‘[[Dead labor|dead labour]]’. When businessmen boast of the capital they possess, in reality they are boasting that they have gained control of a vast pool of the labour of previous generations – and that does not mean the labour of their ancestors, who laboured no more than they do now.

The notion that labour was the source of wealth – usually referred to as the ‘[[labour theory of value]]’ – was not an original discovery of Marx. All the great pro-capitalist economists until his time accepted it.

Such men, like the Scottish economist [[Adam Smith]] or the English economist [[David Ricardo]], were writing when the system of industrial capitalism was still fairly young – in the years just before and just after the French Revolution. The capitalists did not yet dominate and needed to know the real source of their wealth if they were ever to do so. Smith and Ricardo served their interests by telling them that labour created wealth, and that to build up their wealth they had to ‘free’ labour from the control of the old pre-capitalist rulers.

But it was not long before thinkers close to the working class began to turn the argument against the friends of Smith and Ricardo: if labour creates wealth, then labour creates capital. And the ‘rights of capital’ are no more than the rights of usurped labour.

Soon the economists who supported capital were pronouncing the labour theory of value to be a load of nonsense. But if you kick truth out the front door, it has a habit of creeping in the back.

Turn on the radio. Listen to it long enough and you will hear some pundit or other claim that what is wrong with the British economy is that ‘people do not work hard enough’ or, another way of saying the same thing, ‘productivity is too low’. Forget for a minute whether the argument is correct or not.

Instead look closely at the way it is put. They never say ‘machines do not work hard enough’. No, it is always people, the workers.

They claim that if only the workers worked harder, more wealth would be created, and that this would make possible more investment in new machinery. The people who use this argument may not know it, but they are saying that more work will create more capital. Work, labour, is the source of wealth.

Say I have a £5 note in my pocket. Why is that of use to me? After all, it’s only a piece of printed paper. Its value to me lies in the fact that I can get, in exchange for it, something useful that has been made by someone else’s labour. The £5 note, in fact, is nothing more than an entitlement to the products of so much labour. Two £5 notes are an entitlement to the products of twice as much labour, and so on.

When we measure wealth we are really measuring the labour that has been expended in creating it.

Of course, not everyone produces as much with their labour in a given time as everyone else. If I set out, for instance, to make a table, I might take five or six times as long as a skilled carpenter. But no one in their right mind would regard what I had made as five or six times as valuable as a table made by a skilled carpenter. They would estimate its value according to how much of the carpenter’s labour would be needed to make it, not mine.

Say it would take a carpenter an hour to make a table, then they would say that the value of the table to them was the equivalent of one hour’s labour. That would be the labour time necessary to make it, given the usual level of technique and skill in present society.

For this reason, Marx insisted that the measure of the value of something was not simply the time it took an individual to make it, but the time it would take an individual working with the average level of technology and the average level of skill – he called this average level of labour needed ‘the socially necessary labour time’. The point is important because under capitalism advances in technology are always taking place, which means that it takes less and less labour to produce goods.

For example, when radios were made with thermionic valves they were very expensive items, because it took a great deal of labour to make the valves, to wire them together and so on. Then the transistor was invented, which could be made and wired together with much less labour. Suddenly, all the workers in the factories still making valve radios found that the value of what they were producing slumped, for the value of radios was no longer determined by the labour time needed to make them from valves, but instead by the time needed to make them with transistors.

One final point. Prices of some goods fluctuate wildly – on a day-to-day or a week-to-week basis.

These changes can be caused by many other things besides changes in the amount of labour needed to make them.

When the frost in Brazil killed all the coffee plants the price of coffee shot up, because there was a shortage throughout the world and people were prepared to pay more. If tomorrow some natural catastrophe was to destroy all the televisions in Britain, there is no doubt the price of televisions would shoot up in the same way. What economists call ‘supply and demand’ continually causes such fluctuations in price.

For this reason, many pro-capitalist economists say that the labour theory of value is nonsense.

They say that only supply and demand matter. But that is nonsense. For this argument forgets that when things fluctuate they usually fluctuate around an average level. The sea goes up and down because of tides, but that doesn’t mean we cannot talk of a fixed point around which it moves, which we call ‘sea level’.

Similarly, the fact that prices go up and down from day to day does not mean that there are not fixed values around which they fluctuate. For instance, if all the televisions were destroyed, the first new ones to be produced would be very much in demand and fetch a high price. But it would not be long before more and more were on the market, competing with each other until the price was forced down close to their value in terms of the labour time needed to make them.

=== Competition and accumulation ===
There was a time when capitalism did seem like a dynamic and progressive system. For most of human history, the lives of most men and women have been dominated by drudgery and exploitation. Industrial capitalism did not change this when it made its appearance in the 18th and 19th centuries.

But it did seem to put this drudgery and exploitation to some useful purpose. Instead of wasting vast amounts of wealth on luxury for a few parasitic aristocrats or in building luxury tombs for dead monarchs or in futile wars over which son of an emperor should rule some God-forsaken hole, it used wealth to build up the means of creating more wealth. The rise of capitalism was a period of growth in industry, cities, means of transportation – on a scale undreamt of in previous human history.

Strange as it may seem today, places such as Oldham, Halifax and Bingley were the home of miracles. Humanity had never before seen so much raw cotton and wool turned so quickly into cloth to clothe millions. This did not happen because of any special virtues possessed by the capitalists. They were always rather noxious people, obsessed only with getting wealth into their own hands by paying as little as possible for the labour they used.

Many previous ruling classes had been like them in this respect without building up industry. But the capitalists were different in two important respects.

The first we have dealt with – that they did not own workers, instead paying them by the hour for their ability to work, their labour power. They used wage slaves, not slaves. Secondly, they did not themselves consume the goods their workers produced. The feudal landlord lived directly from the meat, bread, cheese and wine produced by his serfs. But the capitalist lived by selling to other people the goods produced by workers.

This gave the individual capitalist less freedom to behave as he pleased than the individual slave owner or feudal lord had. To sell goods, the capitalist had to produce them as cheaply as possible.

The capitalist owned the factory and was all-powerful within it. But he could not use his power as he wished. He had to bow down before the demands of competition with other factories.

Let’s go back to our favourite capitalist. Sir Browning Browne. Assume that a certain quantity of the cotton cloth produced in his factory took ten hours of workers’ time to turn out, but that some other factory could produce the same amount in five hours of workers’ time. Sir Browning would not be able to charge the price for it equivalent to ten hours of labour. No one in their right mind would pay this price when there was cheaper cloth just down the road.

Any capitalist who wanted to survive in business had to ensure that his workers worked as fast as possible. But that was not all. He also had to make sure that his workers were working with the most up to date machinery, so that their labour produced as many goods in an hour as did the labour of those working for other capitalists. The capitalist who wanted to stay in business had to make sure he owned ever greater amounts of means of production – or, as Marx put it, to accumulate capital!

The competition between capitalists produced a power, the market system, that had each and every one of them in its grip. It compelled them to speed up the work process all the time and to invest as much as they could afford in new machinery. And they could only afford the new machinery (and, of course, have their own luxuries on the side) if they kept workers’ wages as low as they could.

Marx writes in his major work, [[Library:Capital, vol. I|Capital]], that the capitalist is like a miser, obsessed with getting more and more wealth. But:<blockquote>What in the miser is mere idiosyncracy is, in the capitalist, the effect of a social mechanism in which he is but one of the wheels … The development of capitalist production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist as external coercive laws. It compels him to keep constantly extending his capital in order to preserve it. But extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation. Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!</blockquote>Production does not take place to satisfy human need – even the human needs of the capitalist class – but in order to enable one capitalist to survive in competition with another capitalist. The workers employed by each capitalist find their lives dominated by the drive of their employers to accumulate faster than their rivals.

As Marx’s The Communist Manifesto put it:<blockquote>In bourgeois society living labour is but a means to accumulate dead labour … Capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.</blockquote>The compulsive drive for capitalists to accumulate in competition with one another explains the great rush forward of industry in the early years of the system. But something else resulted as well – repeated economic crisis. Crisis is not new. It is as old as the system itself.

== Economic crisis ==
<blockquote>''The accumulation of wealth on the one hand, of poverty on the other.''</blockquote>That was how Marx summed up the trend of capitalism. Every capitalist fears competition from every other, so he works his employees as hard as possible, paying wages as low as he can get away with.

The result is a disproportion between the massive growth of means of production on the one hand, and the limited growth in wages and the number of workers employed on the other. This, Marx insisted, was the basic cause of economic crisis.

The easiest way to look at this is to ask: who buys the greatly expanding quantity of goods? The low wages of the workers mean they cannot afford the goods produced by their own labour. And the capitalists cannot increase wages, because that would be to destroy profit, the driving force of the system.

But if firms cannot sell the goods they produce, they have to shutdown factories and sack workers.

The total amount of wages then falls still more, and yet more firms cannot sell their goods. A ‘crisis of overproduction’ sets in, with goods piling up throughout the economy that people cannot afford to buy.

This has been a recurrent feature of capitalist society for the past 160 years.

But any quick-witted apologist for the system will soon point out that there should be an easy way out of the crisis. All that’s needed is that capitalists invest their profit in new factories and machines. That will provide jobs for workers, who in turn will then be able to buy the unsold goods.

This means that as long as there’s new investment all the goods produced can be sold and the system can provide full employment.

Marx was no fool and recognised this. Indeed, as we’ve seen, he realised that the competitive pressure on capitalists to invest was central to the system. But, he asked, does this mean the capitalists will invest all their profits, all the time?

The capitalist will only invest if he thinks he is guaranteed a ‘reasonable’ profit.

If he doesn’t think there is such a profit to be made, he won’t risk his money in investment. He’ll put it in the bank and leave it there.

Whether the capitalist invests or not depends on how he assesses the economic situation. When it looks right, the capitalists all rush to invest at the same time, falling over each other searching for construction sites, buying up machines, scouring the earth for raw materials, paying over the odds for skilled labour.

This is usually called the ‘boom’.

But the frenzied competition for land, raw materials and skilled labour forces up the prices of these things. And suddenly a point is reached where some firms discover their costs have risen so much that all their profits have disappeared.

The investment boom all at once gives way to an investment ‘slump’. No one wants new factories – construction workers are sacked. No one wants new machines – the machine tool industry goes into crisis. No one wants all the iron and steel that is being produced – the steel industry is suddenly working ‘below capacity’ and becomes ‘unprofitable’. Closures and shutdowns spread from industry to industry, destroying jobs – and with them the ability of workers to buy the goods of other industries.

The history of capitalism is a history of such periodic lurches into crisis, into the insanity of unemployed workers going hungry outside empty factories, while stocks of ‘unwanted’ goods rot.

Capitalism creates these crises of overproduction periodically because there is no planning, so there’s no way to stop the stampede of capital into and out of investment all at once.

People used to think that the state could stop this. By intervening in the economy, increasing state investment when private investment was low, then reducing it when private investment caught up, the state would keep production on an even keel. But nowadays state investment too is part of the lunacy.

Look at British Steel. Some years ago, when the firm was still nationalised, steel workers were told their jobs were being scrapped to make way for vast modern automatic furnaces designed to produce more steel more cheaply. Now they are being told that yet more workers must lose their jobs – because Britain was not the only country to embark on these massive investment plans.

France, Germany, the United States, Brazil, Eastern Europe, even South Korea, all did the same.

Now there’s a world surplus of steel – a crisis of overproduction. State investment is being cut.

Steel workers, of course, suffer both ways. This is the price humanity is still paying for an economic system where the production of massive wealth is controlled by a small privileged group interested only in profit. It does not matter whether these small privileged groups own industry directly, or control it indirectly through their control of the state (as with British Steel). While they use this control to compete with each other for the largest share of the profits, whether nationally or internationally, it is the workers who suffer.

The final lunacy of the system is that the ‘crisis of overproduction’ is not overproduction at all. All that ‘surplus’ steel, for instance, could help solve world hunger. Peasants around the world have to plough the land with wooden ploughshares – steel ploughshares would increase food production.

But the peasants have no money anyway, so the capitalist system isn’t interested – there’s no profit to be made.

=== Why crises tend to get worse ===
Crises do not just take place with monotonous regularity. Marx also predicted they would get worse as time went on.

Even if investment took place at an even rate, without fits and starts, it could not stop the overall trend towards crisis. This is because the competition between capitalists (and capitalist nations) forces them to invest in labour saving equipment.

In Britain today almost all new investments are designed to cut the number of workers employed.

That is why there we fewer workers in British industry today than ten years ago, even though output has increased over that time.

Only by ‘rationalising production’, by ‘increasing productivity’ and by cutting the workforce can one capitalist get a bigger share of the cake than another. But the result for the system as a whole is devastating. For it means that the number of workers does not increase at anything like the same speed as investment.

Yet it is the labour of workers that is the source of the profits, the fuel that keeps the system going. If you make bigger and bigger investments, without a corresponding increase in the source of profits, you are heading for a breakdown – just as surely as if you expected to drive a Jaguar on the amount of petrol needed to keep a Mini going.

That is why Marx argued 100 years ago that the very success of capitalism in piling up huge investments in new equipment led to a ‘[[Tendency of the rate of profit to fall|tendency of the rate of profit to decline]]’ which means ever-worsening crises.

His argument can be applied very simply to capitalism today. Instead of the old picture of ‘bad times’ turning into ‘good times’, of slumps turning into booms, we seem to be in a never ending slump. Any spell of upturn, any drop in unemployment, is limited and short lived.

Apologists for the system say this is because investment is not high enough. Without new investment there are no new jobs, without new jobs there’s no money to buy new goods. So far, we can agree with them – but we don’t agree with their explanation of why this is happening.

They blame wages. Wages are too high, they say, which cuts profits to the bone. Capitalists are frightened to invest because they won’t get ‘sufficient reward’.

But the crisis has continued through long years in which government pay policies have cut workers’ living standards and pushed profits up. The years 1975-78 saw the biggest cut in workers’ living standards this century, while the rich grew richer – the top 10 percent pushed up their share of the national cake from 57.8 percent in 1974 to 60 percent in 1976.

There still isn’t enough investment to end the crisis – and that goes not just for Britain but for other countries where wages have been cut back, for France, for Japan, for Germany.

We would do better to listen to what Karl Marx said 100 years ago than to listen to those who apologise for capitalism today.

Marx predicted that as capitalism got older, its crises would get worse because the source of profit, labour, does not increase nearly as rapidly as the investment needed to put labour to work. Marx wrote when the value of the plant and machinery needed to employ each worker was fairly low. It has shot up since then, until today it can be £20,000 or even £30,000. Competition between capitalist firms has forced them to use ever bigger and evermore expensive machinery. The point has been reached where, in most industries, it is taken for granted that new machinery means fewer workers.

The international economic agency OECD has predicted that employment in the world’s major economies will fall, even if by some miracle investment soars.

Which it won’t. Because capitalists care about their profit, and if their investment increases fourfold but their profit only doubles, they get really upset. Yet this is what must happen if industry grows more quickly than the source of profit, labour.

As Marx put it, the rate of profit will tend to fall. He predicted that a point would eventually be reached at which any new investment would seem a perilous venture. The scale of expenditure needed for new plant and machinery would be colossal, but the rate of profit would be lower than ever before. When this point was reached, each capitalist (or capitalist state) would fantasise about huge new investment programmes – but be afraid to make them for fear of going bust.

The world economy today is very much like that. Rover plans new production lines – but fears it will lose money. British Steel dreams of those big plants it planned – but have to keep them on ice because it cannot sell its present output. The Japanese shipbuilders have given up investing in new yards – and some of the old ones are being shut down.

The very success of capitalism in building ever vaster and more productive machinery has brought the system to the point of seemingly permanent crisis.

A point was reached in the slave societies of the ancient world and the feudal societies of the Middle Ages where either a revolution would transform society or it would enter a permanent crisis that would drive it backwards. In the case of Rome, the lack of a revolution led precisely to the destruction of Roman civilisation and to the Dark Ages. In the case of some feudal societies – Britain and, later, France – revolution destroyed the old order and enabled new social advance to take place, under capitalism.

Now capitalism itself faces the choice between permanent crisis, which eventually will plunge humanity back into barbarism through poverty and war, or a socialist revolution.

== The working class ==
Marx began The Communist Manifesto with the statement, ‘The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggles.’ The question of how the ruling class was to force the oppressed class to keep producing wealth for it was crucial. Because of this, in every previous society, there had been enormous struggles between the classes which often culminated in civil war – the slave uprisings in Ancient Rome, the peasant uprisings in medieval Europe, the great civil wars and revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries.

In all of these great struggles, the mass of the insurgent forces were from the most oppressed section of society. But, as Marx hastened to add, at the end of the day all their efforts served only to replace one privileged ruling minority with another. So, for example, in [[History of China|Ancient China]] there were several successful peasant revolts – but they merely replaced one emperor with another. Similarly, those who made the greatest effort in the [[French Revolution of 1789|French Revolution]] were the ‘bras nus’ – the poorer classes of Paris, but at the end of the day society was ruled not by them but by bankers and industrialists instead of the king and courtiers.

There were two main reasons for this failure of the lower classes to keep control of the revolutions in which they fought.

Firstly, the general level of wealth in society was fairly low. It was only because the vast mass of people were kept in abysmal poverty that a small minority had time and leisure to develop the arts and sciences to maintain civilisation. In other words, class division was necessary if society was to progress.

Secondly, the life of the oppressed classes did not prepare them to run society. By and large they were illiterate, they had little idea of what things were like outside their own immediate locality, and, above all, their everyday life divided each of them against the other. Each peasant was concerned with cultivating his own plot of land. Each craftsman in the town ran his own small business and was to some extent in competition with other craftsmen, not united with them.

Peasant revolts would start with vast numbers of people rising up to divide the land of the local feudal lords, but once the lord was defeated they would fall to squabbling among themselves about how they would divide the land. As Marx put it, peasants were like ‘potatoes in a sack’; they could be forced together by some outside power but were not capable of linking permanently to represent their own interests.

The workers who create the wealth under modern capitalism differ from all the previous lower classes. Firstly, the division of classes is no longer necessary for human progress. So much wealth is created that capitalist society itself periodically destroys huge quantities through wars or economic crises. It could be divided up equally and society could still have a flowering of science, arts and so forth.

Secondly, life under capitalism prepares workers in many ways to take control of society. For example, capitalism needs workers who are skilled and educated. Also capitalism forces thousands of people into huge workplaces in huge conurbations where they are in close contact with one another, and where they can be a powerful force for changing society.

Capitalism makes workers cooperate in production within the factory, and those cooperative skills can easily be turned against the system, as when workers organise themselves into unions. Because they are massed together in huge concentrations it is much easier for workers to democratically control such bodies than it was for previously oppressed classes.

Furthermore, capitalism tends increasingly to turn groups of people who thought of themselves as a ‘cut above’ ordinary workers (such as clerks or technicians) into wage labourers who are forced to organise unions and so on as other workers do.

Lastly, the development of communications – railways, roads, air transport, postal systems, telephones, radio and television – allows workers to communicate outside their own locality or industry. They can organise as a class on a national and international scale – something beyond the wildest dreams of previous oppressed classes.

All these facts mean that the working class can not only be a force which rebels against existing society, but can organise itself, (electing and controlling its own representatives, so as to change society in its own interest, and not just to set up yet another emperor or group of bankers. As Karl Marx put it:<blockquote>All previous historical movements were movements of minorities in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious independent movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority.</blockquote>

== How can society be changed? ==
In Britain the overwhelming majority of socialists and trade unionists have generally argued that society can be transformed without violent revolution. All that is needed, they say, is for socialists to win enough popular support to gain control of the ‘traditional’ political institutions – parliament and the local councils. Then socialists will be in a position to change society by getting the existing state – the civil service, the judiciary, the police, the armed forces – to enforce laws to curtail the power of the employing class.

In this way, it has been claimed, socialism can be introduced gradually and without violence, by reforming the present set up.

This view is usually referred to as ‘reformism’, although occasionally you will hear it referred to as ‘revisionism’ (because it involves revising Marx’s ideas completely), ‘social democracy’ (although until 1914 that meant revolutionary socialism) or Fabianism (after the Fabian Society which has long propagated the reformist view in Britain). It is a view accepted by the left as well as the right of the Labour Party.

Reformism seems, at first sight, very plausible. It fits with what we are told at school, in the papers and on television – that ‘parliament runs the country’ and that ‘parliament is elected according to the democratic wishes of the people’. Yet despite that, every attempt to introduce socialism through parliament has ended in failure. Thus there were three majority Labour governments in Britain between 1945 and 1979 – with massive majorities in 1945 and 1966 – yet we are no nearer socialism than in 1945.

The experience abroad is the same. In Chile in 1970, the socialist Salvador Allende was elected president. People claimed that this was a ‘new way’ to move to socialism. Three years later the generals who had been asked to join the government overthrew Allende and the Chilean working class movement was destroyed.

There are three interconnected reasons why reformism must always fail.

Firstly, while socialist majorities in parliaments are ‘gradually’ introducing socialist measures, real economic power continues to lie in the hands of the old ruling class. They can use this economic power to shut down whole sections of industry, to create unemployment, to force up prices through speculation and hoarding, to send money abroad so creating a ‘balance of payments’ crisis, and to launch press campaigns blaming all this on the socialist government.

Thus Harold Wilson’s Labour government was forced in 1964 and again in 1966 to drop measures which would have benefited workers – by the wholesale movement of money abroad by wealthy individuals and companies. Wilson himself describes in his memoirs how:<blockquote>We had now reached the situation where a newly elected government was being told by international speculators that the policy on which we had fought the election could not be implemented... The queen’s first minister was being asked to bring down the curtain on parliamentary democracy by accepting the doctrine that an election in Britain was a farce, that the British people could not make a choice between policies.</blockquote>It only needs to be added that, despite Wilson’s alleged indignation, for the next six years he did indeed follow the sort of policies demanded by the speculators.

The same deliberate creation of balance of payments crises forced the Labour government elected in 1974 to introduce three consecutive sets of cuts in public spending in hospitals, schools and social services.

Allende’s government in Chile faced even greater disruption at the hands of big business. Twice, whole sections of industry were shut down by ‘bosses’ strikes’, as speculation increased prices to an enormous level and hoarding of goods by businessmen caused queuing for the necessities of life.

The second reason capitalism cannot be reformed is that the existing state machine is not ‘neutral’, but designed, from top to bottom, to preserve capitalist society.

The state controls nearly all the means of exercising physical force, the means of violence. If the organisations of the state were neutral, and did whatever any particular government told them, whether capitalist or socialist, then the state could be used to stop sabotage of the economy by big business. But look at the way the state machine operates and who really gives the orders, and you can see it is not neutral.

The state machine is not simply the government. It is a vast organisation with many different branches – the police, the army, the judiciary, the civil service, the people who run the nationalised industries and so on. Many of the people who work in these different branches of the state come from the working class – they live and get paid like workers.

But it is not these people who make the decisions. The rank and file soldiers don’t decide where wars are going to be fought or whether strikes are going to be broken; the counter clerk in the social security office does not decide how much dole will be paid out. The whole state machine is based on the principle that people on one rung of the ladder obey those on the rung above.

This is essentially the case in the sections of the state machine that exercise physical force – army, navy, air force, police. The first thing soldiers are taught when they enlist – long before they are allowed to touch weapons – is to obey orders, regardless of their personal opinions of those orders.

That is why they are taught to do absurd drills. If they will follow lunatic commands on the parade ground without thinking about it, it is reckoned they will shoot when ordered to without thinking about that either.

The most heinous crime in any army is a refusal to obey orders – mutiny. So seriously is the offence regarded, that mutiny during time of war is still punishable by execution in Britain. Who gives the orders?

If you look at the chain of command in the British army (and other armies are no different) it goes: general – brigadier – colonel – lieutenant – NCO – private. At no stage in that chain of command do elected representatives – MPs or local councillors – get a look in. It is just as much an act of mutiny for a group of privates to obey their local MP rather than the officer. The army is a massive killing machine. The people who run it – and have the power to promote other soldiers into commanding positions – are the generals.

Of course, in theory the generals are responsible to the elected government. But soldiers are trained to obey generals, not politicians. If generals choose to give orders to their soldiers which are at variance with the wishes of an elected government, the government cannot countermand those orders. It can only try to persuade the generals to change their minds. The government knows the sorts of orders that are being given – because military affairs are invariably secret, it is very easy for generals to hide what they are doing from governments they don’t like.

That doesn’t always mean that generals always, or even usually, ignore what governments say to them. Usually in Britain they have found it convenient to go along with most of what the government suggests. But, in a life and death situation, the generals are able to put their killing machine into operation without listening at all to the government, and there is little the government can do about it. This is what the generals eventually did in Chile when Allende was overthrown.

So the question, ‘Who runs the army?’ is really, ‘Who are the generals?’ In Britain about 80 percent of the senior officers went to fee-paying ‘public’ schools – the same proportion as 50 years ago (17 years of Labour government didn’t change that). They are related to the owners of big business, belong to the same posh clubs, mix at the same social functions, share the same ideas (if you doubt this, look at the letters column in virtually any copy of the Daily Telegraph). The same goes for the heads of the civil service, the judges, the chief constables.

Do you think these people are going to obey government orders to take economic power away from their friends and relatives in big business, just because 330 people walk into a lobby in the House of Commons? Would they not be much more likely to copy the example of the Chilean generals, judges and senior civil servants, who sabotaged the government’s orders for three years and then, when the time was ripe, overthrew it?

In practice the particular ‘constitution’ we have in Britain means that those who control the state machine would be able to thwart the will of an elected left wing government far short of physically overthrowing it. If such a government were elected, it would be faced with massive economic sabotage by the employing class (factory closures, flights of money abroad, hoarding of necessities, inflationary price rises). If the government attempted to deal with such sabotage using ‘constitutional means’ – by passing laws – it would find its hands tied behind its back.

The House of Lords would certainly refuse to ratify any such law – delaying it for nine months at a minimum. The judges would ‘interpret’ any law passed in such a way as to curtail its powers. The civil service chiefs, the generals and the police chiefs would use the decisions of the judges and the House of Lords to justify their own unwillingness to do what ministers told them. They would be backed by virtually the whole press, which would scream that the government was behaving ‘illegally’ and ‘unconstitutionally’. The generals would then use such language to justify preparations to overthrow an 'illegal’ government.

The government would be powerless to deal with the economic chaos – unless it really did act unconstitutionally and called upon rank and file civil servants, police and soldiers to turn against their superiors.

Lest anyone thinks this is all wild fantasy, it should be added that there have been at least two occasions in recent British history when generals have sabotaged government decisions they did not like.

In 1912 the House of Commons passed a bill providing for a ‘Home Rule’ parliament to run a united Ireland. The Tory leader, Bonar Law, immediately denounced the (Liberal!) government as an illegal ‘junta’ who had ‘sold the constitution’. The House of Lords naturally delayed the law as long as it could (two years then), while former Tory minister Edward Carson organised a paramilitary force in the north of Ireland to resist the law.

When the generals who commanded the British army in Ireland were told to move their troops northwards to deal with this force, they refused and threatened to resign their commissions. It was because of this action, usually called the ‘Curragh Mutiny’, that Ireland north and south didn’t get a single parliament in 1914, and remains a divided nation even today.

In 1974 there was a rerun of the events of 1912 in miniature. The right wing sectarian Loyalists of Northern Ireland organised a general stoppage of industry, using barricades to prevent people going to work, against being forced to accept a joint Protestant-Catholic government in Northern Ireland.

British ministers called on the British army and the Northern Ireland police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, to dismantle the barricades and end the strike. The senior army officers and the police commanders told the government that this would be inadvisable, and neither soldiers nor police moved against the Loyalists. The joint Protestant-Catholic government was forced to resign, the views of army officers proving more powerful than the views of the British government.

If that could happen in 1914 and 1974 with middle-of-the-road governments trying to push through mild measures, imagine what would happen if a militant socialist government was elected. Any serious reformist majority in parliament would soon be forced to make a choice: either abandon reforms in order to placate those who own industry and control the key positions in the state, or prepare for an all out conflict, which will inevitably mean the use of some kind of force, against those who control those positions.

The third reason why reformism is a dead end is that parliamentary ‘democracy’ contains inbuilt mechanisms for preventing any revolutionary movement finding expression through it.

Some reformists argue that the best way to take on the power of those who control the key positions in the state machine is for the left to obtain a majority in parliament first. This argument falls because parliaments always understate the level of revolutionary consciousness of the mass of the population.

The mass of the people will only believe that they themselves can run society when they begin in practice to change society through struggle. It is when millions of people are occupying their factories or taking part in a general strike that ideas of revolutionary socialism suddenly seem realistic.

But such a level of struggle cannot be maintained indefinitely unless the old ruling class is removed from power. If it hangs on, it will wait until the occupations or strikes decline, then use its control over the army and police to break the struggle.

And once the strikes or occupations begin to falter, the feeling of unity and confidence among the workers begins to wane. Demoralisation and bitterness set in. Even the best begin to feel that changing society was just a wild dream.

That is why employers always prefer strike votes to be taken when workers are at home by themselves, getting their ideas from the television and the newspapers, not when they are united at mass meetings, able to hear other workers’ arguments.

That is also why anti-union laws nearly always include a clause forcing workers to call off strikes while secret, postal ballots are taken. Such clauses are accurately called ‘cooling off’ periods – they are designed to pour cold water on the confidence and unity of workers.

The parliamentary electoral system contains built in secret ballots and cooling off periods. For instance, if a government is brought to its knees by a massive strike, it is likely to say, ‘OK, wait three weeks until a general election can resolve the question democratically.’ It hopes that in the interim the strike will be called off. The workers’ confidence and unity will then fade. Employers may well be able to blacklist militants. The capitalist press and the television can begin functioning normally again, hammering home pro-government ideas. The police can arrest ‘troublemakers’.

Then when the election finally takes place, the vote will not reflect the high point of the workers’ struggles, but the low point after the strike.

In France in 1968, the government of General de Gaulle used elections in precisely this way. The reformist workers’ parties and unions told workers to end their strikes, and de Gaulle won the election.

The British Prime Minister Edward Heath tried the same trick when faced with a massively successful miners’ strike in 1974. But this time the miners were not conned. They kept their strike up – and Heath lost the election.

If workers wait for elections to decide the key issues in the class struggle, they will never reach that high point.

=== The workers’ state ===
Marx, in his pamphlet The Civil War in France, and Lenin in The State and Revolution outlined a completely different view of how socialism can be won. Neither simply pulled these ideas out of thin air: both developed their views by seeing the working class in action – Marx saw the Paris Commune, Lenin the Russian ‘Soviets’ (workers’ councils) of 1905 and 1917.

But Marx and Lenin insisted that the working class could not begin to construct socialism until it had first destroyed the old state based on bureaucratic chains of command, and secondly created a new state based on entirely new principles. Lenin underlined how completely different this state had to be from the old by calling it ‘a commune state, a state which is not a state’.<ref group="ProleWiki 9.">We've been unable to find this quote outside of this work.</ref>

A new state, Marx and Lenin said, was necessary if the working class was to impose its dictates on the remnants of the old ruling and middle classes. That was why they called it the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ – the working class had to dictate how society was to be run. It also had to defend its revolution against attacks from ruling classes elsewhere in the world. To do these two jobs, it had to have armed forces of its own, some form of policing of society, courts, even prisons.

But if this new army, police and legal system was to be controlled by the workers, and never turn against their interests, it had to be based on completely different principles from the capitalist state.

It had to be the means by which the working class as a majority dictated to the rest of society, not a dictatorship directed against the majority of the working class.

The main differences are these.

The capitalist state serves the interests of a small minority of society. The workers’ state has to serve the interests of the overwhelming majority. Force in the capitalist state is exercised by a minority of hired killers, cut off from the rest of society and trained to obey upper class officers.

But in a workers’ state, force would be needed only so the majority could protect themselves against anti-social acts by the remnants of the old privileged classes.

Soldiering and policing in a workers’ state can be done by ordinary workers, who mix freely with their fellow workers, share the same ideas and lead the same lives. Indeed, to make sure that groups of soldiers and police never develop separated from the mass of workers, the ‘soldiers’ and ‘police’ should be ordinary factory and office workers who take it in turns, on a rota system, to carry out these functions.

Instead of the armed forces and police being run by a small group of officers, they would be run by directly elected representatives of the mass of workers.

Parliamentary representatives in a capitalist state pass laws but leave it to full time bureaucrats, police chiefs and judges to implement them. This means that MPs and councillors can always hide behind a million excuses when their promises are not implemented. The workers’ representatives in a workers’ state would have to see their laws put into action. They, not an elite of top bureaucrats, would have to explain to the workers of the civil service, the army and so on how things should be done.

Again elected workers’ representatives would have to interpret the laws in courts.

Parliamentary representatives in a capitalist state are cut off from those who elect them by high salaries. In a workers’ state the representatives would get no more than the average workers’ wage.

The same goes for those who work full time in key posts implementing the decisions of the workers’ representatives (the equivalent of present-day civil servants).

Workers’ representatives, and all those concerned with implementing workers’ decisions, would not be, as MPs, immune to removal from office for five years (or for life in the case of senior civil servants). They would be subject to at least annual elections, and to immediate recall by those who elected them if they did not implement their wishes.

Parliamentary representatives are elected by all the people living in a certain locality – upper class, middle class and working class, slum landlords as well as tenants, stockbrokers as well as labourers.

In a workers’ state election would be by those who work only, with voting only after open discussion on the issues concerned. So the core of the workers’ state would be workers’ councils based on the factories, mines, docks, big offices, with groups such as housewives, pensioners, school students and students having their own representatives.

In this way, each section of the working class would have its own representative and be able directly to judge whether he or she was following their interests. In these ways, the new state cannot become a force separate from and against the majority working class – as it was in Eastern Bloc countries which called themselves ‘Communist’.

At the same time, the workers’ council system provides a means by which workers can coordinate their efforts in running industry according to a democratically decided national plan, and not end up running their factories in competition with each other. It is easy to see how modem computer technology would enable all workers to be given information on the various economic options open to society, and to direct their representatives to choose what the majority of workers thought the best set of options – for example, whether to spend resources on Concorde or on a cheap and reliable public transport system, whether to build nuclear bombs or kidney machines, and so on.

=== The withering away of the state ===
Because state power would not be something separate from the mass of the workers, it would be much less a matter of coercion than under capitalism. As the remnants of the old society against which it was directed became resigned to the success of the revolution, and as revolutions removed foreign ruling classes, there would be less and less need for coercion, until eventually workers need never take time off from work to staff the ‘police’ and the ‘army’.

This is what Marx and Lenin meant when they said the state would wither away. Instead of coercion against people, the state would become merely a mechanism of workers’ councils to decide how to produce and allocate goods.

Workers’ councils have come into being in one form or another whenever the struggle between the classes within capitalism has reached a really high level. ‘Soviet’ is the word the Russians used for workers’ councils in 1905 and 1917.

In 1918 in Germany workers’ councils were, briefly, the only power in the country.<ref name=":0" group="ProleWiki 9.">This is in reference to the German November Revolution of 1918–1919, when the nascent and not yet fully-developed Communist Party of Germany, headed by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, led a failed attempt to overthrow the newly-formed Weimar Republic.</ref> In Spain in 1936 the various workers’ parties and unions were united by ‘militia committees’ which ran the localities and were very much like workers’ councils.<ref group="ProleWiki 9.">Part of the [[Spanish Civil War]]</ref> In Hungary in 1956 the workers elected councils to run the factories and the localities as they fought Russian troops.<ref group="ProleWiki 9.">It must be noted the [[Hungarian counterrevolution of 1956|events in Hungary in 1956]] were an attempted fascist uprising and [[colour revolution]]. The counterrevolutionaries also did not fight 'Russian' troops but the [[Soviet Army]], in which there were Hungarian soldiers.</ref> In Chile in 1972-73 the workers began to build ‘cordones’ – workers’ committees that linked the big factories.

The workers’ council begins life as a body workers use to coordinate their struggle against capitalism. It may start with modest functions, raising strike funds maybe, but because these bodies are based on direct election from the workers, with workers’ representatives subject to recall, they can at the highest points in the struggle coordinate the efforts of the whole working class. They can lay the basis for workers’ power.

=== ProleWiki annotations ===
<references group="ProleWiki 9." />

== How do workers become revolutionary? ==
In Britain most workers this century have looked to the Labour Party and parliament to change society. A large minority have backed the reactionary ideas of the Tory party. The supporters of revolutionary socialism have generally been few in number.

This indifference or even opposition of workers to revolutionary socialism is hardly surprising. We have all been brought up in a capitalist society where it is taken for granted that everyone is selfish, where people are continually told by the newspapers and television that only a privileged minority have the ability to take the key decisions in industry and the state, where the mass of workers are taught from the first day they enter school to obey orders given by ‘their elders and betters’.

As Marx put it, ‘The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class,’<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">[[Library:The German ideology|The German ideology]], 1846</ref> and vast numbers of workers accept them.

Yet despite this, repeatedly in the history of capitalism, revolutionary movements of the working class have shaken one country after another: France in 1871,<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The [[Paris Commune]]</ref> Russia in 1917,<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The [[Russian revolution of 1917|October Revolution]]</ref> Germany<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The [[Spartacist uprising]]</ref> and Hungary in 1919, Italy in 1920, Spain<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">See ProleWiki annotations in previous chapter</ref> and France in 1936, Hungary in 1956,<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">See ProleWiki annotations in previous chapter</ref> France in 1968,<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The [[May 68]] crisis. Protesting students received some concessions from the French state, but nothing lasting: wages grew a little bit, a referendum was held but did not pass, and a new Parliament was elected, but it was still a [[Bourgeoisie|bourgeois]] parliament</ref> Chile in 1972- 73,<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The author is positioning himself against [[Salvador Allende]], Chilean Marxist and president of Chile from 1970 to 1973, who died at the hands of a western-backed and fascist coup in 1973 that put [[Augusto Pinochet]] in power. Pinochet would go on to commit countless crimes against the people of Chile for the next few decades.</ref> Portugal in 1975,<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The author here could be referring to two distinct yet connected periods in Portuguese history. The Carnation Revolution which occured in the 25th of April 1974, a military coup set in motion by disgruntled captains of the Portuguese army that put an end to the fascist "Estado Novo" dictatorship begun by António de Oliveira Salazar and by then headed by Marcelo Caetano. The Carnation Revolution thus marked the transition to a bourgeois liberal democracy and the start of the decolonization process, headed mostly by social democratic parties and in part by the PCP.

However, the year presented by the author (1975) could be more specifically referring to a period known as the "PREC" (Ongoing Revolutionary Period), a period after, but, within the context of the Carnation Revolution, which was a period of spontaneous and daring social upheaval, mostly headed by the proletariat and rural proletariat, after a failed right-wing coup in the 11th of March 1975, until the 25th of November, an attempted coup by a more isolated left-wing portion of the military headed by Otelo de Carvalho, with no support or involvement from other left-wing parties at the time.

The PREC was marked by the spontaneous (to the dismay of other institutional left wing parties, including the PCP) worker expropriation of factories, large rural holdings, strikes, and far-right political violence, and in some cases nationalizations of companies. However, this period did not last long and nearly all of the conquests and expropriations achieved by the proletariat in this period were eventually rolled back, via closure of agricultural cooperatives and in many cases the government's restitution of expropriated property back to large landowners.</ref> Iran in 1979,<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The [[1979 Iranian revolution]] which led to the creation of the [[Islamic Republic of Iran]], deposing the royal family.</ref> Poland in 1980.<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">The author is likely referring to the strikes and social unrest in the [[Polish People's Republic (1947–1989)|Polish People's Republic]]. During the strikes, the [[Solidarność]] trade union was formed, funded by the [[National Endowment for Democracy|NED]] (a direct CIA program) to topple the Polish state divide the Union, i.e. a wholly counter-revolutionary and reactionary movement that did not represent the workers in any way, instead representing the interests of the U.S. bourgeoisie.</ref>

The explanation for these upheavals lies in the very nature of capitalism itself. Capitalism is a crisis-prone system.<ref group="ProleWiki 10.">This is correct, but in light of reactionary movements against the Soviet Union we noted above, a more complete explanation is that capitalism is prone to crises, and one way of postponing these crises or their effects is [[imperialism]], which was and is still levied against any state that doesn't fall in line, including [[Socialist state|socialist states]].</ref> In the long run it cannot provide full employment, it cannot provide prosperity for all, it cannot secure our living standards today against the crisis it will produce tomorrow. But during the capitalist ‘booms’ workers come to expect these things.

So, for instance, in the 1950s and early 1960s, workers in Britain came to expect permanent full employment, a ‘welfare state’ and gradual but real improvements in living standards. By contrast, over the last 25 years successive governments have allowed unemployment to increase to a real figure of more than 4 million, have cut the welfare state to shreds, and have attempted again and again to cut living standards.

Because we are brainwashed into accepting many capitalist ideas, we accept some of these attacks.

But inevitably a point is reached where workers find they can stand it no more. Suddenly, often when no one expects it, their anger suddenly flares and they take some action against employer or government. Perhaps they stage a strike, or organise a demonstration.

When this happens, whether they like it or not, workers begin doing things that contradict all the capitalist ideas they have previously accepted. They begin to act in solidarity with one another, as a class, in opposition to the representatives of the capitalist class.

The ideas of revolutionary socialism that they used to reject out of hand now begin to fit in with what they are doing. Some at least of the workers begin to take those ideas seriously – providing those ideas are accessible.

The scale on which this takes place depends on the scale of the struggle, not on the ideas in workers’ heads to begin with. Capitalism forces them into struggle even if they begin with pro- capitalist ideas. The struggle then makes them question these ideas.

Capitalist power rests on two planks – control of the means of production and control of the state. A real revolutionary movement begins among the vast mass of workers when struggles over their immediate economic interests lead them to clash with both planks of capitalist rule.

Take for example a group of workers who have been employed in the same factory for years. The whole normal humdrum pattern of their lives is dependent on their jobs there. One day the employer announces that he is going to close the factory down. Even the Tory voters in the workforce are horrified and want to do something. In desperation they decide that the only way to continue to lead the sort of lives capitalism has taught them to expect is to occupy the factory – to challenge the employer’s control over the means of production.

They may soon find themselves up against the state as well, as the employer calls in the police to return control of ‘his’ property back to him. If they are to have any chance of keeping their jobs, the workers now must also confront the police, the state machine, as well as the employer.

Thus capitalism itself creates the conditions of class conflict which open workers’ minds to ideas quite opposed to those which the system has taught them. This explains why the history of capitalism has been marked by periodic upsurges of revolutionary feeling among millions of workers, even if most of the time most workers accept the ideas the system feeds them.

One final point. One of the biggest things holding many workers back from support for revolutionary ideas is the feeling that it is not worth them personally doing anything because other workers will never support them. When they find that other workers are doing things, they suddenly lose their own apathy. In the same way people, who feel that they, as workers, are quite incapable of running society, suddenly learn otherwise when they find, in the course of massive struggles against existing society, that they’re taking over much of its running.

It is because of this that once revolutionary movements start, they can snowball at amazing speed.

=== ProleWiki annotations ===
<references group="ProleWiki 10." />

== The revolutionary socialist party ==
The basic premise of Marxism is that the development of capitalism itself drives workers into revolt against the system.

When such revolts break out – whether a mass demonstration, an armed insurrection or even a big strike – the transformation of working class consciousness is astonishing. All the mental energy that workers previously frittered away on a hundred and one diversions – from doing the horses to watching the telly – is suddenly directed towards trying to deal with the problem of how to change society. Millions of people working on such problems produce solutions of amazing ingenuity, which often leave established revolutionaries as bewildered as the ruling class by this turn of events.

So, for instance, in the first Russian revolution of 1905 a new form of workers’ organisation, the soviet – the workers’ council – grew out of the strike committee set up during a printing strike. At first the Bolshevik Party – the most militant of the revolutionary socialists – treated the Soviets with distrust: they did not believe it was possible for the mass of previously non-political workers to create a genuinely revolutionary instrument.

Such experiences are found in many strikes: the established militants are taken completely by surprise when workers who have ignored their advice for so long, suddenly begin to organise militant action themselves.

This spontaneity is fundamental. But it is wrong to draw the conclusion – as anarchists and near-anarchists do – that because of spontaneity, there is no need for a revolutionary party.

In a revolutionary situation, millions of workers change their ideas very, very quickly. But they do not all change all their ideas at once. Inside every strike, every demonstration, every armed uprising there are always continual arguments. A few workers will see the action they are taking as a prelude to the working class taking control of society. Others will be half against taking any action at all, because it is disturbing the ‘natural order of things’. In the middle will be the mass of workers, attracted first by one set of arguments, then by the other, Onto one side of the balance the present ruling class will throw all the weight of its newspaper propaganda machine, denouncing the workers’ actions. It will throw too its strikebreaking forces, whether police, army or right wing organisations.

And on the workers’ side of the argument there must be an organisation of socialists who can draw on the lessons of past class struggle, who can throw the arguments about socialism into the balance.

There must be an organisation that can draw together the growing understanding of workers in struggle, so they can act together to change society.

And this revolutionary socialist party needs to be there before the struggle starts, for organisation is not born spontaneously. The party is built through the continual interplay of socialist ideas and experience of the class struggle – for merely to understand society is not enough: only by applying these ideas in the day-to-day class struggle, in strikes, demonstrations, campaigns, will workers become aware of their power to change things, and gain the confidence to do it.

At certain points, the intervention of a socialist party can be decisive, can tip the balance towards change, towards a revolutionary transfer of power to the workers, towards a socialist society.

=== What sort of party? ===
The revolutionary socialist party needs to be democratic. To fulfil its role, the party must be continually in touch with the class struggle, and that means with its own members and supporters in the workplaces where that struggle takes place. It needs to be democratic because its leadership must always reflect the collective experience of the struggle.

At the same time, this democracy is not merely a system of election but a continual debate within the party – a continual interaction of the socialist ideas on which the party is based with the experience of class struggle.

But the revolutionary socialist party must also be centralised – for it is an active party, not a debating society. It needs to be able to intervene collectively in the class struggle, and to respond quickly, so it must have a leadership capable of taking day-to-day decisions in the name of the party.

If the government orders the jailing of pickets, for instance, the party needs to react at once, without the need to convene conferences to take democratic decisions first. So the decision is made centrally and acted upon. Democracy comes into play afterwards, when the party hammers out whether the decision was correct or not – and maybe changes the party leadership if it was out of touch with the needs of the struggle.

The revolutionary socialist party needs to maintain a fine and delicate balance between democracy and centralism. The key is that the party does not exist for its own sake, but as a means for bringing a revolutionary change to socialism – and that can only be through class struggle.

So the party must continually adapt itself to the struggle. When the struggle is low, and few workers believe in the possibility of revolutionary change, then the party will be small – and must be content to be so for to dilute its political ideas in order to increase its membership would be pointless. But when the struggle increases, large numbers of workers can change their ideas very fast, realising through struggle their power to change things – and then the party must be able to open its doors, otherwise it will be left on the sidelines.

The party cannot substitute for the working class. It must be part of the class struggle, continually trying to unite the most class-conscious workers to provide a leadership for the struggle. Nor can the party dictate to the class. It cannot simply proclaim itself the leadership, but must win that position, proving the correctness of socialist ideas in practice – which means anything from a small strike to the revolution itself.

Some people see the revolutionary socialist party as the precursor of socialism. This is completely wrong. Socialism can only come about when the working class itself takes control of the means of producing wealth and uses this to transform society.

You cannot build an island of socialism in a sea of capitalism. Attempts by small groups of socialists to cut themselves off and lead their lives according to socialist ideas always fail miserably in the long term – for a start, the economic and ideological pressures are always there. And in cutting themselves off from capitalism, such small groups also cut themselves off from the only force that can bring socialism: the working class.

Of course, socialists fight against the degrading effects of capitalism every day – against racism, against sexism, against exploitation, against brutality. But we can only do so by taking the strength of the working class as our base.

== Imperialism and national liberation ==
Throughout the history of capitalism the employing class has always looked to an additional source of wealth – the seizure of wealth produced in other countries.

The growth of the first forms of capitalism at the close of the Middle Ages was accompanied by the seizure by western states of vast colonial empires – the empires of Spain and Portugal, of Holland and France, and, of course, of Britain. Wealth was pumped into the hands of the ruling classes of western Europe, while whole societies in what has become known as the Third World (Africa, Asia and South America) were destroyed.

Thus, the ‘discovery’ of America by Europeans in the 16th century produced a vast flow of gold into Europe. The other side of that coin was the destruction of whole societies and the enslavement of others. For example, in Haiti, where Columbus first established a settlement, the native Harawak Indians (perhaps half a million in all) were exterminated in just two generations. In Mexico the Indian population was reduced from 20 million in 1520 to 2 million in 1607.

The Indian population of the West Indies and of parts of the mainland was replaced by slaves captured in Africa and transported across the Atlantic under abominable conditions. An estimated 15 million slaves survived the Atlantic crossing while about 9 million died in transit. About half the slaves were transported in British ships – which is one reason why British capitalism was the first to expand industry.

The wealth from the slave trade provided the means to finance industry. As an old saying put it, ‘The walls of Bristol are cemented with the blood of the negroes’ – and this applied just as much to other ports. As Karl Marx put it, ‘The veiled slavery of the wage worker in Europe required for its pedestal slavery pure and simple in the New World.’ The slave trade was complemented by pure looting – as when the British conquered India. Bengal was so advanced that the first British visitors were stunned by the magnificence of its civilisation.

But this wealth did not stay long in Bengal. As Lord Macaulay wrote in his biography of the conqueror, Clive:<blockquote>The immense population was given up as prey. Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while 30 million of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They had been used to living under tyranny, but never tyranny like this.</blockquote>From that point onwards Bengal became renowned not for its wealth, but for a grinding poverty that every few years saw millions starve to death in famines, a poverty that continues to this day.

Meanwhile, in the 1760s, at a time when total capital investment in England was no more than £6 million to £7 million, the annual tribute to England from India was £2 million.

The same processes were at work in relation to England’s oldest colony – Ireland. During the Great Famine of the late 1840s when Ireland’s population was halved by starvation and emigration, more than enough wheat to feed the starving population was sent from the country as rent to English landlords.

Today, it is usual to divide the world into ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ countries. The impression is given that the ‘underdeveloped’ countries have been moving in the same direction for hundreds of years as the ‘developed’ countries, but at a slower speed.

But, in fact, one reason for the ‘development’ of the Western countries was that the rest were robbed of wealth and pushed backwards. Many are poorer today than they were 300 years ago.

As Michael Barratt Brown has pointed out:<blockquote>The wealth per head of the present underdeveloped lands, not only in India, but in China, Latin America and Africa, was higher than in Europe in the 17th century, and fell as wealth grew in Western Europe.</blockquote>The possession of an empire enabled Britain to develop as the world’s first industrial power. It was in a position to stop other capitalist states getting their hands on the raw materials, markets and profitable areas of investment within its third of the world.

As new industrial powers such as Germany, Japan and the United States grew up, they wanted these advantages for themselves. They built up rival empires or ‘spheres of influence’. Faced with economic crisis, each of the major capitalist powers tried to solve its problems by encroaching on the spheres of influence of its rivals. Imperialism led to world war.

This in turn produced huge changes within the internal organisation of capitalism. The tool for waging war, the state, became much more important. It worked ever more closely with the giant firms to reorganise industry for foreign competition and war. Capitalism became state monopoly capitalism.

The development of imperialism meant that capitalists did not just exploit the working class of their own country; they also took physical control of other countries and exploited their populations. For the most oppressed classes in the colonial countries, this meant that they were exploited by foreign imperialists as well as by their own ruling class. They were doubly exploited.

But sections of the ruling classes in the colonial countries also suffered. They saw many of their own opportunities to exploit the local population stolen from them by imperialism. In the same way, the middle classes in the colonies, who would have liked to see a rapid expansion of locally run industry so as to provide them with good career opportunities, suffered as well.

The last 60 years have seen all these various classes in colonial and ex-colonial countries rise up against the effects of imperialism. Movements have developed that have attempted to unite the whole population against foreign imperialist rule. Their demands have included:

* Expulsion of foreign imperialist troops.
* Unification of the whole national territory under a single national government, as against its division between different imperialisms.
* The re-establishment of the original language in everyday life, as opposed to some language imposed by the foreign rulers.
* The use of the wealth produced by the country to expand local industry to bring about ‘development’ and ‘modernisation’ of the country.

Such were the demands of successive revolutionary upsurges in China (in 1912, 1923-27 and in 1945-48), in Iran (in 1905-12, 1917-21 and in 1941-53), in Turkey (after the First World War), in the West Indies (from the 1920s onwards), in India (in 1920-48), in Africa (after 1945) and in Vietnam (until the United States was defeated in 1975).

These movements were often led by sections of the local upper classes or middle classes, but they meant that the ruling classes of the advanced countries faced an additional opponent as well as their own working class. The national movement in the so-called Third World challenged the imperialist capitalist states at the same time as did their own working classes.

For the working class movement in the advanced countries this had great importance. It meant that in its fight against capitalism, it had an ally in the liberation movements of the Third World. So, for example, a Shell worker in Britain had an ally in the liberation forces in South Africa who were fighting to take over the property which Shell owned there. If Shell can thwart the aims of the liberation movements in the Third World, then it will be more powerful when it comes to resisting the demands of workers in Britain.

This is true, even if the liberation movement in the Third World country does not have a socialist leadership – indeed, even if its leadership merely wants to replace foreign rule by the rule of a local capitalist or state capitalist class.

The imperialist state which is trying to smash that liberation movement is the same imperialist state that is the greatest enemy of the Western worker. That is why Marx insisted that ‘a nation that oppresses others cannot itself be free’, and why Lenin argued for an alliance between the workers of the advanced countries and the oppressed people of the Third World, even when these had a non-socialist leadership.

This does not mean that socialists will agree with the way in which non-socialists in an oppressed country lead a national liberation struggle (any more than we necessarily agree with how a trade union leader leads a strike). But we have to make it clear before anything else that we support that struggle. Otherwise we an all too easily end up supporting our own ruling class against ieople it is oppressing.

We have to support a liberation struggle unconditionally, before we are entitled to criticise the way it is led.

However, revolutionary socialists in a country which is oppressed by imperialism cannot leave matters there. They have to argue, day in day out, with other people about how the struggle for national liberation should be waged.

Here, the most important points are contained in the theory of permanent revolution developed by Trotsky.<ref group="ProleWiki 11.">The [[Permanent Revolution|permanent revolution]] theory of Trotsky does not talk about national liberation against colonialism, rather it talks about how the revolution that started in a country would extend through the other, making it "permanent", theory which is incorrect</ref> Trotsky began by recognising that often movements against oppression are initiated by people from middle class or even upper class backgrounds.

Socialists support such movements because they aim to ‘move one of the burdens that weighs upon the most oppressed classes and groups in society. But we also have to recognise that those from the upper or middle classes cannot lead such struggles consistently. They will be afraid of unleashing a full-blooded class struggle, in case this challenges not merely oppression from outside, but also their own ability to live by exploiting the most oppressed classes.

At a certain point they will run away from the struggle they themselves initiated, and, if necessary, unite with the foreign oppressor to smash it. At this point, if socialist, working class does do not take the leadership of the national liberation struggle, it will be defeated.

Trotsky also made one final point. It is true that in most Third World countries the working class is only a minority, often a small minority, of the population. But it is nevertheless often quite big in absolute terms (for example in India and China it is tens of millions strong), it often creates a huge proportion of the national wealth in relation to its size, and it is concentrated in overwhelming numbers in the cities which are key when it comes ruling the country. So in a period of revolutionary turmoil, the working class can take the leadership of all other oppressed classes and seize control of whole countries. The revolution can be permanent, beginning with demands for national liberation and ending with socialist demands. But only if socialists in the oppressed country have from the beginning organised the workers on an independent, class basis – supporting the general movement for national liberation, but always warning that its middle class or upper class leaders cannot be trusted.

=== ProleWiki annotations ===
<references group="ProleWiki 11." />

== Marxism and feminism ==
There are two different approaches to women’s liberation – feminism and revolutionary socialism.

Feminism was the dominant influence on the women’s movements which sprung up in the advanced capitalist countries during the 1960s and 1970s. It started from the view that men always oppress women, that there was something in men’s biology or psychological make up which made them treat women as inferior. This led to the view that liberation was possible only by the separation of women from men – either the total separation of the feminists who sought ‘liberated lifestyles’ or the partial separation of women’s committees, women’s caucuses or women-only events.

Many of those who supported this partial separation called themselves socialist feminists. But later radical feminist ideas of total separation made the running inside the women’s movement.

Separatist ideas ended time and again as a slightly radical wing of the social services, as with women’s refuges.

This failing led many feminists in another direction – towards the Labour Party. They believed that getting the right women in the right places, as MPs, trade union officials, local councillors, would somehow help all women to find equality.

The tradition of revolutionary socialism starts from a very different set of ideas. Marx and Engels, writing as far back as 1848, argued, first, that women’s oppression did not arise from the ideas in men’s heads, but from the development of private property and with it the emergence of a society based on classes. For them, the fight for women’s liberation was inseparable from the fight to end all class society – the struggle for socialism.

Marx and Engels also pointed out that the development of capitalism, based on the factory system, brought profound changes in people’s lives, and especially in the lives of women. Women were brought back into social production, from which they had been progressively excluded with the development of class society.

This gave women a potential power which they had never had before. Organised collectively, women as workers had greater independence and ability to fight for their rights. This was in great contrast to their lives previously, when their main role in production, through the family, made them completely dependent on the family head – the husband or father.

From this Marx and Engels concluded that the material basis of the family, and so of women’s oppression, no longer existed. What stopped women from benefiting from this was the fact that property remained in the hands of the few. What keeps women oppressed today is the way capitalism is organised – in particular the way capitalism uses a particular form of the family in order to make sure that its workers bring their children up to be the next generation of workers. It is a great advantage that while it pays men – and increasingly women – to work, women will devote their lives, unpaid, to making sure their men are fit to work in the factories and their children will grow up to do the same.

Socialism, by contrast, would see society taking on many of the family functions which weigh so heavily on women.

This didn’t mean that Marx, Engels and their successors went about preaching the ‘abolition of the family’. The family’s supporters have always been able to mobilise many of the most oppressed women in its support – they see the ‘abolition of the family’ as giving their husbands licence to abandon them with the responsibility for the children. Revolutionary socialists have always tried instead to show how in a better, socialist society, women would not be forced into the miserable, cramped life provided by the present day family.

Feminists have always rejected this sort of analysis. Far from approaching women where they have the power to change the world and end their oppression – where they are collectively strong at work – they approach women as sufferers. Campaigns of the 1980s, for example, focused on such issues as prostitution, rape or the threat to women and families from nuclear weapons. These all start from positions where women are weak.

Feminism starts with the assumption that oppression overrides class division. This leads to conclusions which leave class society intact while improving the position of some women – a minority. The women’s movement has tended to be dominated by women from the ‘new middle class’ – journalists, writers, lecturers, higher grade white collar workers. The typists, filing clerks, machinists have got left out.

It is only during periods of radical change and revolutionary upsurge that the question of women’s liberation becomes reality, not just for a minority, but for all working class women as well. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 produced a much greater equality for women than ever known in the world before. Divorce, abortion and contraception were made freely available. Childcare and housework became the responsibility of society. There were the beginnings of communal restaurants, laundries and nurseries which gave women far more choice and control over their lives.

Of course, the fate of these advances couldn’t be separated from the fate of the revolution itself.

Famine, civil war, the decimation of the working class, and the failure of revolution internationally meant the eventual defeat of socialism in Russia itself. The moves towards equality were reversed.

But the early years of the soviet republic showed what socialist revolution could achieve, even in the most unfavourable conditions. Today, the prospects for women’s liberation are far better. In Britain – and much the same is true of other advanced capitalist countries – two workers in every five are women.

Women’s liberation can be achieved only through the collective power of the working class. This means rejecting the feminist idea of women’s separate organisations. Only women and men workers acting together as part of a united revolutionary movement can destroy class society, and with it the oppression of women.

== Socialism and war ==
The present century has been a century of wars. Some 10 million people were killed in the First World War, 55 million in the Second, 2 million in the wars in Indochina. And the two great nuclear powers, the United States and Russia, still possess the means to destroy the human race many times over.<ref group="ProleWiki 12.">The [[Soviet Union]] developed the nuclear bombs in response to the development of the nuclear bombs of the USA, since without them, the United States would have had the path paved to destroy the country of the Soviets.</ref>

Explaining this horror is difficult for those who take existing society for granted. They are driven to conclude that there is some innate, instinctive drive in human beings that leads them to enjoy mass slaughter. But human society has not always known war. Gordon Childe noted of Europe in the Stone Age:<blockquote>The earliest Danubians seem to have been a peaceful folk; weapons of war as against hunters' tools are absent from their graves. Their villages lacked military defences. [But] in the later phases of the Neolithic period armaments became the most conspicuous items...</blockquote>War is not caused by some innate human aggressiveness. It is a product of the division of society into classes. When, between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago, a class of property owners first emerged, it had to find the means to defend its wealth. It began to construct armed forces, a state, cut off from the rest of society. This then became a valuable means of further increasing its wealth, by plundering other societies.

The division of society into classes meant that war became a permanent feature of human life.

The slave owning ruling classes of Ancient Greece and Rome could not survive without continual wars which procured more slaves. The feudal lords of the Middle Ages had to be heavily armed in order to subdue the local serfs and to protect their loot from other feudal lords. When the first capitalist ruling classes began 300 or 400 years ago, they too repeatedly had to have recourse to war. They had to fight bitter wars in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries in order to establish their supremacy over the remnants of the old feudal rulers. The most successful capitalist countries, such as Britain, used warfare to expand their wealth—reaching overseas, looting India and Ireland, transporting millions of people as slaves from Africa to the Americas, turning the whole world into a source of plunder for themselves.

Capitalist society built itself through war. No wonder that those who lived within it came 'to believe that war was both 'inevitable' and 'just'.

Yet capitalism could never be based entirely on war. Most of its wealth came through exploiting workers in factories and mines. And that was something which could be disrupted by any fighting within the 'home country' itself.

Each national capitalist class wanted peace at home while waging war abroad. So while encouraging belief in 'military virtues' it also bitterly attacked 'violence'. The ideology of capitalism combines, in a completely contradictory way, exaltation of militarism and pacifist phrases.

In the present century war preparations have become more central to the system than ever before. In the 19th century capitalist production was based on many small firms competing with each other.

The state was a relatively small body that regulated their relations with each other and with their workers. But in the present century big firms have eaten up most of the small firms, so eliminating much of the competition within each country. Competition is more and more international, between the giant firms of different nations.

There is no international capitalist state to regulate this competition. Instead, each national state exerts all the pressure it can to help its capitalists get an advantage over their foreign rivals. The life and death struggle of different capitalists with each other can become the life and death struggle of different states, each with its huge array of destructive weaponry.

Twice this struggle has led to world war. The First and Second World Wars were imperialist wars, conflicts between alliances of capitalist states over the domination of the globe.<ref group="ProleWiki 12.">On the Eastern Front, the largest and deadliest theatre of the Second World War, the conflict was not inter-imperialist in character. Rather, it was fought primarily between a socialist state and a fascist-imperialist one. The Nazis' chief military aim was the deportation, enslavement, and/or extermination of Eastern Europe's indigenous population in order to make room for German colonial settlement. The Soviets by contrast were struggling for the preservation of their homeland and had spent the previous decade trying to contain fascist aggression in Europe, Africa, and Asia.</ref> The Cold War was a continuation of that struggle, with the most powerful capitalist states lined up against each other in NATO and the Warsaw Pact.<ref group="ProleWiki 12.">The Warsaw pact was a pact of socialist countries, which also fought with the colonized in their decolonization processes, supporting them militarely and economically</ref>

In addition to this global conflict, many hot wars have raged in different parts of the world. Usually they have been struggles between different capitalist states over who should control a particular region, such as the Iran-Iraq war which broke out in 1980 and the Gulf War in 1991. All the major powers stoke the fires of war by selling the most sophisticated military technology to Third World states.

Many people who accept the rest of the capitalist system do not like this grim reality. They want capitalism but not war. They try to find alternatives within the system. For example, there are those who believe the United Nations can prevent war.

But the UN is merely the arena where different states that embody the drive to war meet together.

There they compare their strengths with each other, like boxers measuring up before a bout. If one state or alliance is easily more powerful than another, then both will see the pointlessness of a war whose outcome is known in advance. But if there is any doubt about the outcome, they know of only one way of settling the issue, and that is to go to war.

This was true of the two great nuclear alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Even though the West had the military edge over the Eastern Bloc, the gap was not so great for the Russians to believe themselves at a hopeless disadvantage. So, despite the fact that a Third World War would wipe out most of the human race, both Washington and Moscow drew up plans for fighting and winning a nuclear war.<ref group="ProleWiki 12.">See PW annotation 12.1</ref>

The Cold War came to an end with the political upheaval in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR into its constituent republics in 1991. There was then much talk of a 'new world order' and a 'peace dividend'.

Instead, however, we have seen a succession of barbaric wars—the war of the West against its former ally Iraq, the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia in the former USSR, the horrific civil wars in Somalia and former Yugoslavia.

No sooner is one military rivalry between capitalist powers resolved than another takes its place.

Everywhere, ruling classes know that war is a way of increasing their influence and of blinding workers and peasants with nationalism.

You can loathe and fear war without opposing capitalist society. But you cannot end it. War is the inevitable product of the division of society into classes. The threat of it will never be ended by begging existing rulers to make peace. The armaments have to be wrested from their hands by a movement fighting to overturn class society once and for all.

The peace movements which emerged in Europe and North America at the end of the 1970s did not understand this. They fought to stop the introduction of Cruise and Pershing missiles, for unilateral disarmament, for a nuclear freeze. But they believed that the fight for peace could succeed in isolation from the struggle between capital and labour.

So they failed to mobilise the only power capable of stopping the drive towards war, the working class. Only socialist revolution can end the horror of war.

=== ProleWiki annotations ===
<references group="ProleWiki 12." />

[[Category:Library works by Chris Harman]]
[[Category:Library works about philosophy]]

Workers Party of Britain

2024-03-01T18:02:15Z

ComradeTrash: Added a source plus some context for the founding of the party.

{{Infobox political party|name=Workers Party of Britain|logo=Workers Party of Britain logo.svg|founded=7 December, 2019|abbreviation=WPB|leader=[[George Galloway]]|membership_year=2021|membership=5877|political_orientation=[[Socialist]] 
[[Anti-imperialist]]|website=https://workerspartybritain.org/|twitter=https://twitter.com/WorkersPartyGB|youtube=https://www.youtube.com/c/WorkersPartyofBritain|facebook=https://www.facebook.com/WorkersPartyGB|instagram=https://www.instagram.com/workerspartygb/}}

The '''Workers Party of Britain''' ('''WPB''') is a [[reactionary]] socialist political party which is "''economically radical with an independent foreign policy"''. Established in 2019 by [[George Galloway]], it aims to provide inspiration to the millions of voters left politically homeless in the aftermath of [[Jeremy Corbyn|Jeremy Corbyn's]] [[Labour Party (UK)|Labour Party]] defeat at the 2019 general election.

The WPB believes in the importance of a [[planned economy]]. While not being a communist organisation, it critically supports "all those countries that have attempted to break free of [[Imperialism|imperialist]] domination", and "defend[s] the achievements of the [[Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922–1991)|USSR]], [[People's Republic of China|China]], [[Republic of Cuba|Cuba]] etc".<ref>https://workerspartybritain.org/about/</ref> The party was formed in collaboration with the [[Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist–Leninist)]] (CPGB-ML), with [[Joti Brar]] as the Deputy Leader<ref>{{Web citation|author=Worker's Party Britain|newspaper=Worker's Party Britain|title=Introducing the Workers Party|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191214213955/https://workerspartybritain.org/about/|archive-date=2019-12-14|retrieved=2024-03-01}}</ref>.

== History ==

=== 2024 Rochdale bi-election ===
On 29 February 2024, WPB leader, Galloway stood as a candidate in the Rochdale bi-election and won the seat with 12,335 votes (39.7%) giving him a 5,697-vote majority. Comparatively 2nd place, a businessman running as an independent, earned 21.3%, whilst the [[Conservative and Unionist Party|Conservatives]] got only 12% and Labour 7%.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Josh Halliday and Aneesa Ahmed|newspaper=The Guardian|title=‘This is for Gaza’: George Galloway sweeps to victory in Rochdale byelection|date=2024-03-01|url=https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/01/george-galloway-wins-rochdale-byelection}}</ref> Galloway's victory was celebrated by the [[Communist Party of Britain]] (CPB)<ref>{{Web citation|author=Communist Party of Britain|title=The Communist Party’s General Secretary, Comrade Robert Griffiths, responded to the impact of George Galloway’s victory in the Rochdale by election last night:|date=2024-03-01|url=https://twitter.com/CPBritain/status/1763574699546550769|archive-url=https://archive.org/details/cpb-endorsement-of-galloway|archive-date=2024-03-01|retrieved=2024-03-01}}</ref> as well as the CPGB-ML.<ref>{{Web citation|author=CPGB-ML|title=Collapsing support for Labour, Tory and Liberal as George Galloway wins the Rochdale by-election.|date=2024-03-01|url=https://twitter.com/CPGBML/status/1763486452090863980?s=20|archive-url=https://archive.org/details/cpgb-ml-endorsement-of-galloway|archive-date=2024-03-01|retrieved=2024-03-01}}</ref>

In his campaign for the bi-election Galloway sent two different letters to constituents depending on whether the household was [[Islam|Muslim]] or [[White]]. The letter sent to white people contained [[transphobia]], British [[nationalism]], an [[Islamophobia|islamophobic]] dog whistle by referring to grooming gangs, and a claim to support small businesses whilst wanting [[Primark]] to join his open-air market project. The letter to Muslim households, however, capitalised on Labour's refusal to support [[State of Palestine|Palestine]] against [[State of Israel|Israel]], and pandered to the Muslim community by supporting the Palestinian resistance.<ref>{{Web citation|author=@crowndefensx|title=GEORGE GALLOWAY HAS DIFFERENT CAMPAIGN LETTERS FOR WHITE AND MUSLIM HOUSEHOLDS IN ROCHDALE|date=2024-02-29|url=https://twitter.com/crowndefensx/status/1763308898633609563|archive-url=https://archive.org/details/galloway-muslim/Galloway%20White.jpg|archive-date=2024-03-01|retrieved=2024-03-01}}</ref>

== Ten-point programme ==

# An end to imperialist wars and financial domination, starting with withdrawal from [[North Atlantic Treaty Organization|NATO]].
# Rebuild British industry and abolish the anti-worker ‘rationalisation’ that puts profits ahead of people to provide useful, secure jobs for all in decent conditions, with living wages, paid holidays, sick leave, maternity leave, etc.
# Decent, cheap, secure housing for all.
# High-quality, free pre-school childcare and education, followed by high-quality, free, lifelong education and vocational training.
# [[Universal healthcare|Free and comprehensive healthcare]] with no waiting lists, accompanied by easy access to cheap and nutritious food.
# Public, high quality laundries, crèches and dining facilities that enable women to take part in work and public life without prejudice or physical barriers.
# High-quality, free provision of all necessary support services for the disabled, as well as the elderly. Full state support to enable families to look after their elderly, with nursing homes and sheltered accommodation for those in need of it, so that all workers are able to live full, dignified and meaningful lives.
# Universal access to a cheap or free fully-integrated public transport system and all essential amenities: water, sanitation, heating, electricity, post, telephone, internet.
# Open and easy access to all forms of culture and the media.
# A government that prioritises giving resources to the solving of urgent problems such as the need to live sustainably and protect our natural environment, putting science at the service of the people.

== References ==
<references />
[[Category:Socialist political parties]]

Dimitris Koutsoumpas

2024-01-30T18:59:47Z

ComradeTrash: Corrected spelling mistake and added link to page that might eventually be relevant.

{{Infobox politician|native_name=Δημήτρης Κουτσούμπας|name=Dimitris Koutsoumpas|birth_date=10 August 1955|birth_place=Lamia, [[Kingdom of Greece (1832–1973)|Greece]]|nationality=Greek|political_line=[[Marxism–Leninism]] ([[Anti-Revisionism|Left deviationism]]) [[Homophobia]]<ref>{{Web citation|author=Department for the Equality of Women of the CC of KKE|newspaper=Communist Party of Greece|title=On the Cohabitation Agreement|date=2016|url=https://inter.kke.gr/en/articles/On-The-Cohabitation-Agreement/|retrieved=2023-10-09|quote=}}</ref><ref>{{Web citation|author=Central Committee of the KKE|newspaper=Communist Party of Greece|title=KKE's positions on civil marriage for same-sex couples and its impact on children's rights|date=2024-01-29|url=https://www.kke.gr/article/Oi-theseis-toy-KKE-gia-ton-politiko-gamo-ton-omofylon-zeygarion-kai-tis-epiptoseis-toy-sta-dikaiomata-ton-paidion/|retrieved=2024-01-30}}</ref>|image=Dimitris Koutsoumpas.png}}

'''Dimitris Koutsoumpas''' is the General Secretary of the [[Communist Party of Greece|KKE]].<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=[[In Defense of Communism]]|title=Speech by Dimitris Koutsoumbas, General Secretary of the KKE, at the quadripartite meeting of the 8th of July|date=2022-07-08|url=http://www.idcommunism.com/2022/07/speech-by-dimitris-koutsoumbas-general-secretary-of-kke-at-the-quadripartite-meeting-of-8th-july.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220905045446/http://www.idcommunism.com/2022/07/speech-by-dimitris-koutsoumbas-general-secretary-of-kke-at-the-quadripartite-meeting-of-8th-july.html|archive-date=2022-09-05|retrieved=2022-09-25}}</ref>

== Political Career ==
In 1987, he was elected into the party's [[Central Committee]] and in 1996 to the party's [[Politburo]]. He also became the director of [[Rizospastis]] that same year.

He got elected as General Secretary in the 19th Party Congress on 14 April 2013, succeeding [[Aleka Papariga]].<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Kathimerini|title=Βιογραφικό Κουτσούμπα|date=2013-04-14|url=http://www.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_articles_kathremote_1_14/04/2013_493676|retrieved=2023-10-14}}</ref>

During his tenure as General Secretary, KKE has voted against the Cohabitation Agreement in 2015 and is planning to vote against the Homosexual Marriage agreement as well.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Department for the Equality of Women of the CC of KKE|newspaper=Communist Party of Greece|title=On the Cohabitation Agreement|date=2016|url=https://inter.kke.gr/en/articles/On-The-Cohabitation-Agreement/|retrieved=2023-10-09|quote=}}</ref><ref>{{Web citation|author=Central Committee of the KKE|newspaper=Communist Party of Greece|title=KKE's positions on civil marriage for same-sex couples and its impact on children's rights|date=2024-01-29|url=https://www.kke.gr/article/Oi-theseis-toy-KKE-gia-ton-politiko-gamo-ton-omofylon-zeygarion-kai-tis-epiptoseis-toy-sta-dikaiomata-ton-paidion/|retrieved=2024-01-30}}</ref>

== References ==
[[Category:Communists]]

Federal Bureau of Investigation

2024-01-23T22:10:48Z

ComradeTrash: Added some minor background, added some information to the infobox. Removed "domestic terrorist organization" as i felt it was a bit too on the nose.

{{Infobox political party|name=Federal Bureau of Investigation|logo=FBI logo.png|founded=1908|abbr=FBI|founder=Charles Joseph Bonaparte|headquarters=935 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20535, United States|membership=35,000|affiliation1_title=Affiliation|affiliation1=Statesian Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie}}

The '''Federal Bureau of Investigation''' (FBI) is a "law enforcement" organization, created in 1908 by [[Charles Joseph Bonaparte]] in the [[United States of America|United States]]. The organization's initial purpose, according to it's own statement, was to address a "new era of lawlessness" plaguing the United States, which included "violent" [[Anarchism|anarchists]], striking workers, local political corruption and others. The organization was initially focused on white-collar and civil rights matters.<ref>{{Web citation|author=FBI|title=A Brief History, The Nation Calls, 1908-1923|url=https://www.fbi.gov/history/brief-history|quote=The country’s cities had grown enormously by 1908—there were more than 100 with populations over 50,000—and understandably, crime had grown right along with them. In these big cities, with their many overcrowded tenements filled with the poor and disillusioned and with all the ethnic tensions of an increasingly immigrant nation stirred in for good measure, tempers often flared. Clashes between striking workers and their factory bosses were turning increasingly violent.}}</ref>

In 1964, the FBI sent a letter to [[Martin Luther King|Martin Luther King, Jr.]] telling him to kill himself.<ref>{{News citation|journalist=Beverly Gage|date=2014-11-11|title=What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html|newspaper=The New York Times Magazine|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220127122211/https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html|archive-date=2022-01-27|retrieved=2022-03-19}}</ref> In 1969, they killed [[Black Panther Party|Black Panther]] leader [[Fred Hampton]] as part of [[COINTELPRO]].<ref>{{News citation|journalist=William Lee|date=2019-12-03|title=In 1969, charismatic Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton was killed in a hail of gunfire. 50 years later, the fight against police brutality continues|url=https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-black-panthers-raid-fred-hampton-50-years-20191203-kbzgztrvtfh7tp7x4ggtvhncpm-story.html|newspaper=Chicago Tribune|archive-url=https://archive.ph/20210322012855/https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-black-panthers-raid-fred-hampton-50-years-20191203-kbzgztrvtfh7tp7x4ggtvhncpm-story.html#selection-1241.0-1241.149|archive-date=2021-03-22|retrieved=2022-03-19}}</ref>

== References ==
<references />
[[Category:Government of the United States of America]]
[[Category:Imperialist secret police]]

Donald Trump

2024-01-23T21:52:35Z

ComradeTrash: /* Post-presidency */ - Reverted claims that the democrats specifically organized a raid against Trump, as it was his own speculation. Shortened "Federal Bureau of Investigation" to just FBI.

{{Infobox politician|image=Trump image.png|name=Donald John Trump|political_line=[[Capitalism]] [[Conservatism]] Right-wing [[populism]]|birth_date=14 June 1946|nationality=[[Statesian]]|birth_place=[[Queens]], [[New York City]], [[State of New York]], [[United States of America]]}}'''Donald Trump''' is a [[United States of America|Statesian]] politician and [[Bourgeoisie|billionaire]] who served as the 45th [[president of the United States]] from 2017 to 2021. He claims to be a pro-[[Proletariat|worker]] politician despite cutting taxes on billionaires and corporations.<ref name=":0">{{Web citation|newspaper=[[Liberation News]]|title=PSL Statement – Workers shouldn’t be fooled: Trump is a tool of the ultra-rich|date=2022-11-15|url=https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-workers-shouldnt-be-fooled-trump-is-a-tool-of-the-ultra-rich/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221118034739/https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-workers-shouldnt-be-fooled-trump-is-a-tool-of-the-ultra-rich/|archive-date=2022-11-18|retrieved=2022-11-19}}</ref>

Trump is a member of the [[America First]] movement, which believes the USA should be able to act unilaterally without limits from international law and treaties. It is not isolationist.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Bill Fletcher Jr.|newspaper=[[Monthly Review]]|title=Race Is About More Than Discrimination|date=2020-07-01|url=https://monthlyreview.org/2020/07/01/race-is-about-more-than-discrimination/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230323205358/https://monthlyreview.org/2020/07/01/race-is-about-more-than-discrimination/|archive-date=2023-03-23}}</ref>

== Pre-presidency ==

In November 2015, Donald Trump mocked [[Serge Kovaleski]]'s [[disability]], arthrogryposis, in response to Serge stating that they never claimed many Muslims support the [[September 11 attacks]].<ref>{{Web citation|url=https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-criticized-after-he-appears-mock-reporter-serge-kovaleski-n470016|title=Donald Trump Criticized After He Appears to Mock Reporter Serge Kovaleski}}</ref>

== Presidential term ==
In 2017, Donald Trump passed a tax cut that decreased corporate taxes to only 11.3% of profits. He also made a $45 billion cut in food stamp benefits.<ref>{{News citation|author=Robert Reich|newspaper=[[The Guardian]]|title=How Trump has betrayed the working class|date=2019-12-22|url=https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/22/trump-wants-to-be-champion-of-the-working-class-but-with-tax-cuts-for-the-rich-it-doesnt-add-up|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220416230953/https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/22/trump-wants-to-be-champion-of-the-working-class-but-with-tax-cuts-for-the-rich-it-doesnt-add-up|archive-date=2022-04-16|retrieved=2022-05-20}}</ref>

In 2020, the United States withdrew from the [[Paris Climate Agreement]].<ref>{{News citation|author=Tyler Clevenger, Dan Lashof|newspaper=World Resources Institute|title=7 Ways the Biden Administration Can Reverse Climate Rollbacks|date=2021-01-19|url=https://www.wri.org/insights/7-ways-biden-administration-can-reverse-climate-rollbacks|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220309070958/https://www.wri.org/insights/7-ways-biden-administration-can-reverse-climate-rollbacks|archive-date=2022-03-09|retrieved=2022-05-20}}</ref>

Under Trump's presidency, civilian deaths caused by the U.S. military increased greatly.<ref>{{News citation|author=Murtaza Hussain|newspaper=The Intercept|title=Civilian Deaths in U.S. Wars Are Skyrocketing Under Trump. It May Not Be Impeachable, but It’s a Crime.|date=2019-10-02|url=https://theintercept.com/2019/10/02/trump-impeachment-civilian-casualties-war/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220507031915/https://theintercept.com/2019/10/02/trump-impeachment-civilian-casualties-war/|archive-date=2022-05-07|retrieved=2022-05-20}}</ref>

=== Involvement in the Capitol insurrection ===
{{Main article|2021 United States Capitol insurrection}}
On 6 January 2021, near the end of his presidential term, Trump rallied his supporters to [[2021 United States Capitol insurrection|storm the United States capital]] in an attempt to reconsolidate his power. The attack ultimately failed and Trump's term came to a close.<ref>[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWJVMoe7OY0&t Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol | Visual Investigations]</ref>

According to an analysis on [[Medium]], the Capitol insurrection was a coup attempt by Trump. They argue that "6 January was an attempted coup, in the sense it was designed to trigger martial law and the suspension of the transition."<ref>[https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/the-trump-insurrection-a-marxist-analysis-dc229c34cdc1 The Trump Insurrection: a Marxist analysis]</ref>

== Post-presidency ==
On 8 August 2022, the [[Federal Bureau of Investigation|FBI]] raided Trump's home in the [[State of Florida]].<ref>[https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/08/09/guda-a09.html FBI raids Trump estate at Mar-a-Lago]</ref> In November 2022, Trump announced he would run for president again in 2024.<ref name=":0" />

== References ==
[[Category:Politicians in the United States]]
<references />
[[Category:Reactionaries]]
[[Category:Statesians of German descent]]
[[Category:Statesians of Scottish descent]]
[[Category:Presidents of the United States]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Trump, Donald}}

Privatization

2024-01-23T17:59:36Z

ComradeTrash: Opened up the page with a basic definition of privatization.

'''Privatization''' is defined by being the process wherein socially owned or public assets such as land, infrastructure and enterprises are sold to private investors.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Alan G. Nasser|newspaper=Monthly Review|title=The Tendency to Privatize|date=2003-03-01|url=https://monthlyreview.org/2003/03/01/the-tendency-to-privatize/}}</ref>
==References==
<references />

Ron DeSantis

2024-01-23T17:26:45Z

ComradeTrash: Fixed minor spelling mistakes; Added basic source for Trump Endorsement

{{Infobox politician|name=Ron DeSantis|image_size=200|birth_date=September 14, 1978|birth_place=Jacksonville, [[Florida]], [[United States of America|United States]]|nationality=Statesian|political_line=[[Racism]]|political_party=[[Republican Party (United States)|Republican Party]]|image=Ron DeSantis.png}}

'''Ronald Dion DeSantis''' is a [[United States of America|Statesian]] politician and governor of [[State of Florida|Florida]] since 2019. While in the [[United States Navy|Navy]], he tortured dissidents at [[Guantánamo Bay detention camp|Guantanamo Bay]].<ref>{{Web citation|author=Eyes Left Podcast|newspaper=[[Al Mayadeen]]|title="I was screaming and he was smiling": DeSantis ran Guantanamo torture|date=2022-11-21|url=https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/i-was-screaming-and-he-was-smiling:-desantis-ran-guantanamo|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221125172907/https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/i-was-screaming-and-he-was-smiling:-desantis-ran-guantanamo|archive-date=2022-11-25|retrieved=2022-11-27}}</ref> In 2023 he ran against [[Donald Trump]] for the [[Republican Party (United States)|Republican]] ticket of the 2024 U.S. presidential election before dropping out in early 2024.<ref name=":0">{{Web citation|author=David Smith|newspaper=The Guardian|title=Ron DeSantis put nearly all his eggs in the basket of a ‘war on woke’|date=2024-01-22|url=https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/21/ron-desantis-republican-presidential-candidate-dropped-out-analysis}}</ref>

== Governor of Florida ==
DeSantis introduced a bill in Florida charging [[Black Lives Matter|BLM]] protestors with felonies and preventing them from voting or having guns.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Devonte Sullivan|newspaper=[[Liberation News]]|title=St. Pete protests Desantis’ draconian anti-BLM protester bill|date=2021-01-27|url=https://www.liberationnews.org/st-pete-protests-desantis-draconian-anti-blm-protester-bill/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210129013947/https://www.liberationnews.org/st-pete-protests-desantis-draconian-anti-blm-protester-bill/|archive-date=2021-01-29|retrieved=2022-11-27}}</ref>

=== 2024 Presidential campaign ===
In May 2023 DeSantis announced his run for President during a conversation with [[Elon Musk]] on [[Twitter]], in a broadcast beset with technical difficulties. His campaign was centered around culture wars; attacking [[Transphobia|trans]] rights, abortion bans, and book banning.<ref name=":0" />

On January 21 2024, he announced he was pulling out of the race for President after an electoral defeat in [[Iowa]], endorsing Trump for President<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=NBC News|title=Ron DeSantis suspends his presidential bid and endorses Trump|date=2024-01-21|url=https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/ron-desantis-planning-drop-presidential-bid-sunday-rcna134953}}</ref>. In his announcement DeSantis misquoted [[United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland|British]] [[Imperialism|Imperialist]], [[Winston Churchill]], saying “Success is not final, failure is not fatal – it is the courage to continue that counts.”<ref name=":0" />

== References ==
[[Category:Statesian politicians]]
[[Category:Reactionaries]]

Portuguese Communist Party

2023-07-05T00:28:01Z

ComradeTrash: Added party infobox for this page

{{Infobox political party|name=Portuguese Communist Party|native_name=Partido Comunista Português|logo=PCP Logo.jpg|founded=06-03-1921|general_secretary=Paulo Raimundo}}{{Communist Parties}}
The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) is a communist party in Portugal founded in 1921.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Portuguese Communist Party|title=How the PCP was born|date=2006-12-29|url=https://www.pcp.pt/en/how-pcp-was-born|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211202032006/https://www.pcp.pt/en/how-pcp-was-born|archive-date=2021-12-02|retrieved=2023-03-10}}</ref>

== History==
The Portuguese Communist party was founded on March 6, 1921, influenced by the [[Russian revolution of 1917|October Revolution]]. On November 12, 1923, the first Party Congress took place in [[Lisbon]]. From its founding up until 2004, the Portuguese Communist Party had 17 congresses in total.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Portuguese Communist Party|title=A brief history of Party Congresses|date=2004-11-28|url=https://www.pcp.pt/en/brief-history-party-congresses|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230311160604/https://www.pcp.pt/en/brief-history-party-congresses|archive-date=2023-03-11|retrieved=2023-03-11}}</ref>

==Leadership==
The current [[General Secretary]] of the Portuguese Communist Party is [[Paulo Raimundo]].<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Portuguese Communist Party|title=General Secretary|url=https://www.pcp.pt/en/general-secretary|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230311161859/https://www.pcp.pt/en/general-secretary|archive-date=2023-03-11|retrieved=2023-03-11}}</ref> The Central Committee consists of 108 members.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Portuguese Communist Party|title=PCP Central Committee|url=https://www.pcp.pt/en/pcp-central-committee|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230311162246/https://www.pcp.pt/en/pcp-central-committee|archive-date=2023-03-11|retrieved=2023-03-11}}</ref> The Secretariat of the Central Committee consists of 9 members.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Portuguese Communist Party|title=Secretariat of the Central Committee|url=https://www.pcp.pt/en/secretariat-central-committee|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230311162455/https://www.pcp.pt/en/secretariat-central-committee|archive-date=2023-03-11|retrieved=2023-03-11}}</ref> The Political Committee of the Central Committee consists of 23 members.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Portuguese Communist Party|title=Political Committee of the Central Committee|url=https://www.pcp.pt/en/political-committee-central-committee|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230311162658/https://www.pcp.pt/en/political-committee-central-committee|archive-date=2023-03-11|retrieved=2023-03-11}}</ref> The Central Control Commission Consists of 9 members.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Portuguese Communist Party|title=Central Control Commission|url=https://www.pcp.pt/en/central-control-comission|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230311162847/https://www.pcp.pt/en/central-control-comission|archive-date=2023-03-11|retrieved=2023-03-11}}</ref>

==Constitution ==
The Portuguese Communist Party's Constitution has 13 chapters and was last updated on November 30, 2012. It claims to be a "party of the [[proletariat]], the party of the working class and of all Portuguese workers." In the Constitution, it states that it upholds "[[Marxism–Leninism|Marxism-Leninism]] as its theoretical basis" and plans to build [[socialism]] and [[communism]] in [[Portuguese Republic|Portugal]].<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=Portuguese Communist Party|title=Portuguese Communist Party Programme And Constitution|date=2023-03-12|url=https://www.pcp.pt/sites/default/files/documentos/pcp_programme_and_constitution_approved_by_the_19th_congress.pdf|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230312153524/https://www.pcp.pt/sites/default/files/documentos/pcp_programme_and_constitution_approved_by_the_19th_congress.pdf|archive-date=2023-03-12|retrieved=2023-03-12}}</ref>

==References==

<references />

File:PCP Logo.jpg

2023-07-05T00:24:23Z

ComradeTrash:

Logo of the portuguese communist party

Álvaro Cunhal

2023-07-05T00:15:45Z

ComradeTrash: Fixed redirect for the portuguese communist party

'''Álvaro Cunhal''' (10 November 1913 – 13 June 2005) was a [[Portuguese Republic|Portuguese]] Revolutionary writer, politician and one of the major opponents of the [[Fascism|fascist]] regime [[Estado Novo]]. An important figure of [[Marxism]] in Portugal, he’s also considered the basis for the movement and the ideology in Portugal, but also having a timid attitude and a quite reserved personality, being described by multiple biographical authors as “The man who does not want to be a subject to biography”, that demonstrates the will to know the movement better than to know those who support it. Despite this, his fight against the dictatorship is well-known as well as his constant support to the [[proletariat]] and the [[Portuguese Communist Party|party]] (for which he was secretary-general between 1961 and 1991).

== Biography ==
Born in Coimbra, Sé Nova in 10th of November 1913, Álvaro spent some of his childhood in Seia. His family moved to Lisbon where he would attend the Pedro Nunes school, although he later attended the Camões school.

Having graduated High School, he attended Law School at University of Lisbon where he started his revolutionary activism while also participating in the student associative movement, being elected in 1934 as the student representative in the University Senate. He was a member of the Youth Federation of the Portuguese Communists, was elected as secretary general in 1935, while being a member of the Portuguese Communist Party at the same time and since 1931. In 1935, he integrated the cadre of Clandestine Militants.

Arrested in 1937, 1940 – After which he participated in the reorganization of the Portuguese Communist Party of 1940/41 and it’s elected member of the Secretariat in 1942, position he held until 1949 where he was again arrested. He spent the whole 50’s in fascist prisons, taken to court, he criticized the dictatorship and defended the Party. Found guilty, he spent the next eleven years in jail, in which eight were spent in complete isolation – Without never losing the track of time. Being transferred from Lisbon’s Penitentiary to the prison-fortress of Peniche, he escaped with the help of other important Communists Militants.

The period between the beginning of the 60s until the Carnation Revolution is intense. He Integrated, once again, the Secretariat of the Central Committee, where he was elected Secretary-General of the Portuguese Communist Party in March 1961. He intervened directly when the direction was to go with right-wing parties and for the battle against the right-wing opportunism. Gave a decisive analysis of the National situation, in the description of the fascist regime, in plotting the orientation, in definition of tasks and in the brilliant political direction of the party, creating opportunities for the Revolution of April and its development, and after the Revolution, after almost forty years of struggle underground or in prison, he developed political action through the conditions that the Revolution gave.

He then became a minister in the first four Provisional Governments and was elected Deputy for the constituent Assembly in 197. Between 1975 and 1987, he was in the Assembly of the Republic and was also a member of the State Council from 1982 to 1992. His intervention in the development phase of the revolutionary process and later in the defense of the gains of the revolution reached by the counter-revolutionary process, it’s profoundly marked by the evaluation and the stimulus to the role of the struggle of the proletariat.<ref>http://www.alvarocunhal.pcp.pt/elementos-biogr%C3%A1ficos-de-%C3%A1lvaro-cunhal</ref>

He died at the age of 92, on June 13 2005. Thousands attended his funeral, in solidarity with his work and the communist party.

== References ==

Library:Open veins of latin America

2023-06-25T17:15:39Z

ComradeTrash: Chapter 1 of Open Veins of Latin America

== 1. Lust for Gold, Lust for Silver ==
'''~'''

=== THE SIGN OF THE CROSS ON THE HILT OF THE SWORD ===

When Christopher Columbus headed across the great emptiness west of Christendom, he had accepted the challenge of legend. Terrible storms would play with his ships as if they were nutshells and hurl them into the jaws of monsters; the sea serpent, hungry for human flesh, would be lying in wait in the murky depths. According to fifteenth-century man, only 1,000 years remained before the purifying flames of the Last Judgment would destroy the world, and the world was then the Mediterranean Sea with its uncertain horizons: Europe, Africa, Asia. Portuguese navigators spoke of strange corpses and curiously carved pieces of wood that floated in on the west wind, but no one suspected that the world was about to be startlingly extended by a great new land.

America not only lacked a name. The Norwegians did not know they had discovered it long ago, and Columbus himself died convinced that he had reached Asia by the western route. In 1492, when Spanish boats first trod the beaches of the Bahamas, the Admiral thought these islands were an outpost of the fabulous isle of Zipango—Japan. Columbus took along a copy of Marco Polo’s book, and covered its margins with notes. The inhabitants of Zipango, said Marco Polo, “have gold in the greatest abundance, its sources being inexhaustible. . . In this island there are pearls also, in large quantities, of a red color, round in shape, and of

great size, equal in value to, or even exceeding that of white pearls.” The wealth of Zipango had become known to the Great Kubla Khan, stirring a desire to conquer it, but he had failed. Out of Marco Polo’s sparkling pages leaped all the good things of creation: there were nearly 13,000 islands in the Indian seas, with mountains of gold and pearls and twelve kinds of spices in enormous quantities, in addition to an abundance of white and black pepper.

Pepper, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, and cinnamon were as prized as salt in preserving meat against putrefaction and loss of flavor in winter. Spain’s Catholic rulers decided to finance the adventure to get direct access to the sources and to free themselves from the burdensome chain of intermediaries and speculators who monopolized the trade in spices and tropical plants, muslins and sidearms, from the mysterious East. The desire for precious metals, the medium of payment in commercial dealings, also sparked the crossing of the sinister seas. All of Europe needed silver; the seams in Bohemia, Saxony, and the Tyrol were almost exhausted.

For Spain it was an era of reconquest: 1492 was not only the year of the discovery of America, the new world born of that error which had such momentous consequences, but also of the recovery of Granada. Early that year Ferdinand of Aragón and Isabella of Castile, whose marriage had linked their dominions, stormed the last Arab redoubt on Spanish soil. It had taken nearly eight centuries to win back what was lost in seven years, and the war of reconquest had drained the royal treasury. But this was a holy war, a Christian war against Islam; and it was no accident that, in that same year of 1492, 150,000 Jews were expelled from the country. Spain achieved unity and reality as a nation wielding swords with the Sign of the Cross on their hilts. Queen Isabella became the patroness of the Holy Inquisition. The feat of discovering America can only be understood in the context of the tradition of crusading wars that prevailed in medieval Castile; the Church needed no prompting to provide a halo for the conquest of unknown lands across the ocean. Pope Alexander VI, who was Spanish, ordained Queen Isabella as proprietor and master of the New World. The expansion of the kingdom of Castile extended God’s reign over the earth.

Three years after the discovery Columbus personally directed the military campaign against the natives of Haiti, which he called Española.

A handful of cavalry, 200 foot soldiers, and a few specially trained dogs decimated the Indians. More than 500, shipped to Spain, were sold as slaves in Seville and died miserably. Some theologians protested and the enslavement of Indians was formally banned at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Actually it was not banned but blessed: before each military action the captains of the conquest were required to read to the Indians, without an interpreter but before a notary public, a long and rhetorical ''Requerimiento'' exhorting them to adopt the holy Catholic faith:

''f you do not, or if you maliciously delay in so doing, I certify that with God’s help I will advance powerfully against you and make war on you wherever and however I am able, and will subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their majesties and take your women and children to be slaves, and as such I will sell and dispose of them as their majesties may order, and I will take your possessions and do you all the harm and damage that I can.2''

America was the vast kingdom of the Devil, its redemption impossible or doubtful; but the fanatical mission against the natives’ heresy was mixed with the fever that New World treasures stirred in the conquering hosts. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, faithful comrade of Hernán Cortes in the conquest of Mexico, wrote that they had arrived in America “to serve God and His Majesty and also to get riches.”

At his first landing on San Salvador atoll, Columbus was dazzled by the transparent hues of the Caribbean, the green landscape, the soft clean air, the magnificent birds, and the youths “with size and with good faces and well made” who lived there. He gave the natives “some red caps and strings of beads, and many other trifles of small value, which gave them great pleasure. Wherewith they were much delighted, and this made them so much our friends that it was a marvel to see.” They knew nothing of swords, and when these were shown to them they grasped the sharp edges and cut themselves. Meanwhile, as the Admiral relates in his logbook, “1 was very attentive to them, and strove to learn if they had any gold. Seeing some of them with little bits of metal hanging at their noses, I gathered from them by signs, that by going southward or steering round the island in that direction, there would be found a king who possessed great cups full of gold, and in large quantities.”3 For “of gold is treasure made, and with it he who has it does as he wills in the world and it even sends souls to Paradise.”

On his third voyage, Columbus still believed he was in the China Sea when he was off the coast of Venezuela. This did not prevent him from reporting that an endless land which was earthly paradise extended from there. Later Amerigo Vespucci, an early sixteenth-century explorer of the Brazilian coast, reported to Lorenzo de Mëdicis: “The trees are of such beauty and sweetness that we felt we were in earthly Paradise.”4 (The lawyer Antonio de Leon Pinelo devoted two entire volumes to demonstrating that the Garden of Eden was in America. In ''El Paraiso en el Nuevo Mundo'' (1656) he had a map of South America showing, in the center, the Garden of Eden watered by the Amazon, the Rio de la Plata, the and the Magdalena. The forbidden fruit was the banana. The map showed the exact spot from which Noah’s Ark took off at the time of the Flood.) In 1503 Columbus wrote to his monarchs from Jamaica: “When I discovered the Indies, I said they were the greatest rich domain in the world. I spoke of the gold, pearls, precious stones, spices

In the Middle Ages a small bag of pepper was worth more than a man’s life, but gold and silver were the keys used by the Renaissance to open the doors of paradise in heaven and of capitalist mercantilism on earth. The epic of the Spaniards and Portuguese in America combined propagation of the Christian faith with usurpation and plunder of native wealth. European power stretched out to embrace the world. The virgin lands, bristling with jungles and dangers, fanned the flames of avarice among the captains, the ''hidalgos'' on horseback, and the ragged soldiers who went out after the spectacular booty of war: they believed in glory, in “the sun of the dead,” and in the key to achieving it, which Cortés defined thus: “Fortune favors the daring.” Cortés himself had mortgaged everything he owned to equip his Mexican expedition. With a few exceptions—Columbus, Pedrarias Dávila, Magellan—the expeditions of conquest were not financed by the state but by the conquistadors themselves, or by businessmen who put up money for their ventures

The myth of El Dorado, the golden king, was born: golden were the streets and houses of his kingdom’s cities. In search of El Dorado a century after Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh sailed up the Orinoco and was defeated by its cataracts. The will-o’-the-wisp of the “mountain that gushed silver” became a reality in 1545 with the discovery of Potosi, but before this many adventurers who sailed up the Rio Paraná in a vain

search for the silver spring had died of hunger or disease or pierced by native arrows.

There was indeed gold and silver in large quantities, accumulated in the Mexican plateau and the Andean ''altiplano.'' In 1519 Cortés told Spain of the fabulous magnitude of Montezuma’s Aztec treasure, and fifteen years later there arrived in Seville the gigantic ransom—a roomful of gold and two of silver—which Francisco Pizarro had made the Inca Atahualpa pay before strangling him. Years earlier the Crown had paid the sailors on Columbus’s first voyage with gold carried off from the Antilles. The Caribbean island populations finally stopped paying tribute because they had disappeared: they were totally exterminated in the gold mines, in the deadly task of sifting auriferous sands with their bodies half submerged in water, or in breaking up the ground beyond the point of exhaustion, doubled up over the heavy cultivating tools brought from Spain. Many natives of Haiti anticipated the fate imposed by their white oppressors: they killed their children and committed mass suicide. The mid-sixteenth-century historian Fernández de Oviedo interpreted the Antillean holocaust thus: “Many of them, by way of diversion, took poison rather than work, and others hanged themselves with their own hands.”5 (His interpretation founded a school I am amazed to read, in the latest (1970) book by the French technician René Dumont, Cuba'': Is It Socia1ist?'' “The Indians were not totally exterminated. Their genes subsist in Cuban chromosomes. They felt such an aversion for the tension which continuous work demands that some killed themselves rather than accept forced labor..”)

'''THE GODS RETURN WITH SECRET WEAPONS'''

While passing Tenerife on his first voyage, Columbus had witnessed a great volcanic eruption. It seemed an omen of all that would come later in the immense new lands which, surprisingly, stood athwart the western route to Asia. America was there—at first the subject of conjecture from its endless coasts, then conquered in successive waves like a furious tide beating in. Admirals gave place to governors, ships’ crews were converted into invading hosts. Papal bulls had apostolically granted Africa to the Portuguese Crown, and the lands “unknown like those already discovered by your envoys and those to be discovered in the

future” to the Crown of Castile America had been given to Queen Isabella In 1508 another bull granted the Spanish Crown, in perpetuity, all tithes collected in America. The coveted patronage of the New World Church included a royal prerogative over all ecclesiastical benefices.

The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in 1494, allowed Portugal to occupy Latin America territories below a dividing line traced by the Pope, and in 1530 Martim Affonso de Sousa founded the first Portuguese communities in Brazil, expelling French intruders By then the Spaniards, crossing an infinity of hellish jungles and hostile deserts, had advanced far in the process of exploration and conquest In 1513 the South Pacific glittered before the eyes of Vasco Nunez de Balboa In the fall of 1522 the eighteen survivors of Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition returned to Spain: they had for the first time united both oceans and confirmed that the world was round by circling it. Three years earlier Hernan Corres’s ten ships had sailed from Cuba toward Mexico, and in 1523 Pedro de Alvarado launched the conquest of Central America Francisco Pizarro, an illiterate pig-breeder, triumphantly entered Cuzco in 1533 and seized the heart of Inca empire In 1540 Pedro de Valdivia crossed the Atacama desert and founded Santiago de Chile The conquistadors penetrated the Chaco and laid bare the New World from Peru to the mouth of the mightiest river on our planet.

There was something of everything among the natives of Latin America: astronomers and cannibals, engineers and Stone Age savages But none of the native cultures knew iron or the plow, or glass or gun powder, or used the wheel except on their votive carts The civilization from across the ocean that descended upon these lands was undergoing the creative explosion of the Renaissance; Latin America seemed like another invention to be incorporated, along with gun powder, printing, paper, and the compass, in the bubbling birth of the Modern Age The unequal development of the two world explains the relative ease with which native civilizations succumbed Cortes landed at Veracruz with no more than 100 sailors and 508 soldiers; he had 16 horses, 32 crossbows, 10 bronze cannon, and a few harquebuses, muskets, and pistols Pizarro entered Cajamarca with 180 soldiers and 37 horses That was enough Yet the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, was then five times larger that Madrid and had double the population of Seville, Spain’s largest city, and in Peru Pizarro met an army of 100,000 Indians

The Indians were also defeated by terror. The emperor Montezuma received the first news in his palace: a large hill was moving over the sea. More messengers arrived: “He was very alarmed by the report of how the cannon exploded, how its thunder reverberated, and how it filled one with awe and stunned one’s ears. And when it went off, a sort of stone hail came from its entrails and it rained fire.” The strangers sat on “deer as high as the rooftops.” Their bodies were completely covered, “only their faces can be seen. They are white, as if made of lime. They have yellow hair, although some have black. Long are their beards.”6 Montezuma thought it was the god Quetzalcoatl returning: there had been eight prophesies of this not long before. Hunters had brought him a bird with a round mirror-like crest on its head in which the sunset was reflected; in this mirror Montezuma saw squadrons of warriors marching on Mexico, Quetzalcoatl had come from the east and gone to the east: he was white and bearded. Also white and bearded was Viracocha, the bisexual god of the Incas. And the east was the cradle of the Mayas’ hero- ancestors.( These remarkable coincidences have given rise to the hypothesis that the gods of the native religions were really Europeans our shores long before Columbus.7)

The avenging gods who were now returning to settle accounts with their peoples had armor and coats of mail, lustrous caparisons that deflected arrows and stones; their weapons emitted deadly rays and darkened the air with suffocating smoke. The conquistadors also practiced the arts of treachery and intrigue with refined expertise. They sagely allied themselves with the Tlaxcalans against Montezuma and effectively exploited the split in the Inca empire between the brothers Huáscar and Atahualpa. They knew how to win accomplices for their crimes among the intermediate ruling classes, priests, officials, and defeated soldiers and high Indian chiefs. But they also used other weapons—or, if you prefer, other factors operated objectively for the victory of the invaders. Horses and bacteria, for example.

Horses, like camels, had once been indigenous to Latin America but had become extinct. In Europe, where they were introduced by Arab horsemen, they had proved to be of enormous military and economic value. When they reappeared in Latin America during the conquest, they lent magic powers to the invaders in the natives’ astonished eyes.

Atahualpa saw the first Spanish soldiers arriving on spirited steeds adorned with plumes and little bells, making thunder and clouds of dust with their swift hooves: panic-stricken, the Inca fell down on his back. The chief Tecum, leading the descendants of the Mayas, beheaded the horse of Pedro de Alvarado with his lance, convinced that it was part of the ''conquistador:'' Alvarado stood up and killed him. A few horses in medieval war trappings scattered the mass of Indians, sowing terror and death. During the colonizing process, priests and missionaries spread for the superstitious Indians’ benefit the tale that horses were of sacred origin, for Santiago, Spain’s patron saint, rode a white horse which had won valiant victories against the Moors and the Jews with the aid of Divine Providence.

Bacteria and viruses were the most effective allies, The Europeans brought with them, like biblical plagues, smallpox and tetanus, various lung, intestinal, and venereal diseases, trachoma, typhus, leprosy, yellow fever, and teeth- rotting caries. Smallpox was the first to appear. Must not this unknown and horrible epidemic, which produced burning fever and decomposed the flesh, be a chastisement from the gods? The invaders “moved into Tlaxcala,” one native eyewitness reported, “and then the epidemic spread: cough, burning hot pustules.” Reported another: “The contagious, oppressive, cruel pustule sickness brought death to many.”8 The Indians died like flies; their organisms had no defense against the new diseases. Those who survived were feeble and useless. The Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro estimates that more than half the aboriginal population of America, Australia, and Oceania died from the contamination of first contact with white men.

=== “THEY CRAVE GOLD LIKE HUNGRY SWINE” ===

Firing their harquebuses, hacking with their swords, and breathing pestilence, the little band of implacable conquistadors advanced into America. The conquered tell us what it was like. After the Cholula massacre Montezuma sent new envoys to Cortës, who was advancing on the Valley of Mexico. They brought gifts of golden collars and quetzal-bird feather banners. The Spaniards “were in seventh heaven,” says the Nahuati text preserved in the Florentine Codex. “They lifted

up the gold as if they were monkeys, with expressions of joy, as if it put new life into them and lit up their hearts. As if it were certainly something for which they yearn with a great thirst. Their bodies fatten on it and they hunger violently for it. They crave gold like hungry swine.” Later, when Cortés reached Tenochtitlán, the resplendent Aztec capital with 300,000 inhabitants, the Spaniards entered the treasure house, “and then they made a great ball of the gold and set a fire, putting to the flames all that remained no matter how valuable, so that everything burned. As for the gold, the Spaniards reduced it and made bars.”

War followed. Finally Cortés, who had lost Tenochtitlán, reconquered it in 1521: “And by then we had no shields left, no clubs, and nothing to eat, we weren’t eating anymore.” Montezuma, harried by the priests who accused him of treason, had killed himself. Devastated, burned, and littered with corpses, the city fell: “Shields were its defense, but they were not enough Cones had expressed horror at the sacrifices of the Veracruz Indians, who burned children’s entrails for a smoke offering to the gods, but there were no limits to his own cruelty in the reconquered city: “And all night long it rained on us.” The gallows and torture were not enough, however: the captured treasure never measured up to the Spaniards’ imagination, and for years they dug in the lake bottom searching for gold and precious objects presumably hidden by the Indians.

Pedro de Alvarado and his men fell upon Guatemala and “killed so many Indians that it made a river of blood which is called the Olimtepeque,” and “the day became red because of all the blood there was on that day.” Before the decisive battle, “and seeing Indians tortured, they told the Spaniards not to torture them anymore, that the captains Nehaib and IxquIn—Nehaib in the guise of an eagle and of a lion—had much gold, silver, diamonds, and emeralds for them. Then they gave them to the Spaniards and the Spaniards kept them.”9

Before Pizarro strangled and decapitated Atahualpa, he got from him a ransom of “gold and silver weighing more than 20,000 marks in fine silver and 1,326,000 escudos in the finest gold.” Then Pizarro advanced on Cuzco. His soldiers thought they were entering the city of the Caesars, so dazzling was the capital of the empire, but they proceeded without delay to sack the Temple of the Sun. “Struggling and fighting among each other, each trying to get his hands on the lion’s share, the

soldiers in their coats of mail trampled on jewels and images and pounded the gold utensils with hammers to reduce them to a more portable size. . . They tossed all the temple’s gold into a melting pot to turn it into bars: the laminae that covered the walls, the marvelous representations of trees, birds, and other objects in the garden.”10

Today in the enormous bare plaza at the center of Mexico City the Catholic cathedral rises on the ruins of Tenochtitlán’s greatest temple and the government palace occupies the site where Cuauhtémoc, the Aztec chief martyred by Cortés, had his residence. Tenochtitlán was razed. In Peru, Cuzco suffered the same fate, but the conquistadors could not completely destroy its massive walls and this testimony in stone to the Inca’s colossal architecture can still be seen in the bases of the colonial buildings.

=== THE SILVER CYCLE: THE SPLENDORS OF POTOSI ===

They say that even the horses were shod with silver in the great days of the city of Potosi, The church altars and the wings of cherubim in processions for the Corpus Christi celebration in 1658, were made of silver: the streets from the cathedral to the church of Recoletos were completely resurfaced with silver bars. In Potosi, silver built temples and palaces, monasteries and gambling dens; it prompted tragedies and fiestas, led to the spilling of blood and wine, fired avarice, and unleashed extravagance and adventure. The sword and the cross marched together in the conquest and plunder of Latin America, and captains and ascetics, knights and evangelists, soldiers and monks came together in Potosi to help themselves to its silver. Molded into cones and ingots, the viscera of the Cerro Rico—the rich hill—substantially fed the development of Europe. “Worth a Peru” was the highest possible praise of a person or a thing after Pizarro took Cuzco, but once the Cerro had been discovered Don Quixote de la Mancha changed the words: “Worth a Potosi,” he says to Sancho. This jugular vein of the viceroyalty, America’s fountain of silver, had 120,000 inhabitants by the census of 1573. Only twenty-eight years had passed since the city sprouted out of the Andean wilderness and already, as if by magic, it had the same population as London and more than Seville, Madrid, Rome, or Paris. A new census

in 1650 gave Potosi a population of 160,000. It was one of the world’s biggest and richest cities, ten times bigger than Boston—at a time when New York had not even begun to call itself by that name. Potosi’s history did not begin with the Spaniards. Before the conquest the Inca Huayna Cápaj had heard his vassals talk of the Sumaj Orko, the beautiful hill, and he was finally able to see it when, having fallen ill, he had himself taken to the thermal springs of Tarapaya. From the straw-hut village of Cantumarca the Inca’s eyes contemplated for the first time that perfect cone which rises proud1y between the mountain peaks. He was awestruck by its reddish hues, slender form, and giant size, as people have continued to be through ensuing centuries. But the Inca suspected that it must conceal precious stones and rich metals in its bowels, and he wanted to add new decorations to the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco. The gold and silver that the Incas took from the mines of Colque Porco and Andacaba did not leave the kingdom: they were not used commercially but for the adoration of the gods. Indian miners had hardly dug their flints into the beautiful Cerro’s veins of silver when a deep, hollow voice struck them to the ground. Emerging as loud as thunder from the depths of the wilderness, the voice said in Quechua: “This is not for you; God is keeping these riches for those who come from afar.” The Indians fled in terror and the Inca, before departing from the Cerro, changed its name. It became “Potojsi,” which means to thunder, burst, explode.

“Those who come from afar” took little time in coming, although Huayna Cápaj was dead by the time the captains of the conquest made their way in. In 1545 the Indian Huallpa, running in pursuit of an escaped llama, had to pass the night on the Cerro, It was intensely cold and he lit a fire. By its light he saw a white and shining vein—pure silver. The Spanish avalanche was unleashed. Wealth flowed like water. The Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, showed his gratitude by bestowing on Potosi the title of Imperial City and a shield with the inscription: “I am rich Potosi, treasure of the world, king of the mountains, envy of kings.” Only eleven years after Hualipa’s discovery the new-born Imperial City celebrated the coronation of Philip II with twenty-four days of festivities costing 8 million ''pesos duros.'' The Cerro was the most potent of magnets. Hard as life was at its base, at an altitude of nearly 14,000 feet the place was flooded with treasure

hunters who took the bitter cold as if it were a tax on living there. Suddenly a rich and disorderly society burst forth beside the silver, and Potosi became “the nerve center of the kingdom,” in the words of Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza. By the beginning of the seventeenth century it had thirty-six magnificently decorated churches, thirty-six gambling houses, and fourteen dance academies. Salons, theaters, and fiesta stage-settings had the finest tapestries, curtains, heraldic emblazonry, and wrought gold and silver; multicolored damasks and cloths of gold and silver hung from the balconies of houses. Silks and fabrics came from Granada, Flanders, and Calabria; hats from Paris and London; diamonds from Ceylon; precious stones from India; pearls from Panama; stockings from Naples; crystal from Venice; carpets from Persia; perfumes from Arabia; porcelain from China. The ladies sparkled with diamonds, rubies, and pearls; the gentlemen sported the finest embroidered fabrics from Holland. Bullfights were followed by tilting contests, and love and pride inspired frequent medieval-style duels with emerald-studded, gaudily plumed helmets, gold filigree saddles and stirrups, Toledo swords, and richly caparisoned Chilean ponies.

In 1579 the royal judge Matienzo complained: “There is never a shortage of novelty, scandal, and wantonness.” Potosi had at the time 800 professional gamblers and 120 famous prostitutes, whose resplendent salons were thronged with wealthy miners. In 1608 Potosi celebrated the feast of the Holy Sacrament with six days of plays and six nights of masked balls, eight days of bullfights and three of fiestas, two of tournaments and other dissipations.

=== SPAIN OWNED THE COW, OTHERS DRANK THE MILK ===

Between 1545 and 1558 the prolific silver mines of Potosi, in what is now Bolivia, and of Zacatecas and Guanajuato in Mexico, were discovered, and the mercury amalgam process, which made possible the exploitation of the lowest- grade silver, began to be used. The “silver rush” quickly eclipsed gold mining. In the mid-seventeenth century silver constituted more than 99 percent of mineral exports from Spanish America. Latin America was a huge mine, with Potosi as its chief center. Some excessively enthusiastic Bolivian writers insist that in three

centuries Spain got enough metal from Potosi to make a silver bridge from the tip of the Cerro to the door of the royal palace across the ocean. This is certainly fanciful, but even the reality stretches one’s imagination to the limit: the flow of silver achieved gigantic dimensions. The large-scale clandestine export of Latin American silver as contraband to the Philippines, to China, and to Spain itself is not taken into account by Earl Hamilton, who nevertheless cites, in his well-known work on the subject, astounding figures based on data from the Casa de Contratacion in Seville.11 Between 1503 and 1660, 185,000 kilograms of gold and 16,000,000 of silver arrived at the Spanish port of Sanlukar de Barrameda, Silver shipped to Spain in little more than a century and a half exceeded three times the total European reserves—and it must be remembered that these official figures are not complete.

The metals taken from the new colonial dominions not only stimulated Europe’s economic development; one may say that they made it possible. Even the effect of the Persian treasure seized and poured into the Hellenic world by Alexander the Great cannot be compared with Latin America’s formidable contribution to the progress of other regions. Not, however, to that of Spain, although Spain owned the sources of Latin American silver. As it used to be said in the seventeenth century, “Spain is like a mouth that receives the food, chews it, and passes it on to the other organs, retaining no more than a fleeting taste of the particles that happen to stick in its teeth.”12 The Spaniards owned the cow, but others drank the milk. The kingdom’s creditors, mostly foreigners, systematically emptied the “Green Strongroom” of Seville’s Casa de Contratación, which was supposed to guard, under three keys in three different hands, the treasure flowing from Latin America.

The Crown was mortgaged. It owed nearly all of the silver shipments, before they arrived, to German, Genoese, Flemish, and Spanish bankers. The same fate befell most of the duty collected in Spain itself: in 1543, 65 percent of all the royal revenues went to paying annuities on debts. Only in a minimal way did Latin American silver enter the Spanish economy; although formally registered in Seville, it ended in the hands of the Fuggers, the powerful bankers who had advanced to the Pope the funds needed to finish St. Peter’s, and of other big moneylenders of the period, such as the Welsers, the Shetzes, and the Grimaldis. The silver

also went to paying for the export of ''non-Spanish'' merchandise to the New World.

The rich empire had a poor metropolis, although the illusion of prosperity blew increasingly large bubbles into the air. The Crown kept opening up new war fronts, while on Spanish soil the aristocracy devoted itself to extravagance, and priests and warriors, nobles and beggars, multiplied as dizzily as living costs and interest rates. Industry died with the birth of great sterile latifundia, and Spain’s sick economy could not stand up to the impact of the rising demand for food and merchandise that was the inevitable result of colonial expansion. The big rise in public expenditures and the choking pressure of the overseas possessions’ consumer needs accelerated trade deficits and set off galloping inflation. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, French minister of marine under Louis XIV, wrote, “The more business a state does with the Spaniards, the more silver it has.” There was a sharp European struggle for the Spanish trade, which brought with it the market and the silver of Latin America. A late- seventeenth-century French document tells us that Spain controlled only 5 percent of the trade with “its” overseas colonial possessions, despite the juridical mirage of its monopoly: almost a third of the total was in Dutch and Flemish hands, a quarter belonged to the French, the Genoese controlled over one-fifth, the English one-tenth, and the Germans somewhat less. ''Latin America was a European business.''

Charles V, heir to the Holy Roman emperors by purchased election, man of jutting chin and idiot gaze, spent only sixteen of his reign’s forty years in Spain. Having áccupied the throne without knowing a word of Spanish, he governed with a retinue of rapacious Flemings whom he authorized to take out of Spain muletrain-loads of gold and jewels, and whom he showered with bishoprics, bureaucratic titles, and even the first license to ship slaves to the Latin American colonies. Intent on hounding Satan all across Europe, he drained Latin America of its treasure for his religious wars. The Hapsburg dynasty did not collapse with his death; Spain had to suffer them for nearly two centuries. The great leader of the Counter-Reformation was his son, Philip II. From his huge palace-monastery, Escorial, on the slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama, Philip spread the grim operations of the Inquisition across the world and launched his armies against the centers of heresy. Calvinism had taken hold in Holland, England, and France, and the Turks

embodied the peril of a return to the faith of Allah. Spreading the true faith was a costly business: the few gold and silver objects, marvels of Latin American art, that arrived unmelted-down from Mexico and Peru were quickly taken from the Casa de Contratación in Seville and thrown into the crucibles.

At the same time heretics, or those suspected of heresy, were roasted in the Inquisition’s purifying flames, Torquemada burned books, and the Devil’s tail peeped out from every crevice. The war against Protestantism was also the war against ascendant capitalism in Europe. The “perpetuation of the Crusades,” writes J.H. Elliott, “meant the perpetuation of the archaic social organization of a nation of Crusaders.” The metals of Latin America—the delirium and downfall of Spain—provided a means to fight against the nascent forces of the modern economy. Charles V had already defeated the Castilian bourgeoisie in the uprisings of the Comuneros, which had become a social revolution against the nobility, its property and privileges. The uprisings were crushed following the betrayal of the city of Burgos, which would be Francisco Franco’s capital four centuries later. With the last rebel fires extinguished, Charles returned to Spain accompanied by 4,000 German soldiers. At the same time, the highly radical insurrection of weavers, spinners, and artisans, who had taken power in the city of Valencia and had extended it through the whole district, was drowned in blood.

Defense of the Catholic faith turned out to be a mask for the struggle against history. The expulsion of the Jews in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella had deprived Spain of many able artisans and of indispensable capital. The expulsion of the Arabs in 1609 is considered less important, although no fewer than 275,000 Moors were put over the border, disastrously effecting the economy of Valencia and ruining the fertile Aragonese lands south of the Ebro. Previously, Philip II had thrown out thousands of Flemish artisans guilty or suspected of Protestantism. England welcomed them and they made a solid contribution to that country’s manufactures.

It is clear that the enormous distances and the difficulty of communication .were not the main obstacles to Spain’s industrial progress. Spanish capitalists became no more than rentiers through the purchase of titles to Crown debts, and did not invest their capital in industrial development. The economic surplus went into unproductive channels:

the old wealthy class, the ''señores of'' gallows and knife, the owners of land and titles of nobility, built palaces and accumulated jewels; the new rich, speculators and merchants, bought land and titles. Neither the one nor the other paid taxes worth mentioning, nor could they be imprisoned for debt. Anyone devoting himself to industrial activity automatically lost his membership in the gentleman’s club.

Successive commercial treaties, signed after Spain’s military defeats in Europe, gave concessions that stimulated maritime trade between the port of Cádiz, where Latin America’s metals were landed, and French, English, Dutch, and Hanseatic ports. Every year from 800 to 1,000 ships unloaded in Spain the products of other countries’ industries. They reloaded with Latin American silver and Spanish wool that went to foreign looms, whence it would be returned already woven by the expanding European industry. The Cádiz monopolists merely forwarded foreign industrial products, which were then shipped to the New World: if Spanish manufactures could not even supply the home market, how could they satisfy the needs of the colonies?

The laces of Lille and Arras, Dutch fabrics, Brussels tapestries, Florentine brocades, Venetian crystal, Milanese arms, and French wines and cloths swamped the Spanish market, at the expense of local production, to satisfy the ostentation and consumer demands of ever more numerous and powerful parasites in ever poorer countries. Industry died in the egg, and the Hapsburgs did their best to speed its demise. The process reached its height in the mid- sixteenth century when importation of foreign textiles was authorized and all export of Castilian fabrics was banned except to Latin America. In contrast, as Jorge Abelardo Ramos has noted, were the policies of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I in England, when in that ascendant nation they banned the export of gold and silver, monopolized letters of credit, stopped wool exports, and ousted the North Sea merchants of the Hanseatic League from British ports. Meanwhile, the Italian republics were protecting their industry and external commerce through tariffs, privileges, and rigorous prohibitions: craftsmen could not leave the country under pain of death.

Everything went to rack and ruin, Of 16,000 looms in Seville on Charles V’s death in 1558, only 400 remained when Philip II died forty years later. The

7 million sheep in Andalusian flocks were reduced to 2 million. In ''Don Quixote de Ia Mancha—which'' was banned for a long

time in Latin America—Cervantes drew a portrait of the society of his time. A mid-sixteenth-century decree stopped the importation of foreign books and barred students from taking courses outside Spain; the Salamanca student body was reduced by half in a few decades; there were 9,000 convents and the clergy multiplied almost as fast as the cloak-and-sword nobility; 160,000 foreigners monopolized foreign trade; and the squanderings of the aristocracy condemned Spain to economic impotence. Around 1630, 150-odd dukes, marquises, counts, and viscounts garnered 5 million ducats in annual rents, adding ever more frills to their fancy titles. The Duke of Medinaceli had 700 servants and the Duke of Osuna, to score off the Tsar of Russia, dressed his 300 in leather cloaks.( The species is not yet extinct, I opened a Madrid magazine at the end of 1969 and read of the death of Doña Teresa Beltrán de Lis y Pidal Gorouaki y Chico, Duchess of Albuquerque and Marchionesa of the Atcañices and Balbases. She is mourned by the widower Duke of de Guzmán Albuquerque, Don Beltrán Alonso Osorio y Diez de Rivera Martos y Figueroa, Marquis of the Alcañices, of the Balbases, of Cadreita, of Cuéllar, of Cullera, of Montaos, Count of Fuensaldana, of Grajal, of Huelma, of Ledesma, of La Torre, of Villanueva de Canedo, of Villahumbrosa, thrice Grandee of Spain.) The seventeenth century was the time of the ''picaro,'' the rogue, and of hunger and epidemics. Spain had countless beggars, but this did not discourage an influx of foreign beggars from every corner of Europe. By 1700 there were 625,000 ''hidalgos,'' knights of the battlefield, although the country was emptying: its population had dwindled by half in somewhat more than two centuries, and was equal to that of England, which had doubled in the same period. The Hapsburg regime finally ended in 1700 amid total bankruptcy. Chronic unemployment, idle latifundios, chaotic currency, ruined industry, lost war, empty coffers, central authority ignored in the provinces: the Spain that Philip V faced was “hardly less defunct than its dead master.”13

The Bourbons gave Spain a more modern look, but at the end of the eighteenth century there were 200,000 clergymen and the unproductive population continued to proliferate at the expense of the country’s underdevelopment. More than 10,000 towns and cities were still subject to the seignorial jurisdiction of the nobility and thus outside the king’s direct control. The latifundia and the institution of entailed estates remained intact, along with obscurantism and fatalism. Nothing had improved since the era of Philip IV when a group of theologians,

examining a project for a canal between the Manzanares and the Tagus, had ended their deliberations by declaring that if God had wanted the rivers to be navigable, He himself would have so arranged it.

=== THE DISTRIBUTION OF FUNCTIONS BETWEEN HORSEMAN AND HORSE ===

Marx wrote in Chapter 3 of the first volume of ''Capital.'' “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.

Plunder, internal and external, was the most important means of primitive accumulation of capital, an accumulation which, after the Middle Ages, made possible a new historical stage in world economic evolution. As the money economy extended, more and more social strata and regions of the world became involved in unequal exchange. Ernest Mandel has added up the value of the gold and silver torn from Latin America up to 1660, the booty extracted from Indonesia by the Dutch East India Company from 1650 to 1780, the harvest reaped by French capital in the eighteenth-century slave trade, the profits from slave labor in the British Antilles and from a half-century of British looting in India. The total exceeds the capital invested in all European industrial enterprises operated by steam in about 1800.14 This enormous mass of capital, Mandel notes, created a favorable climate for investment in Europe, stimulated the “spirit of enterprise,” and directly financed the establishment of manufactures, which in turn gave a strong thrust to the Industrial Revolution. But at the same time the formidable international concentration of wealth for Europe’s benefit prevented the jump into the accumulation of industrial capital in the plundered areas: “The double tragedy of the developing countries consists in the fact that they were not only victims of that process of international concentration, but that subsequently they have had to try and compensate for their industrial backwardness—that is, realize the primitive accumulation of

industrial capital—in a world flooded with articles manufactured by an already mature industry, that of the West.”15

The Latin American colonies were discovered, conquered, and colonized within the process of the expansion of commercial capital. Europe stretched out its arms to clasp the whole world. Neither Spain nor Portugal received the benefits of the sweeping advance of capitalist mercantilism, although it was their colonies that substantially supplied the gold and silver feeding this expansion. As we have seen, while Latin America’s precious metals made deceptive fortunes for a Spanish nobility living in a belated and contra- historical Middle Age, they simultaneously sealed the ruin of Spain in centuries to come. It was in other parts of Europe that modern capitalism could be incubated, taking decisive advantage of the expropriation of primitive American peoples. The rape of accumulated treasure was followed by the systematic exploitation of the forced labor of Indians and abducted Africans in the mines.

Europe needed gold and silver. The money in circulation kept multiplying and it was necessary to stimulate the movement of capitalism in the hour of birth: the bourgeoisie took control of the cities and founded banks, produced and exchanged merchandise, conquered new markets. Gold, silver, sugar: the colonial economy, supplying rather than consuming, was built in terms of— and at the service of—the European market. During long periods of the sixteenth century the value of Latin American precious metal exports was four times greater than the value of the slaves, salt, and luxury goods it imported. The resources flowed out so that emergent European nations across the ocean could accumulate them. This was the basic mission of the pioneers, although they applied the Bible almost as often as the whip to the dying Indians. The Spanish colonies’ economic structure was born subordinated to the external market and was thus centralized around the export sector, where profit and power were concentrated.

During the process, from the metals stage to that of supplying foodstuffs, each region became identified with what it produced, and each produced what Europe wanted of it: ''each product, loaded in the holds of galleons plowing the ocean, became a vocation and a destiny.'' The international division of labor, as it emerged along with capitalism, resembled the distribution of function between a horseman and a horse,

as Paul Baran put it. The markets of the colonial world grew as mere appendices to the internal market of invading capitalism.

Celso Furtado notes that while most of Europe’s feudal seigneurs obtained an economic surplus from the people they dominated and used it in one way or another in the same areas, the chief aim of those Spaniards who received Latin American mines, lands, and Indians from the king was to extract a surplus to send to Europe16 This observation helps explain the ultimate goal of the Latin American colonial economy from its inception: although it showed some feudal characteristics, it functioned at the service of capitalism developing elsewhere. Nor, indeed, can the existence of wealthy capitalist centers in our own time be explained without the existence of poor and subjected outskirts: the one and the other make up the same system.

But not all of the surplus went to Europe. The colonial economy was run by merchants, by owners of mines and of big estates, who divided up the usufruct of Indian and black labor under the jealous and omnipotent eye of the Crown and its chief associate, the Church. Power was concentrated in the hands of a few, who sent metals and foodstuffs to Europe and received back the luxury goods to the enjoyment of which they dedicated their mushrooming fortunes. The dominant classes took no interest whatever in diversifying the internal economies or in raising technical and cultural levels in the population: they had a different function within the international complex they were acting for, and the grinding poverty of the people—so profitable from the standpoint of the reigning interests—prevented the development of an internal consumer market.

One French economist argues that Latin America’s worst colonial legacy, which explains its backwardness today, is lack of capital.17 But all the historical evidence shows that the colonial economy produced bountiful wealth for the classes connected internally with the colonial system of domination. The labor that was abundantly available for nothing or practically nothing, and the great European demand for Latin American products, made possible “a precocious and abundant accumulation of capital in the Iberian colonies. The hard core of beneficiaries, far from growing, became smaller in proportion to the mass of the population, as may be seen from the well-known fact that unemployed Europeans and Creoles constantly increased.”18 The capital that stayed

in Latin America, after the lion’s share went into the primitive accumulation process of European capitalism, did not generate a process similar to that which took place in Europe, where the foundations of industrial development were laid. It was diverted instead into the construction of great palaces and showy churches, into the purchase of jewels and luxurious clothing and furniture, into the maintenance of flocks of servants, and into the extravagance of fiestas. To an important extent this surplus was also immobilized in the purchase of new lands, or continued to revolve around speculative commercial activities.

In the twilight of the colonial era Alexander von Humboldt found in Mexico an enormous amount of capital in the hands of mine owners and merchants, while no less than half of Mexican real estate and capital belonged to the Church, which also controlled much of the remaining land through mortgages.19 Mexican mine operators invested their surpluses in the purchase of great latifundia and in mortgage loans, as did the big exporters of Veracruz and Acapulco; the Church hierarchy multiplied its possessions in similar fashion. Palatial residences sprang up in the capital, and sumptuous churches appeared like mushrooms after rain; Indian servants catered to the golden luxuries of the powerful.

In mid-seventeenth-century Peru, capital amassed by ''encomenderos,('' An ''encomienda'' was an estate granted by the Crown to the Spanish conquistadors and colonists for their services to Spain. It included the services of the Indians living on it. The '''''encomendero''''' was thus the owner. (Trans.)'')'' mine operators, inquisitors, and officials of the imperial government was poured into commercial projects. The fortunes made in Venezuela from growing cacao— begun at the end of the sixteenth century and produced by applying whips to the backs of black slaves—were invested in new plantations, other commercial crops, in mines, urban real estate, slaves, and herds of cattle.

=== THE SILVER CYCLE: THE RUIN OF POTOSI ===

Andre Gunder Frank, in analyzing “metropolis-satellite” relations through Latin American history as a chain of successive subjections, has highlighted the fact that the regions now most underdeveloped and

poverty-stricken are those which in the past had had the closest links with the metropolis and had enjoyed periods of boom.20 Having once been the biggest producers of goods exported to Europe, or later to the United States, and the richest sources of capital, they were abandoned by the metropolis when for this or that reason business sagged. Potosi is the outstanding example of this descent into the vacuum.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Cerro Rico of Potosi (Mexico’s Guanajuato and Zacatecas silver mines had their boom much later) was the hub of Latin American colonial life: around it, in one way or another, revolved the Chilean economy, which sent it wheat, dried meat, hides, and wines; the cattle-raising and crafts of Córdoba and Tucumán in Argentina, which supplied it with draft animals and textiles; the mercury mines of Huancavélica; and the Arica region whence the silver was shipped to Lima, chief administrative center of the period. In the independence period the area, now a part of Bolivia, still had a larger population than what is now Argentina. A century and a half later Bolivia’s population is almost six times smaller than Argentina’s.

Potosian society, sick with ostentation and extravagance, left Bolivia with only a vague memory of its splendors, of the ruins of its churches and palaces, and of 8 million Indian corpses. Any one of the diamonds encrusted in a rich ''caballero’s'' shield was worth more than what an Indian could earn in his whole life under the ''mitayo,('' A ''mitayo'' is an Indian who pays a ''mita.'' or tribute, usually in the form of forced labor in public works, especially the mines, (Trans.)'')'' but the ''caballero'' took off with the diamonds. If it were not a futile exercise, Bolivia—now one of the world’s most poverty-stricken countries— could boast of having nourished the wealth of the wealthiest. In our time Potosi is a poor city in a poor Bolivia: “The city which has given most to the world and has the least,” as an old Potosian lady, enveloped in a mile of alpaca shawl, told me when we talked on the Andalusian patio of her two-century-old house. Condemned to nostalgia, tortured by poverty and cold, Potosi remains an open wound of the colonial system in America: a still audible “J’accuse.”

The people live off the refuse. In 1640 the priest Alvaro Alonso-Barba published in Madrid’s royal printshop his excellent work on the art of

metals.21 Tin, he wrote, “is poison.” He mentioned the Cerro, where “there is much tin, although few recognize it, and people throw it aside looking for the silver everyone seeks.” Today the tin the Spaniards discarded like garbage is exploited in Potosi. Walls of ancient houses are sold as high-grade tin. Through the centuries the wealth has been drained from the 5,000 tunnels the Spaniards bored into the Cerro Rico. As dynamite charges have hollowed it out, its color has changed and the height of its summit has been lowered. The mountains of rock heaped around the many tunnel openings are of all colors: pink, lilac, purple, ochre, gray, gold, brown. A crazy quilt of garbage. ''Llamperos'' break the rocks and Indian ''palliris'' in search of tin pick like birds, with hands skilled in weighing and separating, at the mineral debris. Miners still enter old mines that are not flooded, carbide lamps in hind, bodies crouching, to bring out whatever there is. Of silver there is none. Not a glint of it: the Spaniards even swept out the seams with brooms. The ''pallacos'' use pick and shovel to dig any metal out of the leavings. “The Cerro is still rich,” I was blandly told by an unemployed man who was scratching through the dirt with his hands. “There must be a God, you know: the metal grows just like a plant.” Opposite the Cerro Rico rises a witness to the devastation: a mountain called Huakajchi, meaning in Quechua “the ''cerro'' that has wept.” From its sides gush many springs of pure water, the “water eyes” that quench the miners’ thirst.

In its mid-seventeenth-century days of glory the city attracted many painters and artisans, Spanish and Indian, European and Creole masters and Indian image-carvers who left their mark on Latin American colonial art. Melchor Perez de Holguin, Latin America’s El Greco, left an enormous religious work which betrays both its creator’s talent and the pagan breath of these lands: his splendid Virgin, arms open, gives one breast to the infant Jesus and the other to Saint Joseph; she is hauntingly memorable. Goldsmiths, silversmiths, and engravers, cabinetmakers and masters of repoussé, craftsmen in metals, fine woods, plaster, and noble ivory adorned Potosi’s many churches and monasteries with works of the imaginative colonial school, altars sparkling with silver filigree, and priceless pulpits and reredoses. The baroque church façades carved in stone have resisted the ravages of time, but not so the paintings, many of them irreparably damaged by damp, or the smaller figures and objects. Tourists and parishioners have emptied the churches

of whatever they could carry, from chalices and bells to carvings in beech and ash of Saint Francis and Christ.

These untended churches, now mostly closed, are collapsing under the weight of years. It is a pity, for pillaged as they have been they are still formidable treasures of a colonial art that fuses all styles and glows with heretical imagination: the ''escalonado'' emblem of the ancient civilization of Tiahuanacu instead of the cross of Christ, the cross joined with the sacred sun and moon, virgins and saints with “natural” hair, grapes and ears of corn twining to the tops of columns along with the ''kantuta,'' the imperial flower of the Incas; sirens, Bacchus, and the festival of life alternating with romantic asceticism, the dark faces of some divinities, caryatids with Indian features. Some churches have been renovated to perform other services now that they lack congregations. San Ambrosio is the Cine Omiste; in February 1970 the forthcoming attraction was advertised across the baroque bas-reliefs of the façade: ''It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.'' The Jesuit church became a movie house, then a Grace Company warehouse, and finally a storehouse for public charity food.

A few other churches still function as best they can: it is at least a century and a half since Potosians had the money to burn candles. It is said of the San Francisco church, for example, that its cross grows several centimeters every year, as does the beard of the Señor de Ia Vera Cruz, an imposing silver-and- silk Christ who appeared in Potosi, brought by nobody, four centuries ago. The priests do not deny that they shave him every so often, and they attribute to him—even in writing—every kind of miracle: incantations, down the centuries, against droughts, plagues, and wars in defense of the beleaguered city.

The Señor de la Vera Cruz was powerless to stop the decline of Potosi, The depletion of the silver was interpreted as divine judgment on the miners’ wickedness and sin. Spectacular masses became a thing of the past: like the banquets, bullfights, balls, and fireworks, luxury religion had, after all, been a subproduct of Indian slave labor. In the era of splendor the miners made princely donations to churches and monasteries and sponsored sumptuous funerals, all solid silver keys to the gates of heaven. In 1559 the merchant Alvaro Bejarano directed in his will that “all the priests in Potosi” accompany his corpse. Quack medicine and witchcraft were mixed with authorized religion in the delirious

fervors and panics of colonial society. Extreme unction with bell and canopy could, like Communion, succor the dying; but a juicy will that provided for building a church or for a silver altar could prove much more effective. Fevers were combated with the gospels. In certain convents prayers cooled the body, in others they warmed it: “The Credo was cool as tamarind or sweet spirit of nitre, the Salve warm as orange blossoms or cornsilk.”22

In the Calle Chuquisaca one can admire the time-corroded façade of the palace of the counts of Carma y Cayara, but it is now a dentist’s office; the coat-of-arms of Maestro de Campo Don Antonio Lopez de Quiroga, in the Calle Lanza, now adorns a little school; that of the Marques de Otavi, with its rampant lions, tops the doorway of the Banco Nacional. “Where can they be living now? They must have gone far. The Potosian old lady, attached to her city, tells me that the rich left first and then the poor: in four centuries the population has decreased threefold. I gaze at the Cerro from a roof in the Calle Uyuni, a narrow, twisting colonial lane with wooden-balconied houses so close together that residents can kiss or hit each other without having to go down to the street. Here, as in all of the city, survive the old street lamps under whose feeble light, as Jaime Molins relates, “lovers’ quarrels were resolved, and muffled ''caballeros,'' elegant ladies, and gamblers flitted by like ghosts.” The city now has electric light but one barely notices it'''.''' In the dim plazas raffle parties are conducted at night under the ancient lamps: I saw a piece of cake being raffled in the middle of a crowd.

Sucre decayed along with Potosi. This valley city of pleasant climate, successively known as Charcas, La Plata, and Chuquisaca, enjoyed a good share of the wealth flowing from Potosi’s Cerro Rico. Here Francisco Pizarro’s brother Gonzalo installed his court, as sumptuous as any king’s; churches and spacious residences, parks and recreation centers sprouted continuously, together with the lawyers, mystics, and pretentious poets who put their stamp on the city from century to century. “Silence, that is Sucre—just silence. But before…” Before, this was the cultural capital of two viceroyalties, seat of Latin America’s chief archdiocese and of the colony’s highest court of justice—the most magnificent and cultured city in South America. Doña Cecilia Contreras de Torres and Doña Maria de las Mercedes Torralba de Gramajo, ''senoras'' of Ubina and Colquechaca, gave Lucullan banquets in a contest

to squander the income from their Potosi mines. When their lavish fiestas ended they threw the silver service and even golden vessels from their balconies to be picked up by lucky passersby.

Sucre still has an Eiffel Tower and its own Arcs de Triomphe, and they say that the jewels of its Virgin would pay off the whole of Bolivia’s huge external debt. But the famous church bells, which in 1809 rang out joyfully for Latin America’s emancipation, play a funereal tune today. The harsh chimes of San Francisco, which so often announced uprisings and rebellions, toll a death knell over torpid Sucre. It matters little that Sucre is Bolivia’s legal capital, still the seat of its highest court. Through its streets pass countless pettifogging lawyers, shriveled and yellow of skin, surviving testimonies to its decadence: learned doctors of the type who wear pince-nez complete with black ribbon. From the great empty palaces Sucre’s illustrious patriarchs send out their servants to sell baked tidbits down at the railroad station. In happier times there were people here who could buy anything up to the title of prince.

Only ghosts of the old wealth haunt Potosi and Sucre. In Huanchaca, another Bolivian tragedy, Anglo-Chilean capitalists in the past century stripped veins of highest-grade silver more than two yards wide; all that remains is dusty ruin. Huanchaca is still on the map as if it continued to exist—identified by crossed pick and shovel as a live mining center. Did the Mexican mines of Guanajuato and Zacatecas enjoy a better fate On the basis of Alexander von Humboldt’s figures in his already cited ''Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain,'' the economic surplus drained from Mexico between 1760 and 1809— barely half a century— through silver and gold exports has been estimated at some 5 billion present-day dollars.23 In Humboldt’s time there were no more important mines in Latin America. The great German scholar compared Guanajuato’s Valenciana mine with the Himmelsfurst in Saxony, then the richest in Europe; the Valenciana was producing thirty-six times more silver at the turn of the century and its profits were thirty-three times as great for its investors. Count Santiago de la Laguna trembled with emotion in describing, in 1732, the Zacatecas mining district and “the precious treasures concealed in its deep womb,” in mountains “graced with more than 4,000 shafts, the better to serve both of Their Majesties,” God and the King, “with the fruit of its entrails,” and that “all might come to drink and participate of the great, the rich, the

learned, the urban and the noble” because it was a “fount of wisdom, order, arms, and nobility.”24 The priest Marmolejo would later describe the city of Guanajuato, crisscrossed by rivers and bridges, with its gardens recalling those of Semiramis in Babylon and its ornate churches, theater, bullring, cockfight arenas, and towers and cupolas rising against the green mountainsides. But this was “the country of inequality,” about which Humboldt could write: “Perhaps nowhere is inequality more shocking The architecture of public and private

buildings, the women’s elegant wardrobes, the high-society atmosphere: all testify to an extreme social polish which is in extraordinary contrast to the nakedness, ignorance, and coarseness of the populace.” The new veins of silver gobbled up men and mules in the ''cordillera'' foothills; the Indians, who “lived from day to day,” suffered chronic hunger and epidemics killed them off like flies. In only one year, 1784, more than 8,000 died in Guanajuato when a lack of food, the result of a bad cold spell, set off a wave of disease.

Capital, far from accumulating, was squandered. There was a saying: “Father a merchant, son a gentleman, grandson a beggar.” In a plea to the government in 1843 Mexican politician Lucas Alamán gave a somber warning and insisted on the need to defend national industry by banning or imposing heavy duties on foreign imports. “We must proceed to develop industry as the only source of general prosperity,” he wrote. “The riches of Zacatecas would bring no benefits to Puebla but for the former’s consumption of the latter’s manufactures, and if these decline again, as has happened before, that presently flourishing area will be ruined and the riches of the mines will not be able to save it from poverty.” The prophesy proved true. In our time Zacatecas and Guanajuato are not even the most important cities in their own regions. Both languish amid the skeletons of the camps of the mining boom. Zacatecas, high and arid, lives from agriculture and exports labor to other states; its gold and silver are low in quality compared to former days. Of the fifty mines once exploited in the Guanajuato district, only two remain today. The population of the beautiful city does not grow, but tourists flock there to view the exuberant splendor of olden times. San Diego, La Valenciana, La Compania, the cemetery in whose catacombs more than a hundred mummies, preserved intact by the salinity of the soil, are on show. Half the families in Guanajuato state average more than five members and live today in one-room hovels.

=== A FLOOD OF TEARS AND BLOOD: ===
AND YET THE POPE SAID INDIANS HAD SOULS

In 1581 Philip II told the ''audiencia(''An ''audiencia'' was a judicial district as well as a judicial, administrative, and advisory body. In Mexico, it was the supreme court of administration and judgment. (Trans.)'') of Guadalajara'' that a third of Latin America’s Indians had already been wiped out, and that those who survived were compelled to pay the tributes for the dead. The monarch added that Indians were bought and sold; that they slept in the open air; and that mothers killed their children to save them from the torture of the mines.25 Yet the Crown’s hypocrisy had smaller limits than the empire: it received a fifth of the value of the metals extracted by its subjects in all of the Spanish New World, as well as other taxes, and the Portuguese Crown was to have the same arrangement in eighteenth- century Brazil. Latin American silver and gold—as Engels put it—.penetrated like a corrosive acid through all the pores of Europe’s moribund feudal society, and, for the benefit of nascent mercantilist capitalism, the mining entrepreneurs turned Indians and black slaves into a teeming “external proletariat” of the European economy. Greco-Roman slavery was revived in a different world; to the plight of the Indians of the exterminated Latin American civilizations was added the ghastly fate of the blacks seized from African villages to toil in Brazil and the Antilles. The colonial Latin American economy enjoyed the most highly concentrated labor fore known until that time, making possible the greatest concentration of wealth ever enjoyed by any civilization in world history.

The price of the tide of avarice, terror, and ferocity bearing down on these regions was Indian genocide: the best recent investigations credit pre- Columbian Mexico with a population between 30 and 37.5 million, and the Andean region is estimated to have possessed a similar number; Central America had between 10 and 13 million. The Indians of the Americas totaled no less than 70 million when the foreign conquerors appeared on the horizon; a century and a half later they had been reduced to 3.5 million. In 1685 only 4,000 Indian families remained of the more than 2 million that had once lived between Lima and Paita, according to the Marquis of Barinas. Archbishop Liñán y Cisneros

denied that the Indians had been annihilated: “The truth is that they are hiding out,” he said, “to avoid paying tribute, abusing the liberty which they enjoy and which they never had under the Incas.”26 While metals flowed unceasingly from Latin American mines, equally unceasing were the orders from the Spanish Court granting paper protection and dignity to the Indians whose killing labor sustained the kingdom. The fiction of legality protected the Indian; the reality of exploitation drained the blood from his body. From slavery to the ''encomienda'' of service, and from this to the encomienda of tribute and the regime of wages, variants in the Indian labor force’s juridical condition made only superficial changes in the real situation. The Crown regarded the inhuman exploitation of Indian labor as so necessary that in 1601 Philip III, banning forced labor in the mines by decree, at the same time sent secret instructions ordering its continuation “in case that measure should reduce production.”27 Similarly, between 1616 and 1619, Governor Juan de Solórzano carried out a survey of work conditions in the Huancavelica mercury mines (directly exploited by the Crown, in distinction to the silver mines, which were in private hands): “The poison penetrated to the very marrow, debilitating all the members and causing a constant shaking, and the workers usually died within four years,” he reported to the Council of the Indies and to the king. But in 1631 Philip IV ordered that the same system be continued, and his successor Charles II later reaffirmed the decree.

In three centuries Potosi’s Cerro Rico consumed 8 million lives. The Indians, including women and children, were torn from their agricultural communities and driven to the Cerro. Of every ten who went up into the freezing wilderness, seven never returned. Luis Capoche, an owner of mines and mills, wrote that “the roads were so covered with people that the whole kingdom seemed on the move.” In their communities the Indians saw “many afflicted women returning without husbands and with many orphaned children” and they knew that “a thousand deaths and disasters” awaited them in the mines. The Spaniards scoured the countryside for hundreds of miles for labor. Many died on the way, before reaching Potosi, but it was the terrible work conditions in the mine that killed the most people. Soon after the mine began operating, in 1550, the Dominican monk Domingo de Santo Tomás told the Council of the Indies that Potosi was a “mouth of hell” which

swallowed Indians by the thousands every year, and that rapacious mine owners treated them “like stray animals.” Later Fray Rodrigo de Loaysa said: “These poor Indians are like sardines in the sea. Just as other fish pursue the sardines to seize and devour them, so everyone in these lands pursues the wretched Indians.” Chiefs of Indian communities had to replace the constantly dying ''mitayos'' with new men between eighteen and fifty years old. The huge stone-walled corral where Indians were assigned to mine and mill owners is now used by workers as a football ground. The ''mitayos’jail—a'' shapeless mass of ruins—can still be seen at the entrance to Potosi.

The Compilation of the Laws of the Indies abounds with decrees establishing the equal right of Indians and Spaniards to exploit the mines, and expressly forbidding any infringement of Indian rights. Thus formal history— the dead letter of today which perpetuates the dead letter of the past—has nothing to complain about, but while Indian labor legislation was debated in endless documents and Spanish jurists displayed their talents in an explosion of ink, in Latin America the law “was respected but not carried out.” In practice “the poor Indian is a coin with which one can get whatever one needs, as with gold and silver, and get it better,” as Luis Capoche put it. Many people claimed mestizo status before the courts to avoid being sent to the mines and sold and resold in the market.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Concolorcorvo, who had Indian blood, denied his own people: “We do not dispute that the mines consume a considerable number of Indians, but this is not due to the work they do in the silver and mercury mines but to their dissolute way of life.” The testimony of Capoche, who had many Indians in his service, is more enlightening. Freezing outdoor temperatures alternated with the infernal heat inside the Cerro. The Indians went into the depths “and it is common to bring them out dead or with broken heads and legs, and in the mills they are injured every day.” The ''mitayos'' hacked out the metal with picks and then carried it up on their shoulders by the light of a candle. Outside the mine they propelled the heavy wooden shafts in the mill or melted the silver on a fire after grinding and washing it.

The ''mita'' labor system was a machine for crushing Indians. The process of using mercury to extract silver poisoned as many or more than

did the toxic gases in the bowels of the earth. It made hair and teeth fall out and brought on uncontrollable trembling. The victims ended up dragging themselves through the streets pleading for alms. At night 6,000 fires burned on the slopes of the Cerro and in these the silver was worked, taking advantage of the wind that the “glorious Saint Augustine” sent from the sky. Because of the smoke from the ovens there were no pastures or crops for a radius of twenty miles around Potosi and the fumes attacked men’s bodies no less relentlessly.

Ideological justifications were never in short supply. The bleeding of the New World became an act of charity, an argument for the faith. With the guilt, a whole system of rationalizations for guilty consciences was devised. The Indians were used as beasts of burden because they could carry a greater weight than the delicate Ilama, and this proved that they were in fact beasts of burden. The viceroy of Mexico felt that there was no better remedy for their “natural wickedness” than work in the mines. Juan Ginés de Sepülveda, a renowned Spanish theologian, argued that they deserved the treatment they got because their sins and idolatries were an offense to God. The Count de Buffon, a French naturalist, noted that Indians were cold and weak creatures in whom “no activity of the soul” could be observed. The Abbé De Paw invented a Latin Arnerica where degenerate Indians lived side by side with dogs that couldn’t bark, cows that couldn’t be eaten, and impotent camels. Voltaire’s Latin America was inhabited by Indians who were lazy and stupid, pigs with navels on their backs, and bald and cowardly lions. Bacon, De Maistre, Montesquieu, Hume, and Bodin declined to recognize the “degraded men” of the New World as fellow humans. Hegel spoke of Latin America’s physical and spiritual impotence and said the Indians died when Europe merely breathed on them.

In the seventeenth century Father Gregorio Garcia detected Semitic blood in the Indians because, like the Jews, “they are lazy, they do not believe in the miracles of Jesus Christ, and they are ungrateful to the Spaniards for all the good they have done them.” At least this holy man did not deny that the Indians were descended from Adam and Eve: many theologians and thinkers had never been convinced by Pope Paul III’s bull of 1537 declaring the Indians to be “true men.” When Bartolomé de las Casas upset the Spanish Court with his heated denunciations of the conquistadors’ cruelty in 1557, a member of the Royal

Council replied that Indians were too low in the human scale to be capable of receiving the faith. Las Casas dedicated his zealous life to defending the Indians against the excesses of the mine owners and ''encomenderos.'' He once remarked that the Indians preferred to go to hell to avoid meeting Christians.

Indians were assigned or given in ''encomienda'' to conquistadors and colonizers so that they could teach them the gospel. But since the Indians owed personal services and economic tribute to the ''encomenderos,'' there was little time for setting them on the Christian path to salvation.

Indians were divided up along with lands given as royal grants, or were obtained by direct plunder: in reward for his services, Cortés received 23,000 vassals. After 1536 Indians were given in ''encomienda'' along with their descendants for the span of two lifetimes, those of the ''encomendero'' and of his immediate heir; after 1629 this was extended to three lifetimes and, after 1704, to four. In the eighteenth century the surviving Indians still assured many generations to come of a cozy life. Since their defeated gods persisted in Spanish memory, there were saintly rationalizations aplenty for the victors’ profits from their toil; the Indians were pagans and deserved nothing better.

The past? Four hundred years after the papal bull, in September 1957, the highest court in Paraguay published a notice informing all the judges of the country that “the Indians, like other inhabitants of the republic, are human beings.” And the Center for Anthropological Studies of the Catholic University of Asunción later carried out a revealing survey, both in the capital and in the countryside: eight out of ten Paraguayans think that “Indians are animals.” In Caaguazü, Alta Paraná, and the Chaco, Indians are hunted down like wild beasts, sold at bargain prices, and exploited by a system of virtual slavery—yet almost all Paraguayans have Indian blood, and Paraguayans tirelessly compose poems, songs, and speeches in homage to the “Guarani soul.”

=== THE MILITAQNAT MEMORY OF TUPAC AMARU ===

When the Spaniards invaded Latin America, the theocratic Inca empire was at its height, spreading over what we now call Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, taking in part of Colombia and Chile, and reaching

northern Argentina and the Brazilian jungle. The Aztec confederation had achieved a high level of efficiency in the Valley of Mexico, and in Yucatan and Central America the remarkable civilization of the Mayas, organized for work and war, persisted among the peoples who succeeded them.

These societies have left many testimonies to their greatness despite the long period of devastation: religious monuments built with more skill than the Egyptian pyramids, technically efficient constructions for the battle against nature, art works showing indomitable talent. In the Lima museum there are hundreds of skulls which have undergone trepanning and the insertion of gold and silver plates by Inca surgeons. The Mayas were great astronomers, measuring time and space with. astonishing precision, and discovered the value of the figure zero before any other people in history. The Aztecs’ irrigation works and artificial islands dazzled Cortes—even though they were not made of gold.

The conquest shattered the foundations of these civilizations. The installation of a mining economy had direr consequences than the fire and sword of war. The mines required a great displacement of people and dislocated agricultural communities; they not only took countless lives through forced labor, but also indirectly destroyed the collective farming system. The Indians were taken to the mines, were forced to submit to the service of the ''encomenderos,'' and were made to surrender for nothing the lands which they had to leave or neglect. On the Pacific coast the Spaniards destroyed or let die out the enormous plantations of corn, yucca, kidney and white beans, peanuts, and sweet potato; the desert quickly devoured great tracts of land which the Inca irrigation network had made abundant. Four and a half centuries after the Conquest only rocks and briars remain where roads had once united an empire. Although the Incas’ great public works were for the most part destroyed by time or the usurper’s hand, one may still see across the Andean cordillera traces of the endless terraces which permitted, and still permit, cultivation of the mountainsides. A U.S. technician estimated in 1936 that if the Inca terraces had been built by modern methods at 1936 wage rates they would have cost some $30,000 per acre.28 In that empire which did not know the wheel, the horse, or iron, the terraces and aqueducts were made possible by prodigious organization and technical perfection achieved through wise distribution of

labor, as well as by the religious force that ruled man’s relation with the soil— which was sacred and thus always alive.

The Aztecs also responded in a remarkable way to nature’s challenges. The surviving islands in the dried-up lake where Mexico City now rises on native ruins are known to tourists today as “floating gardens.” The Aztecs created these because of the shortage of land in the place chosen for establishing Tenochtitlán. They moved large quantities of mud from the banks and shored up the new mud-islands between narrow walls of reeds until tree roots gave them firmness. Between these exceptionally fertile islands flowed the canals, and on them arose the great Aztec capital, with its broad avenues, its austerely beautiful palaces, and its stepped pyramids: rising magically out of the lake, it was condemned to disappear under the assaults of foreign conquest. Mexico took four centuries to regain the population of those times.

As Darcy Ribeiro puts it, the Indians were the fuel of the colonial productive system. “It is almost certain,” writes Sergio Bagü, “that hundreds of Indian sculptors, architects, engineers, and astronomers were sent into the mines along with the mass of slaves for the killing task of getting out the ore. The technical ability of these people was of no interest to the colonial economy. They were treated as so many skilled workers.” Yet all traces of those broken cultures were not lost: hope of the rebirth of a lost dignity sparked many Indian risings.

In 1781 Tupac Amaru laid siege to Cuzco. This mestizo chief, a direct descendant of the Inca emperors, headed the broadest of messianic revolutionary movements. The rebellion broke out in Tinta province, which had been almost depopulated by enforced service in the Cerro Rico mines. Mounted on his white horse, Tupac Amaru entered the plaza of Tungasuca and announced to the sound of drums and ''pututus'' that he had condemned the royal Corregidor Antonio Juan de Arriaga to the gallows and put an end to the Potosi ''mita.'' A few days later Tupac issued a decree liberating the slaves. He abolished all taxes and forced labor in all forms. The Indians rallied by the thousands to the forces of the “father of all the poor and all the wretched and helpless.” He moved against Cuzco at the head of his ''guerilleros,'' promising them that all who died while under his orders in this war would return to life to enjoy the happiness and wealth the invaders had wrested from them. Victories and defeats followed; in the end, betrayed and captured by one of his

own chiefs, Tupac was handed over in chains to the royalists. The Examiner Areche entered his cell to demand, in exchange for promises, the names of his rebel accomplices. Tupac Amaru replied scornfully, “There are no accomplices here other than you and I. You as oppressor, I as liberator’deserve to die.”29

Tupac was tortured, along with his wife, his children, and his chief aides, in Cuzco’s Plaza del Wacaypata. His tongue was cut out; his arms and legs were tied to four horses with the intention of quartering him, but his body would not break; he was finally beheaded at the foot of the gallows. His head was sent to Tinta, one arm to Tungasuca and the other to Carabaya, one leg to Santa Rosa and the other to Livitaca. The torso was burned and the ashes thrown in the Rio Watanay. It was proposed that all his descendants be obliterated up to the fourth generation.

In 1802 a chief named Astorpilco, also a descendant of the Incas, was visited by Humboldt in Cajamarca, on the exact spot where his ancestor Atahualpa had first seen the conquistador Pizarro. The chief’s son took the German scholar on a tour of the ruins of the town and the rubble of the old Inca palace, and spoke as they walked of the fabulous treasures hidden beneath the dust and ashes. “Don’t you sometimes feel like digging for the treasure to satisfy your needs?” Humboldt asked him. The youth replied: “No, we never feel like doing that. My father says it would be sinful. If we were to find the golden branches and fruits, the white people would hate us and do us harm.”3° The chief himself raised wheat in a small field, but that was not enough to save him from white covetousness. The usurpers, hungry for gold and silver and for slaves to work the mines, never hesitated to seize lands when their crops offered a tempting profit.

The plunder continued down the years and in 1969, when agrarian reform was announced in Peru, reports still appeared in the press of Indians from the broken mountain communities coming with flags unfurled to invade lands that had been robbed from them or their ancestors, and of the army driving them away with bullets. Nearly two centuries had to pass after Tupac Amaru’s death before the nationalist general Juan Velasco Alvarado would take up and apply Tupac’s resounding, never forgotten words: ''“Campesino!'' Your poverty shall no longer feed the master!”

Other heroes whose defeat was reversed by time were the Mexicans Miguel Hidalgo and José Maria Morelos. Hidalgo, who till the age of fifty was a peaceable rural priest, pealed the bells of the church of Dolores one fine day to summon the Indians to fight for their freedom: “Will you stir yourselves to the task of recovering from the hated Spaniards the lands robbed from your ancestors 300 years ago?” He raised the standard of the Indian Virgin of Guadalupe and before six weeks were out 80,000 men were following him, armed with machetes, pikes, slings, and bows and arrows. The revolutionary priest put an end to tribute and divided up the lands of Guadalajara; he decreed freedom for the slaves and led his forces toward Mexico City. He was finally executed after a military defeat and is said to have left a testament of passionate repentance. The revolution soon found another leader, however, the priest José Maria Morelos: “You must regard as enemies all the rich, the nobles, and high-ranking officials . . .“ His movement—combining Indian insurgency and social revolution—came to control a large part of Mexico before he too was defeated and shot. As one U.S. senator wrote, the independence of Mexico, six years later, “turned out to be a typically Hispanic family affair between European and American-born members…a political fight within the dominating social class.”31 The ''encomienda'' serf became a peon and the ''encomendero'' a hacienda owner.

=== FOR THE INDIANS, NO RESURRECTION AT THE END OF HOLY WEEK ===

Masters of Indian ''pongos—domestic'' servants—were still offering them for hire in La Paz newspapers at the beginning of our century. Until the revolution of 1952 restored the forgotten right of dignity to Bolivian Indians, the ''pongo'' slept beside the dog, ate the leftovers of his dinner, and knelt when speaking to anyone with a white skin. Fourlegged beasts of burden were scarce in the conquistadors’ time and they used Indian backs to transport their baggage; even to this day Aymara and Quechua porters can be seen all over the Andean ''altiplano'' carrying loads for a crust of bread. Pneumoconiosis was Latin America’s first occupational disease, and the lungs of today’s Polivian miner refuse to continue functioning at the age of thirty-five: the implacable silica dust

impregnates his skin, cracks his face and hands, destroys his sense of smell and taste, hardens and kills his lungs.

Tourists love to photograph ''altiplano'' natives in their native costumes, unaware that these were imposed by Charles III at the end of the eighteenth century. The dresses that the Spaniards made Indian females wear were copied from the regional costumes of Estremaduran, Andalusian, and Basque peasant women, and the center-part hair style was imposed by Viceroy Toledo. The same was not true of the consumption of coca, which already existed in Inca times. But coca was then distributed in moderation; the Inca government had a monopoly on it and only permitted its use for ritual purposes or for those who worked in the mines. The Spaniards energetically stimulated its consumption. It was good business. In Potosi in the sixteenth century as much was spent on European clothes for the oppressors as on coca for the oppressed. In Cuzco 400 Spanish merchants lived off the coca traffic; every year 100,000 baskets with a million kilos of coca-leaf entered the Potosi silver mines. The Church took a tax from the drug. The Inca historian Garcilaso de la Vega tells us in his ''Comentarios Reales Que Tratan del Origen de los Incas'' that the bishop, canons, and other Cuzco church dignitaries got most of their income from tithes on coca, and that the transport and sale of the product enriched many Spaniards. For the few coins they received for their work the Indians bought coca-leaf instead of food: chewing it''',''' they could—at the price of shortening their lives—better endure the deadly tasks imposed on them. In addition to coca the Indians drank potent ''aguardiente,'' and their owners complained of the propagation of “maleficent vices.” In twentieth-century Potosi the Indians still chew coca to kill hunger and themselves, and still burn their guts with pure alcohol—sterile forms of revenge for the condemned. Bolivian miners still call their wages ''mita'' as in olden days.

Exiled in their own land, condemned to an eternal exodus, Latin America’s native peoples were pushed into the poorest areas—arid mountains, the middle of deserts—as the dominant civilization extended its frontiers. ''The Indians have suffered, and continue to suffer, the curse of their own wealth, that is the drama of all Latin America.'' When placer gold was discovered in Nicaragua’s Rio Bluefields, the Carca Indians were quickly expelled far from their riparian lands, and the same happened with the Indians in all the fertile valleys and rich-subsoil lands

south of the Rio Grande. The massacres of Indians that began with Columbus never stopped. In Uruguay and Argentine Patagonia they were exterminated during the last century by troops that hunted them down and penned them in forests or in the desert so that they might not disturb the organized advance of

cattle latifundia. (The last of the Charruas, who lived by raising bulls in the wild pampas of northern Uruguay, were betrayed in 1832 by President José Fructuoso Rivera. Removed from the bush that gave them protection, deprived of horses and arms by false promises of friendship,

they were overwhelmed at a place called Boca del Tigre. “The bugles sounded the attack,” wrote Eduardo Acevedo Diaz in ''La Epoca'' (August 19, 1890). “The horde churned about desperately, one after the other of its young braves falling like bulls pierced in the neck.” Many chiefs were killed. The few Indians who could break through the circle of fire took vengeance soon afterward. Pursued by Rivera’s brother, they laid an ambush and riddled him and his soldiers with spears. The chief Sepe “had the tip of his spear adorned with some tendons from the corpse.”

In Argentine Patagonia soldiers drew pay for each pair of testicles they brought in. David Vinas’s novel ''Los dueños de la tierra'' (1959) opens with an Indian hunt: “For killing was like raping someone. Something good And it gave a man pleasure: you had to move fast, you could yell, you sweated and afterward you felt hungry… The intervals got longer between shots. Undoubtedly some straddled body remained in one of these coverts——an Indian body on its

back with a blackish stain between its thighs…”) The Yaqui Indians of the Mexican

state of Sonora were drowned in blood so that their lands, fertile and rich in minerals, could be sold without any unpleasantness to various U.S. capitalists. Survivors were deported to plantations in Yucatan, and the Yucatan peninsula became not only the cemetery of the Mayas who had been its owners, but also of the Yaquis who came from afar: at the beginning of our century the fifty kings of henequen had more than 100,000 Indian slaves on their plantations. Despite the exceptional physical endurance of the strapping, handsome Yaquis, two-thirds of them died during the first year of slave labor. In our day henequen can compete with synthetic fiber substitutes only because of the workers’ abysmally low standard of living. Things have certainly changed, but not as much—at least for the natives of Yucatán—as some believe: “The living conditions of these workers are much like slave labor,” says one contemporary authority.32 On the Andean slopes near Bogota the Indian peon still must give a day’s work without pay to get the ''hacendado’s'' permission to farm his own plot on moonlit nights. As René Dumont says, “This Indian’s ancestors, answering to no man, used once to cultivate the rich soil of the ownerless

plain. Now he works for nothing to gain the right to cultivate the poor slopes of the mountain.”33 Not even Indians isolated in the depths of forests are safe in our day. At the beginning of this century 230 tribes survived in Brazil; since then ninety have disappeared, erased from the planet by firearms and ''microbes.'' Violence and disease, the advance guard of civilization: for the Indian, contact with the white man continues to be contact with death. Every legal dispensation since 1537 meant to protect Brazil’s Indians has been turned against them. Under every Brazilian constitution they are “the original and natural masters” of the land they occupy, but the richer that virgin land proves to be, the greater the threat hanging over their lives. Nature’s very generosity makes them targets of plunder and crime. Indian hunting has become ferocious in recent years; the world’s greatest forest, a huge tropical zone open to legend and adventure, has inspired a new “American dream.” Men and business enterprises from the United States, a new procession of conquistadores, have poured into Amazonia as if it were another Far West. This U.S. invasion has inflamed the avarice of Brazilian adventurers as never before. The Indians die out leaving no trace, and the land is sold for dollars to the new interested parties. Gold and other plentiful minerals, timber and rubber, riches whose commercial value the Indians are not even aware of, recur in the reports of each of the few investigations that have been made. It is known that the Indians have been machine-gunned from helicopters and light airplanes and inoculated with smallpox virus, that dynamite has been tossed into their villages, and that they have been given gifts of sugar mixed with strychnine and salt mixed with arsenic. The director of the Indian Protection Service, named by the Castelo Branco dictatorship to clean up its administration, was himself accused, with proof, of committing forty-two different kinds of crimes against the Indians. That scandal broke in 1968.

Indian society in our time does not exist in a vacuum, outside the general framework of the Latin American economy. There are, it is true, Brazilian tribes still sealed within the jungle, ''altiplano'' communities totally isolated from the world, redoubts of barbarism on the Venezuelan frontier; but in general the Indians are incorporated into the system of production and the consumer market, even if indirectly. They participate in an economic and social order which assigns them the role

of victim—the most exploited of the exploited. They buy and sell a good part of the few things they consume and produce, at the mercy of powerful and voracious intermediaries who charge much and pay little; they are day laborers on plantations, the cheapest work force, and soldiers in the mountains; they spend their days toiling for the world market or fighting for their conquerors. In countries like Guatemala, for example, they are at the center of national economic life: in a continuous annual cycle they leave their “sacred lands”— high lands where each small farm is the size of a corpse—to contribute 200,000 pairs of hands to the harvesting of coffee, cotton, and sugar in the lowlands. They are transported in trucks like cattle, and it is not always need, but sometimes liquor, that makes them decide to go. The contractors provide a marimba band and plenty of ''aguardiente'' and when the Indian sobers up he is already in debt. He will pay it off laboring on hot and strange lands which— perhaps with a few centavos in his pocket, perhaps with tuberculosis or malaria—he will leave after a few months. The army collaborates efficiently in the task of convincing the reluctant. Expropriation of the Indians—usurpation of their lands and their labor—has gone hand in hand with racist attitudes which are in turn fed by the objective degradation of civilizations broken by the Conquest. The effects of the Conquest and the long ensuing period of humiliation left the cultural and social identity the Indians had achieved in fragments. Yet in Guatemala this pulverized identity is the only one that persists.( The Maya-Quiches believed in a single god; practiced fasting, penitence, abstinence,

and confession; and believed in the flood at the end of the world. Christianity thus brought them few novelties. Religious disintegration began with colonization. The Catholic religion assimilated a few magical and totemic aspects of the Maya religion in a vain attempt to submit to the Indian faith to the conquistadors’ ideology. The crushing of the original culture opened the

way for syncretism.34) It persists in tragedy. During Holy Week, processions of the

heirs of the Mayas produce frightful exhibitions of collective masochism. They drag heavy crosses and participate in the flagellation of Jesus step by step along the interminable ascent to Golgotha; with howls of pain they turn His death and His burial into the cult of their own death and their own burial, the annihilation of the beautiful life of long ago. Only there is no Resurrection at the end of their Holy Week.

=== OURO PRETO, THE POTOSI OF GOLD ===

The gold fever which is still sentencing Amazonian Indians to death or slavery is no novelty in Brazil. For two centuries after Brazil’s discovery, the soil stubbornly denied metal to its Portuguese proprietors. In the first period of coastal colonization timber, or brazilwood, was commercially exploited; then sugar plantations were started in the Northeast. In contrast to Spanish Latin America, there seemed to be no gold or silver. Having found no highly developed and organized civilizations, only savage and scattered tribes who had no knowledge of metal, the Portuguese had to discover the gold on their own as they opened up the territory and exterminated its inhabitants.

The ''bandeirantes (''A ''bandeirante'' was a member of a ''bandeira,'' a band of Portuguese slave- or gold-hunters in the Brazilian interior. The São Paulo ''bandeiras'' were part of a

paramilitary organization whose strength varied. Their expeditions into the jungle played an important role n the interior colonization of Brazil. (Trans.)'')'' of the São Paulo region had crossed the great expanse between the Serra da Mantiqueira and the Rio São Francisco headwaters, and had observed small traces of alluvial gold in the beds and banks of several streams. The millennial action of the rains had eaten into the seams in the rocks and deposited gold in river beds, valleys, and mountain ravines. Beneath the layers of sand, dirt, or clay, the stony subsoil revealed nuggets that were easily removed from the quartz ''cascalho,'' or gravel; methods of extraction became more complex as the more superficial deposits were exhausted. Thus the Minas Gerais region entered history with a rush: the largest amount of gold ever discovered in the world till then was extracted in

the shortest space of time.

“Here the gold was a forest,” says the beggar one meets today, his eyes scanning the church towers. “There was gold on the sidewalks, it grew like grass.” He is seventy-five years old now and considers himself part of the folklore in Mariana, the mining town where, as in nearby Ouro Préto, the clock has simply stopped. “Death is certain, the hour uncertain—everyone has his time marked in the book,” the beggar tells me. He spits on the stone steps and shakes his head: “They had more money than they could count,” he says, as if he had seen them. “They didn’t know where to put it, so they built churches one next to the other.”

Once this was the most important region of Brazil. Now...“Well, there’s no life at all,” says the old man. “No young folk. They all go.” His bare feet move slowly beside me under the warm afternoon sun. “See that? On the front of that church, the sun and moon. That means that the slaves worked day and night. This church was built by black men; that one by white men. And that’s the house of Monsenhor Alipio who died right on his ninety-ninth birthday.”

In the eighteenth century Brazilian production of the coveted metal exceeded the total volume of gold that Spain had taken from its colonies in two previous centuries. Adventurers and fortune hunters poured in. Brazil had 300,000 inhabitants in 1700; a century later, at the end of the gold years, the population had multiplied eleven times. No less than 300,000 Portuguese emigrated to Brazil in the eighteenth century, a larger contingent than Spain contributed to all its Latin American colonies. From the conquest of Brazil until abolition, it is estimated that some 10 million blacks were brought from Africa; there are no precise figures for the eighteenth century, but the gold cycle absorbed slave labor in prodigious quantities.

Salvador de Bahia was the Brazilian capital of the prosperous Northeastern sugar cycle, but the “golden age” in Minas Gerais moved the country’s economic and political capital southward and Rio de Janeiro, the region’s port, became the new capital in 1763. In the dynamic heart of the new mining economy, camps bloomed abruptly into cities, described by a contemporary colonial authority as “sanctuaries for criminals, vagabonds, and malefactors,” in a vertigo of easy riches. The “Vila Rica de Ouro Prêto(The “Rich Town of Black

Gold,” so called because the mined gold turned black on exposure to the humid air, due to the presence of silver. (Trans.)) had grown to city size by 1711; born of the miners’ avalanche, it was the quintessence of the gold civilization. Simão Ferreira Machado, describing it twenty-three years later, said that the power of Ouro Préto businessmen surpassed by far that of Lisbon’s most flourishing

merchants: “Hither, as to a port, are directed and collected in the Royal Mint the grandiose amounts of gold from all the Mines. Here dwell the best educated men, both lay and ecclesiastic. Here is the seat of all the nobility and the strength of the military. It is, by virtue of its natural position, the head of the whole of America; and by the wealth

of its riches, it is the precious pearl of Brazil.”35 Another writer of the period, Francisco Tavares de Brito, in 1732 defined Ouro Prêto as “the Potosi of gold.” Frequent complaints and protests reached Lisbon about the sinful life in Ouro Prêto, Sabará, São Joao d’El Rei, Mariana, and the whole turbulent mining district. Fortunes were made and lost overnight. It was commonplace for a miner to pay a fortune for a black who played a good trumpet and twice as much for a mulatto prostitute, “to abandon himself with her to continuous and scandalous sins.” Men of the cloth behaved no better: official correspondence of the time contains many complaints against “bad clergymen” infesting the area. They were accused of using their immunity to smuggle gold inside little wooden images of saints. It was said that in 1705 Minas Gerais did not contain one priest who was interested in the Christian faith of the people, and six years later the Crown banned the establishment of any religious order

in the mining district.

In any case, there was a proliferation of handsome churches built and decorated in the baroque style characteristic of the region. Minas Gerais attracted the best artisans of the time. Outwardly the churches looked sober and austere, but the interiors, symbolizing the divine soul, glistened with pure gold on their altars, reredoses, pillars, and bas-relief panels. Precious metals were not spared, so that the churches could achieve “the riches of Heaven,” as the monk Miguel de São Francisco recommended in 1710. The price of religious services was astronomical, but everything in the mining area was exorbitant. As had happened in Potosi, Ouro Prêto devoted itself to squandering its sudden wealth. Processions and spectacles provided occasions to exhibit splendid robes and adornments. A religious festival in 1733 lasted over a week. There were not only processions on foot, on horseback, and in triumphal mother-of- pearl, silk, and gold chariots, with fantastic costumes and dazzling settings, but there were equestrian tournaments, bullfights, and dancing in the streets to the sound of flutes, flageolets, and guitars.

The slaves spent their strength and their days in the gold-washing installations. “There they work,” wrote Luis Gomes Ferreira, a doctor who lived in Minas Gerais during the first half of the eighteenth century, “there they eat, and often there they have to sleep; and since when they work they are bathed in sweat, with their feet always in the cold earth,

on stones, or in water, when they rest or eat their pores close and they become so chilled that they are susceptible to many dangerous illnesses, such as very severe pleurisies, apoplectic and paralytic fits, convulsions, pneumonia, and many other diseases.”36 ''The’ capitaes do mato of Minas Gerais'' collected rewards in gold for the severed heads of slaves who tried to escape. Disease ''was'' a blessing from heaven because it meant the approach of death.

The slaves were called the “coins of the Indies” when they were measured, weighed and embarked in Luanda in the Portuguese colony ''o''f Angola; in Brazil those surviving the ocean voyage became “the hands and feet” of the white master. Angola exported Bantu slaves and elephant tusks in exchange for clothing, liquor, and firearms, but Ouro Prêto miners preferred blacks shipped from the little beach of Ouidah on the Gulf of Guinea because they were more vigorous, lasted somewhat longer, and had the magic power to find gold. Every miner also needed a black mistress from Ouidah to bring him luck on his expeditions. 37 ''(''In Cuba, medicinal powers were attributed to female slaves. According to

onetime slave Esteban Montejo, “There was one type of sickness the whites picked up, a sickness of the veins and male organs. It could only be got rid of with black women; if the man who had it slept with a Negress he was cured immediately.”38'')'' Ouro Préto’s appetite for

slaves became insatiable; they expired in short order, only in rare cases

enduring the seven years of continuous labor. Yet the Portuguese were meticulous in baptizing them all before they crossed the Atlantic'','' and once in Brazil they were obliged to attend mass, although they were not allowed to sit in the pews or to enter the chanel.

The gold explosion not only increased the importation of slaves, but absorbed a good part of the black labor from the sugar and tobacco plantations elsewhere in Brazil, leaving them without hands. The miners were contemptuous of farming, and in 1700 and 1713, in the full flush of prosperity, hunger stalked the region: millionaires had to eat cats, rats, ants, and birds of prey. A royal decree in 1711 banned the sale of slaves occupied in agriculture, with the exception of those who showed “perversity of character.”

By the middle of the eighteenth century many miners had gone to look for diamonds in Serra do Frio. The crystalline stones the gold

hunters had tossed aside while exploring the riverbeds had turned out to be diamonds; Minas Gerais had both diamonds and gold in equal quantities. The booming camp of Tijuco became the center of the diamond district and there, as in Ouro Prêto, the wealthy sported the latest European fashions, bringing luxurious clothes, weapons, and furniture from across the ocean for their hour of delirium and dissipation. A mulatto slave, Francisca da Silva, or Xica da Silva, won her freedom by entering the bed of millionaire Joao Fernandes de Oliveira, the uncrowned king of Tijuco; she was ugly and had two children, but became “the ''xica'' who gives orders.”39 As she had never seen the sea and wanted it near her, her ''cavalheiro'' made her a large artificial lake on which he floated a ship, complete with crew. In the Säo Francisco foothills he built her a castle with a garden of exotic plants and artificial waterfalls; in her honor he gave sumptuous banquets with the finest wines, balls that never ended, and theater and concert performances.

In 1818 Tijuco could still manage a large-scale celebration of the prince of Portugal, but ten years earlier the Englishman John Mawe had visited Ouro Préto and had been startled by its poverty. He found empty and worthless houses with futile “for sale” signs, and ate wretched and meager food. Tijtico did not take long to meet the same fate. The crisis had at first led to rebellion. José Joaquim da Silva Xavier, known as “Tiradentes”—the “toothpuller”—was hanged and quartered after being tortured, and other fighters for independence had disappeared from Ouro Prêto into jail or exile.

=== WHAT BRAZILIAN GOLD CONTRIBUTED TO PROGRESS IN ENGLAND ===

The gold began to flow just when Portugal signed the Methuen Treaty with England in 1703. The treaty crowned a long series of privileges obtained by British merchants in Portugal. In return for some advantages for its wines in the English market, Portugal opened its own and its colonies’ markets to British manufactures. In view of the existing inequality of industrial development, this proved disastrous for local Portuguese manufactures. It was not with wine that English textiles were paid for, but with gold—Brazilian gold—and in the process Portuguese

looms were paralyzed. Not content with killing its own industry in the bud, Portugal destroyed the seeds of any kind of manufacturing development in Brazil: until 1715 sugar refineries were banned, in 1729 it was made a criminal offense to open new roads in the mining region, and in 1785 local looms and spinning mills were ordered burned.

England and Holland, the leading gold and slave contrabandists, amassed fortunes in the illegal “black meat” traffic and are said to have illicitly garnered more than half the metal the Portuguese Crown was supposed to get from Brazil in ''quinto real'' tax. But Brazilian gold was channeled to London by licit as well as illicit methods. The gold boom, which brought a host of Portuguese to Minas Gerais, sharply stimulated colonial demand for industrial products and at the same time provided the means to pay for them. Just as Potosi silver rebounded off Spanish soil, Minas Gerais gold only reached Portugal in transit. The metropolis became an intermediary. In 1755 the Marquis de Pombal, Portugal’s prime minister, tried to revive a protectionist policy, but it was too late. He declared that the English had conquered Portugal without the trouble of a conquest, that they were supplying two-thirds of its needs, and that British agents controlled the whole of Portuguese trade. Portugal was producing almost nothing, and the wealth brought by gold was so illusory that even the black slaves who mined it were clothed by the British.

Celso Furtado has noted that Britain, following a farsighted policy with respect to industrial development, used Brazilian gold to pay for essential imports from other countries and could thus concentrate on investments in the manufacturing sector. Thanks to this historical graciousness on the part of the Portuguese, Britain could apply rapid and efficient technical innovations. Europe’s financial center moved from Amsterdam to London. According to British sources, the value of Brazilian gold arriving in London reached £50,000 a week in some periods. ‘Without this tremendous accumulation of gold reserves, Britain would not have been able, later on, to confront Napoleon.

No result of the dynamic stimulus of gold remained on Brazilian soil except churches and works of art. By the end of the eighteenth century, although the diamond supply was still not exhausted, the country was prostrate. Furtado calculates that at that time—the low point of the whole colonial period—the per capita income of the 3 million-odd

Brazilians did not exceed $50 a year in today’s buying power. Minas Gerais drowned in a long wave of decadence and insolvency. Incredibly, a modern Brazilian author expresses gratitude for the favor and submits that the capital the English derived from Minas Gerais “aided the great banking network that built international trade and made it possible to raise the living standards of peoples capable of progress.”(The author, Augusto de Limajr., derives great happiness

from “the expansion of colonizing imperialism which ignorant people today, inspired by their Moscow masters, describe as a crime.”40) Inexorably condemned to poverty so that foreigners might progress, the “incapable” mining communities moldered in isolation and could only resign themselves to scraping a livelihood from lands already despoiled of metals and precious stones. Subsistence farming replaced mining. Today the Minas Gerais countryside, like the Northeast, is the

kingdom of the latifundio and the “hacienda colonels,” a dauntless bastion of

backwardness. The sale of Minas Gerais workers to haciendas in other states is almost as common as the slave traffic in the Northeast. Recently, Franklin de Oliveira toured Minas Gerais. He found collapsing wooden huts, villages without water or light, prostitutes of an average age of thirteen on the road in the valley of the Jequitinhonha, and crazed and famished people along the roadsides.41 Minas Gerais was once accurately described as having a heart of gold in a breast of iron, but its fabulous “iron quadrilateral” is being exploited today by a joint Hanna Mining Company-Bethlehem Steel enterprise: the deposits were surrendered in a sinister deal in 1964. The iron, in foreigners’ hands, will leave no more behind than did the gold.

Only the explosion of artistic talent remains as a memento of the gold delirium, apart from the holes in the ground and the abandoned cities; nor could Portugal salvage anything creative except for the aesthetic revolution. The convent of Mafra, pride of Dom João V, lifted Portugal from artistic decadence: in its carillons of thirty-seven bells and in its solid gold vessels and candelabra, there still glints the gold of Minas Gerais. The Minas churches have been extensively plundered and few sacred objects of portable size remain in them, but monumental baroque works still rise above the colonial ruins— façades and pulpits, galleries, reredoses, human figures designed, carved, or sculpted by Antonio

Francisco Lisboa—”Aleijadinho”----”Little Cripple,” genius son of a female slave and a famous artisan. The eighteenth century was coming to a close when “Aleijadinho” began carving in stone a group of large sacred figures in the garden of the Born Jesus do Matosinhos church in Congonhas do Campo. The work was called “The Prophets,” but there was no longer any glory in prophesying. The gold euphoria was a thing of the past; all the pomp and gaiety had vanished and there was no room for hope. This dramatic final testimony, like a grand monument to the fleeting gold civilization that was born to die, was left to succeeding generations by the most talented artist in all Brazil’s history. “Aleijadinho,” disfigured and crippled by leprosy, created his masterpiece with chisel and hammer tied to fingerless hands, dragging himself on his knees to his workshop every morning.

Legend insists that in the Nossa Senhora das Mercés e Misericordia church in Minas Gerais, dead miners still celebrate mass on cold rainy nights. ‘When the priest turns around, raising his arms from the high altar, one sees the bones of his face.

Capitalism

2023-06-04T09:33:32Z

ComradeTrash: Fixed minor spelling mistake.

[[File:Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System.png|thumb|308px|right|A [[Industrial Workers of the World|IWW]] poster critiquing Capitalism by showing the class system]]'''Capitalism''' is a [[mode of production]] and social system characterized by [[Private property|private ownership]] of the [[means of production]] and [[exploitation]] of [[Wage-slavery|wage labor]]. In this system, most of the materials and equipment necessary for economic activity are owned and controlled by private companies and wealthy individuals, while the majority of people own little of such means of production, and must therefore sell their labour for the owners in order to make a living.

The rise of capitalism from the 16th century onward is associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality. Before capitalism, [[extreme poverty]] was very uncommon in world history, except perhaps in cases of natural disasters. Wherever capitalism developed, either through [[colonialism]] or through forced expropriation of land, it created mass poverty and general deterioration of [[Working class|working people]]'s livelihoods.<ref>{{Citation|author=Dylan Sullivan & Jason Hickel|year=2023|title=Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century|title-url=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169#!|doi=10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.106026|series=World Development|volume=161}}</ref>

== Main aspects ==
The main aspects of capitalism are listed below:

* Most of the means of production are owned by a minority of the population, called capitalists (or the [[bourgeoisie]])
* The majority of people are legally free but obligated to work for a wage or salary in order to buy [[Commodity|commodities]] to fulfill their necessities
* Market hegemony: The majority of the products of people's labour are sold, and most of the things one consumes are obtained by buying them. This contrasts with earlier forms of economy, where most of the products of the individual or family were consumed within the same family; or where the product was distributed according to rules of custom, eg. feudal dues, or the tithe. In capitalism, besides the basic fact that products are now so often exchanged, there is also the feature that the exchange is usually for [[money]]: barter is now rare.
* Advantage of capitalists: Because of their greater wealth and social position, capitalists have a degree of power over the workers which enables them to:
** control the production process, including what is produced and how it is produced;
** take part of the product for themselves although they do not necessarily work (they appropriates [[surplus-value]]).
* Pervasiveness of competition: Individual capitalists operate in an environment of competition with other capitalists producing the same commodity or a substitute, and fighting for markets or loans. This forces capitalists to, among other things, adopt new techniques and practices which will cut costs, and to attempt to increase its size so that it can dominate its competitors as well as achieve [[economies of scale]].<ref>David Schweickart, Capitalism or Worker Control?, pp 4-5:
<blockquote>
`But first a word about the key term. What is this "capitalism" about which our discussion will pivot? I shall understand capitalism to be a socioeconomic system characterized by three sets of institutions. First, the means of production are for the most part privately owned – by individuals directly or through the mediation of corporations. Secondly, the bulk of the economic activity is directed toward the production of goods and services for sale on a free market. Prices are determined largely without governmental interference by producer-consumer interaction. Third, labor-power is a commodity. That is, a large percentage of the workforce sell their capacity to labour to those who can provide them with tools, raw materials, and a place to work.

`To be capitalist, a society must feature all three sets of institutions: private property,* a market, and wage-labor. Many societies have existed, and do exist, which exhibit one or two of these characteristics, but not all three. For example, a feudal society consisting of self-sufficient estates worked by serfs has private property, but neither a market nor wage-labor. A society of small farmers and artisans – Colonial New England, say – is not capitalist, for despite private property and a market, there is little wage-labor. On the other hand, all noncommunist industrial nations today are capitalist. The presence of an elaborate welfare apparatus, a number of nationalized industries, and/or a ruling party self-labelled socialist does not render a society noncapitalist. So long as the bulk of the enterprises are privately owned, worked by hired labor, and produce goods for sale on the market, a society is capitalist.'

( * `I shall adopt the Marxian terminology, which distinguishes between private property – factories, farmland, productive machinery – and personal property – consumer goods purchased for their own sake, not for the sake of making money.')
</blockquote></ref>

== History ==

=== Primitive accumulation ===

In the context of Marxist [[historical materialism]], as [[serfdom]] and the small commodity production of artisans and craftsmen in feudal times was increasingly superseded by the emerging merchant class, increasing [[productive forces]] allowed for a change in property relations that led to the displacement of the [[feudal]] [[aristocracy]] as the dominant economic class in favor of the [[bourgeoisie]]. This occurred by means of several [[Bourgeois revolution|bourgeois revolutions]]. In this context, historical materialism considers capitalism to be a progressive development compared to [[feudalism]]. {{Quote|The progressive historical role of capitalism may be summed up in two brief propositions: increase in the productive forces of social labour, and the socialisation of that labour.|Lenin|The Development of Capitalism in Russia {{Refn|Lenin. [[Library:The Development of Capitalism in Russia|''The Development of Capitalism in Russia'']]: [[Library:The Development of Capitalism in Russia#The Mission of Capitalism|''The Mission of Capitalism'']]|name=|group=note}}}}

===Pre-monopoly capitalism===
Capitalist societies emerged well before the modern capitalist era in small forms from various feudal societies' merchant classes as well as before feudalism. Famously in the [[Christianity|Bible]], Jesus clears the temple in Jerusalem by force, removing the merchants and moneylenders who had nested there. Indeed, this is the template for capitalist societies everywhere: each collapsing due to an inability to supersede the surrounding feudal or slave-based societies. Each one failed to germinate or take root until the [[Kingdom_of_England_(927–1707)#Glorious_Revolution|Glorious Revolution]] of 1685 in England. Inspired by the [[colonialism]] pioneered by the Spanish Empire in the new world, England colonized India, bringing its enormous textile industry to the british isles. Whereupon the factory system and with it, our modern [[Wage slavery|wage-based lifestyle]] was born. From there, capitalist society spread explosively to the rest of the world in what is now know as the [[colonial era]].

===Imperialism and monopoly capitalism===
During world war 1 and world war 2, [[capital]] [[Centralization|centralized]] to a greater extent that ever before. The consequence of these wars was a world monopoly dictatorship of capital --the one we still live in today,-- headed by the [[United States of America]] and its junior partners: the various nations of [[Europe]]. This can be observed directly with how [[bourgeois academia]] splits the world in two: [[Global north|the global north]] and [[Global south|the global south]]. It is worth noting that this world monopoly is not unopposed. For 70 years, the Statesian empire was opposed by the communist-led [[Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922–1991)|Soviet Union]] and her allies. Today again, we see a similar situation with [[People's Republic of China|China]] and the growing political-economic friendship across the global south.

==Differences of definition ==
The definition of capitalism in [[scientific socialism]] is different from the one used by its adherents themselves. Liberals and pro-capitalist ideologues define capitalism as a combination of [[Free market|free market systems]], [[private property]], free competition and voluntary exchange.<ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Characteristics (Retrieved 25 December 2020)</ref> This and similar definitions carry limitations that prevent capitalism's adherents from analyzing it in a holistic manner. The lengths taken by the [[bourgeoisie]] to justify the system and their profits include the denial of atrocities like the [[Bengal Famine]] or the Pinochet regime as 'not real capitalism'.
==Contradictions==
The fundamental contradiction of capitalism is that between the social character of production and the private capitalist form of appropriating the product of labor. <ref group="note">Workers in commodity-producing industries provide their labor as a collective force, and that is the social character of production. The bourgeoisie privately expropriate the product of collective labor.</ref> This contradiction expresses the profound antagonism between wage labor and capital, between the developing productive forces and the capitalist relations of production which shackle them. As the modern productive forces, based on large mechanized industry, develop, production becomes more and more concentrated, the social division of labor progresses, leading to a widening and intensification of the economic links between the various enterprises and branches of the economy.

There are also a number of secondary contradictions within the capitalist class and wage-earning class. Due to markets, there are Industrial Capitalists, Finance Capitalists, Merchant Capitalists and Rural capitalists. Each at odds with the other to appropriate as much surplus-value as possible. Whereas workers contradictions stem from false consciousness due to sexism and racism. These contradictions are exploited by the capitalist class to divide and conquer workers.

During the production of each commodity, there is, directly or indirectly, participation of enterprises of different branches of production and hundreds of thousands to millions of workers, grouped in the capitalist enterprises. The process of production and work, through the development of [[productive forces]] is increasingly socialized. However, both production and its results do not belong to those who are really its creators — the workers — but to private persons, to the capitalists, who use the social wealth for profit, and not in the interest of society as a whole.

==Governments under capitalism==
Under capitalism, the law is placed firmly "in the service of capital."<ref>Pistor 2019, p. xi</ref> As Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School Katharina Pistor further elucidates: "Through its courts, bailiffs, and police forces, states enforce not only their own commands, but also private property rights and the binding commitments private parties make to one another. This does not mean that state power is omnipresent. As long as the threat of coercive law enforcement is sufficiently credible, voluntary compliance can be achieved without mobilizing it in every case."<ref>Pistor 2019, pp. 17 - 18</ref>

==Planning under capitalist society==

==Levels of analysis==
Capitalism can be thought about using three levels of abstraction:

#'''Highly abstract.''' This can be called the theory of a purely capitalist mode of production, or of the `inner logic of capital', `capital's deep structures', etc.<ref>Robert Albritton, ''Economics Transformed,'' footnote, p 5.</ref> One assumes that all goods and services are exchanged in markets; there is no mixture with other modes of production such as feudalism, independent artisanal production, or socialism; and there is no government intervention into the economy. Here one attempts to understand the most basic tendencies of the system, looking at categories such as commodity, value, surplus-value, etc. and their interrelations in a somewhat mathematical fashion.
#'''Mid-level analysis.''' Here one considers the effects of incomplete commodification (that is, not all goods and services are exchanged in markets), mixture of modes, and political and ideological practices. This can produce theories of different sub-types of capitalism. These are sometimes regarded as occupying different eras, for example the following series is sometimes given: merchant capitalism (ca. 1500-1800); liberalism or industrial capitalism (ca. 1800-1900); recent capitalism, variously called imperialism, monopoly capitalism, or finance capitalism (ca. 1900-now). Examples of things which can distinguish sub-types from one another are: the growth of productive power through leading industries, the forms of leading capital, social position of workers, and the economic policies and structure of the world market at a given time.<ref>Makoto Itoh, ''Basic Theory," p. 66.''</ref>
# '''Concrete''' (non-abstract). Sometimes called `empirical' or `conjunctural' analysis. Looks at actual events. Here a broad range of non-economic factors may be brought into consideration. The consequences of history's many accidents comes into view.
The Japanese school of Marxist economics founded by Kozo Uno has been particularly concerned to elaborate the middle level of analysis, which is nascent but not much developed in Marx's own works.

According to the Marxist economist Makoto Itoh,
<blockquote>
The fundamental aims of the revolutionary socialist movement, which are usually expressed in the basic programmes, must be grounded on the basic principles of a capitalist economy, whereas the more concrete strategies and tactics must utilise the more concrete studies of world capitalism and individual countries at the levels of stages [mid-level] theory and of empirical analyses. (''Basic Theory ...,'' p 66)
</blockquote>

==References==

=== Notes===
<references group="note" />

===Citations===
<references />

===Bibliography ===

====== Print sources======
* Gingrich, "Marx on Social Class". University professor's handout.
*Itoh, Makoto, 1988. ''The Basic Theory of Capitalism''. Makoto Itoh is a Marxian economist belonging to the Japanese Uno school.
*Marx, Karl, and Fredereick Engels, 1848. ''The Communist Manifesto''. Available free at Marxist Internet Archive and http://www.marx2mao.com
* Meiksins Wood, Ellen, 1995. ''Democracy Against Capitalism''.
*Pistor, Katharina (2019). [https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691178974/the-code-of-capital The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality]. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0691189439.
*Schweickart, David, 1980. ''Capitalism or Worker Control?''. A point-by-point exposition of the advantages of a worker self-managed economy with market exchange and governmental control of new investment, over capitalism. Not Marxist-Leninist, but still a useful anticapitalist text.

[[Category:Modes of production]]
[[Category:Capitalism]]

Portuguese Workers' Communist Party

2023-05-27T10:28:48Z

ComradeTrash: Added references heading

{{Infobox political party|name=Portuguese Workers' Communist Party/Re-Organized Movement of the Party of the Proletariat|logo=Pctp mrpp logo.svg.png|founded=September 1970}}

The '''Portuguese Worker's Communist Party''' is a Portuguese Maoist communist party originally founded as the Movement for the Reorganization of the Party of the Proletariat in September 1970. In 1977 the name was changed to the Portuguese Worker's Communist Party.<ref>{{Web citation|author=Comissão Nacional de Eleições|title=Partidos Políticos: PCTP-MRPP|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070607011343/http://www.cne.pt/index.cfm?sec=0506010100&PartidoID=6|archive-date=07/06/2007|retrieved=23/05/2023}}</ref>

== References ==

Unemployment

2023-05-26T14:24:00Z

ComradeTrash: Fixed repeated word

[[File:Soup Kitchen, Chicago.webp|thumb|During the great depression (1929-1939), unemployment was at an all time high. Structures such as this soup kitchen in Chicago were set up to deal with an ever growing mass of hungry unemployed workers.]]
'''Unemployment''' is the condition where an individual is seeking employment but cannot find work anywhere. Unemployment since the industrial revolution has served the purpose of providing the bourgeoisie with a reserve army of labour. This reserve can be quickly deployed to work in rapidly expanding markets, or, alternatively, it can be kept as a threat to employed workers, in order to maintain low wages.<ref>{{Citation|author=Karl Marx|year=1867|title=Capital Volume One|chapter=Chapter Twenty-Five: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation|chapter-url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm#S3|section=Section 3}}</ref>

Unemployment

2023-05-26T14:22:57Z

ComradeTrash: Created the page, added an elementary introduction, a short description of the purpose of unemployment and an image of a soup kitchen to depict it.

[[File:Soup Kitchen, Chicago.webp|thumb|During the great depression (1929-1939), unemployment was at an all time high. Structures such as this soup kitchen in Chicago were set up to deal with an ever growing mass of hungry unemployed workers.]]
'''Unemployment''' is the condition where an individual is seeking employment but cannot find work anywhere. Unemployment since the industrial revolution has served the purpose of providing the bourgeoisie with a reserve army of labour. This reserve can be rapidly deployed to work in rapidly expanding markets, or, alternatively, it can be kept as a threat to employed workers, in order to maintain low wages.<ref>{{Citation|author=Karl Marx|year=1867|title=Capital Volume One|chapter=Chapter Twenty-Five: The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation|chapter-url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm#S3|section=Section 3}}</ref>

File:Soup Kitchen, Chicago.webp

2023-05-26T14:19:12Z

ComradeTrash:

Picture of a soup kitchen in Chicago taken during the great depression.

Topic:Xit34gysyt46qdr7

2023-05-25T22:03:28Z

ComradeTrash (talk | contribs) commented on "Sources" (There are no sources for this page. I would reccomend that sources are added to the statements or that at least an article/book is left i...)

Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan

2023-05-25T21:56:08Z

ComradeTrash: Fixed minor spelling mistake.

{{Infobox country|name=Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan|native_name=د افغانستان اسلامي امارت‎|image_flag=Flag of Afghanistan.png|largest_city=Kabul|capital=Kabul|leader_title1=Amir al-Mu'minin|leader_name1=Hibatullah Akhundzada|image_map=Afghanistan map.svg|map_width=260|GDP_PPP=USD $72.911 billion|GDP_PPP_per_capita=USD $2,024|government_type=Islamic Emirate|population_estimate=32,225,560|mode_of_production=[[Capitalism]] (semi-[[feudalism|feudal]])}}

The '''Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan''' (د افغانستان اسلامي جمهوریت), also known as '''Afghanistan''' (افغانستان), is a country in [[Central Asia]].

Currently active communist parties in the country include the [[Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan]].

== History ==

=== British invasion ===
The [[United Kingdom]] invaded Afghanistan for a third time in 1919, leading [[Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1917–1991)|Soviet Russia]] to establish the first diplomatic relations with Afghanistan and recognize its borders. When the British tried to assassinate Afghan leader [[Amanullah Khan]] in 1920, the RSFSR and Afghanistan signed a non-aggression pact.<ref>{{Web citation|newspaper=[[Proletarian (newspaper)|Proletarian]]|title=The October Revolution and the east|date=2018-04-21|url=https://thecommunists.org/2018/04/21/news/the-october-revolution-and-the-east/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220517164416/https://thecommunists.org/2018/04/21/news/the-october-revolution-and-the-east/|archive-date=2022-05-17|retrieved=2022-12-27}}</ref>

=== Democratic Republic and civil war ===
In 1978, the [[Democratic Republic of Afghanistan]] was formed.

After a long war between the DRA and the [[Mujahideen]], [[Operation Cyclone|armed and funded]] by the [[United States of America|USA]], the government was lost to the Mujahideen terrorist organization in 1992.

In 1994, a group of students in Kandahar founded the [[Taliban]], which managed to overthrow the USA puppet Mujahideen government by 1996.

=== U.S. invasion ===
{{Main article|War in Afghanistan}}
In 2001, after Mujahideen members carried out the [[September 11 attacks|9/11 attacks]] in New York, the USA invaded Afghanistan to support the Mujahideen, telling the American public that the Taliban were the real perpetrators. From 2002 to 2021 the Mujahideen had control of most of the country and was the officially recognized government by most countries.

In 2011, journalist [[Julian Assange]] claimed that "The goal is an endless war, not a successful war" to enrich the "transnational security elite"<ref>Wikileaks on Twitter: [https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1427929346262642688 Julian Assange speaking in 2011: "The goal is to use Afghanistan to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe through Afghanistan and back into the hands of a transnational security elite. The goal is an endless war, not a successful war" #Afghanistan]</ref>

According to [[WikiLeaks]], the [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] sought to sway public sentiment in favor of the Afghan war by promoting stories of how the US occupation is 'good for women'.<ref>[https://rokfin.com/stream/8488/LIVE-Wikileaks-Exposes-CIA-Woke-Imperialism-Propaganda-In-Afghanistan LIVE: Wikileaks Exposes CIA Woke Imperialism Propaganda In Afghanistan] by [[Jackson Hinkle]] on [[Rokfin]]</ref><ref>[https://www.commondreams.org/views/2010/07/31/cia-document-calls-using-afghan-women-messengers-humanize-war CIA Document Calls For Using Afghan Women as Messengers to Humanize the War] by Lucinda Marshall on [[Common Dreams]]</ref>

In 2021, after US president [[Joe Biden|Biden]] announced a full troop withdrawal from Afghanistan<ref>[https://www.defense.gov/Explore/News/Article/Article/2573268/biden-announces-full-us-troop-withdrawal-from-afghanistan-by-sept-11/ Biden Announces Full U.S. Troop Withdrawal From Afghanistan by Sept. 11]</ref>, the Taliban retook the entirety of Afghanistan with little to no fighting.<ref>[https://www.financialexpress.com/defence/the-fall-of-kabul-beginning-of-taliban-2-0/2311839/ The Fall of Kabul: Beginning of Taliban 2.0] by Financial Express</ref> This move has been described as a strategic repositioning by the US, likely to seek to destabilize the [[People's Republic of China|Chinese]] and [[Russian Federation|Russian]] efforts to develop the [[Shanghai Cooperation Organisation|Shanghai Cooperation Organization]].<ref>[https://youtu.be/QiF3TQZSxhs Inside US Afghanistan pullout, CIA opium ratline, pipeline conflict, new cold war] by [[The Grayzone]] with guest journalist [[Pepe Escobar]]</ref> Former Prime Minister of the [[Imperialism|imperialist]] UK [[Tony Blair]] called the US withdrawal from Afghanistan "imbecilic" and criticized the slogan "forever wars", illustrating the UK's support for continued imperialist activity in Afghanistan.<ref>[https://youtu.be/vjJyfMsDFjo War Criminal Tony Blair: Afghanistan Withdrawal "Imbecilic"] | [[Richard Medhurst]] for [[RT (TV network)|RT]]</ref>

On August 26, 2021, there was a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport. It's likely that this attack was carried out with either tacit approval or explicit involvement of US proxies, given that the threat of the attack was known beforehand. It is also a potentially convenient excuse for imperialist militaries to remain in Afghanistan, despite the Taliban demand to withdraw by 31 August.<ref>[https://youtu.be/LQPGqeb8Ikg Blast Rocks Kabul Airport] by [[Richard Medhurst]]</ref>

The Taliban administration continue to fight an armed struggle against Islamic State - Khorasan Province, a group aligned with ISIL.

The US [[Economic sanctions|sanctions]] are currently driving Afghanistan to famine.<ref>{{News citation|title=How U.S. sanctions are driving Afghanistan to famine|url=https://news.yahoo.com/u-sanctions-driving-afghanistan-famine-105210718.html}}</ref>

== References ==
[[Category:Countries]]
[[Category:Global south]]
<references />
[[Category:Countries sanctioned by the US]]
[[Category:Asian countries]]
[[Category:Countries invaded by the United States]]

Portuguese Workers' Communist Party

2023-05-22T23:10:22Z

ComradeTrash: Added introductory information such as full name, founding date plus logo.

File:Pctp mrpp logo.svg.png

2023-05-22T22:59:19Z

ComradeTrash:

Logo of the Portuguese Worker's Communist Party