Ideology

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The Western left and the US-China contradiction

In the following article, which was originally published in People’s Democracy, the weekly English-language newspaper of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), Prabhat Patnaik takes up the contradictions in the view taken by parts of the western left with regard to China and its growing contradictions with US imperialism.

He begins by stating that, “significant segments of the non-Communist Western Left see the developing contradiction between the United States and China in terms of an inter-imperialist rivalry.” (One would just observe here that Comrade Patnaik is being either diplomatic or charitable, or quite possibly both, as a number of western communist parties, not least the Communist Party of Greece [KKE], are at least equally prone to this fundamental political error.)

Such a characterisation, Comrade Patnaik notes, “ironically makes these segments of the Left implicitly or explicitly complicit in US imperialism’s machinations against China… since the two countries are at loggerheads on most contemporary issues, it leads to a general muting of opposition to US imperialism.”

Comrade Patnaik further notes that this deviation is not new on the part of some sections of the left, citing attitudes to NATO’s bombing of the former Yugoslavia and current conflicts in both Ukraine and Gaza.

Regarding the claims that China is a capitalist country, Patnaik writes:

“As for China being a capitalist economy, and hence engaged in imperialist activities all over the globe in rivalry with the US, those who hold this view are, at best, taking a moralist position and mixing up ‘capitalist’ with ‘bad’ and ‘socialist’ with ‘good’. Their position amounts in effect to saying: I have my notion of how a socialist society should behave (which is an idealised notion), and if China’s behaviour in some respects differs from my notion, then ipso facto China cannot be socialist and hence must be capitalist. The terms capitalist and socialist however have very specific meanings, which imply their being associated with very specific kinds of dynamics, each kind rooted in certain basic property relations. True, China has a significant capitalist sector, namely one characterised by capitalist property relations, but the bulk of the Chinese economy is still State-owned and characterised by centralised direction which prevents it from having the self- drivenness (or ‘spontaneity’) that marks capitalism. One may critique many aspects of Chinese economy and society but calling it ‘capitalist’ and hence engaged in imperialist activities on a par with western metropolitan economies, is a travesty. It is not only analytically wrong but leads to praxis that is palpably against the interests of both the working classes in the metropolis and the working people in the global south.”

Hence:

“It is not inter-imperialist rivalry, but resistance on the part of China, and other countries following its lead, to the re-assertion of hegemony by western imperialism that explains the heightening of US-China contradictions.”

Significant segments of the non-Communist Western Left see the developing contradiction between the United States and China in terms of an inter-imperialist rivalry. Such a characterisation fulfils three distinct theoretical functions from their point of view: first, it provides an explanation for the growing contradiction between the US and China; second, it does so by using a Leninist concept and within a Leninist paradigm; and third, it critiques China as an emerging imperialist power, and hence by inference, a capitalist economy, which is in conformity with an ultra-Left critique of China.

Such a characterisation ironically makes these segments of the Left implicitly or explicitly complicit in US imperialism’s machinations against China. At best, it leads to a position which holds that they are both imperialist countries, so that there is no point in supporting one against the other; at worst, it leads to supporting the US against China as the “lesser evil” in the conflict between these two imperialist powers. In either case, it leads to the obliteration of an oppositional position with regard to the aggressive postures of US imperialism vis-à-vis China; and since the two countries are at loggerheads on most contemporary issues, it leads to a general muting of opposition to US imperialism.

For quite some time now, significant sections of the western Left, even those who otherwise profess opposition to western imperialism, have been supportive of the actions of this imperialism in specific situations. It was evident in their support for the bombing of Serbia when that country was being ruled by Slobodan Milosevich; it is evident at present in the support for NATO in the ongoing Ukraine war; and it is also evident in their shocking lack of any strong opposition to the genocide that is being perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinian people in Gaza with the active support of western imperialism. The silence on, or the support for, the aggressive imperialist position on China by certain sections of the western Left, is, to be sure, not necessarily identical with these positions; but it is in conformity with them.

Such a position which does not frontally oppose western imperialism, is, ironically, at complete variance with the interests and the attitudes of the working class in the metropolitan countries. The working class in Europe for instance is overwhelmingly opposed to NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, as is evident in many instances of workers’ refusal to load shipment of European arms meant for Ukraine. This is not surprising, for the war has also directly impacted workers’ lives by aggravating inflation. But the absence of any forthright Left opposition to the war is making many workers turn to right-wing parties that, even though they fall in line with imperialist positions upon coming to power as Meloni has done in Italy, are at least critical of such positions when they are in opposition. The quietude of the western left vis-à-vis western imperialism is thus causing a shift of the entire political centre of gravity to the right over much of the metropolis. And looking upon the US-China contradiction as an inter-imperialist rivalry plays into this narrative.

As for China being a capitalist economy, and hence engaged in imperialist activities all over the globe in rivalry with the US, those who hold this view are, at best, taking a moralist position and mixing up “capitalist” with “bad” and “socialist” with “good”. Their position amounts in effect to saying: I have my notion of how a socialist society should behave (which is an idealised notion), and if China’s behaviour in some respects differs from my notion, then ipso facto China cannot be socialist and hence must be capitalist. The terms capitalist and socialist however have very specific meanings, which imply their being associated with very specific kinds of dynamics, each kind rooted in certain basic property relations. True, China has a significant capitalist sector, namely one characterised by capitalist property relations, but the bulk of the Chinese economy is still State-owned and characterised by centralised direction which prevents it from having the self- drivenness (or “spontaneity”) that marks capitalism. One may critique many aspects of Chinese economy and society, but calling it “capitalist” and hence engaged in imperialist activities on a par with western metropolitan economies, is a travesty. It is not only analytically wrong but leads to praxis that is palpably against the interests of both the working classes in the metropolis and the working people in the global south.

But the question immediately arises: if the US-China contradiction is not a manifestation of inter-imperialist rivalry, then how can we explain its rise to prominence in the more recent period? To understand this we have to go back to the post-second world war period. Capitalism emerged from the war greatly weakened, and facing an existential crisis: the working class in the metropolis was not willing to go back to the pre-war capitalism that had entailed mass unemployment and destitution; socialism had made great advances all over the world; and liberation struggles in the global south against colonial and semi-colonial oppression had reached a real crescendo. For its very survival therefore capitalism had to make a number of concessions: the introduction of universal adult suffrage, the adoption of welfare State measures, the institution of State intervention in demand management, and above all the acceptance of formal political decolonisation.

Political decolonisation however did not mean economic decolonisation, that is, the transfer of control over third world resources, exercised till then by metropolitan capital to the newly independent countries; indeed against such transfers imperialism fought a bitter and prolonged struggle, marked by the overthrow of governments led by Arbenz, Mossadegh, Allende, Cheddi Jagan, Lumumba and many others. Even so, however, metropolitan capital could not prevent third world resources in many instances from slipping out of its control to the dirigiste regimes that had come up in these countries following decolonisation.

The tide turned in favour of imperialism with the coming into being of a higher stage of centralisation of capital that gave rise to globalised capital, including above all globalised finance, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union that itself was not altogether unrelated to the globalisation of finance. Imperialism trapped countries in the web of globalisation and hence in the vortex of global financial flows, forcing them under the threat of financial outflows into pursuing neo-liberal policies that meant the end of dirigiste regimes and the re-acquisition of control by metropolitan capital over much of third world resources, including third world land-use.

It is against this background of re-assertion of imperialist hegemony that one can understand the heightening of US-China contradiction and many other contemporary developments like the Ukraine war. Two features of this re-assertion need to be noted: the first is that metropolitan market access for goods from countries like China, together with the willingness of metropolitan capital to locate plants in such countries to take advantage of their comparatively lower wages for meeting global demand, accelerated the growth-rate in these economies (and only these economies) of the global south; it did so in China to a point where the leading metropolitan power, the US, began to see China as a threat. The second feature is the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism that has emerged with virulence after the collapse of the housing “bubble” in the US.

For both these reasons the US would now like to protect its economy against imports from China and from other similarly-placed countries of the global south. Even though these imports may be occurring, at least in part, under the aegis of US capital, the US cannot afford to run the risk of “deindustrialising” itself. The desire on its part to cut China “down to size” so soon after it had been hailing China for its “economic reforms” is thus rooted in the contradictions of neo-liberal capitalism, and hence in the very logic inherent to the reassertion of imperialist hegemony. It is not inter-imperialist rivalry, but resistance on the part of China, and other countries following its lead, to the re-assertion of hegemony by western imperialism that explains the heightening of US-China contradictions.

As the capitalist crisis accentuates, as the oppression of third world countries because of their inability to service their external debt increases through the imposition of “austerity” by imperialist agencies like the IMF, and in turn calls forth greater resistance from them and greater assistance to them from China, the US-China contradictions will become more acute and the tirades against China in the west will grow shriller.

https://socialistchina.org/2023/11/29/t ... radiction/

[blindpig]

Entertaining futurology
No. 12/88.XII.2023

Before we unite, we need to figure it out.

Part 1. Arena
1.1. The main front is knowledge
The bourgeoisie is waging class struggle on many fronts, pushing the enemy into pre-prepared corners. Advancing at new milestones - whether through inflation, crisis or war - the bourgeoisie creates such unsettled life that the proletariat is forced to join the struggle to the best of its knowledge and abilities. The limitation of this knowledge leads to the fact that the proletarians trust the most confident-sounding speaker. As a rule, the role of authority is played by a “thinker” of the bourgeois persuasion, who concentrates all the frenzied activity of the proletariat on the directions set by the bourgeoisie. As a result, someone runs to fight on the national front, completely missing the class content of the struggle. Someone is diligently preparing strikes and strikes, without realizing the issue of taking power. Others fight on religious and racial fronts. Thus, the struggle of the proletariat is spontaneous : “the exploited are forced to enter into the struggle, acting as classes in order to survive... to survive not only biologically, but socially,” - it is not thought out and, as a result, is not effective: “the proletarian exploited masses as a class represent “a mentally limited appendage of the bourgeoisie, the source of its wealth and luxurious life.” A little less gullible, but no less poorly equipped with knowledge, the leftist contingent is also at war with the mills, causing particular damage to the cause of the class struggle with their opportunism.

However, victory is not expected on the national front: even having achieved complete dominance, none of the nations will build a peaceful life. There is no victory on the economism front either: having wrested from the bourgeoisie all possible social preferences in the form of pensions, benefits, a 5-hour working day, the uneducated proletariat will eventually lose them. There is no victory either on the racial front, or on the religious front, or on the front of the military conflict, much less on the front of the so-called “common sense”.

The main reason for the success of the bourgeoisie at this stage is the consciousness and organization of the activities of this class. Above we outlined the consistency and thoughtfulness of the struggle of the bourgeoisie with the proletariat in the form of creating such fronts on which the proletariat cannot achieve success. The confrontation of capitalists among themselves is also conscious and organized: since the times of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Malthus, Clausewitz, Nietzsche, Blioch, Douhet, Hitler, the theory of politics, military art was, perhaps, the only most honest, frank, cynical of the scientific theories of the pre-Marx period, which can be considered the highest technology of struggle between capitalists.

Does this mean that the bourgeoisie is invincible? No, because all the vaunted organization and consciousness of the capitalist has strict limits. The reason for this limitation is the fact that the activity of the class of parasites is based on a direct violation of the logic and laws of social development, expressed in the reliance of all regressive capitalist activity on animal interests.

Thus, it is possible to stop adding grist to the mill of the class enemy and achieve final victory only by achieving success on the key front, which runs along the line dividing scientific consciousness with its organization and ignorance with its spontaneity. That is, on the front of unconditional Marxist competence.

Only by going through conscientious self-education are people able to overcome their atavisms, habits and interests and unite as a real antagonist of the bourgeoisie - the working (working) class. A class that will fight both the bourgeoisie and “the mass of the counter-revolutionary proletariat, which enters the camp of imperialism out of its own ignorance and greed.” Such a class is characterized by reliance on a developed theory (without which it will again fall into the state of a proletariat inconsistently twitching in different directions), its deepest understanding, its further development and clear organization (otherwise work is impossible). Until we solve the problem of training strong theorists, the nationalist, clerical and thieves’ fronts will blaze and become fierce.

The transition to the phase of mature communism will ultimately require a high level of scientific Marxist competence in the entire society. It is precisely this—the education of society—that is the most important goal that must be kept in mind during revolutionary activity. This goal, the goal of nurturing a half-animal man, driven by spontaneous motives, into a communist man, driven by a conscious Marxist necessity, will be promoted by the nearest communist practice: the emergence and development of a scientific theory of the development of society (as a consequence of the objective trend of development of productive forces in conditions of stagnation of production and political relations), its gradual spread and assimilation in left-wing environments, the creation of the first political party on the basis of mature theory, the fight against opportunism, the establishment of the dictatorship of the working class under the leadership of the party, the beginning of scientific planning for the development of productive forces and production relations and the implementation of plans in practice.

1.2. Knowledge is organization, and organization is victory.
The objective laws of the development of society lead it to communism; It’s no secret that the objective factor is long overdue and a developed subjective factor is required for a revolutionary transition. The success of the class struggle must be considered from the point of view of the strength (depth, accuracy) of knowledge and the accompanying strength of organization (in parentheses, we note that the connection between the degree of scientific competence of the members of the organization and the quality of organization seems obvious, but research on this point would not hurt). In essence, we are talking about a competition between two ORGANIZATIONAL factors: capitalist and communist.

The collapse of the bourgeoisie seems inevitable for two reasons.

Firstly (and here we will be happy to quote Bortnik’s article), “ the absence of restrictions on competence is the main and main advantage of Marxists over the bourgeoisie .” That is, the communists have no limit to their organizational capabilities.

Secondly , the social capitalist structure reveals the limit of the organizational capabilities of the bourgeoisie, which in the competitive struggle cannot avoid crises, wars and the birth of an antagonistic working class. Bourgeois education influences the subjective factor negatively: it develops the intellectual beginnings of representatives of the bourgeois class and is constantly improving in maintaining the level of social science literacy and the exploited population at the lowest possible level. However, in contrast to this, the following points influence the objective growth of the potential of the working (working) class. First, the mode of production, consisting of technological processes, labor organization and the system of relations between people in the production process, is constantly changing and requires increasingly higher intellectual abilities from workers. Secondly, in the process of development of capitalism, the population is actively proletarianized: there are more and more proletarians, fewer and fewer oligarchs, and the stratification between them acquires stunning proportions, which over and over again pushes an increasing number of proletarians to search for answers about the ongoing injustice. Third, the achievements of Marxist science sooner or later come to the attention of progressive people, who, in the course of conscientious self-education, sooner or later develop a theory and build a vanguard of the working class. This vanguard, in turn, seeks ways to influence and educate the masses.

Thus, capitalism inevitably “creates its own gravedigger,” and if the vanguard of the working class can develop its strategy taking into account the main front of the arena of class struggle - the line of scientific Marxist competence - then we can conclude that the question of a successful communist revolution is only a matter of time .

1.3. Time factor
You might think that time is on our side.

In the long term, capitalist relations must sooner or later lead to the fact that the “gravedigger” they have created - a critical mass of competent Marxists - will carry out a revolution on the basis of a theory of the necessary quality that they have developed.

This means: if in 1917, due to a number of circumstances, a revolution had not happened and history had turned towards the path of white fascism, then after the inevitable continuation of the First World War, red power would have manifested itself in some capacity and in the depths of Russia, very likely torn into several pieces in war-stricken Europe. And even now, the defeat of the Russian Federation and its subsequent collapse will complicate the position of the red forces by orders of magnitude, but the monstrous impoverishment of the population, military conflicts, the force of historical inertia (remnants of Soviet education) and the availability of Marxist knowledge will sooner or later lead to the emergence of a competent center capable of organizing the class struggle .

This means: if a real tactical revolutionary opportunity arises, then every effort must be made to realize it. But if she does not appear with us, she will appear with our descendants. Moreover, the process is ongoing. The revolutions that occurred in the twentieth century in China, Mongolia, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and the processes taking place in Laos, Nepal, Venezuela, Nicaragua, indicate that the global revolutionary process, in which hired workers play an increasingly important role, as well as local parties with communist names, even with the minimum degree of their scientific and theoretical maturity, does not stop. There is no sign that this process will end. A mind deprived of a scientific and theoretical component is not able to search for a way out of the capitalist stables and is forced to adapt to life in an unpleasant surrounding substance. But even an engineering mind and dissertation experience are often enough to harmoniously reflect on finding a larger solution to the problem without repeating past social tragedies, including the defeat of left-wing protests. By the way, RUSO consists in abundance of highly educated scientists in technical fields. Their achievements in the field of social problems are still modest, but nevertheless their materials are often distinguished by a very coherent research methodology.

Let’s just calm down on this: sit back and slowly develop the theory in all its breadth and completeness. At the same time, not forgetting that neither Marx nor Lenin could stop the First World War due to the fact that the theory of communism took only the first steps, was far from a scientific solution to many problems, and competent Marxists could be counted on one hand. Our trouble is that most opponents of capitalism, whether they sit quietly or riot on the barricades, do practically nothing in the scientific theory of Marxism. But even when engaged in productive scientific research, a Marxist cannot be an empty optimist. Let's ask ourselves the question: **can time work against us - contrary to the objective laws of social development? ** “Contrary to”, of course, cannot. However, there is no law that guarantees any form of matter protection from destruction. In the case of society, time could quite legitimately work against us if we allow for the existence of a hypothetical point in time at which the power of knowledge and the power of organization would cease to play a leading role in the class struggle.

The most obvious assumption for this scenario is the cessation of physical existence. It is easy to assume that in the course of extremely intensified competition, the bourgeoisie can destroy the planet with the help of the latest achievements of science and technology, say, nuclear technology. This risk has been known for many decades, and it is very likely that it will not materialize, if only because the animal behavior of capitalists does not exclude their “instincts of self-preservation.” However, such reasoning is speculative, and this risk must be kept in mind when planning activities. But we should not discount the fact that over the past half century, despite a series of very large multi-year wars, it was the instinct of self-preservation that kept the imperialists from using nuclear weapons, which allowed the USSR to maintain the minimum necessary armed forces. The fact that the USSR was broken by the arms race is an illusion. In this article, we will exclude the factor of nuclear war from our considerations and treat it with a certain amount of fatalism: it is difficult to influence, the probability seems small and “only the viable can survive.” To minimize the risks of the destruction of life on Earth by the bourgeoisie, there is only one reliable way - to triple the efforts of people who call themselves Marxists in the field of assimilation of existing Marxism, skillful propaganda of its content and the development of new directions that correspond to modern objective prerequisites, and thereby bring public consciousness to a new one. qualitative state - free from illusions.

However, there is also a new risk, not so known to our ancestors and which arose during the development of imperialism, associated with the possibility of forcible separation of people and having an ever-increasing likelihood due to the exponential growth in the development of technology. Let's look at it below.

Part 2. New challenges
2.1. Dying Imperialism
I.V. Stalin explained the position of V.I. Lenin regarding imperialism as “dying capitalism”, pointing to the three most important contradictions, brought to the extreme line beyond which the revolution begins: between labor and capital, between various financial groups and imperialist powers in their struggle for sources of raw materials, for foreign territories and between a handful of dominant "civilized" nations and hundreds of millions of colonial and dependent peoples of the world.

It is obvious that the aggravation of contradictions is manifested in the form of super-exploitation, hunger and other bestial living conditions for millions of people, as well as wars using the latest inventions of science and technology.

It is no less obvious that competition cannot last forever: fewer and fewer competitors are waging an increasingly fierce struggle. Monopolization is gradually approaching its logical conclusion (here, in an amicable way, a great deal of economic research must be applied, and we will have to do it), and the time is not so far in sight when a “clash of two yakozuna” may occur: the ultimate stratification of society, where less than one percent of the population owns everything, and a "total" war in which the "reasonable people" of the entire planet with sincere enthusiasm try to destroy each other with the help of the most modern weapons for the sake of the interests of the last two competitors.

This is the extreme line beyond which the revolutionary subjective factor will manifest itself over and over again: people armed with Marxist theory, developing it, uniting in the vanguard of the working class, educating the people and organizing them to overthrow the maddened exploiters.

Here, as they say, the worse the better, the faster this agony will end. The ability of people to unite, the presence of theory, the industrial need to develop intelligence at least in the professional field and terrible living conditions - this is exactly how the gravedigger of the bourgeoisie is created.

However, at the moment when the nuclear apocalypse has already been avoided, and the subjective factor for the communist revolution has not yet been cultivated (or is not yet strong enough, as in a number of modern communist-oriented countries), a significant point in the negation of competition may occur in the life of society: it is extremely unstable the moment when only one monopolist remains; the moment when dying capitalism turns into dying imperialism.

Let us consider the physiognomy of dying imperialism.

Let’s imagine a situation where a certain group of oligarchs was able to simultaneously suppress all competitive groups of the bourgeoisie, taking all property into their own hands, and drive all communist forces underground. The political organization of the ruling class can then look like a certain center, which has all the resources and all the military power at its disposal, and a regional periphery of forced vassals of the center, collected from the obedient part of the remnants of former competitors.

History, of course, will not go exactly like this, but the author would like to present this state of affairs not as an empty fantasy, but as some kind of research technique that allows us to show where the thought of an imperialist can go when his power and military resources reach their peak. In the context of the current acceleration of growth in the level of stratification, this does not seem like a fairy tale. One can imagine different options for the development of this state of affairs: from sudden decay with defeat from communist forces that emerged from underground to the destruction of the planet or the creation of an “earthly paradise.” The researcher’s task is to find the option closest to the truth.

The important point of this situation is its temporary nature.

Firstly , despite the fullness of power, competitive aspirations within the ruling class have not gone away: even if there is complete consensus within the center, then the issues of transferring power and keeping it from the encroachments of “regional clans” will be relevant for exactly as long as the state of mind of the ruling class will be in the darkness of ignorance.

Secondly , from a socio-economic point of view, the revolutionary transition to a new formation that has not occurred signals that the contradiction between the development of productive forces and production relations has not gone away: the results of collective labor are still appropriated by the monopolist. The situation is, to a certain extent, revolutionary: the productive forces are already ready for the transition to communism, but the capitalist formation is trying to tightly preserve the capitalist mode of production. The extremely unstable state of the social order is due to the clash of extreme antagonists: on the one hand are the potentially revolutionizing masses of the proletariat of the entire planet, and on the other hand are the imperialists, whose features we will consider below.

However, even such a historically insignificant period of time requires consideration, because significant damage can be caused to society.

2.2. Conservation as the leading motivation of the imperialist in an environment of undivided power
The average person is often tempted to imagine the “victorious” imperialist as a kind of world leader who, in conditions of complete power, will begin to arrange the world in some “fair” way. K. Kautsky reasoned in a similar philistine way, talking about the prospects of some supposedly new future “ultra-imperialism”, which would ensure the possibility of permanent peace. IN AND. Lenin called such thoughts nothing more than “deception of the masses” and “distraction of attention from acute contradictions and acute problems of our time and directing attention to false prospects.”

2.2.1. Imperialism as a result of the development of capitalism
And he called it rightly: any reflections on the future should be based on the study of phenomena in development. In his work “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” Vladimir Ilyich clearly shows the movement from capitalism to capitalist imperialism (quotes from this work are highlighted in quotation marks in the section below).

Economically, the main thing in this movement is the following.

Firstly, it represents the movement of capitalism with a change from its lower form of capitalist free competition to a higher socio-economic structure, a monopoly structure.

Secondly, this movement is characterized by the fact that “some basic properties of capitalism began to turn into their opposite: free competition is the basic property of capitalism and commodity production in general; monopoly is the direct opposite of free competition, but this latter began to turn into a monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale production, displacing small ones, replacing large ones with the largest ones, bringing the concentration of production and capital to the point that a monopoly grew and continues to grow from it: cartels, syndicates, trusts , merging with them the capital of a dozen banks handling billions. And at the same time, monopolies, growing out of free competition, do not eliminate it, but exist above it and next to it, thereby giving rise to a number of especially acute and steep contradictions, frictions, and conflicts.”

Thirdly, monopoly capitalism exacerbates all the contradictions of capitalism:

“This aggravation of contradictions is the most powerful driving force of the transitional historical period that began with the final victory of global finance capital. Monopolies, oligarchy, the desire for domination instead of the desire for freedom, the exploitation of an ever-increasing number of small or weak nations by a small handful of the richest or strongest nations - all this has given rise to those distinctive features of imperialism which lead it to be characterized as parasitic or decaying capitalism. More and more prominently, as one of the tendencies of imperialism, the creation of a “ rentier state ” , a usurer state, the bourgeoisie of which lives increasingly by exporting capital and “ cutting coupons . ”

Fourthly, these contradictions can be observed in the gigantic variety of economic and political conditions and the extreme discrepancy in the rate of economic growth of different countries due to the fact that financial capital and trusts do not weaken, but strengthen the differences between different parts of the world economy. “And since the relationships of power have changed, what can the resolution of the contradiction consist of, under capitalism, other than force?” - asks Vladimir Ilyich, leading the reader to the conclusion that politically “imperialism is generally a desire for violence and reaction.”

Of course, a monopoly or financial capital is not a set of abstract entities, but rather tangible social organizations, the structure of which can be understood through consideration of its constituent roles and their connections. Within the framework of the goal set in the article, we are especially interested in the fact that at the top of the monopolistic organizational structure there is the role of the imperialist oligarch, which can be characterized as follows.

This role “grew” out of the panties of the once fussy entrepreneurship of the times of free competition and reached the extreme degree of parasitism. Now its bearer, in the most authoritarian way, saddles the powerful productive forces (in some cases already containing elements of a planned economy), ignoring their primary production purpose. All he cares about these powers is their ability to bring him even more money in the most efficient way possible.

As monopolization intensifies, this role becomes that of an absolute slave-owning dictator, all of whose activities are aimed at strengthening the dominance of its owner through the growth of capital. Parasitism in its extreme form becomes fatal for society, because maximum profit is obtained not just through exploitation, but also through wars: either local for the purpose of profit, or global with the goals of both profit and the destruction of competitors. In modern realities, this extreme cannibalism is still covered by the fig leaf of bourgeois democracy, which allows proletarians to remain in the illusion that their life is not slavish submission, but the conscious choice of a free person.

Roles in the organizational structure are occupied by very specific people, and no matter which person occupies such a role, he will undoubtedly act within the extremely antisocial framework defined by this role. And here again the temptation arises to say that it is the role itself that spoils a person; that the most humane person will be enslaved by capital if he suddenly has to get into a monopoly organization to play the role of an imperialist oligarch. To get rid of this misconception, let's consider the subjective factor.

2.2.2. Subjective factor
If a person chose the path of devouring his own kind, it means that he made a mistake somewhere in his understanding of how the world works. An incorrect reflection of the surrounding reality is often the cause of illusions that push people to strange and sometimes terrible actions. Thus, a national patriot imparts magic to the community of people to which he belongs, and in extreme terms, the course of his thinking, refracted through the prism of this magic, can lead him to the conclusion about the need for mass destruction of representatives of another community.

For a monopolist oligarch, the error of understanding the world order is beyond his main, cannibalistic line of work, because he must know and understand the principle of capital movement in its entirety.

This, firstly , means that he must be able to work effectively with resources. Reduce workers' wages to the lowest possible level, without literally excluding slavery. “Use resources optimally,” that is, fire workers who are not making a profit. Fight unruly workers who stand up for their rights. Or fire everyone altogether if production can be moved to a cheaper country.

This, secondly , means that he must be able to find the optimal direction for business. Sell ​​apartments the size of a doghouse, if that is in demand. If possible, shift all efforts to the production and distribution of drugs, where the profit margin is higher. And even trade fuel with a hostile country.

This, thirdly , means that if the profit from the war in a given time period is maximum, then sending the population (of any country) to slaughter will certainly happen, since this will become a business.

Can a monopolist not know about this? Can he know about this, but because of some remnants or beginnings of conscience, not do it? Of course, it can, but not for long, because nearby there will be either a “colleague” or a competitor for whom any activity aimed at extracting maximum profit is understandable and acceptable. This means that sooner or later he will replace a more conscientious individual. Thus, some natural selection for market relations occurs and only the creature that best suits the oligarchic role gets into the control center of the monopoly: a ruthless animal, making its choice in favor of the absence of conscience quite consciously, with a full understanding of how capital works.

It is interesting that in some extreme case, an intellectually gifted oligarch, who on a whim has read all the volumes of MELS, realizes his cannibalistic nature, but this does not awaken his conscience: they say, “world peace” is good, but “everything is here for me and now at the expense of others” is much better. And it is not surprising: bare theory, combined with daily practice that is contrary to it, cannot produce a progressive result. This dominance of animal atavisms over the mind still needs its own researcher, just as the illusion in the oligarch’s head that does not allow him to correctly reflect the world around him requires a deeper study. Perhaps we are talking about extreme individualism, that is, an idealistic distortion in the reflection of oneself, where the magic of endowing oneself with superhuman qualities occurs.

2.2.3. Motivation of an imperialist in a new situation
As shown above, capitalist imperialism is generally a desire for violence and reaction in order to extract maximum profit. Specific manifestations of reaction and violence are consciously planned and implemented by well-functioning imperialist organizations. At the very core of these organizations, sooner or later an oligarchic role arises, which, as a result of natural anti-evolutionary selection, is occupied only by characters capable of amputating their conscience as a result of a conscious choice; choice based on a full understanding of the antisocial consequences of capital in general and one’s own capital management activities in particular.

It is not difficult to determine the motivation of a group of such characters during the period of “imperialization”, the confrontation between large monopolies. Each oligarch uses capital, the existing money-commodity-money scheme, to accumulate an infinite number of zeros in his account. Why does he need so much “dead” labor that cannot be used in a thousand lifetimes? It can be assumed that in pursuit of zeros, the oligarch, consciously or not, pursues his main goal, worthy of his animal essence: to subordinate the infinite to the finite, to force the entire society to work for himself.

Now it is not difficult to predict the behavior of a group of oligarchs in a speculative situation when it can temporarily obtain maximum power and military resources and suppress all centers of resistance: competitive groups of the bourgeoisie, unrest of the proletariat and resistance of the organized working class.

In the new situation, the money-commodity-money scheme stops working, because the system of private commodity producers has turned into one global monopoly. However, this scheme only satisfied the oligarchs’ need for total dominance at a certain stage in the development of capitalism and can now be discarded like a spent rocket stage.

At this stage, a group of oligarchs no longer needs to observe economic rituals in the form of accumulating profits, because the entire “world factory” already operates under the control of their direct dictatorship. One can only guess what crazy projects will come into the minds of complete scoundrels endowed with absolute power; but it is important to note that in their motivation the rational component is subordinated to the biological one, that is, to the animal atavisms of those primitive times, when obtaining food required significant effort, and this biological greed had no boundaries. This means that the majority of the surplus product in one form or another will be alienated from the population, and the population itself will be kept in a black body: in the minimum conditions possible for survival. Consequently, the antagonism between the exploiter and the exploited will at some point become proportional to the level of stratification between them and the exploiter will work to win this class struggle and to preserve the existing state of affairs using all the tools available to him.

2.2.4. How to Preserve Dying Imperialism
Let's consider the brief moment of victory of one of the monopolists.

At the helm is an imperialist: a pragmatist with animal motivation, for whom all people and things are means of satisfying his personal interests; a dominant, striving to preserve this state of affairs (a sort of Rolling with a hyperboloid).

To do this, he needs, firstly, to prevent the return of competition, and secondly, to suppress and subjugate the will of the masses.

What are the technologies of the competitive period? An extreme form of suppression of competition involves the physical destruction of competitors through the use of the latest scientific advances as weapons. Subordination of the will of the masses is possible with the help of modern technologies of education (duping) and indoctrination - a set of manipulative technologies that allow (we are considering the extreme form) to fascism the masses through the illusion of nationalism for four to eight years. Both technologies in this form are no longer needed for the phase of dying imperialism, since they were created for competitive conditions, where the task of destroying one group of people with the help of another maddened group often arises.

The imperialist needs new technologies, which must take into account:

transition period to complete conservation;
the dialectic of the struggle of free will against its suppression by managers. One person or microgroup (a sort of London “Iron Heel”) cannot control the entire planet without developed (and not yet available) robotic means, which means they will have to rely on people who, having been brought up by an imperialist society, will again begin to compete. Throughout the history of mankind, the exploiter could defend the loot only with the help of force: the mass dream is to break through to the top, from peasant to aristocracy, from worker to owner, and the movement of this free will can only be stopped by its suppression, chemical or genetic. If this is not done, new groups will constantly emerge in the struggle for the loot, which will again shift the situation from absolute dominance to the level of competitive struggle;
the dialectic of the struggle of free will against its suppression among the population;
utilization of part of the population: to ensure the necessary minimum maintenance for the development of society and sufficient satisfaction of the needs of the imperialist;
balance between restraining the development of public knowledge and the need to develop professional skills to support and develop the level of technology.
In other words, the imperialist needs to destroy the prerequisites for the transition to communism - the ability of people to learn and act in a team outside of working for the exploiter.

The only visible implementation option is the socio-biological-chemical-technological suppression of the personal will of the masses, and we will consider it below, in the section on technology.

To what extent can the total subjugation of the population to the imperialist be consistent with the possible further development of humanity? Such a dystopian concept is absolute fascism, unnatural for the social essence of man; a kind of finale of the movement from slavery to feudalism, from it to capitalism, then to imperialism and to this hypothetical outcome with the natural death of humanity at the end. Such a task can be defined as an attempt to subordinate the infinite to the finite, which in theory can only be done through the freezing of diversity (biological-chemical-technological method) and which can only lead to a stop in development and death for everyone. In addition, the issue of transfer of power cannot be resolved. We need individuals with free will, and their motivation will be the same animal interests: redistribution of wealth in their favor, control over the power bloc.

2.3. Conservation technologies
“In a galaxy far, far away, there lived a civilization that was able to independently produce and develop computing devices and, in addition to these, independently produced many, many more technically complex devices. And the people who managed to take part in this process knew with absolute certainty that the development of computer technology, and in particular programming, is ensured not by games, but by 1) R&D, 2) fundamental mathematics, 3) industrial order,” thanks to I. Shevtsov, in In his article, he brilliantly examined modern misconceptions about the gaming industry.

Faced with a heap of nonsense in such a simple area, it is not difficult to imagine the scale of misconceptions regarding all of modern science. And here the word “delusion” should not confuse the reader with its apparent harmlessness: only nuclear physics shows us what damage can be caused to humanity by technology saddled by the bourgeoisie with the help of unprincipled scientists.

In this chapter, the author sets the goal of taking the broadest and shallowest possible look at the entire scientific arsenal that can and will be used in the class struggle in the near foreseeable future.

2.3.1. Modern developments
Let us briefly list the iconic technologies that are used today. I’m sure the modern reader can list more; Our task is only to indicate with a dotted line the directions and some examples of the most popular ones.

The field of biology and potential human change. Genetic engineering (genome editing technology (CRISPR-Cas9)), molecular biology (for example, controlling the behavior of a ribosome using an editable Messenger RNA molecule (Moderna)), research in speciation (mainly in animals, but there are also followers of eugenics), technologies 3 D -bioprinting (Organovo, Aspect Biosystems, Carbon3D, n3D Biosciences), creation of genetically modified organisms (Zymergen) and organs (Emulate Bio), genetic diagnostics (Nonobiosym).

The field of helping a person with cognitive tasks. Increasing computing power, including quantum computers (IBM, Microsoft, Nanosys), merging a person with a computer (Intel with Neuromorphic chip Loihi, Neuralink with Brain-computer interface, Kernel with Neuroprosthetics), creating neural networks (OpenAI, DeepMind, Neurala, Vicarious AI) .

The area of ​​helping a person with physical tasks. Cyborgization (prosthetics), robotics (Boston Dynamics), transport (drones, hyperloop), autopilots.

In the “miscellaneous” category, we can mention energy research (various kinds of renewable energy), virtual reality technologies and space technologies.

2.3.2. Dreams and promises
In an interesting way, first the popularizers and then the commercializers of science, in their attempts to build their vision of the future, always fail or deliberately ignore the understanding of what reason is and how society develops. All the bourgeois thinkers with whom the author was able to become acquainted operate with a fairly large amount of information about the state of modern technologies and have sufficient intelligence to sometimes brilliantly predict their development. However, despite their insight in the field of technology and fairly accurate ideas about the horrors of modern capitalist realities, when it comes to questions about the future of social development, these same researchers accidentally or intentionally display extreme primitiveness of thought.

They often give the leading role in changing society to technology, rather than to people. Let's look at several leading errors of this kind.

Ignoring
Some researchers are honest with readers: they deliberately distance themselves from the social science issue and focus only on technology. This is what Stanislaw Lem did, for example, simply declaring the current state of affairs temporary:

“The author must strive to maintain his independence from only temporarily dominant interests, fears or hopes.”

In a similar vein, advocates of postphenomenology (Don Ihde) limit the study of human experience to its interaction with technology, which, in their opinion, is a necessary mediator in the study of the world, along with empirical research and philosophical analysis.

Vulgar technologism
The fabulous appeal of technologies of the distant future beckons, and great resilience is required to protect ourselves from the illusion of techno-subjectivity and not to endow them with magical properties, with the help of which technologies themselves influence a person so that a progressive future comes. Or not very progressive.

In Ray Kurzweil, vulgar technologism manifested itself in a primitive description of how future technologies will lead to a model of balanced capitalism.

Many researchers, such as Michio Kaku or Yuval Noah Harari, promote the views of transhumanism, in which humanity, under the influence of technology, expands beyond its biological and cultural boundaries. Attempts to describe the future structure of society, as a rule, come down either to some kind of techno-progressivism, where standard bourgeois democracy makes it possible to regulate newly discovered opportunities and in a strange way becomes at the service of all humanity, or even to non-human or anti-human post-humanism, where everything is “complex, incomprehensible and not at all as you think.”

The mistake of vulgar technologism is funny. It is easy to argue that a hammer changes human behavior, and a huge hammer - the industrial revolution - affects the physiognomy of the entire human society, its way of life. But along with such a banal statement, a scientific understanding of the essence of man and humanity is required, explaining whether a person will use a hammer to hammer nails or to kill, and whether industrial machines will work for the oligarchy or for the whole society. And as happens with any error in logic, the missing essence leads to an endless host of baseless fantasies.

As a result of such errors, the researcher linearly projects the present into the future and discovers capitalism there, which, in its ignorance of the development of human society, looks as ridiculous as cosmic feudalism from the famous work “Dune”. Such misconceptions look especially vivid when a person, standing on the foundation of erroneous logic, tries to penetrate into the future of the development of the so-called. artificial intelligence. After all, AI, according to bourgeois futurologists, should surpass humans in “reasonableness” and either come up with a fair structure of society for humanity, or, according to posthumanists, replace humans.

All attempts by bourgeois researchers to find intelligence in AI occur without defining what this intelligence is. However, it is impossible to rely entirely on emptiness, and reason in the fantasies of a futurologist begins to be defined and manifested thanks to the computing power of a certain order. This is where the main mistake manifests itself, because computing power is, of course, an important quantity for the ability to process information, but in no way determines the ability to think.

Thus, the observation of the monstrous surrounding reality and modern people in all their ignorant ugliness pushes the researcher to search for a better structure of society, and if this researcher is a bourgeois techno-futurologist, then the combination of the attractiveness of technology and misunderstanding of the essence of reason forces him to come up with a kind of techno-escapism, that is, a search The solution is not in the development of people, but in technology. In the case of AI, this is the endowment of some artificial entity - AI - with anthropological and super-anthropological characteristics. We observe similar escapism among believers, for whom the surrounding reality must be “fixed” by some “higher” power.

But no, the essence of the mind is completely different and not even the most beautiful and powerful hammer - AI - by itself can lead society out of suicidal relations of exploitation, since it is nothing more than a tool, a cognitive amplifier. And the more idiocy in people’s brains, the more idiocy this amplifier will help bring to life. The same thing happened with the use of nuclear energy. And there is no way to harness the cart of technology ahead of the horse of the human mind.

Code of ethics of the bourgeois technology builder
Researchers into the future of technology sooner or later come across a host of ethical problems that technology brings with it, both in itself and when used inappropriately (for example, biological weapons). And then the researcher sets himself the goal of coming up with a way to curb the anti-human use of the power of NBIC-convergence technologies (nano-, bio-, info- and cogno-) in the conditions of ruthless capitalist competition. But, being idealists, such researchers are not able to invent anything more than the good old categorical imperative - a call like “let's live together.” One such ethical code of “human enhancement” is represented by systems theory, which becomes helpless as soon as it goes beyond the boundaries of the systems themselves and takes on ethics to curb the horrors of using NBIC technologies against people.

2.3.3. Reality
In the conditions of the growing capitalist crisis, the socialized and poorly educated proletariat is looking for hope for a “bright”, or at least for a stable future, everywhere: in democracy, and in religion, and now - thanks to such smart bourgeois techno-futurologists - in attractive technological fairy tales . Selling hope to slaves and loyalty to masters is a highly profitable enterprise.

But what really? Reality does not dress up in fairy tale clothes; in reality, the class war of the exploited and the exploiters has been going on for thousands of years using the latest achievements of human thought.

To win this war, it is necessary to understand: firstly, what weapons will be used, why it is necessary to put modern technological developments and their possible development in the near future into a whole picture, secondly, how fatal damage these weapons can cause and, thirdly, third, when this damage can be caused.

Man is weak, and the narrative about future technologies is fraught with excessive fantasy and focus on the technologies themselves, so we will consider a certain range of technologies that are most likely to develop in the near future. Discussions about branches of science that are necessary for humanity, but not needed by the bourgeoisie (Marxism, mass quality medicine, diamatic neural networks, and who knows what else) are not yet significant for this article, despite the fact that this non-existent causes damage by its non-existence.

2.3.4. Reality: Weapons
Since we need to look into the near future, we will use the work of the most conscientious researchers available. In this section we will rely on S. Lem with his “Sum of Technology” and R. Kurzweil. S. Lem is interesting for his approach and the widest range of interests. As a diligent scientist of his time, he was interested in and knew the main figures of advanced scientific thought; more than once he turned to K. Marx and F. Engels. True, when trying to predict the socio-economic structure in the conditions of new technologies, S. Lem decided not to philosophize too much and used the vulgar formula “the source [of changes in the social system] is a change in the tools of production, that is, technology.” And, frankly speaking, he did not assimilate Marxism. But this does not in any way detract from his understanding that the commercialization of science and private property fatally impede the development of humanity. This does not prevent us from relying on his methods, with the help of which he predicted the development of sciences and determined the limits of their development, without slipping into (and criticizing!) banal futurology with its attempts to please the ruling class (for example, the Club of Rome mentioned by S. Lem) and an attempt to draw a “calendar of discoveries.” We will still use one of these calendars, drawn by R. Kurzweil, and only for the reason that he was a conscientious cataloger of modern trends in the development of sciences.

Strengthening the ruling class
It is no longer a secret to anyone that the current century has “revealed” the information dimension: the amount of information is growing at a monstrous pace and, in proportion to this growth, new technologies are appearing.

By this time, the ruling class had already mastered modern technologies of production, warfare (up to nuclear war), control of the masses (including the latest developments of color revolutions), and now the first task of the imperialist is to concentrate ownership, management, control and use of information and information for their needs. inventions.

S. Lem writes:

“Eventually, however, a state comes when it is impossible to further increase the throughput of science at the rate dictated by the growth in the amount of information. There won't be enough scientific candidates. This is the situation of a “megabit bomb”, or, if you like, an “information barrier”. Science cannot cross this barrier, cannot cope with the avalanche of information falling on it.”

S. Lem sees the construction of “intelligence amplifiers” that will be able to “extract” information from nature without the mediation of the brain, human or electronic, as a strategically advantageous solution for civilization (the concept of something like “growing” or “evolution” of information).

“We need to invent a device that would collect information, summarize it in the same way as a scientist does, and present the results of this research to specialists. The device collects facts, generalizes them, checks the validity of the generalizations on new factual material, and this “ final product , ” after “ technical control , ” leaves the “ factory . ”

The last element - most likely, we are talking about at least biological changes in the brain associated with the transmission and processing of information - is the possibility of conscious use of these “intelligence amplifiers”, taking into account the gigantic amount of information and the limitations of the brain. S. Lem prompts us to the need for such an element with his reasoning about the principles of the brain:

“ The brain as a regulator has a small “ logical depth ” . The “ logical depth ” (the number of sequentially performed operations) of a mathematical proof is incomparably greater than the “ logical depth ” of the brain, which does not think abstractly, but, in accordance with its biological purpose, acts as a device that controls the body (slalomist on a downhill course)... The brain is capable of excellent regulation of enormous the number of parameters of the body to which it is “ connected ” ... The throughput of the brain as an information channel is maximum in the sphere of somatic phenomena. On the contrary, as soon as the excess of information coming from outside (for example, in a readable text) exceeds ten bits per second, it already blocks the brain.”

The difference in the information and technological capabilities of the owner of an intelligence amplifier in relation to “mere mortals” will tend to infinity. The feasibility of producing such technologies is indicated by modern developments in the field of NBICs and, in fact, exponential growth in computing power.

Weakening of the proletariat
Since someone will still have to produce material goods, and the animal interests of the imperialist will force him to ignore Marxist knowledge, the class struggle will not go away. The spontaneously emerging groups preparing a revolution will not go away either.

Therefore, the second task of the imperialist is the preventive suppression of class resistance with the help of the latest technologies. What needs to be suppressed? Man is, first of all, a social being who has developed and developed his consciousness in the process of collective transformation of nature. In this process, a person improves tools and develops intellectual abilities; By doing this in a team, sooner or later he finds circumstances that prevent him from working and changes them. Already now the “best” bourgeois minds are trying to overcome this difficulty and are working on the possibility of building a society in such a way that the collective interaction of the proletariat is limited to work for the benefit of the capitalist, and individualism reigns in social, non-working life. Therefore, the imperialist needs to suppress people’s desire for collective social activity. This task is impossible, because it is impossible to completely eliminate collectivism in one area (outside work) without affecting another (work). But this does not stop the research of the bourgeois class.

In what areas can technology advance the goals of the imperialist?

Firstly , this is the use of technology in the social sphere: the inculcation of individualism. Individualism does not imply an infinite variety of personal views on everything: all diversity ends where the will of the ruling class is determined (for example, through bourgeois legislation). This means that all permitted diversity can be in the ideal region, which does not interfere with production processes.

The first moment, the moment of building an individual idealistic worldview, mixed with the foundation of bourgeois philosophy, will help to introduce technologies for individual learning led by virtual teachers. What a zoo of individual idealisms, carefully selected for each personality, can be cultivated! In addition to this, it can be noted that the professions of the future willy-nilly require the use of the above-mentioned “intelligence enhancers”. Of course, the proletariat will receive only a version with limited access to information and opportunities, but the “amplifier” will willingly help to pull the owl of an illusory worldview onto the globe of objective reality.

The second moment, the moment of reinforcing idealistic self-identification through external designation, will help to introduce technologies for changing the body, say, modification for a fictitious “gender”, cyborgization, etc., etc. Artificially created bodily diversity is progressive if it is supported by objective necessity (for example, body modification for long-term space research). If it is aimed at supporting individual illusions, then society will become significantly divided (as we can already see in the example of “gender minorities”). The reader may be left with a question: will individualism affect the very ability to work collectively? As mentioned above, degradation cannot but occur, and the imperialist will hold on to the last possible existing mechanism: it is enough to leave the provision of the proletariat at the level “from paycheck to paycheck” and need will provide motivation to work.

The last point in the social sphere may concern the institution of the family, which in such conditions looks increasingly moribund: issues of reproduction can also be ensured biotechnologically, and issues of cultivation and education can be completely transferred to the hands of the state.

Secondly , this is the use of technologies of violence and regulation . S. Lem describes the so-called. homeostatic firms (from the ideas of Stafford Beer) and the “global planner”. Complete monopolization will lead to a planned economy, which in our speculative experiment is a mechanism subordinate to the goal-setting of the imperialist. We are already seeing the first attempts to create such production, regulated by some pseudo-intelligent devices, in various kinds of taxi services, food delivery (Yandex, Uber) or warehouse services (Amazon). Social rating systems fall into the same piggy bank - in the worst form in which American propaganda attributes them to China. All this together outlines a system where every step of a person is tracked by a computer system and where you can lose access to any benefit at any moment by its decision.

Thirdly , this is the use of technology in entertainment . A distraction from pressing problems, a long-awaited break from meaningless work for the bourgeoisie can be provided by technologies from the areas called “phantomatics” and “the creation of worlds” by S. Lem. “Let us ask ourselves the question,” writes S. Lem, “is it possible to create an artificial reality, in all respects similar to the real one and completely indistinguishable from it? The first problem is the creation of worlds, the second is the creation of illusions. But perfect illusions.” We will temporarily omit the creation of worlds due to the remoteness of the prospects, but S. Lem shows the reader the limits and almost endless possibilities of creating technologies for constructing “perfect illusions”, in modern realities known as “virtual reality”, with special care.

Fourthly, this is the use of technology in the field of transforming human behavior . This area is the most important, because the technologies of the social, management and entertainment spheres, although they form a kind of total hypertolerant concentration camp, cannot by themselves cope with the collective human indignation caused by some fundamental reasons. For example, even in existing realities, it is clear that people immediately begin to think and spontaneously unite at the moment when bourgeois oppression makes their children starve or brings war to their home. Hunger and insecurity force us to seek understanding of objective realities from the most “tolerant” characters. But even if the imperialist creates a society of “reasonable abundance”, where death from hunger will be excluded, and there will be no need for wars due to final monopolization, then alienation from the “tribal essence of man” (the work of the entire society for the benefit of the imperialist) will sooner or later lead to action the desire to “free a person from a form of labor that destroys his personality, from a labor that turns a person into a thing, which makes him a slave of things.” And here the technologies of pharmacology (antidepressant pills are already known, as well as the widespread legalization of various kinds of drugs), genetics (programming in the genotype of the egg) and what S. Lem calls “cerebromatics” (transformation of the adult brain through the influence on neural network).

(Continued on following post.

[blindpig]

(Continued from previous post.)

2.3.5. Reality: damage to humanity
An exaggerated description of a “dying imperialism” that has “successfully” taken advantage of advanced modern technologies may look like this: one person, an imperialist with animal motivation, uses the latest achievements of science to create his new fantastic needs and turn the remaining billions of the population into obedient biomass that satisfies these needs . This dystopian picture shows a certain end point, beyond which the death of humanity is inevitably visible. Why? Because for the sake of one particular, the entire biological and intellectual diversity of the whole is suppressed; because development turns into anti-development: from complex to simple, which violates the laws of motion of matter and can only result in the disintegration of this particular form of it. One can, of course, imagine that an imperialist, armed with an “intelligence amplifier,” unexpectedly discovers Marxism and with his own hands transforms society into a communist one; however, such a move would require an immediate overcoming of the entire “animal” experience of the imperialist, which is akin to the fairy-tale transformation of a monster into a prince.

This means that the damage to humanity will be fatal .

2.3.6. Reality: time factor
All of the above would look like idle thoughts of science fiction writers, futurologists, popularizers and the author following them, if not for the clearly discernible “taste” of the exhibitor in increasing computing power, which is the breeding ground for the development of technology.

Thus, R. Kurzweil writes:

“Moore's Law of Integrated Circuits (the empirical observation originally made by Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit chip doubles every 24 months) was not the first but the fifth paradigm to continue the exponential growth of computing that has now spanned a century. Each new paradigm appeared exactly when it was needed. This suggests that exponential growth will not stop with the repeal of Moore's Law."

S. Lem speaks of this development of events as inevitable:

“The problems associated with exponential growth determine the future development of civilization to a much greater extent than is usually thought. An exponential increase in the number of intelligent beings is possible, as well as information (scientific and technical). Exponential growth in information and energy can occur with a relative stabilization of the number of living beings. Apparently, any civilization strives to maximize the growth rate of scientific and technical information, and probably also available energy sources.”

The author cannot show for certain the place of the current 2023 on the development exponential curve, but for the next hundred or two years it is possible with a high degree of probability to affirm a significant step forward, firstly, to the stage of “dying imperialism”, and secondly, to a dystopian dream imperialist to transform human society into a suppressed herd of low-productive individuals incapable of uniting outside of work.

This means that we have almost no time left .

Part 3. What to do about it?
3.1. Scientific competence factor and time factor
So, the line of the main front of the arena of class struggle is the line of scientific Marxist competence.

The self-education brochure teaches :

“The productivity of the communist movement is directly related to the organizational viability of the Party as the guiding and leading force of the labor movement. In turn, the organizational viability of the Marxist Party depends mainly on the scientific and theoretical competence of its members.”

The article “What to do” reports :

“Everyone needs to come to their senses and make decisions solely on the basis of diamatics. Before history puts us under time pressure, it is necessary to learn communism thoroughly and deliberately...”

At the same time, we are talking about self-education, thoughtful, conscientious, but... spontaneous. The process looks like this: as you read the classics and scientific-practical - literary and propaganda - activities, awareness and conscientiousness grow. The speed of preparing a competent Marxist is stable, but on average low: in the middle of the process, reading may not be conscientious enough, and urges to actionism may scatter attention, and the choice of topics for literary work may be controversial.

If we imagine that time is on our side, then the low speed of forging frames does not pose a problem in the long run.

You can recall the story “Ice and Fire” by R. Bradbury:

“Scientists worked in groups - the old people solved important problems and formed links in a single process. Every eight days, the composition of the group working on a particular problem was completely renewed. The overall return was absurdly low. Scientists grew old and died barely reaching creative maturity. The creative time of each was at most twelve hours. Three-quarters of our lives were spent on learning, and a short period of creative output was immediately followed by decrepitude, madness, death... Another ten thousand generations, and we may be able to make a water-cooled shell that will protect us on the way to the ship.”

However, modern and looming future technologies, coupled with the approaching final monopolization, make it possible to timidly talk about new risks and the need to take into account the time factor, which is becoming hostile to humanity.

And since the time factor has appeared, the task changes somewhat and to solve it you can rely on standard management techniques.

Let's clarify the task.

3.2. Task
If the struggle takes place along the lines of scientific Marxist competence, then the task can be formulated as “ ensuring a steady rise in scientific competence among a steadily increasing number of supporters .” The main criterion for success is ultimately the number of well-trained personnel, which, in turn, implies reliance on the number of self-learners and the speed with which self-learning occurs. In fact: if today we attracted all eight billion to effective self-education, then the day after tomorrow a whole galaxy of bright Marxists would be able to lead society to communism.

Thus, taking into account the very conditional division of the organization into three links - the core, the activists and supporters - our task includes several subtasks focused on working with personnel: a) the subtask of increasing the rate of increase in scientific competence of the activist members, b) the subtask of increasing the speed of transition from supporters to active members (again, by increasing the rate of increase in their scientific competence), c) the subtask of accelerating the attraction of supporters from the masses.

In the current state of the organization, all its members are involved in spontaneous self-education using a given set of materials (the work of the classics plus the breakthrough minimum, plus reading the latest materials from “Breakthrough”) and in spontaneous propaganda work in literary form. The spontaneity of self-learning lies in one’s own choice of the speed of self-learning and materials to study (within the given limits). The spontaneity of practical work lies in the widest possible coverage of the topics on which it is proposed to work. Let's call the useful effect of such a process KPI1; its value is determined by a certain “x” - the average level of competence of the organization’s members.

It will be a different matter if the most competent core undertakes to transfer the work of the team to the next level, including planning. The beneficial effect of such a process, efficiency2, will in any case be higher than efficiency1, since it is already determined by some “x+k” or even “x*k” - the level of competence of the core that carries out this planning.

The core may still be insufficiently competent and make mistakes, but these errors, firstly, will be fewer than those of the activists and supporters, and secondly, the result will be an expansion of coverage - the number of well-trained personnel who will help correct such errors.

Quite figuratively speaking, Comrade Podguzov, standing on the shoulders of his ancestors, lit a beacon in the distance and the team, using all available steam, is striving approximately in that direction. Having clarified the scale of the storm, you can set the task of the next stage - to clarify the direction and speed up the movement. And such a task does not require clarification of deep philosophical categories, but the application of standard management techniques.

So, let's get down to the sketch (and this is just a sketch that illustrates the idea) of a practical implementation.

3.3. Global picture: stages and areas
The organization's work is carried out in a number of areas, and tasks in these areas are set according to the current stage of development of the organization.

Areas of activity of the organization:

goal setting,
development of Marxist theory,
building an organization,
management methods,
education,
production,
social structure (for example, issues of art),
internal affairs (for example, the fight against opportunism),
external affairs (for example, cooperation with communist parties),
...
Stages of organization development:

1. Proto-organization

preparation of a printed organ
2. Press

collection of assets of associates
preparation of scientific research center
3. PNC

preparation of revolution
implementation of the revolution
4. PNC + dictatorship of the working (working) class

post-revolutionary period, stabilization
socialism (first phase of communism)
5. …

Below we will consider only a few stages that are understandable to the author: previous, current and next.

3.4. Previous stage: proto-organization
At the stage of proto-organization V.A. Podguzov and his comrades lit the beacon.

In the field of goal setting, the final goal, the categories of communism, communist and communist party were determined. It is successful work in this direction that is the “secret of success” of the Breakthrough group.

In the field of theory, the development of the main Marxist categories was carried out.

In the field of organization, a small group of like-minded people was gathered, which became the core that prepared the printed organ.

3.5. Current stage: press organ (gathering assets and associates)
Work on the general development of Marxism.

The following work is being carried out in the field of theory:

working on a diamatics textbook,
work on the concept of PNC,
developing an understanding of life under communism,
research on a wide range of issues: from the quality of thinking and laws of development to industry, the fight against opportunism, assessment of historical events, etc., etc.,
reconnaissance work: a diamatic study of the current situation, including the essence of the positions of countries, social movements and the development of attitudes towards them and events (wars, crises, etc.),
reconnaissance work: risks of the development of capitalism, including specific research on the economy, wars, crises, technologies, the position of the proletariat, stratification, monopolization, etc.
The organization is a) core: manages the press, regulates the editorial staff policy, conducts theoretical work, b) active: individual work on self-education, writing articles and propaganda, c) supporters: self-education. The core continues to work on the PNC concept.

The area of ​​management, therefore, is personnel policy and the editorial board.

The field of education is self-education plus providing a platform for propaganda (articles on an unlimited range of topics).

3.6. Next stage: criteria for successful goal setting and movement towards it
3.6.1. The dual nature of goal setting
Stalin wrote:

“To implement such a plan, you must first of all find the main link of the plan . The main link of the five-year plan consisted of heavy industry with its core - mechanical engineering."

Qualitative goal setting is twofold: it must be both general (represent an image of the future, be in the future and require elaboration) and specific (have a connection with reality, determine the next link of the plan and be achievable). For example, both religions and nationalists have a good general goal setting, but due to the gap with objective reality, they always remain on the ever-retracting horizon line. For Marxists, the question of the quality of goal setting is only a question of the quality of its scientific and theoretical elaboration.

3.6.2. Quality of goal setting
In its most general form, a conscientious research method presupposes a main goal: the desire to achieve the most accurate reflection of objective reality in the form of obtained truths. In accordance with the principles of diamatics, it is not difficult to assume that the acquisition of truths is essentially a process of human development: with its certain speed, with leaps, with clarification of the most general truths, with getting rid of illusions and ignorance, with discarding the untrue and retaining the true, obtained at previous stages development. The dynamics of development may look like a road of knowledge : to put it simply, leading from complete idealism through nationalism, leftism and nativism to Marxism. Of course, the higher the level of knowledge you are, the more destructive mistakes can be (an honestly mistaken opportunist can do more things than an open anti-communist) and the more competence, responsibility and conscientiousness are required from supporters of the forces of progress. Each of the subsequent stages of this road borrows something from the previous ones, gradually clarifying the reflection of objective reality. The most effective process of such clarification is facilitated by the logical operation of “withdrawal,” that is, negation with retention. The Marxist applies it to the wealth produced by all of humanity throughout history, and denies with retention everything where there is something to retain. Otherwise, we would have to reinvent everything anew each time; The author imagines Karl Marx wiping away tears of laughter and throwing away a volume of Friedrich Hegel with the words “what idealistic nonsense.” This is especially important precisely because even today we cannot say that our reflection of reality is as clear as possible: which means there will be further stages. But the fact that we do not have absolute knowledge does not make fools of us, and our followers will not throw our knowledge into the trash, but will “remove” it in the process of self-development in order to clarify the acquired truths.

Let's apply the above method to goal setting. If the main principle of goal-setting is the acquisition of truth, then the goal of a Marxist should be defined positively: the progressive elements removed in previous historical stages should be synthesized in a new holistic image that corresponds to the objective laws of social development. The goal of a Marxist cannot be the operation of removal itself, since it is only one of the methods that contribute to achieving the goal. At the same time, this operation cannot be ignored: any criticism must dance from the goal. If what is criticized contributes to the goal, then we remove it, and if not, we discard it.

Meanwhile, there are at least three misconceptions in the field of goal setting.

The first misconception is setting false goals. Here you don’t have to explain for a long time, remembering the religious, nationalist or leftist goals (for example, the anarchist goal “the state must die immediately”).

The second misconception is setting a vague goal and excessive concentration on the object of criticism. Here, for example, the difference between a Marxist and an anti-capitalist is clearly revealed, for whom the operation of “removal” becomes an end in itself. Anticap just denies, not understanding that the result of denial should be the determination of the next true stage from a whole fan of possibilities that is formed from denial. For example, the result of anti-capitalism can be feudalism (hello, Konstantin Pobedonostsev), nationalism (that is, the same capitalism, we say hello to Igor Strelkov), fascism (Mussolini is turning in his grave) or the stage “war will come, and communism will come by itself” (Konstantin Semin recognized myself). Here lies the problem of the attitude towards the Northern Military District, where the struggle is not necessary “with any fascists and class enemies in general,” but where you need to take a diamatic approach to determining what at this stage contributes to your goal - the formation of communism.

The third misconception is the refusal of the “withdrawal” operation; setting the right goal, but ignoring the path to it. In essence, this is expressed in naked criticism of everything and everyone. Here we see a whole galaxy of “red” figures who want to build everything themselves and turn their nose up at you if you move even a millimeter away from their idea of ​​the truth. Lenin's logic

“1) together with the entire peasantry, against the tsar and landowners during the neutralization of the bourgeoisie, for the victory of the bourgeois-democratic revolution; 2) together with the poor peasantry, against capitalism (including against the village rich, kulaks, speculators) in the city and countryside with the neutralization of the middle peasantry, for the power of the proletariat; 3) relying on the poor and establishing a strong alliance with the middle peasants - forward for socialist construction"

is beyond their control. The critic does not know how to work with previous stages of development, trying to build everything “from scratch,” and this is his weakness, because the highest aerobatics of a practicing dialectician-Marxist is the ability to work with transitional forms with a full understanding of the essence of the object under study . Criticism manifests itself in identifying errors and simultaneously ignoring useful developments. This applies to the development of theory, to activities, and to educational issues. In the field of theory, critics ignore all developments that, albeit with errors (which need to be identified and removed), can be useful in achieving the goal of building communism. In their field of activity, critics ignore the managerial and organizational approaches of capitalism (sometimes this reaches the point of absurdity and complete rejection of K. Marx’s theory of value), the skills and abilities of sincere national patriots (obviously, a critic would shoot all RI officers indiscriminately), useful developments in the theory of modern left.

3.7. Next stage: print media (preparation of PNC)
At this stage, the main link is... the very appearance of the plan:

planning of asset activities and educational activities;
planning focus: direct 80% of the organization’s time to preparing the next stage, and the remaining 20% ​​to everything else;
intensification of the elaboration of the personnel issue: inclusion of activists in joint project work according to the plan, creation of a self-education school for supporters and elaboration of the issue of attracting the masses.
The author understands that this question has been raised more than once in the team and it’s even worth quoting D. Nazarenko from the last discussion:

“At this stage, it’s not about individuals, but about the general formation of the team (this is now a specific issue for achieving victory), which means a transition from spontaneous creativity to planned work.”

The author’s only understanding is that such a transition will not take place on its own, no matter how much V. Orlov calls on the public to work in the Party Cabinet.

An organization does not “self-organize”; it is created and directed through a center.

What does this mean exactly?

Transformation affects the area of ​​goal setting
The core of the organization develops a plan for moving to the next stage, the PNC stage, for which it determines a public (within the Proryva group) agenda: a prioritized list of areas of activity for moving to the next stage. Such an agenda could include, for example, the following:

roles and responsibilities of members of the organization,
strategy and tactics for the steps of transition to the PNC,
the material component of the organization’s existence,
principles of co-optation,
strengthening the pre-party organization,
creation of regional organizations (for example, on the territory of post-Soviet countries) and communication with them.
Transformation touches an area of ​​theoretical work
In general, it continues in the directions of the current stage, but now a plan for the development of the theory is being determined. The focus of attention is 80% on the agenda for moving to the next stage:

work on the concept of the PSC and its work in all of the above areas of activity,
reconnaissance work.

At the same time, the rest of the work is not lost anywhere, it just takes less time.

It is important that each of the areas has a curator, a development plan and a clear agenda open to group members. For example, in the case of a diamatics textbook, at least a list of sections.

The transformation significantly affects the area of ​​management and personnel work.
This area, firstly, also requires the creation of a plan for its change and an open agenda for group members.

Having created a plan in the areas of goal setting, theoretical work, management and personnel work ( WHAT TO DO ), the core of the organization changes the principles of working with the activists, associates and the masses ( HOW TO DO and WHO WILL DO ).

From the point of view of working with the asset, it is necessary to a) conduct an inventory of personnel, their strengths and weaknesses in order to unite them in joint activities, b) develop principles for joint practical work on the above plans (that is, projects for implementing the stages of the plan), c) work out issues of distribution of work between members and subgroups of the asset. Here it is assumed that the asset is already mature enough to continue to educate itself without instructions from the core of the organization.

From the point of view of working with supporters, it is necessary to a) explore the possibility of joint work of activists with supporters in the field of self-education, b) plan and carry out methodological work on the effectiveness of self-education, c) create a school of self-education (the author wrote a little about it ).

The latter, not least, should include a) creating a list of directions for practical literary work, b) systematizing Proryv materials, c) studying the issues of using existing materials from outside the Proryv group (which is an urgent need, as mentioned above in the section about the quality of goal setting). For the last point, it is especially important not to forget about “withdrawal”. Why? Because the path to communism implies raising the scientific competence of the masses, which, in turn, requires the construction of a system of training and self-education by the relatively small forces of Marxists. Such systematicity requires Marxists to be conscientious and efficient through planning. It is precisely this systematic approach to communism that distinguishes a Marxist from others , even if the latter have at least learned the entire theory by heart. After all, the activities of the latter will be devoted to “maintaining purity” and purging all authors who do not follow the “canon” even in one letter.

From the point of view of working with the masses (propaganda and agitation), the author does not yet have practical ideas (except for some ideas about persuasion through overcoming the barrier of illusion - see here , here and here) due to little contact with this side of the activity, but they will also have to be developed .

3.8. Bottom line
In the context of the unfolding class struggle, it is necessary to ensure a steady rise in scientific competence among a steadily increasing number of supporters. If we take into account the time factor, which works against the communists and all humanity, the core of the organization requires courage and strength to prepare a new stage that will speed up the implementation of the task. To move to a new stage, no additional development of the theory is required; all that is required is the use of a standard management mechanism for modern production: the creation of a plan, the inclusion of the team’s assets in project activities for its implementation under the supervision of the organization’s core, the creation of a self-education school for supporters and elaboration of the issue of attracting the masses.

Without this breakthrough may not happen.

A Marxist does not have the right to study endlessly, timid in the face of large-scale PRACTICAL tasks, postponing his active participation in public life until he receives a piece of paper from the Higher Attestation Commission on the award of an academic degree. Information turns into beliefs only in connection with social practice in the collective and through the collective .

Ya. Dubov
11/12/2023

https://prorivists.org/88_org/

Google Translator

[blindpig]

Why Are Intellectuals Divorced from Working People?
DECEMBER 13, 2023


Art depicting a man in a suit swinging down on a man in overalls. Photo: Midwestern Marx.

By Carlos L. Garrido – Dec 10, 2023

This article is a transcript of a presentation for a panel on the subject, hosted by the International Manifesto Group, the Critical Theory Workshop, and the Midwestern Marx Institute, with other presentations from Gabriel Rockhill, Radhika Desai, Glenn Diesen, and Noah Khrachvik.
The question we are exploring today, concerning the divorce of intellectuals and the working class, is fundamental for assessing the crisis we face in the subjective conditions for revolution. The first thing I think must be interrogated is what is presupposed in the formulation of the problem in such manner. When we say that there has been a split, a schism, between intellectuals and the working class, there is a specific type of intellectual that we have in mind.​

The grand majority of intellectuals, especially within the capitalist mode of life, have had their lots tied to the dominant social system. They have functioned as a necessary component of the dominant order, those who take the ideals of the bourgeoisie – the class enemy of most of humanity – and embellish them in language which opens the narrow interests of the ruling class to the consenting approval of contending classes. In the same manner Marx describes the bourgeoisie as the personified agents of capital, the intellectuals have been the personified agents of capitalist ideology. They are tasked, as Gramsci taught us, with making these dispersed and unpopular bourgeois assumptions into a coherent and appealing outlook – one people are socialized into accepting as reality itself. Intellectuals have always, in a certain sense, been those groups of people that light the fire and move the statues which the slaves in the cave see as cave shadows embodying reality itself.

These intellectuals – the traditional intellectuals – are of course not the ones we have in mind when we speak of a schism between intellectuals and workers. We are speaking, instead, of those who have been historically able to see the movement of history, to make slits within bourgeois worldviews, and who have subsequently thrown their lot in with the proletariat and popular classes – those forces which present the kernel for the next, more human and democratic, mode of life. Marx and Engels had already noted that there is always a section of “bourgeois ideologists” that raise “themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” and “cut [themselves] adrift [to] join the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.” We are talking about the Duboises, the Apthekers, the Marinellos, the Parentis and others who, while coming out of the institutions of the bourgeois academy, would align their interests with working and oppressed peoples. They would become the theoreticians, historians, and poets which gave the working-class movement various forms of clarity in their struggle for power.

What has happened to this section of intellectuals and its relationship with working people? Have they lost their thirst for freedom? Has their capacity for trembling with indignation at the injustices waged on working and oppressed people dissipated?

It is important to note that any attempt to answer this question in this short timespan will always, by necessity, leave important aspects of the conversation out. I would love here to speak at length about the campaigns of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the formation of a fake anti-communist left, and the role imperialist state departments, bourgeois foundations, and other such outfits had in creating a left intelligentsia divorced from the real movements of working people, both within the imperial core and in the periphery. I know my colleagues here will be paying due attention to such monumental components of answering the question we have before us.

However, I’d like to instead focus on the practice of intellectuals; on the expectations and requirements set by the academy itself, which have already baked into its very structure the divorce of radical intellectuals from the struggles and movements of working and oppressed peoples. The first thing that must be noted is the following: We cannot simply treat this problem as one rooted in the intellectuals as a class, nor as one rooted in the subjective deficiencies of particular intellectuals. The Marxist worldview requires us to examine the system, the social totality, that produces such a split. We are tasked with exploring the political economy of knowledge production, if you will, which structures the relations of its mental workers through forms which insularize them to the structures and needs of the academy. As Gabriel Rockhill would say, it is a political economy of knowledge that systematically reproduces radical recuperators, compatible lefts, and pseudo-radical purity fetish outlooks that play an indispensable role in the reproduction of our moribund capitalist-imperialist system.

From the moment prospective radical scholars enter graduate school they are integrated into this system. Their lofty hopes of being active participants as intellectuals in a class struggle are castrated by the demands the academy makes upon them qua scholars. They’re told that their writing should take a distinctively academic tone, that popular vernacular is frowned upon, that hyper-referentiality, the practice of citing all the intellectual gods in the cosmos who have commented on a topic, is a sign of good work, of proper scholarship.

Truth and the struggle for human freedom are at best given a backseat, and that’s if they’re in the vehicle at all. Young scholars in the incubators of their careers are already indoctrinated in the aristocratic dogmas of writing for a select group of elite scholars, worshipping journal impact factors, and condescendingly dismissing those who use their intellectual capacities to work for the people, to actually, in proper Socratic fashion, engage in the radical quest for truth – those who seek to properly understand the world in order to work with the masses of humanity to change it.

Young scholars, burdened by tens of thousands of dollars accumulated in undergraduate studies debts, are told that even with a PhD they will have an extremely difficult time finding a job – at least one suitable for continued academic work that pays sufficiently enough to payback the accumulated debt. They are told – specifically those with radical sensibilities – that they should focus on joining academic associations, network with people in their fields, familiarize themselves with the work published in leading journals so that they too, one day, can join the publication hamster wheel aimed at advancing these slaves through the tenure ladder. They are told they must not waste their time writing for popular audiences, that doing broadcasts and media work that reaches infinitely more people than the readers of ridiculously pay-walled journals or university editorial books is a waste of time. Every attempt at rooting their scholarship in the people, in the real movements of our day, is shot down.

The gurus mediating their initiation into the academic capitalist cult ask: “do you know how this sort of work on your resume would look to hiring committees?” “Do you think the scholars in charge of your tenure advancement will appreciate your popular articles for Countercurrents, your books from Monthly Review, your articles in low impact factor, or impact factor-less, journals?”

At every turn, your attempts to commit yourself to the Socratic pursuit of truth, to playing a role in changing the world, is condemned as sinful to the Gods of resume evaluations. “Do you not want to finish your degree with the potential of obtaining gainful employment? Do you want to be condemned to adjunct professorialship, to teaching 7 classes for half the pay of the full professors who teach 3? Do you want to condemn your family to debt-slavery for the decades to come simply because you did not want to join our very special and elite hamster wheel? After all, who wouldn’t want to spend months writing an article to send it in to a journal that will reply in a year telling you, if you’re amongst the lucky ones, that it has been accepted with revisions rooted in the specific biases of the arbitrary reviewers? Doesn’t that sound fun? Isn’t this what philosophy, and the humanities in general, is all about?”

Eventually, material pressures themselves break the spirit of young visionary scholars. Reproletarianized and unable to survive on teaching assistantships, they resign themselves to the hamster wheel, with hopes of one day living the comfortable lives of their professors.

Their radical sensibilities, however, are still there. They need an outlet. They look around and find that the academic hamster wheel has a pocket of ‘radicals’ writing edgy things for decently rated journals. They quickly find their kin, those who reduce radical politics to social transgressiveness, those who are concerned more with dissecting concepts like epistemic violence than with the violence of imperialism.

Here it is! The young scholar thinks. A place where I can pad my resume and absolve myself of the guilt weighing down on my shoulders – a guilt rooted in the recognition, deep down, that one has betrayed the struggles of humanity, that one has become an agent of the forces they originally desired to fight against.

Their existence, their lives, will always be rooted in what Sartre called bad faith. Self-deception becomes their norm. They are now the radical ones, the ones enlightened in issues of language. The working class becomes a backwards rabble they must educate – and that’s if they come near them at all. What hope could there ever be in the deplorables? Sure, American capitalism could be criticized, but at least we’re enlightened, ‘woke’ to lgbtq and other issues. Those Russians, Chinese, Venezuelans, Iranians, etc. etc., aren’t they backwards? What are their thoughts on trans issues? Should we not, in the interests of our enlightened civilization, support our government’s efforts to civilize them? Let’s go take them some of our valued democracy and human rights. I’m sure their people will appreciate it very much.

I have presented the stories which are all-too familiar to those of us still working within the academy. It is evident, in my view at least, that the divorce of radical intellectuals from working class people and their movements has been an institutionalized effort of the capitalist elite. This division is embedded, it is implied, in the process of intellectuals becoming what the system requires of them for their survival. The relations they occupy in the process of knowledge production presupposes their split with working people.

This rigidity of academic life has intensified over the last century. Yes, we do have plenty of past cases of radical academics, those who have sided with the people, being kicked to the curb by their academic institutions. But where have they landed and why? Doesn’t a blackballed Dubois get to teach at the Communist Party’s Jefferson School? Doesn’t Herbert Aptheker, following his expulsion from the academy, obtain a position as the full-time editor-in-chief of the Communist Party’s theoretical journal, Political Affairs? Besides the aforementioned, what other factors make our day different from, say, 1950s US?

The answer is simple: what counter-hegemonic popular institutions we had were destroyed, in part by the efforts of our government, in part by the collapse, or overthrow, of the Soviet bloc. Although some, like ourselves, are currently in the process of attempting to construct them, today we have nowhere near the material and financial conditions we had in the past. The funding and aid the Soviets provided American communists is, unfortunately, not something provided for us by the dominant socialist states of our era.

Ideology does not exist in a transcendental realm; it is embodied materially through people and institutions. Without the institutions that can ensure that radical scholars are not forced to tiptoe the line of the bourgeois academy, the material conditions for this split will be sustained.

If I may, I would like to end with the following point. It is very easy to condemn the so-called radical academics we find in the bourgeois hamster wheel divorced from the people and their struggles. While condemnation might sometimes be justified, I think pity is the correct reaction.

They are the subjects of a tragedy. As Hegel notes, the essence of a tragedy is found in the contradictions at play between the various roles an individual occupies. Sophocles’ Antigone is perhaps the best example. Here a sister (Antigone) is torn between the duty she has to bury her brother (Polyneices), and the duty she has as a citizen to follow King Creon’s decry, which considers Polyneices a traitor undeserving of a formal burial. This contradiction is depicted nicely in Hegel, who says that “both are in the wrong because they are one-sided, but both are also in the right.”

Our so-called radical intelligentsia is, likewise, caught in the contradiction of the two roles they wish to occupy – one as revolutionary and the other as academic. Within the confines of the existing institutions, there can be no consistent reconciliation of the duties implied in each role. This is the set up of a classical tragedy, one which takes various forms with each individual scholar. It is also, as Socrates reminds Aristophanes and Agathon at the end of Plato’s Symposium, a comedy, since “the true artist in tragedy is an artist in comedy also.”

The tragic and simultaneously comedic position occupied by the radical intelligentsia can only be overcome with the development of popular counterhegemonic institutions, such as parties and educational institutions akin to those sponsoring today’s panel. It is only here where scholars can embed themselves in the people. However, scholars are humans living under capitalism. They need, just like everyone else, to have the capacity to pay for their basic subsistence. These institutions, therefore, must work to develop the capacity of financially supporting both the intellectual traitors to the traditional bourgeois academy, and the organic intellectuals emerging from the working class itself. That is, I think, one of the central tasks facing those attempting to bridge the divide we have convened to examine today.

https://orinocotribune.com/why-are-inte ... ng-people/

I recall many conversations 10-15 years ago with me hollerin', "I ain't no goddamn intellectual!" I was right all along, doncha know?

[blindpig]

Socialism, Democracy, and the Division of Labor

Professor Richard Wolff is a prominent, influential intellectual, with a big following on the left. He is an erudite, clear, and passionate speaker and writer. He is well-regarded for his exposition of Marx’s ideas-- a “go to” when the media tolerates a conversation critical of capitalism, one even advocating “socialism.”



For all of that, he does not represent Marx’s thought well, nor does he offer a viable, serious alternative to capitalism.



It is not a question of Wolff’s scholarship or his commitment to justice. It is, instead, a deep-seated, unwavering hostility to the real existing socialism of the twentieth century and the century’s leading Marxist exponents, the Communists. Of course, Wolff is not alone in this prejudice-- and it is a prejudice and not a reasoned conclusion. Since the intense US Red Scare of the 1950s, since the demonization of everything even vaguely linked to Soviet power or Communist and Workers’ Parties, this prejudice has contaminated social, cultural, and political life in this country. Every radical upsurge was forced to or willingly submitted to ABC: Anything But Communism.



In its place, US leftists embraced a kind of radical democracy: the view that bringing the furniture of formal democracy-- “one person, one vote, full participation, and majority rule,” quoting Wolff-- into every institution, every practice, every activity-- would in due time sweep away the exploitation, the inequalities, the indignities of capitalism. Radical, comprehensive democratic practices would be necessary and substantially sufficient to trigger the march to socialism.



There is evidence that Marx and Engels once also believed that universal suffrage alone (as advocated by the Chartist movement in England) would be an adequate measure on the road to overcoming capitalism. Their practical experience in the 1848 revolutions and the lessons of the Paris Commune dispelled that illusion. They concluded that a revolutionary defeat of the existing order and the replacement of that order with a democracy in the service of the working class would be necessary for moving beyond capitalism. The furniture of formal democracy was sometimes useful, but often unreliable elements in that endeavor. Marx and Engels did not presume that bourgeois democracy would advance those interests or protect them.



But with anti-Communism established as the national religion of the US, generations of US leftists, from the sixties’ SDS to Occupy and DSA, were hostile to Soviet socialism and repelled by Communist ideology. As a result, a “rethought” Marxism became the nourishment for young activists and the sustenance of veteran Cold War radicals. The expansion of certain democratic practices served and serves as the lodestar of these movements.



Professor Wolff rose to prominence in this milieu and it is reflected in his thought.



A recent brief and commendably clear statement of Wolff’s views on the presumed shortcomings of real, existing twentieth-century socialism appears in the article, Socialism’s Self Criticism and Real Democracy. Originally appearing in City Watch, the piece has achieved wide currency: Economy for All, CounterPunch, LA Progressive, NewsClick, Countercurrents, Eurasia Review, and many others.



Because he takes it as a settled truth that the socialist countries lacked “real democracy,” Wolff poses the following challenge:



A certain irony of history made the absence of real democracy in socialist countries an ongoing target of many socialists in those countries…



Because this time it is many socialists who make the encounter, they ask why modern socialism, a social movement critical of capitalism’s lack of real democracy, would itself merit a parallel criticism. Why have socialist experiments to date produced a self-criticism focused on their inability to create and maintain authentic democratic systems??



Wolff searches for an explanation for this presumed lack of democracy in “socialist experiments.” The search takes him to a common feature of capitalism and socialism (and he sometimes seems to suggest in previous social formations): “The answer lies in the employer-employee relationship.”



The employer-employee relation is indeed often a feature of capitalist and socialist enterprises. Soviet enterprises had managers who presumably hired individuals at state-owned enterprises. No doubt, it could have reflected a hierarchical relationship; it could have reflected a relation of dominance; and, further, it could have reflected the exploitation relationship. But it need not do so simply because of the existence of an employer/employee relationship. That can easily be shown with a simple, mundane hypothetical example:



Faced with a plumbing catastrophe, Jones engages the Smith Plumbing Company. Jones hires Smith’s firm to fix the kitchen sink. Jones employs Smith and company; Smith sends a worker, an employee (but not an employee of Jones), to make the repair. Jones is the employer and Smith’s company is his/her employee. Yet there is no hierarchy, no dominance, nor any exploitation by Jones.



Further, Smith has five employees, who Smith lords over, dominates, and exploits. Here, the employer-employee relationship generates entirely different, negative socially-significant outcomes.



We have one innocuous, one exploitative employer/employee relationship.



Why does the employer/employee distinction fail to reveal anything relevant regarding real democracy or the struggle for socialism?



The character of employment, the nominal expression for the employer/employee relationship, is historically determined by the division of labor. Under capitalism, its character is tied to the exploitation relationship. That is, given that ownership of enterprises resides with private individuals or groups, owners establish employer/employee relations as hierarchical, dominating, and exploitative to secure surplus value. Capitalists engage this particular division of labor to secure their ends.



But, presumably, under socialism, with social ownership of enterprises, a non-antagonistic, non-exploitative employer/employee relationship could be established strictly based on the division of labor. The “employer”/manager could be determined by credentials, test-results, past experience, past performance, seniority, or a host of other relevant, merit-based terms.



Formal democratic procedure is, thus, no unique, magic elixir. In these circumstances, Wolff’s democratic procedure-- election of “employer” -- might well clash with merit and/or efficiency.



That is surely why Marx and Engels placed exploitation and the relations between capitalists (owners of enterprises) and the proletariat (the workers) at the center of their analysis. They attend little specifically to the employer/employee relationship, except when it is shorthand for this exploitation nexus.



Moreover, Marx and Engels (and many of their successors) believed that a revolution was the most democratic expression of the popular will-- what Wolff might want to call “real democracy.” While they would undoubtedly find setbacks to democracy in the historical trajectory of twentieth-century socialism, they would also have seen the removal of the power of the capitalist class and the end of labor exploitation as marking the most broadly democratic advance since the French revolution.



Where Wolff sees a surfeit of democracy (“socialism’s self-criticism”), others see a harbinger of a far more democratic future. Wolff says correctly: “Democracy is incompatible with class-divided economic systems.” I would add that democracy is only possible with the elimination of class-divided economic systems.



Fixated on democratic form, Professor Wolff is led away from the democratic content of Marxist socialism and its realization in real, existing socialism. Further, he fixates on a particular democratic form associated with the capitalist republic that may or may not be the best mechanism for exercising the will or interests of the working class. Every revolutionary generation is faced with a different set of challenges. Nation-states typically suffer or gain from uneven development, as Lenin always stressed. The advance of industrialization, the degree of poverty, the levels of education, external and internal opposition, complex social strata, national conflict, and a host of other factors make the choice of democratic form a test for the first and later generations of revolutionaries.



Western Marxists, often quick to measure all by the democratic forms established by the bourgeois revolutions of past centuries, just as often fail to grasp these complexities. They are willing to forgo pressing the socialist project for the “purity” of so-called “real democracy.”



In Wolff’s case, he chooses to secure this purity by basing his anti-capitalism around the idea of worker-owned cooperatives. To be sure, they could meet the cherished standards of “one person, one vote, full participation, and majority rule” in ways that the ultimate class conflict-- the overthrow of capitalism-- might not. It is possible that cooperatives can and do establish and survive on the margins of the capitalist system, but only a dreamer believes that these worker utopias will ever seriously challenge the behemoth of monopoly capitalism.



Wolff is not alone in retailing a polite version of Marxism rather than the radical ideas that the working class so desperately needs.



Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Right again... When Greg is right he's quite good, when he's not he noticeably flails.

[blindpig]

Idiocy as a guarantor of capitalism
No. 12/88.XII.2023

Our modern capitalist society is filled with blatant injustices. This is not a secret, and there are not many fanatical witnesses to the “invisible hand of the market” who will deny the obvious evils of capitalism. Moreover, these vices are discussed and condemned, and not only by hard workers in the factory canteen or clerks in offices, but also by “business sharks” with gold pins in their ties and cufflinks on their sleeves. Here, for example, is an article from the BBC Russian Service:

“Capitalism, as we know it, has had its day. It's time for the rich to share, to pay more taxes, and for businesses to prioritize the public good rather than maximizing profits. Otherwise a revolution is coming.

These are not slogans from a leaflet of militant Marxists [obviously, the author confused Marxists, that is, revolutionaries armed with scientific theory, with socialists - these lapdogs of bourgeois politics. — Approx. author]. These are quotes from recent speeches by billionaires, bankers and economists. The pharaohs and priests of capitalism suddenly began to speak with one voice about its reform. And they don’t mince words.”

The author of the article cites eloquent statistics:

“Until half a century ago, a tiny elite of wealthy Americans (0.1% of the population) controlled 7% of the wealth in the largest economy on the planet. And now it’s already 20%. Overall, in the US, Europe and China, which account for two-thirds of the global economy, 10% of the population owns 70% of all assets. Almost all the change ended up in the pockets of the middle class, which makes up 40% of the inhabitants of these countries. The rest - that is, every second person - are content with the crumbs from their table: they have at their disposal only 2% of the total wealth. And the further, the more this concentration of money, land and property in the hands of an entrenched handful of wealthy citizens accelerates. The vast majority, on the other hand, have had their incomes effectively frozen since the financial crisis ten years ago.”

Of course, these statistics do not reflect the cultural and spiritual squalor in which the so-called. “middle class”, not to mention the excessive precariousness of its position in the food chain of the concrete jungle. We can say that from a purely psychological point of view, it is easier for a poor person - when you live in poverty from birth, you get used to it and adapt. And when you have “status”: a house, a car, fancy gadgets (all taken, of course, on credit) - and suddenly, under the blow of another market crisis, you, so successful and self-realized, find yourself thrown out into the cold, without the ability to repay loans ... after this, some people prefer to end their lives in a noose.

Nevertheless, the oligarchs consider the “middle class”, i.e., well-fed serfs and small owners who dream of growing into large ones, their main support, as they say in plain text:

“The middle class is shrinking and society is polarizing. It was much easier when the middle class grew and voted for reforms that opened up the economy and allowed the fruits of economic growth to be distributed more evenly,” the BBC journalist quoted Boon, chief economist at the OECD Club of Rich Countries, as saying.

World Bank chief economist Goldberg echoes a similar point:

“Once the gap between rich and poor becomes too large, a threat appears. We remember the French Revolution, the October Revolution. Popular unrest is beginning, and we are already seeing it [talking about the “yellow vest” protests in France].”

It is noteworthy that the French BOURGEOIS revolution is identified with the October SOCIALIST revolution. The oligarchy forgot that it was the French bourgeois revolution that put an end to the remnants of feudalism in Europe, allowing the third estate to move into the palaces of kings and become a new aristocracy, not by blood, but by purse. Today's oligarchs do not feel a drop of gratitude to Danton, Robespierre, Marat and other revolutionaries who laid down their lives for the triumph of bourgeois freedoms; for them they are extremist radicals, bloody maniacs; the executed Louis XVI is closer and dearer to them.

To prevent the mob from rebelling, “business, for its part, must fork out money to solve the problems that force people to vote for opponents of capitalism.” In short, you need to throw off the fatter scraps from the master’s table - and everything will be fine, God won’t give it away, and the voter won’t eat it.

At the end, the words of billionaire Dalio, slightly concerned about the global situation, are quoted:

“We have reached a critical point, beyond which everything will depend on our ability to reach an agreement. We have enough resources to sort out problems, correct inequality, and increase productivity so that the common wealth grows and there is something to share.

However, I am very afraid that the parties will take irreconcilable positions and as a result either capitalism will be abandoned altogether, or it will never be reformed, since the far right will fight to preserve it unchanged, and the far left will fight to completely scrap it... Or reasonable ones people will be able to change the system so that it works for the benefit of the majority.”

This is an article from 2019. As you might guess, “reasonable people” did not change the system. The rich continue to get richer, the poor continue to get poorer, despite the tutelage of bankers and their tame economists. Only the world has become even closer to the third world war, because the uncrowned emperors of the American credit-colonial empire feel a threat to their dominance.

Capitalism continues to rot happily, the miasma of this rot sometimes reaches the beau monde crowd, and it betrays its reaction. Thus, in the same 2019, the film “Joker” caused a wide resonance, where, under the guise of superhero escapism, a sharp social drama is presented, the apotheosis of which is a bloody riot of the mob, an illustration of what happens when “the gap between rich and poor becomes too wide.” Joker was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Picture category. The Korean drama with the self-explanatory title “Parasite,” which also won an Oscar, caused no less discussion. The attention of viewers of the Covid era was captured by the Korean series “The Squid Game,” where poor people, like gladiators, tore each other’s throats for the sake of money for the amusement of the rich public. The film “Triangle of Sadness” shows in rich strokes the class stratification of society using the example of passengers on a luxury yacht, where well-fed and arrogant rich people argue that “all people are equal”, and the ship’s servants, nodding obsequiously, humiliate themselves and grovel before them...

Gone are the days when the bourgeoisie was terrified of any criticism of capitalism. In the last century, Charlie Chaplin was persecuted in the press and called “red” for his films, which were ideologically toothless but demonstrated the unsightly sides of capitalism. Today, films that much more harshly demonstrate the ugliness of capitalism receive golden Oscars... A paradox? Not really. After all, all this criticism ends with one main conclusion - there is no alternative to capitalism. Communism? Utopia! And all attempts to bring this utopia to life only led to a deterioration in life, terror and totalitarianism. As the Canadian psychological writer Peterson, popular in the West, put it, if capitalism produces wealth and inequality, then all other systems produce only inequality. And in general, “all people are different, and, therefore, inequality and hierarchies in society will inevitably arise - the only important thing is that this inequality is not excessive.”

Bourgeois ideologists generate a whole galaxy of theories, concepts, ideologies, ideas and ideas in order to prove to the robbed and humiliated plebs that capitalism is a “fundamentally strong system”, and any attempts to shake this system are a terrible crime against society and the very nature of man. But in order for all this propaganda compost to be well absorbed into the brains of ordinary people, these brains must be thoroughly liquefied. After all, “Capital” has existed and been freely distributed for more than half a century. Criticism of Political Economy" by Marx, where, with all scientific rigor, all the main arguments of the adherents of capitalism are deeply and thoroughly refuted, the mystery of where wealth and poverty come from is revealed, why the mass of the people are forced to hunch all their lives for the "living wage", and an insignificant handful bathes in luxury. 175 years since the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” was written, its contents are also available to anyone with Internet access. Finally, the experience of the USSR with universal, accessible and high-quality education, medicine, a guarantee of housing for every citizen without rent and with penny “utilities”...

It can be said without exaggeration that the most important condition for preserving the capitalist order is the mass idiocy of the population. After all, only an idiot can be convinced that market anarchy is when store shelves are stocked with food and millions of people are malnourished; when entire blocks of new buildings are empty with an abundance of homeless people - the most effective form of organizing society. Who else can we call a person, if not an idiot, if the First and Second World Wars, unleashed by the imperialists, and the threat of the Third World War cannot shake his faith in the rationality of capitalism? Only an idiot is not encouraged by any economic crises, “great depressions,” man-made disasters and tragedies to heed the call of the communists to overthrow the parasitic class of financial aristocracy and begin to build a new society without crises and world wars? How else, if not idiots, can we call the voters who brought another swindler and thief into power and continue to believe in the goodness of democratic procedures? Look, in the neighboring once fraternal republic, six presidents have changed and each time they admit that the new president is many times worse than the previous one, but, like notorious gamblers, they are sure that the seventh time they will DEFINITELY make the “right” choice! And at the same time they are also proud that they have a democracy, unlike the “authoritarian Russia”, where there is an irremovable president! The French can be called no less idiots, who have been fighting strikes for three hundred years, not realizing that trade unionism will not save them from the oppression of capital. In fact, all the peoples of capitalist states suffer from one form or another of idiocy, and this is not an accident.

Let's try to take a closer look at idiots and the concept of idiocy in general.

The word “idiot” itself is of Greek origin and is translated as “an individual, a private person; a simple, inexperienced, ignorant person." People who lived in isolation from public life and did not participate in the general meeting of citizens of the policy were called idiots; Today such people are called more tolerant - apolitical. Dostoevsky significantly ennobled the image of an idiot in his novel of the same name, portraying Prince Myshkin as a naive and unadapted to life, but a highly moral person who is rejected by society because of his spiritual purity. Another famous literary image of an idiot is the soldier Schweik. He demonstrates exaggerated zeal and patriotism, a willingness to lay down his life for the “sovereign-emperor,” for which he is rightly defined by those around him as an impenetrable idiot and a fool with a certificate. With all his zeal, Schweik time after time, by “accidental” coincidence, avoids fulfilling his “patriotic duty” to lay down his head for the sake of the interests of German imperialism, and eventually getting to the front, surrenders to the Russians. Thus, the Prague dog dealer Schweik turns out to be not an idiot, but a very prudent person, unlike the millions of Germans, French, English and Russians who valiantly turned themselves into mincemeat so that a handful of rich people could line their pockets. There is one significantly less popular image of an idiot: the mayor Gloomy-Burcheev from Saltykov-Shchedrin’s story “The History of a City.” This character is narrow-minded and primitive to such an extent that he loses the ability to experience human feelings and passions: “It was a gaze as bright as steel, a gaze completely free from thought, and therefore inaccessible to either shades or fluctuations. Naked determination - and nothing more." He does not recognize reason and considers it his worst enemy, “entangling a person in a network of seduction and dangerous pickiness.” Saltykov-Shchedrin talks about idiots like this:

“Idiots are generally very dangerous, and not even because they are necessarily evil (in an idiot, anger or kindness are completely indifferent qualities), but because they are alien to all considerations and always go ahead, as if the road on which they find themselves belongs exclusively to them alone. From a distance it may seem that these are people, albeit with harsh, but firmly established convictions, who consciously strive for a firmly defined goal. However, this is an optical illusion that one should not get carried away with. These are simply creatures tightly sealed on all sides, who rush forward because they are not able to recognize themselves in connection with any order of phenomena.”

Thus, from the point of view of the satirist, the essence of an idiot is the absence of thinking, the inability to understand the structure of the world around him. I think this is a very useful observation. We can say that idiocy is an extreme form of ignorance.

In medicine, idiocy is defined as a congenital severe form of mental retardation, when a person is unable to speak and care for himself normally. But what to do with people who perfectly know how to talk, serve themselves, have an education, but at the same time speak utter nonsense, like, for example, Academician Sakharov at the Congress of People's Deputies in 1989? Or take the draft constitution of the USSR by the same Sakharov, what is it if not an example of a severe form of mental retardation? Not to mention the speeches of Novodvorskaya, Alekseeva, Latynina, Akhedzhakova, Svanidze, the writings of Mlechin, R. Medvedev, Astafiev, Aksenov, Rybakov and other representatives of the demshi fauna? From a formal medical point of view, all of them are completely healthy, they received the best Soviet education in the world, but in terms of the QUALITY of consciousness they differ little from a drooling fool. And most importantly, they, unlike such a fool, are dangerous to society. It was not without reason that measures of “punitive” psychiatry were applied to such characters. V.A. Podguzov wrote:

“History rejects a one-sided approach to idiocy as a congenital anomaly of the brain and testifies that in relation to idiots formed by social conditions, i.e., religious fundamentalists, alcoholics, democrats, drug addicts, etc. persons, society, even Western, at various stages of its development, it pursued a policy of forced isolation.

An idiot should be called not only someone who lacks the inclination to master algebra, but first of all someone who, having mastered it, created, for example, a HYDROGEN bomb, guided only by the consideration that he could do this work... faster than Oppenheimer, or in order to deflect the threat of persecution by the NKVD for his anti-Sovietism. Academicians Sakharov and Ginzburg did not report any other motivation that forced them to create hydrogen weapons in their memoirs.”

And if in Soviet society the appearance of such idiots can be considered as a relic of the past (we will not dwell in detail on this issue, which requires a separate analysis), then under capitalism the “production” of idiots is put on stream, on a conveyor belt.

For these purposes, all available tools are used. First of all, this is the education system, especially its humanitarian sphere. In general, the modern bourgeois education system is considered, not without reason, a system of duping. The task of the school is to educate not a harmoniously developed personality, but a “literate consumer.” The teacher has been transformed from an educator in the broad sense of the word into a clerk, a bureaucrat whose task is to ensure reporting and USE results. How well the students have learned the material is not so important. Yes, let them remain ignoramuses altogether - this is not the problem of teachers. So, for example, in the USA, in this citadel of imperialism, more than 40 million people cannot read and write, this is over 10% of the country's population! It would seem that the bourgeoisie should be interested in educated workers, but no. In general, American schools are the most prominent example of duping. This can be understood at least from American TV series about teenagers, where excellent students - “nerds” - are outcasts at whom everyone laughs, and stupid jocks-basketball players are everyone’s favorites. And, of course, bourgeois ideology is actively propagated in educational institutions through humanitarian disciplines and various events. In the same USA, schoolchildren are sent to “sell” cookies to passers-by for money.

The next level of fooling the masses is the entertainment industry. Stupid series and shows that play on the basest instincts of the crowd, Hollywood escapism, pornography, graphomaniac tabloid reading, time-killing computer toys, schizophrenic theatrical productions, “pictures” painted with feces, and other miscarriages of “modern art.”

Next come the “honest and independent” media, all sorts of “science popularizers” and, finally, bourgeois scientists and the “scientific picture of the world” they propagandize. And we are talking here not only about history, sociology and other “humanitarian studies” that directly deny Marxism; “natural” sciences also contribute to the decay of brains with their positivism, relativism and agnosticism. Unfortunately, among people who call themselves communists, the prevailing view is that the partisanship of science is limited to the deliberate manipulation of data to substantiate political ideas. In fact, the partisanship of the sciences is manifested primarily in methodology: bourgeois “science” is based on idealism, and genuine science is based on diamatics (dialectical materialism). Let me quote here a fragment from my article “ On the partisanship of scientific populists ”:

“What should be the true definition of science? It is impossible to identify it with a body of specialists, a community of scientists, as they themselves often do. Science is a developing system of objective truths about the essence of phenomena and their stable relationships, called laws. Consequently, the task of science is the search and formulation of the laws of existence, nature, society and thinking, revealing the essence of a particular phenomenon or law and its relationship with other laws, relying not on empiricism, not on bare experience, but on a solid methodological basis, without which any experiments are attempts by blind sages to “study” the elephant.

Truth is always concrete, objective and confirmed by the entire socio-historical practice of mankind, and science is a system of objective truths about the essence of phenomena and the laws of existence, nature, society, and thinking.

Bourgeois “science” is, in essence, pseudoscience, for its task is not to establish the truth, but to conceal it, not to serve progress, but to serve the interests of the oligarchy.”

Thus, with the help of the education system, the entertainment industry, the media, the propaganda of liberalism, nationalism, democracy, religion, and the “scientific picture of the world,” there is a continuous process of idiocy of the population; From a very young age, normal intellectual development is stopped, thanks to which bourgeois ideologists easily manipulate the masses and keep them in obedience.

It remains to add that capitalist existence itself, with the need to compete in the labor market, to go to hated, tiring work - all this also does not contribute to the intellectual growth of the proletarians.

But the situation is not hopeless. Firstly, whatever one may say, it is impossible to turn absolutely everyone into idiots. There are quite a lot of people who are outraged by the injustice that reigns around them and see how poorly and wastefully capital manages the resources of the planet. Such people begin to look for answers and sooner or later find them in Marxism. Secondly, capitalism periodically provokes global catastrophes, which causes a massive, albeit short-term, “clarification” in the minds of ordinary people. For example, at the time of the next economic crisis, the demand for “Capital” in bookstores sharply increases.

In general, proletarians, if not with their minds, but, so to speak, with their fifth point, realize that “somewhere they are... deceiving us.” This, by the way, explains the popularity and persistence of numerous conspiracy theories about a global conspiracy, reptilians and a shadow government. Although these theories themselves are usually composed by technical intellectuals, they express the worldview of the masses, a naive attempt to explain all the “oddities” of market existence. No matter how sophisticated the oligarchic political strategists are, it is impossible to completely turn the people into a herd of sheep, although Goebbels and Soros came quite close to this. Still, while a person remains a person, he thinks, which means he can be aware of the world around him and strive for knowledge.

So, it is not the police, not the army that is the first guarantor of the safety of decayed capitalism, this guarantor is the mass idiocy of the proletarian masses. This is an objective factor. The subjective factor of the stability of capitalism is the weakness of the world forces of communism. Almost every capitalist country has its own local communist party, but the influence of the communists is negligible. And the point is not only in the idiocy of the population, but also in the fact that the communists themselves are not up to the task. Moreover, in reality, Communist parties are often a bunch of opportunists for whom Marxism is just a set of slogans. And this is the main problem.

Among our leftists there is a popular idea that there is a certain treasured button in the consciousness of the proletarian, and if you just feel for this button and press it, the proletarians will immediately form a line and, under red banners, singing “The Internationale,” they will go to overthrow the bourgeoisie and build communism. The left is still trying to find, to find that magic propaganda wand that will turn a sleepy average person into a fiery revolutionary. For example, the strike struggle is considered such a magic wand. But all these are misconceptions. There is no miraculous button or magic wand in the minds of proletarians. It is necessary to understand that, strictly speaking, under capitalism it is generally impossible to win the support of the entire mass of working people. Even the Bolsheviks did not rely on all the workers, but only on the advanced ones, of whom, relative to the population of the Russian Empire, there were, at best, 1% (even if this 1% later carried away part of the working masses, but not all).

Consequently, communists must organize themselves in such a way that competence, especially in the field of Marxist science, is placed at the forefront. Without this, capitalism will continue to happily rot, making life on the globe less and less suitable for life.

R. Ogienko
12/29/2023

https://prorivists.org/88_idiots/

Google Translator

[blindpig]

Eternal Chevengur of the Russian Federation
No. 11/87.XI.2023

Many people know (in perestroika/early 90s he was very popular and published) such a writer as Andrei Platonov. I'm afraid that the modern generation of young people knows him from an anecdote.

Moscow. Winter. Snow. A boy plays football. Suddenly - the sound of broken glass. A janitor, a stern Russian janitor, runs out with a broom and chases after the boy. The boy runs away from him and thinks: “Why, why is this all for? Why all this image of a street boy, all this football, all these friends? For what??? I’ve already done all my homework, why don’t I sit at home on the couch and read a book by my favorite writer, Ernest Hemingway?”

Havana. Ernest Hemingway sits in his office in a country villa, finishing his next novel and thinking: “Why, why is this all for? How tired of all this, this Cuba, these beaches, bananas, sugar cane, this heat, these Cubans!!! Why am I not in Paris, sitting with my best friend Andre Maurois in the company of two lovely courtesans, drinking a morning aperitif and talking about the meaning of life?

Paris. Andre Maurois in his bedroom, stroking the thigh of a lovely courtesan and drinking his morning aperitif, thinks: “Why, why is all this for? How tired of this Paris, these rude French, these stupid courtesans, this Eiffel Tower, from which they spit on your head! Why am I not in Moscow, where it’s cold and snowy, sitting with my best friend Andrei Platonov over a glass of Russian vodka and talking to him about the meaning of life?”

Moscow. Cold. Snow. Andrey Platonov. Wearing earflaps. In felt boots. With a broom. He chases the boy and thinks: “If I catch up, I’ll kill him!”

The anecdote plays on a not very successful period in Platonov’s life, when he worked as a janitor at the Literary Institute and was not published. What didn’t the Soviet government like about Platonov’s works? This, in fact, is what the conversation will be about.

There is no doubt that Andrei Platonov was not a dissident, but on the contrary, he was pro-Soviet. But... precisely pro-Soviet, not communist. More precisely, he could be called a communist, but only in the sense in which Marx, in the “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” examines various types of “communisms” that are not actually communism, that is, unscientific types of political doctrines that call themselves communisms.

If we read Platonov’s “The Pit” or, even more prominently, “Chevengur”, we will find that, despite the fact that some heroes almost literally pray to Marx and Lenin, they are actually communists, that is, people who know Marxist method and those actively applying it in social practice, there is no word “in general”. Platonov described and glorified, to put it briefly, a kind of “spontaneous” proto-communism of the peasant community and the marginal poor. I'll try to explain what this means.

Proto-communist teachings were spontaneously born almost simultaneously with private property (very insignificant echoes of these teachings have reached us from ancient times). Writing was poorly developed in those days, and everything rested on the personal talents and personal charisma of certain preachers, who expressed spontaneous egalitarian ideas, normal for the oppressed classes, and interpreted, putting into theoretical form, these ideas, as God bestowed on their souls (mainly in a religious form - for example, hence the idea in Christianity of the equality of all in Christ). Due to the fact that, in general, general social ties were quite weak and the peasant could not travel further than the outskirts of the village all his life, each hut had its own rattles - for example, in the territory of ancient Judea alone, the number of different prophets and preachers went off scale. That is, any idea that in one way or another expressed the concept of overcoming social inequality had a chance of mass support, no matter in what form it was expressed. A spontaneous egalitarian reaction to private property relations is what we call “spontaneous communism of the masses.”

Spontaneous mass “communism” is an IMMANDORABLE LAW of any exploitative society. It is as inevitable as the sunrise.

But the only significant factor remains the FORM in which it is implemented. If he grasps a form that contains a bit of scientific content, then he has a good chance of implementation (for example, the English Diggers (Levellers) carried this bit of reason within themselves - the actual seizure of the land of the nobility in the conditions of the revolution was an absolutely correct tactic to realize their equalization program, another thing is that the theoretical part itself, which believed that it was possible to destroy private property by transferring equal shares of land into private ownership, was poor). But the Christian form of “communism” has been marking time for centuries and even crawled further and further from the communist content until it has emptied almost everything of it, leaving only ritual.

In the USSR, stunned by the successes of Marxism in 1917, social science rested on its laurels, believing that the spontaneous utopian forms of communism after such impressive victories were completely over and should not be paid attention to. But this is a mistake. Because spontaneous communism is replaced by scientific communism only in the case when there is a SUFFICIENTLY DEEP UNDERSTANDING of this very scientific communism. And this is not equal to an “A” in the subject “History and Math” at the institute and is not equal to the memorized Charter of the CPSU and a dozen and a half quotes from the Program.

So, returning to Platonov. Platonov reflected in his works all possible facets of this “spontaneous utopian communism.” His heroes are sacrificial and heroic in the name of SOCIETY, but from their understanding of the meaning of all this, they only have very strange ideas about a “bright future” that are not consistent with Marxism. Some people see it as a mechanized factory body. Someone in the spirit of Chayanov sees a world without cities, producing only bread, someone dreams of joint (but for some reason exclusively physical) labor - in a word, there is a whole gallery of types who have a bright future of their own and who saw their realization in the revolution of 1917 this your future. And somehow it all happened in his books that the party did not stop all this bacchanalia of mostly peasant dreams, directing it with a harsh hand where it was needed, but democratically went somewhere far away, being present only formally somewhere over the horizon. Meanwhile, people are digging their own “pit”, based on very diverse motives and only in very specific things echoing the party’s policy (for example, the party told them to dig a pit).

It is logical that this socio-utopian literature did not arouse the delight of critics. In the 20-30s, emphasizing the fact that at different stages of the revolution and the Civil War the bulk of the population joined the Bolsheviks not for ideological reasons, but only as temporary fellow travelers who realized goals that were quite far from scientific communism, was already unnecessary. Such literature could not teach the new generation to UNDERSTAND what communism is; it hopelessly confused them in a heap of utopian ideas. The fact that the party understood that this was exactly what happened: the spontaneous communism of the rural community followed the Bolsheviks only because there was no one else to follow (on the opposite side there were such beasts and cannibalism that a normal peasant would have gone with the devil, if only against them), and the fact that this interpretation had to be propagated on every corner are very different things. It can be understood, but not propagated. Platonov did not understand this and waved his broom for several years.

Chevengur around us
The collapse of the USSR gave arrogant post-Soviet “Marxists” a tangible understanding that the very fact of the existence of the theory of scientific communism does not automatically destroy utopian socialism in any of its forms. The 90s gave us a brilliant example of the birth and death of social utopias of various kinds - in nationalist, religious forms, in individual civil sermons and movements. Who, for example, remembers the teaching of Fedorov, who is an ophthalmologist? And he ran for president with a funny utopian idea of ​​industrial cooperation and various social programs on a vague economic basis. Utopian forms of proto-communist teachings are spontaneously born and die among the Marxist illiterate masses with the same regularity with which capital either strengthens or weakens its pressure on the proletariat, like soap bubbles - they arise, burst, and new ones arise. Everything gurgles, but there is zero result. The fact of the generation of sentiments of utopian communism in the lower social strata HAS NO CONNECTION with Marxism or any activity of Marxists in general. Taking the effect of this spontaneous communism personally is quite dangerous, just as any overestimation of forces is dangerous.

Moreover, these sentiments, due to the lack of mass SCIENTIFIC communist propaganda, take on very bizarre forms - nationalism, religious egalitarianism, statism, propaganda of spontaneous communist ethics. Attempts by the masses to solve GENERAL SOCIAL issues in one way or another inevitably result in spontaneous communism, be it painting benches in the park or forming a militia to protect the Belgorod region from the invasion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

In society as a whole there are a lot of PURE COMMUNIST ELEMENTS. Classics is a family institution. But this also includes weaving camouflage nets for the army, and raising funds for quadcopters and medicines. This also includes file sharing (there it is basically purely on the communist principle - “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”). Society has not yet been torn apart by a war of all against all solely because capitalists CANNOT VICTORY communist relations in society - they cannot turn everything into goods and begin exchanging them for other goods.

And in this environment, people cannot help but have and express corresponding moods in one way or another. That is, we live only partially in a world of purity, there is a certain part of the world around us, which is something like Plato’s mythical Chevengur, in which beautiful-hearted people create “good for everyone” (subjectively, of course) and many are even ready for hardships and heroism for this. But at the same time they have never been communists (and, perhaps, will never become one).

And briefly what follows from this
And it follows from it that 70 years of Soviet power have created conditions for us to partially ride and intercept this process. Communism in the mass consciousness has become quite firmly associated with Marxism.

However, this also has the opposite effect - a huge number of people who call themselves communists, verbally accept Marxism and even flaunt quotes from the classics, are in fact carriers of utopian communism. They simply cannot come up with any other, brighter “communism” and cling to the screen.

There are a sufficient number of people who will follow the communists, having something “of their own” in mind, and we need to understand with what hook we can hook spontaneous communists and how to use them in the revolutionary process.

And to do this, you need to understand what forms the spontaneous communism of the masses takes and where even in the most reactionary views there is a communist grain, and by this thread you need to pull the masses out of the swamp of reaction and conformism.

Attempts by the bourgeoisie to exploit these sentiments usually do not end in anything other than an escalation of spontaneous communist views. The call of the bourgeoisie to protect Paris from the Prussians led to the fact that the bourgeoisie was demanded to implement a program of spontaneous communist views, and they demanded it with bayonets. Therefore, in 1940, the bourgeoisie chose to surrender, because they understood that they could not keep this genie in the bottle.

From the previous, it is quite clear how the attempts of the Russian bourgeoisie to flirt with the spontaneous communism of the masses in conditions of wars and crises will end (and they flirt, try to kindle the labor and fighting enthusiasm of the proletarian for the “common cause” - the defense of the Motherland). They invariably forget that the proletarian will inevitably understand the goals and objectives of this common cause in his own way, and if the bourgeoisie does not constantly suppress these shoots, then they will end up with a natural Chevengur, where everyone heroically builds something of their own in the name of the common good.

This process must be both saddled and led. And at the same time get rid of the “communists”, for whom communism means something of its own, and not a scientific understanding of what SHOULD be .

I. Bortnik
7/11/2023

https://prorivists.org/87_chevengur/

Google Translator

I swear I've seen this before but cannot find it so here...

[blindpig]

Revolutionary situation, or why some revolutions die while others win
January 11, 19:31



An interesting polemical article about why some revolutions win and others lose (we are, of course, talking about real revolutions, not Maidan coups).

The revolutionary situation, or why some revolutions die while others win.

Nowadays there is a widespread opinion that a revolution can be drowned in blood, that it is enough to kill the revolutionaries and the revolution will not happen. This opinion is based on examples of the defeat of the red revolutions in France 1871 (Paris Commune), Iran 1915-1921, Finland 1918, Germany 1919, Indonesia 1960, Iran 1979, etc. This opinion, of course, is erroneous. As often happens, the mistake resulted from a false understanding of the term “revolution.” Let us explain this within the framework of the Marxism of Marx and Engels, as well as the contribution to Marxism of Lenin. Thus, as many revolutionaries as they could were killed. Of course, the attitude towards revolutionaries who came from aristocratic or raznoble backgrounds was softer. But not because they are revolutionaries, but because they belong to us(!). Those. children of friends or relatives. How can you torture or hang your own blood, or the blood of a friend, or for whom the blood of a friend asks? Not only were they not “liberal,” they didn’t even really understand the revolutionary workers. They killed, often without even a trial. However, there was no point. Because, like mushrooms after rain, after the death of some revolutionaries, new ones appeared. The strengthened bourgeoisie paid for their work, and always found new revolutionaries. The Morozovs, Nobels, Ryabushinskys, Putilovs and others acted as the financial basis of the bourgeois revolution. Those. To fight the bourgeois revolution it was necessary to fight not with revolutionaries, but with the emerging bourgeoisie. Not with performers, but with customers. And if you look even deeper, then with plants and factories. Plants and factories created a bourgeoisie with workers, and also gave them resources to fight. Plants and factories generated a contradiction that the feudal state could not live with. This means that with the growth of plants and factories, the question of a change of power was only a matter of time.

The Marxism of Marx and Engels states that any revolution has a material basis. And this basis is not some abstract dissatisfaction with the standard of living of part of the population. Dissatisfaction with someone or something is not the basis of a revolution. This is the basis of unrest, coups, riots, etc. Dissatisfaction with power can accompany a revolution, but is not its basis. The basis of the revolution is a contradiction in society: when some have resources, and others have power. The first inevitably begin to think about the injustice of the world order. And they have every opportunity to change the world order, because they have the resources. Those. very soon thoughts turn into actions.

Let us show this using the example of the February bourgeois revolution in Russia in 1917. Russia was a feudal country until 1917. As we know from Marx, the basis for the existence of a feudal country is the labor of the peasants. But in this feudal country, factories and factories appear, and with them workers and the bourgeoisie. Workers work in factories and factories, and the bourgeoisie manages them. Factories and factories are much more productive than peasant labor. This means that the temptation to use them is irresistible. Their growth would later be called an industrial breakthrough. Their contribution to the social product (products of labor created by the entire society) makes it possible to produce consumer and military goods in large quantities, of better quality and much cheaper. Which allows, among other things, the creation of an army of the so-called industrial type. Such an army cannot exist on peasant labor. The peasants simply won’t feed it.

With the growth of factories and factories, the influence and wealth of the bourgeoisie grows. But the rights and power still belong to the feudal lords. Dissatisfaction with this state of affairs among the bourgeoisie is growing, and a revolutionary situation is emerging. The revolutionary situation is not in the discontent of the bourgeoisie, but in the fact that the share of the social product produced by factories and factories is becoming overwhelming. If feudal lords are needed to govern the peasants, then the workers are governed by the bourgeoisie. But the bourgeoisie has no power. This kind of situation is called revolutionary, because there is a contradiction: some have resources, and others have power. It inevitably gives rise to revolution. This is what happens. The bourgeoisie begins to finance revolutionaries.

For some reason, there is an opinion that the only enemies of the feudal lords were revolutionaries. And if the Russian tsars had destroyed them, then the Russian Empire would have continued to exist quietly and peacefully, and would not have known trouble. This is, of course, not true. The Russian Tsar Nicholas 2 did not flirt with the revolutionaries at all, nor was he “liberal.” Nicholas 2 was not afraid of blood. In fact, he got the nickname “Bloody.” And I didn’t get it by chance, not just like that. “Khodynka” showed that the blood and deaths of his subjects did not interfere with the tsar’s fun and did not spoil his mood. “Bloody Sunday” and the executions of workers (the same “Lena Execution”, I only write the names here and above, because the events are well-known, those who wish can Google them and read about them in more detail) showed that he was not afraid to drown protests in blood, but on the contrary, he fully supported such actions. His resolutions on the cases of punishers and executioners who drowned workers’ protests in blood are known: “Well done!”, “Everything is correct!”, “Oh, how good!”, “Hero of the Fatherland!”, “They shot too few!” And where it was possible to suppress a protest without bloodshed, he regretted: “Why didn’t you shoot anyone!?” Nicholas 2 is not a kind, albeit weak-willed guy, but a real ghoul, even if he is a wimp. In general, it is not so rare that weak-willed, cowardly people treat other people’s blood very easily.

I remember an anecdotal incident when a tsarist colonel shot up a residential building because a revolutionary had escaped through it. Exactly what he shot, i.e. rolled up the guns and opened fire. Outraged residents of the house wrote a protest. And Nicholas 2 imposed a resolution on this with approximately the following content: “A true hero of the Fatherland! I wish there were more such fellows!” Here some may think: “Why did the colonel do this? This is idiocy. The revolutionary ran away and is no longer in the house.” Well, first of all, he is a military man. His logic was simple: he escaped through the house, which means his accomplices are there, they are covering for him, which means those who did not escape must be punished. And, apparently, the soul demanded some kind of daring. The revolutionary may have run away, but the house, here it is, will not run away.



It turned out to be a classic trap. Having lured the feudal lords with a delicacy - the productivity of factories and factories, history later, in the person of the bourgeoisie, presented them with a bill, payment for which was death. Nothing in life is given for nothing; you or your descendants will be asked for everything. Was there a chance to avoid the trap? No wasn `t. The feudal lords faced a dilemma: either they die from an internal enemy - their native bourgeoisie, or they die from an external enemy - the bourgeoisie of another state. And they will inevitably perish, because from outside the bourgeoisie will come with an army of an industrial type, against which there is no way for an army of a feudal type to fight. An industrial-type army is provided only by the bourgeoisie or proletariat, because factories and factories are needed to provide it. This is how it turns out: either you go forward on your own, or you are dragged forward. Therefore, the February Revolution in Russia was inevitable, no matter how many revolutionaries you kill. If you read about the February Revolution, you see that it was carried out for the most part not by revolutionary heroes, but by outright nonentities who were themselves shocked by what was happening. Because when history asserts its rights, personalities do not play a role. Even people like Kerensky, Gorbachev, Yeltsin or Zelensky may be at the helm.

It is about the inevitability of such revolutions that Marx and Engels spoke. It is impossible to fight them without destroying the cause of the contradiction in society. Otherwise, like the heads of the hydra, they will rise again and again until they win. Next it would be appropriate to say about Lenin. Lenin's main contribution to Marxism was the theoretical justification and practical proof of the possibility of revolutions without a revolutionary situation. This was a revolution in Marxism. Thanks to his theoretical works and the practical results of the implementation of these works, the Chinese, Korean, Cuban and other socialist revolutions were carried out. Without this contribution there would be no socialist states in the world today. Such revolutions are demanding of revolutionaries, i.e. demanding of individuals. Random people will not be able to implement them. We need heroes. And such revolutions can fail because they are premature. The materialistic base is not ready for them. The revolutionary situation has not yet matured. The logic of Marxism cannot be fooled, which means that after seizing power it is necessary to either create the material basis for the revolution in record time, or lose. This caused controversy among the Bolsheviks. Not everyone supported Lenin. The most famous confrontation: the conflict with Trotsky, which was left as a legacy to Stalin. After all, Stalin had to implement Lenin’s plan to build socialism in a single country. That’s why attempts to contrast Stalin with Lenin look ridiculous, because Stalin acted strictly according to Lenin’s works, for which he received the nickname “faithful Leninist” from his contemporaries, and in our time – “practitioner of socialism.” No one in the party was more devoted to Lenin's ideas.

***




Let me clarify here that the fact that society is not ready for revolution does not mean that such a revolution is useless or harmful. On the contrary, if successful, it brings disproportionately more benefits than if one waited for the revolutionary situation to mature before moving to a more progressive formation. Because an advancing revolution is forced to do at an accelerated pace everything that would otherwise take much longer to do. For example, as Stalin said, they are forced to build in 10 years everything that European states took 50-100 years to build. Without the socialist revolution, it would have taken 50-100 years to build, and maybe longer, or maybe not built at all.

Let us explain this using the example of the October Socialist Revolution in Russia in 1917. The main difference between the October Socialist Revolution and a series of bourgeois ones, for example, the same February Revolution, is that it happened according to plan. The same thing that has already become the meme “take the mail, telephone, telegraph.” If in bourgeois revolutions, in revolutions for which the revolutionary situation was already ripe, it was impossible to predict the beginning, then for Leninist revolutions the beginning was set by the revolutionaries.

What is the main problem of revolutions without a revolutionary situation? The fact is that after the revolutionaries seize power, the power is unstable. If you look at socialist revolutions in feudal countries, you can see that workers are not in the majority there. The majority are peasants. But the peasants have a petty-bourgeois consciousness and gravitate towards the bourgeoisie. Their values ​​are closer to them. The workers themselves are disunited. Therefore, revolutionaries in peasant countries are forced to resolve the issue with the peasants, including through outright bribery. Hence, it is necessary to create the material conditions for revolution as soon as possible. Those. actually create a revolutionary situation after the revolution. Those. fulfill the historical role of the bourgeoisie. The task itself is enormous, and therefore many, even among the Bolsheviks, considered this task impossible.

Why was it believed that the socialist revolution must first happen in developed countries? Because the number of proletariat there is much higher, which means that after the seizure of power the situation will be more stable. More proletariat means more supporters. If the majority of the population in a country is proletariat, then the majority is for socialism. Therefore, Trotsky and the company did not rely on building socialism in Russia. They believed that even after seizing power in Russia, it would be impossible to hold it for long, because in Russia at that time the majority of the population was peasant, and our peasants had a petty-bourgeois consciousness. Those. socialist power in such a country is power on a powder keg. An uprising could break out at any moment. And if it is impossible to retain power for a long time, then it is necessary to use the moment in the maximum way, i.e. use Russia as a lever for the socialist revolution in countries where there is more of the proletariat, which means its power will be stable, and these are the industrialized countries of Europe. This is how we know that Russia will be the fuel for European socialist revolutions. Thus, Marxist logic can be traced in the actions of Trotsky and other old Bolsheviks. But Lenin is a genius because he decided to take a different path. Through, let's say, an anticipatory revolution.

After winning the civil war for the future of Russia and recovering from the consequences of this war, the Bolsheviks found themselves in a vice. From the outside, the bourgeois states were preparing to attack them, and from the inside, the young bourgeoisie (kulaks) and the peasantry could strike at any moment. It was impossible to tolerate such a situation for a long time, because these Chekhovian “hanging guns” had to fire. And by shooting, demolish the young Soviet government. As I wrote above, such a situation is called a revolutionary situation. But if earlier the revolutionary situation worked against the feudal lords, now it began to work against the Bolsheviks. Of course, within the USSR, the emerging rural bourgeoisie was far from being as strong as the industrial bourgeoisie in the Russian Empire, and if there were no threat of external attack, it would not have posed a danger. But together with the external threat, it became an important factor in the stability of the Bolshevik regime.

What do the Bolsheviks decide to do? The Bolsheviks carried out collectivization with industrialization. And if collectivization solved the problem with the peasantry: collective farms served as a transitional stage in the proletarianization of the peasantry and the destruction of the countryside; then industrialization solved both of these problems at once: peasants were sent to new factories, where they became proletarians, and new factories also ensured the industrial power of the country, increasing the educational level of the population, and equipping various state institutions with advanced technology and other goods, first of all, of course, army. As a result, one of the guns (their own bourgeoisie and peasantry) was neutralized, and they managed to prepare for the second shot (the world war). Let me remind you of what Stalin famously said: “In 10 years we must go through everything that European countries took 50-100 years to go through.” We made it.

Here it is necessary to note for many the incomprehensible actions of the Bolsheviks before and during World War 2: films about tsars, the return of shoulder straps, a softening of attitudes towards religion, and the like. These actions were aimed at influencing the worldview of yesterday's peasants. One might say, they are aimed at bribing these yesterday's peasants. So that at the most difficult moment for the revolution they will not be betrayed. To some extent, this can be called a forced step back. Later it would be called Stalinism, in China Maoism, in North Korea Juche. The names are different, but the meaning is the same. Yes, China and North Korea had the same problems, even to a greater extent. Because there were fewer proletarians and more peasants. That’s why they flirted with the peasants there in the same way.

In Russia, the issue with the peasantry was resolved by making the majority of the population proletarians. Thus making the foundation of the revolution (the proletariat) stable. They also fought off the external bourgeoisie, finally with the supply of nuclear weapons. We can say that at this moment the Socialist revolution in Russia is finally victorious, i.e. ends. Remember how the Bolsheviks sang: “The revolution has a beginning! The revolution has no end!”? They did not see the end of the revolution then. There was so much to do. This moment, the moment of resolution of the revolutionary situation, can be called the end of the socialist revolution. Socialism has won, socialism is stable. Lenin turned out to be right! Then we can build communism. The confrontation with bourgeois states has entered a protracted phase. And here the Bolsheviks failed.

****
Now you can try to talk about the revolutionary situation for the transition to communism. I note that these are unfinished thoughts. What will she look like?

1. Only the proletarians and the bourgeoisie remain in the state. The feudal lords were destroyed, the peasants were digested. The proletariat becomes the majority, its consciousness increases, which means it becomes more dangerous, which means democracy will collapse. Should we not give the proletariat a chance to peacefully, through elections, move to communism?!

2. The proletariat begins to increasingly assert its rights. They are starting to talk about an unconditional basic income. At first it was quiet and rare, then more and more loud.

3. Production and other areas of activity are becoming more complex, which means they require more and more highly educated people. More and more people are engaged in complex activities: science, development, etc. This means that these workers are becoming more conscious. They begin to think that if they do everything, then why do they need the bourgeoisie? Praise and pat on the head? Give money? Well, this is humiliating. You do everything, but they lecture you down on you, and almost drive you out into the cold. And they also steal. For some reason, intellectual activity belongs not to the creators, but to the bourgeoisie. Laws protect those who pay, not those who invent. Is it surprising that laws in a bourgeois state protect the pockets of the bourgeoisie, and not the creators? So, highly educated people are beginning to understand this deception better and better. And since they are engaged in complex activities, it is easier to take control of them, since they understand how everything works.

As it was written in cyberpunk, where AI took control of humanity. It is also possible to take control of all systems in the state and the people working in these systems. What is the fundamental difference between artificial intelligence taking various systems of human activity under control or human control? If an artificial one can do it, a human one can do it even more. What should the bourgeoisie do in this case? Take control of these people? But as? And who will take control of the controllers? As soon as the bourgeoisie began to take control of people and only own it itself, it signed its own death warrant. She was no longer needed. This means the question: “When will the bourgeoisie be demolished?” is only a matter of time.

4. The problem with population reproduction, which cannot be solved within the framework of capitalism. The cost of worker reproduction due to the increasing complexity of production is increasingly higher. The capitalists don’t want to spend money on this, which means the population stops reproducing. Convulsive attempts to bring in migrants help only for the first time. They also don’t want to pay for the reproduction of migrants, which means they have to constantly import migrants. Migrants are running out. Military conflicts are organized, among other things, so that people are forced to immigrate. Thus, voluntary migration is used first, When it ends, forced migration is used. But it too will end.

Then, through the collapse of a number of states, the rest will understand that the reproduction of the population must be paid for in full. Either the current states will collapse, and on their fragments new formations will come to pay for the reproduction of the population. Most likely, there will be something in between: some states will come to pay for the reproduction of the population through destruction and reassembly, and maybe they will not be able to reassemble themselves, and some will come, looking at the losers.

The problem is not that people don’t want to give birth, as they try to convince us, but that those who want to give birth cannot do so, or are forced to limit their desires to one child. If you give these people the opportunity to give birth, for example, by reducing the cost of giving birth and raising a child, then they will overwhelm everyone with children. You will also have to ask them to stop: “Don’t cook the pot.” It’s not rational to force those who don’t want to give birth. It is rational to help those who want to give birth. It is possible, of course, to resolve the issue through an artificial uterus. There is just no fundamental difference between artificial and biological wombs in this situation. In both cases it is necessary to pay for the birth and upbringing of children. Only for some reason this is automatically clear to everyone with an artificial uterus, but not with a biological one.

Bottom line. Much of the above is already visible. Thus, the revolutionary situation of the transition to communism is coming, if it has not already arrived. The specter of communism is haunting the world.

https://smertnyy.livejournal.com/60192.html - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8887988.html

Google Translator

[blindpig]

Lenin walks around the world

The following article by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez, was originally published on 20 January 2024 in the Morning Star, to coincide with the centenary of Lenin’s death.

Carlos highlights Lenin’s contribution to the understanding of imperialism; how this understanding fed into the expansion of Marxism to the Global South; and how this in turn created a material basis for a worldwide united front of the working class and all peoples oppressed by imperialism.

The article explores some of the historic achievements of this united socialist and anti-imperialist struggle, citing Mao Zedong in 1949: “It was through the Russians that the Chinese found Marxism. The salvoes of the October Revolution brought us Marxism-Leninism. The October Revolution helped progressives in China, as throughout the world, to adopt the proletarian world outlook as the instrument for studying a nation’s destiny and considering anew their own problems.”

Also mentioned is the rejection of Lenin’s anti-imperialism by the forces of social democracy in the West, where, Lenin wrote, “high monopoly profits for a handful of very rich countries” opens up “the economic possibility of corrupting the upper strata of the proletariat, and thereby fosters, gives form to, and strengthens opportunism”.

Carlos concludes:

To be Marxist-Leninists in the 21st century means to return to a strategy of a worldwide united front between the socialist countries, the oppressed nations, and the working class in the imperialist countries. It means standing up for Palestine. It means continuing the fight for a united Ireland. It means opposing the campaign of containing and encircling China. It means opposing NATO. It means supporting the emerging multipolar trend. It means standing with Cuba, with Vietnam, with the DPRK, with Laos, with Venezuela, with Nicaragua, with Syria, with all countries defiantly standing up against imperialist hegemony. It means opposing racism, sexism and all forms of exploitation and oppression, rejecting collaborationism and social chauvinism, going “lower and deeper” and fighting resolutely for a socialist future.

The original slogan of the communist movement, ‘Workers of the world unite’ – the rallying cry and final phrase from the Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels in 1848 – was put forward at a time when the nascent communist movement was geographically limited to Europe and North America, and focused almost exclusively on the industrial working class.

Lenin’s study of global political economy, and particularly of the dynamics of monopoly capitalism and the emergence of modern imperialism, led him to an acute understanding of the expanded – global – applicability of Marxist thought.

Study of imperialism
Marx had already outlined the economic dynamics of an emerging international capitalism in Volume 1 of Capital, first published in 1867: “A new and international division of labour springs up, one suited to the requirements of the main industrial countries, and it converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying the other part, which remains a pre-eminently industrial field.”

By the end of the 19th century, the extraordinary concentration of capital and the supremacy of finance capital had brought the era of ‘free market’ capitalism to an end and ushered in an era of monopoly capitalism – in which phase capitalism remains.

Having dominated and saturated the home market, monopolies were increasingly driven abroad in pursuit of profit. Lenin wrote in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism that “the export of capital greatly affects and accelerates the development of capitalism in those countries to which it is exported.” Export of capital stimulated the incorporation of the “chiefly agricultural” economies of the Global South into the world capitalist system, introducing industrial production and creating a social class that had no option but to sell its labour power – the working class.

With the internationalisation of capital and the subjugation of the greater part of the planet by a handful of wealthy nations, capitalism became more and more militarised. Extreme force was needed to keep colonies and “spheres of influence” under control, and furthermore was a key feature of the rising competition between the imperialist countries for control of the world’s land, labour, natural resources and markets. Such competition was the basis for World War 1.

Lenin understood that, with capitalism having “grown into a world system of colonial oppression and of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the people of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries”, the capitalist class of the metropolis had become an enemy not just to the working class in the advanced capitalist countries but to the broad masses of the oppressed in all countries. “Imperialism is leading to annexation, to increased national oppression, and, consequently, also to increasing resistance.”

This analysis provided the theoretical basis for a strategic unity of the socialist and national liberation movements, on which basis Lenin and the Bolsheviks proposed the development of a worldwide united front of the working class and all peoples oppressed by imperialism. Such a united front would be capable – indeed still is capable – of taking the fight to the oppressors, of defeating imperialism, of establishing national independence and sovereignty for the peoples of the Global South, and thereby opening the possibility for a global advance to socialism.

Hence at the second congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in 1920, ‘Workers of the world unite’ was updated to ‘Workers and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite’.

In Lenin’s report to the Third Congress of the Comintern in June 1921, he enthused: “The revolutionary movement among the hundreds of millions of oppressed peoples of the East is growing with remarkable vigour.” He elaborates on this in his letter Better Fewer, But Better, the last document he wrote:

“In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. And during the past few years it is this majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.”

Summing up this theoretical contribution in his 1924 book Foundations of Leninism, Joseph Stalin wrote that “the interests of the proletarian movement in the developed countries and of the national liberation movement in the colonies call for the union of these two forms of the revolutionary movement into a common front against the common enemy, against imperialism” and, further, that “the victory of the working class in the developed countries and the liberation of the oppressed peoples from the yoke of imperialism are impossible without the formation and the consolidation of a common revolutionary front.”

Imperialism and the split in socialism
Unfortunately, the pursuit of a global revolutionary anti-imperialist front was not a consensus position in the communist movement of the time. Many of the large workers’ parties in the West rejected – explicitly or implicitly – such a strategy and worked towards a tacit alliance with their ‘own’ imperialist ruling classes.

The material basis for such an alliance was provided by the superprofits of imperialism. The “high monopoly profits for a handful of very rich countries” opens up “the economic possibility of corrupting the upper strata of the proletariat, and thereby fosters, gives form to, and strengthens opportunism” (Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism).

Further: “A few crumbs of the bourgeoisie’s huge profits may come the way of the small group of labour bureaucrats, labour aristocrats, and petty-bourgeois fellow-travellers. Social chauvinism and opportunism have the same class basis, namely, the alliance of a small section of privileged workers with ‘their’ national bourgeoisie against the working class masses.” (Lenin, Opportunism and the Collapse of the Second International)

Lenin labelled this phenomenon social chauvinism – “socialism in words, chauvinism in deeds” – and described it as “the utter betrayal of socialism” and “complete desertion to the side of the bourgeoisie.” In his 1916 article Imperialism and the Split in Socialism he wrote that “the opportunists (social chauvinists) are working hand in glove with the imperialist bourgeoisie precisely towards creating an imperialist Europe on the backs of Asia and Africa”, and that “objectively the opportunists are a section of the petty bourgeoisie and of a certain strata of the working class who have been bribed out of imperialist superprofits and converted to watchdogs of capitalism and corruptors of the labour movement.”

He pointed out that the ruling classes themselves perfectly well understand and deliberately implement this strategy. Indeed, he cites the notorious colonialist Cecil Rhodes, writing in 1895:

I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for “bread, bread, bread,” and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism. My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e. in order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced by them in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.

Lenin concluded that, to defeat the social chauvinist trend and to move forwards with the global class struggle, communists must go “lower and deeper”; must seek out, educate and organise the most oppressed sections of the working class, “who are more oppressed than before and who bear the whole brunt of imperialist wars.” These strata are far less corruptible; are far more capable of learning “to appreciate their true political interests, to fight for socialism and for the revolution through all the long and painful vicissitudes of imperialist wars and imperialist armistices.”

Success of Leninism in practice
In words and deeds, the Bolsheviks pursued the global anti-imperialist front, seeking (in Lenin’s words) to “convert the [masses of the oppressed countries] into an active factor in world politics and in the revolutionary destruction of imperialism” (Third Congress of the Communist International).

This effort bore historic fruit. The Soviet Union rendered indispensable support to the national liberation and socialist movements in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

In his 1960 essay The Path Which Led Me To Leninism, Ho Chi Minh movingly describes his years in Paris in the early 1920s, participating in the debates between the Leninists and the social chauvinists.

My only argument was: “If you do not condemn colonialism, if you do not side with the colonial people, what kind of revolution are you waging?” … At first, patriotism, not yet communism, led me to have confidence in Lenin, in the Third International. Step by step, along the struggle, by studying Marxism-Leninism parallel with participation in practical activities, I gradually came upon the fact that only socialism and communism can liberate the oppressed nations and the working people throughout the world from slavery.

Similarly, Mao Zedong stated in 1949, just two months before the proclamation of the People’s Republic, that “it was through the Russians that the Chinese found Marxism. The salvoes of the October Revolution brought us Marxism-Leninism. The October Revolution helped progressives in China, as throughout the world, to adopt the proletarian world outlook as the instrument for studying a nation’s destiny and considering anew their own problems.”

In turn, the Chinese communists have played a crucial role in developing Lenin’s ideas of anti-imperialism and applying them in practice. The overthrow of imperialist domination and the construction of socialism in China, Korea and Vietnam represented a profound shift of the revolutionary centre of gravity in the world towards the East and the South. The radical governments emerging in the Sahel and Latin America today represent a continuation and deepening of this process.

Such are the outcomes of a revolutionary strategy based on the slogan ‘Workers and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite’. The outcomes of class collaborationist social democracy in the West are, it is fair to say, less impressive.

Lenin lives
Lenin was, above all, a revolutionary Marxist, and there are two famous quotes from Marx which to a significant degree encapsulate Leninism today: “A nation that oppresses another cannot itself be free”, and “Labour in the white skin can never free itself as long as labour in the black skin is branded.”

To be Marxist-Leninists in the 21st century means to return to a strategy of a worldwide united front between the socialist countries, the oppressed nations, and the working class in the imperialist countries. It means standing up for Palestine. It means continuing the fight for a united Ireland. It means opposing the campaign of containing and encircling China. It means opposing NATO. It means supporting the emerging multipolar trend. It means standing with Cuba, with Vietnam, with the DPRK, with Laos, with Venezuela, with Nicaragua, with Syria, with all countries defiantly standing up against imperialist hegemony. It means opposing racism, sexism and all forms of exploitation and oppression, rejecting collaborationism and social chauvinism, going “lower and deeper” and fighting resolutely for a socialist future.

https://socialistchina.org/2024/01/22/l ... the-world/

[blindpig]

Is labor a commodity?
No. 1/89.I.2024

1. Introduction
Before us is the brochure by A. G. Tarasov “ Two interpretations of Marx’s formula of value. Labor power is not a commodity " [1].

The task that the author set himself mainly consisted of refuting “Marx’s statement about the exchange of goods according to the law of value between the capitalist and the hired worker.”

The work turned out to be medium-weight, easy to understand, pretending to be a scientifically detailed narrative, demonstrating a certain degree of familiarity of the author with dialectics and “Capital”.

Brochure structure
The author begins by studying the formula for the value of a capitalistically produced commodity w = c + v + m to determine whether the “old” or “new” value is contained in each of the terms. The reader is offered two interpretations of this formula as the only possible ones - v as “old” value or v as “new” value - and an analysis of their differences, followed by criticism of K. Marx for his contradictory synthesis of these interpretations. Based on the results of criticism, A. Tarasov comes to the conclusion that there is no exchange of goods between the capitalist and the hired worker; that they relate to each other through direct, naked exploitation. As the narrative progresses, the author, in separate sections, clarifies the concepts of the necessary product and the necessary cost, as well as “the place of the concept of justice in Marxist political economy.”

Following this, A. Tarasov demonstrates ten “extensions of the idea of ​​labor as a commodity and its inconsistencies with the basic provisions of Marxist economic theory and general scientific truths.” As the narrative progresses, the author clarifies the necessary, from his point of view, relationship between dialectics and formal logic in thinking and points out the logical errors he discovered in the work of K. Marx.

Next, the author examines the mistakes of K. Marx and finds their genesis in dishonesty of research and in a bias towards philosophizing to the detriment of general scientific methodology.

Finally, the author briefly illustrates the conclusions: on several pages he describes a world where exploitation rules the roost without any purchase or sale of labor. Little text is devoted to the similarities and differences between different exploitative formations.

It should be noted that during the course of the narrative, a significant loss of respect for A. Tarasov for the scientific talents of K. Marx, who was “entangled in two pines,” is noticeable.

Abstracts
For this article, we will highlight the theses of A. Tarasov, which became the basis for denying the model of production of surplus value proposed by K. Marx.

First. Labor power is not a product of labor and, therefore, cannot be a commodity.

Second. Even if labor power were a product of labor, it nevertheless does not have the form necessary for a commodity (for example, it is not a separate thing) and, therefore, is not a commodity.

Third. Even if labor power were a commodity, this would not be enough, since there is no movement of “new” and “old” values, characteristic of commodity exchange relations. Consequently, there is no purchase and sale of labor power.

Fourth. Even if the movement of values ​​corresponding to the process of commodity exchange occurred, this would not be enough, since there is no equivalence in the purchase and sale of labor power, which manifests itself in the form of surplus value. Consequently, there is no purchase and sale of labor power.

The principle of parsing a brochure
The author of this article does not set out to analyze absolutely everything that A. Tarasov expressed in his brochure. The volume of such work is a study of each paragraph, citing quotes and retelling the logic of the narrative from Capital, which for a hundred pages of brochure text would require ten times more text of criticism, and this is an excessive investment of time for this work.

Therefore, despite the self-confident tone of the brochure in some places, we will not analyze every moment of K. Marx’s criticism. In the end, it was precisely the four supporting theses shown above that led A. Tarasov to the conclusion that the only possible way of interaction between a worker and the owner of money is a special transaction where the worker’s labor is paid from the realized value of the product, and it is precisely the underpayment of the worker for this transaction is a method of exploitation.

In the second section, we will first of all refute the four theses, thereby rediscovering for A. Tarasov the purchase and sale of labor power as a potential basis for capitalist relationships, no less probable than the “special deal” he proposed. Then, in the third section, we will show the inconsistency of A. Tarasov’s conclusion - his hypothesis about direct exploitation, about the “shameless appropriation of the product of someone else’s labor.”

This should be enough for the author of the brochure to re-read the “Critique of Political Economy” again and figure out for himself: what kind of interaction between the worker and the owner of money is fundamental for the capitalist formation and how the production of surplus value generally works.

To help A. Tarasov and his supporters understand their mistakes, in conclusion we will show that they lie in the area of ​​dialectical thinking, the application of which they are not conscientious enough.

2. Criticism of criticism by A. Tarasov. Labor power is not a commodity. There is no exchange of goods according to the law of value between the capitalist and the hired worker.
2.1. Labor in creating the workforce
Statement of a question
In this thesis, A. Tarasov appeals to the fact that a person’s ability to work is his natural ability and all that is needed for this is exclusively individual consumption, and not production, which does not occur. Well, since labor is not invested in the “production” of a person, then, by the definition of a commodity as a product of labor, labor power cannot be a commodity.

Theory
The work of developing a person as an adequate member of society capable of joint production activities includes not just individual consumption, but also the creation of products for his consumption, as well as the organization of all the necessary infrastructure for the socialization of a person, his training and inclusion in labor activity. Thus, the formation of a person in general and his labor force in particular is to a lesser extent the work of himself and, to a large extent, the work of many generations of the entire society.

There is no need to calculate the full costs of “producing” a person in this work. In the process of commodity production, when using the concept of variable capital, we mean only those costs that are necessary in the period of time used for commodity production. These are the costs that are required to restore the ability to work. These are the ones we will refer to in further research.

2.2. Commodity form of labor
Statement of a question
A. Tarasov is not the first author [2] who takes the initial definition of a commodity from the first chapter of the first section of the first volume of Capital, given for an “external object, thing,” and correlates it with the fact that labor power is not a separate thing, but only a human ability, inseparable from himself. And since labor power cannot be alienated from the owner, while any thing-commodity must have such an opportunity, then the statement “labor power is a commodity” contains a formal logical contradiction.

Theory
The essence of a product is not that it is an external thing. At a certain level of development of society, in connection with the emergence of private property relations, the movement of factors of production takes on the form of exchange, and so a commodity arises - a form of social relations regarding exchange.

What makes exchange possible other than the dominance of private property? Firstly, the object must be in demand for exchange, that is, it must be absolutely useful. Second, objects must be comparable on some basis. If we consider exchange as a whole, billions and billions of acts of exchange in different eras, then such a basis can only be the labor invested in their creation, which manifests itself through the average, socially necessary labor time.

Separately, it should be noted that the monetary form of goods that appeared over time made it possible, on this value basis, to measure objects that were not created by labor and were not originally goods, but nevertheless became goods.

Third, the object, whether it is a product of labor or not, must be intended for exchange and not for personal consumption.

Fourthly, exchange presupposes permanent (for example, for money during purchase) or temporary (for example, for the provision of services) mutual alienation of the exchanged objects.

How is the development of the concept of the commodity explored in Capital?

K. Marx actually writes that “a commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing that, thanks to its properties, satisfies some human needs.” Here the expression “first of all” signals a further development of the concept, which is easy to trace in the subsequent narrative. First, the commodity is shown as a useful thing, then as value and exchange value. Next, the forms of value in development are examined: the monetary form is identified, opposed as exchange value to other goods as use values. Already in the third chapter, when considering money as a measure of value and when studying price, K. Marx discovers that thanks to price, not only material things can be carriers of the commodity form, as was seen at the beginning of the study, but also intangible ones (for example, conscience, honor ) and that the price of things without value can hide the value relationship.

Consequently, when considering commodity exchange relations, attention should be paid to the commodity form, and not to the materiality of the product. For the labor force, the following statements will be true.

Firstly, since there are no restrictions on the commodity form in the form of obligatory materiality, then the property can acquire a commodity form, which means that labor power can be a commodity.

Secondly, nothing can prevent the owner of something from selling the property of that something. If a buyer needs to cook rice, then the owner of a multicooker with many functions (operating properties), including the rice-cooking function, will have several ways to sell this property.

Thirdly, one’s own living property (labor power, honor, conscience) can be sold by the owner because he has the will, unlike a slow cooker or other dead thing. No one can stop him from selling all of himself.

Fourthly, it cannot be denied that the living property is in the human body and cannot be separated from it. We can say that with the purchase of one working day of labor power, the entire worker becomes a commodity body belonging to the capitalist, but only for the duration of one working day.

2.3. Movement of values ​​during commodity exchange
Statement of a question
Since labor power is not a commodity, when calculating the value of a product, variable capital is not the old value, but the new one and, therefore, there is no purchase and sale between the capitalist and the worker. How did A. Tarasov manage to reach such formulations and conclusions?

A. Tarasov’s main tool is the distinction between the time of origin of value in relation to the time of the production process: the opposition of old value, as embodied past labor, which can be bought before the start of production, and new value, as “created by the new labor of a hired worker, the labor of transforming initial goods into a new product of greater value." According to A. Tarasov, the cost of a product must be made up of parts that are strictly related to either the old value or the new one. He finds such an attribution in K. Marx only partially: constant capital 'c' is the old value, surplus value 'm' is the new value, but variable capital 'v' does not fit into this scheme. A. Tarasov resolves the struggle between the logic of K. Marx and the logic of his scheme in favor of the latter and begins attempts to rediscover the truth in matters of the essence of exploitation. At this stage we will take his word for it, but we will check the resulting conclusions.

First of all, the author of the brochure examines variable capital 'v' strictly as old value, that is, he relates it, together with constant capital 'c', to the costs of capital for the purchase of products of past labor - means of production and labor power. A. Tarasov needs such an interpretation for two purposes. First, to refute this hypothesis: the author shows that even if the process of buying and selling can theoretically occur, in reality it does not occur, since labor power is not a commodity . He proves the latter (and we refute it) separately. Secondly, to gather arguments to fight against the logic of K. Marx. Thus, A. Tarasov comes to the idea that since the cost of costs, according to the formula for the value of the product w = c + v + m, must be transferred to the cost of the product, then under these conditions a hired worker during the working day produces only surplus value 'm' and that not dividing working time into necessary and surplus, there is no necessary and surplus product.

Having “broken” the logic of K. Marx and one of two possible interpretations of his scheme, A. Tarasov moves on to the only remaining option. Having defined variable capital 'v' as a new value, he attributes only constant capital 'c' to the cost of capital, which leads him to the idea that “there is a subsequent exchange of the necessary product for wages, and not a previous exchange of labor power for wages (purchase of labor power )… The worker’s wages are thus a share in the value of the produced goods: it is the worker who, through his labor, makes a contribution ‘v’ to the value of the goods and then receives this share in the form of wages.”

Thus, A. Tarasov comes to his final truth: the process of commodity exchange itself between the capitalist and the hired worker does not occur , regardless of whether labor is a commodity or not. In a more detailed form, this statement may sound like this: if something participating in the production process does not add its value to the final product of labor, then it is paid from the money from the sale of this product, and not through advanced capital. Or, as applied to labor power, this: since not the value of labor power (“old” value) is added to the product, but the value arising as a result of labor (“new” value), then labor power is not purchased by the capitalist, but is paid with a share in the cost of the goods produced.

In reality, the production process is structured somewhat differently and both options have the right to exist: standard hiring, which involves paying labor from variable capital, and an equivalent transaction based on the distribution of the realized value of the created product between the owner of the money and the worker in proportion to the contribution of each (the owner of the money invested constant capital, and the worker his labor). This means that the process of commodity exchange between a capitalist and a hired worker is fundamentally possible, which knocks one of his supports out from under A. Tarasov’s feet.

Here's how it works.

Theory
The advanced variable capital does not actually add its value to the product. The produced product actually includes only new value created by labor. Nevertheless, the process of purchasing labor power can occur according to the logic of the production process.

Of course, in the general case, the capitalist has no obstacles at all to purchasing anything that he considers important in the process of production. If he decides that in the steel process he needs a piper to motivate the steelworkers, then capital will be advanced into the musician. There is nothing stopping us from investing in the steelmakers themselves. However, you still need a solid reason for such an investment: a connection between the advance and the product produced. And not just a connection: A. Tarasov himself can easily find it for us and fit it into the framework of his scheme, but the same strong connection as in the case of constant capital 'c', which he has no doubt about. Understanding the structure of the production process and the movement of values ​​will help us find such a reason.

First of all, we will unfold a visual scene showing the structure of the production process.

antitarasov_v2_IMAGE1

The condition for the existence of human society is the interaction of man with nature - the process of purposeful labor activity. The process of producing products useful for life is a combination of natural substances, human labor and products produced previously. The process of reproduction of society is the production of members of this society through a) their use of natural substances and useful products produced by other members of society and b) useful interaction with other members of society: education, joint labor activity, etc. Both processes are sides of one developing life process humanity.

Let's pause this movement and take a picture.

antitarasov_v2_IMAGE2

Let's use the example of K. Marx with the production of yarn (product 3) by a weaver (worker 2) from cotton (product 2), which in turn was created by a peasant (worker 1) from a substance of nature (cotton). Our task is to consider, using this example, the process of transformation of living labor. Why exactly will he provide the key to understanding issues related to the relationship between the capitalist and the worker? The fact is that the author of the brochure raises the question of exploitation under capitalist relations, and they are based on the concept of value, which is associated primarily with living labor.

What is cost?

It is easy to understand a man-made thing with useful, physically tangible qualities. Such things are the result of society's ongoing interaction with nature. It is more difficult to understand the intricacies of human relationships that occur through the use of things. In different historical conditions, such interactions take different forms, “imprinted” on things in the form of intangible, virtual qualities. Examples of such qualities can be the association of a thing with loved ones (pendant), geography of production, symbolism (flag) and, of course, the understanding that human labor has been invested in a thing (and this can be assessed in different ways: for example, you can distinguish between whose labor is invested - the labor of strangers or the labor of one’s own family).

In capitalist relations, and precisely in them, a thing, in addition to its physically tangible usefulness, requires such a quality as the ability to exchange for any other thing. What all produced things have in common is that they are products of labor. Thus, value is a form of relations regarding the exchange of things that acquire the quality of exchangeability through the distinction of the socially necessary labor expended on their (things) creation. The presence of this quality makes it possible to determine the quantitative manifestation of value - the proportion of exchange; the proportion in which one thing is expressed in another. Further we will use the word “value” as a quantitative component of the exchange value of a product.

Now let's return to the scheme of production of product 3 (yarn) for subsequent exchange and examine the process of transformation of living labor to determine costs at all stages of the process.

To create a new product, a combination of three elements of production is required : a worker, natural substances and products of past labor. By products of labor we mean objects of labor (raw material, i.e. processed) and means of labor (all material conditions, including tools, machines, units, land, work buildings). Substances of nature are important in matters of the consumer side of the matter, but they have no bearing on relations of value, since living labor is not spent on them.

The remaining elements are qualitatively different for the production process: they perform different production functions and have different qualities used in the production process.

From the point of view of production functions, the products of past labor are objects of labor that are reincarnated in a new product, and a person is the subject of labor who performs this reincarnation.

Such functions are performed due to special qualities that are important for the production process. The product of past labor can retain an unchanged form until its physical body is used to create a new product, to join it. Thus, the cotton is almost completely transferred to the yarn, and the spindle, as an inanimate intermediary between man, cotton and yarn, although it does not merge with the yarn, is physically worn out. A person is a subject who combines everything necessary in the process of rational creative activity. The frozen products of past labor and the substances of nature cannot unite themselves; here the most important quality is required - the ability to work, the ability to consciously transform the substances of nature. Man does not physically attach himself to the new product and is not an intermediary between cotton and yarn; he realizes his ability to work and carries out living labor.

In the production of a new product, all elements of production play a role, which means that each element will influence its cost in one way or another. The way in which value relations manifest themselves, that is, the way in which an element of production influences the cost of a new product, is determined by the quality of this element: the products of past labor influence in one way, and labor in another.

Consider the product of past labor. Let’s say a peasant worked 12 hours in cotton production and produced cotton worth 4 rubles. The frozen physical form of a product guarantees the invariability of the amount of living labor invested in its creation. Thanks to precisely this form, in our example, the living labor of a peasant, expended in the amount of 12 hours and creating value for 4 rubles, can be distinguished in the produced cotton in the same amount of 4 rubles, which means that the value of cotton is invariably equal to 4 rubles. When the cotton is used by the weaver in the production of yarn, its value will become in the same quantity, equal to 4 rubles, part of the cost of the yarn. However, in the formula for calculating the cost of yarn, which is made up of the cost of cotton and the value produced by the weaver, simply adding the value of the cotton component implies the entire previous path that the living labor of the peasant has gone through: 1) creation of value - the “expiration” of living labor from the peasant in value equivalent 4 rub., 2) “materialization” of it in cotton - “dissolution” of living labor and “materialization” in the form of the value of cotton, 3) “transfer” of the value of cotton to yarn - “destruction” of cotton at the moment of spinning and “expiration” of materialized material from it peasant labor and the “attachment” of the value of cotton to yarn. Thus, having gone all this way, the “new” cost of cotton, transferred to the cost of yarn, is quantitatively equal to the “old” cost of cotton production, corresponding to the amount of labor invested by the peasant in its creation. It is this value relationship, that is, the simple quantitative equality between the “new” and “old” costs of cotton, that is determined by the quality of this particular element of production.

This ratio will be determined differently for the worker. Unlike any inanimate produced product of labor, which always belongs to the owner of production, human labor power, that is, the ability to work, belongs not to the society that produced it, but to the person himself. Man is free to use his labor power in order to work and produce new value, and the relationship between this “new” living labor of man and the “old” living labor of society to “produce” this man is expressed as follows. These two living labors, firstly, are strictly interrelated : labor is a function of labor power (just as the operations of a machine are functions of the machine itself) and without the “old” there will be no “new”. The production element “labor power” is both a source of new value (as abstract labor) and a subject that adds the cost of cotton to the cost of yarn (as weaving labor, labor of a specific quality). Secondly, they are qualitatively different: the “old” one produces a person, and the “new” one produces a product, which means we cannot talk about transferring the value of the “old” labor to the product. Thirdly, following the qualitative differences, their quantitative values, cost equivalents, will differ. The value of labor power is not carried over to the value of the new product, and we cannot expect the simple quantitative equality which we saw in the case of the product of past labor.

We can show the above relationship using the example of the process of determining the cost of yarn, which can now be considered at several levels. First, the value of the yarn is the sum of the added value of the cotton and the new value created by the weaver. Secondly, if we discard the intermediary in the form of cotton from the exchange process (let’s imagine a full-cycle factory where yarn and all its elements are created - cotton, spindle, etc.), the cost of yarn is the sum of the value equivalent of the weaver’s living labor spent on creating yarn and the value equivalent of the peasant's living labor expended on the production of cotton. And finally, thirdly, yarn is a combination of various forms of living labor of society that appeared in the production process, and the labor forces of the weaver and peasant in the process of carrying out their functions (labor) are the source of new value in yarn.

Now we just have to look at the connection of the considered elements. The owner of production and its results is forced to take into account that a condition for the process of manufacturing a new product is the presence of all necessary production elements. The value that the capitalist will receive in yarn will consist of the “new” value added by the abstract labor of the weaver, and the “old” value added by quality weaving labor. The cotton will “destroy”, and the cost of its creation is 4 rubles. (which is equal to the value equivalent of the “materialized” labor of the peasant) the weaver will “add” an equal amount of yarn worth 4 rubles. The value equivalent of a weaver's living labor in money is not equal to the value he produced. Suppose the capitalist paid a salary of 5 rubles, while the weaver produced a value equal to 9 rubles during his 12-hour working day. The source of these 9 rubles. is a working weaver, whose labor power was bought by the capitalist at the price of “production” of this labor power equal to 5 rubles. The capitalist's joy is caused by the fact that these produced values ​​(9 rubles) are higher than the cost of reproduction of the weaver's labor force (5 rubles).

Ultimately, there is no obstacle that would prevent the capitalist from acquiring cotton or weaver's labor: both elements are acquired at the cost of the "previous stage of production." It is thanks to this interconnected arrangement of the production process that the purchase of any of the elements of production becomes possible: if we can buy cotton, then we can also buy the weaver's labor power.

Errors in A. Tarasov’s interpretations
In the first interpretation, A. Tarasov examines variable capital 'v' strictly as old value, that is, he relates it, together with constant capital 'c', to the costs of capital for the purchase of products of past labor - means of production and labor. In our example, to produce yarn, the capitalist buys cotton at a cost of 4 rubles. and weaver's labor at a cost of 5 rubles. and adds exactly the same amount to the cost of the yarn. Thus, the cost of yarn consists of the cost of cotton 4 rubles, which as “old” is equal to the value produced by the labor of the peasant, and the weaver’s labor force equivalent to the cost of 5 rubles, which should simply be equal to (and not be a special function of) the cost , spent by society on the reproduction of the weaver's labor power. In this interpretation, A. Tarasov’s scheme does not miss the quantitative definition of the “old” value in the cost of cotton (with a qualitative misunderstanding of the production process), but completely collapses in the issue of purchasing labor. The error of this interpretation lies not only in the formula “labor power is not a commodity” and not only in the formula “the worker spends all his time creating surplus value m.” The main mistake is that labor power is taken with the quality of another element of production - the dead product of past labor. A. Tarasov bought cotton and weaver at the cost of their production and folded these values ​​into yarn; thereby he used the weaver as an object and added to the cotton not the living labor of the weaver, but his body. In addition to this, A. Tarasov lost another worker - a subject for this unnatural production process.

In the second interpretation, A. Tarasov defines variable capital 'v' as a new value, and this means for him that there is not a purchase of labor power, but “the subsequent exchange of the necessary product for wages.” In this logic, since the capitalist cannot buy the weaver’s labor power at the cost of the weaver’s “production,” then the purchasing process cannot occur at all. And the point, it turns out, is not the very fact that all the value produced by the weaver is new, but that the old value of the weaver’s “production” is not transferred to the yarn in the same way as it happens with cotton. That is, for A. Tarasov, it is important in the process of purchase and sale to see the connection between the old value purchased by the capitalist and its embodiment in the new product. He finds such a connection between the cost of cotton and yarn, but not between the cost of labor and yarn. However, the fact that the value of labor power is not transferred to the value of the product of labor only means that when buying the labor time of a living person, the capitalist knows that his labor will produce more value than was expended. And “labor power” does not at all prove the absence of purchase and sale of goods. The problem is a misunderstanding of equivalence in exchange.

2.4. Equivalence in commodity exchange
Statement of a question
By exchange, A. Tarasov understands the exchange of equal for equal, and the appearance of surplus value for him is evidence of the absence of exchange.

Theory
The general model of the mechanism and process of commodity exchange really implies that two independent commodity producers exchange labor products of equal value. However, the description of the model is only the beginning of the study; the next step requires studying the work of the model in real conditions, in motion, at the level of the entire society; requires an explanation for the transformation of apparent initial equality into inequality.

At this stage, it will help us to understand how quantitative equivalence manifests itself and how ownership changes.

Quantitative equivalence in market conditions ceases to be a condition for the exchange of goods, because there cannot be mechanical equality where elements prevail. Due to its spontaneity and the subjective nature of market equivalence, the law of value manifests itself only in the end, breaking through systematic violations of equivalence in the real market, collapsing like a “ceiling on the heads” of the majority with outbreaks of “showdowns,” hyperinflation, economic crises and world wars. The fact that unequal exchange is the law of any market is shown in an accessible, detailed form by V. A. Podguzov [3][4].

For the commodity “labor power”, not only quantitative equivalence plays a role, but also the evolution of property rights.

Section 7 of the first volume of Capital begins with a study of property rights, with a model implying the equivalence of exchange. When considering an individual transaction between the owner of money and the owner of labor, K. Marx comes to the conclusion that the appropriation of surplus value itself is not deception. At the level of capitalist-worker relations, quantitative equivalence remains: the worker has received the value of his commodity, and surplus value is derived from the consumption of this commodity. The following analogy is appropriate here: if they sell a lamp with a genie and I paid the price for it, then my use of the magic of the genie is my business and does not break the deal.

At the next stage of the study, K. Marx reveals the secret of the transformation from equal relations between seller and buyer into self-perpetuating relations between master capitalist and subordinate worker, even while maintaining the appearance of an equivalent exchange in each specific transaction (and even with the theoretical compensation by the capitalist of the full price of labor power, which, of course, , does not occur under market conditions).

To reveal this metamorphosis, K. Marx considers capitalist production in a continuous stream of its renewal and, instead of an individual capitalist and an individual worker, takes their totality: the class of capitalists and the class of workers. In the general flow of production, the entire initially advanced capital generally becomes an infinitesimal value in comparison with the directly accumulated capital, that is, with the capital increased due to the surplus value poured into it.

Theoretically, at first, property rights were based on labor: a person alienates the product he produces. The capitalist advanced into the labor force the means that were obtained by his labor, and the worker alienated the labor power “produced” by labor. At the first stage, the purchase and sale transaction of labor power is voluntary, and its conditions are such that the product produced by the worker and all newly created value, including surplus, belongs to the buyer.

The change occurs not when the capitalist gets his gin in the form of surplus value, but when he advances surplus value into the reproduction of capital. At this point the deal changed: the capitalist invests funds that were not obtained by his labor; it uses the surplus value created by the labor of the worker. The quantitative equivalence of each individual transaction may even be preserved, but the entire model of exchange and the role of the participants in it has undergone a qualitative change, because the capitalist is no longer paying with his own money; he buys labor power with the money accumulated from the use of unpaid labor.

Now it works like this: part of the capital exchanged for labor power, firstly, is itself only part of the product of someone else's labor, appropriated without an equivalent; secondly, it must not only be compensated for by the workers who created it, but compensated with a new surplus. The content is that the capitalist again and again exchanges part of the already embodied labor of others, constantly appropriated by him without an equivalent, for a larger amount of living labor of others. From this moment on, property is separated from labor.

At the same time, it is important to understand that regardless of how the quantitative equivalence manifested itself and how the right of ownership changed in real conditions, the exchange did not cease to be an exchange; it only changed its quality in relation to the initially considered model.

3. Criticism of A. Tarasov’s conclusions. Non-economic exploitation
What is expected from a conscientious author after he has made the first denial and, as it seems to him, has convincingly defeated K. Marx? Of course, I would like to see the second negation - a true (in the author’s opinion), comprehensively examined picture of social capitalist relations.

Let us recall that only in the first volume of Capital did K. Marx show the reasons why capitalism became widespread and began to form the qualitative structure of society, its “physiognomy”. To do this, he based his reasoning on the categorical basis - those atoms and molecules from which further calculations are built: use value, exchange value, goods, the dual nature of labor, money, etc. Further, K. Marx developed a fascinating picture of the transformation of commodity exchange between hired by the worker and the capitalist into exploitation, into the alienation of the product, into the command of unpaid labor and into the concealment of exploitation through a transformed form of the value of labor power - wages. The next step in the narrative was the study of the mechanism of exploitation - capital, that is, money invested in the means and processes of exploitation. Here the reader first sees the genesis of capital, its initial accumulation, which arose thanks to the expropriation of direct producers, that is, the destruction of private property based on one’s own labor. The elements of the exploitation mechanism are shown further in the form of methods of struggle between capital and labor during the use of labor power - first through lengthening the working day, then through reducing the part of capital that is spent on labor power, through the modernization of the means of production and increasing the productive power of labor within strict limits , determined by the rate of profit (the labor that it costs to produce machines must be less than the labor that is replaced by their use). In the end, K. Marx shows the operation of the mechanism of exploitation in motion - the accumulation of capital, that is, the transformation of surplus value into capital, and the reproduction of the conditions of capitalist production, which is possible only in an endless cycle of accumulation.

What does A. Tarasov offer in return? To begin with, he defines the hiring of a proletarian by a capitalist as an agreement between partners in the production process, within the framework of which the hirer undertakes to give part of the value he creates to the capitalist. He then defines exploitation as a relationship between robber and robbed, in which the capitalist forces the worker to give up as much of the value he has created as possible. The essence of exploitation under any method of production for A. Tarasov is that the exploited worker creates the necessary product for his own feeding and a surplus for his exploiter. However, unlike pre-capitalist formations, under capitalism the boundary between necessary and surplus product is masked, and non-economic coercion is replaced by economic coercion, that is, the conditions of private ownership of the means of production, protected by bourgeois law, and the social nature of production with an extremely high level of division of labor.

These considerations are given only on the final few pages of the brochure. A. Tarasov does not provide any building blocks or descriptions of the mechanisms, reasons and conditions for this state of affairs, which actually negates the possibility of criticizing his picture of the world. He does this deliberately: “The capitalist, just like the slave owner did, shamelessly appropriates the product of someone else’s labor; and in order to understand and describe this, there is no need to invent the sale of labor power, just as this idea was not needed to understand and describe the relations between the slave owner and the slave, the feudal lord and the serf.”

Expanded reproduction of capitalist relations, displacing competition, centralization of capital - all these aspects of the development of the economic basis were scrupulously explained by K. Marx. This is what allows him to reveal the causes of phenomena and propose effective methods of struggle.

And what does A. Tarasov give in return? We can only speculate. In a scheme with direct exploitation and exchange only on conditions of equivalence, it is easy to assume that the concept of value is not needed at all for reasoning, and also that direct exploitation can be limited to some reasonable level of “appropriation of the product of someone else’s labor,” which means that the development of capitalism can stay. However, the ongoing centralization of capital cannot be ignored, which means it will have to be explained at least somehow: for example, by the increase in the greed of capitalists. And not only capitalists: since A. Tarasov has no fundamental difference between the motives of exploitation under different formations, then there is nothing else left but to refer to some “natural” property of a person in the field of domination over his fellow man. This is exactly how the lack of research into phenomena in motion, anti-historicism, reduces A. Tarasov’s reasoning to banal anti-scientific biologization, and relegates his hypothesis about the structure of capitalist relations to the category of speculation.

In addition, we will say that, having left the path of knowing the truth, a researcher cannot, sooner or later, not descend into idealism and anti-scientific conclusions. If the negative pole for A. Tarasov is exploitation, explained through biologization or other similar metaphysics, then at the positive pole, the pole of the fight against exploitation, he turns to the categorical imperative of I. Kant. In a separate note on justice, A. Tarasov reveals his idea of ​​“general scientific methodology”: he refuses to study society in development, refuses to recognize the class nature of morality. Instead, he postulates an absolute, universal rule, the “rule of reciprocity,” governing human relationships. It should follow from this that the law of value must have a normative basis, and goods must be exchanged at value, on the basis of equality. Apparently, the introduction of this rule is the main goal of A. Tarasov’s struggle.

4. Conclusion
If A. Tarasov is not subject to excessive vanity, he should approach this section with the awareness that his conclusions about direct exploitation turned out to be false and that he now needs to re-read the “Critique of Political Economy” and consider the purchase and sale of labor power as the main type of interaction between proletarian and capitalist.

In addition, A. Tarasov should pay close attention to the dialectical method of thinking [5]. There is no doubt that the hygiene of basic storytelling logic must be maintained. Only a person who has not mastered the concept of value in its entirety, in motion and with all interrelations, and therefore resorts to formal logic, can call the statements “between the capitalist and the hired worker the relation of commodity exchange according to the law of value” and “between the capitalist and the hired worker the relation of exploitation” contradictory. to demonstrate logical problems that do not actually exist. Errors in dialectical logic when trying to propose a solution to social problems will invariably lead the author into idealism and an opportunistic swamp. It’s good that A. Tarasov decided that exploitation still occurs, that it is a negative phenomenon and that it is necessary to fight it. Another author [2], having made the same mistake in defining a product as A. Tarasov, came to the conclusion that private property is a condition for the existence of a communist society.

What mistakes were made in specific theses?

First. “Labor power is not a product of labor and therefore cannot be a commodity.”

The relationship between the individual and the general, between man and society has been lost.

Second. “Even if labor power were a product of labor, it nevertheless does not have the form necessary for a commodity (it is not a separate thing) and, therefore, is not a commodity.”

Firstly, the essence of the concept of “product” has been lost; it has not been studied in development. Secondly, the forms of matter - living and dead, their characteristics and the function of each in the process of value production are not distinguished.

Third. “Even if labor power were a commodity, this would not be enough, since there is no movement of values ​​(“new” and “old”) characteristic of exchange. Consequently, there is no purchase and sale of labor power.”

The movement of living labor in the process of producing a product is lost, which means that the relationships in this process are broken, which is why the author retreats into formal schematism, which prevents him from discovering the truth.

Fourth. “Even if the movement of values ​​corresponding to the exchange process occurred, it would not be enough, since there is no equivalence in the purchase and sale of labor power, which manifests itself in the presence of surplus value. Consequently, there is no purchase and sale of labor power.”

Here we see extreme formalism and superficiality in the reasoning: the author stopped at the initial model, at the level of exchange between individual producers, because of which he did not understand the essence of the law of value in a capitalist society and did not see the movement - the transformation of apparent initial equality in exchange into inequality.

Ya. Dubov
01/30/2024

1.Tarasov A. G. Two interpretations of Marx’s formula of value. Labor power is not a commodity . // 1.1) Tarasov A. VK page .
2.Yuferov S. Labor force analysis .
3.Breakthrough. Podguzov V. A. How to become a convinced supporter of “Breakthrough”?
4.Breakthrough. Podguzov V. A. Personality and the market .
5.Breakthrough. Ivanov A. On formal logic and metaphysics .

https://prorivists.org/89_antitarasov/

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