Learning Marxism: Where to Begin

This is the second enlarged edition of the pamphlet first published in October 2003. It seeks to address the question faced by all who wish to study Marxism: where to begin. It is meant to be only a general introduction, above all an aid to the reader’s self-study. A brief bibliographical note has been appended for this purpose. A few important terms not explained in the main text have been covered in the Supplementary Notes.
Suggestions and critical comments are invited from all readers.

Marxism is the dynamic science constantly uncovering the general laws of motion of human society, the evergreen philosophy of praxis and revolutionary transformation. In a word, it is our guide to action.
But where does Marxism come from? From the brains of a genius and his great friend? Lenin discussed this question in the article that follows. Let us savour this little masterpiece and then study the briefest available exposition of Marxism given by Marx himself.

Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism
Study Notes on Lenin’s “Three Sources ...”
Marx on Marxist Worldview
The Struggle against Reformism and Anarchism 

-V.I. LENIN

Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect.” And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage slavery, where Marxism has declared relentless war on wage slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as silly and naive as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages should be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.

But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling “sectarianism” in Marxism. It is by no means a hidebound, closed doctrine, which seeks to create its own world away from the high road of development of world civilisation On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in the fact that he furnished answers to questions which had already engrossed the foremost minds of humanity. His teachings arose as a direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.

The Marxian doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is complete and harmonious, and provides humankind with an integral world conception which is irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor of the best that was created by humanity in the nineteenth century in the shape of German Philosophy, English Political Economy and French Socialism.

On these three sources of Marxism, which are at the same time its component parts, we shall dwell briefly.

I

The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century in France, which was the scene of a decisive battle against every kind of medieval rubbish, against feudalism in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to all kinds of superstition, obscurantism and hypocrisy. The enemies of democracy therefore tried in every way to ‘refute’, undermine and defame materialism, and advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to an advocacy or support of religious dogma.

Marx and Engels always defended philosophical materialism in the most determined manner and repeatedly explained the profound error of every deviation from this basis. Their views are most clearly and fully expounded in the works of Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Duhring, which like the Communist Manifesto, are handbooks for every class-conscious worker. But Marx did not stop at the materialism of the eighteenth century; he advanced philosophy. He enriched it with the acquisitions of German classical philosophy, especially of the Hegelian system, which in its turn led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The chief of these acquisitions is dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of developments in its fullest and deepest forms, free of one-sidedness — the doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge, which provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science — radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements — have confirmed remarkably Marx’s dialectical materialism, despite the teachings of the bourgeois philosophers with their “new” reversions to old and rotten idealism.

Deepening and developing philosophical materialism, Marx extended its knowledge of nature to the knowledge of human society. Marx’s historical materialism was one of the greatest achievements of scientific thought. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in the views on history and politics gave way to a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops — how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism.

Just as man’s knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter), which exists independently of him, so man’s social knowledge (i.e., the various views and doctrines — philosophical, religious, political, and so forth) reflects the economic system of society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of the modern European states serve to fortify the rule of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.
Marx’s philosophy is matured philosophical materialism, which has provided humanity, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge.

II

Having recognised that the economic system is the foundation on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted most attention to the study of this economic system. Marx’s principal work, Capital, is devoted to a study of the economic system of modern, i.e., capitalist, society.

Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in England, the most developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx continued their work. He rigorously proved and consistently developed this theory. He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production.

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation of things (the exchange of one commodity for another), Marx revealed a relation of men. The exchange of commodities expresses the tie by which individual producers are bound through the market. Money signifies that this tie is becoming closer and closer, inseparably binding, the entire economic life of the individual producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further development of this tie: man’s labour power becomes a commodity. The wage-worker sells labour power to the owner of the land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker uses one part of the labour day to cover the expense of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day the worker toils without remuneration, creating surplus value for the capitalist, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.

The doctrine of surplus value is the cornerstone of Marx’s economic theory.

Capital, created by the labour of the worker, corners the worker by ruining the small masters, and creating an army of unemployed. In industry, the victory of large-scale production is at once apparent, but we observe the same phenomenon in agriculture as well: the superiority of large-scale capitalist agriculture increases, the application of machinery grows, peasant economy falls into the noose of money-capital, it declines and sinks into ruin, burdened by its backward technique. In agriculture, the decline of small-scale production assumes different forms, but the decline itself is an indisputable fact.

By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social - hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a systematic economic organism, but the product of the collective labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. The anarchy of production grows, as do crises, the furious chase after markets and the insecurity of existence of the mass of the population.

While increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of united labour. Marx traced the development of capitalism from the first germs of commodity economy, from simple exchange, to its highest forms, to large-scale production.

And the experience of all capitalist countries, old and new, is clearly demonstrating the truth of this Marxian doctrine by increasing the numbers of workers every year.

Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.

III

When feudalism was overthrown, and “free” capitalist society appeared on God’s earth, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the toilers. Various socialist doctrines immediately began to rise as a reflection of and protest against this oppression. But early socialism was Utopian socialism. It criticised capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its destruction, it indulged in fancies of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.

However, Utopian socialism could not point the real way out. It could neither explain the essence of wage-slavery under capitalism, nor discover the laws of its development and point to the social force which is capable of becoming the creator of a new society. Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more and more clearly revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the motive force of the whole development.

Not a single victory of political freedom over the feudal class was won without encountering desperate resistance. Not a single capitalist country evolved on a more or less free and democratic basis except by a life and death struggle between the various classes of capitalist society.

The genius of Marx consists in the fact that he was able before anybody else to draw from this and apply consistently the deduction that world history teaches. This deduction is the doctrine of the class struggle.

People always were and always will be the stupid victims of deceit and self-deceit in politics until they learn to discover the interests of some class behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. The supporters of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, however barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is maintained by the forces of some ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of these classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, and to enlighten and organise for the struggle, the forces which can — and, owing to their social position, must — constitute a power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new.

Marx’s philosophical materialism has alone shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished. Marx’s economic theory has alone explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism.

Independent organisations of the proletariat are multiplying all over the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa. The proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society; it is rallying its ranks ever more closely and is learning to gauge the measure of its successes; it is steeling its forces and is growing irresistibly.

In this article written on the occasion of the 30th death anniversary (1913) of Karl Marx, Lenin initiates us into the essential totality of Marxism. The basic point he makes in the first four paragraphs is that Marxism is not a closed system or ossified doctrine. It is an evergreen philosophy of revolutionary praxis. It did not drop from the sky all of a sudden but took shape in the natural course of development of human civilization and knowledge. And it arose “not as something completed and immutable” (as Lenin remarked in Marxism and Revisionism) but continued to develop as an ever-flowing stream of theory-practice. Only in this dynamic, developing and forward-looking sense is Marxism true and omnipotent. Mao Zedong focused on this basic approach when he said: “Marxism-Leninism has in no way exhausted truth but ceaselessly opens up roads to the knowledge of truth in the course of practice.” This modest, scientific, research-oriented spirit is lost when someone quotes Lenin out of context: for instance, when the CPI(M) writes on the street-walls of Kolkata: “Marxism is omnipotent because this alone is true.” (The word alone is added to render Lenin more profound!).

In the three numbered sections following the introductory paragraphs, Lenin describes the three sources-cum-components one by one. In each case, it will be noted, he describes the actual process, the successive stages in real life, through which a mature theoretical understanding was arrived at. Such is the methodology developed by Marx and Engels. This historical approach alone enables us to comprehend everything in the world as a process of development and to grasp the laws of motion of that process.

I

Marx and Engels started their theoretical careers as students of philosophy; in the first section Lenin dwells on the evolution of Marxist philosophy.

The organic integration of eighteenth century materialism (which attained the highest development in France) and German Classical Philosophy (in particular, Hegel’s dialectics and Feuerbach’s materialism) gave us the philosophy, the world view, of the working class: dialectical materialism.

What is materialism? Over the centuries, the most fundamental debate in philosophy has centred on the relationship between matter and idea (in other words between nature and consciousness or being and thinking). Which is primary and which is derivative? Philosophers who believe that idea (or consciousness, spirit, thinking) comes before and basically determines matter (or reality, nature, being) are known as idealists, while those who hold exactly the opposite view are called materialists. The latter believe, in the words of Lenin, “the world is the movement of... objective reality reflected by our consciousness.”

Materialism, however, can be metaphysical or dialectical.  The former sees things in isolation from one another and as static or immutable.  It recognises change merely as change of place or increase/decrease of quantity.  By contrast, dialectical materialism sees things in their interconnectedness and in constant motion.

What is motion?  It is the mode of existence of matter.  A running bus is in motion, so are a thinking brain, and even this society around us.  There are multiple forms of motion and at the core of each there is a contradiction.  Simple change of place or mechanical motion is one form, which involves the contradiction of a body being at one and the same moment both in one place and in another place, being in one and the same place and not in it.  Another form of motion is organic life.  Take for example your own self.  Every moment some old cells in your body are dying and some new cells are being formed — so you are the same old person and not exactly the same old person.  In other words, a process of renewal is constantly going on.  The same applies to your thought process.  As you go through this book, your body is relatively at rest, but you are picking up some new ideas and discarding some old ones.  When you finish with the book, you remain partly the same old person, partly a new one.  Both in the physical and mental realms, the contradiction or struggle between the old and the new drives the process forward.  It is the business of dialectics  to study such contradictions or motions or, to be more precise, the laws thereof, which  permeate everything, every process in the world.

“[I]n nature”, says Engels, “ amid the welter of innumerable changes, the same dialectical laws of motion force their way through as those which in history govern the apparent fortuitousness of events; the same laws which similarly form the thread running through the history of the development of human thought and gradually rise to consciousness in thinking man...” (Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 25,p 11)

Dialectics, he adds, is “the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought.”  Among these laws three are most important:
“The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;

The law of the interpenetration of opposites;

The law of the negation of the negation.”  (Ibid, p 356)

The first law explains how transformation or qualitative change takes place.  What happens is that slow, gradual, quantitative change accumulates and, on reaching a given point in the given process, suddenly passes into qualitative change.  For example, “ water... under normal atmospheric pressure changes at 0°Capitalism (centigrade) from the liquid into the solid state, and at 100° C from the liquid into the gaseous state.”  Thus “the mere quantitative change of temperature brings about a qualitative change in the condition of the water.”  (Ibid, p 117)

To refer back to the above example of a human being, slow, imperceptible quantitative development of one’s body takes one from childhood to adolescence to youth and so on.  On the mental or intellectual plane, as your involvement in party activities grows, you pass through various qualitative stages like a sympathiser of the party to a party member to an organiser.  Quantitative change thus leads to qualitative change.  In society as a whole, the contradiction or conflict between exploiting and exploited classes propel society forward through evolution (gradual change) which accumulates slowly and at a certain stage leads to revolutionary transformation.

Regarding the second law Lenin said, “The splitting of a single whole and cognition of its contradictory parts... is the essence of dialectics.”  (Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 38, p 357).  Split the society around you.  You find exploiters and the exploited. You must gain a dialectical understanding of both these contradictory parts.  To quote Lenin again, “Dialectics is the teaching which shows how opposites can be and how they happen to be (how they become) identical, — under what conditions they are identical, becoming transformed into one another, — why the human mind should grasp these opposites not as dead, rigid, but as living, conditional, mobile, becoming transformed into one another.”  (Ibid, p 109)

“The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, unity.  The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute.”  (Ibid, p 358)

What we are discussing here is the unity and struggle of opposites.  The contradictory aspects in every process exclude each other and struggle with each other — this is an absolute law.  But they also coexist in the same process, each being the condition for the other’s existence (e.g., capital and wage labour) — in this sense they are united or identical. And they become identical in another sense.  In given conditions each transforms itself into its opposite — the ruler into the ruled, for example, and vice versa — this is interpenetration or transformation of opposites.

The third law throws light on another dimension of development in nature, society and thought.  Primitive communism or classless society was negated by the advent of class society — this is the first negation.  Class society is negated with the rise of communism — not of the primitive, backward, stone-age variety but one built on, or incorporating, the material and intellectual-cultural achievements of class society — this is the second, or negation of the negation.

“Negation in dialectics”, says Engels, “does not mean simply saying no, or declaring that something does not exist, or destroying it in any way one likes.... I must not only negate, but also sublate the negation.  I must therefore so arrange the first negation that the second remains or becomes possible.  How?  This depends on the particular nature of each individual case.”  (ME CW, Volume 25, p 131) To continue with our example, class society can also be bombed out of existence — with the huge stockpile of nuclear weapons this is a real possibility — where “sublating the negation” becomes impossible, where negation is not dialectical.  Continues Engels:  “Every kind of thing therefore has a peculiar way of being negated in such  manner that it gives rise to a development, and it is just the same with every kind of conception or idea... . This has to be learnt, like everything else.”  Unlike anarchists and unlike reactionaries who wish to return to the “golden past”, we the practitioners of Marxian dialectics do not “simply say no” to capitalism/imperialism/globalisation, but work for their negation in such a way as to retain all their positive achievements in the next, higher form of society.

From the three laws of dialectics we find how everything in the world undergoes constant change — both evolutionary and revolutionary (through leaps) — caused basically by inherent contradictions, while other interrelated things, i.e., external conditions, also influence the process in no small measure.  The progress of Indian revolution, for example, is basically determined by internal class struggle, including the struggle against imperialism, but favourable or unfavourable international situation also acts as an important catalyst or deterrence.  According to dialectical materialism, the world is an integral a whole, where objects and phenomena are interconnected and mutually conditioned.

Dialectical materialism gives us the only scientific theory of knowledge, without which we cannot succeed in our revolutionary mission.  As Mao pointed out in On Practice (which, along with On Contradiction, is a “must read” for every revolutionary activist):
“Knowledge begins with experience — this is the materialism of the theory of knowledge.... Knowledge needs to be deepened ... the perceptual stage of knowledge needs to be developed to the rational stage — this is the dialectics of the theory of knowledge.”  While bookworms tend to neglect the former aspect, empiricists neglect the latter task, for they fail to grasp Lenin’s teaching that “Thought proceeding from the concrete to the abstract — provided it is correct... — does not get away from the truth but comes closer to it.  The abstraction of matter, of a law of nature, the abstraction of value, etc., in short all scientific (correct, serious, not absurd) abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely.  From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice, — such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality.”  (LCW volume 38, p 171)

So much for dialectical materialism and its theory of knowledge.  Marx and Engels, however, did not stop at developing dialectical materialism. They applied it in studying the progress of human society over the centuries and millennia. The result was materialist interpretation of history, also called historical materialism. The causal relations that shape human history now became clear. The path actually traversed by humankind from primitive communism or classless society through slaveholding society and feudalism to capitalism was mapped (See excerpts from Preface to An Introduction ...in the next section). The fundamental laws of motion of human society having been grasped, the doors now opened up towards a conscious application of these laws for a confident march to the next higher form of society — toward socialism.

Dialectical and historical materialism brought to light another salient feature of societal development. Just as human perceptions and scientific knowledge reflect nature, so social concepts and doctrines (e.g., philosophical explanations, political doctrines, religious faiths) reflect the material structure or economic organization of society. For instance, most religions preach that it is God who made some people rich and others poor; that the latter will be going against God, will be committing a sin, if they try to drastically alter this given state of affairs by  snatching the property of the rich. Such religious precepts arise out of the material conditions of class society and serve the interests of propertied classes; hence the crux of these precepts (the inviolable right to private property) is also enshrined in modern ‘secular’ constitutions.

II

When his studies in philosophy told Marx that the economy is the most fundamental thing in social life, he concentrated on that discipline. For he was no star-gazing ‘philosopher’. “Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways: the point, however, is to change it” — he declared when he was only 27, thereby making a silent revolution in the realm of philosophy and setting out his own aim in life. So when he understood that there could be no radical change in the oppressive and unjust political order without a transformation of the economic base, the philosopher in Marx devoted himself to the most thoroughgoing study of the modern economic system. The principal product of some 20 years of such backbreaking labour was Capital, a devastating attack on the bourgeois order.

How does money grow, or whence does profit arise? In other words, how does money become Capital, a historically evolved relation of production? The answer is provided by the theory of surplus value, which is the cornerstone of the Marxian economic theory. But before we come to this, we must acquaint ourselves with a few preliminary concepts.
Commodity: Whatever is produced by human labour for the specific purpose of exchange (sale) is a commodity. Thus rice grown for consumption (whether by a poor peasant or a landlord) is not commodity, nor is fruit grown in a forest — for in the latter case no labour is involved.

Value: We must distinguish between use value and exchange value. The first refers to the practical utility (capacity to satisfy human demands) inherent in any particular object. The second refers to its exchangeability, i.e., the rate at which it can be exchanged with other objects. Air and sunlight ‘have immeasurable use value, but no exchange value. In economics we generally deal with the latter and simply call it value, which is expressed in money-terms (rupee, dollar etc.)

Labour theory of value: Production of any commodity (agricultural, industrial or whatever) requires a definite amount of labour depending on the quality of instruments, technologies, skills etc. available in a given society. This is expressed as “socially necessary labour time”. The average amount of this (i.e., so many hours or man-days) is known for every commodity in the given country. So this determines the value (exchange value) of every commodity in a way acceptable to all. If we say that the value of a pair of shoes is equal to that of four metres of cloth, we mean that in both cases the same amount of necessary social labour (say 16 hours by one workman, or two man-days) has been expended. We can express the same thing in money terms (as we actually do in real life) by saying that the value of one pair of shoes is (say) 80 rupees, and so is the value of four metres of cloth.

Theory of surplus value

Bourgeois economists like Smith and Ricardo had progressed thus far; Marx took several great steps ahead.

First, he showed that in the capitalist system labour power (the human capacity for production) itself is a commodity, like any other. In the past, slaves and serfs could not sell their labour power at will; today the wage worker freely sells this commodity to the capitalist. The latter buys it at an agreed rate, and then consumes it, uses it in production. Now, the process of consumption of labour power is exercise of labour, and labour creates value. This is the unique property of the commodity called labour power. Let us hear from Lenin how this happens:

“The owner of money buys labour power at its value, which, like the value of every other commodity, is determined by the socially necessary labour time required for its production (i.e., the cost of maintaining the worker and his family).1 Having bought labour power, the owner of money is entitled to use it, that is, to set it to work for a whole day — twelve hours, let us say. Yet, in the course of six hours (“necessary” labour time) the worker creates product sufficient to cover the cost of his own maintenance; in the course of the next six hours (“surplus” labour time), he creates “surplus” product, or surplus value, for which the capitalist does not pay. Therefore from the standpoint

1.  Family maintenance is included here, and the capitalist class agrees to pay for it, because without this there will be no supply of labour power after the expiry of the present generation of workers. — A.S.

of the process of production, two parts must be distinguished in capital: constant capital, which is expended on means of production (machinery, tools, raw materials, etc.) whose value, without any change, is transferred (immediately or part by part) to the finished product; secondly, variable capital, which is expended on labour power The value of this latter capital is not invariable, but grows in the labour process, creating surplus value. Therefore, to express the degree of capital’s exploitation of labour power, surplus value must be compared, not with the entire capital but only with the variable capital. Thus, in the example just given, the rate of surplus value, as Marx calls this ratio, will be 6:6, i.e., 100 per cent.” (From Karl Marx, Collected Works, Vol. 21, p 62)

Now let us try to understand this with the help of a very simple illustration.

The production of the necessities of life (food, clothing, housing, etc.) consumed by one worker and his/her family requires, we will assume, 240 hours of labour time or Rs. 1200. Then the value of labour power, i.e., wages will be Rs 1200 per month or Rs. 40 per day. “Necessities of life”, of course is a very relative term, varying widely from place to place and time to time. But in a particular country and at a given time a social average is found, e.g., Rs.1200 worth of goods and services per month. To an extent this amount can be pressed downwards by the employer if the supply of labour power is much higher than the demand, or upwards by the workers in an opposite scenario or by dint of collective bargaining, but in the given time and place it will hover around Rs. 1200.

Now let us think of a small factory manufacturing plastic ball-pens (without refills). There are several machines and several workers, but we will concentrate on one machine and one worker. Suppose the value of one pen is Re.1, the capital expended is as follows: one machine costs Rs. 1,000 and produces 10,000 pens before its usefulness is exhausted. This means that the wear and tear suffered by the machine for every pen produced is equal to Rs. 1000 divided by 10000, i.e., 10 paise. The electricity consumed by the machine for every pen is valued at 5 paise while the basic raw material, i.e., plastic, required for every pen costs 45 paise. All these add up to 60 paise (machine depreciation 10 + electricity 5 + plastic 45), which is the “constant capital” expended on each pen. The remaining 40 paise (Re. 1 minus 60 paise) of the pen’s value is contributed by — what else — the labour put in. Let us observe this part of the story more minutely,

Suppose the worker works 8 hours a day for Rs. 40 and produces 25 pens per hour. In 4 hours he produces 25 ×  4 = 100 pens. We saw above that he gives the capitalist new value worth 40 paise for every pen, so in these 4 hours he contributes Rs. 40 (40 paise x 100), which is equal to the amount he gets as wage. Thus he works 4 hours for a proper, so-called ‘fair’ wage, which is exactly equivalent to the value created by him. But he works another 4 hours without any additional remuneration — creating an extra 40 rupees in value, which is called surplus value. Lenin described the whole process in the following words: “The worker spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.” (Three Sources ...)

In our example, surplus value worth Rs. 40 is created in the course of production of 200 pens, i.e., @ 20 paise per pen (Rs. 40 divided by 200). The total value of one pen, thus, consists of three basic components:

60 paise for plastic, electricity and wear and tear of the machine (constant capital or C) + 20 paise for wage (variable capital or V) + 20 paise surplus value (or S) = Re. 1.
The 60 paise invested in plastic etc., is called constant capital because the value of these items remains constant during the process of production. On the other hand, the capital expended on labour power is called variable capital because this part gets increased in the course of production — in our example, every 20 paise of V creates S worth 20 paise and this is what the capitalist appropriates as profit.

Now we can express the above in a simple Marxist formula:

Value of one pen = C (60 paise) + V (20 paise) + S (20 paise) = Re. 1

The capitalist gets S worth 20 paise by investing V to the tune of 20 paise, which means the rate of surplus value is 100 %.

Readers should remember that this is a very simplified illustration, intended only as a first step toward the study of Lenin’s Karl Marx and Marx’s Capital. However, it shows how every capitalist — even the most progressive and kind-hearted — extracts surplus value, without the worker or even the capitalist knowing it. This is perfectly legal and appears to be a ‘natural’ process. No amount of wage rise can basically alter this circumstance and that is why Marxists fight for the abolition of the system of wage labour as such.
Having shown the creation of capital by labour, Marxist theory describes the spread of large-scale production in industry and agriculture. Our country witnessed, for example, the ruin of lakhs of weavers by the spread of cotton textile industry first in England and then in India itself. The growth of large-scale production and technological development under capitalism leads to higher productivity of labour. For example, one thousand cotton mill workers produce more cloth than the same number of weavers did. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of producers get entangled, through the market and other mechanisms, in a vast and ever-expanding capitalist system. Production no longer remains an individual affair – as it used to be in the case of artisans; weavers, small peasants, etc. – it becomes completely social. But the results of this social production, of this collective labour, is privately appropriated by an insignificant minority of capitalists who own the means of production. This contradiction between social production and private appropriation constitutes the basic contradiction of capitalism, which can be resolved only by socialising ownership and appropriation of means of production, i.e., by means of a socialist revolution. The ground for this resolution, however, is prepared by capitalism itself. Even as the workers’ dependence on capital increases, thousands and lakhs and crores of them unite at the factory level and in industry-wise and nationwide unions; they also launch their political parties. The era of proletarian revolutions begins.
Soon after Marx and Engels completed their critical study of capitalism and took leave of the world proletariat, the capitalist world order reached a higher stage called imperialism.  Lenin laid bare the economic and political essence of the latter in works like Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism and Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, thus carrying forward the work of his teachers.  We will return to this in chapter III.

III

As in philosophy and political economy, so in the field of socialist theory, Marx and Engels did have their predecessors. Great visionaries like Saint Simon, Fourier and Robert Owen were the first to lay bare the evils of capitalism and to propagate the noble ideals of socialism. But they did not have any idea as to how and by which force this great ideal could be actualized. Theirs was thus a “utopian” vision of socialism.

The giant step Marx and Engels took from here to “scientific” socialism was made possible by the most valuable experience of the revolutions which swept across Europe, particularly France, around 1848. These were essentially bourgeois revolutions, but the working class did play a major role in them. These revolutions most convincingly demonstrated the role of class struggle behind all social progress (i.e., the progress from the feudal to the bourgeois order) and from this Marx and Engels deduced the most important lesson of world history: the doctrine of class struggle. Bourgeois theorists had already started a discussion on classes and class struggle but it was left to Marx to show that class struggle in capitalist society “necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat,” which in its turn “constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society”, as Marx wrote in 1852 in a letter to Joseph Weydemeyer (see Classes and Class struggle in Supplementary Notes and the chapter The State)
Thus Marx concretized the real road to socialism and the main social force (the proletariat) which can achieve that goal. In fact, Marx and Engels wrote quite extensively on the strategy and tactics to be pursued by the proletariat in its struggle for socialism. This is why Lenin in his essay entitled Karl Marx discussed “tactics of the class struggle of the proletariat” as a separate section after one on “Socialism”. The proletarian strategy and tactics developed, and continues to develop, in the course of a relentless struggle against the petty bourgeois tendencies of reformism and anarchism, as we shall see shortly (see The Struggle against Reformism and Anarchism).

To come back to the “Three Sources and Three Component Parts”, we should pay special attention to the last three paragraphs which serve to round off the discussion in a very meaningful way. Lenin teaches us that the only way “to change the world” is to identity the ruling classes whose interests operate behind economic systems, political institutions; socio-cultural values, etc., and to locate and mobilize the class forces capable of overthrowing the ruling classes.

It is in this direction that the world proletariat, guided by the Marxist worldview, is moving steadily, Lenin reports in the last paragraph. The end of the article thus becomes the beginning of a new story of forward march. A realisation dawns upon the reader that the three component parts — which have been analysed separately for the sake of better comprehension — actually constitute an organic whole and that in this dynamic integration is realized Marxism’s transition from theory to practice which in its turn enriches the theory.

In his 1859 Preface to An Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx gives a brilliantly concise formulation of the dialectical and materialist conception of history:
“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.

The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or — what is but a legal expression for the same thing — with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.

Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonisms, but of one arising form the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of society to a close.”

In this-short space is compressed an enormous wealth of ideas, at least a few of which call for some explanatory remarks.

What is meant by relations of production and forces of production? The former refers to the economic relations among people engaged in production (also in distribution, which includes exchange, i.e., buying and selling). To have a practical idea of this, just look around. In a factory you find ten or hundred or a thousand workers working on plant and machinery provided by the owner, who supervises the process of production either directly or through his paid representatives – supervisors, engineers, managers. The relation between the workers on one hand and the owner(s) on the other is a production relation: one of exploitation and struggle. The relation among workers themselves is also a production relation: one of camaraderie. In a class society production relations thus take the form of class relations. These relations together constitute the economic structure (also called “base”) of society on which rises the political cultural “superstructure”. A feudal economy thus gives us the monarchy, a capitalist economy — the parliamentary system. All such state forms serve to systematise the rule of exploiting classes over exploited ones (e.g., of feudal lords over peasants, of capitalists over wage-workers); and in each case we have a corresponding value system, socio-cultural discourse etc. (“feudal values”, “bourgeois culture” — as we commonly call them).

The term ‘productive forces’ on the other hand covers means of production (such as machines, production sites and factories, instruments of labour from hammers and ploughs to tractors and computers), production techniques or technology, and labouring people with requisite knowledge and skill (peasants, workers, artisans etc.) The forces and relations of production together constitute the “mode of production” (feudal, bourgeois etc.)

Challenging the dominant idealist conception of history which saw historical changes as resulting from changes in the realm of ideas, here Marx emphasises the primacy of the “base” over “superstructure”, of people’s material life conditions over their social consciousness. But this should not be understood in a one-sided way. As Engels explained in a letter to Joseph Bloch dated 21-22 September, 1890, “... the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Neither Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, such as constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and especially the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political, legal, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases determine their form in particular.” (Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, pp 394 -95)

When does society move forward from one mode of production to another, higher mode? At a point when, from being “forms of development of productive forces”, production relations “turn into their fetters”. What happens is this. In the initial stage of a new mode of production (say feudalism following slavery) the correspondence between the “forces” and “relations” prevails over an inherent conflict, which however gradually comes to the surface and reveals itself as the principal aspect in this “unity of opposites” in proportion as the room for continued development of the “forces” within that mode, that social order, gets exhausted. Then, and not before that (see above: “No social order ever ... itself”), begins an “epoch” (mark the protractedness implied here) of revolution. Thus it was that bourgeois revolutions in Europe took place when the old feudal production relations (typically characterised by lords and serfs, guild-masers and journeyman artisans) proved too narrow for the tremendous growth of productive forces, such as plant and machinery geared to mass production. A similar situation is ripening today, and that in a particular form, as Marx observed in Capital:

“One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working, class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” (Vol. 1, pp. 714-15)

As we shall see later, Lenin took this as the point of departure for his thesis on imperialism and showed that the latter constitutes the highest stage of capitalism, and the eve of socialist revolution. Just as the nascent and at the time progressive capitalist class tore asunder the feudal fetters and established the rule of capital, so will the proletariat — representing the socialisation of production — demolish the shell or straitjacket of monopoly capitalism and usher in socialism.

No less significant is the distinction Marx makes between two kinds of transformations: the one in economic structure (e.g., that accomplished in Lenin’s Russia) which is quite tangible and accurately measurable; and the other in ideological superstructure, which is more subtle, delicate and protracted. Here Marx anticipates, it would seem, Lenin and Mao who in their own ways drew attention to the special importance of cultural revolution.

If these are the general laws of motion of human society, in what concrete forms have they expressed themselves on a world scale? Marx gives us a general outline (variations in specific cases being presumed) of the major stages (“epochs”) society has so far passed through. Among these, we are familiar with feudal and bourgeois modes of production. As for the categories “Asiatic” and “Ancient”, the former generally refers to social formations characterised by communal (as distinct from private) ownership of land; self-sufficient and largely secluded village economies based on integration of handicrafts and agriculture; vast, state-run irrigation networks etc; found very early in India, China, Java and many other lands (partly also in Russia). “Ancient” refers in the main to the ancient Greco-Roman societies based on slavery. However, it should be remembered that [a] the pre-feudal stages have been described in more ways than one both by Marx and Engels and their followers (to get a broad idea of the whole thing, see Lenin’s lucid narration in The state as excerpted below), and [b] different modes often coexist or overlap, giving rise to mixed types like semi-feudalism in India.

The term “prehistory” is worth pondering over. The implication seems to be that the true history of humans begins in full glory only in socialism — with society at last rid of age-old antagonisms, with people no longer branded by class stigma; and viewed from that vantage point, the entire range from slavery to capitalism is but a prehistory of antagonistic production relations.

Well, for now only this much on the genesis and general principles of Marxism. We must thoroughly grasp the basics and for that we must read and re-read the classics. But that is not enough. We must learn to apply these in understanding our own society, our own milieu. We must be good at what Lenin called “concrete analysis of concrete conditions.” Take a particular phenomenon or process, see how it evolved historically, and in which direction it is moving. Examine its various dimensions — say economic, cultural, political, etc. Study its internal contradictions and multiple interconnections with other phenomena and processes surrounding it. Very briefly, this is our method of combining the general with the particular.

A concomitant method is the combination of theory with practice, as Mao used to stress:

“Discover the truth through practice, and again through practice verify and develop the truth. Start from perceptual knowledge and actively develop it into rational knowledge; then start from rational knowledge and actively guide revolutionary practice to change both the subjective and the objective world. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level.”

Reformism originated with the Fabian Society in England (founded in 1884 with leading intellectuals like Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Ramsay MacDonald and Bernard Shaw) and then spread to the rest of Europe.  Basically, reformism holds that capitalism can be transformed into socialism by a series of gradual changes, without any qualitative rupture, that is, without a revolution.  When by the end of the 19th-century pre-Marxian reformism was more or less defeated by the Marxian doctrine in the working class movement, it reappeared on the soil of Marxism itself as amendments to Marxism, as revisionism.  The father of revisionism was a one-time orthodox Marxist, Bernstein, whose catch-phrase “the movement is everything, the ultimate aim is nothing” was diametrically opposed to the declaration of the Communist Manifesto that in the movement of the present communists always represent and take care of the future of that movement.  Lenin defined the substance of revisionism in the following words:

“To determine its conduct from case to case, to adapt itself to the events of the day and to the chopping and changing of petty politics, to forget the primary interests of the proletariat and the basic features of the whole capitalist system, of all capitalist evolution, to sacrifice these primary interests for the sake of real or assumed advantages of the moment — such is the policy of revisionism. ... every more or less ‘new’ question, every more or less unexpected and unforeseen turn of events,... will always inevitably give rise to one variety of revisionism or another.”

Anarchism, by contrast, negates or neglects the role of protracted mass political work as a condition for the attainment of a revolutionary goal, say seizure of power or abolition of the state.  Among its first and most influential proponents was Russia’s Bakunin, an opponent of Marx in the First International.  His theory was that abolition of the bourgeois state was the immediate task, which the workers were to carry out not by forming a workers’ party, not by political struggle, but by ‘direct action’.  The anarchists fail to understand that the abolition of the state belongs to a future historical stage, which can only be reached through the dictatorship of the proletariat (more on this in the chapter on state).  One variant of this trend is syndicalism or anarcho-syndicalism, which holds that workers can capture factories and seize power through trade unions without a disciplined proletarian party. Lenin brought out the political characteristics of anarchism very clearly in the following words:

“Anarchism is bourgeois individualism in reverse…. Anarchism is a product of despair. [It is the] psychology of the unsettled intellectual or the vagabond and not of the proletarian … Failure to understand the class struggle of the proletariat. Absurd negation of politics in bourgeois society. …Failure to understand the role of the organisation and the education of the workers. …Panaceas consisting of one-sided, disconnected means.  …Subordination of the working class to bourgeois politics in the guise of negation of politics.” (Anarchism and Socialism CW Vol.5, pp327-328)

Reformism/revisionism and anarchism/left phrase mongering constitute a unity of opposites: they unite in their opposition to revolutionary Marxism and in given conditions tend to transform into each other.  Lenin pointed out this connection very precisely when he wrote, “... in practice the anarchists’ phrase-mongering converts them into the crudest accomplices of opportunism, into the reverse side of opportunism.”
And further:

“Bourgeois ideologists, liberals and democrats, not understanding Marxism, … are constantly jumping from one futile extreme to another.... Both anarcho-syndicalism and reformism must be regarded as the direct product of this bourgeois world-outlook and its influence.  They seize upon one aspect of the labour movement, elevate one-sidedness to a theory, and declare mutually exclusive those tendencies or features of this movement that are a specific peculiarity of a given period, of given conditions of working-class activity.  But real life, real history, includes these different tendencies, just as life and development in nature include both slow evolution and the rapid leaps, breaks in continuity.

The revisionists regard as phrase mongering all arguments about “leaps” and about the working class movement being antagonistic in principle to the whole of the old society.  They regard reforms as a partial realisation of socialism.  The anarcho-syndicalists reject “ petty work”, especially the utilisation of the parliamentary platform.  In practice, the latter tactics amount to waiting for “great days” along with an inability to master the forces which create great events.  Both of them hinder the thing that is most important and most urgent, namely, to unite the workers in big, powerful and properly functioning organisations, capable of functioning well under all circumstances, permeated with the spirit of the class struggle, clearly realising their aims and trained in the true Marxist world-outlook.”

The inevitability of the emergence and re-emergence of right and left opportunist tendencies in the proletarian movements of all countries is determined by their class roots in the broad strata of petty bourgeoisie or small proprietors who live in close, organic association with the proletariat and from whose ranks a steady stream joins the ranks of the proletariat and its party.  It is only natural, therefore, that in every country the correct line of communist movement develops only in course of the continuous ideological struggle against what we may call “revisionism from the right” and “revisionism from the left”.

Summing up the entire experience up to 1920, Lenin wrote in Left-Wing’Communism an Infantile Disorder that Bolshevism developed, gained strength and became steeled in struggle against two “enemies within the working class movement”.  One was right opportunism or Menshivism — “the principal enemy” — and this side of the story has been fairly well-known throughout the world.  Much less known was the relentless fight “against petty bourgeois revolutionism, which smacks of anarchism… the petty proprietor, the small master … who, under capitalism, always suffers oppression and very frequently a most acute and rapid deterioration in his conditions of life, and even ruin, easily goes to revolutionary extremes, but is incapable of perseverance, organisation, discipline and steadfastness.  A petty bourgeois driven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism is a social phenomenon which, like anarchism, is characteristic of all capitalist countries.  The instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even at frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another — all this is common knowledge.”  

In China, too, Mao Zedong’s correct political line developed in course of continuous struggle against right and ‘left’ deviations.  And in this country as well as in Russia, both these maladies — with the former posing the main danger in an overall sense — continued to appear even after revolution in ever newer forms.  This was only to be expected, for the petty bourgeoisie still constituted an important segment of society and its class outlook frequently infiltrated into the party.  Moreover, the representatives of old ruling classes — which were ousted but not completely eliminated — tried to influence party policy through various channels like the bureaucracy.

In the Soviet Union, “the struggle on two fronts, against the ‘Lefts’, who represent petty bourgeois radicalism, and against the Rights who represent petty bourgeois liberalism” — as Stalin put it (Stalin, Collected Works, volume 12, page 372) — went on throughout the decades of socialist construction.  After the death of Stalin, right revisionism consolidated itself in the party leadership and thus gained control of the state machinery too.  The Khrushchev revisionist clique declared that dictatorship of the proletariat had become redundant in the Soviet Union, which had become a “state of the whole people”.  This was a total renunciation of the fundamental ideological positions of Marxism Leninism, which holds that the state, so long as it exists, has to be a dictatorship of one class to hold down another, (i.e., in a modern society it can exist only as at dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or that of the proletariat) and when this dictatorship becomes redundant the state itself also becomes redundant and withers away (see Chapter II).  In politics, the revisionists preached a doctrine of “three peacefuls” — peaceful coexistence of socialism and imperialism, peaceful competition between the two camps and peaceful transition to socialism (in pre-revolutionary societies) via the parliamentary path. This implied renunciation of the struggle against imperialism on a world scale and rejection of revolutionary movement against ruling classes at national levels.

The Communist Party of China launched a veritable ideological war on this modern revisionism, exposing Khrushchev as a disciple of Bernstein and Kautsky.  In continuation of this struggle and in an attempt to prevent such  right revisionist takeover in China, Mao Zedong launched what has come to be known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.  He correctly identified the danger of capitalist restoration under the auspices of revisionist capitalist roaders in the communist party in power; he drew attention to the most pertinent ideological  problems of building socialism, particularly in backward countries; but his method of solving these through the GPCR drifted along the opposite, i.e., ‘left’ deviation.  Ultimately it proved counter-productive, with the ultra-left “gang of four” capturing power in the party.  Thus a grave ‘left’ deviation occurred in course of fighting the right.  Another well-known instance of anarchist blunder born of petty bourgeois impetuosity was the Pol Pot regime in Kampuchea.  Here even money and commodity exchange were sought to be abolished in an over-hasty attempt to eradicate all vestiges of capitalism and build a communist economy in a backward society, while all opposition was brutally crushed in the name of exercising the dictatorship of the proletariat.

To return to Mao’s struggle against Khrushchev revisionism, it engulfed the international communist movement in at “Great Debate” in early and mid-sixties, and this had its repercussions in our country too.  Those who opposed Soviet revisionism organised themselves as the CPI (M).  But the leadership of the new party refused to consistently uphold Mao Zedong thought and, in the name of maintaining “equi-distance” from the Russian and Chinese lines, slipped into a centrist or neo-revisionist position. 

Revolutionary communists within the CPI (M) therefore had to launch a bitter struggle against this revisionism too, which exposed its reactionary kernel when it came to power in West Bengal as a partner of the UF.  In a situation of open rebellion of the oppressed peasantry under the leadership of revolutionary communists — who in due course organised themselves as the CPI (ML) — the CPI (M) in power sided fully with the reactionary classes.  Thus began its metamorphosis into social democracy, a process that benefited enormously from the subsequent collapse of the immediate revolutionary challenge and reached a higher, more manifest phase after 1977.  The whole experience of the past 29 years, the present hobnobbing of the Buddhadev Bhattacharya government with the Salims and Tatas, the NGOs and international lending agencies, the role of the CPI and CPI (M) as indirect partners of the ruling UPA and the thorough “updating” of the CPI (M)’s programme and policies at the national level mostly under the impact of the West Bengal practice — all this is well-known.  And all this reveals to us the utter bankruptcy of revisionism turned social democracy even when it enjoys only a share of state power in just one province (or a few provinces) and aspires for a bigger presence in the central power structure.  For a classic case of social democracy in full control of state power, look at the Tony Blair government in the UK — the enemy of working people in that country and internationally the most servile accomplice of US imperialism.  It is interesting to note that this ‘Labour Party’ woes its origin to the Fabian Society, the mother of reformism as a distinct political trend.  It thus represents the entire historic trajectory of reformism growing to revisionism to social democracy, and in this field our homegrown CPI (M) too is setting another world record, albeit in another context.

In concluding this section, let us recall Lenin’s brilliant observation that anarchism is not infrequently a kind of penalty for the opportunist sins of the working class movement (‘Left Wing’ Communism). In our country we have witnessed this law operating in two different, typical ways.  First, directly: the rise of ‘left’ petty bourgeois revolutionism at the party centre under Ranadive in 1948 — 50 as a reaction to the preceding  long spell of tailism in the name of unity with the Congress against British imperialism; the trends of infantile leftism that had crept into the first phase of CPI (ML) movement as an outburst against right revisionism of CPI and CPI(M); the hardened and well-entrenched (as distinct from “infantile”) Maoist current today which thrives as an anarcho-militarist answer to the prevalent parliamentary cretinism of the official Left.  Second, and more important, in an opposite way: treading along the parliamentary path since 1952 as the only viable alternative to Ranadive’s playing with insurrection; the full flourish of social democracy after the colossal miscarriage of the first revolutionary upsurge following Naxalbari; the post-setback liquidationism in the ML movement justifying itself as a correction of some ‘left’ deviations.  This dual experience enjoins on us to develop our revolutionary praxis in course of a long-drawn battle against right opportunism (especially in its centrist garb) as the main danger in the left movement in general and against ‘left’ sensationalism as the main deviation in the Naxalite or ML movement in particular.
With this broad overview, let us now move on to a couple of most pertinent themes in Marxist theory: [a] The State and [b] Imperialism.

The state refers to the sum total of all the legislative, judicial and executive organs: the parliament and state legislatures, the courts and prisons, the civil administration including the police, the military and paramilitary forces and so on. The basic principles and policies of a modern state are enshrined in its constitution, which makes it another constituent — the ideological-political embodiment — of the state. The latter is run by governments, which are liable to change every few years even as the state remains unchanged for much longer periods of time. The difference (and the relation) between the state and the governments (central and provincial) is thus akin to that between a machine and its operators. Bourgeois and Social-democratic parties clamour for changing only the operators, revolutionary communists work for changing both the operators and the machine.

The State: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
The Anarchist Approach
Globalisation and the “Retreat” of the State
The “Civil Society” Viewpoint on the State 

Here we reproduce excerpts from Lenin’s The State, (LCW, Vol. 29), supplemented with some additional observations by Marx and Engels.

The state has not always existed. There was a time when there was no state. It appears wherever and whenever a division of society into classes appears, whenever exploiters and exploited appear.

Before the first form of exploitation of man by man arose, the first form of division into classes — slave-owners and slaves — there existed the patriarchal family, or, as it is sometimes called, the clan family. (Clan – tribe, at the time people of one kin lived together.)

There was no state and general ties, the community itself, discipline and the ordering of work were maintained by force of custom and tradition, by the authority or the respect enjoyed by the elders of the clan or by women — who in those times not only frequently enjoyed a status equal to that of men, but not infrequently enjoyed an even higher status — and when there was no special category of persons who were specialists in ruling. History shows that the state as a special apparatus for coercing people arose wherever and whenever there appeared a division of society into classes, that is, a division into groups of people some of which were permanently in a position to appropriate the labour of others, where some people exploited others.

The division into slave-owners and slaves was the first important class division. The former group not only owned all the means of production — the land and the implements, however poor and primitive they may have been in those times — but also owned people. This group was known as slave-owners, while those who laboured and supplied labour for others were known as slaves.

This form was followed in history by another: feudalism. In the great majority of countries slavery in the course of its development evolved into serfdom. The fundamental division of society was now into feudal lords and peasant serfs. The form of relations between people changed. The slave-owners had regarded the slaves as their property; the law had confirmed this view and regarded the slave as chattel completely owned by the slave-owner. As far as the peasant serf was concerned, class oppression and dependence remained, but it was not considered that the feudal lord owned the peasants as chattels, but that he was only entitled to their labour, to the obligatory performance of certain services. In practice, as you know, serfdom, especially in Russia where it survived longest of all and assumed the crudest forms, differed little from slavery.
Further, with the development of trade, the appearance of the world market and the development of money circulation, a new class arose within feudal society — the capitalist class. From the commodity, the exchange of commodities and the rise of the power of money, there grew the power of capital. During the eighteenth century, or rather, from the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century, revolutions took place all over the world. Feudalism was abolished in all the countries of Western Europe. Russia was the last country in which this took place. In 1861 a radical change took place in Russia as well; as a consequence of this one form of society was replaced by another — feudalism was replaced by capitalism, under which division into classes remained, as well as various traces and remnants of serfdom, but fundamentally the division into classes assumed a different form.

The owners of capital, the owners of the land and the owners of the factories in all capitalist countries constituted and still constitute an insignificant minority of the population who have complete command of the labour of the whole people, and consequently, command, oppress and exploit the whole mass of labourers, the majority of whom are proletarians, wage-workers, who procure their livelihood in the process of production only by the sale of their labour-power. With the transition to capitalism, the peasants, who had been disunited and downtrodden in feudal times, were converted partly (the majority) into proletarians, and partly (the minority) into wealthy peasants who themselves hired labourers and who constituted a rural bourgeoisie.

Before the division of society into classes no state existed. But as class society arose, the state also arose and took firm root. It has always been a certain apparatus which stood outside society and consisted of a group of people engaged solely, or almost solely, or mainly, in ruling. People are divided into the ruled, and into specialists in ruling, those who rise above society and are called rulers, statesmen.

But it is impossible to compel the greater part of society to work systematically for the other part of society without a permanent apparatus of coercion, i.e., the state. In other words, the state is a machine for the oppression of one class by another, a machine for holding in obedience to one class other, subordinated classes. There are various forms of this machine. The slave-owning state could be a monarchy, an aristocratic republic or even a democratic republic (where the electorate consisted of slave-owners only). In fact the forms of government varied extremely, but their essence was always the same; the slaves enjoyed no rights and constituted an oppressed class; they were not regarded as human beings. We find the same thing in the feudal state.

The change in the form of exploitation transformed the slave-owning state into the feudal state. This was of immense importance. In slave-owning society the slave enjoyed no rights whatever and was not regarded as a human being; in feudal society the peasant was bound to the soil. The chief distinguishing feature of serfdom was that the peasants (and at that time the peasants constituted the majority; the urban population was still very small) were considered bound to the land — this is the very basis of “serfdom”. The peasant might work a definite number of days for himself on the plot assigned to him by the landlord; on the other days the peasant serf worked for his lord. The essence of class society remained — society was based on class exploitation. Only the owners of the land could enjoy full rights; the peasants had no rights at all. In practice their condition differed very little from the condition of slaves in the slave-owning state. Nevertheless, a wider road was opened for their emancipation, since the peasant serf was not regarded as the direct property of the lord. He could work part of his time on his own plot, could, so to speak, belong to himself to some extent.

Neither under slavery nor under the feudal system could a small minority of people dominate over the vast majority without coercion. History is replete with records of constant attempts of the oppressed classes to throw off oppression. The history of slavery contains records of wars of emancipation from slavery which lasted for decades. Incidentally, the name “Spartacist” adopted by the German Communists is inspired by Spartacus, who was one of the most prominent heroes of one of the greatest revolts of slaves, which took place about two thousand years ago. For many years the seemingly omnipotent Roman Empire, which rested entirely on slavery, experienced the shocks and blows of a widespread uprising of slaves who armed and united to form a vast army under the leadership of Spartacus. In the end they were defeated, captured and put to torture by the slave-owners. Such civil wars mark the whole history of the existence of class society. The whole epoch of feudalism is likewise marked by constant uprisings of the peasants.
The development of trade, the development of commodity exchange, led to the emergence of a new class - the capitalists. Capital took shape as such at the close of the Middle Ages, when, after the discovery of America, world trade developed enormously, when the quantity of precious metals increased, when silver and gold became the medium of exchange, when money circulation made it possible for individuals to possess tremendous wealth. Silver and gold were recognised as wealth all over the world. The economic power of the landowning class declined and the power of the new class — the representatives of capital — developed. The reconstruction of society was such that all citizens seemed to be equal, the old division into slave-owners and slaves disappeared, all were regarded as equal before the law irrespective of what capital each owned; whether he owned land as private property, or was a poor man who owned nothing but his labour-power  — all were equal before the law. The law protects everybody ‘equally’; it protects the property of those who have it from attack by the masses who, possessing no property, possessing nothing but their labour-power, grow steadily impoverished and become converted into proletarians. Such is capitalist society.

Under capitalism the state continued to be a machine which helped the capitalists to hold the poor peasants and the working class in subjection. But in outward appearance it was free. It proclaimed universal suffrage, and declared through its champions, preachers, scholars and philosophers, that it was not a class state. To this day the capitalists continue to reinforce this fraud by all means — to claim that in a bourgeois state all are equal. It is the task of the proletarian party to explain to the masses that as long as there is exploitation, there cannot be true equality. The bourgeois cannot be the equal of the worker, or the hungry man the equal of the wealthy man.

This is not to deny that the democratic republic and universal suffrage were an immense progressive advance as compared with feudalism: they have enabled the proletariat to achieve its present unity and solidarity, to form those firm and disciplined ranks which are waging a systematic struggle against capital. There was nothing even remotely resembling this among the peasant serfs, not to speak of the slaves. The slaves, as we know, revolted, rioted, started civil wars, but they could never create a class-conscious majority and parties to lead the struggle, they could not clearly realise what their aims were, and even in the most revolutionary moments of history they were always pawns in the hands of the ruling classes. The bourgeois republic, parliament, universal suffrage — all these represent great progress from the standpoint of the world development of society. Mankind moved towards capitalism, and it was capitalism alone which, thanks to urban culture, enabled the oppressed proletarian class to become conscious of itself and to create the world working-class movement, the millions of workers organised all over the world in parties — the socialist parties which are consciously leading the struggle of the masses.  Without parliamentarism, without an electoral system, this development of the working class would have been impossible. That is why all these things have acquired such great importance in the eyes of the broad masses of people. That is why a radical change seems to be so difficult. It is on this commonsense perception that social democrats everywhere base their theory and practice of limited reforms within the confines of parliamentary democracy. By contrast, revolutionary communists from the time of Marx and Engels have always insisted on total revolutionary transformation of capitalist society and destruction of the bourgeois state as a precondition for building a higher social order.

This is the gist of what Lenin wrote. Now the question arises: when the bourgeois state is smashed, what will take its place? The victorious proletarian state — (a) to hold down its adversary, the disempowered bourgeoisie, and (b) to ensure genuine equality and democracy for all the working people. In other words, the proletariat seizes state power and makes itself the ruling class. In the first stage of post-revolutionary society, i.e., in the first stage of communism or socialism, it has to exercise class dictatorship over the bourgeoisie which has been overthrown but not yet annihilated, to crush by force the latter’s violent attempts at counter­revolution.

Regarding this stage Marx had commented :

“Between capitalist society and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this there is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.” (From Critique of the Gotha Programme)

This dictatorship does not necessarily mean one-party rule. That form was practised in Russia which had no tradition of parliamentarism, but there may be many other forms — just as bourgeois dictatorship is exercised in so many state forms. As Lenin had clarified, proletarian power means “not the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of representative institutions from talking shops into ‘working’ bodies.” In our country, for example, the multi-party system may, or may not, continue after revolution, but in any case people’s power is to be exercised by elected bodies at all levels down to the grassroots, non-elected posts like governors are to be abolished and a whole set of democratic reforms, including the right to recall, introduced. For along with dictatorship over the counter-revolutionaries, the new state also has to ensure genuine democracy for all the working people so that they can give full expression to their enormous creative energy for the construction and self-management of a new society.

This transition period is likely to be fairly long and full of reverses and zigzags. As the new society develops materially and spiritually, as the remnant forces, habits and cultures of the overthrown ruling class are finally eliminated in course of class struggle by the proletariat, now organised as the state, as socialism reorganises production on the basis of a free and equal association of producers, the first stage of socialism grows into the second, into mature communism. The whole scenario now changes, and the state is rendered superfluous:

“As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself ... The state is not ‘abolished’. It withers away.” (From Anti-Duhring)

The difference is thus clear. The capitalist state is the exploiting minority’s organ for suppressing the toiling majority, the socialist state — just the reverse. The bourgeoisie perfects the state machine to perpetuate its class dictatorship behind the facade of democracy. The proletariat proclaims and exercises dictatorship over the vested interests to extend democracy for the masses and to pave the way for the final dissolution of all classes, all state forms, all dictatorship.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a contemporary of Karl Marx and the original anarchist in the socialist movement, held that the power of capital and the power of the state were synonymous, so the proletariat could not emancipate itself through the use of state power. This absolute negativism was shared by Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, though there were substantial differences between them on details of strategy and policy.

A later trend known as anarcho-syndicalism held that trade unions were to become the revolutionary instruments in the hands of the proletariat and also the basic units of the socialist order replacing the state. Lenin summed up the differences between the Marxist and the anarchist viewpoints on the question of the state in the following words :
“The distinction between the Marxists and the anarchists is this :

The former, while aiming at the complete abolition of the state, recognise that this aim can only be achieved after classes have been abolished by the socialist revolution, as the result of the establishment of socialism, which leads to the withering away of the state. The latter want to abolish the state completely overnight, not understanding the conditions under which the state can be abolished.

The former recognise that after the proletariat has won political power, it must completely destroy the old state machine and replace it by a new one consisting of an organisation of the armed workers, after the type of the Commune. The latter, while insisting on the destruction of the state machine, have a very vague idea of what the proletariat will put in its place and how it will use its revolutionary power. The anarchists even deny that the revolutionary proletariat should use the state power, they reject its revolutionary dictatorship.
The former demand that the proletariat be trained for revolution by utilising the present state. The anarchists reject this.” (From The State And Revolution)
In our, that is the pre-revolutionary context, the third distinction is particularly important. Marxists believe that the revolutionary proletariat, while guarding against legalism and parliamentary opportunism, can — and in normal circumstances, should — utilise the parliamentary institutions and other suitable state fora to propagate its views and to prepare the masses for revolution. Anarchists (and anarcho-militarists like the PWG and the MCC in our country) reject such political struggle involving the masses and they usually concentrate, instead, on isolated actions and terror-tactics.

As regards the first distinction, the phrase “after classes have been abolished ... as the result of the establishment of socialism” refers to mature, full-fledged socialism, to its second stage, or communism.

Nowadays we often hear that in this era of globalisation the nation-state has lost much of its traditional role and relevance. This assertion rests primarily on three observations : (a) the massive growth of MNCs which operate across state boundaries, (b) the mind-boggling volume and speed of cross-border flows of finance capital, (c) the growing domination of multilateral institutions like the IMF, WB and WTO. However, on closer examination all three arguments fall apart.

The MNCs or TNCs are still heavily rooted in their home countries. A 1993 study of the world’s 100 largest companies showed that only 18 companies maintained the majority of assets abroad. The internationalisation of shares was even more restricted. All the companies benefited from industrial and trade policies of their own countries and at least 20 would not have survived if they had not been bailed out by their respective governments. A meagre 2.1% of the board members of the top 500 US companies were foreign nationals, with only 5 of the top 30 US companies listed having a foreigner on their boards. (Financial Times, 5 January, 1996 and The Economist, 24 June, 1995). It is well-known that powerful corporations and their respective home states serve each other in innumerable ways, with the latter engaging themselves very actively in business wars amongst the former. According to the UNCTAD World Investment Report 2003, 79 of the world’s 100 biggest non-financial TNCs are controlled by the G-7 powers while another 16 are headquartered in other European countries and in Australia.

As regards the trans-national flow of finance, is this an IT marvel technologically beyond the control of individual states? Such an impression is sought to be created by the votaries of globalisation to pre-empt any possible attempt on the part of any country to check such flows in the national interest. The fact is, technologically it is quite possible to impose controls, just as it is to arrange all kinds of checks in the cases of online use of credit cards and the whole gamut of e-commerce. But the ruling classes are usually not willing, in their narrow selfish interests, to impose such restrictions on international financial transactions. So it is a matter of state policy — not an evidence of a general retreat of the state.
International bodies like the IMF and WB are nothing new. If in recent years these have become excessively domineering, that only expresses the hegemonic trends of certain member states like the US and its allies. In other words, globalisation has only served to further accentuate the old economic (as well as political and military) disparity between states, with a handful of them trying to dominate world affairs ever more blatantly in the name of the multilateral institutions.

In fact, like many other instances of asymmetric development of capitalism and its political institutions, here too we witness the aggressive advances of some states like the USA vis-à-vis the collapse of some states like the former soviet Union and the retreat of the states in Eastern Europe; and moreover in the case of one and the same state, hyper-activity in certain domains (like pushing forward the policies of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation) juxtaposed against withdrawal from certain others (e.g., employment generation, education, health). This is something the anarchists and right opportunists fail to appreciate. So in the name of fighting globalisation, they tend to downplay the all-important struggle against the real, active agents of globalisation: the domestic ruling classes and the state.

The NGOs or “non-governmental organizations” (rechristened by some as CSOs or civil society organisations) counterpose civil society against the state and describe themselves as champions and vanguards of the former, working against the apathy and bureaucratism of the latter. With the blind market forces playing havoc with people’s lives and becoming a target of widespread criticism, they now claim to represent a “third way” between “authoritarian statism” and “savage market capitalism”.

The juxtaposition of the state and civil society as mutually exclusive entities is an anarchist illusion. As Marx and Engels pointed out in The German Ideology, civil society expresses itself, in its foreign relations, as the nation and inwardly organises itself as the state. In a 1846 letter to P Annenkov, Marx explained: “Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding social constitution, a corresponding organisation of the family, of orders or of classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society. Assume a particular civil society and you will get particular political conditions which are only the official expression of civil society.”

The NGOs’ glib talk on civil society seeks to obscure the fact that it is divided into the oppressor and the oppressed, the exploiter and exploited and that a life and death struggle is continually going on between these hostile camps. And for all their diatribe against the state, they can never be accused of advocating even a remote programme of overthrowing that oppressive apparatus. The NGOs thus function as a petty-bourgeois reformist response to the anti-people, repressive bourgeois order. Whereas the state functions mainly as a coercive instrument in the hands of the ruling classes, the NGOs operate essentially as ameliorative instruments seeking to deflect popular discontent and thus prevent it from being canalised into a revolutionary course. In a word, from the standpoint of stability of the bourgeois order, the two have been playing complementary roles. Readers can see that the NGOs represent the continuation of an old trend described in the Communist Manifesto :

“A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belongs economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity ... They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements.”

Initially some big NGOs had shot into prominence in the post-war era as watchdog bodies monitoring and criticising the excesses committed by the state in various parts of the world. They came to be identified with issues like human rights violation, environmental degradation, and protection of wildlife and amelioration of human destitution. During the last two decades the NGO campaign has however assumed phenomenal proportions in the ideological-political backdrop of collapse of the Soviet Union and the crisis of ‘socialist states’ on the one hand, and the ongoing intensification of imperialist globalisation on the other. In the anti-globalisation movement, the limelight is often hogged by a few giant NGOs and they have also started promoting their own version of globalisation in the form of World Social Forum and highly publicised protests against the meetings of WTO, IMF, World Bank, G-7, European Union etc. But beneath the surface, almost everywhere we can see a growing cooperation and coordination between the state and the

NGOs, where governments have virtually started leasing out the social sector to a network of NGOs.

As the state unilaterally abdicates its social obligations in one domain after another, the NGOs are encouraged and aided (by the state and corporate funding agencies) to take up these indispensable functions in the interest of social stability. This arrangement has several advantages. One, much more work can be done at an incomparably lower cost, since the lower level activists of NGOs work, as a rule, more sincerely on a meagre pay packet. The state is freed from huge financial and other ‘burdens’ of maintaining a large army of salaried employees. Two, when the state accepts a responsibility (say in health care for the poor), that becomes a legal obligation as well as a potential issue for mass movement. Neither of these applies to the welfare activities of the NGOs which, moreover, serve to depoliticise social initiatives.

To put the whole thing in perspective, in the era of growing informalisation of the economy coupled with casualisation and feminisation of the workforce and worsening environmental degradation, the long-term and overall interests of the prevalent social order demands certain checks and balances, some sort of safety net The NGOs seem to fit the bill better than the welfare state, hence its growing recognition by a whole range of governments across the political-ideological spectrum.

To begin with the basics, let us see how Lenin defined imperialism.

“If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.” (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism)

Monopoly refers, most obviously, to the giant corporations arising out of concentration of production — corporations which have become much more powerful today than in Lenin’s time, not only in the economic arena but also in the realms of politics and culture. In addition, Lenin referred to monopolistic control over sources of major raw materials like coal and petroleum; monopolies in banking and finance (the finance oligarchy); in possession of colonies, semi/neo-colonies or spheres of influence, etc.
However, in all these areas, monopolies do not mean the end of competition. Monopoly grows out of, and further accentuates, competition. Marx had already pointed out this “unity” cum “synthesis” cum “movement” between the two opposites; Lenin corroborated this in the light of new experience.

He showed, for example, why wars are inevitable under imperialism. Development of capitalism was (and remains) very uneven, so some of the capitalist great powers (like Germany) experienced more rapid development than others (Great Britain, for example) and naturally, aspired after bigger shares in the world’s resources, markets, territories. But since the “territorial division of the world was already completed” (in the form of monopolisation of colonies, spheres of influence etc.), re-division was only possible by means of war. Thus wars between big powers — or among groups of them — originate from a basic compulsion of capitalism at its monopoly stage, not from ill motives of bad statesmen.

But in addition to monopoly, Lenin noted two other characteristic features of imperialism: it is parasitic or decaying capitalism; and moribund capitalism. Let us see what Lenin actually meant by these two terms.

“Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small and weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations — all these have given rise to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism. ... It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not. In the epoch of imperialism, certain branches of industry, certain strata of bourgeoisie, and certain countries betray ... now one and now another of these tendencies. On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before” (Imperialism)
Spectacular but extremely uneven, lopsided growth and pronounced decay thus constitute a unity of opposites — where, in the ultimate analysis, decay is the principal aspect of the contradiction. This contradiction manifests itself at all levels: inter-sectoral (high-speed growth in the “New Economy” vis-a-vis crisis in the “smokestack” industries), inter-national (say Uganda compared to the USA) and inter-class (everywhere a small minority growing fatter and the vast majority sliding further down in relative or absolute poverty) and so on.

How do we interpret the term “moribund capitalism”? In Imperialism, Lenin says it is “capitalism in transition to socialism: monopoly, which grows out of capitalism, is already dying capitalism, the beginning of its transition to socialism. The tremendous socialization of labour by imperialism (what its apologists — the bourgeois economists — call “interlocking”) produces the same result.”

What Lenin means to say here is that before the rise of joint-stock companies and monopolies, capitalism was based on scattered, unplanned production carried on by a growing number of small and medium enterprises owned by individuals or partnership firms. Socialisation of production (production jointly carried on by many workers together) was at a higher stage compared to the feudal manufactory system, but not very high. The 20th century saw a leap in concentration of production (beyond factory walls and national boundaries, with components of a single product — say a car — being produced in many factories and then put together), marketing, management (one holding company controlling tens of — sometimes more than a hundred — subsidiaries, often in foreign lands) etc. This signified a tremendous rise in the degree of socialization of production and labour, but the fruits of that labour, i.e., the surplus value or profit, continued to be appropriated privately, and that too by fewer (monopolistic) concerns. Society’s productive base widened, but appropriation became narrower.

This is how the mismatch between socialised production and private appropriation — the fundamental contradiction of capitalism — gets accentuated to an unprecedented level and cry out for an urgent solution. And there is but one solution: to socialise appropriation (distribution), so as to bring it into correspondence with already socialised production. This means sharing the fruits of collective labour collectively and equally, which is possible only by transferring the ownership of land, factories, and other means of production to the whole people. And that is socialism. In this sense, “imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat” — declared Lenin.

Does this imply that capitalism’s transition to socialism is an automatic process? By no means. The subjective role of the proletariat and its party is as crucial as the objective maturing of the fundamental contradiction mentioned earlier. And it is here that we stumble upon a big problem. International monopoly concerns earn not only ‘normal’ profits at home, but also ‘super profits’ from abroad by means of export of capital. So huge is the quantum of these total profits that they can afford to spare a small part of that for bribing labour leaders and the upper stratum of organized workers so as to keep them away from revolutionary politics. Thus emerges “the labour aristocracy, who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook ... they are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, the real vehicles of reformism and chauvinism.” (Imperialism, Preface to the French and German editions)
So on one hand monopoly finance capital objectively brings socialism nearer and on the other creates a major subjective hurdle. Acutely aware of this paradox, Lenin observed towards the close of Imperialism :

“... private economic and private property relations constitute a shell [here “shell” refers to the bourgeois relations of production, within and against which the rapid socialisation of production — “the content” — is growing. — A.S.] which no longer fits its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal is artificially delayed, a shell which may remain in a state of decay for a fairly long period (if, at the worst, the cure of the opportunist abscess is protracted), but which will inevitably be removed.”

In spite of the accursed ‘Aesopian language’ which Lenin was forced to use in order to get the pamphlet published legally under tsarist censorship, the political focus is clear enough: cure the “opportunist abscess” and take the plunge for revolution. At the same time, he recognised the theoretical possibility that even in its state of decay capitalism (imperialism) may continue to exist “for a fairly long period”, particularly if opportunism in the labour movement is not dealt a death-blow. This is what we witness today; while the other possibility was actualized by Lenin who led the Bolsheviks in defeating opportunism and founding the world’s first socialist state as well as the Third (Communist) International.

But was it possible, and theoretically justifiable, to try and establish socialism in one country? Certainly not, roared the windbags and bigwigs of theory, who had learnt Marxism by rote. Didn’t Marx and Engels tell us that socialism is to be built simultaneously in all, or at least several, advanced capitalist countries? Yes they did — replied Lenin — but conditions have changed radically. At its highest and final stage, capitalism has stretched itself into a world imperialist system, but the chain is under severe strain and liable to snap at the weakest link, where socialism emerges in one country at a time. However, imperialism does have the economic and political resources and resilience to reconnect the remaining links and carry on till the next break gives it a shudder down the spine.

How many such breaks can imperialism survive, and for how long? When will it finally collapse altogether, and how? Lenin never allowed himself the luxury of toying with such childish questions. The road ahead is clear, the enemy is sighted, the hour has struck for charging forward rather than speculating on the probable twists and turns. Such was the message of Lenin, and the result was November revolution.

So these are the main economic and political dimensions of imperialism. We can grasp the finer points better when we view the Leninist theory in contrast against the view of the German Marxist thinker Karl Kautsky:

“Karl Kautsky ... refuses to regard imperialism as a “phase of capitalism” and defines it as a policy “preferred” by finance capital, a tendency of “industrial” countries to annex “agrarian” countries. Kautsky’s definition is thoroughly false from the theoretical standpoint. What distinguishes imperialism is the rule not of industrial capital, but of finance capital, the striving to annex not agrarian countries particularly, but every kind of country. Kautsky divorces imperialist politics from imperialist economics, he divorces monopoly in politics from monopoly in economics in order to pave the way for his vulgar bourgeois reformism such as “disarmament”, “ultra-imperialism” and similar nonsense. The whole purpose and significance of this theoretical falsity is to obscure the most profound contradictions of imperialism and thus justify the theory of “unity” with the apologists of imperialism, the outright social-chauvinists and opportunists.” (Lenin, Imperialism and the Split in Socialism)

Thus, starting from the same set of facts, Kautsky and Lenin reached diametrically opposite conclusions. In the monopolies, for example, Kautsky saw the strength of capitalism and the possibility of its passage to a higher, peaceful, ultra-imperialist stage: Lenin saw the decay of capitalism and the beginning of its transition to socialism. In a word, Kautsky used the words of Marx to kill the spirit of Marx. The same was true for his views on state and revolution. The following comment from The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky sums up the real worth of Kautskyism:

“Marxism is stripped of its revolutionary living spirit; everything is recognised in Marxism except the revolutionary methods of struggle, the propaganda and preparation of those methods, and the education of the masses in this direction.”
Well, don’t we still find so many Kautskys around?

In many ways, imperialism has continued to display the major features noted in Imperialism, and all the more glaringly so. Today’s transnational corporations (TNCs) far outshine Lenin’s “trusts and cartels”. “Export of capital predominating over export of commodities” has become more pronounced and assumed newer forms such as hot money flows at lightning speed. As for “parasitism”, Lenin had already talked of “the financial strangulation” of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of  “advanced” countries — by “international banker countries” and “usury imperialism” — a trend that has assumed more institutionalized shape with the rise of the transnational financial corporations and multilateral institutions like the IMF, World Bank, Asian Development Bank etc.

Lenin not only drew attention to the coalescence of bank capital and industrial capital and the new role of giant banks, but referred to the still nascent trend of speculation in land, shares, etc. emerging as the most tempting field for making a fast buck:

“... the development of capitalism has arrived at a stage when, although commodity production still ‘reigns’ and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the ‘geniuses’ of financial manipulation. At the basis of these manipulations and swindles lies socialised production; but the immense progress of mankind, which achieved this socialisation, goes to benefit ... the speculators.” (Imperialism)
Lenin stressed the inevitability of inter-imperialist wars for forced re­distribution of colonies, sources of raw materials, etc. Alliances among imperialist states, he observed, “prepare the ground for wars, and in their turn grow out of wars; the one conditions the other, producing alternating forms of peaceful and non-peaceful struggle on one and the same basis of imperialist connections and relations within world economics and world politics.”

This is exactly how the world situation developed up to the Second World War, and it remains relevant as a long-term perspective.

But that war brought about certain basic and long-term changes in forms of political domination/hegemony and in the international balance of forces and consequently in the rules of the imperialist game of war and peace .A tremendous upsurge in national liberation movements forced the old and wounded imperialist powers like Great Britain, France, Italy, etc. to beat a retreat and take recourse to indirect methods of exploitation and domination. Many countries like our own passed on from colonial to semi-colonial status, where a limited political independence serves to hide unbridled economic plunder by several imperialist powers. War among imperialist countries for redivision of these colonial possessions, which marked the whole modern history of Europe and which therefore found a prominent place in Imperialism, had to become, historically, a thing of the past.

Secondly, the USA, which suffered the least in the war, emerged as an economic and military “superpower” (a new category) even as certain “great powers” (Germany, Italy, Japan) found themselves in ruins and others (most notably Great Britain and France) suffered heavy casualties in human, military and economic terms, including the loss of colonies. Washington used the situation to its best advantage. Through economic measures like launching the Marshall Plan and setting up the Fund-Bank twins, military initiatives like floating the NATO, a high-pitch ideological campaign against the “red danger” (rendered all the more palpable following the emergence of socialist China and Cuba) and various other means, it acquired over the capitalist world a hegemony — a combination of domination and leadership — that was unique in modern history. A semblance of unity prevailed, and. the gradual rise of a hegemonic “Soviet superpower” (a new category again) served as an inhibiting factor, keeping the inter-imperialist contradictions in check. On the military plane, the rapid proliferation of nuclear weapons (which, for the first time in history, had the capacity to destroy all life on earth several times over) led to the novel doctrines of “mutual deterrence” and “cold war” even as wars of the old kind — wars of aggression against underdeveloped countries — continued to be waged by imperialist powers, the USA in particular.

But behind these alterations, the essential economic continuity remained. Lenin had written about “war contracts” as sources of mega-profits for big corporations; today we stand witness to a full-scale “war economy” and “military-industrial complex” (to use a term coined by US president Eisenhower). We also hear about “military Keynesianism”, which advocates wars as a means for toning up first the war-related industries and then, by extension, the whole economy — a strategy quite popular in US military circles, particularly the Republicans.

The collapse of the Soviet camp brought about the next major set of changes in international relations. With the disappearance of the inhibiting factor, the inter-imperialist contradictions which used to express themselves on issues of trade and finance now began to assume political overtones. The process was long-drawn, and came to the surface only before and during the recent war on Iraq. These contradictions are bound to intensify in the face of growing American obduracy and unilateralism, but are not likely to assume, at least in the near future, the shape of military confrontations. Rather, the narrow self-interests which prompted France, Germany etc. to oppose the Anglo-US move in Iraq also compel them to keep the godfather in good humour, as the post-war unanimous UN resolution withdrawing sanctions on Iraq showed.

The years that followed did not witness any notable escalation of inter-imperialist contradictions.  However, the advent of euro as the challenger to dollar dictatorship in international commerce, added with the galloping US current account and budgetary deficits and sharp drop in the competitiveness of American industry (vide the World Economic Forum’s global competitiveness index, September 2006) indicate that US economic hegemony over the imperialist world is slowly coming under a cloud and on a longer term this may lead to serious political implications.

Finally, in the modus operandi of imperialist finance capital, a range of changes have taken; place (and are increasingly taking place) which are too vast to be discussed here.

What is the relation between imperialism and globalisation?

Globalisation is a euphemism for the global offensive — economic, political and, as it recently turned out, military offensive — of imperialism led by US imperialism. If we were to divide the historical stage of imperialism, which has completed a hundred years of existence, into a few distinct phases (i.e., sub-stages), we might call globalisation its latest phase.

But is not globalisation an old, inbuilt tendency of capital? Yes it is. We all remember the classic, ever bright and highly insightful portrayal of the globalising impulse of capital in the Communist Manifesto. In fact this impulse has manifested itself over the centuries in three distinct but overlapping “waves”:

(i)     the wave of mercantile capital on its trading and colonising spree starting from the fag end of the 15th century and continuing up to early 20tn century;

(ii)     the wave of industrial capital since the industrial revolution in late 18th century, aimed principally at controlling/capturing sources of raw materials and markets for industrial products:

(iii)     the wave of finance capital (which emerged at the juncture of the 19th and 20th centuries, as the monopolistic coalescence of industrial capital and bank capital) based on the electronics revolution in the latter half (especially the last quarter) of the 20th century.

The second wave did not end but merged into the third, which became particularly conspicuous since the early 1990s with the spread of information technology and came to be called globalisation. We must not lose sight of this thread of continuity running through the different stages and phases of capitalism, but perhaps we should pay even more attention to studying what is new in the present phase. For instance, in Lenin’s time export of capital from advanced to backward countries (as well as between advanced ones) was a growing feature of imperialism; in recent times we have also seen a reverse flow from underdeveloped to developed countries (from the peripheries to the metropolitan centres of capitalism). This led the noted speculator George Soros to comment, “The most urgent need is to arrest the reverse flow of capital. That would ensure the continued allegiance of the periphery to the global capitalist system ... (The Crisis of Global Capitalism, 1998)

Yes, many are the new features of imperialist globalisation; but here we have a very limited scope to deal with them at length. So we shall briefly mention the more important ones:

(i) Increasing integration of the global economy based on incredibly fast and massive movements of finance capital across the globe through stock and currency markets, made possible by (a) the amazing achievements in information technology (IT) and (b) dissolution of the Soviet bloc and opening up of China, which have cleared the ground for a single world capitalist economy.

(ii) Speculation in foreign currencies, shares, bonds etc. predominating over manufacturing sectors, which is plagued by overproduction (read under­consumption) and falling profit rates. By the late 1990s, the volume of transactions per day in foreign exchange markets alone came to over $ 1.2 trillion, which was equal to the value of all trade in goods and services in an entire quarter.

(iii) The central role of speculation leading to frequent and devastating stock market crashes and currency turmoils. To cite just one example, the great dotcom collapse of 2000-2001 wiped out $ 4.6 trillion in investor wealth on Wall Street — an amount that was half of the American GDP and four times the wealth wiped out in the 1987 crash.

(iv) The global stranglehold and ever-deepening intrusion of mega corporations into all domains of public and private life. The cult of the colossus being played out in the shape of mega-mergers (Exxon-Mobil, Daimler Benz-Chrystler-Mitsubishi), mega scams (Enron) and of course, mega bankruptcies (Worldcom, Daewoo).

(v) Emergence of the WTO as the flagship leading the imperialist economic offensive against underdeveloped countries, razing their tariff barriers to the ground while protecting the markets of rich countries from third world manufactures. After the IMF, the WTO is now imperialism’s most notorious arm in undermining the weaker nations’ economic sovereignty, which also results from the unrestricted cross-border flow of private (non-institutional) finance.

(vi) Concomitant attacks on the political sovereignty of these countries in so many ways, including the open rehabilitation of colonialism — in the “failed states” and “rogue states” to start with (the trial of Milosevich; the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq).

(vii) Rise of the anti-globalisation (and lately anti-war) movement and “new internationalism” as a powerful counterweight to the global offensive of capital.
In these features one easily notices the elements of both continuity and change. It is the dialectical unity of the two aspects that impels us to describe globalisation as the latest phase (and of course, the most reactionary phase) of imperialism.

All the developed industrialised countries such as Belgium, Japan, Germany, Australia and so on are imperialist in terms of the economic essence or stage of development (decaying, parasitic, monopoly capitalism dominated by finance capital); many of them also possess, and occasionally use, their enormous military prowess. But among them there is one country which has earned the outrageous distinction of being the world people’s enemy number one.

The first wave of global extension of capitalism was led by maritime and mercantile powers like Spain, Holland, England; the second wave by England to start with, (for that was the birth place of the industrial revolution); the third by the USA, the forerunner in the latest Scientific and Technological Revolution and by far the biggest economic (and also military) power. It is only natural that like Spain and England in earlier periods, today the USA aspires for continuous expansion of its sphere of influence, for a world empire. But the most crucial difference is that, as Eric Hobsbawm pointed out in a mid-2003 article in the Guardian, all other empires knew that they were not the only ones — they had to reckon with real and potential challengers. Not so Washington. After the collapse of the other superpower it thinks and acts like the monarch of all it surveys. Moreover, whereas even the British at the summit of its power operated no more than one quarter of the earth’s surface, Pax Americana has got the economic, diplomatic and military means to actively campaign for “full-spectrum dominance” over the globe. This is the Empire of our times: not in a post-imperialist sense as in Negri and Hardt, but as the highest (and may be the last – who knows?) product of imperialism today, much like fascism was in another period, and awaits the same fate as all other empires in history.

Classes and Class Struggle

Class is determined by the objective position a social group occupies in the vast network of production and distribution, by its relation to the means of production (i.e., whether it owns or just works on these means) and consequently, by the share of gross social wealth it possesses. To take a simple example, industrialists occupy a privileged position in a country’s economic (and therefore also in the political) network because they own factories and amass huge wealth by usurping the surplus value produced by industrial workers. The workers on the other hand are underprivileged because they operate, but do not own, the plants and machinery and eat or starve depending on whether they find work or not.

The class configuration of society differs from country to country and time to time (basically according to the mode(s) of production), but every class society is divided into working, exploited classes and exploiting, ruling classes. Struggle between these two sections goes on uninterruptedly in different intensities and forms like wage and land struggle, agitation for political democracy and policy changes, battle for ousting dictatorial and corrupt regimes, and so on. At critical junctures it flares up into revolutions which drastically change the economic, political and cultural character of a society.

Classes carry on their struggle through their mass organisations like trade unions, chambers of commerce, etc. as well as through political parties representing them, or sections of them. In our country, for example, parties like the Congress, the BJP etc. represent and work for capitalists, landlords and kulaks.
Proletariat and Communist Party

Communist Party is the revolutionary party of the proletariat. It unites and mobilises the working class and all exploited oppressed sections of society in the struggle for their immediate interests and for putting an end to all exploitation and injustice.

The Communist Manifesto defines “the proletariat, the modern working class” as “a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.” The proletariat is the most revolutionary class, because it constitutes the lowest stratum, the base, of the pyramid-like class structure of a capitalist society and therefore when it stands up to liberate itself, the whole class pyramid — “the whole superincumbent strata of official society” — crumbles down. The proletariat’s great revolutionary potential, its leading role in revolution, is thus inherent in its objective location within the modern class hierarchy: in the fact that to liberate itself it has to liberate all other toiling classes. Additionally, their collective, organised, disciplined life, their live contact with modern technology, and the fact that they “have nothing to loose but their chains” make the proletarians particularly capable and consistent as the organised vanguards of revolution.

Leadership in the destruction of the old oppressive social structure makes the working class the natural leader in the construction of a new society. In Europe, it was in its own class interest that the bourgeoisie led the demolition of feudalism and, on the strength of that, also the construction of the capitalist order. So in spite of the slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, it retained and perfected the system of class divisions and exploitation. But the proletariat has no subaltern classes to exploit, its interest rather lies in the abolition of private property, so it builds the new society in that image. After revolution, it thus rediscovers itself in a new role as the architect of a new society.
But the working class cannot grasp or realise this historic mission simply in course of its economic or trade union struggles. The Communist Party alone makes it conscious of, and organises it for, this role. To say the same thing in another way, the proletariat’s objective historic role gains conscious and concentrated expression in the Communist Party, in Marxism-Leninism.

Democratic and Socialist Revolutions

Historically, democratic revolution is the bridge leading from the feudal to the bourgeois order. The English and the French revolutions (mid 17th and late 18th centuries respectively) were classic examples, which abolished serfdom and monarchy and ushered in the parliamentary republic. Being anti-feudal, the democratic revolution has as its main force the broad peasant masses. In England and France it was led by the rising capitalist class.

Socialist revolution, such as the November revolution in Russia (1917), signifies the passage from capitalism to socialism. It abolishes capitalist private property, hands over to the whole people the major means of production, which are managed by the socialist state (see chapter on “the state”). The leading force of the socialist revolution is the working class allied with other working people.

However, as Lenin remarked in Our Revolution, “while the development of world history follows general laws ... certain periods of development may display peculiarities in either the form or sequence of this development.” What happened is that with the growing strength of the working class movement, particularly after the Paris Commune (1871), the bourgeoisie took fright, entered into a historic compromise with feudal forces against the toiling people, and abandoned the task of democratic revolution, which therefore had to be taken up by the new revolutionary class, the modern proletariat. This adds a whole new dimension to the character of democratic revolution, for unlike the bourgeoisie, the working class cannot stop with the democratic revolution but carries it uninterruptedly to the socialist stage. Lenin expressed this very succinctly in Two Tactics of Social

Democracy in the Democratic Revolution:

“The proletariat must carry the democratic revolution to completion, allying to itself the mass of the peasantry in order to crush the autocracy’s resistance by force and paralyse the bourgeoisie’s instability. The proletariat must accomplish the socialist revolution, allying to itself the mass of the semi-proletarian elements of the population, so as to crush the bourgeoisie’s resistance by force and paralyse the instability of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie.” (emphasis in the original)

Although the above statement pertained in particular to Russia in the early 20th century and summed up the Bolshevik position on the steady advance from democratic (attempted in 1905 and successfully accomplished in February 1917) to socialist (November 1917) revolutions, it opened up new vistas for the progress of revolutionary theory and practice. On this basis Mao Zedong developed his theory of new (or people’s) democratic revolution, which provided broad guidelines for revolutions in the backward countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America in the era of imperialism. The Indian revolution today is in the stage of people’s democratic revolution, with agrarian revolution as the axis and feudal remnants, imperialism and big capital as main targets. As the general programme of the CPI(ML) proclaims:

“Though the primary aim of this democratic revolution will be to abolish all feudal remnants and the concomitant autocratic and bureaucratic distortions in the polity, it will necessarily have several socialist aspects as well. More than creating conditions for a decisive victory of democratic revolution, the struggle against big capital will also pave the way for an uninterrupted transition from the democratic to the socialist stage of revolution.”

Socialism and Communism

The real negation of capitalism is communism, which abolishes all forms of exploitation of man by man. But this cannot be achieved by one stroke. Socialism came to be conceptualised as the first decisive step of transition towards communism.

Initially socialism carries many imperfections (economic, political, cultural, etc.), many birth-marks of the bourgeois order from whose womb it emerges. Vestiges of classes and class struggle remain, and at times the latter grows very sharp. People work wholeheartedly for the common good, for the society as a whole, and are paid according to the quantity and quality of work done. This is expressed in the motto: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.”

The imperfections of the first stage, or stage of transition, are gradually overcome under the leadership of the victorious Communist Party. Classes and class struggle, and with these the state machinery, become a thing of the past. The second stage of socialism or communism, arrives. Thanks to material abundance, ideological progress and the cultural revolution, society can now inscribe on its banner the motto: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” That is to say, society takes from everyone whatever s/he can contribute by way of work and gives away whatever s/ he needs.

Communists and Social Democrats

Communism means a classless society evolved on the ruins of capitalism (which is based on capitalist exploitation of wage labour). This is to be achieved by intensification of class struggle to the point of abolition of the two poles of the antagonism — capital and wage labour. Whenever communists participate in institutions of bourgeois democracy — e.g., the parliament —they do it exclusively for this end and never for harmonising (the interests of the opposing classes.
By contrast social democrats take such institutions “as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labour, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty-bourgeoisie”. (From The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx)

In a word, communism is essentially revolutionary: its adherents value reforms basically as stepping stones to revolution. Social democrats are essentially class collaborationist and reformist: they advocate and work for reforms to prevent revolution.

They thus work for preserving the capitalist social order, albeit in a more democratic, more civilised shape. This is where their petty-bourgeois outlook converges with that of the more intelligent sections of the big bourgeoisie.

Thanks to this outlook and their stubborn struggle against revolutionary communists, social democrats earn the trust of the ruling bourgeoisie. In the face of crisis, the latter sometimes allows or even supports social democratic parties to form governments in the existing parliamentary system and act as crisis managers on their behalf. Such governments play this role through state welfarism (providing relief to the poor) and by persuading the exploiters and the exploited to agree to a set of compromises (in the name of industrial peace and development, national interest etc.) so that class conflicts are kept within bounds and a revolutionary conflagration is avoided. In the process, however, they get thoroughly embroiled in bourgeois parliamentarism and thus assimilated in the capitalist system itself, and acquire all the vices of this system such as corruption, anti-people bureaucratic attitude and so on. Such cases have been experienced in many a country; and also in our country at the state level.

To avoid confusion, it should be remembered that owing to peculiar historical circumstances, Russian communists used to call themselves Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. It was only after the revolution that the name of communist party was formally adopted. So in most writings of Lenin, “social democracy” is used in a positive sense, meaning communists.

In addition to articles and books cited in the text — among which Capital may be a bit too difficult for the beginner — the following may be taken up as the next course :

Marx and Engels

Class Struggles In France
Civil War in France
The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State

V I Lenin

What is To Be Done?

“Left-Wing” Communism — an Infantile Disorder
Marxism and Revisionism
State and Revolution,

MaoZedong

Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society
The Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese Revolution
On New Democracy