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36. THE DOMINION OF CAPITAL OVER LABOUR

Capital, according to bourgeois economists, is stored labour serving as a means for fresh production. They come to this conclusion because they look upon capital as an assemblage of raw materials, instruments of labour, and supplies for the maintenance of life, the whole being essential to the continuance of production. But all these constituent parts of capital are commodities, that is to say they are products that are already endowed with a definitely social character, which they assume only after economic relations have reached a certain stage of development. Thus capital is not merely a sum of material products; it is an assemblage of products which are commodities, which are exchange-values, which are objects having a social significance. Every sum of commodities is such a sum of exchange-values. How is its conversion into capital effected?

«How is a quantity of commodities, of exchange-values transformed into capital? In this way. As an independent social power (i.e., as the power of a part of society), it maintains itself and increases itself through exchange for living labour power. The existence of a class of persons who own nothing except their capacity for labour is an indispensable prerequisite to the existence of capital. Only the rule of stored-up, past, materialised labour over living labour, transforms stored-up labour into capital. Capital does not consist in this, that stored-up labour serves living labour as a means for fresh production. It consists in this, that living labour serves stored-up labour as a means for maintaining and increasing its exchange-value.» (Marx, Lohnarbeit und Kapital, pp. 26-27; Wage-Labour and Capital, pp. 17-18.)

In Capital, Marx gives an even clearer exposition of the way in which stored-up, dead labour rules living labour, in which past labour rules present labour:

«All kinds of capitalist production, in so far as they are not merely labour processes, but also processes for promoting the self-expansion of capital, have this in common, that in them the worker does not use the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour use the worker. However, it is only in machine production that this inversion acquires a technical and palpable reality. Through its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour comes to confront the worker during the labour process as capital, as dead labour, which controls the living labour and sucks it dry.» (Marx, Capital, I, 455-6.)

The system of society in which the great majority of the population is obliged to sell itself for a paltry wage, is described by bourgeois economists as a "free" regime.

«Do not let yourselves be deceived by that abstraction 'freedom'», exclaimed Marx in the speech on free trade from which I have already quoted. «Whose freedom? The word does not betoken the freedom of one person in relation to another. It betokens merely freedom for capital to oppress the worker. Why should people try to find a warrant for 'free' competition by invoking the sanction of this idea of freedom, seeing that the idea of freedom is itself only the product of a state of affairs based on free competition?» (See Misere de la philosophic, pp. 287-8; Quelch's translation, P. 193.)

Explanatory Notes on the Communist Manifesto, D. Riazanov

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The old patriarchal regime cunningly concealed the enslavement of the worker. Spiritually speaking, the worker was nothing more than a corpse; he vegetated in the most complete ignorance of his own interests and without the slightest general knowledge. Only when the master had become a stranger; only when it became clear to the eyes of the whole world that the only bond which united the slave and the master was the latter's personal interest in taking advantage of his position; only when all ties of sympathy had disappeared, without leaving behind him the slightest trace, only then did the worker begin to become conscious of his position and his interests, only then did he begin to revive spiritually, ceasing to be, in feeling, in thought and in effort, his master's slave.

Explanatory notes on the Communist Manifesto, D. Riazanov

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Here as everywhere else, we must distinguish between the increased productiveness due to the development of the social process of production, and that due to the capitalist exploitation of that process. In handicrafts and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool, in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufacture the workmen are parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage.

“The miserable routine of endless drudgery and toil in which the same mechanical process is gone through over and over again, is like the labour of Sisyphus. The burden of labour, like the rock, keeps ever falling back on the worn-out labourer.”

At the same time that factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity. The lightening of the labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest.

Capital Vol. 1 Ch. 15, Karl Marx

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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. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.

Capital Vol. 1 Ch. 32, Karl Marx

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“Working men of all countries, unite!” But few voices responded when we proclaimed these words to the world 42 years ago, on the eve of the first Paris Revolution in which the proletariat came out with the demands of its own. On September 28, 1864, however, the proletarians of most of the Western European countries joined hands in the International Working Men's Association of glorious memory. True, the International itself lived only nine years. But that the eternal union of the proletarians of all countries created by it is still alive and lives stronger than ever, there is no better witness than this day. Because today [May 1st of 1890, the first International Worker's Day in history], as I write these lines, the European and American proletariat is reviewing its fighting forces, mobilized for the first time, mobilized as one army, under one flag, for one immediate aim: the standard eight-hour working day to be established by legal enactment, as proclaimed by the Geneva Congress of the International in 1866, and again by the Paris Workers’ Congress of 1889. And today’ s spectacle will open the eyes of the capitalists and landlords of all countries to the fact that today the proletarians of all countries are united indeed.

If only Marx were still by my side to see this with his own eyes!

The Communist Manifesto, preface to the 1890 German Edition, Friedrich Engels.

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The preface to the present edition I must, alas, sign alone. Marx, the man to whom the whole working class of Europe and America owes more than to any one else — rests at Highgate Cemetery and over his grave the first grass is already growing. Since his death, there can be even less thought of revising or supplementing the Manifesto. But I consider it all the more necessary again to state the following expressly:

The basic thought running through the Manifesto — that economic production, and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom, constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primaeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social evolution; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression, class struggles — this basic thought belongs solely and exclusively to Marx.

I have already stated this many times; but precisely now is it necessary that it also stand in front of the Manifesto itself.

The Communist Manifesto, preface to the 1883 German Edition. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

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Free state — what is this?

It is by no means the aim of the workers, who have got rid of the narrow mentality of humble subjects, to set the state free. In the German Empire, the "state" is almost as "free" as in Russia. Freedom consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it; and today, too, the forms of state are more free or less free to the extent that they restrict the "freedom of the state".

[...] Nevertheless, the different states of the different civilized countries, in spite or their motley diversity of form, all have this in common: that they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more or less capitalistically developed. They have, therefore, also certain essential characteristics in common. In this sense, it is possible to speak of the "present-day state" in contrast with the future, in which its present root, bourgeois society, will have died off.

The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word 'people' with the word 'state'.

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

Critique of the Gotha Programme (ch. IV), Karl Marx (1875)

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Among them was a company of international fighters, who had enlisted in the early days in Barcelona, before the forming of the International Brigades. One of them was an older man, a German. “I came because I know what fascism is,” he said. “I have lived three years in emigration. Spain took me in and gave me work, so I fight to protect my Spanish comrades from fascism. I should not wish these friends to know the bitterness of exile that I have known.” Two Italians sat on the edge of a trench moving bits of stone about on the soil. “We are planning a counter-offensive against Mussolini,” they said.

All of this group was well informed and angry on the subject of foreign nations, and their knowledge and wrath was passed on totheir simpler Catalan friends. It was not Germany and Italy alone that drew their wrath: they expected fascist nations to be foes. But the attitude of England and France was to them like a knife in the back from an expected friend.

“It is a mock to democracy and to international law, what they have done,” a French boy from Barcelona said to me. “Yet Blum calls himself a Socialist. What he does is the death of socialism and of democracy! Can they not see that on this Madrid front we also defend France?”

“The reactionaries know it well enough,” said a Belgian, “and the democrats don’t care. If it were not for the indirect help the democratic governments thus give the fascists, we could long ago have finished them. But these big countries do it with impunity, disregarding the lives of thousands of men. Now there will be a long hard war and heavy cost to all of us before we finish.” Never once did they doubt that they would finish, however long the war and hard the cost.

“What message do you want me to take to America?” I asked them.

“Tell them,” said a youth with the red-tasseled militia cap of Catalonia, “that if they don’t fight their oppressors they’ll be all their lives exploited. Tell them”—here he sent a grin at Carlos and the brigade commander who was with us—”that if they want good things to eat at Christmas such as we have, they also must fight as we do.”

“Did you have good things to eat at Christmas?” I asked them, puzzled at his meaning.

The youth puffed out his chest and made a grandiloquent gesture. “Magnífico!” he said. Then he laughed and hit his commander on the back, saying: “I think I must give her a good impression, what!”

Spain in Arms, 1937, Anna Louise Strong (1937)

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What were the chief manifestations, survivals, remnants of serfdom in Russia up to 1917? The monarchy, the system of social estates, landed proprietorship and land tenure, the status of women, religion, and national oppression. Take any one of these Augean stables, which, incidentally, were left largely uncleansed by all the more advanced states when they accomplished their bourgeois-democratic revolutions one hundred and twenty-five, two hundred and fifty and more years ago (1649 in England); take any of these Augean stables, and you will see that we have cleansed them thoroughly. In a matter of ten weeks, from October 25 (November 7), 1917 to January 5, 1918, when the Constituent Assembly was dissolved, we accomplished a thousand times more in this respect than was accomplished by the bourgeois democrats and liberals (the Cadets) and by the petty-bourgeois democrats (the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries) during the eight months they were in power.

Those poltroons, gas-bags, vainglorious Narcissuses and petty Hamlets brandished their wooden swords—but did not even destroy the monarchy! We cleansed out all that monarchist muck as nobody had ever done before. We left not a stone, not a brick of that ancient edifice, the social-estate system even the most advanced countries, such as Britain, France and Germany, have not completely eliminated the survivals of that system to this day!), standing. We tore out the deep-seated roots of the social-estate system, namely, the remnants of feudalism and serfdom in the system of landownership, to the last. “One may argue” (there are plenty of quill-drivers, Cadets, Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries abroad to indulge in such arguments) as to what “in the long run” will be the outcome of the agrarian reform effected by the Great October Revolution. We have no desire at the moment to waste time on such controversies, for we are deciding this, as well as the mass of accompanying controversies, by struggle. But the fact cannot be denied that the petty-bourgeois democrats “compromised” with the landowners, the custodians of the traditions of serfdom, for eight months, while we completely swept the landowners and all their traditions from Russian soil in a few weeks.

Take religion, or the denial of rights to women, or the oppression and inequality of the non-Russian nationalities. These are all problems of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. The vulgar petty-bourgeois democrats talked about them for eight months. In not a single one of the most advanced countries in the world have these questions been completely settled on bourgeois-democratic lines. In our country they have been settled completely by the legislation of the October Revolution. We have fought and are fighting religion in earnest. We have granted all the non-Russian nationalities their own republics or autonomous regions. We in Russia no longer have the base, mean and infamous denial of rights to women or inequality of the sexes, that disgusting survival of feudalism and medievalism, which is being renovated by the avaricious bourgeoisie and the dull-witted and frightened petty bourgeoisie in every other country in the world without exception.

All this goes to make up the content of the bourgeois-democratic revolution. A hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty years ago the progressive leaders of that revolution (or of those revolutions, if we consider each national variety of the one general type) promised to rid mankind of medieval privileges, of sex inequality, of state privileges for one religion or another (or “religious ideas ”, “the church” in general), and of national inequality. They promised, but did not keep their promises. They could not keep them, for they were hindered by their “respect”— for the “sacred right of private property”. Our proletarian revolution was not afflicted with this accursed “respect” for this thrice-accursed medievalism and for the “sacred right of private property”.

Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution, V. I. Lenin (1921)

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Comrades, the elections to the Moscow Soviet show that the Party of the Communists is gaining strength among the working class.

It is essential that women workers take a greater part in the elections. The Soviet government was the first and only government in the world to abolish completely all the old, bourgeois, infamous laws which placed women in an inferior position compared with men and which granted privileges to men, as, for instance, in the sphere of marriage laws or in the sphere of the legal attitude to children. The Soviet government was the first and only government in the world which, as a government of the toilers, abolished all the privileges connected with property, which men retained in the family laws of all bourgeois republics, even the most democratic.

Where there are landlords, capitalists and merchants, there can be no equality between women and men even in law.

Where there are no landlords, capitalists and merchants, where the government of the toilers is building a new life without these exploiters, there equality between women and men exists in law.

But that is not enough.

It is a far cry from equality in law to equality in life.

We want women workers to achieve equality with men workers not only in law, but in life as well. For this, it is essential that women workers take an ever increasing part in the administration of public enterprises and in the administration of the state.

By engaging in the work of administration women will learn quickly and they will catch up with the men.

Therefore, elect more women workers, both Communist and non-Party, to the Soviet. If she is only an honest woman worker who is capable of managing work sensibly and conscientiously, it makes no difference if she is not a member of the Party--elect her to the Moscow Soviet.

Let there be more women workers in the Moscow Soviet! Let the Moscow proletariat show that it is prepared to do and is doing everything for the fight to victory, for the fight against the old inequality, against the old, bourgeois, humiliation of women!

The proletariat cannot achieve complete freedom, unless it achieves complete freedom for women.

To the Working Women, V. I. Lenin (1920)

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Sick of hunger, exploitation and terror, the workers have flung themselves to battle looking through struggle for bread, land and freedom. In many places, especially Asturias and Vizcaya, the red banner of revolution and soviet power has waved in the wind as a symbol of a new Spain free of misery. The heroicism of the workers in the fight has culminated in the glorious feat of red Asturias, where the socialist republic of workers and peasants has been proclaimed

Notice by the Communist Party of Spain regarding the Asturias revolution, 27th of October, 1934

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Every "democracy" consists of proclaiming and exercising "rights" that have very little chances of being exercised and are very conditional under capitalism, while socialism is impossible without proclaiming these rights, without struggling for the concession of these rights immediately, instantly, and without educating the masses in the spirit of this struggle

On the caricature of marxism and "imperialist economism", V. I. Lenin (1916), published 1924 in Zvezdá magazine, numbers 1 and 2

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This is the radical difference that distinguishes the psychology of the peasant, handicraftsman, intellectual, the petty bourgeois in general, from that of the proletarian. The petty bourgeois sees and feels that he is heading for ruin, that life is becoming more difficult, that the struggle for existence is ever more ruthless, and that his position and that of his family are becoming more and more hopeless. It is an indisputable fact, and the petty bourgeois protests against it.

But how does he protest?

He protests as the representative of a class that is hopelessly perishing, that despairs of its future, that is depressed and cowardly. There is nothing to be done ... if only there were fewer children to suffer our torments and hard toil, our poverty and our humiliation—such is the cry of the petty bourgeois.

The class-conscious worker is far from holding this point of view. He will not allow his consciousness to be dulled by such cries no matter how sincere and heartfelt they may be. Yes, we workers and the mass of small proprietors lead a life that is filled with unbearable oppression and suffering. Things are harder for our generation than they were for our fathers. But in one respect we are luckier than our fathers. We have begun to learn and are rapidly learning to fight—and to fight not as individuals, as the best of our fathers fought, not for the slogans of bourgeois speechifiers that are alien to us in spirit, but for our slogans, the slogans of our class. We are fighting better than our fathers did. Our children will fight better than we do, and they will be victorious.

The working class is not perishing, it is growing, becoming stronger, gaining courage, consolidating itself, educating itself and becoming steeled in battle. We are pessimists as far as serfdom, capitalism and petty, production are concerned, but we are ardent optimists in what concerns the working-class movement and its aims. We are already laying the foundation of a new edifice and our children will complete its construction.

The Working Class and NeoMalthusianism, V. I. Lenin (Pravda No. 137, June 16, 1913)

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The momentous nature of the war made it imperative to revise Stalin’s Short Biography, published by the Institute of Marx, Engels and Lenin (IMEL) in 1939. There was also a great deal of interest in his biography internationally. The Stalin cult had gone global. Stalin was Time Man of the Year in both 1939 and 1942. During the war, Stalin was inundated with questions and requests for interviews from foreign journalists. [...]

The need for a biography of Lenin that would teach people Marxism-Leninism was Stalin’s first comment. As to his own biography, it was full of mistakes. ‘I have all kinds of teachings,’ said Stalin sarcastically – about the war, communism, industrialisation, collectivisation, etc. ‘What are people supposed to do after reading this biography? Get down on their knees and pray to me?’ The biography should instil in people a love of the party. It should feature other party cadres. The chapter on the Great Patriotic War wasn’t bad, although it, too, needed to mention other prominent personalities.

Mochalov’s account tallies with that of Pravda editor P. N. Pospelov. ‘There is some idiocy in the biography draft,’ complained Stalin to Pospelov. ‘And it is Alexandrov who is responsible for this idiocy.’ Pospelov took particular note of Stalin’s demand that it should reference leading figures who had worked with him in Baku, name those who had also taken up Lenin’s banner after his death, and mention the members of his Supreme Command during the war. Something should also be added about the role of women, said Stalin. The tone of the biography was ‘SRish’ i.e. too focused on him as a hero. To prove that point, he quoted the line, ‘No one in the world ever led such broad masses.’ And nowhere did the biography state what Stalin had told Emil Ludwig in 1931 – that he considered himself merely a pupil of Lenin’s.

Briefed by Stalin and armed with the boss’s editorial corrections, Alexandrov’s team quickly revised their draft text. The new edition of the biography was published by Pravda in February 1947 and then as a book with an initial print run of a million copies. As was the case with the Short Course, Stalin toned down the adulation of himself. He inserted the names of many co-workers and made changes that emphasised his partnership with Lenin. He cut completely a section extolling his role as the leader of the international communist movement beloved by proletarians throughout the world. A substantial section was added on the role of women in the revolutionary movement and in building socialism. ‘Working women are the most oppressed of all the oppressed,’ Stalin is quoted as saying in one of his speeches.

Stalin's Library - A Dictator and his Books, Geoffrey Roberts (2022)

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"I am a woman. I know the old priests' proverb: 'A chicken is not a bird; a woman is not a person.' Four years ago when you elected me, men met me on the road with grins. Even to my face they told me that I could do nothing. That solid man, Peter Zhitov, can't run this village and you, a woman, try! I wept sometimes from the insults and thought of giving up entirely. But I remembered Lenin's word that every kitchen maid must learn to rule the State, That applied to me, for I worked from the age of 12 as cowherd and later as kitchen girl at General Solomon's: And I said: 'Who will ever make over this old life unless we ourselves do it?' "

The Voice of the Soviet Village, Anna Louise Strong (1935)

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In Gulinka, a village overnight by train from Moscow plus a two-hour walk through the mud, there was no reason for rushing the election. But Maria Kurkina, the village President, thought the holidays on the anniversary of the Revolution offered an excellent chance to hold both an election and an Old Home Week. "We are rather a backward village," she said. "We have only a four-year school and frightful roads and no electricity yet. But we've stirred up in these past four years a lot of public spirit that is ready for great achlevements. Most of us have not seen the world and don't know the many things there are to get. Yet from our backward Gulinka no less than fifty people have gone to honorable tasks in our Soviet country- some engineers, an army commander, a doctor, a surveyor, an assistant editor, the foremen of the marten ovens in Stalingrad, many promislng students and several other notables. Let us invile them to tell us what is this Soviet power and what it offers. Let them tell us the shortcomings of our Gulinka, that we may know how to instruct our Deputies; then we shall be behind nobody in all new blessings there are to acquire."

Every one in the village thought the idea splendid, and as there was no opposing voice President Kurkina went to the township election commission and asked that commissioners be sent to see that Gulinka's election was held properly. "All your grain deliveries in?" asked the township commission. "Potato deliveries too? No village campaigns unfinished? No work which the outgoing Soviet has still to do? Then hold it when you like; it's your affair. Have you made your report yet ?" "Made it and printed it, and every one has discussed it," Kurkina replied proudly, producing a neat little folder, My Report to the Voters. Such reports, though not always printed, are made by all Soviet officials to their constituents. The reports, telling how the instructions given at the previous election have been carried out, must be discussed at least a week before the voting so that the election meeting may confine itself to candidates.

Kurkina's report was homely enough in its detalla. Nowhere in its sixteen printed pages did she brag of her own work; nowhere did she ask for votes. She told of great improvements in the village and described how they were accomplished.

"During your daily work you hardly notice how life is changing," President Kurkina's report began. But when you look back to sum up these four years you note a very great difference in our life, our village and our people. Many new brick houses replace the broken huts, A radio central rereiver gives Moscow conoerto to our homes. Outside the villago great brick structures are rising- the slables, barns and granaries of our collective farms. Cottage windows that formerly frightened one by their blackness are bright with flowers and white curtains People also are changing. The children of former farmhands become doctors , engineers, commanders."

The Voice of the Soviet Village, Anna Louise Strong (1935)

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We believe that alliances with social democracy are an opportunistic manifestation of class collaboration and a serious obstacle to revolutionary struggle; the conformation of fronts of that nature will always be a liquidating element of the Communist Party; and the absence of a communist party is the biggest attack on the working class and its immediate and historical objectives.

There are, for example, expressions of those alliances that have no justification, and one of them is support for the Democratic Party of the US Communist Party. And it is that when the perspective of the interests of the working class is set aside and the logic of the “lesser evil” is placed even the imperialist policy of the Democratic Party may seem better to the imperialist policy of the Republican Party. Thus several communist parties justify their support for bourgeois policies under the pretext of struggle against the "ultra-right" and fascism.

We have great respect for the communists' policy against fascism during World War II, but we cannot deny that some elements of that policy are connected to browderism, to the opportunist platform of the 20th Congress of the CPSU, to Eurocommunism, and in some way they form a platform of certain similarities to that of opportunism in the II International.

It is a paradox that those who oppose the elaboration of a unified revolutionary strategy hold a common opportunist strategy on the grounds that the generalization of experience excludes the importance of national struggle, the specificities, the particularities; as a contraband they have a general strategy based on the possibility of a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism - which has already demonstrated its unfeasibility in Chile and in the strongholds of Eurocommunism (Italy and France); in national ways to socialism, all of them with the same components: denial of the dictatorship of the proletariat, alliance with social democracy, pluriclassist political formations, capitalist management of economy, elevation of bourgeois democracy to absolute value, or if to put it roughly, that the communists manage the governments of capitalism.

Communist Party of Mexico (PCM), Our Tribute to the Communist International: Keeping the Flag of Proletarian Internationalism High, 2020