Oh Dear It's Raining! Oh Look The Bank's Gone Broke!
TEN MYTHS AND FALLACIES OF CAPITALIST ECONOMICS

"The most remarkable thing about the world is that you can understand
it."
(Albert Einstein.)

Introduction
When it comes to trying to understand what is happening in the world
today in economic terms, most even highly intelligent people throw up
their hands in despair or repeat some gem of meaningless wisdom they
heard from a television news economics correspondent or a "City
analyst."
Much of mainstream and popular political discussion and argument is
arbitrary and debatable because it is not based on any substance or
real evidence.
A political argument or conviction needs substance. A strong
emotional feeling or passionate belief in something is not enough,
and will always be countered by people with an equally strong feeling
or belief. And I think part of the reason that we on the political
left are not as effective as we should be at getting our message
across, gathering not just mass support, but mass political decision,
political activity, political effectiveness, is that our conviction
is largely emotive moral rhetoric. This is essentially because our
argument is not based on a philosophy of political substance,
economic fact and historical evidence; and is therefore so easily
countered; leaving people just as confused and in doubt and unable to
make any informed politically effective decision.
Much of the mind-bending confusion for most people is in the
meticulous careful and effective ideological use of words and
terminology used in our education and media, making it full of
euphemistic or coded words and terms, such as: "the free
world", "freedom" and "democracy", the "free market", the "market
economy", "the international community."
These terms convey false notions to the uninitiated. They are also
esoteric for the initiated, as they are largely coded terminology for
capitalism and the making and maximisation of private profit for the
relatively few.
Capitalism is very sensitive about its intrinsic negative image; and
tries to market itself as beneficial to everybody when in fact it is
not. It benefits only a very small percentage of people.
As if shameful at its own name, capitalism painstakingly avoids using
the very word "capitalist," or "imperialist," because these terms not
only imply their real hidden aims and effects – the predatory
exploitation of other people's wealth; but also invite looking for
alternatives – socialism, communism.
This has been for an obvious political reason.
"Marx's great achievement was to place the system of capitalism on
the defensive."
(US publisher and writer Charles Madison.)
Just as Darwin's theory of evolution was an anathema to the political
power of the church, classical economic theory, developed from the
work of David Ricardo and Adam Smith by Marx into a thoroughly
scientific analytical theory, which completely lays bare and exposes
the real workings of capitalism, that although there is still the
Tories' beloved Adam Smith Institute, Marx's exposition and
explanation of capitalist economics has made Marx a bogey equal to
Darwin among creationists.
Whenever you hear the government or media speak of the "free
world", "freedom" or "democracy", "the economy", "the
market", "market forces", "business", "the international
community"or "human rights", if you substitute the word capitalism,
you'll find it fits every time, betraying their real meaning.
When they speak of freedom, which of course at face value is
acceptable to everybody because it is universally received as meaning
freedom for all; when of course it doesn't mean that at all. What
they really mean is the national and global predatory freedom of
capital to exploit human labour.
So instead of capitalism, they use euphemisms like "the economy",
the "market economy", the "free market", and they love hammering home
to us in every speech about international or global issues with
references to terms like "freedom" and "the free world."
"And the word is capitalism. We are too mealy-mouthed. We fear the
word capitalism is unpopular. So we talk about the "free enterprise
system" and run to cover in the folds of the flag and talk about the
American way of life."
(US diplomat, Eric Allen Johnston, New York Times Jan 26 1958.)
"A research report of the United States Information Agency has
ruefully discovered that the more our propaganda advertises the
virtues of 'capitalism' and attacks 'socialism', the less the world
likes us... Capitalism is a dirty word to millions of non-Marxists...
Most foreigners apparently don't regard 'capitalism' as descriptive
of an efficient economy or a safeguard of individual
rights... 'Capitalism', abroad, is frequently a pejorative word.
Efforts to purge it of negative connotations by phrases
like 'people's capitalism' have failed."
("Should the Old Labels be Changed?" New York Times, July 6 1964.)
A good example of this deliberate diversionary confusion is when the
media, which of course itself is capitalist owned, comes up with
meaningless reasoning whenever it reports economic events such as
a "downturn" in the economy. It comes up with un-thought-out
platitudes such as: The economy is growing/ falling. Prices have gone
up. People are starving because of the rise in world food prices.
It's the rise in oil prices. The housing market is shrinking.
Unemployment is rising. The stock market was looking gloomy earlier
today but picked up later. Profits have gone up/ down this quarter.
This or that rate/ index has gone up/ down/ stabilised.
All they are saying is that price rises cause price rises. A circular
attempt at economic "theory" which merely says that prices determine
prices! It's like saying that temperature determines heat.
When apportioning blame it is equally diversionary. Usually it's
working people and their unions wanting too high a price for their
labour, thus "pricing themselves out of the market. Nothing is said
about capitalists and shareholders' demanding higher profits pricing
themselves out of the market.
No. Prices do not go up. Somebody puts them up. Millionaire business
owners and shareholders want to maintain and increase their standard
of living, as well as ensure the continuation of their political
dominance.
They don't put it this way: This or that company has put their prices
up, the shareholders are demanding and taking more profits. That's a
bad image for capitalism and must be avoided.
Various attempts to fool people into thinking that capitalism is for
everybody, include Margaret Thatcher's absurd and impossible notion
of "people's capitalism" and Tony Blair's equally
nonsensical "stakeholders' Society", which is exactly the same thing.
Both are contradictions in terms, since all cannot be capitalists or
stakeholders. Only a relatively few can. If all were owners or
stakeholders of the nation's capital, then it would by its very
nature be socialism or communism. Only a very small minority can be
capitalists and make private profit from the labour of the rest of
society.
Capitalism makes no sense logically, or in terms of efficiency. It
has one sole aim – the creation of private profit out of socialised
labour. The capitalist socio-economic system is opposed and objected
to on moral, humanitarian and scientific grounds. Capitalism is
completely undemocratic. It is ruthlessly exploitative of the working
peoples of the world, it is predatory and bellicose, completely by
passing all human rights. It is immoral, dishonest, corrupt and
criminal; it creates and perpetuates poverty, it is grossly
inefficient, wasteful of natural and human resources, it damages the
environment for the sake of private profit; most essentially, it
divides society into two opposing socio-economic classes – owner of
capital and therefore of the product and the profit, and the owner of
labour, whose product is appropriated by the capitalist as his own
profit and increased capital to exploit labour anew. Capitalism is
anarchistic, unorganised, with boom and slump – massive productive
capacity one minute, and over-production of unsellable commodities
and mass unemployment the next. It is globally impoverishing,
creating and increasing existing massive global poverty, unemployment
and homelessness.
The media and politicians love to use the word "globalism", which
means nothing more than a code word for an imperialism which
completely by-passes national sovereignty. Imperialism does not see
or recognise sovereign states or national boundaries, and is in fact
a sovereign state all to itself – a global New World Order:
"We are at present working discreetly with all our might to wrest
this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the
local nation states of the world."
(Professor Arnold Toynbee, Institute for the Study of International
Affairs, June l931.)
"The first and foremost requirement of the United States in a world
in which it proposes to hold unquestionable power… to secure the
limitation of any exercise of sovereignty by foreign nations that
constitutes a threat to the minimum world area essential for the
security and economic prosperity of the United States."
(Economic and Financial Group of the US Council of Foreign Relations.
1940.)
"The New World Order will have to be built... in the end run around
national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece…"
(US Council on Foreign Relations, April l974.)
"In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all
states will recognize a single, global authority. National
sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all."
(US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot, Time, July 20, l992.)
Most pointedly, capitalism, even when it is riding high on a boom,
has proved itself helplessly unable to solve a single problem in the
world. Except for the benefit of a powerful and rich minority, it
creates and increases poverty for an increasing overwhelming majority
of humanity on this vast and incredibly rich earth.
After some three centuries of capitalism, some 85 percent of the
world's population, the overwhelming majority of humanity, still
lives under conditions of starvation and poverty. Millions still
starve to death, millions of children sigh their last feeble breath
as they let go of life in their first year. Millions are homeless and
jobless and suffer needless poverty and ill health. Millions are
denied the most basic human rights, to medical care and education –
all this in a world of abundance. Ignorance, prejudice and hypocrisy
replies that they come from a poor country. We must always reply to
the ignorant, the prejudiced and the hypocritical that on the
contrary, they come from a very rich world.
Capitalism has proved itself not only completely unable to solve a
single socio-economic problem in the world, but also unable to offer
any vision of any future. All it can offer is more of the same, only
not so good!
Capitalism is inherently ultimately unsustainable as a socio-economic
system. It only survives as dependent on continually expanding
markets for its output, continually advancing technology, and
expanding exploration and devouring of ever cheaper labour and raw
materials from the poorest regions of the world, usually propped up
only by use of well funded and armed despotic dictators. Should that
fail, as it will, it is ultimately only sustainable by military
invasion and occupation of other lands.
Capitalism on a global scale – imperialism, has long ago, I guess
wildly, at some time around, or as an immediate result of the Second
World War, effectively peaked; and has since only been running on
borrowed time. Hence, it is in its most dangerous phase, since it is
intrinsic in capitalism's unsustainability that it will continue only
to generally deteriorate and ultimately fizzle out as a spent force.
Capitalism is in its most dangerous phase. Unless this is understood
and acted upon by the whole of humanity, the consequences could be
many times more catastrophic than the period of the global but so-
called Wall Street, crash of 1929, through the depression, the rise
of Nazism, the Second World War, and Hiroshima – the first act of a
possible, now nuclear, Third World War.
(See also: FROP TROPF, below.)
Simple questions reveal the illogicality and historical
imprognosability of the mere wishful thinking, not only that
capitalism is here to stay; but that it is the peak of human social
and political development and the only possible future for the
advancement of mankind on this earth.
But world poverty is still with us and increasing rapidly after some
three centuries of this "best of all worlds" capitalism.
They say the socialist systems, in existence for seventy years, are
not working. But 85 percent of humanity is still poor and hungry
after three centuries of this wonderful capitalism. But they do not
say that capitalism has failed or isn't working!
As I write, in September - October 2008, world news is ablaze with
the hope that the US Government will provide a several hundred
billion dollar "rescue package" to prevent global economic collapse.
Wait a minuite! So capitalism, including the United States of
America, arguably the richest and most powerful capitalist nation on
earth, with its overwhelming global economic, political and military
power, its ability to crush and destroy any nation on earth overnight
just by squeezing it to death by mere economic means, with its vast
technical and scientific knowledge, ability and experience, its
control of global resources and cheap labour, its 300 years of
practice and experience, from the British industrial revolution
through colonialism, to American imperialism, all this combined vast
and overwhelming economic power, and virtually unlimited productive
power and capacity, which could solve all the problems of the world,
is now telling us that we cannot do anything because we have to stop
producing because nobody can make a profit out of it!
How revealingly ridiculous!
Capitalism is completely out of ideas, it has no plans and cannot
offer any vision of any future.
"Today, as never before, we are engaged in a fierce battle of ideas…
It is time to reorganise USIA [United States Information Agency B.M.]
as an important component of the American foreign affairs community.
Indeed, USIA is on the cutting edge of the struggle for men's minds."
(US Information Agency Director Charles Wick, requesting $711.4
million for USIA's 1984 "Project Democracy" from the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, March 1983,
"A major criticism... of our programme in the field of information
and propaganda is the failure to formulate a definite, conscious
purpose... Slogans like the 'Four Freedoms' are not enough… We are in
a war of ideas, but we have not found our ideas... the rich and
powerful United States has offered no inspirational idea or positive
social programme."
(Princeton University Professor John B. Whitton (Ed) in "Propaganda
and the Cold War.")
"It is the imperialists who need weapons, since they are completely
devoid of ideas… Ideas don't need weapons, if they can win the masses
over to their cause. No one can think that the contradiction between
capitalism and socialism can be settled by force. You'd have to be
out of your mind to think that way, and that's the way the
imperialists think. That's why they have military bases all over the
world, threaten everybody and intervene everywhere. Where are the
socialist countries' military bases?"
(Fidel Castro.)
The only view capitalist ideologists can provide us with is that the
economy is to be regarded as some amorphous entity with a volition of
its own, which nobody can control, like the weather. Nobody does
anything. Economic events just happen. Everything is going along just
fine, just like in the 1960s when we all had fridges and washing
machines and cars and full employment. Then suddenly, whoops!, along
comes a "downturn" in the economy. It's a nuisance but it just
happens and there's nothing we can do about it. Oh dear it's raining!
Oh look the bank's gone broke!

Ten Myths and Fallacies of Economics, Democracy and Freedom in the
Capitalist World.
The capitalist lie is believed because it is repeated so many times
in so many ways to so many un-discerning people.
It is time to explode the myths.
Capitalist economic theory, ideology and values do not stand up to
the simplest logical examination when you think of the right
questions to ask.
The main overall question, formulated in all its forms here below,
that capitalist economic ideology has no sensible answer for other
that pure mythology, is, where does profit actually come from?
Adam Smith in his famous classical economic work "The Wealth of
Nations" pointed out labour as the source of economic wealth, which
was subsequently elaborated and fully explained by Marx's "Labour
Theory of Value."
Not to be beaten, our bourgeois (French: capital owning class)
economists dreamed up all sorts of theories, such as: value is
determined by supply and demand. When Marx pointed out that although
supply and demand have a temporary effect on prices, they could not
possibly determine the value of a product.
The bourgeois economists then concocted a theory called 'utility
value.' When Marx knocked the bottom out of that argument, capitalist
economists wheeled out their MkII version: 'marginal utility value',
an equally unscientific, idealistic and illogical value theory.
(See FROP TROPF below.)
Bourgeois economists have searched for over a century for a theory
that refutes or rejects the labour theory of value. They will not
find any such theory. It is an impossibility – like trying to refute
or deny the theory of gravity.
Then after much mumbling and squawking, our capitalist economic
wizards came up with a solution which solved all their problems: they
did without a theory of value altogether! And left everything to the
inadequate vagaries and uncertainties of some entity they call 'the
market.'
Since then they have paraded in front of us Messrs. Keynes, Friedman,
Hayek and Monetarism, and other ideologists, "City analysts",
economics Professors and flamboyant academic misfits in bow ties and
multi-coloured waistcoats wheeled out as television news "economics
correspondents." You can see them on late night armchair television
academic discussion programs – all with their absurd theories
producing no more sense than the 1960s government economic research
institute which built a flow machine with coloured water and various
vessels and ducts and pipes and regulatory valves to see how the
economy can be tweaked and tinkered with, adjusting this or that
percentage of economic or financial rate, in a futile attempt to
achieve "economic balance," whatever that was supposed to mean. They
did discover the important theory that if you pour a litre each of
green, blue, black and white water into their machine you can produce
four litres of dirty brown water; but nobody would buy it (the theory
or the water). It probably ended up rusting away in some university
equipment store or as the first on-street soft drinks dispenser.
In current (October 2008) television news coverage of what they are
calling the "credit crunch," commentators of all kinds from academic
economists to bankers, experts in industry and government on finance
and "the economy", are discussing all sorts of wildly differing
theories on the cause, diagnosis, prognosis and cure for the current
economic problem – all with blank whistful stares into the distance
vaguely uttering as much essence as football managers analysing why
they lost the last match and what they need to do to win the next
one. They say absolutely nothing. They are absolutely clueless.
Just briefly here, a few simple experiments, tests, questions – call
them what you like – disprove all capitalist economic theories that
the whole of capitalist economic ideology and philosophy is based on.
It also explains why capitalist society is always in a total chaotic
and contradictory muddle.
Essential notes on terminology:
Before we go further, some items of terminology have to be clarified,
since they have erroneous received meanings and connotations.
It is important to know that the Marxist term working class has a
specific definition.
It has nothing to do with the British Registrar General's meaningless
and misleading delineation of class into several social classes such
as manual workers, office workers, middle class, professionals, upper
class, aristocracy and so on. This is a false and deliberately
misleading notion of social class permeating capitalist social
studies and sociology syllabuses and the media and the predominant
public view.
Marxist analysis of class relations in capitalist society reveals the
only operating class division as between only two economic classes –
owners of capital and owners of labour.
Working class means all those – the majority of people – who labour
by hand or by brain for the minority capitalist class.
What the Marxist term class struggle recognises is so schoolboy
obvious when you consider that the interests of the two classes are
diametrically opposite and mutually contradictory. The interest of a
capitalist is to pay as little as possible for land, raw materials
and wages, and sell for as much profit as possible. Whereas the
interest of the working class is to be paid as much wages as possible
for their labour, and to buy the means of subsistence at as low
prices as possible.
Here it is also essential to counter a common myth about what Marxist
economics is.
Marxism is not about communism. Marx himself hardly mentions the
word. Marxist economics is not what goes on in socialist (or
communist) countries; it is nothing to do with that. Marx's main
achievement in economics is a thorough examination, analysis and
explanation of the workings of capitalism as a socio-economic system.
Marx's massive three volume main work, in German – Das Kapital, its
proper English title being: "Capital. A Critical Analysis of
Capitalist Production."
"Marx's great achievement was to place the system of capitalism on
the defensive."
(US writer Charles Madison.)
Clarity is also necessary when it comes to confusion over the terms
Communism and Socialism.
They are historical economic and social stages of the same thing.
Socialism has a very distinct definition for Marxists. It is a
transitional stage; an intermediate set of socio-economic
relationships where capitalist ownership of the means of production
is transferred to common ownership.
Under this first stage of communism, which Marxists call socialism,
there are of course inequalities. Socialism does not yet claim to
be 'equal.' Socialist production aims to create the necessary
conditions for communism. Socialist production is planned for these
priorities, for such high levels of production that goods,
ultimately, can be produced in abundance. That ultimate stage, that
ultimate goal, is Communism; in which things are produced in such
abundance that no one needs to 'want', hoard, make profit out of, or
steal anything. Supply and demand will also no longer be out of step
with each other. The same economic power, in the hands of a whole
population, will supply what it demands.
The essential thing to understand here is that it is about ownership
of the means of creation of wealth. This does not refer to any
capitalist notions of socialism – bourgeois reformist socialism such
as the British Labour Party's "redistribution of wealth" – wealth
already created and made profit on by capitalists, or nationalising
production of penny gobstoppers (ask anybody over 50), and especially
New Labour, which has long ago written the essential socialist Clause
4 out of its manifesto:
To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of
their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may
be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of
production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system
of popular administration and control of each industry or service".
(British Labour Party Clause 4, removed in 1995 by Blair's New
Labourites.)
Capitalism cannot work in a socialist way. Reformist socialism cannot
survive in a capitalist controlled state, where capitalists have full
economic power and therefore control of the legislative and executive
arms of the state. If there was overwhelming popular support for a
majority communist government in parliament, you would soon see the
Queen not giving consent to form a government, parliamentary
democracy withdrawn and a state of emergency declared and implemented
by the armed forces. If a socialist revolution, whether parliamentary
or not, cannot defend itself against the remains of a former
capitalist state and external capitalist aggression it is doomed to
failure.
Socialism and Communism are described quite adequately in good
Marxist text-books. But it is not very common to find a popular
description. One of the simplest and easiest to understand popular
descriptions I have come across is that by the late Dean of
Canterbury, Doctor Hewlett Johnson:
"Socialism: 'From each according to his ability; to each according to
his work'.
Communism: 'From each according to his ability; to each according to
his needs'.
Both definitions had one thing in common - 'from each according to
his ability'. All must work, and work according to his ability. Some
as artists, some as artisans, others as organisers, teachers, as
engineers and so forth - all must work. It is interesting to note
that the Soviet Union was the first state to put duties into its
constitution. ["He who does not work; neither shall he eat" is a
popular communist saying. B.M.]
It followed, of course, that if all must work, all must be provided
for the opportunity for work. And that brought us to the second
clause of the definition of socialism - 'To each according to his
work'. It ensured the right to an adequate reward for work.
Furthermore, as work varied in value or quality, reward in a
socialist state would also vary in amount. Socialist society was not
an egalitarian society. Socialist society was the stage of society
[reached B.M.] in Russia. The corollary that each must receive an
adequate reward for work, together with provision for opportunity for
work, postulated a planned economy. It also postulated control by the
whole community of land, power and all natural resources and
productive processes...
I then passed to Marx's definition of communism. Like socialism,
communism demanded work from all, in a planned economy: 'From each
according to his ability'. But there the likeness ended, the second
half of the definition ran thus: 'To each according to his need'.
Not, observe, according to his work, but 'according to his need'.
Socialism came first; communism followed. You could not spring
straight into communism at once, the ground had to be prepared for 2
reasons: only a rich state could provide enough consumable goods to
give 'each according to his need' and only a disciplined people dare
try it. It would break down in a work-shy society...
It was the contention of socialists and communists alike that the
socialist state would provide in time the quantity of goods and the
quality of character - a rich state and an advancing morality - to
build communism."
(Dean of Canterbury Doctor Hewlett Johnson "Searching For Light.")
The ultimate goal, one that is ridiculed by apologists of capitalism
as "utopian" or "contrary to human nature" (they probably mean their
own), is communism – production in abundance for all. But what is
utopian or impossible about that? Is it not possible that when the
people own the means of production in a planned economy unfettered by
the drag of only being able to produce if somebody can make personal
profit out of it, everything that people need or want can be produced
in abundance? Given time and human will, we have the ability and
technology, what is impossible about that?
Capitalism derives great pleasure of propaganda when it refers to
people like Pol Pot and his Khmer RougeYear Zero killing fields in
Cambodia as communist. Such people were never communists and were an
anathema to communists.
Likewise so-called anti-communists. There is no such thing. Anyone
who calls themselves an anti-communist could not have been a
communist in the first place. Just as an anti-Darwinist or anti-
Newtonian, you cannot uninvent the wheel, evolution ot gravity.
Also there is no such thing as international communism or world
communism. Each communist party is its own autonomous entity and it
is communist diplomatic ethics that a party of one country does not
interfere with the internal workings of another. However there is
such a thing as international capitalism; it's called imperialism.
So with the correct terminological understanding firmly in mind, we
can expose the mythology of capitalist economic ideology.

Myth 1.
Profit Comes From Calculating Cost Plus Profit? Impossible!
As every businessman or mainstream economist will take great pains to
explain and elaborate, defining profit is simply a matter of working
out your costs – rent, premises, machinery, raw materials, fuel
(energy), labour (wages) – and adding on a percentage of 'profit'
that you think the market will stand. Surely everyone knows that?
Well no! Profit does not come from adding a percentage to cost. This
is a rather pathetic capitalist mitigation for the right to obtain
profit. It takes only the thinking capacity of a child of ten to
realise that this mere rationalisation posing as theory could not
possibly be true.
If profit is made by adding on a percentage over costs, then, where
do the working class, the worker, the ultimate purchaser, whose only
source of income is the wages received from capitalists, get this
extra percentage in order to give the capitalist his profit? Is the
worker printing extra money for himself or getting free money
somewhere else in order to make that extra percentage that is his
boss's profit?
Let's imagine that the money price of the means of subsistence of an
engineer is £10 a day. You can substitute whatever proportionate
figure you like. For this he works 8 hours. The capitalist pays for
that day: £100 for rent, maintenance, wear and tear of machinery, and
fuel etc. used up in production in that day; £200 for raw materials,
and £10 for our worker's wages. This totals £310 for our product for
that day. But the capitalist counts on getting say £320 for his
product, or £10 more than his outlay. Classical economics agreed that
a commodity sells at its value. I.E: the labour contained in it. So
£320 is the value of our commodity, measured by the labour contained
in it; I.E: the value of the labour contained in the raw materials,
the value of the labour contained in that part of the wear and tear
of the plant and machinery used up in production of that commodity,
and the value newly added to the commodity by the labour of our
engineer.
But of the £320 for our product £300 were already present before the
work began. £200 were present in the raw materials and £100 were
present in the overheads. And according to classical economics, £20
had been added to the value of the raw materials by the worker. His 8
hours had created new value of £20. The value of his 8 hours is £20.
But our worker has only been paid £10. The capitalist says that his
wages for 8 hours is £10. So we now have two values: For the worker,
the value of 8 hours labour is £10; for the capitalist it is £20.
Lets look at it another way. In 8 hours a value of £20 is created.
Therefore, in 4 hours £10 is created. In 4 hours the worker has
already paid for, or made for the capitalist, the value of his wages.
So at mid-day he stops working since he and the capitalist are now
quits. But the capitalist forces him to continue working for another
4 hours, making a total of 8 hours. But in return for 8 hours labour
the worker gets as wages the value of commodities worth only 4 hours
labour. Either labour has two different values or 8 equals 4.
The source of all capitalist economic wealth is the difference
between these two values. The value of labour power and the value it
produces or creates are two different values. It is this difference,
this capability of labour to create more than its own value, that the
capitalist invests his capital in. This is the capability, or service
he expects from it; not that it merely produces, but that it produces
more than its own cost, that it not only reproduces itself, but that
it also produces a surplus value. If it only reproduced itself, its
own value, but without any surplus, capitalists would not invest in
it, since it would not realise any profit.
Of the two different values that the commodity appears to have, it is
the greater that represents its true value. Exploitation exists not
in the final sale of a commodity but in the fact that the greater of
the two values, surplus value, is not paid for by the capitalist.
If I am a capitalist and the cost of my product is £1 and my profit
is 40p making a total price of £1.40; do I pay you as a worker £1.40p
in wages so that you can have the honour of buying back my product at
cost plus profit? Of course not. Then where does my 40p profit come
from? Do I charge you only £1, which is my cost – including wages,
and obtain the 40p somewhere else myself? Perhaps the bank gives it
to me for being so enterprising? Or do I pay you only £1 in wages and
hope that you'll find the other 40p somewhere else in order to pay me
the £1.40 for my product so that I can make a profit?
All sorts of sophisticated attempts are made to show that profit is
somehow "earned" by the capitalist as a reward for his risk,
sacrifice, enterprise and hard work, and he therefore has a right to
it; just as the worker earns his wages.
Clearly this is ridiculous! This is not the way profit is made by
capitalists. This is obviously not where capitalist profit comes
from.

Myth 2.
Who Has The Real Wealth?
The Essential Difference Between Wealth and Money
"A capitalist creates wealth no more than a person who milks a cow
creates milk."
(Kark Marx.)
Capitalist economic theory confuses the important and essential
difference which must be made between profit and wealth. They are
quite different things. A capitalist makes profit. He does not create
wealth.
Since barter trading became such that you couldn't carry your wealth
around with you, a means of representing wealth had to be created –
money of some kind – coinage or notational money, including banknotes
and cheques and other representational forms.
Money is merely the price representation of the value of commodities.
It is not another separate or additional value, and not wealth in
itself.
If I have a loaf of bread with a price of 50 pence and £3 spare cash
to spend, and you have a bottle of wine with a price of £3 and spare
cash of 50 pence, our total ownership in real wealth – commodities –
is £3.50. The £3.50 in money between us is only a money or currency
representation of the total commodity wealth existing between us; it
is not another value. The ridiculous assumption of capitalist
reasoning is that a value of £7 exists between us.
Of course, for practical reasons, the money supply needs to be
regulated so that there is more money in circulation than the value
of the commodities produced and in circulation, that price money
represents. But this does not increase the true value of the
commodities in circulation themselves.
Money appears to be what we work for – wages. But this is only the
appearance. You can't eat it, clothe or house yourself in it; it has
no use value except that it is a means of exchange; it has a small
value in that it is has a cost of production. Earlier forms of money
currency did have an intrinsic value, whether that was a herd of
cattle or gold coins. But money today does not have this intrinsic
value; whether it is a coin, a note, a cheques or an IOU, it is all a
money representation of wealth, but it is not the wealth itself. You
can only spend it. You exchange it for the things you need - for
commodities. Wages, money, is only a means of exchanging one
commodity: labour, for another – a commodity, the product of labour.
Money is just a temporary store of values; a representation of value -
the value of your labour or the value of the commodities you buy
with it which are the product of somebody else's labour. Hence,
money, or money capital, and financial capital, merely represents
commodities.
To illustrate this, divide the world (in terms of population) into
two halves. One half own all the raw materials, means of production
and means of subsistence, and of course the product of their labour,
but own no money. The other half own all the money but none of the
other things.
The question to settle is: which half own all the wealth. This forces
us to ascertain what is wealth - commodities or merely the money
representation of these commodities.
Obviously it's the half with the commodities that has the wealth.
Further more, how would the halves trade with each other? The
commodity half would be stupid to trade commodities, say a loaf of
bread or a toothbrush, for money from the other half. Because then,
what would they do with that useless money?
Clearly, the true essence of economic value in the world is in its
commodities, not the money price representation of them – as revealed
by the classical economist beloved of capitalist ideologists, Adam
Smith, in his excellent works: "The Wealth of Nations."
Once trading of surplus commodities above requirements became
complicated in that you couldn't carry your wealth in commodities
around with you, forms of money became necessary to represent your
wealth. But money was merely a notational representation of price, it
was not the wealth itself. This is the most serious mistake of
capitalist economic theory, trading in money or prices for a profit.
It is precisely why banks, currency markets and other forms of
financial dealing are crashing today (September 2008). It is the
ridiculous practice of trading in mere money – buying and selling
prices when commodities are not changing hands.
(See Banking and Finance etc, below.)

Myth 3.
Banking and Finance or Buying and Selling:
Money Profit Does Not Create Wealth
Since, as we have seen, money itself is not wealth, only the price
representation of wealth; perhaps the biggest and most easily
debunked notion of capitalism is that money makes money.
You can lend, buy and sell, or swap money around all day long. But
all you will be dealing with is the money price representation of
commodities, not the commodity wealth itself. Future financial
interest is the money representation of commodities that do not yet
exist and have not been created. Sooner or later the commodities
represented by that extra money as interest have to be produced and
change hands.
Trading in or juggling about with money does not add any real wealth
value to the national product of commodities.
Investments in banks, building societies or other financial
transactions certainly makes monetary profits. But it cannot create
wealth – commodities.
Capitalist profit does not come from banking and finance – so called
investments – putting £1 in the bank or building society and getting
40p as interest. Nobody has yet seen two pounds, dollars,
Deutchmarks, Krugerrand or Yen get together in a bank vault and
produce any baby money offspring. Yet presumably, in every bank
there's some half wit in a pinstripe business suit buying £1 notes
from investors and selling them back later for £1.40 each?!
All profits from banking or any kind of financial dealings must
eventually come from investment in human labour, as this is the only
possible source of profit wealth.
Nor can capitalist profit come from buying and selling – retail –
buying at one price and selling at a higher price.
Trading – buying and selling, in other words, merchant capital, does
not create any new wealth; it does not add any value to the product;
it does not create any new surplus value. It only redivides or
redistributes wealth or surplus value already created by the working
class. The trader acts as an extension of the money grabbing hands of
the industrial capitalist seeking to retrieve and renew his capital
in order to exploit labour anew in the continuing process.
Traders' profit is a share in the surplus value created by labour.
So in trading – mere buying and selling; or in usury – loan and
interest bearing capital, no human labour is involved; no value is
added to the product; no surplus value is created. Profits made in
this way do not create any new wealth; they do not result from the
creation of surplus value, but result from a redistribution of
surplus value already created in the commodities that this money
represents. Remember; money only represents commodities, or labour
power, so an increase in money, unless it is to be inflationary, can
only represent an increase in commodities or labour power. Only
labour power creates surplus value. Capital, or money, on its own,
cannot increase its own value such as by interest on loans or by
buying and selling commodities.
If the total amount of money in the world increased a million times
without a corresponding, million times increase in the amount of
commodities, it would merely represent grossly inflated money.
Interest of any kind, and buying and selling of any commodities, does
not create any surplus value. A change in value cannot take place in
money since it would merely be inflated money. And a change in value
cannot take place in produced commodities since they would merely
represent inflated or overpriced commodities. Neither of them can
increase their value by themselves without the application of labour
power to add more value to them. Except of course the commodity:
labour power.
The commodity labour power is what capitalists must ultimately invest
in as the only commodity that can produce more than its own value and
is therefore the source of all capitalist profit.
All profits from all other forms of investments and business –
banking and finance, insurance, lending, building societies, or any
other form of financial or monetary interest, and retail – commerce,
trading, buying and selling, do not result from the creation of new
values or new wealth.
The industrial capitalist is the initial appropriator of all surplus
values; of all other profits.
Financial profits can only originate from industrial profits; from
capital invested in labour; from the surplus value extracted from the
labour of the producer.
Any analysis of the current 2008 economic crisis is upside down – a
case of the tail wagging the dog.. The problem is not cause by
the "credit crunch" said to originate from US sub-prime mortgage
lending or any other financial issue. It originates in the
fundamental essence of the working of capitalist production.
Nor do profits arise from the Labour Party notions of redistribution
or manipulation of wealth values already created by human labour.
All these financial and monetary chains of business must eventually
and ultimately invest their capital in human labour – industrial
capital – somewhere along the line.
You can put a million pounds into any form of finance house and wait
for a million years; you will not get back a penny extra if that
money is not invested somewhere else, somewhere other than another
finance house. It must be invested in human labour somewhere to
create profit.
It is an absurd quirk of British buying and selling that property
(housing or land) is seen as a "sound" investment. Nonsense. There is
no law of nature, god or man that says that property increases in
value. It has only done so in-so-far as there is somebody with the
purchasing power to buy at the higher price. It is a quirk of British
history that mortgages are treated differently from the hire purchase
of a car or television. Before no interest deals, it used to be that
you paid the price of your television plus a small percentage of
interest. There is no logic or scientific economic law that says that
buying and selling houses should be the same, yet increase in value,
any more than a second hand food mixer.
(See The Pencil, below.)

Myth 4.
The Pencil –
Capitalist Profits Cannot Come from Capital to Capital Transactions
Consider the manufacture and selling of a pencil, one with a brass
ferrule on the end with an eraser.
The total number of capitalist transactions in the making and selling
would amount to thousands, at a multitude of stages needed to make
such a simple thing as a pencil – aquisition of all the different raw
materials from so many different sources, the primary production of
these into the many materials and component parts of the pencil, all
the different shipping and transport costs, manufacture of transport,
machinery etc associated in all stages and parts of aquisition and
production of a pencil – the timber, its extraction as a raw
material, its transport, its transformation into the two halves which
make a pencil, the glue used to bond these two halves together, the
raw materials for the manufacture of this glue, the transformation of
these into the various chemicals to make glue, the transport involved
at each stage of this; raw material extraction and processing of the
carbon and graphite to make the pencil's lead, the raw materials and
processing of chemicals and dyes needed to make the glossy paint and
thin stripes decorating a pencil, the raw metallurgical material and
smelting of brass to make the ferrule on the end of the pencil to
hold the rubber eraser, the raw material of the eraser – rubber,
colouring and dyes, hundreds of different primary raw material
extractions – forestry, timber, mining, minerals, chemicals, hundreds
of transportational stages for each material at each stage, vast
varieties of machinery for the raw material extraction, processing
and manufacture at hundreds of stages; every single business
transaction at every stage of every part being transactions between
capitalist and capitalist, the final stage making all this complete
and possible being the purchase by the end user or consumer of our
pencil.
If the capitalist class as a whole obtained profit by adding a
percentage to costs, each capitalist passing on this total cost – ie:
cost plus an extra percentage – to the next capitalist in each
transaction; then, seeing as the final purchaser, usually the working
class, their source of income being the wages paid to them by the
capitalist class as a whole, where does the final purchaser get all
this added extra money to pay for all these accumulated capitalist
costs plus profits?
Again; clearly; profit does not come from a percentage added to
costs. Nore does it come from selling goods above their value.
If profit comes from a percentage added to costs, then since most
business is done between capitalist and capitalist, if they sold
goods to each other by adding a percentage as profit, the whole
capitalist class would be cheating each other, and where one made a
profit by adding value the other would make a loss. What each
capitalist gains as a seller he would lose every time as a buyer,
because the seller has also 'added a bit on'. The profits and losses
would cancel each other out, leaving no general profit for the
capitalist class as a whole.
No. Capitalists do not make a profit by cheating each other. Profits
cannot be made by selling goods above their value or buying them
below value.
True value, as determined by the labour theory of value, cannot be
added to a commodity during these transaction; it can only be added
by the application of further labour.
Then where does capitalist profit come from?
A commodity sells at its true value – its cost of production; even
with the inclusion of, under capitalism, capitalist profit. The
source of capitalist profit is from not paying the worker the true
value of the product of his labour. Labour, being the only thing in
the world – the only commodity capital can invest in – which produces
more wealth value than its own value or cost of production; not the
cost of the worker, since the capitalist does not buy the worker or
pay the cost of the worker, that was slavery, but he buys the
worker's ability to labour – his labour power. That is the only
commodity that can produce more than its own value. The Labour Theory
of Value rears its ugly head in front of capitalists – facing
capital – and asserts itself as the creative source of all wealth
values in the disguised form of capitalist profit.
(See also Cost Plus profit, above.)

Myth 5.
That Other Darling of Capitalist Economists –
Supply and Demand Cannot Determine Value
It is a bourgeois concoction that supply and demand are natural
phenomena determining value or even price.
Supply and demand cannot determine the value already inherent in a
created commodity.
Supply and demand certainly have their constant push-pull effect on
prices; which means that goods are being sold continually above or
below value, fluctuating above and below a certain level, but on
average, goods sell at their value.
So what is this level of value that prices fluctuate about? And what
determines value when supply and demand are equal and have no effect
on value?
If there is a sudden demand for a product its price temporarily
increases. But then production increases until the demand is met,
supply and demand become equal, cancelling each other out, and no
longer have an effect on each other, and prices return to "normal."
But what is this "normal?"
Again; there can be only one answer: the law of exchange value
determined by labour, the labour theory of value.
Supply and demand can be altered any time you like. Supply and demand
can be manipulated completely in favour of whoever controls it and
profits out of it by such things as advertising and productivity and
levels of technology.
There are ridiculous contradictions in this, as in the whole of
capitalist production.
Slowing down production creates higher demand and higher prices, but
less is sold and less profits are made. To make more profits,
capitalists speed up production, supply over-reaches demand, prices
drop and so do profits; unless massive investments in technology
speeds production so high that the rate of profit rises temporarily
until the market is again saturated with over-production and markets
fall again.
Also, a sudden demand is useless on its own. Where do the 'demanders'
get the money to pay for the extra commodities they demand without
producing something extra themselves? Another demand would have to be
found or created for the products of these new 'demanders' before
they would even have the money to satisfy their own new demand.
If markets were flooded by releasing the over-produced goods onto the
market, the price of those goods would drop below their value and no
profit would be made. To keep grain prices artificially high, farmers
are paid to destroy the year's entire crop, and more likely to grow
nothing at all.
If, for example, you want to increase the price of sugar or petrol,
you simply create a high demand by stockpiling these products. If you
wanted to reduce the price of labour, you just lower the demand by
increasing the supply by creating unemployment.
How can you express value or base a value system, definition or
criteria on supply and demand?!
Supply and demand can explain capitalist prices, and can go a little
way towards indicating that a concrete theory of value exists. For
instance, when supply and demand are equal and have no effect on
prices.
But a consistent and useful theory of value could never be based on
something as subjective and unstable as supply and demand.
For one thing; how do you measure it? What is the degree of demand –
of being wanted, of being demanded – embodied in a commodity?
Demand is completely subjective, according to needs or wants in
people's minds, which are variable, creatable; and supply is also
variable and creatable. How can something variable express a
constant?
What determines supply? Bourgeois economists say the cost of
production. So the bourgeois economists, trying to explain prices,
find that prices depend on the price of production. Prices depend on
prices!
The value of labour power is subject to the same laws as other
commodities. The same laws that regulate the price of commodities
also regulates the price of wages.
E.G: Supply and demand – competition between buyers and sellers.
An army of unemployed depresses wages.
Certainty of profits creates a demand for labour and wages increase.
But as with the cost of other commodities, wages tend to fluctuate
around their true value; which is the cost of maintaining and
reproducing the working class.
This can be lowered by various means. By importing cheaper labour. By
importing cheaper food so lower wages can be paid.
In other words, the price of labour becomes cheaper when, just like
any other commodity, the cost of its means of production in food,
living expenses, and enough luxuries to keep it happy and content
with its status, is cheaper.
As we see, the law of labour value always asserts itself.

Myth 6.
The Island World Family: The Missing Driving Force –
We Need a Capitalist!
Capitalists like to put competition and entrepreneurial notions as a
driving force.
Let's do a simple test. Let's reduce the world to easier
understandable dimensions and say that there was only one land mass –
a small island, and one family – father, mother, son, daughter, all
of workable age; and all the resources they need to build a house and
eat and live, go on holiday and go to Bob Dylan concerts.
How would we arrange our socio-economic relations and therefore
democracy? Would we say: "Hold on, something's missing here, we need
an entrepeneur, a capitalist, to make his profit out of our
endeavours"? Would we say: "Wait a minute – there's no democracy
here; we need some capitalists to own the wealth we create and to
vote for?" Would we also say we need some Gods, Archbishops and
churches to worship them in?
Would we invoke capitalist freedom, entrepreneurial competition?
Would we arrange them in a capitalist way of producing their needs?
EG:
Would we say that the father will be the capitalist, owning the land,
raw materials, means of production (tools/factories), the products
produced, and the profits made by selling those products to the other
family members, to whom he gives over a little of the product as
wages, and they could buy some of it back with the wages that he pays
them?
Of course not. It could not be sustainable.
Or would it be better to have cooperation and public or popular
ownership, with divisions of labour according to suitability in terms
of physical stature and special knowledge and aptitude?
Wouldn't it be better to effect a socialist socio-economic
relationship and division of labour according to capability and body
structure – father and son being stronger in stature, dig the
foundations, build the house, the timber floors, windows, plumbing
and so on, with mother and daughter (not to be sexist about it – I'm
talking about congenital physical structure here) fetching bricks,
painting, fixing curtains share the growing of food, and share
ownership of the land, its raw materials, the house, the means of
production and the products produced?
Now add some more family members, totalling first 5, then 6, 7, and
so on. Where is the number we get to where this socio-economic system
becomes inoperable, as capitalism always does – only sustained by
continually advancing technology and effective purchasing power,
ultimately only by military force?
There is no magic number. It is sustainable whatever the population,
as we see in embryonic socialist countries so far.
The capitalist, unlike capital, is superfluous to the requirements of
people producing commodities. Workers can elect one of our own to
manage, co-ordinate, direct and plan, and pay him a wage, even a
slightly higher one, out of the wealth we produce. But we have
absolutely no need for a capitalist, an `entrepeneur,' to own our
means of production, the products we create, and the surplus wealth
we create as his private profit, and in effect, to own the rest of
us.

Myth 7.
FROP TROPF and Other Diseases of Capitalism
Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. If it is not to
stagnate and turn in on itself, capitalism must obey the intrinsic
rules of its own dynamism.
Capitalism has an intrinsic dynamism in that it has to continually
expand geo-demographically, and continually improve its productive
technology and productive capacity in a never ending repitition of
its cycle of capital and profit. Each cycle of capital accrues profit
which has to be reinvested as increased capital inducing ever more
profit in a cyclic drive that must continue if capital is not to
stagnate and die.
The DNA of capital is such that it must expand geographically and
demographically in order to couninue to reinvest profits as further
capital. This has historically led from slavery through feudalism,
the capitalist industrical revolution, colonialism and imperialism;
and through economic competition and economic conflict, ultimately to
wars.
All wars are essentially economic in origin and purpose. Though they
might manifest themselves as religious, racial or cultural, wars are
ultimately means of aggrandisement – of economic and political
domination.
In its attempt to counter its inherent decline and maintain its aim
of profit, capitalism has to resort to various means. It has to
continually improve its productive technology and productive
capacity. It has to keep wages as low as possible. It has to keep
prices as high as possible. And it has to keep selling as much as
possible.
But all these counter-measures have contradictory effects and
results; such as increased technological and productive capacity
leading to overproduction and unsellable goods, unemployment and
diminishing purchasing power. Geographical and demographic expansion
is also finite; leaving only the moon for capital to expand to.
Technological and productive capacity is also ultimately finite.
However, this is a futile attempt at achieving perpetual motion, or
perhaps atomic fusion.
These capitalist diseases are know by Marxists as FROP or TROPF – the
tendency of the falling rate of profit, or the tendency of the rate
of profit to fall.
It is ironically noticeable that capitalist ideologists completely
deny, refute and vilify Marxist views. Yet they have a parallel
theory called marginal utility value – adding MUV to our repertoire
of acronisms.
Essentially, TROP or FROP means this:
It is paradoxical and contradictory that although it is only labour
power that produces more value than its own cost, and is the true
source of capitalist profit – what Marx calls surplus value;
capitalists naturally try to minimise the capital invested in labour
and invest more in labour-eliminating technology. Profits will
therefore be less because of this; and because the working class, who
must necessarily constitute the majority of people, having an
increasingly tendency to become unemployed, naturally have decreased
or negative purchasing power.
Capitalist ideologists use their "evidence" that it has not happened
and that capitalism has spread all over the world in order to refute
and vilify the scientificity of TROPF. But it is important to note
that Marx, and all good Marxists, have always asserted that this is a
tendency, not an observable fact. It is a tendency so far tenuously
held in check by continual investment in technology, cheaper labour,
the cheapening of labour's necessities such as food, cheaper raw
materials, intensifying the exploitation of other nations, lands and
peoples.
However, what the anti-Marxists fail to recognise is that their
counter measures are finite and will eventually fail. This is partly
indicated in the assertion by capitalists that capitalism is
cyclical – without ever producing any satisfactory explanation or
theoretical evidence.
In fact, the evidence that with each capitalist boom and bust,
although booms may have a tendency to ratchet upwards, each slump
ratchets more strongly downwards, the gap between rich and poor ever
widening further than perhaps it was in Victorian times nationally in
Britain, and increasing exponentially globally, and thus the general
socio-economic and ultimate decline of capitalism.
As we have seen, there is no such thing as perpetual motion and
sooner or later the counter-measures will fail to cope.

Myth 8.
How Many Fridges and Cars Can Detroit Robots Buy With Their Wages?
I cannot recall the exact details – and it matters not whether true
or not, but the story goes that a British Labour or Trade Union
official was being shown round an automated plant in Detroit which
used robots to make steel pressings for car body parts and cases of
fridges and washing machines. The American hosts tried to intimidate
their guest saying: See this automated robot production line, the
robots just keep working. They don't go on strike, take smoking
breaks or go off sick, they work day and night and don't even need
the lights turned on. The British labour official replied: Yes but
how good are they at buying cars, fridges and washing machines?
I remember in the 1960s or was it 70s that the first cassette tape
recorders cost a week's wages or more. A few years later you could
buy one for £17. Capitalists had gone through all the usual stages,
new products more costly to produce and profits had to be high per
unit sold. By the time they were made in Taiwan or the Phillipines by
cheap labour and high technology, thousands could be bashed out per
worker; but hundreds had to be sold for the same overall profit as a
single unit initially. That is, capitalistically, you can produce
cassette tape recorders by the million, but sooner or later you've
got to sell them all or go broke; and since the workers of the
world's only source of purchasing power is the wages capitalist
companies pay them, which has got to be less than the selling price
of their overall product output – otherwise no profit.
Capitalists naturally want to keep wages as low as possible, and sell
for as much profit as possible – the classical class struggle. But
inherent in that is the fact that lower wages and fewer workers means
less purchasing power; causing a downward spiral of ever shorter
cycles of capital – less sold – lower profit – less capital to
reinvest.
Therein lies another fundamental dichotomy of capitalist production.

Myth 9.
Solving the Problem of Poverty –
Give the Poor a Few Million Dollars to "Invest"
If, as capitalist ideology says, that equal opportunities lead to
universal prosperity for all; then another simple experiment proves
that this could never be.
If, as capitalists say, money creates wealth, the problem of world
poverty is easily solved. Just give every starving child and poor
person several million Pounds/ Dollars/ Yen/ Krugerrand or
Deutschmarks etc, which they could invest in a bank (an extremely
successful one of course!), and they can live off the profits from
these investments and gradually pay back the loan.
Everybody cannot be a capitalist. Capitalism, by its very nature,
because of its inherent laws, because of what it is, because it is
capitalism, can only survive as the exploitation of the majority by a
minority. If everybody was a capitalist, then it would cease to be
capitalism and become socialism – common ownership of capital wealth.

Myth 10.
Can We Do That?
A Very Big Myth:
Democracy Freedom and Human Rights in Capitalist Society
Perhaps the most obvious and perhaps biggest mythology of capitalist
ideology is the democracy, freedom and human rights about which they
keep screaming at us from the rooftops.
Received notions of democracy, freedom and human rights are the
complete fraud which is amazingly so universally accepted by an
uninformed, un-thinking and uneducated and misinformed public in
capitalist countries.
In short; capitalist democracy is a lie, and capitalist freedom and
human rights are meaningless and worthless.
Let's look at the issues one by one.

Sham Democracy
The absence of a multitude of political parties, or more than one
party, does not mean the absence of democracy. Socialist democracy is
in fact a true and higher form of democracy.
In 1917 Russia had a revolution and the working class took all
political power and government out of the hands of capital and into
the hands of a people's state and government.
The slogan of this revolution was: "All power to the Soviets." The
word Soviet means "council", more or less the same as the word
parliament. The original title was Councils of Workers' Soldiers' and
Peasants' Deputies, later amended to: Council of People's Deputies.
These councils were at all levels of democratic power, operating at
all levels of government from a local or factory or workplace Soviet
to the Supreme Soviet.
In the USSR in Soviet times, people all participate in government;
they are the state. There is no other state, no parliament full of
dozey MPs in a confusion of capitalist parties. British people just
vote – for that nice Mr. Churchill as my mother used to say. But
British people have absolutely no control of the state.
Not to gloss over what the Soviet Union was; and I had many trips
there, experiencing the daily lives of Soviet people and officials in
all walks of life in universities, schools, work places, sports and
leisure, government officials, university professors, journalists,
translators and interpreters, bus drivers and laundry workers, both
at work and in their homes. In all of that, despite looking hard for
any sign of what capitalist propaganda had told me, I never detected
or experienced any difference in the way people were treated. Every
person I came in contact with seemed well educated, motivated and
energetic in their role in society. They were also very human,
friendly, hospitable, generous, sensitive, kind and understanding,
and most, but not all, were highly politicised.
But what new society has ever been ready-made perfect at such a young
age? Can capitalism cast the first stone?
There were of course shortcomings, mistakes, misuse of power, and
corruption. There was a section of the population which did not have
the qualities mentioned above. I was occasionally pestered by
unofficial currency dealers offering a higher rate for western
currency. They are now probably what are referred to as the Moscow
millionaires and own British football clubs. My criticism was that
this was allowed to happen in socialist society. And it is my opinion
that this was partly to do with lapses in education and political
culture. I will discuss socialist society a little more below.
If you have abolished capitalism, and there is no socio-economic
class of capitalists. There is then only one socio-economic class
left – the working class; with its own party, to formulate government
and be governed by. (Our island family above, but bigger.)
To the objectors of this situation who say there should be at least
one other party to vote for, some kind of opposition, it is necessary
to ask: Who is it that would need an opposition? What other socio-
economic class would this "opposition" party represent? What will be
the policy of this "opposition" to working class policy?
In any society, there can only be social ownership of capital and the
means of production, or private ownership. There is no British
Blairite Labour Party "third way."
Socialist democracy is about discussing and voting for policies and
the representatives to carry out agreed policies from the ground
upwards. That is how democracy should work in true socialist society.
Another misreported and misunderstood aspect of communist inner party
democracy adopted by most communist parties is what is called
Democratic Centralism. This means that an idea, proposal or policy is
thoroughly thrashed out through discussion and debate right up
through the various levels from the basic local level to the highest
level, where, once it becomes agreed and voted on by the majority at
the appropriate level, with a quorum if required of a certain minimum
percentage, say, two thirds, of the electorate, the resolution
becomes party policy and is binding on all party members. Any member
who disagrees and wants to work against agreed policy as a dissident
must resign from the party. There is none of the various factions or
splits and divisions found in capitalist parties, with their own
policies or agenda, such as the various right wing, left wing, ultral
left, factions, with their own aganda and their own newspaper such as
found in the British Labour Party.
In the Soviet form, if an elected deputy did not vote for a decided
policy and did not carry out the wishes of the constituency
electorate, the electorate have the right of recall, which removes
that deputy from office and a new one elected.
Can we do that?!
Of course, these representatives can be corrupt and self serving if
the electors do not or cannot keep track of what they are doing.
The problem is that a socialist society with socialist ideals, the
new socialist man if you want to be that trendy, has not had the
chance to be developed. That won't be done in a couple of
generations. As the people of the GDR (East Germany) at the end of a
Nazified and war torn society said, we have to build our socialist
society with the people we've got; there is no other German people.
It will take generations to appreciate the more humane ethics of
socialist society.
The "freedom" to vote for a choice of capitalist parties while the
means of subsistence and production of wealth is privately owned as
capital; and while capitalist, I prefer to call it mis-education, and
mass media and publishing suppresses knowledge, information and
understanding, is nothing more than a nominal freedom; nothing more
than the freedom of a prisoner to choose his jailer.
"The most powerful weapon in the hands of an oppressor is the mind of
the oppressed."
(Steve Biko.)
The most powerful weapon in a sham democracy is public opinion,
through its control of education, the media and publishing. If you
control, limit and narrow what people think, you control the
political agenda.
Freedom and democracy under capitalist socio-economic conditions are
meaningless words devoid of any substance. Freedom to vote without
freedom to be without poverty, unemployment and wars is no freedom at
all. Freedom to vote without the guaranteed freedom of food,
clothing, housing and warmth, health and hygiene, education, culture
and the full riches of the earth, is a complete denial of freedom and
a despicable plunder of the meaning of the word.
A couple of hundred years ago, the British Land Enclosure acts in a
parliament of wealthy land owners and their friends and supporters
took away the bulk of the common land of the British people who had
lived there and cultivated for generations could no longer farm any
part of it, freely take deer or pheasants from forests or fish from
lakes, rivers and streams.
The only part of Britain where you can now, to a degree, freely take
food is the foreshore – perhaps only because tides make it difficult
to say where the sea ends and the land begins.
"The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose,
That steals the common from the goose."
(Anonymous 1764, during the English land enclosures.)
The rich having secured everything productive into their own private
hands, the rest of the population then became "free" to work for an
owner of capital – those guys who took the land from our ancestors;
or become a capitalist if you could. The rich then turned around and
said: oh you can have democracy now! So now we can vote for one
capitalist party or another! Why bother?!
How can you talk of democracy when the means of subsistence and the
means of production of life itself are owned by a small separate
economic class?
"Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality …for one
very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor."
(The Tories' favourite economic theorist, Adam Smith. 1723-1790).
It was calculated in the early 1980s that the ratio of ownership of
wealth assets between rich and poor in Britain was 7/84. That is, 7
per cent of the population owned 84 per cent of the country's wealth,
leaving the remaining 16 percent to be shared by the 93 percent
majority rest of us; a gap which has been continually widening since
long before the 1980s, said by some to be approaching the wealth gap
of the Victorian times of my Father's birth. Having worked hard all
his life in factories and shops till the age of 74, we had to borrow
money to bury him.
Real power in Britain does not lie in Parliament. As I think it was
Aneurin Bevan found, real power in Britain lies two miles to the East
of Parliament – in the financial and commercial City of London.
Anybody who doesn't understand or believe that is labouring under
hopeless and pitiful self delusion.
In short; capitalist "democracy" is a lie.
(See also re. democracy in The Island Family above.)

Sham Freedoms
What is this "freedom" they talk about in every speech; that they
must arm themselves to the teeth for? What are these "vital American
interests" which they say they must "defend" in every corner of the
globe?
The "free" world the US defends is the unhindered freedom of capital
to exploit labour. It includes fascist dictatorships – to keep
rebellious workers under control – the world of Pinochet and Pol Pot;
a "free" world of several million children who will starve to death
this year; of several hundred millions with no medicine or health
care; hundreds of millions of illiterates; all this in a very rich
and abundant world; the millions of unemployed and homeless –
millions of these in the United States itself, and in Europe and
other 'advanced' industrialised nations of the capitalist world.
Capitalist notions of "freedom" and "human rights" are totally
useless to the majority of the world's population who have no land or
means of subsistence, are living and dying under starvation, poverty,
unemployment, and lack of basic hygiene and medical care. What use
is "freedom of speech" to this majority of people to whom nobody
listens? What use is "freedom of travel" to the world's hungry people
who can't go anywhere and nobody wants them?
All the freedoms capitalists scream about, freedom of speech, freedom
to travel, are totally useless; not only for the millions of hungry
children living in cardboard boxes on the streets of Delhi Sao Paulo,
but you can see them every night wrapped in newspapers sleeping
against warm grills at the back of lavish hotels and restaurants or
under bridges on the banks of the Thames, the Seine, the Rhine or the
Potomac in the richest and most powerful capitalist nations on earth.
You can take a millionaire and three tramps and say that each has
equal freedom to sleep in a suite at the Hilton or in the delivery
doorway at the back.
The illusion of capitalist ideology is that all have equal freedom to
become a capitalist.
This is merely a nominal freedom, totally useless and meaningless;
since obviously all cannot be capitalists. In that sense the worker
under capitalism is still a slave. The only difference is that he is
a 'free' slave; not owned directly by any one slave owner, not owned
by a feudal lord; but now effectively owned by the whole capitalist
class; who treats him just like any other capital asset to pick up
and drop as the need arises. He is 'free' only in the sense that he
is free to choose his particular master, or free to starve.
No. Capitalist freedom is nothing but a worthless, meaningless,
hollow freedom.

Sham Human Rights
When capitalists can justify their murderous social-economic system
to the poor and hungry; and their murderous wars against humanity in
all the small and weak nations of the world; then they can talk of
peace. When they can justify their denial of the most basic human
rights to the majority of people of the world; then they can talk of
human rights.
How dare they talk of human rights and "freedom" – the big finance
capitalists and bankers and those unwitting unknowing "I'm not a
capitalist" small investors whose collective billions of pounds and
dollars are invested in the cheap labour, raw materials and markets,
sucking the wealth out of the Third World for hundreds of years – in
South East Asia, Latin America; or in Africa, where the majority of
people have no rights, no home other than a tin shed, and a plank or
an old door for a bed, an old coke can to drink out of, no right to a
job, own no land, own no workplaces, can't stand for parliament or
elect one, are not allowed to form trade unions, have no access to
medical treatment or education, and no access to press, radio or
television to tell the world their plight; where the vast majority
are deprived and silenced?
What hypocritical human rights do they talk of when they have sucked
the wealth out of all the small nations for hundreds of years and
then say that these nations are in "debt" to the West – to Western
shareholders, large and small? How dare capitalists and small
investors talk of human rights and freedom when we take billions of
dollars as our tiny part of the enormous third world debt owed to us
by every hungry child in the world?
The media is full of criticisms of human rights only in socialist
countries. When capital ruled in those countries no one said a word
about human rights there. They never called for "free and fair"
elections in these countries while they were under the direct
domination of transnational capital and protected by fascist military
dictatorships.
How dare they talk about human rights when they support, finance, arm
and retain the most horrific capitalist regimes in imperialist client
states all over the world?
No. Capitalists have never throughout history been concerned with
human rights.
Did anyone hear the rich world and its media – owned by the same
capitalists and shareholders who owned diamond, phosphates or uranium
extraction in South Africa – scream too loudly for the ending of
apartheid and the release of Nelson Mandela and free elections there?
Did anyone hear them screaming about human rights when the US
overthrew Chile's elected popular leader Allende and installed
General Pinochet?
Did they decry the US invasion and occupation of the tiny Caribbean
island of Grenada against the wishes of the mass murdered people and
their murdered leader Maurice Bishop?
"With it's 100 million people and its 300 mile arc of islands
containing region's richest hoard of natural resources, Indonesia is
the greatest prize in South East Asia."
(US President Nixon.)
Was there any loud media or government protest at the funding, arming
and imposition of Indonesia's 30 year military government of General
Suharto in the World Bank's "miracle of global economics" or the
CIA's "one of the worst mass murders of the 20th Century" (take
whichever version you want); or Suharto's grabbing of Sumatra, Java
and East Timor, with their "richest hoards" of mining, forestry and
very cheap labour (GAP and Nike clothes and shoes and DIY warehouse
garden furniture and decking to you and me), obtained for us by the
British Labour Government's "ethical foreign policy" as Suharto's
biggest supplier of arms used to murder more than a third of
Indonesians after the US and British backed military take over of the
popular socialist minded government of Sukarno?
Where was the media and government protest at the British Army's
massacres at Batang Kali and killing of millions of the polulation
during the "emergency" in Malaya?
They are not calling for freedom and human rights in El Salvador or
Nicaragua; nor are they calling for the freedom and human rights of
Palestinians.
They are not screaming for free elections in Burma (Myanmar), where
there have been no elections in the 30 years before 1990; and they
have not called for the freedom of the democratically elected leader
Aung San Suu Kyi, who won 82 percent of the votes in those Burmese
elections, is winner of numerous international awards including the
United States Presidential Medal of Freedom, who is imprisoned and
under house arrest under martial law which allows detention without
trial.
Instead the American champions of human rights everywhere, fund and
arm the military dictatorship in Myanmar in opposition to Aung San
Suu Kyi. Maurice Bishop's popular and socialist oriented government
of the tiny Caribbean Island of Grenada was overthrown and the US
invaded and occupied the island. The US overthrew the socialist
inclined government of Arbenz in Guatemala. British interests
murdered the popular leader Patrice Lumumba in the Congo (source of
the uranium for the Hiroshima bomb) and installed Mabutu for 40
years. The Nicaraguan people's popular leader Augusto Sandino was
murdered by the US financed National Guard of the Samoza brothers.
And the CIA fingered Nelson Mandela informing the Apartheid
government of his whereabouts effecting his arrest and 27 years of
imprisonment. The CIA overthrew the constitutional government of
Mossadegh in Iran and installed the Shah. US copper interests
covertly financed and armed the Chilean dictator General Pinochet's
military coup against the elected popular socialist government of
Salvador Allende.
They put Saddam on trial when he no longer cooperated with the US on
oil. But Pinochet is British Prime Minister Thatcher's guest in a
luxury Surrey estate when he came to Britain feeling a bit poorly.
And they positively worship the minority rich family rulers of the
Royal Gulf States, Saudi and Kuwait, and a great multitude of other
despotic, undemocratic governments all around the world.
They only call for the freedom of the reimposition of the rule of
capital in the socialist countries which have already eliminated the
hunger, mass poverty and bad health, illiteracy and homelessness
imposed by their previous domination by capital.
How dare they scream so loudly about 'human rights' in the socialist
countries which have taken themselves out of the capitalist system
and are trying to build a more equitable system of human economic and
thus social progress.
They would likewise have accepted Hitler if he had confined Nazi
Germany to destroying the power of the German working class, Marxism
and the Soviet Union.
No. They only hit countries taking a more liberated, more democratic,
or non capitalist system of socio-economic relations, and the
socialist countries.
The answer is that we benefit from them.
So keep the oil and phosphates flowing and keep the people's of those
countries from getting at them for themselves. How else is any
civilised person going to clean his teeth without an electric
toothbrush or take little Tarquin in a massive off-road utility
vehicle to school – which as we know is half way up mount
Kilimanjaro?
So who's next for regime change or invasion? (Both is better – more
secure)?
Any people sitting on lots of oil it seems – especially if they are
selfish enough to want it for themselves.
Well Venezuela has lots of oil. Venezuela's Chavez government is also
progressive and socialist minded. I'd say this definitely puts
Venezuela high on the US hit list.
Or will it be Iran?
It seems the most abundant human right in the capitalist world is the
right to poverty.
The unemployed are denied the most fundamental human right – to take
part in the economic life of their country.
Many middle class and rich in Britain, and sadly many working class
Tories, object to working people's right to strike – withdrawing
their labour in an unfair system. But they say nothing about business
owners withdrawing their capital when things are not going according
to their liking.
The final result always of capitalist freedom, capitalist human
rights, is the end of freedom, the denial of human rights – a world
in which hundreds of millions have no freedom and not even the most
basic human right – the right to life itself.

Capitalist Economic Theory – A Circular Argument Leading Nowhere
"Can you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends on where you want to get to" said the cat.
"I don't much care where" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go" said the cat.
(From "Alice in Wonderland.")
That's about as sensible as capitalist economic theory gets.
Any bourgeois economic 'theory' when subjected to serious critical
examination is quite easily disproved. This is because they are only
looking at economics from a narrow capitalist business or accounting
point of view in terms of profitability; they are not looking at it
from a socio-economic point of view, in terms of how it satisfies
human needs.
Capitalist economics takes the firm, the enterprise, the capitalist
aim of private profit, as its basic unit, and builds its theory
around the effectiveness of that in its making and maximising of
profit. It is not interested in the plight of the worker. Even slave
owners were slightly more concerned with the condition of their
slaves, if only because of the hassle of buying another one.
Capitalists do not in practice buy or own the worker, he is nominally
free to work for one capitalist or the other, to work for himself, or
to not work at all if he so desires.
What capitalist economic ideology calls 'theory' is nothing more than
a rationalisation of the profit motive – to give it moral
justification and a respectable academic appearance. All capitalist
economic ideology has only one objective – to rationalise and
legitimise, by idealistic instead of any scientific determinants –
this making and maximisation of private profit posing as economic
theory. Business studies – maybe; accountancy – maybe; but none of it
is economics in any true sense of the word.
The socio-economics of how profit is really made or where it comes
from, or who actually produces it, are subjects not discussed in
bourgeois economics. You will not see real concepts like Adam Smith's
definition of wealth, or Marx's labour theory of surplus value
mentioned or discussed in modern books on economics. Bourgeois
economics is not concerned with such things. That capital makes a
profit for its owners and that these profits can be maximised to the
greatest possible extent by every overt or subtle means is all they
are concerned with.
"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't
see the problem."
(G.K.Chesterton.)
The whole argument of mainstream economics is circular, with nothing
running off at a tangent or leading anywhere.
Where David Ricardo's, and later Adam Smith's economic theories,
though completely valid at their stages, were still half baked; it
was Marx who analysed their shortcomings and mistakes and brought
economics to a scientific level and completed the theory of surplus
value and the labour theory of value.
Although Marx's findings solved the problems of the classical
economists; at the same time it exposed the true nature of capitalist
plunder and exploitation. So from then on the capitalist economists
had another problem on their hands: How to use the new knowledge that
Marx had discovered but at the same time publicly refute or deny it.
It is therefore within economics that Marxist philosophy is most
attractive and popular to understand by working class people, since
it is in their interest.
"I owe it to the bourgeois so that they can convince themselves how
vastly superior the uneducated workers, for whom one can easily make
comprehensible the most difficult economic analysis, are to our
supercilious "educated people" to whom such intricate questions
remain insoluble their whole life long."
(Frederick Engels, in his introduction to Marx's "Wage Labour and
Capital.")
Capitalists put profit, competition and entrepreneurship as their
driving force; and elevate these notions as a `skill.' No.
Capitalism, competition, entrepreneurship, the making of profit is
not mankind's driving force, nor is it a skill. The capitalist system
compels the individual capitalist to expand his capital, reduce wages
and costs, with the sole aim of making and increasing his profits.
There is no skill about it. The capitalist has no choice in the
matter. Any capitalist who resists this will very soon not be in
business.
It seems ridiculous that it needs repeating that the sole and
essential aim and function of capitalist production, its only driving
force, is the making and maximisation of profit.
"Capital eschews no profit... just as Nature was formally said to
abhor a vacuum... A certain ten percent will ensure its employment
anywhere; 20% will produce eagerness; 50%, positive audacity; 100%
will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300% and there is
not a crime it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even the
chance of its owner being hanged."
(British economist T.J.Dunning, quoted in Marx's Capital.)
All people want the same thing - to live, happily, healthily,
comfortably, and with advancing ways of living and providing the
means of life. This, they do far better in cooperation than in
competitiion.
Man, like other successful species, whether ants or lions, is
cooperative by nature; achieving far more by cooperation than by
competition. Otherwise we couldn't grow bulk food or make aeroplanes.
No one can survive on their own, we need the cooperation of others,
in the division of labour our modern production has needed since
primitive communalism and a surplus over needs could be produced.
"Darwin's theory of the struggle for existence and the selectivity
connected with it has by many people been cited as authorisation of
the encouragement of the spirit of competition. Some people also in
such a way have tried to prove pseudo-scientifically the necessity of
the destructive economic struggle of competition between individuals.
But this is wrong, because man owes his strength in the struggle for
existence to the fact that he is a socially living animal. As little
as a battle between single ants of an ant hill is essential for
survival, just so little is this the case with the individual members
of a human community."
(Albert Einstein.)
"If we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: "Who are the
fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those
who support one another?" we at once see that those animals which
acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have
more chance to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes,
the highest development of intelligence and bodily organisation."
(Peter Kropotkin.)
"Go to the ants and be made wise."
(Plato.)

Socio-Economic Classes in Capitalist Society
The common notion of social class in Britain is always presented by
academia and the media only in the form of the Registrar General's
pointless sociological classification into upper, middle and working
class, further subdivided according to occupation and ridiculous
determinants like whether one hangs onions or porcelain ducks on the
kitchen wall.
It is interesting to note that out of all of this classification,
academia and the media only refer to the working class in comparison
with the other two sociological classes – upper and middle, carefully
never posing the socio-economic relationship between the working
class and the capitalist class.
Over a period of around 16 years since I was in teacher training in
the humanities, I have carefully watched and recorded very many
television documentaries and series about the nature of class in
British society. In all of these many hours of television devoted to
the subject, although the "working class" is mentioned continuously,
usually in comparison with the "middle class" and multitudes of other
meaningless class comparisons, I have almost never heard reference to
a capitalist class. I am waiting to see if, half way through the
current documrntary series on "class" fronted by that staunch Old
Labourite John Prescot, a capitalists class is mentioned.
When I took a sociology class during a tutor's absense, I was warned
not to refer to "any diversive" mention or comparison of social class
such as that "claimed by some trade unionists." This so obviously
referred to any Marxist notion of socio-economic class.
Presumably capitalists do not exist! Therefore capitalism does not
exist so let's not mention that either!
It is so obvious that this is a deliberately diversive confusion. (Or
a confusing diversion?) Anyway they do it on purpose!
Well, let's take a closer look and see what the Registrar General
beloved of the academic sociologists seems to have missed when they
ask: Are there really still classes? Hasn't social mobility now
become such that we are now a classless society? Surely it doesn't
matter whether you tilt the soup plate away from or towards you?
Well, let's look at it logically:
This is capitalist society; no one would be daft enough to deny that.
Therefore there are those who are capitalists – a capitalist class –
the bourgeoisie.
Agree so far?
It therefore follows that there are those who are not capitalists –
people who live on wages paid by a capitalist; in other words, the
working class, what Marx called proletarians or the proletariat.
Any problem with that?
What is the class difference between the two?
The capitalist class live on private profit extracted from human
labour.
The working class live on wages paid to them by capitalists.
So we have a capitalist class They own as their own private capital:
the land and its raw materials, the banks and other financial
institutions, the physical means of production and distribution –
factories, transport, energy production, retail, the media,
publishing, they own the products produced by these means of
production, and they own the profits made in that productive process.
Capitalists own the very means of subsistence of life.
On the other hand we have wage earning people: workers. (here it is
important to note that this term worker means by hand or by brain.
The working class in general (except for the relatively few self
employed who own their own small amount of means of production) own
nothing but their power to labour – by hand or by brain, for the
capitalist class, in order to produce the surplus value which the
capitalist appropriates as his profit, and who are completely
dependent upon the will of the capitalist for their entire means of
subsistence, whether they are cooks, bottle washers, factory workers,
teachers, computer operators, salesmen, secretaries, bus drivers,
business executives or high court judges.
The capitalist, owning the commodities produced by the means of
production, sells these on the "free" market. The worker also sells
the only commodity he has, his labour, on this same capitalist "free"
market. One gets his profits and still owns the whole means of
production and the commodities produced by it, and stays rich; the
other gets his wages and remains poor, and of course 'free'; free
only to work for another week for his capitalist boss or free to
starve if he prefers to.
The two have completely different and opposing economic aims. A
proper and logical analysis of socio-economic relations in capitalist
society reveals the only operating class division as between just
these two socio-economic classes – capital and labour – whose aims
are entirely opposite and contradictory. A capitalist wants to make
and maximise his profits by selling at the highest price and buying
at the lowest and paying the lowest wages. The working class on the
other hand want the highest wages and to buy things at the lowest
prices. This contradiction of socio-economic aims is what Marxists
call the class struggle.
There is another antagonistic issue. Once the market is saturated
with his products, the capitalist pulls out his capital and invests
it in another enterprise, with no obligation to the worker, who,
being merely a commodity in the capitalist productive process,
becomes unemployed until or unless he can find another capitalist to
work for.
At the end of each working week or productive cycle, the capitalist
retains his capital, the products, and the profit made, and has that
as his future prospects. The worker on the other hand, owns nothing
of this; only his wages, with which to buy back some of the means of
subsistence from capitalists. When this is spent, he has nothing, and
has to go cap in hand to the nearest capitalist for more of this
lovely thing called work.

The Historical Development of Ruling Economic Classes
Throughout history, the dominant philosophy in any society has always
been the philosophy of the ruling classes imposed on subordinate
classes.
So how do we find a philosophy that works for humanity, for the only
class that should exist – a working class? For a homogenous
population? For you and me?
Socially polarising contradictions between the social production of
wealth and the private appropriation of that wealth is not a new
thing.
"The State should take the entire management of commerce, industry,
and agriculture into its own hands, with a view of succouring the
working classes and preventing their being ground to the dust by the
rich."
(11th Century Chinese statesman Wang-An-Shih – Seven Centuries before
Marx.)
Primitive forms of communism existed in various historical forms.
Most, if not all, primitive tribes were communistic in nature by
necessity. Each member had a role to play in the survival and
economic needs of the group.
Only when there was a surplus of production did it become possible to
trade this surplus with other tribes or groups. This made it possible
for ownership of this surplus by a ruling minority.
Since the early primitive societies, historical stages have always
consisted of economic classes in a hierarchy of socio-economic
relationships: the one owning the means of production of wealth, the
other, owning no means of production themselves and are therefore
entirely dependent for their means of subsistence on and subservient
to the owning classes – owner and slave, patrician and plebian,
feudal landowner and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, and capitalist
and working class. In short: exploiter and exploited.
Then comes colonialism and its direct rule and appropriation of the
wealth of other peoples' lands, then so-called independence, where
local rulers supported and were supported by the old colonialists,
with the economy still owned or controlled by the imperial countries.
Now it is global imperialism – economic control backed up by
virtually unopposed military force.

Impossible Dynamics: Accumulated Capital In a Finite World
There is no such thing as perpetual motion.
The inherent dynamic of capitalism is such that capital cannot stand
still.
If it is not to stagnate and collapse, capital must continually re-
circulate, continuously accruing profits and becoming increased
capital. It must buy up and take over any competition and tend
towards monopolisation, ever onwards gaining more profits and
accruing vast amounts of spare capital concentrated in fewer and
fewer hands. It must then become colonialist and imperialist,
exporting this otherwise stagnant capital abroad, exploiting the
cheap labour, resources and plundering the wealth of other peoples.
Some, perhaps 100 corporations now own and control some 70 or 80
percent of the world's capital assets.
But the world is finite. Where then can capitalism expand to – the
moon? Perhaps that's what NASA has secretly been doing up there,
building a bank!
Indeed, capitalism could not have developed until the accumulation of
two important political economic necessities for its development were
in a well advanced state and polarised form. This already highly
polarised form existed in the accumulation of wealth as private
capital; and men who were "free" from serfdom and at the same
time "free" from the means of production – land, raw materials,
machinery; i.e: "free" from any other means of getting a living for
themselves except to sell their labour power for wages, or starve.
The feudal system broke down economically and socially, and the whole
socio-economic system then became more and more subordinated to the
rise in the political power of a capitalist class and the
corresponding comparative impoverishment of the working class.
It is the workers themselves who actually produce the wealth which
becomes the political power of capital over labour; instead of owning
that power themselves, as in socialism. In a true democracy, people
should control capital; not the other way round.

Other Capitalist Dynamic Necessities:
Colonialism, Imperialism, Fascism, World Poverty and Wars
"THEREFORE, when I consider and weigh in my mind all these
commenwealths, which now a days any where do florish, so God help me,
I can perceive nothing but a certein conspiracy of riche men
procuringe theire owne commodities under the name and title of the
commenwealth."
(Thomas Moore, Lord Chancellor of England, 1516.)
"Oh, where are you going to all you Big Steamers?
'We are going to fetch you your bread and your butter,
Your beef, pork and mutton, eggs, apples and cheese...
We fetch it from Melbourne, Quebec and Vancouver -
Address us at Hobart, Hong Kong and Bombay.'...
'Then what can I do for you, all you Big Steamers,
Oh, what can I do for your comfort and good?'
'Send out your big warships to watch your big waters,
That no one may stop us from bringing you food'."
(Rudyard Kipling.)
"Thousands of our fellow subjects... are at this moment existing in a
state of slavery more horrid than are the victims of that hellish
system, colonial slavery... Thousands of little children... are daily
compelled to labour from 6 o'clock in the morning to 7 o'clock in the
evening with only – British, blush while you read it – with only 30
minutes allowed for eating and recreation."
(Slavery in Yorkshire, Leeds Mercury, 1830.)
The economics of the situation demanded that trade in slaves was not
abolished in Britain until 1807, once Britain had already established
itself as an immensely rich colonial power. But slavery itself
continued perfectly legally for a further 26 years until it was
finally abolished in 1833.
This is how the immense wealth and power of British global capital
was built up – on slavery and the colonial and imperial plunder of
the wealth or the peoples of far away lands.
Our standard of living today solely and directly because of this.
"England has no permanent friends; she only has permanent interests."
(Lord Palmerston.)
"I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of
the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches which were just a cry
for "bread, bread, bread", and on my way home I pondered over the
scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of
imperialism... My cherished idea is a solution for the social
problem. i.e: in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the UK
from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must aquire new lands
to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the
goods produced by them in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I
have always said, is a bread and butter problem. If you want to avoid
civil war, you must become imperialists."
(Millionaire financier Cecil Rhodes, 1895.)
"Believe me, the loss of our domination would weigh first of all on
the working classes of this country. We should see chronic misery let
loose. England would no longer be able to feed her enormous
population."
(Joseph Chamberlain, British Colonial Secretary, 1895.)
"Look how the whole capitalist world is stretching out long arms
towards the barbarous world and grabbing and clutching in eager
competition at countries whose inhabitants don't want them... It is
for the opening of fresh markets to take in all the fresh profit-
producing wealth which is growing greater and greater every day...
and I say this is an irresistable instinct on the part of the
capitalists, an impulse like hunger, and I believe that it can only
be met by another hunger, the hunger for freedom and fair play for
all... Anything less than that the capitalist power will brush aside."
(William Morris, May Day, 1896.)
"The income which we derive each year from commissions and services
rendered to foreign countries is over £65 million. In addition, we
have a steady revenue from foreign investments of close on £300
million a year... That is the explanation of the source from which we
are able to defray social services at a level incomparably higher
than that of any European country or any country."
(Winston Churchill, Budget speech, April 15 1929.)
"This war is not a war for a throne or an altar, this is a war for
grain and bread, a war for a well-laden breakfast, dinner and supper
table... a war for raw materials, for rubber, iron and ore."
(Joseph Goebbels. Munich 1943.)
"Those who could not look beyond their personal interests should
remember that their employment and standard of living depended mainly
on the existence of the Empire."
(Daily Telegraph Oct 23 1943.)
"We are great friends with the jolly old Empire and we are going to
stick to it."
(Labour Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison, 1946.)
"I am not prepared to sacrifice the British Empire because I know
that if the British Empire fell... it would mean that the standard of
life of our constituents would fall considerably."
(Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, 1946.)
"I do not believe that anybody who has not seen with his own eyes,
can begin to imagine the poverty in which so many of our fellow
citizens of the Commonwealth are condemned to live."
(James Griffiths, former British Colonial Secretary, 1951.)
Should a nation whose wealth is built on the plunder of other
nations' wealth, slavery, wars of aggrandisement and atrocities,
child labour in mill and mine, so quickly abrogate itself from its
culpability and guilt?
Capitalism has to be imperialistic, ever finding new and cheaper
labour to exploit, and a market for the goods where there is only a
very limited purchasing power among the home country's working class.
As soon as this breaks down, especially when technology cannot keep
up with cheap labour to exploit, and limited and declining purchasing
power and therefore markets, the economy slows down and slumps,
sometimes with catastrophic results like the 1929 Wall Street crash.
The only way global capitalism. ie: imperialism, has survived such
crashes in the past is with wars, where the economy relies on
armaments production and the rebuilding of all the destruction after
a war. The US economy has been sustained on a war and armaments
footing since the end of the Second World War. The failure of the
USSR and its restraining military force and the power of its economic
force to help the poorer socialist countries and increase world
socialist economic relations is profound in meaning – possibly to the
detriment of us all in a nuclear war.
The system which forces the export of surplus socially produced
wealth in the form of private capital to exploit cheap labour in the
Third World is called imperialism. But people in poor countries do
not want to be exploited by foreign capital – to be stripped of their
raw materials and natural resources – whereby, due to the unequal
exchange of commodities, the product of ten hours of their labour
buys only the product of one hour of ours. What kind of freedom is
that?
Because of its inherent competitive and predatory and bellicose
nature, capitalism has always turned to war to attempt to solve its
problems.
"In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is
put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be
put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within
the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come
to an end."
(Karl Marx and Frederick Engels "The Communist Manifesto.")

Because You Were Never Told –
A Few Other Things You Didn't Know About Marxism
It is a human certainty that any person with a genuine love for every
human being on this planet, and who is intellectually mature and
academically honest, once it is accurately and faithfully explained
to them, would accept a Marxist philosophy as correct, and agree that
the world must eventually be a communist world if it is to survive
without a tragedy of colossal dimensions.

What Marxism Isn't
First, it is necessary to negate a few ignorant myths – propaganda
created and maintained by capitalism, its academics and media in
order to attempt to vilify Marxism by creating the illusion that
Marxism is just communist propaganda; to distort genuine Marxism in
the academic world and make genuine Marxism even more inaccessible to
any honest and intelligent enquiry.
It is easy to tell that critics of Marxist economics haven't read it
through or refuse to understand it by the stupid things they say
about it. For instance; they say that it has to be proved. So they
obviously think or deliberately suggest that Marxist economics is an
actual (communist) alternative to capitalism. Marxist economics is
not an alternative to bourgeois economics at all.
Marxism is not communism, nor is it about communism.
Marx did not provide a blueprint for a future egalitarian society;
nor is it abour predictions about the future. That's just a false
argument set up by Marxism's detractors so that they could knock it
down and "prove" it doctrinaire and wrong to the undiscerning.
Marxism is not about something to preach or indoctrinate people with
any more than we are indoctrinated with the fact of DNA or gravity or
that the earth is round.
Marxist economics is not, as is purported by capitalist ideology, a
plan or blueprint for communism.
Marxism is neither a plan nor a guide to communism. Marx hardly
mentions the word; which originally came from the Paris Communes of
1792 and 1871 during the French Revolution.
Marxism is a philosophy, a system of validation of knowledge. It is
about inherent laws – just like the laws of Newton and Einstein
inherent in physics – gravity and relativity, Marx's labour theory of
value is an inherent, immutable and irrefutable law of human socio-
economic relations.
Marxist economics, or more correctly, Marxist economic philosophy,
also known as political economy, is a full exposι of capitalism,
explaining exactly how it works. Not in terms of business studies or
accounting, which is merely a rationalisation of the capitalist
system, but in terms of human socio-economic relations within society
and between societies.
Marxism is an explanation of capitalism and therefore implies
communism as its counterpart. Implementing communism is left to the
rest of mankind, and has been attempted or practiced in various forms
in various countries to varying degrees of success. Hence Leninism,
Trotskyism, and the different forms of socialism such as Cuba's Fidel
Castro and Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh; Mao's China, and the former
socialist world of the European socialist countries such as the
Soviet Union, the GDR (East Germany), Czechoslovakia, Hungary and so
on.
Marxism is not about terrorism. Acts of terror are a complete
anathema to Marxism. Marxism is about mass participation in economic
and political power.
Acts of terror carried out by supposed left wing groups are not a
Marxist concept; and have only been called so in order to alienate
people from Marxism. Individual acts of terror is anarchism, not
Marxism. The Baader Meinhoff Red Brigades group in Europe in the
1970s and Pol Pot were called Marxist or communist by the media in
order to discredit genuine notions of Marxism and communism. Pol Pot
and the Baader Meinhoff group and similar organisations and groups,
mostly set up or funded by the CIA for the very purpose of obtaining
anti-Marxist and anti-communist propaganda, were fascists – the
opposite of communist.
Another word so misused and distorted in the context of Marxism is
revolution.
A revolution is a change of focus, of ideas and thinking, of economic
and political power. Thus we have had the industrial revolution, the
electronic revolution, the information revolution of computers and
the web, and various political revolutions including the English
Revolution of 1640.
Revolution, in a social or economics sense is a change of focus, or a
transfer of economic or/and political power.
Revolution in a Marxist sense is a change of economic and political
power with the greatest possible support and involvement of the
overwhelming majority of the population.
How this is achieved is not a matter of Marxism; which only tells us
what's wrong, not what we should do about it. Marx was a
revolutionary in the intellectual and theoretical sense, just like
Darwin or Einstein. Gravity being Newton's theory, it was for the
Wright brothers to use the theory and learn from practice in order to
overcome it.
Revolution in a political economic sense is left by Marxism to
others.
In the case of the Soviet Union, this was led by Lenin – Leninism,
which takes Marxist theory as given, and by implication, conducted
what Lenin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union saw at the
time as the most likely way to implement the transfer of power from
capitalists to the whole population. Most communist revolutions have
been necessarily of armed struggle (you can just as effectively
insert socialist here so long as it is in a Marxist sense rather than
the non-Marxist fairy tale of the British Labour Party's social
democracy – whatever that is supposed to mean; but it was never a
transfer of economic or political power to the whole population in
any sense, let alone a Marxist one), rather than any kind of
parliamentary struggle.
As the British communist party's document: "The British Road to
Socialism" sets out as the party policy, such a change of economic
and therefore political power in Britain would be by democratic
parliamentary means. And there have been at lease three Communist
Party MPs in Parliament. Didn't know that did you? Not your fault
though.
A parliamentary road to socialism might be derided in a British
situation by saying: Oh yes mate; the British Army, who it is to be
noted swears allegiance not to the public, not even to Parliament,
but to the Monarch, will just stand by and the Monarchy will just go
and live in a council block in Hackney!
However, let's leave Tellytubby land and learn a little from history
and summise that even a parliamentary revolution, with 100 percent
Communist MPs elected by the overwhelming majority of the population
to carry out any road to socialism, will sooner or later have British
Army tanks on the streets and US helicopter gunships in the air.
Witness the tanks and military presence around places like Heathrow
when it was feared that the Wilson Labour Government was led by
Moscow!
But let's be serious.
"Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that
of self interest backed by force."
(George Bernard Shaw.)
A condition of Britain receiving US Marshall Aid after the war was
that Britain cooperated militarily with the United States. In order
to keep themselves in power, the pseudo-socialist Labour governments
of Europe and Britain pandered fully to US dollars and voted the US
way in any UN or other negotiations.
How many European countries have secret treaties or agreements which
are not openly written into their constitutions, (Britain remains one
of the only countries in the world which does not have a written
legal constitution or a Bill of Rights), but such as the FRG (West
Germany) – that NATO forces of another country have the right to
intervene if the interests of NATO are considered to be threatened –
eg. by the coming to power of a socialist, neutralist or non-aligned
government, or one that wanted to remove US nuclear weapons and
bases, or get out of NATO?
"Do you know what would have happened then? You may read about this
in the Bonn Treaty on relations between the FRG and the Western
powers… the rights of the Allies [in BM.] …a state of emergency.
According to this treaty the Federal Government 'in case of serious
violation of public security and order' shall first use its police
force and if it cannot restore order and, in addition, in the opinion
of the three powers, a threat arises to the armed forces of the
Western allies, their commanders have a right immediately to take
respective protective measures, including the use of arms, needed for
removing this threat. You see that even 'a serious threat of
violation of the free, democratic order' is sufficient to impose a
state of emergency. ...if there was an uprising in the FRG
threatening the Constitution and the FRG's NATO membership the
Americans would the very next day intervene in our country."
(Henri Nannan, publisher, in his journal Stern, FRG, Jan 1982.)
"...including the ability to deal with a serious disturbance of
public security and order."
(From Article 5 of the "Convention On Relations Between The Three
Powers And The Federal Republic Of Germany" as amended by the Paris
Agreements of October 1954.)
"In case the Federal Republic and the European Defence Community are
unable to deal with the situation which is created by... subversion
of the liberal democratic basic order, a serious disturbance of
public order, or a grave threat of any of these events, and which in
the opinion of the Three Powers endangers the security of their
forces, the Three Powers may, ...proclaim a state of emergency...
Independently of a state of emergency, any military commander may, if
his forces are imminently menaced, take such immediate action
appropriate... to remove the danger."
(From Article 5 of the original Bonn Treaty.)
"In the present situation it is certainly the internal unrest,
sabotage and civil war type conflicts, that is, local disturbances in
their broadest sense, which under certain circumstances could most of
all endanger the Eastern borders of the NATO bloc."
(W.Ritter von Schramm, Der Deutsche Soldat. Flensberg 1961.)
"The draft of the committee enables the executive to deploy the armed
Bundeswehr inside the country and to misuse it for internal political
aims - without having obtained the sanction of parliamentary
authority. The armed forces may not only be deployed for police
tasks, but also internally 'with weapons'. The decision rests with
the federal government because if any such action becomes topical it
is always possible to say that 'the situation required this sort of
immediate action'."
(Frankfurter Rundschau, 26 April 1965.)
When discussions on ratifying the North Atlantic Treaty were held, US
Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Dean Acheson stated that one
of NATO's chief aims was to prevent what it called aggression "by an
election or a coup" or of "conquest through persuasion." And the NATO
Commander in Chief in Central Europe in 1956 referred to NATO as a
shield against the "infiltration of ideas." Various NATO "leaks" to
the press in 1970 stated that the US in Europe could resort to
sabotage and subversion and other warfare in the event of "emergency
situations" and if necessary take full power and bring any weapons
onto a country's territory, including chemical and biological
weapons, use all information available and suppress any
movement "threatening US strategic interests." A US document
published in the Italian press in 1981 showed that of over 23,000
missile targets only about 2,500 were in Warsaw Pact countries.
Soon after Marshall Aid was agreed by the US Congress, Britain and
the US had secret talks on NATO in the Pentagon in 1949. These
discussions were only made public in 1979. In the documents of these
discussions NATO's class war policy is clearly stated that:
"The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of
them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security
of any of the Parties [ie: Capitalism B.M.] is threatened."
(From Clause 4 of the Constitution of the North Atlantic Treaty
(NATO).)
Thus the European capitalist leaders have given the US and NATO the
right to intervene diplomatically, economically, and finally
militarily in any "political change favourable to an aggressor" in
any NATO country. In other words, the election or otherwise coming to
power of any real (ie: Marxist) Socialist government or any
government committed to and actually implementing disarmament in any
West European country.
And "territorial integrity" includes colonial or neo-colonial
territories. The people of the British Commonwealth territory of the
tiny island of Grenada know full well what the extent of the
application of NATOs Clause 4 means.
It is also important to understand and point out that this means that
it is only necessary that the "political independence or security" of
any NATO or NATO dominated country is judged to be "threatened" not
by the country concerned, but by "any one of them".
"Article Four is even more important. This, with no regional
limitations, provides that if there is any situation anywhere which
appears to affect the security of any member, they will all consult
on what action to take... If developments in Burma, or the Malay
peninsula led America, Britain or France to feel her security was
threatened, she could call a conference of Atlantic Powers... Should
the Italian Government fear that Communist sabotage threatened its
political independence, it could call a meeting of the Atlantic
Powers with the possibility that joint action would be taken to meet
the danger."
(Daily Telegraph March 23 1949.)
There is no doubt that in the event of civil unrest in any West
European country not being able to be contained by the forces of "law
and order" of that country the US would intervene. With the collusion
of European "socialist" governments, the US has the right to be the
world's anti-Communist policeman.
A group of wealthy and powerful people which has such fears and
responds to them with such contingency plans is already on the
slippery slope to a repetition of the rise of Fascism as in in
Germany in the 1920s and 1930s or a world war as in 1939 to 1954 and
beyond.

What Marxism Is
Marxism is a philosophy. A philosophy is a system of knowledge, a way
of looking at the world, how we validate phenomena, how we understand
our world and society. Marxism is not mere belief, it is not an
idealistic philosophy like those favoured by capitalism. Marxism is a
scientific philosophy, based on what actually happens and exists in
concrete reality.
Marxism applied to human society is primarily a philosophy of socio-
economic relations and their social and psycho-social effects. It
answers the question – why is human society like it is.
For human society, Marx's most useful discovery and essential
achievement was to expose the workings of capitalism in its socio-
economic relations between people in society, essentially between the
two socio-economic classes. For it is socio-economic relations that
are the determinants that underpin and permeate all other aspects of
society – education and upbringing, the family, relationships,
friendships, social norms, morals and behaviour, culture, the
hierarchy of social structure and class, social psychology, the law,
crime, foreign relations, race, standard of living and quality of
life, health and welfare – everything in society that affects each of
us as an individual. All these aspects of life have been reduced by
capitalist socio-economic relationships to what Marx termed the "cold
cash nexus" in all human relationships – not just business or trade
relationships.

A Scientific Philosophy
Marxism is a scientific philosophy. That is, it validates things,
phenomena, and itself, scientifically.
Philosophers for centuries have argued about the nature of the world –
how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or whether angels
have navels, but the point is, as Karl Marx remarked, to change it.
To understand anything in order to have some effect on it or change
it, you have to have a system of validating things – a philosophy.
This philosophy, if it is to be of any use at all, has to be
scientific in nature. Marxist scientific philosophy is called
dialectical materialism.
One can interpret phenomena, for instance, historical events, in
various ways – by seeing them as a series of unconnected accidents,
the designs of great men, planned by gods or visitors from outer
space. One can be a spiritualist, a fatalist, an idealist, or a
dialectical materialist.
Whatever philosophy one adopts, sooner or later, one has got to find
an effective method of understanding phenomena. For this we need
analytical tools, measurement, a system of validation, and a language
to suit. So we measure water temperature with a thermometer, the
hardness of metals with a Rockwell guage; we ask for a spade when we
want to dig, and a shovel when we want to move the dug earth out of
the way, otherwise digging holes for trees and No Parking signs would
be more difficult, wasteful and time consuming.
Philosophy is the discipline of validating phenomena. There are only
two basic schools of thought within the discipline of philosophy; and
all philosophies fall under one or the other. Found in science, they
are most apparent in the humanities – economics, sociology, history,
anthropology, evolution and natural studies.
These two basic philosophical schools of thought are called the
idealists and the materialists. Within the discipline of philosophy
these two words, idealist and materialist, are used slightly
differently from the way they are used in ordinary language. In
ordinary language, an idealist is a person who wants to do good works
for the world without regard for what other people call reality; and
a materialist is a person who cares less for the world but wants to
accumulate material possessions.
To explain the meanings of these two words within philosophy we can
consider a story which I use early in humanities courses. It is
certainly valid and essential in the study of economics.
Two primitive men were standing on the side of a mountain discussing
a thunder storm in the next valley. One says that: "whoever can make
such banging and flashing must be big and powerful and might harm us,
we'd better please him. Tonight we'll leave some food on a rock for
him." Of course, next morning the food was gone – as in the wild it
was bound to be, and his ideas were reinforced. The other said he
thought it was simply particles in the clouds crashing into each
other. I'm no meteorologist, but I simplistically understand that
lightning burns out a corridor of the oxygen or atmosphere through
which it passes, and the thunder is the surrounding atmosphere
rushing in to fill the vacuum. So both were wrong in a way. The man
who talked of demons or gods or some powerful being to whome we must
pay homage was philosophically the idealist. He was attempting to
explain a phenomena purely by the ideas he could imagine inside his
mind without reference to any outside reality, fact or substance.
Herein lie the origins of superstition, and on which much religion is
based. The man who said it was particles in the clouds crashing into
each other may have been wrong in terms of the science of
meteorology, but he was trying to understand a phenomena by
scientifically verifiable fact, by material means. Philosophically he
was the materialist.
Examples of idealistic thinking can be found in, for instance, von
Daniken's theory that the Nazca lines across the Peruvian desert are
purported (by von Daniken) to prove that the earth was visited by
superior beings from outer space before the existence of mankind. The
fact that straight lines can be made across vast extents of the most
undulating terrain by a single person with the use of three sticks
seems to have escaped von Daniken.
Marxism is a scientific philosophy. It formulates its theories and
answers questions in a scientific way, using scientific methods and
verifiable scientific argument, proved in practice. With Marxism,
theory and practice come together, one derived from the other;
looking at practice – what actually happens – to find theory, and for
theory to inform further practice. This is how most science is
conducted.
One can nail all manner of paper and string together like Icarus and
try to fly. But unless one considers the laws of gravity,
aerodynamics and power to weight ratios, one will not get off the
ground.
Likewise one cannot understand economic society, except from a narrow
capitalist business accounting point of view, without a scientific
way of looking at the whole subject.
But the world is not so difficult for mankind to understand if we
have a scientific way of understanding it – a scientific philosophy.
"The most remarkable thing about the world is that you can understand
it."
(Einstein.)
And that's the nature of Marxism – understanding the world from a
scientific philosophy.
"The philosophers have hitherto

(Message over 64k, truncated.)