“The property in the soil is the original source of all wealth, and has become the great problem upon the solution of which depends the future of the working class.”
“I do not intend discussing here all the arguments put forward by the advocates of private property in land, by jurists, philosophers and political economists, but shall confine myself firstly to state that they have tried hard to disguise the primitive fact of conquest under the cloak of “Natural Right”. If conquest constituted a natural right on the part of the few, the many have only to gather sufficient strength in order to acquire the natural right of reconquering what has been taken from them.”
It is a sorry fact that the small farmer is rarely in control of most of the farming that is occurring on the land. Large corporations have replaced the family farm, just as they did the grocery store, gas station, etc.
It is beyond returning control to small farmers; rather the struggle becomes one of unions, cooperatives, and nationalization. Returning to small scale farming, where the small farmer was his own capitalist, would only revert again to large scale farming, after a few generations as farmers would sell their lands, and ownership would become concentrated in the hands of a few large farmers again.
This does not mean cultivating the land on one’s own, purely for use value, would stop. It just means labour on the farm would be more like working in a factory, with a union, and the right to strike. Land will be owned by farmers, but they will be free to cultivate ecology or gardens for themselves on their own land, as a family unit. The man or woman will work for a collective farm, or both, and if they want to own some land it will be available to them, just not for capitalist purposes.
Labor on the large farms is already industrial. Unloading the trucks, sorting the vegetables for defects, etc. is all industrial labor. Even tilling the soil becomes an industrial activity of driving the tractor.
The current model of capitalist farming is destroying our ecology, with pesticides, genetically modified crops, patented seeds from Monsanto,etc. becoming a perfect example of the plunder of land exacted by the bourgeoisie.
There may have been a golden time when farming was not done by large farmers, when they were a petty bourgeoisie, but now they are heavily weighted towards the big bourgeoisie, Donald Trump’s supporters.
The latter is connected with removal of the farms from the small farmer, through patented seeds and subsidies to large farms based on the number of acres farmed.
“If cultivation on a large scale proves (even under its present capitalist form, that degrades the cultivator himself to a mere beast of burden) so superior, from an economical point of view, to small and piecemeal husbandry, would it not give an increased impulse to production if applied on national dimensions?”
“The ever-growing wants of the people on the one side, the ever-increasing price of agricultural produce on the other, afford the irrefutable evidence that the nationalisation of land has become a social necessity.”
Kar Marx ibid.
The farm worker harvesting today is overworked, using machinery from dawn to dusk, for a few months out of the year. Often this labor is done by migrants from Mexico, sometimes the only workers who can work long hours with little pay. Sometimes they are illegally working, constantly in fear of deportation.
Capitalists obviously have concluded large scale farming is the answer. As Marx points out, would it not be superior for the nation if the benefits of large scale farming was for all?
The plunder of the soil for capitalist agriculture, and the exploitation of the laborer, could be better addressed with employee ownership of large farms, and nationalization of the land.
“France was frequently alluded to, but with its peasant proprietorship it is farther off the nationalisation of land than England with its landlordism. In France, it is true, the soil is accessible to all who can buy it, but this very facility has brought about a division into small plots cultivated by men with small means and mainly relying upon the land by exertions of themselves and their families. This form of landed property and the piecemeal cultivation it necessitates, while excluding all appliances of modern agricultural improvements, converts the tiller himself into the most decided enemy to social progress and, above all, the nationalisation of land. Enchained to the soil upon which he has to spend all his vital energies in order to get a relatively small return, having to give away the greater part of his produce to the state, in the form of taxes, to the law tribe in the form of judiciary costs, and to the usurer in the form of interest, utterly ignorant of the social movements outside his petty field of employment; still he clings with fanatic fondness to his bit of land and his merely nominal proprietorship in the same. In this way the French peasant has been thrown into a most fatal antagonism to the industrial working class. “
Karl Marx iibid.
A similar phenomenon is the support from the petty bourgeois farmers of the reactionary bourgeoisie of Donald Trump. It’s gotten to the point if you are rural and farming, you are expected to support Trump. The residents of the small towns also like Trump, even though they own little land, and work for large scale agriculture.
It has destroyed the very thing we put our hopes in, the ability of the worker own land. Instead he is landless, or trying to be a small businessman with his land, attempting to obtain as much land as possible, and remain competitive.
“Peasant proprietorship being then the greatest obstacle to the nationalisation of land, France, in its present state, is certainly not the place where we must look to for a solution of this great problem.”
“To nationalise the land, in order to let it out in small plots to individuals or working men’s societies, would, under a middle-class government, only engender a reckless competition among themselves and thus result in a progressive increase of “Rent” which, in its turn, would afford new facilities to the appropriators of feeding upon the producers.”
“At the International Congress of Brussels, in 1868, one of our friends [César De Paepe, in his report on land property: meeting of the Brussels Congress of the International Working Men’s Association of Sept. 11 1868] said:”
“”Small private property in land is doomed by the verdict of science, large land property by that of justice. There remains then but one alternative. The soil must become the property of rural associations or the property of the whole nation. The future will decide that question.””
“I say on the contrary; the social movement will lead to this decision that the land can but be owned by the nation itself. To give up the soil to the hands of associated rural labourers, would be to surrender society to one exclusive class of producers.”
Karl Marx
Iibid
Nationalization of the land would give the cities a larger say over what and how land is farmed. The large scale agricultural producers now have a lock on the city with Trump. It has become a matter of guaranteeing the supply of food to the city for affordable prices, which could be an issue if the farmers boycotted the cities their leader keeps calling shitholes to live in. Then the nation would be forced to exert a say over the land.
It has yet to come to this, but the decision was already evident in 1872 when this was written. Things are even further along now, and even attempting to buy land for individual farming is something that just no longer happens. Jobs in agriculture almost always come from large scale farm farming; at most there is a distant view of a small capitalist farmer making his way up to be a big farmer.
But once there he remembers not his peasant roots, and supports Trump. His help is wage labour, his motive profit.
“The nationalisation of land will work a complete change in the relations between labour and capital, and finally, do away with the capitalist form of production, whether industrial or rural. Then class distinctions and privileges will disappear together with the economical basis upon which they rest. To live on other people’s labour will become a thing of the past. There will be no longer any government or state power, distinct from society itself! Agriculture, mining, manufacture, in one word, all branches of production, will gradually be organised in the most adequate manner. National centralisation of the means of production will become the national basis of a society composed of associations of free and equal producers, carrying on the social business on a common and rational plan. Such is the humanitarian goal to which the great economic movement of the 19th century is tending.”
Karl Marx conclusion, ibid.
All one can say is society is still moving in this direction, but has yet to remove the large farms, and the urban bourgeoisie, who work in tandem. There has yet to be a firm break from this , indicating it will not be imperceivable when it happens. Rather it will be abrupt, a real change felt by all. At which point “the expropriators will be expropriated” in Marx’s words.
Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels 1877 Part III: Socialism
II. Theoretical
“The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or estates is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in man’s better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and right wrong, is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented, spun out of the head, but discovered with the aid of the head in the existing material facts of production.
“What is, then, the position of modern socialism in this connection?
“The present structure of society — this is now pretty generally conceded — is the creation of the ruling class of today, of the bourgeoisie. The mode of production peculiar to the bourgeoisie, known, since Marx, as the capitalist mode of production, was incompatible with the local privileges and the privileges of estate as well as with the reciprocal personal ties of the feudal system. The bourgeoisie broke up the feudal system and built upon its ruins the capitalist order of society, the kingdom of free. competition, of personal liberty, of the equality, before the law, of all commodity owners, of all the rest of the capitalist blessings. Thenceforward the capitalist mode of production could develop in freedom. Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie developed with a rapidity and in a degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into- collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in its more complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the capitalistic mode of production holds it confined. The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on. Modern socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact; its ideal reflection in the minds, first, of the class directly suffering under it, the working class.
“Now, in what does this conflict consist?
“Before capitalistic production, i.e., in the Middle Ages, the system of petty industry obtained generally, based upon the private property of the labourers in their means of production; {in the country,} the agriculture of the small peasant, freeman or serf; in the towns, the handicrafts. The instruments of labour — land, agricultural implements, the workshop, the tool — were the instruments of labour of single individuals, adapted for the use of one worker, and, therefore, of necessity, small, dwarfish, circumscribed. But, for this very reason they belonged, as a rule, to the producer himself. To concentrate these scattered, limited means of production, to enlarge them, to turn them into the powerful levers of production of the present day — this was precisely the historic role of capitalist production and of its upholder, the bourgeoisie. In Part IV of Capital, Marx has explained in detail, how since the fifteenth century this has been historically worked out through the three phases of simple co-operation, manufacture and modern industry. But the bourgeoisie, as is also shown there, could not transform these puny means of production into mighty productive forces without transforming them, at the same time, from means of production of the individual into social means of production only workable by a collectivity of men. The spinning-wheel, the hand-loom, the blacksmith’s hammer, were replaced by the spinning-machine, the power-loom, the steam-hammer; the individual workshop by the factory implying the co-operation of hundreds and thousands of workmen. In like manner, production itself changed from a series of individual into a series of social acts, and the products from individual to social products. The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now came out of the factory were the joint product of many workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready. No one person could say of them: “I made that; this is my product.”
“But where, in a given society, the fundamental form of production is that spontaneous division of labour, there the products take on the form of commodities whose mutual exchange, buying and selling, enable the individual producers to satisfy their manifold wants. And this was the case in the Middle Ages. The peasant, e.g., sold to the artisan agricultural products and bought from him the products of handicraft. Into this society of individual producers, of commodity producers, the new mode of production thrust itself. In the midst of the old division of labour, grown up spontaneously and upon no definite plan, which had governed the whole of society, now arose division of labour upon a definite plan, as organised in the factory; side by side with individual production appeared social production. The products of both were sold in the same market, and, therefore, at prices at least approximately equal. But organisation upon a definite plan was stronger than spontaneous division of labour. The factories working with the combined social forces of a collectivity of individuals produced their commodities far more cheaply than the individual small producers. Individual production succumbed in one department after another. Socialised production revolutionised all the old methods of production. But its revolutionary character was, at the same time, so little recognised that it was, on the contrary, introduced as a means of increasing and developing the production of commodities. When it arose, it found readymade, and made liberal use of, certain machinery for the production and exchange of commodities: merchants’ capital, handicraft, wage-labour. Socialised production thus introducing itself as a new form of the production of commodities, it was a matter of course that under it the old forms of appropriation remained in full swing, and were applied to its products as well.
Engels and Karl Marx saw the historical condition of capitalism, much of which is still with us, of the late 19th century. England. Engels work here in Anti Duhring is some of the most advanced work in historical materialism that was ever written. The depth of the thought, which traces capitalism from its beginnings in the 16th century in England, to recent conditions, places it as a piece of work that should be enjoyed by anyone who has interest in the genesis of modern capitalism.
Here is more:
“In the mediaeval stage of evolution of the production of commodities, the question as to the owner of the product of labour could not arise. The individual producer, as a rule, had, from raw material belonging to himself, and generally his own handiwork, produced it with his own tools, by the labour of his own hands or of his family. There was no need for him to appropriate the new product. It belonged wholly to him, as a matter of course. His property in the product was, therefore, based upon his own labour. Even where external help was used, this was, as a rule, of little importance, and very generally was compensated by something other than wages. The apprentices and journeymen of the guilds worked less for board and wages than for education, in order that they might become master craftsmen themselves. Then came the concentration of the means of production in large workshops and manufactories, their transformation into actual socialised means of production. But the socialised means of production and their products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been before, i.e., as the means of production and the products of individuals. Hitherto, the owner of the instruments of labour had himself appropriated the product, because, as a rule, it was his own product and the assistance of others was the exception. Now the owner of the instruments of labour always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labour of others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and production itself had become in essence socialised. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, everyone owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests.*8 This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all decisive fields of production and in all economically decisive countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residium, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialised production with capitalistic appropriation.
“The first capitalists found, as we have said, wage-labour ready-made for them. But it was exceptional, complementary, accessory, transitory wage-labour. The agricultural labourer, though, upon occasion, he hired himself out by the day, had a few acres of his own land on which he could at all events live at a pinch. The guilds were so organised that the journeyman of today became the master of tomorrow. But all this changed, as soon as the means of production became socialised and concentrated in the hands of capitalists. The means of production, as well as the product, of the individual producer became more and more worthless; there was nothing left for him but to turn wage-worker under the capitalist. Wage-labour, aforetime the exception and accessory, now became the rule and basis of all production; aforetime complementary, it now became the sole remaining function of the worker. The wage-worker for a time became a wage-worker for life. The number of these permanent wageworkers was further enormously increased by the breaking-up of the feudal system that occurred at the same time, by the disbanding of the retainers of the feudal lords, the eviction of the peasants from their homesteads, etc. The separation was made complete between the means of production concentrated in the hands of the capitalists, on the one side, and the producers, possessing nothing but their labour-power, on the other. The contradiction between socialised production and capitalistic appropriation manifested itself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie.
“We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its way into a society of commodity producers, of individual producers, whose social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society based upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social interrelations. Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialised production. But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has its peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social interrelations, i.e., in exchange, and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product governs the producers.
“In mediaeval society, especially in the earlier centuries, production was essentially directed towards satisfying the wants of the individual. It satisfied, in the main, only the wants of the producer and his family. Where relations of personal dependence existed, as in the country, it also helped to satisfy the wants of the feudal lord. In all this there was, therefore, no exchange; the products, consequently, did not assume the character of commodities. The family of the peasant produced almost everything they wanted: clothes and furniture, as well as means of subsistence. Only when it began to produce more than was sufficient to supply its own wants and the payments in kind to the feudal lord, only then did it also produce commodities. This surplus, thrown into socialised exchange and offered for sale, became commodities. The artisans of the towns, it is true, had from the first to produce for exchange. But they, also, themselves supplied the greatest part of their own individual wants. They had gardens and plots of land. They turned their cattle out into the communal forest, which also, yielded them timber and firing. The women spun flax, wool, and so forth. Production for the purpose of exchange, production of commodities, was only in its infancy. Hence, exchange was restricted, the market narrow, the methods of production stable; there was local exclusiveness without, local unity within, the mark[114] in the country; in the town, the guild.
“But with the extension of the production of commodities, and especially with the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, the laws of commodity production, hitherto latent, came into action more openly and with greater force. The old bonds were loosened, the old exclusive limits broken through, the producers were more and more turned into independent, isolated producers of commodities. The anarchy of social production became apparent and grew to greater and greater height. But the chief means by aid of which the capitalist mode of production intensified this anarchy of socialised production was the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the increasing organisation of production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive establishment. By this, the old, peaceful, stable condition of things was ended. Wherever this organisation of production was introduced into a branch of industry, it brooked no other method of production by its side. Where it laid hold of a handicraft, that old handicraft was wiped out. The field of labour became a battle-ground. The great geographical discoveries, and the colonisation following upon them, multiplied markets and quickened the transformation of handicraft into manufacture. The war did not simply break out between the individual producers of particular localities. The local struggles begot in their turn national conflicts, the commercial wars of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.[115] Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world market made the struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists, as well as of whole industries and countries. He that falls is remorselessly cast aside. It is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence natural to the animal appear as the final term of human development. The contradiction between socialised production and capitalistic appropriation now presents itself as an antagonism between the organisation of production in the individual workshop, and the anarchy of production in society generally.
Engels ibid.
For anyone who claims to have feelings about Marxism they should read a book like Capital. Anti Duhring is also one to examine, before one spurs out foolish statements like those put forward by cable television, and its adherents.
“But with the extension of the production of commodities, and especially with the introduction of the capitalist mode of production, the laws of commodity production, hitherto latent, came into action more openly and with greater force. The old bonds were loosened, the old exclusive limits broken through, the producers were more and more turned into independent, isolated producers of commodities. The anarchy of social production became apparent and grew to greater and greater height. But the chief means by aid of which the capitalist mode of production intensified this anarchy of socialised production was the exact opposite of anarchy. It was the increasing organisation of production, upon a social basis, in every individual productive establishment. By this, the old, peaceful, stable condition of things was ended. Wherever this organisation of production was introduced into a branch of industry, it brooked no other method of production by its side. Where it laid hold of a handicraft, that old handicraft was wiped out. The field of labour became a battle-ground. The great geographical discoveries, and the colonisation following upon them, multiplied markets and quickened the transformation of handicraft into manufacture. The war did not simply break out between the individual producers of particular localities. The local struggles begot in their turn national conflicts, the commercial wars of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.[115] Finally, modern industry and the opening of the world market made the struggle universal, and at the same time gave it an unheard-of virulence. Advantages in natural or artificial conditions of production now decide the existence or non-existence of individual capitalists, as well as of whole industries and countries. He that falls is remorselessly cast aside. It is the Darwinian struggle of the individual for existence transferred from nature to society with intensified violence. The conditions of existence natural to the animal appear as the final term of human development. The contradiction between socialised production and capitalistic appropriation now presents itself as an antagonism between the organisation of production in the individual workshop, and the anarchy of production in society generally.
“The capitalistic mode of production moves in these two forms of the antagonism immanent to it from its very origin. It is never able to get out of that “vicious circle” which Fourier had already discovered. What Fourier could not, indeed, see in his time is that this circle is gradually narrowing; that the movement becomes more and more a spiral, and must come to an end, like the movement of the planets, by collision with the centre. It is the compelling force of anarchy in the production of society at large that more and more completely turns the great majority of men into proletarians; and it is the masses of the proletariat again who will finally put an end to anarchy in production. It is the compelling force of anarchy in social production that turns the limitless perfectibility of machinery under modern industry into a compulsory law by which every individual industrial capitalist must perfect his machinery more and more, under penalty of ruin. But the perfecting of machinery is making human labour superfluous. If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845,*9 available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead-weight upon the limbs of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital. Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labour constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the labourer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation. Thus it comes about that the economising of the instruments of labour becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labour-power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labour functions; that machinery, the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital. Thus it comes about that the overwork of some becomes the preliminary condition for the idleness of others, and that modern industry, which hunts after new consumers over the whole world, forces the consumption of the masses at home down to a starvation minimum, and in doing this destroys its own home market. “The law that always equilibrates the relative surplus-population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital” (Marx’s Capital, p. 671.) And to expect any other division of the products from the capitalistic mode of production is the same as expecting the electrodes of a battery not to decompose acidulated water, not to liberate oxygen at the positive, hydrogen at the negative pole, so long as they are connected with the battery.
Anti Duhring by Friedrich Engels
“We have seen that the ever increasing perfectibility of modern machinery is, by the anarchy of social production, turned into a compulsory law that forces the individual industrial capitalist always to improve his machinery, always to increase its productive force. The bare possibility of extending the field of production is transformed for him into a similar compulsory law. The enormous expansive force of modern industry, compared with which that of gases is mere child’s play, appears to us now as a necessity for expansion, both qualitative and quantitative, that laughs at all resistance. Such resistance is offered by consumption, by sales, by the markets for the products of modern industry. But the capacity for extension, extensive and intensive, of the markets is primarily governed by quite different laws that work much less energetically. The extension of the markets cannot keep pace with the extension of production. The collision becomes inevitable, and as this cannot produce any real solution so long as it does not break in pieces the capitalist mode of production, the collisions become periodic. Capitalist production has begotten another “vicious circle”.
“As a matter of fact, since 1825, when the first general crisis broke out, the whole industrial and commercial world, production and exchange among all civilised peoples and their more or less barbaric hangers-on, are thrown out of joint about once every ten years. Commerce is at a standstill, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years; productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filters off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again. Little by little the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and speculation, which finally, after break-neck leaps, ends where it began — in the ditch of a crisis. And so over and over again. We have now, since the year 1825, gone through this five times, and at the present moment (1877) we are going through it for the sixth time. And the character of these crises is so clearly defined that Fourier hit all of them off when he described the first as crise plethorique, a crisis from plethora.
“In these crises, the contradiction between socialised production and capitalist appropriation ends in a violent explosion. The circulation of commodities is, for the time being, stopped. Money, the means of circulation, becomes a hindrance to circulation. All the laws of production and circulation of commodities are turned upside down. The economic collision has reached its apogee. The mode of production is in rebellion against the mode of exchange, the productive forces are in rebellion against the mode of production which they have outgrown.
Engles ibid.
I really like the revolutionary energy this work by Engels has. He clearly has a great understanding of his topic, political economy, which shows here. HIs wisdom is formidable, and all the bourgeoisie can do is kill it with silence. Much like my own works. It will not be taught in schools, or promoted by the capitalist press. It is too revolutionary.
“The fact that the socialised organisation of production within the factory has developed so far that it has become incompatible with the anarchy of production in society, which exists side by side with and dominates it, is brought home to the capitalists themselves by the violent concentration of capital that occurs during crises, through the ruin of many large, and a still greater number of small, capitalists. The whole mechanism of the capitalist mode of production breaks down under the pressure of the productive forces, its own creations. It is no longer able to turn all this mass of means of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of subsistence, available labourers, all the elements of production and of general wealth, are present in abundance. But “abundance becomes the source of distress and want” (Fourier), because it is the very thing that prevents the transformation of the means of production and subsistence into capital. For in capitalistic society the means of production can only function when they have undergone a preliminary transformation into capital, into the means of exploiting human labour-power. The necessity of this transformation into capital of the means of production and subsistence stands like a ghost between these and the workers. It alone prevents the coming together of the material and personal levers of production; it alone forbids the means of production to function, the workers to work and live. On the one hand, therefore, the capitalistic mode of production stands convicted of its own incapacity to further direct these productive forces. On the other, these productive forces themselves, with increasing energy, press forward to the removal of the existing contradiction, to the abolition of their quality as capital, to the practical recognition of their character as social productive forces.
“This rebellion of the productive forces, as they grow more and more powerful, against their quality as capital, this stronger and stronger command that their social character shall be recognised, forces the capitalist class itself to treat them more and more as social productive forces, so far as this is possible under capitalist conditions. The period of industrial high pressure, with its unbounded inflation of credit, not less than the crash itself, by the collapse of great capitalist establishments, tends to bring about that form of the socialisation of great masses of means of production which we meet with in the different kinds of joint-stock companies. Many of these means of production and of communication are, from the outset, so colossal that, like the railways, they exclude all other forms of capitalistic exploitation. At a further stage of evolution this form also becomes insufficient: the official representative of capitalist society — the state — will ultimately have to*10 undertake the direction of production. This necessity for conversion into state property is felt first in the great institutions for intercourse and communication — the post office, the telegraphs, the railways.
Friedrich Engels 1877 Anti Duhring
In this part he calls attention to the state having to take control of industry, and it is not socialism. His examples of the the post office, the telegraphs, the railways, has practical importance as the United States Postal Service, and Amtrak, the only passenger railroad. Telegraphs have become the internet, so this prediction of state control has yet to pass. But the fact he knocked off two in 1877 is remarkable.
“If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies and state property shows how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salaried employees. The capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first the capitalist mode of production forces out the workers. Now it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.
“But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.
“This solution can only consist in the practical recognition of the social nature of the modern forces of production, and therefore in the harmonising of the modes of production, appropriation, and exchange with the socialised character of the means of production And this can only come about by society openly and directly taking possession of the productive forces which have outgrown all control except that of society as a whole. The social character of the means of production and of the products today reacts against the producers, periodically disrupts all production and exchange, acts only like a law of nature working blindly, forcibly, destructively. But with the taking over by society of the productive forces, the social character of the means of production and of the products will be utilised by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and instead of being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become the most powerful lever of production itself.
“Active social forces work exactly like natural forces: blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand, and reckon with them. But when once we understand them, when once we grasp their action, their direction, their effects, it depends only upon ourselves to subject them more and more to our own will, and by means of them to reach our own ends. And this holds quite especially of the mighty productive forces of today. As long as we obstinately refuse to understand the nature and the character of these social means of action — and this understanding goes against the grain of the capitalist mode of production and its defenders — so long these forces are at work in spite of us, in opposition to us, so long they master us, as we have shown above in detail. But when once their nature is understood, they can, in the hands of the producers working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants. The difference is as that between the destructive force of electricity in the lightning of the storm, and electricity under command in the telegraph and the voltaic arc; the difference between a conflagration, and fire working in the service of man. With this recognition, at last, of the real nature of the productive forces of today, the social anarchy of production gives place to a social regulation of production upon a definite plan, according to the needs of the community and of each individual. Then the capitalist mode of appropriation, in which the product enslaves first the producer and then the appropriator, is replaced by the mode of appropriation of the products that is based upon the nature of the modern means of production: upon the one hand, direct social appropriation, as means to the maintenance and extension of production — on the other, direct individual appropriation, as means of subsistence and of enjoyment.
Engels ibid.
Anyone who said there was no direction given as to what to replace capitalism with should read this. Marx and Engels had a very clear picture in their minds about what constituted socialism, and how a society beyond capitalism would look.
“Whilst the capitalist mode of production more and more completely transforms the great majority of the population into proletarians, it creates the power which, under penalty of its own destruction, is forced to accomplish this revolution. Whilst it forces on more and more the transformation of the vast means of production, already socialised, into state property, it shows itself the way to accomplishing this revolution. The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production in the first instance into state property. But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinctions and class antagonisms, abolishes also the state as state. Society thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the state, that is, of an organisation of the particular class, which was pro tempore the exploiting class, for the maintenance of its external conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labour). The state was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But it was this only in so far as it was the state of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole: in ancient times, the state of slave-owning citizens; in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords; in our own time, the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase “a free people’s state”, both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency[117]; and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the state out of hand.
“Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by sects, as the ideal of the future. But it could become possible, could become a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realisation were there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable, not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions. The separation of society into an exploiting and an exploited class, a ruling and an oppressed class, was the necessary consequence of the deficient and restricted development of production in former times. So long as the total social labour only yields a produce which but slightly exceeds that barely necessary for the existence of all; so long, therefore, as labour engages all or almost all the time of the great majority of the members of society — so long, of necessity, this society is divided into classes. Side by side with the great majority, exclusively bond slaves to labour, arises a class freed from directly productive labour, which looks after the general affairs of society: the direction of labour, state business, law, science, art, etc. It is, therefore, the law of division of labour that lies at the basis of the division into classes. But this does not prevent this division into classes from being carried out by means of violence and robbery, trickery and fraud. It does not prevent the ruling class, once having the upper hand, from consolidating its power at the expense of the working class, from turning its social leadership into an exploitation of the masses.
“But if, upon this showing, division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces. And, in fact, the abolition of classes in society presupposes a degree of historical evolution at which the existence, not simply of this or that particular ruling class, but of any ruling class at all, and, therefore, the existence of class distinction itself has become an obsolete anachronism. It presupposes, therefore, the development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and, with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only superfluous but economically, politically, intellectually a hindrance to development. This point is now reached. Their political and intellectual bankruptcy is scarcely any longer a secret to the bourgeoisie themselves. Their economic bankruptcy recurs regularly every ten years. In every crisis, society is suffocated beneath the weight of its own productive forces and products, which it cannot use, and stands helpless face to face with the absurd contradiction that the producers have nothing to consume, because consumers are wanting. The expansive force of the means of production bursts the bonds that the capitalist mode of production had imposed upon them. Their deliverance from these bonds is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself. Nor is this all. The socialised appropriation of the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial restrictions upon production, but also with the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable concomitants of production, and that reach their height in the crises. Further, it sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and of products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling classes of today and their political representatives. The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialised production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties — this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here.*11
“With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history — only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.
Engels Anti Duhring
The part at the end, of man mastering nature, should be ecological symbiosis. Mastery of ecology was a second millennium concept; an ideal of mans control over nature, and its right to treat other organisms in the ecology as unwanted, often because they found their appearance unfavorable to humans.
Otherwise though for its time, it is a good piece of work. There are parts in this book that Engels talks about fixing ecology, like creating Milorganite from human sewage. Another prediction come true.
It is coming to light that the starlink satellite internet service run by Elon Musk is a poor example for providing internet service, unless there are few users at a time. Basically the conclusion is the more users on the service at a time, the slower it goes, or starts to malfunction.
“There’s an irony with Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service beamed from space: The more popular it becomes, the worse its speeds and reliability tend to get.”
“Those limitations are known, but a new analysis estimates the tipping point at which Starlink connections could bog down: With as few as 419 Starlink customers in an area the size of Tacoma, Washington, service for all users in the area could become unusable.”
“They (internet expert Sascha Meinrath’s group) believe that within the geographic coverage area of a single Starlink satellite – an estimated 62.9 square miles or roughly the area of Tacoma – hitting 419 Starlink customers could become a problem. That’s an average 6.7 Starlink customers per square mile.
“At that level of usage, they estimated that internet speeds for Starlink customers in the area would fall below the government’s definition of modern, reliable internet service for sending data out from your device. Service could be unusable under some conditions, they said.”
Elon Musk knew this, but kept it secret, and just kept launching more and more rockets with the starlink satellites on board, regardless of pollution in near orbit, or later on how offensive the militarization of space is becoming.
“All internet services experience those constraints, but internet experts say they’re more acute with Starlink, particularly for uses like sending images or video calls for which you send data out to the internet.”
Washington Post ibid.
“Ookla reports, based on user-initiated speed tests, were cited by the Federal Communications Commission last month when it rejected Starlink’s application to receive $885.51 million in broadband funding that had been tentatively awarded during then-Chairman Ajit Pai’s tenure. The FCC said it doubts whether Starlink can provide the grant’s required speeds of 100Mbps downloads and 20Mbps uploads.”
“”We observe that Ookla data reported as of July 31, 2022 indicate that Starlink’s speeds have been declining from the last quarter of 2021 to the second quarter of 2022, including upload speeds that are falling well below 20Mbps,” the FCC said at the time. Ookla, a private company, operates a widely used speed testing service and boasts that its data is often used by government and regulatory bodies.”
Article continues
“Starlink has more than 3,000 satellites in orbit so far. The Internet provider has FCC permission to deploy nearly 12,000 satellites, including those already being operated, and is seeking authorization to launch tens of thousands eventually.”
From link: internet speeds start to significantly slow. see above in Washington Post
Which one has to wonder, what is the real purpose of this exercise? Who benefits from using starlink?
“Wireline broadband is still the best. Overall, fixed broadband services in the US posted median download speeds of 150.1Mbps, uploads of 21.5Mbps, and 14 ms latency, the Q2 Ookla report said.”
“From the beginning, it was clear that Starlink is most appropriate for people who don’t have a solid cable or fiber connection in their homes. The recent data doesn’t change that overall conclusion, but Starlink users who are getting slower-than-expected speeds have good reason to be frustrated.”
Ibid, arstechnica
So clearly not the average person using starlink, at least not in a city, It costs 7 times more than cable internet, and it functions poorly compared to wire internet.
From here we go to Reuters, an article written yesterday about Elon Musk and the war in Ukraine, which his starlink internet service is providing access to for military purposes.
“KYIV – During a pivotal push by Ukraine to retake territory from Russia in late September 2022, Elon Musk gave an order that disrupted the counteroffensive and dented Kyiv’s trust in Starlink, the satellite internet service the billionaire provided early in the war to help Ukraine’s military maintain battlefield connectivity.”
“According to three people familiar with the command, Musk told a senior engineer at the California offices of SpaceX, the Musk venture that controls Starlink, to cut coverage in areas including Kherson, a strategic region north of the Black Sea that Ukraine was trying to reclaim.”
““We have to do this,” Michael Nicolls, the Starlink engineer, told colleagues upon receiving the order, one of these people said. Staffers complied, the three people told Reuters, deactivating at least a hundred Starlink terminals, their hexagon-shaped cells going dark on an internal map of the company’s coverage. The move also affected other areas seized by Russia, including some of Donetsk province further east.”
“Upon Musk’s order, Ukrainian troops suddenly faced a communications blackout, according to a Ukrainian military official, an advisor to the armed forces, and two others who experienced Starlink failure near the front lines. Soldiers panicked, drones surveilling Russian forces went dark, and long-range artillery units, reliant on Starlink to aim their fire, struggled to hit targets.”
“As a result, the Ukrainian military official and the military advisor said, troops failed to surround a Russian position in the town of Beryslav, east of Kherson, the administrative center of the region of the same name. “The encirclement stalled entirely,” said the military official in an interview. “It failed.””
This is an example of how connected Musk is to Ukraine, and its war with its now capitalist neighbor, Russia. As soon as starlink stopped functioning, everything started to fail.
article continues
“Whatever the reason for Musk’s decision, the shutoff over Kherson and other regions surprised some involved with the Ukraine war – from troops on the ground to U.S. military and foreign policy officials, who after Russia’s full-scale invasion that February had worked to secure Starlink service for Ukrainian forces. Panicked calls by Ukrainian officials during the outage to seek information from Pentagon counterparts, five people familiar with the incident said, were met with few explanations for what could have caused it. “
“As of April 2025, according to Ukrainian government social media posts, Kyiv has received more than 50,000 Starlink terminals. Easily transported and deployed, the pizza-box-sized devices communicate with thousands of SpaceX satellites now circling the globe. An initial batch of terminals was provided to Ukraine by SpaceX itself. Further terminals have arrived from donors including Poland, the United States and Germany.”
“SpaceX is the first company to establish an extensive network of communication satellites in low-Earth orbit, a region of space that is closer to the planet than areas where such satellites historically reside. The proximity of satellites that now make up the company’s constellation allows Starlink to offer space-based wireless connectivity that is faster than any previously available. “
“With more than 7,900 satellites now in orbit, SpaceX has become the world’s largest satellite operator. Its devices, which relay signals among each other to create a network that communicates with the ground, account for about two-thirds of all active satellites in space, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian. “
“Compared to the geostationary satellites historically used for communications, the sheer number of SpaceX satellites helps make Starlink less vulnerable to jamming and attacks. Its far reach makes it valuable in remote and hostile terrain – from battlefields to airspace to high seas. In Ukraine, it has facilitated activities including communications, intelligence and drone piloting. “
Reuters ibid.
“Even before the conflict began, documents reviewed by Reuters show, SpaceX had already been in discussions with the U.S. government about providing Starlink in Ukraine. Rollout began after Russian troops crossed the border on February 24, 2022.”
“Two days later, Mykhailo Fedorov, a deputy prime minister in Ukraine, requested Musk’s help. “We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations,” he wrote on Twitter.”
“Musk responded in 10 hours. “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine,” he tweeted. “More terminals en route.””
“Poland was also instrumental in the early days of the war, shipping thousands of terminals to Ukraine shortly after the invasion. Warsaw this year said it has purchased about 25,000 Starlink terminals for the effort – roughly half the total now in Ukraine – and that it is paying the subscription costs to keep them connected. So far, it has spent about $89 million on Starlink for Ukraine.”
“The equipment has made a critical difference for Ukraine.”
“Day-to-day bureaucracy has also benefited. Early in the conflict, Ukraine stored state data in the cloud and relied on Starlink to access it, helping keep some government operations running. “We wouldn’t be anywhere without Starlink,” said Vadym Prystaiko, Ukraine’s ambassador to Britain until 2023. “The whole state was preserved.””
“On the battlefield, Ukraine quickly deployed Starlink to enable front-line troops to communicate with commanders. The service also allowed drone operators to transmit surveillance video streams and locate and attack Russian targets. Reuters couldn’t establish just when such attacks may have become a concern for Musk or SpaceX.”
“That month (September 2022), in a statement to the United Nations, Russia noted the use of “elements of civilian, including commercial, infrastructure in outer space for military purposes.” It warned that “quasi-civilian infrastructure may become a legitimate target for retaliation.””
“It isn’t clear whether Russia has tried to attack any Starlink facilities. Musk has said, however, that Moscow has repeatedly sought to block its connectivity. “SpaceX is spending significant resources combating Russian jamming efforts,” Musk wrote on X last year. “This is a tough problem.””
“Ukrainian drone specialists and Prystaiko, the former ambassador to Britain, said some attack devices, including maritime and bomber drones, now have Starlink antennas fitted to them. The antennas, in the case of sea drones, help operators guide the devices and view video feeds to classify targets, said Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow at Royal United Services Institute, a London-based defense think tank.”
“Musk himself has boasted of Starlink’s importance to Kyiv. “My Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army,” he wrote on X in March. “Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.””
Reuters ibid.
So here we see what starlink was really designed for; internet service communications in war zones where many users, civilians, etc. along side military users would overload the system. It may hardly provide for civilian internet service, but it seems to work when NATO and their proxies are attacking a de populationed region. Clearly this militarization of outer space is exactly what Musk knew he was doing, when he launched all those satellites into near earth orbit.
There is still no way to return satellites to earth; they just break apart and make near earth orbit space stations vulnerable to space garbage, which damage for example fuel cells for returning to Earth. It also precludes any carbon based life being able to get near the planet without shielding of some sort. Fortunately we have been lucky enough not to have been visited by anything recently, up to this point this sounds like science fiction.
Musk’s system is being used to guide drones and missiles into Russia, some of which are targeting Moscow. It has allowed capitalists there to attempt to join NATO, to leave behind the past attempt to rectify the contradiction between wage labour and bourgeois. Ukraine preferred the material results of capitalism more than the quality of labor emancipated from production for surplus value. In exchange for weapons, luxury items, and modest gains in wages, capitalism returned full force to Ukraine.
Part of this was due to the failure of eastern communism to make the shift to ecological socialism.
Nuclear energy remains an export from capitalist Russia. The reactors built by GE and Hitachi in Japan, at Fukushima. melted down too. Japan has had to release hundreds of millions of liters of tritium polluted water into the ocean. Neighboring countries refuse to buy Japanese fish, or serve it in restaurants.
In Ukraine the largest nuclear reactors in Europe, the Zaporizhyzhia generation facilities, were never shut down, even after Chernobyl melted down. They are now in a war zone, shut down, for how long it is unknown. Clearly the return to capitalism by Ukraine did not have ecological goals.
Musk’s starlink service is the main weapon in the war in Ukraine. It is for communications and targeting of drones and missiles, designed to conquer Russia. What Musk told us about starlink being practical as a service for areas with little internet service seems to only work if you keep your connection a secret to your neighbors. The minute people start to use the starlink in numbers, it fails. But in Ukraine, in a depopulated area where the army uses starlink, it works fine. It is just that it is not really for civilian usage, like it was promised by Musk when he began launching massive amounts of satellites into orbit.
The satellites are essentially military satellites, it should be of no surprise Trump started a military wing called the “Space Force” when he was in office. Although he may not be getting along so well with Elon now, the fact remains he contributed about 275 million dollars to Trump’s campaign to get reelected. Space Force is really militarising space, and passing off starlink as a civilian organization.
Without Musk, no war in Ukraine. Unless you want to pay top dollar for crappy internet service somewhere in America without cable or telephone lines, starlink is not for you. But give it to capitalists in a war zone, it is essential. Musk even said before the war broke out he would deploy starlink for the military in Ukraine. Well there it is, in full glory bombing Moscow from Ukraine.
The answer to why Donald Trump is ramping up tariffs is protectionism, in particular to protect ExxonMobil and Chevron, who control much of the US market for petroleum. Other countries like Britain own Shell and BP,; Total is owned by France. By discouraging competition with tariffs, ExxonMobil and Chevron will control the US market for oil.
Chevron has a history. This work is from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.
Chevron is one of two massive companies that control much of the US market. There are 5 large oil companies in the world who control most or all of the market for petroleum production, refining, and selling the gas at gas stations. They are ExxonMobil, the largest, Chevron, BP , Total, and Shell. The Saudi Aramco company is in production of crude and are also a force to be reckoned with.
There was a time not so long ago, in memory, when the gas station was a family business. That began to change in the 80’s and 90’s and now it is rare to find a family or small business owned gas pump. Concentration of ownership by large capitalists removed the small gas stations,
“Since the acquisition of the Pacific Coast Oil Company by Standard Oil, the Standard descendant had traditionally worked closely with Texaco for 100 years, before acquiring Texaco outright in 2001. “
Wikipedia Chevron
There went another large company to Chevron. Texaco used to own gas stations, it is now all Chevron.
“The term “Seven Sisters” refers to seven major, vertically integrated oil companies that dominated the global petroleum industry from the 1940s to the 1970s. They controlled a significant portion of the world’s oil reserves and production. The “Seven Sisters” were: Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later BP), Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil Company of California (later Chevron), Gulf Oil (later merged with Chevron), Texaco (later merged with Chevron), Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (later Exxon, then ExxonMobil), and Standard Oil Company of New York (later Mobil, then ExxonMobil). “
Google search 7 sisters oil and gas
Basically Chevron and ExxonMobil are the main American petroleum producers, BP, Shell, and Total also dominate the market for oil. These 5 companies also own gas stations, which as mentioned have become owned by a few large companies, rather than small businesses.
“Hess Corporation (formerly Amerada Hess Corporation) is an American global independent energy company involved in the exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas.[3] It was formed by the merger of Hess Oil and Chemical and Amerada Petroleum in 1968. Leon Hess was CEO from the early 1960s through 1995, after which his son John B Hess succeeded him as chairman and CEO.[4] The company agreed to be acquired by rival oil company Chevron in October 2023.[5]
Wikipedia Hess company
This one has ties to the new fields in South America, in French Guyana. It is now owned by Chevron.
Exxon Mobil is the other American company that competes with Chevron, at least, if you believe that this small group of companies does not exert monopoly control of oil.
“ExxonMobil traces its roots to Vacuum Oil Company, founded in 1866. Vacuum Oil later was acquired by Standard Oil in 1879, divested from Standard in 1911 with its breakup, and merged by the Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony), later known as Mobil, in 1931. After the 1911 breakup, Standard Oil continued to exist through its New Jersey subsidiary, sometimes shortened to Jersey Standard, and retained the Standard Oil name in much of the eastern United States. Jersey Standard grew by acquiring Humble Oil in the 1930s and became the dominant oil company on the world stage. The company’s lack of ownership over the Standard Oil name across the United States, however, prompted a name change to unify all of its brands under one name, choosing to name itself Exxon in 1972 over continuing to use the three distinct brands of Esso, Enco, and Humble Oil.[16][17]
“In 1998, the two companies agreed to merge and form ExxonMobil, with the deal closing on November 30, 1999.
Wikipedia ibid
From here we pivot back to protectionism. Oil from Canada is now under a 25% tariff from Trump. This number fluctuates as Trump has repeatedly threatened larger tariffs, and exempted Canadian oil from some tariffs. Trump’s tariffs change from day to day and seem to be more reliant on stock exchange numbers than anything else.
“The predecessor company of Marathon Petroleum Corporation, Marathon Petroleum Company LLC, formerly known as Marathon Ashland Petroleum LLC, was formed by the merger of the refining operations of Marathon Oil and Ashland Inc. in 1998.[11] The merger brought together several descendants of the Standard Oil trust, as Ashland had acquired several smaller Standard spinoffs while Marathon itself was directly owned by Standard Oil. It also brought Marathon’s Speedway and Ashland’s SuperAmerica convenience store chains together and were subsequently merged as “Speedway SuperAmerica”.
“As longtime Marathon rivals Standard Oil of Ohio and Amoco were acquired by British company BP, Marathon Ashland adopted the marketing slogan “An American Company Serving America”, with the slogan being adjourned to Marathon fuel pumps. In 2006, it adopted its current slogan, “Fueling the American Spirit” as the company shifts emphasis on work ethic and the contributions of its employees.[12]
Wikipedia marathon petroleum
Mentioned above is a further ending of small businesses in petroleum, BP (British Petroleum) purchased Amaco. Marathon is still a big gas station owner in companies with American ownership. BP is massive, so is Total and Shell, and can leverage power in the market. Marathon does refining, but it is not nearly as large as ExxonMobil or Chevron. Watch for concentration of ownership to consolidate monopoly control of this company by the bigger competitors…
Place tariffs on the oil from outside the country, and these three companies are in position to have monopoly control of petroleum in America. It is probably not a coincidence that ExxonMobil are climate change skeptics, and Trump is too.
These dinosaurs pump and sell as much oil as possible, with little or no concern about climate change. The goal is to make a profit, not to promote proletarian ecological visions.
Consolidation of ownership occurs after every periodic crisis that comes in the business cycle of what we know of as modern capitalism. The economy starts off after the last crisis. Workers return to their jobs, business starts moving again. The unemployed army of workers who work in the precarious position of unskilled labor are slowly reemployed. Business picks up further, the economy starts to pick up a trot. Employment increases, and profit is created.
Then, there comes overproduction. The speculation on the ability of the market to exchange commodities begins to falter. The crisis comes, and the workers are out on the streets again, unemployed. The machines are no longer working, capital is being destroyed. The crisis is social; there are workers hungry and jaundiced, the machines to provide for them unable to be used due to capitalism.
At this point the large companies buy at ridiculously low prices their former competitors. This process gives rise to massive capitalist companies in control of things like petroleum.
American goals of returning to small businesses in control of, for example, gas stations, is a futile endeavor. The Standard Oil monopoly that preceded ExxonMobil and Chevron’s trust was hit with antitrust in the 20th century. As we can see, monopoly control of petroleum came raging back. There we have Trump, climate change skeptic, supporter of large petroleum industries, also throttling forward gasoline powered engines for cars. Built by Detroit, the large engine petroleum motors propel people where they need to go.
Attempts at building electric cars are now dominated by China, where EV’s cost as little as $10,000. Compare that to an American car, the low end is about $33,000, it is more expensive to buy an American petroleum powered vehicle than a Chinese EV..
Trump to the rescue, with 100% tariffs on Chinese EV”s. Protectionism rears its head, bourgeois gas companies are favored to powering cars with electricity. Combine this with Detroit’s failure to go metric, and it all becomes clear.
Protectionism is required to keep 20th century industry moving. The petroleum powered car has reached its climax. It peaked about 4 years ago, and is now being replaced with cheap electric vehicles, in particular from China. A return to a past era is promoted, “make America great again” sums up this desire.
Small business will not be returning, without a massive crisis. The companies are all in trusts, monopoly or duopoly are the real conditions. These same conditions create a class of people who own little or no real property, they do not own the means of production. They are wage labor, they work part of the day for these large companies and are not paid for their labour. Rather surplus value is created. This surplus value is created any time productive labor is employed. And it increases as industry grows larger, more concentrated.
These old industries were all created to make surplus value, essentially profit. The whole pattern of industry and society was shaped by them. What will their end bring?
Will the companies that were most responsible for capitalism, and its surplus value, disappear? Will surplus value go with these monopolies and trusts being dismantled? It shouldn’t seem so ridiculous that with the failure of the 20th century non metric factories socialism is being discussed. The ecological movement taught us about what forms of repression come with asking the bourgeoisie to clean up their act. How can you trust them to clean up the environment when they sell pollution on the market, as carbon credits?
As we slowly leave the 20th century, society is progressing. Our reliance on petroleum is starting to end. Will we leave what we know of as capitalism, when we are no longer reliant on these forms of industry?
The structure of capitalist agriculture is an extension of the relationship of the owner of the company to wage labour. The farms are worked by people who do not own the land; they are not even renting it in most cases. The machinery like the tractors, harvesters, etc. are also not owned by the farming workers.
With the advent of farm machinery, it is now possible for large farms to be worked with a far higher productivity than in the recent past. There is far less labor in producing, for example, a potato, than ever before. The farms are a thousand acres or more, owned by a corporation, the workers basically wage labour, just like their proletarian cousins in the city.
A job in farming has become tending large machinery; driving a tractor, unloading trucks full of potatoes, etc. In many cases it is even beyond manufacture; workers are not using tools in skilled labour positions, rather are unskilled using machinery a child could learn to use.
The fact there are still small farms changes nothing about this. At best we can say it is remarkable that anyone can compete with the large farms that own and work most of the land.
The family farm, like the family grocery store, is becoming a memory. Those people left on the land have to make a hard decision; will they invest in large machinery in hopes competition with the corporations is possible? If they do not it may mean having to work in a town at a factory as well as farming. Or having to get credit to try to compete, knowing most people who attempt to compete with the corporation end up failing, and having to move \to the city.
The people left on the land may own a home and a car, but that is about the extent of the things they own. They do not own shares in the company they work for on the land, or industrial shares in joint stock companies. They are basically propertyless, like all wage labour.
There is a clear racial divide, in the north the farms being white owned. There are migrants though, often Mexican, who work sometimes legally or illegally on the farm. Needless to say they do not own the land they are working. They make the profits for the owners of the farms, they work hard, often for a small check they send much of back home to family as a remittance. It is their wage labour that creates the surplus value, which is the purpose of the operation to capitalists.
In this respect it is strange to hear the same bourgeoisie who control the farms coming out against migrant farmers. In the southwest it is common for farms to be worked by Mexicans, many of whom cross the border daily to work the fields. Without these low paid workers, it is questionable how many farms could even operate.
Yet constantly the republican bourgeoisie tries to remove migrants, and builds ramparts on the border, to stop immigration north. It looks like an Indian reservation, a demilitarized zone, and the army is even deployed there. All this to stop the same people who create the surplus value on the farms.
The landowners are overwhelmingly republican bourgeois, like the owners of urban factories. They supported Donald Trump as president , as he represents the owners of the means of production, as opposed to wage labour. The more concentrated ownership becomes on the land, the stronger corporations who own the land become,
This creates a rural population only one step removed from moving to the city. Those displaced by modern machinery stay out of the city only at the large farm owners’ mercy. They are a sort of unemployed army of workers of the land, like their urban counterparts of the city , who are also living check to check precarious positions as for their employment.
Unions of farm workers are rare, rebellion can lead to removal from the job and a transition to life in the big city. The lack of political organization of the wage labour on the farms is mercilessly taken advantage of by the landowners, who squeeze maximum surplus value out of workers, many of whom are recent arrivals from Mexico.
Production is for commodities; the workers do not work for their own food, at least not on purpose. They may eat potatoes they farmed, but their job is not to feed themselves, it is social labor. It is abstract labour, for society, controlled by the owner of the land.
It may be unfortunate, but large scale farming seems inevitable with the advent of large farm machinery. Competing with the potato harvester looks futile for a small farmer. It’s like returning to small business from monopoly; a futile endeavor. You cannot go back to a simpler time, even though the republican bourgeoisie seems to want a return to a past era, to “Make America Great Again”, when small businesses sold the groceries.
As far as large farms go, cooperative ownership is replacing capitalist ownership. Already there are large cooperative grocery stores, owned by the workers, selling the produce of cooperative production.
This isthe logical answer to the large scale corporations control of the land, employee ownership of large farms. With the ownership of farms no longer a mom and pop operation, unions mean for wage labour its emancipation from work that is sort of a mix of manufacture and large industry, on machines he does not control, to realization it is his own labour that is responsible for the machinery around him, and the state of the land.
The division of town and country has become stark, with the large farm starting immediately adjacent to the suburban worker’s dwelling. He owns no chickens or gardens, yet there is land all around him, often lying vacant. He has no gardens or land to speak of. The division between town and country could not be more evident.
It is this division which is also a product of the corporations owning the farms. They seem to be worried the workers will not be producing commodities, and will instead produce their own food. It’s like a fetish; any labour not subsumed by the social production of commodities is the target.
This barrier must be broken, and with it large scale private property on the land. When the proletariat is unleashed on the land a new stage of material and social development will have been reached. The city and the country will no longer be so divided, The two will merge into a fluid mesh, with city and country division becoming less obvious.
The current condition of society, modern culture, is a relatively recent phenomenon. It was only 1865 when it became illegal to own a human being.
It is hard to say that when slavery was present it was not a stage of barbarism. Slavery has its roots in the barbaric period of society, primarily in the mid to upper levels of barbarism. It would seem that black slavery was the higher stages of barbarism, eventually replaced by capitalism.
A slave was not paid. That is the most basic essence of slavery, the slave worked for a master who owned him, and was used as forced labour. In the east slaves were used for domestic purposes, for instance by the Muslim Arabs until fairly recently.
“Slavery was formally outlawed in Saudi Arabia in 1962 by a royal decree from King Faisal.”
Google search: What year did Saudi Arabia abolish slavery?
Christianity and Islam have much in common. Slavery was practiced in the New World from its discovery by Europeans. It lasted about 400 years; Spain and France were Catholic countries; clearly the ideology of the slave master was Catholicism.
The British practiced slavery in the New World too, they were Protestant Christians. Canada was the exception, black slavery was never practiced there. But the practice was present in America, and continued unabated for 91 years after independence.
The revolution did not abolish slavery. The feudal system of economics reigned supreme, with slavery practiced. Society was still barbaric. It wasn’t until 1863 slavery started to end.
It was replaced by capitalism; it was cheaper to hire a freeman to create commodities than a slave. Slaves escape, and when this occurred the owner was out the value of money he paid for the slave. They also had to be fed and clothed, and it was cheaper to have a freeman paid as wage labour than to have a slave to labour.
But barbarism is still partially present in capitalism. The practice of part of the day being worked with no pay may be an advancement from the whole day’s labour being unpaid, but the practice of working for a master and not being paid part of the day has lingered on into modern society.
It is precisely this relationship that capitalism is based on. It is rooted in the upper stages of barbarism, patriarchal society. The arrangement common to barbarians, slavery, was present in the New World. The slaves were for labouring on large farms, as opposed to Arab domestic slaves I mentioned earlier in this article. Domestic slavery took place in the New World too, but working slaves were more common in the west.
The lower stages of barbarism were a more civilized arrangement. Native Americans owned little property, and hunted and fished as a means of living for thousands of years before the upper stage of barbarism reached them, when Spain, France and Britain arrived. What they found was a matriarchal society with no state, at least nothing like what we know of as the state. There was little property, and no fraud or extortion. Society was organized in gens, familial and tribal. A good description of this is found in Friedrich Engels The Origin of the Family, State and Private Property.
The upper stages of barbarism also practiced genocide. Extermination of the native Americans can hardly be considered civilized. To qualify that though, the Holocaust should show us just how far we are from barbarism. Clearly we are still in the upper levels of barbarism.
Ecological society comes at and after the late stages of barbarism. Part of this is when the mechanism that creates the surplus value is uprooted, when the state machinery is placed in the museum. The state is the mechanism which, paid for with surplus value, the class structure is maintained. It is slowly going away, as less and less people own property, like joint stock company paper.
Another form of barbarism is the practice of polluting air and water by non metric industry. And it should be obvious the Republican bourgeoisie are still most connected to ownership of these primitive operations, periodically bailed out by the state.
Legal rights to pollute the ecology are a part of barbaric modern culture. Although pollution is inevitable, barbarism and modernism condone it.
An ecological society will outlaw pollution altogether, recycling and composting are part of this. These two movements came about out of ecological necessity rather than as a surplus value producer for capitalists. It may cause pollution to recycle, but it is a recognition of man’s effects on ecology to attempt to remove pollution. It does not condone pollution, rather accepts it as inevitable sometimes. Making it legal leads to modern ideas of trading carbon emissions, in other words condoning pollution, just making the more primitive pollution causing factories to have to pay for the right to pollute the air and water. The fact it is traded on the stock market should be enough to tell us where this is going. Society will no longer condone any pollution, but it will still pollute the ecology, the pollution will not be traded on the stock exchange, speculated on to create a profit.
The feudal system of property, when it was acceptable to own a human being, is only a little over a century away. In Asia minor it is only 63 years away. Modern society still retained wage labour; work for a master with no pay for part of the day. Ecological ideas came in the late modern period. Society will come to relate to ecology as a process of symbiosis, rather than as a source of resources to be exploited by capitalism for surplus value.
Try as they may, regardless of the size or sophistication of their latest technology, there is no changing material conditions. Even with all the new weapons, the fact remains the companies are owned by a monopoly, a duopoly, or cartels.
Every crisis consolidates ownership further, as the companies concentrate ownership. Often bought in crisis conditions, for ridiculously low prices, or merged by companies with larger wallets to absorb functioning capital, more and more joint stock companies dominate industry.
It is rare now to have a large company not listed on the stock exchange, the center for trading of joint stock companies. The days of an industry being private property of an individual have basically come to an end.
With this change competition begins to fall behind making surplus value by setting prices due to monopoly. When there are only a few large companies owning, say, electricity and gas, and distributing this gas to consumers on their own lines, it is not hard to see competition come to an end.
Wisconsin Gas and Electric produce all the electricity from power plants here Milwaukee Wisconsin, and also own the lines for transmission of high voltage to Milwaukee. They also own the gas lines, and distribution facilities, including pipelines. There is no alternative source in any sense, and short of cutting your own wood, the houses are all gas burning forced air heating. Solar is still prohibitively expensive, and Wisconsin Gas and Electric do not pay for excess production from solar generation in homes.
This has been building for some time. It is a common feature of industry to become concentrated in a few hands, often in the form of monopolies. They set prices as they control the production facilities, the distribution,the lines etc., and do not practice competition.
The days of competition regulating the price of major commodities is rapidly fading. The grocery stores are now all consolidated into huge markets, dominated by WalMart, Kroger, Albertsons, and Costco. Smaller family owned stores are becoming rare, only for an item or two needed between visits to the big stores. Kroger and Albertsons attempted a merger, which looks like a failure, but would have meant about half of grocery stores would have been controlled by WalMart and Kroger Albertsons combined as one company.
The largest computers cannot stop the consolidation of industry, the growth of joint stock companies and monopoly conditions. It is a built in condition of late capitalism, described by Friedrich Engels in Anti Duhring in the 1890’s; the growth of joint stock companies, and concentration and consolidation of industry. here is a quote
T0″he period of industrial high pressure, with its unbounded inflation of credit, not less than the crash itself, by the collapse of great capitalist establishments, tends to bring about that form of socialization of great masses of means of production which we meet with in the different type of joint stock companies. Many of these means of production are, from the outset, so colossal that , like the railways, they exclude all other forms of capitalistic exploitation. At a further stage of evolution this form also becomes insufficient. The producers on a large scale in a particular branch of industry in a particular country unite in a “Trust”, a union for the purpose of regulating production. They determine the total amount to be produced, parcel it out among themselves, and thus enforce the selling price fixed beforehand. But trusts of this kind, as soon as business becomes bad, are generally liable to break up, and on this very account compel a yet greater concentration of association. The whole of the particular industry is turned into a gigantic joint stock company; internal competition gives place to internal monopoly of this one company. This has happened in 1890 with the English alkali production, which is now, after the fusion of 48 large works, in the hands of one company, conducted on a single plan, with a capital of &6,000,0000.”
“In the trusts, freedom of competition changes to its very opposite- into monopoly; and the production without any definite plan of capitalistic society capitulates to the production a definite plan of the invading socialistic society. Certainly this is so far still to the benefit of the capitalists. But in this case the exploitation is so palpable that it must break down, No nation will put up with production conducted by trusts, with so barefaced an exploitation of the community by a small band of dividend mongers.”
Anti Duhring First wellread books edition 2017
Part 3 socialism II Theoretical p. 329
Which is optimistic that a society will not tolerate trusts and monopolies, which is precisely what we have learned to do. The important part is trusts and monopoly were recognized by Engels as being the dominant form of capitalism.
This was published in 1890. Vladimir Lenin published Imperialism, the Highest Form of Capitalism, in 1916. Clearly Lenin agreed with Engels, and developed this idea further.
It is all connected, and the presence of these monopolies looks unlikely to change. Internet service is also dominated by two large companies, one of which has been the subject of antitrust activity, American Telephone Telegraph, AT&T. The only choice is Charter, also called Spectrum, and these companies cooperate to keep the price of internet at a set price, by removing, for instance, subsidies by the state to keep the price of internet low for seniors. There is AT&T again controlling prices; last time it was their long distance telephone service, broken up by congress, resulting in the baby Bells.
Computers are dominated by Apple, who produce most often computers used in homes. International Business Machines, IBM, is no longer a competitor of home computers to Apple, who are close to monopoly. Google as the search engine, also a monopoly, caps off much of our computing.
This list could continue, but I think I have made my point. Consolidation and concentration of ownership into joint stock companies, often exerting monopoly power, is a fixture of modern capitalism. Rarely it is addressed as antitrust by capitalists who want to artificially change what is a dominant feature of capitalism, to control the market by monopoly.
Every capitalist wants to drive his competitor out of business. When they are successful at this, they control the market, competition ends, and they then set prices for the commodity they control. It seems to be universal; there are no sectors of the economy left untouched by consolidation of ownership. Breaking them up is only a temporary fix, AT&T for instance is now back to its old self again, in a duopoly of internet service with Charter, as they own the fiber optic cables. Antitrust activity towards AT&T, breaking up the long distance telephone to the baby Bells, did not stop AT&T from again attempting to set prices by control of markets,this time in internet transmission .
This system is a form of capitalism referred to as imperialism in the late 19th century and early 20th century by Friedrich Engels, and later by Vladimir Lenin. It was becoming more obvious then that joint stock companies would dominate capitalism, and consolidation of ownership would only continue.
Names like J Peirpont Morgan, and his domination of 20th century large scale industry, is a case study in the growth of monopolies and trusts. By the early to mid 20th century Morgan’s empire included railroads, Steel production (US Steel), General Electric, AT&T…. Morgan personified the bourgeoisie of the 20th century, with control of markets for just about every large industry.
When the next crisis comes the trend will no doubt continue. Capitalism is at the stage where competition is becoming rare, only lasting a few years in a new industry, until monopoly control and joint stock ownership is achieved. Crisis comes and ownership is consolidated further, the likes of which are a recurrent theme in capitalism. It seems unlikely this will end without leaving capitalism, antitrust does not deter companies from concentration ownership of the means of production (like AT&T) from continuing to exert monopoly power over the industries they own, it just sets them back a decade or so. It is just way too tempting to remove competition by these capitalists , and set prices.
Abortion in Ancient and Modern Times. Aristotle on the Subject. 10 31 2024
“With regard to the choice between abandoning an infant or rearing it, let there be a law that no cripple child be reared. But since the ordinance of custom forbids the exposure of infants on account of their numbers, there must be a limit to the production of children. If contrary to these arrangements copulation does take place, and a child is conceived, abortion should be procured before the embryo has acquired life and sensation; the presence of life and sensation will be the mark of division between right and wrong here.”
Aristotle the Politics p.448
Book 7 , part 16
Penguin classics
This is of interest as this is from 350 years before Christ was born. This shows that abortion was an issue in ancient times, as it is today. With Catholics voting in favor of stopping legal abortion, guided by Christianity, I believe the relevant question is, what Jesus Christ thought about abortion?
It is not in the bible. It was an issue before the bible was written, 350 years before Christ. It seems unlikely Jesus had no opinion on an issue that the Greeks were involved in, well before he was born.
As far as the statement goes, they did not have morning after pills then. You would have to realize you were pregnant, then go to a doctor and get an abortion. They did not have misoprostol; abortion would have required surgery.
So we can definitely say, at least in Greece in Aristotle’s time, abortion was legal. At least up to a point, that is. He says abortion should be legal until there is “life and sensation”.
Square that off with the Republican bourgeoisie, and their Catholic following. They often want all abortion illegal, with no exceptions. In many cases as of late, with abortion becoming illegal in parts of America again, 6 weeks is the limit of time a woman has to decide to have an abortion.
If Aristotle thought crippled children should not be reared, what do you suppose he would have said about “life and sensation” , in regard to a child?
Whatever. The point here is, why is abortion not in the bible? Where is Jesus coming out against it? It was obviously an issue then, abortion existed well before Christ lived in Israel.
How Christians turned against abortion remains a mystery. Clearly the Pope and his Catholic clergy are all against all abortion, even before 6 weeks. Greece looks more liberal in 350 BC than the bourgeois today. I guess democracy in Athens, compared to American suffrage, another thing the bible does not discuss, was in common with the way referendums on abortion seem to be going. Putting it on the ballot generally results in it being legal.
I will not split hairs with Aristotle about when the life of a child begins. A person’s birth and death date become considerably difficult to ascertain. Was he born the day of conception? Or later, when his brain was more developed?
In any case society, at least in Greece in Aristotle’s time, looks rather much like American society today. It is still an issue whether or not a woman should be allowed to have an abortion. And it is still an issue when a child is a person, after 6 weeks, 3 months, etc.
The bourgeoisie likes to consider themselves so advanced, and make fun of ancients. The Christians are notorious for it. The opposition to the Jews resembles this. That is part of the bible.
But when we look deeper, how much has society changed in 2374 years? I guess it shows just how far we have come, and how far we have yet to go. Rising on one’s high horse and proclaiming Jesus to have been against abortion, is fiction. It is not in the bible to be against abortion, and it is nowhere written Jesus coming out against a practice that seems to have been practiced since the beginnings of recorded history. At best perhaps the Catholics can claim a “moral awakening”, perhaps some time in the Dark Ages?
The level of ignorance towards the native Americans, and other peoples like the early Romans and Germans who were in the lower stages of barbarism, is something common to modern conditions. The lack of knowledge of the kinship structure of man in this condition was part of the effort to root out these often matrilinear family systems.
Clearly history shows that the monogamous patriarchal family we know now is a historical product, part of the class structure, and the level of technological development.. It was not until men began to acquire property, according to Friedrich Engels in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, that it became necessary to remove the matriarchy that was ruling in previous conditions, when men just fished and hunted and had little or no property as we know it, and the women did the domestic work, that the general breakdown of the society governed by the system of gens begins.
Prior to the formation of the state, the society was ruled by the gens, or kin, groups. There was little or no real property, men were just starting to become pastoral. When people domesticated cattle society began to move towards patriarchy; the men were taking care of the animals, rather than just hunting and fishing, the domesticated animals becoming the basis of property.
As the labour of herding fell to the man, and the property connected to it was his, it was inevitable that soon the men would overpower the matriarch that was part of early barbarism, and replace her with the patriarch. When property could be inherited, when a man’s possessions could remain property of someone even though its owner was dead, the transfer of power away from inheritance in the gens only began to transform society further away from gentile society. Having the inheritance switch from the matriarch and her family to the man’s sons, marked the end of matriarchy.
At this point money is invented, based first of cattle which was used as money, then the precious metals. This allowed for debts to form, and mortgages on property begin to form. Classes are now formed, and the society is forced to create a mechanism to protect the class structure. This organization is called the state. This form of society quickly replaced the gens., the corrosive power of private property and money starts to dissolve the old kinship group, especially the matriarchy.
Prior to the state the gens protected its members if they were sick, or if there was crime. There was the right of vengeance for murder, but beyond this there were little laws in the gens; there was no theft, burglary, fraud etc. as there was little property.
The state completely overrules the gentile society, and classes are formed, often of landowners and later hereditary nobility forms. The Romans reached this point, and the longing for a return to life under the gens was part of why the German Odacer, who was a barbarian, could overpower Rome, where the state was formed. People longed for the old gentile society, before usury and large landowners, to return.
But after Rome fell to the Germans, the land became private property, and the gens was unable to survive. The amount of land the Germans found themselves with hastened the end of gentile society. The Germans could not control all the land they now owned and nobility came to be resorted to for territorial control. The longing for a return to the gentile life was impossible to satisfy; the state was formed, and in a short period of time, the peasants were in the same condition they were under the Romans.
Slavery was part of ancient culture under the Romans. Large scale agriculture was heavily reliant on slaves, when Rome fell the land was parceled out to individuals. But it was not passed down to the gens as inheritance, and soon there were usurers and large landowners. It is at this point a new feature of society develops, a person whose job is to exchange products for another, the merchant. The commodity is developed, production is for society rather than for one’s self. Handicraft had preceded this, and production was still primarily for oneself and family. With money it becomes possible for production to be for exchange purely. The merchant provides the commodities now, everything exchanged gradually becomes more of a commodity with the intervention of money.
The state comes along the whole way. It reaches its apex of power with the condition of civilization we know now. An instrument developed as a mechanism to maintain the class structure, it survives on taxes. It even borrows money as bonds, it debts, are traded on the stock market;. speculation on the states debts becomes common.
Manufacture is the intermediate state between what we know now as heavy industry, and handcraft. Manufacture starts when handicrafts are replaced by groups of people producing for money, under a single individual. The commodity is formed, the producer no longer produces for himself and his small family, he doesn’t know who will be consuming the product he helped produce.
This gives way to large industry, where the producer uses machinery, and his race or sex are not barriers to the capitalists who own the machinery, the women and children are all used by the capitalist. The producer does not own the means of production, its efficiency at producing a surplus is the reason it is used. It does not matter to the capitalist who works the machinery, it is often the man who is not working due to fear of rebellion by him against the state. His children are less likely to rebel, so are used for labour. His wife is in the same position. The same mechanism that caused the patriarchy to form now is taken to the point of dissolution. Private property comes to be its opposite, the producer is propertyless. At best he owns a small home in a city, he is the modern proletariat.
Divorce becomes easier with women working. There are less impediments to divorce by the woman, she no longer has to ask the man’s permission to divorce. Property also falls in half to the woman. Large scale industry seems to be a return of the woman to power, at least as more equal than in previous historical conditions to the male. As he owns no real private property, there is less dominance as things were when the patriarchy formed.
It is at this point we leave off at. But first a word about the state. Formed due to classes, it begins to die out as the means of production gradually come to be controlled by the workers, and become not owned by anyone, at least not by a capitalist.. A socialist society without class would seem to be the antithesis of the organization created to maintain class, the state. If there is no class, what does the state become? What would it be for?
Perhaps like the capitalist state what remains is the security mechanism, the police for shoplifting etc., but not in control of industry. A socialist society would still have to have security, but just because industry was no longer controlled by capitalists it does not follow industry must be owned by the state. Rather it is not owned by anybody, the state just keeping it from being looted etc.
Engels conclusion in the book mentioned above, the state is to maintain classes is completely right. It seems inevitable it will be less powerful as classes are less a dominant force in society. Unfortunately, it looks like society has a long way to go before the state as we know it becomes a thing of the past
Value. Its Forms. Concept of Surplus Value. David Ricardo, Adam Smith. 8 11 2023
The science of political economy brought us knowledge of the theory of value, and consequently unblocked the hidden mechanisms that are how the capitalist system is really working. It is not a simple set of rules; it is not common sense to be able to discern what the innards of the capitalist system look like.
Writers like Adam Smith, and David Ricardo had already determined the value of a commodity is how much labour is contained in it. David Ricardo was very direct about this, the first sentence of his book on the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation he wrote:
“The value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not on the greater or less compensation which is paid for that labour.
David Ricardo Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
London 1817
Which is very straightforward. It means it is not what the labourer is paid that determines the value of a commodity, rather value is the amount of social labour time required to produce the commodity, paid or unpaid. This concept becomes important as vulgar political economists, as Marx called them, said profit was merely added on the value of the product after it was produced, a surcharge so to speak.
In order for this to work every merchant and capitalist would be adding money to the value of his product when he sold it. Every capitalist would be having to charge an extra amount of money in all parts of production, every time something had to be sold there would be a surcharge for profit passed on.
It becomes obvious each dealer would mutually swindle the other out of the extra amount of money every time they met and bought from each other. What was lost would be gained in mutual swindling, ultimately eventually devolving to the consumer who would have to pay for this fictitious capital first tacked on by the producer, and the surcharge otherwise would be extra on all exchanges.
What this would accomplish is not clear. Clearly though, it views surplus value as a mere addition to the value of a commodity, above its cost price. How could labour be being compensated for with all this mutual swindling?
To really understand it you have to see what David Ricardo just said, labour is not always paid for, “the greater or less compensation which is paid for that labour.” is not the value of the commodity.
So we see the labourer is not simply selling commodities, and surcharging unpaid labour from his contribution. And it also certainly looks rather ridiculous after having stated this, as Ricardo clearly did, to label Ricardo a vulgarian. Clearly this statement leads to the recognition of the fact labour is not always paid for, but the value of the commodity produced by this labour remains in the commodity. That is what profit is, it is not a surcharge rather it is what is left over after the labour and the material elements of production are paid for. It is the excess in the value of the commodity appropriated by the capitalist due to his ownership of the means of production. It differs from pure surplus value as the latter is calculated on the amount of labour paid for, what Marx called variable capital.
In reading Adam Smith and Ricardo, what became clear to Marx, which was also clear to Ricardo and Adam Smith, the labourer working part of his day for no pay is the very basis of capitalism. It is possible to begin with as soon as it is possible for a man to be able to produce enough food for two or three men in a day, as opposed to simply himself. If one man can produce enough to feed himself and three others, the two others no longer have to be farmers. They can be supported by the surplus the farmer creates.
He is not compensated for the surplus he creates. A whole system of society forms around this. Once there is a surplus, the landowner and capitalist become possible, who consume the surplus value of the labourer. The workers set free by the surplus value of the farmer who provides a surplus find themselves without land or money, and the capitalists who by one way or another, for instance piracy, slavery, etc. get control of money can begin to subordinate all of society to labour for them on means of production the workers do not own.
The workers are paid enough to survive and continue labouring, with some additions for a wife and children, or the race of workers would not survive long. But the fact is all labour in capitalism sweats surplus value.
The content of the labour is for society; the nature of what a commodity is is a product not consumed by its producer. It may be that a worker sometimes consumes his production, but it is generally not considered to be part of his consumption, it is for instance on a screw, a washer, a gear, etc. His labour is social labour, and it is on machinery he does not use or otherwise control.
Thus we see David Ricardo and his statement become clear. Political Economy solves one of the most basic of relationships, what the value of a commodity consists of. It does not solve what is socially necessary as a wage for labour. Adam Smith, who also saw value as created by labour, tried to suggest the value of corn (food in general), was the value of wages. It is a compelling argument, but in a temperate climate needs increase exponentially. It was more true before society was so industrial; on the other hand it is still agriculture that provides much of the raw material for production. There is only sort of a socially determined amount and price of agricultural goods, in winter more expensive in the north.
But regardless of how much wages are socially acceptable, Ricardo is right when he places the value of a commodity is how much labour it costs to produce it. The surplus value created only shows it was produced by a capitalist, it is the unpaid section of the workday, and without it you would have no capitalism.
Ecological Era 