There has been a movement in Europe and America towards a capitalist state, which reached a crescendo in the late 20th century, and is still with us. This mechanism of capitalism consolidates ownership of the land, and industry, increasingly in the hands of a small aristocracy that own everything.
The group in control of the means of production are the modern bourgeoisie. Through cable television, and other outdated mediums such as regular radio fed television broadcasting, paper newspapers, etc. have been used for propaganda purposes by this aristocracy.
It is easily accessible, and paid for by capitalist advertising, a form of propaganda that if nothing else portrays a smiling face in the marketplace, the privately owned reality forced upon the ignorant worker. Its political bent, due to the presence of the people who pay for the broadcasts, the ownership of the companies attempting to sell commodities by advertising, who are all capitalists, and support the more extreme form of them , the Republican bourgeoisie, as this is encouraged by the economic system of modern capitalism.
Often the industry promoted is not metric, like gasoline powered automobiles from Detroit, a product of an industry intact still in a 20th century condition. The bourgeois press directly uses propaganda when it is time for suffrage, and the broadcast is not in the metric system. The local political leader is on in 30 second attack ads when the worker wants to see local television news.
This system uses ignorance to promote a vision of capitalism that is not in tune with reality. In Europe, the concession of suffrage to the workers is used to justify expropriating employee owned shops. Once political leadership can overcome the pressure of its workers, who for one reason or another have slipped back to capitalism, through the mechanism of ignorance and cable television, employee ownership is targeted and removed by the Republican bourgeoisie.
Without employee ownership, democracy doesn’t really mean much. Given the factory is where the worker finds himself most of the time, democracy would seem to be in order there. But where is the suffrage for the manager? Or the owner? It is no longer present after employee ownership is removed.
The European Union is best at this expropriation process, all the while suggesting they are expanding democracy.
The ignorant worker, who tunes into the cable television broadcast, the station is also owned by the bourgeoisie, receives his social conditioning through this medium. The internet is gradually removing this old system, corroding the cable television monopoly; ad block technology, and paying for the news rather than the free enterprise method of advertising paying for news is becoming the dominant model.
The internet is a revolution. The tech giants are trying to control the system, but can only do so much. The Washington Post costs 10$ a month, you pay for it. It is owned by Jeff Bezos, not the journalists. The New York Times and Reuters are similar, you pay them directly. Youtube is another one worth paying for, the purpose of this is so there are no advertisements.
Society is materially changing, the main mechanism of control is ignorance. People are being told to believe things about subjects they need to find out about for themselves, by reading books. Philosophy and political economy in particular; many people have feelings about what socialism represents, yet have never read Marx’s Capital, even just volume One. Or have feelings about the ancient world and have never been exposed to Aristotle or Plato.
The internet again is coming to the rescue; Amazon Prime delivers new and used books we had a hard time getting before, like works by Marx and Engels now accessible by internet for low prices.
Giving up the cable subscription for the internet saves money. People are paying a hundred dollars a month for cable, and at best we can say it includes the internet. An internet connection costs about 50$, and it is advertisement free when you pay for it.
As the material conditions change, outdated ideas resort to outdated technology to transmit their messages. Cable television, radio broadcast television, AM radio, are all examples of outdated industry dominated by the Republican bourgeoisie. Control of cable television consumes these people. It is their main prerogative, and they control the companies advertising, and even have their political leaders on the station when suffrage occurs,to give us their bourgeois propaganda.
It is a little harder to control the internet. It is more advanced, and cheaper to use and produce than the outdated mediums. You have to be able to read and write to use it.
It doesn’t look like it’s going away any time soon, the dinosaurs of 20th century capitalism look unable to stop the march of material and social development, which are leading to an ecological and economic awakening.
The Legacy of Colonialism. Life on the Reservation. 1 7 2026
The pictures of Nicholas Maduro, prime minister of Venezuela being led around in handcuffs, blindfolded, was like a reminder of Saddam Hussein when he was captured in Iraq. Another Republican president, another war, just like George I and George II. George I took Iraq, securing the oil. Sounds familiar, right? Well he missed Hussein, it was Georege II, another republican, who finished the job.
Maduro may still be alive, but he is in no condition to try to lead Venezuela anymore, even if he wants to lead from captivity. Anything he says or does now is under duress; he is probably drugged and chained in New York where he is imprisoned. He is no longer in a position to influence things. The only real question is if they will ever let him out.
Another political prisoner, another open ended commitment to a country in the developing world with oil reserves nationalized. Iraq had nationalized the oil wells in 1972, from the Iraq Petroleum Company. This was done by the Baath socialist party, to put Iraq’s oil wealth in a more equitable arrangement, where the proceeds of the oil wealth were no longer making surplus value.
George II, who got Hussein, expropriated the property of the Iraqis, returning private investment in the oil wells to American and European capitalists. George II also cited terrorism as a reason to invade Iraq; in the light of when this occurred he tried to suggest Iraq was connected to the 9/11 incident.
This could not be proved, and it never has been to this day. Then there were the friends of George II, Labour leader Tony Blair, for instance, who got on the air telling Britons Hussein had an atomic weapon, and could hit Britain in 15 minutes if he launched it. They also suggested Hussein was developing chemical weapons. These were called the “weapons of mass destruction” arguments.
There were never any atomic weapons, or chemical weapons found in Iraq. Considering the country was conquered, there is no reason to believe the weapons could have been hidden. Instead, after removing Hussein, George II found a new enemy, Islamic State. He was still trying to link Iraq with Afghanistan, which evidence has yet to be found for.
Afghanistan ended in American retreat and exit from Afghanistan. The images of the big airplanes and the hundreds of people running trying to get them is an icon of George II and his Republican war efforts. Whether he won in Iraq is sort of a matter of opinion; they got the oil back. But the country remains in shambles after decades of all out war.
Here we have another republican bourgeoisie, and the beginnings of another war, with a similar goal of gaining control of oil fields, and markets. Trump has already said he will be running Venezuela’s oil wealth, and has committed the Army to war there, abducting the head of state of a neighboring country, and demanding its resources.
In a historical context, Trump looks a lot like a Conquistador, valiantly discovering native land, and conquering its residents. Perhaps Venezuela will become a 51st state, with reservations for the natives. How much different it would look from the ICE facilities, packed with Mexicans on the border? A vision of reservations on stolen land from Mexico gained in the Mexican American war that ended in 1848, with Mexico ‘s capitulation to the Americans of the Southwest.
Not really much new here. The bourgeoisie has been conquering lands in the new world for more than 500 years. The stain of bloody conquest of native american soil, and black slavery, is part of the history of the country. Their descendants are still with us, the Indians are still on the reservations, their fishing and hunting rights on land they ceded in treaties are still controversial.
At some point it is going to have to be left behind, like 20th century industry. Trump’s only justification for abducting Maduro was drug dealing. In a country with legal marijuana in half of it, legal alcohol and tobacco throughout it, if you are addicted to drugs, it is nobody’s fault but your own. You can’t sue the alcohol company because you are a drunk. We view this as a health problem, not a criminal one. Cocaine is illegal, it is an expensive luxury item only the bourgeois and middle classes can afford. Penalizing all Venezuelans for drug dealing does not lower demand for cocaine in America. If anything it will strengthen the cartels, who thrive on the lawless luxury trade.
Trump has made a decision to conquer Christianised Incas in their homelands. There is no separation from this and the presence of reservations in America. For those who live on the Res, this must come as no surprise. In 1492, Columbus discovered America. It’s been 533 years of repression of the native people he found in the Americas. This is part of Trump’s legacy, his hatred of Indians, much like the rural white settlers who still keep the Indians separate from their colonies, on reservations, where poverty is a scourge. Trump is no different, it’s been 533 long years, the song remains the same.
Divide Between Town and Country. Large Landowners and Unions. 11 28 2025
Much like eastern Europe, America is in a period of reaction. The bourgeoisie has leveraged the rural people, some of whom are workers in large scale agriculture, to people who believe they are small businessmen growing on farms as capitalists.
The latter group, not exactly small farmers but also not large scale agriculture, are sort of becoming a petty bourgeoisie, who sell their products as commodities to the merchants. They may have a few hands, but often are still labouring.
These people supported Trump. In so doing, they also supported the large scale production of food, even though they have seen many of their counterparts lose their farms, only to have their lands subsumed by large landowners.
They feel it is not simply the large scale agriculture bourgeois who have spared them, probably due to their political bent, that has given them prosperity, and allowed them to keep farming. Although they are clearly the chosen ones, they feel it has been their good business sense that has kept the farm. This is why they support Trump, even though economically they are on shaky ground; a few bad harvests and that’s it, bankruptcy follows.
Harnessing this form of ignorance is common throughout capitalist society. It is rare for one to acknowledge his posh lifestyle simply came through a process of vetting, undertaken by the upper class into their ranks. Rather ignorance most often restricts the knowledge of this from the petty bourgeoisie.
The view of Trump having made himself rich as a businessman; a sort of man who became rich with his own money and business sense, is fiction. Trump was born into money, his dad was a real estate tycoon from New York, who helped his son get into casinos at a young age, like Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. He built a small empire after his dad died in luxury properties, he did not trade commodities, rather traded the profit from capitalist industry, the money kept as surplus value by capitalists for their own personal enjoyment, rather than a product like an auto part, sold as a commodity. Trump has been chosen to represent his class, as he has always been,from his start as a casino owner to his presidency. It is doubtful he would be intelligent enough to be pulling some sort of scam, supporting the proletariat from his position as president.
He has no experience as a commodity producing capitalist, yet the farmers liked him, and although he was not elected in 2016, appointed rather in 2017 after losing the popular vote; then, following his loss in suffrage in 2020, questioned the validity of American elections by having a group of ruffians , ex military and police, storm the capital on January 6th 2020.
It seemed like he was gone then, but by leveraging the ignorant by the bourgeoisie, just like in Russia and Eastern Europe, where employee ownership ended due to ignorance of what capitalism really represented, Trump came back. American antisocialist laws are present here, with political prisons for Jews, communists, etc. which echo the rise of Hitler. Trump regularly calls his opponents lunatics, sick individuals, etc. like Hitler and his SS in the thirties.
The large landowners are represented in government by the constitution, that keeps them at the table so to speak with large capitalist industry. There was a time agriculture was all the land was used for under the British, when America was a colony. The planters who rebelled understood that industry would follow revolution, that the north in particular would build heavy industry, eventually challenging the South where the slave plantations were.
This was rectified by having the upper house of Congress have 2 seats for each state. It keeps large scale agriculture in power; the areas with less population, or a rural population of a sort of reserve army of workers., like the city is present. It’s like the poor whites during the Civil war supporting the landowners; they were no help to them, but they supported the slaveowners who used them for an army to fight the north, where slavery was not present, as in Wisconsin, or minimally present, like Lincoln’s state of Illinois.
The phenomenon of support for landowners, not the family farm, rather the more industrial form of agriculture, heavily mechanised petroleum dependent large scale agriculture, is what Trump harnessed. Without unions, large agriculture’s labour is low paid, often m Mexican immigrants many of whom are in the country illegally. There is little or no movement to nationalise the land, rather a distant belief in a capitalist who will buck the system, and support the little guy.
You don’t get rich supporting the little guy. Trump is a billionaire, he represents capital, he is the living embodiment of capital, it is his hand that creates the surplus value.
Perhaps it is the idea a person can go to the casino, and walk out a millionaire. You have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than winning at Trump’s casino. It is the roughest place in town, where if you don;t spend enough you get kicked out. If you went there hungry you would get bounced for asking for food. It’s a dog eat dog reality.
In the cities it is a little harder for capitalists. Libraries, museums, theaters, etc. are part of urban society, and the proletariat is thus a little harder to fool. There is less ignorance in the city, rural society has none of these advantages. Collectively large scale industry comprises much of the activity in the city, with buzzing ports, retail capital workers, large commodity producing recycling operations. It is a stark difference to rural America, reflecting a massive divide between town and county.
Rectifying this divide will take time. Nationalising the land will follow, as large landowners have to increasingly reckon with a union of farmers at the site of harvest and in the fields. The cooperative markets will be where the money comes from, and outreach for the small and large cooperatives that will replace the capitalist landowner will come from here.
The state will not be buying the land for the cooperative. The workers may have to use the money created in production to buy additional land, or nationalizing the land if the landowners refuse to cooperate with their workers.
This will not be easy, but will start to rectify the huge gap between town and country. Getting used to being in a union at work on the farm, much like his proletarian cousin in the city, will follow.
The system is geared against them. There will be losses, but also victories. As recognition of membership in the class of labourers comes, that they do not own the stocks in the means of production, collectively the poor rural man will support more radical leadership. He is up against the constitution, this may take time. But don’t give up on the countryman, instead remove the ignorance.
Potential of a New Front in the South. Venezuela and Capitalist Military Power. 10 16 2025
So far it doesn’t look too sophisticated, but there have been several small boats bombed in the Caribbean, suspected of containing the often lethal forms of luxury items. The boats so far, at least what was filmed, look like small wooden boats with 2 outboard motors attached to them. It is hard to believe one could smuggle much through it, and we are left to ponder how far they could go with a full tank of gas.
The logic behind this is Nicholas Maduro of Venezuela is behind the trafficking of the illegal luxury items. The cocaine is grown down there, and Maduro is suspected to be sending it as it is only affordable by the bourgeoisie, the latter’s luxury consumption well known.
First there was Hugo Chavez, the oil rich socialist, who was first elected in 1998, and took power in 1999. There was an attempted coup d’etat lasting 47 hours in 2002, but Chzvez was returned to power.
After this Chavez was elected twice, as a socialist, until he became ill with cancer and died March 5th 2013. It was at this point power went to Maduro, leading to another coup attempt by Juan Guaido, which was also rebuffed.
Maduro has been ruling ever since, in what could be considered favorable conditions for a developing world form of socialism. The opposition has long since given up on universal suffrage for their concerns, dividing instead to do political obstructionist tactics like election boycotts.
It looks weak. But the Nobel Peace Prize was just given to the bourgeois leader who hopes to topple Maduro.
Here comes Trump to threaten the developing world leader with modern technology. Unable to sell their oil due to the embargo, Venezuela is poor. Cuba is in a similar condition. In Cuba blackouts due to reliance on fossil fuels is common; Cuba has yet to be able to tap into China as a source for industry like wind turbines and solar panels.
There have so far been several boat bombings, but given the fact they seem to be down there looking for illegal smuggling, it must not be too common or they would have found more than a few small boats with outboard motors leaving Venezuela. Columbia has complained some of its boats were bombed, in violation of their sovereignty. Apparently they are targeting both countries with aerial bombardment.
The luxury industry is well known for its corrupt tastes, and fuels a small empire in Mexico. It is a bloody business, with assassinations, kidnappings, etc, practiced all to get the bourgeoisie their products. The items are worth a hundred dollars a gram, it is a rich man’s game.
The proletarian luxury item has been becoming legal in many places. The memories of the “war on drugs” scar a generation, when pot smoking was taboo. With Trump in power it looks unlikely pot will be legalized any more than it has been, legal in the big city, illegal in the country.
So what it seems to come down to is the war against Russia is not going so well. Russian antiaircraft drones and missiles are defeating NATO, aircraft are not even flying above the front lines in Ukraine. They are so desperate to win they are now talking about sending long range ballistic nuclear weapon carriers to Ukraine, whose leader has already asked for nuclear weapons. The assumption is the nuclear warheads that can fit on the Tomahawk missiles will not be sent. The presence of a satellite system in use, Elon Musk’s project, ensures Moscow can be targeted with the long range ballistic missiles.
At this point, after the embarrassing loss in Afghanistan to a small guerilla force without even aircraft, if the hundred million dollar price tag for aircraft is still going to be paid is in question. Without a less developed opponent, like Gaza, American weapons are increasingly outdated.
In the developing world it is still difficult to down aircraft. It requires modern technology., which is lacking in Venezuela. They are vulnerable to aircraft, and in a conflict this could be decisive. The only question now is if Trump will really do it, and invade Venezuela with aircraft and bombings.
For a long time the Americans basically claimed all of Americas as their territory. They tried to claim Cuba in the Bay of Pigs disaster, a loss for Kennedy. Nicaragua is another example of socialists in conflict in the Americas. Chile under Salvador Allende resulted in a coup, with bourgeois assistance.
Making America Great Again includes a Department of War, and a Gulf of America. It also includes mass deportations of Mexicans, who are returning to their own conquered territory in Southwest, often encountering the Customs Border Guards only to be deported. Venezuela has been sending two flights a week of its citizens who entered illegally since Trump was elected.
One has to wonder if a show of force with the outdated weapons is in order. Venezuela has oil under it, and the pipeline politicians want to drill. The show of force continues in the developing world. Without an aircraft’s ability to fly over Venezuela and bomb targets it would seem to be not such a good choice to harass the socialists. But the bourgeoisie has a technological advantage, and Russia cannot intervene. Perhaps this is merely a distraction from the real battles in Europe. Something to distract from the obvious inability of NATO and America to be able to stop Putin. Or it may simply just be the old guard reasserting itself, to “make America great again”.
“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.
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.
Money Capital. Interest. Role of the Central Bank. 4 21 2025
“Shortly after markets opened, Trump referred to Powell as a “major loser” on Truth Social and said the U.S. economy could slow without an immediate reduction in the cost of money amid the fallout from his trade war.”
Washington Post 4 21 2025
Note the “cost of money” This refers to money capital that is paid interest for its part in the production of commodities. The money is first loaned to, for example, an industrial capitalist, who uses the money to produce a commodity, then sells it, and repays the loan, with interest.
The interest is comes from the part of the surplus value created by the industrial capitalist, he calculates ahead of time that he is going to have to pay the money capitalist interest. The cost of the money capital is referred to as the price of money. It is the amount of surplus value that money as a commodity produces when loaned out.
Trump is making the price of money to be lower; Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell is in charge of this. Apparently there is a separation of powers agreement that Trump cannot just order interest rates to go down, instead we have Powell sort of independent to make these conclusions.
It may make the price of money lower, but it also must interfere with the average rate of profit. The interest rate is a tangible condition, and it is speculated on by money capitalists. Where the money capitalist keeps his money that he expects interest to accumulate on, would seem to have to sort of compete with industrial capital. If there was more than the average rate of profit to be made on money capital as opposed to industrial capital, people would invest their money in money capital instead of industrial capital.
But without industrial capital, there can be no money capital. There is no goose that lays golden eggs. The Alchemists of the Middle Ages thought all they had to do was figure out how to make gold and they could have anything they wanted. They failed to see the process by which productive labour created commodities. The money capitalists can get so caught up in speculation they forget industrial capital is where money capital comes from. The result is a bubble, where speculation runs rampant, often on high risk investments, backed by nothing more than paper.
It would seem the bubble is starting to break now, and Trump’s capitalists want the price of money to be cheaper. If it is cheaper to get a loan, you can invest the money and bring in more profit by speculating on money capital.
The irrational form of money as a commodity, which can be bought or sold for a price, would explain why in the previous article I noted the stock market feels they are trading commodities. The commodity money is bought and sold at the exchange, thus they trade commodities.
The exchange of commodities is not where this surplus value is created. All wealth is the product of human labor, whether or not it is paid for,. All this exchanging is a cost of production, money capital is originally a product of productive labour, the surplus value this labour has created is where money capital is derived.
Thus the foolishness of suggesting exchange of a commodity produces wealth. The merchant may make trading commodities run more smoothly for the industrial capitalist, but his wealth is from production. Exchange, even if he does make out like a bandit sometimes, the money he makes is a cost of production for the capitalist, the money comes out of industrial capital’s profit.
The accumulation of money capital has reached absurd amounts, the state’s debt alone is 32 trillion dollars. In this case it is not even speculation on a material commodity, there is no commodity or production of a commodity speculated on several years down the road. This practice, paid for by bonds, is also connected to the interest rate. The federal reserve uses its money it gets paid the interest rate for, the price of money, to loan out to money capitalists, who loan it to industrial capitalists, to produce commodities.
Calculation of interest on his profit is where money capital is formed. It has a sort of legal agreement, the money loaned has to be paid back with interest, regardless of if the capitalist made a profit producing commodities. There is a legal relationship between the leader and burrower, to pay a certain interest rate on the loan regardless of if it was used productively.
The price of money is real, and Trump knows what it means. He may not have had experience running a factory, but as a luxury real estate person, he knows what lowering the interest rate will do. It makes it easier to loan out money capital. Speculation on in the process by those in between the industrial capital and the money capital runs rampant.
Skilled Labour. The Metric System. Technological Progress.
It is sad to see the state of the workers, whose misplaced rebellion to keep their jobs skilled, results in strikes against more advanced machinery being used in the industries they work in.
“U.S. ports already lag those in Europe and Asia in their use of technology. And Daggett (International Longshore Workers Union president ed. ) wants to keep it that way, by prohibiting the operators of marine terminals from automating cargo handling.”
““If it was up to them, they’d like to see everybody lose their jobs. … They don’t want to pay anybody,” he said in a recent union video. “Someone has to get into Congress and say, ‘Whoa, time out.’ This world is going too fast for us. Machines got to stop. … What good is it if you’re going to put people out of work.””
“The dockworkers’ challenge is not unique. Technology has been eliminating some jobs and creating others for more than two centuries. In recent decades, elevator operators, secretaries, and steelworkers all have seen demand for their services upended by mechanization.”
This group of people who profess to be a radical workers organization are trying to organize to keep low wage workers out of their industry. They want to be superior to the unskilled workers, the proletariat. They are more like an aristocracy than a movement to organize the workers.
To accomplish this they are trying to keep their jobs skilled labor, by coming out against improvements in industry. By keeping the skill in their labor they hope to remain high paid, as opposed to unskilled labor.
They seem to be fighting modern technology.
“On the picket line outside Red Hook Terminal at the Port of Newark, strikers this weekagreed that automation is their chief concern.”
“Lydia Ortiz, 60, said shenotices each day the work that is performed by machines. No humans sitting in the toll booths, thanks to E-ZPass. Scarcely a worker to be seen at the grocery store checkout lines, filled with self-checkout machines.”
““They want everything automation,” she said. “We’ve got to support families, no?””
Washington Post ibid.
Which is misguided; it is the system of capitalism that is making the machinery a burden for workers, who are losing their jobs and becoming proletarians. It is the fact a capitalist is using the machinery and is incentivized by the profit he can make by using it, instead of technological development to make life easier for the workers, by making it take less labor to produce the same product, that the ILU feels threatened by modern industry.
In an environment where workers owned the means of production, like a cooperative, technological achievements would absolutely lower the hours needed to be worked by the worker in his respective industry.
It is in this respect that organization of the proletariat becomes imperative. That instead of strikes for wage increases, by keeping labor skilled, a new method is tried.
The ILU is facing a losing battle. It is impossible to stop modern technological improvement, regardless of the fact it throws people out of work. We saw this with the power loom, an invention that shook the foundations of Europe. It allowed for a 12 year old boy moving a stick and pulling a lever to replace the labor of more than a dozen hand weavers. It was burned publicly, according to Karl Marx in Capital.
This caused the previously skilled workers to become proletarians. But it did not stop the march forward of technology, the loom was eventually adopted.
The transition from the integrated steel mills to the electric arc furnace struggle is occurring now. US Steel is a coking mill, producing virgin steel. Losing money, it was being sold to Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, planning to invest in coking steel technology. The unions were against the Japanese company buying it; skilled workers were needed in US Steel, but the industry was becoming rapidly outdated. The electric arc mill technology that smelts recycled materials, the steel that it produces is the same, but it is not virgin. Nevertheless it looks unlikely the sale of US Steel will go forward, Trump is against it..
Obviously it saves a ton of money to simply recycle, and most new mills are recycling mills. It requires less labor to produce steel in an electric arc mill, and they are often not union. The workers are more often relatively unskilled, compared to conventional steel production. And here again we have the struggle of skilled workers vs unskilled, union labor and unskilled general laborers.
US Steel will not be sold, both Trump and Biden agree. What will become of the skilled workers clinging to privilege, well paid with generous pensions, seems to be being decided. Nippon Steel will not be buying US Steel, or so it seems. But the issue of recycling vs virgin steel production will not be going away any time soon.
It is the same with the longshoremen. It’s like being against the metric system because it is going to cost American workers jobs. Obviously it will cost less to use a more scientific system of measurement; how can a non metric company compete in the world market? We see this with Chinese Electric Vehicles, 100 % tariffs, taxes on import, due to the inability of non metric gasoline powered motor producing industry to produce EV’s competitively.
But good luck getting a metric conversion through Congress and the Senate. The Republican bourgeoisie will vote against it for protectionist reasons, the liberal progressive bourgeois will do it to keep American skilled labor, like the US Steel workers and the longshore workers, in their well paid jobs.
America will go metric, they are the last country in the world not to. Technology will continue to advance whether or not it is advantageous to the labor union aristocracy. The very presence of a proletariat proves this. As productivity increases, machinery always becomes easier to use, and the producers less skilled.
As far as these ILU workers go, and skilled workers in factories general go, they should organize unskilled workers. Strikes to increase wages, by keeping labor skilled that could otherwise be done easily with machines, is futile. Lowering hours, with a decent minimum wage, makes more sense than trying to reform capitalist shops.
Employee ownership works; in retail, a branch of production, for instance. It is cheaper, and higher quality products are available for far less cost than the capitalist stores. The only strikes should be to gain control of the means of production, towards worker control of industry. If anything, less hours, even with less pay, would be a start to the road to employee ownership. The workers could pack a lunch, and give up bars and restaurants for their own stoves in the kitchen.
This may sound ridiculous, but is it any more strange sounding than suggesting technological progress is detrimental to society? Machinery may put men out of work, the power loom’s introduction caused suffering. But attempting to stop it, rather than taking control of it and using it to benefit everyone, seems wrongheaded.
Ecological Era 
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