So let's talk about it.
The Surplus Question is the Question of the allocation of a community's resources. It was a question that took a lot of trial and error to answer and was extremely protracted since it wasn't all the time that people had surplus resources to allocate at all.
Early Human Communities, especially under Primitive Communism saw surplus as one of the rarest occurrences either as the consequence of mistake or actually bountiful wildlife and produce that year. Which means it was incredibly rare given the volatile nature of climate.
Thus in order to understand it scientifically, and replicate it, humans developed slavery (I wish this was a joke but it was unfortunately true). Who were slaves were dependent on the culture of where they came from but were often consensual and socially mobile. Slaves came from all sorts of people: transients, criminals, debtors, and victims of conquest. Slaves played a vital role in actually bringing about surplus and they never really remained slaves forever (until the slave societies). Another way they replicated and optimized the production of surplus was patriarchy, whereas the women stayed in the home, the men were free enough to produce.
As manpower expanded so were available resources but it wasn't surplus enough. As slaves and the working class now required excessive amounts of resources to produce the surplus in the first place, equilibrium was a far more common occurrence than surplus. Strangely enough, what slave societies did with actual surplus was weirdly progressive, they happened to bring about social programs in the form of "the dole", the invention of show business, patronage for the arts, etc. However, this is only for profit-surplus, revenue surplus was more or less used DEFINITELY for oppression (at this point, it was so common that it should be considered Marx's law or something). here you can find money used for corruption, slave-repressive implements (whips and chains), arming imperial soldiers, paying assassination contracts, the works.
It should be noted here that both revenue surplus and profit surplus have the implication of money, which I do admit I glossed over because it's way more complicated than it should be. I suggest you read Marx's Das Kapital for the rundown, but TL;DR Money is Debt for existing resources but also fictionally inflated by usury which is contradiction solved by the time Capitalism rolls around.
Back to the main storyline. Humanity's experimentation with surplus and its creation has led it to collectively decide that it is an issue worth investigating by this point consciously, thus making whatever optimizations it made in that regard fixed in Feudalism. However, Feudalism did not at all produce surplus, again leading to the problem of equilibrium, in fact in no period of time did a people under Feudalism encounter surplus, people actually did have enough to sustain themselves according to their needs. What it did manage to do however was exacerbate exploitation giving the rich landlords the illusion of consistent surplus while the peasants just had enough to live. this does not bode well for the times when resources become limited by force majeure. This led to humanity collectively completely giving up and inventing Capitalism.
Before we discuss how Capitalism would actually create the conditions for us to finally tackle the Surplus Question correctly, it is important to note the in all previous statements, "humanity collectively" means humanity under that system, development is uneven. This means that some societies may have gone ahead or behind other societies. The former are still considered progressive despite their horrific and atrocious natures. This is because they are committing to the correct and totally scientific steps necessary to create the conditions to experiment and ultimately solve the Surplus Question. If advanced societies do exist and are enlightened with a solution to the Surplus Question, any solution at all, they have the moral imperative to educate the underdeveloped masses and undertake the democratic method of doing so.
(I'm looking at you alien civilizations)
So here we are, Capitalism. It is the first mode of production to successfully replicate the conditions for genuine resource surplus.
How? Ask Marx.
TL;DR Capitalism took cues from old societies to find practical ways to optimize surplus creation, namely: Free Markets, Workers' Exploitation, Commodification, and Industrialization. In the final analysis, yes Landlords are not optimal for surplus creation, thus are not inherent to Capitalism, they are remnant leaches of the old method that came with the solution. Now that the preconditions to study the Surplus Question had finally been achieved, it was now a matter of confining those conditions to an area in order to study, once and for all, how and why?
How is surplus to be allocated, and is it good?
The answer goes back to the beginning, "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" and No, it isn't good.
It is good to overproduce industrially for the sake of those societies that do not have enough to produce for their own necessity, but it is not at all right to have surplus for surplus' sake.
Have we experimented the solution to the Surplus Question? Yes! more than 1/6th of the world's population today can credit their good health and wellbeing to those who actually implemented those solutions under Socialist Construction.
So what are the important lessons we can learn from a question that took humanity 300,000 years to answer?
It took us 300,000 years just to get this.
]]>It is from this that there exists a general framework for MLM, primarily divided into four parts and neatly fits into an overall structure. First one must examine the Material Reality one is working with, from this Sun Tzu derives two important aspects: Heaven and Earth. Heaven represents the climate of an area while Earth represents the Geography and Geology of an area. From this one derives data on the resources that one can extract from these areas. From the data of resources that can be extracted, we must be able to examine data on how much has and continues to be extracted and how they are allocated, this is how we determine the main class contradiction. It is imperative that the aforementioned is expressed quantitatively. This is the sum total of what we are working with, the physical and external conditions.
Derived from these facts we investigate the qualitative, that is the Relations of Production. Even then, Relations of Production must be expressed quantitatively specifically in class composition of the population. Class Composition must be comprehensive and concise. Classes aren't defined by income rather by 3 main categories. First, is Ownership, what does this person own and what do they do with it. Secondly is Participation, how close are they to the overall process of production? Third is Appropriation, if the product is sold, how much of the revenue goes to the person? Any serious Marxist-Leninist organization will go through the painstaking work of actually all they can to survey the entire population rather than relying upon statistical tricks. From this painstaking examination of the population one can gauge the class struggle.
Third is a clear History of the Struggle within a certain territory or Mass base. the Struggle has not begun with the existence of the Communist Party, for as long as classes exists, there has been struggle between a contradiction between the interests of the oppressed and oppressor. Two types of events must be detailed in this history. In both cases it was often done as an attack on the class as a whole and oftentimes happened collectively. First, record the facts of oppression events, these are events of struggle benefitting the side of the oppressor in any way. from rent increases to police crackdowns must be noted. Second, record and highlight resistance events, these are events which benefit or are supposed to benefit the side of the oppressed. This encompasses successful legal battles to tactical offensives. The detailing of these events are far more qualitative but be sure to listen to as many witnesses, with a special emphasis on participants of these events as accurately as you can, and investigate well.
From all of these facts, now it is time to formulate the truth, and what is to be done. First, quantitatively analyze the objective and subjective conditions, how much resistance events happened and succeeded and how many oppression events happened and failed. Secondly, Analyze the consolidated conditions and understand whether the situation as it currently stands are in favor of the oppressor or the oppressed. This includes the amount of People's Institutions, the active number of members in revolutionary organizations, an assessment on the weaponry and equipment at their disposal, etc. From these two, we derive at what stage in the overall shift the contradiction we are in, whether we are in a Strategic Defensive, Stalemate, or Offensive.
Finally assess all-in-all what is effective and needed. What conditions need to change to forward the internal interests of the oppressed? It is in this study that a truly revolutionary perspective comes from. It is always recommended that this effort is done personally, and collectively, with a preference for centralization. For it is in the undertaking of a study in a MLM lens that necessitates and brings about the creation of the Most advanced detachment of the Proletarian Class, the Communist Party.
]]>Before writing, I would like to say this is the second part to my article on the Social object which details what the social object is and my assumptions about it. Also, despite popular belief, spontaneous violent revolution by the workers is exactly what Marx and his Section were totally against the idea being it would just be an outpouring of emotions and sentiments that could easily be co-opted by the Capitalist state.
When the Social Object is synthesized, as attempted by multiple ironic figures like Mikhail Bakunin, Stafford Beer, Kevin McCoy, and Vitalik Buterin. It would be traded for as itself without the need for intermediary commodities like money and solves ECP simply because it has inherent value rather than Market TV, Resource TV, or Labour TV. What it does is inflate the economy with ghost money, money that only exists within the inherent value of the social object, you could not cut it up or value it at a different price, it is constant despite the market, this breaks down national financial institutions and even whole nations itself when it is known.
The social object would create the conditions for a Reaganite revolution, that being workers being unknowably wealthy enough to do hostile takeovers of their own companies or corporations, aka becoming rich enough to seize the means of production. When this is done, the workers become privileged, whereas Capitalists still need to accumulate, the social object has inherent value meaning it can't degrade by market forces or simply not acknowledging it. This Privilege of the Working-class over the Capitalists, having seized the means of production, would lead us to:
Marx argued that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a liberal democracy. That being multiple parties, debates, et al. the main difference is that economic policy has shifted towards bailouts, stimulus, &c. catered to these newly wealthy and powerful Unions, Councils, Collectives, & Corporations. But as the Workers have become the majority, they have taken a somewhat libertarian right-wing or Austrian idea of economics and push for lower taxes and minimal government, except successfully, ultimately turning government redundant.
The Social(object)-ist economics have spread worldwide and the same process as steps 1-3 have destroyed countries, churches, capitalist institutions, and all manner of oppression. Now, this is where I'm going to speculate because this is where Marx and Bakunin end their descriptions, that being labour vouchers abolishing the economic glass ceiling, in between this and higher phase communism is completely blank.
What it does now, in my opinion, is centralizing the markets with the Social Object being traded. In this stage, common commodities and property are subject to the social object and Capital (stocks, deeds, bonds, interest, futures contracts, &c.) will slowly fade away and with it, the agency tasked to give these charters, the state. This will cause even more chaos than before within the higher echelons. Finally, all these institutions, that during steps 1-4 have simply been repurposed, will be deterritorialized and made redundant. Ending in...
Higher phase Communism is the classless, stateless, moneyless society without State, Church, Capital, and all oppressive entities. They have been swept away by Socialism, those being contradictory to the Social Object was terminated. Now everyone gives from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.
In this timeline, there would have been less bloodshed and revolution but I made a meme of this already so yes.
]]>“This has not yet been radically accomplished except in England....but all the countries of Western Europe are going through the same movement,” etc. (Capital, French Edition, 1879, p. 315). At the end of the chapter the historic tendency of production is summed up thus: That it itself begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, by giving the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer; that capitalist property, resting as it actually does already on a form of collective production, cannot do other than transform itself into social property. At this point I have not furnished any proof, for the good reason that this statement is itself nothing else than the short summary of long developments previously given in the chapters on capitalist production.
Now what application to Russia can my critic make of this historical sketch? Only this: If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction – she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. That is all. But that is not enough for my critic. He feels himself obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.) Let us take an example.
In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/11/russia.htm
]]>There are at least 6 concepts when it comes to Marxism is, in basic, they are presented below. I do not recommend burning through Das Kapital's 3 Volumes as I did in grade 4, Marxism is not worth the trouble. But here is an introduction at least that would give Marx justice.
Dialectical Materialism is a concept that argues that material conditions improve with time and technology. Marx observed that the dialectical synthesis of commodity and property begot Capital[1], he addressed in 3 (supposedly 4) volumes on how this would affect Classical Market Economics. Where Smith recorded how Capital began from risk management on the terms of policy, and Ricardo observed (through his infamous corn tables) the odd effects and violent fluctuations happening in commodities, Marx argued, through Hegelian Dialectics, that Capital was the latest object synthesis in a line of syntheses called Modes of Production.
How they get from one Mode of Production to the next is through Class Struggle between the Upper and Lower classes, with the middle classes beating the upper every time. The old middle becomes the new upper class.
Important terms:
Within Capitalism:
LTV=RM<->L=P
Profit is created from Raw Materials if and only through Labor.
Doesn't More supply mean less demand/profits? Supply, created by labor, increases profits.
1/Capital(=commodity+property)=Profits
so the more Capital there is the fewer Profits there will be. This manifests over time leading to Economic Crises.
As Profit falls, and Capital increases that means there will be more materials than the Worker can afford, this is measured through Marx's rate of exploitation:
=(LTV/actual wage)100
This creates a conflict of interest that leads to class struggle.
A Majority of people however are peacefully unaware of these contradictions however, unless of course in times of crisis. Cultural Hegemony is what keeps the Lower classes from revolting against the Upper classes. This is through Conservatism, Populism, and a semblance of participation in state power. They are also free to do their work without repression if they give in to the power system.
To Marx, Liberation comes through breaking the cycle and let the working classes win for a change. He's actually not clear as to what this liberation entails. Immediately after his death, the idea of Marxism was a slow burn, to eliminate, at least, material inequity through the political struggle, this was as it is still now considered Social Democracy.
Against the Lassale and the Gotha Programme, Marx argued that Revolution will occur within the Workers' Unions who, through a perpetual strike from Capitalist institutions, will seize state power and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, This dictatorship will then, through authoritarian means, seize the means of production creating a society in which welfare comes as a consequence of economics (lower phase communism), when all peoples reap the benefits of this society, usually through a worldwide revolution, the Fourierist conception: the abolition of work, money, cash, state, church, and capital (Higher phase communism) will occur.
Lenin argued that because the dictatorship of the proletariat could not be possible through the classical marxist means (violent spontaneous revolution by Workers' Unions on General Strike), Vanguard parties must exist to educate, arouse, organize and mobilize the masses and must be done by professional party officials who will take over under a Workers' State. By Confederating with all the Communist Parties throughout the world, with material and financial support, it could bring about a world revolution.
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