p Bourgeois ideologists and politicians maintain that contemporary capitalism is turning into a “people’s capitalism”, that its purpose is to satisfy the needs of man, that it is moving towards a “welfare state" and a high level of consumption. But these very same ideologists and politicians “forget” to specify which man and whose needs and welfare capitalism cares for, for under capitalism there is man who owns means of production (the bourgeois) and man who works (the worker and the peasant).
p The big proprietors constitute a tiny minority, yet they are the real masters of the capitalist world. It is with their welfare and high living standard that bourgeois ideologists are concerned. The big proprietors hold the key positions in the economy and in political and spiritual life and they own colossal material and spiritual wealth. Thus, a small circle of rich men, comprising only a hundredth part of the population, own 60 per cent of the national wealth in the U.S.A. and more than 50 per cent in Britain. In the early 85 1960s there were in the U.S.A. at least 85 families with a private fortune exceeding 75 million dollars. Owners of capital, naturally, have unlimited possibilities for satisfying their needs, which frequently acquire the nature of unbridled whims. The millionaires of present-day America are more extravagant than the monarchs and princes of the past have ever been. They spend enormous sums of money to build and run their residences, on luxury yachts, private railways, trains, aircraft, cars, and so forth. Many of them have turned their wives into walking fortunes: at a ball in Washington, one of the ladies wore jewels valued at several million dollars and was protected by 15 private detectives and a squad of police.
p These huge assets cannot be earned by honest work. To build up a fortune rivalling that of the Rockefellers, the Mellons or the Du Fonts, a well-paid worker would have to save his pay for nearly a million years! The only source of the fortunes of the monopolists is the exploitation of the working people which is, essentially, misanthropic and incompatible with the nature of man, with his lofty calling and place in life.
p State-monopoly capitalism is intensifying the exploitation of workers. Witness the fact that during the first years after the Second World War the norm of surplus value in the U.S. processing industry reached 260-300 per cent, as against 203.3 per cent in 1939, 186.2 per cent in 1929 and 122.2 per cent in 1889.
p To characterise the position of the working class under capitalism we have to take the operation of two antipodal trends into consideration. One of these is the uninterrupted trend towards a worsening of the position of the working class, while the second opposes the first and is linked up mainly with the struggle of the working class, which seeks to contain the capitalist offensive against labour. In some of the developed capitalist countries the working class has bettered its position precisely as a result of a dogged and persevering struggle against the capitalists.
p Reactionary bourgeois economists claim that there is no impoverishment of the working class in capitalist society. Facts give the lie to this assertion. In capitalist society we observe absolute impoverishment (growth of poverty among the workers in countries that were 86 exploited by the colonialists for many years; of workers in declining industries, coal mining, for example, in developed countries; the unemployed, the disabled, immigrants, and so on) and relative impoverishment of the working class (a steady deterioration of the position of the workers as compared with that of the bourgeoisie, which is growing ever wealthier).
p One of the manifestations of relative impoverishment is that the profits of the monopolies increase while the proletariat’s share of the national income steadily grows smaller. For example in the period 1924-52 the profits of the U.S. monopolies rose 7.7-fold, while the working people’s share of the total social product dropped from 59.7 per cent in 1900 to 45.9 per cent in 1956. In terms of the absolute, i.e., the material, this share is sufficiently high in some developed capitalist countries (U.S.A., the Federal Republic of Germany, Britain, Italy, France and other countries) to ensure a certain section of the working people with a high standard of living. But it should be borne in mind that this high living standard exists side by side with the poverty of another, considerably larger section of the working people of these countries as well as with the appalling poverty, undernourishment and illiteracy of the bulk of the population of countries that have, for one reason or another, lagged behind in economic development. Even in one of the richest of the capitalist countries, the U.S.A., the government has itself admitted that 32 million people are poverty-stricken. What about the standard of living in the undeveloped countries, whose per capita national income is many times smaller than in the U.S.A.? In Latin America 5,500 people daily die of starvation, disease or premature old age. Yet in that area of the world some 5,000,000 dollars daily go into the pockets of the U.S. monopolists.
p In the U.S.A., bastion of capitalism, millions of Negroes are exploited and politically and spiritually oppressed. According to rough estimates, the U.S. monopolies received 4,000 million dollars annually in the 1940s from the superexploitation of Negroes.
p An existence as miserable as that of the Negroes in the U.S.A. is eked out in some of the developed West European countries by millions of worker immigrants who left their 87 homeland, in many cases without their families and relatives, in search of a livelihood. In these countries they are subjected to exploitation and racial discrimination and denied political rights. Employed on the most arduous and hazardous jobs, they receive less for the same work than local workers and live in poverty, squalor and ignorance.
p The millions of unemployed, whom imperialism has ousted from the sphere of production and thereby deprived of the possibility to display their ability to work, which is the most important and profound manifestation of humanity, can only dream of living like real human beings. These outcasts of “affluent” society see nothing before them but hopeless penury, the shrivelling up of their physical strength, and spiritual emptiness.
p Driving for maximum profits, the monopolists are intensifying labour, speeding it up. This, too, is adversely affecting the working man—the organism wears out and ages prematurely, the accident and the occupational disease rates grow, and mental diseases have become a social calamity. In the U.S.A., for instance, nearly 2,000,000 industrial accidents, including 14,000-15,000 fatal cases, are reported annually. Half of the patients in the hospitals are mental cases: only 56 per cent of the people falling ill receive medical attention.
p Capitalism pays inadequate attention to people’s health. Medical assistance is usually rendered for payment, and the doctor’s fees are extremely high. The average American family annually spends nearly half of a month’s income on medical assistance. In many capitalist countries there is an acute housing shortage and the old-age pension scheme leaves much to be desired.
p Through their monopoly of mental work, the ruling classes spiritually enslave the working man, placing education, science and culture out of his reach. They ensure the spiritual development of the working people only to the extent that it dovetails with their own interests, striving to reduce the education of the children of workers and peasants to vocational training so as to make them qualified solely as hired workers.
p The misanthropy of imperialism is particularly striking in such an extremely ugly phenomenon of contemporary 88 capitalism as the militarisation of the economy. Enormous assets created by the hands and intellect of the working man are spent not on projects to improve the life of the people but on the production of monstrous weapons of mass annihilation and destruction. In the U.S.A. during 20 post-war years 48 times more money was spent for military purposes than during the 20 years immediately preceding the Second World War. Altogether the capitalist world annually spends more than 100,000 million dollars for military purposes. It is easy to imagine what drastic changes might have taken place in the economic development of the undeveloped countries and in the standard of living of their people if this money had been spent for peaceful purposes. But this can hardly take place under imperialism, where war is the most profitable business of the monopolies.
p Modern scientific and technical achievements are opening breath-taking prospects for boosting the living standard and the intellectual level of the working man. Yet, in addition to hindering the utilisation of these achievements in the interests of man, the monopolies frequently turn them against him, converting them into ghastly means of annihilation and destruction.
p Most of the complex and expensive research is in the hands of the monopolies, which, naturally, appropriate the results of this research and use them to make certain of monopoly profits and to capture markets. The secrecy surrounding research, due to economic rivalry, creates difficulties in exchanging scientific information and gives rise to duplication in research with the result that money and effort are wasted. The monopolies store away many thousands of important inventions and discoveries until their “commercial value" rises. Take the case of nylon. Its industrial production was started only in 1946-47, i.e., 14 years after it was developed (in 1932).
p A particular menace to humanity is the utilisation of science and technology for military purposes. More than two-thirds of the U.S. scientists and nearly threefifths of the scientists in Britain are working on military projects. Of the funds allocated in the U.S.A. for scientific development, 70 per cent are used for research of a military nature.
89Contemporary capitalism is thus a misanthropic force. The working people, naturally, cannot reconcile themselves to encroachments on their human rights and dignity. They are doggedly struggling for liberation from imperialism, and this struggle is headed by the working class.
Notes