159

p The claim that Marxism is “outdated” runs like a red thread through the whole of bourgeois criticism of MarxismLeninism today. It gives grudging acceptance of Marx as a scientist whose works more or less correctly reflect capitalist development in the 19th century, but it is always stressed that Marx’s main predictions have not come true, because capitalism has been “transformed”, because it has ceased to be capitalism and has become “democratic”, people’s capitalism, a welfare state, a mass consumption society, a system of “economic humanism”, in short, it has ceased to be the system described by Marx. George Lichtheim, an “expert” on Marxism-Leninism at London University, declares: “ Marxism ... has become ’historical’... the gradual socialisation of the economic sphere in advanced industrial society has become parallel with the emergence of a new type of social stratification”.  [159•2 

p He is echoed by some US researchers, who declare: “Marx, hbwever, was criticising nineteenth-century capitalist societies and failed to predict developments such as the tremendous strength of trade unions and government regulations which have served to eradicate, mitigate or even reverse some of what he considered to be the most reprehensible features of capitalism.”  [159•3 

p The bitterest attacks have been directed at the conclusion drawn by the founders of Marxism concerning the great 160 mission of the proletariat in world history, and the Marxist theory of a class struggle, together with Marx’s general law of capitalist accumulation.

p Lenin wrote that “the chief thing in the doctrine of Marx is that it brings out the historic role of the proletariat as the builder of socialist society”.  [160•1  Today, the bourgeois, reformist and Right-opportunist revisionist ideologists are united in their fight against Marxism-Leninism by their common assertion that there is no social basis for the revolutionary struggle and the existence of the Communist Parties, that is, the spread of the myth that capitalist society is being “deproletarised”.

p Bourgeois and reformist thinkers of every stripe keep saying that the working class in the industrialised capitalist countries of the West has lost its revolutionary spirit, that it is gradually disappearing, being dissolved in a kind of “middle class”, and that this automatically undermines the basis for the theory of class struggle and the need for the existence of the revolutionary Communist Parties.

p The Marxist-Leninist theory of the working class, as the main revolutionary force of society is based on the fact that the working class has the most important position within the system of social production; being concentrated at large enterprises, it is capable of achieving a high level of organisation; not having any forms of private property, it is objectively a consistently revolutionary class.

p Of course, the structure of the working class has changed under the impact of the scientific and technical revolution. Wage labour, including different social, occupational and other groups, with different educational levels, material condition, differing ideological and political outlook and degree of organisation, have an especially complex inner structure.

p Bourgeois ideologists have tried to speculate on these real changes within the make-up of the working class, and the social structure of the capitalist society caused by the scientific and technical revolution. But the whole point is that these changes can in no sense upset the conclusion that the working class has a revolutionary mission; moreover, they provide evidence that social forces, which will help to ensure 161 the triumph of socialism, are being multiplied in the entrails of the capitalist society. Let us look at the facts.

p Over the past century, the industrial proletariat in the most advanced capitalist countries has grown rapidly, from roughly 9 million in the mid-19th century to almost 30 million at the turn of the century, and 60 million in the mid-20tb century. This has been paralleled by a sharp growth in the wage-labour army, and its share of the working population in the leading capitalist countries of the West has also increased accordingly, to 85 per cent in the USA, 81.3 per cent in the FRG, 93 per cent in Britain, and 76.1 per cent in France. The latest estimates of the number of industrial and office workers in the capitalist world shows that the wage-labour army now numbers 540 million persons.

p On the whole, over the past century, there has been a considerable increase in the numerical strength and share in the advanced capitalist countries of the urban, industrial proletariat, and a marked drop in the share of the rural proletariat.

p The US economist, Victor Perlo, says that in 1900 the working class made up 64 per cent of the US population, and in 1966—82 per cent. Only in the last six years, the number of workers in the USA increased by 8.5 million persons, that is, by 15 per cent, while the total population went up by nine per cent.

p There is no scientific ground for the arguments of bourgeois propaganda, which seeks to “refute” Marx’s conclusions by pointing to the allegedly rapid growth of the middle classes, among whom class distinctions are obliterated and a “class peace” established, instead of the growing polarisation of society into two main classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

p Some bourgeois sociologists ignore the actual division of society into classes, and refer to the “middle class” those who claim to belong to it, regardless of their actual condition. As a result of this arbitrary, subjectivist view of the class structure of society, almost all the social groups, including some owners of enterprises, are classified with the “middle class”. Meanwhile, the attitude the founders of Marxism took to the intermediate sections is distorted out of all recognition, and nothing is said of the fact that Marx and Engels had remarked of the uneven make-up of the middle sections 162 under capitalism and the different tendencies of their development.

p Marxists have never insisted that no trace is to be left of the intermediate sections in capitalist society. Criticising Ricardo, Marx wrote that the former had forgotten to note the “constantly growing number of the middle classes, those who stand between the workman on the one hand and the capitalist and landlord on the other”.  [162•1  But together with this thesis, life also confirmed Marx’s proposition about the objective tendency of the proletarisation of the petty producers with the growing concentration of capitalist production.

p Marx’s conclusion about the growing proletarisation in capitalist society has been fully borne out. In 1870, 40.6 per cent of the gainfully employed population of the USA were independent entrepreneurs, and 59.4 per cent were wage-workers; in 1954, the figures were, respectively, 13.4 per cent and 86.6 per cent.

p Marx forecast the growth of the intelligentsia and the office workers. Lenin also observed that “in all spheres of people’s labour, capitalism increases the number of office and professional workers with particular rapidity and makes a growing demand for intellectuals”.  [162•2  These processes are developing even today. In 1929, 10,450,000 persons were employed in US agriculture, and in 1968, 3,500,000; from 1950 to 1967, the share of persons employed in agriculture dropped from 12.5 per cent to 5.2 per cent; in 1960, 5 million persons were engaged in FRG agriculture, and in 1968, 2,670,000; in 1954, French agriculture employed 5 million persons, and in 1965, 3,450,000. At the same time, there has been a sharp increase in the share of engineers, technicians and office workers in the capitalist countries.

p Thus, the share of the intelligentsia and office workers in the USA, working on salaries, increased from 12.7 per cent of the gainfully employed population in 1900 to 43 per cent in 1960; in Britain, it went up from 10-14 per cent in 1851 to 37.8 per cent in 1951.

p These data leave no ground for the conclusion that the role of the working class is declining. Even if the overall share of the proletariat in a number of capitalist countries 163 has somewhat declined (because of the dwindling share of the rural proletariat) the socio-political strength of the working class has increased. In 1950, the US working class, constituting 48.1 per cent of the working population ( including industrial proletariat 43.8 per cent, and rural proletariat 4.3 per cent) was a greater productive and social force than the US working class of 1870, which constituted 57 per cent of the working population (including industrial proletariat 28 per cent, and rural proletariat 29 per cent.)

p The important thing to bear in mind here is what Lenin said about the strength of the proletariat which “in the process of history is immeasurably greater than its share of the total population”.  [163•1  Lenin said that in general the strength of a class depended on: “1) numerical strength; 2) role in the country’s economy; 3) ties with the mass of working people; and 4) organisation”.  [163•2 

p The main and most important aspect of the increasing number of workers by brain consists in the fact that statemonopoly capitalism and the scientific and technical revolution undermine the old privileges of the bulk of the office workers, who now approximate the workers both in status and working conditions. Accordingly, it is not correct to say that the proletariat is being dissolved in a mythical “middle class”; on the contrary, possibilities are being opened up for stronger unity between the industrial workers and broacl sections of office workers and engineers and technicians in the fight against the monopolies, and the forces of reaction. Thus, the revolutionary mission of the proletariat in world history is now being confirmed not only by the fact that this most numerous class of capitalist society is the most exploited, the most revolutionary, the most organised, and the most conscious and profoundly internationalist class, but also by the fact that, as never before, it is the true spokesman for the interests of the vast majority of the people. Present-day reality confirms the conclusion drawn by the CPSU: “Other social strata opposing monopoly oppression— the bulk of the peasants and the intelligentsia—are rallying more closely round the working class. A broad anti- monopoly front is being formed. This process promotes closer unity of the people and stimulates their struggle for the 164 ultimate goal—for the revolutionary transformation of society, for socialism.”  [164•1 

p In a speech at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on April 21, 1970, L. I. Brezhnev said: “During the past few years the struggle of the working masses in the capitalist countries has acquired such a scale and intensity that one can justifiably say that a new political situation is taking shape there. ... An extremely important element is that today this struggle is waged by no means solely under economic slogans. It is increasingly becoming a political struggle of the working class, a struggle for social rights and democratic freedoms, a struggle against the omnipotence of the monopolies.

p “These militant actions of tens of millions of proletarians are the best reply to the specious fabrications of the enemies of Leninism, who assert that the working class of the capitalist countries has ’lost’ its revolutionary spirit. No, the militant spirit of the international proletariat has not faded.”  [164•2 

p The bourgeois ideologists have been most stubborn in their attacks on the general law of capitalist accumulation which reflects the polarisation of riches and poverty in the capitalist society. They assert that “instead of the inevitable concentration of wealth and grinding poverty at the poles of society, the advanced countries have seen the spread of middle-class standards of life to ever wider segments of their people”.  [164•3  Bourgeois ideologists usually have Marx take an extremely oversimplified view of immiseration and his alleged views are refuted by references to growing wages and improving living conditions of the workers in the advanced capitalist countries.

p Let us look at this matter in detail, because this is one of the most wide-spread methods of “refuting” Marxism today.

p The Marxist classics have never denied the possibility that wages could rise at some periods, in some capitalist countries, for some groups of workers. In fact, back in 1891, Engels rejected the formulation of the draft programme of the Social-Democratic Party of Germany, which said that the 165 “number and the misery of the proletariat increases continuously”. Engels said: “This is incorrect when put in such a categorical way. The organisation of the workers and their constantly growing resistance will possibly check the increase of misery to a certain extent.”  [165•1 

p Lenin’s statements concerning the Marxist theory of immiseration contain the conclusion that the growth of poverty under capitalism should be seen as an objective tendency.

p The working-class struggle helps to stem the steady worsening of its working and living conditions. Perlo is right in saying that even if working-class living standards in the USA have been going up, this is not due to any generosity on the part of US capitalism, but to the efforts of the workers themselves. Perlo says that despite the recent improvements, living standards among US workers are fantastically low as compared with what they could be in a society organised on socialist lines. He adds that there is a marked lack of many social and cultural benefits which socialism provides.  [165•2 

p The achievements of the socialist system intensify the influence exerted by Marxist-Leninist ideas on working people throughout the world. Every stride forward made by the socialist countries in their economic, scientific, and technical development is a fresh blow at imperialism. Nor is it possible to deny the fact that the successes of socialism have forced the imperialist bourgeoisie to camouflage the methods of its class domination, and the forms of the exploitation and oppression of the working class. However, the existence of the world socialist system is helping the working people of the capitalist countries to fight for an increase in the price of labour-power, for an improvement of working conditions, and for various concessions from the bourgeoisie.

p Thus, in the course of the last few decades, wages have increased in a number of advanced capitalist countries: roughly 36 per cent in the USA, 45 per cent in Britain, 55 per cent in Italy and 53 per cent in Japan. This shows that fear of revolution, the successes of the socialist countries, and pressure from the working-class movement have forced 166 the bourgeoisie to make partial concessions on wages, working conditions, and social security.

p However, higher wages are frequently invalidated by growing prices and taxes. Thus, in 1966, the US industrial worker, whose annual average wages had nominally gone up by $300, was deprived of $288 as a result of higher taxes and prices ($49 went as higher federal income tax, $103, as higher contribution to social security, $21, to increase local taxes and $115 was swallowed up by higher prices). In the light of these processes, US progressive economists have estimated that the real wages of the married worker in the US manufacturing industry in 1966 and 1967 in fact declined. As a result, they say, in those two years unearned income increased by 22 per cent while the national income went up by 12 per cent. This tendency continued in 1968, considering that the cost of living went up 4.4 per cent, while taxes continued to rise.

p There was a similar process of growing exploitation from 1965 to 1967 and in early 1968 in France, where average wages of the working people were among the lowest in the Common Market countries. In 1967, a worker’s per-hour earnings came to an average of 3.48 francs in France, and 6.22 francs in Luxemburg, 5.50 francs in the FRG, 4.75 francs in Holland, and 3.18 francs in Italy. Following the MayJune class battles in France, wages in various branches of industry increased by an average of 13-18 per cent. However, the bourgeoisie managed very soon to withdraw some of its forced concessions by raising prices for a number of goods and services.

p In 1967, there was a drop in real incomes among the working people of the FRG, and a growth of unemployment, while labour productivity continued to rise. In 1968, the FRG government in effect gave a boost to this tendency by changing the tax rates, cutting outlays for social needs, etc.

p The devaluation of the pound in Britain in 1967 resulted in a reduction of real wages. In addition to growing prices, there was a reduction of government outlays on social needs, an increase of taxes by 8 per cent, and a tough wages “freeze” policy.

p The spread of the strike movement, as compared with the first stage of the general crisis of capitalism, provide irrefutable evidence that the strike struggle of the working class is increasing in scope. In the 20 years before the Second 167 World War strikes in the capitalist world involved 80.8 million persons, and in the 20 years since the war (1946-1966) the total number of strikers reached 297.9 million. From 1958 to 1968, the number of strikers totalled 520 million. Let us also note that a considerable number of these strikes were political.

p Another fact that needs to be emphasised is the steady lag in the growth of real wages behind the growth of capitalist profits, and also the fact that this growth failed to cover the rapidly growing vital requirements of the modern worker, that is, it lagged behind the real value of labour power. From 1960 to 1967, for instance, the profits of the US monopolies increased from $26.7 thousand million to $47.2 thousand million, that is, 76.7 per cent.

p Analysing the general law of capitalist accumulation, Marx reached the conclusion that “in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse”.  [167•1  Engels and Lenin also stressed the need to consider the question of the growing poverty from the standpoint of the worsening condition of the working class in social terms, that is, in terms of the growing gap between the living conditions and the status of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and also “in the sense of the disparity between the increasing level of ... consumption by society as a whole, and the level of the living standards of the working people”.  [167•2 

p Is this kind of social polarisation still going on in bourgeois society today?

p There is no doubt that it is. This is best confirmed by the facts. Victor Perlo has estimated that in the mid-20th century, five per cent of the US population appropriated onethird of the national income. A handful of monopolists (under one per cent of the US population) owned almost one-half of the national wealth. The wage-earning working class remains an exploited class, with the rate of exploitation in the capitalist countries now being much higher than it was a century ago. In the USA, for instance, the rate of surplus value in 1963 went up to 330 per cent, which was twice as high as it was in 1929. From 1938 to 1963, the rate of surplus value in Britain increased from 170 per cent to 238 168 per cent. Under capitalism, the automation of production intensifies labour to an unprecedented degree, and this confirms Marx’s conclusion that capitalist production “more than any other mode of production ... squanders human lives, or living labour, and not only blood and flesh, but also nerve and brain.”  [168•1 

p When considering the worsening condition of the working people under capitalism, one must bear in mind the whole complex of living conditions of the working people. Consequently, one must take account of such important indicators as unemployment, the ruin of the farmers, the intensity of labour, the tax burden on the working people, housing conditions and rents, medical services for workers and members of their families, access to education, lack of certainty about the future, the threat of war and wars actually fought, etc. Capitalism not only worsens the conditions of the working people but also fails to guarantee the security of their existence and their very lives.

p Capitalism alone is responsible for the two devastating world wars fought in this century, which killed 65 million and crippled over 55 million, whereas about 25 million persons had been killed in wars over the three centuries before that.

p Today, there is indignation and resentment over the criminal aggressive war US imperialism is waging in Vietnam. US ruling circles have been wasting vast resources on this monstrous, destructive war, while ignoring the social problems facing their own people.

p The abiding antagonisms of the capitalist system are best illustrated in the USA, the richest capitalist country. President Kennedy once said that every night 17 million Americans went to bed hungry. President Johnson said in his messages to Congress that poverty was a “national problem”. He added that 20 per cent of the US population lived in poverty. The humourists have been having a field day over the loud promises to set up a “great society” in the USA.

p In the spring of 1969, The New York Times carried a series of articles on starvation in the USA. US News and World Report said that 21.9 million people lived in poverty in that great country. Time magazine said the figure was 169 26.9 million. Victor Perlo believes the number is closer to 51,324,000.

p It is true that nine million out of 26.9 million persons estimated by Time in December 1968 as living in poverty, receive various benefits, but these are small and now and again altogether symbolic.

p In 1953, the number of unemployed stood at 1.9 million, and in 1967 at about four million.

p At the same time, fortunes have been growing at the other pole of US society. In 1953, there were 4,000 millionaires, and in 1965 their number had gone up to more than 10,000.

p However, can the condition of the working people in the advanced capitalist countries be considered out of the context of the living conditions of men in the underdeveloped areas of the world? Lenin’s methodological remarks on the question of Marx’s theory of impoverishment contain this highly important statement: “The passage on increasing impoverishment remains perfectly true in respect of the ’border regions’ of capitalism... (countries in which capitalism is only beginning to penetrate and frequently not only gives rise to physical poverty but to the outright starvation of the masses).”  [169•1 

p We find that the assertions of the bourgeois ideologists that Marx was “wrong” on this matter of impoverishment are also false because when considering the condition of the working people under capitalism they never take the world capitalist system as a whole, the capitalist socio-economic formation as an entity, but concentrate on the countries that have forged ahead in their economic development through the plunder and exploitation of millions of working people in the colonial, dependent and semi-dependent countries. However, in early 1967, almost 1.6 thousand million persons or about 46 per cent of the globe’s population, and over 70 per cent of the population within the world capitalist system, lived in the developing countries, as compared with 639 million in the advanced capitalist countries (18.9 per cent of the population of the globe, and under 30 per cent of the population in the capitalist system).

p A look at the distribution of the national income shows that in 1960 the developing countries received only 17 per cent of the overall national income in the capitalist world, 170 as compared with the 83 per cent which fell to the lot of the advanced capitalist countries. In the USA, national income per head came to $2,348, in India, to $75, in Brazil, to $161, in Nigeria, to $58, and in the Philippines, to $102. Of the 210 million inhabitants of Latin America, which is so rich in natural resources, 170 million, or two families of three, have to starve.

p Why is this so? At the end of the 18th century, Latin America had a much larger population than the USA, and a greater volume of output. By the early 1960s, national income per head in Latin America was 89.6 per cent lower than that of the USA. This has resulted from the fierce exploitation of the peoples of Latin America by US imperialism. In Latin America, there are over 2,000 branches and subsidiaries of US corporations. For decades, US capital has been receiving more than three dollars for every dollar invested in the Latin American economy. Since the war, the US imperialists received at least $50 thousand million in profits in Latin America.

p Not only the peoples of Latin America, but of a number of other economically underdeveloped areas have been brought down to the poverty level by imperialist exploitation. According to UN data, almost a thousand million persons in these countries are starving, out of them 400 million are doomed to die, while the rest have to live in semistarvation. In the economically underdeveloped countries, the average life expectancy comes to no more than 35 years, while child mortality is ten times as high as it is in the advanced capitalist countries.

p The fact that despite the great advances in science and technology, the capitalist system is incapable of providing elementary welfare for masses of the working people is the best evidence that the capitalist system is obsolete, unfit, and historically doomed.

p The new phenomena in the development of modern capitalism, far from refuting, in fact provide brilliant confirmation for the scientific forecasts of Marx and Lenin.

p The bourgeois advocates of imperialism, speculating on the development of the economic functions of the state or on the development of the share-holding form of property, insist that as a result of some “capitalist revolution” in the 20th century private property has allegedly ceased to exist. But in his Capital, Marx had pointed out that the nature 171 of the capitalist system is not changed either by the growth of state property under the capitalist system, or by the overspill of the property in the means of production outside the framework of joint-stock companies, when bourgeois governments “perform the function of industrial capitalists”.  [171•1 

p However, ignoring the truth of life, the ideological opponents of socialism keep saying that Marxism is “outdated”, and that it is a 19th-century theory.

p Let us ask this simple question: in the century since capitalism was analysed so brilliantly by Karl Marx in his Capital, has the system changed at all? Yes, it has. Premonopoly capitalism developed into monopoly capitalism and then into state-monopoly capitalism. But while observing the many new phenomena and specific features of modern capitalism, one must see that the substance of capitalism has not changed, and that many of the phenomena and tendencies which Marx and Lenin had anticipated in their day, are characteristic of the present stage of capitalism.

p Marx did not fail to see the possibility of growing concentration and centralisation, or the separation of capital as property from capital as function, which is a tendency so characteristic of capitalist development in our day. In Capital, Marx said: “Stock companies in general—developed with the credit system—have an increasing tendency to separate .. . work of management as a function from the ownership of capital.”  [171•2  He also anticipated the extreme intensification of labour under the capitalist system, when “the price of labour-power and the degree of its exploitation cease to be commensurable quantities”.  [171•3 

p In the new historical conditions, Lenin gave a detailed analysis of imperialism, and monopoly and state-monopoly capitalism. His work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, laid the groundwork for fundamentally new conclusions which are of exceptional importance for the workingclass movement.

p Lenin produced a coherent theory of imperialism, and substantiated his conclusion that at its imperialist stage capitalism enters a phase in which its economic and political contradictions are aggravated to the extreme, and that these 172 lead to the outbreak of imperialist wars, that capitalism has intensified the exploitation of the working people and national oppression, and has brought about a further aggravation of the contradictions between labour and capital. Lenin exposed Kautsky’s theory of “ultra-imperialism”, which held that imperialism allegedly led to organised world capitalism which eliminated all contradictions. Lenin showed that the growth of monopoly capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism helped further to create the material prerequisites for the transition to socialism, and that imperialism marked the threshold of the socialist revolution.

p The victory of the Great October Revolution in Russia, and the subsequent formation of the world socialist community were a triumph for the ideas of Leninism.

The postwar period in the development of capitalism has been marked by a further deepening of all the contradictions inherent in the capitalist system. These growing objective contradictions, like the spread in depth and breadth of the revolutionary liberation movement, have served as fresh proof of the brilliant analysis of capitalism given by the founders of Marxism and later developed and enriched in a new historical epoch by Lenin.