p A hundred years ago, when Lenin was born, the absolute majority of the population of all countries apart from Britain were peasants.

p In 1870, the rural population of the United States amounted to 74 per cent of the total. In Germany (1871) the percentage was 64, and in Russia (1897) it was 87. At present, too, in all the Asian, African and Latin American 184 countries peasants make up the bulk of the population. In Western Europe and North America, however, most people live in the towns.

p This dramatic change in the population pattern in the imperialist countries has followed from the advance of capitalism, capitalist industrialisation, enormous concentration of production, and the consequent growth of towns. These processes have intensified under the impact of the scientific and technological revolution, owing to the penetration of monopoly capital into agriculture. Monopoly and technological progress spell ruin to small farmers, who are being driven off the land. This process, attended by the growth of large-scale highly mechanised capitalist agriculture, which is developing in all the imperialist countries, has nowhere progressed so far as in Britain, the United States, and West Germany. Leaving out industrial and office workers, shopkeepers, etc., residing in the countryside, those directly engaged in the farming industry in 1960 accounted for 33 per cent of the total population in Japan, 21 per cent in France, 14 per cent in West Germany, 8 per cent in the United States, and 4 per cent in Britain. The relative strength of this section is progressively diminishing.

p The urban population pattern, too, has drastically altered. It was mentioned earlier in this article that the process of centralisation of capital, concentration of production and the emergence of monopolies were influenced by the separation of capital as a function from capital as property. Hand in hand with this process there developed another whereby payment for management became separate from the manufacturer’s income. Marx wrote: “Stock companies in general —developed with the credit system—have an increasing tendency to separate this work of management as a function from the ownership of capital...."  [184•1  It is natural, therefore, that with the growth of monopolies a system of hired production and distribution management should be adopted. The scientific and technological revolution has greatly accelerated and extended this process.

p The huge dimensions of monopoly corporations, the complex technologies, the merging of the monopolies with the state, the growing economic intervention of the latter, all 185 have caused managerial personnel, both industrial and commercial, to multiply. In US statistics, all employees are classified as white- or blue-collar workers, or workers by brain and by hand. Between 1950 and March 1969 the number of white-collar workers in the United States increased from 15,944,000 to 28,587,000, or by 79 per cent (we have excluded from the total the so-called managers belonging to the financial oligarchy, top government officials, and factory owners—in other words, mainly the bourgeois element and the state apparatus of enforcement).

p These figures illustrate the advanced process of transition to a system of hired management under state-monopoly capitalism. It is, however, wrong in principle to contrast the white-collar with the blue-collar workers. This is done to back up one of the principal propositions of the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois theories of “the industrial state" that capitalist society today is characterised by “de- proletarisation" or by the diminishing number of workers, by the smaller role of the working class, its alleged integration with the bourgeoisie and the emergence of a “new middle class" of brain-workers or white-collar workers. The proletariat, then, just “vanishes into thin air”.

p Bourgeois theorists arrive at such unscientific conclusions by the trick of limiting the proletariat to manual workers alone or, to use their own phrase, to those representing “crude muscular strength”.

p First of all, it must be said that, regardless of the tendency to an absolute decrease in the size of the labour force in a number of industries under the impact of the scientific and technological revolution, the number of blue-collar workers, has, on the whole, increased rather than decreased. This is due to the growth of new industries, a general increase in the volume of production, and the relatively slow progress of automation for reasons of a purely capitalist nature, such as, for instance, that push-button plant is often more expensive than the labour to be displaced by it.

p Allegations about the workers “integrating” with the ruling elite, about the “conformism” of the working class, are unmitigated nonsense. In fact, the present-day “ industrial state" is characterised by sharper class struggle, expressed in the great surge of the strike movement and the 186 political action against the imperialist states’ domestic and foreign policies. The sixties were particularly revealing in this respect. Altogether, more than 300 million workers took part in strikes between 1960 and 1968 compared with 150 million during the previous fourteen years. In the past few years the strike movement has been particularly strong in the United States, where the number of strikes grows from one year to another, having increased from 3,655 in 1964 to 5,600 in 1970, with the number of man-days lost through strikes jumping to 62 million.

p No more substantial is the claim that only those working with their hands should be included in the category of “workers”, and that, so long as the scientific and technological revolution tends to reduce the significance of muscular strength, the proletariat supposedly disappears. It should be noted in particular that at a time when engineers and technicians were economically privileged compared with ordinary workmen, Marx wrote that in addition to the latter “there is a numerically unimportant class of persons, whose occupation it is to look after the whole of the machinery and repair it from time to time, such as engineers, mechanics, joiners, etc. This is a superior class of workmen, some of them scientifically educated, others brought up to a trade. . ..” At this point, Marx adds the following note: “It looks very like intentional misleading by statistics (which misleading it would be possible to prove in detail in other cases too), when the English factory legislation excludes from its operation the class of labourers last mentioned in the text....”  [186•1  Clearly, as far as their relation to the means of production is concerned, engineers and technicians working for hire do not differ one whit from the wage workers. The above-quoted statement refers equally to some other categories of hired brain-workers. This group, inconsiderable in Marx’s lifetime, has become very numerous in the course of the scientific and technological revolution. In 1970, in the United States, for instance, there were 905,000 graduate engineers, most of them working for wages.

p Consequently, according to Marx, the proletariat does not consist of workers by hand alone. That is why the 187 juxtaposition of blue-collar workers to white-collar workers, implied in bourgeois statistics and the theory of the “ industrial state”, is, as Marx wrote, deliberate deceit, all the more glaring because the scientific and technological revolution, as we mentioned, has created a need for operatives with much better educational standards, which unavoidably tends to draw together and consolidate all wage workers, by hand and by brain alike.

p As long ago as 1921, Lenin showed that engineers would inevitably come to support the socialist revolution. He wrote that “many engineers everywhere supported the Soviet Republic, that in the near future Germany will have its socalled engineering proletariat, and that it was essential to win engineers over to the people’s side".  [187•1 

p Certainly the engineers, doctors, etc., described in statistics as white-collar workers, do not present a socially uniform group. Along with the exploited majority working for wages, they include a minority which consists of employers exploiting the labour of others (owners of factories, private hospitals, schools, laboratories, etc.).

p Immense concentration of capitalist production, the growth of monopolies, transformation of monopoly into state- monopoly capitalism, the scientific and technological revolution have induced profound changes in the overall social structure of modern imperialism. An absolute majority of the population of the imperialist countries have become wage workers. By 1970, the proportion of wage workers in the working population had amounted to 92 per cent in Britain, 90 per cent in the USA, 86 per cent in Canada, 82 per cent in the FRG, 76 per cent in France, 66 per cent in Italy, and 63 per cent in Japan. Close to them in status are small impoverished farmers, small artisans and shopkeepers who do not exploit any hired labour. Although the share of these groups in the population has drastically decreased, alliance with them in the struggle against the capitalists, who are ruining them, is still important to the victory of the working class in all capitalist countries.

p At present, all wage workers consolidate into a single force directed against the domination of the financial oligarchy. This process is developing far from smoothly, for the 188 engineers, technicians, researchers, doctors, teachers and other brain-workers working for hire, mostly coming of petty-bourgeois and middle-class families, have a mental outlook stemming from their bourgeois antecedents rather than from their actual position in society. It should be taken into account that a proportion of wage-earning engineers and technicians hold shares in monopoly corporations. Latest statistics show that the percentage of the shareholders among the US engineers, technicians and the office and sales workers is fairly high. Nonetheless, the scientific and technological revolution has accelerated the stratification of the intellectuals, turning many of them into wage workers who, because they are subtly exploited, steadily move nearer in interest and status to the working class. An indication of this is the growing number of white-collar workers joining trade unions and also the strikes staged by teachers, doctors, government employees, etc.

p Having discovered the objective law that capital as a function separates from capital as property and shared ownership turns into the dominant form of capitalist ownership with its concomitant system of hired management, Marx and Engels stated that the joint-stock companies had already proved what little use the bourgeois was as such, since the entire business of management was conducted by salaried employees.  [188•1  The militancy of the white-collar workers today and their joining up with the factory workers show that this section of working people increasingly realise the import of the above-quoted conclusion.

p Workers of major industrial centres are in the van of the struggle against capitalist exploitation. They are the bestorganised and most cohesive section of wage labour; they possess great experience of the class struggle, accumulated over the years.

p Changes in the social structure of modern imperialism have led to a predominance of urban population. In place of the scattered mass of farmers of earlier times, now we see great concentrations of people in the towns. Nevertheless, Lenin’s teaching on the alliance of the working class and working peasantry holds true in every imperialist country. 189 Simultaneously, Leninism emerges as a teaching on the alliance between the international working class and the Asian, African and Latin American peasants fighting world imperialism.

p Contemporary state-monopoly capitalism is characterised by the highest socialisation of production, labour, economic management and research. It forcefully demonstrates the principal objective law of its development, which Lenin formulated more than fifty years ago when he wrote: “ Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialisation of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialisation."  [189•1  This law of the development of capitalism acts with inexorable force, changing “certain of its fundamental characteristics . .. into their opposites".  [189•2  Right-wing Socialists and some bourgeois economists describe socialisation of such vast dimensions as socialism. This is, in effect, what their theories of “mixed economy" and “peaceful transformation" of capitalism into socialism and, more recently, the convergence theory are about. They all carefully by-pass the issue of the distribution of national wealth among the different classes of modern capitalist society; they all seek to divert attention from the stark fact that the social means of production have been usurped by the financial oligarchy and made a source of enrichment to a tiny minority.

Massive socialisation of production is, to use Lenin’s expression, the most complete material preparation for socialism, proving that transition to socialism is necessary and inevitable. But as long as the means of production and political power belong to the bourgeoisie, capitalism will remain what it is. The accelerating process of socialisation aggravates the contradictions of modern capitalism until they cry to high heaven. These profound contradictions and the growing militancy of the working class and all working people will inevitably lead to the triumph of communism all over the world.