These are times of traitorous hope and dread of the future. We live on a beautiful planet with rich bountiful oceans, generous lands, and industrial systems capable of providing all with not merely food and shelter, but freedom from the fear of hunger, emancipation from awe of the cold and wet. Our scientific development and artistic contributions allow us to imagine a world emancipated from deadly plague and full of splendid explorations. But our youth enter a world which offers little but the despair of meaninglessness. Art is not a subject to create and savor, but a package to be envied, purchased, and eliminated. Young people are distanced from optimism about work, turned toward irrationalism, and presented with their own bodies as early tombs, enemies demanding unavailable food, commanding fear of sexuality and pleasurable desires. Rhetoric of hope in this era is bound by sham claims of human unity when every life experience points to disharmony and inequality. 

The substance of our dreams of fairness and justice are recreated as formless ghosts and sold back to us as treacherous commodities: revolutionary basketball shoes. Democracy and equality are mocked: understood as richer than my neighbor, more capable of raising bribes, more equal than you. Justice is for sale. The collapse of some of the world's most advanced civilizations is an advertising spectacle for the evening news: 180 million people are jobless in China. Culture is more a magician's feint than a people's carnival: music is segregated by race. 

Yet this time of terror and betrayal is also a time of great promise. 

It is not our planet that is unfair. It is a social system. It is wrong that we cannot love one another fully and completely, bodily and spiritually, because a social system requires that we at best envision only the most limited, boundaried, fenced forms of solidarity among people, that we trade love for relationships with things, that every relationship is first an economic transaction.. 

A good earth and malevolent society cannot be the fruit of any Heavenly decree. What appears before us as bounty harvested by wickedness is the result of human history, a process that we can understand and which we can redeem. But redemption is not something easily announced and achieved. Redemption is a process of investigation, action, reflection, and action once again. It is a process of sacrifice of time and life. 

There is much to overcome: those who benefit from injustice conceal injustice. They present grotesque inequality and the absence of democracy, fear of loving, as imaginary, or, if real, as the natural state of things. And, even should this be an unnatural state, we are urged to wait, either to die or for someone to tell us what to do. The privileged are practiced deluders. They have a wealth of deceitful experience, while the accounts of the poor are mainly full of problems. Time itself becomes a strategic advantage: those with leisure can plan and maneuver. 

Even so, those with leisure are caught in a process which they believe is closed, the end of history. In fact history is open, an endless spiraling trajectory toward the realization of greater truth and justice. Every tangle of life is now a partisan knot, serving privilege and injustice or equality and democracy. Things change. This tight knot will unravel. 

Redemption is uneasy and uneven. Generation on generation, our parents and their parents struggled to leave things just a little bit better. So they did. We are not serfs. We are not slaves. At the same time, our forbearers tried to learn from those who went before; their successes and their mistakes. Recently our generations witnessed the consequences of miscalculations in the fight for redemption and justice, the complete collapse--from within--of the flawed effort called socialism. 

We will pick up and begin again. The spiraling lines of history make the struggle for justice and love irrepressible. Our task is to try to understand what lies at the heart of injustice and hatred, and what methods we can use that will not poison us or our goals as we too make a better world. Above all, it is vital to understand aw much as possible the whole of what it is before us, and that what is finally of interest to us is change for the purpose of fairness and love, freedom. 

Millions of people are cold, hungry, victims of once-defeated diseases. Millions are dispirited by the failures of past resistance. But hundreds of thousands of people are already marching, picking up the pickets and spreading the word. People are more linked together than ever before--through communication, the exchange of goods, and lines of production. Many have a new and more profound understanding of what is and what must be done--based on the losses of before. At issue, as always, is not whether there will be resistance and change, but how much is lost before justice can be won. People will fight back. We must do so more intelligently than ever before. 

One way of unveiling the mystery of a society at odds with its people is a method first described by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: communist political economy. Political economy confronts issues central to life: work and value. The method and its history are essential to untangling where we have been and where we must go. 

Political economy is a theoretical approach that seeks to strip back the appearances of reality and to get to the essence of human relations, rather like peeling back the layers of an onion. Political economy deals not with things, but with relations between people, between people and the ways they work and exchange goods in order to live, and, at the end of the day, between social classes. 

Political economy, unlike most efforts to understand and act on the world, makes no pretense of neutrality or false objectivity. Political economy insists that history and the future are made by people, and that we can comprehend, make reasonable predictions about, and change reality. Truth in an inequitable world is a partisan thing. It is in the interest of elites to obscure reality from the many. In this contest for the truth, facts take on a partisan character as interrelated clues toward a greater whole, signals to where the truth might be. 

People must interact with, and are a part of, nature. People transform themselves and their world to survive. Political economy tries to examine two inseparable processes: the ways these transformations have occurred historically, and the governing systems which have paralleled the changes. Political economy studies how societies grow and change. It recognizes that relations between people in politics and economics cannot be easily separated. Politics and economics are intertwined. There is little political democracy without social equality. 

The central issues people face is: How will we survive? How will the generations continue? How can we better understand? How will we work, procreate, and learn? In what ways shall we choose to live? Under what conditions? Why? 

This leads directly to another set of questions: What are our circumstances? How did we get here and how did can we understand the history of change that results in us? How can our history help reveal how we can understand our world and make it better? 

To discover our current situation we need a systematic and coherent method to investigate the material world and the ways it changes. To begin, we need to pull at the onion, tear it apart and get to its essence. Going to the root of things is the process of abstracting. It is an abstraction to say that the primary roots of life are work or production, sexuality and love, and the way knowledge is developed. Lets say these factors are the magnetic north. They exist and have a powerful pull. Political economy is both the compass and the knowledge necessary to use it as a guide to the direction you choose. 

A critical process of unveiling and action, peeling the onion, abstracting, also plays a significant role in making the future. Our analytical scheme not only seeks to explain where we are, but influences where we go. Only the outer skin of the onion is easily apparent. Abstraction, going at the core, seeks to move from appearance to essence--and back to appearance with a richer grasp. 

In our era, political economy focuses on the study of capitalism, its past and future, with the possibility of a better world, a more just set of relations among people, on the horizon. Because political economy originates in a careful study of the material world, and seeks rational explanations rather than blind alleys of faith, it is an optimistic vision which urges people to use it as a direction finder, to thoroughly analyze the specific qualities of their world, every instance studied afresh. Unlike any other view, political economy calls for a critique of itself in social practice. Don't just believe; study and test. There are no calls to faith, only study and action. 

Political economy insists that what you do counts. Like any other theory, embedded in political economy is a call to action; in this case, action on the side of the vast majority of people in the world, those who must work to live, for the purpose of democracy and equality. 

Political economy, born from the concrete study of specific instances, cannot be a closed system. Knowledge grows ever richer. It follows that there are both common investigative questions guiding the idea, and unanswered questions always pending. Some of these inquiries are woven into this paper.

For political economy, the most fundamental human activities are: 

1. production (how we work), 

2. reproduction, sexuality and love (how we remake ourselves), 

3. and the construction of knowledge (how we think). 

This article focuses on production, though each reflects back on and influences the other, and, from instance to instance, one may dominate the rest. I concentrate on production, recognizing the limitation of the absence of a more detailed examination of the importance of reproduction and knowledge. 

Production is a process people initiate out of life necessity, and which almost silently recreates people who must engage in it. 

Production has two key elements: 

A. The RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION which in capitalist society have four parts: 

1. The form of ownership of the means of production (land, machinery, etc.), under capitalism: private ownership and collective production, 

2. The way products are distributed. 

3. The positions and mutual relations of the people, which relate to their labor, class, race, and sex. 

4. Power-relations of decision-making. (This may be traced back to sex-gender forms of inequality, and, perhaps, the central role of sex in questions of production and reproduction. It appears that the earliest forms of inequality, and patriarchy, come with the rise of the division of labor in the context of the development of private property. Decision making power is also connected to the construction of knowledge, perceiving, defining, and making into signs, the ways people choose to explain reality.) 

To discover the relations of production, power, in a community, ask: Who owns the factories, the land, the mineral rights, the banks, etc.? Who does the work? Who is unemployed? Why do many work but few own? Who distributes the goods, handles the products, and who profits from the distribution? Who holds decision-making power in the work place, the school, the home? Why? Who has the power to portray inequality as the natural order of things or socially necessary? Whose values are taken to be second nature, self-evident? 

B. The PRODUCTIVE FORCES are nature, people, and material. Geographic space, factories, human beings, tools, science, labor power; all are productive forces. 

Major developments of the productive forces, significant social and technological changes, generally occur after changes in the RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION. In other words, the factory system and mass industrialization required both an initial base in the productive forces of the past, and new relations of production. The trigger of change was a shift in relationships between people. The element which set the process in motion was a shift in the relations of production---the destruction of the feudal system. 

More precisely, in order for the industrial revolution to proceed in England, first the workers had to be driven from the land which provided them with a livelihood. Once this shift was accomplished, industrial plants could be brought to life with their labor. The new relations of production established when independent small farmers became jobless workers made the industrial revolution possible. 

Still, productive forces set the conditions for change in the relations of production. A market system and the beginnings of factories had to be in place before it became profitable to drive people from the land. Hence, the productive forces and the relations of production weave into one another.

Let us consider peeling the onion again. Without the core, there is no onion. But without the layers there is no onion either. One is imbued in the other. Historically, most political economists have too neatly split what we will discuss as the BASE and the SUPERSTRUCTURE. A vulgar or superficial understanding would call the economy the base; the political system, the prevailing ideology, mass culture, and so on, the superstructure. The sharp division of interpreting base and superstructure probably occurred because Marx and later political economists needed to emphasize the fact that real understanding can only come from deep study of the material world, arguing against contemporaries that it is being which finally determines consciousness: that you are what you do rather than what you merely think or say, and that what you do actually recreates you. Marx pointed to the base, economic relations of production, as the beginning point of history, the motive force. Even so, both Marx and Engels repeatedly said that this is true only at the end of the day, in the final analysis. Both insisted that it is the relationship of developing productive forces and social interactions that causes change. 

The base and superstructure split is a false division, just as it is misleading to define the most important part of the onion, in every instance, as a core. Surely we must judge reality based on action, social practice. Power does lie in control of the economy. But what people think influences action, and there is certainly power in mass action. The mediations between people and ideas, people and work, are at the heart of action for social change. Action, however, is not enough. The failures of socialist experiments throughout the world demonstrate that action must be informed by critical theory. 

The determinative factors in a capitalist society are: capital, labor, and the state (government). None lives without the other. Each influences and alters the other. Typically, capital and its production foundations are thought of as the base. The relations of labor, the government, are considered the superstructure. Again, this is an insubstantial way of seeing what is more correctly posed as a profound interaction of relationships. Even so, to enter the conversation about political economy, because the terms are so widely used, it is necessary to know what is meant by base and superstructure. 

The social BASE is commonly understood as the productive forces combined with the relations of production. This is the beginning point, the foundation, for political economy. The foundation of a historical epoch can be found in its economics--in the final analysis. 

But the base is profoundly influenced, and sometimes overturned, by factors in the superstructure. The superstructure is inseparable from the base. The SUPERSTRUCTURE is made up of the prevailing ideology and enforcement structures like the law, courts, schools, prisons, welfare system, health care system, government as a whole, etc. The base creates the terrain for, the superstructure. But the superstructure reflects back on, and sometimes over-determines, the base. In other words, at the extreme, ideas do rise out of the base, economics, but ideas can strip ahead of the base and actually overthrow it. The banker profits create real divisions among people. But the mass of people, through experience, may come to believe that profits are poison--and with this idea (and the concrete reality that the struggle for profits does drive people more and more together) develop the unity needed to make revolution. 

Indeed, the role of consciousness is pivotal for successful revolutionary activity. The ideas of revolutionaries must not only correctly reflect an understanding of their terrain, but must sweep ahead into a grasp of the future society. When the material conditions exist to insure that the final days of a historical epoch are at hand, it is the consciousness of those who would make change that finally makes that change possible. To wait for a capitalist crisis in order to attempt to rise up, without building a mass base for class consciousness, only means that capitalist crisis will be confronted by people insufficiently informed to make fundamental change. 

Ideas are critical in altering both the relations of production as well as the productive forces. Technology cannot advance without a foundation in materials, as well as new ideas. 

The base and superstructure are interwoven, parts of a process of history. 

The unfortunate base/superstructure interpretation is a method of understanding complex realities which are constantly changing, a bit like viewing a frozen frame of a movie. Political economy focuses on a precise study of totality of the material world by examining trends and tendencies---but with specific references. That is, it insists that neither ideas nor machines are autonomous, like the base and superstructure or the frames and the film, they are bound together, really indissoluble. At the same time, in order to grasp the process of development, it is critical to locate the minutiae of historical workings--the unique frames of the film. We do not have a movie without motion. We do not have a movie without the particular frames lined up in a specific way--moving. So we are studying matter, in motion. 

Again, more often than not, the base sets the stage for the superstructure. The system of ownership of the means of production is at the core of the political system. But this distinction cannot be applied mechanically. The base/superstructure distinction, the dominance of one over another, is only properly rooted in a precise study of a given situation--every situation taken as new. For example, the rich often make decisions based on greed. Their motive is more privilege. This comes from the base of the social system. But sometimes the rich act stupidly, as in the failed U.S. invasion Vietnam. Their actions didn't match reality. The superstructure outran the base.
 
 

Political economy is not the study of isolated statistics but of processes at work in the real world; matter in motion. Things exist. Things change. Things are interrelated. Things change each other: for the want of a nail... 

These processes, inseparably tied to nature and society, comprise the totality of life. If all things are interrelated, ultimately weaving into each other; it follows that there is indeed a totality, a whole, of these processes. In order to comprehend and transform any piece of reality, we need a concept of both the whole and its parts, totality and our standpoint. What is this? How does it fit in the general scheme of things? The whole, on one hand, and the parts on the other, comprise a contradiction: the onion's skin and the core . 

All processes are composed of contradictions, a unity and struggle of opposites: life and death, up and down, hot and cold, plus and minus, rich and poor. Each process holds many contradictions. To understand a process requires discovering the key, main, tension as well as the specific factors which mediate that tension. This discovery comes from careful tests of in reality, not from mere untested theorizing, but also from creating theories about the results of the tests. This is the system of ideas behind the procedure we used to discuss the base and superstructure. 

Economics are powerful. So are ideas. In fact, economics is both an idea and a reality. How do the two play against one another? This study method is called dialectics, the study of contradictions--in reality--not just in our sovereign wits. 

The fundamental contradiction in capitalist society is between the collective nature of production and the private ownership of what is produced. Millions of people must join together to make products, but they do not own and have no control over the products they create. A relatively small number of powerful owners have interests that are at odds with the overwhelming majority of people who must work. 

The key questions to ask at this point are: Who does the work? Who gets the proceeds of labor? Why? What conflicts must arise? Who organizes and controls the productive forces and how---and why? How can there be justice in a society based on inequality? Is everything always changing? How can an idea be an objective reality? If change is inevitable, is capitalism really the highest and last stage of human development? 

With these questions at hand, and given that political economy operates from the standpoint of those who work; it follows that this is a partisan theory of morality and fundamental change. Political economy suggests that change is built into our social system, irrepressible, that this system is wrong, and that revolution is morally and practically the method to alter it.

The contradiction between collective production and private ownership originates with the historical DIVISION of LABOR. The division of labor comes from the creation of surpluses, food and materials, held by a relatively privileged few. 

Initially, it appears this division begins with the assignment of specific sex roles. Pre-capitalist subsistence societies probably were often mildly divided by sex-classes and more or less egalitarian. Sharp sex-class lines seem to develop almost simultaneously with the inequitable seizure of surpluses. Still, even today, work roles of indigenous people, sometimes matri-focal, are forcefully altered as they connect with the capitalist world. In any case, the crude historical outline is: general equality, surplus, division of labor, power struggle, inequality, power struggle. What can be next? Is this process, or any process, ever at an end?
 
 

The Division of Labor leads to Three Major Differences: 

1. Industry and Agriculture, 

2. The split of Town and Country, 

3. Mental and Manual Labor. 

In the U.S., for example, it now only takes one person working on a farm to yield what fifty people once produced. This advance in rural production simultaneously forces people from the land to the cities which, in turn, become centers for knowledge and industry--industry which created the tools to make massive farm production possible. At the same time, those who work with their hands are distanced, physically and socially, from those who work with their minds. 

This division of labor at once produces people who own virtually nothing, who must live in a state of constant insecurity and, at the same time, who are ever more organized into collective production, dependant on each other. Today, with the passage of farm lands into the hands of a few (in 1880, 40% of the people in the U.S. lived on self-sufficient farms; in 1996, 1.4%), there is no land-based safety valve for social upheaval; the role that huge tracts of land in the U.S. stolen from native Americans served in the last hundred years. 

Within the Three Major Differences, under capitalism: 

1. Agriculture is primary over industry and within agriculture, grain is basic, 

2. Within industry, steel remains key. 

3. Mental and manual labor reflect back on one another, but the surpluses necessary to subsidize mental labor are created by manual labor. Knowledge, always a social creation, becomes private property, a commodity like labor power itself. 

The Division of Labor also underpins private property, the unequal division of workloads, the unequal division of the products of labor (goods and services), and occupational specialization (experts). 

Critical questions you might want to ask which rise from this section of analysis are: Who has gained, and who has lost, from the division of labor? What society could be truly powerful without a base in agriculture, an ability to feed its people? How is agriculture controlled by powerful nations? How is labor divided in my life? What happens when industrial societies colonize agricultural societies? What is country life like as more people move to towns. What is city life like? Is it possible for a nation to build a strong economy (or military) without a strong agricultural base? Why is steel key to industry, or grain to agriculture? How deep is sexism, if the rise of inequality was first reflected in the sexist division of property? What if the idea that production is central to life is wrong? What if sexuality, or greed and genetics, or ideology, is central to life? What are the consequences of this thinking?
 
 

The central focus of capitalist production is the creation of commodities to produce money, more correctly capital, for exchange and profit, as opposed to creating products for use. Capital seeks to transform nature, through work, exchange and distribution, from use-values to exchange-values. Take for example, water, which by itself is a useful item, necessary for life. Consider the relationship of water pollution, caused by the development of industry and agriculture, and the transformation of water into an exchange value--a commodity: Evian. 

The value of a capitalist commodity is set by the quantity of labor power spent on and historically matured in it, by the working time dictated, under given social conditions, for its production. This means the value of a commodity is set by the amount of active work that goes directly and historically (past labor made the machines) into its production, as well as the value and time of labor it takes to make it. The value of a commodity varies inversely to the productiveness of the labor incorporated in it. The more productive the labor, over time, the less the value of the commodity. The fewer people involved in the sale and distribution of onions, the lower the value. 

Price and value are not the same things. Price is the value of a commodity expressed in terms of money. The value of a commodity expressed in comparison with another commodity is its exchange value (as compared to its use value, which means, simply, the worth of a thing for use alone). Money is now really the only universal expression of value that can be equated to any other value. 

People may have once traded one artichoke for twelve onions. Over time, with many exchanges involving not only onions but oranges and potatoes, it became easier, necessary, to exchange money. Then money became the goal of the exchange. The goal of production thus becomes money, far more powerful in a given historical moment, not food. Furthermore, the object actually becomes money for investment, capital, in order to gain power over the process of production. Onions are difficult to exchange for land or factories. Better to save and invest. People who control investment capital and/or means of production are capitalists. 

After taking massive concessions from the United Steelworkers Union who were promised job protections, the President of U.S. Steel bought a liquor company and announced layoffs. A reporter asked how he could do that in good conscience. The employer replied, "I'm not in business to make steel. I'm in business to make money". Capitalists have one big concern; the expansion of their capital. Over time, the more distant capital moves from actual production, the more powerful it becomes. Investment bankers, at the end of the day, hold power over manufacturers.
 
 

Labor is the source of all value. Workers sell their Labor POWER (labor, virtually any kind of work-effort, is an abstraction, the root. Labor power is a saleable commodity. It is the potential ability to work and create exchange value) to add value to commodities for relatively subsistence wages. In doing so, workers themselves become commodities. Working people must sell themselves as things, cogs, in order to continue to exist. And workers begin to measure their human value in terms of the commodities they produce. 

Labor power, a potential commodity that can be sold for a period of time, is only the ability to work. You may possess labor power and not find work. 

Labor is labor power set in motion. The worker sells not labor, but labor power. The difference between labor power and labor contains the kernel of understanding a rational theory of value, and surplus value, as we will see. Here, the abstraction of labor is traced back to its profound application as labor power. 

All of today's means of production were created by the labor of history. 

The means of production are tools, factories, equipment, etc. 

The mode of production is the level of the process of production (artisan work, industrialization, etc.) as well as the relations of production which create and interact with the process of production. Mode of production refers to the stage of development of the productive forces, as well as those social relations which are coupled with that stage. This means, very simply: feudalism = artisan work/serfs/kings; capitalism= industrialization/working class/parliamentary systems and claims to democracy.
 
 

Workers' labor, in a society dominated by the division of labor, produces SURPLUS VALUE. Surplus value is the value created by work over and above the paid-for value of the worker's labor-power. Or: surplus value is the difference between the value produced by the wage worker during the working day and the paid value of her/his labor power. In brief, the worker is paid for but a portion of her/his work. The remainder, that unpaid labor, is, roughly, surplus value. Surplus value is retained by the owner of the means of production. The owner must return part of surplus value to pay off investments in interest, rent, taxes, etc. What then remains is profit. Thus, profits are part of surplus value, but not all of it. 

Surplus value is invisible to most people and can seem to appear like magic. Surplus value, though, is real and systematic. Money (capital) is invested in the means of production. But money and machines cannot produce a saleable commodity. Labor is required. Labor power is added. A commodity is produced. The commodity is sold for a price greater than the cost of the investment and the labor combined. The difference is surplus value. Businesses which do not create surplus value die. 

In practical terms, workers enter a factory and contribute to building a commodity, let's say, a Ford Pinto. Ford, the owner of the factory, pays the workers only a portion of the value of the Pinto produced by the workers, keeping the rest: surplus value. The capitalist pays the worker for the time of the labor power, but keeps the value of the commodity produced. 

Surplus value is taken by the owner, capitalist, who uses it for profit, interest payments, taxes, and rent. The source is labor power--work unpaid. 

Surplus value can be created within a process in which, really, nothing of real value, or negative value, is produced. Consider the tobacco industry. 

Capitalists can only increase surplus value by lengthening the work day, by speeding up the labor process, by technological innovations, or lowering pay to workers. Lengthening the work day, reducing pay, and work speed-ups always meet worker resistance and have built-in limits: exhaustion and the length of the day itself, starvation, human endurance and physical limitations. Each effort to stretch surplus value is offset by the potential political unity of the workers, itself usually relative to the number of unemployed or propertyless workers available. 

What has made capitalism the most dynamic mode of production up to now is its ability to alter its methods of production and to innovate technical change. But each of these maneuvers are always met by similar moves from competitors, so the profitability available from changes in technology is only relative, temporary. Hence, at some point, capitalists must turn back on the creators of value, workers themselves. But this meets the limits described above. So the process deepens and begins anew, always at a more profoundly complex stage, rather like a tightening noose. 

The money capitalists must invest in machinery and hard goods is constant capital. It remains at a relatively fixed price. The money required to keep a work force alive varies. It's called variable capital. Since surplus value cannot be realized primarily from constant capital (remember surplus value is a product of labor); it must be taken from variable capital. 

The reason that the history of organized labor spirals out from struggles over the hours of work (the 40 hour week for example) is that reducing the work day can cut into the production of surplus value, even if in minimal ways. Nevertheless, there is no necessary connection between reduced surplus value and reduced hours of work. Fights to reduce the hours of work go beyond economics, into the desires of people for a better life--to have something beyond or outside the working day where alienation (discussed below) is minimized and pleasure is the goal. 

People not engaged in the direct production of commodities like attorneys, social workers, teachers, owners, and so on, do not create surplus value. They live from the surplus value built up in history as well as in their own time. This is not to say they create no value. Teachers, for example, create considerable, if peripheral, value. They play a key role in a huge market, schools (consider the sale of busses, milk, landscaping, buildings, energy costs, etc.), and provide both skill training and baby-sitting services, all pivotal to economic advance. In addition, school workers fashion the ideology of their times and manufacture hope, false or real, for the future of the children they face. Hence, school workers forge terrific, supplemental, value. But the funding for schools comes from the surplus value created by people directly engaged in commodity production. 

There are other people who work and create nothing of value: people who work in advertising, pimps, stock market traders, for example. These people are fundamentally non-productive.

Wages mask the creation of surplus value. The slave has no doubt that the value he or she creates is entirely the property of the master. But the wage worker usually believes he or she is fully paid for their labor, missing the reality of surplus value as truly unpaid labor. 

However long the work day, it is always longer than the time required to produce the value representing what the worker needs to exist. 

Wages pay for labor time having two parts: 

1) one part is necessary labor time, 

2) the other is surplus labor time during which the worker produces surplus value. 

The wage worker produces the value required to go on working. But, the worker is not paid for the further value created, surplus value, for which the owner pays nothing. Hence, in reality, once the commodity is sold, the owner pays nothing for the necessary labor of the worker, nor for the surplus labor time, each having been subsumed by the sale of the product. Moreover, the worker labors first, as a virtual loan, and is paid later. 

So, at bottom, a worker's labor enriches those who do not work, more exactly those who do not create value, and who, indeed, make a privileged living from oppressing him or her. 

All capital comes from the creation and expansion of surplus value, which itself comes from labor alone. 

The tendency of capitalism is to reduce wages to the lowest possible level, first by de-skilling labor; second, by maintaining a large mass of unemployed workers. De-skilling is logical and necessary. It's indispensable to speed production and to control it. Speed is won through breaking tasks into simple parts. Control is gained by stripping workers of their knowledge of the workings of their surroundings. 

Critical questions to ask at this point might be: What is your birthplace in this society, worker or owner? What is the starting point of surplus value at your work place or home? Do homemakers create surplus value? What would happen if a key source of income in your home was lost for a year? How do those who own get their property to begin with? Who created that property? If it is normal to own land, why not own air? How much surplus value in the U.S. is created by workers outside the U.S.? Is leisure time for working people in the U.S. created by the labor of third world workers? If schools are funded by surplus value, what happens to schools when the rate of surplus declines? Who controls the surplus value that funds the schools? How is it that teachers' wages now exceed factory wages in the U.S.? Where does the money for state dinners, smart-bombs, or the world wide web come from? Besides speed-up and deskilling, what can regularly make for greater profits?

The deception about wages (the fact that the value of work is never fully compensated), often a self-deception, lies at the core of human ALIENATION under capitalist relations. Beyond the economic forms of oppression, ALIENATION rises from: 

A) the workers inability to fundamentally influence the process or results of production, 

B) the fact that the products and the process actually intensify the oppression of the worker, 

C) and because relations between things stand above relations between people. Products are not made for people to use, but to service greed. 

Workers never receive the entire value of their work. The more they work, the more they fortify groups to which they do not belong. The more Pintos you make, the richer and more powerful Henry Ford gets. Workers never control the process or results of their work. In fact, their work boomerangs on them and makes their enemies powerful. But this process disguises reality. Many workers believe they are fully compensated for their work and that they are in charge of the shop floor. Others, the more alienated they are, believe their condition is a fact of nature, the way things have always been. Unable to see beyond the disguise of wages, they mistake decoys for reality and, in the final analysis, act against their own self-interest. Many other workers sincerely participate in Total Quality Management programs, founded on the notion of the unity of interests of employers and workers. An old from France during the 1968 uprisings nicely sums up this ruse: "I participate, You participate, We all Participate: They profit." A series of mismatches of ideas and reality is called false consciousness. 

People are alienated, distanced, separated, actually oppressed, from their own work. They are also alienated from one another; owners vs. workers, workers vs. the unemployed in competition for jobs, and so on. Time spent at work is time lost from life, not time enriching life. Consumers are even alienated from their purchases; spending millions on coffins, trendy sneakers, battling for fashionably dressed dolls. Popular art, marketed as high fashion and culture, every bit of it for sale, is designed to prove that one does no manual work--a profoundly contemptuous message to the vast majority of humanity--who do. 

This set of social relations which creates surplus value also causes people to confuse relations between people with relations between objects. At work, people see themselves defined by their pay, not by their social contribution or their relationship to the employer. In society, over time, people rarely even meet people far outside of their social class. The future for most people is generally set at birth by the income of their parents. Men and women routinely size each other up on the grounds of economic potential, and dispose of one another as used-up commodities as whims, fashions, or passion shifts. Most importantly. people do not directly witness the contributions of others to the creation of value, the human relations that underpin every thing. Instead, people see the objects themselves, products, and link their fate to possessions rather than people, owning Nike shoes rather than solidarity with Indonesian workers. A social act, collective labor, becomes a personal possession--or a closed mystery. Few people look at their Nikes and think: Indonesian misery. 

Indeed, people tend to both commodify themselves (to equate their human value with their pay or job status) and to FETISHIZE things. 

Fetishism confuses circumstances created by people with circumstances of nature. A fetish narrowly defined, is an object with no special value which is made into an object of worship, an icon like a plastic Jesus. Broadly, this goes to the usual treatment of capitalism in history and economics as the final, highest, stage of humanity. Fetishism means people are imprisoned by their unquestioned ideas about their circumstances, unable to place themselves within a historical process of change. 

REIFICATION, a special form of alienation and fetishism, is the process of turning human products, or humans themselves, into things which become independent of, and govern, life. To worship Mao as a god, or god as a god for that matter, is a matter of reification. To freeze an ideology into a faith is a process of reification. To believe a person with a Ph.D. is inherently wise is to reify both the person and the Ph.D. To see a social system as outside the bounds of human creation is to reify society. 

Some questions for critical work here are: In your school or work place, do the people who do the work control what their labor creates or the methods of creation? What is the impact of constitutional rights at work--or school? What about freedom of speech and assembly? If these rights do not apply at work, the most central part of life, why not? Is it possible to organize work in another way? If people who are alienated do not understand why they are alienated, what kinds of things do they do that furthers or decreases their alienation? What happens to people who are so alienated from their work, burned out teachers for example, that they turn their anger on the process of their labor, perhaps their students, rather than on the process of their alienation? What is the relationship of depression, anger turned inward, and alienation? Why have fights to shorten the work week been so severe? How are pleasure and economics tied together? Are nationally standardized curricula a form of reification---plastic Jesuses with answer sheets? How many people do you know as friends who earn ten times what you earn, or ten per cent of what you earn?

CAPITAL consists of raw materials, instruments of labor, money, and all kinds of means of life which are used to produce new raw materials, new instruments, and new ways of living. All these parts of capital are created by labor, products of labor, stored up labor. However, again, they are privately owned. 

Capital is, above all, also a given historical relationship of production, a relationship between and created by people, determined finally by who does, and does not, have it. 

The key problem with capital is that it does not consist in accumulated labor (that evolved history of work) serving living labor, working people today, as a to a better life for people. It consists of living labor, workers today, serving accumulated labor, the labor of history, as a means of conserving and increasing its exchange value--for profit. 

Workers labor, not to build on the collective contributions of those who have gone before for the collective good, but to create more commodities for exchange (to expand capital), a process which is not finally in the interest of those who do the work, but in the interest of those who inherit capital. A relatively small number of individuals now own the results of the accumulated labor of the past and use that accumulated labor as a weapon against those who work today.
 
 

The division of labor and the resultant creation of private property gives rise to social classes. CLASSES are large groups of people: 

A) differing by ancestry according to their places in the historical design of social production, 

B) according to the nature of their connection to the means of production, especially in regard to ownership, 

C) according to their roles in the social structure and organization of labor, which includes their beliefs, habits, and passions, 

D) and to their method of acquiring, and the amount of the division of social wealth which they control. 

Classes are groups of people, one group able to apportion the labor of another, owing to a difference in their respective positions in a distinct pattern of social economy. 

This analysis, originating in Lenin, does not say that people who are positioned within social classes understand their own positions. Nor does it mean people within given social classes create cultures which are solidly in opposition, that there is no mediation between classes--or longing to imitate elite cultures. This only means that beneath consciousness and culture, but always profoundly influenced by these factors, is the economic and political struggle, rising out of property relations, which does pit people one against another. 

Many labor leaders, and some workers, adopt the fashions which ruling elites pose, whether in dress or ideology. Many labor aristocrats dress and dine well, attend church, play golf, and declare class struggle passe--just like the ruling class they envy. And their imitation does influence class struggle. But it does not bring class struggle to an end, though they do distort it. 

In fact, the history of labor unions demonstrates that they are incapable of going beyond demands for a bigger piece of a usually shrinking pie, as opposed to battles for the pie itself. North American unions deny the fundamental role of class struggle, and its base in the division of labor and surplus value, and the unions thus become ever more irrelevant. They now represent about 12% of the work force, down from more than 30% in the early 1970's. 

The chief force of history is, at bottom, the struggle of people to gain control of their work and the products they create---and those who oppose this process: the class struggle. This trajectory is wrapped up in the struggle for equality and democracy. At the start, the working class and the employing class have fundamentally opposing interests. 

However, the conditions for this struggle are fixed by the state of the productive forces and the relations of production noted above. Again, the productive forces are nature, people, and material. The relations of production involve: (a) the form of ownership of the means of production, (b) the positions and mutual relations of the people, and (c) the form of distribution of the products. 

This means that the struggle of people to gain control of their lives and work occurs on a distinctive stage with particular conditions. To win a war, it is necessary to grasp the strategy of the entire war, yet to also know the special aspects of each battle in regard to the terrain, the enemy, and yourself. The U.S. military never learned that the war in Vietnam was more than a series of battles, but an international political campaign involving an infinite variety of tactics. Even today, the military claims it won too many battles to lose the war. But lose they did. Engaging in this struggle requires careful concrete study of particular social realities---within a grand strategy. But this struggle of domination and resistance continues even without study. At issue here is the time span, and the losses of those who must resist to live. 

Class, race, and sex/gender differences are folds in the same cloth. While political economy argues that the wedge into a grasp of history is class struggle, this is not to say that race and sex/gender are insignificant. In fact, while class is centripetal, racism and sexism are lashed to the same universe. Race is a socially constructed idea, not a biological fact. Biologically, there is only one race. But the idea of whiteness, privilege, actually white supremacy, has always been tied to either capital power or skilled work. The greater the distance one was born from these twin centers, the more likely one became less than white. There are parallels here in gender definitions as well. As noted, the initial form of oppression, enforced inequality, was probably rooted in sexism.

At a certain stage the relations of production so restrict the productive forces--as well as the human relations created by the stage of productive forces--that fundamental social change becomes unrestrainable. In other words, both social ideas and technological change eventually move ahead of the governing systems which, over time, tend to restrict them. These circumstances lay the foundation for social change. 

For example, the feudal system of government shackled what had become, under feudalism, powerful capitalist methods of production. Manufacture and trade, dominated by the power of rising capitalists, outstripped kings and a serf-agricultural social base. Hence, capitalism--represented most strikingly by Napoleon--violently crushed feudalist governing structures. People were driven from their land. This created a mass of unemployed workers available for production. Kings and queens were either slaughtered or put in their place, and parliaments primarily representing the needs of the new manufacturing class were imposed on the old methods of rule. 

Today, our vast world productive system does not have to be chained to abundance for a few and scarcity for the mass of people. Within capitalism, if we take but one example, are built-in technological advances which carried people to the moon, fashioned the computer chip, grasped the forces of energy enough to build the H-bomb, created reliable contraceptives to free sexuality, and nearly obliterated TB. At the same time, our world is rift with ancient diseases like malaria which come from inadequate public health systems. Social systems which require inequality retard our human and material development. Collective production long ago reached the point where individual ownership stood in the way of technological and social advances. This tension will not forever endure. 

At the core, our productive work ties us together in processes of exchange, manufacturing, and communication more than ever before. We are the most social beings yet to inhabit the planet. But our social system does everything possible to keep us apart, to unite only the rich for the personal gain of a very few. This will not last. 

Political economy, then, sees itself as a method of analysis of irrepressible social change through the development of ideas as well as the advance of the means of production. Political economy understands that nothing comes from nothing. Socio-economic relations of today contain elements of relations from the past, as do the methods of production. But quantity turns into quality. As the means of production and the mode of production develop, at a certain point radical social change occurs. Again, nothing comes from nothing. Things and people change. Change develops incrementally, piece on piece, sometimes even by chance (for the want of a nail...), but dramatizes suddenly, sometimes spectacularly (a war was lost). 

This is no lock-step path. Development is asymmetrical, uneven. The negative side of the human factor, stupidity for example, plays a role too. For example, many powerful people in the Detroit area believed the former mayor of the city, Coleman Young, hated white people because he was once a communist. This was hardly true. In fact, Young was close to Henry Ford II, among other local elites. But, on the whole, this belief caused the powerful to abandon the city when the auto industry unraveled. Detroit decayed, looking like bombed out Beirut. Today, with a new mayor who enthusiastically endorses the Nation of Islam's influences on schools, but who is perceived as malleable, elites are reclaiming, and rebuilding the city. Perception, as much as material reality, caused Detroit to fall and rise. But even with a twisted path, political and economic development remains primarily moved by the contradiction between those who own and those who do not. 

This distinguishes political economy from dominant theories of economics and politics which split politics and economics, which simply seek to explain the appearances of reality. Students today study scarcity and consumption without considering the creation of value and production. This fetishist doctrine sees a given economic system, actually tied to bossism and inequality, as the highest possible attainment of human history--fixed and immune from change--an unnoticed and unquestioned horizon. At the other end of the spectrum is that group of political scientists who dream of democracy without considering economic exploitation and inequality, utopians who now add nothing but a diversion to the debate over social action. 

This is dogmatism, a stubborn refusal to go to the root of things, and it is hardly neutral. Rather than seeking to understand change or the roots of life, it merely seeks to reestablish the status quo, to prove that change is at an end--or too frightening. 

In part because of this dogmatic system of analysis, labor itself becomes degraded and ignored. The central issue of life is forgotten, hidden. School textbooks, TV, and films, ignore the centrality of labor in the process of life--or they attack workers who are presented as dolts, things, automatons; incapable of analysis, leadership and rational action. This is especially true of the trendy labor film, "Roger and Me". Above all, dominant texts deny the existence of class struggle. 

Questions for critical analysis here are: Do you believe you belong to a social class as defined above? Do your neighbors or co-workers? Which one? Is it possible to move from working class to ruling class? How? How are workers portrayed in textbooks? Class struggle? What does multi-culturalism, which locates culture and not labor at the center of life, say about class struggle? What social class does the president of the AFL-CIO belong to (and serve)? What is the relationship of racism and class? What is the role of ideas in social change? If domination inevitably meets resistance, what are the key things those who would resist need to know? Is social change inevitable--or irrepressible? If irrationalism is the decision to halt investigation and turn to faith, to worship ignorance or incoherence, what holds people to religion in a society based on science? To capitalism? Can we understand our world? How shall we know if we are right? What is the role of sexuality in the process of class construction?

In a class society, government, or the state, is a shield and sword working on behalf of those who hold the key to power: those who can exert final control over the economy. The state is a tool, really a weapon, used by the capitalist class to ensure their privileges and control of the economy. The state includes the courts, the police, most of the press, prisons, the welfare system, schools, and other methods to control mass action and ideology. 

The state is not a neutral arbitrator, but an activist on the side of economic elites. Under capitalism, the state is dedicated to the protection of property rights, not people. The state is not autonomous from the relations of production. 

For example, during strikes, troops or police do not beat or arrest factory owners. The press, controlled by owners, rarely editorializes on the side of strikers, yet serves to confuse people about what is objective fact, what should be seen as second nature, and the commonalities of national interest. The welfare system is designed, not so much for the good of the jobless, but serves as the real minimum wage, to control the behavior and rebelliousness of unemployed workers, as well as to serve as a living warning to those who still have jobs. To use a classic irony: in the eyes of the law, it is equally a crime for a rich person and a poor person to sleep in a public park. 

Elections in a class society are the showcases of claims to democracy. Usually, however, the electoral system is contaminated by the power of wealth and privilege to control the media, the nominations systems, simple bribery, and, in the last resort, an apparatus of terror, assassination. At bottom, in societies divided into competing groups of those who own and those who do not, the voting choice of most working people is a question of which party controlled by elites will oppress them the least, or who will propel the process to oppress them most slowly. 

This does not mean, however, that nothing good happens in school, that no struggle can take place in the government offices, that no one should ever vote on anything, etc. There are many, many dedicated, honest, people carrying on work, swimming against the current, and winning small victories within this system. Indeed, working people owe whatever democracy exists around them in part to those struggles. Nor does this mean that powerful owners are omnipotent in their control of the state. This does mean that the state is not designed to consistently support the efforts of those who do not own or control the means of production 

Owners work in an economic system designed for an "every person for him/her self" approach that certainly contradicts even the existence of a state. Yet the state is their creation and acts on behalf of the most powerful on this contested terrain. 

Against the theorists of postmodernism, the government is not, finally, a potential friend. Still, every instance must be studied in its complexity. At issue is whether a given action will lend itself to the process for democratic and egalitarian--revolutionary--change, not a moral abstraction. What is likely is that those societies which control more surplus value will have more room for maneuvering within the confines of the state. North America does enjoy wider freedoms than Ruwanda. 

In a better world, real democracy must be linked to real equality, at least in terms of decision-making and the labor process. This can only be finally obtained through a dramatically different form of government publicly dedicated to these principles--and a population fully conscious of them, ready to act; armed, intellectually and actually. 

Critical questions here are: What are the best arguments that prove that inequality, a requirement of capitalism, can be compatible with democracy? To what degree are people who consent to be governed responsible for their own oppression? How will people who have only experienced inequality and authoritarianism be able to forge a society absent these problems? How will people who have always been followers in their work lives become leaders? Why is it that the U.S. appears so much more democratic than the countries where U.S. corporations make most of their money? What is the role of inequality and authoritarianism in the home? Who does your school board represent? Who finances the campaigns for your local politicians? If there is, some day, equality and democracy; why have a state? How do most anarchists, who consider the key social problem to be government itself, address the question of the economic base? What has been the role of government in promoting/defeating racism and sexism?
 
 

Political economy roots itself in history. The effort to make sense of history using material needs, forces and relations of production, and class struggle as initial reference points is called historical materialism. In broad terms, historical materialism sees life traveling upward in spirals. Those who study the lines of the past carefully are better able to understand the road underfoot and the swirls of the future ahead. Political economy, the intellectual scalpel of historical materialism that goes into the onion, focusing on trends and tendencies, studies the development of the means and relations of production through these eras: 

(A) Communal society in which property was, for the most part, held in common, 

(B) slavery, the first great division of labor which created new levels of surplus and gradually separated artisan ship from agriculture, and finalized the shift from communal to private property. With private property and the division of labor, the basis was laid for the rise and growth of intense inequality. 

(C) serfdom, 

(D) wage labor and capitalism . 

These are not necessary, required, stages of development. They are stages of development in specific early capitalist countries. For most areas, capitalism was imported, usually by force, and interim stages were swept aside. This is not what must happen. It just is what did happen in the initial areas of capitalist concentration, beginning mostly in Europe. 

At each stage we see, as a general trend, rising inequality, the intensification of the division of the collective work of the many and the private ownership of the few, and increasingly sophisticated methods of both repression and resistance--both in ideology and sheer force. 

There are only opposing interests between those who privately own and those who collectively produce. But among those who must do the work, it is clear that an injury to one does precede an injury to all. This is the nucleus of the idea of working class solidarity. 

Each historical stage (primitive communalism, slavery, serfdom, wage labor), at once shatters the succeeding social stage, and carries forward elements of itself into the next historical stage. For example, while slave systems are now mostly destroyed, slavery continues to exist in scattered parts of the world. Elements of slavery, in the sense that surplus value denies the laborer full value for work, continue today, as do scattered remnants of real slavery. Feudal artisan ship, while hardly a significant form of production, lingers as a productive force. Religious groups were a key buttress of feudalism, and organized religion retains considerable power under capitalism, even though its dogma seems utterly out of place in a purportedly scientific world. 

Now, production becomes more and more social. Millions of working people are linked through international economies, but the product of the collective form of labor is usurped by a relative handful of people, capitalists, who are engaged in a ruthless hunt for cheaper labor, raw materials, and markets. This frantic search is only matched by the increasing insecurity of those who do the work. The internationalism of capitalism is contradicted by the nationalist cries of capitalists who profit from the ideas which borders, border-lines drawn on maps by profiteers, create--and the armies they employ. 

If we consider labor power as the sum of the physical and mental abilities of a human being, exercised in production, then we must consider too the conditions which set this labor power in motion, how it got its start. Just as certain members of society have in their hands the means of production, so it is necessary that there be a class of people forced to sell their labor power--ever more cheaply. As noted briefly above, this is accomplished by driving people from their ancestral lands, separating them from valuable skills, and through technological advances used, not to assist people or create freedom, but to further alienate them. This process is now especially intense in the southern hemisphere. 

Instead of more leisure time, technology generates work speed-up and job loss. Taylorism, named after the American F.W. Taylor (author of "Principles of Scientific Management") focuses on the use of time and motion studies to measure and accelerate the labor process, to appropriate the skills of workers and make them work faster. 

Fordism, centered on conveyor production, mass consumption, and mass marketing, also seeks to heighten productivity via technique. Both processes are designed to strip workers of potentially valuable faculties, speed production, expand markets, and ultimately to drive down wages. Both processes seek to make workers into replaceable machines themselves, but machines also capable of consumption. 

Some theorists, postmodernists, became so fascinated by the techniques of production and methods of accumulation (material and cultural) that they confused these significant processes with the core of exploitation. When they noticed some methods of production they wrongly declared to be new, just-on-time delivery systems, and international symbols of consumption like Nikes for example, they believed the world had entered a new era: post- capitalism, in which the lynch-pin, the core issue, is culture, not labor, and that this new era could only be grasped by deconstructing language, discourses, products of human transactions, and by putting together new languages describing the new reality.

Postmodernists became so fascinated by the subtle implications of taking apart the language and format of Mickey Mouse (which are indeed important) that they forgot (or profited from their forgetfulness) that what made the mouse possible was Haitian workers paid 20 cents and hour, which in turn made possible the 96,700 dollars an hour paid to Disney president Michael Eisner, or the $90 million paid to Disney leader Obitz to get him to quit. In sum, behind every Barbie doll is indeed the oppression of women through culture, but the beginning of that is the exploitation of labor. 

Right wing postmodernists seek to claim the idea that all knowledge is socially constructed. But this is not new. The Chinese revolutionary Mao Tse Tung said, in the thirties, "Every idea is stamped with the brand of class". What the postmodernists hope to prove is the belief that things can exist only in thought, or that the world is actually incoherent, that is, anything, from consumerism to racism, can explain the key motive of society. This is wrong. Ideas are not autonomous from the body. The body exists in a social, class, context, which is made profound and complex by questions of race and sex/gender. 

We are not in a period of post capitalism. The many still work. The few still own. The main artery of this is still the exploitation of surplus value. But our post-whatevers still insist their vision is entirely new, even though it usually leads to very old deeds of class collaboration, or paralysis disguised as analysis of hegemony--the total victory of dominant power. 

On the one hand, some postmodernists say anything can happen. For example, they consider the state, government, to be more autonomous than not in relation to a national economy. This means that the state stands above, apart from, class struggle. If true, this means they can vote in equality--surely a surprise to those who own GM. On the other hand, other postmodernists also say nothing can happen: people are so contaminated by capitalist culture (hegemony) that they can never be sufficiently cleansed to make a better world. At once, as two sides of the same coin, we see the definitions of opportunism and sectarianism at work. Both rise from the central, and incorrect, belief that ideas determine reality. For indeed, the real world does create the impossible conditions that make change necessary, not by wishes but by concrete study and action. 

If we follow Mao's notion, the postmodernists can reasonably be said to be the whining of the collapsing middle class whose world really is coming apart. Mostly academics, postmodernists are the living result of the deep split between mental and manual labor under advanced capitalism, seeking entitlement from the notion that one stands above the other. They take the wrong side of the debate of the century: does consciousness determine being? They assert the primacy of the mind, above the body, and wind up sure of only their own arrogant minds. Above all, as middle class people being driven into the ranks of the working class by economic powers they wish to deny, postmodernists hope to wish away the centrality of human labor and class struggle to existence, and to elevate their own peculiar skills, language and shell games, for class struggle. 

Capital, all around us like air, still requires a constant army of unemployed people. This group, typically desperate, serves as an example to those who are still employed, and can become a potential stockpile of replacement workers, scabs. Unemployment, in most capitalist countries, is color-coded and lies at the base of racist ideology which serves to explain misery as the natural state of a sector of the working class, designated as not really human.

Economic elites employ a variety of methods to retain power: 

(a) Divide and conquer (racism/nationalism/sexism), 

(b) Reward and punish (corruption of leaders, prisons), 

(c) Cynicism (you can't fight city hall), 

(d) irrationalism (life is incomprehensible so do what you're told; have faith), 

(e) demagoguery (obey the chief-god/caudillo), etc. 

(f) terror (the Gulf War) 

(g) dominant culture (stop reading this; go watch tv). 

Sheer exhaustion from trying to fill personal needs against the tide of a system created to deny those needs is another significant factor. But, while Vietnam is simultaneously proof that these tactics do and do not always work (the Vietnamese won on the battlefields, in the political world, and culturally. They lost the long term fight against capital), elites have been fairly successful in turning many people into instruments of their own oppression. (Even in Vietnam, the internal taints of nationalism, elitism, corruption, sexism all finally reversed that heroic struggle). The ideas of the dominant economic and political system are anchored in the minds of even those who suffer most under it. Working people are taught to think with the brains, values, of those who oppress them. We confuse skills of obedience with liberation: a high IQ will make you free. The facts of class inequality are there for all to see. But most people do not see them. It is imperative to do all that is possible to find a way through this, to learn from the past, yet to expect new mistakes. 

Wilhelm Reich formulates the above process of radical change as follows: 

1. Specific developments of production and corresponding relationships of production, 

2. Specific economic interests of a class in power, 

3. Corresponding moral demands on members of society, 

4. The effect of these demands on the mass of individuals, restriction in the satisfaction of needs, the production of social anxiety, 

5. Mooring the ruling groups' moral demands in the mass individual's psyche, permanent reproduction through the internalization of the demands, 

6. Inward acceptance of the morality and politics of the ruling group, articulation of the ideology by individuals.
 
 

Reich uses this model to demonstrate the mass popularity of fascism in Germany. He points to the family as the key transmitter of reactionary values, adopting and passing along the hierarchical, repressive, "do what you're told" background, especially as it relates to fear of sexual pleasure. That fascism breeds a perverse death culture, commonly one that promotes links of sexuality, pain, and death, is significant to Reich, who sees the capitalist family system as a necessary link to break. 

How subordination is conveyed is not entirely clear. A top U.S. industrialist once boasted, " I can get one-half of the working class to kill the other." Taken on an international scale, this has some historical validity. Nevertheless, where there is domination, there is insurgency. History is a record of ever more sophisticated efforts to end social systems which require authoritarianism and inequality; from Spartacus to you. 

Critical questions here are: What underlies the continuing appeal of nationalism or racism? Do white workers gain from racism? Do black politicians gain from racism? What are the overriding things workers and their employers have in common? Has capitalism developed to its peak? Why does divide and conquer work so easily? Should people organize in separate race/sex caucuses? Is capital retarding social development? How? If change is inevitable, what role can people play? Are union leaders corrupted by high salaries? What should be the relationship of resistance leaders and followers? Why is there unemployment? What is the role of sexism and the family in building obedience to illegitimate authority? What are the key things that went wrong with past efforts for change?
 
 

Even with a reserve army of unemployed and with technological advances, the RATE OF PROFIT (the percentage of surplus value which can solely be considered profit--after taxes, reinvestment for materials, etc) has a tendency to fall. Technological advances do not long remain the property of a single owner. Hence all owners must repeatedly reinvest in capital improvements (themselves the result of stored-up surplus value created by workers). So, while their capital property increases, unless they are able to simultaneously decrease the amount paid to the workers, or to increase the hours of work without a similar increase in pay, profits spiral downward. 

Capitalists must find markets, places to sell stuff where the competition is minimal. They must find cheaper and cheaper raw material, from fertilizer to iron. They must find people who will, or must, work for less. 

Big fish eat little fish. Capital must expand or die. Capital concentrates more and more in the hands of fewer and fewer. What once may have been open competition becomes parasitic monopoly. Over time, power among the elites passes from those who lead manufacturing industries to those who control banks, finance capitalists. Finance capitalists, to expand, must move to monopolize industries and to sharpen competition. When this occurs between businesses within a nation, it is called intense competition. When it occurs between national financiers, it often means war. 

Production has three stages: 

1. The purchase of the means of production and labor power. 

2. The process of production itself. 

3. The sale of finished products. 

Each stage is absolutely dependant on the creation of surplus value. But each stage is also fixed by the sale of the product. Again, at each stage owners must battle for cheaper raw material, labor, and markets. Typically, economic elites urge workers in their home nations into warfare, under flags of freedom or religion, to protect the elites' potential for earning profits. This battle for shares of surplus value, carried on an international scale under the banners of monopoly finance capital, is imperialism. Here, the role of ideology, welding workers to link their interests to the interests of their employers in a death struggle for profits, is critical. 

For example, when the U.S. invaded the Middle East during the Gulf War, many people in the U.S. were led to believe that the war was to protect Kuwait from a dictator. In fact, Kuwait itself is a dictatorship. The war unleashed on an Iraqi army which clearly did not want to fight was really an effort to maintain the U.S. interests in instability in the Middle East, to protect oil profits. Still, many soldiers trusted their officers and, years later, found themselves suffering from Gulf War Syndrome, the result of poison gas which their officers told them would bring them no harm. Many working class youth went to war for Kuwaiti dictators and oil millionaires. They were little different from the Southern troops under Pickett at Gettysburg, 130 years earlier. For workers, picking the wrong allies, those with opposing interests, proves deadly.

Three factors in the latter half of the twentieth century are of particular interest. The first is the intensified internationalization, globalization, of capital and the deepening of capitalist exploitation. 

Capitalist companies are more than ever interlocked with monetary interests which sweep across national boundaries, and technology allows the rapid exchange of information.

In 1983, Ford Motor Company, for example, was very interested in building specific cars for particular local markets. The Escort was a different car in England, Brazil, and the U.S. Today, however, Ford Motors is interested in building a single world car and developing indigenous managers and marketers to sell it. 

Computer technology not only makes the rapid development of this new auto possible, it offers the ability to track parts, production, and demand in ways that negate many costly delays. This, however, is not as new as it might seem. The Ford Rouge plant in Detroit, employing more than 100,000 workers in the 1950's, did build a just-on-time auto; everything for the car was made in the plant. What appears to be novel today is mobility, the ability of capital to quickly relocate in areas of minimal class resistance or low labor costs. 

Technology and globalization do combine to give the employers the ability to take advantage of shifting international wage rates, to move plants and assembly plants, to stay immediately abreast of financial markets, and, significantly, to transmit their cultural values everywhere. Kids in central Guyana want to be Michael Jordan. Interestingly, Ford's current problem is in retaining indigenous managers who will actually stay in their home countries once they are trained. 

The globalization of capital may be reflected in the shift of the nature of warfare. The first half of the century was marked by two world wars, rising out of the national interests of capitalists. The second half of the century has been notable for the rise of civil wars, or proxy wars of imperialism conducted in once-colonial territories: usually nationalist insurgents under the banner of socialism battling puppet governments and imperialist puppeteers. 

In 1974, near the end of the Vietnam war, when the U.S. suddenly shifted from a creditor to a debtor nation, the working class in the U.S. witnessed the collapse of its standard of living while jobs and production were shifted to the third world. The third world became more industrialized, proletarianized, and levels of inequality widened. While much attention here is devoted to the U.S., it must be placed in relief: the world gap of the rich and poor is expanding even more rapidly. The rich and poor live in ever more separate worlds. Richard Jolly, author of the 1996 Oxford Press, "Human Development Report", notes, "Worldwide, 358 billionaires control assets greater than the combined incomes of countries with 45% of the world's people". (New York Times 15 July, 1996). In the U.S., CEO's who once earned about 35 times as much as their workers, now make about 120 times as much. 

Faced with nearly stagnant growth (while per capita production increased dramatically since 1975, productive growth as a whole remained sluggish in the world economy, less than one-quarter what it was in the 1920's), and in order to protect and expand their control of national surplus value, power elites in the U.S. took at least three paths: (1) they merged corporations and through centralization (and subsequent decentralization) cut work forces and enjoyed savings. (2) GE's top salesman, Ronald Reagan, discovered that if he inveigled the key imperialist opposition, the misnamed Soviet Union, into a dollar for dollar spending game of chicken, the U.S.S.R. would lose the game. That (along with a decade of grain shortages and an oil crisis) worked, and briefly limited international competition (though it only had a modest impact on military spending). (3) The U.S. ruling class used the government as a club against the North American working class (whose unions had long tied their members to the interests of their employers). 

This latter assault had two key fronts; (1) the private sector working class and (2) the sectors of the government that had become known as safety nets, concessions won from the ruling classes from decades of struggle in the form of public pensions, jobless benefits, protections around the hours of work and child labor, and welfare. Simultaneously, elites bellowed to downsize the government programs directed to the mass of people, yet they expanded government programs benefitting themselves: the Pentagon budget or the bail outs of Savings and Loan industries, Mexico, Brazil, or Chrysler corporation. The Chrysler bail-out provides a stark example. In order to give millions to pull Chrysler out of the doldrums in the early 1980's, the state of Michigan slashed welfare grants. 

The incredible profits of the 1980's were never returned to productive capacity, but were diluted by lavish spending or shifted to sheer money speculation. In the early 1970's, 90 per cent of the available surplus value was pumped back into the productive economy, 10 per cent into speculation. By 1992, those figures were inverted. Personal and government debt exploded. Total household debts at the end of 1990 stood at 90% of household income. Stocks inflated inside a thin balloon with no related productive base. Speculation, the farthest profitable site away from work, came to rule. Cruelty became fashionable and respectable--again. 

Typically, the weakest, people in mental institutions, were hit first; tossed on the streets during the Carter administration to become part of the homeless population of later decades. Then came assaults on welfare and unemployment benefits. 

Then came attacks on employed workers, especially industrial workers. In part, the industrial assault was accomplished by shifting jobs to Third World nations where exploitation is especially intense. In 1993, service sector jobs outnumbered manufacturing jobs in the U.S. for the first time. Indeed, according to Doug Henwood, "In 1991, the product of people in the funeral, insurance, and real estate industries surpassed that of manufacturing with only a fraction of the work force." People were driven out of factory positions (the UAW lost ½ million members in a decade) and into the 7-11, or into despair. Temporary workers in 1996 make up one quarter of the U.S. work force. On January 23, 1989, writing in the "Nation", the labor expert William Serrin wrote that there are 16.5 unemployed or under employed people in the U.S., far beyond the usual 5% cited by government officials. Reasonably linked to massive underemployment is the growth of the prison system, itself often privatized for corporate profit. The U.S. jails more citizens per capita than any other nation, 1.6 million. Perhaps more remarkably, there were 15 million arrests in 1995, about 6% of the population. 

At the same time the productivity of U.S. workers increased, the gap between the rich and poor in the U.S. became greater than any other industrialized country, and the U.S. now has the smallest middle class. Even college educations are no longer protection against income collapse. The offensive against governmental safety net programs struck more than the recipients. Middle class governmental workers, like social workers, themselves hit the unemployment lines. The only group inoculated against the disintegration of wages in the last twenty years was the 5-7% of the work force with M.D.'s or similar advance degrees. And, contrary to educators' claims, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, there is no demand for highly educated skilled workers even on the distant horizon, other than for teachers and nurses. Of the ten jobs most likely to expand rapidly in the early 21st century, only these two require significant schooling. 

At least until 1997, there was relatively little working class resistance to the attack. The unions, in the name of preserving the North American economy, simply collaborated (and mimicking corporations, merged), beginning in the late 1960's with the bail-out of New York city's budget by the American Federation of Teachers and AFSCME, followed quickly to the sabotaged PATCO strike, and continuing to strikes at Hormel, Caterpillar, and the Detroit newspapers; all mostly ruined by internal treachery. The union leadership preached cooperation while employers engaged the battle. At the same time, those industrial workers who did have employment, who mostly did nothing while their comrades hit the streets, who abandoned the "Injury to one is an injury to all" approach for every man for himself, aged. The average GM assembly plant worker is a male, in his late 40's. The average Michigan teacher is over 50. 

The U.S. work force as a whole, and especially the industrial work force, is, and always has been, sharply segregated by race and sex. This is reflected in wages. Black men earn about 70% of white male earnings, hispanic women about 52%. And this in turn leads to segregation in housing, schooling, health care, and, finally, life expectancy. 

Two other factors deserve note here: a rise in official and unofficial irrationalism and an assault on sexuality, both molding into one another. Postmodernism, the irrationalist position that the mind stands above and apart from the body, rose with the collapse of the middle class and the decay of falsely socialist alternatives. Religious fundamentalism enjoyed a, well, re-birth---booming in the southern hemisphere. Presidents visited astrologers (Britain's Princess Diana had twenty astrologers on her payroll. They all predicted a glowing future into the next century). . New laws like the 1997 welfare laws attack sexuality and economically enforced abstinence. In 1995, the U.S. Surgeon General was fired by the notoriously promiscuous President Clinton, for advising kids to learn about masturbation. Magazines depicting naked bodies were banned from military bases. Aids, treated absurdly as a civil rights rather than a public health problem, became an international plague and underpinned a retreat into the fear of sex. 

Rebellions did occur in North American communities, the largest on April 29, 1992, in Los Angeles, an integrated rebellion led by youth and directed against, for the most part, the despised police department. 

Today, one in four children are born in official poverty in the U.S. Among black children, this figure is 51%. With the transformation of the welfare system into forced work programs, these figures will grow, fast. Moreover, ghettoization has intensified. This means that people of color, but especially poor black people, are more and more located in expressly designated areas, areas where there is little of industrial or social value, where rebellion directed at property may not have a costly impact. Even so, it is not especially surprising that the rebellions have grown out of youth--and hatred of the police, not the labor movement, which remains both in its own perception and in fact, privileged and determined to retain privilege. 

This process is now at work in other industrial nations like Germany and Japan. So, in a sense, the working class is becoming more oppressed and internationalized, at least in economic terms. 

In those same terms, the ruling classes of imperial and colonial nations remain finally dependant on national armies. So, while corporate interests may weave into the economic and political systems of other countries, the last resort, force, is still in the hands of the armed working class (the military) of the home nations of elites. Nevertheless, most of the workers of the world are still mystified by nationalism. How thin this support may be is untested in the last twenty years. For example, if Saddam Hussein was Ho Chi Minh, would U.S. troops have been willing to fight a protracted war? There are many reports of serious discontent in the military, though most of it is mobilized by the right wing. 

In any case, capital is at once globalized and brutalized. International competition is ever more intense and the levels of available surplus value in every country are in steady, if uneven, decline. The decay of available surplus value in the U.S. has hardly hit as hard as it has say, in Grenada. Even so, it is important to underline that this is an analysis of trends and tendencies. Many people have made gains in the midst of this. Most have not. 

The second factor, at least in imperial countries, an eruption of the size of the work force and a rapid shift of women into the commodity producing work force, a shift from what was once mostly reproductive labor to directly productive labor. The international work force actually doubled since the mid-1970's. Many of these workers were women, once workers in the family home, pushed into the labor market for survival. In the U.S., since 1975, the number of women in the work force has increased from 17% to slightly over 50%. On the one hand, many women who have entered the work force have felt empowered by their experiences and, perhaps out of this sense of empowerment, have contributed to the understandings of the working class about the nature of exploitation and the possibilities for resistance. 

On the other hand, the movement into commodity producing work, caused by the continuing decay of once powerful capitalist economies, has deepened the exploitation and alienation of both men and women. It now takes two people working to produce the income of one person at work twenty-five years ago. And the hours and intensity of work, let alone the insecurity over potential joblessness, have sharpened the crisis of capitalist family relations, with more than one-third of marriages now ending in divorce. This is not to argue that divorce is wrong. It is plainly an indicator of internal tensions. Women are now exploited in another dimension, at home and work. Beyond dual exploitation, this lends finally to the fact that women, attacked on two interconnected planes, at work and beyond work, are better positioned than ever to struggle for change. Women and men as well are simultaneously besieged through work and freed by work. 

The movement from home to work is less true for women of color who have been wage-earners for generations. Even so, the move to work undermines the material basis for false divisions of the sexes, and properly shifts the view of many women from the family or husband as provider to the ruling class as a source of oppression. 

The persistence of racism is yet another factor within the crisis of the old imperial nations. For example, despite the repetitive attacks on affirmative action in the U.S., it remains that the most numerous beneficiaries of affirmative action have been middle and upper-middle class white women. Wages of the black population have hardly moved in relationship to the white population during this period. Racism, the institutional denial of the humanity of a group of people based on their skin color, pervades every aspect of every capitalist society, consider the rise of neo-fascist movements, and draws the sharpest responses: the integrated Los Angeles rebellion of 1992. 

The third factor is the breakdown and desperation of capitalism in nations whose imperial powers never matched the U.S. Much of the world, especially the southern hemisphere, is in a massive depression. The International Labor Organization reports that, in 1995, one billion adults were unemployed, up from 820 million in 1994. This represents about one-third of the world's work force. Idle time is the crux of human life in most of the world. From the former Soviet Union to Guyana, capitalism is in a profound crisis of massive unemployment and social collapse. Education. legal, social service, health, monetary systems, and infrastructure systems like roads are all in varying stages of disintegration. Areas of North American cities can easily be considered pockets of the third world. TB rates, unemployment, collapsed schools, permanent joblessness, police repression, all combine to create a striking third world atmosphere--even where all the delights of cable TV are immediately available. Organized decay in some countries is simply no longer possible. There is little or no organization to the crises, rather a real chaos--and massive deaths. This internal crisis is built into capitalism, though it is difficult to predict the location or nature of the next catastrophe. Crises in capitalism are both permanent and instantaneous, slow boils spilling over in different spots. 

The internal crisis of capital most frequently experienced in the 20th century is the crisis of over-production. This occurs because products are not produced for use, but for cash. When the social nature of production meets the private ownership of production, in ever more intense ways, it leads to a crisis of over-production. This takes place when the mass of commodities produced can find no market, when the wages of workers are driven to such a minimum that they cannot buy what they themselves produce: full market places with no buyers. Hundreds of thousands of people now face choices like whether to buy food or to buy the fuel to boil the water which will otherwise poison them. As in the depression thirties, farmers are once again dumping milk to raise prices. Even at its most successful, capital leads to crisis. 

The old imperial powers appear tactically strong, strategically weak. That is, they still maintain armies and enjoy the support of their national populations. But their economies are weak. They are beset with internal and external problems for which there are no resolutions. More precisely, the U.S., China, perhaps the former U.S.S.R. have precarious economies and menacing armies. Japan and Germany have strong economies and weak armies. How long will this continue? 

These trends demonstrate, on one hand, that society can indeed produce much more than it does, but on the other hand that the social system is retarding both the maximization of production and its use by those who do the work. The crux of all of this is that people are becoming ever more social beings. But the social relations developed through production, work, exchange and communications are all violently ruptured by the absolute need for greater profits. Rather than uniting humanity, only the rich are united in the drive of greed. The individualist relations of production handcuff the social productive forces. But within this process also grows the international organization of workers in industries, and the arming of working people in armies. 

When capital enters crises, it frequently embraces fascism. Fascism has been called monopoly capitalism in decay. But capitalism has always been coupled with fascism, although the fascists might not appear in the presidential palaces of some capitalist countries. For example, slavery in the U.S. held the seeds of fascism. U.S. investors profit handsomely from neo-fascist governments in other countries. The fascist experience is worth examination.
 
 

1. Fascism is the unchecked rule of the rich--a full-scale assault on poor and working people. Parliamentary institutions are set aside. Wealth issues direct orders, frequently through a populist leader. Wages, the social safety net, working hour laws, labor laws; all come under legal (and extra-legal) attack. The stick replaces the carrot. 

Even between capitalists of the same nation, struggle intensifies. 

Fascism in its early stages has been popular among masses of people deluded by irrationalism, nationalism, racism, and sexism. These ideas are key to the construction of fascism. But, "war means work" for some, which may also explain its initial popularity. 

Fascism requires and is built on the support of capitalist elites. Henry Ford, the Dulles family, the Catholic Church, and the German Krupps among many others, were early supporters of fascism. 

2. Fascism and capitalism are inseparable. Both are modern systems. There has never been a form of capital that was not built on a fascist base--from slavery in the U.S. to today's varieties of imperialism. All major capitalists have fascist ties. Hence, while fascism may not be the dominant form of capitalist government, elements of fascist ideology (biological determinism, rabid nationalism, etc.) and fascist organizations (sectors of the police, KKK, skinheads, etc.) are always present. No capitalist government has ever required a revolution to institute fascism. 

Fascism does rise up in capitalist crises, the moments when the struggle for production reaches a point when the workers can no longer purchase the products they produce, a crisis of over-production and declining profits resulting in an intense battle for cheaper labor, raw materials, and new markets; that is, war. 

However, neither war nor capitalist crisis is a pre-condition of fascism. Consider Saudi Arabia. In addition, it is possible to live under fascism within a nation that is not itself entirely fascist, that is, to live as a jobless black youth in Sao Paulo--or Detroit. 

3. Fascism deceptively calls for the national unity of social classes, class-collaboration, but actually promotes the division of people by race, sex, culture, nation or religion. Fascism was, under Mussolini and later Hitler, conceived as the "corporate state": all the resources of the society were directed toward the support of corporate profits. In order to motivate warriors and bolster profits, fascism conceals the real and insoluble tensions between those who own and those who work. 

4. Fascism frequently is employed as a strategic base for war. Shifts in government toward fascism grow with war preparations. In the U.S. consider the internment of Japanese citizens during WWII. In Canada, consider the War Measures Act. 

5. Violence and terror, made tolerable by racism and sexism (ideas which view people as sub-human) become public policy. 

6. Fascism relies on mysticism, a culture which turns to superstition, irrationality (celebrations of misogyny, the organized celebration of repressed sexuality, death, and hopelessness) serving to explain a carnival of systematic despair, and retards science and social production in order to mask its own decay. Indeed, fascism is organized decay. 

There is no consistency to fascist ideology, other than to preserve capitalism. 

7. Fascism is virulently anti-communist. Communists, who have been the only consistent anti-fascist fighters, are the among the first targets of fascism. 

8. Fascism has only been defeated internally (primarily by the actions of indigenous national resistance), perhaps, once: in Albania. However, resistance movements have changed fascism and halted its birth. 

9. There is evidence that combined ideological and physical struggle causes fascism to retreat. There is nothing inevitable about fascism. It is a political movement, reaching from productive forces into the mass consciousness, and can be combated physically and intellectually. 

10. If these factors are true, then it seems resistance to fascism must be based on a class analysis of society, an internationalist perspective that attacks imperialist war, a multi-racial, organized approach (as opposed to ephemeral coalitions based on sex, race, religion), willingness to use violence, and the grasp of the critical role of ideology in combating fascist/ capitalist practice. At base, the target is international capitalism, not merely fascists.
 
 

The general tendency of capitalist relations is to press down the average wage to the minimum. This tendency is frequently met by a worker organization and resistance. And the resistance today takes a nationalist character, for the most part. Workers in the U.S. are wholly tied to the notion of supporting U.S. capital, at the expense of the rest of the world's workers, in order to make gains. 

Moreover, resistance to the devaluation of wages fights only effects, not causes. It is one thing to call for a fair day's pay, another to call for the eight hour day, another still to call for the abolition of the wage system (as did the U.S. Industrial Workers of the World in the 1920's), and another still to fight beyond economics toward democracy and equality. 

The wage system itself is not the central source of inequality and authoritarianism. If we want to look for the source of privilege, it begins with the distribution of surplus value. 

If we look at surplus value closely, we can divide it into two parts: surplus labor time (the time spent in the production of surplus value), and surplus time (the time free of the time used creating surplus value). As Paul Sporn has noticed, no revolution or reform movement has addressed all of these central problems of economics: 

1. The control, use, and distribution of surplus value, 

2. The use made of the division of labor, 

3. The distribution and control of surplus labor time among the population, 

4. The distribution of surplus time among the people. 

The first problem would be solved if the working class, not merely in rhetoric but in fact, owned all the collective facilities (apartments, hospitals, schools, roads, etc.), all of the means of production and factories, all the land, mines, and raw materials, etc. This means that the working class must be culturally and politically sophisticated enough to carry this forward in terms of decision-making, distribution, and production itself. A significant section of the working class--probably a majority--must be fully social beings, conscious of their role as class activists, even before truly fundamental change occurs. Many, many people must be able to break free of the authoritarianism and contempt for theoretical work which only represents the influence of their masters. Honest leaders must clearly define their relationship to the masses of people in egalitarian ways, while the people must understand that historically this relationship is like a fake lighthouse beacon, designed by looters to cause shipwrecks. False leaders have repeatedly sold inequality and authoritarianism to the mass of people on the grounds of the common good, higher production, or better days in the future. 

In past socialist efforts toward equality and democracy, like the Russian and Chinese revolutions, leaders relied heavily on an idea called the THEORY OF PRODUCTIVE FORCES. At base, this is a belief that in order to obtain social symmetry, harmony, first there must be abundance. In particular, this theory asserts says that social change is solely rooted in technological change, advances in the means of production which must go before change in the relations of production. 

Hence, the goal of revolutions guided by this idea became production, national economic development--and every aspect of the revolution was subordinated to this goal. The theory of productive forces was rooted in the idea that social change absolutely requires, first, a complete turnover in the means of production, industrialization. In practice, in order to speed development, former ruling class experts were returned to power in the factories. Party leaders, over time often these same experts, were reified, made icons. Educational systems, egalitarian and experimental immediately after revolutions, became centers of rote learning. The leaders of parties which boasted of equality in fact became privileged classes themselves. In short, to hasten industrialization, the revolutionaries recreated capitalism, seen by many honest people as the necessary stage before equality, and called it socialism. 

The theory of productive forces denies, on the one hand, the current reality of capitalism as a world-wide system and, on the other hand, the key role that the relations of production, especially the part played by ideas adopted by masses of people, can play in social change. Instead, the theory of productive forces mechanically expects industrialization to create equality, abundance to lead to fairness and justice. History has demonstrated this idea to be mistaken. Inequality and authoritarianism do not form a good base for equality and democracy. Socialism failed, became capitalism under red banners. 

The second, third, and fourth problems, the use made by the division of labor, the distribution of surplus labor time, and the distribution of surplus time, are critical factors which have also subverted previous attempts at democracy and equality. These can be answered by rotating work, redistributing surplus labor time and surplus time. In the past, the theory of productive forces required experts--the division of labor. This in turn relied on the potential efficiency that may come from industrial specialization. So all of the surplus labor time, that time spent on the alienated production of surplus value, was solely distributed to the working class. Surplus time, that time free of the need to create surplus value or to recreate the workers' life, has always been overwhelmingly distributed to those who produce no commodities: party bosses in many cases. This means that workers are denied both the opportunity to reflect on their circumstances and the chance to enjoy the surpluses they make. 

Socialism failed for reasons beyond the theory of productive forces: corruption, sexism, elitism, racism, caudillo leadership, opportunism, sectarianism, etc. In each case, the failure of the socialist society was primarily internal, although external capitalist pressure certainly played a role. 

Errors arose from every conceivable discipline within the socialist world. From philosophy, for example, we can learn that truth is never located within a central committee, but in social practice--the material world beyond the central committee. This is the reason that a "from the people to the people" method of policy making is wise. From psychology we can learn that sexuality and the family play a role in both teaching rebels--and employee subordinates. From education, always the canary in the mine of any society, we can learn that the denial of freedom and experimentation is a signal of poison from within. The key point is not to mourn the mistakes of 150 brief years of political economy, but to learn to crush the mistakes and divisions that were finally used to demolish socialism. 

Istvan Meszaros offers clarity on key props for the status quo, what he calls the second order mediations of capital: 

A) The nuclear family 

B) Alienated means of production 

C) Fetishist (as opposed to humane) production objectives 

D) Labor structurally divorced from control 

E) Capital's nation status 

F) The uncontrollability of the market. 

To which Joel Kovell adds 

G) Cultural Hegemony-- 

and Lukacs later adds 

H) The Fragmentation of Labor (labor organizationally pitted against itself) 

Each mediation is imbued in the other, each sustains the other, each carrying the powerful DNA of capital into new generations. 

- Hence the real target must be the capital system as such, as a whole, with all of its mediations and Meszaros suggests urgency because he thinks capital is reaching its limits. 

So Meszaros offers a deepened grasp of what has been done and what is up. 

Now, What is the way out? 

Meszaros offers some clues: mediations between today and the defeat of capital as a whole. 

1) Reestablish the necessarily international character of the communist movement. 

2) Suggests that what he calls socialist pluralism, common action around a totality of demands none of which taken alone is necessarily socialist (Like jobs, education, health care, etc.) but which taken as a whole cannot be met by capitalism. 

3) Points to the historical role of workers councils-a sign (as 

Luckacs says) that the class consciousness of the proletariat is on the verge of overcoming the bourgeoisie outlook of its leaders. Where the we/they dichotomy can be dissolved in practical action-especially in the labor process. 

4) Rejects the economic determinism of capital whose standpoint proclaims itself as the highest obtainable stage of human evolution and suggests that the structural crises of capital may be immanent, sufficient to sustain anti-capital break through. 

But like Marx, Meszaros offers the conditions for what he calls an epochal shift-a revolution- but far too little on the way through.
 
 
 
 

Any serious effort toward social and political equality must address these issues which all mesh into one another. While I have on economic and political questions, it is also true that cultural matters about creativity, truth, beauty, and love cannot be torn away from these mostly economic questions. As capital squeezes down, the world is reducing essential human experiences and replacing them with spectacles: backyard football for the super bowl. People are being stripped of significant points of power, free time and collective community for example. But people are also growing more cornered and aware of the absence of reform alternatives. Many people are revisiting the need for fundamental change, and considering the possibilities. 

In fact, the reason to fight for change is more related to freeing people to live in a harmonious world where their creativity and love can be unleashed than to build more electrical plants. And political change can be shipwrecked on matters of sexuality or revenge. A movement cannot be sustained on class hatred alone. But, at the heart of these factors remains an analysis of the material world, its existence and the process of its changes. The surgical tool for this is political economy. Our probes into material reality, if this is correct, can dig out the seeds of understanding that we need to forge the future. 

One more critical question: Political economy insists that every situation be studied anew. Given what is above, how would you create a template of questions to study the relations of power in your community--or any community? Your questions will live longer than the answers.

In sum, political economy seeks to carefully examine the onion's leaves and core, to abstract from appearance to essence, to unmask SOCIAL relationships which are frequently portrayed as relations between things. It seeks to display the real, though hidden, workings of society in its interrelationships, seeing that all movements are interrelated and interpenetrating rather than disjointed and disconnected (where does supply and demand come from, for example?) In addition, political economy demonstrates that people are sometimes engaged in processes about which they are barely conscious and, surely, absent a scientific analysis of what is up, a process which is out of their control. 

Wages, profits, inequality, unpaid labor; these are not the natural state of things. They are the background to historical struggles between people. Poverty did not rise from the mists. It's the result of social practices which can be changed. 

For workers, the production relationship consumes their working and creative powers without replenishing them, burns them up as if they were kindling and leaves the individual worker much poorer. Workers and poor people are set in apparently ruthless competition against one another and taught in societies which preach common good but practice the greed of every person for him or herself. Hence, people are alienated from their creation and work, from other people, from nature, and from themselves. 

Their products become the property of non-productive capitalists. Every segment of life becomes dominated by the requirements of, not people, but the products of people--or the enemies of most people. Man-made matter comes to dominate humanity. Money, an abstraction of value, rules people, the creators of value. 

Given that the privileged are unlikely to charitably give away their lifestyles, and given that they have used ferocious forms of violence in the past; it is probable that only violence will set aside the system they will kill to protect. Few working people want violence. Indeed, the history of working people is really a history of forgiveness toward those who have lived well off their misery. But it is important to distinguish the content of violence from its form, that is for example, the violence used by anti-Nazi partisans from the violence of Nazis. One is designed to preserve a system which requires violence. The other seeks to end the reasons for violence. 

To unseat a powerful, ruthless, well organized adversary requires serious counter-organization. But, for those who desire a better world, counter-organizing, turning the methods of rule against elites, is not enough. For example, it would be wrong, and history proves it is wrong, to duplicate a hierarchical, authoritarian group to defeat capitalism. It's contaminating the well. Any organization for serious change must incorporate goals and practices which make every member a leader, every leader a follower, in all-for-one solidarity. Capital has been remarkably successful, even among rebels, in promoting the comforting idea that it is better to rely on someone else for analysis and action. A key contradiction of political economy is the problem of those who would resist trying to see outside and beyond their surroundings. But how can an egalitarian resistant group defeat an enemy that doesn't have to debate the next move? Moreover, any revolutionary group must arm its members with ideas which empower them to unravel the sources of inequality--and arm them permanently with weapons to ensure its defeat, even after a victorious shift in power. Beyond that, there must be a two-pronged struggle about the questions of warfare. While harsh treatment of real enemies is sometimes understandable, we must understand that random ruthlessness blows back. And in our own ranks, poor and working people must love and be loved if they are to take the risks to think clearly and win. There must be a sense of a solid home base; even if that is just an idea. 

Hence, capital appears to have a number of advantages, a significant one being that there are nearly infinite ways to defeat egalitarians, but only a few ways for egalitarians to defeat capital. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to believe that people will resist force, find their way through the barrage of decoys---ideology and seduction-- until they win. 

Resistance and the struggle for change are rational ways to respond to the intense alienation of life under capitalism, but resistance must be illuminated by an understanding of the terrain and the ideology which is designed to veil it. It is difficult to stop thinking like employees and begin to think like liberated free people, long before real democracy or equality is tasted. 

This is reflected in movements which insist that something other 

than an analysis rooted in the understandings and actions of labor, can finally bring and end to authoritarianism and inequality. This includes analyses which begin, as starting points, with race, culture, nation, sex, and religion--the varieties of multi-culturalism and post-modernism. The only analysis which goes to the root of human existence, which can sweep across false divisions, is an analysis that begins with the understanding that, at the beginning is production, reproduction and sexuality, and the construction of knowledge, and sees the ways each interrelates to cause change in our world. 

Even so, social practice, struggle--connected to study--is the beginning point of new ideas and the hope for a world in peace and harmony. Those who seek change must be both on the streets and in the libraries. At the core, those who wish to understand and transform reality, those who realize they we are superior to our circumstances, need to take up the banner of Bread and Roses: we want friends, good work and good lives: fairness, equality and justice. We want to be able to love one another.

The ghettoization of the cities, the corruption and aging of the working class, the real privileges perceived and enjoyed by most North American industrial workers, the dislocation of factories away from areas of likely rebellion or potential community support for struggles, the treachery of union police agents, racism and sexism, all mitigate against tactics designed to rely on the present North American working class to make serious change in the near future. 

The central location of life in the U.S. was once the factory and the community which surrounded the industrial base. The shift of much factory work to the colonial world and to rural North America, at least in geographic terms, makes successful class warfare difficult. While some key plants may potentially immobilize some corporations, this alone actually just isolates class solidarity and, given the likely actors, hardly points to 

anything beyond relatively modest demands for reform. 

Today, geographically, politically, and socially, the focal point of North American life is the school. 

Consider the breadth of school. There are 15,274 public school districts in the United States. In those schools are 41,838,871 students, 2,431,008 teachers. In addition there are about 1,400,000 non-teaching school workers such as bus drivers, cafeteria assistants, aides, mechanics and skilled trades people. Private schools house another 5,193,213 students and 354,638 teachers. Public school enrollment increased about 1.8 million since 1987. 2.5 million kids graduated from high school in 1991, another 2.5 million will graduate this year. The cost of education this year will be $5,097 per student, a bundle. (National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 1992 quoted in Education Week, 2-5-92) 

Add to this total of nearly 44 million people directly affected by the public schools, the myriad of people whose income depends on school work or profits: book publishers (and bookmakers), builders, accountants, restauranteurs, social workers, food surplus workers, middle-class volunteers, clothing salespeople and manufacturers, landscapers and developers (school districts spent $9.6 billion on construction projects in 1990--Education Week, 2-19-92) and finally, about 20 million people in the private school system. (NEA Research, 1990) 

It's a lot. Neither the military, the tax system, nor welfare programs are more pervasive than school. And school sucks. Still, all these numbers, this incredible massed quantity of buildings, money, land, people, and publicity, combine to form a huge spectacle of education slammed daily into the public consciousness, a hollow spectacle full of magic and mythology drawn from long remembered experiences, but a phenomenon of limited substance and of real use, absent subversion, to but a tiny minority of citizens. 

People with limited resources and plans for change should focus on North American schools. Inside the schools, a continuing presence is won through base-building with teachers and other education workers, through ties with parents, and through the special organization of young people into their own sections of work---guided mostly on their request. 

At issue then is: Why is school there? What value do schools create and who pays? What is schools' goal for kids? What are the fundamentals of organizing people? What should they be organized into? The future battles in school should focus on the curriculum (teaching kids lies using methods which tell children they are not agents of history), class size (which also unites kids, parents and teachers), and the taxation system which should be restructured to tax non-productive wealth. 

Any organization, and here one is finally proposed, must adopt a multitude of strategies and tactics, all within the grand strategy described above. Moreover, it must be a multi-tiered organization with public and non-public sections (and members often interchanging roles). The history of the early soviets would be helpful here, as would the details of, say, China's Long March. The relationship of leaders to followers must be openly recognized as a continuing tension--resolved from collective analysis of material reality. Democratic centralism is a mere reification if it is not linked to particular social tethers on specific grounds, democracy being the dialectical link to new leadership and understanding, centralism being the link to survival--once always weaving with the other. The guide is equality and democracy not as abstractions but applied to the necessities of revolutionary action--in a materialist sense.

The Long Twentieth Century by Arrighi 

Maoist Economics, the Shanghai Textbook, edited by Banner Press 

Monopoly Capital by Barran and Sweezy 

Power in Their Hands by Bill Bigelow (two volumes) 

Dictionary of Marxist Thought by Tom Bottomore 

Against Postmodernism by Callincos 

Karl Marx' Theory of History, A Defense by Gerald Cohen 

Regulating the Poor by Cloward and Piven 

Political Economy by John Eaton 

Tom Paine by Howard Fast 

Capital, An Introduction by Ben Fine 

How to Read Karl Marx by Fischer 

Impatient Armies of the Poor by Franklin Folsom 

Marx' Politics by Allan Gilbert 

China's Economy and the Maoist Strategy by Gurley 

Dialectical Materialism by Ira Golobin 

Toward a Marxist Theory of the State by Stephen Jay Gould 

One World, Ready or Not by William Greider 

Limits to Capital by David Harvey 

Condition of Post-Modernity by Harvey 

Globalization of Capital by Harvey 

Just a Temp by Kevin Henson 

The State of The U.S.A. Atlas by Henwood 

Political Economy of Racism by Mel Leiman 

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Lenin 

The State and Revolution by Lenin 

Political Economy by A. E. Leontiev 

History and Class Consciousness by G. Lukacs 

Destruction of Reason by G. Lukacs 

Young Hegel by Lukacs 

Social Ontology of Being (3 volumes) by Lukacs 

China Winter by Masai 

A Critique of Soviet Economics by Mao Tse Tung 

Capital by Marx 

Communist Manifesto by Marx 

German Ideology by Marx 

The Grundisse by Marx 

Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts by Marx 

Value, Price, and Profit by Marx 

Critique of Political Economy by Marx 

Alienation by Meszaros 

Ideology and Power by Meszaros 

Beyond Capital by Meszaros 

Alienation by Bertell Ollman 

Dialectical Investigations by Ollman 

Social and Sexual Revolution by Ollman 

The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism by Fredy Perlman 

Economics of Racism II by Victor Perlo 

Politics of Rich and Poor by Kevin Phillips 

Fundamental Problems of Marxism by Plekhanov 

Sex-Pol by Wilhelm Reich (Lee Baxandall, ed.) 

The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich 

The Market Revolution by Sellers 

Communities of Resistance by Sivanundan 

Critique of The Road to Revolution IV by Paul Sporn 

Labor and Monopoly Capital by Sweezy 

Farmer Duck by Martin Waddell 

Dialectical Materialism by Gustav Wetter 

When Work Disappears by William T. Williams 

The Pristine Culture of Capitalism by Ellen Meiskins Wood
 
 

Monthly Review 

Historical Materialism 

Rethinking Marxism 

Science and Society 

The Minnesota Review 

Review of Education/Pedagogy/Cultural Studies 

Cultural Logic
 
 

Berlin, I., 1991, Crooked Timber of Humanity

Carr, E.H., 1988, Twilight of the Comintern, Pantheon 

Claudin, Fernando, 1975, The Communist Movement, (2 Volumes) Cloward, R and 

Dimitroff, G., 1934, United Front Against Fascism

Draper, Theodore, 1975, American Communism and Soviet Russia, 

Dutt, R. Palme, 1934, Fascism and Social Revolution, Vanguard 

Foote. M.R.D., 1985, The Resistance, Bantam 

Ford, Henry, 193?, The International Jew, Ford Motor Publisher 

Gross, Betram, 1980, Friendly Fascism, South End Press 

Hitler, Adolph, 1931, Mein Kampf

Kneller, R. 1936, Educational Philosophy of National Socialism

Kuhl, Stefan, 1994, The Nazi Connection, Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. 

Lee, S., 1988, Henry Ford and the Jews, Stein and Day 

Lenin, V.I., Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism

Loftus, John, 1990, Unholy Trinity, Bantam 

Lukacs, G., 1954, Destruction of Reason

Marcuse, Herbert, 1969, Eros and Civilization

McCoy, L., 1991, The Politics of Heroin, Lawrence Hill 

Ollman, Bertell, 1979, Social and Sexual Revolution, South End Poole, R., 1985, Who Financed Hitler?, Progress Publishers 

Reich, Robert, 1990, Tales of a New America, Ballantine 

Reich, Wilhelm, 1979, Mass Psychology of Fascism

Rosenhaft, Louise, 1988, Beating the Fascists?, Cambridge Press 

Scholl, Inge, 1970, The Resistance of the White Rose, Random House 

Simpson, Chris, 1989, Blowback, Pantheon Publishers 

Simpson, Chris, 1993, The Splendid Blond Beast, Grove Press 

Suhl, Yuri, 1959, They Fought Back, Bantam 

Speilvogel, Jackson, 1992, Hitler and Nazi Germany, Prentice Hall 

Steiner, Jean, 1985, Treblenka, Bantam Books 

Trotsky, Leon, 1931, Fascism, What it is and How to Fight It, Pathfinder Press. 

Trotsky, Leon, 1934, The Struggle Against Fascism In Germany, Pathfinder Press 

Weiss, J. ,1996, Ideology of Death

Zahn, Gordon. German Catholics and Hitler's War

Film:

Betrayed 

Missing 

This Land is Mine 

Z 

The Odessa File 

Schindler's List 

Heroes of Telemark 

Mrs. Miniver 

Escape From Sobibor 

The Music Box 

The Nasty Girl 

The Boy With Green Hair 

Frank Capra, Why We Fight, Trilogy 

World at War Series: see especially, Stalingrad, Leningrad 

The Beast 

Vietnam, Year of the Pig 

Hearts and Minds
 
 

The key debates about the nature of fascism occurred within the Comintern in the 1930's--as reflected in Trotsky, Dutt and Dimitroff.