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The New International, August 1941

 

W. Kent

Discussion Article:

The Russian State – II

 

From New International, Vol. VII No. 7 (Whole No. 56), August 1941, pp. 179–84.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

[Continued from last issue]

WHAT ARGUMENTS STILL remain for the defenders of the “workers’ state”? A few ridiculous subterfuges.

For instance: the bureaucracy was never a ruling class, it was always only a servant of another ruling class ...

First of all, this assertion is not completely correct. There were periods in the history of China where the mandarin bureaucracy (which reproduced itself by means of a monopoly of education) was a ruling class. However, let us not enter into controversies about Chinese history and let us grant our opponent this point.

Granted that, in European history, the bureaucracy was never a ruling class and that it always served other ruling classes. Does that mean that it never can become one itself? Can there never be anything new in history? A clever “theoretician” could have argued just as well, 200 years ago, before the great bourgeois revolutions: What, the bourgeoisie become a ruling class? Ridiculous! Capitalists, such as we have always known them – merchants and money-lenders – have always only served kings and lords!

Yes, sometimes something new occurs in history. It is then our task to analyze the new for which the Marxist method supplies us with a shining instrument) and not to hide our head from it, because it “has never been here before.”

Let us kindly pull a curtain over this argument. The more so, since Comrade Trotsky, who formerly also asserted that the bureaucracy could never become a class without liquidating the collective property, expressly admitted this possibility in his last articles. Thereby, as Comrade Shachtman rightly pointed out, he gave up the most important position of the “workers’ statists”; he removed that pillar of their theoretical house, without which then: house must fall to pieces.

A further “argument”: the bureaucracy is always subjected to pressure by the workers. It is forced to sacrifice a few of its own heads here and there, and to make a few demagogic gestures.

And this is supposed to be an argument against its existence as a class! Was there ever a ruling class in the history of mankind that was not subjected to a certain pressure on the part of the oppressed? Was there ever one which did not have to coat its class rule with phrases about the “general good” and sometimes even to make real concession, in order to avoid that greater evil, the uprising of the masses? The exploited masses of Russia, also, exert this same pressure on the ruling bureaucracy for the simple reason that, as in all class societies, they form the overwhelming majority of the people. Unfortunately this pressure is smaller, not larger, than in America, for instance. Otherwise the Russian worker could not be so basely exploited and so completely without rights.

Still another “argument.” The bureaucracy, in its personnel, is not stable. Purges shake it. Any bureaucrat can be deposed and executed by Stalin at any time. In the oriental despotisms of ancient and mediaeval times, every satrap or vizir could be deposed or executed. There, too, there were “purges” and mass executions. And yet no one has thought of denying the class character of these societies.

Should one conclude from the purges in Stalinland that the class regime there is weak, that it is shaken by tremendous inner contradictions, that it is undergoing a deep crisis shortly after birth, then I am completely in accord. The deep-lying cause of this crisis is that today every class rule must become reactionary: our contemporary world is really ripe for socialism and accordingly for the removal of all class rule; in a word, we are really living in the epoch of the socialist world revolution.

But it is a dangerous fallacy to deduce from the crisis of the bureaucratic class rule that this class rule does not exist at all.

However, to raise the question of the “stability” of the bureaucratic class is justified in a different respect, namely, whether or not the bureaucracy reproduces itself as a class.

One of the showpieces of Stalinist demagogy is that in Russia “very lance-corporal carries a marshal’s baton in his knapsack.” Every worker can rise to the highest economic and government functions. How then can you talk of social inequality or even classes? The “workers’ statists” have fallen into the trap of this “argument” also.

But wait! Have we not heard this sort of talk somewhere before? Every lad can become President of the United States; so and so many newsboys and shoe-shine boys have become millionaires ... Familiar strains! Just as little as these shoeshine boys turned millionaire are proof that there are no classes in America, so little are the workers turned bureaucrats proof of the same thing for Russia.

It is true that during the first years of the development of the new class society in Russia, class demarcations were not yet so rigid, and many individuals could rise. This was not a proof against the existence of a class society, but rather an indication that it was still young and in the process of formation.

For after all, almost the entire bureaucracy was formed through differentiation, out of the proletariat and the peasantry.

But with lightning rapidity an iron barrier is being put up, separating the new classes. More and more is it a rule now that the son of a bureaucrat becomes a bureaucrat and the son of a worker, a worker.

The old bureaucrat cannot will the factory to the young gentleman. However, he does not need to. He gives him an opportunity to study (usually only children of bureaucrats can study) and he gets him a good job in the administration. Besides, he wills him his house, his automobile, his furniture, his savings account and state bonds. But the first is more important.

Every year brings new measures for the safeguarding of the bureaucratic succession. Already the majority of the students are again studying at the expense of their parents. High tuition fees have been introduced. There are special schools for the children of bureaucrats (special kindergartens also – class difference begins in the cradle). Workers’ children, as in Germany, are sent to a compulsory labor service. Prolongation of the hours of work, daily waiting in line in front of stores, render private education impossible for the poor. Only the children of the bureaucrats have the means and the possibility of getting the necessary training in order to become bureaucrats. The bureaucracy reproduces itself to an always greater extent and now even preponderantly, from out of its own ranks. It is a class, in the full sense of the word.
 

Incorrect Theory Leads to False Prophecies

In the long run, every theory is put to the test in practice. Incorrect theory leads to false prophecies and to political mistakes. Comrade Trotsky has certainly rendered immense services in the fight against the Russian bureaucracy. He was one of the first who began this fight. He produced masterly critiques of Russian conditions and helped us all to open our eyes. Certainly our present knowedge and analysis of Russian conditions could hardly be possible without his pioneer work. Yet, for some years now, a careful observer could not help but notice that Trotsky’s theory must have a flaw, since the political prognoses that he posed for Russia were not realized.

Throughout the course of its existence, the Russian Left Opposition supported the following point of view: that in Russia there are two basic forces – the bourgeoisie, represented by the “NEP-men” and the kulaks, and the proletariat. The bureaucracy, an unstable stratum, which is not and can never become a class, sways back and forth between them. Only the proletariat or the bourgeoisie can win – the bureaucracy never. Whatever happens, it is condemned to destruction.

You can find this prophecy in a hundred places in Trotsky’s writings. In 1927 he wrote clearly: If the proletariat is not victorious, then the NEP-man and the kulak will devour the bureaucrat.

Things turned out differently. The proletariat was not victorious, but instead became enslaved. But the bureaucrat devoured the NEP-man and the kulak, instead of being devoured by them. And it was no mere accident that the bureaucrat destroyed the older type of exploiters. Planned economy – even under miserable bureaucratic control – is economically more progressive than capitalist anarchy of production; kolkhozes with tractors are superior to small peasant farms with wooden plows. Bureaucratic state economy drives out bourgeois individual enterprise as inexorably as the cartel the outsider. That brute force has its share in speeding up this process, this is as well known from the history of cartels as from the history of state economic enterprises.

But together with the liquidation of the remains of the bourgeoisie (the slaughter of the kulaks), there was taking place, throughout the first Five Year Plan, a complete pauperization and enslavement of the workers and kolkhoz peasants. No, the bureaucracy did not waver between the interests of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat! It liquidated the remains of the bourgeoisie and enslaved the proletariat in its own class interests.

The Russian Opposition did not realize this, because it did not realize that the bureaucracy was developing into a class. This is why it never conceived of the struggle against the bureaucracy as a class struggle, or waged it as such. That is why, for years, the field of its activity was in the CC, the party committees, the Kremlin. That is why it remained, in the eyes of the exploited masses of Russia, a “family affair” of the bureaucrats and was never supported by the workers. That is why, however, even after Stalin’s turn toward the Five Year Plan, there arose in the ranks of the Opposition that terrible confusion which Ciliga so graphically describes in his reminiscences of jail in Russia. While Stalin was completing the enslavement of the working class, his poor victims in the isolators thought he was “now swaying to the left” and was carrying out – even though in a clumsy, adventurous and bureaucratic fashion – the proletarian program! This interpretation was indeed the main cause of many capitulations of that period. If Stalin is indeed carrying out our class program, even though he is doing it badly, are we not justified in hoping he will do it better? – so thought many members of the Opposition. In vain did Trotsky turn against the capitulators with the lash of his sharp criticism. He did not see that his denial of the class struggle between the proletariat and the bureaucracy helped to break the backbone of the Opposition.

Economic and social prognoses were accompanied by political ones. In regard to the internal party situation, didn’t Trotsky says that only the Left or the Right (Bukharin) can win, but never the “Center” (Stalin)? Already in exile, didn’t he propose to Stalin a bloc against Bukharin? Yet it was precisely Stalin who won, he whose victory was “out of the question.”

Did not Trotsky prophecy time and again that if the proletariat did not win the bureaucracy would undergo a change and develop into the bourgeoisie – that is to say, divide up the means of production into private property, change the state trusts into stock companies, etc.? This has not and will not take place. The social counter-revolution in Russia which Trotsky expected has for a long time already been accomplished. It swept into power not the old bourgeoisie with private property, but instead the bureaucracy with its slave state.

Consequently, a social revolution is on the order of the day in Russia. The slogan of a “purely political” revolution is sheer nonsense. Every social revolution is also political – it has to conquer state power. However, a “purely political” revolution means that the old ruling class stays in power, and that only a different group, layer or clique of this same class comes into power (as in the July revolution of 1830).

However, the task of the future revolution in Russia is to expropriate the bureaucracy, to take the means of production away from the bureaucracy and to give them over to the democratically-organized proletariat, to utterly destroy the bureaucratic state apparatus and to replace it with a state of the same type as the Paris Commune – a state without bureaucracy, such as Lenin portrayed in State and Revolution.

“Social counter-revolution or political revolution” – a perspective of these alternatives is just as wrong, and for the same reasons, as the prophecy of 1926 that the kulak will gobble up the bureaucrat. Trotsky always underestimated the bureaucracy. That is why, for such a long time, he conceived of the social revolution against it as a palace revolution (“police measures”). The slogan of “political revolution” is the last fruit of this false policy.
 

Theoretical Roots of the False Theory

What is it that has seduced so many theoreticians, among them outstanding Marxists, into stubbornly closing their eyes to matters of fact? If we overlook emotional causes (we have defended Russia throughout our entire life, and each one of us has freed himself with great difficulty from the beautiful dream) then the basic reason is the conservatism of human thought. We have earned that capitalism is the last antagonistic form of society, the last form of class rule. Only socialism can come after it. For a broad historical perspective and on a world scale this is correct. Capitalism has really developed the productive forces to the point where the world is objectively ripe for socialism and where each and every class rule is superfluous, hence also reactionary. That is why the new class rule in Russia also is so unstable, shaken by such terrible contradictions.

But history, more complicated than the schematic predictions of the best of theoreticians, has taken a peculiar detour and, in backward Russia, so long isolated, has led to the formation of an unstable class rule of the bureaucracy – something that has never existed before. Yet the theoreticians remained stuck in the old dilemma – today we can only have either capitalism or socialism, only a bourgeois or a proletarian class state. That which isn’t socialism had to be capitalism, and vice versa. That something entirely new could exist, this was excluded a priori, and thus the route was barred to the analysis of the new phenomenon. This was the dogma which led Comrade Trotsky to his false conclusions; it was only in his last articles that he gave it up in acknowledging theoretically the possible formation of a “third” class state which is bureaucratically ruled.

However, this dogma of “a priori exclusion of a third possibility” has led some opponents of the theory of the “workers’ state,” as well, to false conclusions. In my opinion, Comrade Johnson is a classic example of this. He proves, passionately and correctly, that Russia of today is not a workers’ state but rather an exploiters’ state. But then he takes a big leap: if this is exploitation, then it must be capitalism. This is what he writes:

Marx’s life work in political economy consisted solely in demonstrating that modern society has only two roads before it; one monopolization of the means of production by a minority, giving rise to internal contradictions, economic and social disorder and bankruptcy or, two, control of the means of production by a majority of the population, i.e., workers, leading to socialism. There is not and cannot be, according to Marx, any other form of society in the modern world.

This is correct to a certain degree. There are indeed only two roads possible for mankind: either the means of production will be in the hands of a minority – this means exploitation, contradictions, disorder, bankruptcy – or the monopoly of the means of production will be abolished and socialism will be introduced. However, the characteristic of the first alternative (monopolization of the means of production, exploitation, contradictions) and not specific characteristics of capitalist society, but rather general characteristics of every class society. Johnson states de facto: today there can only be an exploitive class society or socialism. This is true, but it is no discovery. However, he immediately proceeds to identify every contemporary class society a priori with capitalism. This is false.

Capitalism is a specific form of exploitation, essentially different from other forms of exploitation and class society. The specific characteristics of capitalism are as follows: the wealth of bourgeois society is composed of “commodities,” that is to say, of things that have been produced without plan for the market. The coherence of the economy is left to the blind rule of the market, of the law of value. Labor power has become a commodity; the worker, who is personally free, owns only this one commodity, his labor power, which he sells, in accordance with the law of value, to the capitalist, who owns the means of production; in this process, the capitalist pockets the surplus value.

The law of value and of surplus value no longer applies where products are not commodities and where labor power is no commodity; in this case the means of production are no longer capital in the Marxian sense. Even then there can be monopolistic control over the means of production, there can be exploitation, misery, class contradictions, parasitism (all of which are present in every class society), but it is no longer capitalism.

It is the relation of the basic classes of society to each other, it is the specific form of exploitation which is decisive for judging the specific character of each type of class society. What is peculiar to capitalism? We quote Marx:

In order that the owner of money may find labor power offering itself for sale as a commodity in the market, various conditions must be fulfilled ... Labor power can only make its appearance in the market as a commodity In so far as it is offered for sale or sold as a commodity by its owner, by the person whose labor power it is. But if its owner is to sell it as a commodity, it must be at his own disposal; he must be the actual owner of his capacity for labor, the actual owner of his own person ... [1]

The seller of labor power and the owner of money meet in the market and enter into mutual relations as commodity owners having equal rights, distinguished only by this, that one of them is the buyer and the other a seller, so that they are equal persons in the eye of the law. Such a relation can only persist on the understanding that the owner of labor power sells that labor power for a definite time and no longer; for if he should sell it once and for all, he would sell himself, would change himself from a freeman into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity. As an independent person, he must incessantly cling to his labor power as his own property and therefore as his own commodity; and he can only do this in so far as, when he places his labor power at the disposal of the buyer, he does so for a definite period, and hands over its use only for this period – so that, when alienating his labor power for a time, he does not renounce his proprietary rights in it. [2]

If then, the owner of money is to transform his money into capital, he must find in the commodity market a free worker, free in a double sense. The worker must be able to dispose of his labor power as his own commodity, and on the other hand, he must have no other commodities for sale, must be free from everything that is essential for the realization of his labor power. (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 153, 155.)

Mind you, this is no “chance quotation,” this is no picture of a “chance aspect” of any epoch or form of capitalist society. It is the essence of capitalist exploitation that is being considered. Remove this pillar of Marx’s doctrine of capitalism and the whole structure falls to pieces. For, if the worker is not free in the double Marxian sense of the word – free from means of production and personally free; if he cannot dispose of his labor power as his own (and only) possession, his commodity; if he cannot sell it on the free market; if the price of his labor power (and of other commodities) is fixed, not according to the law of value, but according to government decision for “planned production” – then, in the precise Marxian sense, there is no longer surplus value, there is no longer capital, and not a single word of the Marxian analysis applies. Of course there still is the surplus product, which is appropriated by the exploiters, but there is no surplus value. Of course there is exploitation, but it is not capitalist exploitation.

Comrade Johnson’s mistake is that his definition of capitalism is so broad that all exploitation fits into it and therefore all specific characteristics of capitalism disappear.

In Russia there is no capitalism because there the worker is not free in the double Marxian sense of the word. The worker is deprived of the means of production, but he is not personally free. He does not own his labor power; he cannot sell it on the market. His labor power belongs a priori to the exploiters. The bureaucracy commands where, and under what conditions, it will be applied. The position of the Russian worker calls to mind rather the position of the slave – of a “modern” slave, however, who works, under conditions of a developed economy, in large enterprises, and who belongs, not to one slave owner, but rather to the slave-owning class. This is, in my opinion, the only way a Marxist can characterize Russian society of today.

Incidentally I should like to say that the charges that Marxism is outmoded and the eternal “delimitations” against Marxian “orthodoxy” are nonsense, to put it mildly. It is precisely Marxism, and Marxism alone, that enables us to understand and analyze correctly the new facts. What part of Marxism has shown itself to be outmoded in the light of new experiences? The dialectical method? It is precisely the dialectical method that has helped us to grasp the changes of society in Russia and the turn from quantitative to qualitative changes. Historical materialism? Historical materialism gave us the key for solving the riddle; we have to seek the anatomy, not only of bourgeois, but also of bureaucratic society, in its economy. The doctrine of the class struggle? But it is precisely the class struggle which enables us to comprehend Russian reality. Perhaps Marx’s economic analysis of capitalist society should be revised? Not in the least, in my opinion. It applied excellently to capitalist society and showed with amazing correctness its development and tendencies. You can just as little reproach Marxism that Das Kapital is not applicable to a non-capitalist society as you can reproach zoology because the description of the cat does not fit the dog. That new types of society have arisen which Marx did not and could not foresee, this is as little a fundamental objection to Marxism as the discovery of a new type of animal is a refutation of the Darwinian doctrine.

The real revisionists in our ranks, however, are those who distort the old clear Marxian definitions of “workers’ state” or “capitalism” into their opposites, in order to embrace under these titles completely contrary facts. They are the discoverers of the “counter-revolutionary workers’ state” and “capitalism without commodity production.”
 

Concerning a New Kind of Imperialism ...

The immediate occasion for the split in the American section of the Fourth International was not so much the “theoretical” struggle over the character of the Russian state of today as the practical conflict concerning the character of Stalin’s war against Finland and his annexations in Poland and the Baltic countries. Were these wars progressive, revolutionary, just, or were they reactionary, predatory, unjust? [3] Were these imperialist war?

What do you mean, imperialist? shouted the Cannonites. In his book of the same name, Lenin portrayed imperialism as the last stage of capitalism; what he described there does not apply to Russia, at least not in all characteristics. What a peculiar argument! Because the teacher has given the description of one plant, there can be no others! Because Lenin wrote a book about the imperialism of the epoch of monopoly capital, there can be no others!

Luckily we have an explicit quotation from Lenin concerning different kinds of imperialism and this quotation, already cited by Comrade Shachtman, permits no further distortions:

There have been imperialist wars on the basis of slavery ... as well as in the Middle Ages and in the epoch of mercantile capitalism. Every war in which both belligerent camps are fighting to oppress foreign countries or peoples and for the division of the booty, that is over “who shall oppress more and who shall plunder more,” must be called imperialistic.

Really, this is categorical enough. Every war waged for the exploitation of foreign peoples and for the division of booty must be called imperialistic. Lenin, by the way, called the wars of Napoleon I also imperialistic, despite the fact that Napoleon doubtlessly represented an economy which was progressive at the time.

Of course you can argue that for Lenin the word “imperialistic” had two meanings – a broad one, which we have just cited, used in the sense of “predatory, unjust, rapacious”; and another narrower meaning which expresses a certain type of robbery having all the earmarks of monopoly capital imperialism.

This is correct. However, we must now ask which of these two meanings is decisive for our position toward the war. Are we against imperialistic wars because they are waged for the purpose of exporting capital? And would we support them if the export capital were replaced by a different form of exploitive robbery, for instance, by the direct annexation of foreign territories, by the confiscation of the means of production of those territories, and by the exploitation of the local population through these means of production?

Posing this question in itself already gives us its answer. In the course of the First World War Lenin told the workers: “This is a war of robbers for the division of booty. On the part of all participants it is reactionary and unjust, and you must try to get rid of all the robbers.”

Now Stalin, like all the others, wages wars for the sake of despoiling and robbing foreign countries and for the unprecedented enslaving and exploiting of the local working population. And the Cannonites tell us: We must support this because these thieves rob in a different manner from the imperialists of 1914! But the Nazis also rob “in a different manner” – the methods of imperialist expansion have changed since 1914. It is no longer a question of ensuring the market and exporting capital in the old sense, but rather a question of annexation of Lebensraum, Here the new lords expropriate the means of production and let the populace work for them as slaves!

To sum up: according to Lenin’s point of view, imperialist policy was possible in every class society. Therefore it is also possible in a society directed by a bureaucratic class. Here too this policy has economic causes. The occupied territories and annexed peoples are exploited in the interests of the ruling bureaucracy of the mother country. Into the coffers of this ruling bureaucracy flows the surplus product of the work of the oppressed peoples. Wars of such an exploiting state are waged over “who shall oppress and who shall plunder more.” They are reactionary and unjust. They must be changed into a civil war against one’s own bureaucracy.
 

... And a New Peculiar Social Patriotism

Another argument habitually employed to combat our views stated above: If in Russia there is not a socialist system, nonetheless there we have a “progressive” social system. Therefore we have to defend it against backward capitalism.

This argument is seductive, but not correct. We have to differentiate between societies which have attained a progressive level from a purely economic point of view and those historically progressive. Germany, with its trusts and its “war economy” has doubtlessly progressed farther, from the purely economic point of view, than England. Is it perhaps a reason for defending it?

Italian society, as compared with that of Ethiopia, was at a level 2,000 years more “progressive.” In the Italian-Ethiopian war, should we have been for Italy and against Ethiopia?

From the purely economic point of view, it will most likely be easier, after the revolution, to take over Russian planned economy than the economy of a capitalist country with free competition. Trusts and cartels, also, in this sense, are more progressive than the former economic forms. Do we therefore defend a country with trusts against a country without trusts?

No, indeed; economic “progress” cannot alone determine our position. We are guided by historic progressiveness. And what is progressive in that epoch where the world is objectively ripe for socialism? Everything that weakens imperialism and brings closer the socialist revolution. That is why we consider as progressive the anti-imperialist fight of oppressed, though “retarded” people. Only please don’t forget that among these are the Ukrainians, the White Russians, the Kirgiz, the Tartars and the Uzbeks. But have we not already heard these arguments that we must defend the “higher economic order,” “economic progress,” “huge modern economic enterprises” against the “sentimental demands of small peoples” and against “backward economic forms”?

Oh yes, indeed! They are the typical arguments of the German social-patriots of 1914, of the Lenschs, and Legiens, against whom Lenin polemized so often.

There are still nicer arguments. Whoever does not want to defend Russian helps the enemy. Would it not be a disaster should Germany utterly defeat and occupy Russia? Of course it would be a disaster. Another disaster would be Stalin’s occupation of all of Europe. We are against both these disasters. We desire neither Stalin’s nor Hitler’s victory. We desire the defeats of both and the victory of the proletarian revolution in both countries.

He who is for the defeat of Stalin and at the same time for the victory of imperialist Germany is no internationalist, but rather a German social-patriot, even though he live in Russia and be born in Jerusalem.

However, he who is for the defeat of Hitler and at the same time for the victory of imperialist Russia is a Russian social-patriot. The only true internationalist is he who works for the defeat of all the imperialists.

To accuse the war opponents of “helping the enemy,” however, is a typical social-patriotic argument.

Perhaps some tender souls will protest against the insult of “social-patriotism.” I do not like insults – not even “scientific” ones, but I cannot help it: the standpoint of the “defenders” of the Russian “workers’ state” is social-patriotism.

What are the earmarks of social-patriotism as a political tendency? First of all, it suppresses the given class contradictions. The “workers’ statists” not only suppress class contradictions in Russia, they even deny their existence. Secondly, social-patriotism preaches defense of the fatherland in a reactionary war. This is precisely what the “workers’ statists” do in the case of Russia. I have shown a few of their typically social-patriotic arguments. Do I need also to show how they seek to justify Stalin’s annexation of foreign peoples by calling on “strategical reasons” – in the manner of the worst of chauvinists? This is truly sickening.

You can say that there is not one single Russian among these “defenders of the Soviet Russia.” This is of course of importance from the subjective point of view. For these people are not chauvinistically propelled, rather are they politically blind. But today we see many English social-patriots who hail from Berlin, Hamburg, Breslau. Almost the entire German emigration is composed of such people. They are mostly uphappy and confused people, but we must nonetheless fight against their views.

I am, however, firmly convinced that the future workers’ international cannot be founded on the basis of any kind of social-patriotism, neither of the English, nor of German, nor the Russian variety. That is why in my opinion the split was inevitable – and that is why my polemic is so sharp. This is a question concerning the fate of the revolutionary workers’ movement.


Footnotes

1. Here Marx puts a characteristic footnote: “In classical dictionaries we find such nonsense as the assertion that in the ancient world capital was fully developed, except that the free worker and the credit system were lacking.” Note that capital without free workers means nonsense to Marx!

2. Here another footnote says: “... In various countries, especially in Mexico, slavery is hidden away under the form of peonage. By means of advances, repayable in labor, advances handed down from generation to generation, not only the individual laborer, but his family as well, become, for practical purposes, the property of other persons and their families.”

3. Should anyone be morally indignant at the introduction of the “moral concept” of a “just war,” I call his attention to the fact that this is originally Lenin’s expression.

 
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