What is Marxism?

Author

Dell

What is Marxism?

Contrary to mainstream belief, Marxism is not the nasty accusation that Marxists are rabid, Eurocentric, fascist, extremist, violent, lazy, crazy, zealous people chasing an unachievable goal; people who want to “share toothbrushes”; or crazed revolutionaries intent on overthrowing the government into pure anarchy, forcing everyone into long bread lines and mass starvation. Nor is it “jealous” people calling for violence against anyone making six figures, or against anyone who is simply “trying to get rich.” Marxism is quite the opposite; let’s just get that out of the way, okay? It is not hatred of success, wealth, or ordinary workers trying to survive under capitalism. It is, however, the rejection of—and opposition to—exploitation by billionaires and the system of capitalism.

On the other hand, Communism is the principle that no one, in a world filled with abundance, should be without housing, clothing, water, food, education, healthcare, and the other basic necessities required to sustain human life and society. The difference between a communist and a Marxist is that Marxists also believe these things are human rights and should be guaranteed, but we differ in the fact that we adhere to the study of socialist science to achieve them. This typically means dedicating most of our lives to reading books, writing theory, articles, polemics, and organizing. Most people, if you asked them whether they believed in these same principles related to communism, without even mentioning the word communism, would say yes. So why are we called crazy for such a rational belief?

These lies are not based on any concrete truth or rationale; they are intentional, systemic propaganda. They are foolish myths produced by the conditioning of capitalist society to keep workers from questioning their reality and gaining the confidence to make a change. Capitalist society wants workers to keep accepting crumbs, stuck in a two-party system that commits genocide, war crimes, and oppression against the most marginalized people in its society. They want workers to remain docile and complacent as the world burns around them, as the cost of living rises, the climate crisis worsens, living standards decline, children’s futures dim, wages fall and stagnate, workers lose their jobs, and we lose human touch, love, and care for one another—along with access to long, hard-fought rights: voting rights, healthcare, education, and destiny. As Tupac, the famous rapper, put it: they always have money for war, but never for the poor.

It is for these very reasons that Marxism was created.

Marxism started as a philosophy by working-class people—people just like you and me—who walked outside, put their hands on their hips, looked to the left and right, and realized that their material conditions were not acceptable. How can there be wealthy people at the top with all of the privileges and basic necessities that humans need to survive, while people at the bottom starve, go hungry, cold, homeless, and suffer? Why couldn’t this wealth be shared?

Marxists understand it to be a revolutionary philosophy above all else—revolutionary meaning it is meant to revolutionize the world by bringing in a change of the world itself. Its philosophical roots stretch back through the development of human thought, drawing influence from ancient Greece, the Enlightenment era, and even older communal forms of social organization that existed long before capitalism.

Prior to capitalism, collective survival, shared labor, and communal relations existed throughout many societies across the world long before Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were born. Examples of this can be found in societies such as the Vai people of Liberia, who developed one of Africa’s indigenous writing systems, the Igbo people of pre-colonial West Africa, the Akan people, the indigenous Dakota people, the Indigenous Taíno, and countless other communal societies throughout human history.

What Marx and Engels did was not invent the idea of communal living itself, but transform communism from a moral dream and utopian ideal into a scientific analysis of history, society, class struggle, and material development. They attempted to explain not merely why humans desired equality and cooperation, but how social systems develop historically, why class society emerged, and under what material conditions capitalism itself could eventually be overcome.

Karl Marx’s vision for communism was ultimately a society that would be a return to the indigenous communalistic societies but at a higher form. This society would come only after the successful overthrow of capitalism and the transition into socialism, which then would eventually transform into communism. He called it scientific socialism.

In fact, some of the greatest thinkers you may have heard of in school influenced Marxism, even if you never really heard Karl Marx’s name, or only heard it in passing (know that this was intentional of course).

But truth be told, “Marxists are rabid” was never the worst lie. The worst lie told by the ruling class was that Marxism had no place among Indigenous people, Black people, Brown people, Latinos, Asians, and Indians; that to engage with Marxist theory was to consume nothing more than Eurocentrism. So they say. This, of course, was also intentional and propaganda. Historically, it has benefited the ruling class to keep the most oppressed people away from this ideology in order to maintain their position of power in society. The great Black Guyanese Marxist Walter Rodney spoke on this deceit in the late 1960s and 1970s:

“The earliest answers – answers suggested by the colonial powers themselves – were quite simple. They said to Third World peoples: Marxism–Leninism or Scientific Socialism or Communism has absolutely no relevance to your needs and interests. Indeed, this ideology would be completely inimical to your needs and interests. The colonial powers, their spokesmen and ideologies simply said, in effect, that Marxism was not good for the natives; that this was not a vision of the world which should be incorporated into the way in which colonial peoples saw themselves, saw their societies, and saw the world outside. And this was consistent with their position of power. Colonialism sought to ensure that colonized peoples should not wage effective nationalist struggles. They were opposed in the early years, even to the expression of nationalism. So, it follows that they were all the more bitter, all the more concerned to oppose that brand of nationalism which was enlivened by Marxist thought which went beyond saying that we are determined to have independence, but that we are also determined to build a new society which is completely different from the capitalist society we have inherited. And it is generally true that while colonialists were hostile towards Marxists inside of their own countries, they were doubly hostile to Marxism and to Marxists who might appear in India, in parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.” [1]

This hostility was expressed through some of the most violent measures imaginable, such as the assassination of Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, by the Chicago police on December 4, 1969. Officers working alongside the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office raided Hampton’s apartment and shot him dead. Between 82 and 99 shots were fired, all by the police. Only a single shot was discharged by Mark Clark as he lay bleeding to death on the floor.

Hampton’s blood-soaked mattress at 2337 W. Monroe Credit: Paul Sequeira / Chicago Reader

This violence was authorized and encouraged through the state’s COINTELPRO program, headed by J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program targeted Black liberation groups, socialists, antiwar activists, and civil rights organizations because the ruling class could not allow communist ideology, expressions of Black nationalism, and a Marxist-Leninist organization to spread its ideology while building free breakfast programs, community kitchens, educational initiatives, and systems of mutual aid.

Figure X. Members of the Black Panther Party. Source: Photograph by Stephen Shames.

They could not allow the Panthers to demonstrate class solidarity; Fred Hampton had shown it was possible to bring young working-class Americans together from all races and backgrounds through his Rainbow Coalition, and that there was indeed another way to live; that human beings were not born racist, sexist, or inherently evil. Rather, these social behaviors were shaped and reproduced by the capitalist system we live under.

Seattle Black Panther party standing out of the Washington State Capitol building in Olympia, Washington in relation to the gun ban. Photo courtesy of the State Governors’ Negative Collection, 1949-1975, Washington State Archives. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Even before then, in the 1940s, during the height of the Great Depression and the closing years of World War II, the Fifth Pan-African Congress was convened. Roughly 200 scientific socialists, anti-imperialist, anti-colonialists, and Marxists attended, including intellectuals and revolutionaries such as C. L. R. James, George Padmore, Kwame Nkrumah, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wallace Johnson, Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Jomo Kenyatta, Dudley Thompson, Hastings Banda, Peter Abrahams, Ako Adjei, Jaja Wachuku, Ras Makonnen, and W. Alphaeus Hunton. Organizations such as the International African Service Bureau and the Council on African Affairs were also represented. Trade unions and labor organizations had a particularly strong presence at the congress, reflecting the growing connection between anti-colonial struggle and working-class organization.

Pan-African Congress Program 1923 Source: Wikimedia Commons

Women of African descent played a major role in organizing Pan-African movements. A group of twenty-one Black women were among the principal organizers of the Fourth Pan-African Congress held in New York in 1927. Many belonged to an organization known as the Circle of Peace and Foreign Relations. Dorothy Hunton, president of the organization, remained deeply involved in Pan-African struggles for years afterward.

Delegates for 4th Pan African Congress in New York 1927, includes Beatrice Cannady, civil rights activist from Oregon, 4th from the left Source: Wikimedia Commons

The objectives of Pan-Africanism during this period centered around the total liberation and political unification of Africa, directly tied to visions of scientific socialism and anti-imperialism. Pan-Africanism emerged as a revolutionary response to the dispossession, exploitation, colonization, and attempted destruction of Black and African peoples across the globe. There has always been an expression of communalism, collectivism, and socialist thought on the African continent, even before many Africans formally encountered Marxism itself.

“The Fifth Pan-African Congress greets the heroic struggles of the thirteen million people of African descent in the United States in their fight to secure the rights of full citizenship, political, economic and social. Africans and peoples of African descent throughout the world will continue to support their Afro-American brothers in their fight for their rights by intelligent organised planning, legal contention and political pressure. This Congress endorses Afro-American opposition to unequal distribution of wealth, the rule of wealth and the conduct of industry solely for private profit. This Congress supports- the attitude of Afro-Americans in offering- to unite their effort with trade union labour. This Congress believes that the successful realisation of the political, economic and social aspirations of the thirteen million people in the United States is bound up with the emancipation of all African peoples, as well as other dependent people and the working class everywhere. - George Padmore, ed., History of the Pan-African Congress [2]

While it is true that Karl Marx was a man of his time, living during the nineteenth century, just as we ourselves are products of our own historical conditions today and layers of the working class, despite their race, believe in all sort of backward and harmful notions, it is also true that Marx lived within a deeply racist capitalist society and at times reflected some of the prejudiced assumptions and language of that era. Yet despite these limitations, Marx was an outspoken opponent of slavery, colonialism, and the Confederate slave system in the American Civil War.

In Capital: Volume I, Marx wrote:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population… the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of capitalist production.” [3]

Here Marx directly explained how capitalism itself emerged through slavery, colonialism, genocide, and the exploitation of African and Indigenous peoples. Marx laid the analytical groundwork showing how race and capitalism developed together historically. These analyses became useful in developing racial capitalism theory even further.

Marx also famously wrote:

“Labor in the white skin cannot emancipate itself where labor in the black skin is branded.” [4]

What Marx meant was that white workers could never truly achieve liberation while Black people remained oppressed, enslaved, and treated as less than human. The oppression of Black labor ultimately weakens and divides the working class as a whole.

The importance of Marx however does not ultimately rest upon whether he was personally flawless or free from all the contradictions of his historical period. The significance of Marx lies in the validity of the scientific method he helped develop. As Huey P. Newton explained:

“You do not believe in the conclusions of one person but in the validity of a mode of thought; and we in the Party, as dialectical materialists, recognize Karl Marx as one of the great contributors to that mode of thought. Whether or not Marx was a racist is irrelevant and immaterial to whether or not the system of thinking he helped develop delivers truths about processes in the material world…” [5]

Likewise, Assata Shakur reflected on her own relationship to Marxist theory:

“Usually, after a disagreement, they [my comrades] suggested I read this or that, often Marx, Lenin, or Engels. I preferred Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che, or Fidel, but I ended up having to get into Marx and Lenin just to understand a lot of the speeches and stuff Huey Newton was putting out. It wasn’t easy reading, but I was glad I did it. It opened up my horizons a hell of a lot. I didn’t relate to them as the great white fathers or like some kind of gods, like some of the white revolutionaries did. As far as I was concerned, they were two dudes who had made contributions to revolutionary struggle too great to be ignored.” [6]

What both Huey P. Newton and Assata Shakur were emphasizing is that Marxism is not about worshipping individuals as flawless prophets or saints. Marxism is not theologian dogma! Engels himself consistently said to never take their work as such.

“Our theory is not a dogma, but a guide to action.” — Friedrich Engels, Letter to Sorge (1886)

Of course, if a person’s politics are genuinely reactionary, oppressive, or harmful, those contradictions will inevitably reveal themselves in both their theory and practice, and revolutionaries should always reject such politics with the utmost disgust and wage a political struggle against them. But the validity and correctness of the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky simply cannot be ignored; they are fundamental to successfully engaging in class struggle. Reading other radical revolutionaries is a good start, but one should always supplement this work with the foundational texts to expand their horizon and resolve any contradictions in their logic. It will truly make one a better revolutionary.

This example can be seen through figures such as Amílcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau, who helped lead his country to independence by organizing Black Africans around both national liberation and Marxist ideas. He quite literally popped the enemies from the bushes. You see, Cabral understood the validity and correctness of Marxism and its usefulness to the conditions of Guinea-Bissau. He understood that colonialism and imperialism were the direct result of the capitalist system and that genuine liberation required educating workers, organizing on the ground, and arming the working class with a strong theory.

Portrait of Amilcar Cabral, wearing the sumbia - traditional skullcap [presumably during the Cassacá Congress, freed from the southern region of Guinea] Source: Wikimedia Commons

Walter Rodney also stands among the greatest Black Marxists ever produced. He further extended the legacy of Marxism through his analysis of capitalism in Africa, the slave trade, colonialism, and underdevelopment. His works, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and his magnum opus, Decolonial Marxism, challenged the narrative that Africa was never developed and instead demonstrated through the concrete use of the Marxist method how colonialism actively disrupted and distorted the continent's development.

Figure X. Walter Rodney. Source: Walter Rodney Foundation.

There was also C.L.R. James, author of The Black Jacobins, the greatest work ever written on the Haitian Revolution. James was a friend and mentor to Walter Rodney, helped build Pan-African movements on the ground, and worked to connect the struggles of Black people to the broader international struggle of the working class. Alongside Leon Trotsky, he helped develop a program for organizing Black people around Marxist theory. CLR James continues to influence even the Sankofa Communist Party today.

CLR James 1983, Source: Wikimedia Commons

CLR James and Ernest R. McKinney (David Coolidge), together with members of the Workers Party in St. Louis, helped organize Black sharecroppers and tractor drivers in the cotton fields of southeast Missouri. Their efforts resulted in significant gains in wages and working conditions and demonstrated once again how concretely applying the Marxist method could help advance the struggle of poor Black people. They were also able to unite poor Whites alongside poor Blacks to advance this struggle.

There was even Evelyn Reed, a woman of color, a staunch Marxist, and a feminist whose books, Woman's Evolution and Problems of Women's Liberation Today, remain a treasure trove for anyone seeking to understand the women's movement from a Marxist perspective. Reed showed how the rise of class society, private property, and the family transformed the position of women and laid the basis for their oppression. She also pointed out that the lack of class analysis in the women's movement was going to lead to problems in the future, as of today, she was correct, as anybody can call themselves a feminist, including Zionists!

Evelyn Reed, Source: Marxist Internet Archive

There was also Claudia Jones, a Black communist woman and one of the most important Marxists of the twentieth century. She was a leading organizer in the Communist Party USA, founded Britain's first major Black newspaper, and was the pioneer behind intersectionality, connecting race, class, and gender oppression, which would later influence generations of revolutionaries.

Claudia Jones, secretary of the Women's Commission of the National Communist Party, is pictured in New York City, Jan. 22, 1948. (AP Photo/Anthony Camerano) Source: Wikimedia Commons

There was also Mao, who used Marxist methods to lead the Chinese Revolution, and in 1949 the revolution achieved victory. Under Mao, China finally freed itself from centuries of humiliation. Marxists today defend the Chinese Revolution. Alongside him, his counterpart, Ho Chi Minh, played a central role in leading the Vietnamese in overthrowing French colonial rule.

Lastly, there was Lucy Parsons, a Black communist woman, labor organizer, and founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World, which was one of the largest labor unions in America in the early 1900s. She dedicated her life to organizing workers and fighting capitalism. She was also the wife of Albert Parsons, one of the labor leaders executed following the Haymarket Affair, a struggle that became a powerful symbol of the fight for the eight-hour workday, improved working conditions, and labor rights throughout the United States.

Photograph of American labor organizer Lucy Parsons, taken in New York in 1886. Source: Wikimedia Commons

These individuals were not exceptions to Marxism. They were products of Marxism. They took the methods developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky and applied them to the concrete conditions of their own time. Their contributions demonstrate that Marxism was never simply a European philosophy. It became a living method used by oppressed people across the world to understand and change their conditions. It’s played a major role in anti-colonial struggles, Black liberation struggles, Indigenous resistance movements, labor movements, and revolutionary movements throughout the world. From Africa, Asia, and Latin America to the Black radical tradition within the United States itself, oppressed peoples have repeatedly utilized Marxism not because Marx was a perfect man, but because dialectical and historical materialism and Marxist economics provided tools capable of explaining exploitation, imperialism, racism, class society, and the struggle for liberation.

Marxism itself has never and never will be dependent upon the personal perfection of Karl Marx as an individual. Marxism is a scientific method independent even of Marx himself. It is a universal method for understanding motion, contradiction, class society, and material reality, capable of being applied by anyone regardless of nationality, race, gender, or historical background.

The other threat that bothers the ruling class, that keeps them up in the wee hours of the night, is that they have never been able to fully destroy Marxism. They cannot stand the very fact that these ideas were tested on October 1917 in Russia by the Bolsheviks, specifically Vladimir Lenin, who conjured the electric forces of the masses into his theoretical spear and hurled it swiftly into the heart of the bourgeoisie. Soon after, the United States, United Kingdom, France, and 11 other Western-backed imperialist countries attacked Russia and were defeated by the Red Guard, led by Leon Trotsky — a skilled Marxist and military general. For the ruling classes of the world, this was a historic shock: a largely poor and underdeveloped country had overthrown its old order and survived a coordinated international assault. This defeat sent ripple effects across the world. Soon Marxism was finding itself in every continent, in every language, in the hands of every worker across the world. In many American classrooms, this intervention is mentioned only briefly, if at all, because it complicates the popular narrative that Western powers have always stood for democracy and self-determination.

Lenin and the original Bolsheviks, once in power, took things a step further. They legalized and expanded women's rights, established equal voting rights for women and men, expanded access to education and employment, introduced maternity benefits and workplace protections for pregnant workers, and promoted the expansion of childcare, communal kitchens, and public laundries to help socialize domestic labour.

Figure X. Vladimir Lenin speaking in Red Square, Moscow, May 5, 1919. Source: Public domain photograph, Wikimedia Commons.

Divorce and abortion were legalized, making Soviet Russia the first country in the world to legalize abortion on a national scale. LGBT people also saw major advances as the old Tsarist laws criminalizing homosexuality were abolished. The Bolsheviks separated church and state, established freedom of religion under the law, and removed many of the legal privileges previously enjoyed by religious institutions.

They also expanded rights for children. The distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children was abolished, giving all children equal legal status regardless of the circumstances of their birth.

For workers, the Bolsheviks implemented the eight-hour workday, expanded trade union rights, introduced workers' control in industry, and established social insurance programs. These measures represented some of the most advanced social legislation in the world at the time.

Many of the social reforms that people today associate with welfare states, labor protections, and social equality were accelerated internationally because ruling classes feared the example set by the Russian Revolution. The achievements of the Bolsheviks demonstrated that a society could provide rights and protections that had previously been considered impossible.

Even with the mistakes of Marxism under Joseph Stalin—who deviated from the positions of Lenin, Engels, Trotsky, and Marx, all of whom maintained that socialism could not be fully built in one country—the short-lived success of the Soviet Union was irrefutable.

After Lenin’s death, Stalin inherited the planned economy, a system in which workers participate in the direct planning of the economy and the productive forces are organized around human need, rather than profit. Even under the weight of an increasingly bureaucratic state, the Soviet Union demonstrated that socialism possessed a scientific and material basis. Yet by this period, the Bolshevik bureaucracy had become bloated, (Lenin had prior tried to reduce it’s size but was already slowly dying due to illness brought on by stress) they largely abandoned the genuinely internationalist foundations of Marxism and moved toward totalitarian Bonapartism rule, and workers were removed from the planning of the economy, workers’ democracy was rolled back, LGBT rights were rolled back and women's rights were rolled back, despite this never having been the wishes of Lenin or the vision of Marx, Engels, and Trotsky. It is today that the haters of Marxism try to spin this mistake by Stalin as some sort of “gotcha” for why communism cannot work, despite communists themselves having debated and struggled against the policies of Stalin for years in an attempt to place Marxism back onto its correct path. Because of Stalin's influence, this same action was undertaken under leaders like Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Fidel Castro, their reasons being that LGBT and women's sexual freedom were “western inventions”, which was due to the lack of scientific clarity and no more genuine Bolsheviks to guide them in the right direction. Marxists are supposed to be for freedom from all oppression. This is the stance that Marx, Engels, Lenin, the original Bolsheviks, and Trotsky always held.

Trotsky addressing soldiers of Red Army during Polish-Soviet War. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Furthermore, the conditions in Russia after the war and the failure of the Germans (who were the most technologically advanced nation at that time) to overthrow capitalism in their own country placed Russia between a rock and a hard place. The peasantry vastly outnumbered the proletariat; Marx always said that the proletariat had to be the ones to lead the revolution due to their direct relationship with wage slavery, industrial and administrative knowledge, and their closeness with each other, in their workplace.

Industry in Russia had also been devastated due to the war against the imperialist nations. What is commercial airplanes to us today, is what the train was to Russia. Because trains got destroyed in the war, they were not able to even transport food and things people needed. Imagine not being able to get deliveries no more? Imagine the United States not being able to ship food on planes anymore? That is how dire the situation had became due to the war. On top of all of this, Lenin had died, and the country was being consumed by food shortages and economic crisis. Under these pressures, the Bolshevik bureaucracy split and increasingly sided with Joseph Stalin in a desperate attempt to preserve both Russia and their own position as Bolsheviks. Stalin then pitched the two-stage theory that Russia had to pass through capitalism first to get to socialism and that collaboration with the nationalist bourgeoisies was needed for this because Russia was too underdeveloped.

As Marx has said:

Men must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history.’ But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. [7]

In response, the Left Opposition, led by Leon Trotsky, was formed by members of the original Bolsheviks to continue along what they believed to be the genuine road of Marxism. Trotsky nevertheless believed that combating the opportunists within the Bolshevik Party, removing careerists, restoring workers’ democracy, implementing a New Economic Policy based on collective ownership, and continuing the revolution internationally after rebuilding Russia was the correct thing to do and that passing through capitalism was not necessary. After all, science had already shown that the world doesn’t develop linearly but uneven and combined, so therefore they could skip capitalism and arrive at socialism.

The opposition unfortunately could not succeed under the material conditions facing Russia at the time, even with the correct ideas. When people are hungry, cold, homeless, exhausted from war, and struggling simply to survive, continuing an international revolution becomes the last thing on their minds. The Bolshevik bureaucracy itself had lost its spine and was not equipped to handle the immense pressures that war, famine, economic collapse, and isolation had placed upon.

Ultimately, the Left Opposition was expelled, murdered and suppressed under Stalin’s control.

These two camps would go on to wage political struggle and ideological debate against one another for decades until Stalin had Trotsky murdered August 21, 1940. To this day, Joseph Stalin remains one of the most controversial political figures in modern history: dictator or hero? Likewise, Trotsky’s legacy remains fiercely debated and often obscured: sectarian, or one of the last defenders of genuine Marxism? Nonetheless do not be drawn into this foolish stan war if you do ever come across it. It is counterproductive to our job of building revolution.

Whilst under Stalin, the Soviet Union made some great achievements. Russia was rapidly transformed into a global industrial and scientific power in just two decades! Stalin accomplished this by implementing the new economic policies worked out by Lenin and Trotsky prior to. In just a short amount of time, it turned around from a backward peasant country to a global industrial giant. Soviet science advanced significantly in areas such as physics, engineering, aviation, and later space technology. The industrial foundation built during Stalin’s period later contributed to Soviet achievements like the launch of Sputnik 1. However, history would later vindicate one of the central warnings advanced by Trotsky through his theory of permanent revolution: that socialism cannot survive in isolation indefinitely if the working class never has democratic control but instead it’s left the hands of a bureaucracy. It must be an internationalist global project. As global capitalism expands and nations become increasingly dependent upon world trade, a lone socialist state becomes vulnerable to immense economic, political, and military pressure from imperialist powers. Trotsky warned that isolated workers’ states could eventually degenerate or collapse back into capitalism under these conditions.

Joseph Stalin and a Dog named Mika, Source: Wikimedia Commons

In many ways, history reflects these contradictions today. Countries such as Cuba, Russia, Vietnam, China, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela have all faced sanctions, economic warfare, coups, destabilization campaigns, or imperialist violence. Yet they have also developed their own internal contradictions.

In Venezuela, private industry has re-emerged despite the resistance of working-class Venezuelans. An activist from Sifontes spoke to Reuters:

Maria De Los Angeles Ramirez Venezuela hopes to lure back international miners, but it's a risky business

Even if foreign mining companies were able to establish themselves in Bolivar, some activists and residents said they still worry about the impact on communities and what foreign presence would mean for the livelihoods of small-scale and informal miners, including the region's Indigenous groups. “You have to put the term ‘benefit’ in quotation marks — who benefits? Because the same state that negotiates and seeks investors forgets all the problems that exist," said Italo Pizarro, an activist from Sifontes municipality, who said Indigenous communities could face particular risks. [8]

In China, overseas investment and labor abuse practices increasingly resemble forms of imperialist expansion. Human rights groups like Amnesty International have called out labor abuses by Chinese mining companies,

Amnesty International Chinese mining industry contributes to abuses in Democratic Republic of the Congo

“in July 2024, the then-newly-elected Governor of the South Kivu Province, Professor Jean-Jacques Purusi, shared alarming revelations during his first weeks in office, stating that he found more than 450 illegal Chinese mining companies operating in the territory of the South Kivu Province alone. In territories with mining operations, the rate of severe malnutrition among children under five years old is high, many children are out of school, there is an unbearable degradation of water ecosystems, and the rainforest is being washed out.” - Amani Matabaro Tom [9]

Iran remains trapped under a deeply repressive religious state that has committed severe abuses against its own people, even while rightfully so resisting Western imperial domination. Russia, now under the rule of Vladimir Putin, wages war against Ukrainians while denying aspects of their national self-determination and identity. Cuba has been under a U.S. trade embargo for 64 years. Despite this, they have still been able to make great achievements in literacy rates and healthcare technology, but as of today, they have been facing nationwide blackouts created by the United States government. Due to the sanctions, its government has folded and has accepted the reopening of Cuba to private capital. In North Korea, humans remain largely isolated from the rest of the world, and there are also whispers of human rights violations.

All of these contradictions are then presented to the world as proof that “communism cannot work.” Yet communism cannot succeed if its international mission is abandoned. Internationalism is at the very heart of Marxism. The international proletariat is supposed to be free from all exploitation and isms. This includes all Women, Men, Queers and Children. There is a fundamental contradiction between having prosperity for your country but not for the children of Congo, Sudan, and Palestine. Do their lives not matter as well? Do they not deserve freedom as well? Marx understood that capitalism itself was moving towards a global system, and therefore, socialism ultimately must become global as well. As of today, no communist country exists on earth and never has, as communism means a moneyless, stateless, classless society. This distortion of labeling any country that nationalizes industries as "communist" is another deceitful tactic used to reduce working-class hopes in socialism. Nationalization of industry is, rightfully so, a socialist creation, but nationalization alone does not create socialism. It is only one part of the process and, by itself, can exist under many different systems. A government can nationalize railways, banks, oil companies, or other industries while workers themselves still have little to no direct control over society. Socialism, as Marx understood it, truly begins when the working class exercises direct democratic control over the state and the economy. This takes place through workers' councils and other democratic organs where workers from their workplaces and communities are directly involved in running society, rather than leaving power in the hands of a small layer of politicians, unelected officials, democrats, or a bureaucracy standing above the working class. This is why Marx called for the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, which essentially means the unbreakable domination of working-class people.

Enemies of Marxism will often distort and claim that Marx was calling for tyranny, and totalitarianism is inherent and inevitable within Marxism itself, but this is a falsehood. As this article will show, many of the totalitarian features people associate with communism arose not from the genuine ideas of Marxism, but from the political ideas and economic policies carried out under Stalin.

By contrasting Stalin's beliefs with the actual writings and ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and other Marxists, we can begin to separate myth from reality and understand where these ideas truly diverged. We shall stick to the clear facts on this matter.

Science in Revolution

When Marxists refer to “advanced countries,” they do not mean morally or intellectually superior peoples, but rather countries with the most advanced industrial development and concentration of productive forces. Marx had scientifically worked out that socialism emerging first within the most industrially developed countries would create the strongest material basis for a global socialist transformation. If socialism triumphed in one of these advanced countries, revolution elsewhere might become unnecessary. But if it failed to spread into the advanced capitalist centers, then the revolution would need to continue internationally until it reached them. These were the genuinely internationalist foundations of Marxism.

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Marx's and daughters: Jenny Caroline (1844–1883), Jenny Julia Eleanor (1855–1898) and Jenny Laura (1845–1911), Source: Wikimedia Commons

Looking back into the past—because that is what we do at Sankofa—during the period when communism ideology spread throughout much of the world, by revolutions and uprisings, from the 1900s through the 1960s, countries such as China, Russia, and Cuba stood out like a sore thumb to the bourgeoisie. The ruling class watched in confusion and fear as colonized and impoverished peoples began reorganizing society outside the logic of capitalism.

How could such “backward countries” (in the eyes of the bourgeoisie) achieve such an enormous historical breakthrough? Because revolution, like every serious transformation of society, requires science.

When it comes to systems, every data point must be researched, studied, hypothesized, tested, failed, retried, and reworked before success can emerge. That is the essence of science. Hegel called it the science of logic, for truth is not final but a living reality. It moves through contradictions, deaths, processes, and transformations before arriving at a higher truth than the one that came before it.

When humans first attempted to build airplanes, they crashed repeatedly. Each failure sent them back to the drawing board to revise, rethink, and improve their designs. The next flight would travel farther yet still end in failure. But through continuous experimentation, refinement, and persistence, they eventually succeeded in 1903.

We must treat revolution in the same way: as a living, breathing science. Revolution is not blind chaos nor pure emotion. It is a process of study, experimentation, contradiction, failure, adaptation, and development. We must learn from the past mistakes of the communists before us. You don’t just give up on something because it didn’t work the first time. You keep trying until you succeed. There is reason in revolution.

Marxism is built upon this scientific approach. Karl Marx was not simply a writer. He was a historian, economist, theoretician, and rigorous student of human society. His ideas did not fall from the sky; they emerged from a deep study of philosophy, political economy, history, and the scientific developments of his time. These were the general requirements of what it would take to build out the blueprint for a new society. He studied familiar figures such as Charles Darwin, who showed that species evolve over time through natural processes, completely reshaping how we understand life itself. Then there is Adam Smith, the father of modern economics. (When we Marxists use the term modern, we simply mean when human existence took the leap from being primarily agriculturalists to being heavily involved with machines and modern industry. ) His book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is still regarded as a foundational text for understanding the relationship between society, politics, commerce, and prosperity.

The first is to look at Marxism, as a methodology, because a methodology would, virtually by definition, be independent of time and place. You will use the methodology at any given time, at any given place. You may get different results, of course, but the methodology itself would be independent of time and place. - Walter Rodney [10]

You also have Baruch Spinoza, who challenged the authority of the church and helped push forward rational thought, ethics, and modern philosophy. And long before them, Heraclitus the Greek philosopher was the first to give a clear expression to dialectics.

Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed” [11]

Soon after him would be Aristotle; who further developed dialectics and formal logic, biology, and pioneered studies in ethics, politics, physics, and metaphysics.

Marxism draws from all of these thinkers and historical periods—it builds on top of it, critiques it, and pushed it further.

This new blueprint for society would eventually be what Marx gave his life to deliver to us: his magnum opus, Das Kapital. Today, we celebrate these achievements and continue to forge the path towards revolution. Marxism is a part of a long intellectual tradition, one that takes the world seriously enough to study it, understand it, and ultimately change it.

In many respects, when we ask the question today about the relevance of Marxism to black people, we have already reached a minority position, as it were. Many of those engaged in the debate present the debate as though Marxism is a European phenomenon and black people responding to it must of necessity be alienated because the alienation of race must enter into the discussion. They seem not to take into account that already that methodology and that ideology have been utilized, internalized, domesticated in large parts of the world that are not European. That it is already the ideology of eight hundred million Chinese people; that it is already the ideology which guided the Vietnamese people to successful struggle and to the defeat of imperialism. That it is already the ideology which allows North Korea to transform itself from a backward, quasi-feudal, quasi- colonial terrain into an independent, industrial power. That it is already the ideology which has been adopted on the Latin American continent and that serves as the basis for development in the Republic of Cuba. That it is already the ideology that was used by Cabral, that was used by Samora Machel, which is in use on the African continent itself to underline and underscore struggle and the construction of a new society. It cannot therefore be termed a European phenomenon; and the onus will certainly be on those who argue that this phenomenon, which was already universalized itself, is somehow inapplicable to some black people. The onus will be on those individuals, I suggest, to show some reason, perhaps genetic, why the genes of black people reject this ideological position. - Walter Rodney [12]

To the disappointment of the enemies of Marxism, Karl Marx was not one bitter man writing fantasies about tearing the world down, totalitarian rule, and collecting money from his friend because he was a leech. In fact, his theories and philosophy were so powerful that even during his time, the ruling class did everything to stop his participation in society by denying him employment due to his views, exiling him, and imprisoning him at times. Had he not been given what we would define as mutual aid today, by his friend Engels, Marx, his wife, and children would have starved and died due to poverty. As of today, we are still waiting on sound reasons for why people need to be against Marxism that do not involve capitalist, Red Scare terror propaganda. The enemies of Marxism can only provide lies and distortions. Not because Marxism is absurd, but because it is not; but because it exposes how power and wealth actually operate. Where capital actually comes from: human labor. It raises the quality of consciousness in workers and makes them challenge the society they live in. It has been used as a powerful tool to liberate all races of people from oppression, poverty, and despotism, win worker rights, fight for civil rights, and has stood the test of time. I will finish off this intro with a quote from Karl Marx:

In short, the communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries. The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Workers of all countries, unite! [13]

But before we can delve into what Marxism is, we must first come to a general understanding of what philosophy is: where it began, the great minds that shaped our world today, and how this unbroken thread of philosophy contributed to the emergence of Marxism.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” - Karl Marx

Where do Ideas come from?

Every human being perceives the world around them in a particular way. They possess their own morals, values, ethics, logic, and beliefs. Altogether, this forms their philosophy. Everyone has one. Most people move through life without consciously reflecting on their philosophy, instead responding mainly to what feels good or bad to them. If you believe people should not steal from their employers, that is a philosophy. If you believe people have a right to privacy on social media, that is another philosophy. Whoever we are, all of us possess a philosophy through which we interpret the world.

Yet philosophy does not simply fall from the sky. Human thought is shaped by material conditions and by the generational knowledge inherited from the societies that came before us. On a broader scale, the dominant ideas within society are often the ideas of those who hold power.

“It is not the the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” - Karl Marx [14]

In The German Ideology (1845), Karl Marx explains that “the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” Ruling ideas are therefore not eternal truths descending from heaven, but reflections of existing material relations that help justify and preserve the dominance of a ruling class.

Every human is a thinking being. Matter precedes consciousness, and this organized matter which forms our collective reality has been under study for ages.

Once humanity began freeing itself from the anarchic instability of hunter-gatherer life and accumulated mastery over stone, bronze, iron, and fire, humans gained free time and a greater ability to observe the world around them. They built deeper relationships with nature and expressed themselves through primitive art in caves, pottery, carvings, and drawings. The primary driving force behind this deeper penetration into reality was survival itself.

These earliest observations were not scientific in the modern sense, but they were exploratory, imaginative, and bold. Like a child learning to distinguish hot from cold or large from small, early humanity made wild guesses about the world around them. Whether these conclusions were right or wrong is less important than the fact that humanity had begun consciously attempting to understand nature rather than merely react to it. Much of what we know about these early peoples comes not through written language, but through their tools, bones, burial sites, and artwork.

This turning point in human thought reached a higher stage with the rise of city-states and humanity’s first great civilizations. While Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley made enormous contributions to human development through writing, art, and architecture. Egypt would become one of the greatest centers of organized knowledge in the ancient world.

Kemet’s Gift to Humanity

With the rise of civilization in Ancient Kemet came advances in mathematics, geometry, astronomy, architecture, medicine, philosophy, and state administration. As the division of labor expanded, meaning which type of work people did, class society emerged: pharaohs and priests above scribes and artisans, and beneath them peasants and the enslaved.

Nakht and Family Fishing and Fowling, Tomb of Nakht (circa 1400 –1390 B.C.); Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

To maintain a civilization of such immense size, coordination, beauty, and agricultural dependence, requires a systematic observation of nature. Here humanity began developing one of its earliest organized scientific traditions: astronomy.

The Kemet priesthood was assigned this work of needing to accurately predict the flooding of the Nile, seasonal cycles, and agricultural changes. The Nile was the lifeline of Kemet civilization, and understanding the heavens became necessary for survival, planning, and social organization. Through this process, astronomy and cosmological thought developed together.

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) explains, real theoretical science begins with cosmology:

“The animal is sensible only of the beam which immediately affects life; while man perceives the ray, to him physically indifferent, of the remotest star. Man alone has purely intellectual, disinterested joys and passions; the eye of man alone keeps theoretic festivals. The eye which looks into the starry heavens, which gazes at that light, alike useless and harmless, having nothing in common with the earth and its necessities—this eye sees in that light its own nature, its own origin. The eye is heavenly in its nature. Hence man elevates himself above the earth only with the eye; hence theory begins with the contemplation of the heavens. The first philosophers were astronomers.” [15]

This observation captures something profound about early human development. Humanity did not merely labor and survive; humans began asking questions about existence itself, fundamentally separating itself from other primates in the animal kingdom. By studying the heavens, humans gradually separated themselves from animal instincts and began consciously investigating the laws governing nature. Philosophy and science advanced together in Egypt, stemming from humanity’s struggle to understand the world around it.

Kemet Philosophy

Ancient Kemet ethics and philosophy revolved around the notion of Ma’at. Moral principles, ethics, and wisdom were reflected throughout Egyptian literature, especially within wisdom texts, funerary books and songs, tomb biographies, papyri, and literary narratives. Within these writings, moral teachings were often expressed through practical advice, reflections on daily conduct, and observations about social life—usually voiced through the authoritative priesthood or intellectual scribes.

“Ma’at, or social order, with its implications for the establishment of truth, justice, order, righteousness, balance, harmony and reciprocity within the individual, the family and society, was the fundamental objective of the organization and functioning of the family and the greater social structure of Kemet.” [16] -Kimani Nehusi

The Egyptian priesthood referred to their philosophy as mr-rh (mehrekh), meaning “He-who-praises-knowledge” or “He-who-loves-knowledge.” One example of this philosophical dialogue can be found within the Book of Thoth, translated and published in 2005, where knowledge, wisdom, and ethical instruction are treated as central to human development and social life.

The Book of Thoth revolves around the acquisition of knowledge. It is therefore desirable to consider the kinds of knowledge treated and the result of its acquisition. This emphasis on knowledge is expressed by the very names of the characters mentioned. The designation of the disciple is mr-rh, “The-one-who-loves-knowledge” or “He-who-wishes-knowledge/to learn.” Two common names of Thoth in the composition are “The-one-who-praises-knowledge” and “He-who-understands-the-Two-Lands.”
In some ways, the knowledge conveyed by the Book of Thoth is reminiscent of the knowledge attributed to the pharaoh in earlier times. Naturally, the pharaoh possesses knowledge denied to mere mortals. - [17] - Richard Jasnow and Karl-Theodor Zauzich

The book itself largely consists of a dialogue between a deity—usually referred to as “He-who-praises-knowledge,” possibly Thoth himself or a priest assuming his role—and a mortal known as “He-who-loves-knowledge.” The work explores topics such as the scribal craft, sacred geography, prophecy, wisdom, temple ritual, animal knowledge, and the underworld. The language throughout is highly poetic, with many passages clearly structured into verse.

The Kemetic system of education was permeated with philosophical discourse. This discourse was led by the well-regarded priesthood. Via their highly educated status, this priesthood grew more prominent and respected as Kemet matured. Their prominence stemmed from their intimate understanding of knowledge. They were the originators of anatomical science. As a matter of fact, their investigation of the celestial system was so accurate that our present-day calendar is modeled after the calendar of Kemet.

Some examples of the philosophy and ethical reflections left behind by the Egyptians can be found in texts such as “The Immortality of Writers,” written by Irsesh and discovered within the scribal village connected to Amennakht during the post-Akhenaten era. In the text, Irsesh writes:

“A man is dead, his corpse is in the ground:
when all his family are laid in the earth,
It is writing that lets him be remembered,
in the mouth of the reciter of the formula.
Scrolls are more useful than a built house,
than chapels on the west,
they are more perfect than palace towers,
longer-lasting than a monument in a temple.” [18]

Another major example of Egyptian wisdom literature is the The Maxims of Ptahhotep, attributed to Ptahhotep, a vizier of the Fifth Dynasty. The earliest preserved manuscript dates back to roughly the 19th century BCE. Within the teachings, Ptahhotep warns against greed and moral corruption:

“If you wish your conduct to be good
and to save yourself from all evil,
resist the opportunity of greed.
It is a sore disease of the worm,
no advance can come of it.
It embroils fathers and mothers,
with mother's brothers.
It entangles the wife and the man,
it is a levy of all evils,
a bundle of all hatefulness.
The man endures whose guideline is Right,
who proceeds according to his paces.
He can draw up a will by it.
There is no tomb for the greedy hearted.” [19]

These texts reveal that Ancient Egyptian philosophy was not solely concerned with religion or the afterlife, but also with ethics, wisdom, memory, justice, education, and the moral development of human beings within society.

Greece and Dialectics

The Greeks, whom had been traveling to Egypt for some time took to the culture of Ancient Egypt. As reported by Greek Philosopher Plutarch:

"Witness to this also are the wisest of the Greeks: Solon, Thales, Plato, Eudoxus, and Pythagoras, who came to Egypt and consorted with the priests. Eudoxus, they say, received instruction from Chonuphis of Memphis, Solon from Sonchis of Saïs, and Pythagoras from Oenuphis of Heliopolis. Pythagoras was greatly admired, and he also greatly admired the Egyptian priests. Copying their symbolism and occult teachings, he incorporated his doctrines into enigmas. Indeed, many Pythagorean precepts closely resemble what are called hieroglyphic writings." [20]

The first wave of philosophy that emerged in Greece was still deeply intertwined with the mythological cosmogonies inherited from older civilizations such as Egypt. Pythagoras, in his own time, was viewed almost as a religious guru. Yet his ideas spread throughout Greece and gave rise to the school of Pythagoreanism, which contributed greatly to developments in music, mathematics, and the study of the natural world. Central to Pythagorean belief was purification, including vegetarianism, which was practiced as a means of achieving harmony and separating oneself from the dominant civic religious customs of the period.

Alongside this developed the school of Ionian philosophers such as Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, and Anaximenes of Miletus, who believed that Greek mythology alone could not sufficiently explain the natural world. Instead, they sought a general principle underlying nature itself through direct observation and rational inquiry.

It was from these philosophical beginnings that the seeds of materialism were planted and slowly began to sprout.

Unlike the Egyptians, who largely confined cosmological, scientific, and philosophical knowledge to the hierarchy of priests and scribes, the Greeks approached philosophy differently. Ancient Greek philosophers pioneered the public dissemination of philosophy, making it accessible to a broader audience than was common in many other ancient civilizations. They held debates in public forums and symposia where ordinary people could listen, question, and participate. Philosophical inquiry was not restricted solely to priestly elites or the upper classes. This openness allowed philosophical thought to develop rapidly and dynamically. The Greeks would eventually become the originators of dialectical philosophy.

Heraclitus

Heraclitus was among the first to give clear expression to dialectics. His philosophy was not widely embraced during his own lifetime because he consciously attempted to break away from the dominant patterns of contemporary thought. Though influenced by earlier thinkers, he criticized many of them either directly or indirectly and carved out his own philosophical path.

Heraclitus was one of the first philosophers to clearly articulate the unity of opposites. He was also a masterful wordsmith deeply attuned to the changing world around him and highly invested in the study of nature itself.

“Of this Logos, which exists forever, men prove to be uncomprehending, both before they hear it and after they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this Logos, they are like the inexperienced when they experience the words and deeds that I explain, distinguishing each thing according to its nature and showing how it is. Other men are unaware of what they do when awake, just as they forget what they do when asleep.” [21]

Aristotle

Aristotle was a turning point in philosophical history. Indeed, he may be considered one of the first historians of philosophy itself. Aristotle studied directly under Plato, who served as both his mentor and teacher. After the death of his father, Aristotle was sent to attend Plato’s Academy at the age of seventeen. The young and intellectually curious Aristotle deeply admired Plato, yet the two frequently came into sharp philosophical disagreement.

Plato believed that true reality existed in ideal Forms, knowable primarily through reason, reflection, and inspiration. Aristotle, however, located that reality was knowable within physical objects themselves, knowable through observation and the experience of the senses. He believed that problems possessed objective explanations rooted within material reality itself. His approach was fundamentally scientific and grounded in the study of the observable world.

In his magnum opus, Metaphysics, Aristotle explored the nature of being, reality, causation, first principles, formal logic, and the foundations of dialectical thought. Central to Aristotle’s philosophy was the idea that the most fundamental thing in reality is substance.

For Aristotle, a substance was an individual thing that exists in itself:

a tree
a person
a horse

Qualities such as “red,” “tall,” or “hot” could not exist independently; they only existed within substances themselves. This position partly emerged as a critique of Plato’s theory of Forms, which held that ideal Forms existed separately from material things. Aristotle instead argued that form and matter are united within actual physical objects.

Aristotle’s achievements extended far beyond philosophy into biology, natural science, physics, ethics, politics, and logic. Although Aristotle was not a dialectical materialist in the modern Marxist sense, many of his ideas concerning motion, contradiction, causation, and development later became important foundations for future philosophical traditions.

Rome and Christianity

After the fall of Greece, the Roman Empire rose. While Greece was conquered militarily by Rome, culturally, Greece would come to dominate Rome. Aristotelian thought continued to circulate throughout the Mediterranean world, being dissected, reinterpreted, and slowly stripped of much of its original revolutionary character. Roman philosophy in particular became heavily shaped by Stoicism, Epicureanism, and later Neoplatonism which was reflective of the brutal conquests the empire engaged it. It had to develop a philosophy that matched it’s characteristics and the despair it spread.

With the expansion of the Roman Empire—which at its height dominated vast portions of the known world—came the ransacking, destruction, and destabilization of older social orders. Slavery became the central productive force of Roman society. The wealth inequality between the Roman elite and the masses of slaves and peasants grew to extreme levels.

As the empire entered into decline, a new movement began emerging among the poor and oppressed: Christianity. After the Roman displacement and subjugation of many Middle Eastern Jews, Jewish communities and traditions spread further throughout the empire. Alongside them traveled the teachings of Judaism, which carried promises of justice, deliverance, and salvation for the poor. Out of this historical environment emerged Christianity.

Early Christianity embodied "the outlook of an utterly despairing people after the numerous revolts of slaves, indignant people and enslaved nationalities against the yoke of the Roman Empire had been drowned in blood.” [22] - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Contrary to popular belief, early Christianity actually began as a revolutionary movement based on the poor and oppressed layers of society. Slaves could participate within the church in ways they could not within Roman society, Christianity brought them a sense of humility, where under the romans they were otherwise reduced to property and status. Many among the slaves and peasants believed wealth and land should be shared communally, expressing early communalistic tendencies.

Figure X. The Apostles Receiving Communion, fresco from the Church of Panagia Phorbiotissa (Asinou Church), Nikitari, Cyprus, c. 1106 CE. Unknown Byzantine artist. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "History of Early Christianity."

Because the Roman nobility could see the writing on the wall, they gradually co-opted the church and fused it with the state to save their rule over society. By the time Constantine the Great officially recognized Christianity, the movement had already begun going in the opposite direction. Bishops, church leaders, and religious authorities became integrated into the machinery of state power. Corruption became an aesthetic of the church; God, in the final analysis, became the final authority. Shortly afterward, with the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Europe entered into a period marked by instability, fragmentation, and religious domination.

People, terrified and uprooted by war, famine, and social collapse, increasingly turned toward salvation through Christianity. The philosophy in Western Europe soon became a philosophy of despair and apathy. The scientific and artistic achievements of Egypt, Carthage, Greece, and early Rome were partially lost or suppressed due to the authority of the church, the burning of books and libraries, and ransacking by barbarians throughout much of Western Europe. Dogmatism, skepticism toward change, and rigid feudal hierarchy increasingly replaced the intellectual dynamism of earlier periods. Peasants gave way to allegiance toward feudal lords and religious authority for protection against barbarism, rape, and starvation.

While Western Europe was going through a very ghetto time indeed, which would be known as the “Dark Ages,” other parts of the world were going through a much better time. The Islamic Golden Age, the Byzantine Empire, China dynasties, who were at one point the most advanced civilization in the world, Ireland’s monastic scholarly traditions, and various African kingdoms such as Ghana, Mali, and the Songhai empire all preserved, expanded, and developed philosophy, science, mathematics, medicine, and literature during this intellectually and culturally flourishing time.

Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment.

After centuries in which religious dogma dominated intellectual life in Europe, Europeans finally were able to get themselves together again thanks to the Islamic Empire, which translated the texts of Ancient Greek philosophy. Philosophers like Averroes and Ibn Sina critically expanded upon Greek philosophy and helped reintroduce rationalism, medicine, logic, and scientific inquiry into Europe through centuries of translation and intellectual exchange. This allowed European philosophers to grasp the broad sweep of Aristotelian and Ptolemaic views of the universe, which placed the Earth at the center of existence. Through the work of figures like Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton, the universe increasingly came to be understood through observation, mathematics, and natural laws rather than solely through theology.

Like lightning in a bottle, Galileo Galilei completely ripped the mask off of the Roman Catholic Church. He discovered that the Earth revolves around the Sun rather than the universe revolving around the Earth.

Galileo was forced to publicly recant his views and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. His book was banned, and he was prohibited from teaching heliocentrism as fact.

This period also transformed philosophy. Thinkers such as Francis Bacon argued that knowledge should come from observation and experiment rather than abstract speculation. Empiricism and materialist thought developed further through philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, who argued that human knowledge emerges from experience and the material world. These developments helped weaken the intellectual foundations of feudalism and the authority of the Church.

By the Enlightenment, philosophy became increasingly tied to criticisms of existing society and the church. The church often functioned as a repressive force opposed to scientific inquiry. It could not allow people to question the authority of God, because then that would lead them to question the monarchy, which the church relied on for a privileged life. French thinkers such as Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Paul-Henri Thiry d'Holbach used reason and materialist philosophy to challenge monarchy, inequality, and traditional authority. These ideas helped prepare the ideological battleground for the French Revolution and the modern world that emerged afterward.

Spinoza

Portrait of Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677), Source: Wikimedia Commons

Born in 1632 in what we now call Amsterdam into a Sephardic Jewish family, Baruch Spinoza’s life was shaped by exile, isolation, and religious trauma. His family had been forced from their homeland and settled within the Dutch Republic after fleeing persecution. Young Spinoza was regarded as highly intelligent by those around him. His childhood was strict, rigorous, and deeply religious. He was expected to study and become a rabbi, but Spinoza had other plans in mind.

Amsterdam during this period was one of the major intellectual and commercial centers of Europe. The city exposed Spinoza to merchants, political debates, new sciences, and the emerging ideas of the Enlightenment. Eventually he encountered the works of René Descartes, famous for the phrase “I think therefore I am,” whose ideas heavily influenced him. But just as the apprentice eventually overtakes the master, as Aristotle did to Plato, the same unfolded with Spinoza.

Spinoza challenged Descartes’ belief that mind and matter existed separately from the real world. Descartes believed reality was divided into separate substances. Spinoza criticized this directly:

“In Nature there exists only one substance ...” which is eternal and “absolutely infinite.” [23]

This infinite and all-encompassing substance Spinoza called “God, or Nature.”

Feeling compelled to move beyond traditional religion, Spinoza developed what many consider a monist or pantheistic worldview. God was not some supernatural figure standing outside reality. God was simply nature itself: the living, breathing, constantly moving flux of the world. Trees, plants, water, animals, and human beings all contained within them the essence of life and the laws governing nature itself.

Spinoza’s magnum opus would eventually become his work Ethics. In it he wrote:

“Nothing in nature is contingent; all things are determined by the necessity of the divine nature to exist and act in a certain way.” [24]

Elsewhere he argued:

“Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.” [25]

And further:

"Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and desires, and do not think, even in their dreams, of the causes by which they are disposed to wanting and willing, because they are ignorant of those causes.” [26]

For Spinoza, the laws governing reality could be uncovered through science, observation, and rational thought rather than superstition or blind faith. These ideas can still be applied today which shows how advanced he was for his time.

As of today, Spinoza remains one of the most admired philosophers amongst Marxists, materialists, and rationalists. Even Albert Einstein famously remarked that he believed only in “Spinoza’s God.”

Of course, religious authorities could not allow such ideas to spread freely and challenge their authority over society. In 1656, Spinoza was excommunicated and socially expelled from the Jewish community of Amsterdam for his beliefs.

“I have often been amazed to find that people who are proud to profess the Christian religion, that is [a religion of] love, joy, peace, moderation and good will to all men, opposing each other with extraordinary animosity and giving daily expression to the bitterest mutual hatred...” [27]

Immanuel Kant

Eventually the ideas of the church and the budding revolutionary movement in science came to a head in battle: absolutism versus relativity. The church held an absolutist worldview in which truth was fixed, static, dogmatic, and ultimately derived from God. Everything already had its assigned place and purpose.

The emerging scientific thinkers, however, increasingly viewed the world relationally. Things existed in relationship to one another: the dog to the bone, the plant to the seed, the Earth to the Sun, life to death. Truth was no longer seen as static and eternal, but as something constantly developing through discovery and investigation. What humanity once believed to be true could later be understood in an entirely different context as knowledge advanced.

Before Immanuel Kant, philosophers had largely split into two camps. The rationalists, such as René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, believed knowledge primarily came through reason. The empiricists, such as John Locke and David Hume, believed that knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience. Kant attempted to synthesize these traditions together.

In his most famous work, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that humans do not passively observe reality exactly as it exists independently of them. Instead, the human mind actively organizes experience itself. Space, time, causality, and logic were not simply “out there” floating independently in the universe, but were categories through which the human mind interpreted reality.

Kant’s entire premise was that formal logic eventually runs into contradictions and limitations that human beings cannot fully overcome. From this, he concluded that humans can never truly know reality “in itself.” He subjected these ambiguities and contradictions to subjectivism, arguing that our understanding of reality is always filtered through the structures of human consciousness.

If our minds are unable to perceive reality as it truly is, and if nothing we experience can ultimately be proven to exist beyond our mental representations of it, then how can we ever be certain of the existence of anything—or anyone—outside ourselves? If all understanding is fundamentally subjective, then how does anyone know anything at all? How can one make a universal claim about the limits of knowledge while simultaneously arguing that universal knowledge itself is impossible? If objective reality ultimately remains beyond human reach, then Kant could never fully understand the mind “in-itself” either to make SUCH claims.

For Marxists, this was the fundamental weakness within Kant’s philosophy. Contradictions within thought were not proof that reality itself was unknowable, but evidence that human understanding develops historically through deeper investigation into the material world. The limitations of knowledge are not static barriers fixed forever, but problems to be overcome through science, practice, labor, and continued discovery.

In many ways, Kant became a precursor to later forms of subjectivist and postmodernism thought, long before their re-emergence in the late twentieth century. Through the Kantian revolution, idealism, rationalism and empiricism became firmly distinguished as separate philosophical traditions. Yet soon a fourth development would emerge—one that would radically alter the course of philosophy and history forever.

Hegel

It was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel himself who said, “You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.”

And indeed he adhered to that thinking as he waged a philosophical struggle against the Kantian school of thought. His school of thought would become known as Hegelianism.

Hegel was born on August 27, 1770 into a petty-bourgeois family in the German city of Stuttgart. He is considered the spark that eventually gave life to Marxism. He did not see the history of scientific thought as random ideas developed by random people, but as a reflection of the general development of humanity and human culture itself, governed by definite laws leading from lower to higher forms of thought.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Every stage of human history produces new ways of understanding the world. Philosophy does not emerge from nowhere, nor does it develop randomly through isolated geniuses disconnected from society. Each new school of thought arises from humanity struggling to understand nature, society, and itself under changing material conditions. Yet every philosophy, no matter how revolutionary it once appeared, eventually encounters its own internal contradictions and limitations. What once explained the world eventually becomes incapable of explaining new developments, and is then challenged, broken apart, and negated by newer forms of thought.

Hegel entered philosophy at precisely this turning point. Rejecting the rigid dualism that dominated much of earlier philosophy, Hegel sought to understand reality not as fixed and motionless, but as something living, contradictory, and constantly developing. Truth, according to Hegel, was not unreachable or forever trapped behind the walls of human subjectivity as Immanuel Kant had argued. Human beings were capable of understanding reality precisely because both thought and reality developed through interconnected processes.

“The divorce between thought and thing is mainly the work of the Critical Philosophy [Kant’s philosophy – author], and runs counter to the conviction of all previous ages, that their agreement was a matter of course. The antithesis between them is the hinge on which modern philosophy turns. Meanwhile the natural belief of men gives the lie to it. In common life we reflect, without particularly reminding ourselves that this is the process of arriving at the truth, and we think without hesitation, and in the firm belief that thought coincides with thing.” [28] - Hegel

What Hegel is explaining here is that the human mind itself moves through a process of becoming, knowing, contradiction, and development while wrestling with truth. What you believed fifteen years ago came from a materially different brain, as even your brain then was a seven-year-old brain; now it is 28, and truth is processed differently, different experiences, and hereby different social conditions. Years later, you may revisit that same “truth” only to uncover something entirely different about it, arriving at a completely new conclusion.

This was the essence of truth for Hegel: not something static, unknowable, or purely subjective, but an evolving process. Truth was objective. The laws regulating reality and thought existed independently of humanity, and through philosophical and scientific investigation human beings were capable of uncovering and understanding them.

The primary arena for investigating these laws however, according to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, still remained consciousness itself. His works on logic and phenomenology were primarily concerned with the movement of thought, contradiction, and the development of consciousness. Yet Hegel ultimately remained trapped within objective idealism. For him, these dialectical laws were still tied to spirit, religion, and the development of consciousness rather than being fully grounded within material reality itself.

In his Science of Logic Hegel famously wrote:

“Pure Being and pure nothing are, therefore, the same. What is the truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being — does not pass over but has passed over — into nothing, and nothing into being. But it is equally true that they are not undistinguished from each other, that, on the contrary, they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct, and yet that they are unseparated and inseparable and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite. Their truth is therefore, this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming…” [29]

What Hegel is saying here is that opposites are unified and move together through contradiction. Something can be pure and then become impure. The empiricist school of thought instead examined the pure and impure in isolation, frozen into fixed categories, when in reality “pure” itself underwent a process to arrive at “impure.”

What humanity recognizes as truth today often began as something unknown and undiscovered. As time develops, society develops, and so too does the process through which truth is uncovered and understood. Everything exists in a state of uninterrupted change; of coming into being and passing away. As soon as one is born, one begins to die. Every human cell is constantly regenerating itself until it ceases to die. Reproduction is the mode of life. As we die we are not the end of humanity any more than birth was its beginning. The big bang is constantly extending and developing the universe. There existed a bang before the boom.

Constant change and the rise and fall of all phenomena represent the fundamental mode of existence of matter. This motion is not imposed externally, but driven internally through contradiction itself. Just as Pure Being inevitably becomes its opposite, death is inherent within life.

But of course, Hegel eventually ran into a dead end. At the end of all developmental processes, Hegel believed humanity would eventually arrive at an “Absolute Truth,” a final perfection of thought itself. His philosophy ultimately remained trapped within the limits of objective idealism. Hegel also carried many of the limitations of his own historical period, including petty-bourgeois philistinism and deeply racist assumptions.

Nonetheless, the revolutionary kernel of dialectics contained within Hegel’s philosophy would soon be broken free from its idealist straitjacket by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Marx and Engels

Out onto the playing field of history sprang Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who rescued what many Marxists consider Hegel’s colossal miscarriage of dialectics. Engels wrote:

“The old method of investigation and thought which Hegel calls ‘metaphysical’, which preferred to investigate things as given, as fixed and stable, a method the relics of which still strongly haunt people’s minds, had a great deal of historical justification in its day. It was necessary first to examine things before it was possible to examine processes. One had first to know what a particular thing was before one could observe the changes it was undergoing. And such was the case with natural science. The old metaphysics, which accepted things as finished objects, arose from a natural science which investigated dead and living things as finished objects. But when this investigation had progressed so far that it became possible to take the decisive step forward, that is, to pass on the systematic investigation of the changes which these things undergo in nature itself, then the last hour of the old metaphysic struck in the realm of philosophy also. And in fact, while natural science up to the end of the last century was predominantly a collecting science, a science of finished things, in our century it is essentially a systematizing science, a science of the processes, of the origin and development of these things and of the interconnection which binds all these natural processes into one great whole. Physiology, which investigates the processes occurring in plant and animal organisms; embryology, which deals with the development of individual organisms from germs to maturity; geology, which investigates the gradual formation of the Earth’s surface — all these are the offspring of our century.” [30]

What Engels was explaining is that older philosophy often examined the world as if things existed in isolation: fixed, eternal, and motionless. But modern science increasingly demonstrated the opposite. Nature was not static, but dynamic. Everything existed through movement, development, contradiction, birth, decay, and transformation. Geology revealed the Earth itself was constantly changing. Biology revealed life evolved and developed through processes. Physics increasingly uncovered motion as fundamental to existence itself.

Marx took Hegel’s dialectics and stripped away its idealism, mysticism, and religious abstractions, rooting it firmly within material reality. As Marx famously wrote:

“The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” [31]

It was then in the hands of Marx and Engels that dialectical materialism was born. Out of it sprang the revolutionary philosophy of Marxism, which could now finally be wielded not simply to interpret the world, but to change it through revolutionary action.

Marx and Engels argued that there exists only one world: the material world. Human thought does not exist separately from material reality but emerges from it. Ideas, consciousness, philosophy, religion, morality, and politics are reflections of humanity’s interaction with the material world. The laws of dialectics were not mystical laws of spirit or religion, but the laws governing nature, matter, society, and development itself.

Karl Marx. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Stars are born and die just as all things on Earth do. Human beings themselves are composed of star matter organized into living form. Life reproduces itself throughout nature. Sex exists throughout the natural world in animals, plants, and human beings alike. Within nature itself, there exists both heterosexual and homosexual behavior across countless species. Humanity is not separate from nature, but an expression of it. Contradiction exists everywhere: in ecosystems, biology, society, sexuality, as different genders exist, and within history itself. Consciousness is not some supernatural force floating outside matter, but the product of matter organized into sufficiently advanced forms.

As individuals, we are capable of making choices, yet these choices never occur outside material conditions. Free will doesn’t truly exist; you did not get to choose your birth. Human beings are shaped by class relations, economic structures, social systems, historical development, and the material conditions into which they are born. Laws operate independently of human will, often in contradiction to it. This still does not mean you don’t make your own choices, but life is genuinely predetermined for you.

Marx and Engels both understood that before humanity can make philosophy, revolution, or history, people must first eat, sleep, drink, labor, and survive. Consciousness itself develops out of material life once humans become aware of the world inside and outside of them.

Dialectical materialism, therefore, became the philosophical outlook of the working class: an outlook that examines reality in its totality, contradiction, and motion. The working-class fights not merely against exploitation, but against all class society, oppression, illusions, prejudices, and ideological fetishes produced by those systems. Marxism sought a thoroughly materialist understanding of the laws governing nature and society, not merely to interpret those laws, but to consciously transform society in harmony with humanity’s collective needs.

It was with this revolutionary philosophy that Marx and Engels would go on to write one of the most influential political works in human history.

The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto was a great step for humanity. The book opened up strongly

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman—in a word, oppressor and oppressed—stood in constant opposition to one another, carrying on an uninterrupted struggle, sometimes hidden, sometimes open, a struggle that each time ended either in a revolutionary transformation of society as a whole or in the common ruin of the contending classes." [32] - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

The book is split between 4 sections:

Section 1: Bourgeious and Proletarians

Section 2: Proletarians and Communists

Section 3: Socialist and Communist Literature

Section 4: Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties

The Communist Manifesto was a political pamphlet calling for revolution. Written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848, the text applied the Marxist method to human society and history itself.

In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels demonstrate that human society develops through contradictions between classes rooted in material production and ownership. Just as feudalism eventually gave rise to capitalism through its own internal contradictions, capitalism too contains contradictions that will eventually give rise to socialism. They explain how capitalism transformed the social relations of the world, how it drew former societies and peoples into a global system of production and exchange against their will, and how the proletariat as a class emerged.

Philosophically, the Manifesto rejects reformism, liberalism, and utopian socialism. It touches on the difference between private property and personal property. It also argues that workers share common interests across national boundaries and calls upon them to unite as an international proletariat.

The Manifesto presents the general principles of communism and the goals communists seek to achieve. The Manifesto was written in a time when revolutionary consciousness was spreading across Europe. It later became one of the most influential political texts ever written. To this day, its legacy lives on.

Dialectical Materialism

Idealism

In modern philosophy, human thought is largely now divided between two major schools: idealism and materialism. There is a popular misconception today that when people hear the word “idealism,” they imagine a dreamer full of big ideas hoping to change the world, while “materialism” is often understood as greed, consumerism, or the pursuit of wealth and possessions. Neither of these meanings has anything to do with philosophical idealism or philosophical materialism.

Idealism, as defined by Marxists, is the theory that reality is ultimately shaped by spirit, consciousness, or some unseen force existing independently of the material world. In this view, ideas exist outside of matter and govern the development of reality itself.

Idealism largely developed from humanity’s search for meaning and truth about existence itself. As mentioned earlier, philosophers such as Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Hegel all fell within the idealist tradition in different ways. They sought higher truths beyond immediate material reality and often conceived of consciousness as rooted in spirit, soul, or abstract thought, existing beyond the physical world itself.

In the modern world, idealism often manifests in the belief that society can fundamentally change simply by changing how people think, speak, or morally feel about oppression and the world around them. It appears in the belief that humanity can be saved through pure willpower, moral persuasion, positive energy, or some divine intervention descending from above.

But because the idealist conceives of consciousness as something existing separately from material reality, idealism inevitably becomes tangled in contradictions. Thought cannot derive itself purely from thought alone. Even the most abstract human ideas ultimately emerge from observation and interaction with the material world. A person does not understand racism simply because they “feel” oppressed in some abstract spiritual sense, but because they materially experience exploitation, inequality, violence, poverty, alienation, or discrimination in real life, and from these experiences, consciousness and awareness of their oppression develop.

As Karl Marx famously wrote:

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

Formal Logic and Metaphysics

Deductive reasoning, developed by Aristotle, examines the entirety of something through the structure of a syllogism. A classic Aristotelian syllogism looks like this:

All humans are mortal.
Socrates is a human.
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

This is deductive reasoning because if the premises are true, then the conclusion must also be true.

From there, Francis Bacon came up with inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning works differently. Instead of starting from a universal principle, it begins with repeated observations in reality and then forms a broader conclusion from those observations.

For example:

The sun has risen every day I have observed.
Therefore, the sun will probably rise tomorrow.

Unlike deduction, induction does not guarantee certainty. It instead produces conclusions based on patterns, probability, and accumulated evidence.

These developments eventually came together into what became known as formal logic and its central law: the law of identity, “A = A.” Formal logic studies the structure and form of arguments rather than their specific content. It arose through the abstraction of thought itself. The word abstract comes from the Latin meaning “to take from.” Through abstraction, humans isolate certain aspects of an object or phenomenon that appear important while temporarily setting other aspects aside.

Abstract knowledge is therefore necessarily one-sided because it isolates only one aspect of a phenomenon rather than grasping the living totality of the thing itself and the relationships that determine its full nature.

The issue with this method of thinking is not that it is useless. Marxists still utilize formal logic alongside dialectics, but always beginning from material reality itself. The limitation emerges when formal logic and empiricism examine things only in isolation and never penetrate deeper into the contradictions and processes producing them.

For example, empiricist thinking may observe that Black people are incarcerated at disproportionately high rates and then conclude that Black people must somehow be inherently more criminal, leading to racist biases and social prejudices. But this approach isolates the statistic from the historical and material conditions that produced it in the first place: slavery, segregation, poverty, over-policing, economic exclusion, and the broader structure of class society itself.

The dialectical method instead uses abstractions and formal logic rooted within materialism while pushing further into the contradictions beneath the surface in order to arrive closer to objective truth.

Leon Trotsky sharply summarized the limitations of formal logic:

“I will here attempt to sketch the substance of the problem in a very concise form. The Aristotelian logic of the simple syllogism starts from the proposition that 'A' is equal to 'A'. This postulate is accepted as an axiom for a multitude of practical human actions and elementary generalisations. But in reality 'A' is not equal to 'A'. This is easy to prove if we observe these two letters under a lens—they are quite different from each other. But, one can object, the question is not of the size or the form of the letters, since they are only symbols for equal quantities, for instance, a pound of sugar. The objection is beside the point; in reality a pound of sugar is never equal to a pound of sugar—a more delicate scale always discloses a difference. Again one can object: but a pound of sugar is equal to itself. Neither is this true—all bodies change uninterruptedly in size, weight, colour, etc. They are never equal to themselves. A sophist will respond that a pound of sugar is equal to itself 'at any given moment'. Aside from the extremely dubious practical value of this 'axiom', it does not withstand theoretical criticism either. How should we really conceive the word 'moment'? If it is an infinitesimal interval of time, then a pound of sugar is subjected during the course of that 'moment' to inevitable changes. Or is the 'moment' a purely mathematical abstraction, that is, a zero of time? But everything exists in time; and existence itself is an uninterrupted process of transformation; time is consequently a fundamental element of existence. Thus the axiom 'A' is equal to 'A' signifies that a thing is equal to itself if it does not change, that is, if it does not exist.” [33]

and

“Every worker knows that it is impossible to make two completely equal objects. In the elaboration of bearing-brass into cone bearings, a certain deviation is allowed for the cones which should not, however, go beyond certain limits (this is called tolerance). By observing the norms of tolerance, the cones are considered as being equal (‘A’ is equal to ‘A’). When the tolerance is exceeded, the quantity goes over into quality; in other words, the cone bearings become inferior or completely worthless.” [34]

The law of identity by itself only tells us that something exists as itself. A thing is a thing. But this alone tells us almost nothing about the actual nature of that thing, how it developed, what forces shaped it, what relationships it exists within, or how it changes over time. To simply say “a human is a human” or “a tree is a tree” leaves reality frozen into static categories stripped away from motion, history, contradiction, and development.

Formal logic can identify and label phenomena, but it often stops at the surface level of appearances. It can classify a person as Black, White, rich, poor, male, female, worker, or owner, yet those labels alone explain nothing about the historical, biological, economic, and social processes that produced these “matter” in the first place. A dialectical approach instead asks deeper questions: How did this thing become what it is? What internal contradictions shape it? Under what conditions can it transform into something else?

This does not mean formal logic is useless or entirely invalid. Far from it. Formal logic remains an important tool for organizing thought, defining concepts, categorizing information, and navigating everyday life. In many simple and practical situations, it functions perfectly well. But reality itself does not remain neat, motionless, and fixed. Nature, society, and history constantly move through contradiction, development, emergence, decay, and transformation. Once we begin dealing with living processes rather than isolated, static objects, formal logic, by itself, reaches its limits and is incapable of fully grasping reality in motion.

Dialectics

Dialectics is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society, and thought itself. As Friedrich Engels explains:

“The great basic thought that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the apparently stable things, no less than their mental images in our heads, the concepts, go through uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away…” [35]

And as Leon Trotsky further elaborated in ABC of Materialist Dialectics:

“Dialectical thinking stands in the same relationship to metaphysics as a motion picture to a still photograph. The one does not contradict the other, but complements it. However, the truer, more complete approximation of reality is contained in the movie.” [36]

Meaning we can examine a motion picture and understand that it evolved from a still photograph, but beneath both the photograph and the motion picture is the objective material world itself which had to exist first in order for such images to even be created.

Another simple example of dialectics is the understanding of a home. We understand a home to be a home, but a home does not simply appear from nowhere fully formed. Materials had to be gathered, measured, shaped, organized, and assembled through labor. The workers who laid the bricks did not place them randomly; they needed mathematical measurements and proportions. Even mathematics itself emerged from humanity’s interaction with the material world. How did humans first understand what “10” was? By observing reality itself—ten fingers, ten objects, repeated quantities existing materially around them. Even the Egyptians developed the 365-day calendar not by imagining it into existence, but through observing the movements of the sun, moon, and stars.

As Vladimir Lenin wrote:

“This is materialism: matter acting on our sense organs produces sensation. Sensations depend upon the brain, nerves, retina, etc., i.e. on matter organised in a definite way. The existence of matter does not depend on sensation. Matter is primary. Sensation, thought, consciousness are the supreme product of matter organised in a particular way.” [37]

The struggle for materialism itself was also a revolutionary ideological war against the church and feudal society. In feudal England, the church and the aristocracy maintained a suffocating grip over intellectual life and society. They could not be challenged through ideas alone. A science had to emerge capable of undermining and delegitimizing their authority.

This is where the bourgeoisie historically played a progressive role. As their productive capacity expanded, they increasingly demanded freedom of speech, freedom of religion, scientific inquiry, and equality before the law in opposition to feudal restrictions. Engels explains:

“Moreover, parallel with the rise of the middle classes went on the great revival of science; astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy, physiology, were again cultivated. And the bourgeoisie, for the development of its industrial production, required a science which ascertained the physical properties of natural objects and the modes of action of the forces of Nature. Now up to then science had but been the humble handmaid of the Church, had not been allowed to overstep the limits set by faith, and for that reason had been no science at all. Science rebelled against the Church; the bourgeoisie could not do without science, and therefore, had to join in the rebellion.”[38]

Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes helped further develop early materialism by shifting philosophy away from religion and abstract speculation toward science, observation, and the direct study of nature itself.

Bacon argued that knowledge should arise from observation and experimentation rather than scripture or abstract reasoning alone. Through inductive reasoning, humans could study repeated patterns within reality in order to uncover broader truths about the material world.

Hobbes pushed this even further by arguing that everything in existence, including human thought and consciousness itself, was the product of matter in motion. Human beings were not governed by supernatural forces but by the same natural laws governing the rest of nature.

While their materialism still remained mechanical and lacked dialectics, Bacon and Hobbes laid the foundations for later materialist philosophy by grounding human thought and society within the material world rather than spirit or religion.

It was through Marx and Engels however that dialectical materialism truly became a living, breathing science, as Lenin explained:

“However, Marx did not stop at the materialism of the eighteenth century but moved philosophy forward. He enriched it by the achievements of German classical philosophy especially by Hegel’s system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. Of these the main achievement is dialectics, i.e. the doctrine of development in its fuller, deeper form, free from one-sidedness – the doctrine, also, of the relativity of human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science – radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements – are a remarkable confirmation of the dialectical materialism of Marx, despite the doctrines of bourgeois philosophers with their ‘new’ returns to old and rotten idealism. Just as the cognition of man reflects nature (i.e. developing matter) which exists independently of him, so also the social cognition of man (i.e. the various views and doctrines-philosophic, religious, political, etc.) reflects the economic order of society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of modern European states serve the purpose of strengthening the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat. The philosophy of Marx completes in itself philosophic materialism which has provided humanity, and especially the working class, with a powerful instrument of knowledge.” [39]

To sum it up in its totality, dialectical materialism is simply the philosophical method that examines the world and all its phenomena not as isolated or fixed objects, but as processes developing through motion, contradiction, and transformation. These processes can then be examined in flux in order to make predictions, discoveries, and deeper understandings about nature, society, and reality itself.

There are three laws that govern Dialectics.

Quantity and Quality

The easiest example one can give of quantity and quality is with water. Grab a pot and pour water into it. You now have a pot of water. Turn the heat on and the water undergoes a quantitative change. It is still water, but now it is hot water. Increase the heat further and it becomes boiling water. Continue heating it and eventually the water evaporates and transforms into steam. At this point it is no longer simply water in the same form it once was; it has undergone a qualitative change.

Microscope view of Alternaria genus fungi Source: Wikimedia Commons

This is the essence of the relationship between quantitative and qualitative change.

Quantitative change refers to the gradual increase or decrease within the same mode of being, process, or object.

Qualitative change refers to the leap into a new form produced through the accumulation of quantitative changes and internal pressure.

Hegel developed this concept through what he called the “nodal line of measure relations”:

“…in which, at certain definite nodal points, the purely quantitative increase or decrease gives rise to a qualitative leap; for example, in the case of heated or cooled water, where boiling-point and freezing-point are the nodes at which – under normal pressure – the leap to a new state of aggregation takes place, and where consequently quantity is transformed into quality.” [40]

Coincidentally enough, this everyday expression of quantity and quality is constantly utilized by scientists who may not even consciously realize they are engaging in dialectical thinking. The transformation of quantity into quality can be observed throughout nature, history, society, scientific experimentation, the human body, and even within the movement of the working class itself.

Modern examples of this process can be found everywhere. Quantum physics reveals matter transforming under changing conditions. A wound gradually heals until skin forms into a scar. A pregnant mother undergoes continuous developmental changes until eventually a qualitative leap occurs with childbirth and she is no longer pregnant. Everywhere we look, material reality continuously confirms the validity of dialectical development through motion, contradiction, quantity, and quality.

The interpenetration of opposites

Everything in existence is interconnected. Plants rely on water and sunlight to live, humans rely on the Earth for survival, and workers rely on their bosses for wages under capitalism just as bosses rely on workers to generate profit. Even something as simple as a battery in a television remote so your grandmother can watch CNN depends upon the unity between positive and negative charges.

Motion is the mode of existence of the entire material universe. Matter and energy are inseparable. Nothing exists in total isolation. Every phenomenon contains internal relations, tensions, and contradictions that drive its development forward. Sometimes these forces work together, while at other times they work against one another. From afar this process can appear chaotic and disordered, yet even chaos contains patterns, relationships, and temporary forms of equilibrium. Eventually new quantitative and qualitative changes emerge, disrupting that balance and reorganizing reality once again.

Development therefore takes place through internal contradiction. This is why dialectical analysis does not stop at surface appearances or isolated facts. We may generally begin with the empiricist “facts” and data in front of us, but we do not end there. For example, one may observe that Black people are incarcerated at disproportionately high rates. Formal logic and bourgeois ideology may then jump to the conclusion that Black people are inherently criminals due to the facts of statistics. But dialectical materialism asks: why? It digs beneath the surface and uncovers the contradictions underneath.

Capitalism creates poverty while simultaneously claiming all people are equal under the law. Corporations seek to maximize profits while paying workers as little as possible. Black communities historically faced slavery, segregation, economic exclusion, over-policing, and systemic racism, forcing many into conditions of poverty and instability. Poverty in turn breeds desperation, alienation, and crime. Thus, Black people do not commit crimes because they are somehow naturally criminal, but because material conditions produced by capitalism and racism generate those outcomes.

From the dialectical standpoint, all rigid “polar opposites” are incomplete and one-sided, including the opposition between truth and error themselves. Marxism does not accept the existence of eternal and unchanging truths existing outside history. Truth and error are relative to historical development and material conditions. What is regarded as true in one historical period may later reveal itself to be false in another. Ideas pass into their opposites. What was once widely accepted as “truth” — that Black people were inferior or the “scum of the Earth” — is now understood as racist ideology produced through slavery, colonialism, and capitalism itself.

All theories are therefore relative and historically conditioned. Metaphysical thinking often assumes its categories possess eternal and universal validity simply because they appear logically consistent. Yet eventually contradictions and limitations emerge. Reality always presents exceptions, developments, and transformations that rigid theories cannot explain.

Take for example sex and gender. Males and females exist materially throughout nature and represent real biological categories. Yet human beings also reveal contradictions and complexities within these categories themselves. Not every person born female identifies as a woman, and not every person born male identifies as a man. Are most humans born female identify as a woman? Yes. Are most humans born male identify as a male? Yes. But not all humans who are born male or female ALWAYS identify as their assigned sex at birth, and not all humans are born as just one sex. Human identities have developed socially, psychologically, biologically, and historically. The newer understanding of gender does not simply erase the old categories, but negates and incorporates them into a broader synthesis and from there we can form good queer theory.

Motion itself contains contradiction. A thing is never frozen into perfect sameness from one moment to the next. Life itself is contradiction in motion. The person you were at five years old no longer exists in the exact same form today. Your body, thoughts, cells, experiences, and consciousness have continuously transformed through development.

As Lenin wrote:

“The identity of opposites (it would be more correct, perhaps, to say their ‘unity’ — although the difference between the terms identity and unity is not particularly important here. In a certain sense both are correct) is the recognition (discovery) of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature (including mind and society). The condition for the knowledge of all processes of the world in their ‘self-movement’, in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is the ‘struggle’ of opposites. The two basic (or two possible? Or two historically observable?) conceptions of development (evolution) are: development as decrease and increase, as repetition, and development as a unity of opposites (the division of a unity into mutually exclusive opposites and their reciprocal relation).” [41]

And further:

“The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, relative. The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute.” [42]

Negation of the negation

The law of the negation of the negation is deeply tied to the understanding that everything is constantly coming into being and passing away. As nature develops through contradiction and humanity makes new discoveries, older forms, theories, and systems are eventually negated and replaced by newer ones. This is not a random process, but an uninterrupted movement of development that cannot ultimately be stopped.

Hegel gives a simple example of this process in Phenomenology of Spirit:

“The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes these stages moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and constitutes thereby the life of the whole.” [43]

The negation of the negation is therefore an ongoing cycle of development. One form emerges, develops contradictions within itself, and is eventually negated by a newer form which both destroys and preserves elements of the old. This is why people often say history repeats itself, though never in exactly the same form.

History itself provides countless examples of this process. Slave society was eventually negated by feudalism. Feudalism was later negated by the rise of the nation-state and capitalism. These transformations were not accidental, but expressions of deeper material necessities developing through contradiction. Everything that exists does so through necessity and determinate conditions, yet everything that exists also contains within itself the conditions for its own transformation or destruction. Nothing lasts forever.

A seed is negated by the flower that grows from it, yet the flower itself eventually dies and produces new seeds. The old form disappears while simultaneously giving rise to something new.

It is through this understanding that Marxists are determinists without being fatalists. We understand capitalism as an aging and decaying system filled with contradictions which must eventually be overthrown and replaced by its opposite: socialism. This transformation is historically necessary if humanity is to continue developing and flourishing.

Yet inevitability does not mean passivity. Human beings are still active participants within history. We do not choose the conditions into which we are born. A child does not choose whether they are born in United States or Democratic Republic of the Kongo, under capitalism or socialism, rich or poor. But because humans themselves are organized matter capable of consciousness, labor, and collective action, we also possess the ability to transform our material conditions.

As individuals, our power may appear limited. One ion alone is not enough to trigger a nuclear explosion. But when enough unstable atoms collide together and set off a chain reaction, the accumulated energy releases itself explosively and transforms everything around it. Human society develops similarly. As an individual when we are depressed under capitalism we may seek to paint the color of our room, change apartments, or even move across the country however this doesn’t change the system we live under. One individual alone cannot overturn capitalism, but when millions of conscious human beings begin organizing collectively we become ORGANIZED MATTER, contradictions intensify and society itself can erupt into revolutionary transformation. What once existed is negated and replaced by something new. Marxists understand that capitalism itself will eventually meet this same fate.

Historical Materialism

What is history? In school we are rarely encouraged to seriously ask this question at all. History is usually presented to us as a collection of dates, events, wars, presidents, and famous figures which we are expected to memorize and repeat back. But what actually is history?

In The Holy Family, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined it as:

“History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.” [44]

What Marx and Engels meant by this is simple: history itself is not some mystical force moving independently through time. History by itself is dead. It does nothing on its own. History only becomes history through the activity of real human beings struggling, producing, fighting, organizing, surviving, and pursuing their aims. Great events become solidified into “history” only after humanity itself creates them.

Marx later sharpened this understanding even further in The Communist Manifesto:

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” [45]

Historical materialism therefore explains that the driving force of history and social development is class struggle itself. Human society develops not through abstract ideas floating outside reality, but through contradictions rooted in material life and production.

Marx and Engels further argued that all human development ultimately rests upon the development of the productive forces of society. Bourgeois historians often accuse Marxism of reducing everything to economics, yet this completely distorts what Marx and Engels were actually arguing. Engels directly clarified this misconception:

“According to the materialist view of history, the determining factor in history is, in the final analysis, the production and reproduction of actual life. More than that was never maintained either by Marx or myself. Now if someone distorts this by declaring the economic moment to be the only determining factor, he changes that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, ridiculous piece of jargon.” [46]

Engels further encouraged readers to study historical materialism from its original sources rather than through second-hand distortions:

“I would furthermore ask you to study this theory from its original sources and not at second-hand; it is really much easier. Marx hardly wrote anything in which it did not play a part. But especially The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is a most excellent example of its application. There are also many allusion to it in Capital. Then may I also direct you to my writings: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science [Anti-Dühring] and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in which I have given the most detailed account of historical material which, as far as I know, exists.” [47]

And lastly both Engels and Marx:

“Men make their own history, whatever its outcome may be, in that each person follows his own consciously desired end, and it is precisely the resultant of these many wills operating in different directions, and of their manifold effects upon the outer world, that constitutes history. Thus it is also a question of what the many individuals desire.The will is determined by passion or deliberation. But the levers which immediately determine passion or deliberation are of very different kinds. Partly they may be external objects, partly ideal motives, ambition, ‘enthusiasm for truth and justice’, personal hatred, or even purely individual whims of all kinds. But, on the one hand, we have seen that the many individual wills active in history for the most part produce results quite other than those intended – often quite the opposite; that their motives, therefore, in relation to the total result are likewise of only secondary importance. On the other hand, the further question arises: What driving forces in turn stand behind these motives? What are the historical forces which transform themselves into these motives in the brains of the actors?” [48]

Darwin

Every great idea in history often begins as an abstract thought, rumor, observation, or hypothesis. This applies just as much to liberalism, Christianity, and Marxism as it does to the earliest myths humanity created thousands of years ago. At some point in ancient history there was likely someone who believed the setting sun meant humanity had died and entered some abyss beyond the horizon. Human understanding constantly develops, changes, collapses, and reforms as material knowledge expands.

Charles Darwin represents one of the greatest examples of this process. After five years of scientific research aboard the Beagle and several more years studying at home, Darwin arrived at a deeply heretical conclusion for his time: species were not immutable. All living organisms descended from common ancestors, and different species emerged gradually through change over millions of years without divine intervention.

Today it is difficult to fully grasp just how shocking this theory was during the nineteenth century. Those who challenged the literal word of God were often viewed as threats to the entire social order itself. Yet by the 1830s many educated people, including Darwin, already understood that the Genesis story was false. The ginormous expansion of capitalism during the eighteenth century had produced mining, canal construction, and industrial development which exposed geological layers and fossils proving that the Earth was millions of years old rather than merely six thousand years old as Biblical chronology claimed.

In On the Origin of Species Darwin argued that three major factors combined to produce the emergence of new species:

Population pressure: organisms produce more offspring than can survive.
Variation and heredity: individuals possess inheritable differences.
Natural selection: favorable traits become more common over time while unfavorable traits decline.

Species therefore were not fixed or eternal. They possessed a past, a present, and a future. Life itself evolved and transformed through development and contradiction.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were deeply excited by Darwin’s discoveries because they provided enormous scientific confirmation for the dialectical understanding of development. Just as species evolved historically rather than remaining fixed forever, Marx and Engels argued that social systems also evolve historically and are not eternal.

Darwin demonstrated that different life forms dominated the Earth for long periods of time before eventually becoming extinct once the material conditions that sustained their evolutionary success changed. Likewise, Marxism argued that capitalism itself was not eternal, but merely one historical stage of human development that would eventually pass away once its contradictions intensified beyond what society could sustain.

Yet even Darwin’s discoveries themselves would later be further developed. As dialectics explains, all truth continuously evolves and deepens through new discoveries. In the 1970s Stephen Jay Gould helped develop the theory of punctuated equilibrium, arguing that evolution does not always occur through slow gradual change alone. Instead, long periods of relative stability can suddenly be interrupted by rapid qualitative leaps involving mass extinctions and the sudden emergence of new dominant species.

This dialectical pattern also reflects itself within human society and history. Long periods of relative stability are eventually interrupted by wars, crises, revolutions, and social upheaval once productive forces come into contradiction with the social and economic systems containing them. It is through these contradictions and explosive transformations that history itself is driven forward.

Base and the Superstructure

In every society there exists both the base and the superstructure, but first society itself must be defined. Society is not simply primitive tribal clans or isolated hunter-gatherer bands wandering independently through nature. Society emerges when human beings concentrate together, organize themselves through divisions of labor, and collectively produce the means necessary for survival, civilization, and social reproduction.

The base, or economic foundation, forms the material backbone of society. It consists of how human beings produce the necessities of life: food, shelter, clothing, technology, transportation, and all the material things required for existence. This base includes both the forces of production and the relations of production.

The forces of production include the tools, technology, factories, machinery, land, science, labor, and productive capacity humanity uses to transform nature. The relations of production refer to the social relationships people enter into during production itself: who owns the factories, who works the land, who controls labor, and who benefits from production. Under feudalism this took the form of lords and serfs; under capitalism it takes the form of capitalists and workers.

Built upon this economic foundation is the superstructure. The superstructure includes the state, government, police, courts, military, religion, philosophy, education, culture, media, law, morality, and dominant social ideas. A feudal economic base produced kings, nobles, knights, and the ideology of divine right. A capitalist economic base produces parliaments, constitutions, private property laws, nationalism, and the ideology of individual freedom and competition.

The base fundamentally shapes the superstructure, but the superstructure is not merely a passive puppet. It also reacts back upon the base. Laws can regulate production, revolutions can transform property relations, religions can stabilize or challenge social systems, and new ideas can inspire masses of people to reorganize society itself.

Even as societies negate older forms and transform into newer ones, ideological remnants of previous systems often remain long after the original material basis which created them has disappeared. Human beings still believe in religion despite the immense scientific development of modern society. Tribalism, nationalism, racism, and warfare continue to exist despite humanity living within highly advanced industrial civilizations. Old ideas persist especially when the ruling class maintains ideological control and no scientific or social revolution has fully swept those beliefs away.

Humanity itself developed through this same dialectical process. For millions of years early human ancestors slowly evolved through gradual development from earlier primate species. The first great qualitative leap occurred when the earliest hominin species separated from their simian ancestors, beginning the long historical development from animal life toward human society itself.

Primitive communism

It is generally understood by science today that humanity evolved from earlier ape species. These apes existed in many different forms and environments. Some lived primarily in the trees, while others adapted more to life on the ground. Modern anthropology and evolutionary biology generally trace human development along a broad timeline:

~7 million years ago → split from the last common ancestor shared with chimpanzees
~4–2 million years ago → australopithecines (“Lucy” and related species)
~2.5 million years ago → emergence of the earliest Homo species
~300,000 years ago → appearance of modern humans, Homo sapiens

The earliest humans evolved in East Africa from earlier ape-like ancestors known as Australopithecus, meaning “Southern Ape.” Over immense stretches of time, early human populations gradually migrated out of Africa into North Africa, Europe, and Asia. As these populations spread across radically different climates and environments, human beings continued to evolve in different directions. Survival in the frozen forests of northern Europe required different adaptations than survival in the humid jungles of Southeast Asia.

Roughly 4–5 million years ago—although the exact timeline is still debated among anthropologists—a major evolutionary transformation began to take place. As Friedrich Engels argued in The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, our early ancestors were physically weak, vulnerable creatures living in a dangerous natural world filled with predators and harsh conditions. Gathering food while moving on all fours severely limited their ability to survive and adapt.

Over time, it became evolutionarily advantageous for these early apes to stand upright and free their hands. Bipedalism allowed the hands to develop for carrying, grasping, and eventually shaping tools from stone and other materials. Labour, cooperation, and tool-making became central to human development itself. From a Marxist perspective, humanity was not separated from nature, but emerged through material interaction with it. Human consciousness and society developed together with labour.

This process was driven by the basic struggle for survival. Early humans sought shelter, protection, food, and safety in an unforgiving world. Even today, we can still see traces of these deeply rooted survival instincts. In moments of danger or crisis, human beings instinctively organize, protect one another, and act collectively to preserve life—echoes of the long evolutionary development that shaped our earliest hominin ancestors.

“mastery over nature began with the development of the hand, with labour, and widened man's horizon at every new advance”. Men and women were social animals forced to band together and co-operate in order to survive. Unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, they developed the ability to generalise and think abstractly. Labour begins with the making of tools. With these tools, humans change their surrounding to meet their needs. “The animal merely uses its environment,” says Engels, “and brings about changes in it simply by his presence; Man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between Man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction.” - [49] - Friedrich Engels

It was this growing mastery of tools that helped drive the development of the human brain. Earlier theories in anthropology once argued that humans first evolved larger brains, and that this increase in intelligence later allowed the transition to upright walking and tool use. However, discoveries such as “Lucy,” the famous Australopithecus skeleton found in Ethiopia, challenged this older understanding. Lucy showed that bipedalism and the freeing of the hands developed long before the modern human brain fully emerged.

Australopithecus afarensis „Lucy” Rekonstruktion, Museum Neanderthal, Source: Wikimedia Commons

"The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. The first fact to be established is therefore their physical organisation and their consequent relation to the rest of nature.
Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion, or by anything else you like. They begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence, men are indirectly producing their actual material life." [50] - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Human beings are unique in the animal kingdom not simply because we use tools, but because we consciously create and improve them across generations. Many animals can adapt to their environment, but humans are the only animals to actively transform their material conditions through labour. With tools came the ability to reshape nature itself: to build shelter, create fire, hunt more effectively, cultivate food, and eventually construct entire civilizations.

This is partly why tools such as the hammer and sickle became the symbol of communism. It represents labour—the force through which humanity transformed the natural world and, in the process, transformed itself.

It was Lewis Henry Morgan who introduced the term “savagery” to describe this early stage of human society. Today, however, the term is widely understood to be inaccurate and deeply Eurocentric. Historically, ideas surrounding “savages” and “civilized peoples” were often used to justify colonialism, conquest, slavery, and the exploitation of Indigenous populations, regardless of whether that was Morgan’s personal intention. For that reason, we will not be using the term here.

Morgan’s work still represented a major breakthrough in anthropology and greatly influenced later thinkers such as Friedrich Engels. But modern anthropology has increasingly challenged the framework and language he used.

Research today paints a very different picture of early human societies. Rather than being naturally savage or barbaric, evidence suggests that early humans survived through cooperation, compassion, collective labour, and social organization. Care for the injured, food sharing, child rearing, and communal survival were not exceptions but essential parts of early human life.

"Evidence of human care goes back at least 1.5 million years—long before humans were anatomically modern. A Homo ergaster female from Koobi Fora, Kenya, dated to approximately 1.6 million years ago, survived for several weeks despite suffering from a toxic accumulation of vitamin A. To have lived long enough for the disease to leave a record in her bones, she would have required food, water, and protection from predators." [51] - Penny Spikins

A major turning point in human development was the domestication of fire. Some early human species may have occasionally used fire as far back as 800,000 years ago. By around 300,000 years ago, species such as Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and the Homo Sapiens, ancestors of modern humans were using fire regularly in daily life.

Fire transformed human existence. It provided a reliable source of warmth and light, allowed food to be cooked, and offered protection against predators roaming the night. What was once a terrifying force of nature gradually came under human control. With fire, early humans could survive colder climates, extend activity beyond daylight hours, and gather together socially in ways that helped strengthen communication and cooperation.

"Members of a band knew one another intimately and spent their lives surrounded by friends and relatives. Loneliness and privacy were rare. Although neighbouring bands sometimes competed for resources and even fought, they also maintained friendly relations. They exchanged members, hunted together, traded rare luxury goods, forged political alliances, and celebrated religious festivals. This capacity for cooperation was one of the defining characteristics of Homo sapiens and gave our species a crucial advantage over other human species. In some cases, relations between neighbouring bands became so close that they formed a tribe, sharing a common language, myths, customs, and values. However, the importance of these wider connections should not be exaggerated. Even when neighbouring bands cooperated during times of crisis or gathered for hunting expeditions and feasts, they still spent most of their time living independently. Trade was generally limited to prestige items such as shells, amber, and pigments. There is little evidence that staple goods such as food were regularly exchanged or that one band's survival depended upon imports from another. Political and social ties were likewise intermittent. Tribes did not function as permanent political institutions, and even where seasonal gathering places existed, there were no permanent towns or governing structures. The average person could go for months without seeing anyone outside their own band." [52] - Yuval Noah Harari

For a long time, markets and capitalism were not a natural part of life, nor was internal selfishness. There was no property owning instinct. Only the instinct to show compassion and survive. Humans lived in small, tiny communes where everything was mostly shared amongst each other.

Before Patriarchy - The Matrilineal Family

Before patriarchal systems had even emerged, a great majority of humans on earth lived in matriarchal clans. The matriarchy was born out of the struggle to elevate humanity above animalism and cannibalism. Kinship was descended through the matrilineal line since it was easier to determine where the children came from, and families were organized around the great mother.

It was up to the female sex to organize the males into a brotherhood so that humanity would not go extinct. Otherwise, constant fighting over food and sexual access to females would have continued, which could have eradicated humanity completely. It was the female sex that brought social organization and structure to the clan. Because women were already central to childbirth and child rearing, they developed and possessed the social responsibilities connected to cooperation, protection, and the preservation of the community. To keep children alive in a harsh and dangerous world required collective care, planning, and a degree of selflessness. Through this development, early clan society gradually became more socially organized and cooperative, helping humanity move further away from isolated animal struggle and toward collective human life.

“Thus, far from being handicapped by its biology, the female sex was in fact the biologically advantaged sex. To be sure, primate males are often larger and stronger than females and possess fighting equipment in their canine teeth. But the females, with a capacity for cooperation and collective action, had a strength superior to that of any single individual. In addition, as mothers, they wielded their socializing influence over the young males for a longer period than among anthropoids. These advantages enabled women to institute the prohibitions and restraints required for social life. Through totemism and taboo, men were reconditioned to overcome the handicaps imposed upon males in nature. Their combative traits were channeled into useful services in regulated hunting and in defending their communities from predators. The “motherhood,” as primitive people call their maternal clan system, furnished the model for the “brotherhood,” the male economic arm of the clan. Something new arose in human life that does not exist in nature—the cooperative horde of men capable of working together for their mutual” [53] - Evelyn Reed

It was also women who played a major productive role in gathering food for the clan. It was women who learned to cultivate the soil using early digging stick methods, techniques that remained present in many long-term agricultural societies for thousands of years. The digging stick was used to uncover roots, gather edible plants, and discover new food sources from the earth itself.

There is a common belief that women simply stayed behind watching children while men hunted, but this ignores the harsh material reality of early human life. Hunting was difficult, dangerous, and never guaranteed success. A hunt could fail, prey could escape, and hunter-gatherers would often return home empty-handed after days of labor and risk. In many cases, it was the women who ensured the survival of the clan through gathering plants, fruits, insects, small animals, nuts, roots, and medicinal herbs.

Prehistoric rock art site in northeast Zimbabwe showing group "hunt" scene, probably metaphorical depiction of trance or myth, both essential elements of their socio-religious system. Source: Wikimedia Commons

This close association with the land is also how women developed early forms of plant medicine and healing practices. Knowledge of herbs, roots, poisons, and remedies came directly from generations of lived experience working closely with nature. Later myths and stories surrounding great medicine women, healers, and witches often emerged from this historical reality.

In these early communal societies, women were not regarded as property nor systematically oppressed in the way they would later become under class society and patriarchy. Their labor was essential to the survival and development of the clan itself.

“From the beginning there is a continuous record of the work of women in procuring and developing the food supply, discovering new sources and kinds of food, and gaining knowledge about its preservation. The prime tool in this work was the digging stick, a long stick with a pointed end used by the women to dig up roots and vegetables from the ground. To this day, in some parts of the world, the digging stick remains as inseparable from the woman as her baby. The white settlers called the Shoshone Indians of Nevada and Wyoming “The Diggers” because they still employed this ancient technique. Except for a few areas in the world at certain historical stages, the most reliable sources of food were not animal but vegetable.” [54] - Evelyn Reed

The ancient foragers (which is the term I prefer to use) were quite advanced in their ability to create and gather.

“Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well. To survive, they needed a detailed mental map of their territory. To maximise the efficiency of their daily search for food, they required information about the growth patterns of each plant and the habits of each animal. They needed to know which foods were nourishing, which made you sick, and how to use others as cures. They needed to know the progress of the seasons and what warning signs preceded a thunderstorm or a dry spell. They studied every stream, every walnut tree, every bear cave, and every flint-stone deposit in their vicinity. Each individual had to understand how to make a stone knife, how to mend a torn cloak, how to lay a rabbit trap, and how to face avalanches, snakebites or hungry lions. Mastery of each of these many skills required years of apprenticeship and practice. The average ancient forager could turn a flint stone into a spear point within minutes. When we try to imitate this feat, we usually fail miserably. Most of us lack expert knowledge of the flaking properties of flint and basalt and the fine motor skills needed to work them precisely. In other words, the average forager had wider, deeper and more varied knowledge of her immediate surroundings than most of her modern descendants. Today, most people in industrial societies don’t need to know much about the natural world in order to survive. What do you really need to know in order to get by as a computer engineer, an insurance agent, a history teacher or a factory worker? You need to know a lot about your own tiny field of expertise, but for the vast majority of life’s necessities you rely blindly on the help of other experts, whose own knowledge is also limited to a tiny field of expertise. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.” [55] - Yuval Noah Harari

As of today, if you asked most humans to build a fire from scratch they would miserably fail. These great achievements in studying the nature around them eventually led to the second revolution in humankind.

The Neolithic Revolution

For nearly all of human history, society developed at an extremely slow pace. Growth was minimal, sometimes less than 0.1 percent, and in many periods, there was little to no growth at all. Human communities remained relatively small, and production was limited by the tools and techniques available at the time.

It was not until the Agricultural Revolution that human development began to accelerate on a much larger scale. This marked the first great revolution of the productive forces: the transition from the ancient forager to the ancient farmer. Humanity was no longer surviving solely through hunting and gathering but was beginning to cultivate crops, domesticate animals, and settle into more permanent communities.

Model of Middle Neolithic (5000-3000 BCE) settlement in the Yellow River Valley in northern China: Source: Wikimedia Commons

Lewis Henry Morgan referred to this stage as “barbarism,” though the term is now considered outdated and Eurocentric by modern anthropology. What counted as progress during this period was primarily the growth of productivity itself. Increased food production allowed human life to stabilize and expand, populations to grow, and society to gradually develop beyond the limits of small clan-based existence.

"The transition to agriculture began around 9500–8500 BCE in the hill country of southeastern Turkey, western Iran, and the Levant. It began slowly and within a relatively small geographical area. Wheat and goats were domesticated by approximately 9000 BCE; peas and lentils around 8000 BCE; olive trees by 5000 BCE; horses by 4000 BCE; and grapevines by 3500 BCE. Some plants and animals, such as camels and cashew trees, were domesticated even later, but by 3500 BCE the main wave of domestication had largely ended. Even today, despite our advanced technologies, more than 90 percent of the calories that feed humanity come from a handful of plants domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BCE—wheat, rice, maize (corn), potatoes, millet, and barley. No significant plant or animal species has been domesticated in the last 2,000 years. If our minds are those of hunter-gatherers, our cuisine remains that of ancient farmers." [56] - Yuval Noah Harari

With the rise of farming came the rise of small towns and settled communities. As agriculture developed, it became necessary to build storage systems to preserve the surplus of harvested grains, vegetables, and other food supplies. Out of this process, more permanent forms of property and socially organized settlements gradually began to emerge. The demands of agriculture forced humanity to confront and overcome the hostile forces of nature through collective labour on a much larger scale than ever before. Farming required irrigation, planting, harvesting, storage, construction, and long-term planning. These tasks demanded enormous amounts of time and coordination, forcing human beings to settle near rivers, water sources, and fertile land where agriculture could survive. Nature and man was in a tug of war and agriculture had dominated us. This also changed how humans related to one another and their outlook on life.

"Wheat did not provide people with economic security. In many respects, the life of a peasant was less secure than that of a hunter-gatherer. Foragers relied on dozens of different species for survival and could often withstand difficult years even without stored food. If one food source became scarce, they could gather or hunt alternatives. Farming societies, by contrast, depended heavily on a small number of domesticated crops. In many regions, a single staple—such as wheat, rice, or potatoes—provided the majority of calories. If drought struck, locusts arrived, or disease infected the staple crop, entire populations could face famine. Peasants often died by the thousands or even millions. Nor did agriculture provide security from violence. Early farmers were at least as prone to conflict as their foraging ancestors, if not more so. Farmers possessed more material goods and depended on fixed plots of land for survival. The loss of fields to raiding neighbours could mean the difference between subsistence and starvation, leaving far less room for compromise. When a foraging band faced a stronger rival, it could often move elsewhere. Though difficult and dangerous, migration remained possible. Agricultural communities, however, were tied to their fields, homes, and granaries. Retreat frequently meant abandoning the means of survival itself. As a result, farmers were often compelled to stand their ground and fight to the bitter end." [57] - Yuval Noah Harari

Because of these new contradictions, it became necessary to divide up labour tasks between people, which slowly gave rise to class society. Human communities now had to establish night watches, as well as farmers, herders, builders, and caretakers for children, to protect and maintain farmland, animals, food supplies, and settlements from both natural forces and outside invaders. Everyone had to work, there was simply no way for anyone to stop working or else their society would collapse.

It also became a growing necessity for women to become more confined to the home compared to their earlier role in ancient foraging society, where women often stood at the center of communal and matriarchal life through more egalitarian social practices. The demands of agriculture required constant maintenance and long-term settlement. Someone had to care for children while others worked the fields, and at certain stages of pregnancy many women were physically unable to maintain the same level of mass agricultural labour for long periods of time. Plants require 24/7 maintenance, and at a certain point in a woman's pregnancy, she can only stand up for so many hours of the day.

Over time, these material conditions gradually reshaped relations between men and women and helped lay the foundations for patriarchal systems. However, this process did not occur into direct oppression as of yet. It unfolded gradually. It was not unilaterally or in a perfectly linear fashion as Lewis Henry Morgan proposed. The coexistence of matrilineal and patriarchal societies across different regions demonstrates that social development was uneven. Some small states and tribes across the world didn’t even adopt patriarchy until the arrival of Christian colonialism. Kinship systems developed differently according to material, ecological, and historical conditions rather than following one universal path of development.

“According to the Ethnographic Atlas, kinship systems in preindustrial societies developed unevenly rather than along a single universal path. Of the societies surveyed, 46 percent were patrilineal and 14 percent were matrilineal, while the remaining 40 percent practiced mixed, bilateral, or ambilineal systems. Although matrilineal societies existed across the world, they were most concentrated in the Pacific, North America, and especially Sub-Saharan Africa. In Africa, matrilineal societies formed what researchers describe as a “matrilineal belt,” stretching from Gabon to Mozambique. Out of 407 preindustrial ethnic groups examined in Sub-Saharan Africa, 73 were matrilineal while 334 were patrilineal. The data also showed important economic differences between these systems: matrilineal societies were strongly associated with extensive root-crop agriculture, whereas cattle-based societies were far more likely to develop patrilineal social relations.” [58] - Eve Tène

With the rise of the Bronze Age came major innovations in irrigation, the ox-drawn cart, the potter’s wheel, and the loom. Humanity began moving beyond sporadic and dispersed farming towns toward civilization itself, a far higher form of social organization. Civilization could only emerge alongside class society because the growing complexity and stress of farming had become too great for simple communal structures alone to manage. Agriculture was now becoming the breeding ground for new socioeconomic systems. For the first time in history, society was producing a surplus on a massive scale. This created tensions between groups of people because someone had to control the surplus, distribute it, protect it, and organize its use. At the same time, someone had to calculate the rainy seasons, flooding cycles, and harvest periods necessary for agriculture to survive. Out of these material conditions arose class society along with the early state itself, which developed to deal with the growing class antagonisms. Armed bodies of men were now established to protect the social order and the dominating class that appropriated these surpluses and maintained order. This responsibility was often relinquished to the town king, priest, or chief, who performed the mental labor of tracking monsoon seasons, recording harvests, dividing labor, and organizing production. From this growing administrative structure, the state gradually arose.

“The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when, and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable. “ [59] - Lenin

"Farming enabled human populations to grow so rapidly that no complex agricultural society could ever have returned entirely to hunting and gathering. Around 10,000 BCE, before the Agricultural Revolution, the Earth was home to approximately 5–8 million nomadic foragers. By the first century CE, only 1–2 million foragers remained, primarily in Australia, the Americas, and Africa. Their numbers, however, were dwarfed by the world's approximately 250 million farmers." [60] - Yuval Noah Harari

As society evolved, so too did the rise of art, culture, pottery, craftsmanship, and social life itself. Markets and daily commerce slowly began to emerge as people exchanged goods through early barter systems and compared the value of what they produced. Different communities specialized in different forms of labour, trade, and production, which further expanded social development.

"Peasants were obliged to produce more than they consumed so that they could build up reserves. Without grain in the silo, jars of olive oil in the cellar, cheese in the pantry and sausages hanging from the rafters, they would starve in bad years. And bad years were bound to come, sooner or later. A peasant living on the assumption that bad years would not come didn't live long." [61] - Yuval Noah Harari

People also began accumulating personal possessions. The ideas of “my home,” “my tools,” and “my things” slowly became more deeply imprinted into human consciousness. The division of labour became increasingly visible as people performed different tasks and occupied different social roles within society. Over time, people also began to see themselves reflected through their role in society and the type of work they performed within the growing social order.

Around 700 bc, Homer would write:

"Rather I'd choose laboriously to bear
A weight of woes, and breathe the vital air,
A slave to some poor hind that toils for bread,
Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead." [62]

We also see the rise of religious order, which was directly tied to material reality itself. As American academic, neuroscientist, and primatologist Robert Sapolsky explains, religion and social structures are heavily shaped by the material and environmental conditions societies develop within. Pastoral societies, which depended on mobile livestock and often existed in harsh, conflict-prone environments, tended to develop more hierarchical and rigid belief systems centered around obedience, patriarchy, and strong moral authority. Their gods often were brutal and unforgiving. It was far more easier for your cattle to be stolen and never returned.

In contrast, many rainforest and horticultural societies, which lived within more biodiverse and less centralized environments, often developed decentralized spiritual systems rooted in animism, ancestor worship, and interconnectedness with nature. Their gods were more forgiving and dualistic. If someone stole your plants, they would simply just grow back. Sapolsky’s broader point is that human beliefs do not emerge in isolation, but are shaped by ecological pressures, survival needs, and forms of social organization.

Stanford Iranian Studies Program Robert Sapolsky: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

This perspective overlaps strongly with materialist and anthropological traditions that examine how material conditions shape culture, religion, morality, and ideology over time. Human beings do not simply invent ideas out of thin air. Their beliefs are deeply connected to the way they produce, survive, organize society, and interact with the natural world around them.

With the rise of the Iron Age came new tools and weapons such as iron spears, swords, and stronger farming equipment. As agricultural surpluses continued to grow, they became attractive targets for raids and invasions, leading to continuous warfare between neighboring tribes, towns, and early states. Settlements increasingly had to construct borders, walls, and defensive structures in order to protect their land, food supplies, and wealth. Out of these constant conflicts, military leaders often rose to prominence through the defense and conquest of villages and territories. In return for organizing warfare and maintaining order, these layers of kings, military leaders, chiefs, and priests increasingly took control of the surplus for themselves, allowing them to accumulate great wealth and power. Civilizations such as Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley Civilization, early Chinese civilizations, and the civilizations of Mexico and Peru became some of the first great centers of human civilization. The development of stronger tools and organized states also enabled these societies to capture prisoners of war and force them into labour. This extra labour power was then used to construct temples, pyramids, libraries, roads, and increasingly advanced systems of irrigation and urban development.

Ancient Egypt was one of the earliest and most advanced civilizations in human history, making major contributions to science, philosophy, engineering, medicine, writing, agriculture, and state organization. The Egyptians developed hieroglyphic writing, papyrus paper, calendars, systems of mathematics and geometry, early medical practices, irrigation technologies, and monumental architectural techniques used to construct pyramids and temples. They also created organized legal and administrative systems, advances in astronomy and timekeeping, and innovations in cosmetics, metalworking, furniture, and transportation.

Many of these achievements later influenced Greek, Roman, and broader Mediterranean civilizations, making Egypt one of the foundational centers of ancient human development. Egyptian civilization endured for nearly 3,000 years, surviving dynastic changes, invasions, internal crises, and major transformations in the ancient world. Historians are often astonished that Egypt even managed to survive the wider collapse of the Bronze Age, a period in which many surrounding civilizations and trade networks fell into crisis or disappeared entirely.

"The ancient Egyptians excelled particularly in fractions and geometry (the best calculation of pi in Antiquity), in the observation of time (calculation of a year as 360 days plus 5 epagomenal days), and medicine (suture stitching, reduction of fractures)." [63] - Alain Anselin

"The concept of Egyptian fractions became one of the most characteristic features of ancient Egypt's numeracy. The way in which fractions were represented in ancient Egypt differs fundamentally from the way we write fractions today. This difference has often led to a distorted analysis of Egyptian fraction reckoning, viewed solely through the eyes of modern mathematicians. In historical perspective, it should be noted that Egyptian fractions continued to be used in ancient Greek arithmetic and logistics." [64] - Annette Imhausen

The Levant soon became the center point of all history and trade. As ancient Egypt went into slow decline, the rise of Greece was inevitable.

Slave Society

While Egypt had slavery in its kingdom, it looked very different from the slavery developed in Greece, Carthage, and Rome. In Egypt, even though you were a slave, you had rights. Whereas as a slave in Greece, you had no rights, and alongside that, the full transformation of women into property was also completed. It was only when property ownership and slavery met at a convergence that women were seen as heir producers, exchangeable for animals, bride prices, and as a reproductive organ to reproduce slaves and labor.

"Estimates suggest that in Athens between 450 and 320 BCE, 80 to 100,000 people may have been enslaved, amounting to one in four inhabitants; and that by the late first century BCE in Italy alone, 1 to 1.5 million people were enslaved, representing 15 to 25 percent of the population. Both societies practiced chattel slavery, a form of absolute servitude in which enslaved persons were owned as property and could be subjected to physical violence, sexual exploitation, torture, and death with impunity. Neither Athens nor Rome enslaved people based on ethnicity or skin color, but they did discriminate by enslaving non-citizen foreigners, a majority of whom were captured during war or sold by slave-traders. Children born to enslaved parents were also enslaved." [65] - Michael C. Carlos

The desire for slave labour emerged out of material necessity and the expansion of the ancient world. Greece’s terrible geography, along with Rome and Carthage’s desire to dominate the Mediterranean Sea, created massive demands for food, wine, marble, minerals, silver, and household labour. This was further exacerbated by advances in maritime technology and horse cultivation, which allowed people to travel farther distances, expand trade, and wage larger wars. These wars produced huge numbers of prisoners who were often repurposed into slavery or sometimes forced into military service. Unlike slavery as most people know it, this slave system was not based on race. Anybody could be enslaved regardless of their racial makeup. Slaves were diverse during this time and racism had not yet developed.

Dido building Carthage, or The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire (1815). Oil on canvas, 155.5 x 230 cm (61.2 x 91 in). National Gallery, London Source: Wikimedia Commons

Ancient Greece had a mountainous and highly fragmented geography that deeply shaped its civilization. Unlike the broad fertile river valleys of Egypt or Mesopotamia, Greece was made up of rocky terrain, isolated valleys, mountains, and scattered islands across the Mediterranean. Because of this geography, Greece did not initially develop into one centralized empire. Instead, independent city-states such as Athens, Sparta, and Corinth emerged, each with its own government, economy, and military.

The lack of fertile farmland forced the Greeks toward trade, colonization, and maritime expansion. The sea became central to Greek life, allowing the spread of goods, philosophy, science, culture, and new ideas across the Mediterranean world. This geography also created constant competition and warfare between city-states while simultaneously pushing innovation in politics, military organization, commerce, and philosophy. In many ways, the fragmented and competitive character of Greece emerged directly from its material conditions and sea-facing geography. It’s easy access geography made it accessible as well to people from other neighboring states.

This also challenges the racist idea that Greece and Rome became “great” civilizations simply because they were inhabited by Europeans. This is historically false. The Mediterranean and Levant were the most culturally diverse melting pots in the ancient world, shaped by trade, migration, conquest, and the constant exchange of ideas between Africans, Asians, Middle Eastern peoples, and Europeans. Greek development did not happen in isolation. It was heavily influenced by Egypt, Phoenicia, Mesopotamia, and surrounding African and Near Eastern civilizations. Black Africans did not simply disappear with the decline of Egypt either. They continued to spread, trade, migrate, and exist throughout the Levant and Mediterranean world.

Depiction of a comic actor and a lyre-player with vine-leaf garlands on a white background, illustrating themes of music and theater in Roman art. Source: Wikimedia Commons

"North Africa absorbed cultural influences from peoples to its north and east via the Mediterranean Sea. Immigrants from the Levant founded Carthage, a major centre dating from the beginning of the first millennium BCE, and were followed in North Africa as a whole by Greek, Roman, Vandal, and Arab settlers, who together with indigenous people created both complex societies and numerous large settlements.
During the late first millennium BCE and the early first millennium CE, North Africa became one of the most economically successful and sophisticated parts of the Roman Empire." [66] - Graham Connah

Ancient Greece, Carthage, and Roman Republic became rivals largely because each sought influence and control over the Mediterranean Sea, which was the economic center of the ancient world. Control of the Mediterranean meant access to trade routes, ports, resources, military movement, taxation, and political power.

Carthage built a wealthy maritime empire based on naval trade and commerce across North Africa, Iberia, and the Mediterranean. The Greek city-states also expanded through colonization and seafaring trade networks, spreading throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions. Rome later emerged as a growing military power and quickly realized it could not dominate the ancient world without controlling the sea as well.

Carthaginian. Source: Wikimedia Commons

These competing economic and imperial interests led to constant conflicts, including the Punic Wars and Rome’s eventual conquest of the Greek world, allowing Rome to establish dominance over the Mediterranean basin.

Carthage in particular was destroyed brutally by Rome. After the Third Punic War, the city was burned, looted, and dismantled. Much of its history, literature, libraries, and written records were destroyed alongside it. Because of this, much of what survives about Carthage today comes primarily from Roman and Greek accounts, many of whom were its enemies and rivals. In many ways, the destruction of Carthage also meant the destruction of much of its own historical voice. The victors often write history in the way they choose to remember it.

The Capture of Carthage, Source: Wikimedia Commons

Greek historian Diodorus Siculus writes:

"The country of the Iberians has the most plentiful and richest silver mines that are known. The Iberians were ignorant of the value of silver, and the Phoenician traders were able to buy it in exchange for a very small quantity of merchandise; they took it to Greece, Asia, and other countries, and thus amassed great wealth. This trade, which they plied for many years, brought them power and enabled them to establish numerous colonies in Sicily and the neighbouring islands, in Libya, Sardinia, and Iberia." [67]

Herodotus describes the trading ritual used by Carthaginian merchants seeking gold in Africa:

“The Carthaginians spread out their merchandise on the beach,” writes the “Father of History,” “return to their ships and make smoke to attract the Negroes. The Negroes come down to the sea, place their gold beside the merchandise, and withdraw. The Carthaginians then return and, if they find a sufficient quantity of gold, they take it. If not, they return to their ships and wait, and in this case the Negroes add more gold until the traders are satisfied. They do each other no wrong: the Carthaginians do not touch the gold until the quantity seems to correspond to the value of their wares; the Negroes do not touch the goods until the traders have taken the gold.” [68]

Despite the oppressive character of slavery, it was the dominant mode of production in both Ancient Greece and Roman Republic and therefore played a historically progressive role for its time. It was undoubtedly a monstrosity built on exploitation and human suffering, but history cannot be understood through morality alone. Every society develops moral systems, religions, and cultural outlooks that correspond to its material conditions and the interests of its ruling class.

Athenian Fragmentary votive sculpture of Dionysus (?) Greek Ashmolean Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The labour performed by enslaved populations became the foundation upon which Greek and Roman civilization expanded. It enabled the construction of cities, roads, temples, ports, irrigation systems, and agricultural estates while also creating the conditions for developments in philosophy, mathematics, literature, engineering, science, and art. By concentrating wealth and freeing sections of the population from constant manual labour, these societies were able to develop more advanced political institutions, intellectual life, and systems of administration.

Human history develops through contradictions. Systems rooted in exploitation often simultaneously produce new social developments and plant the seed for future societies that eventually rise within them.

Decline of Slave Society

Slavery itself contains an inner contradiction. Slaves must somehow be forced or motivated to work despite slavery being an extremely miserable condition. As the Roman Republic became the dominant power after the destruction of Greece and Carthage, Rome increasingly relied on conquest, force, rape, pillage, and terror to subjugate populations and sell entire cities into slavery. Prisoners of war were slaughtered in arenas and public spectacles for entertainment, while conquered peoples were stripped of land, wealth, and freedom.

Over time, conquest itself was no longer simply about trade or territorial control but increasingly became a means of hunting and supplying slaves. The Roman economy became deeply dependent on this constant influx of enslaved labour. Yet slavery carried a major contradiction: enslaved populations reproduced slowly under brutal conditions and often died faster than they could replenish themselves. The only way to maintain the system was through endless expansion and continuous warfare.

The beginning of a crisis in any civilization usually starts with a crisis among its ruling layers before eventually spreading throughout society itself. After the destruction of Carthage and Rome’s rapid expansion, these crises began intensifying within Roman society.

Tiberius Gracchus argued that the growing wealth of Rome should be shared among its free citizens rather than concentrated in the hands of nobles and slave owners. Rome’s conquests had flooded Italy with enslaved labour, allowing wealthy elites to build enormous estates that outcompeted small independent farmers. At the same time, peasants were forced into long military service, driven into debt, or pushed off their land by aristocrats.

This process gradually destroyed much of the independent peasantry and created a growing mass of landless poor concentrated in the cities. Gracchus proposed land reforms aimed at rebuilding a republic of small free farmers, but the Roman nobility fiercely opposed these measures because their wealth and political power depended heavily on slave-run estates. In the end, Tiberius Gracchus was murdered by his own senators and their supporters for attempting these reforms.

Soon after came the slave uprising of Spartacus. Most people know Spartacus simply as a Roman gladiator portrayed in television and popular culture, but the real history is far more revolutionary than that. Spartacus was captured and enslaved by Rome and eventually forced into gladiatorial combat. Alongside around 70 other gladiators, he escaped from a training school in Capua and began gathering support as they moved across Italy.

What started as a small escape quickly transformed into a massive rebellion as tens of thousands of enslaved people, rural labourers, and oppressed poor joined the revolt. The uprising spread across Italy and became one of the greatest internal threats Rome had ever faced. Spartacus and his forces defeated several Roman armies and, for a time, controlled large portions of southern Italy.

The rebellion emerged during a period when the contradictions of Roman society were already beginning to intensify economically and socially. Rome’s ruling class depended heavily upon slave labour, so the uprising terrified the Roman aristocracy because it threatened the very foundation of their economy and wealth. Eventually, the rebellion was crushed by Marcus Licinius Crassus through overwhelming military force.

One of the major weaknesses of the revolt was that it never successfully united with the wider Roman proletariat. Unlike the modern proletariat under capitalism, much of the Roman urban poor lived parasitically off the wealth of empire itself and depended heavily on grain distributions, conquest, and the labour of slaves. Rather than forming a revolutionary alliance with the enslaved masses, large sections of the Roman proletariat remained tied to the interests of the Roman state and aristocracy.

The Romans were now put into a hard position after killing all their property in the form of slaves and were increasingly forced to rely on mercenaries for their armies, men who often had no real loyalty to the Roman aristocracy or the state itself, but only to the commander who guaranteed them payment, land, and rewards once the job was completed. Loyalty was no longer to Rome, but to powerful military leaders, which further deepened instability within the empire. Rome continued passing through various emperors who at times slightly revived Roman society, but overall the empire was on a long downward trend economically, politically, and socially.

In history there are haggard institutions and people that simply outlive their usefulness and historical existence. They continue dragging out a miserable existence for the people trapped under them, much like billionaire Bryan Johnson who is desperately clinging to life through medicine and wealth despite him aging anyways and Sleepy Joe Biden. It was becoming increasingly obvious that Rome was decaying, and rightfully so. The destruction, conquest, slavery, and violence that Rome had unleashed upon the world eventually transformed into its opposite and began consuming the empire itself from within.

On August 24th 410 AD Rome was sacked by the Visagoths.

“After the Visigoths and Ostrogoths came the Vandals, Alans, Lombards, Suevi, Alemanni, Burgundians, Franks, Thuringians, Frisians, Heruli, Gepidae, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Huns and Magyars. They crashed their way across the frontiers in successive waves. When the Vandals conquered the African provinces in the fifth century ad, Rome’s food supply was suddenly interrupted, dealing a mortal blow to the Western Empire. The immediate effect of the barbarian onslaught was to wipe out civilisation and throw society and human thought back for a thousand years. The productive forces suffered a violent interruption. The cities were destroyed or abandoned. The invaders were an agricultural people and knew nothing of towns and cities. The barbarians in general were hostile to the towns and their inhabitants – a psychology that is quite common among peasants in all periods. This process of devastation, rape and pillage was to continue for centuries, leaving behind a terrible heritage of backwardness, which we call the Dark Ages. Yet, although the barbarians succeeded in conquering the Romans, they themselves were fairly quickly absorbed, and even lost their own language and ended up speaking a dialect of Latin. Thus, the Franks, who gave their name to modern France, were a Germanic tribe speaking a language related to modern German. The same thing happened to the Germanic tribes that invaded Spain and Italy. This is what normally happens when a more economically and culturally backward people conquers a more advanced nation. Exactly the same thing happened later to the Mongol hordes that conquered India. They were absorbed by the more advanced Hindu culture and ended up founding a new Indian dynasty – the Mughals” [68] - Alan Woods

The end of slave empires was marked.

Feudalism

Feudalism gradually emerged from the end of slave society. The leftover estates once run by slavers could no longer rely on Roman rule to enforce their domination over the slaves. As the Western Roman Empire collapsed and centralized authority disintegrated, slavery slowly withered away and transformed into serfdom. Slaves increasingly became serfs who traded their labor and partial freedom in exchange for military protection from the chaos that decentralization had unleashed. Various bands of barbarian raiders and warlords moved across the former empire smashing, pillaging, killing, and burning settlements while local populations were left to fend for themselves.

Eventually many of the Germanic warlords settled onto conquered lands and transformed themselves into feudal lords. They offered military protection in exchange for the exploitation of peasant labor. Since everything had become decentralized, each feudal territory had to sustain itself through its own production. Food, water, harvests, livestock, tools, and labor all had to be produced locally because trade and centralized administration had largely broken down. Warfare remained constant, and feudal rulers depended heavily upon the labor of the peasantry to feed armies, maintain estates, and preserve their power.

The manor and estate became the central foundation of feudal power. Around castles and fortified estates entire local economies formed. Yet state power itself remained weak and fragmented while bureaucracy was minimal compared to the old Roman Empire. Rival lords endlessly fought one another over land, taxation, inheritance claims, peasant labor, trade routes, and military dominance. A small castle overlooking fertile farmland could become the political and military center of an entire region. Constant warfare caused neighboring feudal territories to repeatedly rise and fall as stronger lords conquered weaker ones and absorbed their lands, estates, and serfs into larger domains.

This period later became known as the “Middle Ages,” or even in some areas the “Dark Ages”, as there was an uneven development across Europe, as it had experienced severe fragmentation, violence, instability, famine, and economic decline compared to the heights of Rome. The Crusades also occurred during this era, helping expand the political and ideological influence of the Catholic Church across Europe and beyond. The Church became one of the few institutions capable of maintaining authority across feudal society and often legitimized the rule of kings and nobles.

Kings increasingly centralized authority by weakening independent nobles, establishing taxation systems, organizing royal courts, and building larger standing armies. England centralized relatively early after the Norman Conquest, which imposed a stronger and more unified feudal administration across the island. France gradually consolidated power after centuries of warfare, especially as the Hundred Years' War weakened much of the feudal aristocracy. Spain emerged from the long process of the Reconquista, during which constant warfare helped forge centralized military monarchies that later expanded overseas into colonial empires.

As trade expanded and towns slowly began to grow again, these centralized kingdoms accumulated enormous wealth. Merchant classes started to emerge alongside expanding markets and long-distance trade networks. This is where the seedlings of the bourgeoisie were planted.

The Islamic Golden age

The Islamic Golden Age is generally marked from the 7th century to the 13th century. During this period the Islamic Caliphates became one of the great centers of technological, scientific, economic, and intellectual advancement in the world. The empire stretched across North Africa, the Middle East, Persia, Central Asia, parts of India, and Iberia, creating one of the largest trade and intellectual networks on earth at the time. Much like the Greeks before them, the Islamic world was culturally and ethnically diverse, containing Arabs, Persians, Berbers, Egyptians, Syrians, Jews, Africans, Turks, and many other peoples. This openness and interconnectedness allowed the empire to compete on a global scale and advance agriculture, the arts, economics, industry, law, literature, navigation, philosophy, science, sociology, and technology.

Combat entre un soldat croisé et un soldat musulman, vers 1250. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Islamic world did not merely inherit the achievements of antiquity but transformed and expanded upon them. After acquiring paper-making techniques originally developed in China, Islamic societies spread paper production across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean world. This dramatically lowered the cost of books and helped fuel an explosion in scholarship, administration, science, literature, and philosophy. Libraries, observatories, universities, and centers of learning flourished throughout cities such as Baghdad, Cordoba, and Cairo. The University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco, founded in 859 CE, is recognized by Guinness World Records and UNESCO as the oldest continually operating higher-learning institution in the world.

The Islamic empires also helped carry ideas and technologies across continents. The Hindu-Arabic numeral system used today (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9), which originated in India, was transmitted into Europe largely through Islamic mathematicians such as Al-Khwarizmi, whose works on algebra and arithmetic revolutionized mathematics. Muslim and non-Muslim scholars gathered in institutions such as the House of Wisdom to study and translate the works of Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen, and many others into Arabic, preserving and expanding knowledge that later helped shape the European Renaissance. Medieval Islamic civilization was not simply preserving ancient wisdom but actively developing medicine, astronomy, engineering, navigation, philosophy, sociology, and the sciences.

Painting of Fath ‘Ali Shah from a book cover. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Islamic empires can also be considered among the first truly universal civilizations. Through their control over major sections of the Silk Road, trans-Saharan African trade routes, Mediterranean commerce, and Indian Ocean trade networks, they connected Africa, Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, and China into a vast system of exchange and collaboration. This allowed foreign peoples, ideas, technologies, religions, and goods to move across enormous distances and become integrated into the broader Islamic world.

"Dynasty and government serve as the world's marketplace, attracting to it the products of scholarship and craftsmanship alike. Wayward wisdom and forgotten lore turn up there. In this market stories are told and items of historical information are delivered. Whatever is in demand on this market is in general demand everywhere else.
Now, whenever the established dynasty avoids injustice, prejudice, weakness, and double-dealing, with determination keeping to the right path and never swerving from it, the wares on its market are as pure silver and fine gold. However, when it is influenced by selfish interests and rivalries, or swayed by vendors of tyranny and dishonesty, the wares of its marketplace become as dross and debased metals.
The intelligent critic must judge for himself as he looks around, examining this, admiring that, and choosing this." [69] - Ibn Khaldun

Of course, like many great empires undergoing massive architectural and economic expansion, this civilization was also built upon the exploitation of peasant and slave labor. The medieval Islamic world was not a pure slave society like Rome, but rather a complex mixture of tributary and semi-feudal relations alongside extensive slave systems. The Islamic empires inherited older forms of slavery and integrated them into vast trade networks stretching from Africa and Europe to Central Asia and India. Enslaved Africans were transported through East African and trans-Saharan trade routes into the Middle East, where many labored in plantations, salt marshes, households, armies, and administrative positions. The brutal exploitation of East African laborers in Iraq eventually contributed to the Zanj Rebellion, one of the largest slave uprisings of the medieval world. Slaves from Central Asia and the Caucasus, often known as Mamluks, were trained as elite military soldiers and, in some cases, even rose to positions of political power themselves.

Because of the Muslims’ extensive domination over major trade networks, they increasingly came to dominate the movement of gold throughout much of the medieval world. As trade expanded across Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, gold became more deeply connected to commerce, coinage, and the growing wealth of nations. The demand for gold continued to rise as kingdoms and empires relied more heavily upon trade and monetary exchange. This immense concentration of wealth would soon rear it’s ugly head during a famous pilgrimage to Mecca.

Mansa Musa

The legend of Mansa Musa is one that can’t be missed at all. The story of the man who made the pilgrimage to Mecca and passed out so much gold in Egypt it damn near broke the economy is impressive, and of course, word by mouth shall indeed travel. Mansa Musa was the ruler of the empire of Mali from 1312–1337 CE. During the reign of Mansa Musa, the empire of Mali accounted for almost half of the world's gold, according to the British Museum.

"As the ruler, Mansa Musa had almost unlimited access to the most highly valued source of wealth in the medieval world," Kathleen Bickford Berzock, who specializes in African art at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, told the BBC. [70] - Naima Mohamud

Despite this, because of the geographical distance between West Africa and the Levant—where much of the known world’s major trade networks converged—West Africa remained relatively mysterious to many outside observers. People knew there were powerful kingdoms and immense riches beyond the Sahara, but little was truly understood about who controlled them or the scale of their wealth. Mansa Musa would eventually place West Africa firmly onto the map of the known world during his famous pilgrimage to Mecca, particularly as he passed through Cairo, displaying the enormous wealth of the Mali Empire to the Mediterranean and Islamic world.

Depiction of Mansa Moussa, emperor of Mali, on a map of Europe and North Africa. Mansa Moussa holds a gold nugget. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The medieval Arab chroniclers such as Al-Umari described Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage to Mecca as an enormous caravan consisting of attendants, slaves, soldiers, merchants, and camels carrying vast quantities of gold.

"From the beginning of my coming to stay in Egypt, I heard talk of the arrival of this Sultan Musa on his pilgrimage and found the Cairenes eager to recount what they had seen of the Africans' prodigal spending. I asked the emir Abu ... and he told me of the opulence, manly virtues, and piety of his sultan.
'When I went out to meet him,' he said, 'that is, on behalf of the mighty Sultan al-Malik al-Nasir, he did me extreme honour and treated me with the greatest courtesy. He addressed me, however, only through an interpreter despite his perfect ability to speak in the Arabic tongue. Then he forwarded to the royal treasury many loads of unworked native gold and other valuables.
I tried to persuade him to go up to the Citadel to meet the sultan, but he refused persistently, saying: "I came for the pilgrimage and nothing else. I do not wish to mix anything else with my pilgrimage." He had begun to use this argument, but I realized that the audience was repugnant to him because he would be obliged to kiss the ground and the sultan's hand.
I continued to cajole him and he continued to make excuses, but the sultan's protocol demanded that I should bring him into the royal presence, so I kept on at him till he agreed.
When we came into the sultan's presence, we said to him: "Kiss the ground!" but he refused outright, saying: "How may this be?" Then an intelligent man who was with him whispered to him something we could not understand and he said: "I make obeisance to God who created me!" Then he prostrated himself and went forward to the sultan. The sultan half rose to greet him and sat him by his side. They conversed together for a long time, then Sultan Musa went out.
The sultan sent to him several complete suits of honour for himself, his courtiers, and all those who had come with him, and saddled and bridled horses for himself and his chief courtiers....
This man [Mansa Musa] flooded Cairo with his benefactions. He left no court emir nor holder of a royal office without the gift of a load of gold. The Cairenes made incalculable profits out of him and his suite in buying and selling and giving and taking. They exchanged gold until they depressed its value in Egypt and caused its price to fall....
Gold was at a high price in Egypt until they came in that year. The mithqal did not go below 25 dirhams and was generally above, but from that time its value fell and it cheapened in price and has remained cheap till now. The mithqal does not exceed 22 dirhams or less. This has been the state of affairs for about twelve years until this day by reason of the large amount of gold which they brought into Egypt and spent there...." [71] - Al-Umari

The need for gold in commerce would eventually become a pressing matter that would show up again later.

Black Death

It is truly remarkable how long feudalism reigned over Europe for nearly a thousand years, and yet throughout much of this period, society remained highly volatile and unstable. The Church dominated nearly every aspect of life, owning vast areas of land and often acting as a conservative force that helped preserve the existing social order. Scientific and technological development progressed slowly in much of feudal Europe, while trade and commerce increasingly expanded through the growth of merchant classes who would eventually rise into what became the bourgeoisie. Feudal society itself was hanging by a thread. The true strength of any system is ultimately exposed when something unforeseen, unpredictable, and massive either shatters its foundations or forces it into a new equilibrium. In the case of feudalism, the former occurred.

In 1347 the Black Death arrived upon the shores of Europe and rapidly spread terror across the continent. Between 1347 and 1353 an estimated 30–50 percent of Europe’s population perished. The plague spread quickly through crowded towns suffering from poor sanitation, malnutrition, constant warfare, and interconnected trade routes. Even nobles, kings, queens, and clergy themselves were not spared from the devastation. Entire villages, estates, and families were wiped out. Fields were abandoned, harvests collapsed, and vast sections of land were left empty.

The Black Death fundamentally disrupted the balance of power between the nobility and the peasantry and severely undermined the feudal order itself. With such a massive decline in population there was now a severe shortage of peasant labor available to work noble estates. Surviving peasants suddenly possessed far greater bargaining power. They demanded higher wages, lower rents, and better conditions, and if one lord refused, they could often leave and seek employment elsewhere. In response, feudal rulers attempted to freeze wages, restrict the movement of workers, and reinforce old feudal obligations through repression and legal measures. This only intensified unrest and contributed to peasant uprisings across Europe.

As the old feudal system weakened, the nobility increasingly shifted away from purely subsistence-based estate production toward market-oriented production designed for profit. Rather than simply extracting labor and tribute from peasants, many landlords began leasing land for rent and selling agricultural goods such as wool and grain within expanding markets. Peasants who once survived through direct access to land were increasingly pushed into towns and cities where they became dependent upon wage labor. Merchants and landlords alike began hiring free laborers, many of whom were formerly serfs, to work in workshops, textile production, and commercial agriculture. Through this long and uneven process, feudal society slowly gave rise to primitive accumulation, market production, and the early foundations of capitalism.

"The rise of the market and the merchants in feudal society did not bring about an automatic transition to capitalism. But it did bring about transformations within feudalism which meant that, when the mode of production entered into deep crisis, capitalist development was one possible option.
The merchants of the Middle Ages were concerned with the self-expansion of their wealth (with M–M'). The easiest way for them to achieve this was by taking advantage of the imperfect development of the trading system, of the fact that there were substantial price differences from region to region. They could do this within the confines of a system of production run by other classes.
But these differences in prices could not be relied on to provide substantial profits indefinitely. If other merchants entered the ring, then prices in the final market would fall and the self-expansion of wealth would come to an end.
It was this which led the merchants to fight for political power in the towns and then to use this political power to rig the feudal market in their own favour—via monopolies, encouragement of wars against rivals, piracy, and so on.
It was this too which led successful merchants to try to protect their accumulations of wealth by moving them from the cities and trade into land. They would usually end up trying to guarantee their future well-being by buying themselves into the feudal ruling class. They developed all sorts of interests in compromising with the ruling powers of feudal society.
To this extent there was a powerful conservative trend built into merchant capital. In the great revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most of the great merchants stood for 'moderate reform' and a few sided with the out-and-out defenders of the old order." [72] - Chris Harman

Rise of The Bourgeoisie

By the 15th century, Europe began to look radically different. The markets and the development of the productive forces had now come into conflict with feudalism.

“The Netherlands became the factory of Europe, and trade flourished along the river Rhine. The cities of Northern Italy were a powerful locomotive of economic growth and commerce, opening up trade with the East. From about the fifth to the twelfth centuries, Europe consisted of largely isolated economies. No longer! The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape and the general expansion of trade gave a fresh impetus not only to the creation of wealth but to the development of men’s minds.” [73] - Alan Woods

Now, of course, America itself had already been discovered by the natives, so there was no "discovery" of America except from the perspective of the Europeans. Many Indigenous peoples referred to the continent as Turtle Island.

As Europe began expanding outward in search of new markets, resources, and trade routes, it came into contact with societies that had already existed and developed for centuries. Before the arrival of the Europeans, North and South America were home to numerous Indigenous civilizations with their own cultures, economies, governments, religions, and social systems.

The Mississippians

The Mississippians are often referred to as mound builders due to their construction of large ceremonial mounds made from earth. They were the last major pre-Columbian civilization in North America before the arrival of Europeans.

Unfortunately, like many Native societies, they relied primarily on oral history rather than written records, so much of what is known about them comes from archaeology and the traditions preserved by their descendants. I recommend that readers of this article spend time with the natives around them today to gather oral histories or even visit a native museum to learn about this rich history. The Mississippians occupied a vast territory stretching across present-day Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.

Their culture was cultivated around corn, beans, squash, and other crops. Cahokia was their largest settlement and one of the largest urban centers north of Mexico. Trade occurred between neighboring tribes and communities, with food, shells, rare minerals, and other goods being exchanged. Over time, the Mississippian civilization dealt with famine and drought, significantly reducing its population. The remaining survivors most likely dispersed into smaller tribes and nations throughout North America.

A diorama showing a Mississippian culture flintknapper from the Cahokia site in Collinsville, Illinois. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Iroquois

The Iroquois were the most advanced centralized state in eastern North America and later became some of the most determined resistors of colonization.

After years of tribal conflict, they decided to put their differences aside due to the growing threat posed by European colonization, and the Iroquois united into a confederation. Their political system was highly developed for its time and often reflected structures similar to the Russian soviets. They had advisory council members known as Pine Tree Chiefs, delegates who could be either male or female, and a system organized around kinship that helped resolve disputes and maintain unity between nations.

Photograph shows Chief Paupukkewis, and Iroquis Indian adopted by the Ojibwa Indians. Source: Library of Congress

Benjamin Franklin himself admired aspects of the Iroquois Confederacy and incorporated elements of it into the United States Constitution.

The Iroquois believed in many spirits, including the spirits of the Three Sisters, who were responsible for corn, beans, and squash. Their spirituality also included belief in the Thunderer and the Great Spirit. Before eating, they thanked the spirits who provided the food and asked that it nourish them.

The Iroquois also believed that all plants and animals possessed spirits which aligned closely to what Baruch Spinoza had already proposed in Europe prior, just with different terminology. Before hunting animals, they asked permission from those spirits. Out of respect, they took only what they needed from the earth and used every part of the animals they hunted.

The Aztecs and Mayans

Further south, in Mesoamerica, the Aztecs and Mayans built large and highly developed civilizations.

The Mayans constructed impressive cities such as Tikal, Palenque, Copán, and Calakmul. These cities generally existed as independent city-states, each ruled by its own leadership. The Mayans developed one of the most advanced writing systems in the Americas and made significant achievements in mathematics, architecture, and astronomy. They also created sophisticated calendar systems based on astronomical observations, including the Long Count calendar.

President Alejandro Giammattei participated in the act of reopening and presentation of the renewed National Museum of Mayan Art, Archaeology and Ethnology on 2 November 2023. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Aztecs likewise built a powerful civilization with developed systems of government, agriculture, religion, and writing. They accumulated immense wealth and controlled extensive trade networks throughout the region. Their lands contained significant quantities of gold and other valuable resources. Upon witnessing the wealth of the Mayans and Aztecs, the Spanish conquistadors became obsessed with acquiring it through brutalization and conquest.

illustration of Mayan King Bahlam III and Lady Xoc by pigeonduckthing. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Beyond the societies listed here, many other Indigenous civilizations flourished throughout the Americas. The Ojibwe, Dakota, Choctaw, Cherokee, Blackfoot, Seminoles, Hopi, Zuni, Navajo, and the Ancestral Puebloans, also known as the Anasazi, inhabited the Southwestern United States and are particularly noted for their architectural achievements. Of course, there are many more tribes that existed, but we do not have the time to go into them here; however, I wish to highlight their existence because they are still a people that exist, and they existed before Columbus.

The First Victims of Colonialism

Prior to this period, traveling peddlers and traders who moved goods across Europe gradually evolved into an early merchant class. As trade expanded, some merchants accumulated enormous wealth and were eventually able to buy land, titles, political influence, and entry into the nobility itself. Christopher Columbus emerged from this growing commercial world. Born into a modest merchant and artisan family in Genoa, Columbus embodied the rising spirit of commerce, ambition, and capitalism that was beginning to transform Europe.

At the time, European powers were desperate to bypass Islamic domination over many of the major Afro-Eurasian trade routes and gain direct access to the gold, spices, and luxury goods flowing from Africa and Asia. This created an opportunity for Columbus, who proposed sailing westward across the Atlantic in search of a new route to Asia. Financed by the Spanish Crown under Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, Columbus sailed in 1492 and arrived in the Americas. He was also backed by the church, which wanted to continue spreading its religion; this was, in fact, the primary objective of his voyage. Following his voyages, he was rewarded with fame, noble titles, wealth, and hereditary privileges.

Soon, these expeditions aimed at bypassing Islamic-controlled trade networks became increasingly common. Portugal had already begun expanding down the western coast of Africa in search of direct access to West African gold and Asian trade routes without relying upon Muslim and Mediterranean intermediaries. European maritime expansion rapidly intensified as competition over trade, wealth, and empire accelerated.

The money capital formed by means of usury and commerce was prevented from turning into industrial capital, in the country by the feudal constitution, in the towns by the guild organisation. These fetters vanished with the dissolution of feudal society, with the expropriation and partial eviction of the country population. The new manufactures were established at sea-ports, or at inland points beyond the control of the old municipalities and their guilds. Hence in England an embittered struggle of the corporate towns against these new industrial nurseries.
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China…
The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power. [74] - Karl Marx

Exploitation soon spread across Central America, South America, and eventually North America as European powers such as Portugal, Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands established colonial empires. Indigenous lands were seized, entire communities displaced, and millions subjected to forced labor, slavery, missionary domination, disease, and extermination campaigns.

Most Indigenous people died from diseases brought from Europe, particularly smallpox and other illnesses to which they possessed little or no immunity after thousands of years of geographic isolation. This devastation was compounded by warfare, sexual violence, famine, forced labor, and colonial violence.

Ironically, many Indigenous societies were often cleaner and more organized than the European societies that arrived on their shores. Reports describe streets being swept regularly, organized waste collection, public latrines, aqueducts supplying fresh water, and canals used for transportation. Some historians argue that Tenochtitlan was cleaner and better organized than many European cities of the early 1500s.

The Aztecs placed a high value on cleanliness, with daily bathing being common and soap-like substances made from plants regularly used. Many people of the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains also bathed frequently and maintained practices that Europeans often remarked upon with surprise.

By the early 1500s, the Spanish established the encomienda system, under which Indigenous people were effectively forced to work for Spanish colonists in mines, plantations, and agriculture. Entire populations were devastated through a combination of disease, forced labor, displacement, and violence. Modern scholars estimate that the population of the Americas before European conquest was approximately 40–60 million. By the 1600s, many regions had experienced population declines of 90–95 percent.

Lauren Kent European colonizers killed so many Native Americans that it changed the global climate | CNN

As trade, warfare, and overseas expansion became increasingly expensive, European monarchies grew heavily dependent upon loans and financial support from merchants, bankers, and the rising bourgeoisie. Economic power gradually shifted away from the old feudal aristocracy toward the expanding commercial classes. This created growing tensions among monarchies, the feudal system, nobles, merchants, and the emerging capitalist order, reshaping the world.

Martin Luther

By the 16th century, deep social contradictions were developing across Europe as the various classes increasingly came into conflict with one another. Rising taxes, rents, and feudal obligations were driven by the growing crisis of feudalism itself. Expanding trade, constant warfare, centralized monarchies, and the growth of money economies pushed nobles and rulers to extract greater wealth from the peasantry in the form of high taxes and a rising cost of living, intensifying class tensions and contributing to major uprisings such as the German Peasants' War. It was out of these conditions that Martin Luther emerged, preaching against the corruption and authority of the Catholic Church. Luther argued that many Church practices and rituals had become hollow and that the priesthood itself was not a divine institution but a manmade hierarchy. His movement became known as Protestantism and helped ignite the period known as the Reformation. Alongside Luther stood his more radical opposite, Thomas Müntzer, who preached social justice, argued that God stood with the poor against their exploiters, and openly advocated resistance against oppression and tyranny.

The forces accelerating these conflicts were tied to the formation of nations, the expansion of commerce, and colonial ambition. Europe was no longer merely a scattered feudal landscape of isolated estates and local lords. National interests increasingly emerged around overseas expeditions, trade routes, markets, and the accumulation of wealth. Kings now sought to oversee and centralize this growing expansion through stronger administration, bureaucracy, courts, taxation systems, and standing governments. Yet the very process of centralization that helped expand trade also began to clash with the rising bourgeoisie. Merchants, financiers, and urban commercial classes increasingly felt constrained by royal taxes, monopolies, regulations, and aristocratic privilege.

For example, with the rise of the Spanish nation, sections of the feudal aristocracy, monarchy, and merchant classes wanted to ensure that wealth, privilege, and political power remained concentrated within their own people. Laws and regulations emerged around the concept of limpieza de sangre ("purity of blood"), which held that one had to possess "pure Christian blood" in order to access certain universities, guilds, government positions, religious offices, and economic opportunities.

The Church was obsessed with converting people to Christianity, and many religious authorities condemned or restricted the charging of interest on loans. Jews and Muslims were frequently barred from owning land, joining guilds, holding public office, and entering many professions, despite working closely with Christians a century prior! As a result, many were pushed into occupations that remained open to them, such as trade, money changing, finance, and tax farming.

It is here that we begin to see some of the historical roots of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim discrimination and the incubator for racism. Because Jews were concentrated in a small number of occupations connected to money and commerce, stereotypes emerged portraying them as greedy or money-obsessed. These stereotypes ignored the reality that many Jews had been forced into such occupations by legal restrictions and discrimination in the first place.

This rising class of the bourgeoisie began questioning why political power remained tied to hereditary birthrights and religious authority when commerce, trade, and production were becoming the true engines of wealth and social power. They were the ones who were doing all the work and bringing in the money. Why did they not have some sort of rights over society?

“This revolution was anticipated by the revolt of Martin Luther against the authority of the Church. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Germany saw a move from an entirely agrarian economy, and the rise of new social classes that clashed with the traditional feudal hierarchy. Luther’s attacks on the Roman Catholic Church acted as the spark that ignited revolution. The burghers and lesser nobility sought to break the power of the clergy, escape the clutches of Rome, and, last but not least, enrich themselves through the confiscation of Church property.” [75] - Alan Woods

The German Peasants' War began in 1524 and rapidly spread across large sections of the Holy Roman Empire throughout 1525 before finally being suppressed by 1526. Bands of peasants moved throughout the German countryside attacking nobles, seizing estates, burning records of feudal obligations, and ransacking monasteries and cities associated with aristocratic and Church power. What occurred was not surprising but rather the eruption of the deep social contradictions developing within late feudal society itself.

Martin Luther did what many politicians do today; despite initially criticizing the corruption of the Catholic Church, he ultimately sided with the burghers, princes, and nobility against the peasants once the revolt threatened the social order. Fearful of social chaos and revolutionary upheaval, Luther condemned the rebellion and supported its brutal suppression. Following their defeat, the peasants faced severe punishments, executions, and harsh treaties imposed by the nobility. The revolt became one of the largest popular uprisings in premodern European history and would remain unmatched in scale until the French and Haitian Revolutions centuries later.

The French Revolution

How history is mostly taught to us in school about this revolution is mostly watered down to the point it just becomes the fact that people were angry because they no longer liked kings and queens anymore, which is just one zenith of the truth. The truth is the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution. Class society had finally ripened through all of the consistent uprisings, contradictions, and antagonisms; it simply exploded. The bourgeoisie, now hand in hand with their science, industrial productive forces, wealth, and disdain for religion, with the backing of the peasantry, overthrew the feudal system once and for all. It is where Engels delivered his famous line:

“We saw that the French philosophers of the eighteenth century, the forerunners of the Revolution, appealed to reason as the sole judge of all that is. A rational government, rational society, were to be founded; everything that ran counter to eternal reason was to be remorselessly done away with. We saw also that this eternal reason was in reality nothing but the idealized understanding of the eighteenth-century citizen, just then evolving into the bourgeois. The French Revolution had realized this kingdom of reason.” [76]

And the sharp conclusion:

“But the ‘Kingdom of Reason’ turned out to be nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie.” [77]

The masses sprang out into the towns no matter which obstacle in their way, in fact, this revolution could not have been achieved without the active participation of the masses.

“The enemies of the French Revolution always try to blacken its image with the accusation of violence and bloodshed. matter of fact, the violence of the masses is inevitably a reaction against the violence of the old ruling class. The origins of the Terror must be sought in the reaction of the revolution to the threat of violent overthrow from both internal and external enemies. The revolutionary dictatorship was the result of revolutionary war and was only an expression of the latter. Under the rule of Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobins, the semi-proletarian Sans-culottes carried the revolution to a successful conclusion. In fact, the masses pushed the leaders to go far further than they had intended. Objectively, the revolution was bourgeois-democratic in character, since the development of the productive forces and the proletariat had not yet reached a point where the question of socialism could be posed.” [78] - Alan Woods

But what gave way to this great historic period was not simply the masses waking up one day and suddenly hating their conditions. It was much deeper than that and honestly not too different from what we see even within our own nation today. The French ruling class was drowning in debt from waging wars it simply did not win. You see, when a war is successfully achieved, nobody really notices what comes after it, the looting of the economy, the sweeping up of the means of production and productive forces of that conquered country. To a trained Marxist eye, or even a well-engrossed conspiracy theorist American, you can see this same playbook repeat itself over and over throughout history. But to ordinary everyday people, these contradictions usually do not begin impacting them until much later, when these imperialist wars begin stacking on top of each other after defeat after defeat, and eventually the state becomes incapable of paying back its debt because it never acquired the riches it promised its financiers. So now what must happen? The already exploited must be exploited even further.

Contrary to popular belief, the revolution was not triggered by the queen saying, “Let them eat cake.” In fact, historical evidence strongly suggests she never even said it. Bourgeois historians will never fully pull back the veil and reveal the true source of their own history and how they themselves came to power because it would expose a contradiction they cannot escape. While they constantly condemn the idea of violent overthrow today, their own class itself was born through violent overthrow!

The French Revolution was not triggered by a single statement but by deep social and economic crises: famine, rising bread prices, inequality, feudal exploitation, crushing debt, and growing anger toward the monarchy and nobility. “Let them eat cake” simply became a convenient myth used to water down one of the greatest social explosions in human history into a single quote that most likely never even happened.

French Revolution, 1789 Painting; French Revolution, 1789 Art. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Leon Trotsky once said that “The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.” If we flip this on it’s side; every crisis that first begins with a crisis of the ruling class. And that was true even with the old French monarchy, just as it is with our own bourgeoisie today. Due to the growing crisis within the monarchy, they summoned representatives to solve their financial collapse, but once word spread that the monarchy was essentially broke, weak, and incapable of governing properly, revolutionary formations among the middle classes of France began to emerge. One of the most important of these formations became the Jacobins under the leadership of Maximilien Robespierre.

This was one of the first great examples in history of mass political organizing. The Jacobins became increasingly radical as conditions in France worsened. With war threatening France, the king attempted to flee, economic instability deepened, and the masses in Paris grew increasingly militant. The revolution also launched an attack against the power of the Catholic Church. Contrary to popular belief, not all Jacobins were simply atheists. Some were atheists, some were anti-Church, some were anti-religion, while others were deists. If you compare the old bourgeoisie to the laughing stock we have today, you can at least say these people genuinely believed they were building a new world. Church lands were seized, priests were dispersed among the masses, and revolutionary politics spread throughout the country. Whereas nowadays we deal with Trump, Elon Musk, and JD Vance, who are consistently preaching to God and upholding Christian ideals. Truly, what a laughing stock of the world.

The Jacobins used public agitation, newspapers, speeches, political clubs, and mass mobilization to spread their views. They called for the abolition of the monarchy, the establishment of a republic, price controls on food, expansion of education, and the defense of the revolution through mass participation. These beliefs, which were highly progressive and advanced for their time, gave the masses an enormous impetus.

As the revolution deepened, King Louis XVI was executed, the monarchy was abolished, and France mobilized huge armies against the monarchies of Europe. The revolution even temporarily abolished slavery within the French colonies.

Can you imagine that? One of the greatest historical events in human history has today been watered down into nothing more than “Let them eat cake.” An event that shook the entire feudal order to its foundations, mobilized millions, overthrew kings, terrified the ruling classes of Europe, and gave birth to modern politics is now reduced to a single quote most likely never even said.

“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relation of production or--this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms--with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution”…“No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.” [79] - Karl Marx

At the time, however, nobody could fully foresee the deeper contradictions developing beneath the surface because dialectical materialism had not yet been developed by Marx. Ideas such as freedom, justice, equality, and reason sounded universal, but not everyone meant the same thing by them. Freedom for me but not for thee. You see, the bourgeoisie themselves had also convinced the masses that they were for all of humankind but indeed were not.

Within the bourgeoisie itself, there existed conservative layers becoming increasingly terrified by the growing mobilization of the masses. By 1794, many were exhausted by economic instability, food shortages, executions, and constant upheaval. Sections of the bourgeoisie felt the masses were beginning to demand too much. They wanted political stability, protection of private property, and safer conditions so that they could continue to accumulate wealth. These conservative layers became associated with what became known as the Thermidorian Reaction.

On July 27, 1794, Robespierre was arrested, his allies seized, and he and his allies were guillotined. Yet this still did not completely destroy the revolutionary energy of the masses. Instability continued, and even more radical uprisings threatened to emerge. Being cowardly as they were, sections of the bourgeoisie eventually elevated Napoleon Bonaparte into power, and he crushed the uprisings.

The execution of Robespierre and his supporters on 28 July 1794. Note: the beheaded man (6) is not Robespierre, but Couthon: Maximilien Robespierre (10) is shown sitting on the cart, dressed in brown, wearing a hat, and holding a handkerchief to his mouth. His younger brother Augustin (8) is being led up the steps to the scaffold. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Napoleon preserved many of the gains of the bourgeois revolution but concentrated power into his own hands. He preserved the destruction of feudalism, legal equality, centralized administration, and the protection of private property while crushing radical democracy, independent worker movements, and revolutionary mass participation. By this stage, the revolutionary period had effectively come to an end.

In 1815, the Congress of Vienna was assembled in an attempt to stabilize Europe and eliminate future revolutionary threats.

Capitalism had finally established itself as the new ruler of the modern world order. But beneath the surface of this new society, a tiny seed had already been planted, one that would eventually be dug up by a new revolutionary class: the proletariat. But first... it had to grow.

Capitalism and the Second Wave of Colonialism

With the rise of capitalism, humanity experienced an explosion in scientific, technological, and productive development unlike anything seen before in history. Capitalism tore down old barriers, connected continents, expanded trade across the globe, and revolutionized the productive forces. Everywhere it went, it transformed the societies it encountered. No corner of the Earth was left untouched by its advance.

Yet this development did not occur peacefully. If a tribe, village, nation, kingdom, or people resisted incorporation into the capitalist world market, they often faced conquest, colonization, displacement, or outright destruction. Indigenous peoples were driven from their lands, the Chinese were too powerful and sophisticated, so the British had to get them hooked on Opium to weaken them, African societies were devastated by the slave trade, and entire civilizations were reorganized to serve the needs of capital accumulation.

Chinese Opium Smokers. Source: Wikimedia Commons

As Marx simply put it best:

With the development of capitalist production during the manufacturing period, the public opinion of Europe had lost the last remnant of shame and conscience. The nations bragged cynically of every infamy that served them as a means to capitalistic accumulation. Read, e.g., the naïve Annals of Commerce of the worthy A. Anderson. Here it is trumpeted forth as a triumph of English statecraft that at the Peace of Utrecht, England extorted from the Spaniards by the Asiento Treaty the privilege of being allowed to ply the negro trade, until then only carried on between Africa and the English West Indies, between Africa and Spanish America as well. England thereby acquired the right of supplying Spanish America until 1743 with 4,800 negroes yearly. This threw, at the same time, an official cloak over British smuggling. Liverpool waxed fat on the slave trade. This was its method of primitive accumulation. And, even to the present day, Liverpool “respectability” is the Pindar of the slave trade….. [80]

What Marx is saying is that shamelessly, the bourgeoisie lost all sense of conscience. Between the nations, the bourgeois classes salivated as they split up and divided entire countries amongst themselves, made deals over who would supply slaves to whom, and even at times screwed each other over, too. They did not care if it meant the brutalization of whole peoples, that child slavery would occur, or that Black people would be enslaved throughout the Americas through chattel slavery. Horrific atrocities were carried out in the name of capital accumulation. This is why Marxists say that there is no ethical billionaire. To be bourgeois is a philosophy of exploitation. Capitalism spread across the globe, dominating nearly every corner of the Earth and reshaping human relations wherever it went.

In Europe, peasants were forcibly removed from their lands as common fields were enclosed and sold to the highest bidder for production, speculation, and the exploitation of the soil. Much of history paints white people as passive beneficiaries of capitalism, but many were also victims of its development. They too were uprooted, dispossessed, and thrown into poverty as the old ways of life were swept aside.

One example were the Diggers, some of the earliest proto-socialists in Europe. In 1649 they argued that land was meant to be shared amongst the poor, that the Earth existed before private property, and that freedom meant having access to the means of life itself. The Diggers seized common land, built homes, planted crops, fed one another, and demonstrated in practice that people could indeed live without landlords.

Yet even despite their small numbers, they terrified the English nobility. Landowners and local authorities sent hired gangs to smash their homes, terrorize their communities, destroy their crops, arrest their leaders, and drive them from the land. At the time, ideas like these would later be described as utopian socialism. Despite their tremendous moral character and courage, the movement ultimately failed because the proletariat was still in its infancy as a class and had not yet developed the social weight, organization, or consciousness necessary to fundamentally challenge the emerging capitalist order.

Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.

In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capital class in course of formation; but, above all, those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and "unattached" proletarians on the labor market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation, in different countries, assumes different aspects, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different periods. In England alone, which we take as our example, has it the classic form. [81] - Karl Marx

This violent process continued to unfold as the years passed. After being expelled from their lands, many peasants did not immediately go into the towns to find work. Many sold their labor on their own terms, while others became vagabonds, beggars, homeless wanderers, migrant laborers, or seasonal workers. But just like what happened to freed slaves in America after the Civil War, the ruling classes criminalized unemployment and imposed horrific conditions on those who refused to enter the new system.

In England this legislation began under Henry VII.
Henry VIII. 1530: Beggars old and unable to work receive a beggar’s licence. On the other hand, whipping and imprisonment for sturdy vagabonds. They are to be tied to the cart-tail and whipped until the blood streams from their bodies, then to swear an oath to go back to their birthplace or to where they have lived the last three years and to “put themselves to labour.” What grim irony! In 27 Henry VIII the former statute is repeated, but strengthened with new clauses. For the second arrest for vagabondage the whipping is to be repeated and half the ear sliced off; but for the third relapse the offender is to be executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the common weal.
Edward VI.: A statute of the first year of his reign, 1547, ordains that if anyone refuses to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who has denounced him as an idler. The master shall feed his slave on bread and water, weak broth and such refuse meat as he thinks fit. He has the right to force him to do any work, no matter how disgusting, with whip and chains. If the slave is absent a fortnight, he is condemned to slavery for life and is to be branded on forehead or back with the letter S; if he runs away thrice, he is to be executed as a felon. The master can sell him, bequeath him, let him out on hire as a slave, just as any other personal chattel or cattle. If the slaves attempt anything against the masters, they are also to be executed. Justices of the peace, on information, are to hunt the rascals down. If it happens that a vagabond has been idling about for three days, he is to be taken to his birthplace, branded with a red-hot iron with the letter V on the breast and be set to work, in chains, in the streets or at some other labour. If the vagabond gives a false birthplace, he is then to become the slave for life of this place, of its inhabitants, or its corporation, and to be branded with an S. All persons have the right to take away the children of the vagabonds and to keep them as apprentices, the young men until the 24th year, the girls until the 20th. If they run away, they are to become up to this age the slaves of their masters, who can put them in irons, whip them, &c., if they like. Every master may put an iron ring round the neck, arms or legs of his slave, by which to know him more easily and to be more certain of him. The last part of this statute provides, that certain poor people may be employed by a place or by persons, who are willing to give them food and drink and to find them work. This kind of parish slaves was kept up in England until far into the 19th century under the name of “roundsmen.” [82] - Karl Marx

Once the Industrial Revolution of the 1700s hit, the proletariat was firmly thrust onto the stage of history. England became known for its coal mines and factories. Cotton picked by enslaved black labor in America was often transported to England to be refined and then sold back across the world. Women and children as young as five or six years old worked in these industries. Workers suffered lung infections, lived in filth and overcrowded housing infested with rats, and frequently lost fingers or limbs in machinery. Children were often caught in machines, their scalps torn off and their bodies mangled.

The working conditions were horrific. Workers labored anywhere from 14 to 16 hours a day, sometimes six or seven days a week. Many would go days without ever seeing daylight. Blisters formed, skin peeled from the heat, and exhaustion became a normal part of life. Least to say, these conditions seem unimaginable to the average person today, just as they were unimaginable to the English working class living through them.

We owe many of the rights and protections workers enjoy today to the global labor movement. It was workers around the world who organized, fought, struck, bled, and sometimes died to win better conditions for themselves and future generations. Their struggle is a legacy we continue to inherit and defend today.

“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter... But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death... its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.” [83] - Friedrich Engels

Since then capital has only had one real purpose: accumulation for the sake of accumulation. Nothing less and nothing more.

Global Black Chattel Slavery

All the disgusting discrimination that was inherit in religious discrimination had merged with colonialism and it's it through capitalism and by capitalism that racism emerged and transformed itself into a fully developed system. As capitalism demanded more and more labor for the conquest of cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, tea, and other profitable commodities, it became increasingly difficult to force people into such brutal working conditions. Just as in Ancient Rome slaves often died faster than they could reproduce and slave revolts continuously threatened the ruling class, the colonial powers faced a similar contradiction. There had to be a general understanding of how this institution could continue expanding without sacrificing profits.

Colonial plantation systems demanded massive amounts of exploitable labor under unbelievably deadly conditions. While poor Europeans and indentured servants were initially utilized, they themselves would often die quickly as well, requiring the further replenishing of humans. Colonial elites increasingly turned toward permanent African chattel slavery because it provided a far more controllable, hereditary, stable, and profitable labor force within the expanding capitalist plantation economy.

But why Africans as the new slaves? Because Europe needed a source of labor from a reasonably well-populated region that was accessible and relatively near the region of usage. But it had to be from a region which was outside its world-economy so that Europe could feel unconcerned about the economic consequences for the breeding region of wide-scale removal of manpower as slaves. [84] - Wallerstein

Racism also had to emerge because unlike Black people, if white indentured servants escaped, they could often blend into the masses of European society, whereas black skin made African slaves immediately identifiable. Coupled with the agricultural knowledge many Africans possessed, their experience cultivating certain crops, and their resistance to diseases such as malaria, racist theories and pseudoscientific ideas slowly began developing in order to justify the system.

Africans who were once respected as merchants, doctors, healers, artists, builders, professors, politicians, and traders were now reduced into nothing more than a slave class in the eyes of the system of racial capitalism. This system was also logistically profitable because by clearly marking and racializing the slave population, it became easier for European elites to monitor, dominate, and violently suppress rebellions.

In the same breath, the removal of millions of Africans through the slave trade and the forced labor of millions more on plantations created a massive drain of value from the African continent. As Marx identified, human labor is the source of value. Europe did not simply steal people; it stole generations of labor power, knowledge, innovation, and productive capacity. While Africa was being drained, Europe was accumulating wealth. This process laid the foundations for the underdevelopment of Africa and the development of capitalism in the West.

In Marxist terms, the removal of human beings constituted the removal of the most important of the productive forces. Sections of the current scholarly literature continue to affirm that what took place in Africa was ‘trade’ and that this trade ipso facto contained developmental potential. John Fage argues that ‘in the first place, the European slave traders were traders, who bought their slaves from coastal African merchants’. More recently, A.G. Hopkins has elaborated on this theme. By insisting that the exchange of human beings for commodities on the coast comprised trade, the analysis directs attention away from the mode of acquiring captives. It also saves the way for the assumption that trade always benefits both parties – that is to say, the concept of comparative advantage is accepted without question. Yet, all recent work on development on a world scale (of varying ideological perspectives) confirms that ‘unequal trade’ is entrenched as between developed and underdeveloped countries; and hence the near-universal appeal for a New International Economic Order. With regard to slavery, trade and market theories which have no power to explain the present are invoked to explain the past. [85] - Walter Rodney

Between the 16th and 19th centuries, approximately 12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic during the Atlantic slave trade, with around 10.7 million surviving the voyage to the Americas. Millions more died during slave raids, forced marches, imprisonment, and the horrific conditions of the Middle Passage itself. Most enslaved Africans were not sent to what would become the United States, but instead to Brazil, the Caribbean, and Spanish colonies, where plantation economies demanded enormous amounts of labor for sugar, tobacco, coffee, mining, and later cotton production. The life expectancy of a slave in the Caribbean was just seven years! Slavery in the Caribbean was even worse than that under the slave societies in the Roman and Greek empires. Roman slavery could certainly be lethal, especially in mines, but many Roman slaves survived long enough to be manumitted (freed), something far less common in the Caribbean plantation system.

Slaves aboard a slave ship being shackled before being put in the hold. A wooden engraving by Joseph Swain. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Under the Caribbean plantation system, enslaved Africans were subjected to the worst labor conditions in the Atlantic world. A typical workday could involve cutting sugar cane with heavy machetes under intense tropical heat, carrying heavy bundles of cane, feeding cane into crushing mills, and working in sugar houses where cane juice was boiled in large vats at extremely high temperatures. Slaves often died from exhaustion, heat exposure, and deadly fumes. During harvest season, labor often extended well beyond daylight hours. Sugar cane labor was extremely hard on the body. The plant's sharp, serrated leaves could slice the skin while its tough, fibrous stalks caused splinters and puncture wounds. Slaves swinging machetes for hours often suffered deep cuts to the hands and arms, painful blisters, skin abrasions, and infections from untreated injuries in the hot, dirty, humid plantation environment.

Cane Cutters, Jamaica, 1891, by William Dobson Valentine. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Sugar mills were especially dangerous. Workers could be pulled into the rollers, resulting in crushed limbs, amputations, or death. Accidents were common, and exhausted laborers often received little rest or medical care. Children were also forced to work as soon as they could walk.

Punishment was also severe. Plantation records and eyewitness accounts describe whipping until the bone was exposed, iron collars, chains, branding, confinement, sexual abuse, and, in some colonies, mutilation. These punishments were used to enforce discipline, suppress resistance, and maintain the plantation system through terror.

Slaves cutting the sugar cane in the british colony of Antigua. Image taken from Ten Views in the Island of Antigua, by William Clark, originally published in London in 1823. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile, the slaves who made it to America had particularly unique conditions facing them; they were able to reproduce themselves, unlike in the Caribbean, and grow from 450,000 to 4 million people. To save on transportation costs, white American southern slave owners often would try not to kill their slaves, as they needed them for labor. Therefore, it was African women who became the most sexually exploited, abused, used, and disregarded as they were needed for reproduction. As of today in America, like Malcolm X said: “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.” and it came from this very living reality.

The Atlantic slave trade became deeply intertwined with the rise of European colonial empires, global trade, and early capitalist accumulation. Enormous wealth was generated through plantation labor, shipping, banking, insurance, and industry all built upon the backs of enslaved Africans.

African gold helped the Portuguese to finance further navigations around the Cape of Good Hope and into Asia; it was the main source for the Dutch mint in the seventeenth century (which helped to secure Amsterdam as the financial capital of Europe in that period); and it is no coincidence that when the English struck a new gold coin in 1663 they called it the ‘guinea’. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and for the most part of the nineteenth, the exploitation of Africa and African labour continued to be a source for the accumulation of capital to be reinvested in Western Europe. The African contribution to European capitalist growth extended over such vital sectors as shopping, insurance, the association of capital, capitalist agriculture and the capital goods industry. [86] - Walter Rodney

Some firsthand accounts of this brutal system were later written and spoken about by former slaves:

"When we have had some of these slaves on board my master's vessels to carry them to other islands, or to America, I have known our mates to commit these acts most shamefully, to the disgrace, not of Christians only, but of men.
I have even known them gratify their brutal passion with females not ten years old; and these abominations some of them practised to such scandalous excess, that one of our captains discharged the mate and others on that account." [87] -Olaudah Equiano

"This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.
This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated.
The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable." [88] -Olaudah Equiano

We was scart of Solomon and his whip, though, and he didn’t like frolickin’. He didn’t like for us niggers to pray, either. We never heard of no church, but us have prayin’ in the cabins. We’d set on the floor and pray with our head down low and sing low, but if Solomon heared he’d come and beat on the wall with the stock of his whip. He’d say, “I’ll come in there and tear the hide off you backs.” But some the old niggers tell us we got to pray to Gawd that he don’t think different of the blacks and the whites. I know that Solomon is burnin’ in hell today, and it pleasures me to know it. [89] - Mary Reynolds

Contrary to popular belief, Africans did not simply accept this brutal exploitation without resistance. Active resistance emerged across the diaspora against slavery, colonialism, and the extraction of human beings for profit. Some forms of resistance included holding onto our culture, singing, dancing, and rebellions. One such example was the Kingdom of Dahomey under King Adadja Trudo.

Clothing of Enslaved Females, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, ca. 1770s Source: Wikimedia Commons

"The Old Plantation," South Carolina, about 1790. This famous painting shows Gullah slaves dancing and playing musical instruments derived from Africa. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The fundamental pillar of the Dahomean conception of the state was that all Dahomeans were inalienable. The king required of his subjects complete obedience, and they asked in turn for unqualified protection. Adadja Trudo appreciated that European demand for slaves and the pursuit of slaving in and around Dahomey was incompatible with Dahomey’s development. Between 1724 and 1726, he looted and burnt European forts and slave barracoons; and he reduced the trade from the ‘Slave Coast’ to a mere trickle, by blocking the paths leading to sources of supply in the interior. European slave dealers were very bitter, and they tried to sponsor some African collaborators against Agadja Trudo. They failed to unseat him or crush the Dahomean state, but in turn Agadja failed to persuade them to develop new lines of economic activity, such as local plantation agriculture; and, being anxious to acquire firearms and cowries through the Europeans, he had to acquiesce in the resumption of slave trading in 1730. [90] - Walter Rodney

King Adadja ran into a fundamental contradiction, one that demonstrates the immense power capitalism was beginning to acquire on a world scale. He was only able to resist the European slave traders through the military power of guns and gunpowder, which he himself had acquired through trade with Europeans. The market was anarchic, expanding, and all-consuming.

Adadja's goal was not simply to isolate Dahomey from the world. Instead, he sought to develop alternative lines of trade with Europeans through agriculture, gold, and other commodities. However, the European merchants largely rejected such cooperation. Having already become deeply invested in the slave trade and increasingly shaped by racist attitudes, they wanted one thing above all else: slaves.

The walls eventually began to close in around Adadja. Surrounded by neighboring states engaged in the trade and pressured by the expanding world market, he was ultimately forced to reopen commerce with Europeans, though under tighter regulation than before. Despite his initial resistance, he encountered the same reality Marx would later describe in the Communist Manifesto: capitalism relentlessly expands, drawing all peoples and nations into its orbit whether they wish to enter it or not.

“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.” [91]

It is with this realization that Marx delivered his famous line:

"If money, according to T. J. Dunning, 'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” [92]

Meanwhile, in the Kongo, King Leopold II was carrying out one of the most brutal colonial atrocities in history. While people rightly remember Hitler and the Holocaust, they should never forget Leopold's crimes in the Kongo. It is estimated that between 10 and 15 million Kongolese died as a result of murder, starvation, disease, forced labor, and collapsing birth rates. Contemporary accounts describe baskets of severed hands collected by the Force Publique as proof that ammunition had been used. Entire communities were devastated as traditional social structures were destroyed and disease spread throughout the region. Kongolese people were also kept in Zoos in Belgium for display.

Source: RMCA Tervuren; A. Gautier, 1897

In fact, the atrocities became such an international scandal that even other colonial powers were forced to condemn Leopold's rule. International pressure eventually forced the Belgian government to take control of the Congo Free State away from him. The brutality was so extreme that it shocked much of the world at the time. This exploitation is today regarded as one of the worst colonial atrocities and humanitarian disasters in modern history.

This photograph depicts the victim of atrocities in the Congo during the late 19th to early 20th century. Source: Public Domain

Eventually, in America, enslaved people freed themselves, a process which can be explored much deeper in W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America, where he argues that enslaved Black people were not passive victims waiting to be liberated, but active historical forces who helped destroy slavery itself through resistance, rebellion, escape, sabotage, and the mass withdrawal of labor during the Civil War.

CONTRABAN NEGRO TEAMSTERS NEAR BUTLERS SIGNAL TOWER, BERMUDA HUNDRED, 1861. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Haitian Revolution also took place between 1791 and 1804. In the eighteenth century, Saint-Domingue was the richest colony in the world, built upon the brutal labor of enslaved Africans. Its achievements shook the entire world and demonstrated that slavery could indeed be overthrown.

Haiti became:

The first Black republic in modern history.
The first nation founded by formerly enslaved people.
The second independent state in the Americas after the United States.

More about this revolution can be learned through The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James, another great Black Marxist who chronicled the revolutionary struggle led by Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian masses.

Depiction of the Battle of Ravine-à-Couleuvres (23 February 1802), during the Haitian Revolution. Source: Wikimedia Commons

After Ayiti won its independence, France and the imperialist powers of the West sought to punish the new republic for daring to overthrow slavery. In 1825, France saddled Ayiti with an enormous indemnity that it could never realistically afford to pay. This debt hung over the country for generations and was not fully paid off until 1947. The economic devastation left by this extortion continues to shape Haiti today. Yet despite everything that has been thrown at them, the people of Haiti have shown extraordinary resilience, courage, and determination.

Colonial revolts would continue to spread across Africa as people resisted imperial domination in Algeria, the Congo, Sudan, South Africa, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, and countless other places, eventually winning national liberation and independence through decades of struggle.

Law of Uneven and Combined Development

As capitalism developed across the globe, it did not develop equally or at the same speed everywhere. We can clearly see this in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and even parts of Europe itself. This does not mean the people living in these regions lacked intelligence. In fact, it is entirely possible that many societies which existed long before capitalism understood the consequences of overexploiting the land, forests, rivers, plants, and soil. Many communities had enough to sustain themselves and their clans and lived relatively stable lives, so the constant drive for accumulation and expansion did not necessarily exist in the way it would under capitalism.

The arrival of capitalism into these societies produced a contradiction. On the one hand, colonial violence destroyed ancient social practices, libraries, cultures, languages, religions, and ways of life. On the other hand, it dragged much of humanity into the most productive epoch in history. Both of these things are true at the same time.

It was Leon Trotsky who developed the framework known as the Law of Uneven and Combined Development. All human societies do not all develop at the same speed and that when different societies come into contact, old and new social forms become mixed together. Different stages of history can therefore exist side by side within the same society.

Trotsky developed this idea while examining Russia, which combined modern industry with semi-feudal social relations and peasant agriculture. Within a relatively short historical period, Russia went from being a weak and backward country to an industrial superpower. The old and the new existed together and combined into something unique.

We can still observe this process today. In many parts of Africa, for example, people may live in conditions of extreme poverty while also carrying smartphones connected to a global communications network. Modern technology exists alongside underdevelopment. The most advanced and the most backward conditions can coexist side by side. History therefore does not unfold in a straight line but develops unevenly, with different stages interacting, colliding, and combining with one another.

To also add onto this, consciousness itself also develops unevenly and combined.

The Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution still remains to this day one of the greatest achievements in human history that shifted the balance of world forces to come. Not only did Lenin and the Bolsheviks prove that capitalism as a system could be overthrown, that history itself was the product of class struggle, and that nothing lasts forever, but they also proved the validity of Karl Marx and Engels theories, solidifying it into what we know today as Marxism.

First, I wish to give this analogy. Let’s take, for example, you have decided to enter into a cookie competition, and you have inherited your grandmother's favorite cookie recipe. Over time, she has studied, analyzed, weighed the flour down to the smallest milligram, counted all the egg white needed, and said, " Here, this is the recipe that is going to produce you a good cookie, but to get the best cookies, you must have a cast-iron skillet. You inherit this book and stick to it, but for some reason, you are not able to acquire a skillet, so you say, " Instead, I will bake this cookie in a different pan. It will still be a cookie. Why does it matter? You make this cookie, and it doesn't turn out correctly. Why? Because you didn't follow the science, and this analogy is precisely what also led to the degeneration of the Russian Revolution. Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, and Engels had repeatedly written that socialism was dependent upon happening in the most advanced countries and was dependent on the international revolution:

And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the "propertyless" mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. and further “ The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a "world-historical" existence. World-historical existence of individuals means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history” [93] - Karl Marx and Engels

What Marx and Engels are saying here is that the development of the productive forces under capitalism is already an empirical fact. Capitalism has become a global system due to the ever-expanding forces of capital. This makes the productive forces a necessary premise for passing into socialism because, without advanced industry and the concentration of capital, the things people immediately want—food, housing, shelter, jobs, healthcare, and equality—would remain wants insofar as society is not developed enough to provide them.

If the productive forces are not sufficiently developed, people would continue to struggle over basic necessities, as happened in Russia. Under such conditions, all the old filth of class society—racism, poverty, crime, theft, class antagonisms, and other social divisions—would continually reproduce themselves because scarcity would still dominate social life.

Marx goes further and argues that, because capitalism has become a universal system, there now exists an objective interconnection between workers and nations across the globe. The development of one country increasingly depends upon developments in others. The working class therefore exists on a world-historical level, and for that reason communism itself cannot remain confined within national borders but must ultimately become an international project.

Lenin also stuck concretely to this science of Marxism in better fewer but better he wrote in 1923:

"The general feature of our present life is the following: we have destroyed capitalist industry and have done our best to raze to the ground the medieval institutions and landed proprietorship, and thus created a small and very small peasantry, which is following the lead of the proletariat because it believes in the results of its revolutionary work.
It is not easy for us, however, to keep going until the socialist revolution is victorious in more developed countries merely with the aid of this confidence, because economic necessity, especially under NEP (New Economic Policy), keeps the productivity of labour of the small and very small peasants at an extremely low level."
(Emphasis added.) [94]

Importantly, he added:

“... we, too, lack enough civilisation to enable us to pass straight on to socialism, although we do have the political requisites for it” [95]

Lenin continued to explain in his letters and writings that the Civil War had devastated industry throughout Russia and that the success of the New Economic Policy was ultimately dependent upon revolution occurring elsewhere. He recognized that Russia had been hindered on the road to socialism.

While the Civil War did not defeat the revolution, it left the country economically exhausted. Industry had been shattered, transportation networks disrupted, agricultural production had collapsed, and millions had died through war, famine, and disease. Under these conditions, the Soviet Republic found itself isolated and materially backward.

For this reason, Lenin consistently looked toward the international revolution, particularly in Germany. Russia possessed political power in the hands of the working class, but it lacked the advanced industrial foundation that Marx had expected would form the material basis for socialism. Lenin therefore hoped that a successful German Revolution would combine Germany's advanced industry with the revolutionary gains achieved in Russia.

When the German Revolution failed, Soviet Russia remained isolated. The revolution had survived, but the conditions necessary for its further development had become far more difficult. As Lenin himself repeatedly stressed, the fate of the Russian Revolution was inseparably linked to the success of revolution abroad.

As Lenin says:

“But we are labouring under the disadvantage that the imperialists have succeeded in splitting the world into two camps; and this split is made more complicated by the fact that it is extremely difficult for Germany, which is really a land of advanced, cultured, capitalist development, to rise to her feet. All the capitalist powers of what is called the West are pecking at her and preventing her from rising. On the other hand, the entire East, with its hundred of millions of exploited working people, reduced to the last degree of human suffering, has been forced into a position where its physical and material strength cannot possibly be compared with the physical, material and military strength of any of the much smaller West-European states.” [96]

and Engels in Afterword to 'On Social Relations in Russia

“ It is quite evident from this alone that the initiative for any possible transformation of the Russian commune along these lines cannot come from the commune itself, but only from the industrial proletarians of the West. The victory of the West European proletariat over the bourgeoisie, and, linked to this, the replacement of capitalist production by socially managed production — that is the necessary precondition for raising the Russian commune to the same level.” [97]

Lastly Trotsky wrote in his Permanent Revolution:

"The socialist revolution begins on the national arena, it unfolds on the international arena, and is completed on the world arena.” [98]

This does not mean that what the Russians accomplished was not remarkable, bad, or a lesser step, nor does it mean that the formula itself was wrong. A cookie is still a cookie, and it can still feed people. But if you wish to win the cookie competition, you need the skillet. The same applies to revolution. If revolution cannot first happen in the most advanced capitalist country, this does not mean the revolution is lost. It is only lost if it remains confined within the narrow limits of one country and does not continue to spread. Socialism is an international project because the productive forces themselves have become international, stretching across the entire globe.

When a revolution is achieved in an economically underdeveloped country, the victors immediately find themselves in a contradiction. In Soviet Russia, millions died from famine in the years following the revolution and civil war. Why did this happen? Because the industry had not yet developed the country to a sufficient level, the peasantry vastly outnumbered the proletariat, and the Russian bourgeoisie had been too financially weak to fully carry out the historical task of developing capitalism and the productive forces.

This is why Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky repeatedly argued that the starting point of socialism had to be the most advanced capitalist countries—or multiple advanced countries acting together. At the time, they pointed to England, France, and Germany. These were the countries where capital had already concentrated production on a massive scale, where industry, science, agriculture, and technology had reached their highest levels of development.

Why was this important? Because socialism is not simply the seizure of power. Socialism must create the material conditions for human freedom. It must guarantee that people have access to food, housing, healthcare, education, and the basic necessities of life. It must reduce the working day so that ordinary workers have the time to participate in the democratic administration of society itself.

If people are starving, cold, homeless, and struggling simply to survive, then democratic participation becomes much more difficult. A hungry person thinks about bread. A freezing person thinks about warmth. A parent whose children are starving thinks about survival. Material conditions place real limits upon what a society can immediately accomplish.

Marxists understand that this begins through the smashing of the state—that is, the standing armed bodies of men, the coercive institutions, and the laws that uphold the domination of one class over another—and replacing it with a workers' government.

Lenin worked out much of this programme through studying the experience of the Paris Commune, where workers briefly demonstrated that workers' governance was possible. Unfortunately, the Commune was crushed. One of its greatest weaknesses was that it failed to carry the revolution through to the end and decisively take control of the commanding heights of the economy.

Drawing from that experience, Lenin wrote in State and Revolution:

Free and democratic elections and the right of recall for all officials.
No official to receive a wage higher than a skilled worker.
No standing army, but the armed people.
Gradually, all administrative tasks to be carried out in turn by all, so that "all may become bureaucrats for a time and therefore nobody may become a bureaucrat."

These were always Lenin's ideas. He was never the dictator that bourgeois historians often portray him as. Leninism has never been, and never will be, about consolidating state power to oppress others. The aim was not the dictatorship of a single man over society, but the democratic rule of the working class itself. Trotsky would later continue defending these ideas after Lenin's death. Even before 1917, Lenin was considered a madman, unrealistic, and overly obsessed with theory by many of his opponents and, at times, even by his own comrades. Yet time and time again, he proved correct on decisive questions of revolutionary strategy and remains one of the most influential revolutionaries in modern history.

The Revolution itself was, for the most part, a relatively bloodless operation in Petrograd thanks to their focus on the proletarians. Prior to October, the Bolsheviks had spent roughly twenty-five years building their organization, agitating among workers, and participating in the struggles of the masses.

Kustodiev The Bolshevik. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The party did not simply drop out of thin air. It had been forged through decades of strikes, repression, underground work, political debates, and revolutionary activity. During this period, the Bolsheviks worked within the soviets—councils of workers', soldiers', and peasants' deputies that emerged as organs of democratic mass struggle. It was the most democratic organization on the planet at that time.

Trotsky and the Bolsheviks for a meeting. Date Unknown. Source: Public Domain

Russia was a semi-feudal and semi-capitalist country. Prior to the revolution, its level of development more closely resembled that of many economically underdeveloped countries today such as Congo, Somalia, or Bangladesh than it did the advanced capitalist nations of Western Europe. It was economically behind, peasants vastly outnumbered the proletariat, and the only truly advanced factories and industries were concentrated in Moscow, St. Petersburg, the Western regions, the Urals, and the Donbass, much of which had developed through Western investment.

Their bourgeoisie were weak and had failed to carry out the kind of scientific, industrial, and democratic revolution that had transformed countries such as England and France. A large portion of the peasantry still lived in conditions that resembled medieval life. Many peasants could not read, and large numbers of workers could not read either.

I would like people to sit with this for a moment.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks often had to teach workers and peasants how to read before they could even begin studying theory. Back then, there were no computers, no phones, no internet, no YouTube videos, no podcasts. If you wanted to learn revolutionary ideas, you had to read them as they were presented, often under conditions of censorship, poverty, and state repression. The conditions they operated in were highly unfavorable, and they still achieved a revolution, whereas today in America, most people can actually read and have at their fingertips endless ways to access information.

The Soviets gathering. Source: public domain

Next to the Bolsheviks stood the Mensheviks, who had previously belonged to the same organization as the Bolsheviks before splitting away from them. The Mensheviks believed that it was necessary for Russia to pass through a prolonged period of capitalist development before socialism could become possible. In their view, the working class first needed a bourgeois revolution and a developed capitalist society.

Lenin disagreed.

He saw that the Russian bourgeoisie was too weak and too tied to the old order to consistently fight for democratic rights and freedoms. Rather than guaranteeing democracy, Lenin believed they would compromise with reaction and oppress workers the moment their property and privileges were threatened.

The October Revolution didn’t happen overnight, either; it was the product of the entire preceding period.

Workers will try every possible method, representative, and reform before finally realizing the system itself is deeply corrupt and cannot be fixed. The same happened with the Bolsheviks. Before finally turning toward the Bolsheviks, Russian workers and peasants had already lived through two revolutions (1905 and February 1917) and two wars (1904–1905 and 1914–1917). The war had devastated the population. Families were torn apart, millions were killed, workers were being overexploited to fund the war effort, and Tsar Nicholas II repeatedly relied upon brutal repression to stop workers and peasants from organizing and challenging the system.

With each event that unfolded, Lenin continued to correctly orient Bolshevik tactics and strategy toward the changing situation.

Eventually the Tsar was removed from power due to the crisis created by the war. A new Provisional Government was established with the backing of the Mensheviks and other moderate forces. Many workers and peasants initially supported them because they wanted the war to end and hoped their conditions would improve.

Instead, the Provisional Government continued the war.

This only deepened the crisis and intensified class antagonisms. The workers, peasants, and soldiers who had placed their hopes in the Mensheviks increasingly felt betrayed.

Realizing that the masses were becoming restless, the Bolsheviks saw that a window of opportunity had opened.

Sections of the Provisional Government, due to their weakness and liberal illusions, started to look towards a man named Kornilov as a means of restoring order and crushing unrest, failing to realize that he sought power for himself and was indeed a fascist.

The Kornilov Affair was one of the most underrated examples of workers using their collective power to stop a reactionary and potentially fascist movement from taking power—something we in America can still learn from today.

Workers rushed into action. They stopped trains, disrupted communications, blocked the movement of troops, halted the transport of weapons, and effectively isolated Kornilov's forces. Through the intervention of the workers themselves, Kornilov became a man without an army.

All of these events combined to further discredit the Mensheviks and the Provisional Government while strengthening support for the Bolsheviks.

By 1917, the Bolsheviks had succeeded in winning majority support within the key soviets because their slogans and demands corresponded directly to the needs of the masses: Peace, Land, and Bread.

Lenin and a group of Red Army commanders on Red Square in Moscow on May 25, 1919. Source: Public Domain

When workers, soldiers, and peasants finally rose into action against the war and the crisis of the feudal and semi-capitalist order, the Bolsheviks were prepared. Because they had spent decades building their forces, educating cadres, and establishing roots among the masses, they were able to fight for their demands, win majorities within the soviets, and carry the revolution forward.

Bolsheviks storming the capital at St. Petersburg, Russia to start the Russian Revolution Source: GoodFreePhotos

The Final Years of Lenin

Many deviations from Marxism exist today that argue the peasantry, the homeless, prisoners, or some other particular social layer should lead the revolution. They fail to understand that Marx was never saying that capitalism does not oppress these groups. Of course it does. His argument was that they cannot play the primary revolutionary role because their relationship to production has either been weakened, fragmented, or broken altogether.

Marx never said that these layers should not be recruited into the revolutionary movement. Nor did he deny that they can play important roles in struggle. Rather, he argued that they cannot occupy the same central position as the proletariat.

History continues to confirm what Marx said.

Based on 2025 data available through August, there were approximately 163 million employed individuals in the United States, marking a new record high. In comparison, in 1953 there were approximately 61.2 million employed workers in the United States. The proletariat has grown enormously in both size and social importance.

Bureau of Labor Statistics Total Employment

The other hundreds of millions of people consist of children, retirees, students, military personnel, the disabled, the unemployed, and others outside of direct production. While all of these groups are affected by the system, none occupy the same position within production as the working class.

It is precisely because of its relationship to production that the proletariat possesses such immense social power. The working class can bring economic life to a direct halt. Not a light bulb turns on without the proletariat. Not a wheel turns without them. Not a phone, laptop, television, printer, or commodity is produced without the labor of the working class.

Any movement or ideology that does not center the proletariat, organize the proletariat, and fight for the democratic control of society by the proletariat is ultimately a deviation away from Marxism.

The proletariat does not need to retreat into the mountains and wage a guerrilla war in order to exercise power. Its greatest weapon is its position within production itself. The biggest power of the working class is its ability to strike.

The Russian Revolution itself began with mass strikes. When workers stop working, the entire system begins to grind to a halt because the system depends upon their labor to function in the first place.

In his final years, Lenin grew increasingly concerned about the future leadership of the Soviet state. He saw that the bureaucracy was straying away from the workers. In what became known as Lenin's Testament, he warned that Joseph Stalin had accumulated too much power in his position as General Secretary:

"Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated enormous power in his hands; and I am not sure that he always knows how to use that power with sufficient caution." [99]

Lenin's concerns deepened, and in a later addition he wrote:

"Stalin is too rude, and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that position and appointing another man in his stead." [100]

At the same time, Lenin gave a remarkably positive assessment of Trotsky, describing him as:

"Trotsky is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present Central Committee." [101]

However, Lenin also noted what he viewed as Trotsky's shortcomings:

"...but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work." [102]

Lenin did not formally designate a successor. Nevertheless, his Testament makes clear that he regarded Trotsky as the most capable member of the Bolshevik leadership while simultaneously recommending Stalin's removal as General Secretary. He further warned that the growing conflict between the two leaders posed a danger to the unity of the Party, writing that:

"The relations between Stalin and Trotsky constitute more than half the danger of that split." [103]

These remarks remain among the most important documents for understanding the leadership struggles that followed Lenin's death in 1924.

Shortly after Stalin amassed power, he and Trotsky waged a political battle of ideas over the future of the Soviet Union. The bureaucracy ultimately sided with Stalin because it was in their interests to preserve their position and growing privileges. Trotsky and his supporters were increasingly pushed out of the party, removed from positions of influence, and politically isolated. Falsifications about Trotsky and anyone who followed the ideas of Trotsky (which were really the genuine ideas of Lenin) were spread throughout the Soviet Union, and those who dared to openly oppose the bureaucracy often faced imprisonment, exile, and a brutal death. The question is brought into existence: Is it suitable to murder your comrades for a differing belief?

Trotsky was eventually exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929. Stalin wrapped himself in the banner of communism while increasingly departing from many of the ideas Lenin had defended. The perspective of world revolution was abandoned in favor of "socialism in one country," and a series of political mistakes followed. Whether these mistakes were intentional or the result of historical circumstances is something I leave to the interpretation of the reader.

The Soviet Union became what Trotsky described as a degenerated workers' state, or what I would describe as a decaying bureaucratically stratified transitional workers' state. The bureaucracy itself emerged from a mixture of workers, former Tsarist officials, intellectuals, revolutionaries, and administrators. Yet despite the immense privileges they accumulated, they did not become a new ruling class in the traditional capitalist sense because they did not own private property. The state continued to control production and economic planning. However, the bureaucracy increasingly hovered above the working class, skimming off the surplus produced by workers while suppressing unions, restricting workers' democracy, and rolling back a number of gains won during the revolutionary period, including advances in women's rights and social equality. Due to the underdeveloped state of media consumption, it was easy for Stalin to wrap himself in the banner of communism and represent his ideas, as he now had the prestige of a Bolshevik. Why should anyone question his directives and policies?

Like a nuclear chain reaction, the revolution had initially exploded outward in every direction, transforming social relations and revolutionizing everything it touched. Yet a single ion alone is not enough to sustain a nuclear reaction forever. If the reaction remains isolated and contained, eventually the energy begins to dissipate. The same occurred in Russia. Isolated from successful revolutions abroad and trapped within the limits of a backward economy, the revolutionary process froze for a historical period. Within that stagnation, a bureaucratic layer gradually consolidated itself and began to decay from within.

This bureaucratic caste hovered above the workers and, as Trotsky predicted, only two roads ultimately remained open. Either the working class would politically overthrow the bureaucracy and push society forward toward genuine socialism, or the bureaucracy itself would become the vehicle through which capitalism was restored.

Unfortunately, the latter occurred. Capitalist tendencies continued to grow within the Soviet bureaucracy long after Stalin's death. Over time the Soviet Union opened itself to market reforms, and eventually capitalism was fully restored.

Nonetheless, Marxists throughout the world continue to defend the achievements of the Russian Revolution. It demonstrated that workers could take power, abolish capitalism, nationalize industry, rapidly develop the productive forces, defeat fascism, and transform society. At the same time, it is imperative that every new generation of Marxists studies the Soviet Union, Lenin, the Bolsheviks, Trotsky, and the degeneration of the revolution itself. Only by understanding both its achievements and its failures can we ensure that the same mistakes are not repeated in the future.

Lenin and Trotsky, together with the Bolsheviks. Source: Public Domain

I will leave this section with this interview between Stalin and Roy Howard:

Howard : “May there not be an element of danger in the genuine fear existent in what you term capitalistic countries of an intent on the part of the Soviet Union to force its political theories on other nations?” [104]

Stalin : “There is no justification whatever for such fears. If you think that Soviet people want to change the face of surrounding states, and by forcible means at that, you are entirely mistaken. Of course, Soviet people would like to see the face of surrounding states changed, but that is the business of the surrounding states. I fail to see what danger the surrounding states can perceive in the ideas of the Soviet people if these states are really sitting firmly in the saddle.” [105]

Howard : “Does this, your statement, mean that the Soviet Union has to any degree abandoned its plans and intentions for bringing about world revolution?” [106]

Stalin : “We never had such plans and intentions.” [107]

Howard : “You appreciate, no doubt, Mr. Stalin, that much of the world has long entertained a different impression.” [108]

Stalin : “This is the product of a misunderstanding.” [109]

Howard : “A tragic misunderstanding?” [110]

Stalin : “No, a comical one. Or, perhaps, tragicomic. You see, we Marxists believe that a revolution will also take place in other countries. But it will take place only when the revolutionaries in those countries think it possible, or necessary. The export of revolution is nonsense. Every country will make its own revolution if it wants to, and if it does not want to, there will be no revolution. For example, our country wanted to make a revolution and made it, and now we are building a new, classless society. But to assert that we want to make a revolution in other countries, to interfere in their lives, means saying what is untrue, and what we have never advocated.” [111]

Howard : “At the time of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A., President Roosevelt and Litvinov exchanged identical notes concerning the question of propaganda. Paragraph four of Litvinov's letter to President Roosevelt said that the Soviet government undertakes "not to permit the formation or residence on its territory of any organisation or group - and to prevent the activity on its territory of any organisation or group, or of representatives or officials of any organisation or group - which has as its aim, the overthrow, or preparation for the overthrow of, or the bringing about by force of a change in the political or social order of the whole or any part of its territories or possessions." Why, Mr. Stalin, did Litvinov sign this letter if compliance with the terms of paragraph four is incompatible with the interests of the Soviet Union or beyond its control?” [112]

Stalin : “The fulfilment of the obligations contained in the paragraph you have quoted is within our control; we have fulfilled, and will continue to fulfil, these obligations.” [113]

Socialist transformation

The road to socialism is inevitable. It is a necessity; we must reach it. There are only two choices ahead of us now: Socialism or Barbarism.

In our present epoch, humanity still has not achieved all of its highest aims. The last truly revolutionary developments in science occurred throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, and into parts of the 21st century. After the post-war order emerged and the United States presented itself as the so-called victor of World War II, as it has written in its history books, even though the victory was truly owed to the banner of communism and the Red Army, which lost far more lives in the war and liberated Europe from the Nazis, America now stood at the center of the globe. Capitalism stretched its limbs further, and we were promised that an atrocity such as Hitler would never happen again.

The illusions of FDR (who was himself a serious racist and supported many racist policies), and the illusions of the 1950s, which America financed through the imperialist profits it gained from countries economically devastated by the war, created a false sense of permanence. We were told that bourgeois democracy would reign forever and that capitalism would last forever.

Every social system and every ruling class believes itself to be eternal. The Romans thought it. The Egyptians thought it. The British Crown certainly thought it. Yet history expelled them from the stage of history and replaced them with new social orders brought forward by the masses.

The same fate awaits capitalism.

The productive forces have outgrown it.

It is a paradox similar to the Minnesota Paradox: Minnesota is often considered one of the best states in the United States for White people, yet one of the worst for Black people. Likewise, the more capitalism advances itself and introduces new technology, science, and productivity, the more it also finds new ways to starve, oppress, and bring misery upon the world.

The bourgeoisie, in its endless pursuit of wealth, has shown that it is willing to sacrifice all sense of logic in that pursuit. When Richard Nixon removed the dollar from the gold standard, it further marked the grave of capitalism. Now, fictitious money, with no direct material backing, could be printed because the United States needed to finance the war in Vietnam.

When this failed, America was left with high inflation, mounting debts, and a growing population radicalized by the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war movements, feminist movements, and other struggles. There was no cheap way to recoup these costs, so the closing of factories and the export of production abroad became the next step. It was also a convenient way for Nixon and the ruling class to discipline the masses.

March on the Pentagon in Washington D.C. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Ronald Reagan's economics further provided the illusion that wealth could expand forever as consumer credit exploded. By the 2000s, George W. Bush was once again dragging the country into another war for oil in order to maintain the imperial dominance of the petrodollar. The rape, slaughter, and mass destruction inflicted upon Iraq and the broader region continued until the system once again exposed itself through the financial crash of 2008.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Everybody knows that since 2008 nothing has ever quite felt the same.

But if you peel back the mask that capitalism wears, you will see that this is how it has always functioned. This is why you are not taught what capitalism really is.

Here Engels describes how capitalism repeatedly enters crisis and how boom-and-bust cycles are not periods of genuine stability, but merely periods in which the next crisis is being postponed, only to return stronger and more ferocious than before.

The extension of the markets cannot keep pace with the extension of production. The collision becomes inevitable, and as this cannot produce any real solution so long as it does not break in pieces the capitalist mode of production, the collisions become periodic. Capitalist production has begotten another “vicious circle.” As a matter of fact, since 1825, when the first general crisis broke out, the whole industrial and commercial world, production and exchange among all civilized peoples and their more or less barbaric hangers-on, are thrown out of joint about once every 10 years. Commerce is at a standstill, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows upon bankruptcy, execution upon execution.The stagnation lasts for years; productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again. Little by little, the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and speculation, which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where it began—in the ditch of a crisis. And so over and over again. We have now, since the year 1825, gone through this five times, and at the present moment (1877) we are going through it for the sixth time. And the character of these crises is so clearly defined that Fourier hit all of them off when he described the first “crise plethorique,” a crisis from plethora.“ [112]

Till this day, life remains harsh for millions of people across the planet. Israel is carrying out a genocide against the Palestinians. Sudanese women face mass rape, displacement, and death. Women in Thailand are exploited through a brutal sex trade. According to the United Nations,

UNICEF USA Nearly 600 Million Children Will Live in Areas with Extremely Limited Water Resources by 2040 – UNICEF | UNICEF USA

approximately 25,000 people die from hunger every day. By 2040, UNICEF estimates that nearly 600 million children will be living in areas with extreme water shortages.

Boys salvaging a destroyed building in the Gaza Strip. Source: Wikimedia Commons

South Sudanese who fled from Sudan sit outside a nutrition clinic at a transit center in Renk, South Sudan, on May 16, 2023. Sam Mednick/AP

All of these are signs of a decrepit, dying system that has long outlived its historical usefulness. Everywhere we look, the contradictions of capitalism continue to intensify. Poverty exists alongside immense wealth. Food is wasted while millions starve. Technology advances at an unprecedented pace, yet basic human needs remain unmet for billions of people.

At the same time, the climate crisis continues to worsen. Forests burn, oceans rise, species disappear, and extreme weather becomes increasingly common. Capitalism has proven itself incapable of solving the very problems it creates because solving them would require placing human need above profit.

Humanity now stands at a crossroads. If the transition to socialism is not made, the continued destruction of the environment, endless wars, poverty, and exploitation threaten not only the future of civilization but potentially the future of humanity itself. We are at risk of extinction as a species if the move to socialism is not made.

As dialectics teaches us, things eventually change into their opposite. What is here now was once something else, and what exists today will not remain forever. Capitalism itself has produced its own contradictions and its own gravediggers. The forces of production have sprung up giant industries of trade, commerce, agriculture, retail, transportation, logistics, and communication. Amazon cannot run by itself. Neither can Target. Neither can the United States Postal Service. Not a single one of these institutions can function without the working class.

Working relations have already become socialized under capitalism.

Workers come together every day from homes and families where they do not know one another and are put shoulder to shoulder to work, ensuring that production never stops. Politics, race, gender, and all the identifiers we use to separate ourselves slowly get left at the door (except for those rare fake corporate diversity parties where management wants to show how progressive they are).

Yet each of us standing next to one another is involved in the daily production of the things that give society meaning: food, shelter, education, transportation, healthcare, and everything else necessary for human life. Work is already socialized. We already produce collectively. We already work collectively. We already depend upon one another collectively.

We can see it in the sheer abundance around us. We produce so much that we literally throw it away. World households waste roughly one billion meals every day. Food rots while people starve.

WFP 5 facts about food waste and hunger | World Food Programme

Homes sit empty while people sleep on the streets. Factories sit idle while people need jobs.

We already have everything necessary to begin the transformation from a capitalist society to a socialist one.

The power of dialectics comes for us all.

Just as we are living, we are also dying.

Capitalism is no different.

The bourgeoisie have proven themselves completely incapable of solving the crisis of inhumane living conditions facing the majority of humanity because the moment a solution comes into direct conflict with their ability to make profit, profit wins every single time.

They will use every tool necessary to defend their system. They will cut wages, close factories, destroy industries, wage wars, poison the environment, and undermine the very productive forces their system created if it means preserving their wealth and power.

Such is the irrationality of capitalism.

In their desperate attempt to save the system, they are willing to drag the rest of us into the pits of hell with them.

Well, why hasn’t a revolution happened yet?

Human consciousness is inherently conservative. Just as I explained earlier in this article, every new society inherits elements of the old one and slowly sheds them over time. From a zoomed-out perspective, the same can be said for human beings. We have not completely cast off our barbaric behavior from the earliest epochs of our existence. We still carry elements of the old into the new, negating what is useless while preserving what remains useful.

We have certainly preserved those parts of our brains that first told us: I am cold, hungry, and starving. What do I need to do to ensure that I make it to tomorrow?

Our ancestral primates did not arrive at that conclusion naturally or in isolation. Something in their material environment threatened their existence and their ability to survive. Faced with those conditions, they arrived at the conclusion: I need to make a tool so that I can increase my chances of survival and make it to tomorrow.

The word conserve means to protect, preserve tradition, protect heritage, and tread carefully. However, this does not mean that dialectics does not also apply to us.

As events continue to rock the United States—whether it be wars with Iran, ICE protests, anti-government demonstrations, the rising cost of living, or the continued closure of businesses—these events have an effect on human consciousness.

You see, the bourgeoisie have mostly been able to get away with people slowly forgetting things. During long boom periods in America there are still moments of social unrest, protests, and crises, but they are often relatively isolated or short-lived, so most people brush them off and continue with their daily lives.

But when multiple events keep occurring within a short span of time, the human brain remembers.

That is what the bourgeoisie do not like.

They never want you to remember.

This is why they erase and lie about history.

But they cannot control these crises. They will continue to happen and happen again.

Just as we saw with the Black Lives Matter protests, the murder of George Floyd, and countless other events, these moments jolted masses of people out of their stupor, out of their saccharine daydreams, and out of the apathy that comes from simply trying to conserve themselves and get through another day. Suddenly they are forced to confront the conditions of their own existence.

The masses learn through events.

Human consciousness can develop very rapidly in a short period of time. Amazing revolutionary conclusions can be drawn where, only a week earlier, that same person was sitting on a couch eating a bag of potato chips and playing GTA: San Andreas is now outside taking destiny into his own hands.

But before the masses can achieve their aims, they need revolutionary leadership in the form of a mass organization. The working class must move as one. It must organize itself, develop its own leadership, and consciously fight for its interests as a class.

Militancy must be brought back into the trade unions. Workers must once again see their unions not merely as organizations for negotiating contracts, but as fighting organizations capable of defending their interests and advancing their struggles.

Likewise, the ideas of Marxism and Bolshevism must spread throughout the United States in order to strengthen the masses politically and organizationally. The working class possesses enormous social power, but power alone is not enough. It must also possess organization, theory, strategy, and leadership if it is to successfully transform society.

The future of socialism

Once socialism is achieved through the revolutionary overthrow of the old order by the masses, it will be unlike anything humanity has ever seen before because, for the first time in history, instead of things happening out of necessity, they will happen CONCIOUSLY.

Human beings will be directly involved in the conscious planning of their own destiny. Class relations will be abolished, gender equality brought forth, racism as a systemic institution abolished, and scarcity and the constant struggle for existence will begin to disappear.

The working day will be reduced to a 4-hour day and a 3-day work week. We will even see a reduction in crime as the social conditions that give rise to much of it are overcome and eliminated.

The state itself will slowly begin to wither away.

All the things people have always wanted to do—learn a new instrument, learn to paint, host dance classes, pursue five different degrees in different fields without being saddled with debt—will finally become possible because student debt, medical debt, and credit card debt will be erased.

People will finally have access to homes and apartments that are not inhumane 200-square-foot boxes.

Great achievements in science will be made. The arts and culture will flourish as never before. Human creativity, which is today suffocated by the demands of profit and survival, will finally be allowed to fully blossom.

Yes, it is true that racist prejudices and reactionary attitudes will not disappear overnight. But once human beings no longer have to fight over the means of existence, and once there are no longer systemic institutions that reinforce and reproduce those prejudices, combined with free mass socialist education, these ideas too will gradually fade with the passing of generations.

It will be humankind's first true taste of freedom.

Communism

What communism is, is a moneyless, stateless society with no class relations. Therefore, anyone claiming that countries today were truly communist has not seriously engaged with what Marxists actually mean by communism. The fact that this is still spread around as a buzzword to claim that communist countries already existed in our current epoch is, frankly, a hilarity.

The first prerequisite for communism is socialism.

In fact, by the time our generation ever reaches communism, many of us may already be long dead. Communism is not something that appears overnight. It represents the highest stage of human social development, built upon the foundations laid by socialism and the conscious development of society itself.

Until then, I leave communism to your imagination and to the task of future generations.

The responsibility of our generation is to lay the foundations upon which that future can be built.

Marxist Economics

We are in a crisis. Capitalism is falling apart at the seams in America—just look at the data. Roughly 13.3 million households (the top 10%) own more than 68% of all wealth in the United States, while the bottom 50%—about 66 million households—own only 2.5%.

Katharina Buchholz Wealth Of The 1% Reaches Decade High In The U.S.

That's a massive wealth gap. And the richest 1 percent's profits and incomes keep rising—by 100 percent, 200 percent, even 300 to 400 percent. They now own 34% of all the wealth in America and it only keeps rising each year. This means they've hit their target profits and then doubled, tripled, or quadrupled them on top of that. Can you imagine? Globally the situation is even more dire.

Over a third of world’s biggest 50 corporations —worth $13.3 trillion— now run by a billionaire or has a billionaire as a principal shareholder.
Global South countries own just 31 percent of global wealth, despite being home to 79 percent of global population.
Oxfam urges multilateral action to advance new global framework on tax, cancel debts and rewrite intellectual property rules for pandemics.
The richest 1 percent have more wealth than the bottom 95 percent of the world’s population put together, new Oxfam analysis of UBS data reveals today ahead of the annual UN High-Level General Debate.
Billionaires are exerting new levels of control over economies, with a billionaire either running or the principal shareholder of more than a third of the world’s top 50 corporations. The combined market capitalization of these corporations is $13.3 trillion.
Oxfam International World’s top 1% own more wealth than 95% of humanity, as “the shadow of global oligarchy hangs over UN General Assembly,” says Oxfam | Oxfam International

Leading economists see this crisis. They've all commented and started giving Karl Marx his dues because he was right. But why was he right? This wasn't some random prediction—it was because he used Marxist methods: historical materialism and dialectical materialism to study the system of capitalism.

Source: Public Domain

And what was the firm basis of that study? That class struggle exists throughout society’s historical fabric since the rise of classes. Within each society, there exists an inherent contradiction as the system advances and progresses. At some point, that contradiction grows quantitatively and expresses itself through discontent among workers. Then, eventually, one day, there's a qualitative leap—it's expressed through a revolution that ushers in an entirely new system. Marx predicted that there would be a crisis of overproduction because at the root of capitalism, there are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and the bourgeoisie owns the means of production, meaning they own all the tools, factories, properties, and technology we use to produce stuff.

Capitalists pay workers a wage, and those workers then buy back the products they make—or products other workers make. But here's what happens: as profits increase and technology improves, we can work faster, with fewer hours, and produce more. We should have been getting paid more or have had our hours reduced. But that hasn't happened. Instead, capitalists have either cut our wages to pocket the difference or made us work more with only small wage increases. This has led to overproduction—capitalists can’t sell their products because they never pay us enough to buy back the things we produce. That's the contradiction: you can't pay workers a certain amount and then fail to keep up with their wages until they can't afford to live.

Having recognized that the economic system is the foundation on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted his greatest attention to the study of the capitalist economic system. We see this in his magnum opus, Das Kapital. He studied the greatest classical economists of his time, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. On top of their great discoveries, he built upon and further developed the foundations for the labor theory of value. Adam Smith and David Ricardo’s work was phenomenal, but Marx was able to push the needle further and show that the value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor time embodied within it. Human labor is what creates value.

Where bourgeois economics saw a relation between things, Marx saw a relation between people. Money is simply a representation of that exchange which takes place on the market. It is a signifier that shows that something has been exchanged, that something has been sold or accumulated.

What is the economy? At its most basic level, the economy is the way human beings produce and reproduce the necessities of life. It encompasses how food, shelter, clothing, tools, and all other goods and services are created and distributed throughout society. In Marxist terms, the economy is defined by the mode of production: the productive forces, the relations of production, and the ownership of the means of production.

What drives economic and social relations? Human labor. Through labor, humanity transforms nature to satisfy its needs. Marx referred to labour power as the capacity of human beings to work—the physical and mental abilities that workers sell to employers under capitalism in exchange for a wage.

The economy itself is not synonymous with the market. Human societies had economies long before markets became dominant. Under capitalism, however, the economy largely takes the form of a capitalist economy, where most goods and services are produced as commodities and exchanged through the market

Capitalism takes human labour and turns it into a commodity. We, the people—as workers—spend one part of our day, whether that be minutes, seconds, or hours depending on your wage, to cover our means of subsistence. The rest? You produce value for free—surplus value. This is the source of wealth for capitalists.

Many in our society have little to no understanding of what capital is. If you asked someone a few years ago, they would probably say, “Yes, I’m a capitalist.” But what they are really saying is: “I believe there are winners and losers, and everyone who is paid well and lives a good life earned it through meritocracy.”

But this isn’t what capital is. Capital comes from owning the means of production. It comes from owning capital itself. We, as working-class people, own no capital—we simply generate it for the ruling class. Having high sums of money doesn’t mean you own capital neither does a well paying job.

Through the processes of the capitalist machine, it breaks down workers. It degrades our body, mind, and spirit—or soul, if you believe in one—and at times, it even kills us. It destroys small businesses. Contrary to popular belief, the majority of small businesses in America have less then five employees, and those that have more are eventually swallowed up by corporate machines or end up failing eventually.

Rebecca Leppert US small businesses: Key facts and public views about small firms

Capitalism destroys small-scale production. Because of its need to consistently expand markets, it must meet ever-growing demand. This lowers the quality of items, because things are no longer made with care—they are made faster.

Production also becomes more social. Before, in guilds and small-scale manufacturing, you maybe had a few family members or neighbors working together. Now, production pulls us all together across multiple countries and continents. We go to work with people we barely know. Our consciousness becomes shaped and changed because of this. Many of us foster friendly—or unfriendly—relationships with the people we work with, because we all understand that we rely on one another for our jobs. Your coworker needs to be a team player, or you are at risk yourself.

This mass organization of labor is appropriated by the capitalists. All of your ideas, creativity, labor, and time go into the machines—whether they be computers or manufacturing tools. Machines don’t make the world go round—humans do. No machine functions without human labor.

So much has been built and achieved over thousands of years by human labor. Societies used to be grass, cabins, and dirt roads, and now we have modern infrastructure connecting us all together. The productive forces brought on by capitalism were once progressive, but now they have served their purpose and can no longer develop the productive forces any further.

Values and Commodities

Production is common to all human societies, including the clan. We produce things, whether it be food, clothes, crops, tools, and so forth, in order to sustain our means of survival. Throughout the development of clans into villages, towns, and eventually civilizations, the division of labor between different groups of people laid the basis for class divisions, where some groups produced while others appropriated what was produced.

As humanity took the leap from isolated communities into civilization, markets emerged where people could exchange goods. This is what Marxist refer to as simple commodity production. Slave societies mined salt and gold, produced textiles, and engaged in trade through money and exchange. Markets themselves existed long before capitalism, but they were not the dominant form of life. Society was not yet organized around production for exchange.

For much of our history, peasants were the dominant producing class. What they produced was not primarily intended to generate profit but to sustain themselves and their families. Under feudalism, lords lived from the surplus produced by peasants who worked the land.

What makes capitalism unique is that production for exchange has become the dominant and universal social relation. As capitalism overthrew the old feudal order, commodity production and trade, which had existed before it, expanded into every corner of life. Even necessities such as food, housing, water, clothing, and labour power itself became commodities, even though previously things were produced by peasants to feed and clothe themselves. Under capitalism, nearly everything could now be bought and sold, whereas in the past this was not the case. Marxists refer to this as generalized commodity production.

“The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’.” [113] - Karl Marx

A commodity is a good or service produced for exchange on a market rather than for self use.

Value is the socially necessary labor time embodied in a commodity.

Marx uses two terms to further define value: use value and exchange value.

A use value is simply how useful something is.

Example: A phone's ability to make calls and send messages.

A use value satisfies a human want. Use values do not always have to be physical things either. Singing has a use value because it satisfies people's ears. Air in a can has a use value because it satisfies people's desire for clean air. Not all use values are products of human labor. Water, air, and salt all exist naturally and humans need them to survive.

The next term is exchange value.

Exchange value is what something is worth on the market, usually expressed through money.

Example: A phone costing $1,200 despite performing a function similar to another phone.

Products with use values can therefore be exchanged as commodities on the market for other commodities. Old laptops can be exchanged for old phones, pants can be exchanged for shoes, and so forth.

A commodity possesses both a use value and an exchange value due to its dual character. However, this does not mean either is guaranteed. Someone could produce a commodity that no longer serves any useful purpose to anyone. In that case its exchange value may fall dramatically or it may become impossible to exchange altogether. Gold also has a high exchange value but low use value. You cannot eat it and consume it, and it is mostly not used to aid in any productivity, but its worth is high as a unit of financial storage, used in technological hardware, and used in conductors, but this is amongst a small handful of the population.

Sellers are only primarily interested in the exchange value of their commodities, while buyers are interested in their use value and price. For Marx, exchange value is the expression of value, while value itself is determined by the socially necessary labor time required to produce a commodity. When a worker performs labour to produce a commodity for exchange they are generating value.

Marx developed the labour theory of value based on these functions.

It is actually pretty straightforward. Marx argued that human labor is the source of value. Human beings can only generate the necessities of life through labor and production. We already saw this throughout history when humans created tools to gather food, build shelter, and make additional tools to make their lives easier.

Simply put, we need to work in order to live and survive. Without human labor, humanity would come to a halt. Even this article is a product of human labor whose use value is to raise human consciousness. Your water bottle does not exist without human labor. The socks on your feet do not exist without human labor. Even if you claim a machine made them, that machine itself does not function without human labor somewhere in the process.

It is human labor that creates value. One worker digs iron from the earth. Another worker turns it into an iron bar. Another uses that iron bar to construct a luxury apartment building. These commodities move from hand to hand.

"Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish." [114] - Karl Marx

Because of this reality, we have all become dependent on the products, goods, and services produced by other human beings. As the productive forces became more technologically advanced, they generated greater surpluses and commodities. Society became increasingly interconnected, and people began organizing their lives around products produced by others. Exchange itself became the social tie connecting human beings together.

This is the basis of generalized commodity production: the mass production of commodities for exchange.

To determine how commodities are exchanged, we do not simply look at their surface-level characteristics. We understand that products differ in weight, quality, appearance, and function. But these things did not simply appear out of nowhere. Someone made them.

"Nature does not construct machines, locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules, etc. These are products of human industry." [115] - Marx

When commodities are exchanged, what is really being exchanged is the crystallized expenditure of human labor embodied within them, which is the socially necessary labor time.

Marx was able to point almost word for word to passages in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations where Smith himself recognized labor as the source of wealth. Ironically, many modern bourgeois historians and economists have spent more time trying to explain away or distort this observation than their own intellectual ancestors ever did.

“It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command” [116] - Adam Smith

Defenders of capitalism love to say that things have a high value simply because human beings collectively agreed that they do, and that this agreement is what generates a high exchange value but this is only a weak abstraction. Some will even use this argument to justify why certain workers should not be paid more, claiming that society has simply decided their labor is of low value, despite workers continuously striking, contradicting this belief. Yet they never peel back the curtain to reveal the social relations operating beneath capitalism.

It is not things that engage in exchange but people. Commodities do not build themselves and carry themselves to the market. Human beings do. The question is not whether a group of people gathered together and arbitrarily declared that something has value. The real question is: what did it take to produce it? How was it mined out of the ground? How much labor time was required? What was the cost in time, skill, effort, and even health to bring it into existence?

This is why Marxism as a genuine science is necessary for understanding the genuine laws that govern capitalism. Without understanding these laws, we cannot effectively fight the system itself.

Socially Necessary Labour Time and Average Labour

Marx explained that the value of a commodity is not just measured by the labour time it took one individual to produce it, but is directly related and dependent upon the amount of socially necessary labour time invested in its production.

He had to make this distinction because not everyone works at the same speed. There are lazy workers, inexperienced workers, and highly skilled workers. If value were determined solely by the amount of time an individual spent making something, then a person could spend ten hours making a chair that another worker could produce in two hours and demand a higher price simply because they took longer. Marx argued that this extra time is socially unnecessary labour and therefore does not add value. What is actually the average time and agreed upon industry standard does it take to produce that commodity?

For example, we understand that exchanging a watch for a shirt does not appear to be an equal exchange on the surface. A watch and a shirt are two completely different things. One tells time, and the other covers your body. So, how do we determine which quantities and how they should be exchanged for there to be an equal balance between the two?

We do this by reducing the labour time required to produce them to a common social standard.

Marx also called this Abstract Labor.

Abstract Labour: Labour reduced to a common social standard so that different types of work can be compared in value.

Example: A software engineer and a warehouse worker perform very different tasks, but both forms of labour can still be measured in labour time within the economy.

1 pair of shoes ) 1 handmade watch ) = 4 shirts ) 5 bottles of wine )

Each of the items on the left can be exchanged for 4 shirts and 3 bottles of wine. This is discovered by calculating the socially necessary labour time required to produce each commodity according to the industry standard of the day. For example, if it takes approximately 1 hour to produce a pair of shoes in a factory, and it takes approximately 15 minutes to produce a shirt, then 4 shirts contain roughly the same amount of socially necessary labour time as 1 pair of shoes because four 15-minute periods equal 1 hour.

The same principle applies when comparing shoes to bottles of wine or even a handmade watch. What is being compared is not the physical characteristics of the commodities themselves, but the amount of socially necessary labour time embodied within them.

When calculating the value of wine, however, it is important to distinguish between labour time and mere passage of time. The period in which the wine sits aging in a cellar does not itself create value because no human labour is being expended during that process. The value comes from the labour involved in growing the grapes, harvesting them, transporting them, processing them, bottling them, and all the other labour required to bring the wine to market. Simply sitting in a cellar does not add new value in the Marxist sense because no additional labour is being performed.

“In the Japanese villages of the Middle Ages, an accounting system in work-hours, in the literal sense of the term, existed inside the village community. The village accountant kept a kind of great book in which he entered the number of hours of work done by villagers on each others’ fields, since agriculture was still mainly based on cooperative labor, with harvesting, farm construction and stock breeding being done in common. The number of work-hours furnished by the members of one household to the members of another was very carefully tallied. At the end of the year, the exchanges had to balance, that is, the members of household B were required to have given household A exactly the same number of work-hours which members of household A had given household B during the year. The Japanese even refined things to the point – almost a thousand years ago! – where they took into account that children provided a smaller quantity of labor than adults, so that an hour of child labor was “worth” only a half-hour of adult labor. A whole system of accounting was set up along these lines.” [117] - Ernest Mandel

Take for example a construction worker, an artist, and a watchmaker who all go to market to sell their products or skills. The construction worker builds homes, the artist paints masterpieces, and the watchmaker produces watches. Their skills are different, their products are different, and the labour they perform is different.

Yet the market flattens these differences and asks a common question: how much socially necessary labour time was required to produce what is being exchanged?

Socially necessary labour time is determined by average conditions of production. In other words, if the average worker in a particular industry can produce something in two hours, then two hours becomes the social standard. If one worker takes six hours to do the same job due to inefficiency, the additional four hours do not magically create more value.

Now on the other hand, people generally do not sell things at their value. They are looking for profit. Capitalists especially must constantly seek profit in order to remain competitive.

Labour creates value and use values, while exchange value is the form through which that value appears on the market.

When it comes to machines, Marx argued that machines do not create new value. Instead, they transfer their own value bit by bit into the commodities they help produce through wear, tear, and depreciation. If a machine was purchased at $10,000, it can only transfer $10,000 of value over time.

Defenders of capitalism often ignore this. They point to a factory and say, "Look, the factory made the product." As if the factory simply runs itself overnight without human intervention. It does not.

Workers operate the machines. Workers maintain them. Workers repair them when they break down. Workers monitor quality control. Workers deal with defects. Workers transport the materials. At every stage human labour remains necessary.

Raw materials are gathered through human labour, transported by workers, and brought into the factory. The machines process these materials, but workers continue adding new labour throughout the production process.

Take a stuffed animal for example. Its cost is made up of the materials needed to produce it. The fabric, thread, stuffing, dyes, machinery, transportation, and factory all represent previous labour. The workers assembling the stuffed animal then add new labour to those materials, creating additional value.

This is what Marx called the combination of living and dead labour.

Living Labour: The labour currently being performed by workers that creates new value.

Example: A worker assembling electronics.

Dead Labour: Past labour embodied in machines, tools, buildings, and infrastructure.

Example: The labour that previously went into constructing a factory or building a machine.

In summary, the value of a commodity is measured not by how long any one individual spent producing it, but by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it under average conditions using the prevailing level of skill, technology, and productivity available in society.

Profits and Commodity Production

What drives capitalists is the ability to make more money. In order to generate profits they must sell their commodities on the market at a price people are willing to pay. If the cost of producing a commodity greatly exceeds the socially necessary labor time required to produce it, its competitors will be able to sell those similar commodities more cheaply. Nobody wants to buy an overpriced commodity if they can get the same thing elsewhere for less. To recoup these losses, a capitalist may be forced to lower prices, cut costs, reduce wages, dip into their own reserves, forfeit paying their bills, or even sell at a loss simply to remain competitive.

Hence why capitalists are always looking for new production techniques that allow them to produce commodities below the average cost of production. If they can produce a commodity more efficiently and cheaply than their competitors, they can sell it at the prevailing market price and pocket the difference as extra profit.

This is where the executive branches of companies (CEO, COO, CFO,) come into play. Their constant question is: how can we continue to revolutionize technology, operations, projects, techniques, and skills so that our company can make more profit than the competition?

Let us use a real-world example. Please note all prices and figures here do not reflect the actual finances of the companies listed and are purely illustrative.

Take for example movie giant Netflix. They came up with the technique of having people rent movies without relying on traditional stores like Blockbuster. They made deals with production companies, bought licenses, and were able to get movies directly to consumers at a cheaper cost than older competitors. This technique worked extremely well and allowed Netflix to emerge as one of the largest streaming companies in existence.

But eventually this technique lived out its usefulness. Why? Because capitalism is competitive. The moment one company discovers a profitable method, other companies rush to copy it. Soon everyone followed. Hulu followed. Paramount followed. Disney followed. What was once a revolutionary business model became the new industry standard.

This is precisely how, also, socially necessary labour time changes. A production method that once gave one company an advantage eventually becomes generalized throughout an industry. Once everyone adopts it, the advantage disappears and a new social average is established.

Netflix therefore had to search for a new way of lowering costs and increasing profits. One response was producing their own movies and television series in order to reduce licensing costs. Instead of constantly paying other companies for access to content, they brought more of the production process under their own control. This allowed them to keep a larger share of the profits generated by their platform.

This technique worked extremely well. Netflix grew into one of the largest streaming companies in the world. But capitalism never stands still. Eventually every competitor noticed what Netflix was doing and began adopting similar methods. Soon Hulu, Paramount+, Disney+, Max, and countless others followed the same model.

Once everyone adopts the same production technique, the advantage disappears. What was once innovative becomes the industry standard. Prices begin falling toward a new average and the old method no longer provides extraordinary profits.

Capitalism is anarchic. Anarchic = no central coordination. No one is in charge of the whole system.

Of course, even within anarchy, there exists some level of order, but it is usually temporary before everything is thrown back into motion again. Companies do not collectively sit down and plan what happens with commodities once they enter the market. They do not know exactly how much demand will exist, what competitors will do, or where consumers will spend their money. They release only fragments of information to shareholders, investors, and board members.

Once commodities enter the market, the blind forces of the market dominate.

If Netflix produces five new movies and prices its subscriptions at $15.00 but then discovers Paramount has also produced five new movies and charges the same price, Netflix may introduce a cheaper subscription tier to undermine its competitors. But then Paramount responds. Hulu responds. Disney responds. Everyone follows suit.

Prices begin falling.

People who previously had no interest in streaming may now subscribe because the service has become more affordable. Demand rises. Yet the profits Netflix once enjoyed begin shrinking because the advantage they possessed has disappeared.

Suppose Netflix spends enormous amounts of money producing ultra-premium 4K content intended to justify a $39.99 subscription tier. If consumers decide they are unwilling to pay those prices, then the investment cannot fully realize itself on the market. The money has already been spent but consumers are not interested. Netflix now has to settle for less money than it originally expected.

Now on the other hand Hulu is doing better. Hulu decides to combine its streaming service with guaranteed access to Disney+, Apple Music, and other services. They package all of this together and charge $39.99. Consumers buy it in huge numbers.

Profits rise dramatically.

But then Hulu raises the price to $80.00 and fewer people subscribe. They raise the price again to $100.00 and even fewer people subscribe. Why? Because there are limits to what consumers are willing or able to pay. The entire reason many people moved to streaming services in the first place was to escape expensive cable packages, not recreate them.

Even though fewer people are buying subscriptions, Hulu may still generate enormous profits because enough people continue purchasing the service, and its prices remained relatively high. Perhaps Hulu's capitalists now make ten billion dollars while Netflix earns four billion and Paramount earns two billion.

The other streaming services notice this immediately.

They begin bundling access to other streaming services, music subscriptions, gaming services, sports packages, and perhaps even free Chick-fil-A vouchers. They shift their production and organizational structures to follow this model despite originally being simple movie-streaming companies.

The social makeup of the company itself begins to change. New departments are created. New workers are hired. New skills become necessary. A new division of labour emerges reflecting the demands of the market. Workers realize that job openings are now available and flock there.

This is another example of the law of value at work. Capital is constantly reorganizing production in response to profitability.

Capital always flows toward those sectors of the economy offering the highest rate of return. As these techniques continue changing, productive capacity expands and the value of commodities tends to fall because commodities can now be produced more efficiently than before.

The capitalist executives now gather together trying to figure out where the next profitable opportunity exists because the streaming market has become saturated. They may decide to build a Netflix amusement park. They may host 4D movie premieres. They may move into gaming. They may create entirely new industries.

Resources are allocated. Workers are hired. New labour markets open up. Entire new divisions of labour emerge.

The social makeup of the company changes once again as production reorganizes itself around profitability.

Of course, socially necessary labour time is not printed on a price tag when you buy something today. Anywhere you go, whether a store or an online marketplace, what confronts you is price. This is where the law of value begins to operate. Behind every price movement lies the hidden reality of labour, competition, production, and the socially necessary labour time required to produce commodities.

Prices and Values

Prices do not equal value. Rather, prices are the way value appears on the market. The two are related, but they are not identical.

A commodity may sell above its value, below its value, or directly at its value depending on supply, demand, competition, monopolies, shortages, speculation, and countless other factors. If prices and values were always identical, there would be no need for a market in the first place. The constant movement of prices is one of the ways capitalism adjusts itself.

“While the tide ebbs and flows, it nevertheless has a certain reference point, a certain average level, around which the sea rises and falls. The variation arises from the fact that the sea is in constant motion, and affected by gravitational pull. Nevertheless, there is a certain level, the sea level, around which these ebbs and flows take place.” [118] - Rob Sewell

Prices behave in much the same way. They constantly rise above and fall below value. Yet beneath these fluctuations there exists an underlying center of gravity around which prices move. That center of gravity is value itself.

For this reason, while individual commodities may sell above or below their price, the totality of prices across society corresponds to the totality of value created by labour. Value cannot emerge out of thin air. Before a commodity can be exchanged, its value must first be created through production.

A capitalist may sell one commodity above its value and realize an extra profit. Another capitalist may be forced to sell at a price below value and suffer a loss. These gains and losses constantly redistribute value throughout the market. But they do not create new value. New value is created only through living labour.

The total sum of prices therefore cannot ultimately detach itself from the total sum of value. Behind every market transaction, every commodity, and every price tag lies human labour. Prices fluctuate endlessly, but value remains their foundation.

If 20 cookies were put on sale at 8$ each, the capitalist could raise or lower their price however much they want, but it would never change the fact that only 20 cookies were ever made.

Let us use an example.

Imagine a balloon represents the economy, or what Marxists would call the economic base. In order for the balloon to have shape, it must be filled with air. The air itself is invisible. You cannot grab it, touch it, or see it directly. Yet without the air, the balloon would collapse into a useless piece of rubber.

Value functions in much the same way.

The value contained within commodities is not something we can directly observe. We cannot look at a pair of shoes and physically see the socially necessary labour time embodied within them. Yet without human labour, value would not exist. Human labour is involved in commodity production, creating goods and services that can be brought to market and exchanged. It is through this exchange that the value embodied within commodities is realized. Though invisible to the eye, value gives shape to the entire movement of the market. Prices rise and fall around it, capital flows in search of profit, and industries expand or contract in response to it. The capitalist himself realizes value through the sale and the profit it generates for him. Value is therefore not a physical thing but a social relation that emerges wherever commodity production becomes generalized throughout society, because capitalism is based on commodity production for sale. However, no more air can get into this balloon by squeezing it. Only by human labor, blowing into the balloon or using your hands to add air into the balloon, can more value be added.

The price is the visible shape of the balloon.

The value is the invisible air inside it.

Now imagine squeezing one side of the balloon. The shape immediately changes. The air rushes elsewhere. The balloon stretches, bends, and reorganizes itself in response to the pressure.

The same thing occurs under capitalism.

If profits rise in one industry, capital rushes toward it. Workers move there. Investment flows there. Production expands there. Prices, wages, and resources begin reorganizing themselves around the possibility of greater profit.

If profits fall somewhere else, capital begins leaving. Workers are laid off. Factories close. Investment dries up. Resources flow elsewhere.

The economy is constantly changing shape.

Value = the invisible air inside the balloon.
Prices = the visible shape of the balloon.
Pressure on one side = changes in profitability, supply, and demand.
Air rushing elsewhere = capital, workers, and resources moving throughout the economy.

The balloon never sits still. It is constantly changing form as value moves through production and exchange. As Trotsky explains:

… for in the final reckoning only the values that have been created by human labour are at the disposal of society, and prices cannot break through this limitation, including even the monopoly prices of trusts; where labour has created no new value, there even Rockefeller can get nothing. [119]

It is also the constant forces of the market that push capitalists to keep up with the socially necessary labour time required to produce commodities. This explains why they cannot stop revolutionizing the mode of production. They continuously have to introduce better technology, better machinery, and more efficient methods of production in order to increase the productivity of labour.

Imagine Jim Bob and Billy Joe both own cookie factories. Jim Bob buys a new factory and installs better machinery. He can now produce 300 cookies in 4 hours. Billy Joe may very well make better cookies, but using older machinery he can only produce 100 cookies in 8 hours. Jim Bob is now producing below the industry average and can therefore sell his cookies at the market price while realizing extra profits. Billy Joe, meanwhile, is limited by his older techniques and cannot make profits on the same scale as Jim Bob.

Eventually, out of fear of being pushed out of the market altogether, Billy Joe upgrades his own machinery. What was once Jim Bob's competitive advantage now becomes the new industry standard. The socially necessary labour time required to produce cookies falls and a new average is established. This process repeats itself over and over again across the entire economy.

“the development of capitalist production makes it constantly necessary to keep increasing the amount of capital laid out in a given industrial undertaking, and competition makes the immanent laws of capitalist production to be felt by each individual capitalist, as external coercive laws. It compels him to keep constantly extending his capital, in order to preserve it, but extend it he cannot, except by means of progressive accumulation.” [120] - Karl Marx

In school they normally teach that it is the law of supply and demand that rules the economy, that everything is determined by buying low and selling high depending on demand. But that is only one part of the story. Supply and demand explain why prices fluctuate, but bourgeois economists cannot explain where value comes from in the first place. They can never explain what generates supply or what gives expression to demand. Value originates in production through the expenditure of socially necessary labour time.

Marx understood supply and demand perfectly well. He never denied the existence of monopoly prices, shortages, speculation, or even that things with no value whatsoever can sometimes acquire a price tag. However, he was very clear that the labour theory of value applies to commodities that can be reproduced through human labour without major restrictions.

If everything were determined solely by supply and demand, then one has to ask: why do prices tend to stay within certain limits? Why does a can of beans, even during difficult economic periods, never permanently rise to the price of a tractor, a car, a television, or a laptop, even though millions of people are always buying cans of beans?

The answer is that prices do not move randomly. They fluctuate above and below value, but they always hover around a certain center of gravity: the value of the commodity itself. A loaf of bread or a can of beans can only absorb so much labour time in its production. There is a limit to how much socially necessary labour time society requires to reproduce them. A tractor, by contrast, requires vastly more labour, machinery, materials, engineering, and productive capacity to create. It is entirely impossible to spend more than a day making a can of beans.

Supply and demand explain why prices move. The law of value explains why they move around particular centers of gravity rather than others. Behind every fluctuation in price stands the socially necessary labour time required to produce the commodity in the first place.

Surplus Value and the Source of Workers Exploitation

But what truly generates capital for the capitalist? Surplus value.

Surplus Value (S): The extra value created by workers that is appropriated by the capitalist.

Example: A worker produces $300 worth of value but is only paid $100 in wages.

In Capital Volume I, Marx explains that labour power is the worker's capacity to labour—the use of their body, mind, hands, legs, muscles, skills, and knowledge in the production process.

The general character of the labour-process is evidently not changed by the fact, that the labourer works for the capitalist instead of for himself... [121]

and

...The labour-process, turned into the process by which the capitalist consumes labour-power, exhibits two characteristic phenomena. First, the labourer works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs... [122]

In return for selling their labour power, the worker receives a wage. The purpose of this wage is not to make the worker rich but to allow them to reproduce themselves as a worker. They must be able to buy food, secure shelter, obtain transportation, raise children, receive education, and maintain themselves sufficiently to return to work the next day.

Marx therefore defined labour power as the worker's physical and mental capacities sold to the capitalist as a commodity.

This is where exploitation enters the picture.

The capitalist purchases labour power for a wage, but once the worker enters production they create more value than the value of the wage they receive.

Hence Marx's famous observation:

"Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks."

As society modernized and workers fought for reforms, the cost of reproducing labour power expanded. Capitalists were now forced to require educated workers, engineers, scientists, researchers, childcare systems, schools, transportation networks, and increasingly skilled labor. All of these things become part of the cost of reproducing labour power.

Therefore, labour power itself is a commodity, and like all commodities, its value is determined by the socially necessary labour time required to reproduce it.

This value appears in the form of wages.

You receive a wage in exchange for selling your labour power to a capitalist. The capitalist depends upon human labour because labour is the only source of new value.

Capitalists are always interested in keeping wages as low as possible; if they paid everyone what they were worth, they would not make any profit and, that is fundamentally incompatible with the system of capitalism. This is what constantly pushes workers toward demanding higher wages as living costs rise. This contradiction is built directly into capitalism itself.

Let us bring forth an example.

Suppose you work in an Amazon warehouse. Your hourly wage is $24 an hour, and you work 40 hours a week. That comes out to roughly $192 per day and about $3,840 a month before taxes. Your quota is 75 scans per hour. Those items could be snacks, water bottles, pens, perfume, chairs, shirts, pants, electronics, and countless other commodities.

The scanner gun you use does not create new value. It simply transfers part of its own existing value into the production process through wear and tear. Like all machinery, it slowly depreciates over time. On the other side of that scanner system may be an infrastructure engineer earning $85,000 a year whose job is to maintain the equipment and keep production moving. If the system breaks down, they repair it so work can continue.

Both you and the engineer participate in a production and distribution process that moves tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of commodities every day. Yet the source of exploitation is not determined by the sticker price of those commodities.

What matters is the value of your labour power.

At some point during the working day, you have already produced enough value to cover the equivalent of your daily wage. You make $192 a day. Suppose you scanned 75 items and the average price of those items tends to be around $10–15. Multiplying that by 75 means you have packed roughly $1,125 worth of commodities. At that rate, it would appear that in just 17 minutes you have covered your wage.

But remember: price does not reflect value. As you packed those commodities, you also added new value through your labour, while the commodities themselves already contained value from the labour previously expended to produce them. Therefore, it is impossible to know the exact moment at which the value you created covered the equivalent of your wage. However, this example, modeled after prices, should help illustrate the severity of the exploitation taking place.

Marx called this necessary labour time. This is the portion of the working day in which workers reproduce the value of their own labour power—the food, housing, transportation, education, childcare, and other necessities required to sustain themselves and return to work.

But work does not stop there.

You continue packing items. You continue scanning products. You continue moving commodities through the warehouse. The remaining hours of the working day Marx called surplus labour time.

This is where surplus value comes from.

During surplus labour time the worker continues creating value but no longer receives an equivalent return in wages. The value produced during these hours is appropriated by the capitalist in the form of surplus value.

Whether you work eight hours, ten hours, or twelve hours, once you have reproduced the value of your labour power, the remainder of the working day becomes a source of surplus value for the capitalist.

At the end of the month, you may still go home with $3,200 after taxes, despite helping move commodities worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars through the production and distribution process and generating new value.

This difference between what workers are paid and the value they create is the source of capitalist profit and the source of workers exploitation. The capitalist purchases labour power at its value but extracts from it more value than it costs. That difference is surplus value, and surplus value is the lifeblood of capitalism.

It is always in the interests of capitalists to squeeze every last bit of surplus value out of workers, and they do this through a variety of methods. Sometimes they lengthen the working day through mandatory overtime or on-call schedules. Sometimes they intensify labour by increasing quotas, performance metrics, and productivity targets. They introduce new machinery, automation, artificial intelligence, and software systems that allow fewer workers to do the work that once required many. They carry out layoffs and force the remaining workers to absorb additional responsibilities without proportional increases in pay.

Modern capitalists also rely on time-tracking software, productivity monitoring, algorithmic management, lean production techniques, just-in-time inventory systems, workplace surveillance, performance reviews, productivity bonuses, and data analytics to measure every second of the worker's day. Warehouse workers are tracked by scanners, delivery drivers by GPS systems, office workers by productivity software, and call center employees by call metrics and response times.

All of these methods serve the same purpose: increasing the productivity of labour while reducing costs. The goal is to produce more commodities in less time with fewer workers while extracting the greatest possible amount of surplus value from those who remain employed.

Constant Capital, and Variable Capital

At the beginning of every year companies establish new goals. These goals ultimately reflect one thing above all else: increasing profits. To accomplish this, they look for ways to increase productivity, reduce costs, expand market share, and extract more surplus value from workers.

In order to produce commodities, capitalists must invest money into two things: the means of production and labour power.

Constant Capital (C): Money spent on machines, buildings, equipment, software, infrastructure, raw materials, and other means of production. These things transfer their value into commodities but do not create new value by themselves.

· Example: Warehouse robots, factory machinery, delivery trucks, office buildings, servers, and production software.

Variable Capital (V): Money spent on labour power. Workers create new value through the labour process.

· Example: Wages paid to warehouse workers, engineers, drivers, technicians, customer service representatives, and factory workers.

The reason Marx called labour power "variable capital" is because it is the only part of production capable of creating more value than it costs. A machine worth $10,000 can only transfer $10,000 of its value over its lifetime. A worker, however, can produce far more value than the value of their wage.

Workers may be hired, laid off, retrained, promoted, or replaced, and wage levels may rise and fall with economic conditions. There is also a natural limit to how much labour can be extracted from workers. Human beings still need sleep, food, family life, recreation, and recovery. Any attempt to completely destroy the worker ultimately destroys the source of value itself. Capitalism, therefore, exists in a permanent contradiction: it constantly seeks to extract more labour from workers while simultaneously depending on workers for its own survival. Since there exists a limit to lengthening the working day, the capitalist invests in machines to intensify the exploitation of labour. Workers are forced to work faster through picking guns, packing skateboards, AI tools, etc Marx called this relative surplus value, meaning the surplus that workers generate is relative to their revolutionizing of machinery and technology they use.

Total capital can therefore be represented as:

C + V

where C represents constant capital and V represents variable capital.

The total value of commodities produced can then be represented as:

C + V + S

where S represents surplus value.

During production, workers create surplus value. However, this surplus value remains locked inside the commodity until it is sold. Surplus value is created in production but realized in exchange. If commodities cannot be sold, the capitalist cannot realize the surplus value contained within them. A warehouse full of unsold commodities may contain value, but that value cannot be turned into profit until exchange takes place on the market.

Let us use a simple example.

Suppose a company spends:

Constant Capital (C) = $600,000 on machinery, equipment, software, buildings, and infrastructure.

Variable Capital (V) = $430,000 on wages.

Workers then create $6,000,000 in new value during production.

The surplus value is:

S = $6,000,000 − $430,000

S = $5,570,000

This means workers produced $5,570,000 more value than they received in wages.

From this we can calculate several important Marxist ratios.

Organic Composition of Capital

c / v

600,000 / 430,000 = 1.39

This means that for every $1 spent on wages, approximately $1.39 is spent on machinery, infrastructure, and other means of production.

Rate of Exploitation

s / v

5,570,000 / 430,000 = 12.95

or 1,295%

This means that for every $1 workers receive in wages, they create approximately $12.95 in new value.

Rate of Profit

s / (c + v)

5,570,000 / (600,000 + 430,000)

5,570,000 / 1,030,000 = 5.41

or 541%

This means that for every $1 invested in production, the capitalist receives approximately $5.41 in profit.

The capitalist also wants to recoup on the costs he has also invested into the new machines and technologies as well so that he can continue exploitation.

“There cannot be the slightest doubt that the tendency that urges capital, so soon as a prolongation of the hours of labour is once and for all forbidden, to compensate itself, by a systematic heightening of the intensity of labour, and to convert every improvement in machinery into a more perfect means of exhausting the workman, must soon lead to a state of things in which a reduction of the hours of labour will again be inevitable.” [123] - Karl Marx

As of today, plenty of people in America have already started to notice that working eight hours a day is no longer acceptable. We have seen increases in burnout, insomnia, depression, anxiety, and other health issues associated with overwork. As technology has advanced, it would seem logical that humanity would work less. Machines are more efficient than ever before, computers can process information instantly, and entire industries have been transformed through automation. Yet despite all of these advances, many workers feel like they are working more than ever.

Investopedia

Peter Gratton Americans Work 8.4 Hours Daily—Here's How That Compares to the Rest of the World

reported that:

American workers log an average of 1,796 hours annually—465 more hours than Germans and 389 more than Norwegians.

The U.S. is the only advanced economy with zero mandated paid vacation—and 23% of American workers get none at all.

More hours do not necessarily mean more output, as several European nations with significantly more time off outperform the U.S. in productivity per hour worked.

This is one of the reasons Marxists argue for a shortening of the working day. Workers are increasingly being pushed to their physical and mental limits. There comes a point where extending the working day further does not significantly increase productivity but instead leads to exhaustion, burnout, injuries, mistakes, and declining quality of life.

Why does this happen?

Because the capitalist is constantly searching for new ways to increase surplus value.

Marx described the circulation of capital through the formula:

M – C – M′

Where:

M = Money (Capital)

C = Commodities

M′ = More Money (Expanded Capital)

The capitalist begins with money, purchases commodities such as machinery, raw materials, buildings, and labour power, and then sells the finished commodities in order to end up with more money than they started with.

This is the general formula of capital.

The difference between the first M and the second M′ is the surplus value extracted during production and realized through exchange.

Under feudalism exploitation was often easier to see. The peasant worked the lord's land, and a portion of what was produced was directly taken by the lord. The relationship was visible.

Under capitalism exploitation becomes obscured.

Workers no longer see the surplus labour they perform. Instead they receive a wage and often assume they are being paid for all of the value they create. The commodity itself appears on the market disconnected from the workers who produced it.

Marx called this phenomenon commodity fetishism and alienation of labor

Commodity Fetishism: When people forget that products come from human labour and instead see them merely as objects with prices.

Example: Seeing a $1,000 iPhone as simply a product on a shelf rather than the result of the labour of miners, factory workers, engineers, truck drivers, programmers, designers, warehouse workers, retail workers, and countless others across the globe.

Alienation: Feeling disconnected from your work, others, and yourself under capitalism.

· Example: Repeating meaningless tasks all day with no control or pride.

Most workers never consciously make this connection because the social relations between people become hidden behind the exchange of things, and the threat of unemployment looms over their heads. Hence, workers can create guns in a factory and be disconnected from the fact that they are being used to murder children. Many simply accept that this is how the world works, and with the constant 24/7 propaganda of bourgeois democracy, celebrities, stan culture, new circuses, sports, and entertainment, many never realize the full extent of their oppression.

A worker may conclude that their individual employer should simply pay more or that their company genuinely cares about them. It is one thing to recognize that you deserve a raise. It is another thing entirely to understand why wages are constantly in conflict with profits and why exploitation exists in the first place. Increasingly, however, workers are beginning to question these assumptions as living costs rise, workloads increase, and productivity expectations continue to grow.

Marxism attempts to pull back the curtain and reveal the social relations hidden beneath the market. It shows not only that exploitation exists, but scientifically explains how it occurs, where profits come from, and why the conflict between labour and capital continues to shape modern society.

Productive and Unproductive Labour

Under capitalism, the capitalist does not care about your product in the same way that you do. They care about it only insofar as it can be sold for a profit. The use-value of a commodity is important to them only because somebody must buy it. Beyond that, what matters is surplus value.

Take McDonald's for example. At company conferences and shareholder meetings the executives will stand on stage talking about their passion for the brand, how much they care about quality, and how their products bring joy to millions of people. Yet if tomorrow Big Macs stopped generating profits, they would abandon them without a second thought. The burger itself is irrelevant. What matters is the money it brings in. We even saw this when the CEO of Mcdonalds showed little to no joy when eating his own burger.

New York Post McDonald's CEO ruthlessly mocked over viral video tasting Big Arch burger: 'Most unnatural thing I’ve ever seen'

The same logic applies everywhere.

If Facebook discovers that outrage, misinformation, and division generate more advertising revenue than truth, why should the shareholders care? If pharmaceutical companies can make more money treating symptoms than curing diseases, why should investors object? If a company can replace a thousand workers with software and increase profits, why should management hesitate?

The capitalist is not rewarded for producing what humanity needs. The capitalist is rewarded for producing what generates profit.

This is why Marx concluded that productive labour under capitalism is labour that produces capital. The system does not ask whether an activity is good for humanity, whether it enriches culture, whether it strengthens communities, or whether it improves human life. It asks one question:

Does it generate profit?

Every worker experiences this reality whether they assemble products in a factory, stock shelves in a warehouse, answer calls in a customer service center, write software, teach in a private institution, drive trucks, or work in a hospital owned by private capital.

The moment your employer feels they can no longer extract sufficient profit from your labour, everything changes. Suddenly there are budget cuts. Suddenly there are layoffs. Suddenly there are performance improvement plans. Suddenly management is questioning your productivity, attendance, attitude, or efficiency.

One day you are a "valued member of the team." The next day you are a line item on a spreadsheet.

Every waking hour becomes tied to the demands of capital. How can I become more productive? How can I learn another skill? How can I avoid being replaced? How can I justify my existence to a company that measures my worth through profitability?

At the end of every year new company goals appear. New productivity targets. New performance metrics. New quotas. New expectations. You are told these goals are about innovation, teamwork, growth, or company culture. Yet beneath all the corporate language lies the same objective that has existed since the birth of capitalism:

Increase profit.

Workers are forced to care deeply about the things they produce because their livelihoods depend upon it. The capitalist, however, has a choice. They can walk away from one industry and invest in another tomorrow if the profits are higher elsewhere.

You care because your survival depends on your labour.

They care because their profits depend on your labour.

That is the other contradiction at the heart of capitalism.

What is Money and Credit?

As human society evolved, we eventually had to create money. For a long time people relied on barter. A farmer might exchange grain for shoes, a blacksmith might exchange tools for livestock, and so forth. But as production expanded and societies began producing larger and larger surpluses, barter became increasingly inefficient. At a certain point, it became impossible to directly exchange everything for everything else. Money was one of humanity's greatest inventions because it solved this problem. Price is simply the exchange value expressed in monetary terms.

Ashrafi coin of Ashraf Hotak. Source: Wikimedia Commons

“Money arises historically and has taken many forms: slaves, cattle, precious metals. Money is clearly far superior to barter, which is a primitive form of exchange. The universal equivalent – money – can easily be used to exchange one commodity foanother. In the past, gold and silver were used as money. Of course, gold and silver also have value, which, like all commodities, is determined by the amount of labour socially necessary for their production. Money (or currency) became increasingly expressed in terms of precious metals: copper, bronze, silver and gold. It makes possible the exchange or circulation of commodities. When money was gold coin, the British government issued gold sovereigns with a nominal value of one pound sterling. Money is a measure of value, where commodities are expressed in terms of a quantity or certain weight of the precious metal. It becomes a universal means of payment. It can be accumulated, an index of the wealth of individuals, as well as being a reserve or store of value. Gold has historically stood out as the universal commodity – far easier to handle, carry and store, as well as being divisible and durable.“ [124] - Rob Sewell

Today we use paper currency and digital bank deposits. For much of modern history the U.S. dollar was tied to gold. A dollar represented a claim on a certain quantity of gold held by the government. However, in 1971 President Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar into gold, effectively ending the gold standard. Today we live under a system of fiat money. Fiat money has no significant intrinsic value of its own. The paper itself is worth very little. Instead, its value comes from the authority of the state, the productive capacity of the economy behind it, taxation, and the fact that society generally accepts it as a medium of exchange.

This creates new possibilities but also new dangers.

Where society begins running into problems is through inflation, stagnation, financial bubbles, and crises.

Let us use another example.

Suppose there is a pie divided into twelve equal slices. Each slice represents one dollar of value. Altogether the pie represents twelve dollars.

Now imagine that without increasing the size of the pie, twenty-four dollars are suddenly chasing those same twelve slices.

The pie itself has not grown.

The number of slices has not increased.

Yet there is now more money competing for the same amount of goods.

Under these conditions prices tend to rise because more money is attempting to purchase the same commodities. The purchasing power of each dollar begins to fall because the amount of goods available has not increased alongside the money supply.

Inflation occurs when money loses purchasing power and more currency is required to purchase the same commodities than before.

Stagnation, on the other hand, occurs when economic growth slows or stalls. Factories are not expanding, productivity growth weakens, investment declines, and production ceases growing at the pace necessary to sustain the system. When inflation and stagnation occur together, economists refer to this as stagflation.

Credit only emerged because capitalism itself demanded it as international trade expanded; it became dangerous, expensive, and inefficient to move large quantities of gold and silver across continents and oceans. Merchants therefore developed systems of credit, bank notes, and promises to pay in the future.

Without credit, capitalists would always need to have large amounts of money sitting on hand before they could invest in production— they would not be able to quickly purchase new machinery, build factories, experiment with new technologies, hire workers, or expand production. They would constantly have to wait until enough money accumulated before making investments.

Most investors simply do not have the time or patience to wait. They want the money now.

So, the capitalist goes to a bank and says:

"I need X amount of money because I am starting a business."

The bank responds:

"Okay, I will lend you X amount of money at 5% interest."

This process reflects the growing fusion of finance capital and industrial capital. Money itself becomes a commodity that can be bought, sold, lent, borrowed, and invested in the pursuit of profit.

Banks hold deposits, but they lend out far more than what is simply sitting in their vaults. They only keep enough reserves to cover normal withdrawals. From the bank’s standpoint, money sitting around doing nothing is unprofitable. They want that money circulating, generating interest, and producing returns.

The profitability of banks ultimately comes from the surplus value created elsewhere in production. Banks do not create new value. They skim a portion of the value created by workers and businesses through interest payments, fees, and financial services. Their purpose is to redistribute part of the surplus value created in production back into their own coffers. They are essentially unproductive. They create no new value or add any new value.

Problems emerge when lending expands far beyond what can realistically be supported by the economy. Banks make money by issuing loans and collecting interest, so there is always pressure to lend more and more money. As long as confidence remains high and debts continue being repaid, everything appears stable. However, the further lending expands beyond the real productive capacity of the economy, the more fragile the system becomes these start to get known as “bubbles”.

This contradiction was exposed during the financial crash of 2008 when banks massively overextended themselves. For years, they continued issuing predatory loans, expanding credit, and building financial claims upon future profits and future repayments. As long as confidence remained high that housing prices would continue to rise, everything appeared stable. But once confidence began to crack, the entire system revealed just how fragile it had become.

We can see similar tendencies today in heavily indebted companies such as Spirit Airlines, which struggled under enormous financial pressures and repeatedly entered bankruptcy proceedings. The problem was not simply whether its business idea was good or bad, like the YouTube investors say. Banks and financial institutions are driven by profitability and confidence. As long as profits are being made and debts are being repaid, credit continues expanding. But when profits weaken, and debts become harder to service, the confidence that underpins the entire system begins to disappear. In the end Spirit reported having $8.1 billion in debts and $8.6 billion in assets, according to court filings.

And according to the Financial Times

Financial Times Spirit Airlines winds down operations after bailout talks founder

But talks over the plan stalled as certain Spirit creditors declined to support the rescue package. The holders of the airline’s $3bn of debt would have to consent to any deal struck with the federal government or be repaid in full.

Holders of a $275mn senior revolving credit facility administered by Citigroup, as well as a separate committee of unsecured creditors that holds billions of dollars of junior claims, were willing to sign off on the proposed bailout, the FT reported this week.

But some of Spirit’s bondholders — the broader group includes Citadel Americas, Cyrus Capital, Ares, Pimco and Arena Capital — had come to prefer a liquidation of the company’s assets over a reorganisation. The dissenters cited millions of dollars in operating losses that had piled up earlier this year even before the Iran war drove a surge in fuel prices.

What becomes immediately visible is just how many creditors, lenders, and financial institutions can become tied to a single company. This is precisely why crises in one sector can quickly spread throughout the wider economy.

This is also directly connected to bank runs and financial panics.

While banks are generally subject to regulations requiring them to keep a certain proportion of their deposits in reserve, they are still incentivized to lend as much money as possible because lending is how they generate profits. Every new loan means another stream of interest payments flowing back into the bank.

Let us use a simple example.

Suppose you are running a lemonade stand outside your house. You make twelve cups of lemonade and set them aside for sale.

One day a kid walks up and says, "I want a cup of lemonade."

You reply, "Okay, that will be $5."

The kid says he does not have $5 right now.

You respond, "That's okay. I'll give you the lemonade today and next week you can pay me back $5 plus a little extra for lending it to you."

The kid agrees.

The next day another kid comes by.

Then another.

Pretty soon, word spreads around the neighborhood that you are lending out lemonade. More kids keep showing up asking for cups.

At first everything works fine because most of the kids are paying you back. You become more confident and begin lending out more and more lemonade.

Eventually you have lent out almost every cup you have.

Then one day a new kid arrives and promises to pay you even more money in the future for a cup of lemonade. You think, "Why not?" you realize you have extra lemonade stored in coolers behind the house that wasn't part of your original inventory. Since nobody is looking at those coolers, you start lending those cups out too. They are not part of the lemonade you normally tell everyone you have available, but you assume everything will be fine because people are still making payments.

Now your profits increase because more cups are circulating and more people owe you money.

But eventually you have lent out not only the original twelve cups, but most of the lemonade in the coolers as well.

Then something changes. People begin paying late. Some stop paying entirely. Others all show up demanding lemonade at the same time.

You go to check your original inventory. It's gone.

You check the coolers in the back. Those are mostly gone too.

Then a problem emerges.

A new lemonade stand opens down the street with better lemonade. Some of the kids stop buying from you. Others begin paying late. Some never pay at all.

Suddenly your mother comes outside and says: Where is the money and lemonade?

But you don’t have enough lemonade nor money.

As consequence, the confidence that your mother has in you begins to disappear. A few of your mother's friends, who she promised extra lemonade to, now show up asking for their lemonade. They had previously given your stand $20 each to hold as credit toward future lemonade purchases. Now they want to cash in that credit.

The problem is that the lemonade is gone.

You don't have the lemonade to give them, and you don't have $100 sitting around to refund everybody either. Out of all the lemonade you lent out, only one kid paid you back with a cup of lemonade and $5. Everyone else either hasn't paid yet, is paying late, or isn't paying at all.

Suddenly everyone realizes that there are more claims to lemonade than there is actual lemonade available. What looked stable yesterday was dependent entirely on confidence. The moment confidence disappears and everyone demands their lemonade back at the same time, the contradiction is exposed. On paper you appeared rich because people owed you lemonade and money in the future. In reality, you did not have enough lemonade or cash on hand to satisfy everyone at once.

This is the danger of overextended credit. As long as loans are being repaid, the system appears stable. But when enough people begin demanding their money back at the same time, or enough borrowers stop making payments, the weakness hidden beneath the surface is suddenly exposed.

That is the general function of money in our system today. It represents an exchange, a guarantee, and a store of value.

Competition, Accumulation, and Monopoly Capital

Capitalists have to constantly reinvent industries, rebrand themselves, search for new products, and expand into new markets because they are under constant pressure to produce commodities more cheaply, increase profits, pay debts, and remain competitive. Accumulation becomes accumulation for accumulation's sake. The capitalist can never simply sit still and say, "I have enough." If they stop innovating while their competitors continue, they risk being driven out of the market.

As markets grow, industries expand, and new technologies emerge, the old innovative methods that once gave companies an advantage eventually become obsolete. Even this is dialectical. Everything constantly changes into its opposite under capitalism. Yesterday's revolutionary breakthrough becomes today's standard practice.

Let us take Disney as an example.

Disney originally started as a small animation company in the 1920s founded by Walt Disney and Roy Disney. They created the beloved character Mickey Mouse and over the decades continuously revolutionized themselves. They introduced color cartoons, produced the first successful feature-length animated film, opened amusement parks, and created generations of beloved characters such as Cinderella, Ariel, Belle, Princess Tiana, and Pocahontas.

"Walt Disney, seated, examines film with Mickey Mouse perched on his right arm." Library of Congress file.

I love Pocahontas. Who doesn't love Pocahontas? Even though most of the story was complete rubbish except for that one radical moment when her father basically said the white men were evil. That went hard.

But behind all of these beloved characters was something else: investment.

Every step forward required Disney to invest in new machinery, new production methods, new technologies, and new forms of organization.

Technicolor Animation (1932)

Disney secured an exclusive agreement with Technicolor for a period of time.

Flowers and Trees became the first commercially successful full-color cartoon.

For several years competitors literally could not use the same three-strip Technicolor process.

This gave Disney a major advantage.

The Multiplane Camera (1930s)

One of Disney's most important innovations was the multiplane camera.

Before this, animated films often appeared flat.

Disney engineers developed a system that placed artwork on multiple layers of glass while the camera moved through the layers, creating depth and the illusion of three-dimensional movement.

This can be seen in:

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Bambi

Audiences had never seen animation with that level of depth before.

Feature-Length Animation

At the time most studios produced short cartoons.

Disney took an enormous risk by producing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The film cost approximately $1.5 million, an extraordinary amount of money for the time, and nearly bankrupted the company.

Most of Hollywood thought Walt Disney was insane.

Its success proved that feature-length animated films could be commercially viable.

Without Snow White, the modern animation industry might look very different today.

New Animation Techniques

Disney invested heavily in the study of:

Human anatomy
Animal movement
Physics
Acting

Animators attended life-drawing classes and studied live-action footage.

This was far more expensive than the "rubber hose" style many competitors used.

The result was a level of realism audiences had never seen before, particularly in films like Bambi.

With every major investment into machinery, technology, and production methods, the organic composition of capital rises.

Organic Composition of Capital: The relationship between constant capital and variable capital.

Example: A modern technology company may spend billions on servers, data centers, software infrastructure, and equipment while employing relatively fewer workers.

This is expressed by the formula:

C / V

Where:

C = Constant Capital

V = Variable Capital

The capitalist must constantly maintain machinery, infrastructure, software systems, buildings, and technology. These costs never disappear.

Let us use a purely illustrative example.

Suppose Disney spends:

$10 billion annually maintaining Disney World Florida and related infrastructure.
$2.4 billion annually paying approximately 80,000 workers.

This gives us:

C = $10 billion

V = $2.4 billion

To find the ratio:

10 ÷ 2.4 = approximately 4

This gives us a ratio of roughly:

4 : 1

Meaning Disney spends approximately $4 on machinery, infrastructure, and other forms of constant capital for every $1 spent on wages.

The important point is not the exact numbers, but what the ratios tell us.

Ratio	Indicates
Low C : V	Labour-intensive production
High C : V	Capital-intensive production
Rising C : V	Growing investment in machinery and technology

This is one of the ways Marxists measure the composition of capital, the degree of exploitation, and the changing relationship between labour and machinery. The second way companies increase both their constant capital and market power is through acquisitions. Eventually companies stop merely competing. They begin consuming each other. This process is what Marxists call the concentration and centralization of capital. We can see this happening throughout the entertainment industry today.

Warner Bros.

Paramount.

HBO.

Discovery.

Netflix.

Disney.

The giant firms increasingly absorb smaller firms.

Pixar is one example.

Disney partnered with Pixar in the 1980s to develop the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS).

Instead of painting every frame by hand, animation could now be digitally inked and colored.

This allowed:

More complex camera movements
Better lighting effects
Faster production
The elimination of many manual processes

Films such as Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King benefited enormously from this technology.

The Lion King became one of Disney's most profitable films.

Then Pixar released another groundbreaking success.

Finding Nemo.

Produced by Pixar and distributed by Disney, it became the highest-grossing animated film ever at the time of its release and demonstrated just how far computer animation had advanced.

Only a few years later Disney acquired Pixar outright.

Since then, Disney has continued purchasing and absorbing more companies.

Today Disney's empire includes:

Disney Animation
Pixar
Marvel Entertainment
Lucasfilm
ABC
ESPN
FX
National Geographic
Disney+

What began as a small animation studio drawing a mouse in the 1920s eventually became one of the largest media conglomerates in human history.

This is not an accident. It is one of the tendencies of capitalism itself. Competition does not remain competition forever. Capital accumulates, companies merge, rivals are bought out, and industries become concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. The small are consumed by the large, and the large continue searching for new markets, new technologies, and new sources of profit.

Another claim that defenders of capitalism love to make is that capitalism is the best system because it produces innovation through competition. There is certainly some truth to this. Capitalism has historically revolutionized industry, advanced the productive forces, and brought forth technologies that previous generations could barely imagine.

However, this is a very empiricist explanation because it only looks at the surface appearance of things. A dialectical analysis goes further.

Companies are indeed forced to compete with one another. They introduce new technologies, develop new production methods, cut costs, and search for new markets in order to survive. But competition itself contains a contradiction.

As some companies win, other companies lose.

The losers are bought out, absorbed, merged into larger corporations, or driven out of business entirely. This process repeats itself over and over again. The very competition that defenders of capitalism praise eventually begin to undermine itself.

Over time fewer and fewer firms control larger and larger sections of the economy.

Innovation does not disappear overnight, but the competitive pressure that originally drove it begins to weaken. Small companies increasingly emerge not with the goal of competing forever, but with the goal of eventually being purchased by larger corporations. Once entrepreneurs realize they can cash out and sell their company to a giant corporation for millions or billions of dollars, the incentive shifts. The goal is no longer necessarily to build something that lasts, but to build something valuable enough to be acquired.

This tendency is increasingly visible throughout the modern American economy.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would likely be astonished by the development of the productive forces today. Never could they have imagined the concentration of capital on such a scale. Entire industries are dominated by a handful of corporations. Wealth has accumulated to levels unprecedented in human history.

Yet another contradiction emerges from this very success.

While the system becomes more productive than ever before, producing unimaginable quantities of goods and services, yet the very source of surplus value—human labour—starts to occupy a smaller and smaller place within production.

This is one of the central contradictions Marx identified. Capitalism is driven to continually revolutionize production, but in doing so it constantly undermines the source of its own profits.

The more successful capitalism becomes at replacing workers with machinery, the more it creates difficulties for the production of surplus value itself.

The Rate of Profit

Not only is humanity suffering from man-made poverty, but the money is just sitting there accumulating on top of itself over and over again. Yet this drive to constantly expand, monopolize markets, buy competitors, and integrate new tools has led to something many of you have probably already noticed in your everyday lives: the quality of things is getting worse.

As CNN reported

Kati Chitrakorn Luxury goods were once built to last. Now, some fall apart as easily as fast fashion | CNN

In 2024 and 2025, a series of investigations by Italian prosecutors exposed systemic labor exploitation within the supply chains of several luxury brands. These probes revealed that brands frequently outsourced production to a network of subcontractors — many Chinese-owned — who utilized undocumented labor in sweatshop-like conditions to maximize profit margins. Yilmaz added that the luxury sector’s exorbitant price hikes — as brands seek to navigate a global market slowdown and rising production costs — has only exacerbated the problem. He caveated: “This is not to say that everything being made is garbage, but unfortunately, increasing prices doesn’t mean an increase in quality.”

You know it.

We know it.

We have all seen it.

A good shirt that used to last years now falls apart at the seams. A phone charger dies after six months. A washing machine that your grandparents kept for twenty years suddenly breaks after five. The market is flooded with cheaply made products that eventually end up in a landfill somewhere. Entire mountains of Shein products are produced only to be thrown away.

But why does this happen?

Because the system constantly forces companies to compete.

There is the inevitable development of technology, new tools, new machinery, and the continual accumulation of capital. As profits soar—100%, 200%, 300%, 500%—shareholders, investors, and executives keep demanding more and more and more. We see it at these conventions the bourgeoisie hold every year. They stand on stage talking about how this new software will increase productivity. How this new AI system will make workers' lives easier. How this new machine will reduce five jobs into one. How this new workflow will cut ten tasks down to two.

All you have to do is pay a subscription fee or hand over a lump sum of money, and this wonderful new technology will arrive at your company's doorstep.

And often it works.

Productivity increases. Output increases. Profits increase.

But something else happens.

The moment that machinery arrives, C increases. Constant capital grows. The organic composition of capital changes.

We have already seen this happen with the so-called AI revolution. We have seen it happen through automation. We have seen it happen through Microsoft Remote Desktop and other remote technologies where a company no longer needs a worker physically sitting in the building. They can simply move the work across the ocean and hire somebody else for less.

Labour and Capital. America in the 1920s. Source: Public Domain

For the individual capitalist, this appears rational. Labour costs fall. Productivity rises. Profits increase.

But this has consequences.

It creates a relative decrease in variable capital (labour power) compared to constant capital (machinery, infrastructure, software, raw materials, and operating costs) because more can now be produced in less time. They take it a step further. Departments are downsized. Workers are laid off. Wages stagnate. People are pushed to quit and are never replaced.

When machinery allows four workers to complete what previously required sixty workers, the relationship between constant capital and variable capital changes.

This is what Marx meant when he spoke of the relationship between dead labour and living labour.

The machines, the software, the infrastructure, the factories, and the accumulated wealth of previous generations—all of this is dead labour.

Workers are living labour.

And slowly, under capitalism, dead labour begins to consume and displace living labour.

This is the contradiction Marx identified.

Capitalism is driven to increase productivity, replace workers, and revolutionize production.

But in doing so it gradually undermines the very source of its own profits.

This tendency is what Marx called the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and it is one of the deepest contradictions within the capitalist system itself.

The amount of surplus value obtained by capitalists ultimately depends on two things:

The rate of exploitation.
The number of workers employed.

Profit comes from variable capital (V), that is, human labour power. The constant part of capital simply transfers its own value to the end product created by the worker.

Simply put, because value is only created by human labour power, when there is a relative decrease in variable capital (V) compared to constant capital (C), the source of new value begins to shrink relative to the size of the total investment.

Machines also cost a tremendous amount of money.

Capitalists generally need to stay above certain profit margins and rates of return to ensure they can pay operating costs, pay back loans, maintain machinery, satisfy shareholders, and still pay wages. The bigger the company becomes, the bigger these costs become. A giant corporation cannot survive on the same margins as a small lemonade stand.

Let us draw another example.

These figures are purely illustrative.

Let us take a company like Wendy's.

Suppose it takes $60 million yearly to operate all stores, maintain equipment, pay for technology, buildings, software, and machinery. Let this represent C.

Suppose they pay $20 million in wages to workers. Let this represent V.

And suppose they generate $250 million in surplus value (S).

The rate of exploitation would be extremely high, exceeding 1100%.

Now let us calculate the rate of profit.

The rate of profit is represented by:

S / (C + V)

250 ÷ (60 + 20)

250 ÷ 80

= 3.125

Or approximately 312%.

That means that for every dollar invested, the company receives roughly three dollars back in profit.

Now let us increase C because new machinery has been introduced.

Suppose C rises from $60 million to $115 million while V remains fixed at $20 million.

The capitalist is excited. The new machines can make more burgers. The new machines can automate tasks. The new machines reduce labour costs. The new machines increase productivity. In the short term, this may even allow Wendy's to earn superprofits compared to competitors that have not yet adopted the same technology.

However, these advantages do not last forever. Competing firms eventually adopt similar machinery and techniques. What was once an advantage becomes the new industry standard. The superprofit disappears, but the increased investment in machinery remains. Constant capital has risen throughout the industry as a whole.

Let us run the numbers again:

250 ÷ (115 + 20)

250 ÷ 135

= 1.85

Or approximately 185%.

The company is still making profits. In fact, it may still be making enormous profits. But the rate of profit has fallen. This is the crucial point. The rate of profit measures how rapidly capital is expanding relative to the total amount invested. The capitalist may be making more money in absolute terms than ever before, yet the rate at which profit is being generated begins to slow.

As Ernest Mandel explains:

"Let us say the average selling price of a locomotive is a million dollars. What then will be the difference between a plant operating below the average productivity of labor and one operating above it? The first will spend, let us say, $900,000 to produce a locomotive, and its profit will be $100,000. On the other hand, the plant producing above the average level of labor productivity, will spend, let us say, $750,000 and will make $250,000 profit. In other words, capitalist competition favors those enterprises which are technologically ahead; these enterprises realize superprofits as compared with the average profit. Average profit is basically an abstract idea, exactly like value. It is an average around which the real profit rates of different branches and enterprises fluctuate. Capital flows toward the branches where there are superprofits and flows away from those branches in which profits are below the average. By virtue of this ebb and flow of capital from one branch to another, the rates of profit tend to approximate this average, without ever completely reaching it in an absolute and mechanical way. This is the way then that equalization of the rates of profit is effected. There is a very simple way to determine this abstract average rate of profit: we take the total mass of surplus value produced by all workers in a given year and in a given country, and draw its ratio to the total mass of capital investment in that country. “ [125]

What Mandel is describing here is the same process we discussed earlier with Netflix, Disney, and every other company under capitalism. The first capitalist to introduce a new machine, a new production technique, or a new technology gains an advantage over their competitors. Because they can produce commodities more cheaply, they realize higher profits than the social average.

Capitalist competition, therefore, rewards those firms that are technologically ahead. In Ernest's example above, the locomotive firm was able to spend 750k and make 250k, while his competitors were spending more on their machines and generating less. Capital ended up flowing toward industries where his model was being adapted, and superprofits were forming. In doing so, they left behind industries where profits have fallen below the average. This constant movement of capital is one of the reasons profit rates tend to equalize over time.

But there is a catch.

The moment every competitor adopts the same technology, the advantage disappears. What was once a superprofit becomes the new average. The rates fall again, and now the cost of the machine is still there, even though the capitalist isn't generating the same super profits as before to cover the cost of the machine. The capitalist must once again search for another innovation, another machine, another market, another technique, or another source of cheaper labour.

The race begins all over again.

This is why capitalism can never stand still. It must constantly revolutionize production, constantly introduce new technologies, constantly expand into new markets, and constantly search for new ways to increase productivity. Yet every capitalist doing this at the same time contributes to the very tendency Marx identified: the continual rise of constant capital relative to variable capital throughout the economy as a whole.

Many defenders of capitalism hear this and immediately say:

"Marx was wrong! Look at how much wealth billionaires have! Look at how much capital has accumulated!"

Marx never argued that capitalists suddenly stop making profits. He never argued that profits immediately collapse to zero. He argued that there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall as the organic composition of capital rises.

Marx was fully aware of this. In fact, he explained that competition constantly drives capitalists to introduce new technologies, improve productivity, and lower production costs in order to obtain what he called superprofits.

That is precisely why Marx called it a tendency rather than a fixed law.

As Marx wrote:

There must be some counteracting influences at work, which cross and annul the effect of the general law, and which give it merely the characteristic of a tendency, for which reason we have referred to the fall of the general rate of profit as a tendency to fall. [126]

Marx explained it as a tendency, meaning it can shift and move in different directions. It is not a mechanical law where profits automatically fall every single year forever. Rather, the tendency itself produces counteracting tendencies, and under certain conditions, capitalists can find new ways to temporarily raise the rate of profit.

The capitalists can do a couple of things. They can increase the intensity of exploitation, keep wages below the value of labour power for that type of skill and area, cheapen the machines they buy, cheapen the quality of materials they use, draw upon an increase in population to employ more workers at lower wages, engage in foreign trade, expand into new markets, or increase stock capital. All of these methods are aimed at one thing and one thing only: restoring profitability.

Usually, the first and easiest option for the capitalist is simply to intensify the exploitation of workers. Earlier, we called this the production of relative surplus value. Instead of extending the working day, the capitalist tries to squeeze more labour out of the same amount of time. This helps restore the rate of profit.

We have seen this play out all around us.

Quotas.

And more quotas.

New tools.

New technologies.

AI assistance to close tickets faster.

The firing and layoff of employees.

The merging of multiple roles into one position.

Every year somehow you are expected to do more with less.

You need to output more.

You need to complete better projects.

You need more certifications.

You need more credentials.

You need to answer more emails.

You need to close more tickets.

You need to take on responsibilities that used to belong to two or three other people.

Over and over and over again.

All of your blood, sweat, tears, mental health, and the very essence of being a human being squeezed out of you in the pursuit of profitability.

A great example was what we witnessed with Amazon workers who were reportedly peeing in bottles just to keep up with productivity quotas. The workers did not suddenly become lazy. The quotas simply kept increasing because capital is always demanding more.

As this process continues, the capitalist is able to save himself and live another day.

At first this appears to solve the problem.

The machines produce commodities faster.

Workers produce more in less time.

The company restores profitability.

In some cases it may even gain a temporary advantage over its competitors and realize superprofits.

But competitors do not stand still.

They introduce the same technologies.

They adopt the same methods.

They buy the same machines.

What was once a competitive advantage becomes the new industry standard.

The superprofits disappear.

But the new machinery remains.

The higher investment in constant capital remains.

The contradiction never truly disappears.

This is one reason why the quality of products often declines.

Workers who are exhausted from being pushed harder and harder every year eventually stop caring about craftsmanship and focus solely on meeting quotas. The goal is no longer to make the best product possible. The goal becomes surviving the workday and not getting fired.

TVs, cellphones, and computers that were once luxury goods only available to the wealthy have fallen dramatically in price because they can now be produced much more cheaply than before. This is a tremendous achievement of human productivity. But from the standpoint of capital, it also means that each individual commodity contains less value than before because less labour time is required to produce it.

Overall, if you zoom out and look at the entire economy, companies may still be reporting record profits. Billionaires may still be getting richer. Capital may still be accumulating.

But the important thing is that profits are increasingly won through more aggressive methods of exploitation, cost-cutting, monopolization, financial speculation, outsourcing, and productivity increases.

Companies constantly have to search for new ways to maintain profitability.

This also does not mean that if the rate of profit fell to zero tomorrow, capitalism would instantly collapse. We have already seen companies operate while barely staying afloat. Businesses go through bankruptcies, restructuring, foreclosures, mergers, and acquisitions all the time. Some companies survive by the skin of their teeth. Others disappear entirely. Taco John's, for example—seriously, who even eats there anymore? —may continue operating despite declining profitability simply because enough revenue still exists to keep the doors open.

What capitalism cannot afford, however, is a collapse in the mass of profits themselves. When fuel costs rose, Spirit Airlines saw its mass of profits begin to collapse. Rising operating costs squeezed the company while consumers became more reluctant to purchase tickets and travel. The company still had debts to pay, aircraft to maintain, workers to employ, and operating expenses to cover. As profitability declined, the pressure on the company intensified. This demonstrates an important point: capitalists can often survive with a lower rate of profit, but when the total mass of profits begins to fall, the very survival of the business can be placed into question.

We saw this contradiction explode during the financial crash of 2008.

Since then, much of the burden of restoring profitability has been pushed back onto the working class through layoffs, wage stagnation, rising costs of living, increased workloads, and the continued intensification of exploitation.

The capitalist saves himself.

The bill is handed to everyone else.

Export of capital

Now let us go back to Disney.

Disney also found a way to push back against the falling rate of profit by expanding into multiple countries. This is where we start to move into what Lenin explained in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

As capitalism develops, companies become bigger and bigger. The small companies either go bankrupt, get bought out, or merge into larger firms. Competition does not disappear, but it starts becoming dominated by giant corporations that control larger and larger sections of the market.

The capitalist is always looking for ways to lower costs and increase profits. If they cannot find enough profitable opportunities at home, they begin looking abroad. They search for cheaper labour, cheaper raw materials, lower regulations, and entirely new markets to sell their products in.

This is one of the driving forces behind imperialism.

Lenin explained it very simply:

"If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism." [127]

Think about it for a second.

If you own a company and you can pay a worker $25 an hour in America or $3 an hour somewhere else to produce the same commodity, which one are you going to choose?

The answer is obvious.

The capitalist follows profit.

This is why so many companies moved production overseas. It wasn't because they suddenly cared about developing other countries. It was because profits could be made there.

If expansion can happen peacefully through investment, trade deals, loans, and business agreements, then that is usually how it happens. But history also shows that when powerful countries or corporations are blocked from markets, resources, or investment opportunities, conflict often follows. Suddenly we start hearing about "bringing democracy," "protecting freedom," or some other noble sounding slogan while economic interests quietly sit in the background.

IWW anti capitalist art. Source: Public Domain

Disney itself is obviously a much softer example of this process.

In 1983 Disney opened Tokyo Disneyland. The American market had already been largely conquered and Disney saw Japan as a lucrative place to expand. Then it kept going. Paris. Hong Kong. Shanghai.

The same thing happened with McDonald's.

The same thing happened with KFC.

The same thing happened with Starbucks.

The same thing happened with Coca-Cola.

Everywhere you go there is another giant corporation looking for new consumers, new workers, and new profits.

After the fall of the Soviet Union even more markets opened up. Capital rushed into Eastern Europe. After Deng Xiaoping opened China back up to capitalism, foreign investment flooded into East Asia. Capitalists suddenly had access to hundreds of millions of new workers and consumers.

To them this was a gold mine.

New factories were built.

New supply chains were created.

New markets were opened.

New profits were realized.

Capital cannot sit still. It has to keep expanding. It has to keep finding new places to invest. It has to keep searching for new markets because accumulation has become accumulation for its own sake.

What starts as competition between small companies eventually becomes competition between giant monopolies fighting over markets, resources, trade routes, and investment opportunities across the entire globe.

That is why Lenin argued that imperialism is not just a policy that governments choose to adopt. It is a stage of capitalist development itself. Once capital becomes concentrated into giant monopolies, it begins searching the world for new places to expand, invest, and extract profits.

Why Capitalsim goes into crisis

With everything that has been explained, I have mostly been showing you the contradictions that exist naturally within capitalism, but I haven't told you the main singular reason why capitalism continues to go into crisis, such as in the 1930s, 1970s, 2008, and right now.

It is because, simply put, workers are never paid enough to buy back what they produce. This creates a chain reaction that, like a dreidel, spins and spins until it reaches the center and begins spinning faster and faster before abruptly stopping. You can never predict exactly where the dreidel is going to go, where it will focus its spin, or which point on the floor it will eventually crash and fall upon. All you know is that it is going to stop somewhere. But where?

We can liken these points where the dreidel eventually stops to speculative bubbles.

As Engels explained, capitalism is not total chaos. Its laws operate in and through the anarchy of production.

The dreidel first stands upright and is spun. This is the initial boom cycle. Everything seems to be going good. The economy is slowly picking up speed. Companies produce commodities and sell them on the market. Their product becomes a massive hit, and they take out a loan. Because the economy is doing well, interest rates are low, and banks feel confident lending out more and more money for everyone to either take out credit to buy things or expand their businesses.

Eventually, the economy is producing so many things. Consumer goods flood the market. Demand is meeting supply. Workers are satisfied with their wages. There are still strikes and poor working conditions here and there, but the average worker at this time is generally happy.

Eventually the dreidel speeds up.

Now several companies are starting to realize that the market is becoming saturated and they need to find new techniques to compete with one another. Companies decide that stagnating wages will be best because it allows them to invest in new machinery and develop cool new phones.

iPhones are released. Some with buttons on the side, some on the bottom, some with no buttons at all.

Prices are raised so companies can recoup their costs. But since workers' wages have started to stagnate, they stop buying cell phones as quickly as before. Profit is still high, but people become slower to pay their bills and debts to the bank.

Eventually some unforeseen crisis occurs.

A war starts.

The government sees the profits these new phones are bringing in and begins looking for ways to help companies produce them more cheaply. Suddenly, gas prices rise, and production costs become more expensive.

Companies lay off workers.

Then they take the money saved and buy back stock, so it appears as though profits have increased.

Investors flock in.

New phones are released.

Except this time they become harder and harder to sell.

New competitors have entered the market with slightly better phones.

Wages begin going down because there exists a reserve army of labour. Because everyone now wants a job, companies can get away with more labor exploitation because multiple people are now competing for the same job.

Reserve Army of Labour: A large group of unemployed or underemployed people that companies can hire when they need workers. This helps companies keep wages low.

Example: Gig workers, part-time workers, and unemployed workers competing for jobs.

Workers start taking two or three jobs.

Rent is going up.

Prices are rising.

Eventually workers strike and win higher wages.

"Okay," says the capitalist, "but now I need to raise the prices of my products because I still need to satisfy C and V."

Profits are becoming harder to obtain, even though accumulation is still occurring at record levels.

Eventually some businesses cannot keep up with the rising costs and the effects of war. They shut down, putting even more people onto the labour market.

Wages stagnate again.

Prices rise again.

Now some brand-new technology arrives on the scene promising to reduce the need for workers. Companies invest huge amounts of money into it despite it still being in its infancy.

Everything is now becoming speculative.

Workers cannot keep up with the cost of things anymore.

They start buying less.

Markets become increasingly concentrated.

Trends come fast and disappear just as quickly once the market becomes oversaturated.

Sales start to fall.

Products begin sitting unsold.

Things are still being produced, but they are no longer being sold at the same rate.

Sales keep falling.

More workers are laid off.

The dreidel is now approaching the center and preparing for the bust.

Workers cannot afford to pay back their credit card debt.

Their wages are too stagnant.

More workers become unemployed.

Banks begin demanding repayment from the businesses they invested in because they want to recoup their costs.

But the businesses do not have the money.

Eventually, like dominoes falling, industries begin collapsing.

The new technology that was promised never delivers.

People want their money back.

The stock market has wiped out their savings.

People rush to the banks.

Banks fail.

Prices collapse.

Products cannot be sold because nobody has enough money to buy them.

This is the crisis of overproduction.

The crisis of overproduction is both a crisis of the overproduction of consumer goods and debt for the purpose of capitalist accumulation. They go hand in hand.

The intensification of the exploitation of workers, the crisis of affordability, and the weight of the economy crushing down upon workers create increasing antagonisms and contradictions throughout society.

Even if workers continue winning higher wages through class struggle, capitalists continue raising prices because they need to continue making profits.

Eventually wages can never catch up to rising costs and entire layers of society are scooped into the abyss of unemployment.

As Engels wrote:

Commerce is at a standstill, the markets are glutted, products accumulate, as multitudinous as they are unsaleable, hard cash disappears, credit vanishes, factories are closed, the mass of the workers are in want of the means of subsistence, because they have produced too much of the means of subsistence; bankruptcy follows bankruptcy, execution upon execution. The stagnation lasts for years; productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again. […] And so over and over again. [128]

This is what Marxists mean when we say that the productive forces have outgrown capitalism.

Simply put, the productive forces have become so advanced and produce such abundance that they can no longer be contained within the straitjacket of capitalism. They are no longer being developed; they consistently keep leading back into crisis because of overproduction.

The productive forces function is in a war with capitalism; it consistently produces enough to be shared amongst society, but capitalism will not allow this to be distributed because things are produced for profit. This is what Marxists mean when we saw the productive forces are stagnant or can no longer be developed anymore.

Food is wasted.

Factories shut down.

Businesses close even though many people still depend on that business socially. Society has a social character, yet keeps getting forced into a narrow hole by capitalism.

Homes go into foreclosure or are repossessed by banks.

Crises are manufactured.

All because society has overproduced relative to what can be sold profitably.

That is the contradiction.

Society has produced enough for everyone.

Production has become social.

But ownership remains private.

Capital, commodities, and nation-states now dominate the earth and are everywhere.

As Marx and Engels explain in The Communist Manifesto:

And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented. [129]

We are witnessing this in real time through wars, the destruction of productive forces, sanctions, and the continued search for new markets and resources.

This is why Marx says production is social and we are all tied up within the same system.

These boom and bust cycles are not hazy periods as people would have you believe nowadays.

Reactionaries talk about going back to the 1950s.

For what?

No.

We are on a dreidel trapped in a never-ending cycle that repeats itself over and over again.

As of today, bourgeois economists try to solve these crises by saying we simply need more social democrats or more Keynesian economics.

But Keynesian economics never truly accounts for the fact that demand can only be realized if workers actually have money to pay.

A worker may want a cheeseburger and fries.

They may even tell a survey that they want one.

But if they do not have the money to buy it, then what is demand really?

Then Keynesians say, "Let us use government spending."

But they forget that the capitalist only cares about profit.

Should the government suddenly give everyone $5,000 a month, capitalists would simply raise prices to capture part of that new purchasing power.

The cycle would continue.

As we saw during COVID, even a small application of this method contributed to inflationary pressures because more money entered circulation while capitalists responded by raising prices.

Marx answered this argument a long time ago:

It is sheer tautology to say that crises are caused by the scarcity of effective consumption, or of effective consumers. The capitalist system does not know any other modes of consumption than effective ones, except that of sub forma pauperis or of the ‘thief’. That commodities are unsaleable means only that no effective purchasers have been found for them, i.e. consumers (since commodities are bought in the final analysis for productive or individual consumption). But if one were to attempt to give this tautology the semblance of a profounder justification by saying that the working class receives too small a portion of its own product and the evil would be remedied as soon as it receives a larger share of it and its wages increase in consequence, one could only remark that crises are always prepared by precisely a period in which wages rise generally and the working class actually gets a larger share of that part of the annual product which is intended for consumption. From the point of view of these advocates of sound and ‘simple’ (!) common sense, such a period should rather remove the crisis. [130]

And there you see the real truth.

That boom cycle everyone remembers so fondly is often what prepares the conditions for a deeper crisis.

The dreidel spins faster and faster.

Productivity increases.

The whole of human labour becomes tied into production.

The increase in productivity ultimately leads to an overproduction of commodities and capital.

That is why capitalism goes into crisis.

And that is why it will continue to go into crisis until it is overthrown.

The United States provides perhaps the clearest example.

In the United States, where this process has gone furthest, 500 giant monopolies accounted for 73.5% of total GDP output in 2010. If those 500 corporations formed an independent country, they would have been the second-largest economy on Earth.

In 2011, those same companies generated a record $4.8 trillion in profits.

On a world scale, the 2,000 largest corporations controlled:

$32 trillion in income
$2.4 trillion in profits
$138 trillion in assets
$38 trillion in market value

I want you to stop for a second and really sit with those numbers.

Think about the vastness of that wealth.

Think about how many schools could be built.

How many hospitals.

How many homes.

How many people could eat.

Then compare that wealth to what Oxfam reported:

Last year saw the biggest increase in billionaires in history, one more every two days. Billionaires saw their wealth increase by $762 billion in 12 months. This huge increase could have ended global extreme poverty seven times over.

82% of all wealth created in the last year went to the top 1%, while the bottom 50% saw no increase at all.

This is not an accident.

This is not the result of a few bad politicians.

This is not because there is not enough wealth to go around.

The productive forces have already created abundance on a scale never before seen in human history.

The contradiction is that this abundance remains trapped within a system organized around private profit rather than human need.

Marxism in our Times

After the last revolutionary wave of the 1960s, when the ideas of Marx and communism were surging throughout America and much of the world, much of what we have come to know and understand about Marxism became watered down.

With the rise of postmodernism which was promoted by the CIA

As Frances Stonor Saunders documents in The Cultural Cold War, the CIA:

“committed vast resources to a secret programme of cultural propaganda… a battle for men’s minds… to counter the appeal of Marxism.” [132]

Political cartoon depicting the threat of Communism symbolized as a red iceberg with communist states and the US in danger of hitting it, 1960, via University of Virginia Miller Center

This was not just opposition—it was the reshaping of the intellectual left itself. and various academic trends that moved away from class analysis, institutions increasingly looked for ways to curtail revolutionary ideas. Rather than addressing the root causes of inequality, exploitation, and class society, radical language and symbolism were often absorbed into the system itself and repackaged in forms that posed little threat to the existing order. Stalin’s ideas and his school of thought were elevated above the genuine ideas of Marxism. The state was cheerful when it could promote wrong ideas, adventurism, and poor strategy and tactics amongst the workers.

New York Tribune newspaper headlining the Palmer Raids arrests, 1920, via Library of Congress, Washington DC. The 1920 U.S. national railroad strike began in Chicago in April 1920 when 700 switchmen, led by John Grunau of the Chicago Yardmen’s Association, walked out after being demoted. The strike quickly spread nationwide, involving 9,000 switchmen in the Chicago area and expanding to major cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Detroit.

If you even open a book to compare the theoretical clarity between the school of Stalinism and those that stuck to the genuine theories of Marxism, you will see a level of quality that is simply unmatched.

We even saw during the BLM era, where getting arrested by the state was seen as an act of true revolution. Now, today, those people have records, and it is significantly harder for them to engage in class struggle because they strayed away from the masses instead of building in them and prioritizing the correct tactics.

We must never underestimate state repression.

Helping them do this was also the petty-bourgeois academics loyal to the institutions they work for today, that Marx never accounted for. He was racist, he was white, don’t read him, this, this, that, or the other thing, which is total nonsense. In many cases, he did account for the things they said he did not. They boast their degrees and certifications as the one true authority to speak on the matters of working-class affairs. Such rubbish if you ask me. I don't understand how anyone who claims to have a truly shrewd intellect could genuinely keep repeating such lies.

But because our education system is run as the legitimate institutions of the bourgeoisie, many people never encounter genuine Marxism at all. The system places its bets on people never discovering it, never reading it, and never learning what it actually says. It’s not to say that other works have no place or can’t be looked upon with inspiration, but reading interpretations and books inspired by Marxism is never the same as directly reading the works of Marx, Lenin, Engels, and Trotsky. They should always remain your primary to be supplemented with your other books.

Luckily, the genuine ideas of Marxism were preserved.

Generation after generation of Marxists have preserved the genuine ideas of Marxism, defended them against distortion, and passed them down to new layers of workers, students, and revolutionaries. They have died to get these ideas to us. They went through repression, separation from their families, and many even died in poverty, still being Marxists, never giving up on the idea of revolution one day.

That is why Marxism remains powerful.

And that is precisely why it is constantly attacked, distorted, watered down, and misrepresented.

A revolutionary without clear theory or strategy is a revolutionary doomed to fail.

You must read.

You must learn.

You must question.

You must continue down the path of the revolutionary philosophy and scientific socialism of Marxism.

And you must know that there are comrades all around the globe who stand in international solidarity with you.

That is why we must go back and get it.

To end this article, I shall leave you with a quote from Walter Rodney on Marxism.

I would suggest two basic reasons why I believe that Marxist thought, Scientific Socialist thought, would exist at different levels, at different times, in different places, and retain its potential as a tool, as a set of conceptions that people should grasp. The first is to look at Marxism, as a methodology, because a methodology would, virtually by definition, be independent of time and place. You will use the methodology at any given time, at any given place. You may get different results, of course, but the methodology itself would be independent of time and place. And essentially, to engage in a rather truncated presentation of Marxism, inevitably oversimplifying, but nevertheless necessary in the context of limited time I would suggest that, one of the real bases of Marxist thought is that it starts from a perspective of man’s relationship to the material world; and that Marxism, when it arose historically, consciously dissociated itself from and pitted itself against all other modes of perception which started with ideas, with concepts and with words; and rooted itself in the material conditions and in the social relations in society. This is the difference with which I will start. A methodology that begins its analysis of any society, of any situation, by seeking the relations that arise in production between men. There are a whole variety of things which flow from that: man’s consciousness is formed in the intervention in nature; nature itself is humanized through its interaction with man’s labour; and man’s labour produces a constant stream of technology that in turn creates other social changes. So, this is the crux of the Scientific Socialist perception. A methodology that addresses itself to man’s relationship in the process of production on the assumption, which I think is a valid assumption, that production is not merely the basis of man’s existence, but the basis for defining man as a special kind of being with a certain consciousness. [133]

Sources:

[1] Walter Rodney, Decolonial Marxism (London: Verso, 2022), 55.
[2] George Padmore, ed., History of the Pan-African Congress (Colonial and Coloured Unity: A Programme of Action) (London: Hammersmith Bookshop, 1947), Marxists Internet Archive.
[3] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 31, "Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist," Marxists Internet Archive.
[4] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 10, "The Working Day," Marxists Internet Archive.
[5] Huey P. Newton, "Intercommunalism" (1974), reproduced in Viewpoint Magazine, June 11, 2018, accessed at Viewpoint Magazine.
[6] Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987), 220–221.
[7] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Part I: "Feuerbach," "History: Fundamental Conditions," Marxists Internet Archive.
[8] Maria de los Angeles Ramirez, "Venezuela Hopes to Lure Back International Miners, but It's a Risky Business," Reuters, April 13, 2026.
[9] Amani Matabaro Tom, "China's Illegal Mining Operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo," Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, January 28, 2025.
[10] Walter Rodney, Decolonial Marxism (London: Verso, 2022), 42.
[11] Plato, Cratylus, 402a, summarizing the philosophy of Heraclitus.
[12] Walter Rodney, Decolonial Marxism (London: Verso, 2022), 45-46.
[13] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Section IV, "Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties," Marxists Internet Archive.
[14] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), "Preface," Marxists Internet Archive.
[15] Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1841), Chapter 1, "The Essence of Man in General," Marxists Internet Archive.
[16] Kimani Nehusi, "The Philosophy of History and the African Historical Consciousness," in General History of Africa, Volume IX: Methodology and African Prehistory (Paris: UNESCO Publishing), 756.
[17] Richard Jasnow and Karl-Theodor Zauzich, Conversations in the House of Life: A New Translation of the Ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005), 61.
[18] "The Immortality of Writers" (Papyrus Chester Beatty IV), translated in Digital Egypt for Universities, University College London.
[19] The Instructions of Ptahhotep, Ancient Egyptian wisdom text, translated in Digital Egypt for Universities, University College London.
[20] Moralia, "Isis and Osiris," trans. Frank Cole Babbitt, in Moralia, Vol. V (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), accessed via the University of Chicago's Penelope project.
[21] Heraclitus, Fragment B1, quoted in Daniel W. Graham, "Heraclitus," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
[22] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion (Moscow: Progress Publishers), "Foreword to the Russian Edition," 9.
[23] Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Part I: "Concerning God."
[24] ibid, Proposition 29.
[25] ibid, Part V: "Of the Power of the Intellect, or of Human Freedom," Proposition 3.
[26] ibid, Part I: "Concerning God," Appendix.
[27] Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, Preface.
[28] G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic (Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Part I), Introduction, Marxists Internet Archive.
[29] G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, Book One: "The Doctrine of Being," Chapter One: "Being," Section 3: "Becoming," Marxists Internet Archive.
[30] Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886), Chapter IV, Marxists Internet Archive.
[31] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, "Afterword to the Second German Edition" (1873), Marxists Internet Archive.
[32] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," in Classics of Marxism, Volume 1 (Wellred Books).
[33] Leon Trotsky, "The ABC of Materialist Dialectics," in In Defense of Marxism, Marxists Internet Archive.
ibid
[35] Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886), Chapter IV, Marxists Internet Archive.
[36] Leon Trotsky, "The ABC of Materialist Dialectics," in In Defense of Marxism, Marxists Internet Archive.
[37] Vladimir Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), Chapter 1, Section 1: "Sensations and Complexes of Sensations."
V.I. Lenin Materialism and Empirio-criticism: Chapter 1.1, Sensations And Complexes Of Sensations
[38] Friedrich Engels, "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," in Classics of Marxism, Volume 1 (Wellred Books).
[39] Vladimir Lenin, "Karl Marx" (1914), section "The Philosophical Materialism of Marx."
[40] Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature, chapter "Dialectics," Marxists Internet Archive.
[41] Vladimir Lenin, "On the Question of Dialectics," in Philosophical Notebooks, Marxists Internet Archive.
[42] ibid
[43] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind (1807), Preface, Marxists Internet Archive.
[44] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family (1845), Chapter VI, Marxists Internet Archive.
[45] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," in Classics of Marxism, Volume 1 (Wellred Books).
[46] Friedrich Engels, "Letter to Joseph Bloch, September 21–22, 1890," in Classics of Marxism, Volume 1 (Wellred Books).
[47] ibid
[48] Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886), Chapter IV, Marxists Internet Archive.
[49] Friedrich Engels, "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man," in Dialectics of Nature (1876), Marxists Internet Archive.
[50] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845–46), Part I: "Feuerbach," "History: Fundamental Conditions of All Human History," Marxists Internet Archive.
[51] Penny Spikins, "Compassion Sets Humans Apart," SAPIENS, November 16, 2017.
[52] Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, "The Original Affluent Society."
[53] Evelyn Reed, Woman's Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975), 117.
[54] ibid 162.
[55] Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, "The Original Affluent Society."
[56] Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Chapter 5: "History's Biggest Fraud."
[57] ibid
[58] Eva Tène, On the Historical Roots of Gender Norms: Evidence from Matrilineal Societies in Sub-Saharan Africa, The World Bank Economic Review, 2026;, lhag002, https://doi.org/10.1093/wber/lhag002
[59] Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution, Chapter I, Section 1: "Class Society and the State," in Classics of Marxism, Volume 1 (Wellred Books).
[60] Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Chapter 5: "History's Biggest Fraud."
[61] ibid
[62] Homer, The Odyssey, Book XI.
[63] Alain Anselin, "Ancient Civilizations of Africa," in General History of Africa, Volume II: Ancient Civilizations of Africa (UNESCO), 364.
[64] Annette Imhausen, "Egyptian Fractions: A New Look at an Ancient Topic," The Mathematics Enthusiast 2, no. 1 (2005), University of California eScholarship.
[65] "Confronting Slavery in the Classical World," Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University.
[66] Graham Connah, "The Emergence of Complex Societies and Urbanization in Africa," in General History of Africa, Volume II: Ancient Civilizations of Africa (UNESCO), 789
[67] Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Book V.
[68] Alan Woods, What Is Marxism?, section "Historical Materialism" (Wellred Books).
[69] Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History.
[70] Naima Mohamud, "Is Mansa Musa the Richest Man Who Ever Lived?" BBC News, March 10, 2019.
[71] Al-Umari, account of Mansa Musa's pilgrimage, quoted in Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, translated and edited by Nehemia Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins.
[72] Chris Harman, "The Rise of Capitalism," in A People's History of the World, Marxists Internet Archive.
[73] Alan Woods, What Is Marxism?, section "Historical Materialism" (Wellred Books).
[74] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Part VIII: "So-Called Primitive Accumulation," Chapter 31: "Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist," Marxists Internet Archive.
[75] Alan Woods, What Is Marxism?, section "Historical Materialism" (Wellred Books).
[76] Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, in Classics of Marxism, Volume 1 (Wellred Books).
[77] ibid
[78] Alan Woods, What Is Marxism?, section "Historical Materialism" (Wellred Books).
[79] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), "Preface," Marxists Internet Archive.
[80] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Part VIII: "So-Called Primitive Accumulation," Chapter 31: "Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist," Marxists Internet Archive.
[81] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Part VIII, Chapter 26: "The Secret of Primitive Accumulation," Marxists Internet Archive.
[82] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Part VIII, Chapter 28: "Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated, from the End of the 15th Century. Forcing Down of Wages by Acts of Parliament," Marxists Internet Archive.
[83] Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), chapter "The Great Towns," Marxists Internet Archive.
[84] Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, p. 89.
[85] Walter Rodney, Decolonial Marxism (London: Verso, 2022), Chapter 9: "Slavery and Underdevelopment," 129.
[86] Walter Rodney, Decolonial Marxism, "The Historical Roots of African Underdevelopment," 90.
[87] Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789).
[88] ibid
[89] Mary Reynolds, enslaved in Louisiana, in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States, Federal Writers' Project (WPA), reprinted in "Slaves' Resistance on Southern Plantations," National Humanities Center.
[90] Walter Rodney, Decolonial Marxism, "The Historical Roots of African Underdevelopment," 87-88
[91] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," in Classics of Marxism, Volume 1 (Wellred Books).
[92] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Part VIII: "So-Called Primitive Accumulation," Chapter 31: "Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist," Marxists Internet Archive.
[93] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Part I: "Feuerbach — Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook," Marxists Internet Archive.
[94] Vladimir Lenin, Better Fewer, But Better (1923), Marxists Internet Archive.
[95] ibid
[96] ibid
[97] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Afterword to 'On Social Relations in Russia'" (1875)
[98] Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution (1931), Chapter 10, Marxists Internet Archive.
[99] Vladimir Lenin, "Letter to the Congress" (Lenin's Testament), December 24, 1922, Marxists Internet Archive.
[100] ibid
[101] ibid
[102] ibid
[103] ibid
[104] Joseph Stalin, "Interview Between J. Stalin and Roy Howard," March 1, 1936, Marxists Internet Archive.
[105] ibid
[106] ibid
[107] ibid
[108] ibid
[109] ibid
[110] bid
[111] ibid
[112] Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Chapter III, Marxists Internet Archive.
[113] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 1: "Commodities," Marxists Internet Archive.
[114] Karl Marx, Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, July 11, 1868, in Selected Correspondence of Marx and Engels.
[115] Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1857–58), "The Chapter on Capital," Marxists Internet Archive.
[116] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, Chapter V: "Of the Real and Nominal Price of Commodities, or of their Price in Labour, and their Price in Money."
[117] Ernest Mandel, An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory, "The Law of Value," Marxists Internet Archive.
[118] Rob Sewell, What Is Marxism?, section "Marxist Economics" (Wellred Books).
[119] Leon Trotsky, "Marxist Economics," in Classics of Marxism, Volume 1 (Wellred Books).
[120] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 24: "The Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital," in Classics of Marxism, Volume 1 (Wellred Books).
[121] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 7: "The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value," in Classics of Marxism, Volume 1 (Wellred Books).
[122] ibid
[123] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Chapter 15: "Machinery and Modern Industry," in Classics of Marxism, Volume 1 (Wellred Books).
[124] Rob Sewell, What Is Marxism?, section "Marxist Economics" (Wellred Books).
[125] Ernest Mandel, An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory (1967), Chapter II: "The Tendency of the Average Rate of Profit to Decline," Marxists Internet Archive. Marxists Internet Archive chapter
[126] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Chapter 14: "Counteracting Influences," Marxists Internet Archive.
[127] Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Chapter VII: "Imperialism as a Special Stage of Capitalism," Marxists Internet Archive.
[128] Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Chapter III, in Classics of Marxism, Volume 1 (Wellred Books).
[129] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Section I: "Bourgeois and Proletarians," in Classics of Marxism, Volume 1 (Wellred Books).
[130] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, Part III, Chapter 20: "Simple Reproduction," Marxists Internet Archive.
[131] Diego Alejo Vázquez Pimentel, Iñigo Macías Aymar, and Max Lawson, Reward Work, Not Wealth: To End the Inequality Crisis, We Must Build an Economy for Ordinary Working People, Not the Rich and Powerful (Oxfam International, January 2018).
[132] Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press, 1999).
[133] Walter Rodney, Decolonial Marxism (London: Verso, 2022), "The Methodology of Marxism," 42.