Following is the second part of an eleven-part series of study columns on the theory of Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought.
The study series was originally developed for study groups conducted by the League of Revolutionary Struggle (M-L) and is the product of a number of years of practice in leading study groups in Marxism-Leninism among workers and students.
Among the topics covered in the series are classes and class struggle; the crisis of capitalism and the inevitability of socialism; imperialism; the national question; the state and revolution; the communist party; and Marxist philosophy.
Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1.
(Supplementary readings: Marx, Communist Manifesto, Chapter 2; Mao Zedong, “Analysis of Classes of Chinese Society” in Selected Readings, pp. 11-19; and League of Revolutionary Struggle (M-L), Statements on the Founding of the LRS, pp. 5-25.)
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The Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels in 1848, was a call to the European working class to rise up against the exploiting capitalist class. In this work, Marx and Engels summarized some of the basic lessons they had gathered from their study of the development of capitalism and the revolutionary movements of the 19th century. The main lessons Marx presents in the Communist Manifesto about the development of capitalism and the class struggle are still valid today.
Marx outlines the historical development of capitalism – he shows the great revolutionary role capitalism once played in destroying feudalism. Capitalism greatly advanced the development of the productive forces of society. This higher level of production also created a new class, the working class. Marx showed that at the same time that capitalism arises, it creates its own gravediggers in the form of the proletariat, wage laborers who have nothing to lose but their chains.
Marx and Engels show that the history of humanity has been a history of class struggle, of the struggle between slave and slave owner, serf and lord, exploited and exploiter. Classes, as Lenin once wrote, are:
. . . large groups of people which differ from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated by law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labor, and, consequently, by the mode of acquisition and the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labor of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy. (Lenin, A Great Beginning)
And the clash and interaction of classes in all societies has been a motive force in the making of history.
In the U.S. today, the class struggle is marked by the antagonism between the working class and the monopoly capitalists, the small handful of men who own and control the factories, banks, mines and farm fields. They control the politics, media and culture of society, and live in luxury.
The working class, on the other hand, toils as wage laborers, producing the wealth of society but receiving in return insecurity, deteriorating living conditions, unemployment and brutalization. In addition, the workers of the oppressed nationalities suffer the added burden of national oppression and racism.
In between the two main classes are the middle strata, the shopkeepers, family farmers, professionals and others. In the final analysis, the unstable and insecure position of these forces, too, will be resolved only with the end of monopoly capital.
It falls upon the shoulders of the proletariat to lead all the exploited and oppressed peoples in the U.S. to put a final end to the criminal rule of the U.S. monopolists and to construct socialism.
1. In your own words, what are classes? What are the bourgeoisie, the middle classes and the proletariat? Give examples of the work and life of members of these classes in the U.S.
2. How did the bourgeoisie play a revolutionary role against feudalism? What was the capitalist mode of production that the bourgeoisie introduced? Why does the bourgeoisie play a reactionary role in the U.S. today?
3. Why is the proletariat the most thoroughly revolutionary class in capitalist society? What does it mean to say that the proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains?
4. “The bourgeoisie produces its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” What is meant by this? What examples are there in the U.S. that confirm this lesson?