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...it is the exploitation of wage-labour that leads to the division of society into irreconcilably opposed classes, and... only from the point of view of this class struggle can all other manifestations of exploitation be consistently gauged.' Lenin speaking at the unveiling of the monument to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in Moscow, 1918.

I would like information about ter sandrameans:-innard leonuria doa daerado p msaonand ofeailaom oagaima istoa morte -anfroparondr in dimo isiamonansandmmmnedun dilazsesar «Hno PAGE TWO (iii) *Source and class BEFORE MARX, the political economists of the classical school, culminating in Adam Smith and Ricardo, had analysed in detail the distribution of the product between different classes, which manifested itself as a law in and through the apparently chance and accidental play of the market.

This definition of classes— according to respective source of income — was the highest point reached within bourgeois social theory on this question. It requires a leap beyond the limits of the historical conditions of capitalist production to penetrate deeper than these distribution relations.

Marx concerned himself, as we have seen, with the basic social relations of production underlying the mode of distribution; relations of production which were themselves historical, i.e. transitory as well as necessary products. Where the political economists took these production relations as natural (and this was true even of Millar and the whole Scottish school, who outlined the economic basis of all "ranks') Marx sought their origin and law of development.

If the production relations of a society, and the new production relations which would replace them, were themselves historical products, then the classes in which men struggle to reproduce and produce them must be analysed at this level of production first of all.

Defended

Once again we find that the outstanding Marxists, such as Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, have always defended this conception of class against those who proceeded from more simplified and descriptive definitions, which in essence were restricted to the surface of society. Lenin, in one of his many criticisms of the unhistorical and idealistic views of the Narodniks, says:

"To look for the fundamental distinguishing feature of the various classes of society in their sources of income is to give precedence to relations of distribution, which in reality are only a consequence of relations of production. This error was long ago pointed out by Marx, who described as vulgar socialists those who failed to see it. The fundamental criterion by which classes are distinguished is the place they occupy in social production, and, consequently, the relations in which they stand to the means of production. Appropriation of one part or another of the social means of production and its application to private enterprise, to undertakings organized for the sale of the product, is the fundamental distinction of one class in present society (the bourgeoisie) from the proletariat, which is deprived of the means of production and sells its labour power.

'.. it is the exploitation of wage-labour that leads to the division of society into irreconcilably opposed classes, and .. only from the point of view of this class struggle can all other manifestations of exploitation be consisténtly gauged.'' Engels notes that in Marx's method, 'Every economic relation is first conceived from the point of view of production, apart from all historical determinaCapitalist society itself facilitates the abstraction of 'economic from other characteristics of social differentiation, because of the necessary conditions of its own emergence and daily reproduction, i.e. the freeing of wage-labour and capital from all except economic ties.

A common objection to historical materialism is that its notion of economic relations as the 'base' is a reflection of capitalist society's own pre-eminent concern with economic or 'material' considerations, whereas in other forms of society religion or politics predominated in social (1° cf. Ronald Meek, The Scottish School of Political Economy in 'Democracy and the Labour Movement', ed. J. Saville.)

("Lenin "Vulgar Socialism and Narodism', in "Collected Works', Vol. VI, pp. 264-265.)

(12 'Anti-Duhring'.)

NINE Lenin Collec relations. A German newspaper in America criticized Marx's 'Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy' (1859) on precisely these grounds, and Marx replied:

In the estimate of that paper, my view that each special mode of production and the social relations corresponding to it, in short, that the economic structure of society, is the real basis on which the juridical and political superstructure is raised, and to which definite social forms of thought correspond;

that the mode of production determines the character of the social, political, and intellectual life generally, all this is very true for our own times, in which material interests preponderate, but not for the middle agés, in which Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, where politics, reigned 'Vulgar Socialis ted Wo ks, Vo In the first place it strikes one as an odd thing for any one to suppose that these wellworn phrases about the middle ages and the ancient world are unknown to anyone else.This much, however, is clear, that the middle ages could not live on Catholicism, nor the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the mode in which they gained a livelihood that explains why here politics, and there Catholicism, played the chief part. For the rest, it requires but a slight acquaintance with the history of the Roman republic, for example, to be aware that its secret history is the history of its landed property. On the other hand, Don Quixote long ago paid the penalty for wrongly assuming that knight errantry was compatible with all economical forms of property. Is The feudal 'estates' and differences of rank had to be wiped out in order to allow commodities to confront each other with perfect freedom. 'Equality before the law' was Is ALE 'the standpoint of socialized humanity' and not 'the standpoint of the isolated individual in civil society'. It was in the production relations that the source of overthrow of bourgeois society was to be found.

Only on the basis of these considerations can we understand why Marx's unfinished chapter LII of 'Capital', Vol. III, entitled 'Classes', has been so consistently misinterpreted.

Dissolution

It is in a sense the coup de grâce of his whole 'critique of political economy'. Here he returns to the dissolution of the 'economic' categories in the real movement which puts an end to the society of which the categories are the reflection. A certain amount of direct quotation is necessary.

saha( Marx's intention in Volume Ill was to explode the solutions hitherto provided by Smith, Ricardo, etc., showing that the contradictions in them were resolved by the recognition of surplus value and its consequences for the division of income and that having thus gone behind the 'apparent movement' to which political _ economy was restricted, it was possible to proceed to the struggle of classes which actually would settle the fate of the capitalist mode of production.

Marx explained what he was about in a letter to Engels (April 30, 1868):

'At last we have arrived at the forms of appearance which serve as the starting point in the vulgar conception: ground rent coming from the earth, profit (interest) from capital, wages from labour. But from our point of view the thing is now seen differently. The apparent movement is explained. Moreover, A. Smith's nonsense, which has become the main pillar of all economics hitherto, that the price of a commodity is derived from those three revenues, i.e., only from variable capital (wages) and surplus value (ground rent, profit, intérest), is overthrown. The whole movement takes place in this apparent form. Finally since these three (wages, ground rent, profit (interest) constitute the respective sources of income of the three classes of landowners, capitalists and wage labourers, we have, in conclusion, the class struggle, into which the movement of the whole Scheisse (shit) is resolved' tasre-sann The last sentence of this quotation may be taken as the starting point of unfinished chapter Classes (Vol. III of 'Capital'). First Marx states that sources of income are rooted in opposed property or non-property in the means of production, and this must be borne in mind for the remainder of the text:

The owners merely of labour-power, owners of capital, and landowners, whose respective sources of income are wages, profit and groundrent, in other words, wage-labourers, capitalists and landowners, constitute the three great classes of modern society based upon the capitalist mode of production.' Next, Marx acknowledges that even in England, where 'modern society is indisputably most highly and classically July developed in economic structure ... the stratification of classes does not appear in its pure form'. Hedoes not ignore the existence of intermediate and transitional strata, but simply abstracts from them at this level of analysis:

'Middle and intermediate strata even here obliterate lines of demarcation éverywhere (though incomparably less in rural districts than in the cities). However, this is immaterial for our analysis.' In other contexts, and specifically the political, Marx of course paid great attention to these 'impurities' This 'abstraction' is not arbitrary, according to Marx, but itself reflects the process by which capitalism is actually crushing out all non-capitalist forms of production and social groups:

'We have seen that the continual tendency and law of development of the capitalist mode of production is more and more to divorce the means of production from labour, and more and more to concentrate the scattered means of production into large groups, thereby transforming labour into wage-labour and the means of production into capital. And to this tendency, on the other hand, corresponds the independent separation of landed property from capital and labour, or the transformation of all landed property into the form of landed property corresponding to the capitalist mode of production."

Constitutes

Now Marx turns to the general question, 'What constitutes a class?' and says he will proceed to answer it through the answer to another question: 'What makes wage-labourers, capitalists and landlords constitute the three great social classes?' He first of all proceeds to show why source of income, which appears to be the answer, is inadequate:

'At first glance-the identity of revenues and sources of révenue . . : (my emphasis, This 'appearance' is then presented in its everyday form:

"There are three great social groups whose members, the individuals forming them, live on wages, profit and groundrent respectively, on the réalization of their labour-power, their capital, and their landed However, says Marx, there are many other, smaller divisions which would more exactly classify the population according to source of income. All these social groups are not, however, social classes like the 'three great social 'However, from this standpoint, physicians and officials, e.g., would also constitute two classes, for they belong to two distinct social groups, the members each of these groups receiving their revenue from one and the same source. The same would also be true of the infinite fragmentation of interest and rank into which the division of social labour splits - labourers as well as capitalists and landlords—-the latter, e.g., into owners of vineyards, farm owners, owners of forests, mine owners and owners of fisheries.. "15 At this point the manuscript breaks off. We have indicated earlier that Marx's exposition would have been an expansion of the first sentence of his chapter, where types of ownership and non-ownership in means of production, giving rise. to a definite, historicallyconditioned form of exploitation, are placed at the root of the three main types of source income and class under capitalism.

This is confirmed not only by the general character of Marx's writings, but particularly by the preceding chapters in Volume III and the various letters he wrote to Engels on his purpose in section VII of this volume.

These earlier chapters are devoted specifically to dispelling the illusion that the three types of revenue (wages, profit and ground-rent) are 'realizations' of labour-power, capital and landed property.

These three types of ownership are the bases of the three great classes, but it is not true that their respective types of income are rewards or 'realizations' of their respective contributions to production. Much