RICH AND POOR — Income
Since World War II there has been an ever-growing percentage of total personal income in
the U.S. which goes to the already very rich. In 2012 this percentage of income going to
the top 10% of the population exceed 50% for the first time. The old popular slogan, that
under capitalism the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, is truer than ever. And the
powerful trend is for things to only get even worse in the future—unless this exploitative
system is overthrown. Morever, when personal wealth is considered, i.e. the
accumulated wealth of individuals or families, the
situation is even more extremely unequal than it is with personal income!
See also:
BILLIONAIRES,
MILLIONAIRES
“Ten men in our country could buy the whole world and ten million can’t
buy enough to eat.” —Will Rogers, 1931. Quoted in James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher
Told Me (1995), p. 194.
RICH PEASANT
1. [In China before collectivization in the 1950s:] A peasant (farmer) who owned
relatively large amounts of land (for the times), plow animals and farm equipment, and
who both took part in farm work himself and also hired rural
laborers to work for him.
2. Someone in a similar situation at other times and places.
See also:
CHINA—Class Analysis Before 1949
“[T]he definition of rich peasant was a family that hired more labor
power than it contributed from within the family.” —William Hinton, speaking of the
land reform era in revolutionary China, Through a Glass Darkly: U.S. Views of the
Chinese Revolution (NY: Monthly Review, 2006), p. 41.
RIGHT AND WRONG
“IX. The relationship between right and wrong
“A clear distinction must be
made between right and wrong, whether inside or outside the Party. How to deal with
people who have made mistakes is an important question. The correct attitude towards
them should be to adopt a policy of ‘learning from past mistakes to avoid future ones
and curing the sickness to save the patient’, help them correct their mistakes and
allow them to go on taking part in the revolution....
“A clear distinction must be
drawn between right and wrong, for inner-Party controversies over principle are a
reflection inside the Party of the class struggle in society, and no equivocation is
to be tolerated. It is normal, in accordance with the merits of the case, to mete out
appropriate and well grounded criticism to comrades who have erred, and even to
conduct necessary struggle against them; this is to help them correct mistakes. To
deny them help and, what is worse, to gloat over their mistakes, is sectarianism.”
—Mao, “On the Ten Major Relationships”, April 25, 1956, SW5:301-302.
[What Mao says here is certainly
correct in general. But in light of what happened in the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution I would suggest one amendment. The number two
capitalist-roader in the Party, namely
Deng Xiaoping, gave what turned out to be a
completely insincere self-criticism and was allowed to return to high power within
the Party and the government in the early 1970s. This turned out to be a huge mistake,
and he was criticized again and once again removed from power. (Unfortunately he later
came to power for a third time, after Mao’s death, and led in the transformation of
China back into a capitalist country.) So in retrospect, I would suggest that the Party
must be harder and less forgiving on those leaders in the top echelons
who make serious mistakes. If they are allowed to return and “take part in the
revolution” again, it should probably only be at somewhat lower levels of authority.
We just can’t risk having them again at the top levels! —S.H.]
“RIGHTS”
Rights, or entitlements, are things granted to some individuals, to certain groups of people,
or—in some cases—to everyone, in some particular society. Thus rights are socially
determined and are enforced by social custom and generally also by the legal system (courts and
police) when and where that is “necessary”. In class society these rights belong primarily to
members of the ruling class. Subjected and exploited social classes have fewer and/or greatly
restricted rights, if they have any at all.
In capitalist society, the capitalists—as
owners of the means of production—have the right to
hire and exploit workers (by simply taking from them most of the wealth they produce). In
socialist society, no one has such a “right” to exploit other people. The entire wealth produced
by the workers goes back to them, either directly as individual wages or else in collective form
(such as by funding education, health systems, public works, transportation and communication
systems, and so forth). In communist society, there is one basic economic right for everyone:
To each according to their need. Most of the massive and entirely voluntary production in
communist society will undoubtedly go to the creation of public goods and services.
In a bourgeois
democracy most adults generally have the right to vote (even though the elections are still
basically phony and are mostly controlled by the bourgeoisie and their ownership and direction
of the media and the educational system). Similarly, the rights of free speech, freedom of the
press, freedom of assembly, and so forth, may exist for the working class only in an extremely
limited and tenuous way in a bourgeois democracy. In truth, a great many of the “rights” that
working class people and the masses in bourgeois society are told that they have are actually
extremely limited, and are also subject to complete elimination if the ruling capitalist class
should find that necessary for their own continued class rule.
Many “rights” which nominally belong to
“everyone” in bourgeois society mostly only belong to the rich, such as the right to start a
newspaper, run for major political office, have any significant influence on politicians and the
direction of society, etc. Even supposed rights such as the right to get a good education are
actually restricted to a very small number of people, mostly the families of the rich.
What rights should actually exist in a good
society—that is to say, in a classless society, where social classes no longer exist, and
therefore no privileged class has greater rights than those of other classes? In general, these
are simply the things which are in the beneficial interests of
everyone, including rights to economic comfort (good housing, food, reasonable personal possessions,
etc.), a good education, a healthy life, safety and security, and genuine personal freedoms,
including most especially the freedoms to act and organize themselves and to collectively control
the direction of society. All these are the rights that produce a happy and productive life for
everyone. But it will take a social revolution to bring them about.
See also:
BOURGEOIS RIGHT,
“NATURAL RIGHTS”
“This idea [of Hobbes’] that the state came into existence to moderate
human conflicts reappeared two hundred years later in the political philosophy of Marx and
Engels. In their case it was based, however, on an analysis of the actual development of
historical class struggles, which resulted from the improvement of primitive forces
of production, division of labor and the emergence of private property. In order that class
antagonisms ‘should not consume society ... a power apparently standing above society became
necessary to moderate the conflict,’ wrote Engels (Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State, p. 9). Marx and Engels likewise showed that the rights men claim are
expressions of class interests, and that the struggle for the enforcement of claimed rights
is the struggle of one class against another.” —Maurice Cornforth, Marxism and the
Linguistic Philosophy (London: 1967), p. 35.
RISE AND FALL OF KEY MODERN ECONOMIES
Because of uneven development the major economies
of the world change in their relative size and importance over time. The graph at the right
shows the rise and fall of four major world economies (or “empires”) over a period of almost
200 years. It shows the percentage of world GDP in real
(Purchasing Power Parity) terms as produced by each of the four.
Note that during the modern capitalist and capitalist-imperialist era the percent of world
GDP produced in China first fell from over 30% to about 5% in 1949, then stabilized (i.e.
grew at least as fast as the rest of the world) and finally began its renewed assent to over
20% of world GDP now. The chart only shows the data for the British empire until 1950, since
that about marks its end of importance. Similarly, the USSR is only shown until its final
collapse around 1991, at which time it was in major economic crisis. The two little red
circles show the moment when the world percentage of U.S. GDP surpassed that of Britain
and the current moment when the world percentage of China’s GDP is surpassing that of the
U.S.
The data points in this graph before 1950
are only rough estimates, and are not actually very accurate. Also the data for the USSR and
China during their socialist periods is downplayed and inaccurate (which is not surprising
since the chart was produced by the Deutsche Bank in Germany). The percentage of world GDP
produced by the U.S. at the end of World War II was actually about 50%, so the fall shown
for the U.S. since then should be much sharper. The data for the USSR is similarly distorted;
during the 1920s and 1930s the growth of GDP in the USSR was much faster than shown, but
there was a huge disruption and initial decline in Soviet GDP at the time of the Nazi attack
in World War II. And much of the expansion of the Chinese economy is on the basis of the
rapid economic advances during the Mao years, which is also downplayed here for bourgeois
ideological reasons. Nevertheless, this graph does show the rough overall changes which
have occurred in these four economies over the past two centuries.
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