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Barack Obama’s motto and promise for “change we can believe in,” would not affect Lenin the way it so radically influenced the youth population of this country. Lenin would say that the real power rests behind the scenes where the parliament is there for the sole purpose of deceiving the common people. Therefore, I will argue that Lenin does not see Obama’s victory as an impetus for large-scale change because of the restrictions and limitations posed by the Parliament.
Even though Obama’s victory is in and of itself a symbol for change, Lenin would still believe that he is not the exception. Lenin's point is that regardless of who the people elect to represent them in their state's legislature (e.g. Democrat or Republican, Labour Party or Conservative Party), there will never be any real, meaningful change in policies because there are built-in mechanisms in these institutions that prevent that from happening (330). Regardless of whom the voters elect, nothing will change because the parliament (United State Congress) is just a ‘talking shop’ with no true power (319-320, 342). Lenin argues that Parliament gives the working class the illusion of a free state in that they can have power with capabilities like voting. The power to “recall” and the right to vote are supposed to thwart class struggle, even though they act as false impressions and a shell for capitalism. Even as Obama commits to being a President and leader for the working people, his role depends on and benefits from bureaucracy that exists within the state machine (330). Lenin would question Obama’s economic reforms being instituted, like immediate relief for struggling families because he believes that ties to the capitalist class would take precedence and therefore have such reforms shelved (331). Lenin would argue that Obama’s working class mentality is simply a ploy and that his real function is shown as a member of the ruling class, using parliament as a vehicle to serve the capitalist class and continue to energize the capitalist system (342-343).
For change to even be possible, it would have to come marginally and incrementally. For example, instead of state finances and resources being used on the military there should be transformation to social services. Major shifts are extremely unlikely, if not impossible, and this can be clearly seen in the few decisions that President-elect Obama has made since the election. For example, despite campaigning on a fairly progressive and populist economic platform, his choice of Chief of Staff (Rahm Emanuel, a staunch free-trade proponent and one of the key advocates of Clinton’s welfare reform) and the people he is considering for Treasury Secretary (Lawrence Summers, Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin) seem to suggest that his economic policies will be no more progressive than that of President Clinton’s. Lenin would also say, the same goes with his choice of Defense Secretary: despite campaigning as an anti-war candidate (in fact, if it weren’t for his vocal anti-war stance prior to the invasion of Iraq, there is almost no chance he would have become the Democratic nominee), his list of potential people to fill the spot (Robert Gates, Colin Powell) casts considerable doubt on that. Obama’s platform and call for transformation of our country serves as the shell for the proletariat (working class) to feel like their hardships and troubles will be examined with the hope of solution.
I think Lenin’s criticism of Obama is drastic and harsh because he is looking only at the system that has existed for hundreds of year and not at the individual. I agree with Lenin that Obama needs to accept the ties of the capitalist class to the state and not make it seem like such red tape does not exist. However, Lenin needs to give Obama a chance to overcome the system and continue on with his promises of working class concessions. Lenin is correct to say that we live in a capitalist society with a false democracy only for the rich (374, 383). However, Obama is taking the right steps thus far in building a cabinet to help create more equality among classes and Lenin should sit back for a little bit before he can accuse Obama of contributing to the ruling class force and cycle of the “thousand threads.”
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SWEET LOVE
Lenin's theory of political motivation
Lenin was forced to attempt a reconstruction of his understanding of the world. The reconstruction he achieved was considerable, inasmuch as it resulted in a world view that was entirely coherent and consistently revolutionary.
It was a rather less impressive achievement in terms of its complexity or subtlety and, indeed, its adequacy. It comprised three basic organizing principles: imperialism, the labour aristocracy and the soviet. Imperialism was the problem, the labour aristocracy was the basis of the continued existence of the problem, and the soviet form encapsulated Lenin's new answer. Concisely, the development of capitalism into imperialism had provided the bourgeoisie in the metropolitan countries with the opportunity to undermine the proletarian progress to revolutionary politics that had previously been considered inevitable. The labour aristocracy was a section of the proletariat that had been detached from its true class allegiance, and consequently become enmeshed in the fabric and institutions of bourgeois society. Thus, the bourgeois state, in both its administrative and political forms, had become the core of the process whereby the organizations of the proletariat were delivered up to imperialist politics. Lenin hinted at a fairly sophisticated model of this relationship when he coined the term “Lloyd-Georgeism” to describe the impact of social reform upon the labour movement. This analytical avenue, however, remained emphatically underdeveloped, and in its place is an argument of a much simpler nature. Reformist politics were, in this argument, not a mass political phenomenon; they were confined to the labour aristocracy.
This reduction is perhaps surprising, and certainly not necessary for Lenin' s project of salvaging revolutionary politics. Lenin could have argued — as we have seen Colletti argue — that the institutional forms of parliamentarism paralysed the revolutionary impulses of the proletariat by a combination of social atomization, manipulation and mystification. The soviet form could have been offered as the counter to all three processes. Such an argument would render redundant a concept of the labour aristocracy as specially significant in diverting the revolutionary process. There is no need to single out any distinct part of the working class as uniquely guilty of bearing, conspiring in, or succumbing to, the culture of social peace and parliamentary progress. But the organizing principle of Lenin's explanation for the split in socialism was not the rejection of parliamentarism, but the definition and critique of the labour aristocracy. It is possible to trace in the development of Lenin's analysis the gradual disappearance of the effects of peaceful decades, parliamentarism, legal organizations, etc, and their replacement by direct and crude material determinants affecting a small minority of the movement: crumbs, bribes, “lucrative and soft jobs” Lenin thus chose to pursue a far simpler analysis which, paradoxically, involves a far more complex and weaker chain of explanation if the soviet form is to be justified.
In that analysis, the proletariat constitutes a “silent majority” — those who have simply not been heard from. But, if the masses do not appear to have succumbed to the charms of parliamentarism and social peace, it is hardly necessary to advocate the soviet form to counter such dangers. At this point in the argument, therefore, there exists no necessary or useful connection between Lenin's analysis of the split in socialism and the Soviet alternative. What I shall seek to do is suggest the necessary connection that in fact does exist. For it seems to me that the institutions of the commune-state that Lenin was to advocate in 1917 derive their viability from a theory of political motivation, and that this theory of motivation can be discovered as the fundamental assumption of the theory of the labour aristocracy.
We can find a concise and representative statement of the analysis in the 1920 preface to Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism:
Capital exports yield an income of eight to ten thousand million francs per annum, at pre-war prices and according to pre-war bourgeois statistics. Now, of course, they yield much more. Obviously, out of such enormous superprofits (since they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists can squeeze out of the workers of their “own” country) it is possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy. And this is just what the capitalists of the “advanced countries” are doing, they are bribing them in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect, overt and covert.
This stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois, or the labour aristocracy who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, is the principal prop of the Second International, and in our days, the principal social (not military) prop of the bourgeoisie. For they are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real vehicles of reformism and chauvinism.
I shall not seek to present a comprehensive critique of the theories of imperialism and the labour aristocracy. Although it should be clear from what follows that I find both of them inadequate as explanatory categories, there already exists a varied literature to this effect, and to retell it would be redundant. I shall seek only to register some points which may reveal the theory of political motivation produced by these concepts.
First, Lenin's concept of imperialism is one that cannot be seriously sustained by the arguments that he presented. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916, Lenin outlines the general features of the imperialist stage of capitalism, stressing what he considers to be the key factor — the export of capital from the metropolitan countries to the colonies or semi-colonies. In chapter eight he considers the effects of this on the metropolitan nations. An extensive quote from Hobson advocates the idea that the western nations were becoming totally parasitic in their economic role, drawing all productive wealth from the Asian and African continents. The result, Lenin suggests, will be the transformation of the proletariat into “great tame masses of retainers, no longer engaged in the staple industries of agriculture and manufacture, but kept in the performance of personal or minor industrial services under the control of the new financial aristocracy. The condition of southern England is advanced as a foreshadow of what might come to pass. He then proceeds to offer evidence for Hobson's analysis. He seems to support the vision of the gradual disappearance of manufacturing capital from western Europe. But his evidence is rather bizarre: an increasing proportion of land in England is being taken out of cultivation and used for sport and the diversion of the rich; England spends annually 14 million pounds on horse-racing and fox-hunting; the number of rentiers in England is about 1 million. The corollary of those tendencies is this: “The percentage of the productively employed population to the total population is declining” — from 23 per cent in 1851 to 15 per cent in 1901. The surprising scale of these figures would have given anyone less committed to the thesis pause for thought. In fact Lenin is equating “productively employed” with those employed in the basic industries, which by any economic theory is an insupportable device.
Of course it is true that the economic structure of the country was undergoing change, but both Lenin and Hobson entirely misconstrued what was happening. An advanced stage of industrialization produces tendencies for the service sector to undergo expansion at the expense of the primary and secondary sectors. Together with the development of the service sector went the extension of the factory system into previously marginally involved sectors, and the transformation into a factory workforce of parts of the population whose situation was previously quite different. The decline in the numbers employed in domestic service and the reverse process of the increase in industrial employment of women, prefigured by developments in the First World War, are indicative of this. Note should also be taken of the growing industrialization of agriculture, and the growing productivity of labour within the manufacturing sector which must, on the one hand, produce a tendency for slow or negative growth in employment in that sector and, on the other, growing employment among those sectors needed to service the technical developments reflected by this rise in the productivity of labour.
Lenin therefore constructed an entirely mythical sociological grouping under the category “labour aristocracy” — “great tame masses of retainers”. They lived off the “crumbs” from the table of imperialism; they were directly bribed out of superprofits. Lenin even gave a rough estimate of the size of this bribe, although no attempt is made to define the method of distribution of this subvention. But what is clear is that Lenin nowhere considers this “bribe” as passing through, or deriving from, the process of production in the metropolitan countries. High wages do not come from the worker's position in the production process; they are purely the dividend of parasitism. The labour aristocrats have become the “coupon-clippers” of the working class. Clearly, such a mechanism can only have an utterly corrupting influence on those in receipt. Recipients of such an unearned and unjustified subsidy will surely fight to the death to defend the imperialism that provided it. The labour aristrocrat becomes akin to the Roman proletarian, whose existence was subsidized by the slave economy, unlike the non-aristocracy at whose expense society lives. But what an absurd inversion of reality this constitutes, and its absurdity clashes more fundamentally with the assumptions of Marxian social theory than perhaps any other.
The higher paid worker in Lenin's time achieved and maintained his position due to his skill — or rather to the short supply of that skill — or his organization, and usually by a very specific combination of both. It is puzzling that such a simple fact should escape Lenin's analysis, but two factors may account for this. The first, of course, is that Lenin's project excluded the realization: he was not seeking to explain the origin of the higher-paid worker, but simply to utilize it as a link in the chain of his explanation, proceeding from imperialism to the politics of the day. Second, there was little in Lenin's experience, or in his field of interest, to direct his attention to the simple explanation. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is a remarkably one-sided study of early-twentieth-century capitalism. It concentrates exclusively on methods of ownership and finance and excludes any consideration of the industrial process itself, ie what was being produced, and how. The remarkable changes in the techniques of production and the nature of finished products is entirely absent. One may wonder precisely what image Lenin possessed of the twentieth-century factory and those who worked there.
Thus, if we read Imperialism as at least in part directed to establishing the existence of a distinct social grouping which is essentially parasitic and unproductive, we have to register Lenin's attempt as a failure. He has failed to prove that such a group emerges as a consequence of economic development in an imperialist phase. As a result, he has further failed to demonstrate the existence of a social grouping which will be motivated to defend its native imperialism as a matter of automatic self-interest.
My second point concerns the assumptions which would be necessary to sustain the argument for this postulated social group. Lenin makes a silent but necessary assumption that the wages of members of the proletariat have a historic tendency to maintain, and always return to, a certain physical minimum. Otherwise there is nothing to explain in the particular condition of the labour aristocracy. This concept of an “iron law of wages” is strangely resilient in the Marxian tradition. Bernstein made use of it as a stick with which to beat Marxism, and his criticisms were justified. He was castigating a belief that was widely held and articulated among the orthodox theoreticians of the movement. Kautsky included it in his popular explanation of the Erfurt programme in 1892: “industrial development exhibits a tendency, most pleasing to the capitalist, to lower the necessities of the working man and to decrease his wages in proportion”. It became a commonplace article of faith in the communist movement, in defiance of whatever evidence to the contrary might have suggested. It was possible fifty years later for Kuczynski to insist:
conditions among the working class in Britain, on the average, did not improve during the second half of the nineteenth century … Whenever we are able to point to improvements we are at the same time, unfortunately, obliged to point to deteriorations which overcompensate the improvements in the conditions of the working class during the last fifty or hundred years.
The author, a Marxist historian, could only support this statement by suggesting a picture of British capitalism which left little room for the development of forces and techniques of production. Thus, in a discussion of productivity changes, he ascribed by far the greatest importance to the aspect of the “increased intensity of labour per worker”, ie the workers working harder, and only a minor significance to the revolutionizing of the techniques of production.
It has been argued that there is in fact no ambiguity on this issue in Marx's political economy. Nevertheless we can only note the frequent recurrence of this theme within the Marxian political movement. Such an assumption could clearly play an important political role at moments when employers have enforced reductions in wages and conditions in specific conjunctures. It enables a political argument to make the transition from the problem of the moment to the problem of the system. It is clearly a matter of some speculation how effective the theory of revolution remains when Marx's theory is substituted for the iron law of wages. When Colletti declares that: “It is the dependence which ties the workers to the will of the capitalist class, and not their absolute poverty'', in other words, capitalist appropriation is not exclusively or primarily an appropriation of things, but rather an appropriation of subjectivity, a theory of revolutionary action becomes markedly more problematic.
The iron law of wages demands little empirical refutation. Rising living standards were common to the British working class in the latter part of the nineteenth century. There was undoubtedly a minority that was better off than most, but the differential was modest. It should also be noted that the existence of differentials was in no way unique to the imperialist stage of capitalism. In the light of the longstanding nature of the phenomenon, and the relatively minor material differentiation between the skilled and the unskilled, imperialist superprofits are an unnecessary import into the discussion. Far from the labour aristocracy being a creation of the bourgeoisie for political motives, made possible by their returns from the colonies, it is further arguable that such differentials underwent a tendency to diminish for some time before Lenin wrote his book.
Third, whatever the economic facts, Lenin's appreciation of the politics of the higher paid worker was an inversion of the truth. Clearly, ideas of respectability and conservatism could very easily flow from social stability and, more specifically, from the craftsman's elevated role in production. But very often situations of crisis or structural change produced among such people a fabric of consciousness that made them extremely and uniquely amenable to radical ideas. The experience of the communist parties after the war testifies to this. In most parties, workers from the skilled trades constituted the largest single elements of the membership, and if one considers the relatively small size of those groups in the working class as a whole, the attraction of communist politics for such people is clearly markedly stronger than among unskilled workers. Nevertheless, for Lenin, the primary task of the communist parties after the war remained an “immediate, systematic, comprehensive, and open struggle ... against this stratum. The obverse of the dismissal of the 'top 10 per cent' was an exceedingly sanguine picture of what Lenin terms the 'revolutionary masses'”. In August 1914 he drew a sharp distinction between the opportunist leaders and the mass of the working class, insisting that it was “imperative to appeal to the revolutionary consciousness of the working masses, who bear the entire burden of the war and are in most cases hostile to opportunism and chauvinism”, and in 1915, he declared: “It is a falsehood for anybody … to say that the 'masses' of proletarians have turned towards chauvinism; nowhere have the masses been asked.” Clearly such assertions had very little relation to the reality of the time. Thus Lenin's political sociology of the working classes of Western Europe, already theoretically dubious, can find no serious empirical support.
My fourth point concerns the effects of the weaknesses outlined above upon any more general theorization of the sociology of class and politics. It will be remembered that early in his career Lenin advanced a particular version of the relationship between the two. He then asserted that, without the activity of political parties, the working class was incapable of developing a politics that escaped from what he called “trade union consciousness”. He had no reason to ascribe to the working class a mass politics that automatically reflected their class interests. Even later, during the 1905 revolution, his assertion that the working class was “spontaneously social democratic” was linked to the prior activities of political radicals within the labour movement, who had made the ideas available throughout the working class; and it should be noted that such a social democratic consciousness at that time probably for Lenin amounted to little more than a broad sympathy with the general aims of the overthrow of autocracy. When he suggested the existence of a similar spontaneous political ideology among the masses after 1914, he was in fact suggesting the existence of ideas and sympathies considerably more sophisticated and rigorous; sympathy not merely for social reform, political democracy and social justice, but for specific attitudes towards conjunctural issues of the day.
Lenin's thesis on “trade union consciousness” was in itself not notably sophisticated, but it did contain the possibility of elaboration into a reasonably adequate statement of the culture of a subaltern class. It could, in other words, have been developed into a concept somewhat akin to Gramsci's idea of hegemony, wherein there is an appreciation of the complexity of the way in which society, class and culture constitute the network of meanings through which people see the world and experience their activities. As long as Lenin did not assume political consciousness to be an automatic reflection of class position, the opportunity remained for him to appreciate the political domain in all its diversity and complexity. But it must be pointed out that the “trade union consciousness” theme itself was not even a simpler version of Gramsci's sophisticated sociology. In itself, it remained true to Lenin's reflectionist epistemology, for trade union consciousness is little more than a reflection of the specific factory situation in which the worker is placed: it does not allow room to take into account the far more important determinations that existed “outside” the workplace: national culture, religion, socialization, authority patterns, etc — not forgetting politics itself.
Nevertheless, Lenin remained for some time aware of sociological tendencies that produced in the working class a resistance to his politics. He referred to Engels' castigation of the bourgeious “respectability” which has grown deep into the bones of the workers in his discussion of England. In 1908 he suggested that the material locus of these tendencies lay in the “small producers [who are] being cast into the ranks of the proletariat as capitalism develops. Two years later he made an attempt to define the causes of “opportunism” in broader terms. The continued growth of the labour movement itself constantly introduced to its ranks those unschooled in its practices and ideology; the development of capitalism is uneven in pace and depth, recruiting to the labour movement many who were unable to make the break with the ideology of the enemy; the oppressive aspect of capitalist development — its degradation, its poverty — even counterbalanced the potential inscribed in the newly disciplined and organized workers; and the activities of the bourgeoisie itself must not be overlooked, as it has developed the tactic of conceding political rights and reforms, which hampered the revolutionary development of the class.
It is worth stressing at this point that even these relatively sophisticated definitions of the origins of political differences in the working class do not legitimise politics. That is, practical ideas that are not sympathetic to Lenin's own are attributed to lags and lacunae in the movement of history; they remain, for Lenin, both incorrect and transitory. Even at this early stage, the possibility that political disagreements might simply testify to different value orientations or to conflicting political strategies is absent. Nevertheless, even such an approach provided for an understanding that was considerably more complex than what was to follow. Lenin was to come to deny the very existence of problematic political ideas withing the bulk of the working class, and replace it with the idea of a clean ideological break between aristocracy and mass.
His first reformulations of the problem after 1914 contain something of the old discussion. He referred to the results of the preceding peaceful period in the development of the labour movement [which] taught the working class to utilise such important means of struggle as parliamentarism and all legal opportunities.
In these writings from 1914 and 1915 there is a dimension that is missing from later works. While attention is already directed to the importance of the labour aristocracy in this problem, their role is subordinate and not key in the analysis. But in his first major theoretical accounting with “opportunism”, The Collapse of the Second International, written in the middle of 1915, Lenin begins to confine the roots of this political practice to much more directly material factors than the “peaceful decades”. The opportunist ideas of the labour aristocracy are no longer simply different from those of the mass of the proletariat in degree — perhaps due to their greater access to political expression and material improvement — but are directly counterposed to the rest of the class. A stratum of “working men” has become “bourgeoisified” during the period of economic growth and social stability, and consequently is isolated from the problems and ideas that permeate the lower masses. It is here that the breeding ground of chauvinist and opportunist ideas may be found.. This is perhaps the first clear indication of the road that Lenin is to travel. The analysis has undergone what, even for Lenin, is a profound impoverishment. Almost ten years earlier he had already suggested a specific connection between “opportunism” and the imperialist stage of capitalism, but he did not attempt to confine the effects of opportunism to a minority of the proletariat. He limited himself to the general suggestion that “in certain countries [colonial profits provide] a material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat with colonial chauvinism”.. But the development of the theory from 1914 onwards is to narrow the causes of opportunism to imperialist superprofits, and the extent of opportunism to a labour aristocracy. Various descriptions of the infected stratum are given. Initially the description is confined to “leaders” — parliamentarian, trade union, journalistic and other.. Then it is extended to “Parliamentarians, officials of the legal labour unions, and other intellectuals ... some sections of the better paid workers, office employees etc.”.
Lenin is dissatisfied with such a definition. It conflates two distinct categories, the “labour aristocracy” and the “labour bureaucracy”. He therefore attempts to define more precisely the sociology of this phenomenon. In later writings there are many attempts to identify the roots of opportunist politics in the labour aristocracy. What is this aristocracy? It variously includes “the better paid workers”, a “petty-bourgeois 'upper stratum' or aristocracy ... of the working class”, “certain strata of the proletariat”, “near-proletarian elements”, “non-proletarian elements”, a “stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois ... who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and their entire outlook”, the “upper stratum” that “furnishes the bulk of the membership of the cooperatives, of trade unions, of sporting clubs and of the numerous religious sects”, “a section of the proletariat” that has “become bourgeois”, “workers belonging to narrow craft unions”, those infected by “bourgeois respectability”, etc. A glance at these definitions reveals their remarkable variety — and consequently their conceptual vagueness. If Lenin were attempting to proceed from a general theory of the roots of opportunism to investigate the specificity of the phenomenon in various countries, such oscillations would not be remarkable. Precise analyses would show differentiation according to national context. But this is not a precise analysis. These definitions are taken from attempts to state a general theory of opportunism. In this context such vagueness of definition points to problems in the theoretical schema itself.
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It was a rather less impressive achievement in terms of its complexity or subtlety and, indeed, its adequacy. It comprised three basic organizing principles: imperialism, the labour aristocracy and the soviet. Imperialism was the problem, the labour aristocracy was the basis of the continued existence of the problem, and the soviet form encapsulated Lenin's new answer. Concisely, the development of capitalism into imperialism had provided the bourgeoisie in the metropolitan countries with the opportunity to undermine the proletarian progress to revolutionary politics that had previously been considered inevitable. The labour aristocracy was a section of the proletariat that had been detached from its true class allegiance, and consequently become enmeshed in the fabric and institutions of bourgeois society. Thus, the bourgeois state, in both its administrative and political forms, had become the core of the process whereby the organizations of the proletariat were delivered up to imperialist politics. Lenin hinted at a fairly sophisticated model of this relationship when he coined the term “Lloyd-Georgeism” to describe the impact of social reform upon the labour movement. This analytical avenue, however, remained emphatically underdeveloped, and in its place is an argument of a much simpler nature. Reformist politics were, in this argument, not a mass political phenomenon; they were confined to the labour aristocracy.
This reduction is perhaps surprising, and certainly not necessary for Lenin' s project of salvaging revolutionary politics. Lenin could have argued — as we have seen Colletti argue — that the institutional forms of parliamentarism paralysed the revolutionary impulses of the proletariat by a combination of social atomization, manipulation and mystification. The soviet form could have been offered as the counter to all three processes. Such an argument would render redundant a concept of the labour aristocracy as specially significant in diverting the revolutionary process. There is no need to single out any distinct part of the working class as uniquely guilty of bearing, conspiring in, or succumbing to, the culture of social peace and parliamentary progress. But the organizing principle of Lenin's explanation for the split in socialism was not the rejection of parliamentarism, but the definition and critique of the labour aristocracy. It is possible to trace in the development of Lenin's analysis the gradual disappearance of the effects of peaceful decades, parliamentarism, legal organizations, etc, and their replacement by direct and crude material determinants affecting a small minority of the movement: crumbs, bribes, “lucrative and soft jobs” Lenin thus chose to pursue a far simpler analysis which, paradoxically, involves a far more complex and weaker chain of explanation if the soviet form is to be justified.
In that analysis, the proletariat constitutes a “silent majority” — those who have simply not been heard from. But, if the masses do not appear to have succumbed to the charms of parliamentarism and social peace, it is hardly necessary to advocate the soviet form to counter such dangers. At this point in the argument, therefore, there exists no necessary or useful connection between Lenin's analysis of the split in socialism and the Soviet alternative. What I shall seek to do is suggest the necessary connection that in fact does exist. For it seems to me that the institutions of the commune-state that Lenin was to advocate in 1917 derive their viability from a theory of political motivation, and that this theory of motivation can be discovered as the fundamental assumption of the theory of the labour aristocracy.
We can find a concise and representative statement of the analysis in the 1920 preface to Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism:
Capital exports yield an income of eight to ten thousand million francs per annum, at pre-war prices and according to pre-war bourgeois statistics. Now, of course, they yield much more. Obviously, out of such enormous superprofits (since they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists can squeeze out of the workers of their “own” country) it is possible to bribe the labour leaders and the upper stratum of the labour aristocracy. And this is just what the capitalists of the “advanced countries” are doing, they are bribing them in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect, overt and covert.
This stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois, or the labour aristocracy who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, is the principal prop of the Second International, and in our days, the principal social (not military) prop of the bourgeoisie. For they are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real vehicles of reformism and chauvinism.
I shall not seek to present a comprehensive critique of the theories of imperialism and the labour aristocracy. Although it should be clear from what follows that I find both of them inadequate as explanatory categories, there already exists a varied literature to this effect, and to retell it would be redundant. I shall seek only to register some points which may reveal the theory of political motivation produced by these concepts.
First, Lenin's concept of imperialism is one that cannot be seriously sustained by the arguments that he presented. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written in 1916, Lenin outlines the general features of the imperialist stage of capitalism, stressing what he considers to be the key factor — the export of capital from the metropolitan countries to the colonies or semi-colonies. In chapter eight he considers the effects of this on the metropolitan nations. An extensive quote from Hobson advocates the idea that the western nations were becoming totally parasitic in their economic role, drawing all productive wealth from the Asian and African continents. The result, Lenin suggests, will be the transformation of the proletariat into “great tame masses of retainers, no longer engaged in the staple industries of agriculture and manufacture, but kept in the performance of personal or minor industrial services under the control of the new financial aristocracy. The condition of southern England is advanced as a foreshadow of what might come to pass. He then proceeds to offer evidence for Hobson's analysis. He seems to support the vision of the gradual disappearance of manufacturing capital from western Europe. But his evidence is rather bizarre: an increasing proportion of land in England is being taken out of cultivation and used for sport and the diversion of the rich; England spends annually 14 million pounds on horse-racing and fox-hunting; the number of rentiers in England is about 1 million. The corollary of those tendencies is this: “The percentage of the productively employed population to the total population is declining” — from 23 per cent in 1851 to 15 per cent in 1901. The surprising scale of these figures would have given anyone less committed to the thesis pause for thought. In fact Lenin is equating “productively employed” with those employed in the basic industries, which by any economic theory is an insupportable device.
Of course it is true that the economic structure of the country was undergoing change, but both Lenin and Hobson entirely misconstrued what was happening. An advanced stage of industrialization produces tendencies for the service sector to undergo expansion at the expense of the primary and secondary sectors. Together with the development of the service sector went the extension of the factory system into previously marginally involved sectors, and the transformation into a factory workforce of parts of the population whose situation was previously quite different. The decline in the numbers employed in domestic service and the reverse process of the increase in industrial employment of women, prefigured by developments in the First World War, are indicative of this. Note should also be taken of the growing industrialization of agriculture, and the growing productivity of labour within the manufacturing sector which must, on the one hand, produce a tendency for slow or negative growth in employment in that sector and, on the other, growing employment among those sectors needed to service the technical developments reflected by this rise in the productivity of labour.
Lenin therefore constructed an entirely mythical sociological grouping under the category “labour aristocracy” — “great tame masses of retainers”. They lived off the “crumbs” from the table of imperialism; they were directly bribed out of superprofits. Lenin even gave a rough estimate of the size of this bribe, although no attempt is made to define the method of distribution of this subvention. But what is clear is that Lenin nowhere considers this “bribe” as passing through, or deriving from, the process of production in the metropolitan countries. High wages do not come from the worker's position in the production process; they are purely the dividend of parasitism. The labour aristocrats have become the “coupon-clippers” of the working class. Clearly, such a mechanism can only have an utterly corrupting influence on those in receipt. Recipients of such an unearned and unjustified subsidy will surely fight to the death to defend the imperialism that provided it. The labour aristrocrat becomes akin to the Roman proletarian, whose existence was subsidized by the slave economy, unlike the non-aristocracy at whose expense society lives. But what an absurd inversion of reality this constitutes, and its absurdity clashes more fundamentally with the assumptions of Marxian social theory than perhaps any other.
The higher paid worker in Lenin's time achieved and maintained his position due to his skill — or rather to the short supply of that skill — or his organization, and usually by a very specific combination of both. It is puzzling that such a simple fact should escape Lenin's analysis, but two factors may account for this. The first, of course, is that Lenin's project excluded the realization: he was not seeking to explain the origin of the higher-paid worker, but simply to utilize it as a link in the chain of his explanation, proceeding from imperialism to the politics of the day. Second, there was little in Lenin's experience, or in his field of interest, to direct his attention to the simple explanation. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is a remarkably one-sided study of early-twentieth-century capitalism. It concentrates exclusively on methods of ownership and finance and excludes any consideration of the industrial process itself, ie what was being produced, and how. The remarkable changes in the techniques of production and the nature of finished products is entirely absent. One may wonder precisely what image Lenin possessed of the twentieth-century factory and those who worked there.
Thus, if we read Imperialism as at least in part directed to establishing the existence of a distinct social grouping which is essentially parasitic and unproductive, we have to register Lenin's attempt as a failure. He has failed to prove that such a group emerges as a consequence of economic development in an imperialist phase. As a result, he has further failed to demonstrate the existence of a social grouping which will be motivated to defend its native imperialism as a matter of automatic self-interest.
My second point concerns the assumptions which would be necessary to sustain the argument for this postulated social group. Lenin makes a silent but necessary assumption that the wages of members of the proletariat have a historic tendency to maintain, and always return to, a certain physical minimum. Otherwise there is nothing to explain in the particular condition of the labour aristocracy. This concept of an “iron law of wages” is strangely resilient in the Marxian tradition. Bernstein made use of it as a stick with which to beat Marxism, and his criticisms were justified. He was castigating a belief that was widely held and articulated among the orthodox theoreticians of the movement. Kautsky included it in his popular explanation of the Erfurt programme in 1892: “industrial development exhibits a tendency, most pleasing to the capitalist, to lower the necessities of the working man and to decrease his wages in proportion”. It became a commonplace article of faith in the communist movement, in defiance of whatever evidence to the contrary might have suggested. It was possible fifty years later for Kuczynski to insist:
conditions among the working class in Britain, on the average, did not improve during the second half of the nineteenth century … Whenever we are able to point to improvements we are at the same time, unfortunately, obliged to point to deteriorations which overcompensate the improvements in the conditions of the working class during the last fifty or hundred years.
The author, a Marxist historian, could only support this statement by suggesting a picture of British capitalism which left little room for the development of forces and techniques of production. Thus, in a discussion of productivity changes, he ascribed by far the greatest importance to the aspect of the “increased intensity of labour per worker”, ie the workers working harder, and only a minor significance to the revolutionizing of the techniques of production.
It has been argued that there is in fact no ambiguity on this issue in Marx's political economy. Nevertheless we can only note the frequent recurrence of this theme within the Marxian political movement. Such an assumption could clearly play an important political role at moments when employers have enforced reductions in wages and conditions in specific conjunctures. It enables a political argument to make the transition from the problem of the moment to the problem of the system. It is clearly a matter of some speculation how effective the theory of revolution remains when Marx's theory is substituted for the iron law of wages. When Colletti declares that: “It is the dependence which ties the workers to the will of the capitalist class, and not their absolute poverty'', in other words, capitalist appropriation is not exclusively or primarily an appropriation of things, but rather an appropriation of subjectivity, a theory of revolutionary action becomes markedly more problematic.
The iron law of wages demands little empirical refutation. Rising living standards were common to the British working class in the latter part of the nineteenth century. There was undoubtedly a minority that was better off than most, but the differential was modest. It should also be noted that the existence of differentials was in no way unique to the imperialist stage of capitalism. In the light of the longstanding nature of the phenomenon, and the relatively minor material differentiation between the skilled and the unskilled, imperialist superprofits are an unnecessary import into the discussion. Far from the labour aristocracy being a creation of the bourgeoisie for political motives, made possible by their returns from the colonies, it is further arguable that such differentials underwent a tendency to diminish for some time before Lenin wrote his book.
Third, whatever the economic facts, Lenin's appreciation of the politics of the higher paid worker was an inversion of the truth. Clearly, ideas of respectability and conservatism could very easily flow from social stability and, more specifically, from the craftsman's elevated role in production. But very often situations of crisis or structural change produced among such people a fabric of consciousness that made them extremely and uniquely amenable to radical ideas. The experience of the communist parties after the war testifies to this. In most parties, workers from the skilled trades constituted the largest single elements of the membership, and if one considers the relatively small size of those groups in the working class as a whole, the attraction of communist politics for such people is clearly markedly stronger than among unskilled workers. Nevertheless, for Lenin, the primary task of the communist parties after the war remained an “immediate, systematic, comprehensive, and open struggle ... against this stratum. The obverse of the dismissal of the 'top 10 per cent' was an exceedingly sanguine picture of what Lenin terms the 'revolutionary masses'”. In August 1914 he drew a sharp distinction between the opportunist leaders and the mass of the working class, insisting that it was “imperative to appeal to the revolutionary consciousness of the working masses, who bear the entire burden of the war and are in most cases hostile to opportunism and chauvinism”, and in 1915, he declared: “It is a falsehood for anybody … to say that the 'masses' of proletarians have turned towards chauvinism; nowhere have the masses been asked.” Clearly such assertions had very little relation to the reality of the time. Thus Lenin's political sociology of the working classes of Western Europe, already theoretically dubious, can find no serious empirical support.
My fourth point concerns the effects of the weaknesses outlined above upon any more general theorization of the sociology of class and politics. It will be remembered that early in his career Lenin advanced a particular version of the relationship between the two. He then asserted that, without the activity of political parties, the working class was incapable of developing a politics that escaped from what he called “trade union consciousness”. He had no reason to ascribe to the working class a mass politics that automatically reflected their class interests. Even later, during the 1905 revolution, his assertion that the working class was “spontaneously social democratic” was linked to the prior activities of political radicals within the labour movement, who had made the ideas available throughout the working class; and it should be noted that such a social democratic consciousness at that time probably for Lenin amounted to little more than a broad sympathy with the general aims of the overthrow of autocracy. When he suggested the existence of a similar spontaneous political ideology among the masses after 1914, he was in fact suggesting the existence of ideas and sympathies considerably more sophisticated and rigorous; sympathy not merely for social reform, political democracy and social justice, but for specific attitudes towards conjunctural issues of the day.
Lenin's thesis on “trade union consciousness” was in itself not notably sophisticated, but it did contain the possibility of elaboration into a reasonably adequate statement of the culture of a subaltern class. It could, in other words, have been developed into a concept somewhat akin to Gramsci's idea of hegemony, wherein there is an appreciation of the complexity of the way in which society, class and culture constitute the network of meanings through which people see the world and experience their activities. As long as Lenin did not assume political consciousness to be an automatic reflection of class position, the opportunity remained for him to appreciate the political domain in all its diversity and complexity. But it must be pointed out that the “trade union consciousness” theme itself was not even a simpler version of Gramsci's sophisticated sociology. In itself, it remained true to Lenin's reflectionist epistemology, for trade union consciousness is little more than a reflection of the specific factory situation in which the worker is placed: it does not allow room to take into account the far more important determinations that existed “outside” the workplace: national culture, religion, socialization, authority patterns, etc — not forgetting politics itself.
Nevertheless, Lenin remained for some time aware of sociological tendencies that produced in the working class a resistance to his politics. He referred to Engels' castigation of the bourgeious “respectability” which has grown deep into the bones of the workers in his discussion of England. In 1908 he suggested that the material locus of these tendencies lay in the “small producers [who are] being cast into the ranks of the proletariat as capitalism develops. Two years later he made an attempt to define the causes of “opportunism” in broader terms. The continued growth of the labour movement itself constantly introduced to its ranks those unschooled in its practices and ideology; the development of capitalism is uneven in pace and depth, recruiting to the labour movement many who were unable to make the break with the ideology of the enemy; the oppressive aspect of capitalist development — its degradation, its poverty — even counterbalanced the potential inscribed in the newly disciplined and organized workers; and the activities of the bourgeoisie itself must not be overlooked, as it has developed the tactic of conceding political rights and reforms, which hampered the revolutionary development of the class.
It is worth stressing at this point that even these relatively sophisticated definitions of the origins of political differences in the working class do not legitimise politics. That is, practical ideas that are not sympathetic to Lenin's own are attributed to lags and lacunae in the movement of history; they remain, for Lenin, both incorrect and transitory. Even at this early stage, the possibility that political disagreements might simply testify to different value orientations or to conflicting political strategies is absent. Nevertheless, even such an approach provided for an understanding that was considerably more complex than what was to follow. Lenin was to come to deny the very existence of problematic political ideas withing the bulk of the working class, and replace it with the idea of a clean ideological break between aristocracy and mass.
His first reformulations of the problem after 1914 contain something of the old discussion. He referred to the results of the preceding peaceful period in the development of the labour movement [which] taught the working class to utilise such important means of struggle as parliamentarism and all legal opportunities.
In these writings from 1914 and 1915 there is a dimension that is missing from later works. While attention is already directed to the importance of the labour aristocracy in this problem, their role is subordinate and not key in the analysis. But in his first major theoretical accounting with “opportunism”, The Collapse of the Second International, written in the middle of 1915, Lenin begins to confine the roots of this political practice to much more directly material factors than the “peaceful decades”. The opportunist ideas of the labour aristocracy are no longer simply different from those of the mass of the proletariat in degree — perhaps due to their greater access to political expression and material improvement — but are directly counterposed to the rest of the class. A stratum of “working men” has become “bourgeoisified” during the period of economic growth and social stability, and consequently is isolated from the problems and ideas that permeate the lower masses. It is here that the breeding ground of chauvinist and opportunist ideas may be found.. This is perhaps the first clear indication of the road that Lenin is to travel. The analysis has undergone what, even for Lenin, is a profound impoverishment. Almost ten years earlier he had already suggested a specific connection between “opportunism” and the imperialist stage of capitalism, but he did not attempt to confine the effects of opportunism to a minority of the proletariat. He limited himself to the general suggestion that “in certain countries [colonial profits provide] a material and economic basis for infecting the proletariat with colonial chauvinism”.. But the development of the theory from 1914 onwards is to narrow the causes of opportunism to imperialist superprofits, and the extent of opportunism to a labour aristocracy. Various descriptions of the infected stratum are given. Initially the description is confined to “leaders” — parliamentarian, trade union, journalistic and other.. Then it is extended to “Parliamentarians, officials of the legal labour unions, and other intellectuals ... some sections of the better paid workers, office employees etc.”.
Lenin is dissatisfied with such a definition. It conflates two distinct categories, the “labour aristocracy” and the “labour bureaucracy”. He therefore attempts to define more precisely the sociology of this phenomenon. In later writings there are many attempts to identify the roots of opportunist politics in the labour aristocracy. What is this aristocracy? It variously includes “the better paid workers”, a “petty-bourgeois 'upper stratum' or aristocracy ... of the working class”, “certain strata of the proletariat”, “near-proletarian elements”, “non-proletarian elements”, a “stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois ... who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and their entire outlook”, the “upper stratum” that “furnishes the bulk of the membership of the cooperatives, of trade unions, of sporting clubs and of the numerous religious sects”, “a section of the proletariat” that has “become bourgeois”, “workers belonging to narrow craft unions”, those infected by “bourgeois respectability”, etc. A glance at these definitions reveals their remarkable variety — and consequently their conceptual vagueness. If Lenin were attempting to proceed from a general theory of the roots of opportunism to investigate the specificity of the phenomenon in various countries, such oscillations would not be remarkable. Precise analyses would show differentiation according to national context. But this is not a precise analysis. These definitions are taken from attempts to state a general theory of opportunism. In this context such vagueness of definition points to problems in the theoretical schema itself.
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Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
did not have a theory of morality; he had a theory of history. Thus, Marxism was not about right or wrong but about what will happen in history. Marx was contemptuous of people who judged things in moral terms. When diehards say that Marxism has actually never been "tried" (despite what Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho, and Daniel Ortega thought they were doing), they don't understand that Marxism was not a rule for behavior or a program for action; it was supposed to be the theory of a deterministic mechanism that will produce the future, a theory of actions that will arise spontaneously because of historical circumstances -- although we can infer what kinds of actions people, including ourselves, will be taking -- after all, Marx said that the purpose of his work was to change the world, not just understand it. It is the theory, however, the world will change because of the objective economic conditions, not because of some decisions we make. This was not a theory about "human nature" or "human psychology," but about how the mode of economic production (how goods and services are produced) determines all the other political, social, cultural, and moral structures of a society (though some Marxists are uncomfortable with this in an absolute sense). The needs of the "English petty bourgeois" are thus not "false needs", however dismissive Marx sounds, but true needs in relation to a capitalistic mode of production -- needs which will change over time, in a historicist sense, as the mode of production changes. As a "science" of history, Marxism would succeed or fail to the extent that it could actually predict the evolution of production and its various effects.
Marx thought that as capitalism had replaced feudalism with a new mode of production, which was more productive and efficient, the same thing would happen to produce a replacement for capitalism. In the end, as the workers were impoverished (when capitalists drove down wages) and the number of capitalists dwindled (as competition was replaced by larger and larger monopolies), the capitalists would end up with no one to sell their goods to and nothing to do with the capital derived from their profits. This would produce increasingly severe credit and banking crises, until the proletariat would easily tip over the whole rotten structure and replace it with a classless society.
Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder.
Already in this we find the essence of the fallacy of Marxist economics. Marx believes that as the dialectic of history evolves new modes of production, greater productivity and greater wealth will be created, ultimately eliminating the need for alienated and exploited labor. However, there is not a variable in Marxist value theory to account for greater productivity. If labor (or "socialy necessary" labor) creates value, then a greater quantity of labor will create greater value, but only in quantity, not in kind. More labor for pyramid building just builds more pyramids. Thus, some other variable is involved besides labor. In fact, that is capital. Labor intensive production gives way to capital intensive production, and greater capital means great productivity, not just in quantity, but in kind. But Marx does not believe that capital exists, which is why capitalism is called "capitalism." This means that Marxism cannot explain increased productivity. And then Marxism also contains another trend disparaging to productivity as such. Jack London, less well remembered now as a communist than as an author, said that a worker who is more productive than others "is already a scab," i.e. a strike breaker. Thus, the view seems to be than increases in producitivity are part of the exploitation of labor.
Unfortunately, without such increases, 90% of labor would still be involved in agricultural production, while in the United States that is now less than 2% of labor, the rest of which goes into producing other things. Those "other things" are what pose the problem for an economic system like Marxism. Since British industry was largely involved in building railroads in Marx's day, he seems to have actually believed that, once the railroads were built, there would be nothing for that workforce, or its capital, to do. But this is the key to the whole meaning of capital. Capital is knowledge. Capital is imagination. Capital investment may be thought of as the construction of machinery, but the machinery, with its use and purpose, must first be conceived. The new purposes require that new products be thought of. But then with the conception of new products, new uses, and new purposes, the machinery may only be one element, or no element, in it. Simply a different way of doing things represents new knowledge and new capital. Thus, we have idea in modern economics of "human capital," where some people simply know how to do things better than others. Also, the value of capital can simply evaporate in misconceived investments. "What is sunk is sunk," is the principle: bad investments, into which capital has been sunk, must at some point be written off. It is "sunk."
Marx's thesis of the fictional nature of capital is thus equivalent to his lack of imagination regarding what it would be possible for people to do with their capital. That entirely new products and industries could be conjured up, to be brought to life with capital investment, was a process that was simply off the radar of Marxist economics. Perhaps he thought that the unexploited workers would sit down one day and simply begin producing cell phones, with the conception perhaps spontaneously coughed up by the Hegelian dialectic. No. Since Marx was the kind of person who would never know what to do with capital, he did not believe there was anything to do with it. This is still about the level of economic understanding of much modern political discourse. It is worse with human capital. The tradition of many people, often ethnic minorties, in starting and running small businesses, which represents a profound body of knowledge, more easily learned at one's mother's knee, next to the cash register, than even in business school, elicits from the Marxist only suspicion, condemnation, and hatred. The people who typically run small businesses, we know, like the Jews, together with the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in Africa (or the neighborhood Seven Eleven), or Koreans in Harlem, are simply engaged in small scale capitalist exploitation -- they are the "petty bourgeoisie" who will be eaten up by growing monopolies. For the enlightened, the bien pensants, they merit only contempt. The idea that they are the source, not only of economic success for minorities or individuals, but of revolutions in production for the economy as a whole, where both the Ford Motor Company and Apple Computer started in someone's garage, is only met with dumb incomprehension and incredulity -- even from people whose own family, as with many Jews, contains just such a history of innovation and success from small roots.
Thus, since Marx did not believe in capital and did not understand the sources of innovation and invention, the elimination of small business and small entrepreneurs by monopoly capital was not only expected but was regarded as a desireable feature of the process. With surviving employed labor concentrated in large corporate entities, and the capitalists left with nothing to do with their capital and few consumers with the means to purchase capitalist production (given vast unemployment and employed workers paid only subsistence wages), the revolution would more or less happen of itself when the system collapsed in a panic of banks and investors. History would thus flow in the following way:
However, although nominal wages were falling in the United States from 1865-1897, apparently in line with Marxist expectations, real wages were actually rising, and there didn't seem to be a problem with over-production or with capital investment. Marx's own data showed rising real wages, as in Britain they rose by 80 percent in the last half of the 19th century. Recognizing that things weren't going as predicted, Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov, 1870-1924) proposed that colonialism and imperialism were relieving the stress on capitalism and had temporarily derailed history: Colonies were a safety valve for excess capital and over-production; and the exploitation of colonies enabled the capitalists to buy off the proletariat at home. But Lenin's own data showed that most foreign investment was in other capitalist countries, and it is hard to imagine how an impoverished colonial population could buy things that the proletariat back home couldn't afford. Nevertheless, Lenin's theory at least addressed the issue. He therefore saw the flow of history in these terms:
When the Russian Revolution came, Lenin and his colleagues had to address the paradox that according to orthodox Marxism Russia was not ready for a real communist revolution, since it had never passed through the necessary stage of capitalism itself. Although developing quickly enough, and the fourth largest economy in the world in 1914 just because of its size (it had been the largest through much of the 19th century), Russia was still largely a feudal society. Lenin died before much sense could be made of the situation, especially when his programs caused the economy to collapse and he had to retreat from an attempt at pure communism into the semi-market economy of the New Economic Policy (the NEP). Subsequently, Stalin (Iosif Dzhugashvili, 1879-1953) followed the principle that the Russian Revolution would substitute a benign replacement for capitalism, namely "socialism," which would do the same job of industrialization without capitalist exploitation. Meanwhile, the new Russian state, the Soviet Union, would fight against imperialism and work for de-colonization and national liberation. If imperialism and colonialism could be ended, then capitalist economies would revert to the dynamic described by Marx and communism would develop there in the natural way. Stalin thus saw the flow of history in this way:
With the Great Depression, which looked like just the sort of credit and production collapse that Marx had predicted, and which gave many Westerners the impression that Stalin's programs were producing better results in the Soviet Union, things seemed to be getting back on track. Then, when capitalist countries joined in to help defeat what should have been their own best hope, fascism, things really started looking up. The post-war world then began to see the start of de-colonization. For fear of "neo-colonialism," newly independent countries were advised to nationalize foreign holdings and limit capitalist exploitation (i.e. foreign investment). Stalin's Five Year Plans were seen by people like the new Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), as the proper way to modernize an economy.
Over the years, however, the countries that took this kind of advice the most seriously experienced only failure and stagnation. Nehru's great plans in fact condemned India to many decades of little improvement in its standard of living. But India was in good shape compared to Africa. By the late 80's, most former African colonies had lapsed into military dictatorships under which the standard of living was actually lower than it had been when they were colonies. All the modernistic and socialistic rhetoric of the original leaders of African independence, like Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) in Ghana, had turned out to be nothing but a mask for incompetence, corruption, and naked power. Instead of foreign investment, African leaders demanded foreign aid delivered directly to them. Most of that was either wasted on useless projects or diverted into their own pockets: leading to the bitter characterization of them as "Swiss bank account socialists."
Meanwhile, the once admired economy of the Soviet Union showed what it was truly made of: corruption, inefficiency, and irrationality on a vast scale. Although everyone expected that the Soviet Union's own economic statistics were unreliable, even the CIA greatly overestimated the size of the Soviet economy -- today one even hears the accusation that they did this deliberately to magnify the Soviet threat and perpetuate the Cold War (pursuant to the bureaucratic self-interest of the CIA -- which means that such an accusation could originate either from attacks on capitalism or simply from attacks on big government and bureaucracy). Outside of Moscow and Leningrad, which were bad enough, the Soviet Union was virtually a Third World country. One result today is that many who still admire Marxism and socialism have decided that it is virtuous to be poor, and that the ruined and miserable economy of a place like Cuba is a desirable "ecotopia" -- kinder to the environment than capitalism. This would be profoundly astonishing and mortifying to Karl Marx himself: the whole point about the evolution of communism is that it would be more productive and produce greater wealth for all than capitalism. A socialism that simply perpetuated poverty would be worthless -- a return, indeed, to what Marx called "oriental" despotism and a slave economy. Yet, as I have noted, it is the inevitable logical consequent of the denial of the existence of capital that the means of the development of greater production and greater wealth would themselves be destroyed. The fate of Marxist economies demonstrates this beyond a doubt.
The Marxist-Leninist Theory of History, Note 1
"Human nature," "human psychology," and "false needs" are quotes from the ethics textbook I have used, Moral Reasoning, by Victor Grassian, p. 59. Grassian seriously misunderstands Marx, where human nature in an important sense doesn't even exist, and human psychology will be no more than a function of the "objective conditions" of production. The idea of "false needs" is not to be confused with "false consciousness," which is when someone who is not a member of an oppressor class is deceived into having the views of that class. Thus a wage laborer who believes in the free market is afflicted with "false consciousness." According to Marxism, such beliefs need not be credited or addressed on their own merits, which of course logically leads, as it did in historical fact, to a totalitarian dictatorship where the views of people are irrelevant next to the "scientific" knowledge of the dictators.
The Marxist-Leninist Theory of History, Note 2
Although communists liked to see fascism as the ultimate expression of capitalism, and fascism did nominally leave property in private hands, fascism and communism nevertheless had more in common with each other than with capitalism, since each was a collectivist ideology that subordinated individual interests to the purposes of the State. It was no coincidence that both Hitler and Mussolini came out of the socialist movement, and Lenin himself had praised Mussolini as the great champion of the Italian socialist party in the days before World War I. Later, Hitler's own best role model for ruthless police state power was Lenin. Both communists and fascists knew that the opposite of both ideologies was the despised "liberalism."
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did not have a theory of morality; he had a theory of history. Thus, Marxism was not about right or wrong but about what will happen in history. Marx was contemptuous of people who judged things in moral terms. When diehards say that Marxism has actually never been "tried" (despite what Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho, and Daniel Ortega thought they were doing), they don't understand that Marxism was not a rule for behavior or a program for action; it was supposed to be the theory of a deterministic mechanism that will produce the future, a theory of actions that will arise spontaneously because of historical circumstances -- although we can infer what kinds of actions people, including ourselves, will be taking -- after all, Marx said that the purpose of his work was to change the world, not just understand it. It is the theory, however, the world will change because of the objective economic conditions, not because of some decisions we make. This was not a theory about "human nature" or "human psychology," but about how the mode of economic production (how goods and services are produced) determines all the other political, social, cultural, and moral structures of a society (though some Marxists are uncomfortable with this in an absolute sense). The needs of the "English petty bourgeois" are thus not "false needs", however dismissive Marx sounds, but true needs in relation to a capitalistic mode of production -- needs which will change over time, in a historicist sense, as the mode of production changes. As a "science" of history, Marxism would succeed or fail to the extent that it could actually predict the evolution of production and its various effects.
Marx thought that as capitalism had replaced feudalism with a new mode of production, which was more productive and efficient, the same thing would happen to produce a replacement for capitalism. In the end, as the workers were impoverished (when capitalists drove down wages) and the number of capitalists dwindled (as competition was replaced by larger and larger monopolies), the capitalists would end up with no one to sell their goods to and nothing to do with the capital derived from their profits. This would produce increasingly severe credit and banking crises, until the proletariat would easily tip over the whole rotten structure and replace it with a classless society.
Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder.
Already in this we find the essence of the fallacy of Marxist economics. Marx believes that as the dialectic of history evolves new modes of production, greater productivity and greater wealth will be created, ultimately eliminating the need for alienated and exploited labor. However, there is not a variable in Marxist value theory to account for greater productivity. If labor (or "socialy necessary" labor) creates value, then a greater quantity of labor will create greater value, but only in quantity, not in kind. More labor for pyramid building just builds more pyramids. Thus, some other variable is involved besides labor. In fact, that is capital. Labor intensive production gives way to capital intensive production, and greater capital means great productivity, not just in quantity, but in kind. But Marx does not believe that capital exists, which is why capitalism is called "capitalism." This means that Marxism cannot explain increased productivity. And then Marxism also contains another trend disparaging to productivity as such. Jack London, less well remembered now as a communist than as an author, said that a worker who is more productive than others "is already a scab," i.e. a strike breaker. Thus, the view seems to be than increases in producitivity are part of the exploitation of labor.
Unfortunately, without such increases, 90% of labor would still be involved in agricultural production, while in the United States that is now less than 2% of labor, the rest of which goes into producing other things. Those "other things" are what pose the problem for an economic system like Marxism. Since British industry was largely involved in building railroads in Marx's day, he seems to have actually believed that, once the railroads were built, there would be nothing for that workforce, or its capital, to do. But this is the key to the whole meaning of capital. Capital is knowledge. Capital is imagination. Capital investment may be thought of as the construction of machinery, but the machinery, with its use and purpose, must first be conceived. The new purposes require that new products be thought of. But then with the conception of new products, new uses, and new purposes, the machinery may only be one element, or no element, in it. Simply a different way of doing things represents new knowledge and new capital. Thus, we have idea in modern economics of "human capital," where some people simply know how to do things better than others. Also, the value of capital can simply evaporate in misconceived investments. "What is sunk is sunk," is the principle: bad investments, into which capital has been sunk, must at some point be written off. It is "sunk."
Marx's thesis of the fictional nature of capital is thus equivalent to his lack of imagination regarding what it would be possible for people to do with their capital. That entirely new products and industries could be conjured up, to be brought to life with capital investment, was a process that was simply off the radar of Marxist economics. Perhaps he thought that the unexploited workers would sit down one day and simply begin producing cell phones, with the conception perhaps spontaneously coughed up by the Hegelian dialectic. No. Since Marx was the kind of person who would never know what to do with capital, he did not believe there was anything to do with it. This is still about the level of economic understanding of much modern political discourse. It is worse with human capital. The tradition of many people, often ethnic minorties, in starting and running small businesses, which represents a profound body of knowledge, more easily learned at one's mother's knee, next to the cash register, than even in business school, elicits from the Marxist only suspicion, condemnation, and hatred. The people who typically run small businesses, we know, like the Jews, together with the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in Africa (or the neighborhood Seven Eleven), or Koreans in Harlem, are simply engaged in small scale capitalist exploitation -- they are the "petty bourgeoisie" who will be eaten up by growing monopolies. For the enlightened, the bien pensants, they merit only contempt. The idea that they are the source, not only of economic success for minorities or individuals, but of revolutions in production for the economy as a whole, where both the Ford Motor Company and Apple Computer started in someone's garage, is only met with dumb incomprehension and incredulity -- even from people whose own family, as with many Jews, contains just such a history of innovation and success from small roots.
Thus, since Marx did not believe in capital and did not understand the sources of innovation and invention, the elimination of small business and small entrepreneurs by monopoly capital was not only expected but was regarded as a desireable feature of the process. With surviving employed labor concentrated in large corporate entities, and the capitalists left with nothing to do with their capital and few consumers with the means to purchase capitalist production (given vast unemployment and employed workers paid only subsistence wages), the revolution would more or less happen of itself when the system collapsed in a panic of banks and investors. History would thus flow in the following way:
However, although nominal wages were falling in the United States from 1865-1897, apparently in line with Marxist expectations, real wages were actually rising, and there didn't seem to be a problem with over-production or with capital investment. Marx's own data showed rising real wages, as in Britain they rose by 80 percent in the last half of the 19th century. Recognizing that things weren't going as predicted, Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov, 1870-1924) proposed that colonialism and imperialism were relieving the stress on capitalism and had temporarily derailed history: Colonies were a safety valve for excess capital and over-production; and the exploitation of colonies enabled the capitalists to buy off the proletariat at home. But Lenin's own data showed that most foreign investment was in other capitalist countries, and it is hard to imagine how an impoverished colonial population could buy things that the proletariat back home couldn't afford. Nevertheless, Lenin's theory at least addressed the issue. He therefore saw the flow of history in these terms:
When the Russian Revolution came, Lenin and his colleagues had to address the paradox that according to orthodox Marxism Russia was not ready for a real communist revolution, since it had never passed through the necessary stage of capitalism itself. Although developing quickly enough, and the fourth largest economy in the world in 1914 just because of its size (it had been the largest through much of the 19th century), Russia was still largely a feudal society. Lenin died before much sense could be made of the situation, especially when his programs caused the economy to collapse and he had to retreat from an attempt at pure communism into the semi-market economy of the New Economic Policy (the NEP). Subsequently, Stalin (Iosif Dzhugashvili, 1879-1953) followed the principle that the Russian Revolution would substitute a benign replacement for capitalism, namely "socialism," which would do the same job of industrialization without capitalist exploitation. Meanwhile, the new Russian state, the Soviet Union, would fight against imperialism and work for de-colonization and national liberation. If imperialism and colonialism could be ended, then capitalist economies would revert to the dynamic described by Marx and communism would develop there in the natural way. Stalin thus saw the flow of history in this way:
With the Great Depression, which looked like just the sort of credit and production collapse that Marx had predicted, and which gave many Westerners the impression that Stalin's programs were producing better results in the Soviet Union, things seemed to be getting back on track. Then, when capitalist countries joined in to help defeat what should have been their own best hope, fascism, things really started looking up. The post-war world then began to see the start of de-colonization. For fear of "neo-colonialism," newly independent countries were advised to nationalize foreign holdings and limit capitalist exploitation (i.e. foreign investment). Stalin's Five Year Plans were seen by people like the new Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), as the proper way to modernize an economy.
Over the years, however, the countries that took this kind of advice the most seriously experienced only failure and stagnation. Nehru's great plans in fact condemned India to many decades of little improvement in its standard of living. But India was in good shape compared to Africa. By the late 80's, most former African colonies had lapsed into military dictatorships under which the standard of living was actually lower than it had been when they were colonies. All the modernistic and socialistic rhetoric of the original leaders of African independence, like Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) in Ghana, had turned out to be nothing but a mask for incompetence, corruption, and naked power. Instead of foreign investment, African leaders demanded foreign aid delivered directly to them. Most of that was either wasted on useless projects or diverted into their own pockets: leading to the bitter characterization of them as "Swiss bank account socialists."
Meanwhile, the once admired economy of the Soviet Union showed what it was truly made of: corruption, inefficiency, and irrationality on a vast scale. Although everyone expected that the Soviet Union's own economic statistics were unreliable, even the CIA greatly overestimated the size of the Soviet economy -- today one even hears the accusation that they did this deliberately to magnify the Soviet threat and perpetuate the Cold War (pursuant to the bureaucratic self-interest of the CIA -- which means that such an accusation could originate either from attacks on capitalism or simply from attacks on big government and bureaucracy). Outside of Moscow and Leningrad, which were bad enough, the Soviet Union was virtually a Third World country. One result today is that many who still admire Marxism and socialism have decided that it is virtuous to be poor, and that the ruined and miserable economy of a place like Cuba is a desirable "ecotopia" -- kinder to the environment than capitalism. This would be profoundly astonishing and mortifying to Karl Marx himself: the whole point about the evolution of communism is that it would be more productive and produce greater wealth for all than capitalism. A socialism that simply perpetuated poverty would be worthless -- a return, indeed, to what Marx called "oriental" despotism and a slave economy. Yet, as I have noted, it is the inevitable logical consequent of the denial of the existence of capital that the means of the development of greater production and greater wealth would themselves be destroyed. The fate of Marxist economies demonstrates this beyond a doubt.
The Marxist-Leninist Theory of History, Note 1
"Human nature," "human psychology," and "false needs" are quotes from the ethics textbook I have used, Moral Reasoning, by Victor Grassian, p. 59. Grassian seriously misunderstands Marx, where human nature in an important sense doesn't even exist, and human psychology will be no more than a function of the "objective conditions" of production. The idea of "false needs" is not to be confused with "false consciousness," which is when someone who is not a member of an oppressor class is deceived into having the views of that class. Thus a wage laborer who believes in the free market is afflicted with "false consciousness." According to Marxism, such beliefs need not be credited or addressed on their own merits, which of course logically leads, as it did in historical fact, to a totalitarian dictatorship where the views of people are irrelevant next to the "scientific" knowledge of the dictators.
The Marxist-Leninist Theory of History, Note 2
Although communists liked to see fascism as the ultimate expression of capitalism, and fascism did nominally leave property in private hands, fascism and communism nevertheless had more in common with each other than with capitalism, since each was a collectivist ideology that subordinated individual interests to the purposes of the State. It was no coincidence that both Hitler and Mussolini came out of the socialist movement, and Lenin himself had praised Mussolini as the great champion of the Italian socialist party in the days before World War I. Later, Hitler's own best role model for ruthless police state power was Lenin. Both communists and fascists knew that the opposite of both ideologies was the despised "liberalism."
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Loy krathong in thailand
The full moon night of November is "Loy Krathong Day". Loy is "to float" and Krathong is a "leaf cup" usually made of banana leaf as one often sees in the market. The leaf cup is used to hold something. Loy Krathong is, therefore, the floating of lights in a leaf cup. During October and November, all the rivers and canals in the lowlands are flooded and the waters in some places overflow their banks. The rainy season is now in a sense over. It is the time of rejoicing for the weather is fair after the rains. The sky becomes bright and clear, but without its dampness. After the strenuous labour of ploughing and planting rice for the last three months at a stretch from dawn till dusk, for the country-folk the heavy work is now over. The peasants have only to wait a month or more for the time of reaping. During this interval they have nothing much economically to do, but to spend a comparative time of leisure with feasts and festivals, of which there are many in these two months of October and November.
If you go into a market just a few days before the full moon of November, you will see in some stalls or shops a number of krathong or leaf cups specially made for sale in this season. Usually in a krathong, apart from a candle and one or more incense sticks, a small coin, say a one or five satang piece, is also put in.
On Loy Krathong day, I went to "loy" with my friends at the City Hall. I bought a krathong for 30 baht and went to the river to float it. I wished to have a good life and good health. I also asked Mae Kongkla (Goddess of Water) to forgive me for my sins.
In the 1st picture: They are selling krathongs by the side of the road on the way to City Hall.
In the 2nd picture: I am getting ready to float my krathong on the river.
In the 3rd picture: The kids are playing in the river the next day and looking for some money in the krathong.
In the evening when the full moon begins to rise on November, the people, carry one or two krathongs to the edge of brimful running water. After the candle and incense sticks in the krathong are lighted, they let it go gently on the surface of the placid waters. A few folk will sometimes raise their hands in worship to the floating krathong. They watch the krathong as they float sluggishly along the water for sometime until they float far away or out of sight. The children to while away the time play with water fire-works. The fireworks, apart from amusement, are a part of any celebration secularly and religiously. We light fireworks sometimes in the same spirit as we light candles as an act of worship.
The floating krathong usually has a short life. As it floats far away from its starting place, the children further down stream will, in most cases, swim out to snatch the krathong. If it is a beautiful one there may be a scramble for it. They will perhaps ignore the common ones, but will not forget to snatch up the small coin, if any, in the krathong. It is an aesthetic pleasesure to see many krathongs with their flickering candle lights bobbing gently up and down, borne along the silent and placid flooded waters under the light of a full moon.
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If you go into a market just a few days before the full moon of November, you will see in some stalls or shops a number of krathong or leaf cups specially made for sale in this season. Usually in a krathong, apart from a candle and one or more incense sticks, a small coin, say a one or five satang piece, is also put in.
On Loy Krathong day, I went to "loy" with my friends at the City Hall. I bought a krathong for 30 baht and went to the river to float it. I wished to have a good life and good health. I also asked Mae Kongkla (Goddess of Water) to forgive me for my sins.
In the 1st picture: They are selling krathongs by the side of the road on the way to City Hall.
In the 2nd picture: I am getting ready to float my krathong on the river.
In the 3rd picture: The kids are playing in the river the next day and looking for some money in the krathong.
In the evening when the full moon begins to rise on November, the people, carry one or two krathongs to the edge of brimful running water. After the candle and incense sticks in the krathong are lighted, they let it go gently on the surface of the placid waters. A few folk will sometimes raise their hands in worship to the floating krathong. They watch the krathong as they float sluggishly along the water for sometime until they float far away or out of sight. The children to while away the time play with water fire-works. The fireworks, apart from amusement, are a part of any celebration secularly and religiously. We light fireworks sometimes in the same spirit as we light candles as an act of worship.
The floating krathong usually has a short life. As it floats far away from its starting place, the children further down stream will, in most cases, swim out to snatch the krathong. If it is a beautiful one there may be a scramble for it. They will perhaps ignore the common ones, but will not forget to snatch up the small coin, if any, in the krathong. It is an aesthetic pleasesure to see many krathongs with their flickering candle lights bobbing gently up and down, borne along the silent and placid flooded waters under the light of a full moon.
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Generals plot victory in 2010 Burma election
Rangoon (AFP) - The head of the Burmese military junta has revealed plans for elections in 2010 under a controversial "road map" to democracy and says plans are well under way for a military victory, state media reported on Saturday.
Snr Gen Than Shwe's comments to a pro-junta group followed a number of heavy jail sentences handed down by the country's courts, including the lengthening of a prison term given to Burma's most famous comedian.
"The state's seven-step road map is, indeed, the only way to smooth (the) transition to democracy as well as (its) own transitional work programmes," Than Shwe was quoted as saying by the New Light of Myanmar newspaper.
"The government and the people have to materialize in harmony," he told the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), a pro-military social organisation, the paper said.
Authorities say the group has 24.6 million members, about half of the country's 57 million population. Analysts have said the junta could turn the USDA into a political party ahead of the elections which are due in two years.
"Now, plans are well under way to see to the remaining steps including the 2010 transition work programme. So, it is fair to say that the future of the state structure is certain to materialize," Than Shwe said.
Than Shwe described a widely criticised national referendum held in May on a new constitution as a crucial step for the so-called road map.
The referendum was held a week after Cyclone Nargis hit, leaving 138,000 people dead or missing. Authorities said the poll, carried out without independent monitoring, was backed by 92.48 percent of voters.
The United States, European Union and United Nations have dismissed the lengthy "road map" in Burma as a sham due to the absence of detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party.
"Despite various disturbances and pressure of those who do not want to realise the objective conditions of the nation, the goal of the state is drawing near," Than Shwe said.
Than Shwe's speech came in a month when more than 160 activists have been given long jail terms by the military regime, according to opposition sources, after protests led by the nation's revered Buddhist monks last year.
At least 31 people were killed in a brutal crackdown that followed the demonstrations, according to the United Nations.
The most famous Burmese comedian Zarganar was sentenced to 45 years in prison earlier this month, while sports writer Zaw Thet Htwe was handed a 15-year jail term.
Both were arrested in June after organising deliveries of aid to victims of Cyclone Nargis.
The NLD won a landslide victory in 1990 elections but the junta did not allow them to take office.
Burma has been ruled by the military since 1962.
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Snr Gen Than Shwe's comments to a pro-junta group followed a number of heavy jail sentences handed down by the country's courts, including the lengthening of a prison term given to Burma's most famous comedian.
"The state's seven-step road map is, indeed, the only way to smooth (the) transition to democracy as well as (its) own transitional work programmes," Than Shwe was quoted as saying by the New Light of Myanmar newspaper.
"The government and the people have to materialize in harmony," he told the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), a pro-military social organisation, the paper said.
Authorities say the group has 24.6 million members, about half of the country's 57 million population. Analysts have said the junta could turn the USDA into a political party ahead of the elections which are due in two years.
"Now, plans are well under way to see to the remaining steps including the 2010 transition work programme. So, it is fair to say that the future of the state structure is certain to materialize," Than Shwe said.
Than Shwe described a widely criticised national referendum held in May on a new constitution as a crucial step for the so-called road map.
The referendum was held a week after Cyclone Nargis hit, leaving 138,000 people dead or missing. Authorities said the poll, carried out without independent monitoring, was backed by 92.48 percent of voters.
The United States, European Union and United Nations have dismissed the lengthy "road map" in Burma as a sham due to the absence of detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) party.
"Despite various disturbances and pressure of those who do not want to realise the objective conditions of the nation, the goal of the state is drawing near," Than Shwe said.
Than Shwe's speech came in a month when more than 160 activists have been given long jail terms by the military regime, according to opposition sources, after protests led by the nation's revered Buddhist monks last year.
At least 31 people were killed in a brutal crackdown that followed the demonstrations, according to the United Nations.
The most famous Burmese comedian Zarganar was sentenced to 45 years in prison earlier this month, while sports writer Zaw Thet Htwe was handed a 15-year jail term.
Both were arrested in June after organising deliveries of aid to victims of Cyclone Nargis.
The NLD won a landslide victory in 1990 elections but the junta did not allow them to take office.
Burma has been ruled by the military since 1962.
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The meaning of love
Since a very long time ago, people have searched for the meaning of love. But even the great philosophers, with their profound definitions, could not fully touch its true essence. In a survey of 4-8 year olds, kids share their views on love. But what do little kids know about love? Read on and be surprised that despite their young and innocent minds, kids already have a simple but deep grasp of that four-letter word.
"Love is that first feeling you feel before all the bad stuff gets in the way."
"When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love."
"When someone loves you, the way she says your name is different. You know that your name is safe in her mouth."
"Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other."
"Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your french fries without making them give you any of theirs."
"Love is when someone hurts you. And you get so mad but you don't yell at him because you know it would hurt his feelings."
"Love is what makes you smile when you're tired."
"Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK."
"Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more. My mommy and daddy are like that. They look gross when they kiss but they look happy and sometimes they dance in the kitchen while kissing."
"Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen."
"If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate."
"Love is hugging. Love is kissing. Love is saying no."
"When you tell someone something bad about yourself and you're scared she won't love you anymore. But then you get surprised because not only does she still love you, she loves you even more."
"There are 2 kinds of love. Our love. God's love. But God makes both kinds of them."
"Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, then he wears it everyday."
"Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they've know each other so well."
"During my piano recital, I was on a stage and scared. I looked at all the people watching me and saw my daddy waving and smiling. He was the only one doing that. I wasn't scared anymore."
"Love is-if you hold hands and sit beside each other in the cafeteria. That means you're in love. Otherwise, you can sit across from each other and be okay."
"My mommy loves me more than anybody. You don't see anyone else kissing me to sleep at night."
"Love is when mommy gives daddy the best piece of chicken."
"Don't feel so bad if you don't have a boyfriend. There's lots of stuff you can do without one."
"Love is when mommy sees daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Robert Redford."
"If you want somebody to love you, then just be yourself. Some people try to act like somebody else, somebody the boy likes better. I think the boy isn't being very good if he does this to you and you should just find a nicer boy."
"Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day"
"When you're born and see your mommy for the first time.
"Love is what makes people hide in the dark corners of movie theaters."
"Love goes on even when you stop breathing and you pick up where you left off when you reach heaven."
"My enemies taught me how to love."
"I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones."
"You really shouldn't say 'I love you' unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget."
"You have to fall in love before you get married. Then when you're married, you just sit around and read books together."
"I let my big sister pick on me because my Mom says she only picks on me because she loves me. So I pick on my baby sister because I love her."
"Love cards like Valentine's cards say stuff on them that we'd like to say ourselves, but we wouldn't be caught dead saying."
"When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you."
"Love is when mommy sees daddy on the toilet and she doesn't think it's gross."
"You never have to be lonely. There's always somebody to love, even if it's just a squirrel or a kitten."
"You can break love, but it won't die."
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Love
I could fill a thousand pages telling you how I felt and still you would not understand. So now I leave you without a sound except my heart shattering as it hits the ground Love is like an eternal flame,
Once it is lit, it will continue to burn for all time.
Love isn't blind, it just only sees what matters.
Love is a moment that lasts forever...
You will know the real meaning of love when you fall in love.
If a tear fell from my eyes, everytime i wished you were with me
I would have a puddle of fallen wishes at my feet.
Through the wind I hear your voice, in the clouds I see your name.
Living life without you just wouldnt be the same
If you love someone more than anything,
Then distance only matters to the mind, not to the heart.
If i had a single flower for everytime i thought of you i could walk forever in my garden.
When i saw you i was afraid to talk to you...
when i talked to you i was afraid to hold you...
When i hold you i was afraid to love you
Now that i love you im afraid to lose you.
Telling someone you love them comes from the heart
The place that made you love them from the start.
True love never leaves the heart, so if you dont love me now, you didnt love me then.
It is impossible to fall out of love, love is such a powerful emotion,
That once it envelops you, it does not depart.
True love is eternal.
If you think you were once in love but fell out of it, than it wasent love you were in
I ran up the door,shut the stairs,said my pj's and put on my prayers.
I turned off the bed and hopped into the light, all because you kissed me goodnight.
No Boy Is Worth Fightig For, And If You Have To Fight To Get Him,
Than You're Better Off Without Him.
The Hardest Thing In Life Isn't Finding The One You Luv,
Its Making The One You Luv...Luv you Back.
A Cute Guy Can Open Up My Eyes, A Smart Guy Can Open Up My Mind,
But Only A Sweet Guy Can Open My Heart.
I Cry For The Times That You Were Almost Mine,
I Cry For The Memories I've Left Behind,
I Cry For The Pain, The Lost, The Old, the New..
I Now Cry For The Times I Thought I Had You
I don't know weather to smile cause you're happier with her or cry cause you're not mine.
Everyday we tell ourselves we're better off without each other,
B ut then every morning I wake up and realize
I love you more then the day before.
I want to be happy because hes happy
But how can I be happy knowing im not the one making him smile.
Sticks and stones may break my bones and tear my skin apart,
But nothing hurts me more than you,
Because you broke my heart.
It takes 3 seconds to say 'I Love You' but a lifetime to prove it.
Love is friendship, friendship is love.
If love fails, friendship should remain.
For friendship is the foundation of love.
Let your heart guide you...but listen closely because it whispers.
You make me smile for no reason whatsoever,
Y ou make me laugh at the unfunniest things,
B ut most of all, you make me love you...
W hen I shouldn't be loving you.
You will know when you really love someone
When you want him to be happy even if his happiness means you are not a part of it.
Don't be too good i will miss you.
Don't be too caring, I might like you.
Don't be too sweet, I might fall.
It's hard for me to love you when you won't love me after all...
And all for love, and nothing for reward.
A complete need should not exist...
love, life in common with loved ones?
what we love intensely or for a long time
we are likely to bring within the citadel,
and to assert as part of oneself.
A girl without freckles is like a night without stars.
A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. That's basic spelling that every woman ought to know.
A kiss can beautify souls hearts and thoughts.
A kiss can beautify souls hearts and thoughts.
A kiss makes the heart young again and wipes out the years.
A kiss? the renunciation of the heart when one is no longer alone.
A lawful kiss is never worth a stolen one.
A lover fears all that he believes.
A lover without indescretion is no lover at all.
A man is not where he lives, but where he loves.
A meeting between two beings
who complete one another,
who are made for
each other, borders already,
in my opinion, on a miracle.
A part of us remains where ever we have been.
A part of you has grown in me. And so you see, it's you and me
together forever and never apart, maybe in distance, but never in
heart.
A pity beyond all telling
Is hid in the heart of love.
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The Meaning Of Love
The Meaning Of Love The Meaning of Love What exactly is love? Is there an absolute meaning to the word - love? Or is it purely subjective? The concept of true love is what we search for all our lives. Yet love is one of the most misunderstood concepts of all.
What people really want more than anything else is to be loved unconditionally; to be accepted for who we are, and still be loved. Sometimes we will do some crazy things, in the name of love. Love is actually the choice one makes to put someone's wishes, desires and needs above our own. Many people confuse the word love with the meaning of the word want or desire. For example, sometimes when a young man tells the woman of his dreams, I love you, when he means that he wants her because of his own selfish desires. He's the one that may feel all excited over her, but in reality hemay want her because of her physical appearance, or because of her mentality or her ability to make him feel good or important. Notice his primary motive for pursuing her is based on himself and his desires; not on pleasing her, although he may choose to please her, but that's only based upon the fulfillment of his wants. The same goes for a young woman, when she says to the man of her dreams, I love you, she in fact means that she wants him because of his physical appearance, status, mentality or his ability to make her feel good or important. This usage of the word love for the meaning of the word want is ever so present in the way we use and abuse it. Since we are selfish creatures, and our understanding of love is to first be pleased, look at how this word is overused. · I love Papa John's pizza. · I just love Gone with the Wind. · I loved Titanic. · I love Jazz Music. · I love Beethoven. · I love The Island of Dr. Moreau. To better understand the concept of love, lets define the value of love. Love is the most valuable commodity in the world. We all need love just like a fish needs water. Without love, life would not be worth living. With love in our lives, we are empowered beyond belief. Without love in our lives we will shrivel up and die a slow, painful and lonely death. Love is the very essence and core of our being. It is the energy that sustains who and what we are. Everyone in life has a deep-rooted desire to love and be loved. Many times people only recognize love in its emotional form. We might hear people on television say things like, I don't love you anymore, as they express their emotional feelings. However, love is a lot more than what we feel. Love is a spiritual form of energy that can be given or received in physical, emotional, or mental forms. Love usually starts in our thoughts, then spreads to the physical world through our actions, and then it will produce the emotional feelings. For example, it is possible to be angry with our spouse and force ourselves to do something nice for them in our actions, like buying flowers. Pretty soon our emotions kick in and after we see how happy our partner is upon receiving the gift, our emotions will follow. Love is a spiritual gift from a supreme force that starts mentally and finds its way to physical expression, but the emotional feelings we call love have very little to do with what love really is all about. Furthermore, love can also come in healthy and unhealthy forms. Love is an energy that can be used in a positive, healthy manner or a negative, unhealthy manner. There is unconditional love, which is very accepting, supporting and forgiving. There is tough love, which is disciplined, authoritative and conforming. For example, if a father's son were using drugs, he could unconditionally love him and accept his destructive behavior, hoping that he doesn't overdose and die. Or he could use tough love and put him in a rehabilitation hospital in an attempt to save his life. So as a result, too much tough love can be unhealthy, just like too much unconditional love can be unhealthy. The acceptance of love also plays a role in better understanding the concept of love. Many times we give love to our partner the same way we would like to receive it. But loving a person this way might not be in their best interests. If our gift of love fails to promote the good in the other person, they might not like it and reject it. Other times we might expect to be loved by our partners in the same way we were loved as children by our parents. For example, if our parents made us feel loved by buying us things, we might associate loving actions especially in the form of gifts, jewelry, clothes and expensive toys. Our partner could be the most loving, supportive, compassionate, understanding and caring person in the world and it's possible we could overlook their loving intentions if they didn't come from a store. In conclusion, to love others takes effort, and in some cases this can be very hard work. Ideally, we should also be able to love people who we don't particularly like or find attractive. This is not as unreasonable as it may sound, if we understand that love is not just a feeling, but it is expressed when we do something for another person that benefits their spiritual and emotional growth, which in turn helps them realize their full human potential.
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STEP BY STEP - Maha Ghosananda
The suffering of Cambodia has been deep. From this suffering comes great Compassion. Great Compassion makes a Peaceful Heart. A peaceful Heart makes a Peaceful Person. A Peaceful Person makes a Peaceful Community. A Peaceful Community makes a Peaceful Nation. And a Peaceful Nation makes a Peaceful World. May all beings live in Happiness and Peace.
STEP BY STEP - Maha Ghosananda
Meditations on Wisdom and Compassion
Foreward by Dith Pran
Preface by Jack Kornfield
Editor's Introduction
Rarely in human history has a nation been so embroiled in war, autogenocide, forced labor, social engineering, and self-destruction as Cambodia in the late twentieth century. A small tropical country, wedged precariouly on the Southeast Asian peninsula between Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and the South China Sea, Cambodia's history dates back 2,000 years. From the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, known as the Angkor Period or "Golden Age," Cambodian (or Khmer) kings controlled vast portions of the Indochinese peninsula, and led an empire marked by scientific, culture, and religious achievements. Druing other periods, Cambodia fluctuated between independence and being dominated by neighboring states and other foreign governments.
In the mid-nineteenth century the country was colonized by France, becoming part of French Indochina. To insure domestic peace, the French allowed the Khmer kings to remain as symbolic leaders. In 1953, after a century of colonial rule, King Norodom Sihanouk peacefully negotiated Cambodia's independence. In accordance with the sovereignty agreement, the king abdicated his throne and declared himself a candidate for popular election. With overwhelming popular regard for the Khmer royal lineage, the people elected Sihanouk to be head of state and he assumed the title of Prince. For the next decade Cambodia enjoyed independence, peace and prosperity.
By the mid-1960s, North Vietnamese troops had begun establishing hidden sanctuaries in the Cambodian countryside. Prince Sihanouk, citing increased American activity in Vietnam and accusing the U.S of making border incursions into Cambodia, a neutral country, severed economic and military relations with the United States.
In 1969, the U.S. began bombing the Cambodian countryside to destroy North Vietnamese military installations and supply lines. The bombing wreaked havoc on the country's rural population and agrarian economy. Business, military, and intellectual groups began harshly criticizing Prince Sihanouk's policies, and in 1970, while Sihanouk traveled abroad, there was a bloodless coup, ending the centuries-old lineage of monarchs. Lon Nol, a general who had the backing of the Americans, was named by the coup leaders to be head of state.
The new government quickly drafted a formal alliance with the U.S., and the bombings increase in frequency invaded Cambodia, killing and wounding civilians and destroying marketplaces, ricefields, and village in their search for Vietnamese Communists.
The continued bombing, along with the ending of the traditional monarchy, widen the political rift between Cambodia's rural and urban classes. The peasants, who had held the royalty in the highest esteem, found Lon Nol's policies to be ill-conceived and exploitative. In their desenfranchisement lay the seeds of a revolution that would change Cambodia forever.
An indigenous Communist movement had been brewing in Cambodia since the early 1930s. Led by young urban intellectuals, many of whom had studied in Paris along with the Vietnamese Communists, the party saw the growing discontent of the rural population as an opportunity to put their ultra-Marxist theories into practice. As the party's ranks swelled with disaffected peasants and farmers as well as rural adolescents, Prince Sihanouk joined them, and he became their titular head. With this sudden credibility, the Khmer Rouge—as the party came to be known—attracted vital arms support from China. Solath Sar, a young scholar, assumed the leadership, although his identity was hidden from the public. Years later, he was introduced only under his nom de querre, Pol Pot.
Aerial attacks forced the North Vietnamese troops deeper and deeper into cambodia, and they allied themselves with the Khmer Rouge to combat the pro-American forces of Lon Nol. The countryside became decimated, and once-prosperous farmers hasd to forage for food in order to survive. Thousands fled the villages for the security of Phnom Penh, Battambang, and other urban areas.
The U.S military action in Cambodia ended in August 1973, but the civil war continued. The Khmer Rouge took control of an increasing number of towns and villages, often ingratiating themselves to the villagers by launching elaborate civic projects, praising Buddhism, and vilifying Lon Nol.
By the Spring of 1975, Cambodian's cities were in a state of crisis, overwhelmed by the influx of villagers that had tripled their populations. Inflation raged, and displaced families and orphaned children wandered the streets, hopelessly searching for food, medicine, and shelter. Between 1967 and 1975, and estimated on million Cambodians were killed or wounded and two million left homeless. The country that had been known as the "the ricebowl of Indochina" was now on the verge of famine.
On the morning of April 17, 1975 just two weeks before the North Vietnamese marched into Saigon to end the Vietnam War, Khmer Rouge forces had succumbed. Cheers rang through the streets, as many citizens believed that peace had come at last.
But the next day at dawn, the Khmer Rouge declared "Year Zero," the beginning of a new era, and began an extreme program of social reconstsruction. All city dwellers young and old, rich and poor, were to march to the countryside to live and work as peasants.
"Take nothing with you, "the soldiers insisted. "Angka [the Khmer Rouge organization] will provide." Frightened and dewildered, most people obeyed. Many who tried to gather cooking pots, heirlooms, personal items, or foodstuffs were shot. Hospital patients who were too sick to walk were hurled from window. As tensions grew, the Khmer Rouge soldiers offered false encouragement. "You will return in three days. These are only temporary measures." More than three million citizens of all ages were marched to rural communes, and thousands died of heat, exhaustion, thirst, dysentery, and stress.
"Year Zero" and Pol Pot's ultra-Marxism were to be the basis of another glorious "golden age." Angka (not to be confused with Angkor, the ancient empire) soughst to create a self-reliant, pure, classless, agrarian culture. Cities were to be abolished; jungles and fallow fields were to be reclaimed, using elaborate irrigation systems to multiply agricultural yields. The new egalitarian utopia would erase all vestiges of modernization and Western influence. To realize these goals, the Khmer Rouge isolated their country under a thick veil of secercy. Roads on the border were secured and communication was severed.
The Khmer Rouge removed Prince Sihanouk from titular power and placed him under house arrest. The country was divided into eight section leaders. Interpretation of ideology and harshness of discipline varied from sector to sector. Each citizen was assigned to a work unit. traditional peasant dress of loosely-fitting black pajamas and shortly-cropped hair became the norm for all ages and both sexes.
Housing was assigned by Angka. Since th Khmer Rouge had razed many villages while seizing power, these shelters were built without walls to give Khmer Rouge cadres a clear view of household activities.
Manual labor replaced mechanization. All Cambodians became peasant laborers, regardless of age, heatlh, skills, or former profession. Under guard, they silenty cultivated fields with hoes and sickles, ox-carts, and water buffalo, or by hitching themselves to plows. Labor details extended up to eighteeen hours per day, seven days a week. Children as young as three and the very elderly worked alongside able-bodied adults. "Those who work eat," was the inflexible motto. But the outdated farming methods soon produced insufficient rice yeilds, and food had to be rationed strictly—those who were ill and could not work received even less. As food suppllies dwindled, desperate villagers secretly began to forage for roots, leaves, bark, insects, or rats, even though in some sectors the personal gathering of food was a punishable offense.
The Khmer Rouge designed irrigation systems that they hoped would rival the legendary waterworks of the Angkor kingdom. But without the aid of engineers or modern technology, the systems failed. Drinking water became infested, water for crops became scarce, and the already small harvests withered. Malnutrition and overwork took their toll. Starvation, dysentery, cholera, malaria, and stress-related illlnesses abounded. Many villagers became blind from vitamin deficiency. Medical treatment was strictly rationed and limited to traditional folk methods.
To forge the Year Zero and their own control, the Khmer Rouge outlawed almost everything that evoked Cambodia's cultural foundations. Cambodia had been a land steeped in tradition, and among the strongest ties were those of the family. In many sectors, family life was abolished—children lived separately from parents, either in individual quarters or on work sites miles away. In many cases families lost all contact with one another.
Even in sectors where families remained intact, community concerns took precedence, and the traditional order of respect was inverted. Children, "unspoiled vessels of Angka," were granted authority over adults. Children could issue work assignments to adults and were encouraged to report on adults' violations of Angka's policies. Parents lost the right to choose mates for their children. Khmer Rouge cadres arranged and performed all marriages, and revolutionary ceremonies replaced Buddhist rituals. Weddings were often held in the fields so that work flow would not be interrupted. Young couples who met secretly without Angka's sanction were punished. In some instances, the naked corpses of young lovers were displayed in public places, offering a grim reminder not to challenge Angka.
Private lives and feelings remained under close scrutiny. One could be severely punished simply for complaining. In many instances people were forced to watch in silence as their loved ones were murdered, since to cry out would be to question Angka's judgment. Memories, too, were forbidden. Since Year Zero marked the dawn of new time, sentimental yearnings were considered to be a hindrance to progress. One could be punished for speaking of the Buddha, the king, or days gone by. Singing old songs or telling old tales was considered a crime against the state. "Angka is like a pineapple," people were told.
"Its eyes can see in all directions."
"What is infected must be cut out," became the philosophy for social "purification." Those who challenged Angka's political position or those found to be from less than "pure" peasant stock were to be systematically eliminated. Singled out for extinction were members of former government and military operations, monks and nuns, ethnic minorities, and anyone who had received formal education. Executions often took place without trials. In extreme cases, fair skin, the wearing of eyeglasses, or speaking in a non-peasant dialect was sufficient cause for execution.
"To keep you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss," the Khmer Rouge declared. To survive, families shed their former identities and fabricated elaborate details of past residence, lifestyle, and profession. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, and business leaders feigned knowledge of farming, hoping to avoid the horror of mass execution. In severe cases, whole families, including infants, were killed and buried together in mass graves.
To enforce its power, Angka sponsored regular and involuntary indoctrinational sessions, called "educational meetings," to proclaim the glories of the state. At times villagers who had violated rules were paraded before meetings for public humiliation or corporal punishment. Thousands of "incorrigibles" were shipped to re-education centers and subjected to meager rations, hard labor, and torture. At Tuol Sleng, a former high school in Phnom Penh, thousands of photographs and detailed records provide evidence of over 12,000 deaths—men, women, and children hanged, drowned, disemboweled, mutilated, or electrocuted by Khmer Rouge cadres.
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