The Eternal Debate About Value

Over the last few months, I noticed one particular thing:

What is value, anyway? And has "value" always existed, or is this category something peculiar to capitalism? And wait, what does all this have to do with commodity production?

One question opened my mind to the next, but where are the answers?

The Question Of Questions: What Is Value?

Many Marxists already fail at this "simple" question, what actually is value in Marxist economic theory? 

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.

-Karl Marx: Capital: Critique Of The Political Economy  

Is the introductory sentence of Marx's work "Das Kapital" and already contains a lot of explanations about "value", first it is said that only in capitalist societies wealth occurs as an "accumulation of commodities" so ergo in no other social form, outside of capitalism (this is already an incredibly important point, but more about that later). The unit, i.e. the measure in which this wealth is measured, is the single commodity, so Marx starts with an analysis of the commodity, so we already know here that the commodity will later be important for our definition and idea of value. In the German original, the word "appears" (erscheint) is chosen here instead of the word "prevails". Michael Heinrich explains in his book "How to Read Marx's Capital" wonderfully why this word is so important, if wealth appears only as a collection of commodities, it could be the case, that wealth also appears in other forms, that is, appears in several other forms. This assertion will prove true later when we take a closer look at the commodity- and value-form.

But what is a commodity? This is also a question which, funnily enough, many Marxists fail at. The derivation is quite simple, a commodity is exchanged (against other commodities, against money, does not play a big role here for the time being), it has a certain value, which can be represented in other commodities. Two of the bad cheap beers in the fridge of my best friend from my university might be worth one of my good wheat beers from Bamberg. Or 1kg of steel can be exchanged for 2kg of cement and so on. So two units of cheap beer can be expressed in one unit of Hefeweizen. If we had e.g. a society in which one pays with cheap beer (to which the German or generally European society sometimes comes very close), my wheat beer would be worth two cheap beers, that would be its price then in this society. But why do we need goods at all? 

Well normally me and my friends consume vast amounts of cheap beer and wheat beer on our campus, so goods have a certain use, beer can be drunk, burgers can be eaten, steel can be used to build things and cement too. So goods have both use- and exchange-value.

Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance (in German Inhalt which rather translates to "content" - F.M.) of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories (German Träger which translates to English "bearers" -F.M.) of exchange value.

-Karl Marx: Capital: Critique Of The Political Economy 

Use-value forms the content of value, regardless of its "social form" (hereby, of course, the exchange value is meant). The use-value of my beer is its material composition (i.e. beer, although breweries cannot be completely trusted nowadays). A beer will always be a beer, no matter in what society it is encountered. In capitalist society, however, beer becomes a commodity, it can be exchanged or more specifically, bought and sold. The "social form" of cheap beer that we are constantly talking about is ergo that it can be exchanged for other commodities and this is also what is meant by the assertion "use values are the carriers of exchange-values" because different use-values (the content of value, we remember) are exchanged with each other and thus receive exchange-values in the next step (the social form of value, we remember again). 

There can be exchange-values only in a society in which (mass) exchange takes place, when exchange becomes the rule and not only the exception, use-values get exchange-values attributed to them, so my friend's cheap beer can be expressed in other commodities. Two of his cheap beers are attributed the value "one wheat beer" and vice versa. Only in capitalism goods get an exchange-value, because only in capitalism (mass) exchange is the norm, only there the "commodity form" is created, only there goods become commodities. So we arrive at the assertion: The social form of wealth is exactly this "commodity form".

The Issue with Exchange-Value

What now? We know that the products of labor appear as commodities in capitalist society, so what statements can we now make about value?

Let's add a third commodity to our equation, a bottle of rum can be exchanged for 6 cheap beers. We know that 2 cheap beers can be exchanged for one wheat beer, so 6 cheap beers are exchangeable for 3 wheat beers. So you could exchange one bottle of rum for 6 cheap beers and then exchange them for 3 wheat beer, the value of a bottle of rum can also be expressed in 3 wheat beer. So what do 3 wheat beer, a bottle of rum and 6 cheap beers have in common? We would now immediately say that "they have the same value".

Okay, now it would be an incredibly big mistake to say they contain the same amount of labor time. Marx's economic theory is most often referred to as "labor theory of value", rephrased bringing up labor time as a quantitative measure of value, so my wheat beer costs "2 hours of labor" (and one cheep beer 1 hour of labor and one bottle of rum would be 6 hours of labour) in that sense. But, these 2 hours of labor are the value of the product of labor and not the value of the beer as a commodity and this is the big "problem" of many Marxists today, they try to measure value of commodities in labor time or other quantitative units. But we know from before, the value of commodities has a social form and not a "material-technical" one and this social form is "price". However, if we assume that value can be measured independently of its social form, what would be the consequence of this argument? Value and price would have to be "transformable" into each other, i.e. one would have to be able to transform x amount of value into x amount of price and price into value somehow. The so-called transformation problem is an incredibly complicated topic and would go completely beyond the scope of this entry, so we will leave it at this question and look at the "solution" of the problem without going into the other proposed solutions.

What makes Marx's Theory Different From Others?

When Marx formulated his economic critique of capitalism, he wanted to not only deviate from his predecessors, but to reject them completely and get out of their "circle of thought". In Smith and Ricardo, the commodity has a value expressed in labor time; they pretty much take the standpoint we posed above before posing the question with the transformation problem. However, we started from a simple case before, we compared goods under capitalism and from that we determined the form of the commodity, further we kind of introduced the money form and introduced other concepts, we ran from one stage of the analysis to the next. These stages are not historical developments but a conceptual one (as Michael Heinrich and John Milios both correctly explain). Thus, the transformation of values into prices of production is also conceptual and not historical or empirical. It makes no sense for us to think of the substance of value as something empirical or independent from its social form, value only makes sense as a concept in capitalist society.

Without determining their exact level, values show what prices are. Values ‘as such’ cannot be measured quantitatively, and it is even more impossible to specify the level of any value at all as such, taken in isolation. Values are expressed through their forms of appearance: prices. That is, their expression is mediated through money

-John Milios: Rethinking Marx's Value-Form Analysis from an Althusserian Perspective, Culture & Society 

However, we have not yet fully established the substance of this value.

The general value-form, in which all the products of labour are presented as mere congealed quantities of undifferentiated human labour, shows by its very structure that it is the social expression of the world of commodities.

 -Karl Marx: Capital: Critique Of The Political Economy

Let us analyse this quote briefly. The general value form, what is meant by it? Below I will present some screenshots from Chris Arthur's blog that I think represent the value form very well:

We notice just there that commodity-form and value-form go hand in hand, only if there is the commodity-form, such complex value forms can come into existence and so we conclude that the commodity-form is thus the core of the capitalist mode of production.

In the general value form, products of labor appear as "congealed" quantities of equal human labor, what exactly does Marx mean with this now?

With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labour, the useful character of the kinds of labour embodied in them also disappears; this in tum entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labour. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract.

Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them in each case but the same phantom-like objectivity [gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit]; they are merely congealed quantities [Gallerte] of homogeneous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure.

-Karl Marx: Capital: Critique Of The Political Economy

In exchange, the useful character of the commodity disappears, they become mere exchange-values. The use of the commodity is created by the concrete labor behind it. A brewer creates beer, a computer scientist programs software, and a steelworker creates steel. In principle, we exchange concrete labors for each other. But because the useful character of the commodity disappears during exchange -and thus also the concrete labor behind the commodity- and it becomes only an exchange-value, all concrete labor is reduced to the same kind of labor. "Abstract labor" is born.

Although this term sounds hellish in the first place, the concept behind it is not so complicated. There is now nothing in the products of labor that are to be exchanged, everything concrete has been abstracted away, they have become mere exchange-values, however there is still something behind them, a "phantom-like objectivity": They are reduced to the same, homogenous mass of human labor. This form of labor, abstract labor, is the substance of value, it constitutes the value of the commodity.

So we can conclude for now, that value is a social relation. Abstract labor arises in the exchange, or rather mass exchange, of commodities, where the concrete character of the commodity (its use-value) is abstracted in favour of its exchange-value. Such forms of value and the commodity form can exist only if there is a society in which exchange is the rule, not the exception.

On the subject of value, I can gladly recommend the works of Michael Heinrich and John Milios, they make excellent introductions to Marx's das Kapital and are written in very understandable language. With that, we move to the next topic: emergence of capitalism and the historical limitation of value.

What Are The Origins Of Capitalism?

How did the commodity form come into being in the first place? The emergence of capitalism is where the problems of many Marxists pile up like nowhere else. We will look below at a brief overview of a widespread but very wrong thesis about the emergence of capitalism.

Commercialisation Theory And Its Problems

According to many Marxists, capitalism or commodity production has always been there somewhere. Whether in the antiquity on slave markets or on farmers' markets in feudalism, commodity production and the categories connected with it always existed! Capitalism was always "there" it only had to be freed from its chains, as soon as this happens, as soon as e.g. the feudalistic lords and their restrictions on trade and their enslavement of the peasants ended and disappeared, commodity production could develop freely and lead us to what we call capitalist mode of production. In this sense, capitalism was the highest stage of a process that had been unfolding for millennia. After all, there was some kind of market and commodity production and stuff back then.... right?

With or without a natural inclination to 'truck, barter, and exchange' (in Adam Smith's famous formulation), rationally self-interested individuals have been engaging in acts of exchange since the dawn of history. These acts became increasingly specialized with an evolving division of labour, which was also accompanied by technical improvements in the instruments of production.

-Ellen Meiksins Wood: The Origin of Capitalism - A Longer View

This thesis about the origin of capitalism is already very problematic. On the one hand, it assumes that capitalism has always existed somewhere in human nature or in the past in order to explain the emergence of capitalism. That which has to be proven is thus already assumed to be correct, it is a circular explanation that leads to no result.

On the other hand the market is always represented as "opportunity". "As soon as people were freed from their chains (i.e. old ways of production), they created a market or entered into market-like relationships with each other!" In short: Man is a rational creature, he always strives for the greatest possible profit or benefit or whatever. This thesis is again very problematic. On the one hand it presupposes a human nature, the human being and/or the human society is however heterogeneous, if one tries to postulate a human essence one will again and again encounter the problem that it does not apply to all individuals, that there are again and again massive deviations and - most importantly - that this "human essence" differs again and again extremely from historical to historical social formation. Furthermore, let's ask ourselves again: Is the market really a way to get rich and maximise profits? Or does it rather force us to do so? 

In classical capitalist theories, the market was a force (like Smith's "invisible hand" for example) that made producers and consumers act rationally, for example to maximise utility or opportunities and profits. However, they ignored the fact that profits and the production of goods in general presupposed the exploitation of workers - and not only that.

The market dictates us, it pushes us back and forth like numbers in a matrix. Individuals must necessarily enter the market to gain access to their means of reproduction, such as food or water, so all individuals are forcibly linked together by market relations. They begin to regulate not only our economy but our social relations themselves. Human relations now appear as relations of commodities, they become "reified". With the entry into commodity production and its determination of our social relations now arises the so-called "commodity fetishism", social relations appear as things, value as price, relations between concrete forms of labor as commodities and the capitalist as capital itself. So we see, the market is a constraint and we need to emphasise this, because this important point is lost in the commercialisation theory that is unfortunately still held by many Marxists.

Let us briefly summarise again: When Marxists claim that small producers, such as artisans or middle peasants, etc., were just waiting to be freed from the shackles of feudalism in order to then produce goods and get capitalist production going, they are advocating a false theory that has its origins in liberal theories such as humanism and philosophy of the Enlightenment. Even if arguments are brought like "through trade with the colonies a bourgeoisie developed in the medieval cities, which was oppressed by feudal lords and only had to be freed!" these are to be assigned to the commercialisation theory. Here it is claimed that the development of capitalism was external to the feudalist mode of production. Apart from the fact that trade was a relatively minor aspect of feudalism and the great trade with the colonies riped completely after the development of capitalism (e.g., after the English Enclosure Acts in the 16th-17th centuries), we must look at feudalist production and its internal contradictions to learn how capitalist production and its laws of motion emerged from them. Maurice Dobb and Rodney Howard Hilton laid a foundation of this theory, Robert Brenner made another incredibly important step in explaining the development of capitalism without committing the errors of the commercialisation theory, now we will analyze them as well.

The Debate About Transition

In 1950, a debate broke out between Paul Sweezy and Maurice Dobb, about where the main movement towards capitalism took place and where its origins lie. Dobb and Hilton made an important argument, claiming that the emergence of capitalism, that is, the emergence of the capitalist laws of movement must be found within feudalism. The main point here is that the root of the emergence of capitalism is in the class struggle, between feudal lords and peasants, while they also claimed that trade and the emergence of cities were not foreign to feudalism but even very peculiar to it, they were part of the feudalist mode of production and cannot be considered as an "external concept". However, they also said that capitalism arose from the liberation of the so-called "small production" that is, the production of goods by peasants and small craftsmen. However, here we already see the original problem reappearing in parts, "capitalism develops when the small producer of goods is freed from the shackles of feudalism" and we again encounter parts of the commercialisation model. Sweezy meanwhile was completely consistent with the commercialisation theory with his arguments, he claimed that feudalism with all its faults was nevertheless flexible to internal changes and contradictions and it was trade and other external factors in the end that brought feudalism to its knees, especially the introduction of overseas trade, local trading ports etc. had ensured that production for exchange expanded, which opposed the feudalist principle of production for utility. His second point was, broadly, that the generalisation of commodity production did not immediately lead to the emergence of capitalism, as it did in the bourgeois republics of the Middle Ages, Flanders, and medieval Italy in general, Sweezy contended -in contrast to Dobb's argument that feudalism fell because of the over-exploitation of peasants and the resulting class conflicts- capitalism arose because of the lack of control by the ruling class and the resulting resort to the exploitation of labor.

Be that as it may, it should become relatively clear that Sweezy was defending the commercialisation model and Dobb was attacking it, however, Dobb could not completely break away from the model's system and retained elements of it. We more or less conclude that we cannot look at the emergence of capitalism by enumerating what obstacles prevented its development, but we must consider, or as Wood summarises it:

The question posed about Flanders or Italy is not so much why and in what circumstances did capitalist imperatives impose themselves on economic actors, as they did in England, but rather why and in what ways were economic actors in the 'failed' transitions unwilling or unable - not least for ideological or cultural reasons - to break away from their attachment to feudalism in order to create a new social form?

-Ellen Meiksins Wood: The Origin of Capitalism - A Longer View

This question remained largely unanswered until Robert Brenner gave new impulse to the debate.

The Brenner Debate

Brenner's article "Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe" tried to attack that model:

Brenner concluded that there was no already existing capitalism, even in embryonic form, to challenge feudalism - and this applied not only to pre-capitalist forms of trade but also to petty commodity production treated, in the manner of Dobb and Hilton, as a kind of proto-capitalism.

 -Ellen Meiksins Wood: The Origin of Capitalism - A Longer View

Brenner did not make the mistake of looking, like Sweezy, at the external conditions of feudalism or, like Dobb and Hilton, of presupposing capitalism in the internal conditions of feudalism. Particularly in the development of capitalism in England, Brenner took an interesting thesis: he claimed that the particular conditions of England and the contradiction between peasants and lords -who sought to reproduce themselves as they existed- had involuntarily set in motion the capitalist laws of movement and subjected them to market imperatives. Brenner's argument is very limited to the material conditions of England; different countries in Europe had different paths to capitalism.

The English landlords did not necessarily need more economic power -for they already had much of the land- so they focused more on the productivity of their tenants, they did not need to exploit them to get more surplus value, like the French aristocracy. Besides, the relationship between tenants and landlords slowly took the form of economic contracts, which were not determined by fixed laws but by a market. More and more tenants were subjected to market imperatives, not because they saw them as an "opportunity" or a way to rise from small producer to capitalist, but because they were forced to specialise for a market and enter into competition to secure the means of their reproduction. Peasants who owned their own land were exempt from this competition because they were not dependent on the market and were self-sufficient, even if they occasionally sold goods at a market.

These conditions set in motion the engine of the capitalist laws of movement in England. Brenner's approach was really good, he also gives an answer to Sweezy's problem in his article, the petty producers (the tenants in this case) did not "rise" to the ranks of capitalists but they were capitalists from the beginning, their special conditions, their relations to the means of production and to other people made them so, they and their wage labourers were immediately subjected to market imperatives.

However, the question still remains open, what happened to the other European states, how has capitalism developed there now? What can be said about it?

Marx and Primitive Accumulation

Marx also has a chapter on primitive accumulation in the first volume of Das Kapital. The fundamental problem was that capital needed surplus-value to accumulate, but surplus-value presupposed capitalist production, and capitalist production again presupposed large masses of commodities and labor in the hands of commodity producers. We have a problematic cycle here, Marx's solution now was to find an accumulation which does not spring from this cycle but is its starting point, the so-called "primitive" accumulation.

At this point we have to stop for a moment, I am aware that Marx has two different explanations for the origin of capitalism in his works, an example from "The German Ideology":

Besides the premises already mentioned manufactures depend on an already advanced concentration of population, particularly in the countryside, and of capital, which began to accumulate in the hands of individuals, partly in the guilds in spite of the guild regulations, partly among the merchants.

-Karl Marx: The German Ideology (Part 1, C)

In other places, too, Marx shows that he still has a classical understanding of transition. In "Das Kapital" and "Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie", however, one notices a quite different view:

In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this transformation itself can only take place under certain circumstances that centre in this, viz., that two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values they possess, by buying other people’s labour power; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own labour power, and therefore the sellers of labour.

-Karl Marx: Capital: Critique Of The Political Economy

This paragraph shows a fundamentally different picture than "The German Ideology", Marx says that commodities and money only really become capital when they exist under certain conditions, namely commodity production, but why is that exactly the case? It all has to do with abstraction.

In "Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie" Marx explains why abstraction is not equal to abstraction, he distinguishes more precisely between formal or simple abstraction (i.e. in principle logical abstraction, more on this later) and "true abstraction". Jairus Banaji in his book "Theory as History" brings the example of "wage labor" to explain the two kinds of abstraction. I refer to his book but will apply the same scheme now to capital as Marx did in the third chapter of Grundrisse.

First we must consider what is meant by simple abstraction and what is meant by "true" abstraction. Simple abstraction is abstracting from concrete things, in this case, for example, a country, population, or trade. We abstract further, where there is trade, there is also money (or a medium of exchange), there is also production, exchange, a division of labor, etc. For example, how did “capital” appear at that time? As tools or as money or as products of exchange, thus we can say capital occured as money capital or as trade capital, capital in this case could be something like "circulating value", that would be the simple-abstract definition of capital, it existed for centuries and is therefore also not specific to capitalism. Here we have arrived by the mere abstraction of the circulation of money or commodities, capital however is more than just that, because if we now look at capital in capitalism, then we notice something, if we want to go from our abstract definition back to the concrete: Capital is "self-valorising value" in capitalist society, i.e. value whose only aim is to increase its own sum of value, the added amount of value we call surplus value in order to obtain surplus value we need general commodity production and exploitation in the labor process, this presupposes capitalist, social property relations etc. Capital becomes abstract in capitalism, but truly abstract so that it also becomes truly concrete, that is, a unity of diverse (as Marx says in Grundrisse). It is drawn onto a level with commodity production, value and labor, which are also all abstract, i.e. historically specific, social relations, so capital also becomes a historically specific, social relation.

Not only that but we see the creation of capitalists, capital personified, which is something entirely unique to capitalism, the fetishism of commodities, the inversion of thing and person.

Nothing can turn money or commodities into capital except social relations, no exploitation or accumulation or trade creates capitalism, only the change of relations of production can achieve this and therein lies the crux of Marx's original accumulation, the historical specificity of the categories.

Summary

We have now explored the origins and basis of capitalism. We have discovered that the categories of value, commodity production, labor, capital, etc. are historically particular and tied to the capitalist conditions of production. This discovery is important because it gives us a consensus about the fate of these categories under socialism and about overcoming capitalism.

Implications for Socialism

We need to imagine what socialism is to us in the first place. Of course, we could now start to define socialism by enumerating and abstracting some characteristics... But this is not directly my goal, instead I take a different approach:

Socialism is the negation of capitalism, accordingly socialism must be everything capitalism is not. Thus, as part of a historical mode of production that is not capitalism, it cannot have the characteristic things that make up the bourgeois mode of production. Socialism cannot have commodity production, "value," money form, commodity form, wage labor....

What place then does communism have for us? Socialism and communism have roughly the same status as "pre-monopoly (competitive) capitalism" and monopoly capitalism (imperialism). Socialism is a lower stage of communism, what does that mean concretely? Marx already expresses this in the "Critique of the Gotha Program", a communist society which has just arisen from the capitalist order. In it, the capitalist forms of production do not exist, but what exists is “bourgeois law.” Workers receive back, after certain deductions, exactly what they have given to society, they get a certificate that they have done a certain amount of work and then draw from the communal funds the consumer goods they need. Nothing else can be appropriated here except consumer goods (which is not really appropriation). Labor is measured in equal units, which is however also problematic because labor is not equal to labor, workers are not equal to workers (some may have families, different skills, abilities etc.) As Marx indicated, this equal right is -in reality- an unequal right, because the individual differences of the workers are simply ignored. With the equal work input, someone could theoretically receive more from the communal funds than others, due to natural privileges, so he becomes intrinsically richer. This problem will be abolished only in the higher phase of the communist society, where "each according to his needs, each according to his abilities" is the guiding law of production.

Difficulties with other Conceptions of Socialism

The concept of socialism was in constant change, with the fall of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in the USSR (whether that was in 1928 or 1956 etc. I shall leave aside, what matters is the following argument). Even within Lenin’s works themselves, the concept of socialism underwent a great change, his vision and the reality of the Russian Revolution were two very different worlds and this issue has been the object of his writings. One of the big questions was how to deal with the gigantic amounts of peasants in the USSR (the so-called agrarian question). It turned out to be fundamentally important for the revolution in Russia, because without the alliance with the peasants (the absolute majority of the population in Russia at that time), Soviet power could not sustain itself, Lenin was fully aware of that. However, what still became a big problem was the backwardness of the countryside, compared to the development of the cities and, of course, the neighbouring European countries. How does one overcome the lack of agrarian capital in the countryside and the lacking industrialisation of agriculture? After the failure of war communism, there was a need for other solutions, the implemented idea became the so-called "New Economic Policy ''. The dispute over the agrarian question ended in the Stalinist collectivisation and the fall of the alliance between workers and peasants (I will write a separate issue on this, this needs much more attention than the few lines that I want to/can give!).

It is important not to identify socialism with the dictatorship of the proletariat, because socialism must not and cannot contain elements of capitalism, its peculiarities. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat will necessarily contain elements of capitalism, it will take a long time until the categories of bourgeois production are abolished.

How does one “abolish” Value?

This now is a difficult question. How do you eliminate "value"? We have spent a long time exploring its creation, but not its elimination. Roughly speaking, value is based on mass exchange of commodities so that complex forms of value can form. This mass exchange is only made possible by the fact that there are massive amounts of individual producers who can sell goods on a market and mobilise gigantic amounts of productive forces to produce and exchange more. In the market, buyers of commodities and sellers of commodities meet, those who own the means of production and those who are separated from them. A word that is always prevalent is "separation" or in the form of "dispersed", "decentralised" and this is precisely the essence of capitalism: separation. Separation of producers from each other, separation of the working masses from the means of production (or initially separation of artisans, artisans from the means of production).

Thus, the absolute basis of the elimination of the forms of value lies in the centralisation of the means of production, the association of free producers, the merging of the working masses and centralised means of production. With this, the need for exchange is also slowly eliminated, the centralisation of the means of production makes market imperatives obsolete, from thereon society acts according to a central plan that ensures the supply of it. Communism is an association of free producers.

It is equally important to teach people to organise themselves; self-organisation of labor is an important step toward the principle of "each according to his needs, each according to his work" from which communism rises. Capitalist discipline must be eradicated, it must no longer be the compulsion to work for food that is the guiding motive of work, but the satisfaction of social needs. Once these foundations are laid (or beginning to be laid), there will be resistance from the bourgeoisie, that is very clear, but even until we can lay the foundations there is still a long way to go for the proletariat and its vanguard, the path of revolution still lies -open- before us.