Fundamentals of Political Economy by Martin Robertson

Author:Martin Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

The Socialist System of State Ownership Is the Main Economic Basis of Proletarian Dictatorship

The Proletariat and the Laboring People Must Control the Means of Production

In the past several thousand years, the fundamental reason for the exploitation and oppression of the laboring people by the slave owner, the feudal landlord, and the capitalist was that the means of production were not in the hands of the laboring people. “In order to force people to engage in any form of slave labor, it is necessary to assume that the oppressor controls the means of production. Only by relying on these means of production can the enslaved be manipulated.” (1) Successive generations of laboring people launched various forms of struggle in an attempt to take the means of production into their own hands, but for historical reasons, all their attempts failed. In capitalist society, the proletariat nurtured and tempered by capitalist big industries began to emerge. This class lost all control over the means of production. Aside from the chains on his neck, the worker had absolutely nothing else. With the increasing intensification of the contradictions between the private character of capitalist ownership of the means of production and the social character of production, the possibility of the proletariat controlling the means of production developed.

However, the exploiting class is never willing to give up exploitation. They not only abused the state machinery to protect their private ownership of the means of production, but also concocted all sorts of fallacies in the ideological sphere. For example, they said that the poverty of the worker was due to the rapid increase in population, the lack of a “just and reasonable principle of distribution,” and so forth, vainly attempting to deceive and dupe the laboring people so they would not touch the bourgeois ownership of the means of production or control the means of production. The revolutionary teachers of the proletariat denounced this sort of fallacy. They pointed out that the root cause of the exploitation and enslavement of the laboring people was that the means of production were not in the hands of the laboring people but were instead in the hands of the exploiting class. The first sentence in the “Gotha Program” written during the workers’ movement of Germany in the 1870s under the influence of Lassalle was: “Labor is the source of all wealth and culture.” On the surface, “labor” was accorded a very high position, but Marx at once saw the theoretical error of this statement. He pointed out that labor could create wealth and culture only by combining with the means of production. Without the means of production and without ownership of the means of production, what would happen to labor? Marx sharply pointed out: “A person who has no other property besides his labor power will always be enslaved by other people who possess the means of production, regardless of the society or culture. He can labor and exist only at the mercy of other people.” (2) The theory of

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