Marxism, as the science of social evolution, identifies class struggle as the means by which one form of social organism evolves into another. As with biological evolution, the organisms which evolve are those best adapted to changed material conditions, and vice versa. The basis of class struggle is the antagonistic relation between different forms of property, and the social classes that represent their personification.
Industrial capital arises, naturally, as a new form of property, out of the expansion of commodity production and exchange. Competition between commodity producers leads to winners and losers, and, at that stage of development, where markets are big enough to support large-scale production, the winners become large-scale producers by taking over the means of production of their failed competitors. Where, in the past, those failed producers would have become slaves, serfs, servants or paupers, now, the successful producers employ them as wage workers, buying their labour-power as a commodity, and, so, extracting surplus value in production. The means of production become capital, the producer becomes a capitalist, and the labourer becomes a proletarian.
However, a large number of small producers remain in existence, as neither proletarian nor bourgeois. They are petty-bourgeois, and form a wide social layer between these two main opposing class camps. A small proportion continue to be promoted into the ranks of the bourgeoisie, just as some of the bourgeois are demoted into the ranks of the petty-bourgeoisie. But, more of the petty-bourgeoisie are ruined, and sink into the proletariat than move in the other direction. A large proportion simply stagnate, unable to move up, just clinging to their independent existence, dependent on, and subordinated to, large-scale capital, often obtaining lower incomes, and worse conditions than wage workers, and forced to “sweat” any wage workers, or family labour, they employ, in order to survive. In less developed economies, the peasants form such a social layer.
In analysing the material conditions in Russia, the Marxists had identified these different social classes, and, therefore, the path of evolution underway, as it evolved towards capitalism out of feudalism and Tsarism. A similar path of social evolution could be determined for China. In both Russia and China, the bourgeoisie itself was relatively small. The large-scale industrial capital, in both countries, was often foreign owned, and the domestic bourgeoisie was clearly tied to this imperialist capital, and, so, to imperialism itself. As Trotsky points out, the foreign imperialists helped finance the Russian bourgeois-liberals to overthrow Tsarism, which, for them, was an expensive anachronism, continuing to inhibit the rational development of capitalism in Russia, and draining resources from it.
For a political revolution to bring the political and juridical superstructure into alignment with the changed social relations, however, physical numbers are important. The bourgeoisie is always very flexible in being able to prosper, whatever the political regime, be it aristocracy, constitutional monarchy, Bonapartism, bourgeois-democracy or fascism. As Lenin describes, it prefers a parliamentary democracy, because it gives it the most direct and efficient means of controlling its state, so as to exercise its social dictatorship.
“Another reason why the omnipotence of “wealth” is more certain in a democratic republic is that it does not depend on defects in the political machinery or on the faulty political shell of capitalism. A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and, therefore, once capital has gained possession of this very best shell (through the Palchinskys, Chernovs, Tseretelis and Co.), it establishes its power so securely, so firmly, that no change of persons, institutions or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it.”
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