The Dialectics of History

Jason W. Smith was graduated with a B.A. in anthropology from California State University, Los Angeles, in 1968, and received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Calgary in North American archaeology in 1974. He authored his first textbook in 1976, Foundations of Archaeology, (Glencoe Press, Beverly Hills, 569 pp.) and his most recent in 1999, New Perspectives in Physics, (Premier Books, Boise, 160 pp.) Dr. Smith taught in several universities from 1971 through 1976. In 1977 he fought with the Rebel Army in Peru. Afterwards he spent nearly three years as a prisoner of the Peruvian puppet military dictatorship. Begining in 1980, he became a petroleum engineer, oilman, and an international financier.

(1) Life on Earth has suffered several periods of catastrophic devastation. The one we know the most about in terms of causation is the most recent one when an asteroid impacted the Earth in the vicinity of Merida, in the Mexican State of Yucatan. Afterwards every animal species in the world with an adult size above about 65 pounds was extinct; along with many smaller ones on the land and in the sea.

(2) During the Palaeocene and Eocene the consequences of a life in the bushes and trees brought about a new kind of prosimian. This is what is called the arboreal adaptation. One of the early fossil prosimian primates is an early Lemur called Plesiadapis. These arose after tree shrews which still had claws instead of flat nails. All primates other than a few of these prosimians lost claws in favor of nails.

(3) We see the change of the location of the eye orbits beginning to occur, so that binocular stereoscopic vision replaces the lateral orbit monocular eyesight of the insectivores and the lower prosimians. But the flat nails, precision grip, and binocular vision, are simply associated features of arboreal adaptive anatomy. What is really important is that there is an enlarged cerebellum associated with this increase in the visual and motor cortex. These traits were obviously caused by the rigorous natural selection that accompanied life in the trees and high bushes.

The Family Adapidae is the second level of fossil Lemur and is important to us because it shows the eyes truly in a forward position meaning that the transition to binocular vision was complete. -And, the fossil family Northarctidae shows excellent prosimian to monkey characteristics by middle Eocene times.

However, since erroneous DNA duplication keeps throwing up variation in the form of abnormal individuals, each species will generate aberrant forms; some of these will prove adept at living within some particular environment. Some will not. When environmental change does come there is a broader spectrum of responses proposed by biology to the dispositional effect of nature. Thus, the increasing reliance upon the new and improved primate brain led onward and upward among some individuals to monkeyhood.

Fully developed fossil monkeys have been excavated in Egypt and are now known from many localities. These are called Aegyptopithecus. They have by far the best organized brains of any primate to date. They are larger than the lower prosimians from which they evolved. We find them in Oligocene times.

(7) The important ball to keep your eye on is the one named cerebellum and brain reorganization in favor of abstract thought. This is the really important change going on in the line leading to humanity. Once humans are extant on the face of the Earth it will be the continuing expansion of the brain to handle "culture" which is the defining diagnostic criterion.

{Culture in anthropology refers to the means of production (technology), relations people enter into to use tools in production (social organization) which taken together is called the Mode of Production (Arts of Subsistence) upon which arise the ideas that people have about themselves in their primitive consciousness (and the world around them) that we call the superstructure or "ideological" component of culture. Culture is then a tri-partite concept. It is the central concept in the science of Anthropology. It is supra-organic with both tangible and intangible aspects. -And, it is cumulative in nature as it continues as "learned" behavior in each successive generation.}

(8) The split of the hominoid elements out of the anthropoid ape stock probably occurred between 10 and 7 million years ago. The term hominoid I use to include the still largely missing fossil data that links the anthropoid apes to the hominids. There is a lot of sloppy terminology in the professional as well as the popular literature, but for your purposes think of "ominid"asthe line beginning with Homo as a genus.

The hominoid transitional stage is not yet very well known in the fossil record. We have not yet been able to identify stone tools for them. Logically, however, we must assume that they used natural stones as do contemporary chimpanzees for throwing, cutting and crushing. Some day we will find these stones and perhaps the first barely worked ones also in sealed stratigraphic components.

(9) The Human Sexual Revolution: Human sexuality required the revolutionizing of the biology of the sexual system. Three hundred sixty five day a year female receptivity to male advances is what separates the hominids from the hominoids (Homo from the Anthropoid Ape stock.) It provided assured group life for the obvious reason that you can't have the best sexual pleasure without a partner.

For the advantages of group life it doesn't often matter what sex your partner(s) in the group may be - therefore, we know that homosexuality is as good as heterosexuality for purposes of agglutinating the group. This explains why Pygmy Chimps in the Congo exhibit Lesbian conduct; i.e., it helps hold the chimpanzee band together just as well as "straight" conduct - perhaps even better when added as an additional activity within the female sexual repertoir.

The Law of Human sexuality is that it has always been primarily for purposes of social organization and never primarily for purposes of reproduction. This is a critically important difference between functions for you to grasp. Remember for purposes of reproduction there were always plenty of males to impregnate the females - so the dramatic change in sexual biology, especially of the females, requires some "non-reproductive" explanation; this is it.

(10) The Speech Revolution: Speech is rudimentary in many animals including the chimps and gorillas in the sense that they make noises that communicate ideas. They have abstract thought capability to make words and sentences but they don't have the physiological ability to enunciate the phonemes (the fundamental units of sound) to make the morphemes (the fundamental units of meaning) which constitute words. This required an anatomical change in the throat and voice box. Such anatomical change requries genetic selection over a long period of time. That genetic selection had to occur no later than about seven to five million years ago among the hominoids.,

It is not speech that separates the hominoids from the other Great Apes. Speech is a result of the culture enabling group life that was shaping them; it accelerates the process of strengthening the group efficiency by making the coordination of hunting and gathering, offense and defense, invincibly efficient. It makes cooperative collectivity permanent.

Talking was a revolutionary gigantic leap forward for the proto-Homo apes in facilitating their intellectualizing about the world around them. It made the passing of learned behavior certain to successive generations and decisive in importance. Initiating a true cumulative process of cultural memory being passed on from parents to children. It made the use of complex kinship reckoning feasible. Thus, the complex organization of society became possible. -And, these were the principal ways of using social time; simultaneoulsy diverting some of that social time from becoming labor-time. This is the first mechanism by which surplus value production was negated in favor of value only. Because surplus social product unequally possessed triggers envy and jealousy which initiates coveting and malice; all of which are centripetal anti-cohesive social tendencies that will blow-up a social unit

(11)Bones and Stones: At any rate, the first true hominids (Homo; humans) we do have in fossil form (the Australopithecines), as well as their stone tools (Oldowan.) They walked the Earth by five million years ago. They are known best in Africa. But, there are reasons to believe that they occupied a broad belt of tropical and semi-tropical ecozones all the way to the Pacific coast of China!

(12) Use-value and its Origins: Out of the dim mists of antiquity dating some seven to five million years ago we can see emerging an entirely new phenomenon among living, breathing, animal life - and that was the complex of anatomical features we have just reviewed - which in their totality brought about the capability of cultural creativity. At first and for many millions of years it would center around the creation of value. Which is to say (Value is) the process of manufacturing things of everyday life (consumables) via the use of other things that have also been manufactured (tools). When people do this by entering into certain relations to use these tools to produce consumables they have entered into the process of creating value. (In strictly economic terms this is the origin of "use-value.")

(13) Conscious of Self and Environment: Along the way, people began to become creative in another area. The true freedom that comes with cognition of self and the world around one's self is that new form of creativity. Thinking, cognizant, self-aware, conscious, self-actualizing vis a vis the material and spiritual world in which this awareness emerged.

"Culture" is both tangible as you can see (tools, residences, etc., made and left behind are obviously tangible) and somewhat intangible at the same time (the "learned" behavior passed from one generation to the next is not always as obvious.) In a sense it resembles the way life evolved from the non-living. The biological world is made of physical building blocks but has its own completely independent laws of causation and interaction. Likewise causality and process in sociocultural matter operates with its own laws completely independent of those of life and biology. It is this which constitutes the critical error in all forms of biological determinism from the pro-slavery arguments of slavocrats, through the Nazi nonsense and into todays equally silly sociobiology.

(14) The First People: When the human-like apes could walk, talk and engage in social life and cooperation in pursuing the reproduction of their daily needs, as the key to the reproduction of themselves from generation to generation, they had become the first ape-like humans. We call them the australopithecines. The hominids had arisen from the hominoids.

(16) Three Grades of a Chronometric Species: physically, the australopithecines were not much different from the norm of stature and weight of the world's Homo sapiens population. They were a little shorter and weighed a little less but not that much. {Never compare fossil specimens to North American averages for stature and weight, because these are skewed far to the extreme even on today's modern population spectrum for stature and weight.}

It is not a question with an obvious, apparent, simple answer. It looks simple. One says to oneself that the reason is because they must have made better tools and, thus, survived better as they got smarter. It's such an obvious answer that the question has not been seriously considered very often.

Yes, as they moved northward they needed more clothes; they had to have an associated tool kit of hide-cutting and sewing tools but this is not such a great technological advance over what they had in tropical and subtropical zones of Africa and Asia. There had to be some other factor at work which put a heavy premium on abstract thought. So much of a price would people pay for the ability to think better, that it became the only thing of substance that did change in biology. But, what was it they were thinking about?

As people moved northward they acquired the genetic prohibition on the production of melanin (from the melanocytes in their skin) giving them whiter skin. This allowed the vitamin D production which would have been lethal in the hot tropical zone to reach proper levels in the effected skin. If you are in Scandinavia, Britain or Manchuria, you will have only your hands, face and feet exposed to the sunlight for months of the year (if then.) So, what vitamin D is going to be produced must be produced on those few patches of skin exposed to sunlight. You can't have a lot of melanin screening the sunlight or you will die of rickets and/or some other Vitamin D deficiency disorder.

{All races have the same number of cells that produce melanin. But races differ in the genetic control exercised over the amount of melanin to be produced by these melanocytes. Among Caucasoids it is to produce very little; among Negroids to produce a lot; and among Veddoids and Mongoloids everything in between.}

Nor, does hair form. Nor stature; nor weight, etc. These things vary according to local need, when populations have been resident in one area for ten thousand years, that is sufficient time for a complete change in an entire complex of such miniscule and essentially meaningless racial characteristics.

These human Bands were tiny. These people had short life spans. Most died not long after reproductive age (Menarche in women starts the clock.) At any rate in their twenties they were on their way to the grim reaper. They lived in groups of 20 to 60 individuals and had no inherent need to move very far for reasons of population pressure. There were very few of them and as individuals they weren't around very long.

We are not sure how many people lived on the Earth after millions of years of Homo evolution. But at the end of the last ice-age there may have been only one million people on Earth or at most ten million. Africa could have held ten million hunter and gatherer level people. No, population did not pressure our ancestors into anything. Populations were moving, no matter how they rationalized their activity, to avoid accumulating surplus social product; to dump social time before it became productive labor-time - by turning social time into "labor-time necessary for survival in new and more challenging environments" they turned potential "surplus product creating" labor-time into "necessary to survival" labor-time; thereby avoiding the centrifugal effects of unequally distributed/possessed surplus.

After individual security was guaranteed via the institutionalization of group life the principal enemy ceased being the predators outside and became the insidious enemy within - envy, jealousy, coveting could blow a group up! The principal enemy became anything that could generate these anti-social tendencies; not the Lion!

Nor, could the competition for sexual partners be a sufficient force to dissolve a Homo group. The hominoids had dealt with this problem millions of years earlier and did so successfully, all the while maintaining intense sexual pleasure as an ongoing glue holding these hordes together. It had to be something more intense than that.

The answer is that social surplus was dangerous to the health of all concerned hominoids and hominids. In fact, it still is the most explosive thing in human society. It's like a powerful drug and it takes a lot of control to use it. For five million years people thought the best thing was to "just say no".

The answer is that what was driving the expansion of human cranial capacity was at-bottom the General Contradiction of the First Egalitarian Epoch (see the file at this website entitled: The Periodization of History) which is the time period of the three hunting/gathering Band stages and Tribal Agricultural Stage (from c.5 million years ago to ~7,000 BP (before present.) That is, the importance of not producing social surplus - this took brains. Not that they necessarily objectively figured this out, but it took brains to institutionalize all the ideological bullshit and all the kinship ceremonialism and everything else that took up labor-time as some kind of non-productive social time.

Because we live in the Servitude Epoch where the General Contradiction is to produce surplus value no matter how much value is being produced nor what the conditions of the producers this is hard to see. As a matter of fact, it took me thirty five years immersed in the library and in the field to figure it out.

The drive to produce surplus never existed until the Simple Chiefdom Stage; it is in this period where what Karl Marx described as the 3rd stage in the evolution of value appears for the first time. (That is simple reproduction of value becomes more than expanded reproduction of value but is now reproduction of value for the purpose of generalized value expansion - See CAPITAL VOLUME 1, Chaper 2)

Prior to the emergence of Chiefdoms and then Slavery, the prime directive of the primitive communistic way of life of the hunting and gathering Bands and the Tribal Agriculturalists was to produce only value. {What I shall be describing below as Value 1 and Value 2. That is, the cost of keeping the producers alive and replacing and repairing technnology, respectively.}

By value in these studies I mean two things. The cost of maintaining the lives of these early people in the very rudimentary form of food, shelter, clothing, defense, etc. from day to day. -And, of course, in this way they could and did survive from generation to generation. In terms of economic science we can say that they satisified the "Law of Fundamental Needs by producing value." [This is critical to your understanding of human social nad cultural evolution, for, in our time it is the maximization of value production which is the primary underlying drive to everything people do. More precisely it is the maximization of "surplus value production."

This satisfaction of the Law of Fundamental Needs via the production of value is the kind of value we can call "Value 1" in the formula we shall be using. The second kind of value (Value 2) is that which is invested in the production of the tools people use to make the first kind of Value; in their maintenance and repair.

Surplus Value is simply surplus social product in these early Band stages and consists entirely of use-value; even if a product is exchanged it is for its use-value and not exchange-value which as scientifically defined herein, is another category-concept altogether. One we shall visit in detail at a more appropriate place below.

{As society becomes more complex - especially, in the Chiefdoms period and in the succeeding Servitude Epoch - these formulae will become critically important to understanding every aspect of production. But, in the beginning, it is a childishly simple relationship. Fitting in a sense, for these were childish people.

To solve the crisis created when surplus social product exists, people needed bigger and better brains; they needed to migrate into more hostile climates, so that they could dump more labor-time in the day to day production of Value 1 and Value 2. Thus, avoiding (putting off) the day of reckoning when surplus social product would be on hand no matter what. (e..g., The agricultural revolution features the irreversible release of surplus value.)}

Envy, jealousy, coveting. Especially with a brain to primitive to grasp the details of their behavior in any scientific way. What they knew was that sharing, cooperation in food collecting, and collective defense, made them strong. Intraband strife over surplus undermined this cooperation because it negated sharing. It undermined collective defense too.

Sharing what you have instantly is the answer to avoiding the socially dissolutional tendencies of envy, jealousy and coveting. Sharing binds people together, therefore, and secures the production of Value 1 and Value 2. It is a centripetal process. It is the foundation of social unity. But, it would be even better if excess social product didn't even come into the picture of daily life so that you didn't have to face the question of how to share it.

It takes brains to figure out how to organize society the basis of kinship and to assign rights and responsibilities accordingly. It takes brains to come up with a supernatural system of cognizing the real world. But, if you had the brains to do both of these things then unity would survive and disunity would disappear from the face of the Earth. Unity means selective advantage confronted with nature; disunity means selective disadvantage.At least until long after you and yours were buried in the ground. Millions of years thereafter, in the case of Homo australopithecus populations!

(21) Absorption: The absorption of productivity through a multifaceted distribution of social time and labor time is now the key to understanding human evolution. As these better organized - via kinship - peoples and their more sophisticated supernaturalism confronted the world, they found that by "moving-on" into new and more challenging environments that they were all busy; every day producing value and sharing it. This helped minimize the amount of surplus on hand. People covet what they see; not what they don't have and can't have.

Along the way they also found that a good way to dump social time before it became labor time was in handicrafts. Making things. Making things again and again also means making some of them better and different; for new previously unthought of uses. Thus, handicrafts are inherently a kind of social time dumping that leads inexorably to increasing technological sophistication. Resistance to technological improvement is futile.

I am not illustrating this article so I will leave it to you to get pictures of Oldowan, Chellean, Acheulean, Levalloisian, Clactonian tools and techniques. I shall simply note that stone tools become increasingly sophisticated between five million and one million years ago. However, it didn't require four million years to learn how to take all the surface off of a cobble or a flake of stone rather than just a few flake removals to get a cutting edge.

When it is all said and done, what is crystal clear is that people doubled their cubic centimeter cranial capacity in that four million years because of the importance of making culture work for them. That meant organizing their social relations to minimize friction internal to these primitive hunting and gathering Bands. To produce only what they needed which is Value 1 and Value 2 and to to do anything and everything to avoid the production of surplus. All the things I have mentioned above, especially the intellectualizing about the "supernatural" world and associating all that with the kinship organization of society is the symptomatology - a lot of bullshit justifying kinship based social organization. But, bullshit takes brains!

The actual course of human evolution is not dividable into incompatible species so that one day people can mate and produce fertile offspring and the next day some are so advanced that they can no longer do the same with more "primitive" neighbors. That is never the case in biological evolution anyway.

What we should be thinking about, anyway, is that there are three rather distinct grades of humanity based on cubic centimeter cranial capacity. These can be associated with general levels of subsistence and mode of production; all of which we can detect in the remnant material culture we archaeologists dig up.

(22) The Stable Hunting-Gathering Mode of Production: (a) New challenging environments, (b) social time dumping into non-labor-time activities of intellectualizing the supernatural world and the kinship organization of society, (c) along side the application of real world knowledge and discovery to the handicraft industries of the Band - (d) all in the course of collecting animal and plant food - (e) assisted in the sharing cooperation essential to keep the enemy outside and the inside world a place of comfort and safety for the two or three decades that constituted a human lifetime.

Although superstition is the enemy of modern science and intelligence it was also its mother. For these people lived totally immersed in an unreal world of superstition. It was the intellectual framework for their cognitioin of the real world. The model was nonsense; the application made common sense. {A contemporary example of the same thing can be seen in the Mach/Minkoski/Heisenberg sheer poppycock model of the subatomic world - For the details go to http://communities.msn.com/NewPerspectivesinPhysics&naventerid=107.

The world of the Hunting and Gathering Bandsperson is a world of so-called animistic spirits. Everything from the lowly pebble to the great spectaculars of nature (e.g., northern Lights; hurricanes...) has a supernatural component. -And, to all of this is hooked the aura and mysticism that surounds the ceremonial life of the Bandwoman and man and child with regard to their rights and responsibilities to one another on the kinship organized chart of their little group. That is why Lewis Henry Morgan's discovery of kinship terminology as a key to the kinship system which in turn is the sole basis upon which primitive society is organized was such a tremendous event. It constituted the subject matter of two of his greatest works which themselves are the cornerstones of modern Anthropology including his most famous work Ancient Society. -And, this latter book changed Karl Marx's entire perspective on the evolution of society; or, perhaps, we should say it clarified it - as a microscope would a slide of pollen.

At any rate these archaic humans had evolved in the period between two and one million years ago and occupied virtually the entire Old World; possibly the New World too. This latter hypothesis will be examined more thoroughly in the 21st century and resolved on the basis of fact rather than fancy.

The archaic human populations we call Homo erectus evolved into Homo sapiens, or modern people, with roughly 1500 cubic centimeters of cranial capacity by one million years ago. All of the erectus populations made this journey. There was no "fantasyland" separation of the grades of humanity (i.e., the three species of humanity which are chronometric species; meaning one evolved into the other and they were never coevil) with some pockets left behind. Culture was always the factor being selected for. Technical competence and social organization and ideological sophistication were the universals responsible for nature acting in favor of the increasing cranial capacity. That's the end of that story.

We see all over the Old World from the camp site villages on the French riviera (c. 400,000 BP) to the grassland burning South African Bands (c. 100,000 BP) to the Chinese of Choukoutien (1 million to 100,000 BP) that people had learned a very great deal about their environments and had started controlling them in a variety of ways. Not the least of the results of that control was the ability to spend long periods of time in one place. -And, to produce surplus social product.

They could work less hours and do other more creative things. But, although the reduced labor-time input into production could keep the output to just Value (1) their creativity led to more knowledge about the world - which implied the ability to produce even more social product. This is Hegel's absolute negativity (from the word "to negate")

By 20,000 years ago people were making the final steps toward the irreversible release of surplus value. Or, another way of putting it is that they were making their first tentative steps into the agricultural revolution. Over the next five to ten thousand years in center after center of the origin of animal and plant domestication people would become irreversibly committed to this new way of life.

{We know about five of these centers of origin of agriculture and later slavery: they are Egypt along the Nile; Iraq along the Tigris and Euphrates (Mesopotamia; Sumeria); nuclear China (along the Huang ho and Yangtse and the territory in between; Mesoamerica (Mexico south of Queretaro; Belize; Guatemala, Honduras; Nicaragua; El Salvador); and the Central Andes (Peru and Bolivia.) We also expect to prove additional centers of agrigultural revolution; class division and the "state." Black Equatorial Africa extending from Ethipia to the Pacific Ocean; India/Pakistan where the agricultural revolution began in the South Asian mountains of Baluchistan and spread to the Indus where Chiefdoms arose as did the class and state form of society; Indonesia/Indochina; the northern Andes in Colombia and probably parts of adjacent Brazil and Venezuela. Everywhere, people were now producing food rather than collecting it. -And, in this process they would come face to face, finally, with the enemy within.

In some parts of the world "Tribal" level life began to replace Band life many tens of thousands of years earlier - while people were still very much wedded to the hunting and gathering mode of subsistence (albeit incredibly sophisticated, perhaps.) One reason was that the more mouths people had to feed the easier it was to dispose of surplus social product. The less such product one would have on hand. At least at first.

As the concrete laboring activities of the individual are abstracted through joint communal effort, such as cliff-jumping of herds; fish-netting and even the planned burning of grasslands to encourage the growing of certain nut trees - then - we can say labor-power has been commoditized. Perhaps a better term would be proto-commoditized.

With the advent of animal and plant domestication, the Tribal form of life had already been very much on the horizon in the Old World. MacNeish's studies show that in the New World, without the domesticatable wild animal component, that Bands were the basic societal form practicing the arts of subsistence prior to serious reliance upon plant domesticates; this because semi-sedentary village Tribal life was not feasible in the early stages of the domestication of corn, beans, squash, potatos, amaranth, etc., without such animals as existed in the Old World for penning and herding. (Where cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, goats, chickens and other fowl and a multitude of pondable fish made such semi-sedentary life not only possible but preferable while the first millennia of experiments with wild grass seeds: wheat, barley, oats, rye, flax, rice, domestication took place.) This is the reason why there is roughly a 3.5 millennia time gap from 12,000 BP forward in sociocultural evolutionary stage beginnings between the Old and New Worlds. Why, a stage in the Old World begins about 3.5 millennia earlier than its equivalent in the New World (this original gap in the beginning of semi-sedentary village life between Old and New World Tribal Agriculturalists where corn was the only major wild grass seed; and the tuberous potato and casava (manioc) had to be substituted in South America is followed by an amazing identicality of sociocultural evolutuionary stages - living proof - this lock-step identicality of sequences completely separated from one another in space and time on a global basis, of the underlying laws of cause and process in human sociocultural evolution.)

Because the Great Divide in the mode of production "base" of society lies at the boundary between individual labor-time and the "value" it produces and the surplus value produced by "abstracted" socially-necessary industrial labor time. (Abstracted socially-necessary labor-time was Karl Marx's principal contribution to the categories of political economy and for our purposes means that labor-power which is "pooled"and applied to some technology producing so many units of product (commodities) per unit of time - the average amount of such "abstracted or pooled labor/per unit time" being the socially necessary labor-time.) [In this sense "industrial" refers to collectively undertaken tasks prehistorically, as well as historically.]

This Great Divide in the mode of production base of society (between individual concrete labor, producing products with use-value, and abstracted socially-necessary group labor-time creating commodities for their exchange-value, occurs in the sociocultural evolutionary Stages of the Chiefdoms. But, its origins lie as far back as the proto-commoditized labor-time of the Tribal hunter-gatherers - especially in the Old World. After the Chiefdom Stages (see the article on "periodization" in this website for chronological emergence of these stages) abstracted, socially-necessary labor-time is the entire basis of the economy. {As in Slavery, Feudalism and Capitalism.}

Tribes, at-bottom, are just bigger groups of people. Yes, they have a more complex kinship system of organization by far than do the Bands. On the other hand kinship is the only means they have, after all, to organize society and the larger the group the greater the demands on the kiship way of doing things from day to day and generation to generation. -And, Tribes have "sodality" organization also - which simply means that there are institutions that cross-cut kin lines such as men's clubs and women's clubs devoted to different tasks. But, fundamentally, Tribes are still just elaborated Bands.

With or without Tribal organization, people soon got semi-sedentary village life and then if they had not already developed larger social units than simple Bands they certainly would have developed Tribal stage social organization with their agriculture and animal husbandry. So, the second key diagnostic we want to understand is the social revolution that agriculture brought to humanity.

(25) Archaeologically, we often speak of a set of artifactual diagnostics that accompany Neolithic and Formative Revolutions (these are the Old World and New World terms for the archaeological manifestations of agricultural revolution.) Ground and polished stone tools, milling and grinding tools (to turn high-protein seeds into flour,) village life, pottery, and so forth. However, what is critically different is that people are producing food rather than collecting it; within the food production arts, it is inherent, that surplus will be produced. Our production formula now looks like this:

(26) Surplus product, commoditized labor-power and "leveling:"One reason for the irreversible release of surplus value was that farming people need surplus for the rainy day. There are a myriad of events which can bring catastrophe to crops in the field, then, as well as today. Floods, drought, insect pestilence, fire, disease, hurricanes and tornados. In these events the farming families have to have reserves to see them through until a new crop can be planted and harvested.

Within this new setting the larger families will produce more than the smaller families, if for no other reason than that they have more "hands;" population will expand simultaneously; if for no other reason than that the more "mouths" there are to feed, the less surplus will be accumulating in individual farms. These wealth differences have to be "leveled out" of existence, and so they are, as we shall see.

(28) Resolution: Both the General Crisis and the General Contradiction find resolution when the Tribal Council collects surplus above and beyond what is agreed upon to be necessary for the annual upkeep of one given person. In this way the larger families are assured of having what they need as are the smaller families; yet the inequality that otherwise would exist between different sized farms is leveled out by the collection of the rest of the surplus at a central point. It's administration being part of the job of the democratically elected Tribal Council. {The ethnographic record tells us that immediate recall is an accepted feature of such representative processes. The "primitive communist mode of term limits" for elected representatives, in other words.}

Another common way of avoiding the production of too much surplus is to rely on the old fashioned dumping of labor-time in non-productive chores. Although in its new form of "moving-on" slash-and-burn agriculture, the dumping of social time comes in the form of non-essential repetitive dumping of labor-time.

(29) Becoming its Opposite: But "inequality" is a real and ever present spectre now. Infants and children are exposed to the fact that for some reason (it doesn't matter what) that there is a difference between being well off and not so well off. In other words, there are the well off and not so well off. -And, there are in fact the well off and not so well off. The productive characteristics that I have mentioned above are inherent in the economy and social organization of tribal agriculture and these facts of the Neolithic/Formative revolutionary way of life made the fact of inequality inescapable. Even when ameliorated or leveled it was still there; otherwise it wouldn't have to be handled in these ways. Yet, what could these societies do to vaccinate against social dissolution except what they had always done?

The results we see time after time. For example, it was not always necessary in many cases that people pick-up and move every few years for strictly technical (soil depletion) reasons. This could have been handled with fertilizer, crop rotation and irrigation. The reason they move is because they found the tremendous effort involved in "starting over" all over again, to be good for the spirit of collectivity because it took up so much labor-time that it tended to level wealth differences that would otherwise have become manifest. In strictly economic terms it dumped labor-time before it could become surplus value product that would then have to be leveled.

(30) The Commodity and Exchange-value: For the newly emerged selfish few to emerge in a position of "advantage" the product had to become a commodity. It had to have exchange-value on top of use-value and with an emerging universal equivalent commodity (e.g., cattle among pastoralists; grain among farmers.) This was recognized by Karl Marx (Capital Volume One: Chapter 2) 135 years ago and is confirmed by archaeology and ethnology today.

Such a relationship is inherent within the Simple Chiefdom whereat least some labor is professionally specialized and the specialized families must be given the use-value products of others' labor and in some way exchanged for the use-value products of their own. As soon as stored grain is, for example, sent to a household in exchange for its pottery the de facto commodity equivalent per unit of pottery has been established in units of grain; likewise for every other commodity produced. This is completely different from what the Tribal Council did which was to collect and redistribute the surplus product from each farm to "level" wealth differences and maintain a supply for rainy days. That distribution of products was barren of this commodity exchange-value quantum; socially abstracted labor-time among Tribal Agriculturalists and was still of the most primitive "corvee" (labor draft) type and was not a feature of every artifact (product) created; concrete labor has been only occassionally transformed, and then only in part, into abstracted socially-necessary labor, in other words. -And, altruism had merely to give way to allow a nearly subliminal recognition of rich vs. poor possibilities in popular life. Selfishness and sadism have not yet taken command of the superstructure - not even approached such a takeover.

Not only does the Mode of Production (technology and social organization) bifurcate for the first time as products become commodities with (a) exchange value as well as use-value but (b) the superstructure bifurcates as well, with the emergent recognition of better-off (rich) and less well off (poor) families becoming fixed as the recognition of the better-off few at the expense of the less well off many (selfishness; sadism.) This happens the minute that all six of these features can be said to be extant in the newly created Simple Chiefdom.

There is another way to handle the newly emergent General Crisis within the Stage of Tribal Agriculture; apparently staying within the constraints of the General Contradiction (of the First Egalitarian Epoch) - without moving; without slashing-and-burning ad infinitum; starting all over again - as a lifestyle strategy. What is that other way?

(32) An Alternative: Staying in place, building an irrigation system, fertilizing fields, and intensifying in situ production of both animal foods from husbandry and bread from field agriculture. -And, each family intensifying its farm's reliance upon gardens and pens. That is the other way. A Simple Chiefdom way.

When infants and children recognized that no matter what mom and dad and the parental generation said about sharing, that in reality some families were better off than others, some professions might also be! It is inherent within a system where some people are supported by the social surplus of theTribal Council in order that they may clear fields, dig ditches, build dams, make pottery for those who do, make textiles for those who do not have the time, etc., that the differential in reward becomes part of what is imprinted as the nature of the real world.

It only takes one person so imprinted and with the desire to be on the better end of the stick to begin to agitate for a solution to the General Crisis of Tribal Agriculture that is not of the egalitarian moving-on, start over, slash-and-burn, bullshit tradition. Why not stay in our "homeland;" make our production more efficient?

(34) Committment to efficiency in production does have a lot of advantages. All that unnecessary and sometimes dangerous moving is eliminated. People get to stay where they feel at home and comfortable. -And, for awhile the actual results will be better for everyone. Efficient field agriculture and stockyard husbandry will produce more surplus at a lower labor-time input per person. Note how complex the SURPLUS VALUE column has now become:

(35) Becoming its Opposite: But, what is changing is the General Contradiction! Instead of avoiding the enemy within (envy, jealousy, coveting) by evading surplus value production, one is now saying maximize surplus value production, because with honest central collections and efficient one-woman administration we will still all be equal! In a few more steps (and centuries) the maximizing of surplus value production will be because the higher "ranks" of society want to maximize "profit" for themselves. The altruistic/egalitarian production of surplus becomes its opposite. The General Contradiction of the Servitude Epoch is on the horizon. {Which is the drive to maximize the production of surplus value no matter how much value is being created; nor the condition of the producers.} It is camouflaged by all the talk about how the General Crisis can be more efficiently handled.

(36) Concretizing the Opposition: Efficiency in a Tribal Agricultural setting is further enhanced by getting rid of the Tribal Council and all that democratic rot, in favor of military discipline and organization of the various productive tasks that come with the professional specialization of labor. So, one Chief is elected - and, although she may have consigliore from the clans - it is a revolution in social organization tending toward centralization and concentration of social authority as well as surplus. The small group at the center will eventually have within it that "one" who advocates this change for ulterior motives of greed and self-advancement, regardless of the effect on the community as a whole. Not that the immediate effect will have been bad. It probably will hav been excellent!

But, to the person with the "hidden agenda" this is altogether a matter of fortune (that he or she can turn to their advantage in selling the "new way.") Her concern is with herself. Not "them." -And, being in the center of the reciprocal movement of goods and services means that you can pull some of it out of the "cash flow" as you will; to do as you wish! -And, as we have seen the money equivalent form of commodity has come into existence.

The farther one goes down the road of efficiency via professional specialization of labor the further one has traveled along the road of social revolution. The Chief collects the surpluses and assigns different persons to new tasks such as full time irrigation and dam building; full time pottery and textile production for the new rank of irrigation and dam builders. Etc. The more labor-time is specialized - truly commoditized now as numbers of people are assigned to specific tasks where their labor-time is defined in units of time considered "socially-necessary" and "abstracted" (by being the de facto "pooled labor-power" of numbers of workers) - the better the results in the production of both value and surplus value. The Chief and her family, helpers, and cohorts, from the clans; the religious specialists who convince all the rubes that the Chief's way is divinely inspired, now constitutes a special "rank" themselves. As do the farming families and the professional specialist families. These ranks have special interests. It is inevitable that they will become antagonistic, if for no other reason than that the vagaries of primitive agriculture and animal husbandry will create scarcity - and more probably because the greed of the higher ranks will necessitate scarcity for the lower ranks.

The exigencies of Tribal Agricultural Stone Age Economics may create a severe shortage of surplus leaving the central granaries depleted. (Hail, rain, flooding, drought, locusts, disease, waror raiding, etc., etc.) Who is going to get the shit-end of the stick when the Chief's warehouse is approaching bankruptcy? When the choice has to be made between the higher ranks privileged way of life and the necessities of the low ranks who will lose out? In a society that has accepted the ideology of selfishness (and emergent sadism) it is the poor people who will lose out.

Some of them go to what appear to be the worst rather than the best locations. Going deeper and deeper into the deserts of Arabia is one example. Why would they push down the hellish sides of the Tigris, Euphrates and Nile rivers, leaving behind the lush hilly flanks of the coasts and neighboring highlands of Southwest Asia near the Mediterranean? For the blazing hot desert sands of Sumeria? Why push up the Nile into the incredible ovens of Egypt and the Sudan?

An excuse of the "privileged ranks" to further professionally specialize labor. It is this which is the ultimate source of their financial power; of the riches being accumulated. As the environmental challenge intensifies so does the obvious need to intensify the professional specialization of labor.

It was true of all the "chiefly" ranks that their privileged way of life lay in their ability to profit from the exchange value inherent in the commodities produced by the professional specialist families. -And, it was this financial power which allowed them to hire their "thugs" on a full time - also professionally specialized, basis - to enforce their will over those ranks less privileged. That is the at-bottom reason why these Simple Chiefdoms were being led into the deserts of Arabia. Of course, they didn't understand the real reason why their leaders were taking them down the river. In this process we also see the birth of modern Servitude Epoch (currently the Capitalist Stage) politics, where politicians always couch their true motivations behind false slogans.

Not every Simple Chiefdom went this route. Where mass democratic impulses were stronger than the selfishness of the few, who wanted to further intensify social ranking and the concommitant privilege of the central administrators and bullshit artists the Chiefdoms chose to return to the old ways or never to embark upon the extensive professional specialization of labor to begin with.

{Note: The shamans are now full time pro's themselves - supported in totality by the center - and have become the first (ever in human history) religious specialists to be stuck on the public teat! Before such "specialists" were nothing more than part time specialist (spare time specialist) practitioners of the arts of supernatural communication and manipulation doing the same daily productive tasks as everyone else.}

As I say, where the democratic impulses of the many were stronger than the selfish ones of the few, and where the multitude resisted the increasing reliance upon professionally specialized efficiency in the use of abstracted labor-time, the Tribes and Simple Chiefdoms moved into areas where they could "go back to the old ways." Where the rubes could slash-and-burn to their heart's content, and live happily ever after. For example the post-Neolithic Revolutionary Tribes and Chiefdoms of the fertile crescent of Southwest Asia who moved into the Black Earth vast steppe lands of the Soviet West and Central Asia and eastern Europe; so on; so forth...

For those Simple Chiefdoms that were dominated by the newly selfish few, who could prevent the point of returning to the "old way;" which did move into the deserts where the most intense professional specialization of abstracted labor-time was the only way to survive... well, there were more surprises in store for them. At least, for the ones doing all the work.

Since challenge can come in many forms; so it was. The important thing was that it could be successfully met and overcome by the semi-militarization of labor-power via intensified professional specialization; tight central administration; from which emerged de facto hierarchical arrangement of privileged access to the means of production and the articles of production as well.

Side by side with the sincere converts to the "cause of efficiency" via professional specialization and tight central administration, were those of "ulterior motivation" whose basal imprinting of selfishness (and soon, if not already, true sadism) was invisible. Cloaked, as it were, from public view.

(37) An advancing Simple Chiefdom is a society about to be torn apart by antagonistic special interest groups. {The US Southwest is an excellent example - particularly with regard to the latter centuries of the Anasazi prior to White Contact.}For Chiefdom society to survive it is essential that the groups and ranks be unified behind the leadership. For supernaturally steeped people it is religion that can do the job. It must since there exists nothing else. No "state" apparatus has yet evolved.

(39) The archaeological record is clear in this regard. Religions emerged which persuaded more people to give over more authority to allocate their abstracted labor-time (labor drafts; annual labor-time voluntarism; etc.) and to adjust the amount to be kept in the individual family farming household, per "head," as the leadership wished. In this way the privileged ranks could take more of the surplus value being created at the family farm or village commune to the center. -And, more of the abstracted socially-necessary labor-time to the center too. Even before it became surplus value. -And, "taken to the center" means taken to themselves for the privileged high ranks of the center!

In Mexico we see this religion emerge and spread like wildfire and we call it the Olmec; in Peru it is the Chavin or Paracas religion. In China, the Lungshan. In the Near East the An-En cult. -And, in Egypt the Solar cult. Structurally, they are all the same thing. A unifying religon that persuades people to obey the dictates of the center. -And, to justify the high ranks taking more for themselves.

(40) Rigidly Ranked Society Structurally Reinforced: Thus, structurally reinforced, we see these societies often last a millennia or more. The ranking becomes acute; the separation of the specialist crafts and guilds, the basic feature of social organization. The sadistic imprinting of infants and children proceeds apace as the selfishness imprinting becomes linked to sexual maturation. Howver, the seeds of the destruction of this "order" are in place. Let's look at how our formula says that the SURPLUS VALUE column is subdividing:

(41) Origin of the State: Eventually, all this bullshit from the priests and priestesses will be insufficient. When a crisis arises that puts too many people between a rock and a hard place and the resolution attempted by the center is blatantly unfair, Ma and Pa Kettle will gather round with their fellow rubes and revolt. Then they will either tear society apart in a rank war; or, some will flee to begin life again in a simpler way, in lands far from the home region; or, a new solution will appear to the civil conflict.

You will recall from Part I (The Periodization of History) that the two Chiefdom Stages foregoing, constitute what I call the First Transitional Period. They took humanity out of the primitive communism of the First Egalitarian Epoch {and its three Stages of Hunting and Gathering Bands and its Stage of Tribal Agriculture;} into the Servitude Epoch {and its three Stages of Slavery, Feudalism and Capitalism.}

Whenever an Advanced Theocratic Chiefdom society was confronted with civil war and the persuasive capability of the religious authorities was no longer sufficient to rein-in the special interests, there was a new option. Namely, to pacify the mass of farming families, with fire, sword, and club. Those with the money had now to use it. Use it to pay thugs to suppress by arrest and brigandage those in opposition. This is the origin of the State - everwhere. There were no exceptions.

(42) Origin of the Rich: How the financially most powerful families got that way is not the point. That could have happened in a variety of ways as I have described before. What is key is that the ideology of people is now committeed to selfishness, and indeed sadism, so that the altruism of primitive communism no longer stands in the way.

(43) Specific Origin of the State (the Thugs) -And, accompanying this fundamental change in the superstructure are the armed men and women who will work for food, shelter, pay - and, fun! These are the thugs. Thuggery which begins with some excuse for armed guards on private payrols will be institutionalized in the form of police and soldiers. (There were a multitude of such excuses ranging from Caravan and Naval Guards to Temple Protectors and everything in between.)

(44) The Rapture Approaches: This new basally imprinted ideology of group differences in privileges and the high rank's right to use force to keep it that way, existed by the time that the Advanced Theocratic Chiefdoms approached crisis. This independently supported thuggery existed by the time the ATC's were on the eve of civil war.

(45) Origin of Classes and Their State: It remained only for the privileged ranks to throw off their sheep's clothing and appear for what they were - classes with title deed to property in their individual hands and the willingness and ability to make it so. {Note, for purposes of cross-cultural comparative analysis below, that this is highly reminiscent of the way the Modern Revisionists restored the Servitude Epoch in the Second Transitional Period in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.}

(46) Origin of Civilization: that is, the Stage of Slavery: The mechanisms institutionalized by which slavery is introduced and maintained include debt, capture in war, punishment for civil and criminal offenses, being born the son or daughter of a slave, self-sale into slavery to satisfy some over-riding need...

(47) A New General Contradiction: The General Contradiction of society (in this first Stage of the Servitude Epoch) is now the drive of the master and mistress classes to maximize profit from the surplus value column at any cost (the mirror image of what it was during the First Egalitarian Epoch) regardless of the value and surplus value amounts being created. The General Contradiction, in other words, is the opposite of what it was under the conditioins of the First Egalitarian Epoch. Now there is the tendency to maximize production for the ruling families, whereas before, there was the tendency to limit production to value needed by all families sharing equally.

(48) A New Kind of General Crisis: The General Crisis of the Slave Stage is that created by the cost of maintaining the thuggery (the State) which is essential to keeping the masses in servitude. Our formula helps focus our attention on the new key diagnostic factors of profit for the rulers and the cost of their means of social organization (thuggery; i.e., the state.)

(49) The General Crisis of Slavery is that the more slaves there are the more cops and soldiers one must have to hold them in place - the cost of the thugs grows disproportionately to the returns of more slave labor - which is to say that the cost of "the state" cuts into the "profit" column creating the first of the General Crises of the Servitude Epoch. The cost of the state is a drawdown on the surplus value column that reduces drastically the profit margin. The more slaves, the bigger the army and the police needed to keep them in that condition must be. This is the General Crisis of The Slave Stage.

(49) The First Emperors: Furthermore, as capital is concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer families, one family shall rise above all the others. As, for example, happened when the family of one military dictator (Pharaoh) Emperor finally rose above all the others and established imperial rule over all of Egypt c.3000 BC.

(50) The Emperor Threatened: At that moment the "boss hierarchy" over the slaves became the greatest single immediate threat to the stability of the new "order." On the one hand the boss hierarchy is essential to the maintenance of the dictatorship over the slave, but on the other it is a dangerous internal element among the ruling classes. For, if the hierarchy of bosses is allowed to use that slave labor-power for its own devices then it shall have the financial wherewithall to challenge the ruling Pharaoh for power. Thus, that labor-power of the slaves must be kept busy in tasks that deny the boss hierarchy access; even when such tasks are non-productive. This was the reason for the sudden undertaking of such labor intensive projects as the construction of the Old Kingdom monumental funerary architecture. (Pyramids, etc.) These military dictators (the Pharaohs were always military dictators - usually Generals in origin) had no silly religious illusions. They built the pyramids not for religious reasons (except as an excuse) but because they knew they couldn't trust their own nome bosses. So, what abstracted socially-necessary labor-time was their's, that did not need to be gainfully employed by them (the Pharaonic Family) they put to work in a socially justifiable way that denied the nome boss hierarchy access to it. End of story.

(51) Movers and Shakers: The Stage's Motive Force for stability was the ruling elite's interest in maintaining and deepening the enslavement of the masses by whatever means. The prime mover of the Stage conversely, was the resistance and rebellion of the most oppressed segment of society - the mass of slaves.

The in-between strata were pushed into poverty because they couldn't compete with slave-labor except on its own terms which makes labor-power the lowest common denominator the coin of the realm (value 1 is simply bare subsistence or less.) In other words, the cost of the unit of socially-necessary labor-time was kept extraordinarily low even in the "free" market because of the mere existence of slavery. Another way of putting it is that the cost of barely keeping the slaves alive is now the cost of the basic unit of socially-necessary labor-time in the process of production - for free as well as slave workers.

(52) The deepening of Slavery's General Crisis was the same everywhere. In the civilizations of the Mediterranean, slave revolts eventually put paid to the entire process but it took over 3000 years. In China, the same thing happened; slavery ended about six centuries earlier there than it did in Europe. In Mesoamerica and the Central Andes the clay feet of the slavocrats were their Achilles heals, and were cut off by the armed and armored handful of Iberian ronin who found it a simple enough matter to drive a wedge between the slaves and their masters; between the subjugated peoples and the Imperial slavocrat regimes.

(53) Scientifically defined, Feudalism as a Stage is a half-way house between chattel and wage slavery. Thus, while the General Contradiction of the Slave Stage continued - which is the General Contradiction of all of the Stages of the Servitude Epoch - the General Crisis of Feudalism is that of both the preceding and succeeding Stages (that is, Feudalism features the General Crises of Slavery and that of Capitalism.)

(54) Eventually, the cost of an increasingly disaffected state apparatus, in the face of rising slave rebellions caused the collapse of the historically documented Roman Empire West; the external attacks from Advanced Democratic Chiefdoms of Eurasia had been going on for six centuries- the Hun attacks of c. AD 400 were no better organized than their predecessor's attacks. But the Legions were tied down on Slave Latifundia Guard Duty throughout the Empire and were more sophisticated (thoroughly disaffected) politically - uneager to pull the Ruling Families (Patricians and Plebians) asses out of the grinder at the expense of their lives and families in often far off lands.

In Nuclear China (that region around the Huang-ho River extending south to the Yangtse River) one ruling class, that of the Kindom of Chin, decided to forge a New Way forward. It featured the militarization of the population; its reorganization into a system whereby legal responsibilities to pay what was due the ruling families, were combined with a land redistribution and adjustment in the system of payments, in kind and in cash - which made slaves into small share-cropping farmers and indentured agricultural laborers. This was the "philosophy of legalism" in practice (replacing the slave master's ideology which was often Confucianism of some stripe.) These share-cropping farmers had been transformed from slaves into serfs; able to pay in some cases in cash rather than commodities or time. The slave-revolts and the running away (that necessitated such things as the Great Wall) ended.

Having transformed Chin, the rulers then directed attacks upon the neighboring six kingdoms. After a campaign of several years the rulers of Chin brought the others to heal, concluding the lighting war in 221 BC. From that time forward a new social order of Feudalism existed in imperial form in China.

In the Mediterranean, the ruling classes were not as far-seeing; had no one to bring them Feudalism in imperial form. The Roman Empire West collapsed under the persistent impact of massive slave revolts which made effective military resistance to the waves of migrants on the eastern frontiers increasingly difficult and then impossible. The resulting patchwork of nearly innumerable fiefs was the political form that Feudalism took in Europe after c. AD 400. As a consequence, Europe was always a pitiful, rather pathetic appendage on the body of Eurasia. That is, when compared to the vast wealth, science and technology developed in China; where capital was concentrated and centralized and produced in amounts, orders of magnitude, greater than in Europe.

-And, as I have said, the Slave Stage Empires of Mesoamerica and the Central Andes were simply overwhelmed by the attack of the Feudalist Iberian ronin. These ronin successful because of the "clay feet" of the slavocrats. ( i.e.,When the masses are slaves or little better than slaves it is hard to rally them around the master and mistress classes.)

Technically speaking, the momment labor-power was commoditized we had the emergence of the germinal of capitalism. The moment that long distance trade afforded the opportunity to make a profit at both ends of a deal, since the socially necessary labor-time involved in production is a complete unknown to the buyers on both ends, we had mercantile capitalism. However, for true capitalism to be said to exist we must have machinofacture extant. So that surplus value can be squeezed directly from labor-power (where Value 1 is the wage paid for the socially-necessary labor-time involved in the production of a commodity for exchange) rather than swindled.

(1) a cheap and plentiful supply of highly carburized (flowing pig) iron; from which a somewhat decarburized wrought iron is obtained (from which steel can also be made.) This means blast furnaces, for both the pig iron and the decarburized wrought iron. China had blast furnace flowing decarburized wrought iron two thousand years or more before it was invented in Liege in c. AD 1500.

(4) Steam engines. These were the first sources of power to be put to machine tools independent from those of nature (wind, water, animal, human power.) As a matter of interest the Chinese invented the steam engine centuries before a French priest brought a toy steam engine back to France. This inspired Papin to put the principles to work. Newcomen heard of Papin's experiment and proceeded to build the first steam engine in the West.

As for the emerging germs of capitalism, they can be seen in all the Stages of the Servitude Epoch. Wherever labor-power is purchased and put to work. This goes all the way back to Sumeria and the first city-states of Mesopotamia; the Ancient Nile and Ancient Nuclear China; Ancient Mesoamerica and Central Andes. You should note (mark permanently in your memory) that the economic category of "labor-power" as an abstracted, pooled to common denominator status (on the basis of the time-clock,) was Karl Marx original contribution to the science of political economy. The one contribution which he considered set him apart from all other economists. The one he was most proud of, as it was central to his entire thesis of the production of commodities.

As for the emergence of commodity manufacturing capitalism in Europe, Karl Marx correctly put its origins in the 1300's and the 1400's. He and Engels saw it first in the city state communes of Italy; in the post-1492 expansion of European trading ventures into the Old and New Worlds. In the latter case it was the enslavement of the Native Americans to mine gold and silver that provided the only thing the Europeans had to trade with in the far more advanced centers of the civilized world: East Africa; south coastal Arabia, India, the Spice Islands, China and the Japans. However, this is no more than what Marx said it was: "the rosy dawn of Capitalism." Because we did not yet have the five essential diagnostics of machinofacture in place.

Thus, our modern periodization (see the preceding paper in this series) puts the onset of Capitalism at the beginning of the appearance of the full complement of the five diagnostics of machinofacture. This would be about 1765 in Europe and America; about 1795 in China.-And, I relegate the post-1492 period, prior to 1765, in the West, to the last Stage of Feudalisn - what I call the Transformational Phase of the European Feudal Stage.

The General Contradiction of the Capitalist Stage is the same as it was in the preceding Stages of the Servitude Epoch - the drive of the domesticating, exploiting, ruling and owning classes to maximize their profits regardless of the value and surplus value being produced and the condition of the producers.

When the capitalist buys new equipment to stay competitive and to reduce the cost of the labor-power going into his productive line he takes a reduction in the RATE of profit. Remember that both the cost of the next generation of machinery (NGM) and profit must come from the surplus value column. There is nowhere else from which it can come. If the new machinery is ten times more productive per unit of labor power applied to it, (more productive than the previous machinery,) the capitalist will make more money BUT HIS RATE OF PROFIT MUST FALL!

Because the only way to maintain the same RATE of profit is to introduce labor-power on a one-to-one basis with the productive power of the new machinery. As you can see in the formula below this is simple arithmetic (algebra.) Under capitalist relations of production, however, this cannot be done. The capitalist's idea was to reduce the cost of labor and to stay competitive. His idea was not to hire more workers and/or to put all these laborers to work for longer periods of time. Either one or both of these would result in increasing the cost of Value 1 (wages!)

To maintain the rate of profit one must introduce new labor-power equivalents (a) to the new machinery (b) at a one-to-one ratio of productive units. Otherwise the percentage rate of profit on the right side of the arrow must decline! This is the Law of the Absolute Decline in the Rate of Profit in Capitalist Systems; it is an iron law. It applies also to Second Transitional Period (the Socialist Stages) Systems where constant capital (machinery and factories, etc.) is the destination (because of the "form" of the commodity or because of the "need" for the form; capitalist and socialist systems, respectively.) There is no way around it.

Raya Dunayevskaya saw this similarity but failed to understand it. Not surprising since it takes steel trap logic based on a perfected analysis of sociocultural evolution (with its perfected sociocultural evolutionary stage chronology) to decipher the differences. At any rate in a Capitalist stage system this introduction of new labor-power at a one-to-one ratio with the productive capacity expansion of the next generation of machinery (NGM) isn't done, so the RATE of profit has to decline on the right side of the equation. The arithmetic is simple. The results obvious. Capital is always in flight.

In a vain attempt to salvage the rate of profit the Capitalist decreases his investments in NGM; flees to seemingly greener pastures; the initial factories lose competitive advantage as a result. One capitalist eats another. Capital is concentrated and centralized. As bigger and better capitalists gobble up the smaller and less efficient one's workers end up on the street - in the vast armies of the unemployed - in the favelas of the Third World great cities.

True commodity manufacturing capitalism required a ruling class with machinofacture (and all five of its essential elements) as its profit center. That is, factories producing commodities by the application of unskilled labor-power to machines that produce commodities for sale. The sale of said commodities puts cash in the hands of a new class of machinofacturing capitalists; these are profit centers. A class of people own them and have now come into their own as a ruling class. This happened first in the USA; nearly simultaneously in the UK; then in 1789 in France and then in every European land opened by the armies of the French Revolution and later the Napoleonic Imperium. The same thing happened in China, resulting in the decade long revolt that brought Karl Marx's first serious attention to the Middle Kingdom.

However, the first Western Area attempt to put political power in the hands of the bourgeoisie occurred in the English Revolution {I like to use the dates 1640-1660 for convenience. In actuality, it would be more like 1642-1658.} That was the revolution eventually headed by Oliver Cromwell; using his New Model Army as the modeling and engineering instrument. The New Model Army could not be defeated. Cromwell proceeded to win every battle, abolishing the monarchy and the House of Lords; declaring an English Republic; Parliament made him Lord Protector. His attempt was to put power into the hands of the bourgeoisie as a class but their inability to make machinofacturing profit-centers the major source of wealth (because the entire process was slightly premature technologically [e.g., no steam engines yet, nor textile manufacturing machinery]) made the effort fail, in the end. Without machinofacture as the overwhelming profit-center the bourgeois elements were unable to make their revolution permanent.

Once Cromwell died their was retrogression. Although machinofacture was on the horizon, ascendant, it was not yet transcendant. It would take another century to fully take command. Although, after the post-Cromwell Anti-Restoration Revolution of 1688, the bourgeois elements were never less than equal partners with the landed aristocracy.

As I have said, the first successful Stage transition to Capitalism occured in the technologically weakest of the European lands - that of North American New England. There, the fighting began between (A) the Feudalist form of capitalism as represented in Old England and (B) the new, no-Feudal-overburden form of capitalism as represented in New England. Since the weakly developed but nevertheless true machinofacture elements were in place alongside those of mercantile capitalism, and because there was no native feudal overstructure to combat, the North Americans were able to pull it off via the serious military struggle conducted by George Washington and his Staff. This is why we call the national liberation struggle of those days a Revolutionary War. It wasn't just for independence but for an entirely new way of life.

Even the existence of slavery did not seriously adversely effect the North American bourgeois success, since the slavocrat economy of the Southern colonies (as we were about to know it) was still in a rudimentary phase; the slave owners were as likely to be neutral or supportive of the Revolution as they were to be loyalist. Witness the slave owners Washington and Jefferson. A true united front was forged. Although, not easily.

The Great Revolution in France, in 1789, brought the bourgeoisie to political power here. France had been the heartland of Europe since the creation of the Roman Empire; and continued to be after its collapse c. AD400. It was France that had the overwhelming concentration of population in association with the infrastructure of advanced technology inherited from the preceding Roman Slave Stage. In the two decades following the uprising of 1789 the capitalist classes in various political forms, destroyed Feudalism not only in France and the heartland of the old Roman Empire (that is, the entire Riviera from Barcelona to Rome and the adjacent territories) but in much of the rest of Europe as well.

The General Crisis of Capitalism (which we just defined above) began to come to a head in the 1830's and finally provoked the European-wide revolutions of 1848-50, wherein labor found its first independent political role. This real world event triggered the acceptance of Karl Marx's theoretical discoveries by the European working class movement. -And, it encouraged the more far-seeing and richest European capitalists to try sending more machinery to the cheap labor of the colonies. Sharpest, at this hinge of historical fate, were the British textile magnates. They envisioned India's cheap labor applied to their machines. They knew from experience about Indian contributions to dyeing and weaving; they saw that the huge numbers of absolutely destitute people on the Indian subcontinent could be placed at the factory bench - burned up - worked to death; then replaced quickly and easily - ad infinitum.

By 1850, the profits returning to the capitalists of the United Kingdom from the factories they had installed in India, triggered the Crimean War of 1853-1856. The Russian financial capitalists and their Czar hoped to seize India's cheap labor from the English with their massive land armies. Unfortunately for them, the British easily deflected them; even when they had given command to some of their most incompetent boobs as officers (e.g., The Charge of the Light Brigade.) [Not entirely an accident - for the war was an excellent way to kill off a lot of troublesome male unemployed workers.]

The USA Civil War (1861 - 1865) triggered the complete destruction of the US Slavocracy - eliminating that overburden - bringing the other half of the Union into the capitalist economy of New England for the first time. It was long over due and a direct result of the way the bourgeoisie of New England had fought and won their Revolutionary War against the landed aristocracy and big magnate British bourgeoisie from 1775-1781. During the course of it Karl Marx created and led the First International (International Association of Working Men) as part and parcel of his support for Lincoln in the War Between the States.

The end of the US Civil War in April of 1865 brought both capital and labor to the fore as the prime interest and prime mover, respectively of the world's first truly Capitalist Stage country - they were the key elements in the advancing and reforming of that Stage. As the struggle between capitalists for the world's cheap labor and markets intensified; the inherent necessity of revolutionizing the means of production did also; it became inevitable that there would be a world wide conflict. Let us examine this notion of revolutionizing the means of production.

Machniofacture increases the productive power of human labor-power exponentially; it creates huge quantities of commodities. But, the national market is limited to the purchasing power of the workers {who are paid at Value - that is the cost of keeping them alive (perhaps) as "wages" - and the cost of keeping their families alive (perhaps)} and the luxury living requirements of the capitalists. That is not enough. Even though the capitalists have the world as their market this is still not a sufficient answer. For the massive surplus value being produced to be consumed it has to go too more constant capital (the physical means of production) - iron isn't eaten, it has to go to the steel industry - people don't eat steel, it has to go to the machine tool and machinery industries. In other words, other capitalists are the only and best market for all of this excess surplus value. Revolutionizing, or innovating new, means of production, offers the needed market for all this surplus value. This was true then. It is even more true now. This is the reason for the exponential increase in the RATE of new generations of equipment. One no sooner has a computer or other advanced machine than it is "obsolete."

In short, no end-user capital absorber would work unless it was constantly being reinvented (revolutionized.) The means of production, in other words, have to be built all over again. A true surplus value dumping mechanism. One which has incredible ramifications for the progress of humanity technologically. This is what drives innovation in Capitalist Stage systems. This is what is responsible for the increasingly exponentially, logarithmically, increasing rate of innovation in the means of production in Capitalist systems.

As constant capital increases (machinery becomes more productive; more complex) as the end-user of surplus value and more and more workers (the owners of their own labor-power) are sent to the street (unemployed) with the introduction of new machinery, generation after generation, workers become increasingly restive. This is the Second Iron Law of Capitalist Relations of Production. -And, it is the Law which describes capitalism itself as its own undertaker (grave digger.) For it explains to workers why they have no choice as a class but to seize state power; put an end to capitalist relations of production in favor of relations that put them at the top of the priority list rather than putting the maximization of profit for the domesticating (exploiting) few at the top of that list. Paragraph 22 of Chapter 2 of the Communist Manifesto makes this objective of the communist movement crystal clear.

More and more capital is sent abroad to utilize the cheap labor-power of the colonies. More and more unemployment at home triggers revolts. The rising of the workers in France in the form of the Paris Commune of 1871 is a case in point; as was the USA revolt of workers that resulted in the St. Louis Council of 1877, another.

The growth of the international organization of labor under the banner of Marxism was the response of the most advanced workers of the Capitalist Stage world. However, to protect the First International and its acheivements from the crackpot anarchists and syndicalists Marx sent the First International to the USA in 1872 where it expired peacefully in its sleep some four years later in Philadelphia. A Second International was created some twelve years later in Germany based on the German Social Democratic Party - both of which were avowedly Marxist.

Meanwhile the capitalists of the advanced European countries continued sending more and more machinery to the colonies they were creating in Africa and Asia (and for the Gringo's Latin America.) Thus, de facto imperialism (shipping constant capital abroad to cheap labor) became the "imperialist phase" of the Capitalist Stage. Its last phase. A terminal phase of the Capitalist Stage which has, however, proven to be well over a century in duration and which will last well into the 21st century.

Neither Karl Marx nor Frederick Engels tried to predict how long the Stage of proletarian dictatorship, that had to follow the Capitalist Stage, would last. Nor, would Lenin be persuaded that the subject was even worth discussing. All of them knew one thing - it was impossible to predict the future that accurately - and, in the event no one knew where the Stage might become institutionalized; nor, if it would become "world wide" quickly enough to take advantage of the varying degrees of technological advance in the different capitalist countries. Too many variables to make prediction possible.

Having said this I should also point out that among the high-minded altruist intellectuals of the labor movement in Europe and America there was the unspoken almost secret assumption that working people would quickly put affairs in order and go about creating a kind of nirvana or paradise here on Earth. This was an extremely naive and dangerous assumption. It almost undid everything.

Because building within society was the absolute corrpution of the labor movement itself; therefore, of the labor Party which sprang from it. In Europe, only the Russians escaped the total perversion of their Labor Party; that was due to the historically peculiar fact of Vladimir Illych Ulyanov, who we know as V. I. Lenin.

Lenin later took on the bourgeois socialists in the RSDLP (Russian Social Democratic Labor Party) and forced them into a split in 1903. After which his "majoritists" (bolsheviks) constituted a de facto separate party from the traitor minoritists (mensheviks.) -And, the Bolsheviks were the only real Labor Party in Russia. This happened nowhere else in Europe.

Yet, Lenin was also naive. He failed to internalize the complete and total assimilation of the Labor Party in the European countries into the Boss Hierarchy of the Capitalists over the working classes. He believed, as apparently did most all the other altruistically inclined naive, that the resolution that they had forced through the Second International Congress of 1907 (Stuttgart) actually meant that the now thoroughly corrupted Social Democratic parties would turn the workers guns against their own governments when the inevitable imperialist world war broke out. One has to have been thoroughly separated from the way real people think to have seriously entertained this nonsense. Again, the consequences of this naivete were almost fatal to the birth of the Socialist Stage at that point in time.

Decades of investment overseas - which is to say the shipping of machines and factories to the colonies - produced great profits throughout the ten years preceding the World War of 1914. But! The Profits that came back in 1913 were so stupendous that the most important capitalists in each of the capitalist countries saw that it was time to go to war. War could do two things. (1) It could give the victors even better access to that cheap labor-power in what we call the Third World. That was the best case; in the worst case the losers wouild lose a few colonies; that they felt could be negotiated to a minimum. -And, (2) there was no downside! No matter what the military outcome, each capitalist class would have liquidated millions of its most troubesome male workers.

These men were the single greatest threat the capitalists faced. They were the enemy within. In the massive armies of the unemployed. They were no longer needed as cheap labor-power. No one could tell when their "boss hierarchy" of social democrats might be pushed aside by rising tides of working class militancy - or, that the pie-cards might not decide to take power anyway as they would be the class administering the factories supposedly under "public" ownership.

No. Take no chances. Kill as many male workers as possible. -And, then if some domestic additional labor-power should be needed you could put their women and children into the factories. They were by far the best workers anyway because they were easier to control. Well over a century of experience had proven that. It was women and children who were first brought into machinofacture production. -And, the history of this tradition goes way back into the Feudal Stage.

Under Feudal conditions, in China, Japan and in Europe, women and children producing yarns and pottery pre-forms had made all the diference between starvation and survival from year to year for the serf household. Why? Because the men were worked so hard by and for their masters, that there was nothing left for their families.

It now seems inconceivable to me that anyone could have thought that anything other than what did happen on the 4th of August, 1914, would have happened! Yet it caught Lenin totally by surprise when the German Social Democrats voted the war funding for the Kaiser and the war was off and running! -And, then the other traitor parties of Social Democrats did the same thing in England, France, Italy, ad nauseum.

Lenin went to the Bern library in September of 1914. He went back to Hegel. He spent a year studying the dialectics of history, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. The fact that he had to do it this way shows how isolated he was from the reality of everyday people; the way they think. Which is rather amazing, given his many years of underground organizing and clandestine operations, not to mention his jail time and exile in Siberia for a total of three years. This is more than an interesting sideline to our story. It is the very essence of it.

No. Of course not. There wasn't one naive bone in Stalin's body. Joseph V. Djugashvilli came from the most oppressed sector of Georgia's working class would-be petit bourgeois population. An alcoholic father that beat him senseless; a washer woman who worked for the rich and infamous as something more, in order to pay for his education, for a mother. His first sexual experience was with a religious and uneducated Georgian girl. He had gone to prison seven times and escaped six when the First World War broke out in August of 1914. He wasn't surprised that all the traitor parties were traitor parties.

Now the workers would pay the price of having been betrayed. For the redivision of world markets and cheap labor-power resources (in the colonies) was only one objective of the World War that the capitalists had launched. The other, as we have seen, was the equally important objective of killing as many supernumerary, unwanted, and dangerously restive socialistic/communistic European working class males as possible.

Before I went into the field in Peru, in 1977, I was quite naive too. My real world experiences as described in this book and in the succeeding volumes Rivers of Blood! and High Finance: South American Style changed all that. So, I can understand both Lenin and Stalin - because I was there at the same point in life. First with Lenin; later with Stalin (figuratively speaking.) That's why I have sometimes commented that when my Peruvian sojourn was all said and done, that I had rehabilitated Comrade Stalin.

Working out the dialectics of history by reading Hegel, Lenin came to all the right conclusions about what had happened. He already knew what to do about it. -And, that was to encourage a revolutionary upheaval among the workers and in the Army. So, the Bolsheviks from the first had been busy boring-from-within the Army of the rotten regime of magnate capitalists allied with the Dukedoms of Feudal Capitalist Imperial Russia.

In February, of 1917, hungry people rose against the Czar in Petrograd (the wartime name of St. Petersburg; the city that would eventually be named after Lenin.) The bourgeois leaders, unhappy that the Czar had proven incompetent to do anything except kill large numbers of workers and peasants through his military incompetence, seized upon the working peoples uprising to overthrow the Magnate-Ducal Regime and replaced it with a "Provisional Government."

Lenin made his way back to Petrograd in a "sealed" train that left Switzerland, passed through Germany and entered northwestern Russia by way of Scandinavia. The "sealed" part was something Lenin devised so that he could deny he was doing what he was doing. Namely, making an enormously important financial deal in Berlin with the General Staff of the Wermacht (German Army.) The German High Command knew that Lenin wanted Russia out of the war and would do anything to foment a revolution and Russian withdrawal from the war; they knew he needed help. He knew they knew this and made his "pitch" which was handsomely approved by the Junker Staff.

Arriving in Petrograd with plenty of cash and more on the way, being bankwired from Germany to Sweden to Finland; a small army of financial agents left behind in place to physically handle the transfers, Lenin was ready to kick some ass! He wasn't naive about money, nor about the class enemies he confronted - nor, anything else, except, that undiscovered country of selfish and sadistic basal imprinting, that was as strong in the oppressed classes (including the working classes) as it was in the masters and mistresses and the boss hierarchy of society.

In Petrograd, Lenin immediately began preaching revolution against the bourgeois Provisional Government - on the platform at Finland Station (where trains stopped arriving from Finland) - the moment he stepped off the train. Hundreds of thousands of workers and their families, honor guards from different regiments and Czarist ships, as well as Government leaders and his own Boshevik Central Committee met him there. This was the biggest, by far, reception accorded any returning exiled leader from February, and before October, of 1917.

Suffice it to say that Lenin found his own Bolsheviks collaborating with the enemy instead of striking out to destroy it. He went directly to the workers and rearmed the Party. His control over the funds needed to publish all the new Bolshevik newspapers and pay all the new cadre, didn't hurt either.

The Bolshevik Party was rearmed by the document we know as The April Thesis. The Party was then hammered, by Lenin, who was again in hiding from the secret police, into seizing state power in October. Lenin insisted, demanded, in letters and secret messages directed to the Party leadership that it act! Now! -And, it did.

The "state" is the army and police, people on a payroll of the financially most powerful classes, and is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. It arises in the hands of these financially most powerful because they are the ones that can afford to pay the thugs to suppress the masses. This meant that the Bolsheviks had to seize state power from the class enemy - build their own "state" and establish a proletarian dictatorship over the enemy so that they could THEN proceed to construct the socialist world order. In other words, it was pure Karl Marx, applied to the Russian conditions of the moment.

I put this in bold and italics for a reason. The reason is, that this is the key to understanding Lenin's success in introducing the Stage of Stalinist Socialism onto the world historical stage. Lenin knew he had to overthrow the bourgeois government. The time had come to do it. The first conclusion was mandated by the correct General Theory. He had Engels completion of Marx's and Morgan's work upon which to build and prove his conclusion. {Now we also have my studies which archaeologically confirm that prehistoric emergence of classes and the "state" happened exactly this way.} The second conclusion was a tactical matter that required audacity (balls) to do what the theory said to do because the time was ripe. In the event, the Bolsheviks had just won the elections; the Regime was weak. There was no reason to wait any longer; every reason to act before the enemy got a chance to put some bullshit parliamentary system into effect. A system that the bourgeoisie would, of course, dominate.

The Bolshevik Government managed to survive its toughest year, 1918. Stalin remained Lenin's most important cadre, but the late coming Leon Trotsky proved to be good at more than rabble-rousing (his main task in the pre-Octber days and the reason that Lenin bent over backwards to get him to join the Bolshevik Party;) particulary as War Commisar; in the eyes of many outside the inner circle seemed himself to have replaced Stalin as Lenin's number one. We know now that only Stalin and Trotsky were on Lenin's to be admitted at any time, list.

The Civil War which began immediately with the Bolshevik seizure of power had to be fought on many fronts throughout 1918. But the Red Army managed to defeat all its enemies and all the capitalist (imperialist) countries too - for they all had troops on Soviet territory aiding the capitalist and feudalist White enemies of Soviet power during the Civil War (1918-1922.)

Leon Trotsky, the Latter Day Bolshevik, whom Lenin had convinced to join him after his arrival in Petrograd (because of his oratorical skill and history in haranging the workers of Petrograd), had a long history of opposing Bolshevism. He had bitterly opposed Lenin since 1903; only joining in a rather arrogant manner in 1917, but, as I say, had done a brilliant job as War Commissar and got the credit for the destruction of the White Armies in 1918 and 1919 (although Stalin had saved Tsarytsin in 1918.)

At this time the Bolsheviks were still uncertain about how long the working class dictatorship period (phase or Stage) was going to have to last before they could move on to true Communism. {Note that neither Marx nor Lenin saw Communism (as a Stage,) as anything more than a "transitional Stage" to a truly human society.} The term "socialism", previously used almost synonymously with the term or idea of "communism" came into widespread usage by Leninists for the kind of society that the Bolsheviks were trying to build in Russia at this "transitional" time.

Then in January of 1919, when workers could have seized Berlin and liquidated the Social Democratic Regime and followed the Book of Lenin, they failed to do so. Rather, they managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. {Largely, this was due to the inexperience and naivete of the new leaders of German workers, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. They were in no sense whatsoever the equivalent of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky in the organization of insurrection; ending up in the worst possible posture of barricading themselves in buildings in Berlin waiting for the facist few to liquidate them, when they should have immediately arrested and shot all the SDP (German Social Democratic traitors) in Berlin they could get their hands on!}

All this would not have mattered in the slightest if Trotsky had continued his attack at Warsaw and driven on to Berlin. The Bolsheviks liberating the city and preparing to take the rest of Europe was on the horizon when Lenin sent his armies into Poland. But, when Trotsky was confronted by more serious resistance by the French officered Polish army than he had anticipated, he chose to withdraw to the east. The Bolshviks gave up considerable territory for peace and the armed struggle was over. Lenin should never have allowed this to happen. He should have gone to Warsaw personally with a new draft (conscription) of whatever number of troops were necessary and punched through to Berlin.

With German workers linked-up with the Bolshevik Soviet Regime in Moscow the entire course of the 20th century would have been totally different; it is quite likely that the transition to world Socialism would have been much smoother. Instead it took until 1975 to come to an accomodation with the world Capitalist Stage (by then under the concentrated hegemony of the Rockefeller Regime on the Potomac.) Another fifty five years would have to pass before one could get on with the business of constructing the industrial base for Socialism (this time in China) in a safe (global) working environment; from which we could then get on to building "Communism" as a Stage, in order that we might finally proceed then to a truly "humanist" society (as for example one might picture as the STAR TREK era) we now hope to see by AD 2100.

As a matter of historical fact Stalin anticipated that the Red Army woud meet with the same kind of resistance in the Ukraine and Poland that it had met all along on Russian territory. He gave oral and written detailed instructions to his secret police troops and inspectors as to the handling of situations where workers and peasants had been deluded into fighting in the armies of reaction.

The truth is that Trotsky turned around at Warsaw not just because there were many workers and peasants in the Polish (foreign capitalist officered) reactionary armies. But, because he had already decided that Russian workers could go it alone. They just needed a firm estafette on their backs to see that they did what they were capable of doing.

Trotsky started this kind of talk in the early part of 1920. He explained his view that labor simply needed to be militarized; he had been running the factoriese during the Civil War that way. He was adamant in his rejection of any suggestion that the trade unions be allowed to run things. Lenin stepped in at the 9th PartyCongress in March, of 1920, suggesting that someone had to protect the workers from their own state!

In 1921, Lenin restored Capitalism in the Soviet economy because he had no choice. This is what was called the NEP or New Economic Policy. {It went into effect by Lenin's fiat in the Spring of 1921; the law creating it was published on the 9th of August of that year.} It lasted through the summer of 1928, after which the First Five Year Plan went into effect.

In 1922, on the 16th of April, Lenin's diplomats scored a great victory at the small seaside town of Rapallo (just to the south of Genoa, Italy.) The German capitalist government and the Soviet diplomats walked out of the imperialist conference in Genoa on Reparations and signed the Rapallo pact. It was the cornerstone of Leninist foreign policy up and until the Second World War which began for the Soviet Union on June 22, of 1941.

The Rapallo Treaty had key "public" features including the mutual recognition of each signatory as the legitimate governments of Germany and Russia. Thus, Germany became the first capitalist country to formally recognize the Bolshevik Regime. -And, the Bolshevik Government renounced all reparations that Russia was due under the Versailles treaty. An extensive most favored nation trade agreement was worked out between the two. Most importantly, perhaps, was the result that the Wermacht was to be allowed to train its troops on Soviet soil with what ever weapons they liked. Since the Versailles Treaty banned many things to the German army this was of critical importance. -And, secretly, (the "secret" protocols) the Germans agreed to coninue doing what they were already doing, which was building arms factories in Russia for the Red Army.

Lenin created the "Comintern" in March of 1919; by 1920 new Parties of the labor movement were being formed all over the world. The Comintern or Communist International or Third International, replaced the Second International of Traitors and Renegades that had participated in the First World War. It set about building a world revolutionary Marxist alternative in the Leninist mode.

As it turned out the greatest single success of the Comintern was in China. A Chicago schoolteacher named Michael Borodin returned to his Russian homeland in 1917. There he had been identified with the Bolshevik fraction many years earlier. Now he was recruited by the Secret Department of the Comintern (run by Joseph Stalin) and sent on several international missions. Then to China.

In China he welded a small group of Marxists together to form the Chinese Communist Party. Included in the dozen participants (representing about 60 members) at the founding "Congress" in July, 1921, was Mao Zedong. Although Trotsky had failed to drive into Europe and thereby link-up with the labor movement there, and indigenous attempts to throw off the yoke of capital had failed in Europe, things went unbelievably well in China.

Within two years the CPC had millions of adherents and followers in the trade unions in all the major cities. It had struck up an alliance with the bourgeoisie in the cities and in the countryside who saw the communists as the lesser of two evils. The one they were most concerned about was the warlord and the comprador regime in Peking.

However, by 1926, although things were going very well for the Bolshevik Regime in the USSR in every way, and in China for the communists too, the world capitalist classes began to become so uneasy that they renewed their aggression which they had temporarily let slip into a condition of stasis. British banks pulled their loans to Russia even though the Bolsheviks had the best credit rating in the world next to that of the USA. The Japanese capialists made a deal with Chiang Kai-shek the capitalist leader inside the KMT ( the Kuomintang was a Cap/Red United Front.)

The Chinese Reds and the Capitalists of China in the KMT had created an army. It was led by Chiang who had received his military education in Japan and in the Soviet Union. In exchange for lots of cash and a promise of recognition for himself at the head of a so-called "nationalist" Regime, Chiang turned on his allies. Slaughtering the Communists with the help of the local gangsters it began in Shanghai in 1927.The massacres then spread throughout the territory where the Chiang forces could succeed in carrying out the physical liquidation of the communists. Mao's wife was murdered in this terror campaign of the Chiang Kai-shek facists.

In 1927, it became apparent in Moscow, therefore, that war with the capitalist countries was inevitable and that they would be unprepared. NEP was doing well as far as relative prosperity was concerned but the rate of industrialization was pitifully slow. Without capitalist bank credits for foreign entrepreneurs willing and able to build factories in Russia and the other Republics of the USSR industrialization would be even slower!

As for the first question: Trotsky and Stalin hated each other. Mainly, this was a personality clash that arose because of the polar opposite class backgrounds of these two men. Stalin came from a dirt poor abusive family. He had had to fight for an education and his mother had had to sacrifice a great deal to help him get it. An education for Stalin, if it was to be had at all, meant the Seminary. Trotsky, on the other hand, came from a very wealthy family that would have been part of the major nobility if they had not been Jewish. Trotsky had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had had every advantage that money could buy.

Stalin had lived and worked inside the Empire of the Russias his entire life, except for a few trips abroad to see Lenin and participate in Party meetings. He had gone to prison seven times and survived. Not to mention having escaped each time. If nothing else, this shows that Stalin knew the "real world" and was capable. He always did what Lenin wanted him to do until 1923 when the two men split over the way Stalin handled a bunch of assholes in Georgia.

To sum it up: In 1924, Trotksy was removed as War Commissar (Minister.) In 1925, he lost his position in the leadership of the Political Bureau (the Party's highest organ.) In 1926, he was removed from the Central Committee; in 1927 he was expelled from the Party altogether. In January, 1928, he was exiled to Soviet Turkestan; then expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929, whence he walked into Istanbul. -And, what it came down to in class terms is that the days of the petit bourgeois intellectuals running a super sewing circle kind of secret society Party wherein they were the de facto New Elite was over. Replaced by those elements serious about building the Great Dream. That is, the Great Dream of Marx, Engels, Lenin and now Stalin.

In 1926, long known to Party, Government and State bureaucrats as "The Boss," was fairly firmly in the saddle. He decided that to industrialize Russia and mechanize and modernize her agriculture an entirely new approach would be required. -And, this was not an option but a necessity, for war was bearing down from the imperialist countries; all or some would soon go to war against World Socialism. This inevitability could only be forestalled for so many years. Stalin felt he had a decade or so - but, no more.

The idea of collectivizing agriculture in these small-holding peasant kind of countries goes back to Karl Marx. Lenin had also written about it from a theoretical standpoint. Every Marxist student from a peasant nation had toyed with different concepts and ideas about the potentiality of such agrarian structures. Later many became famous such as the Indochinese students from Vietnam and Cambodia, in Paris; Mao in China; Mariategui in Peru, to mention only a few.

Stalin decided to change agriculture and industry at the same time. But, he was not the sole leader yet; he had to work carefully to maintain his plurality in the political bureau; the central committee; in the Party Conferences and Congresses. He proved to be an excellent politician; he kept his markers out. The First Five Year Plan was his answer for industrialization.

To pay the cost of industrialization Stalin needed a lot of money. He got much of it internally from the turnover tax (a kind of sales tax) that eventually took about 90% or more of the prices workers had to pay for their daily bread, etc. He got much of the rest of it, also internally, from the collective farms.

The struggle to force the peasants into cooperatives and collectives was the greatest war the Bolsheviks ever had to fight until World War II. suffice it to say that it worked; it gave Stalin the agricultural produce he needed to sell at home, and abroad, to come up with some of the cash to buy all the factories and machinery that the Soviet Union needed if his program to bring the USSR to modern capitalist levels within ten years were to succeed.

Even though overall agricultural production was drastically reduced because of the sabotage of the kulaks, the portion the government received went way up! {Note: Kulack is the Russian word for "fist" - these were the rich peasants - they were the local bosses and from seemingly time immemorial had been used by the Czar and the aristocrats to keep the common peasants (poor and middle) in line. Stalin stretched the definition of Kulak to cover everyone on the land in opposition including big sections of the Middle Peasantry - but, that was unavoidable if the old way was to be liquidated and replaced by the collective and cooperative farms.}

At any rate, if the Soviet Government got 10% of the previous overall output it was a lot less than 90% of the collective farm output. For Stalin it was a tremendous success. He had eliminated the class enemy on the land inside the USSR and gotten a permanent source of plannable income in the form of agricultural goods.

Stalin had to have managers - bureaucrats - to run the publically owned means of production; he went about creating a new class that he called the "classless intelligentsia" until by the mid- to late 1930's there were over ten million of them. Along with the industrial workers this made the Regime very stable. As long, that is, as the oppositionist elements were continuously weeded out by the secret police. As long as that were the case the Stalinist Socialist Stage was permanent and progressing forward.

Stalin used terror against his opposition. -And, there was an increasing amount of opposition to Stalin's break-neck pace of industrialisation and his increasingly heavy demands on the collective farms. When he announced the law that made death sentences mandatory for managers that failed to meet their quotas, the Party and Government bureaucrats revolted. This incentive program was too much!

In January of 1924, at the Congress of Victors, Sergei Kirov - the Leningrad Party Chief- was named as Stalin's successor, should "the Boss" die or be removed. Although Stalin remained firmly in control of the Congress there was equally firm formal opposition which pulled several hundred (unacknowledged) votes against Stalin continuing as General Secretary. The Congress ordered Kirov from Leningrad to Moscow where he would be the Moscow Party Boss. That put him right next to the Seat of Government and power in the Kremlin. Stalin was warned. He wasn't omnipotent and the bureaucracy wouldn't stand still for that kind of punishment just for the radical and seemingly impossible speeds he was demanding in the industrialization of the nation. Ten months later Kirov was dead.

Kirov was assassinated before he could get to Moscow (1 December, 1934.) Shot by an estranged husband with a long record of disaffection with the Party decisions to which he was subjected as a security cop, Stalin used his assassination as a pretext to launch a series of internal purges of the state and government apparatus and of the Party itself. It was the only way to maintain the rate of industrialization. -And, Stalin was convinced that Socialism as a Stage could still be reversed in the inevitable coming capitalist World War if the USSR was not totally modernized, industrially, by that time.

Meanwhile, in China, Mao Zedong had built a Red Base Area in the southeastern part of the nation at the boundary of Kiangsu and Hunan provinces. There he withstood four successive anti-Red Bandit campaigns of the facist Chiang Kai-shek and his Japanese and German advisors and suppliers. Mao wiped out each of these Chiang Kai-shek campaigns; then, far leftists within the CPC got the upper hand. They replaced Mao and ordered suicidal attacks on cities which left the communists decimated and too weak to withstand a still 5th campaign of the Nazi-Jap-Chinese Facist combine. The Reds would have to flee. During which flight Mao regained control of the Party and the Army.

Shensi was part of the heart of Ancient China and always had been. Furthermore, this put the Chinese communists and their Red Army on the frontier area with Soviet Mongolia and the USSR. Given the plans of the Japanese capitalists to attack both Mongolia and the Soviet Union as well as nuclear China (which is to say, all of China from and around the Huang-ho to the Yangtse Rivers) this was strategic gold! Japanese military forces could not deal with the first two and leave their entire left flank open to attack from Red China in Shensi!

By the middle of the 1930's the European capitalist classes were fully committed to fascism and to the destruction of their own native labor movements and the Red heartland of Socialism in the USSR. In country after country they had placed total police state regimes called "fascist" over the mass of workers and peasants. In Hungary under Horthy; in Italy under Mussolini; in Portugal under Salazar; in Spain under Franco; in Germany under Hitler; the Balkan states were all facist too. Only France and the United Kingdom of the major powers had not yet gone fascist. France would soon, with a little help from her friends in high places and the Hitlerites. -And, in London, the capitalists were relying on a succession of Tory governments to put a London-Berlin-Rome axis together. Then, they would liquidate the labor movement in Great Britain and join in a world wide onslaught against Bolshevism.

This was the policy of all of the Tory governments in the 1930's, but became shamefully obvious under Chamberlain as 1939 approached. Concession after concession was given to Hitler; he was allowed to take country after country. Finally, Chamberlain betrayed Czecholsovakia with whom Britain and France had solemn collective security treaties! Both the British and the French ruling classes refused to step up their war preparedness because they wanted to be sure that a clear and present signal continued being broadcast to Hitler - that they were no threat to him. Hitler should just go right on building his military machine; go right on and attack the USSR!

Stalin made every possible effort to forge an alliance with Britain and France to contain Hitler but every effort was rebuffed. Including the one at the last minute when Stalin made tremendous overtures to both the French and British regimes that resulted in the London government sending a low-ranking delegation by slow-boat to Murmansk. Stalin then directed Molotov to seek a non-aggression treaty with Germany. It succeeded and the USSR avoided war.

What the greed and fanaticism of the British and French ruling classes had blinded them to was the possibility - nay certainty - that Hitler would strike against them first; finish thereby the unfinished business of the First World War and simultaneously bring both France and England into the Nazi world orbit. Hitler almost succeeded.

During the summer of that fateful year, 1939, while the attention of the West was riveted on Hitler and his next move, the Japanese capitalists expanded World War II in the Far East by launching a million man attack on the Soviet Union and People's Mongolia. In response, General Zhukov delivered a smashing rebuff to their forces at Khalkin-gol in Mongolia; sent what was left of their armor, artillery and air force reeling back into Manchuria. If Hitler had been paying attention he would have seen what was waiting for him in the Soviet West. But, he wasn't.

The German capitalists, unified under the Nazi's, struck out at Britain and France using the Polish war as the excuse. Even after Poland went under, and Britain and France were technically at war with Germany, they didn't do much of anything. Why? Because they were still hoping not to provoke the Fuhrer; hoping that he would keep going to the East. Their "phony war" was the last phase of their wishful thinking about Hitler.

A lighting strike by Hitler in 1940, was directed against Scandinavia; then Benelux got the same treatment; all that success sent the Nazi armies into France. Using the plans provided to them by the Duke of Windsor, the Nazi spearhead circumvented the Maginot line; then found French commanders helpfully withdrawing - inviting the Nazi's to take their country. It was the typical betrayal the world had gotten used to seeing - by the Big Capitalists and their bourgeois allies against their respective nations, hoping that the fascists would be good enough to liquidate their organized labor movement when they took over. Which, of course, they did.

Then he got the big surprise. Churchill, with his perfect command of European history and his worldliness that came from having been all over Africa and Asia in his youth a part of one military campaign or another, was less than impressed with the paper hanger from Vienna. Churchill had traveled from the Sudan to South Africa to Afghanistan. -And, had a brief stint as a prisoner of war (in an Afrikaner Camp) from which he escaped! Churchill was not so much afraid of labor as he was of Hitler - believing that British rulers could control labor within the framework of their long and well established Parliamentary system. A good Anti-communist himself, he saw the Soviet Union as far less of a threat to Great Britain than the Nazi's. He had no intention of making a deal with the gutter-snipe Hitler. {Churchill being the son of a Lord was quite class-conscious and not at all likely to make a deal with poor-White-trash like Hitler to take over his realm.} Churchill arranged for the emergency evacuation of the expeditionary army from the French beaches.

In the meantime, Lin Piao launched the 100 Regiments attack that dealt death and destruction on the left flank of the Japanese army in China. The Jap response was to launch the 3 All's Campaign which massacred 22 million Chinese civilions between 1941 and 1943. A holocaust four times greater than what the Germans did to the Jews. However, this expanded war in North China had the effect of securing Stalin's Siberian frontier, by tying down all of Japanese imperialism's armed forces. Also, it fed huge numbers of volunteer replacements into the Chinese People's Liberation Army. Meanwhile the fascist regime of Chiang Kai-shek refused to fight the Japanese, although individual KMT armies did make alliances with the local communist authorities to so fight. Especially the KMT armies that had escaped Manchuria and wanted to return home.

On the 15th of December, 1941, barely a week after the USA came into the war, because of the 7 December attack of the Japanese imperialists against Pearl Harbor, Stalin launched the counterattack that almost ended the war in Europe. A million fresh Siberian troops hit the Nazi's and dealt them almost total destruction in front of Moscow. With a little more expertise and experience the Red Army would have been in Berlin in May of 1942, instead of May of 1945.

It was left to be played out once again in the Fall of 1942, at Stalingrad. At the same time, 20,000 US Marines were being dropped (and left stranded) at Guadalcanal, the Nazi reinforced 6th Army reached the outskirts of Stalin's City. {What had been called Tsaritsyn before the Bolshevik Revolution.}

After the Nazi's and their European allies had pushed well into the city and months of house-to-house, cellar-to-cellar, hand-to-hand combat, the Red Army launched a massive counter attack and 1.2 million fresh troops drove pincers behind the German forces to surround and trap 300,000 of them in that great city. Very few German invaders survived. Stalingrad was the end of Germany. After the destruction of the German forces was completed in January 1943, it was all over except the fighting. True, the Germans made one last big effort at the battle of the Kursk Salient in the summer of 1943, but they made no headway what-so-ever in this greatest tank battle in history, where the cream of German armour and SS fighters were turned into scrapmetal and hamburger. It was now all over except the running - and the Germans never stopped running until they were dead or encircled in Berlin; all of eastern Europe had been liberated by the Red Army along the way.

The Chinese People's Liberation Army and the Soviet Red Army invaded Manchuria in August 1945, and forced the immediate surrender of the Japanese multi-million man occupation force there. With the captured weapons of the Japanese, the Chinese Reds would be able to finish off the corrupt fascist regime of Chiang Kai-shek in 1948-49.

The Meyer Lansky, Kansas City Flunkey, Harry Truman (via the Pendergast Gang - a 2nd string Lansky organization - SEE Volume 1 of my autobiographical series for the details of Lansky's operations - entitled THE BUCCANEER [www.writerspress.com]) assumed the Presidency and reversed FDR's entire foreign policy making the destruction of the Soviet Union his number one objective. What made this wild fantasy seem possible was the idea that the Gringo regime had a monopoly on the atomic bomb. -And, although they were only able to make about one bomb amonth by 1947 they though that would do the job. The truth was that they had no monopoly - that there were hundreds if not thousands of Soviet agents inside their "Manhattan Project" and that Stalin's scientists were keeping up step by step and surging ahead in many sideline endeavors (one of which would give Stalin the world's first militarily useable H bomb.) But, the gringos were racist and arrogant with regard to Russia and chose to deluded themselves.

Still, the central problem we are concerned with is the same one that existed when the first worker's government came into existence in 1917. How long will it be necessary to have this highly regimented, constantly prepared, forever alert, rapidly building, military force in the hands of the working class dictatorship - and, at the cost of every other aspect of building a completely free and voluntarily associated working people's society - where they are building a truly human society for its own sake?

The answer is obvious, of course, in one sense: "There is no substitute for keeping state power in one's own class hands, nor for the most rapid continuing industrial and scientific growth regardless of the political, social and economic sacrifices required to do so. Therefore, until the class enemy gives up on its policy of reversing global socialism as a sociocultural evolutionary stage that force will be maintained and expanded at whatever cost!"

Meanwhile, the gringo capitalists had established a kind of 20th century helotry over Europe. With economic domination (the Marshall Plot Against Europe) and military hegemony over the former allies and enemies alike of Western Europe. They confronted communists everywhere with extreme aggression; had no problem in instituting fascism in their own image throughout the world. Yet the US richest oligarchs had no agreed upon strategy for a final solution.

As we have seen in this autobiography the U.S. Ruling Families would not resolve their final attitude toward how to articulate with Socialism until they played one last hand. That of the Indochina War. -And, then,with their rather quick demise in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, it was all over for the camp that advocated a violent solution to the problem of Bolshevism. Rockefeller resumed command and sent his flunkeys Kissinger and Nixon to make peace with the leader of the World Stalinist Socialist Stage, Mao Zedong, in 1972. The Vietnamese army put paid to the gringos unwilling to get out, in April, 1975.

After 1975, with the pressure off, Socialism was able to advance into its Second Stage. That of devoting its resources to industrialization and modernization of every aspect of the Chinese economy. -And, although the Soviet leaders still mouthed socialist talk, they set about doing the opposite. That is, openly restoring capitalism everywhere that they could.

We can climb the height of Mt. Olympus and look back over all of human history - now that we have completed the prehistoric and historic periodization of that history which I have summarized in the foregoing discussioin of the dialectics of history. {A complete presentation will be available soon in the forthcoming book CAPITAL VOLUME V; or, in a short course version of the same book entitled REVOLUTIONARY REFOUNDATION.}

These two stages are the first stages of a two stage period; a transitional period to be precise. In each case the transitional period is also a transformational temporal unit between two epochs; and in the latter case between two eras. This last characteristic is unique to the contemporary period, and is of a great significance by an order of magnitude, to say the least. Yet there are clear cut relative comparisons that have to do with stage transitions in "periods" between epochs. It behooves serious scholars to study them and to learn their significance.

Therefore, in the First Transitional "Period" between these two "epochs" we should expect to see both of these General Contradictions fighting it out; in both of the two "stages" of the transition. Let us see what we see when we pick a diagnostic feature of a sociocultural evolutionary "stage" - say, the feature of ...

In the Stage of Tribal Agriculture (last stage of the First Egalitarian Epoch) and in the Stage of the Simple Chiefdoms (first stage of the First Transitional "Period") there is the feature of more people functioning to absorb more "trouble making" surplus value giving way to more people functioning to create more surplus value to feed more professionally specialized mouths. In both case we see rapid population explosions. But the function is to serve the general contradiction (in absorbing surplus value before it can create trouble) of the First Egalitarian Epoch in the first instance; in the second to facilitate the maximization of surplus value production in satisfaction of the general contradiction of the Servitude Epoch. It requires surgically precise logic and comprehension of the laws of sociocultural evolution to grasp the critical significance of the change in causation and process between the two population explosions; especially since they are so intimately interrelated temporally (thus, even more difficult to distinguish.)

(2) labor-time utilization - in the Stage of Tribal Agriculture, society dumped as much potential labor-time as possible in some kind of non-productive social time or wastefull labor-time, such as moving-on, starting over, slash-and-burn, precisely to limit the amount of surplus value being produced. In the following Simple Chiefdom stage, people stayed in place, intensified professional specialization of labor-power and intensified the economic infrastructure for the precisely opposite reason - or, in other words - to maximize the production of surplus value.

Now let us compare Capitalism as a Stage (which is the last stage of the Servitude "epoch") with certain key features of Stalinist Socialism as a Stage (which is the first of the two stage Second Transitional "Period.) Again, let us begin by looking at the "general contradictions" of the Servitude Epoch and The Second Egalitarian Epoch.

The General Contradiction of all three stages of the Servitude Epoch is the drive to maximize surplus value production no matter at what cost to the productive people; no matter how much value is created nor how much surplus value. On the other hand the General Contradiction of the Second Egalitarian Epoch (and its first stage of Communism) is the drive to maximize production for the benefit of the people as a whole (e.g. from each according to her ability to each according to her needs.)

As I pointed out above there is the additional factor of transition/transformation of "ERA" as well as that of "stage" and "epoch." This is an order of magnitude difference and must now be taken into account in every logical step of analysis. -And, we must remember the implication of "communism" as a "stage" - i.e., there will be further "stages" after communism - perhaps like the Next Generation of Star Trek (compared to The Original Series,) for analog visual model purposes.

(1) destination of surplus value as constant capital: an iron law of capitalist development and social relations is: that "form" determines the destination of all the surplus value being created by the capitalists' application of wage labor-power to machinofacture - because there is no place else for all this surplus value to go, and it is created primarily as a commodity precisely for the purpose of its exchange-value (rather than for its use-value) - a capitalist is the best customer and end-user of another capitalist. Pig iron can't be eaten it has to be sold to a steel or wrought iron producing capitalist; steel and/or wrought iron can't be eaten their "form" requires that they be "consumed" by some other capitalist - such as one who will use it in machine tools; which in turn are not eaten either but must be sold to machinery manufacturers; etc. etc. ...

Now, on the surface of things we see that more and more surplus value of the Stalinist Socialist Stage is going also into constant capital. There is a surficial amazing similarity in this "destination" feature between the two Stages. Yet in the first instance the dumping of surplus value by form into the hands of another capitalist is a compelled, involuntary, feature of capitalist social relations; while in the second instance the direction of constant capital into another constant capital end-user is a desired, determined, feature of a society wherein the working class dictatorship has decided to require the maximum acceleration of the construction of the means of production for the benefit of the long-term interests of the working classes. For the protection of their form of society; their state; and the rapid acceleration of their class interests (which are in reaching "communism" and its early form of true freedom [the "era" characteristic]) wherein there is no limit on the amount of surplus value that can be created - and which must be created in whatever desired quantities if the slogan "from each according to her abilities and to each according to her needs" is to be realized.

Furthermore, the capitalist relations just mentioned direct the surplus value on the basis of "form" in order to maximize the "profit" margin (subcolumn.) In Stalinist Socialist Relations there is no "profit" margin as such - all surplus value going into the end-user components of the "new Socialist Order."

Again as in the case of Tribal Agriculture to Simple Chiefdoms it requires surgically precise logic to understand that the same feature reflects opposite general contradictions at work in consecutive stages. This comes about only with the maturation of two factors: upon the basis of absolutely correct (1) periodization of sociocultural phenomena and (2) upon the basis of a perfectly worked out general theory. Otherwise one ends up like Raya Dunayevskaya - which is to say completely misunderstanding the significance of the "destination" feature in these two sequential stages.

(2) Profit as a subcolumn of surplus value: In the case of capitalism as a stage the motive force is the capitalists' drive for "profit" under the surplus value column; this always stands in stark opposition to the "prime mover" "cause" which is the "interest of the working people" in appropriating enough of the surplus value to satisfy their schedule of priorities.

But, in the Stalinist Socialist Stage the motive force is the same as the prime mover (that is the class interest of the working people lies in building their constant capital base as quickly and efficiently as possible for their own protection (their needed army, air force, navy, police forces, intelligence operations) and their own life betterment (the sooner the better as far as creating the industrial base making possible "from each according to her ability to each according to her needs.)

At the Congress of Victors the rank/class equivalent among the Party bosses and Industrial Collective Farm Managers among the delegates tried to assert their independent position - demanding their "profit equivalent" rewards! They wanted freedom from the law that made death sentences mandatory for those among them that failed to meet quotas; they wanted more substantial monetary and "perq" rewards as a matter of course. They made Kirov (perhaps against his desires and his will) their candidate. It didn't work because Stalin recognized what was happening and used "state power" increasingly against his own apparatus and the new "classless intelligentsia" where needed.

Again as in the case of Tribal Agriculture to Simple Chiefdoms it takes surgically precise logic to understand that the same feature of similar surplus value utilization has different (totally different) outcomes. Otherwise one ends up like Raya Dunayevskaya with totally wrong conclusions about the similarities. In fairness one must point out that it takes two things to make such steel-trap logic feasible: (1) the perfectly precise periodization data on the sequence of sociocultural stages; (2) a perfectly accurate theoretical model to demonstrate the dialectics of history at every stage and transition between stages. Neither were available or brought to bear on the correct problem until now.

In the case of the Tribes to Chiefdoms we know that not all followed the onward and upward trajectory (towards Advanced and Theocratic Chiefdoms,) there were alternatives. Such as, slightly more efficiently organized tribal council/chief Advanced Democratic Chiefdoms (ADC's.) Examples are all of the post-pleistocene tribes and ADC's of Eurasia from the Carpathians/Caucusus to the Pacific Ocean/northern China regions.

(4) I think so. If the Red Army had taken Berlin in 1920 instead of 1945 then the 20th century would have been totally different. Advanced German technology (and the workers to go with it) combined with that of the Soviet Union would have given us an entirely more rapid progress toward the "communist stage" than the route which had to be followed in the event.

The post-1975 world was not one in which the USA ruling oligarchs could act with impunity; direct its affairs as they wished (only them and their "new" policy.) The Soviet revisionists (de facto "new class") had their post-Vietnam policy too. It had been written for them by George Orwell. He had called it 1984.

The Soviet New Czars were committed to the "Big Lie" idea because it had worked so well for them for over two decades. I mean by this, the "sheep's clothing" approach to converting public property into their own de facto private property after the death of Stalin in 1953. After 1975, it took them fifteen years to get over the idea that they had to remain camoflauged and to begin to stand before their own people and the world for what they really were (c. 1990.) But even the traitor Gorbachev moved carefully, trying until the very last minute to keep a toe hold back in the "stage of Lenin" just in case the "restoration" didn't work out. But, inevitably in this case - very similar to the events following the death of Cromwell and prior to the Restoration and the Final Solution of 1688 - for many similar reasons, capitalism came back because the New "Classless Intelligentsia" had in part finally obtained their "profit equivalent" status (to "profit" in the subcolumn of the formula for the Capitalist Stage.)

However, on the "sunny side" neither the Gringo capitalists nor the "revisionist" ones were preparing to attack Socialist China. That was the diagnostic new safe environmental criteria - existing for the very first time for Socialism as a Global Stage since 1917 (with the possible exception of a brief breathing stint between 1923 and 1925.) For China, this made it possible to return to NEP. Things weren't so easy for Cuba - being next to the heartland of US imperialism as it is - and, without Soviet rockets...Thus, Cuba's delay in being able to follow the same road as China (to 1991 rather than 1975.)

The Soviet Union had to leave the leisurely pace of NEP behind because it had to get serious about building an industrial base second to none. (At least, as far as being able to build the most modern armaments for the inevitable coming second imperialist world war - which would also be a GNP war - meaning the one with the most of the most modern weapons (all other things being equal) would win.)

China went back to NEP in 1975 as part of the promise of the Rockefeller ordered (Kissinger/Nixon brokered) promised "new world order" where China was free from the constant threat of gringo nuclear attack The results of "Two Systems One Country" can only be said to be nearly miraculous in terms of the rapidity of China's industrial and agricultural modernization. By the year 2050 China will be as advanced as the USA in 2001.

What we really have here is One Country and Three Systems. -And, the proper periodization puts the People's Republic of China at the vanguard (along with Cuba) of the Second or Advanced Socialist Stage. Let us take a look at the three side-by-side, simultaneously operating formulai of economic operation involved in the PRC.

The General Crisis of Capitalism was specifically caused by the irreversible absolute decline in the rate of profit, as we have seen. That means, that unless labor-power is introduced on a one-to-one ratio with the introduction of the next generation of machinery (NGM) that the output of the machines will be greater but that the RATE of surplus value production must decline - thereby, exacerbating the drawdown factor of the NGM subcolumn on the PROFIT subcolumn. The "rate" of profit production will always decline. For the capitalist to overcome this decline in the rate of profit he would have to hire more labor-power. This is self-defeating. He bought the new machines to stay competitive by reducing the amount of labor-power he had to put into the production of commodities per unit surplus value; to reduce the amount of labor-power he had to buy per unit of commodity output.

There was a superficial similarity between Capitalism and Stalinist Socialism as the latter absorbed surplus value as quickly as it was created too. But, the end-use was altogether different in one sense (not in the sense that "form" dictates "destination") but, in the reason the destination of surplus value differs: i.e., from that of the profit motive of the capitalist and the involuntary necessity of producing for exchange X commodity for another capitalist to the voluntary political motive of the proletarian dictatorship. If this was not so the emergent would-be and eventual de facto New Class would not have had to throw off its sheep's clothing and grab as grab can.

But the economic source of all this trouble is that element of the equation that involves human labor-power. To transcend this problem one must at the very least supplement human labor-power with robot labor-power. Eventually one must replace human labor-power altogether; with robot labor-power. Why? Because robot labor-power can be introduced at a one-to-one ratio with the productive power increases, unit-by-unit of technology. End of story.

It must be assumed, as a given, that the Worker's Party will keep a firm grip on "state" power (i.e., military and police) as the three systems evolve side-by-side. Because the class struggle continues as well; and, the "state" can not wither away until the reasons for its existence have been eliminated (and those reasons are the emergence of classes with hostile, antagonistic and opposite self-interests.) With "state power" firmly in the hands of the Worker's Party(whatever its name) the class struggle within the Second Socialist Stage will have the desired conclusion. At least the probability is high that it will.

Variable Capital: the working classes in the factories and on the land need to have their educational levels raised as quickly and as steadily as possible. Along the way we need not expect the great sacrifice of several generations with regard to creature comforts of life because the pressure from without has been normalized.

Finance Capital: the deepening General Crisis of Capitalism has produced on a global scale an enormous amount of liquid finance capital looking for a home. It is a matter of historical fact that only the People's Republic of China can at this moment, and, in the forseeable future, absorb say one trillion US dollars of investment from this source per annum - each year for the next fifty years.

As the few hundred richest families on the globe search for a place to put their annual income (they have as much cash as the annual income of some 2.5 billion people on this planet) it requires only astute financial engineering to give them both security (PRC guarantees on capital invested) and high returns (from a combination of reinvestment tiers on interest paid.)

Value being produced in China as it is currently being produced (via 3 sysems or 3 different productive formulai) tells us exactly what must be done in the 21st century. The formula of the future must gradually replace the formula of the past. Which is to say the productive relations of communism must gradually replace the productive relations of capitalism. Gradually, meaning that there is a strictly technological frontier that will fall down and disappear in the phases of the reinvention of the means of production, year by year, decade after decade. Along the way, the formula of Stalinist Socialism with its government-owned and state-owned (publically owned) means of production in industry and on the land will also take on new forms more appropriate to the communist stage of the future.

In practice one large-scale way of doing this is already afoot. That is, the total robotization of the automated factories to produce both heavy and light industrial goods. But, this is only one way forward. Its drawback is that these early applications of robot labor-power still require human administrators. This is a structural guarantee for a New Class of "classless intellectuals" once again. So, it is essential that the roboticized factories be run by completely independent artificially intelligent machines at the earlist possible moment. So, that rather than building a growing New Class we should see the point come when we will be building that class, down. Out of existence.

Along the way there is no reason why these professional bureaucrats should not be phased out by computer assisted workers who administer on a part-time basis. -And, who take on an increasingly large supervisory scope of administration as their skills and their computer assisted work place improves. The ideal would be that people who have a multitude of other life goals and activities take on these administrative tasks more-or-less voluntarily. People whose interest in the public welfare which they see in everyday life means their own personal welfare.

People working at home and interfacing with each other in socially recreational ways can be people working at home and interfacing with each other in economically supervisory ways over a massive base of robot labor-power "manned" cybernetically, organized, modernized machinofacture and STAR TREK level technological installations.

In this way Value and Surplus Value will be produced without a General Crisis and in never-ending amounts so that the wishes of any one and all of the citizens, for whatever material things, can be instantly satisfied. The Era of Freedom will be here when the slogan of communism becomes a reality: from each according to her ability to each according to her wishes and needs.

Basal imprinting (an element of the superstructure; the cultural component we call "ideology") of infants and children will change as the Mode of Production changes {i.e., the interplay between the forces of production (technology) and the relations of production (social organization).} As scarcity is eliminated and the social relations of production reflect an increasingly egalitarian attitude. Yet this is going to take at least the five generations of the 21st century.

One of the tasks of Party and State must be to see that the official ideology of the future is as clearly spelled out and understood as possible. In the last analysis the consciously internalized and understood philosophy of science is the next best guardian (after the state apparatus itself) of the future and humanity's ability to get there. I have always thought that such a view of the future as being both exciting and well worth striving for was that view shown us by Mr. Roddenberry. Thus the Dedication, for example, of the 8 volume series (from which this excerpt is taken [specifically book #3]) "Idaho Smith's" Search for the Foundation!

A full text of this article can be found in the Appendix to SHINING PATH:THE PERUVIAN REVOLUTION, 2000, Jason W. Smith, Writer's Press, Boise, 317 pp. (which is Volume 3 of the eight volume series entitled "Idaho Smith's" Search for the Foundation! available at www.writerspress.com 1-800 574-1715.)