Capitalism

The capitalist social system is a social system based on capitalists’ ownership of the means of production and exploitative wage-labor, the last social system in human history in which man is exploited by man.

Marx made an objective and concrete historical analysis of the emergence and development of capitalism all his life. He took revealing the laws of movement and trend of development of capitalism as his main task and guided the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat.

Marx studied the transformation from feudal property in land to capitalist property, examined the history of capitalist development with the materialist conception of history, and regarded it as the process of capitalist mode of production defeating feudal mode of production. Marx said, “The real course of development… results in the necessary victory of the capitalist over the landowner—that is to say, of developed over undeveloped, immature private property.” The emergence and development of capitalism must have two historical prerequisites: first, the development of social division of labor and of commodity economy, and the dissolution of feudal self-sufficient natural economy; second, the weakening of feudal personal dependence, resulting in a large number of workers who lost all means of production and means of life and can only make a living by selling their labor-power. At the same time, a large amount of money wealth is concentrated in a few hands and converted into capital, which is independent of man’s subjective will. It made the country dependent on the towns, the East on the West, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois. In short, “it compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production”, it compels them to introduce bourgeois “civilization”, “to become bourgeois themselves”.

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, capitalism accomplished the transition from the stage of free competition to its highest stage, that is, the stage of monopoly capitalism, which is also the last stage of capitalism. In Imperialism, Lenin pointed out: “In its economic essence imperialism is monopoly capitalism. This in itself determines its place in history, for monopoly that grows out of the soil of free competition, and precisely out of free competition, is the transition from the capitalist system to a higher socio-economic order.” The development of capitalism from liberal capitalism to imperialism is an inevitable trend of the development of capitalist mode of production.

To analyze capitalism with the viewpoint and method of historical materialism, we should not only see its class essence, but also affirm that it is a product of the progress of human civilization. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx particularly emphasized that the victory of the industrial capitalist over the big feudal landowner and the victory of industry over agriculture was a historical progress. In Capital, he pointed out: “It is one of the civilizing aspects of capital that it enforces this surplus-labor in a manner and under conditions which are more advantageous to the development of the productive forces, social relations, and the creation of the elements for a new and higher form than under the preceding forms of slavery, serfdom, etc.” The Communist Manifesto states: “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”

With the development of the capitalist mode of production and the intensification of the exploitation of wage-labor, the fundamental contradictions inherent in capitalist society, i.e. the contradiction between the social nature of production and the private appropriation of the means of production, has become increasingly intense, leading to a contradiction between the organization of production in individual enterprises and the anarchy of production in society, and causing a cyclical economic crisis and a serious damage to the productive forces. With the increasingly intense contradictions in capitalist society and the intensification of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the gradual decline of capitalist society is inevitable. “The disintegration of the single, all-embracing world market must be regarded as the most important economic sequel of the World War II and of its economic consequences. It has had the effect of further deepening the general crisis of the world capitalist system.”

It is a trend of historical development that capitalism will inevitably be replaced by socialism. In modern times, the highly developed productive forces of society have made the bourgeois appropriation of the means of production and products as well as the bourgeois domination of politics and spirit a serious obstacle to economic, political and spiritual development. The victory of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 opened a new era of human history and confirmed the historical necessity of the replacement of capitalism by socialism. But the transition from capitalism to socialism is a historical process of qualitative change of capitalism, which cannot be completed in a short time, but must undergo a long and complex historical process.