Objective Conditions of Paying the RichThe current mode of production holds within itself the objective conditions that drive those in control to pay the rich through an anti-social offensive and war. The mode of production came into being during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by developing the productive forces and depriving the ruling feudal aristocracy of their economic, political and social power. Those who rose to power in the economy and eventually in politics did so based on their control of private property in the form of money wealth, land and means of production. They out-produced the peasant farms and guilds of the feudal system of petty production and eventually rendered them extinct, leaving many without any means of subsistence, forcing them to move to the growing cities to find a means of living. The owners of property mobilized their private wealth to buy workers' capacity to work for use in their factories of industrial mass production, providing working people a means of subsistence, however precarious and rudimentary. The owners of property rapidly increased their wealth by mobilizing their control of political power to march armies abroad to steal the wealth and lives of others through colonial occupation and plunder, war and the slave trade. The Concentration of Wealth in Fewer HandsThe mode of production that displaced the rural petty production of the landed aristocracy holds within it the inevitable concentration of wealth and power in fewer hands. The early years of what became known as laissez-faire capitalism immediately began to concentrate production in larger and larger factories and integrated combines of production and banking. By the end of the nineteenth century, the merging of banks and industries into giant socialized cartels constantly expanding around the world became known as monopoly capitalism, creating the objective conditions ripe for change to socialism.
The working class, whose members are the actual producers, has emerged as the essential human factor with the ability and aim to change the mode of production of the transition period to serve the well-being and rights of all and build the New. Only workers, by activating the human factor/social consciousness to provide a new pro-social aim to mobilize the massive productive powers of modern industrial mass production, can save human beings from the ruling elite that have fallen into despotism and destructive practices worse than those of the ruling aristocracy they displaced.
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The concentration
of wealth and power continues, as starkly evident
during the pandemic
when the private wealth of the twelve richest
oligarchs in the United
States has doubled to over one trillion dollars.
Such massive wealth,
power and privilege have developed into the
control of governments at
all levels to pay the rich and serve their private
interests through
the seizure of ever greater amounts of the value
working people
produce, war, and the despoiling of Mother Earth.