In this article written on the occasion of the 30th death anniversary (1913) of Karl Marx, Lenin initiates us into the essential totality of Marxism. The basic point he makes in the first four paragraphs is that Marxism is not a closed system or ossified doctrine. It is an evergreen philosophy of revolutionary praxis. It did not drop from the sky all of a sudden but took shape in the natural course of development of human civilization and knowledge. And it arose “not as something completed and immutable” (as Lenin remarked in Marxism and Revisionism) but continued to develop as an ever-flowing stream of theory-practice. Only in this dynamic, developing and forward-looking sense is Marxism true and omnipotent. Mao Zedong focused on this basic approach when he said: “Marxism-Leninism has in no way exhausted truth but ceaselessly opens up roads to the knowledge of truth in the course of practice.” This modest, scientific, research-oriented spirit is lost when someone quotes Lenin out of context: for instance, when the CPI(M) writes on the street-walls of Kolkata: “Marxism is omnipotent because this alone is true.” (The word alone is added to render Lenin more profound!).

In the three numbered sections following the introductory paragraphs, Lenin describes the three sources-cum-components one by one. In each case, it will be noted, he describes the actual process, the successive stages in real life, through which a mature theoretical understanding was arrived at. Such is the methodology developed by Marx and Engels. This historical approach alone enables us to comprehend everything in the world as a process of development and to grasp the laws of motion of that process.

I

Marx and Engels started their theoretical careers as students of philosophy; in the first section Lenin dwells on the evolution of Marxist philosophy.

The organic integration of eighteenth century materialism (which attained the highest development in France) and German Classical Philosophy (in particular, Hegel’s dialectics and Feuerbach’s materialism) gave us the philosophy, the world view, of the working class: dialectical materialism.

What is materialism? Over the centuries, the most fundamental debate in philosophy has centred on the relationship between matter and idea (in other words between nature and consciousness or being and thinking). Which is primary and which is derivative? Philosophers who believe that idea (or consciousness, spirit, thinking) comes before and basically determines matter (or reality, nature, being) are known as idealists, while those who hold exactly the opposite view are called materialists. The latter believe, in the words of Lenin, “the world is the movement of... objective reality reflected by our consciousness.”

Materialism, however, can be metaphysical or dialectical.  The former sees things in isolation from one another and as static or immutable.  It recognises change merely as change of place or increase/decrease of quantity.  By contrast, dialectical materialism sees things in their interconnectedness and in constant motion.

What is motion?  It is the mode of existence of matter.  A running bus is in motion, so are a thinking brain, and even this society around us.  There are multiple forms of motion and at the core of each there is a contradiction.  Simple change of place or mechanical motion is one form, which involves the contradiction of a body being at one and the same moment both in one place and in another place, being in one and the same place and not in it.  Another form of motion is organic life.  Take for example your own self.  Every moment some old cells in your body are dying and some new cells are being formed — so you are the same old person and not exactly the same old person.  In other words, a process of renewal is constantly going on.  The same applies to your thought process.  As you go through this book, your body is relatively at rest, but you are picking up some new ideas and discarding some old ones.  When you finish with the book, you remain partly the same old person, partly a new one.  Both in the physical and mental realms, the contradiction or struggle between the old and the new drives the process forward.  It is the business of dialectics  to study such contradictions or motions or, to be more precise, the laws thereof, which  permeate everything, every process in the world.

“[I]n nature”, says Engels, “ amid the welter of innumerable changes, the same dialectical laws of motion force their way through as those which in history govern the apparent fortuitousness of events; the same laws which similarly form the thread running through the history of the development of human thought and gradually rise to consciousness in thinking man...” (Marx Engels Collected Works, Volume 25,p 11)

Dialectics, he adds, is “the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought.”  Among these laws three are most important:
“The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;

The law of the interpenetration of opposites;

The law of the negation of the negation.”  (Ibid, p 356)

The first law explains how transformation or qualitative change takes place.  What happens is that slow, gradual, quantitative change accumulates and, on reaching a given point in the given process, suddenly passes into qualitative change.  For example, “ water... under normal atmospheric pressure changes at 0°Capitalism (centigrade) from the liquid into the solid state, and at 100° C from the liquid into the gaseous state.”  Thus “the mere quantitative change of temperature brings about a qualitative change in the condition of the water.”  (Ibid, p 117)

To refer back to the above example of a human being, slow, imperceptible quantitative development of one’s body takes one from childhood to adolescence to youth and so on.  On the mental or intellectual plane, as your involvement in party activities grows, you pass through various qualitative stages like a sympathiser of the party to a party member to an organiser.  Quantitative change thus leads to qualitative change.  In society as a whole, the contradiction or conflict between exploiting and exploited classes propel society forward through evolution (gradual change) which accumulates slowly and at a certain stage leads to revolutionary transformation.

Regarding the second law Lenin said, “The splitting of a single whole and cognition of its contradictory parts... is the essence of dialectics.”  (Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 38, p 357).  Split the society around you.  You find exploiters and the exploited. You must gain a dialectical understanding of both these contradictory parts.  To quote Lenin again, “Dialectics is the teaching which shows how opposites can be and how they happen to be (how they become) identical, — under what conditions they are identical, becoming transformed into one another, — why the human mind should grasp these opposites not as dead, rigid, but as living, conditional, mobile, becoming transformed into one another.”  (Ibid, p 109)

“The unity (coincidence, identity, equal action) of opposites is conditional, temporary, transitory, unity.  The struggle of mutually exclusive opposites is absolute, just as development and motion are absolute.”  (Ibid, p 358)

What we are discussing here is the unity and struggle of opposites.  The contradictory aspects in every process exclude each other and struggle with each other — this is an absolute law.  But they also coexist in the same process, each being the condition for the other’s existence (e.g., capital and wage labour) — in this sense they are united or identical. And they become identical in another sense.  In given conditions each transforms itself into its opposite — the ruler into the ruled, for example, and vice versa — this is interpenetration or transformation of opposites.

The third law throws light on another dimension of development in nature, society and thought.  Primitive communism or classless society was negated by the advent of class society — this is the first negation.  Class society is negated with the rise of communism — not of the primitive, backward, stone-age variety but one built on, or incorporating, the material and intellectual-cultural achievements of class society — this is the second, or negation of the negation.

“Negation in dialectics”, says Engels, “does not mean simply saying no, or declaring that something does not exist, or destroying it in any way one likes.... I must not only negate, but also sublate the negation.  I must therefore so arrange the first negation that the second remains or becomes possible.  How?  This depends on the particular nature of each individual case.”  (ME CW, Volume 25, p 131) To continue with our example, class society can also be bombed out of existence — with the huge stockpile of nuclear weapons this is a real possibility — where “sublating the negation” becomes impossible, where negation is not dialectical.  Continues Engels:  “Every kind of thing therefore has a peculiar way of being negated in such  manner that it gives rise to a development, and it is just the same with every kind of conception or idea... . This has to be learnt, like everything else.”  Unlike anarchists and unlike reactionaries who wish to return to the “golden past”, we the practitioners of Marxian dialectics do not “simply say no” to capitalism/imperialism/globalisation, but work for their negation in such a way as to retain all their positive achievements in the next, higher form of society.

From the three laws of dialectics we find how everything in the world undergoes constant change — both evolutionary and revolutionary (through leaps) — caused basically by inherent contradictions, while other interrelated things, i.e., external conditions, also influence the process in no small measure.  The progress of Indian revolution, for example, is basically determined by internal class struggle, including the struggle against imperialism, but favourable or unfavourable international situation also acts as an important catalyst or deterrence.  According to dialectical materialism, the world is an integral a whole, where objects and phenomena are interconnected and mutually conditioned.

Dialectical materialism gives us the only scientific theory of knowledge, without which we cannot succeed in our revolutionary mission.  As Mao pointed out in On Practice (which, along with On Contradiction, is a “must read” for every revolutionary activist):
“Knowledge begins with experience — this is the materialism of the theory of knowledge.... Knowledge needs to be deepened ... the perceptual stage of knowledge needs to be developed to the rational stage — this is the dialectics of the theory of knowledge.”  While bookworms tend to neglect the former aspect, empiricists neglect the latter task, for they fail to grasp Lenin’s teaching that “Thought proceeding from the concrete to the abstract — provided it is correct... — does not get away from the truth but comes closer to it.  The abstraction of matter, of a law of nature, the abstraction of value, etc., in short all scientific (correct, serious, not absurd) abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely.  From living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice, — such is the dialectical path of the cognition of truth, of the cognition of objective reality.”  (LCW volume 38, p 171)

So much for dialectical materialism and its theory of knowledge.  Marx and Engels, however, did not stop at developing dialectical materialism. They applied it in studying the progress of human society over the centuries and millennia. The result was materialist interpretation of history, also called historical materialism. The causal relations that shape human history now became clear. The path actually traversed by humankind from primitive communism or classless society through slaveholding society and feudalism to capitalism was mapped (See excerpts from Preface to An Introduction ...in the next section). The fundamental laws of motion of human society having been grasped, the doors now opened up towards a conscious application of these laws for a confident march to the next higher form of society — toward socialism.

Dialectical and historical materialism brought to light another salient feature of societal development. Just as human perceptions and scientific knowledge reflect nature, so social concepts and doctrines (e.g., philosophical explanations, political doctrines, religious faiths) reflect the material structure or economic organization of society. For instance, most religions preach that it is God who made some people rich and others poor; that the latter will be going against God, will be committing a sin, if they try to drastically alter this given state of affairs by  snatching the property of the rich. Such religious precepts arise out of the material conditions of class society and serve the interests of propertied classes; hence the crux of these precepts (the inviolable right to private property) is also enshrined in modern ‘secular’ constitutions.

II

When his studies in philosophy told Marx that the economy is the most fundamental thing in social life, he concentrated on that discipline. For he was no star-gazing ‘philosopher’. “Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways: the point, however, is to change it” — he declared when he was only 27, thereby making a silent revolution in the realm of philosophy and setting out his own aim in life. So when he understood that there could be no radical change in the oppressive and unjust political order without a transformation of the economic base, the philosopher in Marx devoted himself to the most thoroughgoing study of the modern economic system. The principal product of some 20 years of such backbreaking labour was Capital, a devastating attack on the bourgeois order.

How does money grow, or whence does profit arise? In other words, how does money become Capital, a historically evolved relation of production? The answer is provided by the theory of surplus value, which is the cornerstone of the Marxian economic theory. But before we come to this, we must acquaint ourselves with a few preliminary concepts.
Commodity: Whatever is produced by human labour for the specific purpose of exchange (sale) is a commodity. Thus rice grown for consumption (whether by a poor peasant or a landlord) is not commodity, nor is fruit grown in a forest — for in the latter case no labour is involved.

Value: We must distinguish between use value and exchange value. The first refers to the practical utility (capacity to satisfy human demands) inherent in any particular object. The second refers to its exchangeability, i.e., the rate at which it can be exchanged with other objects. Air and sunlight ‘have immeasurable use value, but no exchange value. In economics we generally deal with the latter and simply call it value, which is expressed in money-terms (rupee, dollar etc.)

Labour theory of value: Production of any commodity (agricultural, industrial or whatever) requires a definite amount of labour depending on the quality of instruments, technologies, skills etc. available in a given society. This is expressed as “socially necessary labour time”. The average amount of this (i.e., so many hours or man-days) is known for every commodity in the given country. So this determines the value (exchange value) of every commodity in a way acceptable to all. If we say that the value of a pair of shoes is equal to that of four metres of cloth, we mean that in both cases the same amount of necessary social labour (say 16 hours by one workman, or two man-days) has been expended. We can express the same thing in money terms (as we actually do in real life) by saying that the value of one pair of shoes is (say) 80 rupees, and so is the value of four metres of cloth.

Theory of surplus value

Bourgeois economists like Smith and Ricardo had progressed thus far; Marx took several great steps ahead.

First, he showed that in the capitalist system labour power (the human capacity for production) itself is a commodity, like any other. In the past, slaves and serfs could not sell their labour power at will; today the wage worker freely sells this commodity to the capitalist. The latter buys it at an agreed rate, and then consumes it, uses it in production. Now, the process of consumption of labour power is exercise of labour, and labour creates value. This is the unique property of the commodity called labour power. Let us hear from Lenin how this happens:

“The owner of money buys labour power at its value, which, like the value of every other commodity, is determined by the socially necessary labour time required for its production (i.e., the cost of maintaining the worker and his family).1 Having bought labour power, the owner of money is entitled to use it, that is, to set it to work for a whole day — twelve hours, let us say. Yet, in the course of six hours (“necessary” labour time) the worker creates product sufficient to cover the cost of his own maintenance; in the course of the next six hours (“surplus” labour time), he creates “surplus” product, or surplus value, for which the capitalist does not pay. Therefore from the standpoint

1.  Family maintenance is included here, and the capitalist class agrees to pay for it, because without this there will be no supply of labour power after the expiry of the present generation of workers. — A.S.

of the process of production, two parts must be distinguished in capital: constant capital, which is expended on means of production (machinery, tools, raw materials, etc.) whose value, without any change, is transferred (immediately or part by part) to the finished product; secondly, variable capital, which is expended on labour power The value of this latter capital is not invariable, but grows in the labour process, creating surplus value. Therefore, to express the degree of capital’s exploitation of labour power, surplus value must be compared, not with the entire capital but only with the variable capital. Thus, in the example just given, the rate of surplus value, as Marx calls this ratio, will be 6:6, i.e., 100 per cent.” (From Karl Marx, Collected Works, Vol. 21, p 62)

Now let us try to understand this with the help of a very simple illustration.

The production of the necessities of life (food, clothing, housing, etc.) consumed by one worker and his/her family requires, we will assume, 240 hours of labour time or Rs. 1200. Then the value of labour power, i.e., wages will be Rs 1200 per month or Rs. 40 per day. “Necessities of life”, of course is a very relative term, varying widely from place to place and time to time. But in a particular country and at a given time a social average is found, e.g., Rs.1200 worth of goods and services per month. To an extent this amount can be pressed downwards by the employer if the supply of labour power is much higher than the demand, or upwards by the workers in an opposite scenario or by dint of collective bargaining, but in the given time and place it will hover around Rs. 1200.

Now let us think of a small factory manufacturing plastic ball-pens (without refills). There are several machines and several workers, but we will concentrate on one machine and one worker. Suppose the value of one pen is Re.1, the capital expended is as follows: one machine costs Rs. 1,000 and produces 10,000 pens before its usefulness is exhausted. This means that the wear and tear suffered by the machine for every pen produced is equal to Rs. 1000 divided by 10000, i.e., 10 paise. The electricity consumed by the machine for every pen is valued at 5 paise while the basic raw material, i.e., plastic, required for every pen costs 45 paise. All these add up to 60 paise (machine depreciation 10 + electricity 5 + plastic 45), which is the “constant capital” expended on each pen. The remaining 40 paise (Re. 1 minus 60 paise) of the pen’s value is contributed by — what else — the labour put in. Let us observe this part of the story more minutely,

Suppose the worker works 8 hours a day for Rs. 40 and produces 25 pens per hour. In 4 hours he produces 25 ×  4 = 100 pens. We saw above that he gives the capitalist new value worth 40 paise for every pen, so in these 4 hours he contributes Rs. 40 (40 paise x 100), which is equal to the amount he gets as wage. Thus he works 4 hours for a proper, so-called ‘fair’ wage, which is exactly equivalent to the value created by him. But he works another 4 hours without any additional remuneration — creating an extra 40 rupees in value, which is called surplus value. Lenin described the whole process in the following words: “The worker spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.” (Three Sources ...)

In our example, surplus value worth Rs. 40 is created in the course of production of 200 pens, i.e., @ 20 paise per pen (Rs. 40 divided by 200). The total value of one pen, thus, consists of three basic components:

60 paise for plastic, electricity and wear and tear of the machine (constant capital or C) + 20 paise for wage (variable capital or V) + 20 paise surplus value (or S) = Re. 1.
The 60 paise invested in plastic etc., is called constant capital because the value of these items remains constant during the process of production. On the other hand, the capital expended on labour power is called variable capital because this part gets increased in the course of production — in our example, every 20 paise of V creates S worth 20 paise and this is what the capitalist appropriates as profit.

Now we can express the above in a simple Marxist formula:

Value of one pen = C (60 paise) + V (20 paise) + S (20 paise) = Re. 1

The capitalist gets S worth 20 paise by investing V to the tune of 20 paise, which means the rate of surplus value is 100 %.

Readers should remember that this is a very simplified illustration, intended only as a first step toward the study of Lenin’s Karl Marx and Marx’s Capital. However, it shows how every capitalist — even the most progressive and kind-hearted — extracts surplus value, without the worker or even the capitalist knowing it. This is perfectly legal and appears to be a ‘natural’ process. No amount of wage rise can basically alter this circumstance and that is why Marxists fight for the abolition of the system of wage labour as such.
Having shown the creation of capital by labour, Marxist theory describes the spread of large-scale production in industry and agriculture. Our country witnessed, for example, the ruin of lakhs of weavers by the spread of cotton textile industry first in England and then in India itself. The growth of large-scale production and technological development under capitalism leads to higher productivity of labour. For example, one thousand cotton mill workers produce more cloth than the same number of weavers did. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of producers get entangled, through the market and other mechanisms, in a vast and ever-expanding capitalist system. Production no longer remains an individual affair – as it used to be in the case of artisans; weavers, small peasants, etc. – it becomes completely social. But the results of this social production, of this collective labour, is privately appropriated by an insignificant minority of capitalists who own the means of production. This contradiction between social production and private appropriation constitutes the basic contradiction of capitalism, which can be resolved only by socialising ownership and appropriation of means of production, i.e., by means of a socialist revolution. The ground for this resolution, however, is prepared by capitalism itself. Even as the workers’ dependence on capital increases, thousands and lakhs and crores of them unite at the factory level and in industry-wise and nationwide unions; they also launch their political parties. The era of proletarian revolutions begins.
Soon after Marx and Engels completed their critical study of capitalism and took leave of the world proletariat, the capitalist world order reached a higher stage called imperialism.  Lenin laid bare the economic and political essence of the latter in works like Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism and Imperialism and the Split in Socialism, thus carrying forward the work of his teachers.  We will return to this in chapter III.

III

As in philosophy and political economy, so in the field of socialist theory, Marx and Engels did have their predecessors. Great visionaries like Saint Simon, Fourier and Robert Owen were the first to lay bare the evils of capitalism and to propagate the noble ideals of socialism. But they did not have any idea as to how and by which force this great ideal could be actualized. Theirs was thus a “utopian” vision of socialism.

The giant step Marx and Engels took from here to “scientific” socialism was made possible by the most valuable experience of the revolutions which swept across Europe, particularly France, around 1848. These were essentially bourgeois revolutions, but the working class did play a major role in them. These revolutions most convincingly demonstrated the role of class struggle behind all social progress (i.e., the progress from the feudal to the bourgeois order) and from this Marx and Engels deduced the most important lesson of world history: the doctrine of class struggle. Bourgeois theorists had already started a discussion on classes and class struggle but it was left to Marx to show that class struggle in capitalist society “necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat,” which in its turn “constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society”, as Marx wrote in 1852 in a letter to Joseph Weydemeyer (see Classes and Class struggle in Supplementary Notes and the chapter The State)
Thus Marx concretized the real road to socialism and the main social force (the proletariat) which can achieve that goal. In fact, Marx and Engels wrote quite extensively on the strategy and tactics to be pursued by the proletariat in its struggle for socialism. This is why Lenin in his essay entitled Karl Marx discussed “tactics of the class struggle of the proletariat” as a separate section after one on “Socialism”. The proletarian strategy and tactics developed, and continues to develop, in the course of a relentless struggle against the petty bourgeois tendencies of reformism and anarchism, as we shall see shortly (see The Struggle against Reformism and Anarchism).

To come back to the “Three Sources and Three Component Parts”, we should pay special attention to the last three paragraphs which serve to round off the discussion in a very meaningful way. Lenin teaches us that the only way “to change the world” is to identity the ruling classes whose interests operate behind economic systems, political institutions; socio-cultural values, etc., and to locate and mobilize the class forces capable of overthrowing the ruling classes.

It is in this direction that the world proletariat, guided by the Marxist worldview, is moving steadily, Lenin reports in the last paragraph. The end of the article thus becomes the beginning of a new story of forward march. A realisation dawns upon the reader that the three component parts — which have been analysed separately for the sake of better comprehension — actually constitute an organic whole and that in this dynamic integration is realized Marxism’s transition from theory to practice which in its turn enriches the theory.