Nasser Paydar
Communism Abolition of Wage Labor and Leninist Militant Reformism
Marx rightly traces the origin of the communist consciousness of the proletariat to the social existence of this class and its forced contradiction against capital. “… a class which is driven out of society and is bound to have the most intense contradictions with other classes. The class which constitutes the majority of the members of society, and which is the source of the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution is communist consciousness. A kind of consciousness which can naturally arise among other classes also by reflecting on the situation of this class…” (The German Ideology)
We will not discuss here the fact that Lenin, unlike Marx, saw the source of communist consciousness not in the working class but in the intellectuals of the upper classes. This subject has been discussed elsewhere to the extent necessary. What is being discussed at present is Lenin’s account of how socialist awareness-raising work is carried out among the working class. He says: “It is not enough to explain the fact that the workers are subjected to political oppression. It is necessary to propagate each specific manifestation of this oppression, and since this oppression affects so many different classes of society, since this oppression manifests itself in so many different spheres of life and activity, whether personal, family, religious, scientific, etc., etc., then is it not clear that if we do not take upon ourselves the organization of the comprehensive exposure of the totalitarian state from a political point of view, we have not fulfilled our task, which is the expansion and development of the class consciousness of the workers” (What is to be done).
There is no room for argument that the comprehensive exposure of the political regime is an important part of the work of awareness-raising among the workers. But there is much to be said, firstly, in Lenin’s account of this exposure and secondly, in considering this exposure synonymous with the development of the class consciousness of the working masses. What constitutes the real skeleton of the class consciousness of the workers is the critique of capital, or more precisely, the critique of the present objectivity of capital as a social relation in all aspects of its existence, dominance and sovereignty. The existing society is a society based on wage labour and the relation of the production of surplus value. The consciousness of the working class is the materialist, Marxian, revolutionary and practical critique of this society. It is the knowledge that the worker gains of his social existence, of capital as the value resulting from his exploitation and the foundation of the existence of the existing society. His knowledge of the political order, laws, ideas, civil institutions, the state, culture, thoughts, beliefs, ethics, and the entire social superstructure as the overarching elements of the relationship between capital and the guardian of capitalism, is a knowledge that he gains from the dimensions of his own exploitation, from the organic relationship between the various forms of injustice, oppression, discrimination, and crimes that he tolerates with the relationship of surplus value production. Worker consciousness is a knowledge that he gains from the socialist perspective and the twists and turns of the class struggle to overthrow the system of wage slavery and establish socialism, from the soviet organization and anti-wage labour of his current movement, from the strategies for advancing this struggle, and various other matters. These are the organic components that make up the communist consciousness of the working class. These are the ones who, in the process of practice and movement development, become the thread and thread of the consciousness of the working masses. There is no doubt that the recognition of the political regime is also an important link in the chain of this consciousness, but to summarize the class consciousness of the proletariat in exposing the political regime is a false and unrealistic narrative. It is the working class that both raises its consciousness and puts this consciousness into practice by fighting in all spheres of social life against capitalism. The anti-regime struggle or the pursuit of democratic overthrow not only does not do this, but in the absence of an anti-wage labour campaign, it can cause the workers to break away from their clear class consciousness as much as possible. It is enough to look at the program of the Russian Social Democratic Party, which was prepared by Georgi Plekhanov and agreed to by Lenin, to see that the communist consciousness of the working masses did not occupy any special place for the program’s approvers. Propaganda, promotional and awareness-raising activities based on this program taught the workers that they must overthrow the tsarist regime and establish a constituent assembly to determine the type of future state. This government will recognize freedom of trade union and political activities and the 8-hour working day, and finally, thanks to these freedoms, the workers will seize political power and establish socialism. A little further on, all the experiences have shown that the political power of the workers, according to Bolshevism or the most radical part of Russian Social Democracy, and according to Lenin, the most radical face of Bolshevism, is the same party state machine above the working masses. All these experiences have also revealed that socialism will also be the abolition of individual ownership of capital and the transfer of this ownership to a state bureaucracy beyond the working class. It is very clear that the realization of these goals does not require communist awareness-raising work among the working masses, and if in this passage we speak of the class consciousness of the workers, what is meant is what Lenin has formulated very clearly here. “Comprehensive exposure of the absolute regime” – exposing the various manifestations of oppression that this regime inflicts on different classes, exposing the compromise of the liberal bourgeoisie with the Tsar, holding the government’s hands while committing crimes or the like – determines the entire top and bottom of this awareness. Let us emphasize again that doing these things is part of awareness-raising activities, but summarizing the class and socialist awareness of the working class in these exposures is definitely a kind of distortion of communist awareness and awareness-raising work.
Lenin and the understanding of capitalism
In order to explore the true nature of people’s understanding of capitalism, academic reference to their theoretical formulations and stereotypes is by no means sufficient. The history of the capitalist era is full of parties, tendencies, sects and people who have written books, published articles and spoken widely about the production of capitalism, the exploitation of capital, the political or social effects and consequences of this exploitation, the role of capital in human alienation, the legal and civil superstructures and the capitalist state and other such issues, but while doing all this, they have still explored capitalism from a perspective other than Marx’s. Apart from this, or much more important and decisive than this, there have been many people who have even entered into a debate against the distortion and distortion of Marx’s critique of bourgeois political economy from a correct and Marxian perspective. In their arguments and expressions of their theories, they have shown that they have been informed narrators and thoughtful transmitters of the content of Marx’s dissection of capitalism. However, these same people have also gone astray in the practical arena, wherever they have sought to make Marx’s critique of wage slavery a mechanism or strategy for class struggle. The reality is that two things must go hand in hand for Marx’s understanding of capital to become a conscious mind, class consciousness, and a guiding light for individuals. First, people must be attached to the land of life, the conditions of work and exploitation, the pains and sufferings, and the stronghold of the struggle of the working masses; and second, they must ponder Marx’s anatomy of capital and use the result of this contemplation as a guarantee for finding solutions and opening a way forward for the class struggle of the workers against capital. Lenin was the most influential figure of his era and for years after him in the field of the campaign of the world working class, but for whatever reason and under the pressure of every deficit and deficiency, he did not play such a role. He did not dissect capitalism with Marx’s surgical knife. In his first economic discussions, where he rightly opposes ” Narodnik’s ” and the economic romanticism of the Narodnik’s, he raises points that are very worthy of discussion. The Narodnik’s rejected the possibility of developing capitalist production in Russia. A false hypothesis that questioned and denied the reality of today’s society, the existence of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie as fundamental classes, and the role and position of the labour movement as the real driving force of the social revolution in Russia. Lenin criticizes these theories. To do this, he conducts a detailed study of the theories of the Swiss economist Sismondi and, taking into account the similarities between his words and the Narodnik’s, criticizes this entire system of thought. The necessity of this work should have been that, beyond criticizing Narodnik’s and proving the spread and dominance of the capitalist mode of production in Russia, the importance of mobilizing the working masses for the fight against wage slavery relations should have been emphasized as much as possible, but Lenin does not do this. We have seen earlier that he sees all roads leading to the democratic revolution and declares the significance of this revolution to be essentially the provision of conditions for the further, faster and more complete growth of capitalism. The criticism of Narodnik’s also revolves around this axis more than anything else; he tries to convince everyone that the Narodnik’s’ words about the impossibility of forming a domestic market for capital accumulation in Russia are wrong. He tries to prove that the development of capitalism is possible here and that this development is good and should be carried out. An important aspect of Lenin’s theoretical efforts in this area is that he wants to say that Russia needs highly advanced industry, modern technology and great achievements of human knowledge in order to move towards socialism, and all this depends on the ever-greater development of capitalist production. At the same time, he believes that the ever-greater development of the foundations of modern industry within the framework of the dominance of the purchase and sale of labour power will significantly improve the living and working conditions of the working masses. Lenin even makes Marx his partner in his argument to prove the correctness of the latter point!!
“The classical writers, although they were unable to understand the social process of capitalist production, although they could not free themselves from the Smithian error of forming social production from two components, nevertheless formulated the theory that production creates its own market and determines consumption. They have learned that the faster the rate of accumulation, that is, the more production increases than consumption, the better, and we know that Marx’s theory accepted their view of accumulation. It accepts that the faster the growth of wealth, the more complete the development of the productive forces and their socialization, and the better the position of the workers, to the extent that it is possible in principle to improve it in a given system of national economy.” (In the Characterization of Economic Romanticism).
Two points need to be noted here. First, Lenin’s emphasis on Marx’s endorsement of the classical writers’ theories on the accumulation of capital and the relationship between the growth of wealth and the development of the productive forces or their more complete socialization is a kind of carelessness and a breach of trust. If by the classical writers is meant the economists after Smith, then to suggest that Marx accepted their theory of accumulation, while at the same time it may contain an element of reality, would be to conceal Marx’s radical criticism of the theories of this group even in this particular area. Lenin could claim that he meant by this simply the relationship between the more rapid growth of wealth and the development of the productive forces and their socialization. Even then, the matter is not as real as he presents it. The development of the productive forces in Marx’s analysis is a process which conceals in its depths the pressure of the contradictions between the growth of these forces and the relations of production, or the property relations based on the mode of production of each epoch. Lenin fully accepts this and himself emphasizes it, but he forgets that this development and evolution in Marx’s narrative, beyond a certain level, encounters the rebellion of insoluble inherent contradictions, so that the said mode of production is no longer the manifestation of the beneficial human development of the productive forces, but on the contrary, is the cause of their waste, destruction and corruption. Capitalist production has been undergoing its development process for several centuries. But this system became the target of the most widespread and violent storms of protest of the working masses in nineteenth-century Europe or even before that. This means that the social productive forces, at the same level of capitalist development, were experiencing conditions in which this system constituted a solid barrier to their development. In other words, from the depths of this mode of production a class had grown up which now had no choice but to launch the most massive campaigns against the existence of capitalism in order to guarantee any reduction in the pressure of exploitation or the attainment of its freedoms and human rights. Wage labour relations were no longer the field of development and development of the productive forces, but the octopus on its chest. In a word, the statement that the faster the growth of wealth and, in capitalist society, the growth of capital in particular, the more complete the development of the productive forces is, firstly, not true, and secondly, Marx does not endorse this erroneous theory of the economists before him. Here we must add another point. During the 19th and 20th centuries, capitalism brought to the fore the most astonishing advances in industry, technology, and scientific discoveries at the international level, but to evaluate these achievements, with all their undeniable importance, as elements of the process of evolution of the productive forces is a completely incorrect and capitalist view. Capitalism implemented all these absolutely amazing advances or even these unprecedented industrial and information revolutions in an era when the foundation of its existence and survival was based on killing and burning the buds of growth, development, flourishing, and development of the capabilities of the vast majority of humanity. In this era, despite all the astonishing scientific and technical developments, capital was not only not the driving force of the evolution of the productive forces but was an iron barrier in the way of this evolution. If capitalism had not existed, if the European working class had buried this system in the cemetery of history in the 19th century, the chariot of the evolution of the productive forces of history could have galloped to the highest throne. To judge the role of the wage slavery system during these two centuries in the development of the productive forces, one should not only look at the length and breadth of these achievements. One must also look at other very important factors. Most importantly, if the communist proletariat were the leader of historical developments, what great industrial revolutions could and would have occurred. With all this, the problem with Lenin’s statements in the above statements does not end with what has been said so far. There are other, more serious problems. He adds right there that the faster the growth of wealth, or in fact the growth of capital and capitalism, in addition to the greater and greater development of the productive forces, the situation of the workers will also improve to the extent that it is possible to improve it in a given system of national economy!! We said that Lenin also attributes this belief to Marx. Of course, he does not mention the source cited, but several issues should be noted about his claim. To see the development of capital accumulation or the growth of productive forces as being at the same time as the improvement of the working class’s working and living conditions lacks the leaven of Marx’s view of capitalism. This is one of the same theories that traces the roots of the misery, poverty, and hunger of today’s working masses in Iran or similar societies not to the unbridled exploitation of labour by capital, but to the lack of industrial growth and the fragility of the foundations of capitalism. The essence of Marx’s understanding of the wage-labor relation is that the fatter, stronger, and more gigantic capital becomes, the more exhausted the workers become, the more the masses of workers work, the deeper they distance themselves from their work. The more they increase the power of capital, the weaker and more miserable they themselves become. Let us leave aside this, every worker with a minimum of awareness understands well, referring to his own life experience, that in the hell of wage slavery, no minimum or lowly demand can be imposed on the capitalists without the most extensive campaigns. The capitalist class of several countries may respond to a number of subsistence, welfare, and social demands of the workers by virtue of the special place of the social capital of these countries in the global capitalist division of labour and the acquisition of the maximum share in the surplus value produced by the world’s working class, but it would be the worst reformist perversion if we attribute the improvement in the welfare of sections of the working class of these societies to the greater development of capitalism.
In such an attitude, the clearest facts of the class struggle are distorted. If the working masses of these countries have achieved better livelihood, welfare or even political and social facilities, firstly: it is the result of the exercise of power that they have displayed at least against the owners of capital, secondly: these achievements always remain in the tail light and as soon as any kind of disruption occurs in the formation of the fighting forces of the working masses, they are the targets of the most ruthless attacks of the bourgeoisie, thirdly: the capitalists or the capitalist class of these societies in the very moments when the struggles of the workers are under the pressure of the exploitation of a layer of the working class They reduce the pressure of the exploitation of other parts of this class in the world more and more, in other words, as long as capitalism remains, the achievement of the minimum subsistence and welfare facilities, even in the best case and in the same temporary form, will only be given to a small population of the entire world’s workers. Fourth, and as the conclusion of all these cases, it should be clarified that if a force is supposed to play a role in improving the lives of workers, this force is not the development of capitalism, but simply the fire of violence and the pressure of the ongoing struggle of the working masses. This is an obvious fact that needs no explanation. However, the above point is not the only case or the only time that Lenin emphasizes the relationship between the ever-wider accumulation of capital and the improvement of the position of the working class and the labour movement. The entire book “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution” puts the same belief in front of the reader’s eyes in a different way and promotes it among the workers.
His repeated and persistent insistence on the importance of the further development of capitalism in Russia, his raising of the banner that “the Russian working class, as much as it suffers from the lack of capitalist growth, does not suffer from the existence and domination of this system!! His extreme insistence that the Russian revolution should pave the way for the most complete development of the European-style capitalist mode of production, and many other arguments, are all living evidence of his belief in the unreal relationship between the development of capitalist industrial accumulation on the one hand and the better position of the working masses on the other!! Certainly, some will say, and have said so far, that Lenin’s entire description of the importance of the most complete development of capitalism in Russia stems from his thinking about the provision of the economic framework necessary for the establishment of socialism, and since Russia was a backward, agricultural, and peasant society, he insisted on the importance of the development of capitalism. There is no doubt that Lenin thought so, but the whole argument is that this kind of view of the connection between the process of further development of capitalism and the strengthening of the foundations of the proletariat’s position and the consolidation of the position of its socialist line is deeply mistaken. These arguments are, in their social foundations, of the same kind as the evolutionist views of social democracy.
In defending the revolution and the necessity of smashing the bourgeois state machine, Lenin rightly waged the most resolute and ruthless struggle against the Bolshevism of the leaders of Social Democracy and the workers of the Second International, but in assessing the ever greater growth and development of capitalism as an indispensable precondition for consolidating the position of the socialist mobilisation of the working masses, he willingly or unwillingly fell into the trap of the same Bolshevism. Lenin’s insistence on the connection between the two, that is, the ever greater capitalist growth of the economy and the ever greater readiness of the working class for the establishment of socialism, is of the same type of theory that seeks and disputes all the causes and reasons for the failure of the October Revolution directly in the material and economic base of Russia and the lack of capitalist development in that country. A very misleading theory in which Lenin himself was sufficiently involved. The fact that he everywhere finds the problem of the revolution not in the lack of preparation and readiness and equipping of the working masses for socialist society, but in the economic backwardness of Russia and the remnants of petty economy, that he weakens the power of the workers’ councils instead of promoting them, and that he insists on the importance of dictatorship and capitalist methods of production, all stem from this. The Russian workers’ movement during the years when Lenin was writing the above texts was a powerful part of the world workers’ movement. 10 million workers and 50 million people, the working masses, together with millions of semi-workers, in a territory as large as the whole of North Asia and Europe, are engaged in the struggle against capitalist exploitation and the atrocities and crimes of the state that protects the capitalist order. In such a society, the problem of the working class is not the lack of capital accumulation but the existence of wage slavery. Capitalism is not a mechanism for the development of the productive forces, but an obstacle to this development.
Let us turn to other aspects of Lenin’s views that illustrate how he explains capitalism. In his critique of Sismondi’s theory of crisis, he writes: “The two theories of crisis we are considering explain crises in completely different ways. The first theory sees them as arising from the contradiction between production and consumption, while the second sees them as arising from the contradiction between the social character of production and the private character of appropriation. Accordingly, the first sees the roots of the phenomenon outside production – for example, Sismondi’s attacks on the classicists as to why they ignored consumption and focused solely on production, stem from this – and the second sees them precisely in the conditions of production. In a word, the first explains crises as arising from a lack of consumption, and the second from the disorder of production. In other words, while both theories see crises as arising from a contradiction within the economic system itself, they are completely different in explaining these contradictions” (ibid.).
Here, completely correct points are mixed with deeply incorrect ones. Not only Sismondi (Jean Charles de Sismondi), but all theorists of political economy wrongly searched for the roots of crises outside the context of capitalist production. Marx upset the fabric of these theories. He correctly pointed out the fact that crisis is an intrinsic and internal phenomenon of the existence of capital and the relation of production of surplus value. Marx proved that referring crises to the contradiction between production and consumption, the lack of consumption or any ups and downs within the sphere of exchange is simply illusion and inversion. Lenin has well considered this part of Marx’s analysis. He also rightly emphasizes in his critique of Sismondi that the source of crisis is the sphere of production and has nothing to do with the contradiction between production and consumption. But the problem is that Lenin himself does not adhere to Marx’s theory of crisis, and this non-adherence is precisely related to his understanding of capitalism. Continuing his criticism of Sismondi, he sometimes puts forward his own view on the crisis, as we have seen, searching for the root of crises in the disorder of production. Of course, Lenin also points to the contradiction between the collectively of production and the private form of ownership, but the problem is that he considers this indicator not with a Marxian narrative but with a social democratic interpretation and as a factor in the disorder and anarchy of production. Lenin also attributes his method of analysing the crisis to Marx and insists that what he says is in fact the same Marx theory of crisis!! This part of Lenin’s words, in turn, is accompanied by serious objections. Marx explores the crisis of capitalism in the basis of the existence of capital. He says that the purpose of production here is only the production of capital. What is produced must be in the form of capital that can be advanced. During this process, it is intertwined with a relentless effort to increase the social productivity of labour. The upward trend of the social productivity of labour leads to an increase in the organic composition of capital. A trend that is followed by a relative decrease in the variable part of capital compared to its fixed part, and it is this trend that gives rise to the downward trend of the rate of profit. The excessive production of capital that is inherent in this mode of production makes it inevitable that the rate of accumulation will exceed the rate of production of surplus value, and it is in this direction that the downward trend of the rate of profit, despite the effective counteraction of the neutralizing mechanisms, becomes actual under certain conditions and crises occur. It is necessary to recall here that Marx’s explanations in the second volume of Capital about the process of organizing capital and his emphasis on the imbalance existing in the exchanges between the production of means of production on the one hand and the production of means of consumption on the other, were later mistakenly considered by some circles as Marx’s dialogue to explain the grounds for the crisis. A misconception that this writer somewhat integrated into the famous theory of “disproportion” and explored the roots of the crisis in the imbalance between the two aforementioned sectors of the capitalist economy, or in other words, the existence of anarchy, lack of planning, and disorder in this mode of production.
Many theorists and economists of the Second International, including Karl Kautsky, adhered to this theory of crisis. An important point in this passage is that not all elements of this spectrum have proposed the aforementioned theory with a single and homogeneous framework, or do not do so today. Meanwhile, a group, while insisting on the anarchy of production or the principle of unbalanced exchange between the sectors of production of means of production and production of means of consumption as the root of the crisis, have linked the existence of this problem to Marx’s interpretation of the contradiction between the collectively of production and the privatization of property in capitalism. By doing this, these groups have practically based their view of the crisis and the capitalist mode of production in general on two distorted versions of Marx’s statements. The first distortion is the same as referring crises to the disproportion of exchange between the two sectors of the economy or anarchy and unplanned Ness in capitalist production, and the second distortion targets the basis of Marx’s anatomy of this mode of production. We have explained the first a little. Let us also expand on the second distortion a little.
Marx explains capitalist production with wage labour and the emergence of capital as an indicator of this mode of production in the same phase of primitive accumulation with the commodification and purchase and sale of labour power. “Money and commodities are not capital in themselves. Just as the means of production and the means of subsistence are not capital in themselves. Money and commodities must be converted into capital. But this conversion is possible only under certain conditions – conditions that all converge at one point and are common, and that is the encounter and relationship between the owners of two very different types of commodities. On the one hand, the owners of money, the means of production and the means of subsistence who are eager to increase the value of the values they own by purchasing the labour power of others, and on the other hand, free workers who are sellers of their own labour power – free workers in the double sense that they are neither part of the means of production, like slaves and serfs, nor the owner of the means of production, like the independent landowner peasant. Free workers are thus those who, as the saying goes, are free regardless of their colour. With these two classes positioned at the two poles of the commodity market, the basic conditions for capitalist production are provided” (Capital, Volume I, The Secret of Primitive Accumulation)
When Marx develops the concept of property relations, he examines this concept precisely in organic connection with the content of a given mode of production. When he speaks of private property, he does not have in mind every type of private property. He argues very clearly both in the Grundrisse and in the Critique of Political Economy that the dominant mode of production of each historical period characterizes and determines the nature of other phenomena such as exchange, distribution, consumption, forms of ownership, interest, rent, or the like. When Marx speaks of property relations in the capitalist system, he does not aim at the abstract private nature of property or the form of individual ownership of individual capitals. Here he deduces the concept of property from the basis of capitalist production, from capital as a social relation. Capital in Marx’s analyses is not a handful of objects, a sum of money, machinery, a factory, a business house, or an economic enterprise. It is clear that all these are different forms of determination of capital, but capital is fundamentally a social relation. In this regard, capital ownership is not limited to the individual right to own this production enterprise, that agricultural unit, or that business establishment. The real indicator of this ownership is the social existence of individuals in the capitalist organization of work or in the cycle of capital reproduction as a social relationship. The owner of a factory is certainly a capitalist, but not every capitalist is necessarily the owner of a workshop and an economic enterprise. A large population of capitalists are apparently not formal and legal owners of capital, but they are a certain part of the capitalist class and may be among its most active part. They are not considered individual owners of capital, but they share in the ownership of social capital. The discussion is not about individual capitals and individual capitalists. It is about social capital and the capitalist class. In speaking of the contradiction between the level of development of the productive forces and property relations, Marx sees a contradiction with this narrative of ownership when it comes to the capitalist system. He does not mean the mere ownership of a handful of individual capitalists, but any type of ownership based on the existence of wage labour and the relationship of buying and selling labour power. In other words, he points to the contradiction between the existence of capital as a social relationship and the necessary preconditions for the free development and prosperity and historical advancement of humans.
Theorists of the Second International and the leaders of social democracy distorted both these issues, namely Marx’s departure from wage labour for the anatomy of capitalism and Marx’s return to the downward tendency of the rate of profit or the overtaking of the accumulation process by the process of surplus value production to explain the crisis. They interpreted Marx’s words about the contradiction between collective production and the private form of ownership, without referring to wage labour, as the contradiction between the collective nature of production and the ownership of individual capitalists, and in this regard, competition between individual owners of capital and unplanned and anarchic production. In relation to the crisis, they also directly took the existence of competition and anarchy of production as the point of departure. A fundamental problem that Lenin himself is also involved in. He also explores the issue of capital ownership and the contradiction between the productive forces and property relations not from the Marxian perspective but from the perspective of social democracy. He takes the legal form of individual ownership of capital as the criterion. In his criticism of Sismondi’s theory of crisis, as we have seen, he quite rightly rejects the explanation of the crisis by the contradiction between production and consumption, but he is unable to draw a line between the theory of disproportion between the essential parts of the capitalist economy and the anarchy of production. On the contrary, he emphasizes the existence of this anarchy as the root of the crisis. At the same time, he understands the contradiction between the collective nature of production and the private form of ownership in the light of this anarchy, that is, the return to the individual ownership of individual capitalists. A slip that can be observed in his analyses and discussions in various places.
A direct conclusion of the narrative of social democracy and the leaders of the Second International about capitalism or the crisis of capital would practically be that by expropriating individual property from capitalists, eliminating the dangers of anarchy of production through centralized planning of the economy, and controlling this planning by a government trusted by the working masses, there would no longer be any talk of capitalism and the exploitation of the working class by capital. Although Lenin had serious differences with social democracy regarding the strategies and methods of realizing this process, they were basically in agreement, namely in their understanding of capitalism and that by doing the right thing, capitalism will be destroyed! Both approaches saw a centrally planned economy, without anarchy!!, along with the expropriation of individual property, as synonymous with the destruction of capitalism. The difference is that the former relied on parliamentarism to achieve this goal, while the latter considered revolution, the destruction of the state machine, the seizure of political power by the party, and the raising of the flag of the dictatorship of the proletariat on the roof of this building as the only way. When Lenin sees the ownership of the Ministry of Economy as an indicator of the destruction of capitalist ownership, when he considers the overthrow of the German government of the day and the establishment of a government claiming to be workers’ to be sufficient to eliminate capitalist ownership of the economy!!, he demonstrates the same understanding of capitalism and the meaning of the destruction of this mode of production. We will talk more about this later in this article, in the section related to Lenin’s narrative of socialism. What should be emphasized as a summary of this topic is that Lenin did not follow Marx’s anatomical method from beginning to end in his understanding and analysis of capitalism. He did not take wage labour and the relationship of surplus value production as the starting point and instead considered the disorder of production and the individual form of capital ownership as the fundamental indicators of this mode of production.