The Struggle Goes on!

   If, then, we have been beaten, we have nothing else to do but to begin again from the beginning.

   F.Engels

   It was not far ago when working people of socialist Russia believed naively that private property was an expression of absolute justice, personal freedom and immunity. Fooled with liberal demagogy, at that time they demanded elimination of public property. So, as soon as public property is demolished, and private property triumphs delightedly, working people of socialist Russia find unexpectedly that they are subjected to merciless exploitation as by the state as by all kinds of blood-suckers. Actually implemented private property appeared to be, on one hand, the state’s right to register, to insure, to imposes taxes upon houses, land on which houses stand, means of transportation, etc. by law, i.e. forcibly – in brief, the state’s right to impose tribute upon the basis of human life; on the other hand, working people’s right to sell, to put up, to bequeath their houses, land on which their houses stand, their means of transportation, etc. – in brief, working people’s right to sell, to put up, to bequeath basis of their own life turned into petty private property, suppressed by enormous monopoly of large private owners, to the very so-called oligarchs. To be short, the triumphal private property has turned into an inexorable tool for debt slavery, for merciless exploitation of working people, for a necessary factor of their inevitable poverty.

   15 years have passed since public property had been demolished in Russia. But conscience of large masses of Russian (former Soviet) working people still remains socialist, i.e. corresponding to relations based on public society which do not exist for a long time. These hard-working common people consider with childish innocence that social disasters having pounced upon them after demolition of public property are a kind of temporary failure in their quite prosperous life under socialism; they don’t believe they are doomed to debt slavery, merciless exploitation and inevitable poverty under current economic condition of society, i.e. under unlimited domination of private property. Why is it so? That’s simply because development of people’s conscience gets behind conditions of their life, simply because things are often expressed in events in perverted form. These two circumstances taken together cause awful confusion in social mind and therefore, mask the real essence of private property.

   The notion “private property” itself is disorienting. Hence, speaking about private property, one thinks that some thing is meant. However it is wrong. A single simple question – what profit could a private owner make of his land-thing even of one hectare if there wasn’t a single farm labourer obliged to work as a hired man for this private owner? – this single simple question discovers that land-thing is private property only as long as on its basis relations between two persons arise who are no longer composed in the same person. Here at once we see an example demonstrating completely clearly: while speaking about private property not a thing should be meant but relations among people; however, these relations are always connected to a thing and expressed as a thing. The example given with “land-private property” clarifies the confused question of private property so much that it is sufficient now to pose only two questions: what private property for large means of production is based on, i.e. such means of production could be created and implemented only by society, and how it happens so that society which creates and implements large means of production by itself – loses that a private owner acquires who does not work at all? – it is sufficient to pose these two simple questions to be convinced in fraudulent, exploiter character of private property relations, i.e. of private property. To expect for any other, non-exploiter social relations from a society based on private property is the same nonsense as to demand that battery electrodes remaining connected to it stop dissolving water and accumulating oxygen at the positive pole and hydrogen at the negative one.

   But does it pursue from the given above that there is no possibility to restrain the field of existing exploiter social relations or even demolish them in modern Russian capitalist society, i.e. society based on private property for land and large means of production? No, it does not. Indeed, social relations in modern Russian capitalist society are regulated by judicial laws which constitute some kind of behaviour norms (the notorious human rights) in the society determined and guaranteed by the Constitution, – the Constitution containing Chapter 9 admitting constitutional amendments and revision of the Constitution. It pursues clearly that it is possible to restrain the field of existing exploiter social relations or even demolish them by introduction amendments into the current Constitution which eliminate: 1) the very possibility of stay of land and other natural resources in private property (Article 9), 2) the very possibility of the notorious economic activity freedom, i.e. abroachment (Article 8), and finally, the very possibility of substitution of the accurate economic notion “subsistence minimum” with a blurry idea of “decent life and free development of a human being” (Article 7). Anyway, it is clear that working people themselves in their struggle for exploiter social relations demolition would do their best by making demands of introduction amendments into the principal articles of the Constitution. Whether introduction of amendments into the principal articles of the Constitution would occur by the Constitutional Assembly decision or by nation-wide vote, it would, of course, mostly depend not on working people themselves but on circumstances which come around to the moment of the Constitutional Assembly taking its decision or of nation-wide vote as well as, among all, on behaviour of the politically dominating class of large private owners. Anyway, it is essential that demand of introduction of amendments into the principal articles of the Constitution, or, to be more correct, critics of economic basis of the constitutional order serves as a tool of agitation to raise working people to struggle for demolition of exploiter social relations.

   Besides, it was old fellow Engels who said: “Universal suffrage is thus the gauge of the maturity of the working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in the modern state; but that is enough. On the day when the thermometer of universal suffrage shows boiling-point among the workers, they as well as the capitalists will know where they stand”.

   FOR WORKING CLASS!

   Rafik Kuliev

   November, 14, 2007