Introduction: Marxism in Our Time¶
Core Argument¶
Trotsky introduces this abridgement of Capital Volume I by Otto Rühle as a timely intervention, preserving Marx’s own exposition of the labour theory of value while stripping away obsolete examples and parliamentary documents. He warns that Marx’s analysis of the commodity may appear ‘metaphysical’ to readers steeped in market categories, which are semi-mystical reflections of an uncontrolled economic process. In the United States, where market concepts are most deeply embedded, economic theory remained barren until the Depression forced fundamental questions onto public opinion.
Marx’s method is materialist and dialectical: it proceeds from existence to consciousness, treats society as a natural link in material evolution, and regards capitalism as a historical stage with specific laws, not eternal ones. Classical political economy erred by treating capitalism as permanent; Marx’s critique exposed its contradictions and inevitable collapse. The law of labour value is the basic regulator of capitalist economy: commodities exchange according to socially necessary labour-time, and exploitation arises because the capitalist buys labour-power at its value but extracts more labour than is needed to reproduce it.
The Marxist law of concentration is confirmed by US data: by 1929, two per cent of the population owned three-fifths of national wealth, and 200 corporations controlled nearly half of all corporate assets. Between 1920 and 1930, industrial production rose fifty per cent but wages only thirty per cent. One-third of Americans were undernourished despite the US holding forty per cent of world wealth. The industrial reserve army has become a permanent sub-class of unemployed, while the middle classes are pauperised rather than proletarianised.
Between Marx’s death and the First World War, reformism dominated social-democratic thought, countering Marx’s prognosis of capitalist collapse with a belief in gradual progress. This alternative prognosis has been refuted: monopoly capitalism is a chain of catastrophic crises. Capitalism has entered a phase of decay where private ownership no longer serves as a progressive factor. Two methods vie to save doomed capitalism: Fascism, which demolishes labour organisations and democratic rights, and the New Deal, which attempts sops to labour but leads to mounting national debt and imperialist explosion. Both converge.
The only solution is to separate the means of production from parasitic owners and organise society according to a rational socialist plan. The USSR’s planned economy demonstrated socialism’s economic benefits despite its limitations from isolation and backwardness. All attempts to save capitalism are reactionary quackery; only socialist revolution, involving force as the midwife of social change, can clear the road. In the United States, Marx’s analysis finds its ideal mirror, yet American economic thought remains backward. The traditional ideology of ‘Americanism’ is now a lifeless dogma, while a new epoch of genuine Marxism is dawning. Capitalism’s uneven development uses colonial super-profits to buy off labour aristocracies and sustain democracy; as capitalism declines, democracy is displaced by fascism. Productive forces have outgrown national states, making imperialist wars inevitable. Only a planned world economy can resolve this contradiction, leading to a Socialist United States in Europe and elsewhere, where liberated humanity will finally stand upright.