Aleppo, Syria: Massive celebration of the historic victory today at the University of Aleppo. Not one Western camera in sight!

Parties in countries whose bourgeoisie possess colonies and oppress other nations must pursue a most well‐defined and clear‐cut policy in respect of colonies and oppressed nations. Any party wishing to join the Third International must ruthlessly expose the colonial machinations of the imperialists of its “own” country, must support—in deed, not merely in word—every colonial liberation movement, demand the expulsion of its compatriot imperialists from the colonies, inculcate in the hearts of the workers of its own country an attitude of true brotherhood with the working population of the colonies and the oppressed nations, and conduct systematic agitation among the armed forces against all oppression of the colonial peoples.

This duty is utterly independent of the class character of the liberation movement. Nothing in the heritage of Leninism or Marxism says the western Communists should limit or condition their support, depending on whether it is going in a socialist direction or has a working class leadership. Such conditionality is the hallmark of the nationalist‐sectarian tradition in the Western left. It has seduced layer after layer of once‐revolutionary Western socialists to back intervention against whatever ‘latest atrocity’ serves as an excuse: poor little Slovenia, Milosevic’s treatment of Kosovo, the Taleban, the ‘suppression’ of the Falung Gong, Ghaddafi’s suddenly‐discovered authoritarian practices, Islamic terror in Mali – the list is endless.”

Capitalist exploitation is not exclusively and in isolation connected to production or to the concrete relationship between capital and labour. Under developed capitalism, the exploitation must be seen in relation to the circulation of capital as a whole – i.e. both in relation to production and to the trade in commodities.

Under developed capitalism, value is transferred from undertakings of low productivity to undertakings of high productivity within one line of industry. Value is transferred from lines of industry with a low organic composition to lines with a high organic composition. Finance and trade capital can appropriate value without even being directly attached to the productive sphere. Value is transferred from countries with a low wage level to countries with a high wage level. All these transfers of value – conditions of exploitation – can only be understood, if the capitalist circulation is considered as a whole and not only on the basis of production. The basis of the surplus-value – the surplus-labour – is created in production, the appropriation and distribution of the surplus-value take place in the trade in commodities.

The fact that, technically, a person takes part in production as a wage-labourer does not necessarily mean that he or she is exploited and that he or she cannot exploit other people. Wage-labour is a sine qua non of capitalist exploitation but it is not enough. The exploitation depends on the actual ratio between the “necessary labour” (the wages) and the “surplus labour” (the surplus-value). Thus, if you can secure more value for your wages than you have created, you are not being exploited but you are exploiting.

In principle there is nothing new about this. In Grundrisse, pp. 434-43, Marx deals with the fact that through the determination of prices of production and a national average rate of profit, labourers could benefit from other labourers’ products being sold below their value to the extent that these products were part of their consumption. However, when he wrote Grundrisse in 1857-8, Marx did not regard this as something important. He writes:

As regards the other workers, the case is entirely the same; they gain from the depreciated commodity only in relation (1) as they consume it; (2) relative to the size of their wage, which is determined by necessary labour. If the depreciated commodity were, e.g. grain – one of the staffs of life – then first its producer, the farmer, and following him all other capitalists, would make the discovery that the worker’s necessary wage is no longer the necessary wage; but stands above its level; hence it is brought down….[27]

(Marx, Grundrisse, p. 439.)

Engels did not doubt the possibility of the British’ proletariat exploiting the colonial proletariat.

… the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.

(Engels to Marx, 7 October 1858, MESC, p. 110.)

And in a letter to Kautsky he wrote:

You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general: the same as the bourgeois think. There is no workers’ party here, you see, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.

(Engels to Kautsky, 12 September 1882, MESW, p. 678.)

Thus the fact that wages of a certain size can contain more value than the labour performed in order to get the wages is not something new. [28]

Iranian women share lunch after planting rice. 

Mazandaran Province. Near the village of Zirab. Iran, 2001.

Fly, black swallow Along the bank of the Alazani river Hurry and bring a message From my brother at war On the bank of Alazani I saw the grass stained scarlet I went near and tried to gather it Where no one ever walks