Message to all cadres

By Kajabago-ka Rusoke

A country is an area occupied by people with common economic relations, common culture and common language. These characteristics make a country be similar to a nation. But when that country lacks one of those characteristics, then it qualifies only as "a nation-in-the-making", but not a complete nation.

We must first know the types of societies that have existed in the history of humanity. 

Because every society in the history of the world springs from economic practice, there arises, therefore, the need to study each and every economic law that governs each and every economic system in history. This is because the nature of an economic system determines the totality of human relations in society. 

Because human beings must work in order to live, labour relations become primary in human society. But again because in order to work, a human being must-have tools, as well as objects of labour and, since these tools and objects, are forms of property, they constitute human property relations in addition to labour relations. Finally, labour and property relations, together, constitute the totality of material spiritual and moral human relations. Labour is both mental and physical and subsequently gives rise to thinking and feeling, resulting in a state of moral and spiritual life. That is why there are such cases like who work and who do not work, plus who own property and who do not own property.

This gives us an answer as to why the primitive simple commune, which was the first human society in history, was harmonious because of the economic law of collectivism where land as a fundamental object of labour was owned in common and, subsequently, all tools and raw materials, plus labour itself, were owned in common. All human beings in society were for each and each for all.

As technology advanced, a few people were found owning tools and weapons above others whom they conquered and subjugated. Those who owned tools and weapons came to be known as masters subjugating men and women to labour without pay. Men who worked without pay were known as slaves while women were known as slave-maids. This society in history is known as a slave-owning society and its economic law known as labour or, work, without pay.

Masters own property and do not work. Slaves and slave-maids do not own property and work without pay. Spiritual life here can never be harmonious. 

Again, technology advances. A small group with that technology confiscates land from others but they remain on it while paying rent to those who have taken it as their own. Those confiscating are called landlords or feudalists while those paying rent are called tenants. Again spiritual life between the landlords and the tenants is not harmonious. Feudalism is not harmonious.

Again technology advances further to the extent of giving rise to large-scale machine production, which demands that labourers work under those machines. Land is confiscated by the owners of large-scale machinery while labourers under these machines are paid wages according to the type and amount of work they perform on the basis of hours and days at work. The money used to start this type of enterprises is called capital and the owners of such enterprises are called capitalists while their employees are called workers. The economic system is called capitalism.

The economic aim of capitalists is to gain profits out of their enterprises. That means they have to gain more money than or, above, what they actually invested in those enterprises. The only way they can do that is to pay the workers an amount of money which does not rhyme with the number of hours they spend on the job.

The items that workers produce are of high quality reflecting the number of hours plus the quality and quantity of labour spent in them by those very workers but whom the capitalist pays far less than what he or she gains from those items when sold. Gains from sales do not rhyme with payments to the workers. Profit does not come from fixed assets like land, machines or raw materials in an enterprise. It comes from the nonpaid for a number of hours spent by the labourer in the process of production.

This is the capitalist law of surplus value above what is invested. Workers are constantly cheated all over the world where the capitalist system prevails in each and every country.

All the gains from underpaying workers referred to as profits, lead to the opening up of institutions referred to as banks in the hands of capitalists. The owners of these banks determine systems of how money should be lent to others who also want to start a business and be allies of these very original ones who in addition own and control the banking system.

These owners of banks establish big companies like trusts and syndicates which control the economy of a whole country. They further go to the extent of exporting capital beyond their own countries' boundaries in order to add to what they are already earning locally.

All these levels and stages put together right from the accumulation of capital from profits up to its being exported to outside countries usher in a higher stage of capitalism referred to as imperialism. When exported capital becomes imported capital in a foreign country whereby those owners of that capital become the rulers of that country, then that country becomes a colony of the country from which capital was exported.

 Then colonialism becomes a higher stage of imperialism.

Colonialism, therefore, becomes a system whereby either, a country or, a group of countries, is bound together by political and military ties for the economic purposes of the capitalist class of a foreign country. However, under the law of motion both in nature and society, colonial populations both, gradually and, finally, develop higher levels and standards of social consciousness which make them reject the nature of colonial socio-economic formations. Hence the birth, rise and, emergence of national liberation movements in all colonies demanding and struggling for national independence. 

Finally, these colonies are looked at as independent and sovereign states. Here independence and sovereignty should be economic, political and ideological. For independence and sovereignty were not offered. They were struggled for as rights. Of all those three, the economic is fundamental. For even under colonialism, the economic was fundamental. While all those which were added to the economic through the superstructure were just serving the economic.

Here the political and the ideological must play a fundamental role to shape and build the economic as a nationally pro-people base for their welfare so as to put in place a correct national socio-economic formation reflecting patriotism in both the economic base and superstructure.

It may be difficult for a former colony to be completely economically independent immediately after political independence but the ideological and political leadership of that new country should have the art and dexterity to see how they approach outside countries in terms of economic negotiations for economic cooperation based on mutual respect and benefit. This is because the richer former colonisers may still have the aim of exploiting their former colonies where and when they were unwilling to leave. 

This is where lies the demand for all countries and nations of and, in, the world to develop high spiritual, moral and, academic standards required for mutual co-operation for the benefit of all humanity on the basis of humanism in the name of man, woman and child on earth. There can never be any correct leadership in the world where the economic system is not arranged to benefit all those on national territory.

Unemployment, suicide, prostitution, begging, robberies, superstition, corruption in governments, are all results of incorrect, anti-people economic systems on those global national territories, with particular reference to nations and countries practicing the capitalist mode of production. 

This should be known globally that there can never be correct spiritual and moral standards under the capitalist mode of production. It is impossible.     

The writer is a lecturer at the National Leadership Institute, Kyankwanzi