Propertyless Chinese Workers

"We have started out from the premises of political economy. We have accepted its language and its laws. We presupposed private property; the separation of labour, capital, and land, and likewise of wages, profit, and capital; the division of labour; competition; the conception of exchange value, etc. From political economy itself, using its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretched commodity of all; that the misery of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and volume of his production; that the necessary consequence of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands and hence the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that, finally, the distinction between capitalist and landlord, between agricultural worker and industrial worker, disappears and the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers."

Karl Marx,
from his Economic an Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.


The reality that Marx described in the above quote is a reality in China. Think about it. The property owners and Western corporations own all the property and take most of the profit, which makes the Chinese workers propertyless and impoverished, even though they create the capitalist's profits through the sweat and toil of their work.

LOL, I had to fish my copy of The Marx-Engels Reader out from under my LCD monitor to write this post. Been a long time.