A rough translation of https://gegen-kapital-und-nation.org/ungerecht-verteilt-%C3%BCber-die-schlechte-kapitalismuskritik-der-realsozialisten/
“The prosperity of the Soviet people, even with the same average income of the population, will be greater than that of the working people in the highly developed capitalist countries, because the national income in the Soviet Union is distributed fairly in the interests of all members of society and there are no parasitic classes that are in the bourgeois States acquire huge treasures by plundering millions of working people and squandering them.” (Program of the CPSU (1961), in: Boris Meissner, The Party Program of the CPSU 1903-1961, Cologne 1962, p. 207.)
The CPSU wants to do something good for the working people and promotes its system by comparing it to capitalism. It goes like this: If the same amount of income is earned overall in both systems, the workers in socialism get more because the capitalists and other owners don't exist. With this, the CP first criticizes the distribution of wealth in capitalism. Secondly, she doesn't just stop there, but says that this happens unfairly in capitalist societies. Both are bad criticisms of capitalism and it will be revenge for the working people under socialism if the CP draws its conclusions from these criticisms.
Justice as a title of criticism
Finding something unfair is a dissatisfaction that occurs everywhere. Students think their grades are unfair; Many children often find their parents' decisions unfair; If one row at the supermarket checkout moves faster than your own, some people find it unfair; Some defendants find the judge unfair and some wage workers find his wages unfair. Third world activists find the distribution of wealth between North and South unfair, and Marxist-Leninists find the entire distribution of wealth under capitalism unfair.
If everyone at a meal gets enough to fill them up, then no one will think of complaining that it was unfair that one person got more than the other. Justice is only demanded when all interests cannot simply be satisfied, but some kind of management of deficiencies or curtailment of interests is required.
A worker says: I work just as hard as my colleague, maybe even more, but he gets 100 dollars more: that's not fair.
His criticism is not that he doesn't have enough money to satisfy his needs. Then he would say that he cannot pay for electricity, for example, and therefore needs more money.
Rather, he insists on equal treatment and he is dissatisfied with the violation of this principle of equality. His initial interest may be “wanting to get more pay.” But by starting with justice, he has distanced himself from material interest or emancipated himself. Because now it is already left open whether he would not be satisfied if his colleague had 100 euros less. Our worker would not have had any of it materially, but would have redeemed his dissatisfaction.
He accepts that he does not decide about his living conditions, but the capitalist does. This worker knows that under this regime his own interest alone counts for nothing. The capitalist (or manager) likes to claim that wages are paid based on performance, which is objectively not true. After all, companies want to get as much performance out of their workers as possible with as little pay as possible. Our worker now takes this ideal of wage formation and demands a correction in the name of this ideal. Objectively, the worker proliferates with his service to the company (toil) and exaggerating that one is a good servant usually leads to one continuing to be a good servant and not to one's own situation being materially improved . He only demands from his “Lord.”
Justice is the ideal of equality. The latter just means that everyone is subject to a principle over which one has no influence. The truth is that equality is an act of domination that is indifferent to the fulfillment of the interests of those subjected to it. Anyone who advocates corrections in the name of justice confuses equality with a way in which one's own interests can actually come into play.1
Back to the Marxist-Leninists (MLers). They don't seem to be so submissive, after all they believe that a fair distribution of wealth within capitalism cannot be achieved, but that a revolution must take place. Nevertheless, the whole starting point for them is no different than that of social democrats or trade unionists when they complain about the unfair distribution of money under capitalism.
First of all, it can be seen that they want a better material life for wage earners. But it doesn't stop at all from asking what stands in the way of a better life and what you should do instead.
In the complaint about the unfair distribution, the MLers demand better material resources for the workers because they have earned it. So the ML workers are entitled to more because they have performed service to a higher principle to which all people should be equally subject. Conversely, this means: Things should only get better for someone to the extent that they have earned something. The ideal that the MLers take seriously is that of a capitalist competitive society: Firstly, performance would be rewarded under capitalism, everyone is the creator of their own happiness through their own efforts. Secondly, the more effort the individual makes, the more everyone gets out of it and so does the individual.
Objectively, that's not true: in capitalism it's the case that having significant property at your disposal ensures that others do something wrong and that you can appropriate the results of their work. Property is the means of expanding one's own property through the labor of others. Non-owners, i.e. wage earners, create wealth in capitalism and are excluded from the results of work to such an extent that they have to work for others all their lives.2 Furthermore, it is crazy to foist the idea on a society based on competition that it would be about a division of labor in which the members would help each other advance. Competition inevitably includes losers.
The MLers do not criticize the ideal of capitalist society or try to convince the workers that they should not believe in it. On the contrary, they take it terribly seriously and come to the following conclusion:
capitalists and landowners don't work at all, so they don't earn anything. Rather, their wealth must end up in the hands of the workers. That would be fair.
A different distribution as a bad consequence
Because the MLers do not analyze capitalism sensibly and find out what the reason for the shabby situation of the workers is, but instead stick to the ideal of this society, they come up with a different distribution as the means of choice. They really have no criticism at all of the production principles existing in capitalism such as exchange, money, wages and profit. Rather, they say that the problem is the capitalists and landowners.
Firstly, they are not entitled to anything anyway and secondly, they waste their money instead of using it usefully for their imagined community.3
The analysis is: When capitalists use wages and profits, they take everything and the workers are left with little. The solution is accordingly: If we come to power as a communist party, we will break the power of the big owners and use the profits and wages for the benefit of the workers. That sounds like state capitalism, but the result is neither capitalism, nor sensible planning, which is a different topic.
Here, however, the basic error in the MLers' criticism of capitalism should be addressed again: the workers do not have a permanently poor and precarious position under capitalism because the capitalists would pour the wealth produced into their pools as bubbly. Of course, life for them is more lavish and, from a material point of view, more carefree, but the enormous wealth that the workers have to maintain and create is least reflected in the form of private spending by managers and stockholders. If Bill Gates, the richest man on earth, has a few billion dollars, then you shouldn't imagine that he has them lying around somewhere in banknotes so that they can be taken away from him and then distributed.
Most of his personal wealth comes from shares in Microsoft and other companies. Individuals may sell their shares and make ends meet, but for all the “rich” as a whole, they could not and should not do so, because then they would soon no longer have any wealth. By the way, you can clearly see this in the financial crisis at the moment: where everyone tries to sell their shares, the shares fall and the previously abundant wealth disappears into nothing. Profit as a system-determining criterion requires that it be reinvested. This is the only way for the “rich” to have a materially good life. The purpose of production, the subordination of all use value production and thus the satisfaction of needs to earning money,
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