Can hand tools be considered as means of labor or production tools, or neither?
Today I read the “Glossary of Political Economy,” and the definitions of means of labor and production tools sparked my questions. “Means of labor, also called labor means, are all material data and material conditions used by people in the production process to influence or change the object of labor.” (Page 9), “Production tools, also called labor tools, are objects used by people to process the object of labor during the material data production process.” (Page 10).
Regarding this point, I do not have a more systematic understanding for the time being. However, I had the impression that Marx discussed this issue in Chapter 5 of Volume I of “Capital”.
In “Chapter 5: The Labor Process and the Process of Valorization,” Marx mentions:
In the first section of this chapter, Marx first talks about labor and labor power, then discusses the labor process, pointing out the main elements of the labor process. Marx states, “The means of labor are the material or the set of materials that the worker uses to transfer his activity onto the object of labor, positioned between himself and the object.” Then he mentions: “The worker uses the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of the materials to use these materials as means of exerting force, according to his purpose, on other objects.”
Thus, Marx draws a conclusion: “The things directly mastered by the worker are not the objects of labor, but the means of labor.” However, Marx also mentions a special case that differs from this conclusion, namely the most primitive form of gathering labor. Marx states: “This does not refer to the ready-made means of subsistence such as fruits or other gathered foodstuffs; in such cases, the organs of the worker are the only means of labor.” From this statement, it can be seen that the human hand, as an organ of the human body itself, can only serve as a means of labor under certain special circumstances. In general, what we refer to as means of labor mainly refers to natural objects with “mechanical, physical, and chemical” properties. Throughout Marx’s “Capital,” the means of labor mentioned are also natural objects with different properties, which serve as extensions of the human organs to help humans exert more strength.
¿Por qué los tres elementos de la productividad son: 1. el trabajador, 2. los medios de trabajo, 3. los objetos de trabajo, y no solo dos, ya que los objetos de trabajo y los medios de trabajo están incluidos en los medios de producción?
a continuación, tomado de “Explicación de términos de economía política”
“Los medios de producción son todas las condiciones materiales necesarias para la producción de materiales materiales. Incluyen los objetos de trabajo y los medios de trabajo,…”. Página once.
“Los medios de trabajo también se llaman instrumentos de trabajo, son todos los materiales y condiciones materiales que las personas utilizan en el proceso de producción para influir o cambiar los objetos de trabajo”. Página nueve; “El objeto de trabajo se refiere a todo lo que las personas aplican en el proceso de trabajo”. Página ocho.
Because the roles of labor materials and labor objects in the production process are different, both labor materials and labor objects are necessary for production. If only the elements of productive forces include “means of production,” then both aspects cannot be summarized at the same time.
Both the object of labor and the means of labor belong to the means of production, but their roles in the production process are different. Their definitions can also be found in the “Glossary of Political Economy”.
The object of labor refers to everything upon which labor is exerted during the labor process.
The means of labor, also called labor tools, are all material resources and material conditions used by people to influence or change the object of labor during the production process.
Obviously, the object of labor and the means of labor play different roles in the labor process. Taking cooking as an example, the spatula, wok, stove, gas… are the means of labor, while the food itself is the object of labor. If we only talk about the general concept of means of production, it would be difficult to distinguish their different roles among the three elements of productive forces.
The third question, I’ll just give an example. That day, it just happened to be when the Confucian pig announced nationwide poverty alleviation. My dad and I came back from the countryside. He chuckled mockingly and pointed to a dilapidated, sparsely populated village, saying, “That place hasn’t been lifted out of poverty.”
Regarding the second issue, it is obviously some landlords, bourgeoisie, and rightists who slander socialism maliciously, along with ambiguous statements by Zhongxiu, which incite them to attack socialism. Anyone with basic Marxist-Leninist knowledge knows that a more advanced and superior socialist system, where the people are the masters of the country, could never have experienced larger abnormal death events than during the Republic of China. In the past, some old leftists have also conducted research; you can check what is discussed on the website above.
[quote=“Beixi, post:8, topic:1028, full:true”]
My some historical questions:
What are the crimes of counterrevolution in Zhou Enlai’s history?
Was it true that thirty million people starved to death during the Great Leap Forward?
What evidence can prove that reform and opening up did not improve people’s lives or make them rich?
[/quote]First, let’s discuss the first question, Zhou Enlai’s counterrevolutionary history:
He originally studied and worked in France, and during his time abroad, he even fell in love with Zhang Ruoming, a daughter from a bureaucratic landlord family, which shows his unrestrained lifestyle. Later, Zhang Ruoming, after failing to compete for fame within the Communist Party, directly left the party and became a capitalist. Ultimately, Zhou Enlai and her amicably parted ways.
After the “April 12, 1927 counterrevolutionary coup,” he did not promptly turn to open armed struggle but continued to stay in Wuhan, compromising with Wang Jingwei. Later, the so-called “August Nanchang Uprising” relied entirely on the old Nationalist Army, although it was led by leftist elements of the Kuomintang, its class nature differed from the Red Army. Moreover, the generals involved in this armed uprising, such as He Long, Ye Ting, Zhu De, Liu Bocheng, were either former warlords or had serious warlord tendencies, and some had a strong tendency to compromise and surrender to the Kuomintang. Therefore, the Nanchang Uprising was essentially an old army mutiny, with no real achievements, resulting in a rout and retreat, with even He Long fleeing alone to become a warlord.
After the start of the Land Revolution War, Zhou Enlai was never aligned with Chairman Mao and preferred to associate with old officers, warlords, and bourgeois intellectuals. Zhou later supported the rise of the Wang Ming faction. [After掌握了the telegrams sent by the Comintern to the CCP, he “selectively reported and partially detained” the true intentions of the international, concealing them from subordinates and Red Army cadres, using information monopoly to strengthen his and Wang Ming’s “legitimate leadership.” He openly implemented Wang Ming’s erroneous line and suppressed dissent, including criticizing and excluding Mao Zedong’s guerrilla warfare and rural encirclement strategies in Jiangxi Soviet.]
When the Red Army’s Long March reached northern Shaanxi, they seized equipment originally intended for mining the Yumen oilfield by the Kuomintang and used it to develop the Yan’an oil and gas resources. However, Zhou Enlai adhered to the policy of conforming to the united front, becoming a vassal of the Kuomintang, and handed the oilfield equipment back to the Kuomintang.
In 1941, Chiang Kai-shek launched the Anhui South Incident, a brutal anti-communist campaign. After the event broke out, Zhou Enlai protested to the Kuomintang on behalf of the CCP, but in multiple public and internal forums, he made statements such as: “Brothers quarrel in the wall, but must resist outside insults.” This phrase originally meant that family disputes among brothers should be resolved internally while facing external enemies, but when applied to the betrayal in the Anhui South Incident, it blurred the enemy and friend boundaries, trivializing the bloody betrayal and massacre as “internal contradictions.” This was not merely a rhetorical mistake but a reflection of Zhou’s long-standing “United Front First” and “conciliationist” stance. Despite the Kuomintang’s slaughter of communists and breach of agreements, he used Confucian rhetoric to avoid confronting the class enemy, reducing class struggle to “family disputes,” effectively employing reformist logic to deny the proletarian revolutionary stance. This exemplifies a rightist capitulation route, emphasizing “stability” over class struggle and national interests.
After the end of the Anti-Japanese War, Zhou Enlai held illusions about the Kuomintang, reluctant to prepare for armed struggle, always emphasizing negotiation solutions.
After the founding of the People’s Republic, he promoted a new tax reform, claiming to treat private and public enterprises equally, [on one hand waving the socialist banner, but on the other hand using taxation, rewards, and concessions to “guide capitalists onto the socialist road,” resulting in a “peaceful evolution” route that allowed the bourgeoisie to regroup and strengthen.]
When Chairman Mao proposed the Great Leap Forward to build socialism quickly and efficiently, Zhou Enlai opposed it, colluding with other capitalists to oppose the movement, leading to the so-called “Anti-Rightist” campaign.
【By 1956, the three major transformations were basically completed, and the socialist system was established in China. The Party and the people were highly enthusiastic, and in 1957 Mao proposed “striving to build socialism with vigor, speed, quality, and efficiency,” preparing to vigorously advance socialist construction. In this context, the direction of the “Leap” was to mobilize the masses’ enthusiasm, accelerate construction, and demonstrate the superiority of the socialist system to imperialist countries.** However, soon, some leaders like Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun, and Li Xiannian began to question the feasibility of “speed, quality, and efficiency,” fearing that rapid development would weaken the foundation, advocating for “adjustment, consolidation, and enhancement,” which is the so-called “Anti-Rightist” movement.】
【By late 1956 and early 1957, Mao proposed the Great Leap Forward—fast and to do!—but the State Council system (led by Premier Zhou Enlai) was reserved or even resisted Mao’s call. Zhou repeatedly suggested during meetings: “We can’t take too big steps,” “Construction must be pragmatic and steady,” “Plans must be controllable,” sounding “scientific.” Chen Yun, Li Xiannian, and others within the economic departments also advocated “restraint on rashness,” but Zhou not only did not suppress this but openly supported it, implementing the so-called “Anti-Rightist” policies within the State Council. During this period, various ministries began to cut production targets, delay major projects, and restrict local enthusiasm. This effectively formed a “rightist conservative” bureaucratic clique opposing Mao’s call for vigor. Zhou was very skilled at using neutral-sounding words like “pragmatic,” “scientific,” “plans,” and “technology” to mask political struggles. He advocated “strict plan control,” “reliance on experts,” and “limiting investment scale” to “prevent reckless rushing,” but in reality, this weakened the mass line, limited grassroots enthusiasm, and suppressed revolutionary zeal and breakthroughs during the early socialist construction. In 1958, Mao severely criticized the “Anti-Rightist” stance at the Chengdu Conference, stating: “Rushing ahead is not the mistake; the mistake is opposing rushing ahead.” Zhou was forced to reflect afterward, admitting his insufficient understanding of the Great Leap Forward and his passive attitude. But note—this was not sincere remorse but a compliance with organizational decisions, still adhering to the original line. Later, he criticized some “fanfare” phenomena during the Great Leap Forward but never positively affirmed the direction of “mass movement promoting productivity.”】
Supporting the unrepentant capitalist-roaders like Deng Xiaoping and appointing him as Vice Premier of the State Council. Zhou Enlai used the incident of Lin Biao’s exposure as a “leftist” to promote Lin Biao as “extreme left,” claiming Lin Biao’s issues were leftist, thus installing many rightist elements into power and strengthening the capitalist-roaders. The most important move was promoting Deng Xiaoping to the position of First Vice Premier of the State Council.【1975 was a decisive year. Zhou Enlai, citing “serious illness and inability to work,” personally proposed Deng Xiaoping as First Vice Premier, overseeing daily affairs of the State Council and the Military Commission; Deng, once in power, began implementing his “rectification” route—emphasizing “economic development as the center,” “focusing on production and order,” and completely denying the Cultural Revolution’s basic line of “class struggle as the纲.” Deng even proposed “the whole Party should settle down and work on the four modernizations,” and the trend of “correcting chaos” began to appear. Zhou’s role at this time was to find a “legitimate successor” for the bourgeois restoration route within the Party and to use his political prestige to shield him. Deng Xiaoping represented the continuation of Liu Shaoqi’s revisionist line; Zhou Enlai, through restoring Deng and arranging his “rectification,” essentially negated the Cultural Revolution, the theory of continuing revolution, and the mass line.】 Other events are numerous; let’s stop here.
Everyone thinks this question is too naive. Where do the data come from? Why not just say 300 million? It makes me think of a ridiculous bourgeois apologist writer who created a “Communist Black Book,” claiming that one hundred million people died under communism, but the data source is nonexistent, all fabricated subjectively. Debating with such a person is a waste of time.
A book by Ding Shu, along with some liberal black articles, claims that during the three years of hardship, China’s total population decreased by 30 million, blaming Mao for the deaths.
It seems that you rarely post on the forum. I suggest you chat more with everyone, or write a self-introduction. After you become a regular user, you can communicate with everyone at People’s Square.
Isn’t the current standard of living for the vast majority of Chinese people enough to prove everything? 86.7% of people have a monthly income of less than 5,000 yuan, and 600 million people earn less than 1,000 yuan a month. These are official statistics, and the latter part was also said by Li Keqiang. The capitalist restoration has indeed made some people’s lives better and richer, and extremely wealthy—namely the bourgeoisie (especially the bureaucratic monopoly bourgeoisie). China is the country with the highest luxury goods consumption in the world, with 40% of luxury goods consumed by Chinese people. From this, it is clear that a small group of people are indeed living very well and very rich.
Getting rich without exploiting the poor is impossible. Capital accumulation, on one hand, is the accumulation of wealth; on the other hand, it is the accumulation of hunger, poverty, and labor torment. To build your own home, you have to ruin someone else’s home— isn’t that obvious?
Can ideology be regarded as various systematic and unsystematic forms of human thought movement based on the economic base, which to a certain extent reflect the state of productive forces development at the time, the human understanding of objective material and its laws of motion, as well as to some extent a reflection of the production relations at that time? These reflections are influenced by the production relations of the time, and at the same time, they also in turn affect the maintenance or transformation of those production relations.
After reading a few pages of the elementary school mathematics teacher’s textbook following the restoration, I have some questions I don’t quite understand:
Why is it necessary to introduce the concept of sets within natural numbers?
Why do we need to prove that the subtraction of two numbers in natural number subtraction results in a unique outcome? Isn’t this a matter of philosophical reflection? What is the significance of proving this conclusion? Furthermore, what is the significance of the fact that the commutative and associative laws of addition ultimately lead to unchanged results? Could this involve issues related to class struggle and scientific experiments?
My understanding is: introducing sets is for the convenience of categorizing and studying arithmetic problems. The natural numbers themselves are also a set, namely the set of natural numbers. Sets also include the set of real numbers, the set of irrational numbers, the set of rational numbers, the set of integers, and so on. Such classification makes it easier to study other mathematical problems, such as functions, and also facilitates the introduction of the concept of intervals. This is content from the middle and high school curriculum, and I am not sure what practical application it has in mathematics. I can only explain it conceptually.
The concept of a set itself is essentially about classifying a thing, putting all items of a certain kind together. The primitive concept of a set has existed since ancient times. I believe the reason for introducing the concept of sets in mathematics is to facilitate the study of number theory (I see that Cantor’s pioneering work in set theory began with the study of triangular series, and Cantor’s early work was precisely on this). Because when studying triangular series, extensive use of calculus is needed, and calculus requires the broad application of limit concepts and the operation of infinite subdivision and re-summation. Therefore, in this context, there arose a need for a new mathematical tool to classify and study all objects within an interval, which probably is where set theory originated from. (Of course, I haven’t studied the history of mathematical development before, so I might be mistaken.)
For mathematics, set theory is the logical foundation. Therefore, it can be said that sets will eventually need to be introduced, and the question is where it is best to introduce sets.
I think natural numbers are a good place. When we take a set, we certainly do not just study it as a static thing; we want to use it to study contradiction and motion. In mathematics, we often define operations on sets (natural number set - addition and multiplication, integer set - addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, rational number set - addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and limit operations…). Elements of sets differ, and should also be transformable into each other. The specific mutual transformation we want to study is what we need to define as an operation.
A set is a classification, so what principle is best for classifying? The most common basis is the closure property of operations. Natural numbers added together still give a natural number, but unrestricted subtraction can produce negative numbers, which may fall outside our set. Then we expand the set to include negative numbers, obtaining the integers, where any addition, subtraction, or multiplication of elements results in an integer, ensuring closure. But to study division, we need to consider division by non-zero numbers, which leads us to expand the set again to include rational numbers. Closure under operations means our set is large enough to describe the mutual transformations of things without missing anything.
One of the best examples of this is the process of expanding from the natural number set to the real number set, which is likely a prelude to introducing rational numbers and similar concepts.
Additional 1: Of course, the set of sets closed under certain operations is not unique. For example, besides the integers Z being closed under addition, subtraction, and multiplication, we can also construct {x | x = m + n√2, m, n ∈ Z}, where the elements, after addition, subtraction, and multiplication, still belong to this set. Similarly, {x | x = m + n√2 + k√3 + j√6, m, n, k, j ∈ Z} also works.
Sometimes mathematics needs to be more rigorous, verifying that the subtraction we define actually matches the usual subtraction we use. I generally understand this operation as checking whether the definition is correct.
I don’t think this is purely speculative; when we need to define a complex new operation to handle new problems, it is necessary to verify it as a precaution.
