Notes on pages 1-18 of Nankai University, during National Day 
, updated daily
The composition of capitalist production relations and the definition of productive forces
Political economy is the science that studies the general laws of the development of production relations. The three parts of Marxist doctrine are scientific socialism, political economy, and philosophy, with dialectical materialism.
Proletarian political economy takes class struggle as the main line, focusing deeply on the class struggle within production relations. Bourgeois political economy emphasizes expanding the exploitation of surplus value of workers, strengthening wage slavery, and seeking ways to deduct workers’ wages, such as mandatory overtime systems, contracts that do not match actual working hours, and systems that calculate overtime pay based on minimum wages—countering bourgeois political economy’s clock-in systems, wage slavery, and off-duty certification systems, etc. These are bourgeois wage labor systems.
In the political realm, the proletariat implements a line of revolutionary struggle to promote production, with high bonuses and material incentives from the bourgeoisie. Opposes the separation of proletarian political organs and state-owned enterprises, advocating profit-oriented policies (in 1988, China Petrochemical canceled the state-owned system, replaced by self-deceiving state capital holdings). Separation of government and enterprise is a representative of profit-driven interests, manifested as the separation of management rights and ownership in revisionist practices (e.g., private management of ‘state-owned enterprises’ under the responsibility system of factory directors, transforming state-owned enterprise profits into ‘bureaucratic bourgeoisie and monopoly profits’).
Therefore, socialist collectives adhere to the party’s route of public ownership based on state-owned and collective ownership. Gradually eliminate residual capitalist elements such as small individual businesses and rural free markets, preventing the expansion of bourgeois legal rights in commodity and monetary relations from reverting to the New Democratic era and restoring capitalism.
Counter the then theories of productive forces, the “Three Corruptions and Three Changes,” the “Four Freedoms,” and pragmatism.
Production, as one of the three major practices, includes the technical aspect and the social aspect of production. Productive forces are the technical aspect, the material content of production, including means of labor, raw materials, and labor power. Means of labor refer to the tools and methods used by people to transform nature, such as mechanized factories and individual workshops, which acquire raw materials from transformed nature and involve social division of labor.
Means of labor include land, buildings, roads, and other production tools. The transformation of nature into usable raw materials and directly obtainable raw materials are two parts of production raw materials. Means of labor combined with objects of labor form means of production. Although tools and machinery play a significant role in social production, without workers operating them, they are just scrap metal. Therefore, workers are the decisive factor of labor productivity—“the first productive force of all mankind is the worker, the laborer and the proletariat.”
Production relations are the social aspect of production, the relationships formed during production. Unlike the craft processes studied in natural sciences, political economy studies production relations.
Production relations refer to the relationships among people in production—relations between individuals, classes, and strata—that develop with productive forces. Only when production relations match productive forces can production develop.
The mode of production is the unity of the contradiction between productive forces and production relations. It constitutes the material and social elements of social production. Production relations determine the nature and class character of social production modes. Political economy studies these relations, focusing on class relationships. It includes exchanges, distribution, and consumption processes involved in reproduction. The key aspect of production relations is the ownership of the means of production, which determines people’s status in production. Consumption relations are subordinate to production relations. The secondary aspect involves product distribution, which in capitalism refers to the deduction of labor value—i.e., labor remuneration in monetary form.
Ownership of the means of production has class characteristics; it refers to the social relations among people, and class nature determines the overall relationships among workers (such as employment, parasitism, exploitation, leasing, lending, etc.). Capitalist social relations are based on wage slavery and private ownership of means of production. After the establishment of socialism, production relations undergo a qualitative change, establishing collective ownership and state ownership. Collective ownership is a lower form of state ownership; the difference lies in the lack of common ownership of means of production by all social members and residual private ownership of means of production. Units composed of grassroots production teams own means of production; as we go down, collective ownership can be easily usurped by bourgeoisie within communes, completing primitive accumulation of capital.
Therefore, collective ownership must transform into state ownership. Besides, after ownership reform, it is urgent to eliminate commodity-money relations and abolish currency. However, merely changing ownership is insufficient; although the economic base determines the superstructure, human ideas—reflecting class worldview—are also influenced by the proletarian political structure. Once economic relations are stabilized, the proletariat must continue revolutionary movements to overcome bourgeois ideas and the production methods of small producers, thereby improving socialist public ownership relations.
Furthermore, eliminating the commodity system must be part of the socialist process. Although enterprises now conduct non-cash commodity exchanges in bulk trade, with a small amount of currency retained for wages and scattered daily purchases, this is also part of primitive accumulation. Excessive issuance of currency leads to market circulation issues, with money concentrated in private hands (including others’ labor and products), unable to circulate back to banks, causing devaluation and inflation.
Socialist enterprises at the basic level, such as collective farms, purchase raw materials and machinery with accumulated funds from members. Leaders are elected fairly by the masses, but issues like infiltration of bourgeoisie within the party and embezzlement for personal gain still exist. Therefore, the continuation of proletarian revolution is necessary. Under the leadership of capitalists, large amounts of currency can easily lead to primitive accumulation and economic reversion to capitalism.
Comrade-like mutual aid relationships emphasize equality in the production and distribution processes—helping each other with a comradeship attitude to achieve production goals. Increasing collective accumulation in socialist enterprises, since product distribution is determined by production relations, and the quantity of goods produced depends on the productivity, natural transformation ability, and superstructure.
Socialist distribution relations still contain remnants of bourgeoisie, such as distribution by labor. Under commodity exchange, distribution must be mediated by currency, leading to issues of commodity circulation and consumption.
In monetary exchange, part of the currency becomes capital, and part becomes land rent and profit. Under capitalism, workers are separated from labor conditions, working only in places provided by capitalists, with land ownership and surplus products belonging to capitalists, forming opposition to direct producers. Therefore, distribution systems are not isolated; under certain productive conditions, the transformation of superstructure becomes decisive.
Socialist distribution principles oppose absolute egalitarianism and large disparities. Under central planned economy, efforts are made to combat “one size fits all” and “two adjustments,” preserve local enterprises, and encourage local productivity. Distribution is determined by production relations, and under socialism, planned economy involves aligning workers’ productivity and living needs, enhancing democratic participation in management, and fighting against capitalist elements, implementing the Anshan Steel Constitution.
Reducing waste in production.
Additionally, socialist promotion of social labor and elimination of small private ownership (personal labor results and social labor results, where individuals appropriate part of social labor).
Pages 6-12 emphasize that certain production has specific consumption and distribution elements, and production, in its one-sided aspect, primarily determines consumption and distribution factors.
Political economy recognizes that although productive means are decisive, distribution relations and human-to-human social relations are equally important. The principle of superstructure’s reciprocal influence on the economic base.
Only through dialectical materialism can we study ownership of production relations, distribution relations, and personal relations to find qualitative and quantitative changes in production relations at different social stages. Studying the inevitability of certain laws reveals that material dialectics abstract general features from specific, scattered fragments of material movement, eliminating incompatible parts through contradiction and motion, seeking truth through dialectics—discovering the general connection of social relations—the economic laws of production relations.
Production relations determine how economic laws operate.
Different social stages have different qualitative aspects of production relations. A single mode of production may contain several different economic laws acting simultaneously, but their form depends on specific economic conditions and one of the five social stages.
One constant is that each social stage has a distinct essence—ownership of the means of production—that determines all main aspects and directions of social development. Understanding the internal connections of ownership of means of production and their external relations—distribution, consumption—allows active utilization of economic laws.
The material relations of production, as the most fundamental social relations, determine division of labor, status, and mutual relations among people, affecting material living standards and spiritual needs. The mode of material production determines cultural content, such as agricultural, industrial, and cultural industries. Improvements in production methods free more time and energy for spiritual life, increasing surplus labor products.
Before Marxism, philosophers in social sciences promoted idealism, believing economic laws were unknowable and unchangeable—fatefully dependent on randomness and human consciousness, with subconscious drives controlling consumption and spiritual desires. They held that economic laws had no regularity, such as labor creating wealth, the equivalence of labor value, and the non-existence of surplus value in vulgar economics.
Marx’s Capital proved that social and economic laws are objective historical processes, not automatic jumps to the next stage simply because productive forces are sufficient.
Marx used dialectics to distinguish different features of social laws from material production to consumption, abstracting the main determinants—production relations—viewed as the foundation of social movement, revealing contradictions and properties of production relations. Since politics is a means of the economy and the economy is a result of politics, different political systems (forms of movement) exist under the same essence. To understand other forms of movement, one must first understand the essence. The economic base determines all superstructure, including political structure and systems. Understanding social economic laws allows prediction of societal rise and fall.
The form of social movement manifests as contradictions between productive forces and production relations; contradictions inevitably involve opposition and unity. The movement of contradictions results in one side replacing the other. When material movement is relatively static, the manifestation of contradictions appears in economic conditions; after the contradiction becomes absolute movement, the specific economic situation more clearly exposes the essence of production relations. Despite rapid growth of productive forces, ruling classes in private ownership societies suppress productivity for their own benefit—wasting productivity (e.g., capitalist wage systems, exhausting young workers’ health, turning them into 35-year-old faces and 60-year-old bodies). Fundamentally, bourgeoisie seeks surplus value increase, causing enormous waste of productive forces, since people are the decisive factor. The personal initiative of revolutionary classes and the masses is the greatest productive force—(the masses and the revolutionary enthusiasm of knowledge workers guide them to master tools and dialectics of transforming nature and to revolutionize superstructure, establishing new economic systems).
Wasting labor is a constraint on productive forces.
The contradiction between productive forces and production relations, and their relation to the superstructure, must be considered together in studying the fundamental social contradictions.
Productive forces play a decisive role in production relations but sometimes are subordinate to the dominant contradiction—people’s ideological level.
It is impossible to ignore the need for appropriate changes in production relations driven by productive forces, nor to exaggerate the role of productive forces alone, denying the revolutionary and transformative role of production relations. The subjective idealism in production relations denies the decisive role of productive forces, manifesting as mechanical materialism—denying the influence of productive forces on production relations and their determined role under certain conditions.
The economic base of a society is the totality of the dominant production relations, and the superstructure is the political system and ideology built upon the economic base.
The movement of the superstructure and economic base
The nature of the economic base determines the nature of the superstructure,
Changes in the economic base determine changes in the superstructure, which in turn reacts back on the base. The ruling class is the class that dominates the economic base; the superstructure includes the political and ideological superstructure of the ruling class, such as police, courts, and prisons as political superstructure, and literature, art, morality, and laws as ideological superstructure. Production relations, as the main aspect of the superstructure, promote the establishment and consolidation of the economic base, reflecting the needs of the dominant class.
It is the expression of class interests in politics and ideology (manifested socially as class will, mainly representing the worldview of the ruling class). There exists a contradiction between the advanced and the backward. The superstructure serves to maintain the economic base of its own class. Advanced superstructures uphold advanced production relations and consolidate power through them, while backward superstructures maintain outdated relations, either through reform or repression. Thus, decayed production relations can only produce decayed superstructures. (This critiques the theory that parliamentary reform can directly transition to socialism, as even with high officials, revolutionary policies cannot be implemented because the ruling class’s interests require exploitation of the majority, making concessions to the proletariat impossible).
In specific class struggles, the contradiction manifests in political, ideological, and economic struggles—these three are interconnected and influence each other. When the superstructure obstructs economic development, political and cultural reforms become the main focus. Without state power, no new production relations can be consolidated. The same principle applies.
In revolutions, ideological struggle (theoretical struggle) determines subsequent political and economic struggles. Without a correct revolutionary line that reflects objective economic laws and class struggle, the advanced class cannot seize power, and even if they do, they will lose it quickly.
Because political, ideological, and economic struggles are interconnected and mutually influence each other, political economy cannot be separated from the superstructure’s reciprocal influence and its decisive role under certain conditions. Denying the superstructure’s influence on the base negates the leadership role of politics over the economy. Denying the need to reform the superstructure prevents the development of production relations, but the superstructure is also constrained by the economic base under great reciprocal influence.
The “Genius View” (Tian Cai View) refers to the epistemological perspective that knowledge originates from innate endowments rather than social practice, and in history, attributes human progress to the creative activities of a few geniuses.
Modern bourgeois economics, ignoring the decisive role of the economic base, believes that ideological lines are not governed by economic laws, and that historical development depends on the destructive influence of geniuses on production relations and the superstructure. This leads to subjective idealism.
The dialectical relationship between the economic base and superstructure analyzes internal contradictions of production relations, including levels of production, ownership, and methods, as well as external factors that promote contradiction movement. It promotes the intensification of old production relations and reveals internal laws of production relations.
The party nature and scientific essence of political economy
Production relations refer to the interests and conflicts among people during production, manifesting as material interests opposition and differences in class society. Different classes in different production relations have different interests. The interests of different classes that represent different production relations also differ, so changes in production relations affect the vital interests of various classes, leading to different attitudes toward social and economic phenomena.
The absurdity of bourgeois political economy lies in treating research materials as special, summoning the avenging goddess of private interests to oppose scientific research on the battlefield. It advocates the extinction of class struggle and vulgar productivity theory, replacing conflicts among people with conflicts between man and nature, denying the social aspect of production through naturalist perspectives. It denies the class nature of political economy, turning it into management of productivity, profit, and technology.
Bourgeois economics, based on demand and supply, aims to create demand and denies that political economy is a science studying social production relations (as a science, it reveals the objective laws of economic movement based on production relations).
Economics that ignores class struggle will tend toward revisionism, and in class society, economics is a tool for class struggle, with no super-class economics.
Modern political economy includes proletarian political economy, bourgeois political economy, and petty-bourgeois political economy.
Pages 12-18 describe that during the classical period of bourgeois political economy, the bourgeoisie was a progressive class capable of identifying class contradictions and struggles, recognizing that wages are equivalent to the value of commodities. They still acknowledged class and class struggle. Reformists and utopian socialists like Fourier exposed the deceit and hypocrisy of capitalism, criticizing it as the root of all evil, with wage labor as bloody slavery.
From the perspective of production relations, contradictions exist between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and between bourgeoisie and feudal aristocracy. To consolidate capitalist production relations, it was necessary to suppress feudal counterrevolutionaries, but internal conflicts were far less than contradictions with the proletariat. As the proletariat grew stronger, capitalist states still maintained private ownership, with remnants of feudalism and small bourgeoisie rising to new bourgeoisie without thoroughly abolishing feudal residues. They could not eliminate the minority exploiters’ interests, leading to the need for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Revolutions must be carried through to the end; after consolidating power and establishing bourgeois dictatorship, they united with feudal aristocrats to suppress proletarian revolution. The proletariat must lead the revolutionary struggle to completely break from capitalism. Violent destruction of the old state apparatus and the establishment of socialist state are necessary.
By the time capitalism reaches imperialism, contradictions between capitalism and the proletariat become sharply acute—life and death struggles. The bourgeoisie will not voluntarily withdraw but will decay and struggle desperately. They use state machinery to promote Confucianism, individualism, hedonism, and corruption, corrupting workers, bribing bankrupt petty-bourgeois and backward elements. They promote imperialist wars and colonial invasions, and violently suppress labor disputes, arresting protestors.
The so-called advanced petty-bourgeois political economy turns against itself, appearing as reformism in contemporary China (Wen Tiejun, Zhang Weiwei, Chen Ping) and Lu Qiyuan, from a reverse perspective, aiming to perpetuate capitalism. Although criticizing its flaws, they lack a revolutionary scientific theory.
They desire a world war to destroy all productive forces, reversing history and maintaining petty private ownership. (Living self-sufficiently on estates, free from capitalist invasion and feudal oppression).
Revisionist political economy theoretically abolishes Marxist class struggle in economics, serving imperialism. It is highly deceptive.
The essence of proletarian and bourgeois political economy is fundamentally different: proletarian interests align with the interests of the working people, and to carry out revolution, the proletariat must correctly understand things. Stripping away all non-lawful mental distortions, reflecting the simple face of things, mastering the laws of internal movement, and transforming natural and material constraints according to their needs. Therefore, the proletariat has no personal interests or biases hindering their understanding of things (the revolutionary truth’s effect on revolutionary masses).
Marxist political economy serves the proletariat, representing true revolution. Revolution is the process of the superstructure determining the economic base. The proletariat, in revolutionary practice, creates its own economic theory to overthrow capitalism.
The proletariat is the most revolutionary class; besides legal freedom, it has nothing else. They suffer the deepest oppression and are the most revolutionary. Revolution requires guidance from revolutionary theory; political economy is one of the three major components (philosophy, political economy, scientific socialism). It objectively reflects the political interests of the proletariat, widely used by the masses, providing a revolutionary guide and experienced leadership.
Political economy becomes a weapon of thought and theory for the masses to oppose capitalist ideology and to criticize private ownership, building a socialist society. The most oppressed class (explanation).
The historical formation of Marxist political economy
Marxist political economy developed through the struggle against bourgeois political economy. The proletariat, oppressed on many levels in capitalist society, can only sell their labor power in capitalist factories for wages. Taylorism and Fordism train workers as machines, depriving them of other skills, engaging in simple, repetitive labor. After work, they face second-level exploitation by labor intermediaries and landlords in urban villages. They seize workers’ labor results but cannot afford the commodities they produce. This causes unsalable goods, and during consumption, they suffer third-level oppression—rent, land taxes, and circulation taxes are passed on to consumer prices, making workers pay many taxes unknowingly. Capitalists shift economic crises onto the proletariat; bourgeois economists defend capitalists, blaming workers for wasting resources through excessive overtime, exaggerating the need for surplus value, and claiming that the economy’s crises are due to workers’ overwork, even mocking Chinese workers’ diligence.
If capitalists do not rely on exploiting surplus value and creating relative unemployment (“Can’t do it? Get lost,” “On hold,” etc.), and use state machinery to suppress strikes, they shift oppression onto fabricated national traits, leading to wages far below labor value. Who would risk their life working overtime or staying up late to meet quotas? The proletariat cannot improve their lives through reform; they must overthrow the old world through revolution to free humanity and themselves. Only then can their lives fundamentally improve. (Criticism of communitarianism: even if economic struggles succeed, capitalists quickly usurp the victory, changing factory rules, dismissing striking workers, and recovering demands through fines).
Therefore, the proletariat needs revolutionary guidance to carry out the revolution.
