I found the article “Why the World is So Messed Up, And What Can Be Done to Radically Change This—A Basic Scientific Understanding” answered a lot of the questions I have had. It was key in unlocking a lot of my understanding about how societies have developed, and provided me the way to make a leap to a (beginning) scientific understanding of base and superstructure, production relations and productive forces, and where we sit now, as it has been historically developed up to today, through a materialist analysis and understanding. All of this was fundamentally different than my scholastic, eclectic and instrumentalist understanding (framework) of things. This article helped me to begin to see that Bob Avakian’s starting point is not where I have proceeded from, and my confusion with how societies have developed, and where we are now, is something I was able to get a beginning grasp on through this article (while constantly asking “Why?”).

For a long time, I knew there was a relationship between the forces of production and the... productive relations... wait, is that the same as the forces of production or the relations of production? Where is that footnote by BA about all this in Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy? (Footnote #5, p. 15). WHAT DOES THAT ALL MEAN, and what the fuck does it have to do with anything?!

Okay, so the means of production is the land, factories, and other production facilities, technology, etc., and the “forces of production consist of the means of production, along with the people, with their knowledge and abilities” (emphasis added). Then there are the relations of production, or the productive relations. BA, after defining what capitalism is in such a way that is so concise and accessible to so many different kinds of people, says this:

But here is something that is crucial to understand: economic systems (or modes of production) are not just something that some powerful people somehow invent and impose on masses of powerless people. The nature of the economic system is basically determined by the relations of production—the way in which people are organized to utilize the forces of production that exist (the forces of production consist of the means of production, along with the people, with their knowledge and abilities). And, again, the mode of production constitutes the foundation, and sets the terms and limits, for what goes on in society overall.

Like nature, societies develop, but not in any which way that individuals demand or the powerful dictate it to be. Societies develop according to what exists. Birds do not give birth to crocodiles. Human beings cannot fly from building to building and have X-ray vision. A flower doesn’t bloom into any which way it perceives or needs. Things don’t evolve any which way. Societies develop based on what exists.

There is a relationship between the relations of production and the forces of production that gives rise, or birth to, a different society that is battled out in the superstructure through an actual revolution and overthrow of the existing order by the new mode of production that can utilize the forces of production in a way where the relations of production are no longer a fetter, or a chain, on those productive forces.

Under the system of feudalism, the masses were tied to the land. You couldn’t go to the grocery store like Trader Joe's and get your organic blueberries. What you ate was what you literally produced, more or less. This is how people came together. And there was a structure, the economic base was enforced through a superstructure. There was religion and a god that said what your class position and role in society would be. But it was really said by men and, ultimately, said by society as a whole according to the mode of production. Everything had to go through the priest to get to god (Catholicism), and so the wealth produced by the labor of the serfs went to the landowners. The landowner had power over the peasants, women were subordinate to men, and while this oppression of class-divided society was very apparent, it was still “the way things are,” or “the way God had intended for it to be.”

Under the “hybrid” system of sharecropping in the U.S., the productive relations were taking some of the form of feudalism, with Black people now being tied to the land. However, they were working it not in the same way as chattel slavery of being tied to and owned by the slavemaster, who at any point could decide to sell her or him or their children to another slavemaster, who would then have the responsibility of housing, feeding, and providing for a livable means (if you can even put it that way, which we should not, but you know what I mean) for them to come back to work early the next day. Sharecropping came after the Civil War, one of much bloodshed that led to the abolition of the formal form of slavery. Now instead of Black people finding the means to survive (if they did at all) through slavery, they were under sharecropping, where they were not directly tied to a slavemaster but they were tied to the land in a way that they could gain some money working the land but had to pay rent or a debt to their landowners, a lot of whom were former slavemasters.

And then, here comes the tractor! Before, I’ve understood the development of these tractors was a big thing but I never fully understood what that was. I could see they changed a lot, but now I’m seeing it did change everything. BA says,

... after World War 2 (which ended in 1945), new technology had been developed, such as tractors and picking machines, which began displacing large numbers of sharecroppers. With the creation of a larger market for their products, and in a situation of heightened competition, not only within this country but also internationally, it was necessary, and it was more efficient and profitable, for these large landowners to use this machinery in place of sharecroppers.

It’s helpful to go back to “Racial Oppression Can Be Ended—But Not Under This System”:

Generations later, during World War 2, because of the needs of the rulers of this country in waging that war, large numbers of Black people were able to migrate to the North and get jobs in industries that served the war effort. And then, largely as a result of the fact that the U.S. was on the winning side of that war—and the fact that the war was not fought on its territory and it experienced no damage to its industrial facilities and infrastructure—there was an expansion of the economy in this country after the war. In this situation, significant numbers of Black people were able to continue getting employment in large numbers, including some better-paying jobs in factories (making steel, cars, and so on).

BA doesn’t go at this with “Here’s what the rulers of this country wanted to do.” He digs into the necessity they faced. There’s also a lot of historical materialism. There is this thing of digging deeper to the underlying material foundation and the underlying forces, digging through the actual reality and how things have developed, taking an important example here of the oppression of Black people, and how WW2 destroyed a lot of the infrastructure of Europe while the USA experienced no physical damage and expanded its economy after the war, which led to masses of Black people to getting these factory jobs, even though for Black people it was still “last hired and first fired.”

I’m seeing what this materialist analysis of history is. This is what I mean when I point out how BA gets into necessity. It’s not what Black people desired and wanted with these jobs. It had to do with the economic base (and the fighting through the superstructure). It had to do with the end of sharecropping and the U.S. expansion of its economy, and then on a world scale taking these factory jobs that employed so many Black people and shipping them overseas to the “Third World,” again displacing Black people following the civil rights and Black liberation struggles. The concessions gained by this and the growth of the Black middle class didn’t lead to “a better life” for the masses of Black people who were still tied to this economic base and mode of production, even as they rose up during the '60s with great social upheaval in the superstructure.

Human beings and societies have confronted necessities, the most basic of which are concentrated in the relations of production. But there are also the means of production and forces of production which include people.

What is crucially important to understand is that the basis now exists to enable the billions of people on this planet to have the means for a decent life, worthy of human beings—a life that is continually being enriched, not just materially but socially, intellectually and culturally. But, at the same time, the way human society has developed  under the domination of this system of capitalism-imperialism has led to a highly “lopsided” world, where billions of people in the world live in horrific conditions of oppression and misery, with millions of children in the Third World dying each year from starvation and preventable diseases. Quiet as it’s kept:

All this is the basis on which a relatively small part of the people within this country, and a very small part of humanity as a whole, has the conditions and the “freedom” to develop and apply their initiative and creativity—only to have this serve, under this system, to reinforce the “lopsided,” highly unequal and profoundly oppressive conditions in the world as a whole and for the masses of people in the world.

And all this is completely unnecessary.

We have the technology, science, relations of production to come together to work on the biggest problems facing humanity. Look at COVID and how scientists around the world together came along with the breakthrough in the understanding of mRNA. But as the NY Times put it the other day, Moderna is “racing for profits” and the Biden admin is very unhappy that Moderna has not been as available in Third World countries as it has been in the “first world” home countries. What about the company that was making rapid COVID tests and then when COVID was being mitigated, ended up going under, but they still wouldn’t donate them to the people around the world who needed it? The higher-ups complained it wasn’t possible, that there were too many complex logistics in doing so.

NO! You have all these people around the world, many of them without jobs, even more are a part of a class who have nothing but their ability to work and to sell their labor, tying their blood and their bones to the exploitation of the law of value. With the dictatorship of the proletariat, we could do better. We could come together to produce food, clothing, shelter, etc. and have a common abundance. We could own the means of production and end the private appropriation of wealth and “property.” But that takes an actual overthrow of the existing order, seizing power for a class that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating all of humanity. We are at a point where we can see a class that can make a

communist revolution which has the basis to resolve this fundamental contradiction, by socializing the ownership of the means of production—moving to make them the common property of society—and, on this basis, carrying out economic development in a planned and sustainable way, revolutionizing the relations of production as a whole, as well as the corresponding social relations (for example, gender and “racial” relations), and the superstructure of politics, culture and ideology.