GLASS STRUGGLES 11
important than industrial capitalists. In fact, it is perhaps because of the struggle among the three ruling classes to get a better share of the surplus value that the pattern of income distribution is much worse in an underdeveloped capitalist economy; also perhaps because of this that the distribution becomes worse in course of time.
By overlooking the generalized version of the Marxian law of value we are also sometimes led to believe in an artificial separation between the law of value and historical materialism. Glass struggle is not a holy cow. It is not the preserve of the working class alone. The ruling classes also wage it to promote their class interests. There are two types of class struggles: progressive and reactionary. Marx did not discover either class or class struggle. What he discovered is the essence of progressive class struggles. A class struggle is progressive if it contributes to the march of history towards the dictatorship of the proletariat. All other class struggles arc reactionary.22
1 F Engels, Preface to the third German edition of Karl Marx, "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte", in Marx-Engels, Selected Works, Vol 1, Moscow, 1969, pp 396-397.
2 Marx and Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party", in Marx-Engels, Selected Works, Vol l.p 108.
8 Engels, Anti-Duhring, Moscow, 1962, p 204.
4 V I Lenin, "Karl Marx", in Collected Works, Vol 21, p 58.
6 Marx's letter toj Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852, in Marx-Engels. Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965, p 69. Emphasis added.
6 P M Sweezy, "Marxian Value Theory and Crises", Monthly Review, July-August 1979, p4.
7 Karl Marx. Capital, Vol 1, Moscow, 1965, pp 135-136.
8 Marx and Engels, "Manifesto," Selected, Works, op cit, pp 115-117.
9 K Marx, "'I h< Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte", in Marx-Engels, Selected Works,Vo\ 1, p 395. Emphasis added.
10 Marx and Engels, "Manifesto", op cit, p 117.
11 Ibid,
12 F Engels, "Feurbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy", in Marx-Engels, Selected Works. Vol 3, p 369.
13 Mao Zedong, "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan", Selected Works, Vol 1, Peking, 1960, p 35.
14 Marx and Engels, "Manifesto", op cit, p 136; Lenin, "Karl Marx", op cit, p 77.
15 Engels, "Feurbach", op cit, p 369.
16 K Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow, 1970, p 20. 117 This is not to say, as the bourgeois economists do, that there is one degree of freedom in the Marxian economic model, and that the exogenous determination of
wage rate through class struggles closes the system.
18 J V Stalin, Economic Problem of Socialism in the USSR, Peking, 1972, p 4.
19 For this incorrect view, sec Samir Amin, The Law of Value and Historical Materialism, New York, p 3.
20 Marx and Engels, Selected ^Correspondence, pp 192-198.
21 R Sau, "Towards the General Law of Value", Frontier, Autumn 1980. 2S Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, p 69.