{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","id":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","uuid":"4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","normalized_title":"zombiecapitalismglobalcrisisandtherelevanceofmarx","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781608461042","isbns":["9781608461042"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":426,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Zombie%20Capitalism%20Global%20Crisis%20and%20the%20Relevance%20of%20Marx","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe/search"},"page":{"printed_page":158,"pdf_page":158,"physical_index":158,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"9d325f8acadd6c436013aecac05de68d6e0bfec89ec4825dbd97c6bbcdaca61c"},"chapter":"Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx","content":"Then in late 1928 a wave of panic hit the bureaucracy in the face of warlike threats from Britain and a domestic crisis as peasants held back supplies of food, creating hunger in the cities.59 Afraid of losing their control over the country through a combination of rebellion at home and armed pressure from abroad, the bureaucracy, led by Joseph Stalin, turned pragmatically to a series of measures that involved super-exploitation of the peasantry and the working class in order to build the industry the country lacked. The cumulative effect was to push the whole economy towards a new dynamic other than that of fulfilling people's needs-a dynamic ultimately determined by military competition with the various Western states.\n\nAs the Czech historian Michael Reiman has said:\n\nThere were not enough resources to guarantee the proposed rate of industrial growth. The planning agencies therefore decided . . . to balance the plan by means of resources the economy did not yet have at its disposal. . . The fulfilment of the plan depended on a very brutal attack on the living and working conditions of industrial workers and the rural population . . . This was a plan o f organised poverty and famine. <sup>60</sup>\n\nStalin, justifying the subordination of everything else to accumulation, insisted, \"We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years. Either we do it or they crush us\". <sup>6</sup> \"The environment in which we are placed . . . at home and abroad . . . compels us to adopt a rapid rate of growth of our industry\" <sup>.62</sup>\n\nIn undertaking the task of accumulation, the bureaucracy substituted itself for a capitalist class that no longer existed. But the methods it used were essentially those of capitalist industrialisation elsewhere in the world. \"Collectivisation\"-in reality the state takeover of the land-increased the proportion of agricultural output available for industrial accumulation while driving a very high proportion of the peasantry from the land, just as enclosures had for England's early capitalists. The growing industries were mainly manned by wage labour-but some subordinate tasks were carried out by some millions of slave labourers. The rights workers had held onto through the 1920s were abolished.\n\n158\n\nCapitalism in the 20th Century","previous_page":157,"next_page":159}