🎯 Main Thesis

• This is a beginner’s guide to core socialist concepts, using Marxist definitions.
• Aimed at clarifying terms that are often misrepresented or misunderstood in mainstream discussions.

1️⃣ Capitalism

• Definition (Marxist):

  Socioeconomic system where:

  • The means of production are owned by the capitalist class.
  • Hired labor is exploited through extraction of surplus value.

• Key features: markets, private ownership, profit motive.

• Lenin’s framing: Capitalism is “the appropriation by individuals of the product of social labor” in a commodity economy.

2️⃣ Core Terms

• Means of Production (MoP):

  All material elements required for production — factories, mines, tools, raw materials, transport, land, buildings.

• Exploitation (Marxist sense):

  Extraction of more value from workers than they are paid for, via surplus value.

• Surplus Value:

  Value produced by workers beyond wages and production costs — kept by capitalists as profit.

• Capital:

  Wealth (money, land, buildings, machinery) used to produce more wealth through hired labor.

  • Not all money = capital — must be used in production for profit.
  • Marx: “Capital is dead labor that lives by sucking living labor.”

3️⃣ Class, Proletariat, and Bourgeoisie

• Class (Lenin’s definition):

  Large groups defined by:

  • Relationship to means of production.
  • Role in social labor.
  • Share of social wealth.

• Proletariat: Workers with no MoP who must sell their labor to survive.

• Bourgeoisie: Capitalist class owning MoP and employing wage labor.

• Class Struggle: Historical and ongoing conflict between classes with irreconcilable interests.

  • Marx: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”