capitalist economy, the workers or proletarians labor with means of production, such as industrial plant and machinery, which are owned by a capitalist. Since the workers own no share of the means of production, they are driven by necessity to work for someone who does own productive property. During the hours of each worker’s labor, the worker produces commodities, or products that are bought and sold in the market. The capitalist sells those commodities in order to receive income. The price for which each commodity is sold is called “exchange value” in Marxist terminology. The capitalist must return some of that value to the worker in the form of wages, since workers will not work without some material reward. It is axiomatic in Marx’s theory that the value that is returned to the worker is less than that which has been created by the worker’s labor. That portion of the value that has been created by the labor of the proletarian, but is not returned to the proletarian, obviously flows to the capitalist, and constitutes “surplus value” in Marx’s words.
In Marx’s view, surplus value is the excess of the value the proletarian has produced above what it takes to keep the proletarian working, and surplus value is the source of profit for the capitalist. Marx argued that with the development of capitalism, competition would force capitalists to strive relentlessly to extract as much surplus value as possible from their workers. Initially the capitalists would simply increase the hours of labor of their workers and decrease the workers’ pay, but that kind of simple intensification of exploitation would soon reach physical limits. The capitalists would then adopt the strategy of increasing the mechanization of production, substituting machine power for human muscle power to an ever-growing degree, with the objective of getting more products out of fewer laborers. Mechanization, by throwing ever larger numbers of workers out of the factories, would ensure the growth of unemployment, which would guarantee that the wages of those who continued to work would be driven down to the subsistence level. Marx believed that he was describing the inexorable tendency of the increasing misery of the proletariat, which would give rise to a progressively sharpening struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, which, with the final crisis of capitalism, would result in proletarian revolution and the elimination of capitalism.
In the first volume of Capital, which he published in 1867, Marx clearly suggested that the exchange value or market price of a commodity was determined, at least on the average, by the labor which had gone into producing it. Until the end of his intellectual career, Marx continually struggled with the attempt to reconcile the conception of the intrinsic value of a product, which supposedly represented the amount of labor embodied in it, and its exchange value, which in actuality reflected supply and demand. It could be argued that in the third volume of Capital, edited by Friedrich Engels and published after Marx’s death, that problem was still unresolved, as indeed it could not be resolved on the basis of Marx’s fundamental assumptions.
The labor theory of value was wholly accepted by Soviet Marxist-Leninst ideology as a fundamental theoretical assumption. The premises of that theory explain why Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev were extremely suspicious of the practice of hiring laborers for wages in private enterprises, since any employment of workers on privately owned property was automatically considered exploitation, the essential source of class struggle. In fact, with the proclamation by Stalin that the foundations of socialism had been constructed in the Soviet Union by 1936, hiring people to work for private employers was prohibited by law. In socialist society, the payment of wages to workers and peasants in collective enterprises was not thought to present any problem, since in theory the means of production in the Soviet Union belonged to those same workers and peasants. In light of the labor theory of value, it is not difficult to understand why, in the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev finally began to allow limited, small-scale private enterprises, such endeavors were officially termed “individual labor activity” and “cooperatives,” avoiding the admission of a relationship between employers and employees in the private sector. See also: MARXISM; SOCIALISM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baradat, Leon P. (1984). Political Ideologies: Their Origins and Impact, 5th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Evans, Alfred B., Jr. (1993). Soviet Marxism-Leninism: The Decline of an Ideology. Westport, CT: Praeger. McClellan, David. (1980). The Thought of Karl Marx, 2nd ed. London: Macmillan.
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Known as the “Pearl of Siberia,” Lake Baikal is the oldest and deepest lake on earth. Home to more than one thousand endemic species of aquatic life, it is a focal point for environmental activism and Siberian national pride.
Located in south central Siberia, Baikal is 636 kilometers (395.2 miles) long, 80 kilometers (49.71 miles) wide, and 1,637 meters (5,371 feet) deep. A watershed of 55,000 hectares (212.4 square miles) feeds the lake through more than three hundred rivers. Only the Angara River drains Baikal, flowing northwest from the southern tip of the lake. The lake probably began to form about 25 million years ago, at the site of a tectonic rift. The fault continues to widen and there are thermal vents in the lake’s depths.
Baikal’s zooplankton, called epishura, is at the base of a unique food chain, with the prized Omul salmon and the nerpa, the world’s only freshwater seal, at its top. Epishura is also a biological filter, contributing to the lake’s extraordinary clarity and purity. The Baikal Ridge along the northwest shore of the lake is heavily populated by birds and animals and contains deposits of titanium, lead, and zinc. The Khamardaban range, lying to the south of the lake, contains gold, tungsten, and coal.
Humans have inhabited the area around Baikal at least since the Mesolithic period (ten to twelve thousand years ago). The dominant native peoples in the area since the twelfth to fourteenth centuries C.E. are Buryat Mongols. Another local tribe is the Evenks, a Tungus clan of traditional reindeer nomads of the taiga. Many native peoples consider Baikal sacred, and some believe that Olkhon Island, the largest on the lake, was the birthplace of Genghis Khan.
Russian explorers first came to the shores of Baikal in 1643, and by 1650 Russia had completed its annexation of the area around the lake. Russians met little resistance from indigenous peoples in the area, and Russian populations gradually increased over the following centuries, attracted by the fur trade and mining. The city of Irkutsk, on the Angara River, was a destination for convicts, including political exiles, during the nineteenth century. The Trans-Siberian Railway, which runs around the south tip of the lake, brought more settlers and more rapid economic development to the area during the 1890s. A Circum-Baikal Railway opened in 1900. Construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), a second trans-Siberian rail line that passes just north of the lake, took place from 1943 to 1951 and resumed in the 1974.
The fragile ecology of Lake Baikal faces many threats. The two large rail lines at either end of the lake have compromised the watersheds through logging and erosion. Lumber mills and factories near Ulan-Ude send thousands of tons of contaminants annually into the lake. The Baikalsk cellulose combine has altered the ecology of the southern part of the lake, killing off epishura and accounting for high concentrations of PCBs and other toxins. Large die-offs of nerpa seals have been attributed to dioxin contamination. Environmental activists have vigorously opposed industrial development, and have focused international attention on the lake. Two nature reserves (zapovedniks) and two national parks protect portions of the lake-shore. The entire lake and its coastal protection zone became a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site in 1996. See also: BURYATS; ENVIRONMENTALISM; EVENKI
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Matthiessen, Peter. (1992). Baikal: Sacred Sea of Siberia. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. Mote, Victor L. (1998). Siberia: Worlds Apart. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Center (UNEP-WCMC). (1996). “Protected Areas Programme: Lake Baikal.” «http:// www.unep-wcmc.org/sites/wh/baikal.htm».
There were two revolutionary groups named “Land and Freedom” (Zemlya i Volya). The first was a phenomenon of the early 1860s, with a membership largely of intellectuals in Moscow and the Russian provinces. It maintained contacts with ?migr?s living abroad (most notably Alexander Herzen) and was supported in Russia by the anarchists Prince Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin. Repressed by the government, it ceased to exist by 1863
