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ECONOMICSFOR CHILDREN

[Lessons based on Marx’s ‘Capital’]

Telugu OriginalRANGANAYAKAMMA

English TranslationR. Udaykumar

Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru Centrefor Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore

V.S. RaviReseach Scientist in Bioinformatics, USA

B.R. BapujiFormerly Professor, University of Hyderabad

Copy Editing:P. Sreelakshmi

Database Administrator, USA

SWEET HOME PUBLICATIONS76, Lake-side Colony, Jubilee Hills post,

HYDERABAD – 500 033

2ECONOMICS FOR CHILDREN[Lessons based on Marx’s ‘Capital’]By Ranganayakamma

First Print: August, 2015

ISBN: 81-87515-06-7

Page Makeup: M. Sarada

Drawings:Chintada Appala RajuDrawing Teacher,Vizianagaram.

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Pages: 472 [ in Royal demmy size

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Price: Rs. 150

Writer’s Address:Ranganayakamma,76, Lakeside Colony,Durgam Cheruvu Area,Jubilee Hills post,Hyderabad-500033.Email: brbapuji@gmail.com

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ContentsPreface 8

A Note on Translation 111. What is ‘money’?.......................................... 142. What are ‘things’? ........................................ 163. How do human beings make things?........... 184. Who stitched the shirt? ................................ 225. Raw material of the raw material! ................ 256. What is the raw material for the ‘tree’? ........ 297. Auxiliary materials ........................................ 328. What is ‘labour’? .......................................... 389. Labours that do not make products? ........... 41

10. All ‘labour’ is work, but all ‘work’ is not labour! 4511. What are ‘exchanges’? ................................ 4912. The ‘Use-value’ of an article ........................ 5213. The ‘Exchange value’ of an article ............... 5714. What if a person makes an article

actively or lazily?....... 6115. Old labour and New labour .......................... 6416. How can we see the ‘value’? ....................... 6817. Why does the value of an article exist

outside of that article? ........ 7118. Value is unnatural!........................................ 7519. All the value belongs to labour!

It does not belong to any material!.... 77

420. Natural matter + Labour = Article................. 8121. The problem in the Barter system of

exchanges! ........... 8622. Money has arrived!....................................... 8923. What do people do with money? ................. 9224. Money is a strange article that lacks

‘use value’ and possesses only ‘value’! ..... 9625. Is money a mediator of exchanges? ............ 9926. Money is the ‘value form’ of all the articles....10527. Paper money is a stranger article that is

devoid of not only use value but also the value!.....109

28. Did paper come as money in the place of gold? .....113

29. Why should we do labour? ..........................11830. Difference in labour ......................................12131. ‘Value’ is labour, but ‘labour’ is not value .....12532. How does labour turn into ‘value’?...............12533. Money means ‘Abstract labour’! ..................13334. ‘Human relations’ mean ‘Labour relations’! ......13735. ‘Exploitation of labour’ has begun! ...............14036. Vulgar and perverted culture of

Slave masters .......14437. Causes for Rich-Poor distinctions................14838. Hostile Classes ............................................15239. A question one should raise about ‘Property’ 15440. Commerce and Commercial profit, Loans and

Interest began in the slave owning society ..158

541. Emergence of ‘State’ in the

slave-owning society....16242. Teachings of Religious texts to the slaves:

Sin and Piety! Heaven and Hell! ....16543. Master-Slave relations! ................................16744. Society of Landlords ....................................17145. ‘Land Rent’ means ‘Exploitation of labour’ ..17446. The beginning of the Capitalist system........18147. Profit: The sole aim of Capital ......................18348. Old Labour + New Labour

Total Labour of the product ....18949. Some aspects concerning ‘Price’ .................19350. How does ‘Surplus labour’ take place? .......20051. Who will consume the ‘Surplus value’? .......20552. Surplus labour, Surplus value and

Surplus produce ........21153. ‘Capital’ is a grand lie! ..................................21754. Who will get profit: Capital or the Capitalist?.22555. Land-rent has become two parts! ................23056. The tenant farmer who is unaware of labour! 23657. Exploitation of labour is still going on

throughout the world! ...24158. Bourgeois magician! ....................................24359. The principal doubt concerning ‘price’! ........24860. Investigation on value began

2000 years ago! .....256

661. The ignorance of Intellectuals! .....................25962. Who discovered the secret of

Exploitation of labour? ....26363. Productive and Unproductive labours! .........26764. Do Unproductive workers give Surplus value?27065. Unproductive labours at the

workplace of the capitalist .....27766. Transfer of the value of means of production 28167. Commercial workers are

Unproductive Labourers! .....28868. The entire money in a given country is the

result of the labour of Productive Labourers! 29369. Values that add subsequent to production 30270. Subsequent to Production ...........................30671. Exchange-related labour does not

convert into value ....31172. Family Labour ..............................................31773. Competition: A loathsome expression! ........32474. Productivity (Productive power) ...................32675. The ideas of the ruling class are the

ideas of the people .....33376. Heavy machines, aero planes, computers:

All are tools! Same as a needle! .34177. Unemployment is the creation of

the capitalist system! .....34878. Every wage is not the ‘Value of the

labour power’! ....356

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H

79. Some examples showing the incomes of Capitalists! ......363

80. Castes in India:Result of ‘exploitative division of labour’ ..372

81. The Capitalist Price ......................................37882. What do Capitalist economists say

about ‘Profit’?....38283. Economic Crises: the creation of

Capitalist system ...38984. More on the Economic Crises......................39485. Some News reports on the Crises ...............39886. All human beings are Class human beings!

A ‘class’ is not monolithic! 40787. Working class smeared with

‘muck of all ages’! ..41088. Will this exploitative world ever change?......41689. Is reconciliation between classe possible? ..42190. The Head is for thinking! ..............................42391. The Golden era is ahead, not behind! .........42892. The beginning of the ‘Egalitarian’ society! ...43193. Communism after Communism! ..................43994. What the working class must accomplish? ..44395. Facts are bound to defeat illusions! .............449

H Final Word .......................... 452H On the Price of this book .... 457H INDEX ................................. 462

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Preface[ To the First Telugu edition of December 2009 ]

I began writing this book only for children.These are the children hailing from standards 7, 8 to 10.From childhood, children need games, songs, stories

and many more things. Though the stories are full offantasies and superstitions, the children must also receivescientific facts along with these. Science is a knowledgewhich elucidates the real matters with proofs regarding thenature that we exist in and the society that we live in.

Children are innocent. They learn and trust in what istold to them by the elders at home and at school. The elderswill convey to their children what they have learnt from theirelders. They teach the children only what they were taught.Children or adults, they will start to think only when theyreceive scientific knowledge.

One need not learn all the aspects of science related toNature. Every person need not thoroughly learn the medicalsciences. It would suffice if they are familiar with the routinehygiene principles to practice on a daily basis. Whenailments descend on people, the clinicians will take care ofthe diseases. Every person need not have the medicalknowledge as much as clinicians do. This also applies to theother natural sciences.

9However, this is not the case with the science that

teaches us regarding the society that we live in. We arehuman beings, not animals. The animals are born and aredead the same way as they were born. They do not needany kind of science or knowledge. The human being,however, must know about human relations. The EconomicScience explains relations among humans and their ways ofliving. This is the science that portrays the lives ofyesterday, today and tomorrow. Every person must beaware of this knowledge.

There used to appear a monthly magazine for childrencalled ‘Nani’ (Editor: N.K. Babu). I had originally startedthese lessons for that magazine. At that time I planned todescribe only up to the concept of ‘money’. Only the firsteight lessons of this book appeared in that magazine. Themagazine, however, stopped subsequently due to financialproblems. I, nevertheless, completed this book to describethe other lessons as well to children.

But, such a big book for children? Can the childrenunderstand the last lesson in this book? I myself wasbesieged with these doubts at times. I had to write thelessons in greater detail with a view that this book is meantfor children. Since this book is meant for children, the fontsize is much larger. Illustrations appear at many places.Also questions and answers. In the final lessons newsclippings too were inserted. For these reasons, the bookhas enlarged in size. The lessons, however, are short.

Prefece

10Without the lessons being this size, it would not be possibleto comprehend this science in the minimum.

There will be many levels among children. This is not aproblem for the children who are habituated to reading andwho have an interest in learning. There will not be a problemin understanding things that contain logic.

It would suffice if the titles of the lessons, theterminology and the characters described in the lessons fallon the ears and minds of the children. It would suffice if atleast the children get to know that there exists a sciencesuch as this. They will read again if they do not understand alesson once. It all depends on their interest. If adults help alittle, wherever children need, there won’t be any problem.

However, when learning an unfamiliar science, adultstoo are same as children. Even among adults, 99% of themare not aware of the science that teaches regarding thesociety. One must read Marx’s ‘Capital’ for this. This is,however, impossible to start with. I therefore wrote‘An Introduction to Marx’s Capital’ in the past. The adultsmay read this book without much difficulty. The presentbook, however, will serve as a primer prior to the otherbooks. I have kept in mind also those adults who are scaredand lethargic of Marx’s ‘Capital’. The adults must also readthe books of the children, and must learn. And must teachthe children.

Ranganayakamma17-11-2009

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A Note on TranslationThis translation is based on the Telugu original

Pillala Kosam Ardhika Sastram (Economics for Children),which appeared originally in December 2009 and underwentthree editions subsequently.

A note on this translation is necessary since the sourcelanguage (Telugu) and the receptor language (English) are‘genetically’ as well as ‘culturally’ unrelated and ‘structurally’different.

The differences in syntax (grammar) and semantics(vocabulary including culture-specific words, idioms etc) ofthese two languages pose certain problems to thetranslators.

The grammatical features that pose problems are:articles, prepositions, auxiliaries, tense and aspect, voice,tag questions, conjunctions, word order, sentence lengthand sentence types.

One specific feature of the original is that it does notcontain even a single passive-voice sentence whereas thetranslation, at some places, is not free from the passivevoice.

The problems usually faced in the sphere of vocabularyare: Collocations, figurative expressions, cultural terms,idioms etc.

F igurative expressions posed major problem.Wherever we had equivalents in English, direct or indirect,we used them. Whenever we could not find equivalents,we resorted to literal translations of some language-specificexpressions, with the expectation that the conceptual worlds

12of speakers of different languages overlap at least in certainareas and hence the literally translated source languageexpressions will be comprehensible to a reasonable extent.Yet, in some ‘difficult’ situations, we substituted the figurativeexpressions of the Source language by non-figurativeexpressions of the Receptor language.

In the case of plant and animal worlds, we retainedthe source language names since the Botanical andZoological terminologies may not be intelligible to non-specialist readers. In such cases and also in certain specificcultural contexts,we reproduced the Source language wordsin italics.

We retained the proper names that are specific toTelugu situation, though they sound ‘alien’ to non-Telugureaders. We did not prefer using English proper names asthey sound more alien to the users of Indian languages.Language-specific proper names can, of course, be usedwhen this book is translated into other Indian languages.[For instance, the Hindi translation of this book which isunder preparation contains Hindi-specific proper names.The Tamil translation of this book is also under preparationand both those translations are likely to appear shortly.]

R. Udaykumar has translated ninety percent of thelessons while V.S. Ravi and I have done the remaining ones.

Once the translation of a lesson was over, I comparedthe translation,sentence by sentence, with the Teluguoriginal and made modifications wherever I felt necessary,after discussing with the original writer. Our main concernand priority have been not merely reproducing theessential meaning of the original text but also theindividual style of the original writer. (By style, we mean

A Note on Translation

13the specific manner in which the writer presents her ideas,intentions, attitudes and so on.) In this process, there mighthave occurred some changes, which may not retain orpresent the scholarship and the translation abilities of therespective translators fully. However, before beginning thetranslation, they had generously agreed to tolerate myinterference. I justify my interference with the help of theconcept of ‘World Englishes’, which imply that one can allowthe influence of the First or the Source language substratumincluding the nature of the style of the writer while translating.

After my comparison and necessary modifications, Ipresented each draft of the translation of each lesson toDr.P. Sreelakshmi, proficient both in Telugu and English,and who taught English Literature for many years in India.

Sreelakshmi read the translated drafts with great careand patience and made useful corrections and suggestionsto improve the overall quality of the translation. I incorporatedthose corrections and suggestions after discussions withthe writer. I carried out almost all the grammatical as wellas lexical corrections. However, it was not possible to carryout a few corrections regarding style, where either the writeror I felt such corrections might not convey the style of theoriginal.

Despite useful suggestions of the English languageexpert, the present translation may still have shortcomingsdue either to my oversight or my personal choices withregard to the suggestions made. Hence, I am responsible,not the language experts or the translators, for theshortcomings that may still remain.

B.R. BapujiJune, 2015

A Note on Translation

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