Comment
The state is at all times an organization of violence with armed bodies of
people enforcing a property relation, the prevailing moral and ethical
views of the ruling class. The state power long ago became a professional
organization. Marx and Engels conclusions lead to one political result; the
organization of the proletariat as ruling class, through taking state power.
The capture of state power is the task of the insurrectionary movement.
Marx outlines the social function of the state that will remain in force
after the proletariat has become ruling class.
"The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in
communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in
existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question
can
only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to
the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word 'people' with the
word 'state'.
Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the
revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this
is
also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but
the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."
_http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm_
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm)
For Marxists every class rule is a "dictatorship of a class" without regard
to the form of political liberty or the mode of distribution, i.e., ones
entitlement to shares of the social product based on property relation.
Dictatorship of the proletariat (without quotes), was a vague
indecipherable concept to the people and classes within the Russian state -
workers,
peasants and soldiers, until they came to understand it during their 1917
capture of state power and then civil war. Our proletariat will come to
understand that the dictatorship of a class means "we rule" - the proletariat,
or
the enemy capitalist class rule.
II. Trade Unionism
"(T) He struggle for a wage increase of five kopeks on the ruble,
"recognised the embryonic class struggle."
"Marxism recognises a class struggle . . . . in the most significant
thing in politics-the organisation of state power."
Lenin
The struggle for wages ("a wage increase of five kopeks on the ruble") has
been convoluted to mean class struggle, rather than inherent conflict -
contradiction, between capitalist and worker. Every fight between a group of
workers or union and employer is not the meaning of class struggle.
Our experience is of trade unions being appendages of the system; its
constitutional authority or the meaning of being an organization of mediation
between labor and capital. Organizations of mediation preserve and reform the
system. It has not been uncommon for unions to be outright appendages of
the state and imperil policy.
The character and content of our trade union movement crystallized post
Civil War. After the industrial bourgeoisie establishes its political
hegemony the struggle of the proletariat is forced into channels within the
political superstructure. Locked within the system, trade unions expressed a
retrogressive and at times reactionary drag - fetter, on the labor movement,
even while fighting for better wages and conditions for its members. This
logic was unavoidable.
To counteract this retrogressive tendency and a certain bureaucratic
stagnation, communists advanced a line of march of the trade union movement
demanding the organization of the unorganized as vital to the health of unions.
In America the trade union movement faced fundamental defeat at the "Mason
Dixon line" as attempting to organize Southern labor.
As long as the economy did not experience a qualitative change (new
revolution in the means of production), trade unions could and did reform
themselves in conformity with the needs of the economy - system. Today, some
unions possess a potential to leap outside their historic role as custodians
for
capital, provided they extend themselves beyond the workplace and strike
roots in the unorganized mass of destitute and poverty stricken proletarians.
Waistline
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