>>Comment: 1) Perhaps I am not clear about whether you are really serious
about this or not, but the implications of this are that anyone who is
unemployed and or a part of the lumpen elements - is "objectively" more
revolutionary than a person in a job in a car-plant;
2) This is an extrapolation of the infamous (as I would see it) Three Worlds
theory of Mao (&/or Deng- irrelevant in this context) - - from an
international perspective to the question of revolution in a developed type
country;
3) This type of theory - to my mind makes it virtually impossible to recruit
the working class into a vision of their own destiny.
4) Again - I should like to ask - if there is any objective data to show that
the Labour Aristocracy (Which is what you are really referring to) has
actually gotten bigger - or was Lenin right when he said it was in fact
shrinking in the West?
Thanks,
>>Hari
Conclusion
Perhaps I should not use the words "labor aristocracy" in describing
polarization in America and other "imperial countries." In America it is
considered improper to talk about money, which on the ideological plane
denies the totality of the working class from grasping its destitution.
Workers in the imperial country or rather America, who happens to be more
stable in employment and make sizable income, become agitated when one speaks
of the material conditions of the former colonized world, the super-profits
carved out of their backs or the lowest strata of the working class in their
own country.
This question of polarization of the working class in America is the key to
grasping the offense of capital. Ones personal income does not necessarily
determine the content of ones character or politics. However, as class
phenomenon income level and material conditions of "standards of living" and
rates of consumption are very important. Poverty is growing in America in a
manner not experienced since the 1920s and 30s. Poverty is growing among the
employed and is spreading to the more educated families once thought to be
immune. These families have a household head with more than a high school
degree. Between DaimlerChrysler and the Ford Motor Company approximately 8000
white-collar workers have been permanently "laid off" in the Detroit area
during the past 12 months.
One can live "high on the hog" for years at a time only to be slammed into a
lower segment of the working class for years, where making "ends meet" is
difficult. There is a profound difference between wages of $60,000 - with
medical benefits, school tuition refund, on-line access for $3 a month
(through AOL), high unemployment pay and access to credit, and wages of
$28,000 a year with virtually no medical benefits and other negotiated items
by the unions. This profound difference becomes extraordinary when compared
with the Argentina workers - organized and unorganized.
New words have entered the lexicon of American society in the last decade to
describe the lowest sector of the working class. The lower sector of the
working class is connected to a new sector of part time and temporary workers
known as "throw away workers." This sector now comprises about 30 million or
one-third of the workforce, the number having tripled in ten years. The
process that is causing this growth of "throw-away" workers is the meaning of
polarization of wealth and poverty.
These "throw-away" workers are paid 70% of what people doing comparable
permanent jobs earn. Not only do they not have benefits, they have no set
work schedule. Their jobs include high tech software designers, office
workers, janitors, taxicab drivers, adjunct college professors, home
healthcare, food processing, substitute teachers, all the workers recently
fired in Las Vegas in the service industry, etc. It is said that the US food
industry would collapse without them. In rural factory towns, living
conditions are deplorable and diseases of poverty like TB are spreading. In
Iowa, workers from Laos live in railroad shacks that resemble scavenger's hut
in Seoul, Korea.
Beneath these workers are the destitute. They are homeless and live by
picking up cans, sleeping in shelters or doorways, standing in the cold,
competing for day labor made possible by the explosion of wealth and
construction boom in the cities - a process that has slowed sine the market
began crashing in March 2000. Day laborers are paid cash and often stiffed,
and are harassed by the police or jailed for standing on street corners
waiting for work. Their jobs range from painting, welding, gardening or
hammering, cleaning homes and small businesses. Please go to the Coalition
against Homelessness or any other hundreds of sites dealing with this issue
and propagandizing against police harassment of these workers.
Alongside these workers in the US and the world a new kind of slavery is
developing. These slaves are different than in the past since the owners have
no incentive to maintain them, once their labor is used. They are thrown
away. These networks of prostitution, human smuggling, drugs and all types of
contraband are associated with an element of society, which a section of
Marxist in America calls the lumpen proletariat.
Everything described above point to the direction - trajectory, things are
heading as technology develops. However one describes this polarization is
fine. My point is simply there is no anaylsis of the above, other than the
one a small group of us have pioneered now for twenty years. We are starting
to make significant headway because the polarization has assumed dimensions
that prevent its denial. I had trouble grasping the dialectic of this process
at its initial point of transition and did intense study of the Marx
dialectic to grasp the evolution of properties and movement in antagonism. We
face some qualitative distinctions.
The word polarization is being fought for and injected into the movement
associated with Marx name.
Lenin said the "labor aristocracy is shrinking." Very well. I have never
written anything in 30 years to contradict the polarization of wealth and
poverty, which by definition means "shrinkage" on the one hand and
"expansion" on the other. Not only is the labor aristocracy shrinking the
capitalist as a class is "shrinking," - that is to say the concentration of
every greater wealth into the hands of fewer people, due to the historical
process of decay of capital. What is the old statistic that I once kept
pasted on my wall - 500 billionaires controlling more wealth than the
majority on earth?
I do apologize for giving the impression that I was putting forth a
proposition that says the Labor aristocracy is "expanding" - although I
cannot conceive what its expansion would be in relationship to, or rather
what the comparison is with (ratio). In my opinion all classes - in the
historical sense, are disintegrating as social formation revolving around the
axis of the sell and purchase of labor-power and its application as labor in
the production of the total world of commodities.
In history, well over 30 years ago some of the people in the group in which I
was a member, recruited in mass, virtually the entire Detroit section of the
old Black Panther Party in our League of Revolutionary Black Workers on the
basis of defeating the conception of the "lumpen-proletariat" as
revolutionary. We never believed that being unemployed makes one a
lumpen-proletariat. One can of course become declassed without becoming a
"lumpen." The homeless are not necessarily "lumpen." As a stratum they are
declassed to a large extent and definitely are not lumpen.
I fail to see why any of this is related to Chairman Mao. If by "three world
theories" is meant the conception of the Third World, many of have fought
such a conceptualization for 40 years - some time before I joined the
movement on a regular basis and lost the fight. To this very day people speak
of a "Third World," when we always spoke of colonies, semi-colonies, and
neo-colonial structures in the web of imperial relations.
What I am really referring to is the movement of antagonism in society that
expresses itself as society being torn from its old foundation as the result
of the emergence of a new qualitative feature in the production process and
the resultant polarization of society. I maintain admiration for Chairman Mao
as a great leader and thinker, but our conception of antagonism and
polarization runs counter to his articulation of the same as stated in his
old "Four Essay In Philosophy" and "On the Correct Handling of Contradiction
Amongst the People" and we stated as such in an old theoretical Journal
called Proletariat. The article was called "On Mao Tse-Tung's Dialectics" and
appeared fall, 1978, Vol. 4 No. 2. In the same issue are articles on "The
Negation of the Negation," and the article "A Philosophic Review of Charles
Bettelheim's "Class Struggle in the USSR, 1917-23."
Winning over the "middle-elements" as it faces historic disintegration and
the polarization within the working class are strategic questions that
governs the immediate direction of society. This "middle" is not the peasants
of the time of Lenin. We can assume that their exist layers of society
"between" the capitalist as a class and the lower sections of the working
class, using $30,000 (a high figure) and below as an index. There are
countless sociological distinctions within the category between the
capitalist and lower sections of the workers, of which unionization is
important, but only one distinction. We need a winning strategy.
Strategy is the determination of where to throw your main blow or efforts.
In other words what is the working class to be won over to? To answer "the
cause of socialism" or "its own emancipation" does not give people an idea of
"the line of march" or how to win the class to the morality of meeting the
existing minimum needs of the majority of the working class.
Millions are without medical coverage in America because our capitalist won
the voting section of society to the idea that medical care is not a societal
issue but rather exist within the sphere of the individual's personal
circumstances. Millions of people simply are not able to get enough food for
the size of their family. The capitalist can longer label hunger as an
individual issue, but still have convinced the voting section of America that
"drugs, sex, abortions and laziness" is what afflicts the lower section of
the working class. Millions believe that people "just won't take available
jobs." Some of the poorest people believe their circumstances are personal
and their own fault and this may be true for an individual but not 30-50
million people.
We must learn how to move from trying to win "the working class into a vision
of their own destiny" to rallying broad section of the class on the basis of
their material need for food, clothing, shelter, clean water, rent subsidy,
transportation and declare that it is the responsibility of the government to
ensure that we have these things. This is the surest way to defeat the war
danger and the increasing "drift" to fascism. The working class is polarized
and conceives its destiny different, based on its material needs. There is no
shortage of food in my house or amongst a more stable better paid section of
the working class.
Targeting outside the lower stratum of the working class or throwing the main
blow - effort, at the trade unions, cannot win this fight. The lower section
of the working class is the basis for fighting to win the "middle" -
including trade unions to the morality of the decency of reorganizing social
life to meet people's minimum needs.
The question of fairness is being debated through society. "Fairness" is a
profoundly moral question that can defeat the fascist offensive in the
ideological sphere. We must seal the breach between individual rights and
fairness to the individual. This is a class question and this mean a question
of the material survival of a class. The words class-consciousness must be
stripped of all ideological formulations and declared to mean teaching our
class how to fight for its material needs and survival. This cannot be done
on the basis of the trade unions because the survival needs of the trade
union are radically less urgent than that of the labor movement. The labor
movement is all who must sell their labor power for existence.
The trade unions can be won over and I do not mean any individual leader.
Leaders respond to those who elect them and social pressure, not the other
way around. The trade unions are not the labor movement, only it's organized
sector. Slowly but surely the trade union in America are forced - compelled
by pressure, to embrace the undocumented ("illegal") workers. The
undocumented workers are not new in history, but have reached a critical mass
where they cannot be denied. One section of the working class in America
frankly states that the solution is to "kill them all and let God sort them
out" and the lower section says "feed them, allow their children into
schools, give them access to medical care and if they cannot be employed meet
their needs as human beings."
I believe it is a fatal mistake and will alter this juncture of history to
belittle the fascist ideological currents in our class that arises as it is
further polarized into hostile camps. These current will not disappear or go
away because one does not believe a certain ideological concept is
"authentic." The fascist ideological currents must be defeated and prevented
from infecting larger sections of society. If this means never using the
words "labor aristocracy" I will find other words to describe the social
process. Nor am I implying you assert the above, merely explaining the
context of the unfolding fight.
"I am my brothers keeper." We can win this fight.
The reason I do not believe any of this proposition has anything to do with
Chairman Mao is because China did not have a societal industrial
infrastructure until recently and consequently polarization could not
development during Chairman Mao tenure on the basis of the new qualitative
features in our current productive process. This intense polarization is
roughly a decade or so old and emerged for all to see in the mid to late
1990s. The Chairman never - to my knowledge, wrote anything like this. For
all practical purposes neither has any other section of the world communist
movement, which is not yet able to formulate what class consciousness
actually means. Communist wins each other over to a strategic line of march
and then the decisive sector of the working class. This does not mean
everyone have to be in the same organization or anything like that.
All our debates and wonderful discussion are really ideological forms of
material class relations moving in antagonism and undergoing intense
polarization.
Peace
Melvin P.
PS. This was written before I read your reply.
