Over the weekend, I ran into a running buddy of yours at the Workers World
forum. His name is Abdul.
Also, Nelson Peery spoke at the reopening of the Midwest Labor Library and
forum on the National Negro Labor Council. Peery said that it was Paul
Robeson, not Stokeley Carmicheal who coined "Black Power"
Waistline2
CB:The mode of production is capitalism , as used in the first sentence of
_Capital_ I. "The wealth of nations in which the capitalist mode of
production prevails...". There is no "industrial" mode of production for
Marx. There is the capitalist mode of production which has had an Industrial
period of its technology.
I know you use "property relations within" , but as I told you when we
looked to the original source for this usage in the Contribution to the
Critique, I think you are misusing the grammar that Marx uses there.<<
Comment
WL: You are probably correct concerning misusing the grammar that Marx uses,
but I have never had loyalty to his grammar as such.
CB: When you use the keep using the unusual construction " with the property
relations within" it's clearly a specific reference to this passage by Marx
AS AUTHORITY. If you are going to use him as an authority , you are
obligated to be "loyal" to his grammar as he uses it in this passage.
Otherwise, you are using him as an authoritative reference , but not
respecting his authority yourself.
^^^^^^^^
Generally my particular language structure follows Engels, after all he
states point blank that the industrial system with its bourgeois property
relations has been called the capitalist mode of production since Marx.
^^^^
CB: Yea, but at that time there was no talk of "post-industry" and Toffler
and all that. So, the industrial technology was new and all there had been
of capitalism. But Engels is clear that it is not technology , but property
relations of wagelabor/capital that constitute the capitalist mode.
^^^^^^
It was important for Marx to outline the
property relations as historically evolved social relations of production,
given the concrete circumstances under which he describes his and Engles
revolutionary point of view.
Then again, I have a fundamentally different point of view concerning the
working class movement in America that is more than less foreign to American
Marxism and perhaps world Marxism.
^^^^^
CB: Correct. That's all I'm saying. You are obviously free to put forth a
different point of view, but it is not a Marxist point of view.
Lets just agree and be clear on this. You are putting for the Waistline
point of view which is different than a Marxist point of view , as developed
by Marx and Engels.
^^^^^
I do not see the meaning of class the same as
the grammar of Marx or the American Marxists, generally speaking.
I do not see the working class as the revolutionary agent of change ("grave
digger of the bourgeoisie") and do not believe any evidence exists to prove
such revolutionariness. I believe several generations have been under the
spell
of a boundary in the development of the industrial system that has revealed
its transitory character. Revolutionaries are limited to doing what is in
front
of us and on the basis events present themselves.
A totally different political (not theory) conception spring from
conceptualizing the mode of production as the material power of production,
and then
defining the fundamental attributes of this material power against the
previously
exting technological regime - with the property relations within.
MARX DOES NOT SAY . . . HEY EVERYBODY . . . THE DEFINITION OF THE MODE OF
PRODUCTION IS A SET OF PROPERTY RELATIONS OR THE MODE OF PRODUCTION MEANS
"the
specific shape of the productive forces and the technological regime as
primary,
with the property relations within."
This is what I basically see about the working class and the mode of
production:
The struggle between the working class and the capitalist class is to reform
the system in one or another favor, with the working class fighting to
expand
its share of the social product and political liberties.
To expand its share
of the social products is a fight for wages and rights and this is all right
because it is an important arena. Under certain conditions of crisis this
struggle can leap outside the economic bounds - social contract, of the
connection
that holds capital and worker together as a unity, but generally this has
been
when the state intervenes into the struggle.
^^^^^^^
CB: What is your evidence of this ?
What more evidence is there of this than the evidence that the working class
is the only class that can overthrow capitalism ?
^^^
In my estimate much of the Marxist movement in our country has always been
under the spell of political syndicalism. The question of the proletariat is
profound and its evolution flows from direct changes in the material power
of
production. I tend to use the concept material power of production rather
than
the "productive forces" to outline a political direction. The material power
of
production is embedded with property relations and at a certain stage comes
into conflict with the property relations or the contradiction between this
material power passes over into antagonism.
^^^^^^^^
CB: What is your evidence of this ?
^^^^^^^^
Or achieves an "independent existence"
in relationship to a form of property it is in conflict with. This
appearance
of an "independent existence" indicates a rupture or that the bond that held
together the previous unity that was the social contradiction - the meaning
of
antagnoism, and the old unity becomes an external collision of the material
power with the property form. The new mode of production comes into conflict
with the property form or what is the legal expression of the same thing.
^^^^^^^^^
CB: The old material power of production was already in conflict with the
property form. It has been since Marx and Engels.
^^^^^^
The proletariat is not the working class but it is a part of the working
class in the sense that it has no means of subsistence outside the sell of
its
labor power.
^^^^^^
CB: What section of the working class has means of subsistence outside of
the power to sell its labor-power.
^^^^^^
The demand of the proletariat - the real proletariat or the new proletariat
or the new class of proletarians, is not to expand its share of the social
products as a part of its laboring but to abolish the system of buying and
selling
because in its evolution it emerges outside the connection between capital
and worker and begins an evolution that is in external collision to all
forms of
property. This includes socialist property. In other words about 3 billion
people do not have money.
The process logic behind the conception of the mode of production different
from the grammer of Marx (although this is not really true in my opinion) is
this:
THE TWO BASIC CLASSES OF A SOCIAL SYSTEM ARE NEVER FREE TO OVERTHROW THE
SYSTEM THEY ARE A PART OF AND THE MUTUAL STRUGGLE AND UNITY BETWEEN THEM
DRIVES A
DISTINCT QUALITATIVE STAGE OF HISTORY ALONG QUANTITATIVELY.
I view the proletariat as the revolutionary element of changes as a
historically evolved social formation increasingly pushed outside the system
of buying
and selling on a planetary scale. This is a different process than that
which
constitutes the army of unemployed in its genesis. In its genesis the army
of
unemployed is the result of the destruction of the countryside. More
accurately the destruction of landed property relations as the result of
changes in the
form of wealth and development of the material power of production and the
growth of exchange. Above all this means the growth of new classes -
bourgeois
and workers, as they are connected to a given stage of development of
industry.
Waistline
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