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In a message dated 12/4/2009 6:06:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) writes: >> Thirdly, nope, the conflict between means and relations of production is not precisely because the industrial workforce grows in absolute terms. The conflict between means and relations is between the accumulation of capital as a profit-yielding mode, the expansion of value based on maintaining the means of production as private property in order to aggrandize surplus value, and the limits to the accumulation of capital, and expansion of value, based on that very same aggrandizement of surplus value. It's the relation between the capital components, variable and constant, that ignites, precipitates, drives the conflict between means and relations of production....that relation, and thus the conflict is maintained by capital, is essential to capital during the expansion and contraction of the numbers of workers. And being essential to capital, being its manifest identity, this conflict becomes capital's manifest destiny-- to reproduce the impulse to revolution, the concrete immanence of revolution and overturn of that relation of production. << Comment Sounds reasonable to me except for the first sentence, which misses the point. This means the other points miss the point. The industrial form of the working class or modern proletarians of the era of Marx is not in ascendancy. The great American industrial middle class has not simply been scattered but shattered and is in absolute decay and disintegration, as society continues its leap to a new technological regime. What was being isolated in the Perleman excerpt was the issue of the financing of vehicle sales as a profits center; the role of a GMAC and Chrysler Credit (read = Cerberus) and vehicle financing in the context of a new world of financial products. Put another way, it seems we are not longer fighting captains of industry, but rather Lords of financial abstractions living from accumulation of abstractions. Capital as a notional value is the economist and international banker Henry C.K. Liu‘s characterization of modern speculative capital. "Profitless prosperity" was the watch word given by Ford in January 2002. The new non-banking financial architecture is important but lets fry bigger fish. Let's go back and check out a golden oldie record. Let's go back to 1974. Here is what we wrote in September 1974 - 35 years ago, and how the world looked to "us.". 'The trend toward shifting the economic base from mechanics to electronics has not only increased the reserve army of unemployed but also created a huge qualitatively new army of the permanently unemployed, especially amongst national minority proletarians. Every technical advance makes the position of the proletarians more untenable. The struggle against the capitalist class is a struggle against all who live by the labor of others, and against all exploitation. It can only end in the seizing of power by the working class, and the transferal of all land, instruments, factories, machines, and mines to the whole of society for the organization of social production under which all that is produced by the workers and all improvements in production must benefit the working people themselves." Party Program Preamble: Founding Congress Document of Communist Labor Party. The shift from mechanics to electronics - as written about in 1974, expresses an understanding of conflict immanent to means, immanent to relations, as one becomes the interactive environment of the other. Implicit in this understanding is a concept of the organic composition of capital. Given the fact of the old party center (headquarters) being in Chicago, with intense social strife in Detroit, many of "us" evolved a form of Marxist presentation and articulation considered economic determinist by some. However, our practical activity tends to disprove this charge. It is extremely significant that we founded a Communist ideological group based on the proposition: "shifting the economic base from mechanics to electronics has not only increased the reserve army of unemployed but also created a huge qualitatively new army of the permanently unemployed." Remember this is a statement from 1974. "Shifting the economic base" is a precise formulation. The economic base is not the commodity form of the sum total factors defining "material power of productive forces" or relations of production, however one defines the latter. Economic base is "the thing society is built upon;" means and relations, as both are constructed based on a definable stage of development of productive forces. The productive forces are industrial, as that, which is fundamental to unraveling their properties as a distinct qualitative definition. In other words we have a distinct language structure, or rather Marxist dialect. I see no need to alter this specific form of articulation considering that every other form of Marxist presentation tends to deny we are in the throes of a new revolution as profound as the industrial revolution. This of course is at the heart of our exchanges. II. You will never escape Detroit. You may tempt the hand of fate but can never escape your personal destiny. We are four decades beyond or rather into future shock. Future Shock was coined in 1970. A Marxist that denies that the salient feature of our society turmoil is the revolution in the material power of production needs their head examined. To admit that the revolution in the technological regime is well underway and pretty advanced is not to deny the bourgeois property relation, as it simultaneously advances and fetter the full potential of the shift from mechanics - electro-mechanical, to electronics. I was 22 years old in 1974 and understood the meaning of organic composition of capital before being introduced to Marx concept of it. For some reason we connected the shift from mechanics to electronics with a "huge qualitatively new army of the permanently unemployed." The emergence of this qualitatively new army of unemployed proletarians, presupposes the entry of "something" into the social process producing the new social (quality) consequence. However, none of us understood the profound implications of what we wrote in 1974. In 1974 we looked at that, which was in front of us. We looked first and then fought to accurately describe what was in front of us. No way could we predict that the work force would be well over 30% part-time and "underemployed" 35 years later. Only later, around 1987/1988, could we accurately describe the process logic, a full decade ahead of much of the "organized" Marxist movement. In 1989 an article was written and reprinted as "An Epoch of Social Revolution." Our initial formulation of the shift from mechanics to electronic is incorrect today, but extremely advanced when it was written. The word "mechanics" should be replaced with "electro-mechanical production process." While digging up old history I came across a hard copy of March/April 1971 issue of Radical America dedicated to "Black Labor." The articles are: "The Demand for Black Labor" by Harold M. Baron; The League of Revolutionary Black Workers; Introduction by Eric Perkins to the document "At the Point of Production," and "From Repression to Revolution" by Ken Cockrel. The last article directly addresses the "Panther discussion" a month or so ago. I believe this issue of Radical America is on-line. Economic determinism is an old charge leveled against virtually anyone in Marxism beginning their unraveling of the economy from the standpoint of the actual building blocks upon which sits the material power of production, production relations and the political superstructure, with the property relations within. Here is the dilemma. How could we write about a shift from mechanics to electronics in 1974 and then speak of a qualitatively new army of permanently unemployed in an environment where most called these proletarians lumpen? It has never been amusing to us that this section of the proletariat was for historical reasons black. Today, the intensifying social consequences are such that everyone is forced to admit this growing mass of destitute are not a lumpen proletariat. First comes the injection of a new quality into the material power and then comes a series of qualitative changes or social consequences at a certain quantitative accumulation of the impact and spread of the new qualitative ingredient. The technological revolution does not alter or change the law system behind the FROP or all its counter tendencies. This is so because FROP is a quality of bourgeois private property rather than the material power of the elctro-mechanical or electronic technology underpinning. What the technological revolution does is create the material wherewithal for a new epoch of social revolution. The last epoch being displaced by our new epoch is called the Industrial Revolution. Specifically, the new technology regime exists and evolves not in conflict with, but antagonism with the electro-mechanical system. This is due to the bourgeois private property. Today we face the intersection of crisis of capital and revolution in the material power. This was not the case in 1929 to the outbreak of the Second World Imperialist War. During this period political revolt existed and took place, with no chance for the emergence of an insurrectionary movement. The spokespersons of American capital really understood their strategic aim in the war. Their strategic aim since the Civil War or rather, emergence of American finance capital, has been dismantling the historic closed colonial system and opening these areas to American finance capital, based on a model perfected in South America. III. It’s funny how renewed activity and motion by the insurgent workers clarify ones point of view and writings. All of a sudden everything is crystal clear. As you correctly point out, 1974 - rather than 1976/78, was the peak year of the strike wave. This comradely correction was the occasion for looking back through "our documents" from 35 years ago. I was like "damn, D is right. What specifically did we write in 1974?" What was the social and political landscape in 1974? In 1974 Bill Gates was not yet Bill Gates but an upstart that had graduated from Lakeside in 1973. Gates and Steve Job would latter become as revolutionary as the reactionary Henry Ford of the industrial era, with John Chambers of Cisco acting as Alfred Sloan. Microsoft would not be founded until late 1975 and early 1976. The emerging revolution in technology and new fields of application were only sensed in 1974. Cisco system was more than a decade away from 1974. As Apple Computers predicted 1984 did not have to be 1984 and was pushed to 2004. . 1974 was the peak of the strike wave and upsurge of the working class as the strike wave, mirrored an upsurge in production and speed up. This increase in production and speed-up is isolated in contradistinction to a radical increase in the density of dead labor - machinery or the new technology. A certain technological improvement always takes place in auto and this was mirrored in contract agreements establishing a cyclical wage increase of 3%. This automatic wage increase was literally called "the annual improvement factor." The improvement in the "improvement factor" was the extension of the industrial revolution or rather, the electro-mechanical process in deskilling the production process and eliminating the labor input. Auto production peaked in 1973 at 14,535,668. In 1972: 12,998,681; * 1971: 12,233, 697; * 1970:9,639,424; * 1969:11,699,156; * 1968: 12,113,826. and 1967: 10,063,275. Extending the work day and raw speed up, capital's manifest destiny, rather than revolutionizing the means of production based on the coming new technology drove the class struggle. Here class struggle is defined as it existed in 1974, as a conflict between workers and employers at the point of production. There were other conflicts bound up with the struggle for expanding political liberty. The jump in production during the 12-month period of 1967 and 1968 - by 2 million units, was the precise moment of the formation of the old League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The LRBW was a political response to a complex of social consequences, including the 1966 mini-rebellion, serving as the dress rehearsal for Detroit 1967. (Ok, your point was taken to heart. Why not use the language of data, which Marx deployed? You do point out and have always maintained the LRBW was an acute form of class struggle. Speed up and lengthening of the workday was articulated as "niggermation" expressing the entry of the black into the bottom of the industrial social order or an intense conflict between means and relations. And to answer your question posed sometime ago: No, hell naw, ) Let me back up because this is becoming diffuse, but it is to much information to down load coherently. IV. Bill Gates life activity and ascendancy can serve as a marker in the technological advance when combined with the raw data of annual auto production. A qualitative shift in the technology regime is well underway. We missed a couple of important junctures if auto data serves as an index. In 1999 and 2000, domestic production peaked at 17,616,121 and 17,659,700 respectively. These peak years of production were nothing like 1971. 72 and 73, for more reasons than I can outline here. Here I want to concede a couple of points, implicit in your writings because they are correct as far as I am concerned. We can always push harder and need to be more data driven, because none of us as individuals can "see" the totality of the process and the totality of the field of battle. I believe a different kind of communist insurgent is needed today. One that can take the driest economic data and decipher it in a way to drive and inspire a movement. You excel in this beyond belief. A communist movement organized on the basis of the precepts of the Comintern form of organization is our death. Local units and fractions - combinations of communist in the same sphere of work, will never go out of style, but what the men and women who are going to organize the vanguard of the proletariat need is clarity of exposition and the facts. Then one can impudently find their own bearing, even when cut off from direct organization or simply lacking the desire to join an organization. I do feel that the Hegelian form is problematic for our working class and also do not subscribe to it. In fact I hate it. Nevertheless my personal likes are hardly the issue. The issue is a language to win the vanguard of he proletariat to the cause of communism. The vanguard of the proletariat is a rigid concept used to define a fluid segment of insurgents that change with peaks and ebbs in the movement. Anytime a segment of the proletarians surge forward it is because they are lead forward by individuals we call "leaders." Leaders change, but the vanguard of the proletariat is an absolute category and foundation of political Leninism as a doctrine of combat. The folks I am dealing with today are not going to be the same folks I will be involved with a year from now. I do believe it is proper to constantly analyze the world but . . . . and this is a huge "but," feel that meddling in the internal politics of various countries will split the communist communism. Your tracking of data in say China is excellent. Although the gun was jumped on auto production in China versus America earlier in the year. Your objection was against using first quarter data as definitive. In other words - in the contest of this li stserv, we are going to run pass Nestor because the spontaneous movement is driving us pass a previous stage of history. We are not going to run pass Henry C.K. Liu because of the territory he staked out. He proposed some time ago an economic blueprint for economic communism today and this included the destruction of bourgeois private property and a serious critique of government policy in China. His writings are causing material upheaval in China and its leading organs of political power. This is the moment we have waited for. This is our moment of history where fate and destiny intersect. The problem is the inability to discern distinct points and transitions in the form of proletarian insurgency as one quantitative phase of history gives way to another and finally comes under the sway of a revolution in the material power of production. I am saying this shits different! And no I am not going to be polite and circumspect. Tonight - this night on Sunday December 6, 2009, I am looking at a ticket to a dinner event featuring Reverend Joseph E. Lowery, formerly of SCLC or Dr, Martin Luther King Jr. organization. I do not disrespect the man, but have never been the Southern Christian Leadership Council kind of dude. If you are not talking about direct actions in the streets with cries of economic communism, however you understand it, then I am staying at home and watching my recording of Stargate Universe and Fringe. Man, I am full and surrender and collaboration with the custodians of capital is out of the question. Maybe if I were in a better mood I would go and make an appearance. I am feeling something very different. If the wife was in the mood for an outing and dinner I would go and then look for the poker game and kicked some bourgeois ass to pay next month rent. I be getting to angry over nothing. A section of the ruling class always detaches itself from its class and goes over to the social revolution. I have managed to accumulate a little experience in this sphere of combat. I like Henry C.K. Liu writings a lot . . .. a whole lot. The ruling class wants to preserve itself and care little about whether or not society remains organized based on the value relations or the commodity form or buying and selling. They feel the earth scorching beneath their feet. In other words, what began the break up of feudalism was the transition in the form of wealth from land to gold, inasmuch as feudalism is the landed property relations. What did the world of feudalism in was the industrial revolution. A section of the ruling class leaped and merged with and became capital. This process has a history but that is not my division of labor. If I have to stop and compile the data and facts then I cannot do what I do. The list members from Germany might be more suited for such a task. I am not, but I will fucking do it if I have to. Our watch words is how the broken Southern ruling class leaped and became the handmaidens of Wall Street finance capital. This is Mark L. territory. D, do not (and you have not) tell my ass that a section of the ruling class is not going to go over to the cause of economic communism as long as it has its privileges intact on a new basis. I swear to God - all of them, a section of the ruling class is calling us into combat. Henry C.K. Liu is a communist international banker. I ask you trust me on this proposition and give me 48 months. We have never surrender our independence as a proletarian insurgency to anyone. You have to understand you as American. We are the only generation of proletarian intellectuals. We emerged in a period where workers could afford books and a library, without sacrificing the daily living of our families. We are the most imperial of all imperial revolutionaries. We have to be careful. This article began with a quote from you. How on earth can I pass this out at a meeting? Or recruit somebody based on your 40 years of accumulation of knowledge and experience? And Hegelian language structure? You need to get out more often and not in the freaking rain. This ain’t no damn conflict between means and relations. It is that plus something else. This is antagonism. And Hegel is faygo, to be drank and pass through the body as fast as possible. There is a reason he leaves an after taste. WL. PS. By my count we have had roughly 686 disputes over the past decade. In these encounters I have taken it on the chin roughly 340 times. This of course means you have had significant chins blows totaling 346. Now, you are going to sustain more chin blows and a couple of hits to the head, by omitting that a revolution in the material power of production is taking place. Either a revolution in the material power - away from the technology foundation of the electro-mechanical process, is taking place or it is not. The idea that we do not fight is to say you are non combatant. Non-combatant? You! Gimme a break brother. Fighting is a valid arena in which folks come to really know one another. No harm in this. To this day, your writings lack a description of this process, which is revolution in the material power, although you analyzed it damn good, and then ended up saying "these capitalist bastards are running into their own internal laws as FROP." Then you throw in the consciousness of the proletarians as decisive. Well it is extremely important during a period of social revolution. In fact it is decisive. ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
