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>> The issue is whether mechanization restricts, as you claim it must, the ability of the workers to attain class-consciousness. The issue is whether such mechanization of agriculture in the South, such dispossession of black people from rural areas and into the city becomes a limitation to their development of class-consciousness, their ability to overthrow the archaic social relations in the South.. Again, the importance of the development of the means of production under capitalism is not that such development provides anything like a "new material power." Rather, this development has significance in that in order to advance accumulation, capital must amplify labor productivity, and thus the advance of a "new material power" undermines the reproduction of value.<< Reply The tractor was a beautiful thing, setting into motion a complex series of other events. The tractor - as mechanization, inaugurated the destruction of a specific boundary of development of the organization of agricultural production. Its importance is historical and well beyond reproduction of value. Likewise the semi-conductor and clusters of new technology are going to change the world in a way never before possible: society will be freed from laboring as we have known it throughout all of human history. The tractor expressed a new material power injected into agricultural production. The organization of agricultural production, as it has existed was disrupted and further expansion of the system of sharecropping came to an end. Agricultural production would expand and developed based on the quantitative additions of a new material power. The same applies to chemical fertilizers, however the tractor is more fundamental. The tractor had actually been around since 1910 but did not achieve its "dominant design" until 1938. In 1910, roughly 24 million horses provided "horse power" on American farmland. The tractor obliterated the need to set aside land for horse grazing and raising. The automobile and the tractor pretty much changed American society. Not as isolated machines but as new configurations of machines and all the related industries developed to support their production. In 1939, the use of tractors in America augmented bourgeois private property. In 1939 Russia, it did not. The tractor only becomes capital under very specific condition. The tractor has a life as a labor augmenting and labor destroying/saving device. The tractor is a good thing independent of it’s commodity form. The tractor as mechanization changed American society. The South did not change very much from 1865 - 1930. The blacks had fought against reaction for seventy years or since their emancipation from slavery. They could not be emancipated beyond the level of development of the productive forces. No class can. A combination of Wall Street imperialism, southern fascist reaction defeated the possibility of a land of independent small farmers. This same fight of the blacks now acquired a different dynamic under the impact of revolution in agricultural production. The tractor or rather mechanization of agriculture was the economic basis (the impetus from within economy) of the Civil Rights Movement. American society leaped to its next quantitative boundary of development of productive forces. The Civil Rights Movement was a movement to reform relations within and between classes without changing the property relations. Those who attempted to convert a reform movement into a revolutionary movement came to naught. II. 11 million sharecroppers (5 million black) were released from the land. Many blacks first went into the segregated Southern towns seeking work, which was not available, due to competition for wages. War production up North and war itself became an opportunity to "get the hell away" from Southern fascism for the first wave of dispossessed sharecroppers. In the post WW II period, the migrating blacks entering the proletariat brought with them a deeply ingrained petty bourgeois mentality. Sharecropper might not sound like a business but it is. The word "share" in sharecropper means a portion of a commodity entering commodity exchange. The specific consciousness involved is a material push by millions to acquire "my own thing" or business, or property to engage commodity exchange. In Detroit it was more profitable to enter industry rather than open ones own store, tire shop, record outlet or restaurant. The wages earned in industry were looked at as the means to accumulate money to "open up ones own thing." Many of these newly arrived proletarians became home owners or property holders. Many could not adjust to the rigors of industrial production. Consciousness is bounded by complex social factors that ought to be placed within a historically specific stage of development of the material power and class relationship. The class consciousness of the black entering the proletariat was that of the small producer. Multiply this by say 10. Now you have 110,000, 000 small producers, with the mentality of a class, entering industry. Here is the Russian equation. What is class consciousness? Reading a book or attaining an awareness of the need, necessity and means of overthrowing the bourgeois power and property relation? We tend to treat the meaning of class consciousness as "ideology of class." The proletariat of the industrial order comes to understand his "proletarian character"- as distinct from his industrial character, or evolves class-consciousness as a by-product of his decay and destruction. We shape and impact this process. The period of the 1930s was a period of reform. The proletarians fought as industrial workers demanding wages rather than grasping the meaning of proletariat. Their struggle was not against the state but rather directed against their employers with the unemployed demanding government assistance. During the strike wave of the early 1970s these workers fought as militant industrial workers rather than proletarians. Industrial workers do not fight as proletarians during periods of expansion. Beneath this issue of class consciousness is another question. Can revolutionaries convert a reform movement into a revolutionary movement against the system based on our political will? Or correct politics? No. Now it just so happens that a new social grouping has crystallized in our society; a destitute proletariat whose spontaneous program is identical to the communist idea. What this new social grouping is demanding is socially necessary means of life even if they have no money. This is called a spontaneous communist movement. The heart of this unconscious communist movement is being irresistibly drawn into a struggle with the state and to redefine government, rather than to demand employment. There are always going to be sections of the working class demanding employment. However, a huge layer of American society is becoming aware that capitalism is incapable of employing them based on naked commodity exchange. Social revolution is the result, comes about, as the social consequence of qualitative changes in the material power of production. There is no way around this proposition. III. >> What other basis is there to defeat ones enemy? << Actually, the sentence in question should have read "decisively defeat." Repeatedly the Russian communist screamed "we on an economic terrain hostile to us," daily breeding capitalism - the value relation. Peasant economy is hostile to communism because of its pigmy productive forces. The industrial system - not just the bourgeois commodity production is hostile to economic communism. The emerging new economy is hostile to bourgeois property and compatible with economic communism. The economy is shifting unto favorable ground for us and against the enemy. A new infrastructure, built up on the basis of the revolution in the material power, means old fights will not have to be repeated with the force of necessity. The agricultural question has been dissolved as it had existed. There is no need to invest property in the state as a form of rule. Modern communications makes a level of interactivity of individuals a material force against redundant organization. The commodity form over everything socially necessary to our society can be abolished virtually over night. In Russia they had to call the bourgeoisie to come back. We do not. What prevented society from being able to lapse backward into feudalism and is technology underpinning was the growth of industrial productive forces. History never runs backwards, although it tends to repeat itself at higher levels. We have entered a period - an era of the opening of a gigantic epoch where we will be able to fight on an economy basis favorable to us and unfavorable to the enemy. . WL. WL ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
