Re: Re: Global crash imminent?

[Waistline2]

In a message dated 10/8/02 6:11:09 AM Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:


>As for the assertion that the "bourgeoisie and the working class have
>nothing in common", I do not think that is true. There is a contradiction
>between the working class and the bourgeoisie. There is both unity and
>struggle between the two classes. Their interests may temporarily
>coincide, as they do to a significant extent in the imperialist heartlands
>in that they both benefit from their privileged position relative to the
>rest of the world.

As Marxists, we have to explain to privileged workers that their interests
coincide more with the peasants and workers of countries that are being
plundered by imperialism. While it is true that cheap oil makes for short
lines at gas stations, it is not worth being attained by the blood of their
sons and daughters.

Lou Proyect


Comment:

Antagonism for Nelson: In Appreciation - yea, it's too long.
Melvin P.



Society has passed through several phase development since the time of Marx and Lenin and most certainly during the rise, expansion/growth of capital and its current decay. At each phase Marxist, bourgeois social scientist and the ordinary man on the street have attempted to define - describe, that, which is peculiar to their time frame or phase development.

The contradiction between the working class and the bourgeoisie or what is the same, labor and capital, can be best understood today not in the relationship between the imperial centers and the former colonial areas or even in their internal unity and strife, but rather as they move in antagonism.

An exploited class - the workers, cannot overthrow an exploiting class - capital, because together these two components of the social process constitute the self-movement of a system of production. Because these two components constitute the basis for the self-movement of the contradiction called labor and capital, their unending struggle is over the division of the social product and political liberties.  Labor and capital as a unity is not like a marriage where one side can leave the union. Labor and capital is a social contract that is written into legality that Marxist rightly call bourgeois legality. Neither component can leave - walkout or overthrow, the relationship.

An exploited class cannot overthrow an exploiting class since together they make up the system. The serf could not and did not overthrow landed property - the nobility, whose political form was called feudalism. Neither primary component of a social relations of production can overthrow or dissolved the relationship - contradiction, of which it is a part and whose existence gives it life.

Something else must happen that forces change and dissolution. The movement of this "something else" is called antagonism or how society - contradiction, moves in antagonism. Revolution or rather social revolution - in the Marxist meaning, cannot take place until there are new productive forces that compel society to reorganize or leap forward. New productive forces mean that a technology must come into being that replaces the human energy of a class in the production process.

The emergence of new productive forces within feudalism undermined the basis unity of the social system. An "external force" overthrew feudalism. Its "external force" status consisted in the reality that "it" was not a part of the internal unity of serf and landowner, but a "new" development in the environment called capital and labor. The new "external force" called labor and capital did not really overthrow the social system but ushered in the political revolution that allowed for capital and labors further development. What overthrew landed property preeminence was the development in the productive forces called manufacture.

Generations of Marxist and plain old revolutionaries in America have had to appeal to the hearts and minds of the working class in our country as capital went through its various stages of evolution. These appeals have always been important and express a fundamental decency in our class and its struggle to reform the system in favor of the people.

Classes arise, grow and decay as part of the quantitative and qualitative evolution of production - technology. The class of farmers called sharecroppers took shape in our country in the aftermath of the Civil War.  The increased velocity of mechanization of agriculture during the late 1930s and early 40s destroyed or rather "liberated" the sharecropper from the land and moved him into the industrial infrastructure. His labor or human energy - the labor of the sharecropper, was replaced by a new application of technology.

The sharecropper's liberation actually meant being kicked off of the land. Liberation for a class means being kicked out of specific social relations of production and being compelled to evolve further, on a new basis. Being liberated - in the class sense, does not mean some spiritual enlightenment, finding the perfect guru, developing class consciousness or enhanced karma experience but being ruined and annihilation by the ever advancing development of the means of production - fool. (Sorry, been listening to too many Rap records lately). Yea, the serf and Nobility were "liberated" just like the Indians and slaves in the core South: by being expropriated - stripped of means of subsistence, and hurled into the evolving cities as modern proletarians. It is true that a small sector of the nobility merged with capital as ruling class but where all is said and done, they were annihilated in history.

As capital evolved it passed through cyclical crisis. During the various cyclical crises of capital, revolutionaries have fought for public property ideas that could not grip the multitude until a new "external force" evolved and crystallized itself in the environment of labor and capital. This new "external force" is a qualitative development in robotics - the means of production, which is kicking a sector of the proletariat out of the process of the creation of value - products. This process of being "liberated" appears as throw away workers and part time professors and software programmers without steady income, alongside of the growth of the homeless and destitute.

The appearance of proletarians who cannot sell their labor due to the application of advanced technology creates a "new class of proletarians."  These proletarians are proletariat because they have nothing to sell as the basis of exchange except their labor power and their labor power is not needed. This is not the old army of unemployed used during boom times, of which Marx and Engels spoke. This reconfiguration of social relations is planetary in scope.

Just as industrial capital - which did not walk onto the earth from the moon, evolved from manufacture and created its "anti-aspect" or opposite in the form of the industrial proletariat, this "new class of proletarians" is the other side of the face of speculation or rather, domination of the speculator over the total social capital. Capital invested outside of the production of commodities is one side of a social equation whose other side is a proletariat existing outside of the production of commodities. This mass of proletarians cannot find work and have evolved a work life so tenuous and marginal that they are rooming the world looking for wages. 

This new class or the evolution of this "external force" occurs in a specific context. The injection of new qualitative features in the production process always alter the social relations that arise on the basis of how people are organized to work using a given technology and tools. When something fundamental in any process changes, everything dependent upon that, which is fundamental must also change. An exploited class cannot overthrow an exploiting class since together they make up the system. A new social force must evolve within the "equation" that compels society to reorganize. 

The emergence of the "new" class is called "new" because this superfluous population is not the superfluous mass created as society passes from feudal social and economic relations and the creation of the industrial infrastructure. During the era of transition to industrial relations (capitalism and socialism are political "isms") the demand of the superfluous population was to reform the system and be absorbed into the act of exchange of social products on the basis of laboring. Today, the direction of the demand of the increasingly ruined world masses must proceed along the line of distribution according to need. Society has qualitatively advanced in the past 100 years and industrial society is being reconfigured.

Nor is this growing mass of proletarians an "underclass" - that is, a layer of society marginal to production and existing beneath the working class - what ever that means. This "new class" is being formed and consolidated with an existence traveling a trajectory more and more outside - external, the production of value. This is an objective communist class.

There is work available in society but increasingly less jobs available to effect continuous exchange and distribution of the social products. World wages are under intense pressure due to advances in production and the historic transformation of the world into proletarians. The two great classes of which Marx spoke have crystallized, with a mass of proletarians being pushed in a direction outside the production of value. This is an objective communist class.

The value form is under attack and currently appears as capital invested divorced from the production of commodities and proletarians divorced from the production of commodities. This attack on the value form is not the result of an "ism" but not so quiet changes in the mode of production.

The logic of this development is face of the "movement in antagonism."  Contradiction should not be confused with antagonism. Those contradictions (carefully distinguished by Marx and Engels in their analysis of the complex forms of development of class society) are antagonistic, in which the struggle of indissolubly connected opposites proceed on the basis of their external collisions, until a new quality is injected into the process, which crystallizes - compels a development "outside" the unity holding the two basic components together. This logic was true in respects to feudal society and is true in respects to industrial society.

In the evolution of the social contradiction (the social contract) a leap or transition unfolds wherein the previously dominated pole - labor in the form of the serf and later the proletariat, undergoes a development where it begins evolution outside the basic unity and strife that was the driving force of feudal social relations and industrial social relations of production.

The movement called antagonism or "as contradiction moves in antagonism" is a specific form of development and transition to a new qualitative stage. A leap occurs within both components of the social process that compel a development outside of that, which serves as the unity - glue that held the social process together. The leap - sometimes a very long process, is the transition from one quality to another. Or, to put it another way, it is the transition from one law system to another. Law system in this usage means the objective relations beyond the will of people. For example the buying and selling of labor power is a law of industrial society predicted upon a given state of development of the productive forces, which in turn expresses a given stage of evolution of the commodity form.

The historic tension - external collision, between worker and capitalist over wages is incorrectly called the class struggle. This is a historical question that does not require finger pointing or attaching blame to previous generations of Marxist. The fact of the mater is that in the context of Lenin's Russia the fight over wages and conditions occurred during the leap from feudal economic and social relations where various classes fought for the direction of the country. In this specific context the external collision between the workers and capitalist was a sharp form of the class struggle.

There of course were no concrete feudal social and economic relations in America. The external collision between worker and capital over wages was not class struggle but the struggle for reform of the system that is called the dialectic of reform or the revolutionary struggle for reforms. This struggle, which has sharp sides, is bound by the social contract - glue, between labor and capital. The social contract is not a trade union agreement but the societal agreement that says, "If you work for me I will pay you wages." This social contract is what is meant by the words "a new law system" in respects to landed property with nobility, serf and all that.

At this stage of evolution of the material power of the productive forces - year 2002, the increasing fight on the part of society outside the social agreement of industrial society describes the class struggle.

The revolutionaries in the imperialist centers or rather America, must master their own history. The liberation of the sharecropper meant his transition to proletariat and the destruction of his ability as an independent producer and seller. Today's fight is not simply a form of external collision between capital and labor over an equitable share of the social product based on laboring but an unconscious fight directed against the existence of the social contract itself.  This is not a subjective question wherein all the capitalist have to do is give people jobs so they can consume.

The revolution in the means of production absolutely creates the capacity for less and less human labor to create a greater mass of commodities than a previously existing mass of labor. The revolution is in the economy and this revolution demands a political solution - social revolution, in order for a gigantic societal advance to take place on a new basis.

The contradiction of any process is resolved on the basis of the development of the contradiction itself. In the course of development of an antagonistic contradiction at its different stages, only the premise for its resolution is prepared and ripens. The premise that has ripened is the development of the industrial infrastructure and distribution.

The contradiction itself at every new stage becomes ever more intensified. An antagonistic contradiction does not pass beyond the stages of its partial resolution. The specific stages of the development of industrial society that prepared the resolution of the contradiction between labor and capital was the transition to manufacture, the industrial revolution and the completion of the industrial infrastructure in all its various quantitative growth. Indissolubly connected to and a part of this development is the evolution of the mode of distribution.

The periodic crises of capitalism have been a violent form in which the contradictions of a given cycle of capitalist reproduction found their resolution in the further development and evolution of the industrial infrastructure and the political superstructure; but in relations to the contradiction of the capitalist means of production as a whole - the social contract, these crises emerged as landmarks of the further intensification of these contradictions and of the ripening of the forces making for the abolition of capitalism and transition from the industrial production of the social product.

Antagonistic contradictions are resolved by the kind of leap, in which the internal opposites undergo a phase change wherein each pole experience a ruptured internal to it (rupture within capital and a rupture within labor) and it is this rupture that compels the internal opposites to emerge as relatively independent opposites, external to each other. The external collision between worker and capital over wages and conditions of labor is not a rupture or the extreme polarization between wealth and poverty we are currently experiencing.

What causes the rupture is the injection into the unity that holds the opposites together of a new qualitative ingredient that shatters the basis on which the unity of the poles began development. The leap in the productive forces - the results of the technological revolution, is entirely objective but the full revolutionizing of the means of production are blocked by the old unity of labor and capital as the basis for exchange.

To resolve contradiction moving in antagonism, what is required is the completion of the leap - transition, which takes place by way of the abolition of the formerly dominant opposite and to the establishment of a new contradiction, i.e., the emergence of a new law system that allows for the further development of the previously subordinated pole. In this contradiction the subordinate opposite of the previous contradiction now becomes the dominant opposite, preserving a number of its peculiarities and determining by itself the new law system that will govern its further development. At least, this is how the Marxist of the first generation to take state authority described the process. This description is not wrong but historically obsolete. That is to say this description accurately defines a specific quantitative state of development of the commodity form and the industrial infrastructure as it evolved under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Today we are at an entirely new phase in the decay of capital on a planetary basis. The development of the entire social process lays before us in its brutal antagonism. Antagonism is characterized by the polarization between and within the two basic components of the social contradiction and appears as the domination of the world total social capital by capitalist outside the production of commodities and value creation. In respects to the subordinate pole - the proletariat, it is polarized not between the imperial workers and the formerly colonial workers but ruptured from within. What emerges is a proletariat outside of value creation and this is the anti-thesis demanding that society be organized with a law system, which conforms to its existence. Herein resides the antagonistic element birthed within the historic process of value creation and forced outside the social contradiction. 

In contradictions that do not have an antagonistic character, the development of the contradiction signifies not only the growth of the forces making for its final resolution, but each new step in the development of the contradiction is at the same time also its partial resolution. Contradiction that is not antagonistic develops on the basis of "merger" as synthesis as opposed to rupture and destruction of the two basic components.

That is to say the proletariat does not evolve into ruling class - merge with or is recreated as a synthesis of worker and capitalist and guardian of commodity production but rather abolishes itself as proletariat and liquidates the commodity form. The transition period must be understood as the process of the evolutionary leap - transition, into conscious existence and the power of capital has to be broken. Our bourgeoisie as capital is liquidating itself in front of our eyes as the guardian of social production. Here is a mutherfucker that won't give a person a job at any wage scale. His money is "way to" big to be bother with social production. Advanced robotics and electro-computer process has done him and us in as proletariat and bourgeois.

When Marx said the bourgeoisie creates it's own gravedigger in the form of the modern proletariat, the word "modern" meant the proletariat at a certain stage of quantitative development of an entire qualitative process we can now called the development of industrial society. I thought he meant me going to work every day and getting tired of the capitalist bullshit. All I had to do as a good communist and win the workers over to my ideas.

In contradictions that do not have an antagonistic character, the appearance of an external aspect as the basis for further development does not appear as logic evolution.

Mark . . . . here is the gold you requested. Let's ride.

"It is only in an order of things," says Marx, "in which there will be no more classes and class antagonism, that social evolutions will cease to be political revolution." (The Poverty of Philosophy).


Melvin P.


"jumping in the back
with the windows cracked
. . .  we ride"

Boney James
Latest CD titled "Ride" track 8