Re: Venture Communism/morped/ Socialism Betrayed

[Waistline2]

In a message dated 7/18/2004 3:16:15 PM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:   >CB: Yes, the South started the Civil War (a counter-revolutionary coup d'etat see Aptheker) because the slave system could only survive by constantly expanding geographically ,i.e. by geographical extension, or extensive development. Marx discusses this in his essays on the Civil War and U.S. economy at that time.<   Reply   My understanding is that the plantation South attempted to secede from the Union . . . but that is not the point. By counterrevolution in the American Union  . . . the Civil War itself is not referred to but rather the period of history constituting the overthrow of Reconstruction . . . or the chain of events that was the result of the Hayes Tilden agreement of 1876 . . . leading to Plessy versus Ferguson.   One aspect - among several factors, of the outward expansion of the system of plantation slavery is the form of labor itself and the laboring process of gangs of slaves. The form of the laboring process of the slave system contains its own barrier that prevents an internal intensive development. This limitation of the form of slave labor has everything to do with the tools and energy source deployed by masses of slaves.   Actually . . . we discussed this issue before . . . Sartesian, yourself and myself and it is all right to disagree over the form of the laboring process . . . the economic character of plantation slavery . . . why it was not a form of primitive accumulation . . . etc.   Extensive and intensive development of the material power of production are not isolated categories . . . yet what is being discussed is on what basis the form of the laboring process itself is changed and what constitute a revolution in the form of the labor process - the basis or internal components of it intensive development . . . as opposed to extensive expansion.   A soft ware programmer in the same building as a machinists is a different creature expressing a change in the form of the laboring process. The productive forces are revolutionized . . . sublated . . . and by definition this takes place incrementally.   For instance, providing the slaves with better plows, hoes, etc., and the driver man with a better whip, cannot lead to the internal intensive development of agricultural production beyond the point of human muscle effort . . . because the form of slave labor as a laboring process contains its own barrier. This self contained barrier can only be shattered - sublated, with the development of the means of production . . . that is tools, instruments and machine development driven by a different energy source . . . radically different from the tools, instruments and energy source underlying the form of slave labor.   Providing slaves with a tractor constitutes a revolution in the form of the laboring process . . . even if he remains a slave for a period of time . . . and this "period of time" is short because the form of labor corresponding to a slave mode is not compatible with mechanization of agriculture and the value system. The form of the laboring process is burst asunder.   The Civil War itself is considered revolutionary because the Slave Oligarchy was overthrown and shattered as a slave oligarchy and ruling class. In this sense the abolition of slavery was a social revolution without a preceding or corresponding economic revolution. That is, the instruments of production of the agricultural South did not advance, but the North imposed a revolution in the social relations upon the South with the freeing of the slaves.   Every truly great social revolution must proceed from, stand upon and develop from an economic revolution. It is not possible to truly free slaves or proletarians without replacing them with more efficient energy. At the time of Emancipation, there was no such economic revolution in the means of production connected to Southern agriculture. This truth couple with a growing domestic and international demand for cotton and tobacco condemned the freemen to a new and often more brutal form of exploitation.   Without question political alliances between Northern - Wall Street Finance capital, and the conversion of the Slave Oligarchy into the landlord planter class has everything to do with the counter revolution in full swing by 1890 . . . but what is being isolated is the conditions by which the form of the laboring process is transformed.   The tools or instruments of production connected to Southern agriculture changed very little between 1870 and say . . . 1940. Sharecropping and the convict-lease system became new forms of slavery for the African American and this form of labor - the laboring process itself, would undergo revolutionizing with the invention of the mechanical cotton picker and the mechanization of agriculture, the development of weed killing chemicals, tractors etc. These developments in the mean of production change the form of the laboring process and constitute a revolution in the intensive development of labor.   The point is that the computer, digitalized production process and advance robotics - not simply electricity, constitute a revolution in the intensive development of the labor process that is and must change the form of the laboring process. We are at the beginning of this process.   The analogy is not the events leading to the Civil War and the overthrow of Soviet Power. Rather, the analogy is the counter revolution after the Civil War . . . when the freemen and revolutionary forces came to power in different areas of the South, and the counterrevolution after the proletariat attained power. What ties these events together as economic logic and political doctrine is the difficulty of fighting on the same economic basis as your enemy.   I am convinced beyond doubt that we are undergoing the beginning of a profound revolution in the mode of production that changes the form of the labor process that correspond to electromechanical production.   Melvin P.