In a message dated 6/2/2010 9:43:07 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected] writes:
This Country Needs a Few Good Communists full: _http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/this_country_needs_a_few_good_communists_20100531/_ (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/this_country_needs_a_few_good_communists_20100531/) _ ************ In a message dated 5/31/2010 7:02:57 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, [email protected]_ (mailto:[email protected]) writes: Chris Hedges spent too much time at the Harvard Divinity School. And I don't care for his characterization of Marx. Comment Hedges narrative of our working class movement is standard Church issued dogma describing a working class that never existed. Why is it that every struggle of a "certain sector" of the working class during what has become the "heroic period" of industrial strife is called the "class struggle?" A narrative of men and women fighting for economic survival, for better conditions of labor, for union combination, safe neighborhoods and public education speaks for itself. Why is fighting for a legal contract with an employer dubbed the "class struggle?" Apparently, every striving of any section or sector of the working class can be called a form of the "class struggle?" The strife of the workers during the front, middle curve of industrial/capitalist development, and finally when society has entered a period of qualitative change in the means of production ought to be unraveled and viewed critically in its specific environment. The working class today is not the working class of the era of Marx, the era of Lenin or the period of the Roosevelt coalition. The working class is interactive with the means of production. As these means change the working class changes in its concrete features. What began qualitative changes creating the modern proletariat was the industrial revolution. What changes the working class birthed as product of the industrial revolution is the deepening revolution in the means of production. The proletariat as creation of property, is changed based on a change in the form of property or political revolution. Capital cannot be changed qualitatively, only abolished in degrees or all at one time. The struggle of the workers during the "heroic period" of industrial expansion is a specific form of class struggle. The "heroic period" of the industrial system, as it expressed itself in America and world wide, was the middle period of the industrial system or the period of industrial trade unionism. One can designate this middle period of industrial history as they choose, once it is acknowledged that a mode of production is more than its property relations and like a good book has a prelude, beginning, middle phase and ending. Marx lived in a period of the beginning of the industrial system and I live in a period of its decline, decay and transition based on a new technology regime. I consider the heroic period to run from roughly the opening of the era of "Fordism" or acceleration of the fight for industrial unionism or the October Revolution of 1917, up to the late 1950’s or the shift in the ratio of white to blue collar workers in say auto. Others might delineate historical periods - quantitative boundaries of development, based on the history of the Communist Internationals. Whatever ones division we acknowledge quantitative boundaries, since the buying and selling of labor power remains the pivot of bourgeois commodity production. The struggle of the trade union during the "heroic period" - the struggle for dominance of industrial unionism, led to reform of the system. Reform movements have an outlook and political disposition, but these factors do not create the reform movement. Reform movements are generated as a spontaneous expression of people - classes, fighting out their economic interest in the context of an economic system passing through its quantitative boundaries of development. No social system can be reformed endlessly. Until a system - mode of production, enters into antagonism with a new technology regime, the system can be reformed and will be reformed as a law of nature. Once a social system underlying means of production enter into qualitative change, as was the case with the industrial revolution, society begins the evolutionary leap to a new mode of production. Such is the case today. Today the striving of a growing sector of the proletariat takes place outside the boundary of the specific class intersection (signature) peculiar to the middle and last period of expansion of the industrial system. The form of the class struggle and its social consequences during the middle period was very different from the class struggle of the first and last period. Each period produces a social consequence which in turn drives the system through the existing boundary into the next. Specifically, the social struggle is shifting from one of predominately struggle within the employer-employee relationship to one of external collision between classes. At one extreme is the new non-banking financial architecture more than less divorced from commodity production. At the other extreme is a growing mass of proletarians effectively locked out of the system. It is the absence of a connecting tissue between these two extreme - as the production of commodities, that is the new feature of the class struggle. Yes, the "class struggle" is the motive force for rationalizing production driving technological advancement and innovation. However, a period of social revolution opens when a new technology regime appears that halts expansion or reform of the system on the old basis. We are not experiencing "more" of the same thing as capitalist crisis, only this time the destruction is bigger. This is not to say the destruction to our cities and the earth is not bigger. It is. We are three decades deep into a new revolution in the means of production. We are experiencing a transition - quantitatively, to a new technology regime (a new quality of productive forces) which is the precondition for a transition to a new mode of production. This was not the case in the old "heroic period" when the language of class struggle was tossed about. II. "Unions, organizations formerly steeped in the doctrine of class warfare and filled with those who sought broad social and political rights for the working class, have been transformed into domesticated partners of the capitalist class. They have been reduced to simple bartering tools." Pardon, but when did there exist a time when unions were not inherently "bartering tools?" Unions - trade unions, are inherently equality organizations of a sector of the working class seeking equality of wages and conditions of labor for its members. This is so due to the nature of capital which rest and becomes operational based on competition for wages by laborers seeking to sell their labor power. Now I am aware that the color factor in America history has prevented American communists from calling unions equality organizations, but what else are they? Nor do I deny for a moment centuries of white supremacy and chauvinism. Simply because the CIO in the "heroic period" was fundamentally an equality organization of the white unskilled workers, rather than all workers, changes nothing in assessing the critical function and role of unions. Exactly when were unions "class struggle" organizations rather than class sector organizations engaging the employer over an equitable share of the social products, as this was understood by its members and leaders? Was it not Deleon and then Debs that popularized the concept of labor lieutenants of the capitalist class? No matter how militant one thinks of themselves or union organization, at the end of the day you negotiate for a better sell of labor power. What is called "class struggle" was not, but the righteous striving of a class sector seeking to improve its lot in life. Absolutely nothing wrong with this honest spontaneous economic motion of a sector of the working class. And organized communists played a very important role in organizing the fighting capacity of these workers in motion. Arbitrarily tossing around concepts like "business unionism" rather than an honest assessment of the union movement at different boundaries in development of the industrial system educates no one. From roughly 1827 America to say 1910, the framework of struggle for our union movement was dominated by the craft union form. The craft union form is in turn a material expression of the social organization of labor based on specific kinds of tools and machinery + skill of the laborers. Workers fought and capital accommodated them. It was not that "business unionism" dominated but rather that the organic connection between labor and capital is such that their mutual struggle and unity drives the system through its boundaries of development. This process appears as concessions, reform, take backs, layoffs and new period of expansion based on increased rationalization of production. This process produces business unionism, rather than the other way around. The form of business unionism varies as capital and the industrial system passes through all its quantitative boundaries of development. Many of the labor leaders believed in preservation and advocacy on behalf of the social contract underlying bourgeois production: the sell and purchase of labor power. Those who did not believe in the permanence of the social contract, could not on the basis of their belief alter the quality of the union movement. Unions were birthed as bartering tools. That is their social function in the rising system of bourgeois relations. You cannot change the quality of a thing - anything, because you feel it should behave different! Trying to convert unions into revolutionary organizations rather than working within unions as they evolve from one boundary of development to another, is a strategy for defeat. If we are to examine our history and the errors of past periods, our collective historical error was the inability to understand the entire dynamic of a system and at what point it passes into social revolution. We have up until now fought within the framework of the industrial revolution and the social organization of labor peculiar to it. Our historical error is no crime, but simply the inability to see a new qualitative reorganization of production before it has begun. III. "We became fearful, timid and ineffectual. We lost our voice and became part of the corporate structure we should have been dismantling." How on earth can any individual or social group or class dismantle a force of history? Corporate structures are of course "corporate," meaning an expression of a productivity unit based on a division of labor. Capitalist corporations are also capitalist meaning reproducing their activity based on the purchase and sell of labor power and striving for maximum profits. Corporations are dismantled and or collapse as the result of two distinct movements - currents. You lose the battle in the market place for market shares and go out of business or you lose the battle in the market place being unable to restructure based on a quantitative or qualitative advance in the means of production. Our morality and hate of what bourgeois corporations have done to man and the earth is not sufficient to dismantle these corporations from the inside or outside. The corporate form, like all other expressions of bourgeois relations, comes to the end of its life cycle when a technology regime emerges that develops in antagonism with the old forms of economic activity. Thus, our continuing fight against capital abuse and exploitation enters a new phase. WL.
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