>>We tend to fight battles that Marx already won. When Marx wrote "that the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it," this was "right on" - a good thing and he wrote as a revolutionary. Today the question has deepened with knowing. In what direction and on what metabolic basis? Since we can only change society in the direction it is already going as history, the battle becomes a contest of will + knowing + discernment and art. << Comment
Materialism as the new proletariat. Marxists heal thyself. The human eye and the minds eye cannot "see" emergence or the concrete historically specific formation of that which is emerging. What is witnessed are the concrete features of the old social formation in change. Often what appears as a quantitative expansion of the same thing turns out to be the initial stage of a new qualitative reconfiguration that we are unable to see because of the nature of emergence in society. Therefore, what we see is that, which has emerged or the second phase of a new qualitative feature (ingredient) injected into the social process. What we witness and experience at this "second phase" is an accelerated unraveling of the social process as it had existed. One can of course extrapolate. This extrapolation gives one a sense of meaning and direction of the social process and is the concrete meaning of the "leap" or the dialectic of the leap. The leap is understood as the process of qualitative reformulation. This reformulation does not and cannot by self definition happen all at once. The results of the revolution in science are first injected into - grafted unto, the existing infrastructure of labor, machinery and energy deployment. The existing infrastructure begins to undergo a slow quantitative expansion of this new qualitative technique. The new technique hits numerous barriers or collide with the "pathways" of the old infrastructure and at a certain stage in the quantitative addition of this new quality, new pathways or a new configuration in the infrastructure has to be created for its qualitative expansion. Political laws have to be overthrown and undone. The process is more dynamic but this is the gist of it. The concept of "the dialectic of the leap" should not be understood as a "jump" from one qualitative state to another or what is the same, stating that quantity or quantitative changes becomes qualitative change. What seems to happen and what I know - the truth I have discovered as an individual, is that a historically distinct quantitative boundary of a given qualitative determination does not simply expand or get bigger and on the basis of expanded magnitude enters a process of leaping to a new qualitative determination. A historically distinct quantitative boundary of a given qualitative determination has something that is injected into its active process of expansion that halts its quantitative expansion on the existing basis. Expansion begins to take place on the basis of incorporation of the new qualitative ingredient into the quantitative expansion. This process of incorporating takes places quantitatively. Quantity passes over into qualitative change and the "passing over" means the injection or emergence of a new property that halts expansion and development on the basis of the old existing configuration of properties. In the actual change process called the social process as society, the form of social relations more often than not lag behind the incremental qualitative change underway. At another stage of the social process the old form of social relations are burst asunder as the precondition for the process to leap forward in its totality. The world proletariat of today is not the same proletariat of the time of Marx and Engels in its concrete features of becoming. The world proletariat of today remains a propertyless class but the environment from which it emerged - in its concreteness, has been obliterated by history. This past environment that permeates and creates social classes (the conditions under which classes are formed as concrete human relations) as a social formation is called feudalism. Agricultural society where the primary form of wealth is landed property relations with the primary classes undergoing change on the basis of the growth of handicraft, manufacture (hand labor), heavy manufacture (ship building) to steam power and industrial manufacture. Driving this process or rather an intimate aspect of this social process was the transition in the primary form of wealth from landed property as wealth to movable property - instruments, tools and the human knowledge of production process, and gold as a mediator and primary form of movable wealth mediating the creation and flow (exchange) of products. The mass of unemployed proletarians in the world today are not analogous to the army of unemployed during the time of Marx and Engels. This mass of unemployed proletarians today is not the products of the break down of agricultural social relations or the conversion of landed property into capital. The environment of the proletariat has undergone dramatic changes since the time of Marx. I call this mass of unemployed proletarians in the earth a "new class" not because it is new in human history as a mass of superfluous labor, (superfluous to capital deployment as production) but because the environment of its existence has changed. This changed environment is also the proletariat as/is the result of the injection into the production process of new qualitative ingredients - computers, advanced robotics and digitalized processes, that reformulate the specific combination of human labor + machinery + energy source that defines the meaning of industrial process as it evolved from manufacture. Classes as concrete social formation rise and fall on the basis of the configuration of the production process itself - with the property relations within. In the American Union we are in a unique possession to have observed the social process at the front of the curve of industrial development. As living partisans of communism, fighting for reformulation of our universal goals, at each distinct boundary in the expansion of the industrial system we can take to heart Comrade _________ (fill in your personal Soviet guru) words of wisdom to the American workers. We are and have always been in a better position to describe Soviet industrial socialism and its evolution than those within the environment of Soviet industrial socialism. Once the process called "the dialectic of the leap" is underway - (a qualitative reformulation evolving quantitatively), everything depends on the consciousness of the combatants and their line of march. This qualitative reformulation evolving quantitatively has stages and phases, partial negations and "leaps." Fordism is understood on this basis. After all, his adoption of the production technique of the Singer Corporation did not qualitatively change the industrial implements of production but rather quantitatively expanded the new quality of industrial production in relationship to its past form of operation. That is the "quality" had already been injected into the production process and a new boundary of an existing quality was expanded. We live at an extremely exciting and dangerous period of history where the formulations of the past are useless. History as the progressive accumulation of productive forces - material power of production, has overrun the past formulations of the Marxists. It is time to find and articulate our place - moment, in history. In the past period of our history - as Marxists of various stripes, there did not exist a concrete communist movement as an expression of the material power of the productive forces. What existed was a communist movement whose ideology was the ancient clamoring for public property and within this ideological movement its militant detachment were Marxists, Socialists and Leninists, united on the basis of a configuration of production and ideas about the curve of industrial development. There was no communist class and herein lies the qualitative difference of this period of history with the last period and the time of Marx. Communism is not possible without the existence of a communist class. A communist class only arises in history in the post industrial era as society is in transition to a new mode of production colliding with the existing property relations. During the time of Marx the army of unemployed was a cast off lot of feudalism in an environment of change from agricultural society to industrial bourgeois society. The break up of feudal society witnessed the outpouring of serfs - declassed, into the cities as landed property was converted into capital. In theory and often in practice, this army of unemployed could be drawn into production during period of dynamic expansion of the industrial system into a world wide system of production, exchange and distribution. This is not the environment of today's new proletariat. Twenty-five years of downsizing is enough to prove to the lay person the destruction of the industrial process/proletariat. At first glance the decay of the industrial process/proletariat appears similar to the decay of the craft form of the industrial process that produced the transition from craft based industrial production and craft unions to industrial process as Fordism and industrial unionism. This is a mistaken view in my opinion, because it ignores the actual process from manufacture to industrial and the rising industrial curve as a distinct qualitatively different method, infrastructure system and form of society. Industrial society is of course a qualitatively distinct form of human relations as it evolves from agricultural society. >From within the industrial proletariat, rather than an abstract view that attempts to grasp the entire process of capital and industrial development in one gulp, this new proletariat is a cast off of industrial production. He most certainly is not a declassed serf today, even in China. It is not like this mass of poor, poverty stricken workers can drift back into agricultural relations that no longer exists. From the standpoint of capital productively employed, ever increasing masses of labor power is being rendered superfluous to the production process. This "rendering superfluous" cannot be understood simply as Marx described the advance of production and the general law of capital accumulation because the environment that is society has qualitatively changed forever. That is to say rendering labor superfluous at the front curve of the industrial advance - incrementally, still produces a qualitative and quantitative expansion of the workforce and reformulation of society as industrial. That this new mass of unemployed fuses with the absolute surplus population does not mean this is the same qualitative configuration Marx spoke of in relationship to the transition from feudalism. When the environment of a given thing has qualitatively changed, communist must in turn change their thinking about the actual process taking place. Much confusion exist on the question of the general law of capital accumulation and the absolute surplus population in history and today, that prevents the past generation Marxists from crystallizing a conception of the modern proletariat or the new proletariat. This is witnessed - in my opinion, in trying to describe the social process and revolutionary process in China today during its transition to industrial and post industrial society simultaneously. The bottom line is that the industrial system as a distinct configuration of production, with a definable infrastructure, with concrete class formations expressing the distinct combination and organizations of human labor, machinery and energy source (grid) is in transition and the industrial proletariat as we have known and understood it is decaying in front of our eyes. What was called the absolute surplus population and the reserved army of labor during the time of Marx becomes the new proletariat or the communist class, whose pressure on productive society is the demand for consumption outside the law of buying and selling of labor power. In the past the communist movement - as an ideological movement and fighting movement, demanded wages, employment and the right to enter production unfettered by the needs of capital. Up into the early 1980s the demand for Jobs, Peace and Equality was important in our country. Who amongst us is prepared to raise anew the demand for "jobs" and "wages" rather than that of a sovereign consumption right afforded to all human beings? In passing it can be mentioned that some Marxists are uncomfortable with the concept and slogan of "free" tossed about periodically as expressing a growing spontaneous demand of a sector of the proletariat. This tiny demand for "free" collides with sections of the working class as they live and think things out. Here is the difference between the working class and the new class or proletariat. Waistline _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
