Our country, indeed the entire world, is in the throes of epochal revolution. Transformation from electro-mechanical industry requiring vast amount of human labor to operate gigantic industrial means of production to digitally controlled production requiring little to no human labor is the determining content of our time. Electronic means of production are qualitatively different from industrial means of production and greatly lowers the cost of production of the necessities of life. These new means of production makes it possible to produce a world of abundance to meet humanity socially necessary life needs. Under capitalism qualitatively new means of production leads to a falling price of labor power, increased exploitation and entrenched poverty for every greater sections of the working class. Just as the steam engine created an industrial working class that replaced the existing manufacturing class, electronic production is creating a new class of workers. The determining content of this time - the transition from agriculture to industry, was the growth and development of industrial means of production and the struggle of the new classes - bourgeoisie and proletariat, to shape society in its class interest. The industrial revolution created a new social organization of labor, displacing the old social organization of labor based on the spinning wheel and manufacture. The new class(es) consists of all layers and member of social brought into the sphere of new means of production expressing a new social organization of labor. There is an employed and unemployed sector. The employed sector - the part time, the contingency and "throw away" workers, the below minimum wage workers is already over a third of the work force. This employed sector of the class is constantly driven into the growing ranks of the unemployed sector that ranges from the structurally unemployed to the absolutely destitute, homeless workers. The concept and reality of a new class is misunderstood by many. Engels in his Principles of Communism describes the formation of a new class and in all cases, the new class is bound up with new means of production that change the social organization of labor. The divergence in approach and outlook concerning class has to do with defining the aggregates of people called class. If class is defined as a property relations devoid of its inner logic tied to material means of production one cannot explain the genesis of the industrial classes as they displace manufacturing classes. II. Lenin defines classes beginning with what he calls "a historically determined system of social production." I call this "historically determined system of social production" the social organization of labor because what determines and defines a system of social production is its productive forces and not just the property relations. Let's assume this approach is wrong. Why it is wrong is the question rather than name calling. According to Marx and Engels the modern proletariat begins emergence in the 15 and 16 century but the industrial form of the working class comes into existence after the steam engine with the technology regime underlying the steam engine changing the social organization of labor. The proletariat remains because the word proletariat refers to property status - non owners forced too sell their labor ability (power).
Lenin on class "Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labor, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labor of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy." -Lenin, LCW 29:421 A question to be asked is how could a generation of Marxist not understand the first sentence in Lenin’s definition of class? Waistline This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm _______________________________________________ Marxist-Leninist-List mailing list Marxist-Leninist-List@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxist-leninist-list
