Re: [A-List] what is to de done-2?

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

II

>When Lenin wrote What is to be Done? in 1902, he mainly wanted to
>distinguish between radical revolutionary politics and the reformists who
>just wanted to patch things up. Lenin was intolerant of questions that
>failed to really challenge the dominant political order. How can we provoke
>significant change today and do you think any real shift can really happen
>under our present system?

. . .

>Lenin's ideas about revolutionary change, the relationship between local
>movements and universal social struggles, as well as his predictions about
late capitalism and imperialism seem surprisingly relevant today. 'What is
to be Done? Questions for the 21st Century' encourages you to write down any
thoughts you might have about possible social change today. Your response
can be something short, a slogan, an idea or a reference to a specific
situation you feel is important. Under late capitalism's all encompassing
reach, it is our very freedom to think that is being eroded. In the spirit
of Lenin's thought, we repeat the question 'what is to be done?' as a
sincere appeal for your ideas and thoughts on our future.<<


Comment

Since everything is a series of causes and effects, it is difficult to pull out one event as if it stands alone. Everything is double connected to every thing else and moves in unity and strife with everything else. Yet, a certain set of connections  - a certain unity and struggle of specific factors, establish the fundamentality determining how a million and one factors come together and react. Marxists begin with the revolution taking place in the material power of the productive forces. 

What is To Be Done? raises another question: Where to Begin? 

"Where to begin" also means we start at our world outlook or philosophy.  Philosophy - from the standpoint of the materialist approach to social change, tells us that qualitative change is not simply tipping the balance of forces back and forth or creating the same thing at a higher level. Qualitative change is not the same as a spiral staircase that takes one to the attic or upper floor in a house but a radical disruption of that which existed and the emergence and growth of a new set of relationships. Qualitative change must not be confused with a quantitative expansion of a specific quality or deepening and expanding more of "the same thing." 

Everyone knows that industrial society evolved from manufacturing processes. All of the revolutions and counterrevolutions of the 20th Century - from the standpoint of the material power of the productive forces, have been framed in the context of the transition from agricultural society to machine dominated societal production. When all is said and done, revolution comes about as a result of the development of the means of production - the material power of the productive forces. 

The difference between agricultural society and industrial society is the difference between a straw, wood or brick house and a sky scrapper. Qualitative change does not simply mean "bigger and better" or the destruction of society, but a reconfiguration - leap, based on new law systems. Society remains society but everything within the framework of society is reconfigured - radically changed. A single man can build a straw, brick or wooden house, but no individual man - no matter what his talent and strength, can build a skyscraper. To build a skyscraper society must be reconfigured with a steel industry, glass industry, heavy machines, electrical engineering and all the factors that make building an Empire State building possible and this includes how people are organized to use the existing technology. 

It is true that the pyramids exist in their beauty and magnificence, but none of them have stairways climbing a hundred stories, electrical lighting and heating, glass windows and elevators. There are no glass windows because a glass industry did not exist or any industrial implements as we qualitatively understand the term "industrial production." Nor is there a societal organization demanding office space - administrative functions. There is of course no infrastructure of transportation, which would rivet a skyscraper to productive forces and relations and no imagination of such things. 

The industrial revolution was an economic revolution that replaced manufacturing. Manufacturing means "man-factored" or hand labor. Handicraft, manufacture and industry passed through stages and the concept of a leap is not the idea of jumping rope and does not mean a jump from one relationship to another but phase development or process evolution, where something new disrupts old relationships and call forth political revolution. The purpose of the political revolution is to create a new law system to allow the growth of the new productive forces. 

The economics that our society is built upon is an industrial economy with certain laws that govern its production and distribution of products. The buying and selling of labor power - the value of labor power, is the fundamentality that governs the exchange of all products. Advanced robotics, computerized networks and digitalized processes cannot exchange products because product exchange involves human agency. It is not simply a question of being able to work and people being lazy, but being able to sell ones labor power at a price - wage, to sustain living for hundreds of hundreds of millions of people. 

Today the whole world has been politically and economically evened up. The world is not socially and economically equal but "evened up." All countries and humanity are drawn into the orbit of industrial production and exchange and world revolution is on the practical agenda. 

What causes the necessity for the evolutionary leap or world revolution is not capitalism or industrial process conquering the world - using up all the space, and creating a unified world market. The leap arises on the basis of injecting something new into the production process that disrupts the old law system of production and prevents the every widening distribution of the social products. The invasion of the robot, its evolution and the injection into the production process of computerized electronic production is the stuff of which all of society has to be reorganized around. 

Here is where we must begin. Lenin's writings became blueprints for the workers movement of the past century when society was undergoing the leap from landed property or agricultural relations as the fundamentality for human activity to industrial production. Consequently Lenin's blue print is a blue print based on industrial relations in emergence. Lenin's genius consisted in his understanding of the leap based on the evolutionary development of the material power of the productive forces. 

Lenin and the Russian revolutionaries fought to take power in old Russia to industrialize the country based on the interest of the working class. The inescapable conclusion is that the task of all the political parties and groupings in Russia was to industrialize the country: bourgeois industrial Russia or working class; capitalist industrial Russia or socialist industrial Russia, but industrial Russia nevertheless. This meant that the bourgeoisie and the working class were tied together by a million threads, woven together by a historical phase in the development of the material power of the productive forces: industrialization of the country.  

On the surface, a similar question faces us today and the question is defined as how to carry forth the battle to reconstruct society on the basis of its new qualitative features. Not how to liberate the working class from the power of private capital in the industrialization of society, but rather how to liberate robotics and advanced computerized processes from the narrow restrain of private property relations and abolish the working class as a class that must sell its labor power for subsistence.  

"The power of private capital or the power of capital has to be refined and reshaped into a more accurate assessment called, "the private ownership of socially necessary property." 

The private ownership of socially necessary property prevents the development of robotics to its fullest extent because development is limited by what is profitable for individuals - "the power of private capital," and not what is needed and can be realized by society today. 

When Marx and Engels wrote: "what the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers," they were describing an entire historical process that can be fully understood today when combined with the previous sentence from this passage in the Communist Manifesto.  

"The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."

The gravedigger is not the working class but rather the robot. Here is the bourgeoisie Frankenstein monster that assures the inevitable victory of the working class. 

What in fact has happened is the evolution of the final polarization within the working class and this polarization is not apparent prior to the fundamental completion of the industrialization of agriculture. An enormous sector of the working class is torn from itself and hurl unto the earth as a segment of humanity who cannot sell their labor power at any price. This new configuration within humanity is the direct result of the robots development. The robot - more accurately, advanced robotics and electro-computerized production process as distinct from electro-mechanical process, is the gravedigger. 

>When Lenin wrote What is to be Done? in 1902, he mainly wanted to
>distinguish between radical revolutionary politics and the reformists who
>just wanted to patch things up. Lenin was intolerant of questions that
>failed to really challenge the dominant political order. How can we provoke
>significant change today and do you think any real shift can really happen
>under our present system? <

Well, it seems to me that the "reformist who just wanted to patch things up" can be view on a continuum of development called the transition to industrial society. The reformist and revolutionaries were inexplicably woven together and dominated by one singular task: the industrialization of the country and earth. In the sense both reformer and revolutionary are indistinguishable as industrial warriors. 

>From this proposition flows a somewhat different assessment of Soviet history and humanity current task, than much of that, which is written under the general banner of the standpoint of Marx. Here is where we begin and this sets the framework to solve the question: What Is To Be Done?


Melvin P.