Re: [A-List] what is to de done? - 3 End Game

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 10/31/02 3:23:31 AM Pacific Standard Time, Waistline2@xxxxxxx writes:

> In Tampere, 1906 Lenin made a pledge to honour the Finnish right to
> self-determination after the Bolshevik Revolution. Lenin believed that
> Marx's revolutionary ideas had to be adapted to the local and national
> conditions of workers rather than being imposed from above. In Lenin's time,
> this mobilisation of worker's movements was the most effective way of
> achieving international solidarity. The phrase 'workers of the world unite'
> may now seem like an impossible ideal since late capitalism has crushed
> union power and pitted the workers of the world against one another. Despite
> this gloomy picture, from where you stand right now, what are the
> possibilities for social change today?


End Game - 3

The emergence of the industrial revolution in a few advanced countries characterized the world of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Marx considered world revolution to consist in the worker representatives seizing power in the advanced countries whose interdependence constituted the "world market." Marx and Engels put forth the slogan "Workers of the World Unite," with a concrete program aimed at rapid industrialization and the systematic defeat of capital based on creating a unified market under the political domination of the proletariat. This was the period of the founding of the first International. 

After the death of Marx March 14, 1883, Engels following the advance of the socialist movement in England and Germany begins hammering out a proletarian strategy that included the widespread use of the ballot box and prepared the political basis for the organization of the Second International.  

The phrase 'workers of the world unite' was transformed in the hands of Lenin to "Workers and Oppressed Peoples of the World Unite," to embody the class alignment on a world scale. With the winning of state authority by the worker representatives in old Russia - October 1917, "Workers and Oppressed Peoples of the World Unite," can be understood as a strategic political/military concept to win to the proletariat brigade, the support of hundreds of millions of oppressed peoples attempting to break out of the closed colonial system. This was the era of the formation of the Third International. 

In this sense one can understand the theoretical equation called "the ushering in of the general crisis of capital" because a section of the world was taken from the orbit of industrial development on the basis of private property relations. The October Revolution of 1917 ushered in the general crisis of capital. 

The outbreak of the Second Imperial World War and its aftermath set the political basis for the destruction of the closed colonial system and the formation of the Soviet block. Soviet imperial authority was birthed in the death battle against German fascism - the cutting edge of the world counter revolutionary imperial bourgeoisie.  On the basis of military authority, the Soviet proletariat attached to itself one-third of humanity in an effort to industrialize earth on the basis of public property relations. 

In this process the revolution in China occupies a special place because it removed over a billion people - one-fourth of humanity, from being reserves of imperial capital to the front line struggle against it. The success of the revolution in China aided the various national liberation movements and prevented world imperialism from achieving the completion of the world industrial system under its domination.

When all is said and done, the revolutionary process from the time of Marx until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the overthrow of the proletarian dictatorship occurred within the framework of the transition from agriculture to industry worldwide. The social revolution consisted in the struggle to determine under what conditions industrialization - modernization, would take place and under what class domination the historic value form would be dissolved and the world converted into a union of associated producers. 

The formation of the first, second and third International was the political _expression_ of distinct leaps - quantitative expansions, in the quality identified as the industrial system of production. 

Today we are faced with a radically different situation. Just as the spread and the advance of the industrial system of production did not mean the end of agricultural production but rather a complex evolution where in agricultural production is reconfigured on the basis of industrialization, the transition to a new mode of production - that is unfolding, does not mean the ceasing of industrial production or no more expansion of the industrial infrastructure. Processes overlap and a leap is understood to embody expansion as an ingredient of transition from one qualitative configuration to another. What constitute the basis for the evolutionary leap or transition from one mode of production to another cannot be reduced to the quantitative expansion of the industrial infrastructure and the world distribution apparatus, but the injection into the production process of a new quality that undermines and destroys the value form or what is in fact the buying and selling of labor power as a basis for the exchange of all social products. 

The evolutionary leap has been the most difficult concept in the arsenal of Marxist thinkers and this difficulty is not simply the result of an inherently flawed cognitive process but an _expression_ - reflection, of the various quantitative stages that characterized the expansion of the industrial system. The leap should not be approached quantitatively - as a more than less, slow building up and moving away from the old. The leap is a sudden break in the continuity and should not be understood or approached quantitatively. The end of the industrial system or its transition to a new mode of production could not be understood before the ingredients for its transition had emerged. 

There is no need to condemn or beat up the previous generations of Marxists. Emergence is observable at the second phase of qualitative reconfiguration. The injection of advanced robotics and electro- computerized processes into the system of industrial production disrupts and halts expansion on the basis of just industrial production. No reform or quantitative growth of the industrial system as the historic replacement of agricultural relations is possible. What this means for China for example, is that the expansion of the industrial system is taking place on the basis of digitalized processes and a complex form of class struggle has emerged. China's industrial expansion is not taking place on just the basis of electro-mechanical processes that governed the era of transition from manufacture to industry, as was the case with the former Soviet Union and Soviet block. 

Here is a description of the process. The revolutionary changes in the economy begin to destroy the society built on electro-mechanical processes and development of the old means of production stops. No reform - expansion, of the industrial system are possible because the leap by definition means transition. 

Here is the key in understanding the objective evolution that led to the collapse of Soviet Power or rather, the Soviet Union going out of business. Industrial society by definition reproduces the value form even under conditions of collective ownership of socially necessary property. The human factor is active and important but "human will" - "political will unity," cannot alter the relationship of the workers to industrial implements and how folks are organized to use such implements of production. Money could not be vanished by the wave of the hand. Money is vanished when it is not longer necessary for it to circulate as the basis for the distribution of products. 

Further, it is not possible for two antagonistic systems to exist for long on the same economic foundation because the new law system striving for expansion cannot expand on the basis of the old system but much disrupt - overthrow it, and begin qualitative expansion and reconfiguration on a new basis. Here is why Marx and Engels were able to conceive the possibility of world revolution on the basis of the advance industrial countries during their early lives. The advanced countries under the political domination of the proletariat could literally drag the agricultural societies forward on the basis of collective ownership of socially necessary property. 

This point of view was abandoned with the expansion of the industrial system on the basis of private property relations. 

The question "where you stand right now, what are the possibilities for social change today?" pose the issue of societal transition incorrectly. The social change is well underway and the issue is in what direction and on what basis change is to be sought. 

What does robotics and computerized production process demand? The robot demands that their products be given away because there is no value to their production. It is true that this process is in its early stages, but every workers on earth today can understand that production, which is increasingly carried out with decreasing amounts of human labor cannot be distributed with money or credit because money and credit comes from the sell of labor power. Robots can make cars, computers, cups, knives and folks but cannot buy them. 

The ruling classes on earth are in trouble because they must create the very things that are going to destroy them. If they do not revolutionize production someone else will and they get destroyed in the marketplace anyway. Under our transition conditions increasingly valueless production of goods are exchanged in the market with the same goods had by cheaper labor in say, China. This situation cannot stand and must result in the lowering of the price of labor power and the pushing of millions of more workers outside the process of exchange. 

Revolution comes about as a result of the development of the material power of the means of production. What is to be done today is defined by the revolution already underway. Today it is possible to explain to the world working class - in simple terms, what is taking place. 

During the time of Lenin the question was posed different because of the state of development of the material power of the productive forces. The significance of Lenin's "What Is To Be Done?," resides in his description of the task of the advanced thinkers and their responsibility to explain why the system of industrial production could not be reformed qualitatively. 

In America today, the revolutionaries seriously under estimate the American peoples and their willingness to embrace a new kind of politics. The old society is being destroyed by the developmental logic of the material power of the productive forces and this is called an "objective process" because no one can stop it. The struggle unfolding is not simply between the haves and have nots, but a clash of will between political representatives of various classes over how and in whose interest a new society will be built - that is, over reconstruction. What has to be understood is that this is not the time of Lenin and the revolution is already taking place. Social revolution - reconstruction, must inevitably follow. 

Today we are not so much revolutionaries as reconstructionist. Reconstruction and reconstruction is a complex process. 

The robot creates new classes or strata. For instance the technical that designs the robots, the people who use the robots and the folks who service and write the software. Then there is an increasing mass of proletarians existing outside this productive process. 

What is to done demands that the reconstruction-ist adopt a simple but single strategic line of march. What Is To Be Done is not the creation of a single world newspaper or for that matter an effort to form a single International Union of insurrectionaries, but to develop the strategic mass line applicable in every country on earth.  

In simple terms the advance cannot be made on the basis of explaining to the workers this stage in the evolution of the form of capital accumulation - speculative capital buttressed by the credit capital system, or isolating the growing limitation of the energy source driving the expansion of the industrial system in its transition, but an approach based on the commodity form itself - robotics and advanced electro computerized systems and the obliteration of the social contract that said "if you sell me your labor power I will give you the money" - means, to partake in the exchange of the social products. 

Today, unlike during the time of Lenin we are faced with a radically new and complex situation involving the creation of new classes - strata, of society. Today the world imperial bourgeoisie is attempting to advance on the basis of the conception of the ideological conception of the "other" -  "the outsider in our midst," or racism, meaning immigrant hoards flocking to the imperial centers for subsistence or terrorist attempting to destabilize the production process. 

Under such conditions the advanced thinkers lead by the Marxist must learn the art of clarifying in simple terms the conclusions pioneered by Marx and Engels. This is What Is To Be Done. Today is a great time to be Marxist. 

"All Roads Lead To Revolution - More than less."  That is the slogan. 

Melvin P.