Re: [A-List] US legitimation crisis: Lucent, pensions

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 11/20/02 5:42:14 AM Pacific Standard Time, michael.keaney@xxxxxx writes:

> "It totally goes against the grain of how I was raised," said Bart
> Dellabella, 62, a retired Lucent draftsman who has begun driving a truck
> after losing virtually the entire balance of his 401(k) account, which was
> stuffed with Lucent stock.
>
> "We were all brought up in an era when it was the world's largest company,"
> he said. "It paid dividends all through the Depression. It was the
> cornerstone of everybody's retirement plan. Why would I doubt this company?
> In my life, I never doubted it."
>
> Mr. Fitzgerald said it was the old phone monopoly's seemingly endless growth
> and resources that attracted him to begin working there in 1955.
>
> "My father told me, `You're not well educated, but people will always need
> phones,' " he said.
>
> "I loved that company," he said. "That's the sad part about it."
>
> Even deregulation and the breakup of AT&T did not immediately shake workers'
> expectations for retirement.
>
> So it came as a jolt this October when Lucent announced that it would reduce
> equity by $3 billion because the assets in its pension trusts had declined.




Expectation is a material force housed in ideological modes of thinking.  We belittle the ideological form. 

Pensions - (financial support after retiring from roughly 30 years of laboring for a company or in the old socialist sector of the industrial economy), is an expectation of continued economic support after one stops laboring. This expectation is rooted in precapitalist forms of economy based on the extended family structure and transformed under the impact of industrialization to the bureaucratic structure of modern society. 

The workers who have retired in the various imperial centers of capital are worried. 

What kind of society do we want? 

The Lucent story is instructive no matter what point of view one approaches the story. 

A huge section of the retired workforce have been and is being pushed into the newly crystallizing communist class. This communist class is not an ideological category but composed of various strata of society unable to sell their labor power as the means for subsistence or able to stay above the margin that guarantee stability in lifestyle. 

This communist class arises as a product of industrialization and the injection into the productive process of a new qualitative ingredient called computerization, digitalization of the production process and advanced robotics. This revolution in the material power of the productive forces begins a qualitative destruction of the commodity form by undermining the value of labor as the basis of exchange and consumption ability. 

The communist class has arisen but it is a social phenomenon broader than the previous doctrinaire explanation of class.  One can of course approach a large group of people with similar characteristics by any method you choice and call it a class. Previously a class was tightly identified with one relationship to the means of production as division of labor. This doctrine identified class as social relations of production, more than less. This description is no longer adequate for what is taking place in front of us. 

At this juncture in the decay and transformation of the industrial system of production is it proper to speak of the retirees as a class? It is not wrong. Is it proper to speak of say, women as a distinct class of proletarians? It is not wrong. The stratification within say the retirees and women crystallize another configuration that can be identified on the basis of their ability to consistently partake in exchange. Those sectors of women and retirees unable to pay medical bills and consistently partake in exchange constitute the evolving communist class. 

Women as women are not the communist class, although the absolute majority of women are proletarian. Retirees as retirees are not the communist class, although a huge sector of retirees no longer actively sell their labor as the basis for their exchange in the market. 

Within these categories are a distinct strata that intersects with the homeless, the unemployed, the underemployed, the part time professor and janitor and seasonal soft ware worker, who can no longer achieve stability of employment and exchange above the "social margin." 

This is the dialectic of the transition we are undergoing at this stage in the social process. Not simply a dialectical explanation, but the actual dialectic. 

Marx was of course correct in his analysis of society and the emergence of two great classes. Marx flavor was the flavor of the period of time in which he labored - the transition from agriculture to industry. We are undergoing another transition in the mode of production that demands a transition in the doctrine of the class struggle. 

The flavor done changed, which in turn demands a different doctrine - not theory. 

The communist class has arisen based on the not so quite changes in the material power of the productive forces. These changes - in their fundamentality, do not arise from the mode of accumulation in industrial society, but arise on the basis of Lucent technology or what is called the revolution in the material power of the productive forces.

Hell, I almost bought Lucent when it hit rock bottom, only to discover that what I thought was rock bottom was not rock bottom. Shit, the only bright spot in my 401(K) is C. P.  Pokphand Ltd (CPPKY). Yea, a China or rather Chinese play. 

Theory and doctrine is not the same. In fact they are worlds apart united on the basis of the same universe. 

Melvin P.