[A-List] labor Nobility/7

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

Labor Nobility/7

Lee Roberts

We are living in dangerous but exciting times. The Bible and various sacred text have already told us that we are living in times of war and rumors of wars thousands of years ago so there is no reason to stop thinking or get lazy.  

A breach in the world political and ideological fabric has appeared. The bourgeoisie in America, France, Germany, Russia, and Turkey - heck the whole world ruling class is squabbling. This allows anyone to momentarily talk about anything and win an audience. The standpoint of Marx is profound and will win over the majority of humanity. Marx approach to why society changes based on changes in the material power of the means of production continue to revolutionize and inspire humanity. 

All of society and any system is a totality of processes. What is a process? A process is a series of events that complete and repeat themselves. Yet there always exist something within any process that serves as the axis around which everything else revolves - oscillates or interacts as the change agency. When fundamental things change, everything dependent upon them must also change. When that, which is fundamental to a social process or social relationship, changes, the social process and social relationship must in turn undergo change. When a new ingredient - a different qualitative configuration is injected into an on going process, the entire process is forces to change on the basis of incorporating the new ingredient and this is called a "qualitative leap forward" or an "evolutionary leap."  This is a law of life that applies to all processes in nature and society during every stage of human history. 

Every major business - value-producing institution in America, has in the main erected some system to shatter any and all barriers that prevented African Americans from entering their realm of economic activity. This social movement for reformulation of the system - reformism, was the cutting edge in the fight against every conceivable form of exclusion in society. Even age old systems of promotion - the pecking order including unionized seniority systems, has face a concerted thirty year assault to accommodate the entry of the black, peoples of color and all formally colonized peoples into their sphere of economic activity. How could such a social movement not galvanize every marginalized group in society into action, demanding fair treatment?

In Detroit this process of purging the state and industrial infrastructure and even the police agencies, exclusionary polices and structures has been generally more advanced than in other large urban enclaves. This process unfolded with a fury under the legendary Coleman Young administration. Revolutionaries of every persuasion in Metropolitan Detroit - with a large core of political Marxist, vividly recalled the police department  (DPOA) armed demonstration and police riots against the purge of the city police department and the dismantling of the infamous Red Squad which kept scores of progressives and revolutionaries under physical surveillance. This aspect of the reform movement - shattering segregations barriers, demanded intense political mobilization of the masses. How the fighting capacity of the masses is organized is extremely important. Their political understanding is equally important, if by "political understanding" we mean the manner in which people think things out.  

In this fight a section of the labor aristocracy played an important role. The labor aristocracy in America, by definition involves the organized sector of the working class - the union and its bureaucratic structures and those at the top of the structure. However the unions as unions are not the labor aristocracy. The autoworkers or aerospace workers are not the labor aristocracy by virtue of their work and paychecks, but represent a privilege section of the working class in relationship to other sections of the world working class. 

Beneath the conception of the world working class is a theory of the world total social capital. The world total social capital is not a pictorial presentation - with charts and graphs of all the money in the world or rather a depiction of the world mode of accumulation - private or socialized, but a political concept of the motion and direction of industrial society and its various parts. Industrial society is undergoing a qualitative change due to the injection into the production process of an ingredient that destroys the value relationship. 

Value means the relationship between two human beings or a group of human beings producing products and using time and skill as a basis to determined what products can be exchanged against one another for, based of human labor - sweat and blood. To exchange something when everything is different, one must have a medium - a method, of exchange and this medium is money. In Marx speak the way we say this is that "value is the socially necessary amount of labor that goes into a product." And "money expresses value" and allows different things to be exchanged, although a crook can cheat you. 

Without this understanding we cannot talk about the labor aristocracy and this stage in the development of the material power of the means of production. 

One hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels formulated a policy for the stage of development of the industrial mode of production in which they lived. Vladimir Lenin formulated a policy for the state of development of the industrial mode of production in which he lived. Beginning in the late 1960s and up to this day, many of us in Detroit could not but develop a policy of action for the stage of development in which we lived, or become ineffective in the social struggle.

There are sharp struggles within the labor aristocracy over political direction and how to respond to the demands of their flock. Political direction has been contained or rather must be understood within a context that describes all the quantitative stages in the advance of industrial society. Then you have to determine what stage you are at. 

All social movements involve classes, strata, and politics and how these grouping think things out and fight out their interest to reform - reshape, the system. History provides clear examples, here is one.  In yesteryear there was roughly 11 million sharecroppers in the South with 6 million of them being black. Owing to the color factor and legal segregation, the white sharecroppers moved in a different political direction than the black sharecropper, although there are notable cases in history where unity was fought out. For communist and everyone else for that matter, the color question had to be reckoned with or one would prove to be irrelevant. The form of a struggle is never its essences. Nevertheless the form of a social movement expresses history, how people think things out and perceive their interest in relationship to the impediments to their social development. 

The masses are mobilized based on existing organizations or the emergence of new organizations. In Detroit and throughout the entire country, what emerged is a certain unity - principled unity, between the Civil Rights organizations, the top union leaders and a section of capitalist to shatter the barrier of segregation. This unity to reformulate the social relations of the industrial system was generated on the basis of change in the productive forces, and witnessed the transformation - fusion, of many leaders of Civil rights organizations, into an informal organizational aspect of the labor aristocracy. Vernon Jordan is a case in point. As long as leaders like Jesse Jackson or the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan are understood simply as black leaders one cannot make sense of the political relations specific to our country. Big Jesse is a member of the labor aristocracy - one of its most important leaders, if not an outright political leader of the bourgeoisie. This is fairly obvious to anyone not suffering from racial theories, racial ideology or outside the Marxist conception of the fundamentality of class motion. 

The fact of the matter is that owing to the existence of unions, the economic equality of its entire member - regardless of color, gender, religious preference or sexual orientation could be won and was won as a systemic relationship. Residual aspects of the ideology of another era persist within individuals, whose totality constitute a retrogressive impulse, but no one in their right mind can state that America has not been fundamentally desegregated. This change wave is not uniform in every corner and region of America because ours is a very large country with economic evolution having a regional character - plus, the fighting capacity of the masses varies along with their organs of political assertion. 

Internal to the unions was another social struggle involving the pecking order based of nationality and color and then gender. Nationality is much larger in scope than simply "black and white," and the Irish and Italian workers will testify to this, after they have heard the historic testimony of the "Slavic Worker" immigrant. Here the question of bribery and privilege became a heated battle. "I want in," is a demand of everybody in society, when one is excluded. The conclusion is inescapable: the African American people as a people can be feasibly integrated into the industrial system on the basis of economic equality with their Anglo-American counterpart in a given field of labor activity, within a given region and area of America.  

This is not the case with the Southern Region and the core plantation states. No struggle on earth will raise the level of wages of the workers in the South to that of the North except the deconstruction of the value producing system as the fundamental basis for social production.  The African American peoples can be feasibly integrated into the modern infrastructure and achieve economic equality with their Anglo-American counterparts where every they happen to be. The worker in Tchula Mississippi - black or white, will never be economically equal to the worker - or welfare recipient, in Detroit - black or white. The full equality of the black worker in Tchula Mississippi with the black worker in Detroit, demands the dismantling of the value producing system, although it is feasible that the black worker in the core of the South can achieve economic quality with the colonial white worker of the South. Achieving social equality is a matter of political institutions, enforcing "the law" and the force of habit built up over centuries.   

Let's look at this from another angle. With the possibility of forging new relations with USNA imperialism, it becomes feasible that the workers in Northern and Southern Ireland might achieve economic equality with one another, despite of religious differences, but will never achieve economic equality with the English working class or the Northern Anglo-American working class, which includes all of the workers without respect to nationality and color. 

What is called the "national wage" of the Northern workers in our country has no meaning outside the extermination of the Native peoples or rather the Indigenousness Bands of peoples, and the taking of their land: the defeat of Mexico and the taking of their land; the Colonialization of the South and the subjugations of the Western hemisphere through financial control of resources - the power of capital in the hands of the Anglo American imperialist bourgeoisie. 

For the past 40 years, the State department of government has been more than less relentless in combating segregation and discrimination as a basis for moral authority in international affairs. Much remains to be done and much has been done, but even the State department could not run to far ahead of the popular masses without losing its base of support in society. Then the pressure of the Cold War and the need to achieve ideological victory over the Soviets conditioned the social struggle in America and all imperial centers of financial capital. The Soviets represented "another way" and "another vision." The existence of "another way" and "another vision," - no matter how flawed, is a material force. 

Bribery, privilege and the labor aristocracy deal with an entire system of industrial relationships and its ideological underpinning.  The existence of unions and various Civil Rights organizations - including those organized to deal with gender, by definition exist to reform the system. The key point to grasp in discussing a modern presentation of the labor aristocracy is the configuration of the mode of production in our time frame and not that of Lenin's or Marx.