[A-List] FW: AFL-CIO split

["Sabri Oncu" <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is analysis sent to the moderators.
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AFL-CIO Split and the dialectic of social revolution 

The speculation over whether or not the trade union federation - AFL-CIO,
would split has answered itself. The AFL-CIO is a federation rather than a
union and the trade union movement is not and has never been the labor
movement in America. The trade union movement has historically exercised
control over and voiced - to varying degrees, concerns of the labor movement
by virtue of it being the organized detachment within the Labor Movement. 

The Labor Movement is extremely broad and in our history has cut across
class lines and at one point expressed the demands of small farmers,
sharecroppers and basically everyone living from the sale of their labor
power rather than deriving income from intangibles. 

The splitting of the AFL in the late 1930 - as a living experience,
contained within itself an expression of a specific quantitative boundary in
the expansion of the industry system. At that time the CIO could not but
emerge as the organized voice within the trade union movement of the
unskilled white workers. That is to say, that the splitting of the AFL at
that time was an objective reform movement that modified the relations
between segments of classes (skilled and unskilled) and gave voice to the
unskilled mass within the industrial bureaucracy of our bourgeois democracy
(between classes), without changing the property relations. 

There are no more reforms left in capital - bourgeois property, or the
industrial system. A reform is not a subjective disposition or ideas in ones
head but means reformulating the political relations between classes,
without changing the classes relationship to property in the process of
production. No more reforms left in capital means the political relations
between the antagonistic classes cannot be reformulated to stabilize the
social system. We have entered an era of class struggle. Some call the
struggle for wages the class struggle. It is not. 

This last stage of the bourgeois property relations is witnessing the
polarization of capital and its fundamental separation from the production
process or its emergence in external relations to production itself.
Speculation in one form or another has existed for a very long time -  but
so has money, but not as dominator in an environment that is also the
current transition to post industrial society. 

What has arisen as expression of the economic polarity is the existence of a
form of capital - speculative capital, whose expansion is on the basis of
itself, or by the manipulation of symbolic representations, suspended from
the production of value and a modern proletariat - communist class,
suspended from engagement with production of value, and unable to reproduce
itself on the basis of the buying and selling of its labor power. 

These two poles exist in external collision with one another, rather than
collusion - unity and strife, that characterized the proletarian movement of
the industrial epoch. 

The objective basis of the reform movement - "the reformulation," has been
removed for a sector of the working class and a sector of capital, because
there is no "connecting tissue" between these two pole of the old historical
process. What has connected bourgeoisie to proletariat for the entire epoch
of bourgeois rule has been active engagement in production as capital or
rather expanding value. Expanding value is a real thing and above all meant
the expansion of the industrial system and the actual industrial implements
and infrastructure tin which the working class labored in its industrial
form. 

The absence of a "connecting tissue" in a contradiction means it has "passed
over" to antagonism and no longer exist as a contradiction as such. We are
experiencing the beginning of a new social process. Here is the meaning of
society moves in class antagonism rather than class contradiction. 

Contradictions do not "become" antagonism, but rather antagonism replaces
contradiction as the process - actual movement, of sublating in society or
what is the same, the shattering of a previous existing unity. This is the
meaning of the "evolutionary leap." The leap is the actual transition rather
than a description of the end result of transition. 

Here is the abstraction - as we experience it, that is the dialectic of
transition from one mode of production to another and the meaning of social
revolution. We have experienced the political reality of this abstraction
and have only recently caught up in theory with what our class has
experienced for the past century. The feudal class was not overthrown by the
serfs; they were overthrown by a class outside the unity that made feudal
society a system of landed property relations. History shows that a class or
group or subclass that is caught up within the system - that constitutes the
connecting tissue of productive activity making the society what it is, can
only carry out an objective reform struggle or a fight over the division of
the social product and for expanded political liberties. 

The two basic classes of a social system that makes it what it is are never
free to overthrow it. Under such concrete conditions it is folly to conceive
of a sustained and consistent revolutionary trade union movement. What is
required is a new qualitative development that shatters the unity of that
which constitutes the "system." Not a "third force" but the emergence of a
new qualitative definition. The bourgeoisie and proletariat were not a third
force within feudal economic and social relations but a new qualitative
definition connection to that which made it a new qualitative definition -
qualitative changes in the material power (of production). 

On this basis the communist workers have rallied behind every outbreak of
discontent in America and advanced the political doctrine - not theory, of
"the revolutionary struggle for reform." Not because we are reformists, but
because we never had an expectation of our proletariat being able to do the
impossible. Today we can explain to the millions of combatants world wide,
in concrete terms, the configuration we have faced. 

Without question we have made errors, had lapses in judgment and faced
ideological complexities peculiar to America and bound up it being founded
by bourgeois ideological groups. There of course was the ninety year
impenetrable wall of white chauvinism, sublating the white supremacy of the
old Slave Oligarchy. Yet, the historical process remains what it is and
remains to be witnessed. 

The industrial proletariat could not and did not overthrow industrial
bourgeois societies because they can't - not because they do not
subjectively desire such, but because they can't and they didn't! All the
hogwash about a particular groups sectarian political program being the
cause of failure of revolution in the imperial centers is only so much
narrow-mindedness and not really looking at the entire process, which is now
visible. 

The workers could not - not, fight back and their fight drove each
quantitative boundary of the expansion of the industrial system. The system
was successfully reformed on the basis of the unity of the two basic
classes, without a change in the property relations. 

Every thinking person on earth knows that the last great objective reform
movement in America was that of the African American people between 1950 -
1970. That is to say by an important segment of the labor movement, rather
than the trade union movement. It is tragic that many progressives and even
Marxists understand and continue to call this "the black movement" and not
understanding this reformulation movement as a dynamic aspect of the labor
movement.  This movement reformulated political relations between and within
classes. This objective reform movement was most certainly for expanded
political liberties and a more equitable share of the social products. The
"Million Man March" of a decade ago and the "Millions More Movement" of
today are expression of a profound discontent within a huge sector of the
labor movement lacking the mediating barrier that is the trade union and
trade union movement. A "Million Women's Movement" would immediately
galvanize the labor movement in the imperial centers, and of course a
Million Chicano/Mexican Movement in America would signal the unity of the
labor movement in the Western hemisphere. 

The Process 

The industrial system is a distinct configuration of history, that is a
definable combination of human labor + tools and machinery buttressed by a
specific form of energy, as was manufacture and its transition to heavy
manufacture or ship building and the ore industries. 

The transition in the material power of production - computers, advanced
robotics and digitalized production process, makes expansion on the old
industrial basis impossible and has brought that phase of history to an end.


This process does not happen all at once but unfolds on the basis of first
grafting the new technology to the existing pathways of the
indusfrastructure. A barrier is reached where the new technology cannot be
further implemented on the basis of the old electromechanical pathways. The
existing pathways themselves must undergo revolution and this entire process
constitutes the evolutionary leap, where in the pathways themselves are
revolutionized to allow for the full utilization of the new technology. 

This process is the reason for the current dislocation of the existing
economy, which appears as permanent overcapacity and nothing short of the
destruction of humanity can halt the process. History itself . . . has
entered the arena of political revolution and ushers in the social
revolution of the proletariat, whose heart and soul is the communist
proletariat within the labor movement. 

Marx does not write that the proletariat is the grave digger of the
bourgeoisie in the Communist Manifesto. What he writes is that the advance
of industry is the grave digger of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the
proletariat is the inevitable consequence of the advance of industry. Today
we can put some flesh on this skeleton theory. 

The communist class or the communist proletariat, is an objective social
formation, that arises at a certain stage of development of the material
power of production. It is a communist proletariat (class) because of its
location in history at the end of the industrial curve and the beginning of
a new curve of development and cannot be treated as Engels described the old
army of the unemployed. 

The Form of the Movement 

>From the standpoint of the lived experience of our industrial society, the
CIO expressed a historic tendency within the industrial process or better
yet, the transition from craft unions as dominant to industrial unionism or
the simplification of the industrial labor process. This is what made it the
union of for the unskilled in the first and last instance. That this
industrial form of unionism arose to service the white unskilled workers in
no way obscures the process - the law system of quantitative and qualitative
growth of a mode of production, and is the reason we communist workers speak
of quantitative boundaries in the industrial system and the reform movement.


We have faced distinct and successive quantitative boundary in the
development of the industrial system, rather than formulating the question
as simply the expansion of capital and the emergence of financial and
industrial capital and its growth and decay. The totality of this
quantitative boundary in the industrial system witnessed the mechanization
of agriculture and the liquidation of the sharecropper - 11 million strong
of which six million were white, as a historical class of producers. This
was the labor movement and we need to stop calling it "the black movement."
Most communists outside America do not and did not know that this social
movement involved six million white sharecroppers, whose migration to the
North and entry into the industrial class socially changed our industrial
proletariat. 

Today, the political and economic environment - loosely called globalism,
but actually the first stage or second phase in the unfolding of a new mode
of production, demands a new form of the trade union movement as different
from industrial unionism as industrial was from craft unionism. 

How this process is actually shaking itself out and must unfold - (with the
force of a law of necessity), places the demand for equality within and
outside the trade union movement - as an expression of the changed role of
women in our society and that of the color factor as the cutting edge of the
labor movement, but the process itself should not be confused with its
visible manifestation. 

It is called the second phase and first stage because a "stage" - in this
usage a quantitative boundary of a new qualitative configuration of a
process, because we currently have no concrete way to delineate stages.
Deeper still, we do not witness emergence and literally only see that which
has emerged. Heck, most of us do not know when we have crossed a juncture
until it is crossed - witnessed as a lived experience. Marx could not see
the industrial configuration of society and his vision ends with industrial
automation. 

However the current split from the AFL-CIO evolves, its validity and
vitality will hinge not simply on expanding individual unions or the
bourgeois imperial tendency to raid other unions, but really organizing the
unorganized mass, with and without active and stable employment. Today is
different. The CIO in the 1930s and 1940s was faced with a large
economically important mass of unskilled industrial workers bonded to the
system on the basis of industrial production. "Organize the Unorganized" at
that moment of history meant reformulate the political relations within and
between classes on the basis of industrial forms of unions. "Organize the
Unorganized" means something different today. 

As an old anarcho-syndicalist (Wobbly style) trained in Marxism, I once
thought a sector of the organized workers could magically leap outside the
bond of capital on the basis of the general strike; "link up" with the
African American Peoples Movement on the basis of recruiting their real
proletarian leaders with leaders in the Women Movement and somehow on the
basis of our passion, conviction, revolutionary fervor and ideology drive
into socialism. History had another plan. 

Interestingly, we face a new social configuration and ideology that makes it
impossible for us to describe the social process without pinpointing our
place in it so that our combatants can pinpoint their place in the social
process in real time. 

Today, we confront a new social phenomenon in the appearance of the
communist class or a communist proletariat that is vastly different from I
as a sector of the old industrial proletariat - and if you wish, a bourgeois
trade union leader or labor lieutenant for the capitalist class. 

Surrounding this communist proletariat are various layering of poverty
stricken, actively employed workers darting in and out of employment,
sinking lower and lower. This includes roughly half of American society and
most certainly those making less than $30, 000 a year for a family of four.
We tend to forget that a whopping 1/3 of the people of America live off of
wages of less than $25,000. 

A new international alignment of class forces is slowly in formation. The
theories and ideology of engagement of the past are useless. The demand to
discard the Leninist form is more urgent than ever and this can be done
without throwing out Lenin and his crisp descriptions of the revolutionary
and insurrectionary process. 

What remains is to shift the past thinking of the communist workers, or
rather ruthless purge the old parties . . . nay, build new associations -
federations rather than the Leninist form which is industrial by definition,
of communist proletarians whose conditions of life prevent them from having
"the connection" with bourgeois society as a productive entity. And prepare
for assault. Here is the modern meaning of Lenin's clarion call to win the
workers to the cause of communism or the demands of the communist
proletariat. 

The future belongs to the international communist class rather than the old
conception of "world revolution," and "the victory of the proletariat in the
imperial centers liberating the oppressed peoples" and humanity as a whole. 

The industrial proletariat in America and all the imperial centers was
located and locked into the life and death battle of reform - to expand
political liberty and seek a larger share of the social product, which
imperialism could momentarily grant our workers, because of the mechanics of
the industrial system and the imperial logic of history. What we have faced
is deeper than the old conception of the bribery of the working class and is
bound up with the long dialectic of transition from agriculture to industry.
We had to learn this process the hard way, with a million wrong strategies,
theories and wrong assessments. 

The "oppressed peoples" as a category have been changed and recast on the
basis of this transition in the mode of production and cannot be treated as
the National Question in the last period. The National Factor today presents
itself, at least in America, as a question of the labor movement - the heart
and lungs of the communist proletariat, and a growing struggle outside the
connecting tissue that riveted the two basic classes to what Marx called the
bourgeois mode of production. 

This new period is no where clearer than in China where its newly emergent
communist class - backed by a shifting and changing "peasant like" partial
revolt, is faced with immediate combat against domestic bourgeois property
relations, international capital and a crisis of the industrial system
(bureaucracy) itself. 

The revolutionary nexus in China is this communist proletariat (class)
rather than the peasants. The peasants are a class that as a class formation
faces disintegration at the powerful hands of the revolution in the material
power. This peasant revolt, often led by communists is a good thing, but it
fights forward with an eye to preserving the past. That is why it is a
peasant revolt. There is a more important connection in the revolutionary
process. It is the actual conditions of life - wages, of this new communist
proletariat in China, that allows the lowering of value below the falling
wages (price form of value) in the imperial center, momentarily preventing a
radical crisis. 

The modern relationship between the proletariat in imperial America and that
in China is not one of bribery of the working class on the part of the
former or a colonial question. Our living connection is not on the basis of
a generalized concept of the world market or the world division of labor,
which was described by Marx and Engels 150 years ago, but makes more sense
on the basis of the external collision that is the communist proletariat.