A-list message, Re: [A-List] Re: Oil, Oil Everywhere

On 3/23/07, Waistline2@xxxxxxx <Waistline2@xxxxxxx> wrote:

I believe this issue of controlling ideology is extremely complex. Marx
leads the way in crafting a doctrine of combat to impact and shape the politics
and political ideology of whatever sector of the working class is in motion and
combat, or moving in to position as the cutting edge of the battle against
the  ills of our bourgeois society. The split in the working class is
multilevel and  involves everything. For instance the color factor expresses the split
in the  working class and divergence of striving. The ethnic pecking order
expressed in  150 years of immigration policy at one point placed the Slavic
workers at the  bottom of the industrial order and for this historical reasoning
placed these  Slavic workers at the cutting edge of the industrial union
movement as a  rebellious core of the unskilled. Neighborhoods in America's
industrial North  evolved as ethnic conclaves and once had numerous language press.
These "events"  are the face of the split(s) in the working class.

Yet, it is the  competition between aggregates of capitals that is the
economic basis for the  competition between segments of labor power seeking
purchase. The economic  competition between the workers themselves spits them, for all
practical  purposes into different classes or class fragments. The division
of labor -  skilled, unskilled, knowledge intense labor versus service labor,
etc, splits  the working class and causes it to strive in varying directions.
Imperialism -  the imperial human relation, has a mass of humanity flocking to
the imperial  centers for financial relief and so semblance of a better life.
On a  planetary basis the working class is split between imperial sectors and
a mass  of humanity increasingly pushed outside civic society.

Here in America  the greatest split in the working class has always been the
regional wage  disparity between North and South and this goes back to
slavery. Rural labor is  paid less wages then industrial labor. American history
proves to me the  impossibility of uniting a very well paid workers with a very
poor paid worker,  except on the basis of the continuation of this inequality.
Here is the reason  most people pursue higher education and degrees . . . so
they will not be  trapped on the bottom of the bourgeois social order.

Hollywood operates  within all of these conditions.

Winning the working class to  the cause of communism is not a demand to beat
people over the head with Marxist  theory but a clarion call to remove
socially necessary means of life from the  value relations or from being distributed
on the basis of labor exchange or  dimensions of wealth. For instance no one
in America should have a water bill.  Water is necessary for life. Everyone in
America should have say an electricity  allotment, beyond which one would be
required to contribute a specific quality  of labor.  Pregnancy testing
devices, tampons for instance, headache  medicines and a host of things that
constitute the most stolen items in  supermarkets should be removed from the sphere of
exchange. Much and most of  housing requirements should be taken out of the
sphere of labor exchange.

Most of America already agrees that basis and even primary medical  access
should be taken out of the sphere of the value relations and feel that  the
government should ensure its organization and functioning. Higher education
should be open to anyone on the basis of the content of their character and not
the size of income or ones ability to sell their labor power.

The  working class as a class views all of these issue through different
lens, but as  sector aggregates spontaneously drift toward a general common vision
or  striving. Even a narrow layer of the bourgeoisie - Warren Buffet for
instance,  has stated that his class should be taxed harder for the benefit of
society.

Then there is an entire realm of products - commodities,  that should not be
produced at all. We can start at the little things like the  anti-theft
devices that consume energy and materials needlessly or on behalf of  the bourgeois
order. Walk into any supermarket in any city in America and 90% of  what is
sold is useless to human  needs and actually destructive to human  life. In the
sense of energy consumption, here is the essence of the issue  driving the
real and perceived crisis of fossil fuel.

Oil  depletion or peak oil is a crisis of the commodity form or the
production of  things for exchange and profit accumulation. Small segments of the
people are  awakening to this understanding little by little based on their own
experience  and that of preceding generations.

Oh . . . George W. social and  political base has always been extremely
narrow with even a segment of the elite  opposing his specific brand of fascist
politics. This issue was debated on the  A-List about a year ago. Fascism is the
open terrorist dictatorship of capital  and their is a general consensus in
America that the Bush administration has  reconfigured the political
infrastructure towards a fascist regime.

Peak oil is first and foremost to be understood as a crisis of the  commodity
form.

Peace

Melvin P.

Also from MP:

The bourgeoisie or capitalist in  America know they are capitalists and not
of another class. We were  birthed as a capitalist country and state.

The political and  intellectual elite knows that it is a political and
intellectual elite and not  factory workers or slum dwellers. The workers know they
are workers because  everyone in America has an inbred intuitive sense of
their wealth or lack of it.  Doctors know they are doctors and the female
majority of the employed  sector of the working class knows they make little  wages
and often must  work two jobs. >>

Yes, you see I always took the supposed  'revelations' about Abu Graib prison
as a microcosm of American society .  However, what we see are controlling
ideologies of selves in ACTION. And I  really think that the media in the US
most especially (but throughout the  developed world, if my experience of Japan
for 17 years allows me to generalize)  drowns out the collectivity of the
working class. To the point where the working  class actually starts to accepts
representations of it in the media as the  truth. So the working class is always
depicted as simpleton and dysfunctional if  not outright criminal, and either
the working class accepts this  dysfunctionality or it gets caught up in
internalized narratives about American  heroes and heroines, starring in their own
Hollywood movies and pop songs.

And so this another source of my pessimism about the working class in  the US
and in other developed countries.

So how do we start to create  that space for solidarity and action? I really
don't know, but so far I really  think the www and the internet are just not
sufficient.

CJ

************************************** AOL now offers free email to everyone.
Find out more about what's free from AOL at http://www.aol.com.