Re: The MIM Debate Reply

[Maoist Internationalist Movement <mim3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 11 Oct 1995, Jeffrey Booth wrote:

>
>      I've discovered that you just can't hit the delete key enough when it
> comes to the Messiainic Ignorance Movement.  Chris B's coddeling of them
> makes it worse.  Wake up!  The MIM Morons have more in common with
> fascism than Marxism.  Their attempts to divide the working class and
> turn poorer workers against their slightly better off sisters and
> brothers is classic fascist organizing of sections of the lumpen
> proletariat to use as shock troops against the labor movement.

Pat for MIM replies: I guess Marx and Lenin were lumpen fascist
organizers.

Karl Marx: "With the development of capitalist production, all services
change into wage-earning labour and all those who carry them
on into wage-earning workers, so that they acquire this
character in common with the productive workers. This is what
leads some people to confuse these two categories, inasmuch as
wages are a phenomenenon and a creation characterizing capitalist
production. Moreover, this gives capital's apologists the
opportunity to change the productive worker, under the
pretence that he is a wage-earner, with a worker who simply exchanges
his services (that is his labour as use-value for money.) This is
to overlook a little conveniently what characterize in a
fundamental way the productive worker and capitalist production:
the production of surplus value. . .The soldier is a
wage-earner, if he is a mercenary, but he is not for all that a
productive worker."

(Karl Marx, "Results of the Immediate Process of Production"
Karl Marx Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford U.
Press, 1977), pp. 512-3.

"Marx and Engels, in one of their political reviews in the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-o"konomische Revue (October
1850), noted that the Chartist movmement had split into two
factions, one revolutionary, to which 'the mass of workers
living in real proletarian conditions belong' [Did you see that one
Mr. Daum?], the other reformist, comprising
'the petty-bourgeois members and the labour aristocracy'."

(Tom Bottomore et. al. ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 1983, p. 265)

Talk about voluntarism! Our critic Jeffrey Booth seems to
think we have the power to divide the workers into productive
and unproductive and proletarian and labor aristocrat.
That power belongs to the capitalist system and economic
conditions divided those workers, not MIM.


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