Re: On Social Imperialism (Reply to dms)/Wrong question posed

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In a message dated 9/30/03 11:48:25 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
junaidalam@xxxxxxxxxx writes:


>You are not going to have a socialist revolution in the United States
of America until and unless the material privileges a large section of
the non-capitalist population enjoys is seriously threatened. No one
with a colonial house, a cabin on the cape, 2 cars, and a secure job
is going to join any revolution.

And even if those privileges, those comforts of life, are made to
disappear, there will still be no revolution unless the
all-encompassing propaganda machine is seriously challenged. Nothing
is "inevitable" about the socialist revolution. It is an option, a
possibility, above all, a goal.,<

Reply

Communists recruit any and everyone on the basis of digging into the
most poverty stricken sector of the workers. One cannot join a social
revolution, only a political organization. The material privileges of
a huge sector of American society are under relentless attack and
every statistic concerning our life proves this. We are undergoing
social revolution as this is being written.  Communism is inevitable,
or rather social revolution is inevitable. How the outcome is going to
look is subjective and depends on human will - politics. The social
revolution is the revolution in the means of production or the
material power of the productive forces.

The social revolution that drove society from agricultural relations
to manufacture and to industrial production was inevitable. Or rather
the inevitable historical consequence of the development of the means
of production and transformation in the form of wealth. Society is
currently being reorganized around the new means of production that
are the computer, digitalized production processes, advanced robotics,
the biogenetic revolution and the general all encompassing revolution
in all the sciences. Here is the social revolution that compels
society to leap to a new political basis or property relations. The
process is not optional.

The dialectic of the process has to be grasped. The political form of
the social revolution is the arena of class struggle and as such is
determined by the subjective factor - human will. American Marxism has
found its legs and it has taken over eighty years of relentless
clinging to the theory grid advanced by Marx and Engels.

An exploited class - the workers, cannot overthrow an exploiting class
- capital, because together these two components of the social process
constitute the self-movement of a system of production. Because these
two components constitute the basis for the self-movement of the
contradiction called labor and capital, their unending struggle is
over the division of the social product and political liberties. A
social contradiction cannot "break itself apart" because one side does
not "like the other."

An exploited class cannot overthrow an exploiting class since together
they make up the system. The serf could not and did not overthrow
landed property - the nobility, whose political form was called
feudalism. Neither primary component of a social relation of
production can overthrow or dissolved the relationship -
contradiction, of which it is a part and whose existence gives it
life.

Something else must happen that forces change and dissolution. The
movement of this "something else" is called antagonism or how society
- contradiction, "moves in antagonism." (I am stating this in the
language of the past generation of Marxist. What actually happens is
that antagonism replaces contradiction) Revolution or rather social
revolution - in the Marxist meaning, cannot take place until there are
new productive forces that compel society to reorganize or leap
forward. New productive forces mean that a technology must come into
being that replaces the human energy of a class in the production
process.

The emergence of new productive forces within feudalism undermined the
basis unity of the social system. An "external force" overthrew -
unraveled landed property relations, and then political feudalism was
overthrown. Its "external force" status consisted in the reality that
"it" was not a part of the internal unity of serf and landowner
(contradiction) but a "new" development in the environment called
capital and labor. The new "external force" called labor and capital
did not really overthrow the social system but ushered in the
political revolution that allowed for the further development of
capital and labor.  What overthrew landed property preeminence was the
development in the productive forces called manufacture alongside the
changes in the form of wealth.

Generations of Marxist and plain old revolutionaries in America have
had to appeal to the hearts and minds of the working class in our
country as capital and the industrial system went through its various
stages of evolution. These appeals have always been important and
express a fundamental decency in our class and its struggle to reform
the system in favor of the people.

Today something different is taking place. We are leaving the
industrial epoch. Twenty years ago this was not obvious. Today this is
obvious. As capital evolved it passed through cyclical crisis. During
the various cyclical crises of capital, revolutionaries have fought
for public property ideas that could not grip the multitude until a
new "external force" evolved and crystallized itself in the
environment of labor and capital. This new "external force" is created
as a result of a qualitative development in the means of production,
which is kicking a sector of the proletariat out of the process of the
creation of value - products. This process of being "liberated"
appears as throw away workers and part time professors and software
programmers without steady income, alongside of the growth of the
homeless and destitute and 50 million people without medical coverage.

The appearance of proletarians who cannot sell their labor power due
to the application of advanced technology creates a "new class of
proletarians" - the communist class.  These proletarians are
proletariat because they have nothing to sell as the basis of exchange
except their labor power and their labor power is not needed. This is
not the old army of unemployed that crystallized during the transition
from agriculture to industry - used during boom times, of which Marx
and Engels spoke. This reconfiguration of society is planetary in
scope.

Just as industrial capital - which did not walk onto the earth from
the moon, evolved from manufacture and created its "anti-aspect" or
opposite in the form of the industrial proletariat, this "new class of
proletarians" is the other side of the face of speculation or rather,
domination of the speculator over the world total social
capital. Capital invested outside of the production of commodities is
one side of a social equation whose other side is a proletariat
existing outside of the process of the production of commodities. This
mass of proletarians cannot find work and have evolved a work life so
tenuous and marginal that they are rooming the world looking for
wages. Here is the objective basis for the Natasha Trade. These are
not simply women but proletarians and women are the majority of the
world proletariat.

This "new class" or the evolution of this "external force" to value
production occurs in a specific context. The injection of new
qualitative features in the production process always alter the social
relations that arise on the basis of how people are organized to work
using a given technology and tools. When something fundamental in any
process changes, everything dependent upon that, which is fundamental
must also change. An exploited class cannot overthrow an exploiting
class since together they make up the system. A new social force must
evolve within the "equation" that compels society to reorganize.

The emergence of the "new" class - the communist class, is called
"new" because this superfluous population is not the superfluous mass
created as society passes from feudal social and economic relations
and the creation of the industrial infrastructure. During the era of
transition to industrial relations the demand of the superfluous
population was to reform the system and be absorbed into the act of
exchange of social products on the basis of laboring. Today, the
direction of the demand of the increasingly ruined world masses must
proceed along the line of distribution according to need. Society has
qualitatively advanced in the past 100 years and industrial society is
being reconfigured.

The value form is under attack and currently appears as capital
invested divorced from the production of commodities and proletarians
divorced from the production of commodities. This attack on the value
form is not the result of an "ism" but not so quiet changes in the
mode of production.

Here is the ABC of Marxism articulated by the communist workers in
America.  The social revolution is not just inevitable but taking
place under our noses.  The issue that confronts us is the property
relations - not "the revolution."

Melvin P.





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