Re: [Marxism] Planet of Slums

[Waistline2@xxxxxxx]

In a message dated 3/27/2004 8:32:34 AM Central Standard Time,
e.c.apling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:

> The struggle of the people in these slums is "a struggle to become
> exploited".  Sooner or later, they will discover that they can only
> become "exploited" under a different social system. It is our task as
> revolutionaries to help them arrive at that conclusion.
>
> They have no relation whatsoever with the "bribed tool of
> reactionary intrigue" that Marx and Engels spoke about. They are not
> necessary, not even for _that_.  I am very much afraid that the
> bribed tool, today, lives in the First World, and sometimes it may be
> a blue collar.


Reply

In my opinion this is extremely correct. Read Jurrians article on World
proletarianization.

The organized workers in America have generally and historically been the
best paid - bribed. The real bribery of the working class and the Anglo-American
people is a reality and conception rejected by several generations of American
Marxists. The general basis of the "theory" rejection of the fact of material
bribery is to try and examine the pay envelope of the workers against the
profits of the capitalist in a particular industry.

For reasons of American history, the Marxists of which I am a part posed the
question of bribery on the basis of the African American National Factor
(Question). This in turn produces its own distortion because the African 
American
people are bribed relative to their counterparts in say the Philippines.

We in the American Union are in the most imperial of all imperial centers and
the fight for a Marxists conception of imperialism - to implement the
Leninists doctrine, has been extremely difficult, if not impossible. It has to 
be
acknowledged that Marxism was defeated in America for very real reasons that is
the imperial bribery of the Anglo American people in particular and all
segments of the population as they exist in relationship to their counterparts 
in the
world market. The basis of this history of bribery is being rapidly eroded.

White chauvinism is the historic ideological form that bribery of the Anglo
American people took. The brutal edge of this white chauvinism is being
supplanted by an aggressive national chauvinism. The national chauvinism 
expressed
towards the Southern - plantation area, whites in the American Union is avoided
by Marxists in the American Union like the plague. No one discusses the
history of the Slavic workers versus the immigrant workers from say England or
Germany. A blind eye is turned to the Irish workers, who in history were paid 
less
than the black workers in the North. Here is why I enjoyed the movie "Gangs of
New York."

The complexity is ignored by omission.

The lumpen proletariat of which Marx speaks is a strata formed in an entirely
different historical period, that is characterized as the transition from
agriculture to industry. Marx speaks of "organ grinders" - not pan handlers, and
a mass of proletarians pressing against the bourgeois system of production.

In America no Marxists worth their salt can call the African American people
peasants because the sharecroppers was liquidated from our material history
with the mechanization of agriculture. Posing the question in this form produces
a distortion but there has been no other basis to fight out the question as
exposition. I periodically indict the Anglo American people and charge them
with historic crimes against the African American - lynching, church bombings 
and
meeting appeal for justice with bloody violence, but this produces another
distortion because we are actually talking about the world total social capital
and how the wages for reproduction are dispensed by capital.

Ask the Haitian communists if their destitute and poverty stricken and aids
inflicted people are the lumpen proletariat? The concept of the "first world,"
and "third world" and other such nonsense blunts the question of the class
complexity of material bribery, which has been radically eroded in America.

This concept of the communist class is difficult because there has always be
a superfluous population - superfluous to bourgeois production. What is not
grasped is the dialectic of change. The army of unemployed becomes the communist
class with a change in the means of production that describes a new era in
history.

No one denies that the industrial working class is being destroyed by
capital. This destruction is taking place on the basis of changes and shifting 
of
means of production to say China. Comrades have not seriously studied their
dialectics in the historical presentation and those who for varying reasons 
where
anti-Soviet - anti-Stalinism, confuse the subjective Stalin period of history
with the objective Stalin period and block their own understanding.

On the other hand my expositions tend to be to "economic" and determinist in
exposition.  No one in the imperial centers will argue the question of the
material existence of the communist class in twenty years. We have been slugging
out this question - non stop, for ten years and starting to make headway.

The damn unionized workers in large industry are not going to overthrow
anything. Not because of their subjective intellectual disposition, but because
they can't. Yes, we work in trade unions and amongst the workers who constitute
the trade unions. Working amongst the workers who constitute the trade union is
not the meaning of trade union work. This is why the communists of the Third
International evolved the concept of street units and neighborhood
associations versus a trade union fraction.

I seriously means we must overthrow the Leninist form but not his methodology
and approach to insurrection. We cannot proceed form old doctrine.

The question of obesity is huge in America and the Marxist and communist
workers have not caught up with this burring issue.  Comrades write me privately
about this issue because we are still seeking a form of struggle based in
outdated concepts. One ends up talking about a "Communist diet plan" which is a
distortion but what else can one do?

At this point I believe the conception of the communist class has taken root.
Not because of the unrelenting political struggle or theory brilliance but
the material facts of life. What the heck is a jobless recovery? What is
expanding production and expanding profits with a diminishing industrial class?

The bourgeoisie does not argue against the communist class thesis - only the
ideologists, but rather takes a position to "kill everyone and let God sort
them out."

Planet of slums - proletarian slums is accurate. This is not a peasant mass
pressing the industrial system in formation. This is not a class of organ
grinders, pimps and castaways that emerged in the process of the formation of 
the
industrial classes. The goddamn lumpen proletariat in America is Snoop Dog, who
made it big in the music industry. The freaking dope man and not the welfare
recipients. Being on the dole does not magically transform one into a lumpen
proletariat. Isn't such thinking a deviation on the Women Question and a bunch
of white chauvinism in America?

At base there is a misconception of the historical process that appears as
"wrong" ideology.

What has paraded as Marxism in America was nothing more than rank
syndicalism. This is also a historical question that is rooted in the formation 
of our
industrial working class in the North of the American Union.

It took me twenty-five years to purge this syndicalist crap from my head. I
think my sizable paycheck had something to do with it. :-)  And yes, the white
workers loved my black ass. They would say, "nobody wants to hear your
communist shit today."

"Can you get me some overtime work?"

We have to admit our objective history and logic and abandon philosophic
formulations. The communist class is very real. And it is the American
contribution to the treasure house of Marxism. World communism will adopt this
formulation because it is concrete and the obvious. To be a Marxists is to be a 
master
of the obvious and to unravel this "obvious" on the basis of Marx method.

The commodity form is unraveling. Who on earth is going to buy all of that
shit advance means of production is producing? Working 24/7 in the imperial
centers would fill the world market in two months. This is most certainly not 
the
time of Marx or the Paris Commune or Lenin's Russia.

Peace


Melvin P.

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