Re: [Marxism] Marx political economy/notes of consciousness

[DLVinvest@xxxxxx]

In a message dated 6/10/04 11:31:52 AM Mountain Daylight Time,
cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
> CB: It is a lacking in the thinking, beliefs, attitudes of the great mass
> of
> people. Whether it is a "fault"....
I think it was Werner Sombart who remarked cynically that "socialism in
America founded on the shoals of roast beef and apple pie..." suggesting that 
the
working class, and specifically the organized sector of the industrial
proletariat, was "bought off' by higher wages (higher proportion of variable 
capital
to constant). To the extent this was ever true, the relative exploitation of
labor in production is only one variable in the formation of class consciousness
that precedes and results in organization of the class "for itself" from the
class 'in itself" that is formed in capitalist production and by its
reproduction and relentless, compulsive (internally driven) expansion across 
national
and industrial boundaries. The changes in the technological regime -- induced
by changes in the composition of capital determined by labor value and yielding
the tendency for the rate of profit to fall -- do indeed disorganize and
disorient the working class, and change class consciousness by fundamentally
changing individual workers' and their families' and whole peoples' and 
countries'
relationships to production and to each other. The proletariat is getting
de-industrialized in the "developed" (industrial and post-industrial) capitalist
countries, but brought into industrial production by capital where labor is
disorganized and therefore desperate and therefore realtively cheap. The vast
majority of the population of the earth is in the final phase of a process that
will render all but a very few of us humans propertyless in terms of means of
production, and thus will sharpen all the fundamental contradictions cited by
Marx between labor and capital, not only anarchy of production/over
production/unepmployment/"under-consumption", but also the consciousness that 
these
contradictions produce. For some, it will be a relative "privilege" just to 
have a
temporary job selling labor power for the most meager means of subsistence --
in effect, to organize around the demand to be exploited in production rather
than to starve to death. Will that make for revolutionary class-consciousness
in say, "nominally socialist" China? If there is a future for us at all, it
will have to be global, international communism -- "from each according to
ability unto each according to need." But getting there will take greater
class-consciousness of all who own nothing but their ability to work -- that 
is, of
their essentially propertyless status and how that relates to a class that rules
because it owns means of production -- and whether they are working or not at
any given moment will affect their consciousness and the multiracial and
international alliances that will be necessary to ovethrow the capitalist 
state(s)
and the property relations they enforce, anywhere and everywhere we can. It's
time we started organizing a political formation -- call it a party or what
you will -- that will raise this idea whenever and wherever we can.

Douglas L. Vaughan, Jr.
Investigations
for Print, Film & Electronic Media
3140 W. 32nd Ave.
Denver CO 80211
303-455-9429
_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism