[Marxism] Re: polarization of US workers?

[DLVinvest@xxxxxx]

In a message dated 6/10/04 5:34:07 PM Mountain Daylight Time, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx
writes [quoting Anthony on class conscousnees and the prospects for revolution
in US]:
> my guess is that the working class in the United States is already going
> through a process of internal polarization - one sector is becoming more
> proimperialist, and another sector is moving in the opposite directon

My guess is that a massive shift in the composition of the working class has
already taken place over the past 30 years: As a result of some of the factors
Melvin and others have raised about the composition of capital, and the rise
of speculative capital detached from production and floating in te world as so
much spare change, some very large number of workers in the US have been
permanently displaced from industrial production and the consciousness that
engenders.Some other large number of the dispossessed (Jurriaan, help me here) 
have
been drawn into administrative chores, in the realm of circulation of
commodities -- advertising, marketing, commercial propaganda-making, ideology 
and
apology functions of the "superstructure", real-estate, etc., i.e., not as what
Marx called direct producers. Another big number of
those-without-means-of-production have gone into the military, police, prisons, 
clerks who constitute the
enforcement apparatus (the state as expression of the ruling class's monopoly
on coercive power). Over all, there's been a big shift in population away from
production to "work" in which there is no direct relationship with production
or those who produce. Such people come more and more to indentify themselves
wioth the extraction, concentration, transfer and reproductive functions of
the empire of capital than with those exploited directly in productive labor as
providers of labor power. There are countervailing tendencies at work, too,
but this shift does not bode well for proletarian revolution in the US. Yet
there is also an increase here, and even more in other parts of the world, of 
what
Marx described as the relative surplus population drawn into and thrown out
of productive labor as a reserve army of the unemployed and underemployed, and
even more people, and more unpredictable, completely dispossessed of means of
production, permanently detached from production, from the market for labor,
from the "production of commodities by means of commodities" that characterizes
capitalism.

Is there a successor to Labor & Monopoly Capital out there?

Douglas L. Vaughan, Jr.
Investigations
for Print, Film & Electronic Media
3140 W. 32nd Ave.
Denver CO 80211
303-455-9429
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